by Ларри Нивен
«Sure.»
«Well, I never even wondered. I did wonder why Cuba wasn't much hotter than Nome.»
Ander said, «The whole planet's a web of superconductor cable. We had to restart the Gulf Stream five hundred years ago, and it just went from there. Nome imports heat; Cuba imports cold. Even so, Earth would be pretty cold if we weren't getting so much power from the orbiting satellites.»
«Uh huh. What are you going to do when the ice age turns off?»
«Move.» Ander grinned. «Where did you go after the antimatter system?»
«I moved in with Sharrol in Nome.»
He looked at me. «You? Settled down like a Grog on a rock?»
Maybe he had the right to sneer. Ander and I had toured singles nodes together on two worlds, blowing off steam after marathon work sessions. I held my temper and said, «You can spend a lifetime seeing Earth.»
«Where do you want to eat?»
I said, «The Pequod Grill is good.» Good and expensive, and an offworlder would have heard of it. Just the place a destitute B. Shaeffer might pick if someone else was paying. And nobody would ask me where Sharrol was.
We had almost reached the transfer booths. Just to pull Ander's chain, I turned suddenly into the phone booth to see if I could break his grip.
He pulled me back effortlessly. «What?»
«I thought I'd phone and see if the Grill's full up,» I said, and remembered. I couldn't use my pocket phone. It was in the wrong name.
«I'll do it.» He used a card. It took him ten seconds to get a reservation. There are mistakes you don't pay for.
We pushed into a transfer booth. He said, «So there you were, nesting —»
I said, «It was love, stet? We weren't lockstepped … well, we were, a little. I didn't know any women on Earth. Sharrol had some playmates, but a lot of the men she knew were moaning and clutching themselves.» I grinned, remembering. «Rasheed. 'Lockstepped, sure, but you can't mean me! with a great dramatic wave of his arms, like he could have been joking. There were some couples we played with, but not so much of that, either, after a while. We talked about having children. Then we looked into it.»
Ander said, «You?» I wasn't sure how to read his expression. A little disgust, a little pity.
I dialed the Pequod.
* * *
We flicked in on the roof, under a rolling curve of greenblack water. The daylight was fading. Ander led off toward the restaurant twelve floors down. He seemed to be familiar with the Pequod. Might even be registered here.
Test that. «I need to visit a 'cycler, Ander. Long day.»
«Me, too,» he said. «This way.»
In the 'cycler he maneuvered himself between me and the door, and I let him. Amusing scenarios came to mind: If I needed a booth, he could watch the door, but what if he needed a booth? Not that it mattered. I didn't want to escape, not until I could know I was loose. I wanted to speak of lost treasure.
But I needed to know how much he already knew. Why was I here? Who had come with me? How? How was I surviving? I waited in the hope that he might speak of those things, and of Carlos Wu's autodoc, too.
So we didn't talk much until we were settled at a table, with drinks. Ander wasn't interested in local cuisine. He ordered beef — no imagination. I found crew snapper on the menu, billed as an order for two. Heh heh.
I asked, «What happened to Greg Pelton's expedition?»
Ander said, «Antimatter planet. The more he thought about it, the more he needed to know. He kept expanding his plans until some government gnome took notice. After that it just inflated. Government projects can do that. Everyone wants in; they always think there's infinite money, and suddenly it's gone from science fiction to fantasy.
I don't even know if Pelton's still involved. The UN has probes in the system. Meanwhile the current plan calls for a base on the planet.»
I laughed. «Oh, sure!»
He grinned at me. «Set on a metal dish in stasis, inside a roller sphere also in stasis. It is antimatter, after all.»
He wasn't making it up. He was too amused. «Civil servants love making plans. You can't get caught in a mistake if you're only making plans, and it can pay your salary for life. And I shouldn't have heard that much, Beowulf, nor should you. If a terrorist knew where to find infinite masses of antimatter, things could get sticky.»
«And that is why you weren't asked to ghostwrite the tour guide,» I surmised.
Ander smiled. He said, «Back to work. You've met Outsiders. Would you consider them a threat?»
«No.»
