Protector

by Larry Niven

  A squirrel darted into a tree as they came near. A rabbit looked at them from a row of beets.

  “It reminds me of Confinement Asteroid,” said Alice.

  “It reminds me of California,” said Roy. “Except for the way the gravity bends around. I wonder if I’ve been here before.”

  She looked at him sharply. “Do you remember anything?”

  “Not a thing. It’s all strange. Brennan never mentioned the kidnappings at all, did he?”

  “No. He…may think he doesn’t have to. We must have it all figured out, because were here. If Brennan thinks in pure logic, then he’d just be covering old ground, as if we’ve already talked it all out.”

  Beyond the garden they could see the topmost tower of a medieval castle, almost on its side from this perspective. Brennan’s laboratory, no doubt. They looked, then turned away.

  The land grew wilder, became a stretch of California chaparral. They saw a fox, ground squirrels, even a feral cat. The place was lousy with wildlife: like a park, except for the way it bent.

  On the inner curve of the toroid they stood beneath the grassy sphere, looking up at their ship. The great tree pointed its branches at them. “I could almost reach those branches,” said Roy. “I could climb down.”

  “Never mind. Look there.” She pointed around the curve of the donut.

  Where she pointed was a flowing stream, and a waterfall that fell up out of the middle, fell from the major section of Kobold to the grassy sphere.

  “Yah. We could get to the ship, if we wanted to take that fall.”

  “Brennan has to have a way to get from here to there.”

  “He did say, Swim in any water you find.”

  “But I can’t swim. You’d have to do it,” said Alice.

  “Okay. Come on.”

  The water was icy cold at first. Sunlight glittered blindingly off the water…and Roy wondered again. The sun was hot and bright overhead. But they’d have seen an atomic generator that size.

  Alice looked down at him from the bank. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Pretty sure.” He laughed partly because he was shivering. “If I get in trouble, get Brennan. What do you want from the ship?”

  “Clothes.” She was naked under the transparent pressure suit. “I kept wanting to cover myself with my hands.”

  “From Brennan?”

  “I know, Brennan’s sexless. Still.”

  He asked, “Weapons?”

  “No point.” She hesitated. “I tried to think of some way to check what Brennan’s been telling us. There aren’t any instruments on the ship that would do it. Still…you might try pointing the solar storm warning toward Sagittarius.”

  Roy swam toward the waterfall. There was none of the sound of wild water. It could not be as dangerous as it…ought to be.

  Something brushed his ankle. He twitched and looked down. Silver flashed away from him through the water. A fish had brushed his leg. That had never happened to him before.

  He came to where water was falling up. He rested, treading water, letting it draw him in. There was a moment of disorientation, and then…

  …he was in a smoothly flowing stream. Alice stood watching him with concern. She stood horizontally out from the side of a sheer cliff.

  Currents around his feet made him wonder. He ducked under, into turbulence, and came out the other side of the stream, headed back. He ducked again, and rode the current to where it emptied onto the green ball in a kidney-shaped pond. The ship was just a few yards away.

  He pulled himself out of the water, laughing and blowing. A stream that flowed two ways through the air!

  The ship’s solar storm warning showed no sign of a disturbance in Sagittarius. It proved nothing. He didn’t know how much activity it took to set the instrument off.

  He stowed clothing for both of them in another pressure suit, and added a couple of handmeals because he was hungry. He brought them back in the sealed suit. He had never looked at the weapons.

  There was a Möbius strip forty feet moss and six feet broad, made of some silvery metal, suspended almost horizontally in the air with part of the edge embedded in bare dirt. They studied it for awhile, and then Alice…tried it.

  Gravity was vertical to the surface. She walked around the outside, negotiated the twist upside down, and came back along the inside. She jumped down with her arms raised for applause.

  There was a miniature golf course. It looked absurdly easy, but Roy borrowed a putter from a rack and tried it anyway. He got several shocks. The ball drew strange curves in the air, sometimes bounced higher than it had fallen, and once it came back at his head as hard as he had hit it. He stuck with it long enough to realize that the gravity fields were changing from minute to minute, and then he gave up.

