by Larry Niven
“How do you feel?” she said.
Sam gave her an incredulous look. “How fast is it supposed—I will be dipped for a sheep. What is in those?” He was already improving.
“An isopiate bound to a prostaglandin counter, in a liquid osmosis facilitator. The capsule coating breaks down on contact with hydrogen chloride, which anyone in a lot of pain has plenty of in his stomach.”
“An opiate? How much?” He’d seen addicts when he was a kid, before wireheading became legal and killed them all off.
“Damn little. The compound only breaks down where the tissue is damaged and releases the narcotic on the spot. I thought they had that in your time.”
“Injected. I usually managed to stay out of hospitals. How’s Earth doing?”
She stared at him. “You really are one of the very first sent, aren’t you? Earth is charcoal. The Sun went giant.”
Sam sat very carefully on the bed. “How the hell long has it been?”
She shook her head quickly. “Sixteen thousand years and change. Sol was expanding and contracting long before humans evolved, and the cycles were constantly getting shorter. In hindsight it was obvious it had a lot more waste material inside it than age could account for on its own. The current guess is that it’s about a fourth-generation star. Born old, like a clone. For a long time people thought the extra heavy elements were necessary to produce life, but after we started getting tol and chup who knew some physics we learned different. They didn’t have stars like that; just us.”
“Tolul would be a tol?”
“Right. It’s just a coincidence of names, like a human named ‘Manny.’ Mine’s Marjorie Fein, what’s yours, Mr. Watt?”
“Samuel.”
She stared at him. Then she said, “Take the rest of your clothes off.”
“Look, that’s not necessary.”
“To whom? I didn’t get selected by lot, you know. The chup don’t even approve of this job. Besides, you’ve just had a full course of restoratives. You’re going to get heffened any minute.”
“What’s ‘heffened’ m—” Sam took a fast deep breath, let it out slowly, and took another. The sensation he was feeling was one he’d never thought could be duplicated: the one he’d felt when he was seventeen and doing extra work after school, and Ms. Zachau casually tossed her panties on his lab table on her way to the storage room.
“That,” said Marjorie.
***
After some time—and it sure was some time—Marjorie said, “Questions, or sleep?”
As long days went, this had probably been the record, but—“I thought everybody was supposed to be beige in the future. Nobody I saw was. You look Indian.”
She grinned. “You’d completely baffle anyone who wasn’t in Orientation if you said that. The term you want is ‘Guptani.’ ‘Indios’ is a term first directly applied to people in the New World, long before India was called that by its own people. Originally ‘Indios’ was due to the error of location, then later it became a pun, because the people seemed to possess a strain of innocence that Europeans hadn’t encountered before, and were regarded as closer to divinity: ‘in dios.’ In fact, they weren’t all that innocent, just not up on all the scams. I’m afraid you’re going to hear me being pedantic a lot. Orientation is fundamentally immersive teaching. You can choose what you look like, doesn’t cost much. I chose a Guptani appearance after a lot of study of Earth’s cultures. Many of them made sexuality into a religion or an art form, but only the Guptani made it into a philosophical study.” She beamed at him. “I think it makes me sexier.”
“So do I. Why hasn’t the language changed?”
“It did, for a while. Almost all my ancestors were from ships that were in transit during the Evacuation, and they either came here or someone went and got them. By the time the human refugees started to show up in the tube, nobody here could understand them, but the chup said everybody had to learn one language, and there were a lot more refugees than locals, so we all ended up speaking your kind of American, more or less. Most useful language in history.”
“Human history.” You didn’t last long as an engineer if fanatical nitpicking wasn’t a reflex.
“Any history. The chup and the tol both had rigid formal rules of language. Very old cultures. American used to be called ‘English’ before it got complicated. English got started on an island that used to get invaded every few generations by new strangers, and people really had to work to make themselves understood. So far it’s been able to express any thought anybody can form—sometimes because, if it doesn’t have a word for something, it steals one and blanks the chip ID.”
That sounded like the modern equivalent of filing off the serial numbers. Fair enough. “Oh. So ‘heffening’ is from an alien word?”
She frowned. “No, human, and from about your time I think. Regular verb, artificial origin I believe, ‘causing arousal and heightened esthetic perception to an unexpected and pleasing degree.’ I heffen, you heffen—”
Light dawned and Sam interrupted. “Ah ha. I get it. Derived from ‘heffener.’”
“That was a word already?”
“A name.” It was a shame the man hadn’t lived to hear he’d been verbed. “Good term for it. What was in those shots, anyway?”
“Twenty-five targeted retroviruses for repairing chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA, the KSP treatment, and enough ATP to get it all started. Men need one more shot than women so the Y chromosome isn’t ignored. It’s the price you pay for being taller and stronger.” She smiled.
“That and zippers,” Sam said. “Not worried about infectious diseases?”
“No, the KSP covers that.”
The term suddenly registered. “It used to be ‘KS.’ Does ‘P’ stand for ‘Philips’?”
“Yes, when he was starting the refuge Captain Philips turned out to be something of a heinlein.”
