by Larry Niven
Impatience got to him. There were not even flames on the blackened logs now. He opened the oven door, letting in air. The gasses caught with a soft whoosh. Corbell leapt back slapping at his hair and eyebrows; but no, they hadn’t caught.
He had to tear a door off a narrow cupboard. It was the only tool he could find. With the door he harried the logs out of the oven and into the trash can. He took the cupboard door along, too. Flat metal, it might serve somehow.
His way back to the park was slower. Three times he had to open a door to let out the smoke; each time the car slowed as if it had rammed invisible taffy. But he got back, and maneuvered the trash can out of the car into the patch of vines, under a threatening sky. The logs had gone to coals.
He turned the can on its side and braced the bottom higher than the lip. He pushed the coals into a pile at the back. He found more wood, not too damp, which he set in the trash can to be dried by the heat. When the warm rain opened up on him it didn’t bother him. It was not especially uncomfortable, and now his fire was safe.
This time a million years ago…this time two million years ago…Corbell the spaceman had already crossed tens of thousands of light-years, and at the core of the galaxy was skirting the edge of a black hole massive as a hundred million suns…
Corbell the naked savage went forth to hunt his dinner.
Living things rustled around him, but he saw nothing. It didn’t matter. He didn’t have anything to kill with, not so much as a kitchen knife. He kept his eyes open for another club while he pulled up roots. He pulled up quite a number of different roots. He’d roast them all, and taste them.
He spent more time gathering nuts. The rain stopped. This rain seemed regular enough: starting just after noon, lasting two or three hours. It was nice to be able to count on something. In the customary red sunset light he sat down to cook his dinner.
He had to throw away half the roots. He got, in rough and approximate terms, one potato, one very large beet, a combination yam and carrot, and a more nearly pure yam. He burned most of the nuts, but some survived, and were delicious. He went back for more.
Then night was upon him. He set the trash can upright and set some dead tree limbs in the coals, and settled down to sleep in a patch of nearly dry moss.
the third day
Corbell half woke in darkness. He felt fur and a warm spot against his back, but elsewhere he was chilled. He curled more tightly around himself and went back to sleep.
Sometime later the memory snapped him awake. Fur? There was nothing against his back now. A dream? Or had a friendly cat-tail stretched against him for warmth? The touch hadn’t wakened him fully. He and Mirabelle used to share their king-sized bed with a kitten, until the kitten became a tomcat and started behaving like one.
Well, he was awake now. He did easy exercises until the stiffness was gone. He breakfasted on fruit; what else? Perhaps he ought to be looking for nests, and eggs.
The fire was still going. He built it up with twigs, then went looking for larger pieces. He wished for an ax. The little stuff burned too fast, the big stuff was too heavy to move, and he would soon use up all the dead limbs in the area. He spent part of the morning dragging a huge limb to his replenished fire. After he had tilted the trash can on its side and pushed the big end of the limb into it, he decided he’d created a fire hazard. He moved the whole arrangement onto a nearly buried outcropping of granite.
It was meat he hungered for. If he could find a straight sapling perhaps he could fire-harden it into a spear—provided he could sharpen a point. What he really needed was a knife, he thought. For that alone it was worth exploring Sarash-Zillish.
Four crossed commas brought the car to the Sarash-Zillish Hospital. Corbell recognized it at once. From outside it was identical to the Four City Hospital.
Civilization must have become awfully stereotyped before its collapse. Corbell fantasized a great pogrom in which all the world’s architects had died. Afterward humanity had been reduced to copying older buildings detail for detail. It didn’t make a lot of sense. He’d look for other reasons for the duplication he saw everywhere.
Inside, the place kept reminding him of his nightmare flight from Mirelly-Lyra. Clean corridors, doors with no handles, cloud-rug…The only difference was the lack of a vault. He found a central place, a two-story room lined with shelves and occupied by a computer that must be diagnostic equipment. But there was no vault door and no double “phone booth.” No precautions against thieves. No mummified losers.
