A World Out of Time

by Larry Niven

  They didn’t like it when he repeated a song they’d heard before. He wondered why, but he obeyed their wishes.

  “Oh, we got a new computer, but it’s quite a disappointment,” Ktollisp sang, “’cause it always gives this same insane advice: Oh, you need little teeny eyes for reading little teeny print like you need little teeny hands for milking mice!” The flavor or mockery in his singing was for Corbell. He couldn’t know what the words meant. But his pronunciation was accurate.

  Corbell had sung that song once.

  Beside him was the Boy who had attacked him that night a week ago, the leader in some respects. Skatholtz was broad of nose and lip, woolly-haired, long-limbed and emaciated-looking. He might have been a black preteen, but for the partial baldness and the prison pallor he shared with the others. He said in English, “He sings well, do you think?” and laughed at what he found in Corbel’s face. “Now you know.”

  “You remember everything. Everything! Even whole songs in another language!”

  “Yes. You need to learn my speaking more than I need to learn your speaking, but I learn yours first. This is why. You are different, Corbell. Older. I think you are older than anything.”

  “Almost anything.”

  “I will teach you how to talk. When you tell your tale, we all want to listen. I make a mistake with you. Do you know why I hit you? We thought you are only a dikt who broke with rules. You did not—” Skatholtz jumped suddenly to his feet. He stood at parade rest for a moment; then he shrank back, hands raised half in supplication, half to ward a blow.

  “I didn’t cringe,” said Corbell.

  “Yes, cringe. It is a formal show of respect.”

  Ktollisp sang, “So we got an expert genius and he rewrote all the programs, but we always got results that looked like these: Oh, you need little teeny eyes for reading little teeny print like you need little teeny license plates for bees.”

  It was pink-and-black dusk in the park. The Boys had returned early this day. They spent most of every day in Sarash-Zillish, going through buildings like a flock of wild birds. Exploring, Corbell had thought. Savages swarming through ruins they could not understand.

  He’d soon lost that illusion. A pair of Boys had escorted him outside the hospital operating room while the others worked inside. When he was allowed back in, Corbell’s scalpel-spear had been reattached. The many-jointed arms above the operating table were carefully carving a phantom patient.

  He was not allowed to watch repairs, but he had seen the results. The refrigerator in the police building, restored. A factory tested, run through its cycle until it had built two “phone booths.” The Boys did Corbell the signal honor of letting him test the booths. He had not tried to balk. Another factory had produced a bathroom, a complete unit with pool and sauna. The Boys had repaired and tested the city lighting. Now the sides of many buildings glowed with soft yellow-white light. Others remained dark. The effect was eerie: a city-sized chessboard.

  They lived like savages, but apparently it was from choice.

  In camp Corbell had done his share of the work, hauling firewood and digging up roots. They had given him a loincloth, but they would not give him a knife to replace his scalpel-spear. He still didn’t know what place he held among them. He feared the worst. They were too intelligent. They would see him as a lesser being, an animal.

  He needed them. It wasn’t just company he needed. He could not travel safely until he knew something about this new continent.

  The boy was singing all the verses, to the muted laughter of his companions. Corbell said, “Sooner or later I’ll run out of songs. Sooner.”

  Skatholtz shrugged. “It is all the same. We leave here when light comes again. We go to other…tribes? To tell them that Sarash-Zillish is ready for the long night. You come with us.”

  “Night? Is it night that’s coming?” Had he landed in autumn, then?

  “Yes. So you came from space, unready! I thought that. Yes, the long day is ended and the short day-nights are with us and the long night comes near. In the long night we live in the city. Hunters go to the forests around, and food will keep in the cold boxes. In day we live more as we like.”

  “What’s it like out there?”

  “You will see.” Skatholtz picked up a passing cat-tail and stroked its fur. “We have time to teach you some speaking,” he said, and he switched to the language Corbell had tagged Boyish. Corbell was agreeable. He enjoyed language lessons.

