There was a thin layer of dust on the floor, as in all the unused rooms of the palace, which were only cleaned annually, if at all. Ansset walked slowly into the room,' the dust rising at each footfall. He walked to the fireplace; the urn that had held Mikal's ashes still waited beside the opening. He turned back to face the Mayor, who finally spoke.
Riktors Imperator, the Mayor said, with the formality of a memorized message, has said to you, Since you were not at home with me, you will stay where you are at home, until the Songhouse sends for you.
Riktors misunderstood me, Ansset said, but the Mayor showed no sign of having heard. He only turned away and left, and when Ansset tried the door, it did not open to his touch.
3
They spent weekend after weekend in Mexico, the largest city in the hemisphere. Josif went to make the rounds of bookstores-the market in old books and rare books was always hot, and Josif had an eye for bargains, books selling for way under value. He also had an eye for what he wanted-histories that were long out of print, fiction written centuries ago about the author's own period, diaries and journals. They say there's nothing original to be said about the history of Earth, that all the facts have been in for years, Josif said fiercely. But that was years ago, and now no one remembers anymore. What it was like to live here then.
When? Kyaren asked him.
Then. As opposed to now.
I'm more interested, she always told him, in tomorrow.
But she wasn't. Today was all that interested her in the first weeks they spent together. Today because it was the best time she had ever had, and she wasn't sure that it would last, or that tomorrow would be half as desirable.
Kyaren went to Mexico for the feel of people. Nowhere in Eastamerica, and certainly nowhere in the Songhouse, were there people like those who crowded the sidewalks of Mexico. No vehicles were allowed except the electric carts that brought in goods to the stores; people, individual people, had to walk everywhere. And there were millions of them. And they all seemed to be outside all the time; even in the rain, they sauntered through the streets with the rain sliding easily off their clothing, relishing the feel of it on their faces. This was a city where Kyaren's hunger could be filled. She knew no one, but loved everyone.
They sweat, Josif said.
You're too immaculate, Kyaren answered crossly.
They sweat and they step on your feet. I see no reason to be in a crowd any more than is unavoidable.
I like the sound of them.
And that's the worst of it. Largest city in the world, and they insist on speaking Mexican, a language that has no reason to exist.
Kyaren only scowled at him. Why not?
They're only five thousand kilometers from Seattle, for heaven's sake. We managed to talk like the rest of the empire. It's just vanity.
It's a beautiful language, you know, she said. I've been learning it, and it opens your mind.
And makes your tongue fall out of your mouth.
Josif had no patience with the eccentricities of his native planet.
Sometimes I'm embarrassed as hell to be from Earth."
The mother globe.
These people aren't real Mexicans. Do you know what Mexicans were? Short and dark! Show me a short dark person out there!
Does it matter if they can trace their pedigrees back to the number one Mexican and her husband? Kyaren demanded. They want to be Mexican. And whenever I come here, I want to be Mexican.
It was a friendly argument that always ended either with them going outside-Kyaren to wander and talk to storekeepers and shoppers, Josif to prowl along the shelves, waiting for a title to make a sudden move so he could pounce-or in bed, where their pursuits more nearly coincided.
It was on a weekend in Mexico that they decided to take over the world.
Why not the universe?
Your ambition is disgusting, Josif said, lying naked on the balcony because he liked the feel of the rain, which was falling heavily.
Well, then, we'll be modest. Where shall we start?
Here.
Not practical. We have no base of operations.
Tegucigalpa, then. We secretly twist all the programs of the computers to follow our every command. Then we cut off everybody's salaries until they surrender.
They laughed; it was a game. But a game they played seriously enough to do research. They would hunt for possible weaknesses, places where the system could be subverted. They also worked to get an overview of the system, to understand how it all fit together. Josif knew his way around the government library in Mexico, and they both spent time punching up readouts on the establishment of Tegucigalpa only three hundred-odd years before.
The thing's relatively new. Half the functions have only been installed in the last ten years. Ten years! And most other planets have been fully computerized for centuries.
You're too down on Earth, Kyaren chided him, poring over minutes of meetings, which were so heavily edited at their level of clearance that it was hard to get anything coherent out of them at all.
But it was not in Mexico that they found the scam. It was at home.
Kyaren had been reading a book on demographics, one that she had only been able to skim at Princeton. It set norms for age distributions on a planet; she found the information fascinating, especially the variations that depended on local employment, climate, and relative wealth. She amused herself by plotting the demographic distribution of ages for Earth, based on the easily obtained statistics on employment and the economy. Then she took a few minutes of break time at work to check her figures.
They were wrong.
From birth to retirement age at 80, her figures were actually quite good. It was from 80 to 100 that things didn't work.
Not enough people were dying at those ages.
In fact, she realized, almost no one was dying, compared to the normal mortality rates. And then, from 100 to 110, they died like flies, so that from 110 on the statistics were normal.
Surely someone would have noticed this before, Kyaren thought. Certainly the Earth would have gained a reputation for unusually low mortality rates. It had to be common knowledge-the food distribution must certainly be affected by it, and pension expenses must be unusually high. Scientists must be trying to discover the reason for the phenomenon.
And yet she had never heard of it at all
In the programming manuals they had looked at in the library in Mexico, Kyaren had found some little-known programs that allowed an operator to check a program rather than use It to find and process data. Kyaren talked to Josif about it that night, which they spent at his place because it was larger and had room for both of them without having to petition for extra furniture, which would have made their arrangement public knowledge.
I've checked my figures again and again, and they're not wrong.
Well, the only way to solve it is go kill some old people, I guess, Josif said, reading a twenty-third-century mystery-in translation, of course.
Josif, it's wrong. Something's wrong. Kyaren, he said, impatient but trying not to sound like it, this is a game we were playing. We really don't have any responsibility for the whole world. Just for dead people and the not-quite-dead. And then just as numbers.