Larry Niven - A World Out Of Time.pdf

(539 KB) Pobierz
A World Out Of Time—Larry Niven
A World Out Of Time—Larry Niven
To Owen Lock and Judy-Lynn del Rey, who edited the manuscript of this book and
made me do some necessary rewriting: Where the hell were you when Ringworld
was published?
To anyone who owns a first edition of Ringworld: Hang on to that. It’s the only
version in which the Earth rotates in the wrong direction (Chapter 1).
CHAPTER 1 -- RAMMER
I
Once there was a dead man.
He had been waiting for two hundred years inside a coffin, suitably labeled, whose
outer shell held liquid nitrogen. There were frozen clumps of cancer all through his
frozen body. He had had it bad.
He was waiting for medical science to find him a cure.
He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, but no cure existed
for the billions of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the
risk. He had gambled anyway. Why not? He’d been dying.
The vaults held over a million of these frozen bodies. Why not? They’d been
dying.
Later there came a young criminal. His name is forgotten and his crime is secret,
but it must have been a terrible one. The State wiped his personality for it.
Afterward he was a dead man: still warm, still breathing, even reasonably healthy—
but empty.
The State had use for an empty man.
Corbell woke on a hard table, aching as if he had slept too long in one position. He
stared incuriously at a white ceiling. Memories floated up to him of a double-walled
coffin, and sleep and pain.
The pain was gone.
He sat up at once.
And flapped his arms wildly for balance. Everything felt wrong. His arms would not
swing right. His body was too light. His head bobbed strangely on a thin neck. He
reached frantically for the nearest support, which turned out to be a blond young
man in a white jumpsuit. Corbell missed his grip; his arms were shorter than he had
expected. He toppled on his side, shook his head and sat up more carefully.
His arms. Scrawny, knobby—and not his.
The man in the jumpsuit said, „Are you all right?“
„Yeah,“ said Corbell. My God, what have they done to me? I thought I was ready for
anything, but this—He fought rising panic. His throat was rusty, but that was all
right. This was certainly somebody else’s body, but it didn’t seem to have cancer,
either. „What’s the date? How long has it been?“
A quick recovery. The checker gave him a plus. „Twenty-one ninety, your dating.
You won’t have to worry about our dating.“
That sounded ominous. Cautiously Corbell postponed the obvious next question:
What’s happened to me? and asked instead, „Why not?“
„You won’t be joining our society.“
„No? What, then?“
„Several professions are open to you—a limited choice. If you don’t qualify for any
of them we’ll try someone else.“
Corbell sat on the edge of the hard operating table. His body seemed younger, more
limber, definitely thinner, not very clean. He was acutely aware that his abdomen
did not hurt no matter how he moved.
He asked, „And what happens to me?“
„I’ve never learned how to answer that question. Call it a problem in metaphysics,“
said the checker. „Let me detail what’s happened to you so far and then you can
decide for yourself.“
There was an empty man. Still breathing and as healthy as most of society in the
year 2190. But empty. The electrical patterns in the brain, the worn paths of nervous
reflex, the memories, the person had all been wiped away as penalty for an
unnamed crime.
And there was this frozen thing.
„Your newstapers called you people corpsicles,“ said the blond man. „I never
understood what the tapes meant by that.“
„It comes from popsicle. Frozen sherbet.“ Corbell had used the word himself before
he became one of them. One of the corpsicles, the frozen dead.
Frozen within a corpsicle’s frozen brain were electrical patterns that could be
recorded. The process would warm the brain and destroy most of the patterns, but
that hardly mattered, because other things must be done too.
Personality was not all in the brain. Memory RNA was concentrated in the brain, but
it ran all through the nerves and the blood. In Corbell’s case the clumps of cancer
had to be cut away. The RNA could be leeched out of what was left. The operation
would have left nothing like a human being, Corbell gathered. More like bloody
mush.
„What’s been done to you is not the kind of thing that can be done twice,“ the
checker told him. „You get one chance and this is it. If you don’t work out we’ll
terminate and try someone else. The vaults are full of corpsicles.“
„You mean you’d wipe my personality,“ Corbell said unsteadily. „But I haven’t
committed a crime. Don’t I have any rights?“
The checker looked stunned. Then he laughed. „I thought I’d explained. The man
you think you are is dead. Corbell’s will was probated long ago. His widow—„
„Damn it, I left money to myself!“
„No good.“ Though the man still smiled, his face was impersonal, remote,
Unreachable. A vet smiles reassuringly at a cat due to be fixed. „A dead man can’t
own property. That was settled in the courts long ago. It wasn’t fair to the heirs.“
Corbell jerked an unexpectedly bony thumb at his bony chest. „But I’m alive
now!“
„Not in law. You can earn your new life. The State will give you a new birth
certificate and citizenship if you give the State good reason.“
Corbell sat for a moment, absorbing that. Then he got off the table. „Let’s get
started then. What do you need to know about me?“
„Your name.“
„Jerome Branch Corbell.“
„Call me Pierce.“ The checker did not offer to shake hands. Neither did Corbell,
perhaps because he sensed the man would not respond, perhaps because they
were both noticeably overdue for a bath. „I’m your checker. Do you like people? I’m
just asking. We’ll test you in detail later.“
„I get along with the people around me, but I like my privacy.“
The checker frowned. „That narrows it more than you might think. The isolationism
you called privacy was—well, a passing fad. We don’t have the room for it...or the
inclination, either. We can’t send you to a colony world—„
„I might make a good colonist. I like travel.“
„You’d make terrible breeding stock. Remember, the genes aren’t yours. No. You
get one choice, Corbell. Rammer.“
„Rammer?“
„I’m afraid so.“
„That’s the first strange word you’ve used since I woke up. In fact—hasn’t the
language changed at all? You don’t even have an accent.“
„Part of my profession. I learned your speech through RNA training, many years
ago. You’ll learn your trade the same way if you get that far. You’ll be amazed how
fast you learn with RNA shots to help you along. But you’d better be right about
liking your privacy, Corbell, and about liking to travel, too. Can you take orders?“
„I was in the army.“
„What does that mean?“
„Means yes.“
„Good. Do you like strange places and faraway people, or vice versa?“
„Both.“ Corbell smiled hopefully. „I’ve raised buildings all over the world. Can the
world use another architect?“
„No. Do you feel that the State owes you something?“
There could be but one answer to that. „No.“
„But you had yourself frozen. You must have felt that the future owed you
something.“
„Not at all. It was a good risk. I was dying.“
„Ah.“ The checker looked him over thoughtfully. „If you had something to believe
in, perhaps dying wouldn’t mean so much.“
Corbell said nothing.
