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"I was a little crazy."
"That seems normal."
"What happens next? How long do you stay here?"
"If some machine needs to be repaired, we stay. Otherwise we leave tomorrow. We have many tribes to meet, to tell them that we have made Sarash-Zillish ready for them."
Time was constricting for Corbel, but he dared not hurry. At the moment he had nothing at all to do. And everyone else was busy.
On the second floor the Boys had opened what might be a power generator. They ordered him away from their secrets.
In another room women wove cloth of exceptional beauty and color. "During the long night we cover ourselves," one told him. She refused to teach him how to weave. "The thread might cut off some of your fingers."
"It's that strong?"
"What would be the point of making cloth less durable?"
He stole a loop of the thread, held it a moment, then put it back. Sure, it'd make wonderful strangling cord, but where would he hide it?
He wound up in the kitchen/dining room complex, serving food and watching the cooks. He had been a pretty good cook once, but no sane chef would try to use someone else's kitchen without exploring it first. And it was bad news. The implements and measuring spoons were unfamiliar, of course. But the basic foods and the spices were also unfamiliar. If he intended to pay his way here, he would have to learn to cook all over again.
In mid-afternoon a woman offered to relieve him at the serving counter. She took a second look and said, "You are unhappy."
"Right."
"I am Charibil. Can I help?"
He couldn't tell her all his problems. "There's not much here I'm good for."
"Men don't have to work if they don't want to. You do have one useful talent. You can make greater the variety of traits among us."
Their gene pool was a little skimpy, yeah. Though there was variety. Charibil herself had the epicanthic fo!d and delicate features of an oriental, though she was Corbell's height. The uniformity was there too: pale skin, breasts wide and flat, half-bald scalp and curly black topknot, slender frame.
She jumped suddenly to her feet. "Come to the orgy room, Corbell. You need cheering up. Is it displacement from your tribe that bothers you? Or fear of the ancient dikt and her cane?"
"All of the above. Right, I need cheering up."
If he thought to be alone with Charibil, he was wrong. She called to three friends as they passed, and one joined them; and then a small golden-haired woman invited herself into the group; and four women presently reached the bedroom complex with Corbel. Others were there: a man and a single woman who seemed to want to be alone. Charibil and the other women suddenly picked Corbell up by arms and legs, swung him wide and slung him through the air, laughing at his startled "Hey!"
The surface surged as he splashed down, surged again as they joined him. He laughed with them. For a moment, the laugh caught in his throat.
There was a mirror over the bed.
He couldn't have missed that last night... and he hadn't. The others had those mobile sculptures over them. Had the women noticed anything? Corbell pulled Charibil against him, rolled onto his back with her on top... and looked up at himself.
Long, thi
They'd noticed his tension. They turned him over and massaged it away. The kneading of muscles gradually became eight hands caressing him... and Corbell was seduced twice, to his own amazement. He felt that he was falling in love with four women: an impossible thing for CORBELL Mark I. In post-coital sadness Corbell knew at last that Corbell was dead...
He distracted himself with questions.
"No, all nights are not like last night," Charibil told him. "The men would tire of us. Last night was special. We stayed away from this place for five short days. We like to give the Boys something to watch."
"Why?"
"Why? They rule us, and they live forever, but there is one joy they can't know!" she gloated.
You can live forever! It was on the tip of his tongue... but instead he said, "What do the men do when they're not up here? I mean, if they don't work-"
"They make decisions. And, let me see: Privatht is perhaps our finest cook. Gording deals with the Boys in all matters; in fact he is with them now. Charloop makes things to teach and entertain children-"
"Gording is in the Boy camp?"
"Yes, he and the Boys had some important secret to discuss. They wouldn't-"
"I've got to be there." Corbell rolled off the bed. If Gording and the cat-tails had come together, then Corbell had to be there too. "I'm sorry if I'm being rude, but this is more important than I can tell you." He left. Behind him he heard tinkling laughter.
III
It was near sunset. Boys and boy-children were roasting a tremendous fish over coals. Ktollisp was telling them a tale. The children were making much of a pair of indolent furred snakes. Corbell looked for Gording's white hair.
He found Gording and Krayhayft and Skatholtz a good distance from the main group. They were spitting Boyish too fast for Corbell's understanding. He caught the word for Girls, and his own word Ganymede. And he saw the third cat-tail curled in an orange spiral on a rock almost behind Skatholtz.
They saw him. Gording said, "Good! Corbell's sources of knowledge are different from ours."
Krayhayft scoffed. "He did not even see the implications."
Skatholtz said, "Gording is right. Corbell, in one of our tales there is a line with no meaning. The tale tells of the war between Girls and Boys. The line tells that each side destroyed the other."
Corbell sat down cross-legged next to Skatholtz. "Could this have something to do with our strayed planet?"
"Yes, with the mere fleck of light that grows brighter but does not move against the background of fixed stars. Do you understand what that might mean?"
He'd been assuming that that dot of light was the banded gas giant Peerssa had shown him; but that didn't have to be true. If something in the sky grew brighter without moving... grew closer, with no shift sideways?
"It's coming down our throats!"
"Well phrased," said Skatholtz.
But it was monstrously unfair that Corbell should have found eternal youth just before the end of the world! "You're guessing," he said.
"Of course. But the Girls ruled the sky," Krayhayft said. "When the Girls knew they had lost, they may have aimed your missing Ganymede on a long path to smash the world."
He couldn't let this moon thing distract him. When his chance came he had to be ready. But did it matter? What if Don Juan had brought him home just in time to face impact with a lost moon!
"Wait a minute. Why not a short path?"
Krayhayft shrugged. Skatholtz said, "Who can know the mind of a Girl? They are long dead."
"They weren't stupid. The longer the path, the more chance the moon would miss the world. It's been-" Divide by twelve. "-a hundred thousand years, after all."
"We do not know how they moved worlds. How can we know what difficulties they faced? Perhaps the long path was their only choice."
Corbell stood up. He stretched, then sat down on the smooth rock behind him: a big boulder with a cat-tail sleeping on top, well behind his head. He braced his feet against a smaller, half-buried boulder.
"I don't like it. I don't like my place in it. Any minor design change in Don Juan and I could have been back a hundred thousand years sooner or later. What are the odds I'd get here just in time for all the excitement?"