Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven

by Larry Niven

Kash-First: "Your teeth don't leave the same marks as a lion's."

  I stopped thinking about revealing myself. I used my mag specs to watch Long Tracks pick up the lion's head. He clacked the jaws a couple of times. "Bite him with this."

  Kash-First said, "LE Bannett has kept every promise expressed or implied."

  Long Tracks was silent.

  Kash-First said, "Recall why we came. We can hunt anywhere. Have we learned more of the human state? Can we give Prisst-Captain any hint of what our ancestors faced, to be so battered and humiliated in war after war?"

  "Fool's errand. We have had only one human to study. He is far from typical. He kills as easily as we do, and revels in it."

  "Yes, the human is not interesting. But the rest? What of Africa? Do we finally know the horrors this species faced in the ages before it expanded across its world?"

  "Ur?"

  "And then came back to hunt."

  There is a Tide

  I

  Then, the planet had no name. It circles a star which in 2830 lay beyond the fringe of known space, a distance of nearly forty light-years from Sol. The star is a G3, somewhat redder than Sol, somewhat smaller. The planet, swinging eighty million miles from its primary in a reasonably circular orbit, is a trifle cold for human tastes.

  In the year 2830 one Louis Gridley Wu happened to be passing. The emphasis on accident is intended. In a universe the size of ours almost anything that can happen, will. Take the coincidence of his meeting—

  But we'll get to that.

  Louis Wu was one hundred and eighty years old. As a regular user of boosterspice, he didn't show his years. If he didn't get bored first, or broke, he might reach a thousand.

  "But," he sometimes told himself, "not if I have to put up with any more cocktail parties, or Bandersnatch hunts, or painted flatlanders swarming through an anarchy park too small for them by a factor of ten. Not if I have to live through another one-night love affair or another twenty-year marriage or another twenty-minute wait for a transfer booth that blows its zap just as it's my turn. And people. Not if I have to live with people, day and night, all those endless centuries."

  When he started to feel like that, he left. It had happened three times in his life, and now a fourth. Presumably, it would keep happening. In such a state of anomie, of acute anti-everything, he was no good to anyone, especially his friends, most especially himself. So he left. In a small but adequate spacecraft, his own, he left everything and everyone, heading outward for the fringe of known space. He would not return until he was desperate for the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice.

  On the second trip he had gritted his teeth and waited until he was desperate for the sight of a Kzinti face.

  That was a long trip, he remembered. And, because he had only been three and a half months in space on this fourth trip, and because his teeth still snapped together at the mere memory of a certain human voice…because of these things, he added, "I think this time I'll wait till I'm desperate to see a Kdatlyno. Female, of course."

  Few of his friends guessed the wear and tear these trips saved him. And them. He spent the months reading, while his library played orchestrated music. By now he was well clear of known space. Now he turned the ship ninety degrees, beginning a wide circular arc with Sol at its centre.

  He approached a certain G3 star. He dropped out of hyperdrive well clear of the singularity in hyperspace which surrounds any large mass. He accelerated into the system on his main thruster, sweeping the space ahead of him with the deep-radar. He was not looking for habitable planets. He was looking for Slaver stasis boxes.

  If the pulse returned no echo, he would accelerate until he could shift to hyperdrive. The velocity would stay with him and he could use it to coast through the next system he tried, and the next, and the next. It saved fuel.

  He had never found a Slaver stasis box. It did not stop him from looking.

  As he passed through the system, the deep-radar showed him planets like pale ghosts, light grey circles on the white screen. The G3 sun was a wide grey disk, darkening almost to black at the centre. The near-black was degenerate matter, compressed past the point where electron orbits collapse entirely.

  He was well past the sun, and still accelerating when the screen showed a tiny black fleck.

  "No system is perfect, of course," he muttered as he turned off the drive. He talked to himself a good deal out here where nobody could interrupt him.

