Scatterbrain

by Larry Niven

  He thought about the prettiest places he had seen. Peacegiven Square, when the kinless had swept it clean and set up their tents. The Flower Market, which he wasn’t supposed to go to. Most of the town was dirty, with winding streets, houses falling down, and big houses that had been well built but were going to ruin. Not like Placehold. Placehold was stone, big, orderly, with roof gardens. Dargramnet made the women and children work to keep it clean, even bullied the men until they fixed the roof or broken stairs. Placehold was orderly, and that made it pretty to Whandall.

  He tried to imagine another place of order, bigger than Placehold. It would have to be a long way, he thought. “Didn’t that take a long time?”

  “No, we’d go in a wagon in the morning. We’d be home that same night. Or sometimes the Lords came to our city. They’d come and sit in Peacegiven Square and listen to us.”

  “What’s a Lord, Mother’s mother?”

  “You always were the curious one. Brave too,” she said, and petted him again. “The Lords showed us how to come here when my grandfather’s father was young. Before that, our people were wanderers. My grandfather told me stories about living in wagons, always moving on.”

  “Grandfather?” Whandall asked.

  “Your mother’s father.”

  “But—how could she know?” Whandall demanded. He thought that Pothefit had been his father, but he was never sure. Not sure the way Mother’s mother seemed to be.

  Mother’s mother looked angry for a moment, but then her expression softened. “She knows because I know,” Mother’s mother said. “Your grandfather and I were together a long time, years and years, until he was killed, and he was the father of all my children.”

  Whandall wanted to ask how she knew that, but he’d seen her angry look, and he was afraid. There were many things you didn’t talk about. He asked, “Did he live in a wagon?”

  “Maybe,” Mother’s mother said. “Or maybe it was his grandfather. I’ve forgotten most of those stories now. I told them to your mother, but she didn’t listen.”

  “I’ll listen, Mother’s mother,” Whandall said.

  She brushed her fingers through his freshly washed hair. She’d used three days’ water to wash Whandall and Shastern, and when Resalet said something about it she had shouted at him until he ran out of the Placehold. “Good,” she said. “Someone ought to remember.”

  “What do Lords do?”

  “They show us things, give us things, tell us what the law is,” Mother’s mother said. “You don’t see them much anymore. They used to come to Tep’s Town. I remember when we were both young—they chose your grandfather to talk to the Lords for the Placehold. I was so proud. And the Lords brought wizards with them, and made rain, and put a spell on our roof gardens so everything grew better.” The dreamy smile came back. “Everything grew better; everyone helped each other. I’m so proud of you, Whandall; you didn’t run and leave your brother—you stayed to help.” She stroked him, petting him the way his sisters petted the cat. Whandall almost purred.

  She dozed off soon after. He thought about her stories and wondered how much was true. He couldn’t remember when anyone helped anyone who wasn’t close kin. Why would it have been different when Mother’s mother was young? And could it be that way again?

  But he was seven, and the cat was playing with a ball of string. Whandall climbed off Mother’s mother’s lap to watch.

  Bansh and Ilther died. Shastern lived, but he kept the scars. In later years they passed for fighting scars.

  Whandall watched them rebuild the city after the Burning. Stores and offices rose again, cheap wooden structures on winding streets. The kinless never seemed to work hard on rebuilding.

  Smashed watercourses were rebuilt. The places where people died—kicked to death or burned or cut down with the long Lordkin knives—remained empty for a time. Everybody was hungry until the Lords and the kinless could get food flowing in again.

  None of the other children would return to the forest. They took to spying on strangers, ready to risk broken bones rather than the terrible plants. But the forest fascinated Whandall. He returned again and again. Mother didn’t want him to go, but Mother wasn’t there much. Mother’s mother only told him to be careful.

  Old Resalet heard her. Now he laughed every time Whandall left the Placehold with leathers and mask.

  Whandall went alone. He always followed the path of the logging, and that protected him a little. The forest became less dangerous as Kreeg Miller taught him more.

