by Larry Niven
Nothing, nothing, nothing…“He’s got to be in range by now. Peerssa, dammit, answer!”
Gording pushed the suit aside and took the chair. The silver cane remained fixed on the old woman. She didn’t notice. Malice and victory! She gave Corbell the shivers.
Corbell jumped when the cat-tail abruptly dropped from the ceiling into the old woman’s lap. It landed soft as a snowflake and coiled there, ears up, watching Corbell make a fool of himself.
Nothing, nothing, nothing, n—The voice came faintly, fading in spots. “Peerssa for the State, Peerssa for the State calling Jaybee Corbell. Please allow for a delay of sixty-seven seconds in transmission. Corbell, I have a great deal to tell you.”
“Yeah, you do! I’ve got a great deal to tell you, too! I can tell you most of the history of the solar system. Tell me first, have you taken control of the planet Uranus? If so, what do you plan to do with it?” To Gording he said, “I’m asking him now. We’ll know in a minute.”
“What takes so long?”
“Speed of light. Uranus must be thirty-three and a half light-seconds away.”
Gording nodded. He was not impatient. Even his handling of the cane seemed negligent…but it never left the old woman. Good. Because she still had that look.
When Peerssa spoke he was irritatingly placid. “Yes, I am guiding a planet I believe to be Uranus. You were right in guessing that this is the solar system. After losing contact with you I flew to investigate the most easily available anomaly, the new planet between Jupiter and Saturn. I found a satellite with control systems which would respond to—”
“I know all about the motor! The question—” He bit it off. The delay was going to drive him nuts. Peerssa was still talking:
“—my broadcasts. I was able to probe the fail-safe programs first. Otherwise I might have damaged something. Eventually I found an object in the planet’s upper atmosphere radiating strongly in the infrared. I found a tremendous motor, a fusion pulse drive clearly intended to move the entire planet. Oh, you know about the motor. All right. I’ve already started the braking sequence. In twenty-two days Uranus will be inserted into orbit two million miles ahead of the Earth. I’m going to move the Earth further from Jupiter. We’ll cool it down to normal.”
“Don’t do it!” Corbell barked. He remembered uneasily that he had never been sure of Peerssa’s motives. “Listen, life on Earth has been adjusting to this situation for a million years or more. If you screw it up now most of the biosphere will die, including what passes for humanity these days.”
The old woman already looked younger, if only in a tightening of the muscles in her face, a smoothing of the pouchy look. Corbell looked away from the malicious cat-smile. He lifted the helmet and said in Boyish, “We were right. No coincidence at all. Peerssa dropped me here, then went to look Uranus over. He’s going to put everything back the way it was when he left Earth.”
Gording stared. “But the ice! The ice would cover—”
“Bear with me a little longer, will you?” He lowered the helmet on Gording’s answer.
Peerssa’s delayed reply came. “I do not take your orders, Corbell. I take orders from Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, who was once a citizen of the State.”
He should have known better, but it took him by surprise. He screamed, “You traitor!”
Mirelly-Lyra threw back her head and laughed.
Corbell laid the helmet on the desk. It took him a moment to find his voice. “No wonder you were smirking. What happened?”
She was thoroughly enjoying herself. “I tried to call your autopilot. No luck. A few days ago I tried again. It may have helped that my translator uses your voice. Peerssa and I talked for many hours about the State, and the world, and you—”
She broke off because Peerssa’s reply had arrived. “My loyalty has never wavered, Corbell. Was there ever a time when you could say the same?”
“Drop dead,” Corbell told the helmet. “Stand by. Mirelly-Lyra is with us now. We’ll try to talk her into changing your orders.” To Gording he said, “She rules my autopilot. She rules Uranus. I’m tired.”
“You must persuade her not to let it carry out its mission. This is urgent, Corbel.”
“I thought of that.” Corbell closed his eyes and leaned back.
He could watch it happen. As long as he could survive at all, he would be young. He could watch glaciers cover Antarctica until the ice was a mile thick. He and Mirelly-Lyra could watch the dwarf buffalo and the nude polar bears and the Boys and the dikta flee north until they froze in snowstorms or starved in land baked bare of life or died for lack of the vitamin D in kathope seed.
