The Goliath Stone

by Larry Niven

  “Good God, you’ve never read Terry Pratchett either? Why are you here again?”

  “Um, because I can get a knot out of a rubber band with my tongue?” she said.

  Toby started getting a little worried after May had been laughing for five minutes or so. It was only when she calmed down that he noticed that Alice was looking ostentatiously innocent. And Yellowhorse hadn’t said another word.

  Guys need to stick together sometimes. “So what was the story you have to tell?” he said.

  “Right,” said Yellowhorse. “Early in the nineteenth century a young writer, living on his wife’s inheritance due to his lack of success, was criticizing her taste in reading, asserting that she was damaging her standards of judgment with the novels she bought. Her view was that the books had merit or they could not have attracted a publisher’s interest or the public’s money. He replied that he was perfectly capable of writing a book that was complete rubbish, but which people would buy because it was exciting to read. She told him to go ahead. He sat down with paper and quill pen and wrote an inflammatory document filled with blood, dramatic speeches, and every error of fact, logic, and consistency he could cram into it. He spent the rest of his life writing sequels. Died fairly rich, and I imagine somewhat bitter. The title of the book was The Last of the Mohicans.” He waited for any response, got none, and added, “Mark Twain, who had lived for decades on the frontier, went to his grave trying to get people to notice.”

  After it became apparent that neither of the women had anything to say, Toby said, “I got partway through that in junior high. I believe it.”

  “I never read it—except the parts Twain quoted,” Yellowhorse said. “But I knew the James Fenimore Cooper story. So I set out to write a romance novel with plenty of horses and chocolate in it, and as little sense as I could stomach. Basically as a practical joke. Prison is boring. A guy who was getting out after thirty years took the manuscript with him and got it to an agent, and it hit the stands inside of six months. That’s very fast for dead-tree publishing. I called it For the Virgin in Mind.”

  “You’re Narya Farthingsworth?”

  It took Toby a moment to realize that both women had said it. He stared at each in turn.

  May, at least, had the advantage of having a face that was already much redder than Alice’s; but neither would make eye contact.

  Yellowhorse had gone on talking. “I split the take three ways: me, my courier, and the woman who showed up for signings. She’d done one porn film, hated it, and had the misfortune of being unforgettable. She got plastic surgery, claimed to be the daughter of a retired Russian mobster and his British mistress, and did a wonderful job. There’s an awful lot of really good actresses in porn. Or there were. Haven’t checked lately.”

  “How did you make contact with her?” Toby said.

  “Oh, I knew her before I went to work at Littlemeade. You meet the most interesting people at conventions. She did the author picture on all six books, too. Tremendous camera presence, worked great.”

  “Six?” Toby said.

  “For the Virgin in Mind, Love is a Pineapple, Hallelujah, Bitter Fruit, America’s Last Top Model, and Where You Find It. I wrote them like Mad Libs. Use the same plot framework, then plug in nouns, verbs, and adjectives as needed. Losing the family property, tropical island with missionaries, persecuted early Christians, disaffected superhero in jail, post-Apocalypse, and Gold Rush. I squeezed out two a year. Susan got burned out and wanted to retire after number six, and I was glad of the excuse. I was getting cynical even for me.”

  Toby noticed Alice was wooden-faced. Yellowhorse saw him looking, turned, and said, “Oh dear.”

  “I grew up wanting to be Penny Dreadful,” said Alice. “I took martial arts and data analysis.”

  Yellowhorse was nodding. “Model is still the poorest seller. Actually has some literary merit. You’ll recall there weren’t the usual armadas of motor vehicles. Cars need serious infrastructure, and even in full-on Jonathan Winters smart-ass mode I have my limits. Hence the horses. —After a while, when I saw how the other cons responded to the books, I realized they were potato chips for the soul. Not very nutritious, but something to chew on, and salty. Felt better about taking the money after that.”

  “They let you have the money in prison?” Alice said.

  “Oh, no, my courier set up an investment account for me.”

  “You trusted him?”