  All the chaparral was dangerous, but the scrub that gathered round the redwoods was actively malevolent. Kreeg’s father had told him that it was worse in his day: the generations had tamed these plants. There were blade-covered morningstars and armory plants, and lordkin’s-kiss, and lordkiss with longer blades, and harmless-looking vines and flower beds and bushes all called touch-me and marked by five-bladed red or red-and-green leaves.

  Poison plants came in other forms than touch-me. Any plant might take a whim to cover itself with daggers and poison them too. Nettles covered their leaves with thousands of needles that would burrow into flesh. Loggers cut under the morningstar bushes and touch-me flower beds with the bladed poles they called severs. Against lordwhips the only defense was a mask.

  The foresters knew fruit trees the children hadn’t found. “These yellow apples want to be eaten,” Kreeg said, “seeds and all, so in a day or two the seeds are somewhere else, making more plants. If you don’t eat the core, at least throw it as far as you can. But these red death bushes you stay away from—far away—because if you get close you’ll eat the berries.”

  “Magic?”

  “Right. And they’re poison. They want their seeds in your belly when you die, for fertilizer.”

  One wet morning after a lightning storm, loggers saw smoke reaching into the sky.

  “Is that the city?” Whandall asked.

  “No, that’s part of the forest. Over by Wolverine territory. It’ll go out.” Kreeg assured the boy. “They always do. You find black patches here and there, big as a city block.”

  “The fire wakes Yangin-Atep.” the boy surmised. “Then Yangin-Atep takes the fire for himself? So it goes out…” But instead of confirming, Kreeg only smiled indulgently. Whandall heard snickering.

  The other loggers didn’t believe, but…“Kreeg, don’t you believe in Yangin-Atep either?”

  “Not really,” Kreeg said. “Some magic works, out here in the woods, but in town? Gods and magic, you hear a lot about them, but you see damn little.”

  “A magician killed Pothefit!”

  Kreeg Miller shrugged.

  Whandall was near tears. Pothefit had vanished during the Burning, just ten weeks ago. Pothefit was his father! But you didn’t say that outside the family. Whandall cast about for better arguments, then said. “You bow to the redwood before you cut it. I’ve seen you. Isn’t that magic?”

  “Yeah, well…why take chances? Why do the morningstars and laurel whips and touch-me and creepy-julia all protect the redwoods?”

  “Like house guards.” Whandall said, remembering that there were always men and boys on guard at Placehold.

  “Maybe. Like the plants made some kind of bargain,” Kreeg said, and laughed.

  Mother’s mother had told him. Yangin-Atep led Whandall’s ancestors to the Lords, and the Lords had led Whandall’s ancestors through the forest to the Valley of Smokes, where they defeated the kinless and built Tep’s Town. Redwood seeds and firewands didn’t sprout unless fire had passed through. Surely these woods belonged to the fire god!

  But Kreeg Miller just couldn’t see it.

  They worked half the morning, hacking at the base of a vast redwood, ignoring the smoke that still rose northeast of them. Whandall carried water to them from a nearby stream. The other loggers were almost used to him now. They called him Candlestub.

  When the sun was overhead, they broke for lunch.

  Kreeg Miller had taken to sharing lunch with him. Wh
andall had managed to gather some cheese from the Placehold kitchen. Kreeg had a smoked rabbit from yesterday.

  Whandall asked, “How many trees does it take to build the city back?”

  Two loggers overheard and laughed. “They never burn the whole city,” Kreeg told him. “Nobody could live through that, Whandall. Twenty or thirty stores and houses, a few blocks solid and some other places scattered, then they break off.”

  The Placehold men said that they’d burned down the whole city, and all of the children believed them.

  A logger said, “We’ll cut another tree after this one. We wouldn’t need all four if Lord Qirinty didn’t want a wing on his palace. Boy, do you remember your first Burning?”

  “Some. I was only two years old.” Whandall cast back in his mind. “The men were acting funny. They’d lash out if any children got too close. They yelled a lot, and the women yelled back. The women tried to keep the men away from us.

