Scatterbrain (2003) SSC

by Larry Niven

  Each requires materials we can’t manufacture yet, though such materials are well within theoretical limits.

  Each holds awesome energies imprisoned. After all, each was built to transfer awesome energies to a spacecraft and (in some cases) collect it again by decelerating the spacecraft. Any such device would be a disaster of awesome proportions, if its energies were accidentally released on Earth.

  Most of these skyhooks depend on low gravity and high rotation. The Beanstalk, for instance, won’t work at all on any world in the solar system, barring Earth and Mars. Mars is smaller and spins just as fast.

  And each would be safer, smaller, cheaper, and require less robust materials if built on Mars. If something went wrong, no city would die, and Mars could bear the scars.

  If we are to claim the solar system, we need Mars as a test bed for skyhooks.

  Robert Forward had made an extensive study of orbital tethers. He intended to build and sell them. He started small, with a tether designed to drop a used-up satellite out of orbit.

  IV

  To take the universe, we must learn how to build habitats, and how to reshape worlds. By the time we set our feet on Mars, we will know a little about both.

  The Apollo capsules weren’t much of a habitat. There was no attempt at recycling. There wasn’t room for the kind of exercise that could keep a human being human during years in free fall. Artificial gravity wasn’t even considered. A mission to Mars would need all of that. A habitat on Mars would benefit from all we will have learned from the taking of the Moon.

  V

  We’re already learning how to reshape a world: the Earth.

  We speculate that Mars could be made habitable by releasing buried water or water in hydration, by warming the planet, or by bashing it with comets. (The skyhooks come first. To reach the comets, bringing enough horsepower to hurl them into the inner solar system, we will need easy access to orbit.)

  VI

  It bothers me a little to be so treating a planet as raw material. Arrogance may come naturally to me, but I remember wanting Mars because it was…well, Mars.

  If I’ve slighted your own reasons for claiming Mars, forgive me. My viewpoint may be peculiar. I’ve wanted to walk the surfaces of other worlds ever since I found Heinlein. Any excuse will do.

  VII

  A successful species evolves in many directions. Species that follow one line of development, like humans or horses, are unusual, and it isn’t a mark of success. Where did Homo erectus go, anyway?

  If we do not first destroy ourselves, we will make our own aliens.

  If we intend to take the universe for ourselves, we will need Mars. Our selves will change in the process. The Martians may not remain human. The entities that reach the nearest star may be beyond imagination. The trick is to remain adaptable.

  How to Save Civilization and Make a Little Money

  Jerry Pournelle and I were gearing up to write about parasite control. We’d have set a novel on the Moon and built it around a concept I’ve been revising since (I think) high school.

  Parasite control is needed to keep any enterprise from ballooning into something unaffordable, particularly any government project. It’s terribly important to achieving orbit. Nothing lifts from the ground unless you can keep people from piling their own projects on it. That was what made the X-plane program work: build one device to test one concept. Build and launch it quick, before the parasites notice.

  X-33? X-34?

  So there we were, rewriting the space program yet again…and I realized that the books stacked all around my office, some published, some just manuscripts, were all rewriting the space program. They’re all over the bookstores too: Baxter’s Titan and Voyage; Greg Benford’s The Martian Race; Victor Koman’s Kings of the High Frontier; Michael Flynn’s Star series. The website is currently jammed with speculation on how to make space enterprises work better.

  I told Jerry that that ecological slot is full.

  But it continued to worry me. In my own recent novels I have often rebuilt the space program. Delta Clipper-like craft flew in the background in Destiny’s Road. Rainbow Mars is a fantasy set eleven hundred years from now and based in time travel, but the Space Bureau still has to lie about their accomplishments; they reach Mars via an underfunded version of Bernie Robert Zubrin’s “Mars Direct” scheme.

  If I wanted to write the same novel over and over again, I’d do romances.

  What’s going on here? A. E. Van Vogt never worried about what a spacecraft cost. I don’t think Isaac Asimov did either.

