by Larry Niven
IV
He woke early. A cat-tail had crawled along his ribs, liking the warmth, tickling him. It mewed in protest as he rolled away. There was more protest from his overused muscles.
The fire had died. Jupiter, white with a thin red crescent edge, made the night seem bright.
Well, I’m in trouble again, he thought. Imagine my amazement. Everyone in the world wants dictator immortality, and they all think I’ve got it, and they’re all half right. Why do the Boys want it? Maybe they want to destroy it. It’s the biggest difference between them and the dikta…
He let his hand stroke the orange cat-tail. It draped itself over his knee and rumbled contentedly.
What is it? If it’s edible it’s in Sarash-Zillish. Everything I ate in Four City, Mirelly-Lyra ate too. One kind for women and one for men? and man’s immortality doesn’t affect women at all? I don’t believe it.
So something in the park holds dictator immortality, in the sap or the juice or the blood, and I ate it. What did she eat when she searched Sarash-Zillish? The Boys eat almost no vegetables—and vegetarians eat no meat—but she fed me both, and fruit too. Insects? I don’t eat insects.
If I could get her to Sarash-Zillish, I’d know. Watch her. See what she doesn’t eat.
The stars were bright tonight. A few unwinking stars had a pinkish tinge: small Jovian moons. The Boys were sprawled far from where the fire had been. A Boy on guard looked around as Corbell sat up. It was Krayhayft, the only Boy with white in his hair.
Heady smells reached Corbell. Wet earth and growing things, traces of young supermen who hadn’t washed recently, a ghost of broiled meat that Corbell hadn’t shared: suddenly he was hungry. And suddenly he was elated.
“What the hell am I complaining about?” he whispered. The cat-tail stopped purring to listen. “I’m young! If nothing else works I can outrun the bitch! I should be dancing in the streets, if I could find a street.”
Young again! That made twice. If he could find out how he did it, he could stay young for the rest of his life. Everybody’s dream. And even if he couldn’t—the grin died on his face. Now he had fifty years to protect, half a century of lifespan that the Norn would rip from him if he couldn’t show her the Tree of Life in Sarash-Zillish.
Something that tasted funny? Everything tasted funny. Different soil. Three million years of change.
It was too damn simple anyway. Immortality? And you drink it like fruit juice? An injection might have been more plausible, if he had received any kind of injection. Or…had he inhaled it like marijuana, in the smoke from the wood of a carefully gene-tailored tree?
“Corbell. Do you enjoy the morning?”
Corbell jumped violently. The sentry’s approach had been perfectly silent. He settled beside Corbell. By Jupiter light the pale threads gleamed in his hair. Corbell had wondered at the grace with which he moved: Krayhayft who carried the fire starter, Krayhayft the storyteller.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” said Krayhayft.
“That’s old,” said Corbell. Jupiter years. “I wonder why you aren’t the leader.”
“The old ones learn to avoid that chore…and to avoid the fighting that goes with it. Skatholtz can beat me. Skill in fighting has an upper limit. One is born with one’s greatest possible strength.”
“Oh.”
“Corbel, I think I have found your spacecraft.”
“What?”
“There.” The Boy was pointing low on the northern horizon, where a few stars glowed in the gray-black of coming dawn. One showed pink among blue-tinged stars. “The one that might be a moon except that it does not move. Is that your spacecraft?”
“No. I don’t know where my ship went. Don Juan wasn’t ball-like. It would look more like a thick spear.”
Krayhayft was more puzzled than disappointed. “Then what is it? I have seen it twinkle oddly. It does not move, but it grows more bright every night.”
“The whole system of worlds is messed up. I can’t explain it. I think that’s the next world out from Jupiter.”
“I wish it had been your spacecraft,” said Krayhayft. He fell to studying the steady point of light. Entranced…
The cat-tail slithered from Corbell’s knee and disappeared into the grain. Corbell saw two more low shadows slipping after it.
A cat screamed. Simultaneously something much bigger vented a much lower, coughing roar. Krayhayft shouted, “Alert!”
