“Gif thit nafn!”
The Danska words barked from the car radio as a jet whine cut across the hum of motor and tires. “Identify yourself!” Jason Philippou cast a look skyward through the bubbletop. He saw a strip of blue between two ragged green walls where pine forest lined the road. Sunlight struck off the flanks of the killer machine up there. It wailed, came about, and made a circle over him.
Sweat started cold from his armpits and ran down his ribs. 1 nui&t not panic, he thought in a corner of his brain. May the God help me now. But it was his training he invoked. Psychosomatics: control the symptoms, keep the breath steady, command the pulse to slow, and the fear of death becomes something you can handle. He was young, and thus had much to lose. But the philosophers of Eutopia schooled well the children given into their care. You will be a man, they had told him, and the pride of humanity is that we are not bound by instinct and reflex; we are free because we can master ourselves.
He couldn’t pass as an ordinary citizen (no, they said mootman here) of Norland. If nothing else, his Hellenic accent was too strong. But he might fool yonder pilot, for just a few minutes, into believing he was from some other domain of this history. He roughened his tone, as a partial disguise, and assumed the expected arrogance.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“Runoif Einarsson, captain in the hird of Ottar Thorkeisson, the Lawman of Norland. I pursue one who has brought feud on his own head. Give me your name.”
Runoif, Jason thought. Why, yes, I remember you well, dark and erect with the Tyrker side of your heritage, but you have blue eyes that came long ago from Thule. In that detached part of him which stood
aside watching: No, here I scramble my histories. I would call the autochihons Erythrai, and you call the country of your European ancestors Danarik.
“I hight Xipec, a trader from Meyaco,” he said. He did not slow down. The border was not many stadia away, so furiously had he driven through the night since he escaped from the Lawman’s castle. He had small hope of getting that far, but each turn of the wheels brought him nearer. The forest was blurred with his speed.
“If so be, of course I am sorry to halt you,” Runoff’s voice crackled. “Call the Lawman and he will send swift gild for the overtreading of your rights. Yet I must have you stop and leave your car, so I may turn the farseer on your face.”
“Why?” Another second or two gained.
“There was a visitor from Homeland”—Europe—”who came to Ernvik. Ottar Thorkeisson guested him freely. In return, he did a thing that only his death can make clean again. Rather than meet Otter on the Valfield, he stole a car, the same make as yours, and fled.”
“Would it not serve to call him a nithing before the folk?” I have learned this much of their barbaric customs, anyhow!
“Now that is a strange thing for a Meyacan to say. Stop at once and get out, or I open fire.”
Jason realized his teeth were clenched till they hurt. How in Hades could a man remember the hundreds of little regions, each with its own ways, into which the continent lay divided? Westf all was a more fantastic jumble than all Earth in that history where they called the place America. Well, he thought, now we discover what the odds are of my hearing it named Eutopia again.
“Very well,” he said. “You leave me no choice. But I shall indeed want compensation for this insult.”
He braked as slowly as he dared. The road was a hard black ribbon before him, slashed through an immensity of trees. He didn’t know if these woods had ever been logged. Perhaps so, when white men first sailed through the Pentalimne (calling them the Five Seas) to found Ernvik where Duluth stood in America and Lykopolis in Eutopia. In those days Norland had spread mightily across the lake country. But then came wars with Dakotas and Magyars, to set a limit; and the development of trade—more recently of synthetics—enabled