The forest ended.
Far across a prairie of waving yellowish-red vegetation, Corbell saw a last sliver of the departing sun. Jupiter was a pinkish-white disk, rising.
Here they made camp. Presently Corbell ate roasted elephant for the first time in his life. He was too tired to sing for his supper. Someone was telling a story-it was Krayhayft, who had oriental eyes and gleaming white patches in his straight black hair-and the others were listening in intense concentration, when Corbell dropped off to sleep.
They tramped all the next day through waving pinkish-yellow grain. Corbell judged it wheat. "Who grows this?" he asked Skatholtz, and was answered with laughter.
Wheat took cultivation, didn't it? Maybe it had been gene-altered. Four gene-altered cats still lived among the tribe; they took their turns riding the necks of various tribesmen. A wheat that grew wild would be worth having: more useful than a cat that was all tail.
All day Corbell saw kangaroos and ostriches bounding through the wheat. They were fast and wary. Once there was a lone man with a spear, far ahead, a pale figure at a dead run behind a fleeing ostrich. The pair was long gone when the tribe got there.
Late in the day Krayhayft found the tracks of something large. The tribe followed. Near sunset their quarry came in sight: a big, shambling mass that ran from them on four legs until it turned at bay on two.
It was a bear. Its skin was hairless and yellow but for a mane of thick white fur. A nude polar bear? And no dwarf, either. It waddled toward the hunters and tried to maul them with its great claws; but it was fighting Homo superior in the prime of health and youth. They danced around it, slashing. It fought on long after it should have bled to death.
They ate bear meat that night, while the cat-tails hunted at the edge of firelight. Jupiter was full, banded and orange.
Corbell was dozing with a full belly when Ktollisp dropped beside him. He spoke slowly, enunciating. "Do you sing tonight?"
"If I choose, then no."
"Acceptable. What was this about growing grain?"
"The grain we used didn't grow without human help."
"Like Skatholtz, I do not read your face well. If this is fiction-for-entertainment, you do it well. We will be sorry to lose you."
"How do you Lose me?" The Boy might mean only that dikta die sooner or later, like cat-tails.
No. Ktollisp said, "When we reach the dikta, we lose you."
Corbell hadn't counted on that. "How many days?"
"Four. Five if we stop for amusement somewhere. You will like the dikta, Corbel. There are men and women and the making of new Boys between them. They have a city and some country around, but they are not smart enough to make the machines go. In day we fix the things that go wrong at night."
"They're not smart enough? They are the same... kind you are. Their heads should be built the same."
"They have the brain, the stuff inside the heads, just like us. They do not have the time. We do not tell them how to fix machines. They do not live long enough to learn, and they might break the machines learning, and we punish them if they leave. So they stay in the dikta place. They need us. We know where to find them. We must know this because we must bring new boys to the tribes."
"What happens to the... small ones not boys?"
"The girls? They grow. Some boys grow too. We choose the best, the smartest and the strongest, one from each tribe for each year, and we send them back to the dikta. We do not do the thing to them that makes them stay the same forever."
Planned breeding for superior Boys... and it would tend to cow the young Turks, to the benefit of the leaders. Corbell said, "There must be a lot more women than men."
Ktollisp grinned. "You like that?"
Anger tied his tongue. "You-you joke! I die of being too old soon! I can't make more Boys!"
Ktollisp had Corbell by the hair, his knife was drawn, before Corbell could do more than gasp. He slashed-slashed away a thick handful of Corbell's hair and held it before his eyes. "Your lies are for the newly born. We are offended," he said. "Can you lie as to this?" The thin white hair he held in firelight was dark brown for half an inch at the roots.
Corbell gaped.
The tribe surrounded him. They must have been listening all the time. Yes, they looked offended. Skatholtz said, "No dikt grows hair like that. You have found the dikta way to live long like Boys, that we know only in tales. We must know what and where it is."
Corbell had forgotten his Boyish, every word. In English he cried, "I haven't the remotest idea!"
Ktollisp slapped him.
Corbell tried to block with his arms. "Wait, wait. You're right, I must have taken dikta immortality. I just don't know where. Maybe, maybe it's in something I ate. The dikta did a lot of gene engineering. They made the cat-tails and the wild wheat. Maybe they made something that grows dikta immortality, something that grows in Sarash-Zillish. Listen, I didn't know it was happening! I can't see my own hair!"
Skatholtz was gesturing the rest back. "You could not feel your youth returning?"
"I thought I was... getting adapted to the rough life. I spent like a hundred and thirty years in a cold-sleep tank, ten years at a time my years, not yours. I couldn't know what it did to me. Listen, there's an old woman who's been searching every city in the world for dikta immortality. If she doesn't know, how could I?"
"We know nothing of this woman. All right, Corbell. Tell your story. Leave nothing out."
He had been sleepy. Now he was scared boneless-and still bone-weary-and in that state Corbell told his life's story. Whenever he paused for breath Skatholtz spat complex phrases in Boyish, translating.
Telling savages about a black hole at the center of a galaxy was easier than he had expected. Telling Mirelly-Lyra's tale was wearing. They kept backing him up for points she hadn't mentioned, for points she hadn't even noticed in her thirst for dictator immortality. They found her lack of curiosity incomprehensible.
Questions. What had he eaten? Drunk? Breathed? Could immortality have been in the bath in One City? It was a mistake to mention the Fountain of Youth... but no, the dikta themselves used baths.
Dawn came and Corbell was still talking. "It could have been any of the things I tried. The fruits, the nuts, the roots, the meat. The soup, even; I mean the combination of a lot of things plus the heat. Hell, it could even be the water in the fountain."
Skatholtz stood and stretched. "We can find out. When we return to Sarash-Zillish we will take a dikt. Shall we go?"
"Go?" Corbell saw that the other Boys were getting up, collecting gear. "Oh, please! I'll fall over!"
"You are stronger than you think, Corbell. For too long were you a dikt sick with age."
They marched.
The wheat-covered prairie went on forever. They camped early, after the afternoon rain. Corbell sprawled in the wet earth and slept like a dead man.
IV
He woke early. A cat-tail had crawled along his ribs, liking the warmth, tickling him. It mewed in protest as he rolled away. There was more protest from his overused muscles.
The fire had died. Jupiter, white with a thin red crescent edge, made the night seem bright.
Well, I'm in trouble again, he thought. Imagine my amazement. Everyone in the world wants dictator immortality, and they all think I've got it, and they're all half right. Why do the Boys want it? Maybe they want to destroy it. It's the biggest difference between them and the dikta...