If Mirelly-Lyra had not lied, the Boys had owned this city. They would not have needed to steal dictator immortality. Only dictators—adults—would need that.
He found more locked doors…which would open with a kick. He found an operating room: two flat tables with straps attached, and clusters of jointed arms above them, tipped with scalpels and suction tubes and needles and clamps. The metal showed the stains of neglect and age.
The stiffly extended insectile arm: That was his target. Corbell climbed up on a table, leaned out to grip the arm at its end. He swung outward and hung suspended. The arm sagged, then broke in the middle and dropped him to the floor.
Corbell the hunter left the hospital carrying three feet of metal spear with a scalpel at the end.
Again the rains caught him on the way back. He made his way to his fireplace, checked to see that the fire was still going, then sat down to wait it out. There were several inches of water in his other trash barrel.
He was killing time by trying to shave—very carefully, but the weight of the handle was awkward and he wasn’t doing a good job of it—when he saw the giant turkey. It was pecking under a nut tree, looking bedraggled and unhappy. He froze. It hadn’t seen him. He debated as to whether he might sneak up on it. Probably not.
He eased forward onto the balls of his feet, spear held lightly in both hands.
He sprinted. The bird looked up, squawked, turned and fled. Corbell swung the spear and chopped at its foot. The bird stopped to peck at whatever had bitten it. Corbell chopped again, at the neck, and felt the satisfying shock in his shoulders.
The bird was hurt and in panic. It ran in clumsy circles, squawking, while Corbell chased it. He got two more shots at the neck, and then he had to stop, gasping, his pulse thundering in his ears. The bird was spouting blood. It hadn’t slowed down, but its flight was Brownian motion, sheer blind panic.
It had not gone far when Corbell recovered his breath and resumed the chase. He was moving in for the kill when the bird turned and ran straight at him. A lucky swing as he sprawled backward, and the bird was headless. It ran right over him and kept going.
He tracked it until it fell over.
The patch of bare rock was nearly dry. Corbell spilled his fire across it, added more wood, then went back for the bird. He pulled feathers until he was exhausted, rested, pulled more feathers. He opened the bird’s belly and cleaned it, tugging two-handed at internal organs, his feet braced on rough rock.
The cupboard door from the police station became his griddle. He fried the liver on it, and ate it while parts of the rest of the bird were roasting. Afterward he worked at cutting into the joints. He couldn’t build his fire big enough to roast the whole bird, but he could roast a drumstick. And broil thick slices of breast on a stick.
Meat! It was good to taste meat again. There was far too much for tonight. He had roasted both drumsticks; he could eat them cold tomorrow. He could cut up parts of the carcass and boil them for soup, in the other trash can, with some of the roots.
II
The northeast was turning gray, but in the black northwestern sky one star still glowed. Corbell had watched it on several nights. It did not twinkle and it did not move against the stellar background. That made it a planet, a big object dimly lit, possibly the world whose skewed orbit had disturbed Peerssa.
Now it twinkled; now it was marginally brighter. Corbell blinked. Just his imagination? Now it was fading before the coming dawn…Corbell closed his eyes
. He didn’t want to wake up. There was no special reason why he should. He wasn’t hungry or uncomfortable.
He’d learned much about the empty city during these past twenty days, but there were mysteries still to be explored. His encampment had become comfortable. He had a fireplace, a soup pot, and the car for shelter. He had tools: He had used the scalpel to carve wooden cooking implements. He didn’t need clothes. For two full days he had practiced throwing rocks, and taken his reward in squirrel meat. Yesterday he had killed another giant turkey, his third.
Big deal.
Obscurely depressed, he curled tighter in his bed of moss.
Corbell the architect and Corbell the interstellar explorer seemed equally dead. In his pride he had called himself a naked savage, but he wasn’t that. A savage has his duties to the tribe, his tribe’s duties to him. He has legends, songs, dances, rules of conduct, permitted and unpermitted women, a place for him when he grows old…but Corbell was alone. He could make fire—with the help of a supersophisticated kitchen. He could feed himself—now that practically everything he could touch was edible.
