N-Space

by Larry Niven

  “How many of your own? I met Reseda.”

  “Four. She’s the youngest. And one who died.”

  “I guess I’m surprised you moved back to the farm.”

  She shook her head. “I did it right. The children took the curse off the memories. So how are you? You must have stories to tell. What are you doing now?”

  “There’s a party at the spaceport, and we’re the stars. Want to join us?”

  “No. Busy.”

  “Can I come out there? Like tomorrow, noon or thereabouts?”

  He was watching for hesitation, but it was too quick to be sure. “Good. Come. Noon is fine. You remember how to get here? And noon is just past eleven?”

  “And midnight is twenty-two twenty.”

  “Right. See you then.”

  He hung up. Now: summon the Library function on the computer? He wondered how much of the Sauron story was still classified. But a party was running, and a spaceman learned to differentiate: there was a time for urgency and a time to hang loose.

  When he pushed back into the crowd, Maria grabbed his arm and shouted in his ear. “Mayor Anderssen!” She pointed.

  The Mayor nodded and smiled. He was tall, in his late thirties, with pale skin and ash-blond hair and a wispy beard. Terry reached across the table to offer his hand. The Mayor put something in it. “Card,” he shouted. “Temporary.”

  “Thanks.”

  The Mayor circled the table and pulled up a chair next to him. “You’re the city’s guest while you’re down. Restaurants, hotels, taxis, rentals.”

  “Very generous. How can we repay you?”

  “Your Captain has already agreed to some interviews. Will you do the same? We’re starved for news. I talked Purser Laine into speaking on radio.”

  “Fine by me. I’m busy tomorrow, though.”

  “I got a call from a friend of mine, a Brenda Curtis. She says she used to know you—”

  “I just called her a minute ago. Hey, one of her kids—”

  “Reseda. My daughter. Brenda isn’t married, but she’s had four children, and she’s got something going with a neighbor, Bob Maddox. Anyway, she called to find out if I was getting you cards, which I already was.”

  Terry’s memory told him that nuclear families were the rule on Tanith. “An unusual life-style,” he said.

  “Not so unusual. We’ve got more men than women. Four hundred ships wrecked in the Battle. Lots of rescue action. Some of the crews reached Tanith and never went any further. We tend to be generous with child support, and there are specialized marriage contracts. Can you picture the crime rate if every woman thought she had to get married?”

  Tanith had changed.

  Maria handed Terry a drink, something with fruit and rum. He sipped, and wondered.

  Brenda must have called the Mayor as soon as the little girl told her about his first call. He remembered an injured woman trying to put her life back together. She’d been in no position to do spur-of-the-moment favors for others. Brenda had changed too.

  2640A, NOVEMBER [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  “We’re trying to save civilization,” Napoleon’s Purser lectured Terry. “Not individual ships. If Tanith doesn’t have some working spacecraft, it won’t survive until the Empire gets things straightened out. So. We’re giving you…Firebee?—if you want it. The terms say that you have to run it as a merchant ship or lose it. That’s if we decide it’s worth repairing. Otherwise…Well. We’ll have to give any working parts to someone else.”

  Arrogant, harassed, defensive. He was dispensing other people’s property as charity. The way he used the word give—

  They discussed details. Terry’s third list surprised him. He studied it. “Your drives are intact? Alderson and fusion both?”

  “Running like new. They are new, almost.” Terry knew the danger here. Firebee was alive if her drives were alive…and some other ship might want those drives.

  “Well. I don’t know anyone who needs these spares, offhand, except…we’ll record these diagnostic programs. Very bright of you to list these. Some of our ships lost most of their data to EMPs. Can I copy this list?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I can give you a rebuilt fusion zap. You’d never leave orbit without that, would you? We can re-core the hover motors on your #2 boat. Spinner for the air plant if you can mount it. Don’t tell me you can if you can’t. Someone else might need it. You could ruin it trying to make it fit.”

  “I can fit it.”

  “I dare say. Nuliajuk?”