  Morning: They moved out. There was incredibly little fuss. They all seemed to wake at once. Soup had been simmering all night, made to Corbel’s recipe, which they liked. Breakfast was soup in coconut shells. They picked up pots, cloth, the fire starter, half a dozen edged weapons. One, an albino Boy with pink eyes and cottony golden hair, handed Corbell twenty pounds of jerked meat wrapped in cloth. They left.

  Corbell woke fully, marching the rest of the way. He had to drive himself to keep up, though the Boys made no attempt to set a steady pace. They ambled. Some dodged into buildings, then jogged to rejoin the tribe.

  Savages they were not. They carried an idiosyncratic variety of edged tools, no two alike: scimitars, machetes, sabers, shapes that had no name, all with carefully sculpted handles. They had made the jerky the way Corbell would have, in an oven set on Low. The cloth they carried was indestructible stuff as thin as fine silk. Krayhayft’s flashlight/fire starter projected light of variable intensity, in a conical beam or a beam no thicker than a pencil.

  Organized they were not. But they had broken camp in minutes!

  They tramped through silent streets. Ingrowths of jungle grew thicker about them, until the city became jungle. They passed a straight tree trunk that Corbell suddenly realized was vine-wrapped metal. He looked up to see where it joined other members in a hexagonal array: a part of the old dome.

  The jungle bore fruit: small oranges, breadfruit, several kinds of nuts. The Boys ate as they walked, and picked raw nuts to replace the roasted nuts they carried. They talked among themselves. Corbell couldn’t follow their conversation; it went too fast.

  He strode along in their midst, keeping the pace he’d set himself. Incredible, the way his old body had healed! Tomorrow the aches would come; tomorrow he might not be able to move, except he’d damn well better. Today he felt fine. He felt like a scoutmaster leading his troop. Memo: Don’t test your authority.

  Three hours or so into the hike…and that could almost be a fight developing up ahead. Skatholtz and another Boy were spitting syllables at each other with unwonted vehemence.

  Last night’s singer loped to join them. Ktollisp was a burly, big-chested Boy with Skatholtz’s black man’s features and everybody’s pale skin. He snapped one word at the two and they shut up.

  Ktollisp looked about him; frowned; pointed. The troop went off in that direction. They found a clearing, a few bushes growing on otherwise bare ground. Corbell watched, not understanding, as the troop formed a circle and Skatholtz and the other Boy stepped into it.

  What was this, a duel? The two dropped their knives and breechclouts (no pubic hair). They circled like wrestlers. The challenger kicked at Skatholtz’s heart. Skatholtz swerved clear…and now it was happening too fast to follow. Fists and feet and elbows struck to kill: a momentary hold broken by an elbow between the eyes, the challenger kicked off balance and handspringing clear; Skatholtz jumping full over a bush and then using it as a shield. It looked like a damned dance! But Skatholtz was favoring one leg, and the other Boy was circling faster. He was going to run him down.

  He caught a kick in the face as he closed. Skatholtz moved in for the kill.

  Ktollisp barked one word.

  The bloody-nosed Boy cringed before Skatholtz, held the pose a moment, then straightened.

  Everyone got up and started moving again. Someone else was carrying Skatholtz’s cumbersome pack of cloth. His opponent was grinning and wiping at a bloody nose.

  In midafternoon Skatholtz said two words Corbell recognized. He
said, “Stop talk.”

  They did. Now the silence of their march was uncanny.

  Skatholtz dropped back to walk beside Corbell. Very quietly he said, in Boyish, “You walk too loudly.”

  “I can’t help it. Are we hiding from something?”

  “From dinner we hide. Earlier was too early. We did not want to carry food so far. If something moves, let me know.”

  Corbell nodded. He didn’t expect to see anything. It would be months before his brain could train his eyes to see what the Boys could see in familiar territory. The keen-eyed Indian sees things the white man can’t, but only in his own environment.

  Two Boys transferred their loads to others and slipped away. Corbell couldn’t see where they had gone…but presently there was a weird and terrifying sound, like a clarinet screaming for help. Every Boy instantly moved off the trail to flatten against a tree. Corbell copied them.

