The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  “Hundred and seventy next April. But the years aren’t getting any shorter, Lloyd, contrary to public opinion. Why do they have to stack me in the rear? I get nervous when I see the wings turn red hot.” He shifted uncomfortably.

  Judy Greenberg came back from the rest room and sat down next to Lloyd. Luke was across the aisle, in the space made by removing two chairs before takeoff. Judy seemed to have recovered nicely; she looked and moved as if she had just left a beauty parlor. From a distance her face was calm. Garner could see the slight tension in the muscles around the eyes, in the cheeks, through the neck. But Garner was very old. He had his own, non-psychic way of reading minds. He said, as if to empty air, “We’ll be landing in half an hour. Greenberg will be sleeping peacefully until we get there.”

  “Good,” said Judy. She leaned forward and turned on the tridee screen in the seat ahead.

  Kzanol felt a brand new and horribly unpleasant sensation, and woke up sputtering. It was the scent of ammonia in his nostrils. He woke up sputtering and gagging and bent on mass murder. The first slave he saw, he ordered to kill itself in a horrible manner.

  The slave smiled tremulously at him. “Darling, are you all right?” Her voice was terribly strained and her smile was a lie.

  Everything came back in a rush. That was Judy…“Sure, beautiful, I’m fine. Would you step outside while these good people ask me some questions?”

  “Yes, Larry.” She stood up and left, hurrying. Kzanol waited until the door was closed before he turned on the others.

  “You.” He faced the man in the travel chair. He must be in charge; he was obviously the oldest. “Why did you subject Judy to this?”

  “I was hoping it would jog your memory. Did it?”

  “My memory is perfect. I even remember that Judy is a sentient female, and that the idea of my not being Larry Greenberg would be a considerable shock to her. That’s why I sent her away.”

  “Good for you. Your females aren’t sentient?”

  “No. It must be strange to have a sentient mate.” Kzanol dug momentarily into Greenberg’s memories, smiled a dirty smile, then got back to the business at hand. “How did you bring me down?”

  The old one shrugged. “Easy enough. We put you to sleep with a sonic, then took over your car’s autopilot. The only risk was that you might be on manual. By the way, I’m Garner. That’s Masney.”

  Kzanol took the information without comment. He saw that Masney was a stocky man, so wide that he seemed much shorter than his six feet two inches, and his hair and eating tendrils or whatever were dead white. Masney was staring thoughtfully at Kzanol. It was the kind of look a new biology student gives a preserved sheep’s heart before he goes to work with the scalpel.

  “Greenberg,” he said, “why’d you do it?”

  Kzanol didn’t answer.

  “Jansky’s lost both his eyes and most of his face. Knudsen will be a cripple for nearly a year; you cut his spinal cord. With this.” He pulled the disintegrator out of a drawer. “Why? Did you think it would make you king of the world? That’s stupid. It’s only a hand weapon.”

  “It’s not even that,” said Kzanol. He found it easy to speak English. All he had to do was relax. “It’s a digging or cutting tool, or a shaping instrument. Nothing more.”

  Masney stared. “Greenberg,” he whispered, as if he were afraid of the answer, “who do you think you are?”

  Kzanol tried to tell him. He almost strangled doing it. Overtalk didn’t fit human vocal cords. “Not Greenberg,” he managed. “Not a…slave. Not human.”

  “Then what?”

  He shook his head, rubbing his throat.

  “Okay. How does this innocuous tool work?”

  “You push that little button and the beam starts removing surface material.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh. Well, it suppresses the…charge on the electron. I think that’s right. Then whatever is in the beam starts to tear itself apart. We use the big ones to sculpture mountains.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “We did.” He started to choke, caught himself. Masney frowned.

  Garner asked, “How long were you underwater?”

  “I think between one and two billion years. Your years or mine, they aren’t that much different.”

  “Then your race is probably dead.”

  “Yes.” Kzanol looked at his hands, unbelievingly. “How in—” he gurgled, recovered, “how under the Power did I get into this body? Greenberg thought that was only a telepathy machine!”