  “He was a professional hit man.” After a moment he added, “Sorry, you don’t know about convicts. As a significant percentage of the U.S. population, they’ve been developing their own culture. This phenomenon is unique to the United States, because in other countries these are the people who end up working for the government. So: Sexual abusers of any sort are the enemy—most cons have been abused. Molesters tend to have ‘accidents’ pretty quick, but rapists are mostly just shunned—which in prison is worse than it sounds. Associating only with each other eats away at them. Hit men—as distinct from an ordinary hired killer, who is simply avoided—are so reliable they’re sometimes asked to arbitrate disputes. They’re in there because they wouldn’t rat out their employers. Honorable. Target killers—that is, people who murdered someone and were then done—are often respected but always watched. Since I was a killer who’d targeted a couple of serial rapists, cons treated me about the way freed slaves would treat Lincoln if he showed up. Attentive but not clingy.”

  Toby thought of something. “Is that where you got the money to get JNAIT set up?”

  “Oh, no, it still hasn’t come to that much. I got most of the seed money from Leslie Reynolds.”

  Toby gaped. “You know Leslie Reynolds?”

  “How do you think I heard about Littlemeade? It’s not like you had want ads. I’d run into her husband at a couple of conventions—nicest guy I ever met outside of AA. Good friend of Ivar Jorgenson. You two— Never mind, wandering afield there. Anyway, she ran into me at the freezer vault where his body is. She’d set up a camera to see who was leaving candy. —Lots of people had been leaving flowers, but the concept of killing new life to honor the dead has always bothered me. —His work kept me from killing myself back in the Seventies. We talked, she mentioned Littlemeade, and I thought you might need some ideas. I’m still working on the ice problem.”

  Toby shook his head. “It’s nothing but short progress and dead ends.”

  “Yeah, but string one idea after another and you get further. It’s like dieting. Any diet works for about three weeks, then your progress slows to a crawl. What you do, you go on a new diet every three weeks.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Toby.

  “It works,” said Alice. “I lost sixty pounds in a year that way. Kept it off. Got my comfort-eating under control. It’s what Sylvia Noonan did in Bitter Fruit.”

  The Rukh beneath them turned and started accelerating up the runway. May heard and felt the roar in her bones and was satisfied: it was as she had imagined. Her passengers sagged back in their seats, stopped trying to talk and simply experienced.

  When they were in the air, the sound became a whistling hush. Alice wondered, “Mycroft, how did you get the tribes to adopt you? It had to be before they were taking immigrants, and they couldn’t know about the bots yet.”

  “They didn’t. It involved drugs and explosive casting. I do have some American ancestry, judging by facial bones … and an interestingly mysterious smile I saw on an old picture of my great-grandmother.… Most likely from somewhere in the Rockies. It isn’t a big enough percentage to claim tribal status, though. Having some Indian blood in the U.S. is about as rare as finding a successful bar next to a medical school. What I did, I found some people who were just trying to mind their own business and live their lives, and showed them how to stop being bothered by patronizing anthropologists. Any tribesman who isn’t willing to play a practical joke on Europeans is obviously some kind of mole for Indian Affairs, so it went great. They’d pick the leader of some ‘expeditio
n’—defined as a professor and several assistants who wanted to go camping on somebody’s rangeland—hint about a secret ceremony, and allow themselves to be bribed into letting him see it. Then they’d make him fast for three days, stuff him full of peyote, and take him into the inner sanctum where the holy of holies was kept. This would turn out to be a steel plate that had been deformed into the shape of the front half of a coyote.”

  There was a silence that seemed much longer than it was. They could hear the liquid oxygen start pumping into Firebird’s tank.

  “What?” said Alice.

  “None of them ever came back,” Mycroft added.

  “They really did it?” May said.

  “Repeatedly. In several places. Nobody ever came back. Or talked about it. I’ve been waiting to hear something, but I don’t expect to. Anthropologists do get some silly notions, like ‘people so primitive they don’t know what causes pregnancy’—hell, cats know what causes pregnancy! Why else does a tomcat get the crap beat out of him after he’s done?—but this would be like going to a meeting of UFOlogists, and saying you were taken aboard a flying saucer and met Santa Claus.”

