A World Out of Time Read online

  “Bullshit.”

  “Is it that easy for you to ignore your duty?”

  Corbell swallowed an urge to drive his fist through a bank of dials. “No, it’s not easy. Every time you raise the holy name of the State, something in me snaps to attention.”

  “Then why not listen to the voice of your social conscience?”

  “Because it’s not my conscience! It’s those damn shots! You filled me full of memory RNA, and that’s where my sense of duty to the State is coming from!”

  Peerssa took a good dramatic pause before he said, insinuatingly, “Suppose it’s your conscience, after all?”

  “I’ll never know, will I? And that’s your doing, isn’t it? So live with it.”

  “You will never see Earth again. Your medical facilities will not keep you alive that long.”

  Corbell snorted. “Don’t be silly. The medicines and the cold-sleep tank are supposed to keep me young and healthy for the first two hundred years. The cold-sleep tank has a rejuvenating effect, remember?”

  “It doesn’t. I lied. You were to remain alive for the duration of your mission. If the medicines had been better, we would have extended the mission.”

  It rang true; it fitted well with what Corbell knew of the State. “You sons of bitches.”

  “Corbell, listen to me. In three hundred years the State may discover complete rejuvenation. We could arrive home in time—”

  “For noncitizens?”

  No answer.

  “We’re going to the galactic axis. You have your orders.”

  “You must enter cold sleep immediately,” Peerssa said in a dead voice.

  “Oh?”

  “Your optimum program is ten years in cold sleep, six months to recover, then cold sleep again. You will survive to see the galactic axis, barely.”

  “Uh-huh. And if you happened to forget to wake me up?”

  “That’s your problem. Traitor.”

  II

  Raw throat. Cramped muscles. Eyes that wouldn’t focus. Questing hands found him in a coffin with the lid still on.

  Waking from cold sleep was like waking from death. He had half expected this when they froze him in 1970. And he had half expected never to wake. He whispered, “Peerssa.”

  “Here. Where would I go?”

  “Yeah. Where are we?”

  “One hundred and six light-years from Sol. You must eat.”

  Suddenly Corbell was ravenous. He sat up, rested, then climbed down from the tank, treating himself like fragile crystal. He was lean as death, and weak. “Fix me a snack I can take to the Womb Room,” he said.

  “It will be waiting.”

  He felt light-headed. No, he felt light. He picked up a large bulb of hot soup in the Kitchen, and sucked at it as he continued to the Womb Room. “Give me a view,” he said.

  The walls disappeared.

  The stars blazed violet-white over his head. The stellar rainbow spread out from there: violet stars in the center, then rings of blue, green, yellow, orange, dim red. To the sides and below there was almost nothing: a dozen dim red points, and the feathery ring of flame that marked his drive. That had dimmed to, for Peerssa had pulled the ram fields close; and had reddened, because the fuel guided into that ring was moving at near lightspeed relative to the ship.

  Peerssa was bitter. “Are you satisfied? Even if we turned back now, we have lost over four hundred years of Earth time—”

  “You bore me,” said Corbell, though he felt stabbing pain from what he would once have called his conscience. “What happens next?”

  “Next? You eat and exercise. In six months you must be strong and fat—”

  “Fat?”

  “Fat. Otherwise you could not survive ten years in cold sleep. Finish your soup, then exercise.”

  “What do I do for entertainment?”

  “Whatever you like.” Naturally Peerssa was puzzled. The State had provided nothing for Corbell’s entertainment.

  “Yeah, I thought so. Tell me about yourself, Peerssa. We’re going to be together a long time.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know how you got to be this way. What was it like to be Peerssa the checker, citizen of the State? Start with your childhood.”

  Peerssa was a poor storyteller. He rambled. He had to be led by appropriate questions. But there was more than his voice to tell tales with.

  He was an inept motion-picture director with an unlimited budget. On the wall of the Womb Room he showed Corbell the farming community where he had grown up, and the schools of his childhood (skyscrapers with playgrounds on the roof), and the animated history texts he had studied during his final training. The memories were usually hazy. Some were shockingly sharp and brightly colored: the enormous ten-year-old who bullied Peerssa on the exercise roof; the older girl who showed him sex and thus frightened him badly; his civics teacher.

  Corbell ate and slept and exercised. He tended Don Juan with the half-instinctive love and understanding absorbed with his rammer training. In between, he had from Peerssa all the knowledge he had not dared demand of Pierce the checker.

  He saw views of Selerdor, the city he had only glimpsed from a rooftop. The buildings were as blocky and unimaginative inside as out. The carvings at street level were in Shtoring, the State language. They were edifying principles, rules of conduct, or the life stories of State heroes.

  He grew to know Peerssa as well as he had known Mirabelle, his wife for twenty-two years. In knowing Peerssa he grew to know the State. The computer memory held what Corbell would have called civics texts. He read those, with helpful comments from Peerssa.

  He learned of two brush-fire wars that had half destroyed the world. In ashes of war and fires of idealism the State had been born, said Peerssa, and had rapidly grown all-powerful. It was a benevolent fascism, Peerssa said. What Peerssa described had distinct overtones of Chinese and Japanese empire. Society was drastically stratified. A citizen’s obligations to those above him (and below him!) were backed with his life.