  Garner nodded. “Right. And you’ve been in that body, so to speak, all along. The alien’s memories were superimposed on your brain, Greenberg. You’ve been doing the same thing with dolphins for years, but it never affected you this way. What’s the matter with you, Greenberg? Snap out of it!”

  The slave in the travel chair made no move to kill himself. “You,” Kzanol/Greenberg paused to translate, “whitefood. You despicable, decaying, crippled whitefood with defective sex organs. Stop telling me who I am! I know who I am!” He looked down at his hands. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes and ran itching down his cheeks, but his face remained as expressionless as a moron’s.

  Garner blinked at him. “You think you are what’s-his-name, the alien terror from Outer Space? Nuts. The alien terror is down on the first floor of this building, and he’s perfectly harmless. If we could get him back to normal time he would be the first to call you an impostor. Later I’ll take you down and show him to you.

  “Part of what you said is true. I am, of course, an old man. But what is a, er, whitefood?” He made the word a separate question.

  Kzanol had calmed down. “I translated. The whitefood is an artificial animal, created by the tnuctipun as a meat animal. A whitefood is as big as a dinosaur and as smooth and white as a shmoo. They’re a lot like shmoos. We can use all of their bodies, except the skeleton, and they eat free food, which is almost as cheap as air. Their shape is like a caterpillar reaching for a leaf. The mouth is at the front of the belly foot.”

  “Free food?”

  Kzanol/Greenberg didn’t hear him. “That’s funny. Garner, do you remember the pictures of bandersnatchi that the second Jinx expedition sent back? Greenberg was going to read a bandersnatch mind someday.”

  “Sure. Hey!”

  “Bandersnatchi are whitefoods,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “They don’t have minds.”

  “I guessed that. But, son, you’ve got to remember that they’ve had two billion years to develop minds.”

  “It wouldn’t help them. They can’t mutate. They were designed that way. A whitefood is one big cell, with a chromosome as long as your arm and as thick as your little finger. Radiation could never affect them, and the first thing that would be harmed by any injury would be the budding apparatus.” Kzanol/Greenberg was bewildered. What price another coincidence? “Why would anyone think they were intelligent?”

  “Well, for one thing,” Garner said mildly, “the report said the brain was tremendous. Weighed as much as a three-year-old boy.”

  Kzanol/Greenberg laughed. “They were designed for that, too. The brain of a whitefood has a wonderful flavor, so the tnuctip engineers increased its size. So?”

  “So it’s convoluted like a human brain.”

  Why, so it was. Like a human brain, and a tnuctip brain, and a thrint brain, for that matter. Now why—

  Kzanol/Greenberg cracked his knuckles, then hurriedly separated his hands so that he couldn’t do it again. The mystery of the intelligent “bandersnatch” bothered him, but he had other things to worry about. Why, for example, hadn’t he been rescued? Three hundred years after he pushed the panic button, he must have struck the Earth like the destroying wrath of the Powergiver. Someone on the moon must have seen it.

  Could the lunar observation post have been abandoned?

  Why?

  Garner crashed into his thoughts. “Maybe something bigger than a cosmic ray made the mutations. Something like a machine-gun volley o
r a meteor storm.”

  Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head. “Any other evidence?”

  “Oh, hell yes. Greenberg, what do you know about Jinx?”

  “A good deal,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. Larry’s knowledge of Jinx had been as thorough as any colonist’s. The memories clicked into place, unbidden, at the sound of the word. Jinx…

  Moon of Binary, third planet out from Sirius A. Binary was a banded orange giant, bigger than Jupiter, and much warmer. Jinx was six times as big as Earth, with a gravity of one point seven eight, and with a period of rotation more than four days long. Of all the factors which had shaped Jinx, the most important had been its lack of radioactive materials. For Jinx was solid all through its rocky lithosphere and halfway to the center of its nickel-iron core.

  Long ago—before even his time, Kzanol’s time—Jinx had been much closer to Binary. So close that the tides had stopped her spin and pulled her into an egg shape. Later, those same tides had pushed her outward. Not unusual. But, though the atmosphere and ocean assumed a more spherical shape, Jinx did not. The body of the moon was still egg shaped.

  Jinx was an Easter egg, banded in different colors by the varying surface pressures.

