A World Out of Time

by Larry Niven

  “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 she’d be, or where 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.”

  “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 grass 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 pass 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 Uranus had been nearing Jupiter in the random orbit the Girls had left it in, when Don Juan 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 Uranus 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 Uranus, 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.

  Corbell pelted after him. The lion seemed taken aback…but he decided. He charged Gording. Somehow Gording danced aside. The lion turned, broadside to Corbell. Corbell threw all his weight behind the spear, leaned into it as it punched into the lion behind the ribs. The lion screamed, turned and slashed, and missed, because one of its forelegs was unaccountably missing. Gording did his trick again and both the lion’s forelegs were gone.

  “Now run!” Gording cried.

  They ran toward Sarash-Zillish. In the clear air they could see the bluish line where trees began. “Male lion…drives the prey…toward the female,” Gording panted.

  Corbell looked back and saw something wheat-colored bounding through the tall wheat. A glance at the old man made him say, “You’ll wear yourself…out. We’ll have…to fight.”

  They stopped, blowing.

  The female’s caution gave them time to breathe. She stalked out of the wheat to find them facing her like statues of athletes, eight feet apart. She roared. They didn’t flinch. She thought it over. She roared again. Corbell stood poised, confident, happy.

  The female departed. Twice she looked back, thought it over, and kept going.

  Corbell walked now with a silly smile plastered across his face. He couldn’t help it. Every time he let his face relax it came back. Any normal pair of men would have been bragging unmercifully; but Gording clearly considered the incident closed. He didn’t even show relief at Corbell’s competence…which was flattering, in a way.

  Finally Corbell said, “Real lions would have torn us up. Why are there so many small versions of big animals?”

  “Are there?”

  “Yeah. Lions, elephants, buffalo. There must have been about ten thousand Jupiter years of famine here, before the soil turned fertile. The big animals must have starved faster. Or maybe they died of heat prostration: too much volume, not enough surface.”

  “I believe you. I look at you and I see a different kind of dikt. We have had time to adapt to reddened sunlight and long days and long nights. Animals and plants and dikta…and Boys adapted through the dikta. If Uranus widens the world’s path now, it will all be lost.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you ready to face Mirelly-Lyra?”

  “Yeah.” Corbell shivered, though the morning was not especially cool. It would get cooler. Co
rbell tried to visualize six years of night—and saw Mirelly-Lyra stalking him in the dark. He said, “It’d be nice if we could find dikta immortality before we meet her. She’d do damn near anything for that.”

  “If we ever find it, my turn comes first.”

  Corbell laughed. “There’s bound to be enough of it. Otherwise it would have been…guarded.”

  “Why did you pause?”

  “Guarded. The hospital vault in Sarash-Zillish wasn’t guarded. Were the Boys that sure a dikt couldn’t get to it? It looked just like the other vault except for the guard systems, the vault door and the one-way prilatsil and the armored glass cubicles in the roof.”

  “What of it? What if one dikt or three found dikta immortality? The guarded chamber in Four City was protected from dikta by dikta who owned it, or so you assumed.”

  “I was wrong. Four City was old, but not like Parhalding. More like Sarash-Zillish. I think the Boys built Four City.”

  The trees were closer now. Fruit trees. Corbell was hungry. He shrugged that off. He had the tail end of something…

  Ashes of a dying fire. Most of it comes out in the feces and urine…but not all of that; urea can build up in the joints and cause gout. Cholesterol can build up in the veins and arteries. But even when all these are washed away…there are still the inert molecules that accumulate in the cell itself.

  Picture the miracle that can remove those. Now tell me what it looks like.

  “There was nothing to guard!”

  “I don’t under—”

  “There was nothing to guard in Sarash-Zillish. I had it turned around. Heeeyaa! I’ve got it! Dikta immortality!”

  Gording backed away a bit. “You had it once before. What fierce beast is to bite me this time?”

  “I don’t have to say. I made a fool of myself once. Not this time. Come on.” The trees were close and Corbell was hungry.

  IV

  Corbell walked alone through the streets of Sarash-Zillish. His face itched. His scalp itched. His chest itched. He was trying to ignore an acid stomach.

  How did loners walk? He’d seen only one loner close enough to tell. That one had been certain of welcome; his walk had been springy and confident, Boyish. Corbell tried to keep his walk springy and confident.

  The windows of Sarash-Zillish were dark. The streets were empty and silent. This whole charade could turn out to be unnecessary, itches and all…

  They had filled their bellies with fruit in the forest outside Sarash-Zillish. There Corbell had used the head of the broken spear to shave his face and his chest and four inches of his scalp around a topknot. Gording had cut away his long white hair. Gording had shaved too, for all the good that would do; there were white-haired albino Boys, but they didn’t move like their joints hurt.

  Laughing, joking Boys spilled out of a probable department store. Corbell turned a corner to avoid them, just like a loner would, maybe. At a distance he should pass as a loner. Close up, no chance. Dikta immortality be damned, he was no twelve-year-old. He wished Gording were beside him; but that would have torn it. Two was just the wrong number to pass.

  The brush clogging the street thickened. Corbell waded into it. Here were tangled vines rising almost vertically to a wall. Corbell turned along its length.

  The wall, he found, had a gentle curve to it. Probably it formed a circle or an ellipse. Here there was a break, and near the break the shrubbery thickened and grew taller, as if the park spilled out through the opening. Corbell passed it and kept going. There were park sounds: tree limbs rustling in the breeze, small birds whistling, a sudden loud squawk followed by (Corbell jumped) a burst of laughter. Boys! Boys on the other side of the wall. And the wall opened ahead of him.

