A World Out of Time

"That's old," said Corbell. Jupiter years. "I wonder why you aren't the leader."

"The old ones learn to avoid that chore... and to avoid the fighting that goes with it. Skatholtz can beat me. Skill in fighting has an upper limit. One is born with one's greatest possible strength."

"Corbel, I think I have found your spacecraft."

"What?"

"There." The Boy was pointing low on the northern horizon, where a few stars glowed in the gray-black of coming dawn. One showed pink among blue-tinged stars. "The one that might be a moon except that it does not move. Is that your spacecraft?"

"No. I don't know where my ship went. Don Juan wasn't ball-like. It would look more like a thick spear."

Krayhayft was more puzzled than disappointed. "Then what is it? I have seen it twinkle oddly. It does not move, but it grows more bright every night."

"The whole system of worlds is messed up. I can't explain it. I think that's the next world out from Jupiter."

"I wish it had been your spacecraft," said Krayhayft. He fell to studying the steady point of light. Entranced.

The cat-tail slithered from Corbell's knee and disappeared into the grain. Corbell saw two more low shadows slipping after it.

A cat screamed. Simultaneously something much bigger vented a much lower, coughing roar. Krayhayft shouted, "Alert!"

It bounded out of the grain and leapt at Corbell's throat: something as big as the biggest of dogs. Corbell threw himself to the side. He saw a spear plant itself solidly in the open mouth, and then the Boys were on it. It was a dwarf lion, male, magnificently maned. It died fast. Even the first spear might have killed it.

Corbell got up, shaken. "The female could be out there."

Skatholtz said, "Yes," and joined the others who were fa

Presently he noticed something small in the path the lion's charge had left through grain. He found a small butterscotch-sundae corpse. The other cat-tails had returned to the fire. They seemed unusually subdued.

At dawn he helped two Boys build a fire. He saw the reason later, when four more trekked in with ostrich eggs. They set the eggs on the coals, carefully cut the tops off and stirred the contents with spear hafts.

Scrambled eggs! Still no coffee.

Corbell strode along in pink sunlight, feeling good. The slapping-around was a bitter memory, with bruises to corroborate it, but he set next to it another memory: Ktoffisp's fist holding white hair with dark-brown roots. Oh, for a mirror! He was a slave, if not worse. But he was young! With an outside chance to stay that way a long time.

They had crossed a row of big, badly weathered rocks, oddly textured, big as houses and bigger. Now the land sloped down... and Corbell found Skatholtz marching beside him. Skatholtz said in English, "What do you know of the Girls?"

There was a Boyish word for girl-child and another for dikta woman, but Girl was a third word, and it carried a certain emphasis.

Corbell answered, "Mirelly-Lyra told me something about them. There was a balance of power between Boys and Girls, and somehow it fell apart."

"By her tale, the Girls ruled Boys as Boys rule dikta."

"No. Look at it with more care. The Girls ruled the sky; they could move the world. By implication they controlled the weather. They couldn't change the world's rotation, but they could decide how far the world should be from the sun. In fact, they first moved the world because the sun was getting too hot.

"The Boys ruled the dikta. They could see to it that no more Boys or Girls were born." An interesting role reversal, that. "In itself that isn't a lot of power, not in a crowded world where everyone expects to live forever anyway-"

"But our land was less rich! The tales tell it so!"

"Yeah. Look at it from the other direction. Suppose the Boys let the dikta breed like rabbits-breed fast. They kill most of the girlchildren and hide most of the boy-children. The boy-children grow up. They get dikta immortality as long as they behave. Now the Boys have an army. They invade."

The land had leveled out. Ahead it sloped upward again. Skatholtz mulled it over, then: "Our tales tell nothing of this."

"That's because it never happened. The Boys couldn't feed such an army. Poor land. So the balance of power lasted-oh, tens of thousands of your years."

"I see, partly. I am not used to thinking like this. What went wrong? Somehow the Girls lost control."

"Yeah. Weather?"

"Our tales tell of a great thawing. When green things grew for the first time in our land, the Girls tried to take it. The thaw happened when the Girls grew too proud. In their pride they lost a moon, and with the moon they lost their power."

Corbell laughed. "They lost a moon? Hey, just how accurate could those tales be after... a hundred thousand years?"

"We live long. We remember well. Details may be lost, but we do not add fiction."

The land sloped upward. In the distance Corbell could see another line of big, melted-looking rocks.

"A moon. It sounds completely silly, but... Peerssa told me the moons of Jupiter were out of their orbits, but that's not too strange. Dropping the world into their midst could have done that. But he also said Ganymede is missing completely."

"Ganymede?"

"The biggest moon. Hell, I don't see how it fits in."

"And the sun is too hot, you said, and King Jupiter is too hot."

"And the weather is screwed up," said Corbell. "It all comes down to a change in the weather. It wiped out the balance of power. Then the Boys wiped out the Girls."

"We tell tales of that war. Weapons as strong as a meteor strike! Look, Corbell, such a weapon was used here." Skatholtz swept an arm behind him.

They had crossed a shallow dish-shaped depression a couple of miles across, rimmed by these half-melted... "Just a minute," said Corbell. He dropped his load of jerky and scrambled up a rock twenty feet high and of oddly uniform texture. There at the top he found lines of rust red making a great Z: the remains of a girder.

"These were buildings," he said. "It must have been a Boy city."

"When I was young I wanted to use weapons like that." Skatholtz laughed boyishly. "Now I cringe at what they must have done to the weather. But we destroyed the Girls."

"They did you some hurt, too." Corbell climbed down from the melted building. They'd have to trot to catch up to the tribe.

"The tale tells that they destroyed us," said Skatholtz. "I never understood that saying."

Corbell and Skatholtz marched on in silence for a time. Boys chattered ahead. It was just past noon, too early to hunt. Very far away, a great brown carpet flowed away from the noise they were making: thousands of animals too distant to recognize, too numerous to count.

Skatholtz said in Boyish, "Soon we reach the border to the great water. A day's march broad is that border. Thea word is-" Corbell learned the words for shore and sea. "The near village holds a pleasant surprise," and Skatholtz used another unfamiliar word. "I can't describe it. We must do work for it."

"All right." In his youth Corbell had never liked muscle work. But oh, it was good to have the muscles now! He asked, "Why were we talking English?"

"Because I must know you. I must learn when you are telling fiction."

Corbell chose not to protest the injustice. "I wonder about the cat-tails."

"What do you wonder?"

"In Sarash-Zilish they rule. Here there are things bigger and more violent. How can they live?"

"Soon or late a predator kills them. Until then they are pleasant to keep near. Soon or late, everything dies except Boys."

"Before this evil you control your rage skillfully. Will we find more cat-tails among the dikta?"