Scatterbrain (2003) SSC

by Larry Niven

  He had me back by evening. I wandered the territory I’d seen Tuesday. Street music, lots of parks and fountains, a roofless restaurant.

  Thursday: An old industrial site in a deep valley. “They’ve locked up the waterfall”—in pipes running down the cliff to a power plant, all decades old. “Sometimes they let it out.” There’s a turbine on display, designed for not much water and a pressure head of half a mile, with a jet that could cut Superman in half.

  The old captains of industry followed powerful obligations to their workers. Early this century, one noticed his people were going nuts without sunlight in winter. He set up an early cable car system to get his people up to the crest in winter, where the sunlight was.

  We went up and wandered the crest for a while. Wonderful view.

  Up the canyon to the power plant, and the site of the Nazi heavy water plant. Allies tried to bomb it, but the canyon’s too deep. They couldn’t get an angle. Norwegian saboteurs went in, blew it up, went out, a hairy exercise that ran smooth as silk. They later starred in a movie about it. The Nazis fixed the plant, we did bomb it, and the Nazis (believing that they needed heavy water to make their bomb) quit.

  Upslope still, to a dam made with no concrete, just rock. It’s a Norwegian technique. Dinner: an isolated restaurant, wonderful view, an unfamiliar but delicious fish. Then—

  Bruce Pelz had warned me not to leave Norway without seeing a stave church. Bjørn took us to a working stave church at dusk (9 P.M.) It’s truly wonderful, and indescribable.

  Friday: Five in the morning, I woke with an allergy attack. It gets me in the eyes. Cause: fatigue, shortage of sleep. It eased off after four hours or so. I got some shopping in before Bjørn showed up at noon.

  Oslo is surrounded by primeval forest. Bjørn was set to take me walking there. But Intercon was due to start at 6 P.M., and my GOH speech would follow. “Get me to the hotel for a couple of hours on my back,” I said, “or I’ll collapse.”

  Nordik law allows anyone to pick berries in the forest; it’s one reason the forest has to be protected with such ferocity. We ate blueberries and wild strawberries as we went. Bjørn took us to a tremendous view over Oslo.

  Then he got us lost. Three kilometers down a wrong path, in the rain, and back too far, before he realized that he’d been reading his compass with his knife blade directly underneath it. I didn’t make it back to the car. I boarded a bus a kilometer short of that target; sat around ten to fifteen minutes waiting for the bus to move; and saw Bjørn in his car at the next stop.

  The hotel shower was all that I’d dreamed of during the walk in the rain. Heaven.

  I’m afraid I short-changed the speech somewhat. My mind just turned off. But I’d gone for show-and-tell, because of the language gap: I’d tossed stuff in my luggage, Ringworld Game and Comic illustrations, design specs for Dream Park paraphernalia, interesting badges, the TrantorCon Restaurant Guide, Fallen Angels and the T-shirt with the cover, other books: things to pass around. I hope they spoke for me. (I think I’ll try it again at my next convention.)

  Saturday: Everyone in Olso seems to speak English. It was like a standard little convention in some respects. In others, no. They take it for granted that the GOHs will vanish frequently to do tourist things.

  I was lucid again for the morning panel. Then we (Bjørn and Mary Gentle and her husband and some others) went to lunch and the Viking Ship Museum. Viking ships are awesome in the complexity and skill of their creation.

  Sirius magazine had published one of my stories. They fed me Danish beer and Linie Aquavit: chive-flavored vodka that has been shipped to the southern hemisphere and back (across the Line) as a guaranteed means of aging. It’s wonderful.

  Nightfall, 9 P.M.: Heidi Lyshol (the energy source for Oslo fandom) and her husband took me and Mike Jitlov to Emmanuel Vigeland’s Sculpture Garden. This is the right time, she says. See it in half darkness, without swarming tourists. We wandered among over a hundred statues of people at every age and in almost every possible human mood, and not a scrap of clothing among them. Nice, somber mood.