  “Then one afternoon it all got very scary and confusing. There was shouting and whooping and heat and smoke and light. The women all huddled with us on the second floor. There were smells—not just smoke, but stuff that made you gag, like an alchemist’s shop. The men came in with things they’d gathered. Blankets, furniture, heaps of shells, stacks of cups and plates, odd things to eat.

  “And afterward everyone seemed to calm down.” Whandall’s voice trailed off. The other woodsmen were looking at him like…like an enemy. Kreeg wouldn’t look at him at all.

  Saturn’s Race Collaboration with Steven Barnes

  Larry’s Take—

  I tossed a phrase into an early story, long before I ever met Steven Barnes. It was just a bit of a story’s back history; it didn’t mean anything at the time. The One Race War.

  Over the years my mind toyed with that phrase, elaborating it. Not so long ago, racism didn’t even have a name; it was just a universal way of thinking.

  Everyone on the far side of the hill is demons. We are the one race, the Platonic ideal of race, and we must be protected.

  Despite the courts, despite the media, despite all the yelling of victims and “victims,” people continue to color-code people. That perfectly normal line of thinking would lead to a horror, sometime in our future. I needed to see it.

  With Saturn’s Race, with Steven’s help, I finally got to write about the One Race War. Let the story speak for me.

  (And I’ve added some notes to Steven’s.)

  Steven’s Take—

  Over the twenty-plus years that Larry Niven and I have collaborated, we’ve covered a lot of odd territory. From high-tech gaming to a future Olympics, from monster-haunted planets to stranded space shuttles, it’s been a wild ride indeed.

  We wanted our latest work to be something special. Because I had moved to Washington state from my native Los Angeles in 1994, it was growing more difficult to find the kind of relaxed time that leads to the generation of ideas and the meshing of creative gears. We had the Internet to link us, but we hadn’t tested that. There was a real possibility that this might be the last book we wrote together.

  (As of this writing, there lurks on the horizon a terrific Niven idea involving asteroid mining and nanotech…so who knows?)

  At any rate, if this was our valedictory, I wanted to be very certain that it was a good one. So we batted ideas around for months.

  We chose to write a prequel to Achilles’ Choice.

  This was attractive for a number of reasons. Achilles’ Choice was actually a novella expanded with wonderful art by Boris Vallejo. I feared our readers might feel a bit cheated by its length; but they’ve been gracious (as SF readers tend to be), and reviews and comments were positive. Nonetheless, we’ve wanted to tell more of the story.

  We could further explore the destiny of Jillian, the woman who bet her life in an Olympiad which promises extended life and vast power to the winners, and death to the losers. Perhaps we could go sideways: tell another story set in the same world.

  But first we’ve gone backward to explore the history of the mysterious entity called Saturn.

  Achilles’ Choice was a parable about the price ultracompetitive type A people pay to achieve their goals. Remember Achilles, the invulnerable Greek hero? The gods gave him a choice: a long, dull life or a short glorious one. It has been said that if world-class athletes were offered a drug that would guarantee gold medals and fame, but kill them within five years, 80 percent of them would say “yes.” This is something that many people cannot understand. They look at a Muhammad Ali, stricken by Parkinson’s, and think boxing should be outlawed. “Poor man,” they say, certain that he regrets the day he stepped into the ring. Nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that all men and women die, and too many of us die without even distantly reaching our potential. In the overall life of the universe, whether you live to 30 or 90 or 120 means little. What might mean something is the degree to which you tap every last bit of potential within you: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. And if you do that, during the moments you are in that space of total awareness, psychological time does not exist. These moments (sometimes referred to as the flow state) are so precious that mankind has pursued them in every form, even where such pursuit is risky or lethal.

  It was easy to tell the story of Olympic hopeful Jillian. So strong, so smart, so basically decent, and doomed but for the intercession of the mysterious Saturn.

  So, then: who was Saturn? That is the story we set out to tell next.

