by Larry Niven
“Maybe it’s not dependable, this shield. No, that’s stupid,” he said. I dug into my fish, letting him run on. “So…what are they running from?”
I said, enjoying myself, “Consider this. Puppeteers don’t like hyperdrive. Humans do. Kzinti do. By the time their traveling worlds reach the Clouds of Magellan, we’ll have been there for thousands of years. After all, the Core explosion is coming for us, too.”
“We wondered if they didn’t like the kzinti for neighbors,” Ander said. “Or humans. Or all of us together. Known space seems to be packed with sapient species. Maybe the rest of the universe isn’t like that.”
“They could even be running from their own reputation, but they’re not, Ander. They’re going too slowly. They’d find all of us waiting, every species that uses hyperdrive, or else something tougher that ate us. And they’re not going to where territory is cheap.”
“Cheap?”
“Well, they’ve got their own planets, but even Outsiders pay rent when they use somebody’s sunlight. The Clouds will be packed with refugee species and locals, too. If…Ander, I can’t see why they would want the Clouds of Magellan at all. They could find something closer. Something in the plane of the galaxy, for the shielding effect, maybe a spherical cluster. Did I mention I was out of the aliens business?”
He scowled. “Yah, and settled down forever, except you weren’t. What happened?”
I thought it through before I spoke. Here was my tale, and whatever Ander could check had better be the truth.
“We ran,” I said. “Bad mistake, but I still don’t know what I could have done differently. Puppeteers don’t come into it. Or…well, I got money from them years ago. I thought the ARM couldn’t trace that.”
Of course the ARM had, and it wasn’t much. But General Products had indemnified Elephant for his hull, and Elephant had given that to me when we were ready to flee Earth. They wouldn’t trace that.
Ander said, “Beowulf, what if they’ve got a low-thrust drive big enough for a planet? The Outsiders could boost them up to speed. They’d use their own drive to turn and then stop over the next two hundred thousand years.”
I thought it over. “They wouldn’t have to depend on anyone else, then. Yah. Puppeteers wouldn’t trust Outsiders for their species survival.”
“Do you think Outsiders trust puppeteers?”
Nobody knew very much about Outsiders. “Ander? There’s a place where there’s no Outsiders.”
“What are you thinking? Close to a sun?”
“Outsiders and starseeds. We only guess at the relationship, but the best guess is they’ll try to rescue the starseeds. Stet?”
“Stet. Maybe they’ll make for the Clouds of Magellan.”
“The shock wave will drive the starseeds ahead of it, wherever they’re going. There won’t be Outsiders near the Core. Ander, there won’t be anybody near the Core.”
“What?”
I was trying to picture it. Worlds in flight—“Drive up along the galactic pole, then turn toward the hub. In ten thousand years they’d meet the shock wave from the Core explosion. I saw it, Ander. A shell of exploding suns, fairly tight, fairly narrow. They’d be through it in another five thousand years. The Outsiders are gone. All the sapient species are gone, too, dead or fled or hopelessly mutated and still mutating. Thousands of worlds would have been sterilized—maybe millions—but they’d still be covered with free oxygen and organic sludge and maybe even deep-sea life. All ready for easy terraforming. That’s it. They’re headed for the Core.”
He said, “Well.” And thought again and said, “At least it’s different.”
“Is this what you came for?”
“Beowulf, I believe I can tell Sigmund it was worth the trip. Now, will you tell me what happened to Feather Filip and Carlos Wu?”
“Yah. And Carlos Wu’s autodoc?”
He shrugged it off. “Feather Filip vanished from the same time and locale as you and Carlos Wu and Sharrol Janss. I’m supposed to find out who’s dead.”
It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. He put the question that brutally quite deliberately. Maybe it got him what he wanted; because the blood was draining out of my face again. I found my hand at my throat, massaging.
I said, “Nobody should have to eat with you, Ander.”
He looked at the monster on my plate and again wouldn’t give me the satisfaction. “Who’s dead?”
Me! I said, “At least Carlos. You want it from the beginning?”
“Why not?”
