by Larry Niven
He lay long awake, puzzling it out. He had been old and young and middle-aged, in no intelligible sequence. With any luck he would stay young. He had fought for his life and his life-style against the massed might of the State; he had never given up, not with all the excuse in the world.
Did they get tired of too much life?
Corbell didn’t doubt that they could build machines to kill off the sharks. The factories that kept turning out identical bedrooms and baths and offices were a tribute to their laziness; but they were also brilliant. Then why were the sharks still here? Tradition? Machismo?
In the morning the Boys were cheerful as ever. In the afternoon they reached the dikta.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
The Dictators
I
Six City, Dikta City, showed first as a bar of shadow along the shoreline, then as half a mile of blank wall with a low windowed structure peeking above the center. Dikta City showed its back to the approaching Boys.
As they rounded the end of the wall Corbell saw its face. Dikta City was a single building, four stories tall, half a mile long, and as wide as a luxury hotel. Its façade looked north toward the sea and the sun, and was rich with windows and balconies and archways. Between city and sea was a semicircle of low wall over which the tops of trees were visible. A garden.
The dikta were emerging through an arch in the low garden wall. In scores now, they waited.
Dikta City could never have been under a dome. It was the wrong shape. It must have been built late, specifically to house the adults, long after Antarctica became a hothouse and the seas receded across the continental shelf. Topsoil must have been spread over the salt dunes, and walled against the winds. Fish from the sea, and whatever the walled garden produced, would be the only sources of food for miles around.
It would be difficult to leave this place, Corbell thought.
A couple of hundred dikta waited until the Boys were a few yards away, until Corbell had counted seven men among a horde of women. Then they cringed, all of them at once. They held the cringe as Krayhayft stepped forward.
“We come to repair your machines,” Krayhayft said, “and to take your boy-children to ourselves.”
“Good,” said one among them. He had a white beard and shoulder-length white hair, very clean and curly. He straightened from the cringe, as did all the others…and now Corbell was impressed by their general health and dignity. They didn’t act like slaves; the cringe had been a formality. Corbell wondered what would have happened if he had cringed naturally, that fourth day in Sarash-Zillish. The Boys might have killed him as an escapee.
All of the dikta were studying Corbell.
Krayhayft noticed. He spoke at length in a voice that carried. Corbell couldn’t follow everything he said, but he was telling a condensed version of Corbell’s history. The spaceflight, the long voyage, some complex phrases that might have related to relativistic time-compression; the flight from Mirelly-Lyra…no mention of the mad dikta woman’s motives. No mention of dikta immortality. Corbell was sure of that; he listened for it.
The old man listened and laughed; he was vastly entertained. At the end of the narrative he came forward and said, “Welcome to our refuge, Corbell. You will have interesting things to tell us. I am Gording. Do I speak slowly enough?”
“A pleasure to meet you, Gording. I have a lot to learn from you. Yes, I can understand you.”
“Will you join us tonight, then? We have room in the Dikta Place for many more children. It will be instructive to see what your children are like.”
“I—” Corbell choked up. The women were examining him and speculating in whispers. It wasn’t just his browline, though even the women were half bald. His brown-and-white hair must have caught their attention too…and his answer was rudely delayed. “I’m happy you accept me for that important purpose,” he said.
What he was was nervous. Abruptly he was very conscious of his near-nakedness. The dikta were entirely naked.
One of the women—her long black hair was just showing gray—said, “It must be long since you made children with a woman.”
Corbell laughed. Divide by twelve: “A quarter of a million years.”
What she asked then raised laughter. Corbell shook his head. “I may have forgotten how. There is only one way to know.”
He helped the Boys set up camp.
A grove of trees occupied the center of the semicircular garden within the wall, which was far more orderly than the jungle in Sarash-Zillish. The Boys set up camp under the trees, and built their fire with wood brought by dikta women.
