The cane: It had reduced him to a groveling slave, instantly, twice. He had never even considered keeping his dignity. In that, the cane lost half its power: He could feel no shame. Still, he knew that too many applications of the cane would leave him nothing like a man.
He was a shell of a man reanimated by electrical currents and injections of memory RNA. He had been changed again and again, but whatever he was, he was still a man. What the cane might do to him was cruder, more damaging.
He would cooperate.
But: She was mad. Even if sane by the standards of her time- unlikely-by Corbell's she was mad, and dangerous. Old and feeble as he was, he would have to escape before she killed him.
The "phone booth" must be working; he'd seen no microwave oven here in the bedroom. Good.
Calling Peerssa would have to wait. He dared not ask after his pressure suit; it might show that he was thinking dangerous thoughts. And even if Peerssa were still in the solar system, how could he help?
Corbell left the booth and returned to his spread-eagled position on the bed. Mirelly-Lyra moored his hands from behind the headboard, then his ankles. They resumed their conversation.
The translator skipped words. He missed some of it before he realized what he was hearing. Then he asked questions, got her to back up for the blank spots. He heard it in bits and pieces: She was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, a citizen of the State. (The State? He wondered about that. But she described it in much the way Peerssa had, except that her State had been the government of all known worlds for fifty thousand years-Corbell's years, for the Earth had not yet been moved.)
In her youth she had been supernaturally beautiful. (Corbell tactfully did not question this.) Men went incomprehensibly mad over her. She never understood the force that drove men to such irrationality, but she used her sex and her beauty as she used her mind: for advancement. She was born hyperactive and ambitious. By the age of twenty she was high in the ranks of Intra-system Traffic Control.
Because she was now in a position of responsibility, the State conditioned her. After conditioning, her ambition was not for herself alone, but for the good of the State. The conditioning was routine- and, Corbell gathered from later data, it didn't quite take.
If she advanced the State's ambitions by guiding the courses of spacecraft within the solar system, certainly she advanced herself. And she came to the attention of a powerful man in a collateral branch of the bureaucracy. Subdictator Corybessil Jakunk (Corbell heard his name often enough to memorize it) was not her direct superior, but he could do her some good.
So powerful a man was allowed some leeway for his personal desires, that he might serve the State more readily. (The old woman saw nothing wrong in this. She was impatient when Corbell did not understand at once. It may have formed a spur to her own ambition.) His personal desire was Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar.
"He told me that I must be his mistress," she said. "I wished more stature for myself than that. I refused. He told me that if I would share his life for a four-day period, he would gain for me a position in full charge of the Bureau. I was only thirty-six years old. It was a fine chance."
She played him as she had played other men. It was a mistake.
Corbell had wondered why he was being made captive audience to an unsolicited soap opera. He began to find out. Three million years later, at what looked to be eighty or ninety years old, she was still wondering what had gone wrong. "The first night I used a chemical to help. To make one want sex-"
"An aphrodisiac?"
It went into the computer memory. "I needed it. The second night he would not let me use chemicals. He used none himself. I had a bad time, but I did not complain then or on the third night. On the fourth day he begged me to change my mind, give up my position, become his woman. I held him to his promise."
For seven months she was Head of the Bureau of Intra-system Traffic Control. She was then informed that she had volunteered for a special mission, a glorious opportunity to serve the State.
It was known that there was a hypermass, a black hole, at the center of the galaxy. Mirelly-Lyra was to investigate it. After some preliminary use of automated probes, she was to determine by experiment whether (as theory predicted) such a black hole could be used for time travel. If possible, she was to return to her starting date.
"Why did he do it?" she wondered. "I saw him once before I left. He said that he could not bear to have me in the same universe if I was not his. But this was not what he offered at all!"
"He may have thought," said Corbell, "that four days of ecstasy would do it. You'd throw yourself into his arms and beg not to be sent away."
For a moment he feared she would use the cane. Then she broke into dry cackling laughter. He saw something likable reflected there, before her face drooped in brooding hate. Now she looked like death itself, the Norn. "He sent me to the black hole. I saw the end of everything."
"So did I."
She didn't believe him. At her urging he described it as best he could: the colors, the progressive flattening of core suns into an accretion disk, the swelling of the Ring of Fire, the final drastically flattened plane of neutronium flecked with smaller black holes. "I only went in as far as the ergosphere," he said, "and that was only to get me home fast. Did you really go through the singularity?"
She was long in answering. "No. I was afraid. When the time came I did not think I owed the State that much." Her conditioning had worn off to that extent, at least. She had circled the black hole, using its mass to bend her course back on itself, and headed for home. She was eighty years old, still healthy and still beautiful (she said) due to the rejuvenation medicines in her ship's dispensary, when she reached Firsthope.
He checked the times with her. Did her Bussard ramjet accelerate at one gravity all the way? Yes. Twenty-one years each way. Her ship was far superior to Corbell's Don Juan-and looked it. It was a toroid, bigger than Don Juan, and with a cleaner design.
Firsthope was a colony just being established around another star when Mirelly-Lyra left Sol. She hoped that Firsthope would not have records of her defection.
Firsthope fired on her. What she at first thought was a message laser carried no modulation at alclass="underline" It was an X-ray laser, designed to kill.
She tried again. The next system resembled Firsthope: It held a world of Earth's mass and Earth's approximate temperature range, whose reducing atmosphere had been seeded when the State was still young. Perhaps it had been colonized in the seventy thousand years she had been gone... and it had been. She was fired on, and she fled.
"I was bitter, Corbell. I thought it was because of me, because of what I had done. All the worlds would have my record. There was no hope for me. I went to Sol system to die there."
She had already recognized stars in Sol's projected vicinity. At Sol she was not fired on. But the sun was expanding toward red giant status, and Earth was missing. Bewildered, she investigated further.
She recognized Saturn, and Mercury (heavily scarred by mining, just as she had left it), and Venus (showing the signs of an unsuccessful attempt to terraform that useless world). Uranus was in a wildly altered orbit between Saturn and Jupiter, if that was Uranus. Mars bore a tremendous scar, a fresh mare probably left by the impact of Deimos. "The State was going to move Deimos," she told Corbell. "It was too close. Something must have happened."
She found Earth orbiting just inside the orbit of Mars.
Corbell asked, "Any idea how they did that?"