They gave him a short word-association test in English. That test made Corbell
suspect that a good many corpsicles must date from near his own death in 1970.
They took a blood sample, then exercised him to exhaustion and took another
blood sample. They tested his pain threshold by direct nerve stimulation—
excruciatingly unpleasant—then took another blood sample. They gave him a
Chinese puzzle and told him to take it apart.
Pierce then informed him that the testing was over. „After all, we already know the
state of your health.“
„Then why the blood samples?“
The checker looked at him for a moment. „You tell me.“
Something about that look gave Corbell the creepy feeling that he was on trial for
his life. The feeling might have been caused only by the checker’s rather narrow
features, his icy blue gaze and abstracted smile. Still...Pierce had stayed with him
all through the testing, watching him as if Corbell’s behavior was a reflection on
Pierce’s judgment. Corbell thought carefully before he spoke.
„You have to know how far I’ll go before I quit. You can analyze the blood samples
for adrenalin and fatigue poisons to find out just how much I was hurting, just how
tired I really was.“
„That’s right,“ said the checker.
Corbell had survived again.
He would have given up much earlier on the pain test. But at some point Pierce had
mentioned that Corbell was the fourth corpsicle personality to be tested in that
empty body.
He remembered going to sleep that last time, two hundred and twenty years ago.
His family and friends had been all around him, acting like mourners. He had
chosen the coffin, paid for vault space, and made out his Last Will and Testament,
but he had not thought of it as dying. He had been given a shot. The eternal pain
had drifted away in a soft haze. He had gone to sleep.
He had drifted off wondering about the future, wondering what he would wake to. A
vault into the unknown. World government? Interplanetary spacecraft? Clean fusion
power? Strange clothing, body paints, nudism? New principles of architecture,
floating houses, arcologies?
Or crowding, poverty, all the fuels used up, power provided by cheap labor? He’d
thought of those, but they didn’t worry him. The world could not afford to wake him
if it was that poor. The world he dreamed of in those last moments was a rich world,
able to support such luxuries as Jaybee Corbell.
It looked like he wasn’t going to see too damn much of it.
Someone led him away after the testing. The guard, walked with a meaty hand
wrapped around Corbell’s thin upper arm. Leg irons would have been no more
effective had Corbell thought of escaping. The guard took him up a narrow
staircase to the roof.
The noon sun blazed in a blue sky that shaded to yellow, then brown at the horizon.
Green plants grew in close-packed rows on parts of the roof. Elsewhere many
sheets of something glassy were exposed to the sunlight.
Corbell caught one glimpse of the world from a bridge between two roofs. It was a
cityscape of close-packed buildings, all of the same cold cubistic design.
And Corbell was impossibly high on a narrow strip of concrete with no guardrails at
all. He froze. He stopped breathing.
The guard did not speak. He tugged at Corbell’s arm, not hard, and watched to see
what he would do. Corbell pulled himself together and went on.
The room was all bunks: two walls of bunks with a gap between. The light was cool
and artificial, but outside it was nearly noon. Could they be expecting him to sleep?
But jet lag had never bothered Corbell...
The room was big, a thousand bunks big. Most of the bunks were full. A few
occupants watched incuriously as the guard showed Corbell which bunk was his. It
was the bottommost in a stack of six. Corbell had to drop to his knees and roll to
get into it. The bedclothes were strange: silky and very smooth, even slippery—the
only touch of luxury about the place. But there was no top sheet, nothing to cover
him. He lay on his side, looking out at the dormitory from near floor level.
Now, finally, he could let himself think:
I’m alive.
Earlier it might have been a fatal distraction. He’d been holding it back:
I made it!
I’m alive!
And young! That wasn’t even in the contract.
But, he thought reluctantly, because it would not stay buried, who is it that’s alive?
Some kind of composite? A criminal rehabilitated with the aid of some spare
chemicals and an electric brainwashing device...? No. Jaybee Corbell is alive and
well, if a trifle confused.
Once he had had that rare ability: He could go to sleep anywhere, anytime. But
sleep was very far from him now. He watched and tried to learn.
Three things were shocking about that place.
One was the smell. Apparently perfumes and deodorants had been another passing
fad. Pierce had been overdue for a bath. So was the new, improved Corbell. Here
the smell was rich.
The second was the loving bunks, four of them in a vertical stack, twice as wide as
the singles and with thicker mattresses. The doubles were for loving, not sleeping.
What shocked Corbell was that they were right out in the open, not hidden by so
much as a gauze curtain.
The same was true of the toilets.
How can they live like this?
Corbell rubbed his nose and jumped—and cursed at himself for jumping. His own
nose had been big and fleshy and somewhat shapeless. But the nose he now
rubbed automatically when trying to think was small and narrow with a straight,
sharp edge. He might very well get used to the smell and everything else before he
got used to his own nose.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin