The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  But the pilot was out of control. His reflexes had taken over at the instant the shock wave hit, and then his conscious mind…He found himself his own master. And he made his decision and turned off the fuel flow.

  The drive couldn’t possibly be started again.

  Kzanol raged and told him to die, but it was too late.

  The ship, powerless, bucked and swooped in the turbulent burning wind.

  Kzanol/Greenberg cursed fluent and ancient English. Below him a wall of fire tens of miles high retreated toward the horizon. The ship hadn’t turned over; the gyros must still be on.

  The buffeting from below eased. The Golden Circle slowly began to fall.

  XVIII

  “That’s that,” said Masney wearily. “And a good thing too. Do you suppose there ever was a telepathy amplifier?”

  “Sure I do. And it’s not over yet.” Garner was flexing his fingers and looking worried. “Lloyd, just why do you think I was so worried about the Belt beating us to Pluto? Why did we come after them anyway? That amplifier is a new weapon! If the Belt takes it apart and makes one that they can use themselves, we could see the worst and most permanent dictatorship in history.”

  Masney looked at the future Luke had painted and, judging by his expression, found it evil. Then he grinned. “They can’t land. It’s okay, Luke. They can’t get down to the helmet because the—wait a minute. Is Pluto still explosive?”

  “I don’t know. But they can go down if they want, regardless. All they have to do is land on the day side, where there’s no hydrogen, and land so fast they don’t burn through the nitrogen layer. They’d melt through, and eventually they’d have to dig the ships out, but that’s nothing. What counts is the hydrogen. Miss that and you probably won’t start a fire.

  “They’ll probably go down for the helmet as soon as the fire stops. We’ve got to destroy it before they get it. Or after.”

  Masney nodded. “We’ve got some time,” he said.

  “They’re some distance from Pluto.”

  “Not far enough,” said Garner.

  Larry Greenberg opened his eyes and saw darkness. It was cold…“The lights don’t work,” said a voice in his mind.

  “Did we crash?”

  “We did indeed. I can’t imagine why we’re still alive. GET UP.”

  Larry Greenberg—no longer Kzanol/Greenberg—got up and marched down the aisle between the passenger’s chairs. His muscles, bruised and aching, seemed to be acting by themselves. He went to the pilot seat, removed the pilot and sat down. His hands strapped him in, then folded themselves into his lap. There he sat. Kzanol stood beside him, barely in the range of his peripheral vision.

  “Comfortable?”

  “Not quite,” Larry confessed. “Could you leave one arm free for smoking?”

  “Certainly.” Larry found his left arm free. He still couldn’t use his eyes. He pulled out a cigarette and his lighter, moving by touch.

  “It’s a good thing I’m one of those people who can shave without a mirror,” he thought.

  Kzanol asked, “What does that have to do with it?”

  “It means I don’t get uncoordinated without my eyes.”

  Kzanol stood watching him, a blurred mass at the edge of sight. Larry knew what he wanted. He wouldn’t do it; he wouldn’t ask.

  What did Kzanol look like? he wondered.

  He looked like a thrint, of course. Larry could remember being Kzanol/Greenberg, and all he had seen was a small but handsome thrint. But when he’d walked past Kzanol, down the aisle to the pilot room, his fleeting glimpse had found something terrifying, something one-eyed and scaly and iridescent green, with gray giant earthworms writhing at the comers of the lipless mouth, with sharp, pointed, metallic teeth, with oversized arms and huge, machine-like hands.

  “Are you wondering about my oath?” The thrintun voice was chilly, by its own standards.

  “Oaths. Yes, now that you mention it.”

  “You are no longer a thrint in a human body. You are not the being I gave my oath to.”

  “Oh.”

  “I still want you to help me manage Earth.”

  “But you’ll manage me.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Larry raised his burning cigarette and tapped it with his forefinger. The ash fell slower than mist past his gaze and disappeared from sight. “There’s something I should tell you,” he said.

  “Condense it. My time is short; I have to find something.”