  They found a lily pond studded with water sculptures, gentle shapes that rose and flowed out of the surface. By far the most detailed shape was a large sculptured head in the center of the pond. It changed shape as they watched, from the hard face and swelling skull of the Brennan-monster to—

  “I think that must be Brennan too,” said Alice.

  —to a square face with deep-set eyes, and straight hair in a Belter strip cut, and a brooding look, as if the man remembered some ancient wrong. The lips curved in a sudden smile, and the face began to melt…

  Kobold had turned. It was dusk in that region when they returned to the castle.

  It stood up out of a rise of ground, a structure of rough-hewn dark stone blocks, with windows that were vertical slits, and a great wooden door built for giants. “Frankenstein’s castle,” said Roy. “Brennan still has a sense of humor. We might just bear that in mind.”

  “Meaning his story could be a put-on.”

  Roy shrugged. What can we do about it?

  It took two hands to turn the knob of the great door, and both of them pushing to open it.

  Vertigo.

  They stood at the edge of a vast open space. All through it was a maze of stairways and landings and more stairways. Through open doors they could glimpse gardens. There were faceless dummies, a score of them, climbing up and climbing down and standing on the landings and walking into the gardens…

  …but they stood at all angles. Two-thirds of the landings were vertical. Likewise the gardens. Dummies stood unconcerned on vertical landings; two dummies climbed a flight of stairs in the same direction, one going up, one down…

  Brennan’s voice boomed, echoing, from somewhere above them. “Hi! Come on up. Do you recognize it?”

  Neither of them answered.

  “It’s Escher’s Relativity. It’s the only copied work on all of Kobold. I thought about doing The Madonna of Port Lligat, but there wasn’t room.”

  “Jesus,” Roy whispered. Then he shouted, “Had you thought of setting up a Madonna of Port Lligat at Port Lligat?”

  “Sure!” came the cheerful bellow. “But it would have scared a lot of people. I didn’t want to make that many waves. I shouldn’t even have done that duplicate Stonehenge.”

  “We’ve not only found Vandervecken,” Alice whispered. “We’ve found Finagle Himself!” Roy laughed.

  “Come on up!” Brennan bellowed. “It’ll save shouting. Don’t worry about the gravity. It adjusts.”

  They were exhausted when they reached the top of the tower. “Escher’s Relativity” ended in a spiral stair, and that seemed to go on and on, past slits of windows designed for archery fire.

  The room at the top was dark, and open to the sky. By Brennan’s whim its roof and sides seemed smashed away, as by rocks fired from ballistas. But the sky was not the sky of Earth. Suns glared there, hellishly bright, fearfully close.

  Brennan turned from his controls—a wall of instruments six feet tall and twelve feet long, prickly with lights and levers and dials. In the dim light of the suns he looked like some ancient mad scientist, bald and disfigured, pursuing knowledge at any cost to himself and the world.

  Alice was still staring at th
e altered sky. But Roy bowed low and said, “Merlin, the king commands thy presence.”

  Brennan snapped, “Tell the old buzzard I can’t make him any more gold till the lead shipments arrive from Northumberland! Meanwhile, how do you like my telescope?”

  Alice said, “The whole sky?”

  “Lie down, Alice. You’ll strain your neck in that position. It’s a gravity lens.” He read their puzzlement. “You know that a gravity field bends light? Good. I can make a field that warps light into a focus. It’s lenticular, shaped like a red blood platelet. That’s how I get my sunlight. Sol seen through a gravity lens, with a scattering component to give me blue sky. One fringe benefit is that the lens scatters light going the other way, so you can’t see Kobold until you’re right on top of it.”

  Roy looked up at the suns burning close. “That’s quite an effect.”

  “That’s Sagittarius, the direction of the galactic hub. I still haven’t found that goddamn ship, but it makes for pretty lights, doesn’t it?” Brennan touched a control and the sky slid past them, as within some faster-than-light craft moving through a globular cluster.