  Larry and I had spoken of that time, in the not-too-distant future, when corporations would grow stronger than governments. Some would argue this has already happened (though William Gates wouldn’t. LN). Seen from this point of view governments, as geopolitical entities, might seem to be dinosaurs stumbling blindly toward the nearest tar pit. But if they are eventually supplanted, they won’t go without a fight.

  Saturn’s Race grew around this idea nucleus, adding a few more: life extension, a radical approach to overpopulation, the enhancement of intelligence by means ranging from surgical to electronic, the “Millennial Project” approach to privatization of space conquest, and a few other surprises.

  And because we were touching so many bases, and ranging so far, we wanted the story to wrenchingly affect the lives of four extraordinary characters: Chaz Kato, survivor of the infamous Manzanar “relocation” camps and citizen of the floating island Xanadu. Clarise Maibang, security officer, and a woman walking a tightrope between two cultures: one virtually stone-age, and one already halfway to the stars. Arvad Minsky, master and victim of augmentation technology. And Lenore Myles, the beautiful, brilliant young woman who stumbles onto a terrible secret and pays a horrific price

  Not all of these characters survive the book, but we fell in love with them anyway. Each has needs, drives, emotions. Each watched over our shoulders as the act of creation proceeded. Occasionally, they broke our hearts.

  Don’t get us wrong. We and they had fun along the way, playing with intelligent dolphins and sharks, a few asides at Hollywood’s foibles, speculation on the future of Ninjutsu, and a dollop of virtual reality. Because there were a number of serious concerns in Saturn, the book had the potential to become didactic, and nothing kills a good read faster than a lecture. Our basic philosophy became: if we’re having a good time, so will the readers! Judging by our initial feedback, it was the right way to proceed.

  If Achilles’ Choice had a basic theme about the hazardous peaks our best and brightest will climb on the way to the heights, Saturn’s Race’s theme had to do with change and identity and the value of life itself. At what price is life extended? What enhances it best? Love? Intelligence? Wealth? Power? Under what pretext can it be taken from others legitimately? Given the power to impose change from without, without consent, how much change constitutes murder? When is mass murder not murder at all? And ultimately, who has the right to make these decisions, and how will we select them?

  One thing is crystal clear: no matter what system we ha
ve, someone is going to end up on the top. In the past, status has been relegated based on inheritance, brute strength, political savvy, leadership capacity, “divine right,” or a dozen other values. In Saturn’s Race we propose another model. You may or may not like it. But you had better believe it is possible, and it may be our immediate future.

  For now, be happy it’s just a book.

  Hey Steven! Hi, Tananareve!

  Bob and I spent an hour in a deli talking about Saturn’s Race. This is what emerged—and a lot of it is my notes made at his instigation and sanity-checked with him.

  What I’m doing right now is writing very slowly and meticulously. I left the first chunks alone; I’ll get there on another pass, once I’ve become more familiar with the characters, background, etc. Going into the meet with Bob Gleason, I was (and am) watching Chaz recover from the Barrister attack.

  Here’s what I wrote—

  1. Don’t panic if you see a check for only part of the on-acceptance payment. Bob is putting the whole sum through.

  2. Basic problem is not enough development of Saturn…that is Saturn himself, the villain. That’s my job; I said you’d largely left slots for me to work. I told Bob it was going to be wonderful, and gave details.

  3. He had some detailed suggestions, too. If what follows sparks any ideas, tell me what they are. I’m planning to do a lot with Saturn!

  4. How does Saturn react (throughout) to Lenore?

  5. To Chaz?

  6. To Needles rescuing Chaz at the cost of being bitten by Barrister?

  7. Saturn’s opinion of Needles? Of Barrister? Of the linking program? Remember, all of these relationships and entities are evolving.

  8. To heroes? Some minds can’t see a hero or archetype. To others, there’s a favorite. Who would Saturn be imitating? (This too evolves!)

  9. To Poetry? Is there poetry that obsesses Saturn, that he can’t figure out?