  “I don’t think you should own the Earth any more. I’ll stop you if I can.”

  Kzanol’s eating tendrils were doing something strange Larry couldn’t see what it was. “You think like a slave. Not a ptavv, a slave. You had no conceivable reason to warn me.”

  “That’s my problem.”

  “Quite. DON’T MOVE UNTIL I RETURN.” The command carried overtones of disgust. A dark blur that was Kzanol moved, vanished.

  Larry heard the airlock chugging to itself.

  The clerk was a middleman. It was his job to set priorities on messages sent into and received from deep space. At three in the morning he answered the ring of the outside phone.

  “Hello, ARM Maser Tranceiving Station,” he said, a little sleepily. It had been a dull night.

  It was no longer dull. The small brunette who looked out of his screen was startlingly beautiful, especially to the man who saw her unexpectedly in the dead hours.

  “Hello. I have a message for Lucas Garner. He’s on his way to Neptune, I think.”

  “Lucas Garner? What—I mean, what’s the message?”

  “Tell him that my husband is back to normal, and he should take it into consideration. It’s very important.”

  “And who is your husband?”

  “Larry Greenberg, That’s G-R-”

  “Yes, I know. But he’s beyond Neptune by now. Wouldn’t Garner already know anything you know about Greenberg?”

  “Not unless he’s telepathic.”

  “Oh.” It was a trick decision for a clerk. Maser messages cost like uranium, less because of the power needed and the wear and tear on the delicate machines than because of the difficulty of finding the target. But only Garner could decide whether an undependable “hunch” was important to him. The clerk risked his job and sent the message.

  The maser beam reached Pluto more than five hours later. By that time it was no longer useful.

  Most of the beam missed Pluto and kept right on going; and the message was picked up centuries later by beings who did not resemble humanity in the least. They were able to determine the shape of the conical beam, and to compute its apex. But not accurately enough.

  The fire had slowed now. Most of the unburned hydrogen had been blown before the fire, until it was congested into a cloud mass opposite on Pluto from the resting place of the Golden Circle.

  Around that cloud bank raged a hurricane of awesome proportions. Frozen rain poured out of the heavens, hissing into the nitrogen snow. The layers above nitrogen were gone, vaporized, gas diluting the hydrogen which still poured in. On the borderland hydrogen burned fitfully with halogens, and even with nitrogen to form ammonia, but around most of the great circle the fires had gone out. Relatively small, isolated conflagrations ate their way toward the new center. The ‘hot’ water ice continued to fall. When it had boiled the nitrogen it would begin on the oxygen. And then there would be a fire.

  At the center of the hurricane the ice stood like a tremendous Arizona butte. Even the halogens remained frozen across its flat top, thousands of square miles of fluorine ice with near-vacuum above. Coriolis effects held back the burning wind for a time.

  On the other side of the world, Kzanol stepped out of the Golden Circle.

  The thrintun spacesuit was a marvelous assemblage of tools. No changes had been made in it for centuries before Kzanol’s time; for the design had long been perfect, but for an unsuspected flaw in the emergency systems, and the naive thrintun had never reached that level of sophistication which p
roduces planned obsolescence. The temperature inside the suit was perfect, even a little warmer than the ship’s temperature.

  But the suit could not compensate for the wearer’s imagination.

  Kzanol felt the outer chill as his ship fell behind. Miles-thick blankets of nitrogen and oxygen snow had boiled away here, leaving bubbly permafrost which showed dark and deep green in the light of his helmet lamp. There was fog, too, and dense but very deep, a single fog bank that stretched halfway around the world.

  Moving in great, easy flying hops, he reached the first rise of the crescent in twenty minutes. It was three miles from the ship. The crescent in twenty minutes. It was three miles from the ship. The crescent was now a slightly higher rise of permafrost, scarred and pitted from the fire that had crossed it. Kzanol’s portable radar, borrowed from the Circle’s lockers, showed his goal straight ahead at the limit of its range. About a mile ahead, and almost a thousand feet deep in permafrost.

  Kzanol began to climb the slope.

