Scatterbrain

by Larry Niven

  Sharrol said, “Tanya’s a flat phobe, too.”

  Feather’s fingers closed with bruising force. I sensed that the lady didn’t like seeing her plans altered.

  “Wait one,” Carlos said. “We can fix that. We’re taking my ’doc, aren’t we? It wouldn’t be plausible, let alone intelligent, for Carlos Wu to go on vacation without his ’doc. Feather, how big is the lander’s freezebox?”

  “Yeah. Right. It’ll hold Tanya…better yet, both children. Sharrol can ride in your ’doc.”

  We talked it around. When we were satisfied, we went home.

  Three days out, three days returning, and a week on Mars while the ARM team played with Boy George. It had to be us. I’d familiarize myself with Boy George, Feather would supervise the ARM crews…and neither of us were flat phobes.

  I brought a dime disk, a tourist’s guide of Fafnir system, and I studied it.

  Kzinti and human planetologists call Fafnir a typical water world in a system older than Sol. The system didn’t actually retain much more water than Earth did; that isn’t the problem. But the core is low in radioactives. The lithosphere is thick: no continental drift here. Shallow oceans cover 93 percent of the planet. The oceans seethe with life, five billion years evolved, twice as old as Earth’s.

  And, where the thick crust cracked in early days, magma oozed through to build the world’s single continent. Today a wandering line of volcanoes and bare rock stretches from the south pole nearly to the north. The continent’s mass has been growing for billions of years.

  On the opposite face of a lopsided planet, the ocean has grown shallow. Fafnir’s life presently discovered the advantages of coral building. That side of the world is covered with tens of thousands of coral islands. Some stand up to twenty meters tall: relics of a deeper ocean.

  The mines are all on Shasht. So also are all the industry, both spaceports, and the seat of government. But the life—recreation, housing, families are all on the islands.

  Finding the old lander had indeed been a stroke of luck. It was an identical backup for the craft that set Sinbad Jabar down on Meerowsk in the Fourth War, where he invaded the harem of the Patriarch’s Voice. The disgrace caused the balance of power among the local kzinti to become unstable. The human alliance took Meerowsk and renamed the planet, and it was Jabar’s Prize until a later, pacifistic generation took power. Jabar’s skin is displayed there still.

  Somehow Feather had convinced the ARMs that (1) this twin of Jabar’s lander was wanted for the Smithsonian Luna, and (2) the Belt peoples would raise hell if they knew it was to be removed from Mars. The project must be absolutely secret.

  Ultimately the ARM crews grew tired of Feather’s supervision, or else her company. Rapidly after that, Feather grew tired of watching me read. “We’ll only be on Fafnir two days, Beowulf. What are you learning? It’s a dull, dull, dull place. All the land life is Earth imports—”

  “Their lifestyle is strange, Feather. They travel by transfer booths and dirigible balloons and boats, and almost nothing in between. A very laid-back society. Nobody’s expected to be anywhere on time—”

  “Nobody’s watching us here. You don’t have to play tourist.”

  “I know.” If the ARM had Boy George bugged…but Feather would have thought of that.

  Our ship was in the hands of ARM engineers, and that made for tension. But we were getting on each other’s nerves. Not a good sign, with a three-week flight facing us.

  Feather said, “You’re not playing. You are a tourist!”

  I admitted it. “And the first law of tourism is, read everything.” But I switched the screen off, and said, in the spirit of compromise, “All right. Show me. What is there to see on Mars?”

  She hated to admit it. “Nothing.”

  We left Mars with the little stealth lander in the fuel tank. The ARM was doing things the ARM didn’t know about. And I continued reading….

  Fafnir’s twenty-two-hour day has encouraged an active life. Couch potatoes court insomnia: it’s easier to sleep if you’re tired. But hurrying is something else. There are transfer booths, of course. You can jump instantly from a home on some coral extrusion to the bare rock of Shasht…and buy yourself an eleven-hour time lag.

  Nobody’s in a hurry to go home. They go by dirigible. Ultimately the floatliner companies wised up and began selling round-trip tickets for the same price as one-way.

  “I do know all this, Beowulf.”

  “Mph? Oh, good.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Feather asked. “Find an island with nothing near it and put down, right? Get out and dance around on the sand while we blow the boat up and load it and go. How do we hide the lander?”

  “Sink it.”

  “Read about lamplighters,” she said, so I did.

  After the war and the settlement, UN Advance Forces landed on Shasht, took over the kzinti structures, then began to explore. Halfway around the planet were myriads of little round coral islands, each with a little peak at the center. At night the peaks glowed with a steady yellow light. Larger islands were chains of peaks, each with its yellow glow in the cup. Lamplighters were named before anyone knew what they were.

  Close-up…well, they’ve been called piranha ant nests. The bioluminescence attracts scores of varieties of flying fish. Or, lured or just lost, a swimming thing may beach itself; then the lamplighter horde flows down to the beach and cleans it to the bones.

  You can’t build a home, or beach a boat, until the nest has been burned out. Then you have to wait another twelve days for the soldiers caught outside the nest to die. Then cover the nest. Use it for a basement, put your house on it. Otherwise, the sea may carry a queen to you, to use the nest again.