Some park. In the beginning it must have held only food plants and meat animals. City surrounding a farm. The cat-tails could hardly have survived, vain and decorative though they were, in the presence of real predators.
Domed cities. Mirelly-Lyra had spoken of the Boys building domed cities, here in land that the more powerful Girls hadn’t held. But of course: Sarash-Zillish must have been domed against blizzards and subzero cold, before the world turned unaccountably hot. As for the “park,” the Boys could hardly have grown beans and citrus fruit in the permafrost outside.
The Girls ruled the sky, controlled Earth’s orbit. They must have made a mistake somewhere. What could have turned Jupiter into a minor sun? It must have shocked the Girls as badly as it later shocked Peerssa. It must have; because the change left Boy territory habitable and made Girl territory into scalding deserts, overturning a balance of power tens or hundreds of thousands of years old.
Corbell shifted, then sat up. It was the present that ought to concern him…
Three cat-tails were tearing at his turkey carcass. When he moved they jolted to attention. Corbell reconsidered his first intention. They were eating the raw meat; they had left the roasted drumsticks alone. That left plenty of meat for Corbell.
They studied him: three snakes with solemn cat faces, furred in brown and orange intricately patterned; as beautiful as three butterscotch sundaes. Corbell smiled and gestured hospitably. As if they understood, they went back to their meal.
Breakfast: He ate fruit and drumstick meat and thought about coffee. Afterward he tended his fire. The scalpel was razor-sharp despite age and eighteen days of blunting, but it was no ax. He went far afield to find wood. The exercise was good. Decades in the cold-sleep coffin had preserved him better than he had hoped; he’d gone soft despite the exercises, but the savage life was toning him up. He took the other trash can to what had been a fountain and was now a pond, filled it with not especially clean water, dragged it back and wrestled it into place over the fire.
He turned to the turkey carcass. He cut chunks small enough to fit the trash can. Meat gnawed by cat-tails went in, and so did bare bones. While it heated he foraged for roots to flavor the soup. Potatoes. Carrot-yams. He’d found nothing that resembled an onion, unfortunately. He added beans and, experimentally, a couple of grapefruit. He stirred it all with a wooden paddle.
As usual, noon looked like sunset, which was endlessly disconcerting. Corbell rested. The water was beginning to bubble. Granite was uncomfortable beneath his buttocks. Corbell was mildly depressed, and he couldn’t understand why…
And then he did.
Last day of a camping trip. You’ve worked your tail off; your belt has come in a notch and a half; you haven’t had to think much; you’ve seen some magnificent scenery; there were damn few people on the trails, and they didn’t rub your nerves. It’s been good. But now it’s back to work…
Mirelly-Lyra knew where he was.
He was healthier than he’d known. He could live a Jovian year, if nothing killed him; the tourist in him liked that thought. The mad old woman had promised him one year, an Olde Earth year. He could believe as much of that as he cared to, but a sane man would choose the jungle.
Could a man survive in the jungle outside Sarash-Zillish? It would depend. Corbell had come to Antarctica in either spring or fall of a year twelve years long. An Olde Earth year from now the day might last twenty-three hours, or one. It would be much warmer than this, or much colder.
For the world still had its tilt and its twenty-four-hour rotation. Odd that the Girls had not corrected that…but maybe they were traditionalists. Much odder that they had not moved Earth further out from the growing heat of Jupiter. What concerned Corbell was this: He could not take a world twenty degrees colder, not without clothing, and an endless night might drive him mad.
Soup odors were beginning to permeate the wood smoke.
This sense of urgency was silly. He had a year to get moving. He could make foraging expeditions to the edge of the city. Keep his camp here. Whatever was out beyond the domes had had to be imported. How dangerous could it be? It might well be thousands of square miles of Sarash-Zillish Park.
An endless vacation. And he could use it. In his second life CORBELL Mark II had suffered enough future shock to kill a whole cityful of Alvin Tofflers.
Tomorrow, then. He could take the car as far as the hospital; it was near a standing fragment of dome. Then into the wild with spear and drumstick over either shoulder, if the drumstick kept that long without refrigeration.