Maybe that was an angle. Did the old retread want the Earth all for herself? Or would she prefer company? But she’d fled the Boys once, and lived alone…hmmm. Where did she get her food? Was there anything she couldn’t stand to see extinct?
He opened his eyes. Gording was looking concerned for him. Oddly, so was the old woman.
“Nothing hurts,” Gording said. “I was used to things hurting. Sometimes my breath would come short. Always my joints and tendons and muscles ached. Corbell, you’ve found it. We’re young again.”
“Yeah. Good.”
“Play on her gratitude. I can’t talk to her. It has to be you. You’re capable. The fate of the world is on your shoulders.”
“That’s all I need.” He closed his eyes for a moment…just for a moment…and then he asked Mirelly-Lyra, “How do you feel?”
“I feel good. I feel strong. Maybe I only want to believe your lie.”
“Okay. Pay attention.” Corbell set the helmet between them. He talked half for Peerssa’s benefit. “The world is baked and dead everywhere except in Antarctica. What’s left alive is all tropical stuff evolved for six years of daylight and six years of night. If Antarctica gets covered by ice again everything will die. The ruling population is—” He used the Boyish word. “Boys, eleven-year-olds who live forever. There’s a minor population of adults for breeding. The men look like Gording, or younger. They’re human. There are some minor changes—” He began to describe them: the pale skin, the receding hairline…
Mirelly-Lyra regarded Gording without favor. But she must see him as human. The biggest difference, the receding hairline, looked natural on an old man.
He hadn’t impressed her yet. He went on: “If we ever expect to get a State established again, it’ll be with the adults, the dikta. The Boys are too different. What I’m getting at is, there is a chance. Right now there are about ten women to every man, but in a hundred years it’ll be nearly one-to-one.” An angle there? He definitely had her attention. “Of course, your role wouldn’t be very important at first, with that big an imbalance. But you’d be the only woman with a full head of hair. And the only redhead.”
“Just a minute, Corbell. Isn’t it true that Boys rule the adults? I don’t want to be a slave. And what about the Girls?”
“The Girls are long dead.”
“Ahhh.” Mirelly-Lyra must have hated the Girls.
“Right. It’s Boys and dikta now. We can get the dikta to move here, because we’ve got the dikta immortality. They’ll come. I know where to find a ship.”
She was shaking her head, frowning. Now Corbell knew that she’d bought half of what he was selling. Against half-bald women her great beauty would rule the men who ruled the dikta! But: “How long have the Boys ruled?”
“Ever since you brought the dikta to Antarctica as escaped convicts, whenever the hell that was. Say a million years.”
Oncoming youth put music in her laugh. “And now the dikta will break free, that suddenly? The sheep will become wolves because we offer them a sufficient bribe?”
Dammit, she did have a point. He changed languages. “Gording? Will the dikta revolt?”
“Yes.”
“They never did before.”
“The dangers were too great. The rewards were too small.”
Maybe. Corbell switched to English. “He says th
ey will. I believe him. Now just a minute, let me tell you why. First, they have not been bred for docility. They’ve been bred to produce a better strain of Boys, and they’ve got the genes. Second—how do I put this? You know what a cringing man looks like?”
She grinned. She’d seen Corbell cringe, damn her.
“Okay. They cringe. But it’s a gesture, a formality. The next second they’re walking as tall as ever. The Boys cringe to each other, too. I think the dikta haven’t revolted for a million years because the odds weren’t right. Now they are.”
She sat silent, frowning.
“What did you think you’d get out of Peerssa moving the Earth?”
“I thought…We’re the last of the State, Corbell. I thought we could start the human race over.”
“Adam and Eve, with Eve in charge. Mirelly-Lyra, we’d better hope we can mate with the dikta, because, frankly, I’m terrified of you. I don’t think I could get it up.”
“Low sex urge?”
