by Larry Niven
“Maybe you tried to kill her. I don’t think you’d give her much trouble, but maybe Feather would kill you anyway. She’d still have the kids…”
I slammed my fist on coral. “What did she want? That crazy woman. I never hurt her at all.”
Talking to Sharrol: Lifeless as she was, maybe it wasn’t quite as crazy as talking to myself. I couldn’t talk to the others. They—“You remember that night we planned it all? Feather was lucid then. Comparatively. We were there for her as people. On the trip to Mars she was a lot wilder. She was a hell of an active lover, but I never really got the feeling that I was there for her.”
We never talked about each other’s lovers. In truth, it was easier to say these things to Sharrol when she wasn’t here.
“But most of the way to Fafnir, Feather was fine. But she wasn’t sleeping with me. Just Carlos. She could hold a conversation, no problem there, but I was randy, love, and frustrated. She liked that. I caught a look when Carlos wasn’t looking. So I didn’t want to talk to her. And she was always up against Carlos, and Carlos, he was a bit embarrassed about it all. We talked about plans, but for anything personal there was just you. Sleeping Beauty.”
The night was warm and clear. By convention, boats would show any color except lamplighter yellow. I couldn’t miss seeing a boat’s lights.
“Then, fifteen hours out from the drop point, that night I found her floating in my sleeping plates. I suppose I could have sent her to her own room, I mean it was within the laws of physics, but I didn’t. I acted like conversation was the last thing I’d be interested in. But so did Feather.
“And the next morning it was all business, and a frantic business it was. We came in in devious fashion, and got off behind the moon. Boy George went on alone, decelerating. Passed too close to an ARM base on Claim 226 that even Feather wasn’t supposed to know about. Turned around and accelerated away in clear and obvious terror, heading off in the general direction of Hrooshpith—pithtcha—of another of those used-to-be-kzinti systems where they’ve never got the population records straightened out. No doubt the ARM is waiting for us there.
“And of course you missed the ride down…but my point is that nothing ever got said.
“Okay. This whole scheme was schemed by Feather, carried through by Feather. It—” I stared into the black night. “Oh.” I really should have seen this earlier. Why did Feather need Carlos?
Through the ARM spy net Feather Filip had found a family of six Shashters ready to emigrate. Why not look for one or two? Where Carlos insisted on taking his children and Sharrol and me, another man might be more reasonable.
“She doesn’t just want to be clear of Sol system. Doesn’t just want to make babies. She wants Carlos. Carlos of the perfect genes. Hah! Carlos finally saw it. Maybe she told him. He must have let her know he didn’t want children by an ARM schiz. Angry and randy, she took it out on me, and then…”
Then?
With my eyes open to the dark, entranced, I remembered that final night. Yellow lights sprinkled on a black ocean. Some are the wrong color, too bright, too blue. Avoid those. They’re houses. Pick one far from the rest. Hover. Organic matter burns lamplighter yellow below the drive flame, then fades. I sink us in, an egg in an egg cup. Feather blasts the roof loose and we crawl out—
We hadn’t wanted to use artificial lights. When dawn gave us enough light, we inflated the boat. Feather and Carlos used the gravity lift to settle the freezebox in the boat. They were arguing in whispers. I didn’t want to hear that, I thought.
I turned off the doc’s “Maintenance” sequence. A minute later Sharrol sat up, a flat phobe wakened suddenly on an alien world. Sniffed the air. Kissed me and let me lift her out, heavy in Fafnir’s gravity. I set her on the sand. Her nerve seemed to be holding. Feather had procured local clothing; I pushed the bundle into her arms.
Feather came toward me towing the gravity lift. She looked shapeless, with bulging pockets fore and aft. We slid the lift into place, and I pushed the ’doc toward Carlos and the boat. Feather called my name. I turned. Blam. Agony and scrambled senses, but I saw Carlos leap for the boat, reflexes like a jackrabbit. My head hit the black sand.
Then?