  “You’re ahead of me on this,” I admitted. “What has this lander got for belly rockets?”

  “Your basic hydrogen and oxygen,” Feather said. “High heat and a water vapor exhaust. We’ll burn the nest out.”

  “Good.”

  Yo! Boy, when Carlos’s ’doc is finished with you, you know it!

  Open.

  The sky was a brilliant sprawl of stars, some of them moving—spacecraft, weather eyes, the wheel—and a single lopsided moon. The island was shadow-teeth cutting into the starscape. I slid out carefully, into a blackness like the inside of my empty belly, and yelled as I dropped into seawater.

  The water was hip deep, with no current to speak of. I wasn’t going to drown, or be washed away, or lost. Fafnir’s moon was a little one, close in. Tides would be shallow.

  Still I’d been lucky: I could have wakened underwater.

  How did people feel about nudity here? But my bundle of clothes hadn’t washed away. Now the boots clasped my feet like old friends. Until I rolled them up, the sleeves of the dead man’s survival jacket trailed way past my hands, and, of course, the front and back were in shreds. The pants were better: too big, but with elastic ankle bands that I just pulled up to my knees. I swallowed a tannin secretion dose. I couldn’t do that earlier. The ’doc would have read the albino gene in my DNA and “cured” me of an imposed tendency to tan.

  There was nothing on all of Fafnir like Carlos’s ’doc. I’d have to hide it before I could ever think about rescue.

  “Our medical equipment,” Carlos had called it; and Feather had answered, “Hardly ours.”

  Carlos was patient. “It’s all we’ve got, Feather. Let me show you how to use it. First, the diagnostics—”

  The thing was as massive as the inflatable boat that would carry us to Shasht. Carlos had a gravity lift to shove under it. The Intensive Care Cavity was tailored just for Carlos Wu, naturally, but any of us could be served by the tethers and sleeves and hypo-tipped tubes and readouts along one whole face of the thing: the service wall.

  “—These hookups do your diagnostics and set the chemical feeds going. Feather, it’ll rebalance body chemistry, in case I ever go schiz or someone poisons me or something. I’ve reprogrammed it to take care of you, too.” I don’t think Ca
rlos noticed the way Feather looked at it, and him.

  “Now the cavity. It’s for the most serious injuries, but I’ve reprogrammed it for you, Sharrol my dear—”

  “But it’s exactly Carlos’s size,” Feather told us pointedly. “The UN thinks a lot of Carlos. We can’t use it.”

  Sharrol said, “It looks small. I don’t mean the ICC. I can get into that. But there’s not much room for transplants in that storage space.”

  “Oh, no. This is advanced stuff. I had a hand in the design. One day we’ll be able to use these techniques with everyone.” Carlos patted the monster. “There’s nothing in here in the way of cloned organs and such. There’s the Surgeon program, and a reservoir of organic soup, and a googol of self-replicating machines a few hundred atoms long. If I lost a leg or an eye, they’d turn me off and rebuild it onto me. There’s even…here, pay attention. You feed the organics reservoir through here, so the machine doesn’t run out of material. You could even feed it Fafnir fish if you can catch them, but they’re metal-deficient….”

  When he had us thoroughly familiar with the beast, he helped Sharrol into the cavity, waited to be sure she was hooked up, and closed it. That made me nervous as hell. She climbed out a day later claiming that she hadn’t felt a thing, wasn’t hungry, didn’t even have to use the bathroom.

  The ’doc was massive. I had to really heave against it to get it moving, then it wanted to move along the shore. I forced it to turn inland. The proper place to hide it was in the lamplighter nest, of course.

  I was gasping like death itself, and the daylight had almost died, and I just couldn’t push that mass uphill.

  I left it on the beach. Maybe there was an answer. Let my hindbrain toy with it for a while.

  I trudged across sand to rough coral and kept walking to the peak. We’d picked the island partly for its isolation. Two distant yellow lights, eastward, marked two islands I’d noted earlier. I ran my mag specs (the side that worked) up to 20X, scanned the whole horizon, and found nothing but the twin lamplighter glows.

  And nothing to do but wait.

  I sat with my back against the lip of the dead lamplighter pit. I pictured her: she looked serious, a touch worried, under a feather crest and undyed skin: pink shading to brown, an Anglo tanned as if by Fafnir’s yellow-white sun.

  I said, “Sharrol.”

  Like the dead she had slept, her face slack beneath the faceplate, like Sleeping Beauty. I’d taken to talking to her, wondering if some part of her heard. I’d never had the chance to ask.

  “I never wondered why you loved me. Egotist, I am. But, you must have looked like me when you were younger. Thirty years underwater, no sunlight. Your uncles, your father, they must have looked a lot like me. Maybe even with white hair. How old are you? I never asked.”

  Her memory looked at me.

  “Tanj that. Where are you? Where are Tanya and Louis? Where’s Carlos? What happened after I was shot?”

  Faint smile, shrug of eyebrows.

  “You spent three weeks unconscious in the ICC followed by ten minutes on your feet. Wrong gravity, wrong air mix, wrong smells. We hit you with everything it might take to knock a flat phobe spinning. Then BLAM and your love interest is lying on the sand with a hole through him.

  “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 freeze-box 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 to 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.