  The government built and controlled every power generator. Once these had been very diverse: dams, geothermal plants, temperature-differential plants in the ocean depths; now they were big fusion generators supplemented by roof-top and desert solar-energy collectors. But the State owned them all.

  Once he asked, “Peerssa, do you know what a water-monopoly empire is?”

  “No.”

  “Pity. A lot of early civilizations were water-monopoly empires. Ancient Egypt, ancient China, the Aztecs. Any government that controls irrigation completely is a water empire. If the State controls power of all kinds, they also control the fresh water supply, don’t they? With a population of twelve billion—”

  “Yes, of course. We built the dams and rerouted the rivers and distilled fresh water for deuterium for the fusion plants and sent the excess water onward. If the State had ever paused to rest, half the world would have died of thirst.”

  Musing, Corbell said, “I once asked you if you thought the State would last fifty thousand years.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I think the State could last seventy or a hundred thousand. See, these water-monopoly empires, they don’t collapse. They can rot from within, to the point where a single push from the barbarians outside can topple them. The levels of society lose touch with each other, and when it comes to the crunch, they can’t fight. But it takes that push from outside. There’s no revolution in a water empire.”

  “That’s a very strong statement.”

  “Yeah. Do you know how the two-province system works? They used it in China. Say there are two provinces, A and B, and they’re both having a famine. What you do is, you look at their records. If Province A has a record of cheating on its taxes or rioting, then you confiscate all the grain in Province A and ship it to B. If the records are about equal you pick at random. The result is that Province B is loyal forever, and Province A is wiped out so you don’t worry about it.”

&nbs
p; “We rarely have famines. When we do…” It was rare for Peerssa not to finish a sentence.

  “There’s nothing more powerful than controlling everybody’s water. A water-control empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it. But, Peerssa, the State doesn’t have any outside.”

  Much later, Corbell learned that he had changed his life again. At the time he only suspected, from Peerssa’s silence, that he had offended Peerssa.

  And Peerssa was not Pierce. The checker was long dead; the computer personality had never harmed Corbell. It was worth remembering. Corbell gave up talking about the State. Peerssa was loyal to the State; Corbell emphatically was not.

  There was another topic he eventually gave up. Once too often he told Peerssa, “I still wish you’d sent a woman with me.”

  “Must I remind you that the life-support system is too small for two? Or that Sol is now a vast distance behind us? Or that your sex urge tested low? If it had not, you would not be here.”

  “It was a matter of privacy,” Corbell said between his teeth.

  “But the loving bunks in the dormitory were not the only test. In word association you tested low. Your testosterone level tested low.”

  “You ball-less wonder! How can you talk to me about low sex urge!”

  “The State has a superfluity of testicles,” Peerssa said with no particular emphasis.

  Would Pierce the checker have reacted that way? It was a weird response…but Peerssa meant it. Corbell stopped talking about women.

  Six months passed. Stars passed, too. A few passed close enough to show like violet windows into Hell, and receded like dim red fireballs. Corbell was fat, too fat for his own tastes, fat enough for Peerssa’s, when at last he climbed into the great coffin.

  It happened seven times.

  III

  “Corbell? Is something wrong? Speak, please.”

  Corbell sighed in the cold-sleep tank. He did not move. He had become very used to this routine: the terrible weakness, the hunger, the six months of exercises and of forcing insipid food down his throat, the climbing into the tank to start the cycle over. At this, his seventh awakening, he felt a deadly reluctance to wake up.

  “Corbell, please say something. I can sense your heartbeat and respiration, but I can’t see you. Have you turned catatonic? Shall I administer shock?”

  “Don’t administer shock.”

  “Can you move, or are you too weak?”

  He sat up. It made him dizzy. Ship’s thrust was very low. “Where are we?”

  “Beyond midpoint of our course, thrusting laterally to force us back into the plane of the galaxy. Proceeding according to plan. Your plan, not mine. Now I want to monitor your health.”

  “Later. Make me soup. I’ll take it to the Womb Room.” He moved toward the Kitchen, bouncing oddly in the low gravity. He had aged more than the four years he had been awake. After each awakening the exercises had taken longer to build him up again. He felt brittle, and ravenous.

  The soup was good. The soup was always good. He settled himself in the Womb Room and let his eyes roam the dials. Some of the readings were frightening. The gamma-ray flux would have charred him in minutes, if the power of the ram fields were not guiding the particles aside. Other readings made no sense. Peerssa had told the truth: The seeder ramship was not designed for velocities this close to the speed of light. Neither were the instruments and dials.

  And what about Peerssa’s senses? Was he flying half blind?

  “Give me a full view,” he said.

  The stellar rainbow had hardened and sharpened over seven decades. It had lost symmetry, too. To one side the stars were thickly clustered; the arc of blue-whites blazed like diamonds in an empress’s necklace. To the other, the side that faced intergalactic space, the rainbow was almost dark. Each star was sharply defined within its band of color. But within the central disk of violet stars (dimmer than the blue, but of a color that made one squint) was a soft white glow: the microwave background of the universe, at 3° absolute, boosted to visible light by Don Juan’s terrible speed.