  Nobody ever did until, in the 1950s, Robert Heinlein published The Man Who Sold the Moon. And nobody did again for a long time. Imitating Heinlein used to be normal, but the science fiction writers of the day couldn’t imitate this. None of us had trained for it. The excitement of travel to other worlds is in our nerves and bones, but where is the excitement in economics?

  Then we watched mankind set twelve human beings on the moon for a few days at a time, come home, and stop.

  We saw our space station built in Houston, orbiting too low and too slow, at ten times the cost.

  Thirtieth anniversary of the first man on the Moon, celebrated by grumbling.

  My T-shirt bears an obsolete picture of Freedom space station and the legend, “Nine years, nine billion dollars, and all we got was this lousy shirt,” and it’s years old and wearing out.

  Now is economics interesting?

  Heinlein’s D. D. Harriman used his own major fortune and every possible confidence trick to fund the three-stage spacecraft needed to set a human being (a midget: much cheaper) on the Moon. Heinlein showed the way, and the rest of us began to see the problems. Forty-odd years later, the science fiction community has caught up.

  You could persuade yourself that that’s the answer. One of Randall Garrett’s pseudonyms built the economic foundation for an asteroid belt civilization (and I found it so convincing that I borrowed it). Gerard O’Neill and his students designed huge orbiting habitats, and it all began as an economics exercise. Meanwhile NASA destroyed our last working moonship, laying it out as a lawn ornament, and tried to burn the blueprints too, in a wonderful demonstration of what you can do in space when money is no object.

  In 1980, when it seemed sure that Ronald Reagan would be president and his science advisor would be one of Jerry’s brighter students, Jerry Pournelle gathered about fifty people at my house for an intense weekend. We called ourselves the Citizens Advisory Council for a National Space Policy. We were from every profession that deals with achieving orbit. Our assignment: to create a space program with costs and schedules.

  We met four times during Reagan’s eight years, and twice afterward. We generated the Space Defense Initiative and the renewal of the X-plane program.

  The addition of a few science fiction writers was stunningly effective. We can translate for these guys! Lawyers, corporation heads, plasma physicists, NASA honchos, rocket engineers: they don’t talk like normal people, but they can explain it to me. I myself translated one of our committee papers from lawyerese to English, with Art Dula (the author, a lawyer) hovering at my shoulder, while a party was going on downstairs. It was damn weird, but it came out readable. It’s in N-Space under my title, which they kept:

  “How to Save Civilization and Make a Little Money.”

  The science and engineering communities have also indulged in economics. “Faster, better, cheaper.” Where else would we writers of fiction get our data? The movie Mission to Mars, just out, opened with technology straight from Robert Zubrin’s “Mars Direct.”

  Then it went transcendental.

  “2001: A Space Odyssey” did that too. It started with well-designed technology and sociology. Convincing, realistic. No insane clusters of whizzing asteroids; you can barely spot them. No noises in vacuum, not with Arthur Clarke in charge. Even the worst of today’s movies at least try to match that ideal. And then the movie went transcendental.

>   Is there some reason you can’t tell a story that big, and still find an ending?

  I think I’m onto something here. When you’re out to take the universe, there is no proper ending.

  The conquest of the universe is never where you want it to be. How could it be otherwise? There’s always something more, something next. Sputnik is in orbit? Put up a dog. Television from Mars? Put a camera on a rover! And always and forever, now we send a science fiction writer, or at least a human being, to look around, and touch.

  In reality or in our minds, we will always be rebuilding the space program.

  The Burning City took six years to write and was damned hard work in spots, but—a fantasy set in Los Angeles fourteen thousand years ago—at least it wasn’t rebuilding the space program. I deserve a break today.

  Now I’ll try to turn “The Moon Bowl” into a novelette.

  The Burning City Collaboration with Jerry Pournelle

  In 1992 there were riots. My city of Los Angeles was partly burned. Friends were endangered.

  What does a writer do when he’s pissed off?