Sam absorbed that, nodding. “Almost everybody I’ve seen was human. Earth was evacuated, got it. The aliens aren’t refugees?”
Marjorie looked glum. “Most residents here were born here, but no, the aliens’ ancestors usually weren’t refugees. A few got here by accident, but most were exiles. Criminals.”
Oh hell. “What did they do?”
“The short answer? The tol were sent to nowhere because they wouldn’t fight. The chup were sent because they would.”
And everyone else did what they were told, and the chup did the telling because they were willing to back up everything they said with force: the fundamental basis for the concept of government. “This station isn’t being kept clean, and the procedure for dealing with the rescued is whacked. I don’t think the chup are doing a very good job of running things. It might not be a bad idea to alter the situation.”
Marjorie was conspicuously startled. “Well, that’s different,” she said. “Usually it takes weeks to get someone around to the idea of the Resistance. You’re the first rescue I’ve even heard of who brought it up on your own. Of course, you are Samuel Watt.”
He was pretty sure he didn’t want to know what kind of myths had grown up about him. And he was pretty sure he was going to learn anyway.
He was also pretty sure the Resistance was going to turn out to have been spinning its wheels for a long time. Even assuming they somehow had any of the weapons, using them inside a space habitat certainly qualified as a defining symptom of insanity.
It occurred to him suddenly that since he was the first sent out, people weren’t showing up in anything like chronological order.
It also occurred to him that the reason he was here was that Earth’s transfer booths hadn’t been working. “How did people get themselves sent out when the Sun was going giant?” he said.
“They did it before the expansion,” she said, surprised.
“But I thought I was the first.”
“Yes? Oh, you didn’t get sent out during the final expansion! The pulse you got caught by was the last-but-one. That was how people figured out
what was going on, when the neutrino count went up. In your time the Sun had been contracting for at least a thousand years, until the core got hot and dense enough to use carbon as a fusion catalyst again. Helium ignition didn’t happen until the next pulse, in 2838. Everyone who was going to leave was gone by then.”
“Is there any relationship between when people got sent and when they arrived?”
She waggled a hand. “Vaguely. The people who had themselves sent to nowhere when the transmitter was aimed through the Sun started showing up over a thousand years ago. Most people tried to go to colony worlds, but there wasn’t much room for them.”
“So—” There couldn’t have been room here yet, could there? “Did they get sent to nowhere too?”
“Well, some must have, because they’ve been showing up here. We can’t communicate with the colonies, so there’s no way to know how many there have been. A lot, though. They arrive in random amounts. Sometimes none show up for months. Sometimes there have been so many there was no choice but to send them again immediately. Millions, just about filled the tube.”
“Why can’t we talk to the colonies?”
“Ask the chup, but don’t expect an answer. They’re in control, and they don’t share information unnecessarily.”
“So the tube is idle a lot of the time,” he mused, wondering if there was something useful about that.
She shook her head. “The tube is never idle. We get garbage all the time, and I do mean continuously. There’s radar and like that in the tubes, so the crew can spot things like people, and your survival pod. Those get pulled out fast. The rest goes into the sorting dump, in case something was missed—or someone—and then into the main habitat. A lot gets sent to Titan after that.”
“How big is this place?” he wondered.
“Not big enough,” she grumbled. “Everybody thought Titan would be ready by the time the refugees showed up, but they got here earlier than anyone thought.”
In response to what he deemed an accusing frown, Sam said, “Ten thousand years was the bottom limit. And it was really back-of-the-envelope. No data at all. Titan, huh?”
“It gets about as much light as Earth used to. More orange, I’m told.”
“What about Saturn’s magnetic field?”
“What about it?”
“Uh, radiation?”
She looked surprised. “I never heard of any. It might have blown away, like Jupiter’s tail is doing.”
“Jupiter has a tail?”
“Not as much since I was born. It comes and goes. The last time a moon dropped in it got really thick for a while. Is it important? I can show you the pictures from the last Trojan expedition.”
Sam shook his head, trying to clear it. “No. Maybe you should show me around.”
“Again? Oh. Right. I’ll just put you into a newcomer outfit and get you a list of jargon that’s changed meaning, and we’ll go.”
The outfit was shirt, shorts, and a bag with a capacity of about a peck, all cotton (probably not, but near as) and all a bright, cheerful blue.
Sam’s coloring had always looked sort of walking-dead when set against blue. It had admittedly been a great convenience for Trick-or-Treating, but the rest of the time it was a pain. “Why blue?” he said.
“To show you need things explained,” Marjorie said. “Ancient usage, origin unknown but generally assumed to be from the Doppler effect. You’re catching up. Red is for the people you’re trying to catch up with.”
***
The wheel he’d been on was the third one built around the receiver tube. Only one receiver had been built after all, with vacuum-tube circuitry, since that could be adjusted to accept standard transmissions as well, and there was a certain element of haste at the time. There were now thirty-eight rings around the tube.
They took a booth to the end of the tube.
There were two hundred and ninety-two rings past its end, and another under construction. These rings were larger in radius, and a great deal broader. Ramps and elevators connected the ledge of Wheel 38 to the ground of Wheel 39.