  “Half-breed. Libertarian mother.”

  “Look, our engineers aren’t Esks or Scots, but they’ve been with us for years. So we can’t hire you ourselves, but some other ship—”

  “I’d rather make Firebee fly again.”

  “Good luck. I can’t give you any more.”

  From the temporary port he went directly to the hospital. Lex Hartner was in surgery. Terry visited with Charley until Lex came out.

  “Brenda Curtis invited me to visit her farm with her. Anything I should know? What’s likely to upset her?”

  Lex stared at him in astonishment. He said, “Take a gun. A big gun.”

  “For what?”

  “Man, you missed some excitement here. Brenda said something to a nurse a couple of days after she got here. You know what happened to her?”

  “She doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “She sure doesn’t, and I don’t blame her, but the more she said the more the Navy wanted. She’d have died of exhaustion if I hadn’t dragged her away a couple of times. She was kidnapped by two Saurons! They killed the whole family.”

  “On Tanith itself?”

  “Yeah, a landing craft got down. More like a two-seater escape pod, I guess. I haven’t seen pictures. It came down near an outback farm, way south. The Saurons killed off her family from ambush. They stayed on the farm for a month. She…belonged to one of them.” Lex was wringing his hands. Likely he didn’t know it. “We looked her over to see if she was pregnant.”

  “I should think you bloody would! Can they still breed with human beings?” Rumor had it that some of the Sauron genes had been borrowed from animals.

  “We won’t find out from Brenda. She’s had a child, though. It probably died at the farm. She won’t talk about that either.”

  “Lord. How did she get away?”

  “One went off by himself. Maybe they fought over Brenda. The other one stayed. One day a Weem’s beast came out of the water and attacked them in the rice paddy. It clawed her; that’s how she got the head wound. When she got the blood out of her eyes the Sauron was dead and so was the Weem’s beast. So she started walking. She had to live for two weeks in the swamps, with that wound. Hell of a woman.”

  “Yeah. You’re telling me there’s a Sauron loose on Tanith.”

  “Yup. They’re hunting for him. She took the Marines to the farm, and they found the escape pod and the corpse. I’ve been doing the autopsy. You can see where they got the traits—”

  “Animal?”

  “No, that’s just a rumor. It’s all human, but the way it’s put together…think of Frankenstein’s monster. A bit here, a bit there, the shape changes a little. Maybe add an extra Y gene to turn it mean. I’m guessing there. The high-power microscope’s down.”

  “The other one?”

  “Could be anywhere. He’s had almost a month.”

  “Not likely he’d stick around. Okay, I’ll take a big gun. Anything else I should know?”

  “I don’t know how she’ll react. Terry, I’ll give you a trank spray. Put her out if she gets hysterical and get her back here fast. Other than that…watch her. See if you think she can live on that farm. Bad memories there. I think she should sell the place.”

  2656, JUNE [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  Dinner expeditions formed and went off in three directions. The cluster that took Terry along still crowded the restaurant. A blackboard offered a single meal of several courses, Spartan cooking stra
ngely mutated by local ingredients.

  The time change caught up with him as desserts arrived. “I’m running out of steam,” he told Maria Montez.

  “Okay.” She led him out and waved at a taxi. The gray-haired driver recognized him for what he was. She kept him talking all the way to Maria’s apartment house. She wasn’t interested in planets; it was the space between that held her imagination.

  On the doorstep Maria carefully explained that Terry couldn’t possibly presume on an acquaintanceship of one afternoon (though he hadn’t asked yet). She kissed him quickly and went inside.

  Terry started down the steps, grinning. Customs differ. Now where the hell was he, and where was a taxi likely to be hiding?

  So Brenda was alive and doing well. Friend of the Mayor. Running an orphanage. Four children. Well, well.

  Maria came out running. “I forgot, you don’t have a place to stay! Terry, you can come in and sleep on the couch if you promise to behave yourself.”

  “I can’t really do that, Maria, but if you’ll call me a taxi?”

  She was affronted. “Why not?”