He waited. I said, «They're fragile. Superfluid helium metabolism and no real skeleton, I think. Any place we consider interesting, they die. But never mind that, Ander —»
«They've got the technology to take accelerations that would reduce you or me to a film of neutrons.»
«Not the point. Can you tell me why they honor contracts? They've got ships to run away from any obligation. I think it must be built into their brains, Ander. They honor contracts, and they keep their promises. They're trustworthy.»
He nodded, in no way dissatisfied. «Grogs? Are they dangerous?»
«Tanj straight they're dangerous.»
He laughed. «Well, finally! Kzinti?»
«Sure.»
«Puppeteers. Where are they going?»
«Anywhere they wast to.» He kept looking, so I said, «Clouds of Magellan? That's not the interesting question. The Outsiders can boost a ship or a planet to near lightspeed. Can the puppeteers do that too? Or will they have to summon Outsiders to change their course?»
«And stop.»
«Yeah. I'd say they have the Outsider drive. They bought it or they built it.»
«Or they've got a research project that'll get it for them.»
«I … futz.» Hire Outsiders to push five planets up to four-fifths of lightspeed, then try to figure out how to slow them down. Was that as risky as it sounded? I began to believe it wasn't. There was nothing dangerous in the path of the puppeteer fleet. They had thousands of years to solve the puzzle.
Ander asked again: «Are the puppeteers a threat?»
He had generated in me a mulish urge to defend them. «They honor their contracts.»
«They're manipulative bastards, Beowulf. You know that.»
«So are the ARMs. Your people have been in my face since I reached Earth. Do you know what Sharrol and I had to go through to have children?»
«The Fertility Board turned you down, of course.»
«Yeah.»
«What did you do?»
«Sharrol used to play with a Carlos Wu. Carlos had an open birthright. So we worked something out. Then I went traveling.»
He was, from the look of him, learning far more about Beowulf Shaeffer than he had ever wanted to. He tried to stick to what he knew. «Traveling. Any contact at all with Pierson's puppeteers during that period?»
«No.»
«Other aliens? Aliens the puppeteers dealt with?»
That made me smile. «I'm a celebrity among the Kdatlyno …»
GRENDEL
There were the sounds of a passenger starship.
You learn those sounds, and you don't forget, even after four years. They are never loud enough to distract, except during takeoff, and most are too low to hear anyway, but you don't forget, and you wake knowing where you are.
There were the sensations of being alone.
A sleeper field is not a straight no-gee field; there's an imbalance that keeps you more or less centered so you don't float out the edge and fall to the floor. When your field holds two, you set two imbalances for the distance you want, and somehow you feel that in your muscles. You touch from time to time, you and your love, twisting in sleep. There are rustlings and the sounds of breathing.
Nobody had touched me this night. Nothing breathed here but me. I was dead center in the sleeping field. I woke knowing I was alone, in a tiny sleeping cabin of the Argos, bound from Down to Gummidgy.
And wher
e was Sharrol?
Sharrol was on Earth. She couldn't travel; some people can't take space. That was half our problem, but it did narrow it down, and if I wanted her, I need only go to Earth and hunt her up in a transfer-booth directory.
I didn't want to find her. Not now. Our bargain had been clear, and also inevitable; and there are advantages to sleeping alone. I'll think of them in a moment.
I found the field control switch. The sleeper field collapsed, letting me down easy. I climbed into a navy-blue falling jumper, moving carefully in the narrow sleeping cabin, started my hair, and went out.
Margo hailed me in the hall, looking refreshingly trim and lovely in a clinging pilot's uniform. Her long, dark hair streamed behind her, rippling, as if underwater or in freefall. «You're just in time. I was about to wake everyone up.»
«It's only nine-thirty. You want to get lynched?»
She laughed. «I'll tell them it was your idea. No, I'm serious, Bey. A month ago a starseed went through the Gummidgy system. I'm going to drop the ship out a light-month away and let everybody watch.»
«Oh. That'll be nice,» I said, trying for enthusiasm. «I've never seen a starseed set sail.»
«I'll give you time to grab a good seat.»