And the correct word was indisputably ground. Crops were growing. He even saw what he thought might be cows.
“My god,” Sam said, looking up from the cropland to a wall that must have been half a mile away. “And there are two hundred and ninety-two more of these?”
“Two-ninety-three next year.”
“You should have inflated an asteroid.”
“They bleb out and pop. They’re not homogeneous enough. The second try was what convinced everyone. Killed some people. Come on.” She led him to an elevator—he was going to be some little while getting used to elevators with curved shafts—and said, “Garbage goes out to Wheel 330. We’ll deadhead and meet some people there.”
“You keep the walls in case of blowouts, right?”
Other people were waiting for the elevator, and half of them—the ones dressed scandalously and in red—stared at him until they noticed how he was dressed. Then they stared at Marjorie.
“Never been an air leak in a finished Wheel,” she said. “And check your list.”
Sam had a feeling he didn’t have to. “Why not remove the walls?”
“It’s where people live. More every day. We need the land to grow food, Sam. In multiple layers. This place is so big we’re getting gravity effects at the ends, and it’s still too crowded.”
For the first time Sam realized that the expected arrivals had to number in the billions. “My God, how thick are the walls?”
“Five miles each.”
“What are they made of?”
“Steel reinforced with diamond fibers, mostly. And living spaces, of course, the bottom thousand levels anyway. We’ve got thousands of people to a square mile here.”
Times a thousand levels and hundreds of rings. “And every apartment has its own garden,” he said, not asking.
“Oh yes. There are stories from back when sewage and garbage were processed biologically instead of industrially. Huge suicide and murder rates. The brain appears to be hardwired to respond to trace components of those smells with despair, sometimes leading to random fury. Current theory says it may be a survival trait to limit overcrowding. Can’t have that in an environment that requires constant maintenance, so now it’s all reduced and remade and separated for whatever.”
He could picture the processes needed to accomplish that. She had an astonishing gift for summary; he would have felt compelled to at least mention pressure tanks, or fractional distillation, or magnets, or anyway something. Then he realized he was overcomplicating things: when reduced organics were burned you got stuff good for use by plant life, and the rest was a mixture of high-grade ore whose every ingredient was something somebody had already found useful. It wouldn’t even have to be melted down, just electrolyzed in iridium tanks. (If they didn’t have a lot more iridium than they needed, this whole situation was an unnecessarily elaborate hoax.)
Sam had idly come up with a rudimentary design by the time the elevator arrived, and came out of his reverie to realize that once they reached the top they were going to be riding in what was, essentially, a garbage truck. “Why isn’t there a transfer booth system for this?” he said.
“There is. This is marginally cheaper for garbage, and more popular with people who like the view,” said Marjorie.
“How can it be che—” he began, then thought of angular momentum. The garbage already represented a power loss: it wasn’t transmitted turning. Once it got where it was wanted, paired loads could be sent from axis to rim, each used as compensator mass for the other, but teleporting it from here to there would either be insanely finicky, or screw with angular momentum. Just sending people must have been some trouble. Also, at the axis transceivers sending it to the rim, it would help a lot in measuring those masses if the junk was already in a container. “The cans are made of garbage?” he said.
“Yes, remade concrete. Saves sending them back to this end.”
&nb
sp; The elevator was big, and had seats and entertainment screens. And that damn black mildew wherever surfaces came together. “What the hell is this stuff, anyway?” he said, pointing at some.
Marjorie shook her head. “Something that came in with the first load of garbage, as far as anybody knows. It’s adapted to high-tech environments, uses light and electricity and electronics waste to grow. Actually pays for its keep, it reinforces whatever it’s stuck to. You have to wonder how much time the civilization it came from spent killing off its ancestors for this version to have evolved. If you want to clean it off completely you have to use fluorine or heated ozone.”
It made a border around the plates of fixtures and power sockets. “How much electricity does it use?” Sam said.
“Neighborhood of one part per million, unless there’s a spike. Then it eats the surplus and stores it, or sends it along to a neighbor.”
“It sounds like someone invented it as a living surge protector.”
“That’s one theory. Others have suggested an ancestor was designed as a weapon to bring down an enemy’s infrastructure, but all the other strains worked too fast to spread far.”
Like Ebola couldn’t, before transfer booths. “So it started as a wolf, and what you’ve got now is a collie?”
Marjorie flinched. “Don’t mention dogs around me, okay? A long time back people were breeding them to attack the chup, and there were a lot of deaths. Orientation requires studying everything.”
Sam nodded. Get back on topic. “So the chup and the tol don’t know where it came from either.”
“Not a clue.”
Sam considered. “First load, huh? None since then?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
And she would have. “It sounds to me like somebody made the stuff as it is, and somebody else panicked and threw it away immediately. Otherwise there ought to be more than one type. Anybody ever succeed in giving it a close examination?”
Marjorie tilted her head and looked at him interestedly. “At least some of your reputation must be based on fact,” she said. “It is incredibly difficult to examine. Light is soaked up, and a scanning electron microscope tears it apart. The individual components are no more than virus-sized, but seem to be much more complex on the inside.”
