N-Space

by Larry Niven

  “So you came out of it with no damage.”

  “Not really. The locusts hurt us. We moved the farming lamps in a hurry, but we took our own good time getting them back in place. That was a mistake. Some flare-hating bugs were just waiting to taste our corn.”

  “Too bad.”

  “And a nest of B-70s killed two children in the oak grove.”

  Captain Borg’s mind must have been elsewhere. “You really reamed Rachel out.”

  “I did,” Curly said, without satisfaction and without apology.

  “She was almost catatonic. We had to take her back up to Morven before she’d talk to anyone. Curly, is there any way to convince her she didn’t make a prize idiot of herself?”

  “At a guess I’d say no. Why would anyone want to?”

  Captain Borg was using her voice of command now. “I dislike sounding childish, especially to you, Curly, but baby talk may be my best option. The problem is that Rachel didn’t have any fun on Medea.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “She won’t even talk about coming down. She didn’t like Medea. She didn’t like the light, or the animals, or the way the fuxes bred. Too bloody. She went through thirty-odd hours of hell with your power plant expedition, and came back tired to death and being chased by things out of a nightmare, and when she finally got to safety you called her a dangerous incompetent idiot and made her believe it. She didn’t even get laid on Medea—”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, it’s trivial. Or maybe it’s absolutely crucial, but skip it. Curly, I have sampled the official memory tape of Medea, the one we would have tried to peddle when we got back into the trade circuit—”

  Curly’s eyes got big. “O-o-oh shit!”

  “It comes to you, does it? That tape was an ugly experience. It’s unpleasant, and uncomfortable, and humiliating, and exhausting, and scary, and there’s no sex. That’s Rachel’s view of Medea, and there isn’t any other, and nobody’s going to enjoy it.”

  Curly had paled. “What do we do? Put Rachel’s equipment on somebody else?”

  “I wouldn’t wear it. No rammer is really manic about her privacy, but there are limits. What about a Medean?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t you have any compulsive exhibitionists?”

  Curly shook his head. “I’ll ask around, but…no, maybe I won’t. Doesn’t it tell you something, that she couldn’t get screwed? What man could go with a woman, knowing she’ll be peddling the memory of it to millions of strangers? Yuk.”

  The crawlers had stopped. Human shapes stepped outside, wearing skintight pressure suits and big transparent bubbles over their heads. They moved around to the ground-effect raft and began opening crates.

  “It’s no good. Curly, it’s not easy to find people to make memory tapes. For a skill tape you need a genuine expert with twenty or thirty years’ experience behind him, plus a sharp-edged imagination and a one track mind and no sense of privacy. And Rachel’s a tourist. She’s got all of that, and she can learn new skills at the drop of a hat. She’s very reactive, very emotive.”

  “And she very nearly wiped us out.”

  “She’ll be making tapes till she dies. And every time something reminds her of Medea, her entire audience is going to know just what she thinks of the planet.”

  “What’ll happen to us?”

  “Oh…we could be worried over nothing. I’ve seen fads before. This whole memory tape thing could be ancient history by the time we get back to civilization.”

  Civilization? As opposed to what? Curly knew the answer to that one. He went back to watching the wall.

  “And even if it’s not…I’ll be back. I’ll bring another walking memory like Rachel, but more flexible. Okay?”

  “How long?”

  “One circuit, then back to Medea.”

  Sixty to seventy earthyears. “Good,” said Curly, because there was certainly no way to talk her into any shorter journey. He watched men in silver suits setting up the frames for the solar mirrors. There was not even wind in the Hot End, and apparently no life at all. They had worried about that. But Curly saw nothing that could threaten Touchdown City’s power supply for hundreds of years to come.

  If Medea was to become a backwash of civilization, a land of peasants, then it was good that the farmlands were safe. Curly turned to Janice Borg to say so. But the rammer’s eyes were seeing nothing on Medea, and her mind was already approaching Horvendile.