  The tortured clarinet sounded nearer. They heard branches snapping. What would emerge? A tentacled monster, descendant of aliens enslaved by a younger, space-traveling State?

  The monster burst from the trees. It was crippled, its forelegs running blood, hamstrung. The Boys followed it, first the hunters and then the rest, slashing at its hind legs.

  A baby elephant!

  Corbell caught up in time to see it die. It was murder; it left him sick to his stomach. He fought his squeamishness and moved close to examine the corpse. The beast was wrinkled and marked by old scars. No baby, this. It was an adult elephant four feet tall at the shoulder.

  He asked Skatholtz, “Can I help?”

  “You may not butcher. I cannot let you touch a knife. You are not a dikt, Corbell. You are nothing we know.”

  “Today I kill nobody.” He meant it as a joke, but he didn’t know enough Boyish to phrase or inflect it that way.

  Skatholtz said, “And tomorrow? I think you make fiction-to-entertain, but lives might end if I am wrong. Do you understand my speech?”

  “I will learn.” He knew that Skatholtz was using baby talk for his benefit.

  “Do you know the chkint?”

  “Elephant. When I was young they were bigger, higher than your head at the shoulder.” He wondered how elephants had come to Antarctica. Not as meat animals, surely. Maybe there had been a zoo…

  Skatholtz looked dubious. “There are larger beasts in the sea, but how could such a beast live on land, without support? Still…I have wondered why the elephant’s legs are so thick. Was it to support larger weight?”

  “Yes. The legs were more thick when I was young. The beast was the biggest on land. Five million years ago—” he had divided by twelve, for Jupiter years “—there were beasts far larger. We have found the bones turned to rock in the earth.”

  Skatholtz laughed skeptically and left him.

  Having finished butchering the elephant, they departed. Corbell carried a rack of ribs for awhile, but it slowed him down. A disgusted tribesman finally took it away from him.

  The forest ended.

  Far across a prairie of waving yellowish-red vegetation, Corbell saw a last sliver of the departing sun. Jupiter was a pinkish-white disk, rising.

  Here they made camp. Presently Corbell ate roasted elephant for the first time in his life. He was too tired to sing for his supper. Someone was telling a story—it was Krayhayft, who had oriental eyes and gleaming white patches in his straight black hair—and the others were listening in intense concentration, when Corbell dropped off to sleep.

  They tramped all the next day through waving pinkish-yellow grain. Corbell judged it wheat. “Who grows this?” he asked Skatholtz, and was answered with laughter.

  Wheat took cultivation, didn’t it? Maybe it had been gene-altered. Four gene-altered cats still lived among the tribe; they took their turns riding the necks of various tribesmen. A wheat that grew wild would be worth having: more useful than a cat that was all tail.

  All day Corbell saw kangaroos and ostriches bounding through the wheat. They were fast and wary. Once there was a lone man with a spear, far ahead, a pale figure at a dead run behind a fleeing ostrich. The pair was long gone when the tribe got there.

  Late in the day Krayhayft found the tracks of something large. The tribe followed. Near sunset their quarry came in sight: a big, shambling mass that ran from them on four legs until it turned at bay on two.

  It was a bear. Its skin was hairless and yellow but for a mane of thick white fur. A nude polar bear? And no dwarf, either. It waddled toward the hunters and tried to maul them with its great claws; but it was fighting Homo superior in the prime of health and youth. They danced around it, slashing. It fought on long after it should have bled to death.

  They ate bear meat that night, while the cat-tails hunted at the edge of firelight. Jupiter was full, banded and orange.

  Corbell was dozing with a full belly when Ktollisp dropped beside him. He spoke slowly, enunciating. “Do you sing tonight?”

  “If I choose, then no.”

  “Acceptable. What was this about growing grain?”

  “The grain we used didn’t grow without human help.”

  “Like Skatholtz, I do not read your face well. If this is fiction-for-entertainment, you do it well. We will be sorry to lose you.”

  “How do you lose me?” The Boy might mean only that dikta die sooner or later, like cat-tails.

  No. Ktollisp said, “When we reach the dikta, we lose you.”

