The cloth stuck to his wrists like bandages. He didn't think he could pull loose.
The bedroom's picture windows had stretched before they broke. The edges were like lines of daggers curved outward. He followed Mirelly-Lyra, stepping carefully through the daggers, into knee-high grass.
She gestured him ahead of her, toward a bubble-car like those he had found in One City. Where his feet fell big insects fled, whirring. It was even hotter outside, but at least there was a breath of breeze. The sun sat on the horizon, huge and red, casting long blurred shadows. A hard-to-see red circle on the red sky, smaller than the sun, must be Jupiter.
The car seemed to rest on the very tips of the grass blades. It did not shift as Corbell climbed in. Mirelly-Lyra gestured to him to slide over (with the cane, the cane that was anesthetic and instrument of torture and what else? He was afraid to learn) and climbed in beside him. She bent to the console, hesitated, then punched numbers. "We go for your pressure suit," said the translator at her belt.
The car moved smoothly away. Mirelly-Lyra half relaxed; she was not steering. Already Corbell knew that he could not return by car. He didn't know the destination number of the house.
Down the hill and into a narrow valley the car drove, accelerating. Now they were moving at hellish speed. Corbell gripped a padded bar on the dashboard and wished he dared close his eyes.
She was studying him. "You did not use such cars?"
"No." Inspiration made him say, "We didn't have such things on Dogpatch."
She nodded. The knot in Corbell's belly eased open. God help him if she came to believe that he had left Sol system ahead of her. He had to convince her that he came from her own future.
But there must have been inventions he would know nothing about, things humanity would not have forgotten. Like what? A bathtub designed to fit human beings? A cold cure? A permanently sharp razor blade, or a treatment to stop the beard growing at all? A hangover cure that works?
If only I'd read more science fiction! Well, coming from another planet gives me some leeway- "I really thought I was the first man to reach the galactic core," he said. "Your trip wasn't even in the records."
"How old are you?"
"About six hundred," he said offhandedly. "Our years. In Earth years that's about-" Don't get tricky. Count on her not knowing much about the Earth she came back to. "-five hundred and thirty. How about you?"
"Nearly two hundred. My years, not Jupiter years."
"I'm surprised you never ran out of medicines."
"The children let me take my supply with me into zero-time. I keep them there so that they will not spoil."
A thrill ran up Corbell's neck. She'd keep the food there too, cooking it in large batches and then stopping time for it. That way her meals would always be freshly cooked. And that private jail of hers must be very close to one of the "phone booth" termini.
"What was your sun?" she asked.
The only sun he could even spell was Sirius. "I never heard it called anything but 'the sun,'" he said. "Just how much did you learn about the real immortality, the one the dictators used?"
"Only that. When a dictator died it was through violence." She scowled. "Such events were remembered. My lawyer told me stories of one dictator warring on another, of war spreading to their families. Old stories from far before his time. From the sound of it, the dictators no longer served the State, even then. Only themselves."
"Like Greek gods" he sad. He heard the gap: Mirelly-Lyra's box had not translated his remark. "Powerful and quarrelsome," he amplified. "Mortals did well to bow when the gods passed and otherwise try not to get caught in the wheels."
He glimpsed details of scenery as they flashed past. Green and brown hills. Groves of dwarf trees. He looked for birds, but saw none. They went over a sharp crest, and Corbell's stomach dropped away.
The car sped down toward what even Peerssa would have called a city.
It showed black outlined in red, with the red sun almost behind it. There had been a geodesic dome. A piece of the frame, a dozen linked hexagons, lacy-thin, still stood along one city border. But the city itself retained the dome shape. In the center of a polar coordinate grid of streets sat an enormous cube with bulging sides: the transportation nexus. Spires and glass slabs sloped away from it; the tips of the tallest buildings defined the shape of the lost dome.
A tall glass slab near the center had fallen against the great cube, where, bent in the middle, it leaned for support like a drunk against a large friend. Otherwise this city, Four City, was almost undamaged. One City had largely been ruins. Perhaps Four City was younger than One City; perhaps its dome had protected it from the elements longer.
Green dwarf forest and green-and-gold grassland, the vegetation ran downslope to surround the city on three sides. It stopped sharply at a nearly straight borderline that ran past the city's far edge. Beyond that line, a five-to-ten-mile width of barren borderland stretched to meet the bright blue of ocean.
Strange, Corbell thought. Then it came to him that Four City must have been built before the world grew hot and the oceans receded. It was that old, anyway. But something else was strange about Four City. It had not spread out along the shore. What must once have been a curved line of beach was bare of buildings. No roads joined it to the city. Corbell, peering, made out regularly spaced black dots that might have been "phone booths."
He asked, "Do you know this city well?" Play tour director. Where's your private jail, Mirelly-Lyra
She said, "Yes."
He dropped it. "From here we go to the west coast of-"
"I know. My machines watched your landing."
He had almost grown used to the car's reckless speed, but when they swooped into the city his composure self-destructed. The streets had teeth: big chunks of fallen masonry, jagged sheets of glass. The car swerved around them, tilted forty-five degrees and more to take corners, straightened and tilted again, while Corbell strangled the padded bar.
The Norn studied him with shrewd old eyes. "You're badly frightened. I wonder what your people used for transport."
"Phone booths," he said at random. "For long-distance travel we used dirigibles, lighter-than-air craft."
"You traveled so slowly?"
Sweating, he said, "We weren't in a hurry. We lived a long time." For an instant he considered telling her the truth. Get it over with. Her deal could work for him. They would use her medicines to make him young. Young Corbell would search out the dictators' immortality while frail old Mirelly-Lyra waited it out in a rocking chair. It made good sense.
But Mirelly-Lyra was crazy.
The car swerved violently, ducked under something huge and solid. Corbell looked back. Embedded in the street like a Titan's spear was a girder of Z-shaped cross section. It was as long as the average Four City skyscraper was tall.
The car slowed and eased to a stop beneath the great rectangular face of an office building. Corbell let his death grip relax. The old woman was prodding him with the cane, gesturing him out. He got out. She followed.
The design of windows on the face of the building was not rectangular; the panes (largely missing) were laid out like a pattern in stained glass. And there were curlicues above the great glass doors. Corbell, still shaking in the aftermath of terror, pulled himself together. He needed to remember these; they might be an address. Two commas crossed, an S reversed, an hourglass on its side and pushed inward from the ends, and a crooked pi.