  “We’re out of arrows,” the man in Number Four ship said gloomily. He meant missiles. “How do we stop him now?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” said Lew. “Maybe we can get word to Atwood to start shooting. At worst we may have to go ahead and ram. But one thing’s for sure: Garner must not be allowed to leave here with that amplifier! If he does, we’re likely to see history’s worst period of slavery.”

  “And with an Earthworm at the top.”

  “Perhaps we could go down and destroy it by hand,” offered Number Two. “Land on the dawn side and mount an expedition. ’Course we’d have to take the radar out of one of the ships and carry it somehow.”

  Kzanol aimed the disintegrator thirty degrees downward and flipped the firing switch.

  The tunnel formed fast. Kzanol couldn’t see how fast, for there was nothing but darkness inside after the first second. A minor hurricane blew out of the tunnel. He leaned against the wind as against a wall. In the narrow cone of the beam the ‘wind’ was clear, but beyond the edge it was a dust storm. The wind was dust, too, icy dust torn to particles of two and three molecules each by the repulsion of the protons.

  After ten minutes Kzanol decided the tunnel must be getting too wide. The opening was less than a foot across; he used the disintegrator to enlarge it. Even when he turned off the digging tool he couldn’t see very far into it.

  After a moment he walked into the darkness.

  XIX

  With his left hand Larry reached out and shook the pilot’s shoulder. Nothing. It was like a wax figure. He would probably have felt the same way.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind was Judy. It was different from the way it had been in the past. Now, he believed it.

  Even when separated by over three billion miles, he and Judy were somehow aware of each other. But no more than that.

  He couldn’t tell her anything. He couldn’t warn her that the Bug Eyed Whosis was hours or minutes from owning the Earth.

  The pilot couldn’t help him. He was certainly paralyzed, probably dead. The poor fool should have turned off the fusion shield when he had the chance.

  Where was his mind shield? An hour ago he had created an impenetrable telepathic wall. Now he couldn’t remember how he’d done it. He was capable of it, he knew that, and if he could—Hold it!

  No, it was gone. Some memory, some thrintun memory.

  Well, let’s see. He’d been in Masney’s office when the thrint had screamed at everybody to shut up. His mind shield had—But it had already been there. Somehow he had already knew how to use it. He had known ever since—

  Sunflowers eight feet across. They turned round and round, following the sun as it circled the plantation at Tpiffnitun’s pole. Great silver platters sending concentrated sunlight to their green photosynthetic nodes. Flexible mirrors mounted on thick bulging stalks, mirrors that could ripple gently to put the deadly focus wherever they wanted it: on a rebellious slave or a wild animal or an attacking enemy thrint. For some reason they never attacked members of the House they protected…

  In the giant luxury liner, Larry Greenberg tingled. Fish on fire! The sunflowers must have been controlled by the tnuctip house slaves! He had not the slightest proof, but he knew. He thought, We thrintun…Those thrintun really set themselves up. Suckers!

  Remembering again, he saw that the sunflowers weren’t as big as they looked. He was seeing them from Kzanol’s viewpoint, Kzanol one and a half feet tall, a child of eight thrintun years. Kzanol half grown.

  Kzanol walked slowly through a tunnel which gleamed dull white where the light fell. With practice he had learned to stay the right distance behind the disappearing far wall, following behind his disintegrator beam, so that he walked in a sloppy cylinder six feet in diameter. The wind roared past him and ceased to be wind; it was flying dust and ice particles, flying in vacuum and low gravity, and it packed the tunnel solidly behind him.

  The other suit was two hundred feet farther down the sloping tube.

  Kzanol looked up. He turned off the disintegrator and stood stiffly furious, waiting. They had dared! They were just beyond control range, but coming in fast. He waited, ready to kill.

  Mature consideration stopped him. He needed a ship in which to leave Pluto; his own was probably shot to heat death. Those above were single-seaters, useless to him, but he knew that other ships were coming. He must not frighten them away.

  He would let these ships land.

