A World Out of Time

If only I'd read more science fiction! Well, coming from another planet gives me some leeway- "I really thought I was the first man to reach the galactic core," he said. "Your trip wasn't even in the records."

"How old are you?"

"About six hundred," he said offhandedly. "Our years. In Earth years that's about-" Don't get tricky. Count on her not knowing much about the Earth she came back to. "-five hundred and thirty. How about you?"

"Nearly two hundred. My years, not Jupiter years."

"I'm surprised you never ran out of medicines."

"The children let me take my supply with me into zero-time. I keep them there so that they will not spoil."

A thrill ran up Corbell's neck. She'd keep the food there too, cooking it in large batches and then stopping time for it. That way her meals would always be freshly cooked. And that private jail of hers must be very close to one of the "phone booth" termini.

"What was your sun?" she asked.

The only sun he could even spell was Sirius. "I never heard it called anything but 'the sun,'" he said. "Just how much did you learn about the real immortality, the one the dictators used?"

"Only that. When a dictator died it was through violence." She scowled. "Such events were remembered. My lawyer told me stories of one dictator warring on another, of war spreading to their families. Old stories from far before his time. From the sound of it, the dictators no longer served the State, even then. Only themselves."

"Like Greek gods" he sad. He heard the gap: Mirelly-Lyra's box had not translated his remark. "Powerful and quarrelsome," he amplified. "Mortals did well to bow when the gods passed and otherwise try not to get caught in the wheels."

He glimpsed details of scenery as they flashed past. Green and brown hills. Groves of dwarf trees. He looked for birds, but saw none. They went over a sharp crest, and Corbell's stomach dropped away.

The car sped down toward what even Peerssa would have called a city.

It showed black outlined in red, with the red sun almost behind it. There had been a geodesic dome. A piece of the frame, a dozen linked hexagons, lacy-thin, still stood along one city border. But the city itself retained the dome shape. In the center of a polar coordinate grid of streets sat an enormous cube with bulging sides: the transportation nexus. Spires and glass slabs sloped away from it; the tips of the tallest buildings defined the shape of the lost dome.

A tall glass slab near the center had fallen against the great cube, where, bent in the middle, it leaned for support like a drunk against a large friend. Otherwise this city, Four City, was almost undamaged. One City had largely been ruins. Perhaps Four City was younger than One City; perhaps its dome had protected it from the elements longer.

Green dwarf forest and green-and-gold grassland, the vegetation ran downslope to surround the city on three sides. It stopped sharply at a nearly straight borderline that ran past the city's far edge. Beyond that line, a five-to-ten-mile width of barren borderland stretched to meet the bright blue of ocean.

Strange, Corbell thought. Then it came to him that Four City must have been built before the world grew hot and the oceans receded. It was that old, anyway. But something else was strange about Four City. It had not spread out along the shore. What must once have been a curved line of beach was bare of buildings. No roads joined it to the city. Corbell, peering, made out regularly spaced black dots that might have been "phone booths."

He asked, "Do you know this city well?" Play tour director. Where's your private jail, Mirelly-Lyra

She said, "Yes."

He dropped it. "From here we go to the west coast of-"

"I know. My machines watched your landing."

He had almost grown used to the car's reckless speed, but when they swooped into the city his composure self-destructed. The streets had teeth: big chunks of fallen masonry, jagged sheets of glass. The car swerved around them, tilted forty-five degrees and more to take corners, straightened and tilted again, while Corbell strangled the padded bar.

The Norn studied him with shrewd old eyes. "You're badly frightened. I wonder what your people used for transport."

"Phone booths," he said at random. "For long-distance travel we used dirigibles, lighter-than-air craft."

"You traveled so slowly?"

Sweating, he said, "We weren't in a hurry. We lived a long time." For an instant he considered telling her the truth. Get it over with. Her deal could work for him. They would use her medicines to make him young. Young Corbell would search out the dictators' immortality while frail old Mirelly-Lyra waited it out in a rocking chair. It made good sense.

But Mirelly-Lyra was crazy.

The car swerved violently, ducked under something huge and solid. Corbell looked back. Embedded in the street like a Titan's spear was a girder of Z-shaped cross section. It was as long as the average Four City skyscraper was tall.

The car slowed and eased to a stop beneath the great rectangular face of an office building. Corbell let his death grip relax. The old woman was prodding him with the cane, gesturing him out. He got out. She followed.

The design of windows on the face of the building was not rectangular; the panes (largely missing) were laid out like a pattern in stained glass. And there were curlicues above the great glass doors. Corbell, still shaking in the aftermath of terror, pulled himself together. He needed to remember these; they might be an address. Two commas crossed, an S reversed, an hourglass on its side and pushed inward from the ends, and a crooked pi.

Two sets of doors dropped into the floor to let them through, then slid back up.

Mirelly-Lyra took them through a lobby padded in cloud-rug, then through a corridor lined with handleless doors. "The lifting boxes don't work," she explained. They climbed stairs: three flights, with pauses to rest. They were both panting when Mirelly-Lyra turned down a hallway.

Corbell's fingers worked steadily at a button on his undersuit.

He'd been wearing it since Don Juan took off. He'd washed it several hundred times. He twisted and twisted at the button. One thick flexible "thread" joined it to the fabric. It would have to part all at once.

More doors without handles. Mirelly-Lyra stopped beside the sixth door. She pressed something in her hand against the center of the door. As the door swung open she put the unseen thing back in a pocket and gestured. Corbell passed through ahead of her. He dropped the button as his fingers brushed the jamb.

It was the first big risk he'd taken. He had no choice. He had to be able to re-enter this place.

Mirelly-Lyra kept her eyes on Corbell as the door closed behind her. It closed on the button... and she didn't notice. Corbell was looking around him, everywhere but at the door.

Desk covered with widgetry; cloud-rug; "phone booth"; picture window. The offices were mass produced too. There were minor differences. The "phone-booth" door was transparent. The picture window was intact, and rain had not ruined the desk or the rug.

Corbell's pressure suit and helmet had been dumped on the desk. He picked up the helmet in his bound hands. He called, "Peerssa! This is Corbell for himself calling Peerssa for the State."

There was no answer.

"Peerssa, please answer. This is Corbell calling Peerssa and Don Juan."

Nothing. Not a whisper. And Mirelly-Lyra was watching.

"My ship may be around the other side of the planet," he told her. But Peerssa set up relays! "Or the autopilot may still be holding an equatorial orbit." But he wasn't, he'd changed it! Where was Peerssa?

Then he remembered. Mirelly-Lyra had altered the subway system. Wherever Corbell had come out, wherever he was now, it wasn't where Peerssa had aimed his instruments. As far as Peerssa was concerned, Corbell had never emerged from the subway system.