It bounded out of the grain and leapt at Corbell’s throat: something as big as the biggest of dogs. Corbell threw himself to the side. He saw a spear plant itself solidly in the open mouth, and then the Boys were on it. It was a dwarf lion, male, magnificently maned. It died fast. Even the first spear might have killed it.
Corbell got up, shaken. “The female could be out there.”
Skatholtz said, “Yes,” and joined the others who were fanning out into the grain. Corbell, spearless and superfluous, stayed where he was.
Presently he noticed something small in the path the lion’s charge had left through grain. He found a small butterscotch-sundae corpse. The other cat-tails had returned to the fire. They seemed unusually subdued.
At dawn he helped two Boys build a fire. He saw the reason later, when four more trekked in with ostrich eggs. They set the eggs on the coals, carefully cut the tops off and stirred the contents with spear hafts.
Scrambled eggs! Still no coffee.
Corbell strode along in pink sunlight, feeling good. The slapping-around was a bitter memory, with bruises to corroborate it, but he set next to it another memory: Ktollisp’s fist holding white hair with dark-brown roots. Oh, for a mirror! He was a slave, if not worse. But he was young! With an outside chance to stay that way a long time.
They had crossed a row of big, badly weathered rocks, oddly textured, big as houses and bigger. Now the land sloped down…and Corbell found Skatholtz marching beside him. Skatholtz said in English, “What do you know of the Girls?”
There was a Boyish word for girl-child and another for dikta woman, but Girl was a third word, and it carried a certain emphasis.
Corbell answered, “Mirelly-Lyra told me something about them. There was a balance of power between Boys and Girls, and somehow it fell apart.”
“By her tale, the Girls ruled Boys as Boys rule dikta.”
“No. Look at it with more care. The Girls ruled the sky; they could move the world. By implication they controlled the weather. They could decide how far the world should be from the sun. In fact, they first moved the world because the sun was getting too hot.
“The Boys ruled the dikta. They could see to it that no more Boys or Girls were born.” An interesting role reversal, that. “In itself that isn’t a lot of power, not in a crowded world where everyone expects to live forever anyway—”
“But our land was less rich! The tales tell it so!”
“Yeah. Look at it from the other direction. Suppose the Boys let the dikta breed like rabbits—breed fast. They kill most of the girl-children and hide most of the boy-children. The boy-children grow up. They get dikta immortality as long as they behave. Now the Boys have an army. They invade.”
The land had leveled out. Ahead it sloped upward again. Skatholtz mulled it over, then: “Our tales tell nothing of this.”
“That’s because it never happened. The Boys couldn’t feed such an army. Poor land. So the balance of power lasted—oh, tens of thousands of your years.”
“I see, partly. I am not used to thinking like this. What went wrong? Somehow the Girls lost control.”
“Yeah. Weather?”
“Our tales tell of a great thawing. When green things grew for the first time in our land, the Girls tried to take it. The thaw happened when the Girls grew too proud. In their pride they lost a moon, and with the moon they lost their power.”
Corbell laughed. “They lost a moon? Hey, just how accurate could those tales be after…a hundred thousand years?”
“We live long. W
e remember well. Details may be lost, but we do not add fiction.”
The land sloped upward. In the distance Corbell could see another line of big, melted-looking rocks.
“A moon. It sounds completely silly, but…Peerssa told me the moons of Jupiter were out of their orbits, but that’s not too strange. Dropping the world into their midst could have done that. But he also said Ganymede is missing completely.”
“Ganymede?”
“The biggest moon. Hell, I don’t see how it fits in.”
“And the sun is too hot, you said, and King Jupiter is too hot.”
“And the weather is screwed up,” said Corbell. “It all comes down to a change in the weather. It wiped out the balance of power. Then the Boys wiped out the Girls.”
“We tell tales of that war. Weapons as strong as a meteor strike! Look, Corbell, such a weapon was used here.” Skatholtz swept an arm behind him.
