A World Out of Time

"No. We never leave cat-tails with the dikta."

"Why?"

"It isn't done."

Corbell let it drop. There was a thing he dared not ask yet, but he would have to find out. How carefully were the adults guarded?

The dikta place was the second place Mirelly-Lyra would look for him. He couldn't stay long. The moment she saw him dark-haired, that moment he would have to produce dictator immortality.

And maybe he could. One simple test... made carefully! He did not want the Boys chopping down the Tree of Life!

V

They reached the village at noon. It was a strange blend of primitive and futuristic: an arc of baths, identical to the bath Corbell had found by the shore in One City, half surrounding the village square, and surrounded in turn by sod huts and granaries. There was great variety among the sod structures; but they matched. The village as a whole was beautiful.

Corbell was begi

They worked all that afternoon. A couple of Boys of the village went with them to supervise, shouting their orders with malice aforethought. Corbell and Krayhayft's tribe used primitive scythes to reap grain from the fields and carry it in bundles into the village square, until there was a great heap of it there, until the Boys of the village were satisfied.

After their labor the Boys went whooping to the baths. Corbell waited his turn with impatience. He went the full route, bath and steam and sauna and back to the bath, this time with the Jacuzzistyle bubble system turned on. When he emerged it was dark. They were starting di

The "surprise" Skatholtz had promised was bread, of course. Several kinds of bread, plus rabbit meat the villagers had hunted. Corbell ate his fill of all the varieties of bread. The taste brought on a nostalgic mood. His eyes were wet when Ktoffisp had finished singing Corbell's version of "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."

The bread had surprised him less than the "phone booth" at one end of the arc of baths. He dithered... but Skatholtz knew he knew about "phone booths." While Krayhayft started one of his long tales, Corbell sought out Skatholtz and asked him.

The skeletal boy gri

"Not especially."

"Of course not. Well, you've guessed right. This village trades their grain for other bread-makings all across the land."

"I didn't think the prilatsil would send anything that far."

"The land is crossed by a line of prilatsil, close-spaced. Do you think we would handle emergencies by traveling on foot? Look." Skatholtz drew a ragged circle-Antarctica-and a peace symbol across it. "If there were serious reason to travel, these lines of prilatsil exist. Since the time of the Girls they have been used four times more, if tales have been lost. We keep them in repair."

Corbell kept his other questions to himself. He hoped he would not have to use the prilatsil. They were too obvious. They would be guarded.

When the tribe left in the morning, they carried loaves of bread in their cloth bags. There had been an exchange: Three of Krayhayft's tribe had stayed behind, and three villagers had replaced them. No big deal was made of it, and Corbell had to examine faces to be sure it had happened.

Now there was no more grain. The land dropped gradually for twenty miles or more, and ended in mist. Nothing grew on it but dry scrub. Off to the right of their path was a cluster of sharp-edged shapes, promontories all alone on the flat lifeless ground.

Nature sometimes imitates that regular, artificial look. Corbell asked anyway.

"They are artificial," Skatholtz told him. "I have seen them before. I have my guess as to what they are, but... shall we look at them? Some of Krayhayft's tribe have not seen them."

The troop veered. The structures grew larger. Some lay on their sides, disintegrating. But the nearest stood upright, its narrow bottom firmly set in the ground. The tribe clustered beneath a great curved wall leaning out over their heads.

"Ships," said Corbell. "They carried people and things over water. What are they doing so far from the ocean?"

"Perhaps there was ocean here once."

"Yeah... yeah. When the world got so hot, a lot of the ocean went into the air. This used to be sea-bottom mud, I think."

Krayhayft said, "That fits with the tales. Can you guess what they might have carried?"

"Too many answers. Is there a way in?"

He didn't understand when Krayhayft untied the fire starter from his belt. He would have stopped him otherwise. Krayhayft twisted something on the fire starter, pointed it at the great wall of rusted metal.

The metal flared. Corbell said nothing; it was already too late. He watched the thin blue beam spurt fire until Krayhayft had cut a wide door.

The metal slab fell away. Tons of mud spilled after it. Aeons of dust and rainwater... They waded up the mud slope, joking among themselves, and Corbell followed.

The hull was one enormous tank. There were no partitions to prevent sloshing. Corbell sniffed, but no trace of the cargo remained. Oil? Or something more exotic? Or only topsoil for the frigid Antarctic cities? Topsoil wouldn't slosh around...

The surprise was on deck and above deck. Masts! There was no place here for human sailors. There were only proliferating masts reminiscent of clipper ships, and cables all ru

The hull had appeared to be sound; the masts were in fine shape. But time had reduced the computer to garbage. That was a pity. It was as big as Don Juan's computer, which had housed Peerssa's personality. Conceivably it could have told them a great deal.

They marched down into the fog, and the fog swallowed them.

Corbell heard regular booming sounds that he failed to interpret. Then, suddenly, they had reached the sea. Breakers roared and hissed across a rocky shore.

They rested. Then, while others collected brush for a fire, three of the Boys swam out into the breakers with spears and the rope. It looked inviting. The water would not be cold. But Corbell had seen the Boys hunt, and he wondered what toothy prey waited for them.

Two came back. They swam ashore with the rope twitching behind them and collapsed, panting heavily, while others dragged the rope in with its thrashing burden. They beached twelve feet of shark. The third Boy didn't come back.

Corbell couldn't believe it. How could immortals be so careless of their lives?

The Boys were subdued, but they held no kind of formal ceremony. Corbell ate bread that night. He had no stomach for shark. He had seen what came out of the shark's stomach.

He lay long awake, puzzling it out. He had been old and young and middle-aged, in no intelligible sequence. With any luck he would stay young. He had fought for his life and his life-style against the massed might of the State; he had never given up, not with all the excuse in the world.

Did they get tired of too much life?

Corbell didn't doubt that they could build machines to kill off the sharks. The factories that kept turning out identical bedrooms and baths and offices were a tribute to their laziness; but they were also brilliant. Then why were the sharks still here? Tradition? Maschismo?

In the morning the Boys were cheerful as ever. In the afternoon they reached the dikta.