The metal flared. Corbell said nothing; it was already too late. He watched the thin blue beam spurt fire until Krayhayft had cut a wide door.
The metal slab fell away. Tons of mud spilled after it. Aeons of dust and rainwater... They waded up the mud slope, joking among themselves, and Corbell followed.
The hull was one enormous tank. There were no partitions to prevent sloshing. Corbell sniffed, but no trace of the cargo remained. Oil? Or something more exotic? Or only topsoil for the frigid Antarctic cities? Topsoil wouldn't slosh around...
The surprise was on deck and above deck. Masts! There was no place here for human sailors. There were only proliferating masts reminiscent of clipper ships, and cables all running to a great housing at the bow. A housing for motors and winches and a computer.
The hull had appeared to be sound; the masts were in fine shape. But time had reduced the computer to garbage. That was a pity. It was as big as Don Juan's computer, which had housed Peerssa's personality. Conceivably it could have told them a great deal.
They marched down into the fog, and the fog swallowed them.
Corbell heard regular booming sounds that he failed to interpret. Then, suddenly, they had reached the sea. Breakers roared and hissed across a rocky shore.
They rested. Then, while others collected brush for a fire, three of the Boys swam out into the breakers with spears and the rope. It looked inviting. The water would not be cold. But Corbell had seen the Boys hunt, and he wondered what toothy prey waited for them.
Two came back. They swam ashore with the rope twitching behind them and collapsed, panting heavily, while others dragged the rope in with its thrashing burden. They beached twelve feet of shark. The third Boy didn't come back.
Corbell couldn't believe it. How could immortals be so careless of their lives?
The Boys were subdued, but they held no kind of formal ceremony. Corbell ate bread that night. He had no stomach for shark. He had seen what came out of the shark's stomach.
He lay long awake, puzzling it out. He had been old and young and middle-aged, in no intelligible sequence. With any luck he would stay young. He had fought for his life and his life-style against the massed might of the State; he had never given up, not with all the excuse in the world.
Did they get tired of too much life?
Corbell didn't doubt that they could build machines to kill off the sharks. The factories that kept turning out identical bedrooms and baths and offices were a tribute to their laziness; but they were also brilliant. Then why were the sharks still here? Tradition? Maschismo?
In the morning the Boys were cheerful as ever. In the afternoon they reached the dikta.
Chapter SEVEN: THE DICTATORS
I
Six City, Dikta City, showed first as a bar of shadow along the shoreline, then as half a mile of blank wall with a low windowed structure peeking above the center. Dikta City showed its back to the approaching Boys.
As they rounded the end of the wall Corbell saw its face. Dikta City was a single building, four stories tail, half a mile long, and as wide as a luxury hotel. Its façade looked north toward the sea and the sun, and was rich with windows and balconies and archways. Between city and sea was a semicircle of low wall over which the tops of trees were visible. A garden.
The dikta were emerging through an arch in the low garden wall. In scores now, they waited.
Dikta City could never have been under a dome. It was the wrong shape. It must have been built late, specifically to house the adults, long after Antarctica became a hothouse and the seas receded across the continental shelf. Topsoil must have been spread over the salt dunes, and walled against the winds. Fish from the sea, and whatever the walled garden produced, would be the only sources of food for miles around.
It would be difficult to leave this place, Corbell thought.
A couple of hundred dikta waited until the Boys were a few yards away, until Corbell had counted seven men among a horde of women. Then they cringed, all of them at once. They held the cringe as Krayhayft stepped forward.
"We come to repair your machines," Krayhayft said, "and to take your boy-children to ourselves."
"Good," said one among them. He had a white beard and shoulder-length white hair, very clean and curly. He straightened from the cringe, as did all the others... and now Corbell was impressed by their general health and dignity. They didn't act like slaves; the cringe had been a formality. Corbell wondered what would have happened if he had cringed naturally, that fourth day in Sarash-Ziffish. The Boys might have killed him as an escapee.
All of the dikta were studying Corbell.
Krayhayft noticed. He spoke at length in a voice that carried. Corbell couldn't follow everything he said, but he was telling a condensed version of Corbell's history. The spaceflight, the long voyage, some complex phrases that might have related to relativistic time-compression; the flight from Mirelly-Lyra... no mention of the mad dikta woman's motives. No mention of dikta immortality. Corbell was sure of that; he listened for it.
The old man listened and laughed; he was vastly entertained. At the end of the narrative he came forward and said, "Welcome to our refuge, Corbell. You will have interesting things to tell us. I am Gording. Do I speak slowly enough?"
"A pleasure to meet you, Gording. I have a lot to learn from you. Yes, I can understand you."
"Will you join us tonight, then? We have room in the Dikta Place for many more children. It will be instructive to see what your children are like."
"I-" Corbell choked up. The women were examining him and speculating in whispers. It wasn't just his browline, though even the women were half bald. His brown-and-white hair must have caught their attention too... and his answer was rudely delayed. "I'm happy you accept me for that important purpose," he said.
What he was was nervous. Abruptly he was very conscious of his near-nakedness. The dikta were entirely naked.
One of the women-her long black hair was just showing gray- said, "It must be long since you made children with a woman."
Corbell laughed. Divide by twelve: "A quarter of a million years." What she asked then raised laughter. Corbell shook his head. "I may have forgotten how. There is only one way to know."
He helped the Boys set up camp.
A grove of trees occupied the center of the semicircular garden within the wall, which was far more orderly than the jungle in Sarash-Zillish. The Boys set up camp under the trees, and built their fire with wood brought by dikta women.
"You may go to the dikta," Skatholtz told him then, "but you must not tell them of dikta immortality." It didn't seem to occur to him that he might be disobeyed.
"What about my hair? I know damned well they noticed it."
Skatholtz shrugged. "You are an early type of dikt from before stories were told. Tell them all dikta once grew hair like yours. If any learn what you know, their minds will be... all that they know will be taken from them."
"I'll keep my mouth shut."
Skatholtz nodded. Corbell was dismissed.
The prospect of an orgy was making Corbell jumpy. He had tried to lie with a woman three million years ago, in the State dormitory, the night before they took him to the Moon to board Don Juan. All those staring eyes had cowed him, left him impotent. It might be the same tonight.
But he had half an erection now.
Dikta City's ground floor was a row of long, hall-like public places, each roomy enough for two hundred. The dining room was one of these. It had some of the trappings of a cafeteria. Corbell found trays and utensils at one end of a counter; a dozen women and a man cooked food in large batches and served it as the line passed. Others finished eating and took their places. Weird differences: The single utensil was a large plastic spoon with a sawtoothed cutting edge, and the metal trays floated at elbow level, sinking slightly under the weight of food.