  Viprin race. Bowed skeletal shapes like great albino whippets seemed to skim the dirt surface of the track, racing round and round the audience standing breathless in the center of the circle. Kzanol on one of the too-expensive seats, clutching a colored plastic cord, knowing that this race meant the difference between life as a prospector and life as a superintendent of cleaning machinery. He would leave here with commercials to buy a ship, or with none.

  Larry dropped it. It was too late in Kzanol’s life. He wanted to remember much earlier. But his brain seemed filled with fog, and the thrintun memories were fuzzy and hard to grasp. As Kzanol/ Greenberg he had had no trouble with his memory, but as Larry he found it infuriatingly vague.

  The earliest thing he could remember was that scene of the sunflowers.

  He was out of cigarettes. The pilot might have some in his pocket, but Larry couldn’t quite reach it. A gnal might help. Definitely one would help, for it would probably kill him in seconds. Larry tore a button from his shirt and put it in his mouth. It was round and smooth, very like a gnal.

  He sucked it and let his mind dissolve.

  Two ships rested on the other side of what remained of Cott’s Crescent. In the cabins the pilots sat motionless, waiting for instructions and thinking furious, futile thoughts. The other ships had parked in close orbits about Pluto before their pilots stopped moving.

  Kzanol turned his disintegrator on and began walking. Something bright glimmered through the dark ice wall.

  “They’re down,” said Masney.

  “Two of them. Two more in orbit, waiting for us.” His eyes, deep-sunk in a gaunt white face, had a desperate look. “Too little, too late.”

  “No. Don’t forget, Lloyd, we’re worrying about an alien tool. What are the odds that a human brain can use it? I’ll tell you what I don’t like, though.” Garner rubbed the palm of his hand across his scalp. “If we attack, the first missiles will have to go to Woody and Smoky. They’re Belters, and they’re armed.”

  “I know. Luke, I want a promise.” Masney looked like Death. He was an old man in his own right, and he had been starved for some time. “I want you to swear that the first smell we get of the thought amplifier, we destroy it. Not capture, Luke. Destroy!”

  “All right, Lloyd. I swear.”

  “If you try to take it home. I’ll kill you.”

  His finger, an oversized finger in an oversized mouth with tiny needle teeth. He was on his side, more a lump of flesh than anything else, and he sucked his finger because he was hungry. He would always be
hungry.

  Something huge came in, blocking light. Mother? Father. His own arm moved, perking the finger contemptuously away, scraping it painfully on the new teeth. He tried to put it back, but it wouldn’t move. Something forceful and heavy told him never to do that again. He never did.

  No mind shield there. Funny how sharp that picture was, the memory of early frustration.

  Something…

  …The room was full of guests. He was four thrintun years old, and was being allowed out for the first time. Shown proudly by his father. But the noise, the telepathic noise was too loud. He was trying to think like everybody at once. It frightened him. Something terrible happened. A stream of dark brown semiliquid material shot out of his mouth and spread over the wall. He had defecated in public.

  Rage, red and sharp. Suddenly he had no control of his limbs; he was running, stumbling toward the door. Rage from his father and shame from himself—or from his father? He couldn’t tell. But it hurt, and he fought it, closed his mind to it. Father disappeared, and the guests too, and everybody in the universe was gone. He stopped, frightened. The other minds came back.

  His father was proud, proud. At the age of four little Kzanol already had the Power!

  Larry grinned a predatory grin and got up.

  His helmet? In the lounge, on one of the seats. He got it and screwed it down and went out.

  Kzanol tugged at the great bright bulk until it came out of the ice. It looked like a crippled goblin lying on its back.

  He’d want help now, to get it back. Kzanol turned his attention toward Larry Greenberg. He found a blank.

  Greenberg was nowhere.

  That wasn’t good, not good at all. Greenberg had warned him that he would try to stop him. He must be on his way now, with his mind shield in full working order. Fortunately the amplifier helmet would stop him. It would control even a grown thrint, though of course that was illegal. Kzanol reached down to turn the suit over.