  Corbell hadn’t counted on that. “How many days?”

  “Four. Five if we stop for amusement somewhere. You will like the dikta, Corbel. There are men and women and the making of new Boys between them. They have a city and some country around, but they are not smart enough to make the machines go. In day we fix the things that go wrong at night.”

  “They’re not smart enough? They are the same…kind you are. Their heads should be built the same.”

  “They have the brain, the stuff inside the heads, just like us. They do not have the time. We do not tell them how to fix machines. They do not live long enough to learn, and they might break the machines learning, and we punish them if they leave. So they stay in the dikta place. They need us. We know where to find them. We must know this because we must bring new boys to the tribes.”

  “What happens to the…small ones not boys?”

  “The girls? They grow. Some boys grow too. We choose the best, the smartest and the strongest, one from each tribe for each year, and we send them back to the dikta. We do not do the thing to them that makes them stay the same forever.”

  Planned breeding for superior Boys…and it would tend to cow the young Turks, to the benefit of the leaders. Corbell said, “There must be a lot more women than men.”

  Ktollisp grinned. “You like that?”

  Anger tied his tongue. “You—you joke! I die of being too old soon! I can’t make more Boys!”

  Ktollisp had Corbell by the hair, his knife was drawn, before Corbell could do more than gasp. He slashed—slashed away a thick handful of Corbell’s hair and held it before his eyes. “Your lies are for the newly born. We are offended,” he said. “Can you lie as to this?” The thin white hair he held in firelight was dark brown for half an inch at the roots.

  Corbell gaped.

  The tribe surrounded him. They must have been listening all the time. Yes, they looked offended. Skatholtz said, “No dikt grows hair like that. You have found the dikta way to live long like Boys, that we know only in tales. We must know what and where it is.”

  Corbell had forgotten his Boyish, every word. In English he cried, “I haven’t the remotest idea!”

  Ktollisp slapped him.

  Corbell tried to block with his arms. “Wait, wait. You’re right, I must have taken dikta immortality. I just don’t know where. Maybe, maybe it’s in something I ate. The dikta did a lot of gene engineering. They made the cat-tails and the wild wheat. Maybe they made something that grows dikta immortality, something that grows in Sarash-Zillish. Listen, I didn’t know it was
happening! I can’t see my own hair!”

  Skatholtz was gesturing the rest back. “You could not feel your youth returning?”

  “I thought I was…getting adapted to the rough life. I spent like a hundred and thirty years in a cold-sleep tank, ten years at a time…my years, not yours. I couldn’t know what it did to me. Listen, there’s an old woman who’s been searching every city in the world for dikta immortality. If she doesn’t know, how could I?”

  “We know nothing of this woman. All right, Corbell. Tell your story. Leave nothing out.”

  He had been sleepy. Now he was scared boneless—and still bone-weary—and in that state Corbell told his life’s story. Whenever he paused for breath Skatholtz spat complex phrases in Boyish, translating.

  Telling savages about a black hole at the center of a galaxy was easier than he had expected. Telling Mirelly-Lyra’s tale was wearing. They kept backing him up for points she hadn’t mentioned, for points she hadn’t even noticed in her thirst for dictator immortality. They found her lack of curiosity incomprehensible.

  Questions. What had he eaten? Drunk? Breathed? Could immortality have been in the bath in One City? It was a mistake to mention the Fountain of Youth…but no, the dikta themselves used baths…

  Dawn came and Corbell was still talking. “It could have been any of the things I tried. The fruits, the nuts, the roots, the meat. The soup, even; I mean the combination of a lot of things plus the heat. Hell, it could even be the water in the fountain.”

  Skatholtz stood and stretched. “We can find out. When we return to Sarash-Zillish we will take a dikt. Shall we go?”

  “Go?” Corbell saw that the other Boys were getting up, collecting gear. “Oh, please! I’ll fall over!”

  “You are stronger than you think, Corbell. For too long were you a dikt sick with age.”

  They marched.

  The wheat-covered prairie went on forever. They camped early, after the afternoon rain. Corbell sprawled in the wet earth and slept like a dead man.