He remembered to scrape some of his fire into his trashcan fireplace. He stretched out on the warm granite…
Warm rain hammered at him. He turned over fast, rose to hands and knees and coughed out a tablespoonful of rainwater. First time that had happened. His bonfire must be out, but had the soup cooked first? Was rain getting into his fireplace?
He looked up, and forgot all of these crucial questions.
A dozen or so Boys—approximately a big boy scout troop, but uniformed only in breechclouts—squatted in a circle around Corbell and his fire. They were passing around a drumstick bone, nearly clean by now, while they watched him. As if they had been watching him in perfect silence for hours.
Their hair was rich where they had hair. On some it was black and woolly, on others black and straight, dripping to their shoulders. The crowns of their heads were bald but for a single tuft on the forehead. They ignored the pounding rain and watched, half smiling.
“I should have known,” said Corbell. “The cat-tails. They’re half tame. All right.” He made a sweeping gesture. “Welcome to the Kingdom of Corbell-for-himself. Have some soup.”
They frowned, all of them. One got up: a long, lanky Boy, a budding basketball player, Corbell would have judged. He spoke.
“Sorry,” said Corbell.
The Boy spoke again. Command and anger: That was no boy’s voice, though it was high-pitched. Corbell was hardly surprised. These were the Boys, Mirelly-Lyra’s immortals.
“I don’t speak your language,” Corbell said slowly, with an instinct that went against sense: The natives will understand if you speak slowly and clearly.
The Boy came forward and slapped him across the face.
Corbell hit him flush in the mouth. His right cross hit ribs instead of solar plexus, and the following left missed completely, somehow. Then the whole circle converged on him.
His memory thereafter was a little hazy. There was weight on his knees and forearms. Granite ground into his back. The basketball star sat on his chest and spoke the same sentence over and over through a split lip. He would say it, and wait, and slap Corbell twice, and say it again. Corbell replied with obscenities. He could feel the bruises now.
The tall Boy got off his chest. He said something to the others. They all frowned down at Corbell. They discussed the matter in complex consonants spat
like mouthfuls of watermelon seeds.
Corbell’s head still rang; it had been beaten against granite. Four Boys were still sitting on his forearms and knees. Rain splashed in his eyes. It all tended to muddle his thinking.
Did they think he was a strayed dictator? But Corbell was showing his age. They couldn’t—wrong! No dictator immortality here. The dictators must grow old as Corbell had grown old.
The discussion ended. Four Boys got off Corbell. He sat up rubbing his arms. One took a theatrical pose, pointed at the ground before him, and spat one harsh word. Stay! or Heel! His message was plain, and Corbell was in no shape to run.
The tall Boy still studied Corbell as if trying to make up his mind. The others clustered around Corbell’s soup pot. They scooped soup into halves of coconut shells. The tall Boy finally offered him something else, a ceramic cup from his belt. Corbell waited for room, then moved in.
He sat (gingerly, favoring the bruises) and drank. Cat-tails moved among the tribe like a plague of snakes; rubbed against ankles, and were petted; tore at the raw turkey carcass, what was left of it. Corbell felt fur against his ankle. He stroked a pure-black cat-tail. A rumbling vibration went through his shin.
Shall we say that Corbell has been captured again? Or, Corbell asked himself, shall we say that Fate has given me guides through Antarctica? Put that way, the decision was easy…
III
The soloist sang in a strong, rich tenor. He sang to background music: eight Boys humming in at least four parts, one more beating with turkey bones on Corbell’s trash-can fireplace. Alien music, improvised, overly complex against the simple melancholy tune.
Corbell listened open-mouthed, the back of his neck tingling. He had feared this, and it was true: Three million years had increased human intelligence.
The night after his capture he had tried singing as a way to enhance his entertainment value. Since then he had sung medleys of advertising jingles, or theme songs from movies, or the clean and dirty folk songs he and Mirabelle had sung on the boat: songs three million years out of date. But the Boys liked them.