  Roy said, “What happens when you find him?”

  “I told you that. I’ve played it out a hundred times in my head. It’s as if I’ve lived it all before, in all possible ways. My ship’s a duplicate of the one Phssthpok used, except for some refinements. I can get up to three gravities with the ram alone, and I’ve got two hundred years’ worth of weaponry developments in the cargo pod.”

  “I still think—”

  “I know you do. It’s partly my doing that you haven’t had a war in so long. So you’ve grown soft, and it makes you more likable, bless you. But this is a war situation.”

  “But is it?”

  “What do you know about the Pak?”

  Roy didn’t answer.

  “There’s a Pak ship coming. If the Pak in question ever finds out the truth about us he’ll try to exterminate us. He may succeed. I’m telling you this, dammit! I’m the only man who’s ever met a Pak. I’m the only man who could ever understand one.”

  Roy bristled. The arrogance of him! “Then where is he, O All-Knowing Brennan?”

  Another might have hesitated in embarrassment. Not Brennan. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Where should he be?”

  “On his way to Alpha Centaurus. From the strength of the signal—” Brennan manipulated something, and the sky surged past them in streaks of light. Roy blinked, fighting vertigo.

  The stars jarred to a halt. “There. In the middle.”

  “Is that where your funny chemicals are coming from?”

  “More or less. It’s not exactly a point-source.”

  “Why Alpha Centaurus?”

  “Because Phssthpok would have gone almost in the opposite direction. Most of the nearby yellow dwarf suns are all to one side of Sol. The Centaurus suns are an exception.”

  “So this second Pak would look around the Centaurus system, and if he didn’t find Wunderland he’d head on away from Sol.”

  “That was my best guess. But,” said Brennan, “the direction of his exhaust shows him coming dead on. Now I have to assume he’s been watching for Phssthpok to leave here. I did send Phssthpok’s ship off toward Wunderland. I have to assume it didn’t fool him. If Phssthpok hasn’t left here, he may have found what he was looking for. So Pak number two is coming here.”

  “And where would he be now?”

  The sky surged again. Bright suns backed by tiny suns, dim-lit gas and dust clouds, a panorama of the universe flowed past and lurched to a stop. “There.”

  “I don’t see him.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “So you haven’t found him. Do you still claim to understand the Pak?”

  “I do.” Brennan didn’t hesitate. In all the time he knew him, Roy Truesdale only saw him hesitate once. “If they’re doing something unexpected it’s because of a change in their environment.”

  Unexpectedly Alice spoke. “Could there be a lot of ships?”

  “No. Why would the Pak send us a fleet?”

  “I don’t know. But they’d be further away than you’d guess from the density of your funny chemicals. Harder to find,” she said. She was cross-legged on the floor, with her head thrown back to see the stars. Brennan didn’t seem to be listening—he was working the telescope controls—but she went on. “The exhaust would be more blurred. And if they were further away they’d be moving faster, wouldn’t they? You’d get higher velocity particles.”

  “Not if they were carrying more cargo,” said Brennan. “That would slow them.” The sky surged toward them, and blurred. “But it’s so damn unlikely! There’s only one assumption that would fit. Please bear with me; this takes a lot of fiddling, getting these fields just right.” The starfield half-cleared, then blurred again. “I’d have had to do this eventually anyway. Then we can all stop worrying.”

  The blur of the sky condensed into hard white points. Now there were no giant sun in the field of view.

  But there were a couple of hundred blue points all the same size, tiny, set wide apart in what Roy gradually realized was a hexagonal array.

  “I just didn’t believe it,” said Brennan. “It was too much coincidence.”

  “It is. It’s a whole fleet!” Roy felt horror and the beginnings of panic. A fleet of Pak, coming here—and Brennan, the Protector of Man, hadn’t anticipated it.

  He’d trusted Brennan.

