He let his hand stroke the orange cat-tail. It draped itself over his knee and rumbled contentedly.
What is it? If it's edible it's in Sarash-Zillish. Everything I ate in Four City, Mirelly-Lyra ate too. One kind for women and one for men? and man's immortality doesn't affect women at all? I don't believe it.
So something in the park holds dictator immortality, in the sap or the juice or the blood, and I ate it. What did she eat when she searched Sarash-Zillish? The Boys eat almost no vegetables-and vegetarians eat no meat- but she fed me both, and fruit too. Insects? I don't eat insects.
If I could get her to Sarash-Zillish, I'd know. Watch her. See what she doesn't eat.
The stars were bright tonight. A few unwinking stars had a pinkish tinge: small Jovian moons. The Boys were sprawled far from where the fire had been. A Boy on guard looked around as Corbell sat up. It was Krayhayft, the only Boy with white in his hair.
Heady smells reached Corbell. Wet earth and growing things, traces of young supermen who hadn't washed recently, a ghost of broiled meat that Corbell hadn't shared: suddenly he was hungry. And suddenly he was elated.
"What the hell am I complaining about?" he whispered. The cat-tail stopped purring to listen. "I'm young! If nothing else works I can outrun the bitch! I should be dancing in the streets, if I could find a street."
Young again! That made twice. If he could find out how he did it, he could stay young for the rest of his life. Everybody's dream. And even if he couldn't- the grin died on his face. Now he had fifty years to protect, half a century of lifespan that the Norn would rip from him if he couldn't show her the Tree of Life in Sarash-Zillish.
Something that tasted funny? Everything tasted funny. Different soil. Three million years of change.
It was too damn simple anyway. Immortality? and you drink it like fruit juice? An injection might have been more plausible, if he had received any kind of injection. Or... had he inhaled it like marijuana, in the smoke from the wood of a carefully gene-tailored tree?
"Corbell. Do you enjoy the morning?"
Corbell jumped violently. The sentry's approach had been perfectly silent. He settled beside Corbell. By Jupiter light the pale threads gleamed in his hair. Corbell had wondered at the grace with which he moved: Krayhayft who carried the fire starter, Krayhayft the storyteller.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-one," said Krayhayft.
"That's old," said Corbell. Jupiter years. "I wonder why you aren't the leader."
"The old ones learn to avoid that chore... and to avoid the fighting that goes with it. Skatholtz can beat me. Skill in fighting has an upper limit. One is born with one's greatest possible strength."
"Corbel, I think I have found your spacecraft."
"What?"
"There." The Boy was pointing low on the northern horizon, where a few stars glowed in the gray-black of coming dawn. One showed pink among blue-tinged stars. "The one that might be a moon except that it does not move. Is that your spacecraft?"
"No. I don't know where my ship went. Don Juan wasn't ball-like. It would look more like a thick spear."
Krayhayft was more puzzled than disappointed. "Then what is it? I have seen it twinkle oddly. It does not move, but it grows more bright every night."
"The whole system of worlds is messed up. I can't explain it. I think that's the next world out from Jupiter."
"I wish it had been your spacecraft," said Krayhayft. He fell to studying the steady point of light. Entranced.
The cat-tail slithered from Corbell's knee and disappeared into the grain. Corbell saw two more low shadows slipping after it.
A cat screamed. Simultaneously something much bigger vented a much lower, coughing roar. Krayhayft shouted, "Alert!"
It bounded out of the grain and leapt at Corbell's throat: something as big as the biggest of dogs. Corbell threw himself to the side. He saw a spear plant itself solidly in the open mouth, and then the Boys were on it. It was a dwarf lion, male, magnificently maned. It died fast. Even the first spear might have killed it.
Corbell got up, shaken. "The female could be out there."
Skatholtz said, "Yes," and joined the others who were fanning out into the grain. Corbell, spearless and superfluous, stayed where he was.
Presently he noticed something small in the path the lion's charge had left through grain. He found a small butterscotch-sundae corpse. The other cat-tails had returned to the fire. They seemed unusually subdued.
At dawn he helped two Boys build a fire. He saw the reason later, when four more trekked in with ostrich eggs. They set the eggs on the coals, carefully cut the tops off and stirred the contents with spear hafts.
Scrambled eggs! Still no coffee.
Corbell strode along in pink sunlight, feeling good. The slapping-around was a bitter memory, with bruises to corroborate it, but he set next to it another memory: Ktoffisp's fist holding white hair with dark-brown roots. Oh, for a mirror! He was a slave, if not worse. But he was young! With an outside chance to stay that way a long time.
They had crossed a row of big, badly weathered rocks, oddly textured, big as houses and bigger. Now the land sloped down... and Corbell found Skatholtz marching beside him. Skatholtz said in English, "What do you know of the Girls?"
There was a Boyish word for girl-child and another for dikta woman, but Girl was a third word, and it carried a certain emphasis.
Corbell answered, "Mirelly-Lyra told me something about them. There was a balance of power between Boys and Girls, and somehow it fell apart."
"By her tale, the Girls ruled Boys as Boys rule dikta."
"No. Look at it with more care. The Girls ruled the sky; they could move the world. By implication they controlled the weather. They couldn't change the world's rotation, but they could decide how far the world should be from the sun. In fact, they first moved the world because the sun was getting too hot.
"The Boys ruled the dikta. They could see to it that no more Boys or Girls were born." An interesting role reversal, that. "In itself that isn't a lot of power, not in a crowded world where everyone expects to live forever anyway-"
"But our land was less rich! The tales tell it so!"
"Yeah. Look at it from the other direction. Suppose the Boys let the dikta breed like rabbits-breed fast. They kill most of the girlchildren and hide most of the boy-children. The boy-children grow up. They get dikta immortality as long as they behave. Now the Boys have an army. They invade."
The land had leveled out. Ahead it sloped upward again. Skatholtz mulled it over, then: "Our tales tell nothing of this."
"That's because it never happened. The Boys couldn't feed such an army. Poor land. So the balance of power lasted-oh, tens of thousands of your years."
"I see, partly. I am not used to thinking like this. What went wrong? Somehow the Girls lost control."
"Yeah. Weather?"
"Our tales tell of a great thawing. When green things grew for the first time in our land, the Girls tried to take it. The thaw happened when the Girls grew too proud. In their pride they lost a moon, and with the moon they lost their power."
Corbell laughed. "They lost a moon? Hey, just how accurate could those tales be after... a hundred thousand years?"
"We live long. We remember well. Details may be lost, but we do not add fiction."
The land sloped upward. In the distance Corbell could see another line of big, melted-looking rocks.