They had crossed a shallow dish-shaped depression a couple of miles across, rimmed by these half-melted…“Just a minute,” said Corbell. He dropped his load of jerky and scrambled up a rock twenty feet high and of oddly uniform texture. There at the top he found lines of rust red making a great Z: the remains of a girder.
“These were buildings,” he said. “It must have been a Boy city.”
“When I was young I wanted to use weapons like that.” Skatholtz laughed boyishly. “Now I cringe at what they must have done to the weather. But we destroyed the Girls.”
“They did you some hurt, too.” Corbell climbed down from the melted building. They’d have to trot to catch up to the tribe.
“The tale tells that they destroyed us,” said Skatholtz. “I never understood that saying.”
Corbell and Skatholtz marched on in silence for a time. Boys chattered ahead. It was just past noon, too early to hunt. Very far away, a great brown carpet flowed away from the noise they were making: thousands of animals too distant to recognize, too numerous to count.
Skatholtz said in Boyish, “Soon we reach the border to the great water. A day’s march broad is that border. Thea word is—” Corbell learned the words for shore and sea. “The near village holds a pleasant surprise,” and Skatholtz used another unfamiliar word. “I can’t describe it. We must do work for it.”
“All right.” In his youth Corbell had never liked muscle work. But oh, it was good to have the muscles now! He asked, “Why were we talking English?”
“Because I must know you. I must learn when you are telling fiction.”
Corbell chose not to protest the injustice. “I wonder about the cat-tails.”
“What do you wonder?”
“In Sarash-Zillish they rule. Here there are things bigger and more violent. How can they live?”
“Soon or late a predator kills them. Until then they are pleasant to keep near. Soon or late, everything dies except Boys.”
“Before this evil you control your rage skillfully. Will we find more cat-tails among the dikta?”
“No. We never leave cat-tails with the dikta.”
“Why?”
“It isn’t done.”
Corbell let it drop. There was a thing he dared not ask yet, but he would have to find out. How carefully were the adults guarded?
The dikta place was the second place Mirelly-Lyra would look for him. He couldn’t stay long. The moment she saw him dark-haired, that moment he would have to produce dictator immortality.
And maybe he could. One simple test…made carefully! He did not want the Boys chopping down the Tree of Life!
V
They reached the village at noon. It was a strange blend of primitive and futuristic: an arc of baths, identical to the bath Corbell had found by the shore in One City, half surrounding the village square, and surrounded in turn by sod huts and granaries. There was great variety among the sod structures; but they matched. The village as a whole was beautiful.
Corbell was beginning to get the idea. The ancient factories would build the Boys buildings for certain purposes. It was very easy to go on using them century after century. For other purposes they made their own, and lavished labor and ingenuity on them. He was not entirely surprised when Krayhayft spoke for the tribe, and called it “Krayhayft’s tribe.” He who spoke for the village had Krayhayft’s strange grace, and gray in his long golden hair.
They worked all that afternoon. A couple of Boys of the village went with them to supervise, shouting their orders with malice aforethought. Corbell and Krayhayft’s tribe used primitive scythes to reap grain from the fields and carry it in bundles into the village square, until there was a great heap of it there, until the Boys of the village were satisfied.
After their labor the Boys went whooping to the baths. Corbell waited his turn with impatience. He went the full route, bath and steam and sauna and back to the bath, this time with the Jacuzzi-style bubble system turned on. When he emerged it was dark. They were starting dinner.
The “surprise” Skatholtz had promised was bread, of course. Several kinds of bread, plus rabbit meat the villagers had hunted. Corbell ate his fill of all the varieties of bread. The taste brought on a nostalgic mood. His eyes were wet when Ktollisp had finished singing Corbell’s version of “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”
The bread had surprised him less than the “phone booth” at one end of the arc of baths. He dithered…but Skatholtz knew he knew about “phone booths.” While Krayhayft started one of his long tales, Corbell sought out Skatholtz and asked him.
