A World Out of Time

"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 non-citizens?"

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 light-speed 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 Corbel'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: damns, geothermal plants, temperature differential plants in the ocean depths; now they were big fusion generators supplemented by rooftop and desert solar-energy collectors. But the State owned them all.

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

"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."

"We rarely have famines. When we do..." It was rare for Peerssa not to finish a sentence.