«Right. Thanks.» I waved and went on, marveling at myself. Since when have I had to work up enthusiasm? For anything?
Margo was Captain M. Tellefsen, in charge of getting the Argos to Gummidgy sometime this evening. We'd spent many of her off-duty hours talking shop, since the Argos resembled the liners I used to fly seven years ago, before my boss, Nakamura Lines, collapsed. Margo was a bright girl, as good a spacer as I'd been once. Her salary must have been good, too. That free-fall effect is the most difficult trick a hairdresser can attempt. No machine can imitate it.
Expensive tastes … I wondered why she'd left Earth. By flatlander standards she was lovely enough to make a fast fortune on tridee.
Maybe she just liked space. Many do. Their eyes hold a dreamy, distant look, a look I'd caught once in Margo's green eyes.
This early the lounge held only six passengers out of the twenty-eight. One was a big biped alien, a Kdatlyno touch sculptor named Lloobee. The chairs were too short for him. He sat on a table, with his great flat feet brushing the floor, his huge arms resting on horn-capped knees.
The other nonhumans aboard would have to stay in their rooms. Rooms 14-16-18 were joined and half-full of water, occupied by a dolphin. His name was Pszzzz, or Bra-a-ack, or some such unpolite sound. Human ears couldn't catch the ultrasonic overtones of that name, nor could a human throat pronounce it, so he answered to Moby Dick. He was on his way to Wunderland, the Argos's next stop. Then there were two sessile grogs in 22 and a flock of jumpin' jeepers in 24, with the connecting door open so the Grogs could get at the jumpin' jeepers, which were their food supply. Lloobee, the Kdatlyno touch sculptor, had room 20.
I found Emil at the bar. He raised a thumb in greeting, dialed me a Bloody Marriage, and waited in silence for my first sip. The drink tasted good, though I'd been thinking in terms of tuna and eggs.
The other four passengers, eating breakfast at a nearby table, all wore the false glow of health one carries out of an autodoc tank. Probably they'd been curing hangovers. But Emil always looked healthy, and he couldn't get drunk no matter how hard he tried. He was a Jinxian, short and wide and bull-strong, a top-flight computer programmer with an intuitive knack for asking the right questions when everyone else has been asking the wrong ones and blowing expensive circuits in their iron idiots.
«So,» he said.
«So,» I responded, «I'll do you a favor. Let's go sit by the window.»
He looked puzzled but went.
The Argos lounge had one picture window. It was turned off in hyperspace, so that it looked like part of the wall, but we found it from memory and sat down. Emil asked, «What's the favor?»
«This is it. Now we've got the best seats in the house. In a few minutes everyone will be fighting for a view because Margo's stopping the ship to show us a starseed setting sail.»
«Oh? Okay, I owe you one.»
«We're even. You bought me a drink.»
Emil looked puzzled, and I realized I'd put an edge in my voice. As if I didn't want anyone owing me favors. Which I didn't. But it was no excuse for being a boor.
I dialed a breakfast to go with the drink: tuna fillet, eggs Florentine, and double-strength tea. The kitchen had finished delivering it when Margo spoke over the intercom, as follows: «Ladies and gentlemen and other guests, we are dropping out some distance from CY Aquarii so that you may watch a starseed which set sail in the system of Gummidgy last month. I will raise the lounge screen in ten minutes.» Click.
In moments we were surrounded. The Kdatlyno sculptor squeezed in next to me, spiked knees hunched up against the lack of room, the silver tip of the horn on his elbow imperiling my eggs. Emil smiled with one side of his mouth, and I made a face. But it was justice. I'd chosen the seats myself.
The window went on. Silence fell.
Everyone who could move was crowded around the lounge window. The Kdatlyno's horned elbow pinned a fold of my sleeve to the table. I let it lie. I wasn't planning to move, and Kdatlyno are supposed to be touchy.
There were stars. Brighter than stars seen through atmosphere, but you get used to that. I looked for CY Aquarii and found a glaring white eye.
We watched it grow.