  • • •

  • • •

  “…Take a biped that’s man-shaped, enough so to use a tool, but without intelligence. Plant him on a world and watch him grow. Say he’s adaptable; say he eventually spread over most of the fertile land masses of the planet. Now what?

  “Now an actual physical change takes place. The brain expands…”

  “The Locusts” [with Steven Barnes], 1979

  THE LOCUSTS

  [with STEVEN BARNES]

  There are no men on Tau Ceti IV.

  Near the equator on the ridged ribbon of continent which reaches north and south to cover both poles, the evidence of Man still shows. There is the landing craft, a great thick saucer with a rounded edge, gaping doors and vast empty space inside. Ragged clumps of grass and scrub vegetation surround its base, now. There is the small town where they lived, grew old, and died: tall stone houses, a main street of rock fused with atomic fire, a good deal of machinery whose metal is still bright. There is the land itself, overgrown but still showing the traces of a square arrangement that once marked it as farmland.

  And there is the forest, reaching north and south along the sprawling ribbon of continent, spreading even to the innumerable islands which form two-thirds of Ridgeback’s land mass Where forest cannot grow, because of insufficient water or because the carefully bred bacteria have not yet built a sufficient depth of topsoil, there is grass, an exceptionally hardy hybrid of Buffalo and Cord with an abnormal number of branching roots, developing a dense and fertile sod.

  There are flocks of moas, resurrected from a lost New Zealand valley. The great flightless birds roam freely, sharing their grazing land with expanding herds of wild cattle and buffalo.

  There are things in the forest. They prefer it there, but will occasionally shamble out into the grasslands and sometimes even into the town. They themselves do not understand why they go: there is no food, and they do not need building materials or other things which may be there for the scavenging. They always leave the town before nightfall arrives.

  When men came the land was as barren as a tabletop.

  Doc and Elise were among the last to leave the ship. He took his wife’s hand and walked down the ramp, eager to feel alien loam between his toes. He kept his shoes on. They’d have to make the loam first.

  The other colonists were exceptionally silent, as if each were afraid to speak. Not surprising, Doc thought. The first words spoken on Ridgeback would become history.

  The robot probes had found five habitable worlds besides Ridgeback in Earth’s neighborhood. Two held life in more or less primitive stages, but Ridgeback was perfect. There was one-celled life in Ridgeback’s seas, enough to give the planet an oxygenating atmosphere; and no life at all on land. They would start with a clean slate.

  So the biologists had chosen what they believed was a representative and balanced ecology. A world’s life was stored in the cargo hold now in frozen fertilized eggs and stored seeds and bacterial cultures, ready to go to work.

  Doc looked out over his new home, the faint seabreeze stinging his eyes. He had known Ridgeback would be barren, but he had not expected the feel of a barren world to move him.

  The sky was bright blue, clouds shrouding Tau Ceti, a sun wider and softer than the sun of Earth. The ocean was a deeper blue, flat and calm. There was no dirt. There was dust and sand and rock, but nothing a farming man would call dirt. There were no birds, no insects. The only sound was that of sand and small dust-devils dancing in the wind, a low moan
almost below the threshold of human hearing.

  Doc remembered his college geology class’s fieldtrip to the Moon. Ridgeback wasn’t dead as Luna was dead. It was more like his uncle’s face, after the embalmers got through with him. It looked alive, but it wasn’t.

  Jase, the eldest of them and the colony leader, raised his hand and waited. When all eyes were on him he crinkled his eyes happily, saving his biggest smile for his sister Cynnie, who was training a holotape camera on him. “We’re here, people,” his voice boomed in the dead world’s silence. “It’s good, and it’s ours. Let’s make the most of it.”

  There was a ragged cheer and the colonists surged toward the cargo door of the landing craft. The lander was a flattish dome now, its heat shield burned almost through, its Dumbo-style atomic motor buried in dust. It had served its purpose and would never move again. The great door dropped and became a ramp. Crates and machinery began to emerge on little flatbed robot trucks.

  Elise put her arm around her husband’s waist and hugged him. She murmured, “It’s so empty.”