  His ship’s drive flame had become a blood-red fan of light facing intergalactic space. Peerssa was thrusting laterally to bend their course back into the plane of the galaxy.

  “Give me a corrected view,” Corbell instructed.

  Now Peerssa worked a kind of fiction. From the universe he perceived through the senses on Don Juan’s hull, he extrapolated a picture of the universe seen at rest, and he painted that picture around the wall of the Womb Room.

  The galaxy was incomparably beautiful, a whirlpool of light spread out across half the universe. Corbell looked ahead of him for his first view of the galactic core. It was there, just brighter than the rest, and hazy, without definition. He was disappointed. He had thought the close-packed ball of stars would flame with colors. He could pick out no individual stars; only a vague glow around a central bright point. Behind him the stars were similarly blurred.

  “I’m getting poor definition in the view aft,” Peerssa volunteered. “The light is drastically red-shifted.”

  “And forward?”

  “This is not according to theory. I would have expected more definition within the core. There must be a great deal of interstellar matter blocking the light. Even so…I need more data.”

  Corbell didn’t answer. A multiple star cluster had caught his eye, half a dozen brilliant points whirling frantically as they came toward him. They passed on the right, still jiggling madly, and froze in place as they came alongside.

  “The next time that happens, I’d like to see an uncorrected view.”

  “I’ll call you, but you won’t see much.”

  So here he was at the halfway point, with his destination in sight. No man before him could have seen the glow of the galactic core, or the frantically spinning star cluster flashing past at this close to lightspeed. His enemy’s soul had become Corbell’s slave.

  Corbell flies toward the core suns like a moth toward a flame, expecting death. But he has his victories.

  He finished his anonymous soup. Don Juan’s Kitchen and/or chemistry lab supplied just enough taste, just enough variety, to keep a State noncitizen from cutting his throat. On such fare he must grow fat…and exercise to distribute the fat. Lately it tended to settle in a potbelly, which was no help at all.

  He was getting old. Despite the cold-sleep tank and all the medicines available, he would be decrepit before they reached the core suns.

  His second life should have been more like his first. He had hoped to make friends, to carve out some kind of career…he had been frozen at age forty-four, there would have been time…time even for a marriage, children…

  Things would look better when he had built up some strength. He could go on an oxygen drunk. On request Peerssa would fill the cabin with pure oxygen, while lecturing Corbell on the adverse medical effects for as long as Corbell would let him.

  “About now you usually start telling me my duty,” he said.

  “There’s no point,” said Peerssa. “We’re decelerating now. We’ll be among the core suns before we can brake to a stop.”

  Corbell smiled. “Anyone but you would have given up sooner. Expand my view of the core suns, please.”

  The hub of the galaxy rushed toward him. Dark clouds with stars embedded in them surrounded a bright core. They looked like churning storm clouds. They had changed position since his last waking period.

  But the core itself was a flat featureless glow, except for a single bright point at the center. “The interstellar matter must be almighty thick in there. Can our ram fields handle it?”

  “If we give up thrust and settle for shielding the life-support system and nothing else, you’ll be amazed at what we can handle.”

  “I’ll be dying anyway, of old age.”

  “Corbell, there is a way you can go home again.”

  “Dammit, Peerssa, have you been lying to me?”

  “Calm down, Corbell. There is a w
ay to make you young, if you’re willing. You can understand why I didn’t raise the subject before.”

  “I sure can. Why now? Why would you do this for someone who betrayed your precious State?”

  “Things have changed, Corbell. By now we may be the last remnants of the State. And you weren’t even a citizen.”

  “And you are?”

  “I am a human personality imposed on a computer’s memory banks. I could never be a citizen. You could have been. Such as you are, you may well represent the State. The State may not survive the seventy thousand years we will be gone. You are worth preserving.”

  “Thank you.” Unreasonably, Corbell was touched.

  “The State may exist only in your memory. I’m glad you forced me to teach you speech. I’m glad I told you so much about myself. You must live.”

  “Make me young,” Corbell said with the fervor of a man growing old much too fast. “What does it take?”

  “We have the equipment to take a clone from you. You surely find nothing strange about the concept of cloning?”

  “We knew about it. Cloning of carrots, anyway. But—”

  “We can clone men. We can clone you. Let the individual grow in sensory deprivation, in your cold-sleep tank. We can record your memories and play them into the clone’s blank mind.”

  “How? Oh, of course, the computer link.” The link was a direct telepathic control over the computer. Corbell had never dared use it. He had been doubly afraid of it since the computer became Pierce the checker. Peerssa might use it to take him over.

  Peerssa said, “We must also have injections of your memory RNA.”

  Corbell yelped. “You’re talking about grinding me up into chemically leeched hamburger!”

  “I’m talking about making a young man of you.”

  “It wouldn’t be me, you madman!”

  “The new individual would be as much Jerome Branch Corbell as you are.”

  “Thanks! Thanks a lot! You told me what happened to the real Corbell. Ground up for hamburger and leeched for RNA and injected into a brain-wiped criminal!”