The Fury Out of Time (16 page)

Later there was another inquisition, the longbeards working laboriously to frame questions within Karvel’s limited vocabulary, and Karvel expending a like amount of effort in attempting to find out where he was and what had happened to the U.O. Both concepts remained hopelessly beyond his verbal capacity. The meeting ended on a note of mutual dissatisfaction, and Karvel was returned to the custody of the tutor.

She sensed his desperation, and began to make a sincere effort to find out what was troubling her student. He stammered through oblique explanations.
“Something
I
something
in.” Damn the language! What could he do with the word
walk
to make it mean
travel?

He obtained a word for
circle
by tracing one on the floor with his finger, but he failed utterly in his attempt to convert it into a sphere. He needed a child’s ball, but he had seen no children since his arrival. Had children gone out of fashion in this civilization?

The tutor watched his efforts thoughtfully, and returned that night to lead him to the top of the tower and reveal to him—the full moon.

The moon was. . .the moon. The familiar pattern of the lunar
maria
was as obvious to the naked eye as it had been in the twentieth century. At least Karvel could be positive that he had not left the Earth, but precisely where he was on Earth was not so easily determined. He searched the star-studded sky and could not identify a single familiar constellation.

For another three days Karvel labored vainly, until he was able to seize upon a word meaning
thing,
or
object,
and fashion a statement. “Thing brought me.” The tutor combined this thought with his frantic tracing of circles, and took him to see a circular aircraft like the one that had rescued him.

His frustration reached choleric proportions, the distressed tutor sent for the pilot, and after much fumbling of meaning they achieved understanding.

He was referring to the sphere he had arrived in.

They did not know what had happened to it.

Chapter 3

“Time?” Bluebeard exclaimed. “You come to us from
time?”

Karvel bowed an acknowledgement. “From the past, Sire. From an extremely remote past.”

“This is a grievous disappointment to me,” Bluebeard announced, fretfully combing his beard with his long fingernails. “I had hoped—but never mind. The historians will be pleased.”

“This
historian is not pleased,” the longest pinkbeard said. “He comes from a time before history began. He can tell us nothing, nothing at all. He says—” Pinkbeard glared icily at Karvel. “He says that in his time man had not yet colonized the moon.”

Bluebeard combed his beard again. “So remote a time as that?”

“He said
colonized.
And when I told him that man reached Earth
from
the moon, he would not believe it!”

“Indeed.” Bluebeard eyed Karvel suspiciously. “You presume to deny the facts of our recorded history?”

“Before man could reach Earth from the moon, he had to reach the moon from Earth,” Karvel said stubbornly. “Human history—”

“Prehistory,” Bluebeard said. “You really know nothing but prehistory, and precious little of that. What a disappointment after our high expectations! I doubt that you were worth the trouble. Still. . .prehistory. Give him to Prehistory, and let them see what they can do with him.”

“Prehistory does not want him, Sire,” Pinkbeard said. “Prehistory 1 does not believe that he comes from prehistory.”

“What are we to do with him, then?”

“Languages has requisitioned him, Sire. At least temporarily. His own language, or what he claims to be his own language, is unknown to them.”

“Very well. Let Languages have him. Tell them to find out the truth about him, if they can.”

Karvel took a step forward. “Sire, I must return to the city you call Galdu.”

Bluebeard’s head jerked. “Galdu? Barbarous place. Its people worship their physical selves, and neglect their minds disgustingly. Galdu would have no use for such an imperfect specimen as yourself.”

“Galdu wants him, Sire,” Pinkbeard said.

“Indeed! What do they offer?”

“Nothing, Sire. Galdu demands him. Galdu says that he and his machine arrived in Gald territory, causing much destruction, and he rightfully belongs to Galdu. Galdu says we stole him illegally.”

“Tell Galdu he is not available for trade. We will consider their
offer,
but only when we have quite finished with him.”

Bluebeard huffed himself from the room. The others followed, leaving Karvel alone with Languages 9-17, his tutor.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I really don’t care whether they believe me or not, if only I can make contact with the city that sent out the U.O.’s. How certain are you that it wasn’t Galdu?”

“Galdu has no scientists, and no technicians above the fifth level. Its technicians would perhaps be able to build uncomplicated replacement parts, but I am certain that they would not have the knowledge and skill to make the thing that you describe.”

“I
must
find out where the U.O.’s come from,” he said despairingly. “Can’t you understand that what happened to Galdu could happen here—and worse?”

She could not understand. Her people had no conception of catastrophe. They did not even have a word for it, though the Galds might recently have invented one.

They found the pilot waiting for them in the Languages Tower. “Nothing,” he said unhappily. “The thing you call U.O. is no longer in the park. The Galds probably took it into the city, but no one knows for certain.”

“Galdu demanded me,” Karvel said. “Couldn’t I demand the U.O.? It’s mine.”

They stared at him, as shocked at his bad manners as by his faulty grammar. He had not yet reconciled himself to the fact that in this strange university city of Dunzalo there was no concept of personal property. He could refer to his arm, but not to his clothing, and certainly not to his U.O.

In practice the citizens took whatever they needed from the city’s stores, and no one would have thought of molesting the personal possessions of another—which undoubtedly accounted for the fact that Karvel’s equipment was left in his possession. But the language did not permit him to call it his. It belonged to the city.

