A World Out of Time

He'd learned much about the empty city during these past twenty days, but there were mysteries still to be explored. His encampment had become comfortable. He had a fireplace, a soup pot, and the car for shelter. He had tools: He had used the scalpel to carve wooden cooking implements. He didn't need clothes. For two full days he had practiced throwing rocks, and taken his reward in squirrel meat. Yesterday he had killed another giant turkey, his third.

Big deal.

Obscurely depressed, he curled tighter in his bed of moss.

Corbell the architect and Corbell the interstellar explorer seemed equally dead. In his pride he had called himself a naked savage, but he wasn't that. A savage has his duties to the tribe, his tribe's duties to him. He has legends, songs, dances, rules of conduct, permitted and unpermitted women, a place for him when he grows old... but Corbell was alone. He could make fire-with the help of a super-sophisticated kitchen. He could feed himself-now that practically everything he could touch was edible.

Some park. In the begi

Domed cities. Mirelly-Lyra had spoken of the Boys building domed cities, here in land that the more powerful Girls hadn't held. But of course: Sarash-Zilish must have been domed against blizzards and subzero cold, before the world turned unaccountably hot. As for the "park," the Boys could hardly have grown beans and citrus fruit in the permafrost outside.

The Girls ruled the sky, controlled Earth's orbit. They must have made a mistake somewhere. What could have turned Jupiter into a minor sun? It must have shocked the Girls as badly as it later shocked Peerssa. It must have; because the change left Boy territory habitable and made Girl territory into scalding deserts, overturning a balance of power tens or hundreds of thousands of years old.

Corbell shifted, then sat up. It was the present that ought to concern him...

Three cat-tails were tearing at his turkey carcass. When he moved they jolted to attention. Corbell reconsidered his first intention. They were eating the raw meat; they had left the roasted drumsticks alone. That left plenty of meat for Corbell.

They studied him: three snakes with solemn cat faces, furred in brown and orange intricately patterned; as beautiful as three butterscotch sundaes. Corbell smiled and gestured hospitably. As if they understood, they went back to their meal.

Breakfast: He ate fruit and drumstick meat and thought about coffee. Afterward he tended his fire. The scalpel was razor-sharp despite age and eighteen days of blunting, but it was no ax. He went far afield to find wood. The exercise was good. Decades in the cold-sleep coffin had preserved him better than he had hoped; he'd gone soft despite the exercises, but the savage life was toning him up. He took the other trash can to what had been a fountain and was now a pond, filled it with not especially clean water, dragged it back and wrestled it into place over the fire.

He turned to the turkey carcass. He cut chunks small enough to fit the trash can. Meat gnawed by cat-tails went in, and so did bare bones. While it heated he foraged for roots to flavor the soup. Potatoes. Carrot-yams. He'd found nothing that resembled an onion, unfortunately. He added beans and, experimentally, a couple of grapefruit. He stirred it all with a wooden paddle.

As usual, noon looked like sunset, which was endlessly disconcerting. Corbell rested. The water was begi

And then he did.

Last day of a camping trip. You've worked your tail off; your belt has come in a notch and a half; you haven't had to think much; you've seen some magnificent scenery; there were damn few people on the trails, and they didn't rub your nerves. It's been good. But now it's back to work...

Mirelly-Lyra knew where he was.

He was healthier than he'd known. He could live a Jovian year, if nothing killed him; the tourist in him liked that thought. The mad old woman had promised him one year, an Olde Earth year. He could believe as much of that as he cared to, but a sane man would choose the jungle.

Could a man survive in the jungle outside Sarash-Zillish? It would depend. Corbell had come to Antarctica in either spring or fall of a year twelve years long. An Olde Earth year from now the day might last twenty-three hours, or one. It would be much warmer than this, or much colder.

For the world still had its tilt and its twenty-four-hour rotation. Odd that the Girls had not corrected that... but maybe they were traditionalists. Much odder that they had not moved Earth further out from the growing heat of Jupiter. What concerned Corbell was this: He could not take a world twenty degrees colder, not without clothing, and an endless night might drive him mad.

Soup odors were begi

This sense of urgency was silly. He had a year to get moving. He could make foraging expeditions to the edge of the city. Keep his camp here. Whatever was out beyond the domes had had to be imported. How dangerous could it be? It might well be thousands of square miles of Sarash-Zillish Park.

An endless vacation. And he could use it. In his second life CORBELL Mark II had suffered enough future shock to kill a whole cityful of Alvin Tofflers.

Tomorrow, then. He could take the car as far as the hospital; it was near a standing fragment of dome. Then into the wild with spear and drumstick over either shoulder, if the drumstick kept that long without refrigeration.

He remembered to scrape some of his fire into his trash-can fireplace. He stretched out on the warm granite...

Warm rain hammered at him. He turned over fast, rose to hands and knees and coughed out a tablespoonful of rainwater. First time that had happened. His bonfire must be out, but had the soup cooked first? Was rain getting into his fireplace?

He looked up, and forgot all of these crucial questions.

A dozen or so Boys-approximately a big boy scout troop, but uniformed only in breechclouts-squatted in a circle around Corbell and his fire. They were passing around a drumstick bone, nearly clean by now, while they watched him. As if they had been watching him in perfect silence for hours.

Their hair was rich where they had hair. On some it was black and woolly, on others black and straight, dripping to their shoulders. The crowns of their heads were bald but for a single tuft on the forehead. They ignored the pounding rain and watched, half smiling.

"I should have known," said Corbell. "The cat-tails. They're half tame. All right." He made a sweeping gesture. "Welcome to the Kingdom of Corbell-for-himseif. Have some soup."

They frowned, all of them. One got up: a long, lanky Boy, a budding basketball player, Corbell would have judged. He spoke.

"Sorry," said Corbell.

The Boy spoke again. Command and anger: That was no boy's voice, though it was high-pitched. Corbell was hardly surprised. These were the Boys, Mirelly-Lyra's immortals.

"I don't speak your language," Corbell said slowly, with an instinct that went against sense: The natives will understand if you speak slowly and clearly.

The Boy came forward and slapped him across the face.

Corbell hit him flush in the mouth. His right cross hit ribs instead of solar plexus, and the following left missed completely, somehow. Then the whole circle converged on him.

His memory thereafter was a little hazy. There was weight on his knees and forearms. Granite ground into his back. The basketball star sat on his chest and spoke the same sentience over and over through a split lip. He would say it, and wait, and slap Corbell twice, and say it again. Corbell replied with obscenities. He could feel the bruises now.