"I knew dikta women."
"There may be Girls still in the world. We can threaten them... or can we? Ura.n.u.s will be upon us before we can reach these places. Krayhayft-"
Far down the street, Corbell caught motion. "Your spear," he said, holding it out.
Skatholtz turned to take the spear. In that position he missed seeing what Corbell saw: a bubble-car skimming trees at ninety miles per hour, dropping and slowing.
Krayhayft must have caught something in Corbell"s face. He ran forward, crying, "Alert!"
Startled, Skatholtz glanced back.
Corbell jumped out the window.
The Boys had quick reactions. As Corbell crossed the splinters of gla.s.s a spear haft rapped his ankles hard, threw him off balance. He curled tight and hugged his knees. Instead of landing on his head he fell on his shoulders in high corn. Skatholtz was coming through the window in a graceful swan dive. Corbell rolled, found his feet and ran.
Krayhayft threw his machete. It slashed viciously at Corbel"s calves as it spun past. Krayhayft screamed, "Stop or die!"
Skatholtz barked from close behind him. "Veto! He knows something!"
Corbell dug in.
The bubble-car had stopped just at the entrance. Through the torn vines that still wrapped it Corbell saw white hair and white beard. Gording reached across to open the door. He was holding a stick against the doorpost. Why?
h.e.l.l with it. He threw himself in, thrashed to turn around.
Skatholtz was right there-gaping in horror as he skidded to a panic stop. Corbell slammed the door in his face.
That stick across the door: Gording must have strung thread across the door, and was holding it back with the stick. It could have cut Corbel"s hand off. h.e.l.l with that, too. "Go!"
"I don"t know the codes."
"Oh, for-" Corbell jabbed five times at the compressed hourgla.s.s figure. It was the first thing he thought of, and it was good enough: The World Police Headquarters in Sarash-Zillish. The car surged away.
Corbell looked back-straight into Skatholtz"s eyes, before the Boy prudently dropped from the car. He"d lost his spear. It should have been lying in the street behind him, but it wasn"t.
Blood was running from Corbell"s calves into the spongy stuff that lined the car"s interior. Nothing he could do about it. He didn"t even have clean cloth to bind his cuts. They stung.
Gording said, "Wind the thread around the rock. Do it now, before you cut yourself."
Corbell obeyed. The thread was thin as cobweb, hard to find. He was careful. The car jerked to left and right, dodging bushes, trees, random rubble.
II.
He had fled from the Norn in a car that was deathly silent except for the wind. But now he heard a low, almost subliminal whine. "How old is this-tchiple? Was it in good shape? I didn"t think to ask."
"I don"t repair tchiples. They must have safety devices. The Boys who built them expected to live forever. Where are we going?"
"Sarash-Zillish, where the Boys spend the long night. It"s got machines we can use, maybe. Next question is, does it have Boys?"
"Not yet, I think. I don"t really know."
"We"ll have to risk it. My G.o.d!" Corbell was staring at something that could have meant his death by stupidity. The disk- "I never thought of it at all. I didn"t have a credit disk. How was I going to run a car?" He asked, "How did you happen to have one?"
"The tales tell that name coins were used when the Girls ruled. I reasoned that when the land thawed, the bodies of the dead would be buried outside the city to make the land fertile. There I fled, and there I dug, and I was right. Boys and Girls must have died by the thousands when the Girls came. I found bones and bones all tangled together, and some wore clothes, and in the clothes I found name coins. I tried them in the slot of a tchiple. One coin still kept its pattern." He regarded Corbell dubiously. "You did not remember that you would need a name coin?"
Corbell flushed. "There was a lot to think about."
"I might have been luckier in my ally."
"I guess. Thanks for coming back for me."
"I had to, because you made another mistake. Does this car guide itself?"
The car"s motion had settled down. Now Corbell saw that they had left Parhalding and were skimming across an endless rippling field of wheat. He said, "Unless Skatholtz"s spear... yeah, it guides itself."
"Then look at my hair."
There was nothing at all peculiar about Gording"s hair. It had grown a little tangled, a little greasy, but it was uniformly white... five days after the cat-tail had bitten Gording.
Gording broke an embarra.s.sed silence. "Will I go back to the dikta? Will I tell them that there is dikta immortality, but Corbell has lost it? We have to find it, Corbell."
"I don"t believe it. The cat-tails weren"t... I don"t believe it! d.a.m.n d.a.m.n it, Gording, there was it, Gording, there was no no kind of injection except that cat-tail bite!" kind of injection except that cat-tail bite!"
"Something you ate or drank or inhaled. You may have felt odd afterward. Sick. Elated. Disoriented."
"Getting old is more complicated than that. There are... Do you you know how people get old?" know how people get old?"