  He went back up the steps. “I haven’t set foot on a world for four months. I haven’t held a woman in my arms in longer than that. Now, we heroes have infinite self-control—”

  “But—”

  “I could probably leave you alone all night. But I wouldn’t sleep and I’d wake up depressed and frustrated. So what I want is a hotel.”

  She thought it over. “Come in. Have some coffee.”

  “Were you listening?”

  “Come in.”

  They entered. The place was low-tech but roomy. He asked, “Was I supposed to lie?”

  “It’s not a lie, exactly. It just, just leaves things open. Like I could be telling you we could have some coffee and then get you a taxi, and we could wind up sniffing some borloi, and…You could be persuasive?”

  “Nuliajuks lie. It’s called tact. My mother made sure I knew how to keep a promise. She wasn’t just a Libertarian. She was a Randist.”

  Maria smiled at him, much amused. “Four months, hey? But you should learn to play the game, Terry.”

  He shook his head. “There’s a different game on every world, almost in every city. I can’t sniff borloi with you either. I tried it once. That stuff could hook me fast. I just have to depend on charisma.”

  She had found a small bottle. “Take a couple of these. Vitamins, hangover formula. Take lots of water. Does wonders for the charisma.”

  Maria made scrambled eggs with sausage and fungus, wrapped in chili leaves. It woke him up fast and made him forget his hangover. He’d been looking forward to Tanith cooking.

  There were calls registered on his pocket computer. He used Maria’s phone. Nobody answered at Polar Datafile or Other Worlds. When he looked at his watch it was just seven o’clock.

  No wonder Maria was yawning. She’d woken when he did, and that must have been about six. “Hey, I’m sorry. It’s the time change.”

  “No sweat, Terry. I’ll sleep after you leave. Want to go back to bed?”

  He tried again later. Polar Datafile wanted him tomorrow, five o’clock news. An interviewer for Other Worlds wanted all three astronauts for two days, maybe more. Good payment, half in gold, for exclusive rights. How exclusive? he asked. She reassured him: radio and TV spots would be considered as publicity. What she wanted was depth, and no other vidtapes competing. He set it up.

  He called Information. “I need to rent a plane.”

  Maria watched him with big dark eyes. “Brenda Curtis?”

  “Right.” The number answered, and he dealt with it. A hoverplane would pick him up at the door. He was expected to return the pilot to the airport and then go about his business. How far did he expect to fly? About forty miles round trip.

  Maria asked, “Were you in love with her?”

  “For about two months.”

  “Are you going to tell her about us?”

  That might put both women in danger. “No. In fact, I’m going to get a hotel room—”

  “Damn your eyes, Terry Kakumee!”

  “I’ll be back tonight, Maria. I’ve got my reasons. No, I can’t tell you what they are.”

  “All right. Are they honest?”

  “I…Dammit. They’re right on the edge.”

  She studied his face. “Can you tell me after it’s over?”

  “…No.” Either way, he wouldn’t be able to do that.

  “Okay. Come back tonight.” She wasn’t happy. He didn’t blame her.

  The land had more color than he remembered. Fields of strange flowers bloomed in the swampland. Huge dark purple petals crowned plants the size of trees. A field of sunlovers, silver ahead of him, turned green in his rear-view camera.

  Farms were sparse pale patches in all that color. In the wake of the Battle of Tanith they had had a scruffy look. They were neater now, with more rice and fewer orange plots of borloi. The outworld market for the drug had disintegrated, of course.

  He should be getting close. He took the plane higher. Farms all looked alike, but the crater wouldn’t have disappeared.

  It was there, several miles south, a perfect circle of lake…

  2640B, JANUARY [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  …A perfect circle of lake surrounded by blasted trees lying radially outward. “A big ship made a big bang when it fell,” Brenda said. She was wearing dark glasses, slacks and a chamois shirt. Her diction was as precise as she could make it, but he still had to listen hard. A Tanith farm girl’s accent probably slurred it further. “We were on the roof. We wanted to watch the battle.”