“She wanted hostages. Our children, but Carlos’s children. They’re frozen, they won’t give her any trouble. But me, why would she need me? Killing me lets Carlos know she means it. Maybe I told too many stories: maybe she thinks I’m dangerous. Maybe—”
For an instant I saw just how superfluous I was, from Feather Filip’s psychotic viewpoint. Feather wanted Carlos. Carlos wanted the children. Sharrol came with the children. Beowulf Shaeffer was along because he was with Sharrol. If Feather shot Beowulf, how much would Carlos mind? Blam.
Presently I said, “She shot me to prove she would. But it looked to me like Carlos just ran. There weren’t any weapons in the boat, we’d only just inflated it. All he could do was start it and go. That takes—” When I thought about it, it was actually a good move. He’d gotten away with himself and Tanya and Louis, with both hostages. Protect them now, negotiate later.
And he’d left Feather in a killing rage, with that horrible tube and one living target. I stopped talking to Sharrol then, because it seemed to me she must be dead.
No! “Feather had you. She had to have you.” It could happen. It could. “What else can she threaten Carlos with? She has to keep you alive.” I tried to believe it. “She certainly didn’t kill you in the first minute. Somebody had to put me in the ’doc. Feather had no interest in doing that.”
But she had no interest in letting Sharrol do that either. “Tanj dammit! Why did Feather let you put me in the ’doc? She even let you…” What about the biomass reserve?
My damaged body must have needed some major restructuring. The biomass reserve had been feeding Sharrol, and doing incidental repairs on us all, for the entire three-week trip. Healing me would take another…fifty kilograms? More? “She must have let you fill the biomass reserve with…” Fish?
Feather showing Carlos how reasonable she could be…too reasonable. It felt wrong, wrong. “The other body, the headless one. Why not just push that in the hopper? So much easier. Unless—”
Unless material was even closer at hand.
I felt no sudden inspiration. It was a matter of making myself believe. I tried to remember Sharrol…pulling her clothes on quickly, shivering and dancing on the sand, in the chilly dawn breeze. Hands brushing back through her hair, hair half grown out. A tiny grimace for the way the survival jacket made her look, bulges everywhere. Patting pockets, opening some of them.
The ’doc had snapped her out of a three week sleep. Like me: awake, alert, ready.
It didn’t go away, the answer. It just…I still didn’t know where Sharrol was, or Carlos, or the children. What if I was wrong? Feather had mapped my route to Home, every step of the way. I knew exactly where Feather was now, if a line of logic could point my way. But—one wrong assumption, and Feather Filip could pop up behind my ear.
I could make myself safer, and Sharrol too, if I mapped out a worst-case scenario.
Feather’s Plan B: Kill Shaeffer. Take the rest prisoners, to impose her will on Carlos…but Carlos flees with the boat. So, Plan B-1: Feather holds Sharrol at gunpoint. (Alive.) Some days later she waves down a boat. Blam, and a stolen boat sails toward Shasht. Or stops to stow Sharrol somewhere, maybe on another coral island, maybe imprisoned inside a plastic tent with a live lamplighter horde prowling outside.
And Carlos? He’s had four months, now, to find Sharrol and Feather. He’s a genius, ask anyone. And Feather wants to get in touch…unless she’s given up on Carlos, decided to kill him.
If I could trace Carlos’s path, I would find Louis and Tanya and even Sharrol.
Carlos Plan B-1 follows Plan A as originally conceived by Feather. The kids would be stowed aboard the iceliner as if already registered. Carlos would register and be frozen. Feather could follow him to Home…maybe on the same ship, if she hustl
ed. But—
No way could Feather get herself frozen with a gun in her hand. That would be the moment to take her, coming out of freeze on Home.
There, I had a target. On Shasht they could tell me who had boarded the Zombie Queen for Home. What did I have to do to get to Shasht?
“Feed myself, that’s easy. Collect rainwater too. Get off the island…” That, at least, was not a puzzle. I couldn’t build a raft. I couldn’t swim to another island. But a sailor lost at sea will die if cast ashore; therefore, local tradition decrees that he must be rescued.
“Collect some money. Get to Shasht. Hide myself.” Whatever else was lost to me, to us—whoever had died, whoever still lived—there was still the mission, and that was to be free of the United Nations and Earth.