  "It usually saves fuel," he told himself a week later. By then he was out of the singularity, in clear space. He took the ship into hyperdrive, circled halfway round the system, and began decelerating. The velocity he'd built up during those first two weeks gradually left him. Somewhere near where he'd found a black speck in the deep-radar projection, he slowed to a stop.

  Though he had never realized it until now, his system for saving fuel was based on the assumption that he would never find a Slaver box. But the fleck was there again, a black dot on the grey ghost of a planet. Louis Wu moved in.

  The world looked something like Earth. It was nearly the same size, very much the same shape, somewhat the same color. There was no moon.

  Louis used his telescope on the planet and whistled appreciatively. Shredded white cloud over misty blue…faint continental outlines…a hurricane whorl near the equator. The ice caps looked big, but there would be warm climate near the equator. The air looked sweet and non-carcinogenic on the spectrograph. And nobody on it. Not a soul!

  No next door neighbours. No voices. No faces.

  "What the hell," he chortled.

  "I've got my box. I'll just spend the rest of my vacation here. No men. No women. No children." He frowned and rubbed the fringe of hair along his jaw. "Am I being hasty? Maybe I should knock."

  But he scanned the radio bands and got nothing. Any civilized planet radiates like a small star in the radio range. Moreover, here was no sign of civilization, even from a hundred miles up.

  "Great! Okay, first I'll get that old stasis box…He was sure it was that. Nothing but stars and stasis boxes were dense enough to show black in the reflection of a hyperwave, pulse.

  He followed the image around the bulge of the planet. It seemed the planet had a moon after all. The moon was twelve hundred miles up, and it was ten feet across.

  "Now why," he wondered aloud, "would the Slavers have put it in orbit? It's too easy to find. They were in a war, for Finagle's sake! And why would it stay here?"

  The little moon was still a couple of thousand miles away, invisible to the naked eye. The scope showed it clearly enough. A silver sphere ten feet through, with no marks on it.

  "A billion and a half years it's been there," said Louis to himself, said he. "And if you believe that, you'll believe anything. Something would have knocked it down. Dust, a meteor, the solar wind. Tnuctip soldiers. A magnetic storm. Nah." He ran his fingers through straight black hair grown too long. "It must have drifted in from somewhere else. Recently. Wha—"

  Another ship, small and conical, had appeared behind the silvery sphere. Its hull was green, with darker green markings.

  II

  "Damn," said Louis. He didn't recognize the make. It was no human ship. "Well, it could be worse. They could have been people." He used the comm laser.

  The other ship braked to a stop. In courtesy, so did Louis.

  "Would you believe it?" he demanded of himself. "Three years total time I've spent looking for stasis boxes. I finally find one, and now something else wants it too!"

  The bright blue spark of another laser glowed in the tip of the alien cone. Louis listened to the autopilot-computer chuckling to itself as it tried to untangle the signals in an unknown laser beam. At least they did use lasers, not telepathy or tentacle-waving or rapid changes in skin color.

  A face appeared on Louis's screen.

  It was not the first alien he had seen. This, like some others, had a recognizable head: a cluster of sense organs grouped around a mouth, with room for a brai
n. Trinocular vision, he noted; the eyes set deep in sockets, well protected, but restricted in range of vision. Triangular mouth, too, with yellow, serrated bone knives showing their edges behind three gristle lips.

  Definitely, this was an unknown species.

  "Boy, are you ugly," Louis refrained from saying. The alien's translator might be working by now.

  His own autopilot finished translating the alien's first message. It said, "Go away. This object belongs to me."

  "Remarkable," Louis sent back.

  "Are you a Slaver?" The being did not in the least resemble a Slaver, and the Slavers had been extinct for aeons.

  "That word was not translated," said the alien. "I reached the artifact before you did. I will fight to keep it."

  Louis scratched at his chin, at two week's growth of bristly beard. His ship had very little to fight with. Even the fusion plant which powered the thruster was designed with safety in mind. A laser battle, fought with comm lasers turned to maximum, would be a mere endurance test; and he'd lose, for the alien ship had more mass to absorb more heat. He had no weapons per se. Presumably the alien did.

