"A moon. It sounds completely silly, but... Peerssa told me the moons of Jupiter were out of their orbits, but that's not too strange. Dropping the world into their midst could have done that. But he also said Ganymede is missing completely."
"Ganymede?"
"The biggest moon. Hell, I don't see how it fits in."
"And the sun is too hot, you said, and King Jupiter is too hot."
"And the weather is screwed up," said Corbell. "It all comes down to a change in the weather. It wiped out the balance of power. Then the Boys wiped out the Girls."
"We tell tales of that war. Weapons as strong as a meteor strike! Look, Corbell, such a weapon was used here." Skatholtz swept an arm behind him.
They had crossed a shallow dish-shaped depression a couple of miles across, rimmed by these half-melted... "Just a minute," said Corbell. He dropped his load of jerky and scrambled up a rock twenty feet high and of oddly uniform texture. There at the top he found lines of rust red making a great Z: the remains of a girder.
"These were buildings," he said. "It must have been a Boy city."
"When I was young I wanted to use weapons like that." Skatholtz laughed boyishly. "Now I cringe at what they must have done to the weather. But we destroyed the Girls."
"They did you some hurt, too." Corbell climbed down from the melted building. They'd have to trot to catch up to the tribe.
"The tale tells that they destroyed us," said Skatholtz. "I never understood that saying."
Corbell and Skatholtz marched on in silence for a time. Boys chattered ahead. It was just past noon, too early to hunt. Very far away, a great brown carpet flowed away from the noise they were making: thousands of animals too distant to recognize, too numerous to count.
Skatholtz said in Boyish, "Soon we reach the border to the great water. A day's march broad is that border. Thea word is-" Corbell learned the words for shore and sea. "The near village holds a pleasant surprise," and Skatholtz used another unfamiliar word. "I can't describe it. We must do work for it."
"All right." In his youth Corbell had never liked muscle work. But oh, it was good to have the muscles now! He asked, "Why were we talking English?"
"Because I must know you. I must learn when you are telling fiction."
Corbell chose not to protest the injustice. "I wonder about the cat-tails."
"What do you wonder?"
"In Sarash-Zilish they rule. Here there are things bigger and more violent. How can they live?"
"Soon or late a predator kills them. Until then they are pleasant to keep near. Soon or late, everything dies except Boys."
"Before this evil you control your rage skillfully. Will we find more cat-tails among the dikta?"
"No. We never leave cat-tails with the dikta."
"Why?"
"It isn't done."
Corbell let it drop. There was a thing he dared not ask yet, but he would have to find out. How carefully were the adults guarded?
The dikta place was the second place Mirelly-Lyra would look for him. He couldn't stay long. The moment she saw him dark-haired, that moment he would have to produce dictator immortality.
And maybe he could. One simple test... made carefully! He did not want the Boys chopping down the Tree of Life!
V
They reached the village at noon. It was a strange blend of primitive and futuristic: an arc of baths, identical to the bath Corbell had found by the shore in One City, half surrounding the village square, and surrounded in turn by sod huts and granaries. There was great variety among the sod structures; but they matched. The village as a whole was beautiful.
Corbell was beginning to get the idea. The ancient factories would build the Boys buildings for certain purposes. It was very easy to go on using them century after century. For other purposes they made their own, and lavished labor and ingenuity on them. He was not entirely surprised when Krayhayft spoke for the tribe, and called it "Krayhayft's tribe." He who spoke for the village had Krayhayft's strange grace, and gray in his long golden hair.
They worked all that afternoon. A couple of Boys of the village went with them to supervise, shouting their orders with malice aforethought. Corbell and Krayhayft's tribe used primitive scythes to reap grain from the fields and carry it in bundles into the village square, until there was a great heap of it there, until the Boys of the village were satisfied.
After their labor the Boys went whooping to the baths. Corbell waited his turn with impatience. He went the full route, bath and steam and sauna and back to the bath, this time with the Jacuzzistyle bubble system turned on. When he emerged it was dark. They were starting dinner.
The "surprise" Skatholtz had promised was bread, of course. Several kinds of bread, plus rabbit meat the villagers had hunted. Corbell ate his fill of all the varieties of bread. The taste brought on a nostalgic mood. His eyes were wet when Ktoffisp had finished singing Corbell's version of "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."
The bread had surprised him less than the "phone booth" at one end of the arc of baths. He dithered... but Skatholtz knew he knew about "phone booths." While Krayhayft started one of his long tales, Corbell sought out Skatholtz and asked him.
The skeletal boy grinned. "Were you thinking of leaving us through the prilatsil?"
"Not especially."
"Of course not. Well, you've guessed right. This village trades their grain for other bread-makings all across the land."
"I didn't think the prilatsil would send anything that far."
"The land is crossed by a line of prilatsil, close-spaced. Do you think we would handle emergencies by traveling on foot? Look." Skatholtz drew a ragged circle-Antarctica-and a peace symbol across it. "If there were serious reason to travel, these lines of prilatsil exist. Since the time of the Girls they have been used four times more, if tales have been lost. We keep them in repair."
Corbell kept his other questions to himself. He hoped he would not have to use the prilatsil. They were too obvious. They would be guarded.
When the tribe left in the morning, they carried loaves of bread in their cloth bags. There had been an exchange: Three of Krayhayft's tribe had stayed behind, and three villagers had replaced them. No big deal was made of it, and Corbell had to examine faces to be sure it had happened.
Now there was no more grain. The land dropped gradually for twenty miles or more, and ended in mist. Nothing grew on it but dry scrub. Off to the right of their path was a cluster of sharp-edged shapes, promontories all alone on the flat lifeless ground.
Nature sometimes imitates that regular, artificial look. Corbell asked anyway.
"They are artificial," Skatholtz told him. "I have seen them before. I have my guess as to what they are, but... shall we look at them? Some of Krayhayft's tribe have not seen them."
The troop veered. The structures grew larger. Some lay on their sides, disintegrating. But the nearest stood upright, its narrow bottom firmly set in the ground. The tribe clustered beneath a great curved wall leaning out over their heads.
"Ships," said Corbell. "They carried people and things over water. What are they doing so far from the ocean?"
"Perhaps there was ocean here once."
"Yeah... yeah. When the world got so hot, a lot of the ocean went into the air. This used to be sea-bottom mud, I think."
Krayhayft said, "That fits with the tales. Can you guess what they might have carried?"
"Too many answers. Is there a way in?"
He didn't understand when Krayhayft untied the fire starter from his belt. He would have stopped him otherwise. Krayhayft twisted something on the fire starter, pointed it at the great wall of rusted metal.