And Carlos Wu’s ’doc would finger me instantly. It was advanced nanotechnology: it screamed its Earthly origin. It might be the most valuable item on Fafnir, and I had no wealth at all, and I was going to have to abandon it.
Come daylight, I moved the ’doc. I still wanted to hide it in the lamplighter nest. The gravity lift would lift it but not push it uphill. But I solved it.
One of the secrets of life: know when and what to give up.
I waited for low tide and then pushed it out to sea, and turned off the lift. The water came almost to the faceplate. Seven hours later it didn’t show at all. And the next emergency might kill me unless it happened at low tide.
The nights were as warm as the days. As the tourist material had promised, it rained just before dawn. I set up my pants to funnel rainwater into a hole I had chopped in the coral.
The tour guide had told me how to feed myself. It isn’t that rare for a lamplighter nest to die. Sooner or later an unlit island will be discovered by any of several species of swimming things. Some ride the waves at night and spawn in the sand.
I spent the second night running through the shallows and scooping up sunbunnies in my jacket. Bigger flying fish came gliding off the crests of the breakers. They wanted the sunbunnies. Three or four wanted me, but I was able to dodge. One I had to gut in midair.
The tour guide hadn’t told me how to clean sunbunnies. I had to fake that. I poached them in seawater, using my pocket torch on high; and I ate until I was bloated. I fed more of them into the biomass reservoir.
With some distaste, I fed those long human bones in too. Fafnir fish meat was deficient in metals. Ultimately that might kill me; but the ’doc could compensate for a time.
There was nothing to build a boat with. The burnt-out lamplighter nest didn’t show by daylight, so any passing boat would be afraid to rescue me. I thought of swimming; I thought of riding away on the gravity lift, wherever the wind might carry me. But I couldn’t feed myself at sea, and how could I approach another island?
On the fourth evening a great winged shape passed over the island, then dived into the sea. Later I heard a slapping sound as that flyer and a companion kicked themselves free of the water, soared, passed over the crater and settled into it. They made a great deal of noise. Presently the big one glided down to the water and was gone.
At dawn I fed myself again, on the clutch of eggs that had been laid in the body of the smaller flyer: male or female, whichever. The dime disk hadn’t told me about this creature. A pity I wouldn’t have the chance to write it up.
At just past sunset on the eighth night I saw a light flicker blue-green-red.
My mag specs showed a boat that wasn’t moving.
I fired a flare straight up, and watched it burn blue-white for twenty minutes. I fired another at midnight. Then I stuffed my boots partway into my biggest pockets, inflated my shoulder floats, and walked into the sea until I had to swim.
I couldn’t see the boat with my eyes this close to water level. I fired another flare before dawn. One of those had to catch someone awake…and if not, I had three more. I kept swimming.
It was peaceful as a dream. Fafnir’s ecology is very old, evolved on a placid world not prone to drifting continents and ice ages, where earthquakes and volcanoes know their place.
The sea had teeth, of course, but the carnivores were specialized; they knew the sounds of their prey. There were a few terrifying exceptions. Reason and logic weren’t enough to wash out those memories, holograms of creatures the match for any white shark.
I grew tired fast. The air felt warm enough, the water did too, but it was leeching the heat from my flesh and bones. I kept swimming.
A rescuer should have no way of knowing that I had been on an island. The farther I could get, the better. I did not want a rescuer to find Carlos Wu’s ’doc.
At first I saw nothing more of the boat than the great white wings of its sails. I set the pocket torch on wide focus and high power, to compete with what was now broad daylight, and poured vivid green light on the sails.
And I waited for it to turn toward me, but for a long time it didn’t. It came in a zigzag motion, aimed by the wind, never straight at me. It took forever to pull alongside.
A woman with fluffy golden hair studied me in some curiosity, then stripped in two quick motions and dived in.
I was numb with cold, hardly capable of wiggling a finger. This was the worst moment, and I couldn’t muster the strength to appreciate it. I passively let the woman noose me under the armpits, watched the man lift me aboard, utterly unable to protect myself.
Feather could have killed me before the ’doc released me. Why wait? I’d worked out what must have happened to her; it was almost plausible; but I couldn’t shake the notion that Feather was waiting above me, watching me come aboard.