  But the stasis box was a big one.

  The Tnuctipun-Slaver war had wiped out most of the intelligent species of the galaxy, a billion and a half years ago. Countless minor battles must have occurred before a Slaver-developed final weapon was used. Often the Slavers, losing a battle, had stored valuables in a stasis box, and hidden it against the day they would again be of use. No time passed inside a closed stasis box. Alien meat a billion and a half years old had emerged still fresh from its hiding place. Weapons and tools showed no trace of rust. Once a stasis box had disgorged a small, tarsierlike sentient being, still alive. That former slave had lived a strange life before the aging process claimed her, the last of her species.

  Slaver stasis boxes were beyond value. It was known that the Tnuctipun, at least, had known the secret of direct conversion of matter. Perhaps their enemies had too. Someday, in a stasis box somewhere outside known space, such a device would be found. Then fusion power would be as obsolete as internal combustion.

  And this, a sphere ten feet in diameter, must be the largest stasis box ever found.

  "I too will fight to keep the artifacts" said Louis. "But consider this. Our species has met once, and will meet again regardless of who takes the artifact now. We can be friends or enemies. Why should we risk this relationship by killing?"

  The alien sense-cluster gave away nothing. "What do you propose?"

  "A game of chance, with the risks even on both sides. Do you play games of chance?"

  "Emphatically yes. The process of living is a game of chance. To avoid chance is insanity."

  "That it is. Hmmm." Louis regarded the alien head that seemed to be all triangles. He saw it abruptly whip around, flick, to face straight backward, and snap back in the same instant. The sight did something to the pit of his stomach.

  "Did you speak?" the alien asked.

  "No. Won't you break your neck that way?"

  "Your question is interesting. Later we must discuss anatomy. I have a proposal."

  "Fine."

  "We shall land on the world below us. We will meet between our ships. I will do you the courtesy of emerging first. Can you bring your translator?"

  He could connect the computer with his suit radio. "Yes."

  "We will meet between our ships and play some simple game, familiar to neither of us, depending solely on chance. Agreed?"

  "Provisionally. What game?"

  The image on the screen rippled with diagonal lines. Something interfering with the signal? It cleared quickly. "There is a mathematics game," said the alien. Our mathematics will certainly be similar."

  "True." Though Louis had heard of some decidedly peculiar twists in alien mathematics.

  "The game involves a screee—" Some word that the autopilot couldn't translate. The alien raised a three-clawed hand, holding a lens-shaped object. The alien's mutually opposed fingers turned it so that Louis could see the different markings on each side. "This is a screee. You and I will throw it upward six times each. I will choose one of the symbols, you will choose the other. If my symbol falls looking upward more often than yours, the artifact is mine. The risks are even."

  The image rippled, then cleared.

  "Agreed," said Louis. He was a bit disappointed in the simplicity of the game.

  "We shall both accelerate away from the artifact. Will you follow me down?"

  "I will," said Louis.

  The image disappeared.

  III

  Louis Wu scratched at a week's growth of beard. What a way to greet an alien ambassador! In the worlds of men Louis Wu dressed impeccably; but out here he felt free to look like death warmed over, all the time.

  But how was a Trinoc supposed to know that he should have shaved? No, that wasn't the problem.

  Was he fool or genius?

  He had friends, many of them, with habits like his own. Two had disappeared decades ago; he no longer remembered their names. He remembered only that each had gone hunting stasis boxes in this direction and that each had neglected to come back.

  Had they met alien ships?

  There were any number of other explanations. Half a year or more spent alone in a single ship was a good way to find out whether you liked yourself. If you decided you didn't, there was no point in returning to the worlds of men.

  But there were aliens out here. Armed. One rested in orbit five hundred miles ahead of his ship, with a valuable artifact halfway between.

  Still, gambling was safer than fighting. Louis Wu waited for the alien's next move.