Gording sprawled comfortably in his seat, facing Corbel. The old man showed no sense of urgency. "If I knew everything about aging I would make make dikta immortality. I know genera! things. Substances build up in the body like... the ashes of a dying fire. Some the body can handle without help. It collects them into garbage places for storage and ejects them. Some harmful stuff can be removed from the walls of blood vessels and the tissues of the brain by the right medicines. Dust and smoke that collects in the lungs can be washed away. Without the hospital we would die much faster. dikta immortality. I know genera! things. Substances build up in the body like... the ashes of a dying fire. Some the body can handle without help. It collects them into garbage places for storage and ejects them. Some harmful stuff can be removed from the walls of blood vessels and the tissues of the brain by the right medicines. Dust and smoke that collects in the lungs can be washed away. Without the hospital we would die much faster.
"But some... ashes collect in the smallest living parts of the body. No organ can remove them. I can imagine a chemical, a medicine, that would change these substances to other substances that dissolve more easily, without killing the-"
"Without killing the cell. cell. You"re just guessing, aren"t you? We know there"s dikta immortality, but we don"t know how it does what it does. How does a Boy"s body do it?" You"re just guessing, aren"t you? We know there"s dikta immortality, but we don"t know how it does what it does. How does a Boy"s body do it?"
Gording gestured negation: a brushing stroke with the hand. "That"s the wrong line of thought. Dikta immortality came first. It must be more primitive, less indirect.-Corbell, relax. Nothing can happen until the tchiple stops. We should rest."
"I feel a strong urge to beat my head against something hard. When I think of how I pushed you into jumping me and then threw a cat-tail in your face, teeth first..." He didn"t know Boyish for I"m sorry.
"How oddly you think. You know what you expected. Young and strong and black-haired Gording would throw his arms around your knees and cry wetly into your incredibly hairy chest and offer you his women...." Gording laughed. "Yes, I know you think that way. No, they are not my women. They are their own, and I am my own, as and when the Boys let us rule ourselves. Do you remember how the women acted when you spoke of one man to every woman?"
"Ah... vaguely."
"You must have lived strangely. Don"t you know that there are times when a woman doesn"t want a man? What does he do then? Borrow a woman whose contract is to another man?" Gording was thoroughly amused.
And his relaxation was contagious. Corbell settled himself lower in the recline chair. He said, "You"ll find out, if we get our dikta immortality."
Gording looked startled. "I think you"re right. We would have to free ourselves from the Boys. Raise our boy-children to immortal adults. Slowly the number of women to each man would drop toward one. But-" He smiled. "It would take centuries."
They could see the rain sweeping toward them across the wheat. It exploded against the front of the car. Against the thunder of the rain Corbell raised his voice: "Have you ever tried to escape?"
"We sent scouts. Many were dikta men in their second year, come recently from rejection by the Boys. They were too young to be wise, of course, but they could shave their groins and faces and pa.s.s as Boys. Some were brought back with their memories gone. I think the others would have returned if they could. Some women tried to scout for us during the long night. None of them came back."
The rain drummed out the hum of the motor. Corbell asked, "Did you ever think of escaping by sea?"
"Of course, but how could we hide a sea vessel from the Boys? Corbell, you"ve been across the sea. Is there land? Does life grow there, or is it too hot?"
"There"s life, but it doesn"t grow as thick as it does here, and it"s different life. I know you can eat some of it, because Mirelly-Lyra fed me a fair variety. It was hot there, but not killing-hot. And, listen, I"ve seen sea vessels big enough to hold all of Dikta City. Whether they still float is something else."
"Where?"
"On what used to be the seabed, a short day"s march from where the sea is now."
Gording mulled it over. "Three problems. Getting the sea vessel to the sea. The risk we take if the Boys catch us at it. Third and worst, what will we tell our men when they are grown? That we stole them from immortality? If we find the dikta immortality, Corbel, we can make the dikta flee across the sea."
"It itches at me. I had it all figured out. Brilliantly! Everything pointed to the cat-tails... Listen, are you willing to be bitten again? Maybe it"s only the male cat-tails, or only the females, or only the gray striped. Whatever the Boys didn"t take along to the Dikta Place."
"Flay me alive if you must. The stakes are high. You"d be dead long since if you didn"t guess right sometimes."
Corbell settled further into the spongy material. The drumming rain was a comfortable, homey, safe sound. Presently he fell asleep.
In his dream he was running, running.
III.
Something threw him violently forward. Something soft exploded in his face and threw him back. Now pressure pinned him fast while he spun violently head over heels. He tried to get up and found he couldn"t so much as twitch a finger. He tried to scream and he couldn"t breathe!