“You may go to the dikta,” Skatholtz told him then, “but you must not tell them of dikta immortality.” It didn’t seem to occur to him that he might be disobeyed.
“What about my hair? I know damned well they noticed it.”
Skatholtz shrugged. “You are an early type of dikt from before stories were told. Tell them all dikta once grew hair like yours. If any learn what you know, their minds will be…all that they know will be taken from them.”
“I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
Skatholtz nodded. Corbell was dismissed.
The prospect of an orgy was making Corbell jumpy. He had tried to lie with a woman three million years ago, in the State dormitory, the night before they took him to the Moon to board Don Juan. All those staring eyes had cowed him, left him impotent. It might be the same tonight.
But he had half an erection now.
Dikta City’s ground floor was a row of long, hall-like public places, each roomy enough for two hundred. The dining room was one of these. It had some of the trappings of a cafeteria. Corbell found trays and utensils at one end of a counter; a dozen women and a man cooked food in large batches and served it as the line passed. Others finished eating and took their places. Weird differences: The single utensil was a large plastic spoon with a sawtoothed cutting edge, and the metal trays floated at elbow level, sinking slightly under the weight of food.
Food was a variety of vegetables cooked in elaborate combinations with very little meat; in that sense it was like Chinese cooking. The old man named Gording escorted Corbell through the routine. Tables were of different sizes, seating four to twelve. At a table for six with Gording and four women, Corbell had a fair chance of following a conversation.
They asked him about his hair. He told them Skatholtz’s lie, and expressed surprise at their monochromatic hair and receding hairlines. Maybe they believed him.
Observing his dinner companions up close, he noted that, like the Boys, they showed pallid, almost translucent skin, coupled to all the shapes natural to human beings: noses broad or narrow, lips thick or thin, bushy eyebrows or eyes with epicanthic folds, or both, or bodies burly and invulnerable or slender and fragile…
“Vitamin D?”
He’d spoken aloud. They looked at him, waiting.
“It’s only a theory,” Corbell tried to explain. “Once all dikta were dark brown, when the sun was hot and bright. Some dikta went far north, where it was so cold that they had to cover themselves or die.” They were smiling nervous incomprehension, but he went doggedly on: “Our skin makes a thing we need, from sunlight. When dikta cover themselves for warmth, their skin must let more sunlight through, or they die. My people grew lighter skin. I think it was the same with your people, after the sun turned red.”
They were still smiling. “Dark brown,” Gording said. “Your tale is strange, but our skin does make a life-chemical, kathope.”
“But how do you live in the long night?” Almost six years!
“Kathope seed. We press it for the oil.”
Escaping Dikta City should have been easy during the long night, when the Boys all gathered in Sarash-Zillish. But fugitives would have to carry their own kathope seed…yeah, and Boys would tear it up if they found it growing anywhere but here or in Sarash-Zillish. Corbell was beginning to worry. Maybe he really was trapped.
He asked about the coming festivities.
&n
bsp; “We take sex in company,” T’teeruf told him. At a wild guess she was sixteen or so, her face heart-shaped, her eyes large and expressive, her mouth full and made for laughter, her hair a tightly coiled ruff. Even she was half bald. “Sex is the only pleasure we have that the Boys can’t ever understand. That, and giving birth.” Her eyes dropped shyly. “I haven’t done that yet.”
II
The orgy hall (what else could you call it?) was an afterthought. It seemed the Boys hadn’t thought of putting one in when they built Dikta City. The dikta had repaired the omission by building a kind of infinity sign on the roof, composed of twelve of the mass-produced triangular bedrooms arranged like two pies of six wedges each, with two baths set between. They had knocked out all the inner walls. The small toilets that belonged to the bedrooms still had doors (at least the dikta kept that form of privacy!), but the closets didn’t, and the “phone booths” had been ripped out. Of course.
When Corbell arrived there were dikta on every horizontal surface, beds and couches and coffee tables, and more coming in. Half a dozen women gestured invitation from one of the beds. Corbell accepted.
