A World Out of Time

"There was a vault in the hospital-"

She laughed. "There is a vault in every hospital in every city that remains on Earth. I have searched them all. What vaults haven't been rifled contain nothing but poisons. The medicines have decayed with time and wet heat."

"Tell me more. What did you learn about this dictator immortality after you landed, before they locked you up?"

"Almost nothing. Only that it was there."

"Tell me. Tell me all the wrong answers so I don't have to waste my time on them."

IV

The Children had been waiting when Mirelly-Lyra descended from her spacecraft. Her first guess was that they must be the result of a State breeding program. Dignified, self-possessed, articulate, they displayed an adult wisdom she took for supernormal intelligence. Later she realized that it was the result of lifetimes of experience.

She had never seen their like.

They had never seen hers.

There were adults in the world, but they were a separate breed. She never met any, but she gathered that there were no more than a few thousand of them-all dictator class by courtesy, all using the dictator immortality. They kept themselves apart from the billions of children.

Children. Boys and Girls together, integrated. She thought nothing of it then. Later she remembered.

The Children tried her by her own law, for treason. She gained the impression that the proceedings were a farce for their amusement. Perhaps that was paranoia. They were punctilious; they did not mock her; they did not deviate from laws seventy thousand years old. For her part, Mirelly-Lyra kept her dignity at all times, as she was at pains to inform Corbell.

They sentenced her to the zero-time jail.

"Didn't you ever hear anything about the interstellar colonies?"

"No, nothing."

"It figures. They must have broken away from the State long before you landed. That's probably why they fired on you. Not because you were Mirelly-Lyra, but because you were from Earth."

There was a silence. Then, "I never understood that. Are you saying that the State broke apart?"

"Yeah. It took a hell of a long time, that's all. The State was a water-monopoly empire." Corbell was talking half to himself now. "They tend to last forever, unless something comes in from outside and breaks them up. But there wasn't anything outside the State. The collapse had to wait till the State made its own barbarians."

Hesitantly Mirelly-Lyra said, "You talk as if you have known many kinds of State."

"I predate the State. I was a corpsicle, a frozen dead man. When the State was a century or so old, they... turned a condemned criminal into Jerome Corbell."

"Oh." Pause. "Then maybe you know more than I do. How could the State break apart?"

"Look at it this way. First there was the State expanding through the solar system. Later, much later, there were a lot of copies of the State, one for each star, all belonging to one big State run from Earth. Then... well, I'm guessing. I think it was children's immortality.

"You made a big thing out of the advantages of making eleven year-olds immortal. Okay, fine. What if the other States didn't accept that? Look at how different your children's State would be! The other States probably claimed they were the original State. That makes the solar system State heretics-its citizens, unbelievers."

"What would happen then? Would they stop talking to each other?"

Corbell laughed. "Sure. Right after the war. Right after both sides tried to exterminate each other and failed. That's got to be the way it happened. It's inevitable."

"Why?"

"It just is."

"Then," she said slowly, "that's what happened to..."

"What?"

"When they took me out of zero-time there was more than one State on Earth. Maybe that was inevitable, too. Let me tell you."

The Children led Mirelly-Lyra to the peak of a squat silver pyramid. Widgets of silver and clear plastic floated around her: three-dimensional television transmitters, and weapons that affected the mind and will. They turned off the pyramid; its mirror-colored sides became black iron. They put her in an elevator and sent her down.

She joined a despondent rabble. Some tried to talk to her in gibberish. She watched the elevator rise... and sink again with another prisoner.

None spoke her language.

The elevator never stopped rising and falling, bringing prisoners down, rising empty. The styles of those about her were wildly different; they continued to change with every new prisoner. There was no provision for feeding the prisoners.

It became obvious: Nobody had been here long enough to become hungry.

The twelfth to descend was not a prisoner. A Girl of eleven dropped to just above their heads. Small machines floated around her. One, a silver wand mounted in a larger base, twitched this way and that like a nervous hound eager to be loosed. The Girl was naked, and strangely decorated: Transparent butterfly wings sprang from her shoulders. She called in a sweet, peremptory, oddly accented voice, "Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, are you there?"

So Mirelly-Lyra returned to the world after perhaps a quarter of an hour of subjective time.

Her hosts were half a dozen children, all Girls. The Girl who had come for her, Choss, was in some ways the leader. Their social organization was complex.

Their minds were not the minds of children. They walked like the Lords of the World. Mirelly-Lyra's translator gave Corbell her emotional inflections as well as her words. The emotions were awe and fear and hatred. These were not little girls. They were Girls, neuter and immortal. They were arrogant and indulgent by turns, and Mirelly-Lyra learned to obey them.

They trained her with the floating silver wand... a variant of the silver cane she carried much later. The box she carried constantly at her belt was the same translator she carried now. They made her wear it long after she knew the language. They thought her accent ugly.

It grated on her to think that they regarded her as a social inferior. Later she changed her mind. They regarded her as a house pet, a prized property that could do tricks.

With the children she watched shows put on by other groups of children. Some they attended live. Others were broadcast as three-dimensional illusions, like holovision sets arbitrarily large. Once they floated in interplanetary space for hours, and Mirelly-Lyra wondered at the grim intensity with which Choss's Girls watched a dull and repetitious planetarium show. She understood their rapt concentration later, during the voting.

But most of the shows were bids for prestige. Some of the bulky floating widgets that followed her around were cameras and emotional sensors. Mirelly-Lyra was another show. Because of her, the prestige of Choss's group was high.

Her medicines had retarded, but not prevented, menopause. The change in her body was a near-killing blow to Mirelly-Lyra's faith in herself. She was a trained seal, and aging. One thing kept her going. Somewhere out there was dictator immortality.

At first she welcomed the chance to talk to the Girls. But that was the trouble: Mirelly-Lyra did all the talking. Her own questions were not answered. Questions the Girls put to her she was expected to answer in full. If she didn't lecture at length they became a

Then, once, she found Choss in an indulgent mood.

"Choss told me that the dictators took care of their own medical problems," said Mirelly-Lyra. "The dictators were ruled by the Boys, who made shows with them and saw to it that chemicals in their food kept them from having children. I think Choss was jealous that the Boys would not let Girls play with the dictators. I'm telling this badly," she said suddenly. "These Girls were all older than I. They were decadent aristocrats, not children."