  Toby suddenly said, “Ha! Maybe the aliens have figured that out, so that’s what they do to the people who are really abducted.” He grinned disturbingly.

  “Toby,” said Mycroft, “if there were genuine aliens watching us, and they wanted to be ignored, all they had to do from Day One was paint WHAM-O on the side of the ship. —And why would they care if we’re getting enough fiber?”

  “Mycroft,” said May, laughing, “never make the pilot unable to concentrate.”

  “Tell Toby. I’m not even in arm’s reach.”

  “Help me out here, Alice,” May said. “Stuff something in his mouth if you have to.”

  Silence.

  They looked at Alice. She looked away, out the tiny elliptical window. After a bit she said, “I never get the references.”

  Toby said, “It has been getting a bit—”

  “Moslem. We read the Koran. No, I never got as far as Terry Pratchett. The jokes just keep whizzing past my head. Sorry.”

  “I can stop,” Mycroft said. “I should have been paying attention, Alice. I was trying to distract myself.”

  Toby said, “From what?”

  “This,” Mycroft said, and the motors went off. They were falling free. Then something clunked beneath them, and something whooshed, and they sagged back in their seats as the Rukh began using its oxygen and became a rocket.

  Toby said, “We watched you touch down on target during a skydiving contest.”

  “You’re falling for a few seconds. Your whole body thinks you’ve been murdered. Then the air buoys you up and you’re flying. This is going to be different. In twelve minutes May will turn off the rocket and we’ll fall. Falling is one of the only ways nobody ever tried to kill me. Got no tolerance.”

  “All right,” Alice said soothingly. “Tell a joke. Then explain it.”

  XXVIII

  Always listen to experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.

  —ROBERT ANSON HEINLEIN

  Jack Bernstein had mixed feelings about being NASA’s token Jewish astronaut.

  His technical knowledge and mechanical ability were the best in the astronaut corps, but he didn’t have the reflexes of some of the candidates who were passed over. He had to admit it wasn’t fair.

  Weighing heavily against that was the fact that the current administration’s Middle East policy was one of pressuring Israel into policies that would, if enacted, destroy it as a nation. The official position was that this was motivated by compassion, and not because Bob Foster belonged to a Party whose leaders had been openly indifferent to the mass murder of Jews for more than a century—barring one exception, and he died young.

  The clincher was, if they wanted to maintain the pose, they had to send him into space.

  Screw fair.

  * * *

  He showed up late at the ready room. “Bernstein!” snapped General Quinn. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Ordering breakfast, sir,” he said.

  “We’ve got breakfast waiting on you!”

  “This is an astronaut’s breakfast, sir,” Jack said, and held open the door for the catering crew.

  The first platter was set before Sam Quinn and uncovered as Jack sat down.

  The Healthy Balanced Appropriate Meal that NASA had been inflicting on crews for years looked pitiful at the best of times, but next to the rare rib-eye steak and poached eggs—hot out of the kitchen in the truck—it looked downright contemptible.

  Quinn was biting his lip, trying not to smile.

  None of the other three were trying at all.

  Stephen Edmundson wasn’t trying because he wasn’t happy. “This is contrary to nutritional policy,” he said.

  Martin Tillery, next to him, obligingly took Edmundson’s platter, cut the steak into four pieces, and divided it, the eggs, and the fried potatoes among the other four plates without a word.

  Charley Loomis, mouth full, nodded at Tillery, then beamed at Jack. Then he swallowed some of what he had in his mouth to make room for more.

  Edmundson ate his oatmeal and raw vegetables with icy dignity.

  By and by Quinn mopped his mouth, hove a great sigh, and said, “Men, the mission plan has been updated. A flight commissioned by the Joint Negotiating Alliance of Indian Tribes has been launched from Ecuador, and it’s believed that it’ll attempt to take control of the nanomachines that are controlling the asteroid. An attempt to block it failed, and the JNAIT mission was sent up early, so they’re not in the window for fast rendezvous, but there’s a good chance they’ll arrive while we’re there. We have to prevent our opposition from reaching the nanomachines, because if they do JNAIT will be in a position to hold the entire world for ransom. Our cargo has been accordingly modified. —In the course of this mission, we will be maintaining radio silence whenever possible. There is reason to believe the opposition has excellent counterintelligence.”

