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Corbell picked what looked like a puffy lemon. (The limbs of the tree were thick and low-its green head touched vines swarming to the second story of a building with empty windows-but Boys climbed like monkeys, and they were too close, and watching.) The fruit tasted like lemonade, like lemon with sugar.
Parhalding was what an abandoned city looked like. In Sarash-Zillish he had taken the state of preservation for granted. Foolish. He should have been looking for caretakers.
The vines bulged oddly near the corner, and something glinted within the bulge. Light shifted as he walked... and Corbell became certain that there was a bubble-car under the bulge. How badly damaged? Corbell caught Gording's fraction-of-a-second glance. Had anyone else caught it? The Boys couldn't know everything...
But the tribe had clumped inward as they walked. He might have thought they were afraid of ancient ghosts. They converged to a corn-New file pact mass with Corbell in the middle, and it was Corbell who was afraid.
That building ahead: no vines, no green top. Someone had maintained it. Corbell knew it by its shape: a hospital.
The hospital's big double doors opened for them. Now the dozen Boys around Corbell were close enough to trip over one another, though they didn't. Indirect lighting came alive slowly, showing an admissions desk, a shattered picture window with a few curved transparent teeth still in it, cloud-rug and sofas cleaned of slivers; and a wall covered by twin polar-projection maps with the polar ice caps prominent.
A panicky choking sound pulled his eyes around. Corbell saw yesterday's loner fall to his knees in the doorway. His head was gone. His neck jetted bright blood.
Gording was at bay. The albino stood bent-legged and snarling between Gording and the double doors. As the young albino came at him, Gording threw a rock, sidearm, to miss. Corbell tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The rock passed behind the albino's neck, turned sharply and circled his throat. Gording jerked hard on the other rock still in his hand.
Then it made sense. The albino screamed without sound and clawed at the air between them. His neck parted cleanly. The doors opened for the headless corpse as it stumbled backward. Gording brushed past it and was gone.
Corbell became aware that two Boys were holding his arms. And the rest were charging after Gording.
Corbell's military training was far in the past, but he remembered. Stamp down along the shin; the enemy doubles up, you twist and bring your elbow up- His captors faded like ghosts from his blows, and a swinging arm caught him precisely across the eyes. He was dizzy and half blind as they led him up flights of stairs.
"They'll have him soon," he heard Skatholtz say.
"He's got thread. We'll have to test every doorway," said Krayhayft. "Thread is too near invisible, and if it caught a Boy across the throat-come, Corbell."
They had climbed four flights of stairs and gone down a corridor. Corbell looked into an operating room. Four tables, and spidery metal arms above them.
"Nooo!" Corbell thrashed. Your pain will be instructive to you and to us. They were going to dissect him! They pulled him to an operating table and fastened him spread-eagled, face up.
"You can't be sure you know everything I know," he called to Krayhayft's receding back. Nuts, he was gone. But Skatholtz hoisted himself to sitting position on another table.
"Skatholtz, if you destroy my brain, you lose the only viewpoint that isn't just like your own! Now think about that!"
"We're not going to ruin your brain. At least I think we're not. There is that risk."
"What are you going to do?"
"We're going to entertain each other."
Then Krayhayft came jogging back with a flask of... blood plasma? Clear fluid, anyway. He reached over Corbell's head and nested it somehow among the tool-tipped steel arms.
Corbell thought, Tell them about the car! He swallowed the idea. If his sympathy lay with anyone besides himself, it was with the dikta. Let Gording escape if he could.
A spidery steel arm descended. Its hypodermic tip hesitated above him, then dipped into his neck. Krayhayft's strong hands held his head immobile for an endless time. Then the hypo withdrew and the arm retracted into its nest.
Corbell waited. Would the stuff put him to sleep? Or only paralyze him?
But Skatholtz was releasing his arms and ankles and pulling him to his feet. Corbell swayed. The stuff was doing something to him.
They took him up three more flights of stairs and down a corridor and into a small theater. They dropped him into a cloud-rug chair. Dust puffed up around him. He sneezed and tried to get up, but he was too dizzy. Something was happening to his mind.
Krayhayft was at work behind him somewhere.
The theater went dark.
Lights glowed in the dark, infinitely far away. Stars: the black sky of interstellar space. Corbell found familiar constellations, distorted and then something told him where he was.
"RNA! You shot memory RNA into me! You dirty sons of bitches," he cried in English. "You did it again!"
"Corbell-"
"What'll I be this time? What have you made me into?"
"You'll keep your memory," said Skatholtz, also in English. "You'll remember things you never lived through. You'll tell us. Watch the show."
He was nearly sixty light-years from Sol, viewing what had been the State. A voice spoke in a language Corbell had never heard. He didn't try to understand it. He watched with a familiar fascination. Good-bye, CORBELL Mark II, he thought in the back of his mind. In thin defiance, But I'm still a lousy loser.
Certain stars glowed more brightly than others... and planetary systems circled them, greatly enlarged for effect. Now all but two of these systems turned sullen red-turned enemy. These were the worlds that had turned against the State.
One of the red systems sparkled and faded into the background, its colony destroyed.
The two neutral systems went red.
Another system faded out.
The view closed on Sol system... on more of Sol system than Corbell had known, with three dark gas giants beyond Pluto, and countless swarming comets.
Fleets of spacecraft moved out toward the renegade colonies. Other fleets invaded. Sometimes they came like a hornet's nest, many ships clustered around a Bussard ramjet core. Sometimes like a Portuguese man-of-war: thousands of ships as weights around the fringe of a great silver light-sail. Early fleets included hospital ships and return fuel; later there were massive suicide attacks.
It went on for centuries. The State utopia became a subsistence civilization, turning all its surplus energy to war. The fleets moved at just less than lightspeed. News of success or failure or need for reinforcements moved barely faster. The State was Boys and Girls and dictators all united for the common good. Corbell hurt with the loss of that unity.
He watched a beam of light bathe Sol system: laser ca
The war continued. Farside, economically ruined by its effort, fell before the counterattack. It took a man's lifetime... too much time, before Astronomy noticed what the Farside traitors had done in the dark outside their dazzling light beam, in the distraction provided by the invasion.
The State had looked for the light of fusion spacecraft, not the dim watery light of a new planet. The trans-Plutonian planet called Persephone had had a peculiar orbit, tilted nearly vertical to the plane of the solar system. Its new path had already taken it deep into the system.