  Sunday: My back was still fine: good enough that I admitted I’d sign autographs. Good enough that I went back to Vigeland’s sculpture garden to see it by daylight. Heidi’s wrong. The statues fit just fine among a seething swarm of tourists. (One artist’s vision shaped all of these, with apprentice help. They have a generic look, as if Vigeland forbade any detail beyond some level.)

  When I reached the U, Mary and her husband were fighting. Swords. Demonstrating a technique they evolved themselves, swordsmanship turned on its side so that nobody gets hurt. Meanwhile, someone had made off with around $900 in convention receipts, a paper bag of Norwegian kroner clearly labled as to value and left sitting at the desk. Oslo is delightfully crime-free, but Intercon may have to invent security real soon now.

  A Soviet publisher brought his wife with him to translate, and his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. He wants rights to some of my books. The baby’s just learning Russian. When her mother begins speaking gibberish, she flies into an instant screaming rage.

  So Daddy would speak; then Mommy would begin to tell me in English what stories were wanted, conditions, terms; and the girl would begin a shrieking fit. She didn’t like me talking either!

  They tried various approaches. Mother retreated, nursed her, got her calm…returned and spoke English, and BOOM.

  The format that ultimately worked must have been fun to watch. Daddy’s carrying the girl, swinging her, soothing her, way the hell at the far end of the hall. Back he comes, and he speaks several paragraphs of Russian to me. Then he’s briskly off with Daughter, out of earshot while Mommy translates. I answer. Daddy swings back for more…a long elliptical orbit….

  He asked me to attend a Russian convention. Annual. In February. Sounds cold. Nineteen ninety-two looks busy for me, so I begged to be asked for 1993….

  (And now Gorbachev’s down and back up, the Gang of Eight Stooges is imprisoned, and who knows?)

  Two o’clock, Heidi takes us off to a different sculptor Vigelund’s mausoleum, “the most secret museum in Europe.” Pass through an outer and inner door: the tomb is dimly lit, with rows of chairs down the center. Vigelund shaped statues inappropriate to a public sculpture garden, and painted the walls with human figures, and skulls, and his own portrait twice, living and dead. Every door handle is a snake in a unique configuration. The urn with his ashes sits over the inner door, under the only complete skeletons in the place: they’re fucking in missionary position. It’s awesome, it’s somber, it shouldn’t be missed.

  As the convention wound down, so did I. After closing, a handful of us retreated to Ellen Andresen’s for dinner. I was nearly comatose. Dinner was late but both good and strange, built around hot cereal with a sour cream base. And Heidi took us (me and Mike Jitlov) home.

  Monday: I packed the bottle of PAN liqueur Bjørn gave me. But I found and bought Linie Aquavit duty-free. Now my backpack weighs a ton.

  The plane takes off at ten-thirty, no sweat, bound south for Copenhagen. I’ll change planes and double back over the North Pole.

  Yeah…but they can’t get our plane to start. From twelve-thirty they’ve postponed to seven. But they’ve arranged to take us all to lunch at Tivoli Gardens. It could be worse. I didn’t phone Marilyn yet; it was 3 A.M. in Los Angeles.

  Three busses reached Tivoli. I’d forgotten where we were bound for, so I just stuck with the crowd…and lost them, and may have gotten two other passengers lost too. Two twenty-year-old girls, one from California, one from Sweden. We did our best to hunt down the restaurant, and finally I bought them lunch at random.

  We wandered around together, then they went off to shop. My energy was dwindling. Music, flowers, games, crowds…and my back was starting to hurt, so I sat down a lot. I got rained on. I’d checked my backpack at the airport, sweater and all. No sweat. I drank a cappuccino under a roof, and waited for sunshine.

  Back aboard a bus at five. The guy in fr
ont of me was a fan; had gone to college with Alex Pournelle; was just starting Brin’s Earth, which I had finished on the trip. He had some data for me if I ever planned to go to Russia. We talked a little. He says he’s very prone to coincidence….

  And SAS had postponed to seven-thirty, to use a plane due in from Japan.

  I asked for the return of the money I’d spent on three lunches, and an SAS man got it for me. I bought a haircut, and a ton of chocolate. I phoned Marilyn.