✴
PROCRUSTES
Asleep, my mind plays it all back in fragments and dreams. From time to time a block of nerves wakes:
That’s some kind of ARM weapon! Move it move it too late blam. My head rolls loose on black sand. Bones shattered, ribs and spine. Fear worse than the agony. Agony fading and I’m gone.
Legs try to kick. Nothing moves. Again, harder, move! No go. The ’doc floats nicely on the lift plate, but its mass is resisting me. Push! Voice behind me, I turn, she’s holding some kind of tube. Blam. My head bounces on sand. Agony flaring, sensation fading. Try to hang on, stay lucid…but everything turns mellow.
My balance swings wildly around my inner ear. Where’s the planet’s axis? Fafnir doesn’t have polar caps. The ancient lander is flying itself. Carlos looks worried, but Feather’s having the time of her life.
Sprawled across the planet’s face, a hurricane flattened along one edge. Under the vast cloud fingerprint, a ruddy snake divides the blue of a world-girdling ocean. A long, narrow continent runs almost pole to pole.
The lander reenters over featureless ocean. Nothing down there seems to be looking at us. I’m taking us down fast. Larger islands have low, flat buildings on them. Pick a little one. Hover while flame digs the lamplighter pit wider and deeper, until the lander sinks into the hole with inches to spare. Plan A is right on track.
I remember how Plan A ended. The Surgery program senses my distress and turns me off.
I’m in Carlos Wu’s ’doc, in the intensive care cavity. The Surgery program prods my brain, running me through my memories, maintaining the patterns lest they fuzz out to nothing while my brain and body heal.
I must be terribly damaged.
Waking was sudden. My eyes popped open, and I was on my back, my nose two inches from glass. Sunlight glared through scattered clouds. Display lights glowed above my eyebrows. I felt fine, charged with energy.
Ye gods, how long had I slept? All those dreams…dream memories.
I tried to move. I was shrink-wrapped in elastic. I wiggled my arm up across my chest, with considerable effort, and up to the displays. It took me a few seconds to figure them out.
Biomass tank: nearly empty. Treatment: pages of data, horrifying…terminated, successful. Date: Ohmygod. Four months! I was out for four months and eleven days!
I typed, Open:
The dark glass lid retracted, sunlight flared, and I shut my eyes tight. After a while I pulled myself over the rim of the intensive care cavity and rolled out.
My balance was all wrong. I landed like a lumpy sack, on sand, and managed not to yell or swear. Who might hear? Sat up, squinting painfully, and looked around.
I was still on the island.
It was weathered coral, nearly symmetrical, with a central peak. The air was sparkling clear, and the ocean went on forever, with another pair of tiny islands just touching the horizon.
I was stark naked and white as a bone, in the glare of a yellow-white dwarf sun. The air was salty and thick with organic life, sea life.
Where was everybody?
I tried to stand, wobbled, gave it up, and crawled around into the shadow of the ’doc. I still felt an amazing sense of well-being, as if I could solve anything the universe could throw at me.
During moments of half wakefulness I’d somehow worked out where I must be. Here it stood, half coffin and half chemical lab, massive and abandoned on the narrow black sand beach. A vulnerable place to leave such a val
uable thing, but this was where I’d last seen it, ready to be loaded into the boat.
Sunlight could damage me in minutes, kill me in hours, but Carlos Wu’s wonderful ’doc was no ordinary mall autodoctor. It was state of the art, smarter than me in some respects. It would cure anything the sun could do to me.
I pulled myself to my feet and took a few steps. Ouch! The coral cut my feet. The ’doc could cure that, too, but it hurt.
Standing, I could see most of the island. The center bulged up like a volcano. Fafnir coral builds a flat island with a shallow cone rising at the center, a housing for a symbiote, the lamplighter. I’d hovered the lander above the cone while belly jets scorched out the lamplighter nest until it was big enough to hold the lander.
Just me and the ’doc and a dead island. I’d have to live in the ’doc. Come out at night, like a vampire. My chance of being found must be poor if no passing boat had found me in these past four-plus months.
I climbed. The coral cut my hands and feet and knees. From the cone I’d be able to see the whole island.
The pit was two hundred feet across. The bottom was black and smooth and seven or eight feet below me. Feather had set the lander to melt itself down slowly, radiating not much heat over many hours. Several inches of rainwater now covered the slag, and something sprawled in the muck.