“Yeah. Would you like to rule the dikta instead? You’ll have one thing going for you. You rule the sky. Once again a Girl rules the sky.”
He saw the beginnings of a smile (Corbell forgets that I can rule men with my beauty alone!) and he pushed it home. “But you’ve got to give Peerssa his orders now. He’s already started the braking sequence. Move the Earth now and it’s the end of the world.”
She leered teasingly. “I should make you wait.”
“Peerssa has already started the—”
“Give me the helmet.”
“Goddamn braking sequence. Here. Wait a minute.” He didn’t let go of the helmet.
“Corbell? Isn’t this what you wanted?”
“I just had the damndest thought.” Don’t blow this. The fate of the world—shaddup! “Give me a minute to think it through.” When a man commands a djinn, he tends to be careful with his phrasing. “All right. Peerssa, I’m going to describe what I want to happen. Then you tell me if you can make the course change, and you tell me what side effects we can expect. After that we can put it up to Mirelly-Lyra.
“I want Cape Horn and the region around it to be about fifteen centigrade degrees cooler.”
II
From the roof of the office building they watched Uranus pass.
The planet must be smaller than it had been at Corbell’s birth. Its drive was not all that efficient; it must have blown away megamegatons of atmosphere during aeons of maneuvering. For all that, a gas giant planet was now passing two million miles from the Earth.
It was tremendous. It glowed half full near the horizon: a white half-disk touched with pink, banded and roiled with storms, and a night side black against the stars. From the black edge a tiny, intense violet-white flame reached out and out, lighting the night side, expanding, reddening, dissipating.
Mirelly-Lyra said something that was pure music. No wonder she had been able to persuade men to do her bidding. (The old man’s voice said, “Glorious.”) Her white robe was a shapeless pale shadow in the dark. Corbell stood a little apart from her. Now that she was no longer an old woman, he was more afraid of her than ever. In truth, the Norn now ruled the fate of the world.
Corbell was very twitchy tonight.
He called into the helmet in his hands. “Peerssa, how goes it?” And waited for the response. Nothing, nothing—
“Green bird.” The autopilot was indecently calm. “It was difficult to plot a new path that would not intersect a moon, but I did it. Earth’s new orbit will be somewhat eccentric. Her average temperature will vary around ten degrees lower.”
“Good enough.” Corbell set the helmet down. His urge was to call Peerssa every two minutes. A giant planet falling that close wasn’t glorious, it was terrifying.
She said it again. “Glorious. To think that the State reached such heights! And now there are only savages.”
“We’ll be back,” he said, and laughed too loudly. “Gording doesn’t know it, but what he’s doing in Dikta City is forming the basis for a population explosion. In three thousand years we’ll be building interstellar spaceships again. We’ll need them. Earth will be too crowded.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps Gording did. Do you really think the dikta will come? A million years of slavery, after all—”
“They’ll have to come.” He’d thought it out in all its intricate detail. “In a few months Cape Horn and Four City will be in the Temperate Zone. Plants that grow well in Antarctica will grow well here once we transport them. In Antarctica it’ll be colder than the Boys expect. They’ll huddle in Sarash-Zillish through six Olde Earth years of darkness. Meanwhile the dikta will be setting themselves up here.”
“All very well if the Boys wait. You’ve said they’re very intelligent. They may attack immediately.”
“Let them wait a few months and we’ll give them a nasty shock! We’ll have Peerssa in orbit then. Didn’t he tell you? He’s got a thing that can blast them from orbit while they try to cross the ocean. They’ll think it’s the Girls. They’ll try to wipe out the Himalaya valleys and the Sea of Okhotsk. But if they wait long enough…there’s going to be rain, a lot of rain, when the Earth cools off. It’ll probably swallow Dikta City. The Boys’ll think the dikta drowned.”
Uranus jetted violet-white flame. Peerssa’s path through Jupiter’s moons was a complicated one. The night was vivid with lights: dayside Uranus, the pinpoint flare on Uranus’s night side, Jupiter, the swarming moons. The air was hot and humid and redolent with some rare scent, not quite musk, not quite flower shop. Corbell wondered where it came from. Were whales holding a mating season offshore? The air went to his head.
