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Chapter FOUR: THE NORN
I
Somebody spoke to him. Corbell jerked violently and woke with a scream on his lips. Who but Peerssa could speak to him here?
But he was not aboard Don Juan.
The voice had stopped.
Peerssa spoke from his helmet, "I do not recognize the language."
"Did you expect to? Play it again for me." He listened to Peerssa's recording of a boyish voice speaking in reassuring liquid tones. Afterward he sighed. "If that guy was waiting to meet me himself, what could I tell him? What could he tell me? I'll probably be dead before I could learn his language."
"Your story has wrung my heart. Most of your contemporaries only had one life to live."
"Yeah."
"Your self-centered viewpoint has always bothered me. If you could see yourself as-"
"No, wait a minute. You're right. You're dead right. I've had more than most men are given. More than most men can steal, for that matter. I'm going to stop bitching."
"You amaze me. Will you now dedicate your services to the State?"
"What State? The State's dead. My self-centeredness is as human as your fanaticism."
The stranger's voice spoke again, in beautiful incomprehensible words-and Corbell saw him. His face was beyond the car's forward wall, beyond the metal, as if the metal were transparent. A hologram? Corbell leaned forward.
It was the bust of a boy, fading below the shoulders. He was twelve or so, Corbell guessed, but he had the poise of an adult. His skin was golden, his features were a blend of races: black, yellow, white, and something else, a mutation perhaps, that left him half bald; he had only a fringe of tightly curled black hair around the base of the skull and over the ears, and an isolated tuft above the forehead.
The face smiled reassuringly and vanished. The car shot forward and down.
Corbell was on a roller coaster. He pulled out a chair arm and hung on. The car fell at a slant for what felt like half a minute. Then there was high gravity as car and tu
Light inside, darkness outside. Corbell was begi
His ears popped.
Peerssa spoke. "Your speed is in excess of eight hundred kilometers per hour and still accelerating. A remarkable achievement."
"How do they do it?"
"At a guess, you are riding a gravity-assisted linear accelerator through an evacuated tu
"Barely."
"Corbell, answer if you can. Corbell, answer..." Peerssa's voice faded completely.
"Peerssa!"
Nothing.
Corbell's ears and sinuses felt pressure. He worked his jaw. There was no reason to panic, he told himself. Peerssa would pick him up when he reached Antarctica.
The hissing sound of motion was sleep-inducing. Corbell was tempted to lie down-preferably with his feet forward, because there would be deceleration at the end. To sleep, perchance to dream.
What kind of dreams does the last man on Earth have while traveling beneath the Pacific Ocean at Mach one-and-a-half in a subway system that hadn't been repaired in hundreds of years? He could be stopped beneath the Pacific, to suffocate slowly, while an almost human ghost reassured him that service would be resumed as soon as possible. Peerssa could wait forever for him to emerge.
Too much imagination and I'll scare myself to death. Too little and I'll get myself killed.
Corbell worked his jaw to relieve pressure in his ears. Had Peerssa said evacuated? He poked his head into the helmet to see the dials.
Air pressure was down and still dropping.
He panted as he worked his way into the pressure suit. "Vacuum tu
But now the ride was superlatively smooth. Presently Corbell emptied his bladder; then emptied his suit's bladder into the toilet. The urine ran boiling through the bowl without leaving a trace. A frictionless surface.
Hours passed. He dozed sitting up, woke, lay down on his face, didn't like that, lay down on his back with the backpack a bulge under his shoulders and a chair arm under his head. Better. He slept.
A surge woke him. He sat up. He sucked syrup... sucked the last of it, and it was almost enough. He felt acceleration; was he going uphill? Half a minute of low gravity, a final surge backward. He felt himself at rest. There was an almost subsonic thump beyond the metal end of the car.
The glass door, and the metal door beyond it, both popped open at the same time. Corbell had just stood up when the thunderclap slapped him backward.
Sometimes you would end a long backpacking trip with aches in every muscle and a mind void of everything except the determination to keep walking no matter what. In much the same frame of mind, Corbell got to his feet and limped toward the doors. His ears rang. His head hurt where he'd bumped it on his helmet. He'd twisted his back. He felt stupid: The thunderclap of air slamming into vacuum should not have surprised him.
"Peerssa!" he called. "This is Corbell for himself. Answer if you can."
Nothing. Where the hell was Peerssa? There was nothing blocking him now, was there?
Corbell shook his head. All he could do was keep wading through the surprises until they stopped him.
There were dim lights far back in a great open space. He picked out couches and alcoves and the faintly glowing lines of a wall map. Numbers at his chin showed pressure normal or a bit higher, temperature warm but bearable.
He opened his faceplate.
The air was warm and musty. He smelled dry rot. He lifted his helmet, sniffed again. A trace of animal smell- "Meep?"
He jumped, then relaxed. Where had he heard such a sound? It was friendly and familiar. Motion caught at his eye, left- "Meee!" The beast came questing through dusty cloud-rug. It was a snake, a fat furred snake. It came toward him in an S shaped flow. Its fur was patterned in black and gray and white. It stopped and lifted its beautiful cat's face and asked again, like a cat, "Meep?"
"I'll be damned," said Corbell.
Something rustled behind him.
He forgot the furred snake. He was sleepy, so sleepy that in a moment he knew he would pass out. But there were furtive sounds behind him, and he turned, fighting to stay on his feet.
Under a hooded robe of white cloth with a touch of iridescence in it: a bent human form.
While the cat-snake distracted him, she had struck. He saw her in shadow: tall and stooped, gaunt, her face all wrinkles, her nose hooked, her eyes deep-set and malevolent in the shadow of the hood. Her swollen hands held a silver cane aimed at Corbell's eyes.
He saw her for a bare moment while the numbness closed over him. He guessed he was seeing his death.
II
He was on his back on a form-fitting surface, his legs apart, his arms above his head. The air was wet and heavy and hot. Sweat ran in his crotch and armpits and at the corners of his eyes. When he tried to move the surface surged and rippled, and soft bonds tightened round his wrists and ankles.
His pressure suit was gone. He wore only his one-piece undersuit, on a world uninhabitably hot. He felt naked, and trapped.
Light pressed on his eyelids. He opened them.
He was on a water bed, looking at gray sky through the jagged edges of a broken roof. He turned his head and saw more of a bedroom: curved headboard with elaborate controls, arc of couch with floating coffee table to match.
These bedrooms must have been mass-produced, like prefab houses. But a tornado had hit this one. The roof and the picture windows had exploded outward.