  “So far.” Doc unrolled a package of birth control pills, and felt her flinch.

  “Two years before we can have children.”

  Did she mean it as a question? “Right,” he said. They had talked it through too often, in couples and in groups, in training and aboard ship. “At least until Jill gets the ecology going.”

  “Uh huh.” An impatient noise.

  Doc wondered if she believed it. At twenty-four, tall and wiry and with seven years of intensive training behind him, he felt competent to handle most emergencies. But children, and babies in particular, were a problem he could postpone.

  He had interned for a year at Detroit Memorial, but most of his schooling related directly to General Colonization. His medical experience was no better than Elise’s, his knowledge not far superior to that of a 20th century GP. Like his shipmates, Doc was primarily a trained crewman and colonist. His courses in world settling—“funny chemistry,” water purification, basic mine engineering, exotic factor recognition, etc.—were largely guesswork. There were no interstellar colonies, not yet.

  And bearing children would be an act of faith, a taking possession of the land. Some had fought the delay bitterly. The starship would have been smelling of babies shortly after takeoff if they’d had their way.

  He offered Elise a pill. “Bacteria and earthworms come first. Men last,” he said. “We’re too high on the chain. We can’t overload the ecology—”

  “Uh huh.”

  “—before we’ve even got one. And look—”

  She took a six-month birth control pill and swallowed it.

  So Doc didn’t say: suppose it doesn’t work out? Suppose we have to go home? He passed out the pills and watched the women take them, crossing names off a list in his head.

  The little robot trucks were all over the place now. Their flat beds were endless belts, and they followed a limited repertoire of voiced orders. They had the lander half unloaded already. When Doc had finished his pill pushing he went to work beside Elise, unloading crates. His thirty patients, including himself, were sickeningly healthy. As an unemployed doctor he’d have to do honest work until someone got ill.

  He was wrong, of course. Doc had plenty of employment. His patients were doing manual labor in 1.07 gravities. They’d gained an average of ten pounds the moment the landing craft touched down. It threw their coordination and balance off, causing them to strain muscles and gash themselves.

  One of the robot trucks ran over Chris’s foot. Chris didn’t wince or curse as Doc manipulated the bones, but his teeth ground silently together.

  “All done here, Chris.” Doc smiled. The meteorologist looked at him bleakly from behind wire-rimmed glasses, eyes blinking without emotion. “Hey, you’re a better man than I am. If I had a wound like that, I’d scream my head off—”

  Something only vaguely like a smile crossed Chris’s lips. “Thanks, Doc,” he said, and limped out.

  Remarkable control, Doc mused. But then again, that’s Chris.

  A week after landing, Ridgeback’s nineteen-hour day caught up with them. Disrupted body rhythms are no joke; adding poor sleep to the weight adjustment led to chronic fatigue. Doc recognized the signs quickly.

  “I’m surprised that it took this long,” he said to Elise as she tossed, sleepless.

  “Why couldn’t we have done our adjusting on ship?” she mumbled, opening a bleary eye.

  “There’s more to it than just periods of light and darkness. Every planet has its own peculiarities. You just have to get used to them before your sleep cycles adjust.”

  “Well what am I supposed to do? Jesus, hand me the sleeping pills, wouldja please? I just want to sleep.”

  “Nope. Don’t want anyone hooked on sleeping pills. We’ve got the ‘russian sleep’ sets. You’ll have one tomorrow.” The “russian sleep” headsets were much preferred over chemical sedatives. They produced unconsciousness with a tiny trickle of current through the brain.

  “Good,” Elise yawned. “Sunset and dawn, they both seem to come too soon.”

  The colony went up fast. It was all prefabs, makeshift and temporary, the streets cluttered with the tools, machinery and electric cables which nobody had put away because there was no place for them. Gradually places were made. Hydroponic tanks were assembled and stocked, and presently the colonists were back on fresh food.

  Much more gradually, the stone houses began to appear.

