A World Out of Time Read online

  And he had to go to the bathroom.

  She was irritatingly, embarrassingly slow to understand. He knew she had the idea when she began to pace, scowling, dithering as to whether to leave him in his own filth. Eventually she freed him, first (from behind the headboard) his wrists, then his feet. She stood well back, covering him with the cane, while he went into the middle closet.

  Alone at last, with the door blocking her eyes, he let out a shuddering sigh.

  He wouldn’t try to escape. Not this time. He knew too little. It wasn’t worth the risk that she wouldn’t let him go to the bathroom again. It wasn’t worth the risk of the cane.

  The cane: It had reduced him to a groveling slave, instantly, twice. He had never even considered keeping his dignity. In that, the cane lost half its power: He could feel no shame. Still, he knew that too many applications of the cane would leave him nothing like a man.

  He was a shell of a man reanimated by electrical currents and injections of memory RNA. He had been changed again and again, but whatever he was, he was still a man. What the cane might do to him was cruder, more damaging.

  He would cooperate.

  But: She was mad. Even if sane by the standards of her time—unlikely—by Corbell’s she was mad, and dangerous. Old and feeble as he was, he would have to escape before she killed him.

  The “phone booth” must be working; he’d seen no microwave oven here in the bedroom. Good.

  Calling Peerssa would have to wait. He dared not ask after his pressure suit; it might show that he was thinking dangerous thoughts. And even if Peerssa were still in the solar system, how could he help?

  Corbell left the booth and returned to his spread-eagled position on the bed. Mirelly-Lyra moored his hands from behind the headboard, then his ankles. They resumed their conversation.

  The translator skipped words. He missed some of it before he realized what he was hearing. Then he asked questions, got her to back up for the blank spots. He heard it in bits and pieces:

  She was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, a citizen of the State. (The State? He wondered about that. But she described it in much the way Peerssa had, except that her State had been the government of all known worlds for fifty thousand years—Corbell’s years, for the Earth had not yet been moved.)

  In her youth she had been supernaturally beautiful. (Corbell tactfully did not question this.) Men went incomprehensibly mad over her. She never understood the force that drove men to such irrationality, but she used her sex and her beauty as she used her mind: for advancement. She was born hyperactive and ambitious. By the age of twenty she was high in the ranks of Intrasystem Traffic Control.

  Because she was now in a position of responsibility, the State conditioned her. After conditioning, her ambition was not for herself alone, but for the good of the State. The conditioning was routine—and, Corbell gathered from later data, it didn’t quite take.

  If she advanced the State’s ambitions by guiding the courses of spacecraft within the solar system, certainly she advanced herself. And she came to the attention of a powerful man in a collateral branch of the bureaucracy. Subdictator Corybessil Jakunk (Corbell heard his name often enough to memorize it) was not her direct superior, but he could do her some good.

  So powerful a man was allowed some leeway for his personal desires, that he might serve the State more readily. (The old woman saw nothing wrong in this. She was impatient when Corbell did not understand at once. It may have formed a spur to her own ambition.) His personal desire was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar.

  “He told me that I must be his mistress,” she said. “I wished more stature for myself than that. I refused. He told me that if I would share his life for a four-day period, he would gain for me a position in full charge of the Bureau. I was only thirty-six years old. It was a fine chance.”

  She played him as she had played other men. It was a mistake.

  Corbell had wondered why he was being made captive audience to an unsolicited soap opera. He began to find out. Three million years later, at what looked to be eighty or ninety years old, she was still wondering what had gone wrong. “The first night I used a chemical to help. To make one want sex—”

  “An aphrodisiac?”

  It went into the computer memory. “I needed it. The second night he would not let me use chemicals. He used none himself. I had a bad time, but I did not complain then or on the third night. On the fourth day he begged me to change my mind, give up my position, become his woman. I held him to his promise.”

  For seven months she was Head of the Bureau of Intrasystem Traffic Control. She was then informed that she had volunteered for a special mission, a glorious opportunity to serve the State.

  It was known that there was a hypermass, a black hole, at the center of the galaxy. Mirelly-Lyra was to investigate it. After some preliminary use of automated probes, she was to determine by experiment whether (as theory predicted) such a black hole could be used for time travel. If possible, she was to return to her starting date.

  “Why did he do it?” she wondered. “I saw him once before I left. He said that he could not bear to have me in the same universe if I was not his. But this was not what he offered at all!”

  “He may have thought,” said Corbell, “that four days of ecstasy would do it. You’d throw yourself into his arms and beg not to be sent away.”

  For a moment he feared she would use the cane. Then she broke into dry cackling laughter. He saw something likable reflected there, before her face drooped in brooding hate. Now she looked like death itself, the Norn. “He sent me to the black hole. I saw the end of everything.”

  “So did I.”

  She didn’t believe him. At her urging he described it as best he could: the colors, the progressive flattening of core suns into an accretion disk, the swelling of the Ring of Fire, the final drastically flattened plane of neutronium flecked with smaller black holes. “I only went in as far as the ergosphere,” he said, “and that was only to get me home fast. Did you really go through the singularity?”