It might be a man…a tall man, possibly raised in low gravity. Too tall to be Carlos. Or Sharrol, or Feather, and who was left?
I jumped down. Landed clumsily on the smooth slag and splashed full length in the water. Picked myself up, unhurt. My toes could feel an oblong texture, lines and ridges, the shapes within the lander that wouldn’t melt. Police could determine what this thing had been if they ever looked; but why would they look?
The water felt good on my burned feet. And on my skin. I was already burned. Albinos can’t take yellow dwarf sunlight.
A corpse was no surprise, given what I remembered. I looked it over. It had been wearing local clothing for a man: boots, loose pants with a rope tie, a jacket encrusted with pockets. The jacket was pierced with a great ragged hole front and back. That could only have been made by Feather’s horrible ARM weapon. This close, the head…I’d thought it must be under the water, but there was no head it all. There were clean white bones, and a neck vertebra cut smoothly in half.
I was hyperventilating. Dizzy. I sat down next to the skeleton so that I wouldn’t fall.
These long bones looked more than four months dead. Years, decades…wait, now. We’d scorched the nest, but there would be lamplighter soldiers left outside. They would have swarmed down and stripped the bones.
I found I was trying to push my back through a wall of fused coral. My empty stomach heaved. This was much worse than anything I’d imagined. I knew who this was.
Sunlight burned my back. My eyes were going wonky in the glare. Time was not on my side: I was going to be much sicker much quicker than I liked.
I made myself pull the boots loose, shook the bones out, and put them on. They were too big.
The jacket was a sailor’s survival jacket, local style. The shoulders looked padded: shoulder floats. The front and sides had been all pockets, well stuffed, but front and back had been tom to confetti.
I stripped it off him and began searching pockets.
No wallet, no ID. Tissue pack. The shrapnel remains of a hand computer. Several pockets were sealed: emergency gear, stuff you wouldn’t want to open by accident; and some of those had survived.
A knife of exquisite sharpness in a built-in holster. Pocket torch. A ration brick. I bit into the brick and chewed while I searched. Mag specs, one lens shattered, but I put them on anyway. Without dark glasses my pink albino eyes would go blind.
Sun block spray, unharmed: good. A pill dispenser, broken, but in a pocket still airtight. Better! Tannin secretion pills!
The boots were shrinking, adapting to my feet. It felt friendly, reassuring. My most intimate friends on this island.
I was still dizzy. Better let the ’doc take care of me now; take the pills afterward. I shook broken ribs out of the jacket. Shook the pants empty. Balled the clothing and tossed it out of the hole. Tried to follow it.
My fingers wouldn’t reach the rim.
“After all this, what a stupid way to die,” I said to the memory of Sharrol Janss. “What do I do now? Build a ladder out of bones?” If I got out of this hole, I’d think it through before I ever did anything.
I knelt; I yelled and jumped. My fingers, palms, forearms gripped rough coral. I pulled myself out and lay panting, sweating, bleeding, crying.
I limped back to the ’doc, wearing boots now, holding the suit spread above me for a parasol. I was feverish with sunburn.
I couldn’t take boots into the ICC. Wait. Think. Wind? Waves? I tied the clothes in a bundle around the boots, and set it on the ’doc next to the faceplate. I climbed into the intensive care cavity and pulled the lid down.
Sharrol would wait an hour longer, if she was still alive. And the kids. And Carlos.
I did not expect to fall asleep.
Asleep, feverish with sunburn. The Surgery program tickles blocks of nerves, plays me like a complex toy. In my sleep I feel raging thirst, hear a thunderclap, taste cinnamon or coffee, clench a phantom fist.
My skin wakes. Piloerection runs in ripples along my body, then a universal tickle, then pressure…like that feather-crested snakeskin Sharrol put me into for Carlos’s party…
Sharrol, sliding into her own rainbow-scaled bodysuit, stopped halfway. “You don’t really want to do this, do you?”
“I’ll tough it out. How do I look?” I’d never developed the least sense of flatlander style. Sharrol picked my clothes.