  They blasted their own rock from nearby cliffs with guncotton from the prefab chemical factory. They hauled the fractured stone on the robot trucks, and made concrete to stick it together. There was technology to spare, and endless power from the atomic motor in the landing craft. They took their time with the houses. Prefabs would weather the frequent warm rains for long enough. The stone houses were intended to last much longer. The colonists built thick walls, and left large spaces so that the houses could be expanded when later generations saw fit.

  Doc squinted into the mirror, brushing his teeth with his usual precise vertical movements. He jumped when he felt a splash of hot water hit his back. “Cut that out, Elise,” he laughed.

  She settled back in her bathtub, wrinkling her nose at him. Three years of meager showers on the ship had left her dying for a real bathtub, where she could waste gallons of water without guilt.

  “Spoilsport,” she teased. “If you were any kind of fun, you’d come over here and…”

  “And what?” he asked, interested.

  “And rub my back.”

  “And that’s supposed to be fun?”

  “I was thinking that we could rub it with you.” She grinned, seeing Doc’s eyes light up. “And then maybe we could rub you with me…”

  Later, they toweled each other off, still tingling. “Look!” Doc said, pulling her in front of the mirror. He studied her, marveling. Had Elise become prettier, or was he seeing her with new eyes? He knew she laughed louder and more often than when they had met years ago in school, she the child of a wealthy family and he a scholarship student who dreamt of the stars. He knew that her body was more firm and alive than it had been in her teens. The same sun that had burnt her body nut-brown had lightened her reddish hair to strawberry blond. She grinned at him from the mirror and asked, “Do you propose to take all the credit?”

  He nodded happily. He’d always been fit, but his muscles had been stringy, the kind that didn’t show. Now they bulged, handsome curves filling out chest and shoulders, legs strong from lifting and moving rock. His skin had darkened under the probing of a warm, friendly sun. He was sleeping well, and so was she.

  All of the colonists were darker, more muscular, with thicker calluses on hands and feet. Under open sky or high ceilings they walked straighter than the men and women of Earth’s cities. They talked more boldly and seemed to fill more space. In the cities of Earth, the ultimate luxury had been building space. It was beyond the means of all but the wealthiest. Here, there was land
for the taking, and twelve-foot ceilings could be built. The house Doc was building for Elise—almost finished now—would be as fine as any her father could have built for her. One that would be passed on to their children, and then to their grandchildren…

  She seemed to echo his thought. “One last step. I want a bulge, right here,” and she patted her flat abdomen. “Your department.”

  “And Jill’s. We’re up to mammals already, and we’re adjusting. I’ve got half the ‘russian sleep’ sets back in the infirmary already.”

  The Orion spacecraft was a big, obtrusive object, mace-shaped, cruising constantly across the sky. What had been a fifth of a mile of deuterium snowball, the fuel supply for the starship’s battery of laser-fusion motors, was now a thin, shiny skin, still inflated by the residue of deuterium gas. It was the head of the mace. The life support system, ending in motors and shock absorbers, formed the handle.

  Roy had taken the ground-to-orbit craft up and was aboard the Orion now, monitoring the relay as Cynnie beamed her holotape up. It was lonely. Once there had been too little room; now there was too much. The ship still smelled of too many people crowded too close for too long. Roy adjusted the viewscreen and grinned back at Cynnie’s toothy smile.

  “This is Year Day on Ridgeback,” she said in her smooth announcer’s voice. “It was a barren world when we came. Now, slowly, life is spreading across the land. The farming teams have spent this last year dredging mulch from the sea bed and boiling it to kill the native life. Now it grows the tame bacteria that will make our soil.” The screen showed a sequence of action scenes: tractors plowing furrows in the harsh dirt; colonists glistening with sweat as they pulled boulders from the ground; and Jill supervising the spreading of the starter soil. Grass seed and earthworms were sown into the trenches, and men and machines worked together to fold them into the earth.

  Cynnie had mounted a camera on one of the small flyers for an aerial view. “The soil is being spread along a ten-mile strip,” she said, “and grains are being planted. Later we’ll have fruit trees and shade trees, bamboo and animal feed.”