  I started a story set fourteen thousand years ago, in the fantasy universe of The Magic Goes Away. There was a city they burned down every few years to placate the fire god…

  It went slowly. It was a hard story to write, with a main character who grows up as a gangland thug and evolves into…something else.

  I hike with Jerry Pournelle and his dog on the hill behind his house. We talk of many things. We talked about The Burning City until it became obvious that I needed him as collaborator.

  And so Jerry (the sane one) came to write his first fantasy. It was his suggestion that the California chaparral as of fourteen thousand years ago was really malevolent.

  We’re working on a sequel, a tale of Whandall Feather-snake’s daughter, Burning Tower.

  They burned the city when Whandall Placehold was two years old and again when he was seven.

  At seven he saw and understood more. The women waited with the children in the courtyard through a day and a night and another day. The day sky was black and red. The night sky glowed red and orange, dazzling and strange. Across the street a granary burned like a huge torch. Strangers trying to fight the fire made shadow pictures.

  The Placehold men came home with what they’d gathered: shells, clothing, cookware, furniture, jewelry, magical items, a cauldron that would heat up by itself. The excitement was infectious. Men and women paired off and fought over the pairings.

  And Pothefit went out with Resalet, but only Resalet came back.

  Afterward Whandall went with the other boys to watch the loggers cutting redwoods for the rebuilding.

  The forest cupped Tep’s Town like a hand. There were stories, but nobody could tell Whandall what was beyond the forest where redwoods were pillars big enough to support the sky, big enough to replace a dozen houses. The great trees stood well apart, each guarding its turf. Lesser vegetation gathered around the base of each redwood like a malevolent army.

  The army had many weapons. Some plants bristled with daggers; some had burrs to anchor seeds in hair or flesh; some secreted poison; some would whip a child across the face with their branches.

  Loggers carried axes, and long poles with blades at the ends. Leather armor and wooden masks made them hard to recognize as men. With the poles they could reach out and under to cut the roots of the spiked or poisoned lesser plants and push them aside, until one tall redwood was left defenseless.

  Then they bowed to it.

  Then they chopped at the base until, in tremendous majesty and with a sound like the end of the world, it fell.

  They never seemed to notice that they were being watched from cover by a swarm of children. The forest had dangers for city children, but being caught was not one of them. If you were caught spying in town, you would be lucky to escape without broken bones. It was safer to spy on the loggers.

  One morning Bansh and Ilther brushed a vine.

  Bansh began scratching, and then Ilther; then thousands of bumps sprouted over Ilther’s arm, and almost suddenly it was bigger than his leg. Bansh’s hand and the ear he’d scratched were swelling like nightmares, and Ilther was on the ground, swelling everywhere and fighting hard to breathe.

  Shastern wailed and ran before Whandall could catch him. He brushed past leaves like a bouquet of blades and was several paces beyond before he slowed, stopped, and turned to look at Whandall. What should I do now? His leathers were cut to ribbons across his chest and left arm, the blood spilling scarlet through the slashes.

  The forest was not impenetrable. There were thorns and poison plants, but also open spaces. Stick with those, you could get through…it looked like you could get through without touching anything…almost. And the children were doing that, scattering, finding their own paths out.

  But Whandall caught the screaming Shastern by his bloody wrist and towed him toward the loggers, because Shastern was his younger brother, because the loggers were close, because somebody would help a screaming child.

  The woodsmen saw them—saw them and turned away. But one dropped his ax and jogged toward the child in zigzag fashion, avoiding…what? Armory plants, a wildflower bed—

  Shastern went quiet under the woodsman’s intense gaze. The woodsman pulled the leather armor away and wrapped Shastern’s wounds in strips of clean cloth, pulling it tight. Whandall was trying to tell him about the other children.

  The woodsman looked up. “Who are you, boy?”

  “I’m Whandall of Serpent’s Walk.” Nobody gave his family name.

  “I’m Kreeg Miller. How many—”

  Whandall barely hesitated. “Two tens of us.”

  “Have they all got”—he patted Shastern’s armor—“leathers?”

  “Some.”