“Half man, half snake,” she said. “Me?”
“Like this snake’s fitting mate.” She didn’t really. No flatlander is as supple as a crashlander. Raised in Earth’s gravity, Sharrol was a foot shorter than I, and weighed the same as I did. Stocky.
The apartment was already in child mode: rounded surfaces everywhere, and all storage was locked or raised to eyeball height (mine). Tanya was five and Louis was four and both were agile as monkeys. I scanned for anything that might be dangerous within their reach.
Louis stared at us, solemn, awed. Tanya giggled. We must have looked odder than usual, though given flatlander styles it’s a wonder that any kid can recognize its parents. Why do they change their hair and skin color so often? When we hugged them good-bye, Tanya made a game of tugging my hair out of shape and watching it flow back into a feathery crest. We set them down and turned on the Playmate program.
The lobby transfer booth jumped us three time zones east. We stepped out into a vestibule, facing an arc of picture window. A flock of rainbow-hued fish panicked at the awful sight and flicked away. A huge fish passed in some internal dream.
For an instant I felt the weight of all those tons of water. I looked to see how Sharrol was taking it. She was smiling, admiring.
“Carlos lives near the Great Barrier Reef, you said. You didn’t say he lived in it.”
“It’s a great privilege,” Sharrol told me. “I spent my first thirty years under water, but not on the Reef. The Reef’s too fragile. The UN protects it.”
“You never told me that!”
She grinned at my surprise. “My dad had a lobster ranch near Boston. Later I worked for the Epcot-Atlantis police. The ecology isn’t so fragile there, but—Bey, I should take you there.”
I said, “Maybe it’s why we think alike. I grew up underground. You can’t build aboveground on We Made It.”
“You told me. The winds.”
“Sharrol, this isn’t like Carlos.”
She’d known Carlos Wu years longer than I had. “Carlos gets an idea and he follows it as far as it’ll go. I don’t know what he’s onto now. Maybe he’s always wanted to share me with you. And he brought a date for, um—”
“Ever met her?”
“—balance. No, Carlos won’t even ta
lk about Feather Filip. He just smiles mysteriously. Maybe it’s love.”
The children! Protect the children! Where are the children? The Surgeon must be tickling my adrenal glands. I’m not awake, but I’m frantic, and a bit randy too. Then the sensations ease off. The Playmate program. It guards them and teaches them and plays with them. They’ll be fine. Can’t take them to Carlos’s place…not tonight.
Sharrol was their mother and Carlos Wu had been their father. Earth’s Fertility Board won’t let an albino have children. Carlos’s gene pattern they judge perfect; he’s one of a hundred and twenty flatlanders who carry an unlimited birthright.
A man can love any child. That’s hard-wired into the brain. A man can raise another man’s children. And accept their father as a friend…but there’s a barrier. That’s wired in, too.
Sharrol knows. She’s afraid I’ll turn prickly and uncivilized. And Carlos knows. So why…?
Tonight was billed as a foursome, sex and tapas. That was a developing custom: dinner strung out as a sequence of small dishes between bouts of recreational sex. Something inherited from the ancient Greeks or Italians, maybe. There’s something lovers gain from feeding each other.
Feather—
The memory blurs. I wasn’t afraid of her then, but I am now. When I remember Feather, the Surgeon puts me to sleep.
But the children! I’ve got to remember. We were down. Sharrol was out of the ’doc, but we left Louis and Tanya frozen. We floated their box into the boat. Feather and I disengaged the lift plate and slid it under the ’doc. Beneath that lumpy jacket she moved like a tigress. She spoke my name; I turned…
Feather.
Carlos’s sleepfield enclosed most of the bedroom. He’d hosted bigger parties than this in here. Tonight we were down to four, and a floating chaos of dishes Carlos said were Mexican.
“She’s an ARM,” Carlos said.
Feather Filip and I were sharing a tamale too spicy for Sharrol. Feather caught me staring and grinned back. An ARM?
I’d expected Feather to be striking. She wasn’t exactly beautiful. She was strong: lean, almost gaunt, with prominent tendons in her neck, lumps flexing at the corners of her jaws. You don’t get strength like that without training in illegal martial arts.