The skeletal boy grinned. “Were you thinking of leaving us through the prilatsil?”
“Not especially.”
“Of course not. Well, you’ve guessed right. This village trades their grain for other bread-makings all across the land.”
“I didn’t think the prilatsil would send anything that far.”
“The land is crossed by a line of prilatsil, close-spaced. Do you think we would handle emergencies by traveling on foot? Look.” Skatholtz drew a ragged circle—Antarctica—and a peace symbol across it. “If there were serious reason to travel, these lines of prilatsil exist. Since the time of the Girls they have been used four times…more, if tales have been lost. We keep them in repair.”
Corbell kept his other questions to himself. He hoped he would not have to use the prilatsil. They were too obvious. They would be guarded.
When the tribe left in the morning, they carried loaves of bread in their cloth bags. There had been an exchange: Three of Krayhayft’s tribe had stayed behind, and three villagers had replaced them. No big deal was made of it, and Corbell had to examine faces to be sure it had happened.
Now there was no more grain. The land dropped gradually for twenty miles or more, and ended in mist. Nothing grew on it but dry scrub. Off to the right of their path was a cluster of sharp-edged shapes, promontories all alone on the flat lifeless ground.
Nature sometimes imitates that regular, artificial look. Corbell asked anyway.
“They are artificial,” Skatholtz told him. “I have seen them before. I have my guess as to what they are, but…shall we look at them? Some of Krayhayft’s tribe have not seen them.”
The troop veered. The structures grew larger. Some lay on their sides, disintegrating. But the nearest stood upright, its narrow bottom firmly set in the ground. The tribe clustered beneath a great curved wall leaning out over their heads.
“Ships,” said Corbell. “They carried people and things over water. What are they doing so far from the ocean?”
“Perhaps there was ocean here once.”
“Yeah…yeah. When the world got so hot, a lot of the ocean went into the air. This used to be sea-bottom mud, I think.”
Krayhayft said, “That fits with the tales. Can you guess what they might have carried?”
“Too many answers. Is there a way in?”
He didn’t understand when Krayhayft untied the fire starter from his belt. He would have stopped him otherwise. Krayhayft twisted something on the fire starter, pointed it at the grea
t wall of rusted metal.
The metal flared. Corbell said nothing; it was already too late. He watched the thin blue beam spurt fire until Krayhayft had cut a wide door.
The metal slab fell away. Tons of mud spilled after it. Aeons of dust and rainwater…They waded up the mud slope, joking among themselves, and Corbell followed.
The hull was one enormous tank. There were no partitions to prevent sloshing. Corbell sniffed, but no trace of the cargo remained. Oil? Or something more exotic? Or only topsoil for the frigid Antarctic cities? Topsoil wouldn’t slosh around…
The surprise was on deck and above deck. Masts! There was no place here for human sailors. There were only proliferating masts reminiscent of clipper ships, and cables all running to a great housing at the bow. A housing for motors and winches and a computer.
The hull had appeared to be sound; the masts were in fine shape. But time had reduced the computer to garbage. That was a pity. It was as big as Don Juan’s computer, which had housed Peerssa’s personality. Conceivably it could have told them a great deal.
They marched down into the fog, and the fog swallowed them.
Corbell heard regular booming sounds that he failed to interpret. Then, suddenly, they had reached the sea. Breakers roared and hissed across a rocky shore.
They rested. Then, while others collected brush for a fire, three of the Boys swam out into the breakers with spears and the rope. It looked inviting. The water would not be cold. But Corbell had seen the Boys hunt, and he wondered what toothy prey waited for them.
Two came back. They swam ashore with the rope twitching behind them and collapsed, panting heavily, while others dragged the rope in with its thrashing burden. They beached twelve feet of shark. The third Boy didn’t come back.
Corbell couldn’t believe it. How could immortals be so careless of their lives?
The Boys were subdued, but they held no kind of formal ceremony. Corbell ate bread that night. He had no stomach for shark. He had seen what came out of the shark’s stomach.