  It took off on time. They boosted me forward again: reclining seats. The guy next to me was an engineer with an intense interest in the sciences and none in science fiction. A fascinating conversationalist. We all pretended to sleep, as the plane flew through an endless whiteout afternoon….

  And when the flight was over, my back had stopped hurting. I LOVE SAS.

  Marilyn met me, jet-lagged herself on New Jersey time, and drove us home. I opened the bottle of PAN. It’s a Norwegian liqueur made from forest berries, and it’s wonderful.

  Handicap

  I

  Handicapped people are pro-technology. That’s not an opinion; it’s an order. You will vote against neo-Luddites. You will not shut down atomic plants. You need the tools. You need the energy that makes the tools. You need the energy that runs the tools. You need the ingenuity of the people who play with technology. Most of all, the civilization around you must be wealthy, or you will not survive.

  The Sierra Club wants to shut down any form of energy source that works. The Nader bloc tends to agree. You wouldn’t expect a man on a kidney machine to go along with that. It’s surprising that Sierra Club members don’t notice the tools that make it so much easier to hike: belly bands, lightweight fabrics and aluminum structures in the packs, self-inflating mattresses and geodesic tents.

  Stephen Hawking has Lou Gehrig’s disease: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He belongs to a club with damn few members. Hawking made headlines by killing his own theory: he invented quantum black holes, then looked again at the quantum-mechanical implications, and set a lower limit on their size.

  In the couple of decades during which any normal patient would have been dead, Hawking has expanded our understanding of the universe enormously. It takes a wealthy civilization to afford Stephen Hawking; yet no civilization could afford to lose him.

  So, what are we calling a handicap?

  II

  What might our descendants consider a handicap?

  Glasses. Reading glasses. Orthopedic shoes. These are tools to compensate for handicaps; but they are so nearly perfected, and so prevalent, that moderately bad eyes or feet hardly count as handicaps.

  So: tools compensate for handicaps. So what about telescopes, infrared and ultraviolet detectors, radio and TV, radio and X-ray telescopes? Were we handicapped because we could not see by heat waves?

  Yes, we were. We still are, until someone markets a pair of IR/UV glasses light enough to wear on our noses or as contact lenses.

  A book is an ancient prosthetic device, a compensation not only for ignorance but for stupidity and poor memory. A book has its limits—you have to be bright enough to read—but consider the wonderful things you don’t have to figure out because someone already did that, and did the research, and took the risks. Isaac Newton got mercury poisoning while doing his research, but you don’t have to. You don’t have to ruin your eyes on a homemade telescope.

  Consider the artificial limb. If it can be made to do what a real arm or leg can do, there’s no reason why it can’t do other things too.

  Consider an arm and hand with feedback to the nerves, and all the flexibility of a natural arm and hand. Why not give it an override control that will multiply the strength of the machinery by ten? It’s a machine. Machines are strong. The danger is that it might be stronger than the human joint it’s connected to.

  The bone struts in an artificial leg might be designed to include a spring. Unlatch and you’re riding an extremely sensitive pogo stick. Or include a solid fuel rocket. With properly designed prosthetics you could shock hell out of James Bond.

  I used to be a smoker. I’m waiting for a safe way to clean out a lung.

  Psychological tools? Social tools? The social sciences get above themselves when they refer to themselves as sciences, but that may not hold true forever…

  The true handicap, for each of us, may be that we were born too early.

  III

  Comparing ourselves to our ancestors isn’t really fair here. Certain of the blind have been remembered forever, like Homer and Milton; but remember that a blind man’s most important prosthetic device is a friend who can see. We’ve become better at curing blindness, but where we can’t cure it we substitute a trained dog for the friend.

  Throughout most of history the handicapped have tended to die. For the civilizations of the past, caring for the handicapped was a luxury. That statement holds true today…but it’s harder to notice.

  I’m not being sarcastic. (I’ve been accused of that.) A government’s basic necessity is to keep the army happy. Even keeping farmers productive is minor compared to that, as Josef Stalin demonstrated. We are a wealthy civilization—perhaps we are the first wealthy civilization—and we like our luxuries. Voting booths are an expensive luxury. A wheelchair industry is a luxury. Building ramps into our concrete sidewalks is a luxury.

