"I feel good. I feel strong. Maybe I only want to believe your lie."
"Okay. Pay attention." Corbell set the helmet between them. He talked half for Peerssa's benefit. "The world is baked and dead everywhere except in Antarctica. What's left alive is all tropical stuff evolved for six years of daylight and six years of night. If Antarctica gets covered by ice again everything will die. The ruling population is-" He used the Boyish word. "Boys, eleven-year-olds who live forever. There's a minor population of adults for breeding. The men look like Gording, or younger. They're human. There are some minor changes-" He began to describe them: the pale skin, the receding hairline...
Mirelly-Lyra regarded Gording without favor. But she must see him as human. The biggest difference, the receding hairline, looked natural on an old man.
He hadn't impressed her yet. He went on: "If we ever expect to get a State established again, it'll be with the adults, the dikta. The Boys are too different. What I'm getting at is, there is a chance. Right now there are about ten women to every man, but in a hundred years it'll be nearly one-to-one." An angle there? He definitely had her attention. "Of course, your role wouldn't be very important at first, with that big an imbalance. But you'd be the only woman with a full head of hair. And the only redhead."
"Just a minute, Corbell. Isn't it true that Boys rule the adults? I don't want to be a slave. And what about the Girls?"
"The Girls are long dead."
"Ahhh." Mirelly-Lyra must have hated the Girls.
"Right. It's Boys and dikta now. We can get the dikta to move here, because we've got the dikta immortality. They'll come. I know where to find a ship."
She was shaking her head, frowning. Now Corbell knew that she'd bought half of what he was selling. Against half-bald women her great beauty would rule the men who ruled the dikta! But: "How long have the Boys ruled?"
"Ever since you brought the dikta to Antarctica as escaped convicts, whenever the hell that was. Say a million years."
Oncoming youth put music in her laugh. "And now the dikta will break free, that suddenly? The sheep will become wolves because we offer them a sufficient bribe?"
Dammit, she did have a point. He changed languages. "Gording? Will the dikta revolt?"
"Yes."
"They never did before."
"The dangers were too great. The rewards were too small."
Maybe. Corbell switched to English. "He says they will. I believe him. Now just a minute, let me tell you why. First, they have not been bred for docility. They've been bred to produce a better strain of Boys, and they've got the genes. Second-how do I put this? You know what a cringing man looks like?"
She grinned. She'd seen Corbell cringe, damn her.
"Okay. They cringe. But it's a gesture, a formality. The next second they're walking as tall as ever. The Boys cringe to each other, too. I think the dikta haven't revolted for a million years because the odds weren't right. Now they are."
She sat silent, frowning.
"What did you think you'd get out of Peerssa moving the Earth?"
"I thought... We're the last of the State, Corbell. I thought we could start the human race over."
"Adam and Eve, with Eve in charge. Mirelly-Lyra, we'd better hope we can mate with the dikta, because, frankly, I'm terrified of you. I don't think I could get it up."
"Low sex urge?"
"Yeah. Would you like to rule the dikta instead? You'll have one thing going for you. You rule the sky. Once again a Girl rules the sky."
He saw the beginnings of a smile (Corbell forgets that I can rule men with my beauty alone!) and he pushed it home. "But you've got to give Peerssa his orders now. He's already started the braking sequence. Move the Earth now and it's the end of the world."
She leered teasingly. "I should make you wait."
"Peerssa has already started the-"
"Give me the helmet."
"Goddamn braking sequence. Here. Wait a minute." He didn't let go of the helmet.
"Corbell? Isn't this what you wanted?"
"I just had the damndest thought." Don't blow this. The fate of the world- shaddup! "Give me a minute to think it through." When a man commands a djinn, he tends to be careful with his phrasing. "All right. Peerssa, I'm going to describe what I want to happen. Then you tell me if you can make the course change, and you tell me what side effects we can expect. After that we can put it up to Mirelly-Lyra.
"I want Cape Horn and the region around it to be about fifteen centigrade degrees cooler."
II
From the roof of the office building they watched Uranus pass.
The planet must be smaller than it had been at Corbell's birth. Its drive was not all that efficient; it must have blown away mega-mega-tons of atmosphere during aeons of maneuvering. For all that, a gas giant planet was now passing two million miles from the Earth.
It was tremendous. It glowed half full near the horizon: a white half-disk touched with pink, banded and roiled with storms, and a night side black against the stars. From the black edge a tiny, intense violet-white flame reached out and out, lighting the night side, expanding, reddening, dissipating.
Mirelly-Lyra said something that was pure music. No wonder she had been able to persuade men to do her bidding. (The old man's voice said, "Glorious.") Her white robe was a shapeless pale shadow in the dark. Corbell stood a little apart from her. Now that she was no longer an old woman, he was more afraid of her than ever. In truth, the Norn now ruled the fate of the world.
Corbell was very twitchy tonight.
He called into the helmet in his hands. "Peerssa, how goes it?" And waited for the response. Nothing, nothing-
"Green bird." The autopilot was indecently calm. "It was difficult to plot a new path that would not intersect a moon, but I did it. Earth's new orbit will be somewhat eccentric. Her average temperature will vary around ten degrees lower."
"Good enough." Corbell set the helmet down. His urge was to call Peerssa every two minutes. A giant planet falling that close wasn't glorious, it was terrifying.
She said it again. "Glorious. To think that the State reached such heights! And now there are only savages."
"We'll be back," he said, and laughed too loudly. "Gording doesn't know it, but what he's doing in Dikta City is forming the basis for a population explosion. In three thousand years we'll be building interstellar spaceships again. We'll need them. Earth will be too crowded."
"I hadn't thought of that. Perhaps Gording did. Do you really think the dikta will come? A million years of slavery, after all-"
"They'll have to come." He'd thought it out in all its intricate detail. "In a few months Cape Horn and Four City will be in the Temperate Zone. Plants that grow well in Antarctica will grow well here once we transport them. In Antarctica it'll be colder than the Boys expect. They'll huddle in Sarash-Zillish through six Olde Earth years of darkness. Meanwhile the dikta will be setting themselves up here."
"All very well if the Boys wait. You've said they're very intelligent. They may attack immediately."
"Let them wait a few months and we'll give them a nasty shock! We'll have Peerssa in orbit then. Didn't he tell you? He's got a thing that can blast them from orbit while they try to cross the ocean. They'll think it's the Girls. They'll try to wipe out the Himalaya valleys and the Sea of Okhotsk. But if they wait long enough .