His nervousness left him quickly. Rippling water bed and warm woman-flesh formed his pillows, and it was altogether delightful. Out of courtesy and because she was nearest, he lay with an older woman first. She expressed no disappointment, but he was too quick and he knew it. After all that time, to hurry…and still it felt like a mighty victory. “I gave this up forever,” he said, and thanked her with his eyes.
Now he beat his chest and warbled the Challenge of the Great Ape, and took a woman with pronounced oriental features and warm, skilled hands. This time it was longer, better. The partial baldness of these women made them more exotic. Their breasts were alike, large in diameter but flattened; even in older women they did not sag.
They asked him about his sensations. Even with his wife, Corbell had had difficulty analyzing his own reflexes, and he had trouble now. They probed delicately, with questions and with stroking fingertips, exploring his ancient nervous system and telling him about their own.
A younger man joined them. Two women left, were replaced by two more. Corbell scratched T’teeruf’s back while she was in sexual congress with the other man. Was he through for the night?
Evidently not—
The man was using his hands and toes, attempting to satisfy five Women at a time, reminding Corbell of old paintings from India. Egotist! But it seemed fair, given the proportion of women to men. When inspiration came, Corbell tried those variations himself. It took some concentration…and he had never been in practice. He was tentative, a bit clumsy.
One of the women asked him about it. He told her. One woman to a man…monogamy…no children’s immortality…The faces around him closed down like masks, and the woman changed the subject.
He hardly noticed. He was drunk on the hormones bubbling in his blood. He watched the other man and two women, trying to follow what they were doing, but it all came out as a tangle of arms and legs.
“There are lost skills,” T’teeruf told him a bit wistfully. “Positions used in free-fall. Now they exist only in the tales.”
He tried the sauna (crowded) and the bathtub (crowded). Hot water churned with bubbles and the currents generated by a couple on the far side: Gording and the older woman who had been his first since the corpsicle tank. Wet women rubbed against him. A water splashing war erupted and died out. Corbell and a young woman with golden hair made love, sitting cross-legged in the tub facing each other.
That was when he looked up and saw the Boys: half a dozen of them seated on the edge of an open airwell with their feet hanging down toward the tub. They passed comments to each other while they enjoyed the show. Ktollisp caught him looking and waved.
The girl’s eyes followed Corbell’s upward, then dropped in disinterest. Okay, it didn’t bother her…When Ktollisp waved again, Corbell waved back.
In the bedroom in One City there had been an old videotape of two couples demonstrating lovemaking positions. Even then Corbell had sensed the presence of an audience. Now he knew. They had been there at the coffee table: Boys or Girls watching borrowed dikta, or even (how old was that tape?) Boys and Girls mixed, before the great rift.
The orgy’s impetus dwindled. Now half of Dikta City clustered on the beds and couches and coffee tables in half of the bedroom complex, questioning Corbell. His audience thinned as some left by the stairwell; others went by twos and threes to the other half of the multiple-bed complex and came back later. Corbell talked on and on. The first man to see the bottom of the universe, he had his audience at last. Euphoria!
Suddenly he was yawning uncontrollably.
No, they didn’t use the bedrooms for sleeping. They slept in a ground-floor room. Gording volunteered to walk him over. The fresh air cooled his damp body and cleared his head. The stars were slightly misted over. Gording pointed to a steady pink-tinged star in the north. “Corbell, you came from space recently. What is that?”
“A world like a little Jupiter. It shouldn’t be there, but it is.”
“It grows brighter, but it does not move against the pattern of fixed stars.”
“That bothered Krayhayft, too.” It was brighter, wasn’t it? “Listen, I’m too tired to think.”
The sleeping room was a kind of greenhouse. The sleeping surface was tall grass, living grass, already covered by bodies. Gording and Corbell found space, lay down and slept.