So did Karvel.

So did all of the citizens, up to and including Bluebeard, who was dean of all he surveyed by virtue of his number, zero-zero.

Karvel corrected himself. “Dunzalo could demand it. Dunzalo has me, and the U.O. brought me here. Isn’t that sufficient basis for a claim?”

“It might be,” Languages 9-17 said, “but I doubt that anyone would be interested.”

“You
would. In that machine is a communication in forty languages.”

“Forty. . .
languages?”
she repeated breathlessly.

“Forty languages, all different and all of them guaranteed indescribably ancient. My own language is one of the forty.”

“I’ll see what can be done,” she said, and hurried away.

The pilot, Communications 4-5, was regarding Karvel with amusement. He belonged to the city’s service and maintenance contingent, rather than to the faculties of sanctified knowledge, and he seemed less than wholly sympathetic with their more obvious idiosyncrasies. “You’re learning,” he remarked.

“Languages 9-17,” Karvel mused, looking after the tutor. “What a disgusting name for a young woman. Doesn’t she have any other name?”

“You might call her Wilurzil.”

“That’s much better. Quite nice, in fact. What does it mean?”

“It means, ‘Woman teacher of the one-sixteenth beard class.’”

“I shouldn’t have asked. What about yourself? Surely your best friends don’t call you Communications 4-5.”

“Sometimes they call me Marnox, which means—”

“Something about a bird?”

“Bird-chaser.”

“Very appropriate. Marnox you shall be. Couldn’t the forest people find out anything about the U.O.?”

“No. The Unclaimed People do not get on well with the Galds. Long ago the Galds enlarged their fields at the expense of the forest, and the Unclaimed People have never forgotten.”

“They were kind to me.”

“You were fleeing from the Galds. The Unclaimed People do not often go near Galdu, and especially not now. There was a skirmish when the Galds attempted to enter the forest to find my plane—and you.”

“Who won?”

Marnox grinned. “These days, no one defeats the Unclaimed People in their forest.”

“You’ve traveled about a great deal, haven’t you?”

“I have permission to practice flying,” Marnox said. “We’ve convinced Old Zero-Zero that we need lots of practice. It’s an excuse to get away from Dunzalo, where nothing ever happens.”

“While you’ve been practicing, have you seen anything like the U.O.?”

“No.”

“Or heard of anything like it?”

“No.”

“Someone designed the thing, and built at least two of them, and presumably tested them, and finally sent them to the remote past—sent them out three times, with passengers, and got them back twice before I arrived, and they must have done some damage each time they returned. Isn’t there any form of communication between cities?”

“What a city builds is its own business,” Marnox said. “It wouldn’t be talking about it to other cities unless it wanted to trade it.”

“One of the passengers was a
nonperson.
An unhuman being, probably from a distant world. Do you know of such a creature?”

“The Overseer and his people are from distant worlds, but they are not
nonpeople.”

“What do they look like?”

The pilot’s long forehead puckered in surprise. “Like people!”

“Then it couldn’t have been one of them. Who is this Overseer?”

“Why he’s. . .the Overseer!”

Karvel touched two stools from the walls. “Let’s sit down,” he said. “What I’m trying to do is desperately important, and Wilurzil doesn’t want to talk about anything except word inflections. Tell me about the cities you have seen.”

They were city-states, fiercely independent of each other in all except their disagreements, which were arbitrated by the mysterious entity whose title Karvel translated as
Overseer.

Each city was the center of its own mechanized farm, and deep within its vitals each contained the automated factories that received the products of the farm and processed them into products and by-products and byproducts of by-products.

Because they were so nearly self-supporting, they were able to specialize. Dunzalo was a university city; and somewhere there was a medical city, and a city of mechanics, and a city of agriculturists, and so on, through the entire professional spectrum. The largest city-states, such as Galdu, apparently specialized in producing the one thing all the others needed: people.

Most of the trade between cities was a trade in people. There were no children at Dunzalo. The university city traded its educated young people, and an occasional older specialist, to cities that needed teachers, or linguists, or mathematicians, or whatever Dunzalo could supply. In return Dunzalo received the doctors and mechanics and agriculturists and workers it needed to maintain itself and its farm—and more young people to educate.

“And yet, there is a sort of centralized authority,” Karvel mused. “Where does this Overseer have his headquarters?”

“On the moon,” Marnox said.

“Could I ask to see him?”

The thought shocked Marnox into speechlessness.

“How could I go about traveling to the moon?” Karvel asked.

“No one travels to the moon unless the Overseer’s people take him there.”

“Somewhere,” Karvel said slowly, “there is a city of extraordinarily talented engineers, who built the U.O.’s. How do I go about finding it?”

“I don’t know. We can keep looking, and asking people—”

“That would take too long.”

Karvel was experiencing a disquieting sensation of uncertainty. If he had arrived in the wrong time, or the wrong place, how could he possibly go about finding the right one?

Dunzalo petitioned the Overseer, demanding the surrender by Galdu of one unidentified spherical object, Dunzalo’s by token of its lawful ownership of the object’s pilot. Galdu had already petitioned the Overseer, demanding the return of Karvel by token of its lawful ownership of the unidentified spherical object that had landed him in Gald territory.

“When will this Overseer act?” Karvel asked.

The tutor replied indifferently, “When he is ready.”