  “There must be more,” said Brennan. “Further in toward the galactic core. Too far to see with my instruments. A second wave. Maybe a third.”

  “These aren’t enough?”

  “They aren’t enough,” Brennan agreed. “Don’t you understand? Something’s happened to the galactic core. It’s the only thing that could bring this many ships this far. That implies that they’ve evacuated the Pak world. I don’t see enough ships to do it, not even with the wars that must have been fought, with each protector trying to get his descendants on the first ships.”

  Little blue lights against a sky of too-bright stars. All that, from little blue lights?

  Alice rubbed her neck. “What could have happened?”

  “Any kind of thing. Black holes wandering through the core suns, picking up more and more mass, maybe wandering too near Pak. Or some kind of space-born life. Or the galactic core could be exploding in a rash of supernovae. It’s happened in other galaxies. What burns me is that it had to happen now!”

  “Can’t you think of any other explanation?”

  “None that fits. And it’s not quite as coincidental as it sounds,” Brennan said wearily. “Phssthpok built the best astronomical system in millennia, to chart his course as far as he could. After he left they must have looked around and found—something. Supernovae in a dense cluster of older suns. Stars disappearing. Places where light was warped. It’s still a Finagle’s Coincidence. I just didn’t believe it.”

  “Maybe you didn’t want to,” said Alice.

  “You can believe that!”

  “Why here? Why come to us?”

  “To the only known habitable world outside the galactic core? Besides that, we’ve had time to find them some others.”

  “Yah.”

  Brennan turned to look at them. “Are you hungry? I am.”

  Deep within the eye-twisting maze of “Escher’s Relativity” was a miniature kitchen. It was a landing from one viewpoint, but from another it was a wall, and the wall held cookwear closets and a sink and a pair of ovens and a pull-down platform with burners in it. Raw materials had been dumped near the wall: a squash, a cantaloupe, two rabbits whose necks were broken, carrots, celery, handfuls of spices.

  “Let’s see how fast we can produce,” said Brennan. He became a many-armed blur. Roy and Alice stood back from his flashing hands. One held a knife, and it moved in silver streaks, so that carrots became rolling discs and the rabbits seemed simply to fall apart.

  Roy felt disoriented, cut off from
reality. Those little blue lights above the tower room had no intuitive connection with a fleet of superbeings bent on exterminating mankind. This pleasant domestic scene didn’t help. While a knife-wielding alien prepared his dinner, Roy Truesdale looked through the great castle door at a landscape tilted on its side.

  Alice said, “That food is all from outside, isn’t it? Why didn’t you want us to eat anything?”

  “Well, there’s always the chance that tree-of-life virus has gotten to something. Cooking kills it, and there’s precious little chance it can live in anything anyway unless I’ve spread thalium oxide through the soil.” Brennan did not look up or interrupt his work. “I had a Finagle’s Puzzle facing me when I cut loose from Earth. There was food, but what I needed was the virus in the tree-of-life roots. I tried to grow it in various things: apples, pomegranates—” He looked up then, to see if they’d catch the reference. “I got a variant that would grow in a yam. That was when I knew I could survive out here.”

  Brennan had arranged rabbit and vegetables as for a still-life painting. He put the pot in the oven. “My kitchen had all kinds of freeze-dried produce. I used to like to eat well, luckily. Later I got seeds from Earth. I was never in danger; I could always just go home. But I didn’t like what was going to happen to civilization if I did.” He turned. “Dinner in fifteen minutes.”

  She asked, “Weren’t you lonely?”

  “Yah.” Brennan pulled a table out of the floor. It was not memory plastic extruding itself, but a thick slab of wood, heavy enough to require Brennan’s own muscles. A look back at Alice may have told him that she expected more of an answer. “Look, I’d have been lonely anywhere. You know that.”

  “No, I don’t. You’d have been welcome.”

  Brennan seemed to go off at a tangent. “Roy, you’ve been here before. You guessed that?”

  Roy nodded.

  “How did I wipe out just that section of your memory?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows.” Roy tensed inside himself.