  That move was to drop like a rock. The alien ship must have used at least twenty gees of push. After a moment of shock, Louis followed under the same acceleration, protected by his cabin gravity. Was the alien testing his maneuverability?

  Possibly not. He seemed contemptuous of tricks. Louis, trailing the alien at a goodly distance, was now much closer to the silver sphere. Suppose he just turned ship, ran for the artifact, strapped it to his hull and kept running?

  Actually, that wouldn't work. He'd have to slow to reach the sphere the alien wouldn't have to slow to attack. Twenty gees was close to his ship's limit.

  Running might not be a bad idea, though. What guarantee had he of the alien's good faith? What if the alien "cheated"?

  That risk could be minimized. His pressure suit had sensors to monitor his body functions. Louis set the autopilot to blow the fusion plant if his heart stopped. He rigged a signal button on his suit to blow the plant manually.

  The alien ship burned bright orange as it hit air. It fell free and then slowed suddenly, a mile over the ocean. "Showoff," Louis muttered and prepared to imitate the maneuver.

  The conical ship showed no exhaust. Its drive must be either a reactionless drive, like his own, or a kzin-style induced-gravity drive. Both were neat and clean, silent, safe to bystanders and highly advanced.

  Islands were scattered across the ocean. The alien circled, chose one at seeming random and landed like a feather along a bare shoreline.

  Louis followed him down. There was a bad moment while he waited for some unimaginable weapon to fire from the grounded ship, to tear him flaming from the sky while his attention was distracted by landing procedures. But he landed without a jar, several hundred yards from the alien cone.

  "An explosion will destroy both our ships if I am harmed," he told the alien via signal beam.

  "Our species seem to think alike. I will now descend."

  Louis watched him appear near the nose of the ship, in a wide circular airlock. He watched the alien drift gently to the sand. Then he clamped his helmet down and entered the airlock.

  Had he made the right decision?

  Gambling was safer than war. More fun, too. Best of all, it gave him better odds.

  "But I'd hate to go home without that box," he thought. In nearly two hundred years of life, he had never done anything as importan
t as finding a stasis box. He had made no discoveries, won no elective offices, overthrown no governments. This was his big chance.

  "Even odds," he said, and turned on the intercom as he descended.

  His muscles and semicircular canals registered about a gee. A hundred feet away waves slid hissing up onto pure white sand. The waves were green and huge, perfect for riding; the beach a definite beer party beach.

  Later, perhaps he would ride those waves to shore on his belly, if the air checked out and the water was free of predators. He hadn't had time to give the planet a thorough checkup.

  Sand tugged at his boots as he went to meet the alien.

  The alien was five feet tall. He had looked much taller descending from his ship, but that was because he was mostly leg. More than three feet of skinny leg, a torso like a beer barrel, and no neck. Impossible that his neckless neck should be so supple. But the chrome yellow skin fell in thick rolls around the bottom of his head, hiding anatomical details.

  His suit was transparent, a roughly alien-shaped balloon, constricted at the shoulder, above and below the complicated elbow joint, at the wrist, at hip and knee. Air jets showed at wrist and ankle. Tools hung in loops at the chest. A back pack hung from the neck, under the suit. Louis noted all these tools with trepidation; any one of them could be a weapon.

  "I expected that you would be taller," said the alien.

  "A laser screen doesn't tell much, does it? I think my translator may have mixed up right and left, too. Do you have the coin?"

  "The screee?" The alien produced it.

  "Shall there be no preliminary talk? My name is screee."

  "My machine can't translate that. Or pronounce it. My name is Louis. Has your species met others besides mine?"

  "Yes, two. But I am not an expert in that field of knowledge."

  "Nor am I. Let's leave the politenesses to the experts. We're here to gamble."

  "Choose your symbol," said the alien, and handed him the coin.

  Louis looked it over. It was a lens of platinum or something similar, sharp-edged, with the three-clawed hand of his new gambling partner stamped on one side and a planet, with heavy ice caps outlined, decorating the other. Maybe they weren't ice caps, but continents.