“Corbell?”
“Yeah?”
“What if the dikta are content to grow old gracefully?”
In the dark he could barely make out her impish smile. (Impish? It was that same malevolent smile, with the wrinkles gone. Had it always been merely impish?) He said, “They still won’t have a choice.”
A nasty thought came to him then, and he made haste to correct himself. “They won’t have a choice about coming here. They can take dikta immortality or leave it.” All the same, he had manipulated the dikta—for their own good—and would not Peerssa say the same to Corbell? I’d better be right! If they’ve got complaints in a hundred years, I’ll still be there to hear them!
The shadow in the dark asked, “Will the dikta men find me beautiful?”
“Yes. Beautiful and exotic. If the women liked me, the men will like you.”
She turned to him. “But you don’t find me beautiful.”
“My sex urge is supposed to—”
“That is no answer!” she flared. “You lay with the dikta women!”
He flinched back. “If you must know, I’ve always been a little afraid of a beautiful girl. And I’m scared stiff of you. My hindbrain thinks you’re still carrying that cane.”
“Corbell, you are well aware that the dikta may not survive the change in their biological rhythms. The sun shows every day in Four City, all through the year.” She touched his arm. “Even if they live, we are the last human beings. If we die without children…”
He wanted to shrink away, but something in him simultaneously wanted to move closer. He suppressed both urges. “You’re moving too fast. There may be dikta women already carrying my children. That’ll tell us if they’re human—and even if they aren’t, they’re close enough.”
“Let’s go inside. The heat—” When he gestured toward the garish intruder in the sky, she tugged at his arm. “If it falls on the Earth, do you really want to be watching?”
“Yes.” But he picked up the helmet and followed her. She didn’t have the cane anymore. All she had to wave at him was a planet ten times the size of the Earth.
It was cooler in the elevator. Air conditioning. His nerves still tingled, whether from Uranus’s passing or from the nearness of the Norn…He sniffed suddenly, and had to swallow a laugh. That was what he had smelled on the roof. She had never wor
n perfume before.
Her hood was thrown back. Her hair was exotic: long, fine white hair flowing out of a fiery red undercoat. Of the wrinkles of age there were only traces left. Her breasts were…exotic, yeah: high and conical, delightfully pointed under the robe. Would the dikta see them as powerfully sensual or as evidence of animal origin?
The elevator had stopped. The doors opened. But Corbell was flattened against the wall, and Mirelly-Lyra wasn’t moving, either. She watched him uneasily as he took in great lungsful of air, using all of his strength to hold himself stiff.
He wanted her. It was a madness in him, and he was terrified. “Perfume,” he said, and his voice was a croak.
She said, “Yes. Shame on you for forcing me to such means. If it gives you pleasure to attack my pride, you’ve won.”
“I don’t understand!”
“Pheromones. I altered my medical system to make pheromones to affect your sex urge. Pheromones are biochemical cues.” She stepped forward, put her hands on his shoulders. “Do you think I wanted it this—” And the touch of her was all it took.
The fastenings on her robe weren’t fastened, save one, which ripped. He had more trouble with his own loincloth, his hands were shaking so, and he howled with frustration. She had to do it for him. He took her on the floor of the elevator, quickly, violently. Maybe he hurt her. Maybe he wanted to.
And his head still bubbled with the perfume. He had not had time to notice the differences in her. Now he did. Even fifty thousand years had wrought changes. Her ankles were heavier, her body was thicker in every dimension, than the standard of beauty in 1970 A.D. And she had the damndest eyes, with a tilt that was not oriental…and a soft woman’s mouth. He took her again. She wasn’t passive, but she wasn’t wholly enjoying it, either; she was frightened of what she had unleashed.
Afterward he was calmer. They moved out of the elevator onto the cloud-rug floor. The third time it was she who mounted him. He tried to hold himself back, to let her find her own way, but when it was over he could see his handprints bone white on her hips. He said, belatedly, “Are you all right?”