  She was long in answering. “No. I was afraid. When the time came I did not think I owed the State that much.” Her conditioning had worn off to that extent, at least. She had circled the black hole, using its mass to bend her course back on itself, and headed for home. She was eighty years old, still healthy and still beautiful (she said) due to the rejuvenation medicines in her ship’s dispensary, when she reached Firsthope.

  He checked the times with her. Did her Bussard ramjet accelerate at one gravity all the way? Yes. Twenty-one years each way. Her ship was far superior to Corbell’s Don Juan—and looked it. It was a toroid, bigger than Don Juan, and with a cleaner design.

  Firsthope was a colony just being established around another star when Mirelly-Lyra left Sol. She hoped that Firsthope would not have records of her defection.

  Firsthope fired on her. What she at first thought was a message laser carried no modulation at all: It was an X-ray laser, designed to kill.

  She tried again. The next system resembled Firsthope: It held a world of Earth’s mass and Earth’s approximate temperature range, whose reducing atmosphere had been seeded when the State was still young. Perhaps it had been colonized in the seventy thousand years she had been gone…and it had been. She was fired on, and she fled.

  “I was bitter, Corbell. I thought it was because of me, because of what I had done. All the worlds would have my record. There was no hope for me. I went to Sol system to die there.”

  She had already recognized stars in Sol’s projected vicinity. At Sol she was not fired on. But the sun was expanding toward red giant status, and Earth was missing. Bewildered, she investigated further.

  She recognized Saturn, and Mercury (heavily scarred by mining, just as she had left it), and Venus (showing the signs of an unsuccessful attempt to terraform that useless world). Uranus was in a wildly altered orbit between Saturn and Jupiter, if that was Uranus. Mars bore a tremendous scar, a fresh mare probably left by the im
pact of Deimos. “The State was going to move Deimos,” she told Corbell. “It was too close. Something must have happened.”

  She found Earth orbiting just inside the orbit of Mars.

  Corbell asked, “Any idea how they did that?”

  “No. Deimos was to be moved by fusion bombs successively exploded in one crater. Moving an inhabited planet could not be done that way.”

  “Or who did it?”

  “I never learned. I landed my ship and was arrested at once, on my record, by children.”

  “Children?”

  “Yes. I was in a bad position,” she told Corbell, smiling wanly. “Even at the last, when I landed on Earth itself, it may be that I hoped my beauty would sway a judge. But how could I sway children?”

  “But what happened?”

  Earth was ruled by children, twenty billion children aged from eleven years to enormous. “It was young-forever that did it. The State had discovered an ideal form of young-forever,” the old woman said. “Parents can see to it that their children stop growing older at an age just below—what is your word? When girls begin their cycle of blood—”

  “Puberty.”

  “Just before puberty, they are stopped. They live nearly forever. There is no resultant rise in numbers, because these Children do not have children. The method was far better than the older method of staying young forever.”

  “Older method? Of immortality? Tell me about that one!”

  Suddenly she was enraged. “I could not find out! I learned only that it was for the few, for the dictator class alone. When I arrived it was no longer used. My lawyer knew about it. He would not discuss it.”

  “What happened to the solar system?” he asked.

  “I was not told.”

  He laughed, and desisted when she raised the cane. So the State hadn’t let her play tourist either.

  She let the cane’s tip fall. “They told me nothing. I was treated as one not entitled to ask questions. All that I learned I learned from my lawyer, who seemed a twelve-year-old Boy and would not tell his true age. They learned my crime from my ship’s log. They sentenced me to—” Untranslated.

  “What was that?”

  “They stopped time for me. There was a building where some criminals went to be stored against need.” The bitter smile again: “I was to be flattered. Only unusual breakers of the law were thought to be of future need to the State. People of high intelligence or with good genes or interesting tales to tell to future historians. The building would hold perhaps ten thousand, no more. I was lucky they let me keep my medicines. At that I could only choose as much as I could carry.”

  She leaned close above the water bed. “Never mind this. Corbell, I want you to know that there was an earlier form of immortality. If we find it, we can both be young again.”

  “I’m ready,” said Corbell. He pulled at the soft bindings on his wrists. “I’m on your side. I’d love to be young again. So why not untie me?” It can’t be this easy.

  “We may search a long time. I have already searched for a long time. I must have your youth drugs, Corbell. They may not be as good as the dictators’ immortality, but they must be better than mine.”

  Oh.

  He had to answer. “They’re aboard ship, in orbit. They can’t help you anyway. You’re probably older than I am, not counting the time I gained in cold sleep.” He felt discomfort from the sweat pooled under him; he felt more sweat starting; he felt his helplessness. He saw her raise the cane.

  She waited until he had stopped thrashing before she said, “I understand you. You come from a time earlier than mine. Your medicines are more primitive than mine. I cannot use them. So you say.”

  “It’s true! Listen, I was born before men landed on the Earth’s Moon! When the cancer in my belly started eating me alive I had myself frozen. There was—”

  “Frozen?” She didn’t believe him.