  To wit, guns. Great. War goes to space. Jack held his tongue, but he could see that Tillery and Loomis were as dismayed as he was.

  Edmundson, of course, was delighted. “What are our options, General?” he said.

  “Orders from the president are to do whatever is necessary.” Quinn frowned. “My orders to you are to do only what’s necessary. So far the United States of America has never engaged any country in a war of aggression, and we’re not starting one on my watch.”

  “General, the Tribes aren’t a country. They’ve never been recognized by the U.S., sir,” Edmundson said.

  “They’ve been recognized by China and India, Major, both of whom would be very happy for a pretext to cut off trade with us. Most American industries are dependent on those countries to function. If you have a problem with this mission, perhaps if we’re lucky we can find someone else in the next sixty minutes.”

  The standby list for any given mission was pretty much every member of the corps. The only one not on it today, if Jack recalled, was Doug Waterhouse, who was having some kind of intensive dental surgery—and chances were, he’d be willing to take some Demerol and tie his jaw shut.

  Edmundson, however, had gotten his job because the Senate majority leader owed a media trillionaire a lot of favors. “So do we just wait for them to shoot first, or until they actually hit someone?” he said. “Sir.”

  Quinn gave him the look he might have given a bug in the soup. “Are you certain you’re appropriately motivated, Major?”

  The managerial buzzword got through where sarcasm hadn’t. “Oh, yes, sir!”

  “Very well. I will assess the situation as it develops, and direct our response. —Apart from that, we proceed as planned: find and disable the main computer of the Briareus mission.”

  * * *

  A little before Jack had been accepted as an astronaut, NASA had grudgingly switched over to spacesuits that hadn’t been designed by dead
Germans. Since he was the youngest man in the present crew, that meant he got to hear bitter reminiscences about the old gear while they were all dressing. He nodded and agreed with everyone; as a tech guy, his own irritation was focused on the fact that they were about to be taken into space by a system the United States could have used a year after the Blackbird was built.

  And calling it “subcontracting” didn’t change the fact that they’d had to buy it from an outfit NASA had driven out of the country.

  He continued to hold his tongue while they checked each other’s suits and plugged their own into their support packs. The new suits also had backpacks you could swing off and get at in a timely fashion, i.e., before you died.

  When the van dropped them off at their ride, he was the last man out.

  Each man before him had stopped dead for a moment, even Edmundson. So did Jack. He’d seen pictures of a Rukh, but the reality was beyond any photo or even video. Aside from being NASA white, it looked like a Blackbird had had a heavy date with a Valkyrie, which latter had subsequently mainlined growth hormones during gestation, then fed the offspring red meat from birth. The piggybacked orbiter was big enough to carry a Shuttle. Either Shuttle.

  The orbiter had a couple of solid cores strapped to its fuselage. Granted, they were in a race; but another word for monopropellant, as Richard Feynman had pointed out, was “explosive.”

  And some NASA penny saver in an office in D.C. had arranged for a ladder, for five men, in spacesuits, to climb, to board an orbiter that was being sent in such a hurry that it had slowly-detonating bombs attached.

  Fortunately the firemen in the ground crew had glommed a couple of cherrypickers, and they were all aboard in a few minutes. On his way up, Jack glanced at the port window of the Rukh cockpit, and saw a couple of well-formed pink cheeks pressed against the glass. One had an odd mark. He swung down the Fresnel visor, and was just able to make out a tattoo of a hornet. He’d seen it before, at the beach.

  He’d just edged out Claire Daughenbaugh in qualifying for this mission. Her present commentary on being part of the lifter crew could be construed as a mixed message, possibly worth clarifying later. “Did anyone else notice Daughenbaugh on the way up?” he said as he closed the door behind him.