  Beyond the opening, a twelve-foot Christmas ornament floated above knee-deep vines.

  Corbell thought it through. Then, within sight of the car, he began searching for a straight sapling. Most of the bushes were of the wrong kind, but he found one that would do, even if it was a bit short. He hacked at the base with the truncated spear until he could break it loose. He sat down cross-legged…

  What was keeping Gording?

  Gording was well behind him, tracking him. If anyone noticed, two loners happened to be moving in the same direction, their target a reasonable one: the park.

  Squatting cross-legged, Corbell disengaged the spearhead from the broken haft and used it to shave the sapling. He barely glanced up as Boys came wading through the tangle in what had been a park gate: two, five, ten Boys with a giant turkey carcass slung on poles. Where were they going with that? A kitchen in a nearby building? Effete, that was. He heard a louder voice followed by a pause, and, judging that he had been hailed, he glanced up, held a grinning Boy’s eye for a moment, then deliberately went back to his work. Couldn’t they see he was alone? A loner would damn well make the first overtures, as and when he felt like it, maybe.

  The new haft was shaping nicely. He tried the end against the spearhead. A bit too big. He’d shave it down a little and carve a notch and wedge it in. The rushing of the Boys diminished, moving across the street, but two quiet, puzzled voices were speaking too near him. He glanced up under lowered brows.

  They were near, and looking at him as they talked. The car was—Gording was crouched behind the car!

  How had he gotten there? Corbell hadn’t heard a sound. He must have spotted the car, gone over the wall, circled inside the park and gone over the wall again. Now he crouched, immobile, but looking guilty as hell if anyone should see him.

  The tall Boy with hair like a black puffball hailed Corbell again. “Perfunctory apologies because we interrupt. May we examine your work?”

  Corbell unfolded his legs and slowly stood up, then sprinted for the car.

  The door was open as he had left it. By that much did the Boys fail to intercept him. Gording was ahead of him, sliding in the other door. Corbell slammed his door and clung to the handle, leaning back to hold it shut, while Gording jabbed at the keyboard.

  The black-haired Boy ran alongside, pulling at the door, for longer than Corbell would have believed possible. Finally he dropped away.

  “You said four of anything,” said Gording. “I pushed that.” Crossed commas.

  “I don’t know where that takes us. Let’s see if we can change it.” He jabbed four times at the crooked pi. “I don’t even know if there is a subway terminal here. There’s no giant cube. Everywhere else it was a giant cube.”

  “Rest. If we don’t find the subway we still have a tchiple. Dial at random.”

  “I lost my spear.”

  “I still have the thread.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I thought I was repairing it right. But the way those Boys acted, I must have messed it up somehow. Skip it.”

  On their crooked run through the city they saw only one other Boy. On the wreck of a skyscraper near the city’s center, a lean and ragged loner was mountain-climbing three stories up. As the tchiple zipped beneath him his sunken eyes locked on Corbell’s and held them until the tchiple turned a corner.

  With the big dark still an Olde Earth year away, one loner and the two bands near the park might well be the total population of Sarash-Zillish. It would be nice to think so…but stupid. Sarash-Zillish had to be on that pattern of close-spaced “phone booths.” It was too important not to be. Corbell said, “Some of Krayhayft’s tribe probably got here ahead of us.”

  “They won’t know where we’re going, will they?”

  “They don’t know why we want to get to Cape Horn. I’d hate to underestimate them.”

  The car slowed and settled, bending shrubbery, and stopped. They got out. Gording asked, “Where are we?”

  The sparse greenery in the street thickened to jungle as it climbed the slope to their right. Corbell sprang to the rounded top of the tchiple. The patch of citrus jungle was unnaturally flat and rectangular. Some of the trees looked very old.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But why did the tchiple
bring us here? Where is the subway?”

  “It’d be towering over our heads. Every city I’ve seen, the subway building was a tremendous cube.”

  Gording joined him on the car. Together they surveyed the rectangle of jungle.

  “But a subway is below ground,” Gording said. “Why would it need to be so high?”

  “I never found out what was in the upper stories. Maybe places of government.” Or offices for rent. No way to say that in Boyish.

  “Maybe they made a subway and left off the subway building.”

  The patch of jungle was about as wide as the great cubes in One City and Four City. Corbell said, “Could be. They put a park on it instead. Then the ice cap thawed and a lot of dead dust fell all over everything.” Where did they put the entrances, though? Escalators in the center? No, the trees grew thickest there.

  Where the ground sloped up from the street, there in mid-slope was a dip. Water pooled there, forming a small, dirty, weed-grown pond. Corbell expressed himself under his breath.

  “I don’t know those words,” said Gording.

  Corbell pointed. “Under the weeds and the water and the scum and the mud, that’s where we’ll find steps leading down to the doors. After we dig it out. After we find shovels and dig all that stuff out of there. Then we get to find out if anything still works under all that.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “They won’t let us.” Gording pointed.

  The sharp-faced loner was trotting toward them from across the wide street. He carried an oddly curved broadbladed sword. Well behind him, other Boys spilled out of a building.

  “Do you think you can take him with your rocks?”

  “No,” said Gording. “He’s ready. He knows we’re dangerous. He’ll catch the thread on his blade.”

  “Into the car, then.” They clambered down and in. In frustration Corbell demanded, “How did they get here so fast?”