There was only a brawny golden man with slanted brown eyes and golden hair bleached nearly as white as mine. Tor, she’d called him, and she was Wil. He wrapped me in a silver bubble blanket and pushed a bulb of something hot into my hands.
My hands shook. A cup would have splashed everything out. I got the bulb to my lips and sucked. Strange taste, augmented with a splash of rum. The warmth went to the core of me like life itself.
The woman climbed up, dripping. She had eyes like his, a golden tan like his. He handed her a bulb. They looked me over amiably. I tried to say something; my teeth turned into castanets. I sucked and listened to them arguing over who and what I might be, and what could have torn up my jacket that way.
When I had my teeth under some kind of control, I said, “I’m Persial January Hebert, and I’m eternally in your debt.”
Leaving all our Earthly wealth behind us was a pain. Feather could help: she contrived to divert a stream of ARM funds to Fafnir, replacing it from Carlos’s wealth.
Riiight. But Sharrol and I would be sponging off Carlos…and maybe it wouldn’t be Carlos. Feather controlled that wealth for now, and Feather liked control. She had not said that she expected to keep some for herself. That bothered me. It must have bothered Carlos too, though we never found privacy to talk about it.
I wondered how Carlos would work it. Had he known Feather Filip before he reached Jinx? I could picture him designing something that would be useless on Earth: say, an upgraded version of the mass driver system that runs through the vacuum across Jinx’s East Pole, replacing a more normal world’s Pinwheel launcher. Design something, copyright it on Jinx under a pseudonym, form a company. Just in case he ever found the means to flee Sol system.
Me, I went to my oldest friend on Earth. General Products owed Elephant a considerable sum, and Elephant—Gregory Pelton—owed me. He got General Products to arrange for credit on Home and Fafnir. Feather wouldn’t have approved the breach in secrecy, but the aliens who run General Products don’t reveal secrets. We’d never even located their homeworld.
And Feather must have expected to control Carlos’s funding and Carlos with it.
And Sharrol…was with me.
She’d trusted me. Now she was a flat phobe broke and stranded on an alien world, if she still lived, if she wasn’t the prisoner of a homicidal maniac. Four months, going on five. Long enough to drive her crazy, I thou
ght.
How could I hurry to her rescue? The word hurry was said to be forgotten on Fafnir; but perhaps I’d thought of a way.
They let me sleep. When I woke there was soup. I was ravenous. We talked while we ate.
The boat was Gullfish. The owners were Wilhelmin and Toranaga, brother and sister, both recently separated from mates and enjoying a certain freedom. Clean air, exercise, celibacy, before they returned to the mating dance, its embarrassments and frustrations and rewards.
There was a curious turn to their accents. I tagged it as Australian at first, then as Plateau softened by speech training, or by a generation or two in other company. This was said to be typical of Fafnir. There was no Fafnir accent. The planet had been settled too recently and from too many directions.
Wil finished her soup, went to a locker, and came back with a jacket. It was not quite like mine, and new, untouched. They helped me into it and let me fish through the pockets of my own ragged garment before they tossed it in the locker.
They had given me my life. By Fafnir custom my response would be a gift expressing my value as perceived by myself…but Wil and Tor hadn’t told me their full names. I hinted at this; they failed to understand. Hmm.
My dime disk hadn’t spoken of this. It might be a new custom: the rescuer conceals data, so that an impoverished rescuee need not be embarrassed. He sends no life gift instead of a cheap one. But I was guessing. I couldn’t follow the vibes yet.
As for my own history—
“I just gave up,” I blurted. “It was so stupid. I hadn’t—hadn’t tried everything at all.”
Toranaga said, “What kind of everything were you after?”
“I lost my wife four months ago. A rogue wave-you know how waves crossing can build into a mountain of water? It rolled our boat under. A trawler picked me up, the Triton.” A civil being must be able to name his rescuer. Surely there must be a boat named Triton? “There’s no record of anyone finding Milcenta. I bought another boat and searched. It’s been four months. I was doing more drinking than looking lately, and three nights ago something rammed the boat. A torpedo ray, I think. I didn’t sink, but my power was out, even my lights. I got tired of it all and just started swimming.”