  The ocean was a broad ring of what must be extremely salty water running through the poles of rotation. The regions which the colonists called the Ends, marked by the points nearest to and furthest from Binary, were six hundred miles “higher” than the ocean: six hundred miles further from the moon’s center of mass. They stuck right out of the atmosphere. In the photographs masered in from the first expedition, the Ends had shown bone white, with a tracery of sharp black shadows. Further from the Ends the shadows disappeared beneath the atmosphere, and clouds began to appear. The clouds became thicker and thicker, with brown-and-gray earth showing more and more rarely, until suddenly the clouds were in full control. The ocean was forever hidden beneath a band of permanent fleecy cloud thousands of miles wide. At sea level the air was terrifically dense, with a constant temperature of two hundred and seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

  The colony of Sirius Mater was on the Eastern continent, three thousand miles east of the ocean, a triangle of cultivated land and inflatable buildings at the fork of two rivers. The first colonists had picked a landing place with a high surface pressure, knowing that the denser atmosphere would help protect them from the temperature changes during the long days and nights, and from the ultraviolet scourge of blue-white Sirius A. Sirius Mater now boasted a population of almost two hundred punsters of all ages…

  “Good,” said Garner. “Then I won’t have to explain anything. Can I borrow the phone, Lloyd?”

  “Sure.” Lloyd hooked a thumb at one wall.

  The phone screen was a big one; it covered half the wall. Luke dialed thirteen quick motions of the forefinger. In a moment the screen cleared to reveal a slender young woman with wavy brunette hair.

  “Technological Police, Records Office.”

  “This is Lucas Garner, operative-at-large. Here’s my ident.” He held a plastic card up to the camera. “I’d like the bandersnatchi sections from the Jinx report of 2106.”

  “Yes sir.” The woman rose and walked off camera.

  Kzanol/Greenberg leaned forward to watch. The last report from Jinx had arrived only two months ago, and most of it had not been made public. He remembered seeing stills of the bandersnatchi, but no more. Now, with new eyes eager to compare, he would see whether a bandersnatch was really a whitefood.

  It should not have mattered. By all rights he should have felt as he had when Masney’s sonic sleeping pill first wore off. Friendless, homeless, disembodied, defeated past all hope. But a prisoner’s first duty is always to escape: by collaboration, by treachery, by theft and murder, by any means at all. If he could lull these arrogant slaves into thinking he would cooperate, would give information freely—

  And he had to know. Later he would decide why the question seemed so important. Now he only knew that it was. The suggestion that a whitefood might be intelligent had hit him with the force of a deadly insult. Why? But never mind why. Was it true?

  The girl was back, smiling. “Mr. Garner, I’ll now turn you over to Mayor Herkimer.” She touched something below the edge of her desk.

  The picture dissolved and reformed, but now it was ragged, shot with random dots of colored light. A maser beam had crossed nine light years to bring this picture and had been somewhat torn up on the way, by dust and gee fields and crossing light waves.

  Mayor Herkimer had brown hair and a bushy brown beard over a square jaw. His voice was ragged with interference, but his enunciation was clear and careful—and twisted by an unknown accent.

  “—Since everything that wasn’t welded down had long since been removed from the Lazy Eight II, and since the fusion plant in the Lazy Eight I was not damaged in the original landing and will give us power for a god-dam century, and since there was little work to be done until spring in any case, the Authority voted to risk the Lazy Eight II in exploring Jinx’s oceanic regions. Accordingly six of us red-hot explorers, namely—” Herkimer named names, “took the ship up and went west. A circular flying wing isn’t exactly a goddam airplane, but the ship was lighter than during first landing, and we had enough power to stay up forever or to make a straight-up landing anywhere we could find flat land.

  “One problem was that the goddam visibility kept dropping—”

  Garner whispered, “Their slang seems to have changed somewhat since they moved to Jinx.”

  “Oh, you noticed that?”

  Kzanol/Greenberg twitched in annoyance at the interruption. That would have marked him for an alien anywhere! In 2106 you learned not to hear extraneous noises before you went insane.