The sun shining through glass walls woke him. Four women were still curled on the grass, isolated. The rest were gone.
He had daydreamed of nights like last night, when he was much younger. Without the bald heads, of course. So what? He was lucky they saw him as human. Lucky he could still see them as human, too. Their bodies hadn’t changed much. Their minds had changed more; they seemed geniuses…and they seemed placid in their slavery.
If they hadn’t freed themselves from the Boys in all those aeons, how could Corbell? Corbell remembered that there was a possible answer…which had to be tested.
A ceremony was in progress at the Boy encampment. Eight dikta males (he must have missed one yesterday) were presenting five boy-children to the tribe. Of the three cupbearers, Krayhayft who seemed to be the oldest now seemed to be in charge. The rest of the Boys watched solemnly. Three carried the remaining cat-tails around their necks.
Corbell decided against joining them; he took a place by himself and kept his mouth shut. His chance would come.
The children appeared to be five to seven years old. They were overawed and immensely proud. Of the adults, it was Gording who named each child and described him: his strength, his accomplishments, his habits good and bad. For a moment Corbell thought one of the children was being rejected, and that didn’t fit his preconceptions at all. Then he realized that the boy-child’s name had been rejected. He was being given a new one.
The ceremony broke up suddenly. The boy-children stayed with the Boys; the men went off talking together. Krayhayft called to Corbell. “I know that walk and that look.”
Corbell went over.
“The walk means you have used muscles in unaccustomed labor. I know the bright smile and red eyes, too.”
Corbell grinned. “You’re right.”
“You had fun?”
“You’ll never know.”
“I never will. Some of the boy-children we take try to be the best so that they can be dikta. Do you believe that?”
“Sure. Did you?”
Krayhayft scowled. “It didn’t matter. I was not best at anything. I burnt food. My spear missed the prey. I don’t like to remember that long ago. I remember that I wanted to go home. What does a yearling know of the difference between living five years or six, and living forever?”
“And sex?”
“What does a yearling know of sex? What does a Boy know of sex? He can only watch.” Krayhayft grinned suddenly. “Last night was the first time I ever saw—” He beat his chest with his fists and gav
e an ululating yell.
“I was a little crazy.”
“That seems normal.”
“What happens next? How long do you stay here?”
“If some machine needs to be repaired, we stay. Otherwise we leave tomorrow. We have many tribes to meet, to tell them that we have made Sarash-Zillish ready for them.”
Time was constricting for Corbell, but he dared not hurry. At the moment he had nothing at all to do. And everyone else was busy.
On the second floor the Boys had opened what might be a power generator. They ordered him away from their secrets.
In another room women wove cloth of exceptional beauty and color. “During the long night we cover ourselves,” one told him. She refused to teach him how to weave. “The thread might cut off some of your fingers.”
“It’s that strong?”
“What would be the point of making cloth less durable?”
He stole a loop of the thread, held it a moment, then put it back. Sure, it’d make wonderful strangling cord, but where would he hide it?
He wound up in the kitchen/dining room complex, serving food and watching the cooks. He had been a pretty good cook once, but no sane chef would try to use someone else’s kitchen without exploring it first. And it was bad news. The implements and measuring spoons were unfamiliar, of course. But the basic foods and the spices were also unfamiliar. If he intended to pay his way here, he would have to learn to cook all over again.
In midafternoon a woman offered to relieve him at the serving counter. She took a second look and said, “You are unhappy.”
“Right.”
“I am Charibil. Can I help?”
He couldn’t tell her all his problems. “There’s not much here I’m good for.”
“Men don’t have to work if they don’t want to. You do have one useful talent. You can make greater the variety of traits among us.”
Their gene pool was a little skimpy, yeah. Though there was variety. Charibil herself had the epicanthic fold and delicate features of an oriental, though she was Corbell’s height. The uniformity was there too: pale skin, breasts wide and flat, half-bald scalp and curly black topknot, slender frame…