  What will our descendants regard as their necessities, their rights? Perfect health? Perfect eyesight and hearing, replaceable teeth, replacement organs?

  Do you have the right to a dead man’s organs? Maybe. What are we calling dead? His heart is still going but his brain waves are flat? Okay…

  But let’s say he’s been frozen. No heartbeat, no brain waves. He’s in a tank of liquid nitrogen; he expected to be revived when someone finds a cure for whatever was killing him, and also for the damage done by freezing. Let’s speculate that we can learn how to revive him as parts. Now do you own his organs?

  Okay, try this one. Is a patient dead, do the hospitals have a right to his organs, because he has been condemned to death?

  The law says no. Laws can be changed. There are enough healthy organs in Charles Manson to save a dozen lives…or at least, there were the day he was convicted. Because of advances in medicine, convicted criminals on Death Row may make restitution for their crimes, voluntarily or not. But the same argument applies to one convicted of income tax fraud!

  Should you have the right to choose your own age? Your own shape? In John Varley’s “Eight Worlds” universe, a teacher takes a six-year-old body to teach six-year-olds; surgeons transplant hands to a client’s ankles instead of feet, for greater dexterity in free fall; insurance finances his revival from stored memory if he’s killed.

  In Samuel R. Delany’s Nova there were the “cyborg studs.” Plugs at both wrists and your spine link you directly to whatever machine you choose. Your nervous system becomes an automobile, or a shoe factory. Delany’s major villain was handicapped: his body could not accommodate the cyborg studs.

  Direct brain-to-computer link? Stupidity is a handicap that may someday be cured. Computers are like artificial limbs, in that if you can make a computer that thinks as well as a man, there is no reason to stop there. The human link may end as the minor part of the gestalt…

  IV

  You can’t have any of this. It’s all science fiction: it may be reality someday, if somebody makes it so. The point is this—

  What constitutes a handicap is at least partly a matter of circumstances. What you are, where you are, when you are: these are the tools you work with.

  An intelligent being may still make an art form of his life, whatever his handicaps.

  Did the Moon Move for you too?

  At Swampcon (March 1989) there was a late-night panel on “Sex in Microgravity.” We wondered: have there been experiments in free fall fucking?

  Probably not. If we haven’t tried it, the Russ are even less likely to. They’re prudes.

  Of course either group might have e
xperimented in secret. The answer is worth knowing. If they are to our taste—if mating is achieved—then NASA can send up a verifiable husband-wife team. We’d choose a long-term marriage, not a honeymoon, and give the couple privacy. Nothing of the event would appear on the news, save for afterthoughts.

  One attendee remarked, “Nothing else about that mission would ever be noticed!”

  Me: “Yeah, you could run a secret mission in plain sight…”

  COUPLE TO ATTEMPT SEX IN FREE FALL

  NASA Third VP Ernest Pabst also said that a trillion-megaton antimatter bomb would be deployed in an attempt to move the Moon…

  Did the Moon move for you too?

  Hugo Award Anecdotes by Larry Niven for use at the Hugo Award Ceremonies of 1996

  I

  I haven’t won a Hugo Award in twenty years; but there was a year in which I was up for three.

  That’s no record. Bob Silverberg has done the same several times. The trouble was, Jerry Pournelle and I were up for the novel award with Inferno, and were competing for the novelette with “He Fell into a Dark Hole” and “The Borderland of Sol.”

  That night they gave me the award for “The Borderland of Sol.” Then a gopher led me backstage into a concrete maze of stairs. Escher style. Somewhere out front they were announcing the novella awards, and I wanted to hear that. So I was in a hurry, and I followed the running gopher through that infinite maze….

  The worst thing I’d been able to think of was that the only award I’d win would be the one I’d have to take away from Jerry. It had never occurred to me that I would then stumble over concrete steps at a dead run, breaking—not my kneecaps, though that was likely enough—but the Hugo.

  Jerry Pournelle heard my yell of pain and anger. He dashed backstage just long enough to be sure I hadn’t broken a bone, then back to his seat to watch the other awards disappear.