  “—Couldn’t see at all. The light from the fusion drive didn’t show us the ground until we were two hundred feet up. We landed on the solid jets, near the shoreline, and started the cameras. Right away we were surrounded by—these.”

  Mayor Herkimer had a sense of drama. As he stopped talking, the scene jumped to a sandy, sloping beach. The sand in the foreground was blackened and blown into a curving wall. Beyond, the ocean. There were no waves on that ocean. The water seemed—thick. Thick and gray and living.

  Something moved into view. Something white; something like an enormously magnified slug, but with a smooth, slick skin. From the front of the beast reared a brontosaur neck with no head at all. At its base the neck was as wide as the animal’s shoulders. It rose in a conical slope. The tip was thick and rounded, featureless but for two tufts of black bristles.

  The camera watched as the beast approached; saw it stop at the scorched sand. Others of its kind came out of the mist. The camera swept a full circle, and everywhere there were enormous white bulks like albino sperm whales swimming through sand.

  Their rounded tips swung back and forth; the tufted bristles blew without wind. Of course the bristles were sense organs; and of course the mouths were invisible because the mouths were all closed. Unusual in a whitefood. But they were whitefoods, and no mistake.

  Mayor Herkimer spoke. “These pictures were taken in visible light, but with a long exposure, which accounts for the damn blurring. To us it was like night. Winston Doheny, our biologist, took one look at these monsters and dubbed them Frumious bandersnatch. This species name is now in the goddam log. Harlow went out in a segmented armor suit and shot a bandersnatch for dissection, and the rest ran off. Fortunately the suit stood up to the heat and pressure.”

  Films showed the action. Tracer bullets stitching six lines from off-camera through the bulky front of a bandersnatch. The silent death, evidenced only by a suddenly drooping tip. White shapes fading ghostlike into the mist. Herkimer continued, “They run on a rippling belly foot, and as you can see, they move goddam fast.

  “According to Doheny this animal is one big cell. Nerves are similar to human nerves in structure, but have no cell body, no nuclei, nothing to separate them from other specialized protoplasm. The brain is long and n
arrow, and is packed into a bone shell at the elevated tapering tip. This skull is one end of a jointless, flexible, very strong internal cage of bone. Apparently God never intended the beast to shift position.” Garner winced at the unconscious blasphemy. “The mouth, which was closed in the film, is just ahead of the belly foot, and is good for nothing but scooping up yeast from the ocean.”

  The film showed details from the dissection of the bandersnatch. Evidently the two cops at the door had decided not to look; but Masney and Garner watched in keen interest. Autopsies were nothing new to them. The beast was turned on its side to expose the belly foot, and its jaws were opened with a pulley. Slides were shown of tissue sections. There was a circulatory system, with six hearts weighing eleven pounds apiece; there were strange organs in the left side, which only Kzanol/Greenberg recognized as budding apparatus. He watched with manic concentration as the brain case was opened to show the long, narrow brain, gray and deeply convoluted, in its canoe of a skull. The form was familiar in detail, though he’d never seen one raw. Then it was over, and Mayor Herkimer was back.

  “The ocean is a uniform foot thick in some unknown breed of yeast. Herds of bandersnatchi move along the shoreline, feeding continuously. The shore is no goddam tourist trap. It’s always dark, the waves are smothered by the yeast and the gravity, and the banderanatchi wander along the shore like the lost souls of worn-away mountains. We’d have liked to leave right then, but Doheny couldn’t find the sex organs, and he wanted to make a few more dissections.

  “So we sent out the copters to find another specimen. But no bandersnatch ever came close enough to be shot from a copter. The banderanatchi had been curious and unafraid. Now they ran whenever a copter got close. All of them. They couldn’t possibly have all known about us, unless they were either telepathic or had a language.

  “Yet at least one goddam bandersnatch was always within sight of each copter. They seemed to know the range of our guns.

  “On the third day of the hunt Doheny got impatient. He assumed that it was the copters that the bandersnatchi were afraid of, and he landed his goddam copter and went hunting on foot. The moment he was out of shooting range of the copter, a bandersnatch charged in and flattened it like a goddam freight truck running down a pedestrian. Doheny had to walk back.