Nightmare! Running down the hospital corridors, can"t get enough air-the booths in the vault... don"t work! Out of the vault, searching for instant-elsewhere booths, turn a corner and-the Norn! Paralyzed even to his diaphragm and closed eyelids, his sense of balance gone crazy, he tries again to scream. The cane!
But his scream blew air through... through the stuff across his face. He gasped, and some air leaked through, slowly. Porous stuff across his face. Right, and the hospital was a long time ago.
The spinning stopped. He thought he was upside down.
Let"s see, he"d been with Gording... in a car... The pressure was easing up. He thrust forward with his hands. The stuff gave like a balloon. He worked an arm sideways, found the door, then the handle. Wrestled it open. He squirmed against the porous balloon, edged sideways, and finally dropped out on his head.
The car was upside down in wet, scraggy wheat. It had torn a clear path in its rolling fall. Gording was around in back looking at a broken spear haft that had been jammed under the edge of a close-fitting hood.
"I knew there were safety devices," he said cheerfully.
Relief made Corbell babble. "Too many Great Escapes lately. I"m getting them mixed up. Lord, what a nightmare! For a time there I thought I was back running from Mirelly-Lyra."
Gording looked at him. "She really frightens you, the old dikt."
"She really does. Worse than the Boys. There were some very hairy moments. The city was full of prilatsil, see, and you never knew where where she"d be, or where she"d be, or where I"d I"d be. The best I could do was find a prilatsil and dial at random, over and over, and even then some of them didn"t work. And all the time she was tracking my pressure-suit helmet! She"s probably still got it. At least... I hope she does." be. The best I could do was find a prilatsil and dial at random, over and over, and even then some of them didn"t work. And all the time she was tracking my pressure-suit helmet! She"s probably still got it. At least... I hope she does."
"Why does it matter?"
"I"ll tell you as we go." Corbell paused. "For a moment there..."
"Something?"
"Something connected in my primitive brain and instantly got lost again. Never mind, it"ll come back." Corbell sighted along the line torn through the wheat, then extended the line. "Sarash-Zillish is that way. I wish I knew how far." There were nothing but rolling wheat fields to be seen. "When we come to forest, we"re close."
Gording carefully retrieved Skatholtz"s broken spear. He found the rock with the thread tied to it, found another rock and rebuilt his weapon. The tchiple"s safety balloons had nearly deflated. Gording felt around inside until he had located the plastic disk.
The sun was a fiery flying saucer settling on clouds. They set out into the wet wheat, and Corbell began the tale of how the Girls had lost a moon.
Toward morning they found a stream.
Jupiter had lighted their way in horizontal orange beams that made the land look brighter than it was. Corbell walked into the water before he knew it was there. The stream was shallow and sluggish. Marsh gra.s.s was growing in it, possibly a mutant form of wheat or rice.
Corbell knelt to drink. He rubbed his calves to wash away dried blood. When he looked up Gording held a flopping fish in his hands.
"Gording, you"re quick!"
"Dinner, such as it is-" He was scaling the fish.
"Do we dare build a fire?"
"No, we must not be seen. We"re just the wrong number. We can"t pa.s.s as Boys at any distance. We"ll eat the fish raw."
"No, thanks."
"As you like."
The unwinking point of light had grown no brighter. Odd, that it could have come so fast. But Ura.n.u.s had been nearing Jupiter in the random orbit the Girls had left it in, when Don Juan Don Juan arrived in Sol system. He said as much to Gording. arrived in Sol system. He said as much to Gording.
Gording nodded his pale head. "I have not added the numbers, but I think the paths of Jupiter and Ura.n.u.s must cross forever if it was left free after the Girls dropped Ganymede... But why would they let it free? They would have been trying to turn it, to correct their mistake."
"Maybe they heard there was a war. They took their ships home to bomb the Boys from orbit. They never came back."
Gording had eaten everything but the bones of the fish. He said, "It is unlikely that the Girls waited their revenge for your return. It is unlikely that Ura.n.u.s, falling free, crosses the world"s path just after your return. I think your explanation is right, Corbell. We must go to Four City and find the old dikt who has your pressure-suit helmet. Otherwise we will see the end of all life."
"I was afraid you"d say that. All right. There"s a working tchiple in Sarash-Zillish. It took me there from Cape Horn. I wish I knew the code for getting back... but I don"t."
"Dial at random?"
"Maybe. I"d like to check the subway system first. There are maps in the subway building." He stood. "Let"s go."
Dawn came with a marrow-freezing roar. It whipped Corbell"s head around. He faced a dwarf lion, twenty yards away on a rise of ground, roaring challenge.
Skatholtz"s broken spear slapped against his palm. "Attack!" cried Gording, and he charged the Great-Dane-sized beast.