  “Sauron or Empire ship?”

  “We never knew. It was only a light. Bright enough to fry the eyeballs. It gave us enough warning. We threw ourselves flat. We would have been blown off the roof.”

  They turned east. Presently he asked, “Is that your farm?”

  “No. There, beyond.”

  Four miles east of the fresh crater, a wide stretch of rice paddies. The other farm was miles closer. The Saurons must have gone around it. Why?

  They’d passed other farms. Here the paddies seemed to be going back to the wild. The house nestled on a rise of ground. The roof was flat, furnished with tables and chairs and a swimming pool in the shape of a blobby eagle. The walls sloped inward.

  “You don’t like windows?”

  “No. It rains. When it doesn’t, we work outside. On a good day we all went up on the roof.”

  The door showed signs of damage. It might have been blasted from its hinges, then rehung.

  Lights came on as they entered. Terry trailed Brenda as she moved through the house.

  Pantry shelves were in neat array, but depleted. The fridge was empty. The freezer was working, but it stank. He told her, “There’ve been power failures. You’ll have to throw all this out.” She sniffed; half her face wrinkled.

  He found few obvious signs of damage. Missing furniture had left its marks on the living room floor, and the walls had been freshly painted.

  There were muddy footprints everywhere. “The Marines did that,” Brenda said.

  “Did they find anything?”

  “Not here. Not even dried blood. Horatius made me clean up. They found the escape pod three miles away.”

  Beds in the master bedroom were neatly made. Brenda turned on the TV wall and got Dagon City’s single station, and a picture of Boat #1 floating gracefully toward the landing field. “This works too.”

  Terry shook his head. “What did these Saurons look like?”

  “Randus was bizarre. Horatius was more human—”

  “It looks like he was ready to stay here. To pass himself off as a man, an ordinary farmer.”

  She paused. “He could have done that. It may be why he left. We never saw a Sauron on Tanith. He was muscular. His bones were heavy. He looked…Round shoulders. His eyes had an epicanthic fold, and the pupils were black, jet black.” Pause. “He made sex like an attack.”

 
The smiling faces of Firebee’s crew flashed and died. The lights died too. Terry said, “Foo.”

  “Never mind.” Brenda took his arm and led him two steps backward through the dark. The bed touched his knees and he sat.

  “What did Randus look like?”

  “A monster. I hated Horatius, but I wanted him to protect me from Randus.”

  Could he pass as a farmer? He’d have to hide Randus the monster and Brenda the prisoner, or kill them. But he hadn’t. Honor among Saurons?

  Or…leave the monster to guard his woman. Find or carve a safe house. Come back later, see if it worked. The risk would not be to Horatius. So. “Did Horatius think you were pregnant?”

  “Maybe. Terry, I would like to take the taste of Horatius out of my mind.”

  “Time will do that.”

  “Sex will do that.”

  He tried to look at her. He saw nothing. They were sitting on a water bed in darkness like a womb.

  “I haven’t been with a woman in over a year. Brenda, are you sure you’re ready for this?” He hadn’t thought to ask Lex about this!

  She pulled him to his feet, hands on his upper arms. Strong! “You’re a good man, Terry. I’ve watched you. I couldn’t do better. Do you maybe think I’m too tall for you?” She pulled him against her, and his cheek was against her breasts. “You can’t do this with a short woman.”

  “Not standing up.” His arms went around her, but how could he help that?

  “Is it my face? We’re in the dark.” He could hear her amusement.

  “Brenda, I’m not exactly fighting. It’s just, I still think of you as a patient.”

  “So be patient.”

  She didn’t need his patience. She had none herself. He’d expected the aftereffects of the head wound to make her clumsy. She was, a little. She came on as if she would swallow him up and go looking for dessert. He was appalled, then delighted, then…exhausted, but she wouldn’t let him go…

  He woke in darkness. He wasn’t tempted to move. The water bed was kind to his gravity-abused muscles. He felt the warmth of the woman in his arms, and presently knew that she was awake.