Margo was giving us a slow telescopic expansion. The bright dot grew to a disk bright enough to make your eyes water, and then no brighter. The eyes on a ship's hull won't transmit more than a certain amount of light. The disk swelled to fill the window, and now dark areas showed beneath the surface, splitting and disappearing and changing shape and size, growing darker and clearer as they rode the shock wave toward space. The core of CY Aquarii exploded every eighty-nine minutes. Each time the star grew whiter and brighter, while shock waves rode the explosion to the surface. Men and instruments watched to learn about stars.
The view swung. A curved edge of space showed, with curling hydrogen flames tracing arcs bigger than some suns. The star slid out of sight, and a dully glowing dot came into view. Still the view expanded, until we saw an eggshaped object in dead center of the window.
«The starseed,» said Margo via intercom. There was cool authority in her public-speaking voice. «This one appears to be returning to the galactic core, having presumably left its fertilized egg near the tip of this galactic arm. When the egg hatches, the infant starseed will make its own way home across fifty thousand light-years of space …»
The starseed was moving fast, straight at the sensing eye, with an immediacy that jarred strangely against Margo's dry lecture voice. Suddenly I knew what she'd done. She'd placed us directly in the path of the starseed. If this one was typical of its brethren, it would be moving at about point eight lights. The starseed's light image was moving only one-fifth faster than the starseed itself, and both were coming toward us. Margo had set it up so that we watched it five times as fast as it actually happened.
Quite a showman, Margo.
«… believe that at least some eggs are launched straight outward, toward the Clouds of Magellan or toward the globular clusters or toward Andromeda. Thus, the starseeds could colonize other galaxies and could also prevent a population explosion in this galaxy.» There were pinpoints of blue light around the starseed now: newsmen from Down, come to Gummidgy to cover the event, darting about in fusion ships. This specimen is over a mile in thickness and about a mile and a half in length.
Suddenly it hit me.
Whatinhell was the Kdatlyno watching? With nothing resembling eyes, with only his radar sense to give form to his surroundings, he was seeing nothing but a blank wall!
I turned. Lloobee was watching me.
Naturally. Lloobee was an artist, subsidized by his own world government, selling his touch sculptures to humans and kzinti so that his species would acquire interstellar money. Finagle knew they didn'
t have much else to sell yet. They'd been propertyless slaves before we took their world from the kzinti, but now they were building industries.
He didn't look like an artist. He looked like a monster. That brown dragon skin would have stopped a knife. Curved silver-tipped horns marked his knees and elbows, and his huge hands, human in design, nonetheless showed eight retractile claws at the knuckles. No silver there. They were filed sharp and then buffed to a polished glow. The hands were strangler's hands, not sculptor's hands. His arms were huge even in proportion to his ten-foot height. They brushed his knees when he stood up.
But his face gave the true nightmare touch. Eyeless, noseless, marked only by a gash of a mouth and by a goggle-shaped region above it where the skin was stretched drumhead taut. That tympanum was turned toward me. Lloobee was memorizing my face.
I turned back as the starseed began to unfold.
It seemed to take forever. The big egg fluttered; its surface grew dull and crinkly and began to expand. It was rounding the sun now, lighted on one side, black on the other. It grew still bigger, became lopsided … and slowly, slowly the sail came free. It streamed away like a comet's tail, and then it filled, a silver parachute with four threadlike shrouds pointing at the sun. Where the shrouds met was a tiny knob.
This is how they travel. A starseed spends most of its time folded into a compact egg shape, falling through the galaxy on its own momentum. But inevitably there come times when it must change course. Then the sail unfolds, a silver mirror thinner than the paint on a cheap car but thousands of miles across. A cross-shaped thickening in the material of the sail is the living body of the starseed itself. In the knob that hangs from the shrouds is more living matter. There are the muscles to control the shrouds and set the attitude of the sail, and there is the egg, fertilized at the Core, launched near the galactic rim.
The sail came free, and nobody breathed. The sail expanded, filled the screen, and swung toward us. A blue-white point crossed in front of it, a newsman's shit, a candle so tiny as to be barely visible. Now the sail was fully inflated by the light from behind, belling outward, crimped along one side for attitude control.