  “Frozen, yes! There was the chance that medical science would find a way to heal the cancer and the damage done by broken cell walls and—” His defense ended in a howl. She held the cane on him for a long time.

  He heard: “Open your eyes.”

  He didn’t want to.

  “I’ll use the cane.”

  His eyes were clenched like fists, his face a snarl of agony.

  “A frozen man is a preserved corpse. You won’t lie again, will you?”

  He shook his head. His eyes were still closed. Now he remembered what Peerssa had told him about phospholipids in the glia around brain nerves. They froze at -70° F, and that was the end of the nerves. He’d been committing suicide. And why not? But he’d never, never convince the Norn.

  “Let me speak this right,” said Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar. “I won’t tell you about the first time I was taken from the zero-time jail. The second time happened because the zero-time generator had used up its power source. More than a thousand of us came suddenly into a world that was baked and without life. The weather was hot enough to kill. It killed most of us. The rain came down like floods of bath water, but without rain we would all have died. Many of us reached this place where days are six years long and nights are six years long, but life is still possible. I was old. I didn’t want to die.”

  Resigned, he opened his eyes. “What happened to the others?”

  “The Boys captured them. I don’t know what happened after. I escaped.”

  “Boys?”

  “Don’t be distracted. For many years I used my time only to stay alive. I searched for the dictator immortality, but I never found it, and I grew old. I was half lucky. I found a small zero-time, a storage place for records in the forms of tape and of chemical memory, and for gene-tailored seeds. At first I kept my medicines in it. Later I emptied it out to make a zero-time jail just for myself. Then I altered the subway system to take any passenger from the hot places directly to me. I made warning systems to free me from zero-time when the subway system was in use.

  “Do you understand why I did all of this? My only hope was the advanced medicines that must be carried by any long-range explorer. One day an explorer would come back from another galaxy or from one of our satellite galaxies. He would know no better than to land in places of Earth that are too hot. He would need to come to the polar places immediately.” She stood above him like a great bird of prey. “The subway system would send him to me, carrying the medicines developed in my future, that will let me grow young when my own medicines have only let me stay old. Corbell, you are that man.”

  “Look at me!”

  She shrugged. “You may be a thousand years old, or ten thousand. What you must know is this: If you are what you say, you are useless to me. I will kill you.”

  “Why?” But he believed her.

  She said, “We are the last of the State. We are the last of people. Those who remain are not people anymore. If we could grow young, we could breed and raise more people. But if you do not have the medicines, of what use are you?” He heard her try to soften her voice. His own voice said to him, “Consider. You are too old for even your advanced medicines to affect you. I am different. Give me back my health and I will search out the real immortality that the dictator class used. You are old and frail. You will rest while I search.”

  “All right,” he said. The old woman was a Norn, right enough. She was both life and death to him now. “My medicines are in orbit. I’ll take you to my landing craft. I’ll have to contact my ship’s computer.”

  She nodded. She raised the cane, and he flinched. “If you break your word, you will take your own life, when I let you.”

  III

  When she was safely on the other side of the headboard, Corbell let himself relax. An almost silent sigh of released tension…followed by a wolfish grin and an urge to whoop, savagely repressed. At last Corbell had set himself a goal.

  He had come down to die on Earth. But this was better.

  His hands came free. He sat up, but she gestured him back with the cane. She made him put his w
rists together and bound them before she freed his ankles.

  The cloth stuck to his wrists like bandages. He didn’t think he could pull loose.

  The bedroom’s picture windows had stretched before they broke. The edges were like lines of daggers curved outward. He followed Mirelly-Lyra, stepping carefully through the daggers, into knee-high grass.

  She gestured him ahead of her, toward a bubble-car like those he had found in One City. Where his feet fell big insects fled, whirring. It was even hotter outside, but at least there was a breath of breeze. The sun sat on the horizon, huge and red, casting long blurred shadows. A hard-to-see red circle on the red sky, smaller than the sun, must be Jupiter.

  The car seemed to rest on the very tips of the grass blades. It did not shift as Corbell climbed in. Mirelly-Lyra gestured to him to slide over (with the cane, the cane that was anesthetic and instrument of torture and what else? He was afraid to learn) and climbed in beside him. She bent to the console, hesitated, then punched numbers. “We go for your pressure suit,” said the translator at her belt.

  The car moved smoothly away. Mirelly-Lyra half relaxed; she was not steering. Already Corbell knew that he could not return by car. He didn’t know the destination number of the house.

  Down the hill and into a narrow valley the car drove, accelerating. Now they were moving at hellish speed. Corbell gripped a padded bar on the dashboard and wished he dared close his eyes.

  She was studying him. “You did not use such cars?”

  “No.” Inspiration made him say, “We didn’t have such things on Dogpatch.”

  She nodded. The knot in Corbell’s belly eased open. God help him if she came to believe that he had left Sol system ahead of her. He had to convince her that he came from her own future.

  But there must have been inventions he would know nothing about, things humanity would not have forgotten. Like what? A bathtub designed to fit human beings? A cold cure? A permanently sharp razor blade, or a treatment to stop the beard growing at all? A hangover cure that works?