  Kreeg picked up cloth, a leather bottle, some other things. Now one of the others was shouting angrily while trying not to look at the children. “Kreeg, what do you want with those candlestubs? We’ve got work to do!” Kreeg ignored him and followed the path as Whandall pointed it out.

  There were hurt children, widely scattered. Kreeg dealt with them. Whandall didn’t understand, until a long time later, why other loggers wouldn’t help.

  Whandall took Shastern home through Dirty Birds to avoid Bull Pizzles. In Dirty Birds a pair of adolescent Lordkin would not let them pass.

  Whandall showed them three gaudy white blossoms bound up in a scrap of cloth. Careful not to touch them himself, he gave one to each of the boys and put the third away.

  The boys sniffed the womanflowers’ deep fragrance. “Way nice. What else have you got?”

  “Nothing, Falcon brother.” Dirty Birds liked to be called Falcons, so you did that. “Now go and wash your hands and face. Wash hard, or you’ll swell up like melons. We have to go.”

  The Falcons affected to be amused, but they went off toward the fountain. Whandall and Shastern ran through Dirty Birds into Serpent’s Walk. Marks and signs showed when you passed from another district to Serpent’s Walk, but Whandall would have known Serpent’s Walk without them. There weren’t as many trash piles, and burned-out houses were rebuilt faster.

  The Placehold stood alone in its block, three stories of gray stone. Two older boys played with knives just outside the door. Inside, Uncle Totto lay asleep in the corridor, where you had to step over him to get in. Whandall tried to creep past him.

  “Huh? Whandall, my lad. What’s going on here?” He looked at Shastern, saw bloody bandages, and shook his head. “Bad business. What’s going on?”

  “Shastern needs help!”

  “I see that. What happened?”

  Whandall tried to get past, but it was no use. Uncle Totto wanted to hear the whole story, and Shastern had been bleeding too long. Whandall started screaming. Totto raised his fist. Whandall pulled his brother upstairs. A sister was washing vegetables for dinner, and she shouted, too. Women came yelling. Totto cursed and retreated.

  Mother wasn’t home th
at night. Mother’s mother—Dargramnet, if you were speaking to strangers—sent Wanshig to tell Bansh’s family. She put Shastern in Mother’s room and sat with him until he fell asleep. Then she came into the big second-floor Placehold room and sat in her big chair. Often that room was full of Placehold men, usually playful, but sometimes they shouted and fought. Children learned to hide in the smaller rooms, cling to women’s skirts, or find errands to do. Tonight Dargramnet asked the men to help with the injured children, and they all left so that she was alone with Whandall. She held Whandall in her lap.

  “They wouldn’t help,” he sobbed. “Only the one. Kreeg Miller. We could have saved Ilther—it was too late for Bansh, but we could have saved Ilther, only they wouldn’t help.”

  Mother’s mother nodded and petted him. “No, of course they wouldn’t,” she said. “Not now. When I was a girl, we helped each other. Not just kin, not just Lordkin.” She had a faint smile, as if she saw things Whandall would never see, and liked them. “Men stayed home. Mothers taught girls and men taught boys, and there wasn’t all this fighting.”

  “Not even in the Burnings?”

  “Bonfires. We made bonfires for Yangin-Atep, and he helped us. Houses of ill luck, places of illness or murder, we burned those, too. We knew how to serve Yangin-Atep then. When I was a girl there were wizards, real wizards.”

  “A wizard killed Pothefit,” Whandall said gravely.

  “Hush,” Mother’s mother said. “What’s done is done. It won’t do to think about Burnings.”

  “The fire god,” Whandall said.

  “Yangin-Atep sleeps,” Mother’s mother said. “The fire god was stronger when I was a girl. In those days there were real wizards in Lord’s Town, and they did real magic.”

  “Is that where Lords live?”

  “No, Lords don’t live there. Lords live in Lordshills. Over the hills, past the Black Pit, nearly all the way to the sea,” Mother’s mother said, and smiled again. “And yes, it’s beautiful. We used to go there sometimes.”