N-Space

by Larry Niven

“How gracefully you put it.”

  “But it looks like a black woman’s hair, so you want black skin. So you spend an hour on the roof every afternoon. Naked?” There were no white areas.

  “Sure.”

  “There was a burn-through over Dagon City, and the EMP destroyed most of the records, but maybe not all. Whatever was left had to say that the Curtis family was mostly black.”

  “Whereas the Maddoxes are white,” she said.

  “That burn-through was important. You had to be sure. I’m betting you caused it yourself. It didn’t have any serious military importance, did it? The pulse wiped out hospital equipment too, so they couldn’t look inside you. Couldn’t see that you aren’t built—”

  “If you say, ‘Not quite like a woman,’ I’ll turn you upside down.” She reached down to grip his ankle.

  “You came down in a two-man escape pod. One XYY Sauron, and you. There wasn’t any Horatius loose for fifteen years. No Miranda either.”

  “Only an XX,” she said. Oh, she felt good lying alongside him. The Saurons weren’t a different species. Gene-tailored, but human, quite human.

  He said, “But you didn’t speak Anglic. Here you were on Tanith with some chance of passing for a…citizen. But you couldn’t speak a word, and you were with a Sauron berserker—”

  “We say soldier. Soldiers and officers. We don’t say Sauron.”

  “Okay.”

  “We killed a family and took over the house. It was still war, Terry. We cleaned up as best we could. Hid one body, a girl about my size, and buried the rest. I painted our bantar cloth armor. Turned on the TV wall and left it on. It didn’t tell me what they were talking about, but I got the accents. Worked naked in the fields, but that didn’t help. It left my feet white up to the knees!”

  “The soldier couldn’t hide, so you had to kill him. Lex found the knife wound. He wouldn’t tell me about it, Brenda.”

  “Lex knows. He delivered Van, our second. Van was a soldier.”

  He couldn’t think of anything to say. Brenda said, “I killed Randus. I found a Weem’s beast and gave him to it. We don’t think much of the soldiers, Terry. I cut a claw off the Weem’s beast and made the wound—”

  “Almost through your skull.”

  “It had to be done in one stroke. And kept septic. And in the jungle I had to climb a tree when I had daylight and take off all my clothes to keep the tan. I waved at a plane once. Too late to hide. If the pilot saw me he must have thought he was hallucinating.”

  “What’d you eat out there?”

  “Everything! What good is a soldier who gets food poisoning? Anything a De Lap’s Ghoul can eat, I can eat.”

  “That’s not in the records.”

  “That’s why I can’t cook. I can’t tell when it tastes wrong, I can’t tell when meat’s rotten. I used recipes till I could teach some of the kids to cook.”

  “You couldn’t talk, but you could fake the symptoms of a stroke. That’s the part I just couldn’t believe—God damn!”

  The left side of her face had gone slack as a rubber mask. She grinned with the other side. “Benda Curris,” she said.

  “Don’t do that.”

  She reached across him and finished the collins in two swallows. “How long have you known?”

  “Maybe fifteen years, but I didn’t know, Brenda. I was still angry. There’s a lot of time to think between the stars. I made up this tale. And worked on the kinks, and then I started thinking I must be crazy, because I couldn’t pick a hole in it. You told the Marines about the Saurons to make them talk to you. They wouldn’t notice how fast your speech improved. They were hanging on every word, trying to get a line on the escaped Sauron, and chattering away to each other. They taught you Anglic.

  “I used to wonder what you saw in me. I’m an outworlder. I couldn’t recognize a Tanith accent. You made love to me in the dark because you’d lost too much of your tan in the hospital—”

  He stopped because her hand had closed hard on his arm. “I wanted your child! I wanted children, and Tarzan would look like he was half outworlder. I didn’t plan the power failure, Terry. Hell, it probably tipped you off.”

  “Yeah, you moved like you could almost see in the dark. And wore dark glasses in daylight. The Tanith sun doesn’t get that bright, love.”

  “Bright enough.”

  “Tanith must have been perfect for you. The sun never gets high. In this gravity everybody’s got muscles.”

  “True, but I didn’t pick Tanith. Tanith was where the ships went. What else did you notice?”

  “Nothing you could have covered up. I talked marriage at you so you switched to Lex. While you were carrying my child.”

  “But I can’t get married. In winter the tan goes away. I have to use tanning lotion and do everything by phone.”

  “What was it like for…you? Before?”

  Brenda sat up. “For Sauron women? All right. I’m second generation. Test-tube children, all of us. Women are kept in…It’s like a laboratory and a harem both. The first generation didn’t work out. The women didn’t like being brood mares, so to speak, and one day they killed half the doctors and ran loose.”

  “Good.”

  “There’s nothing good about any of this. They were hunted down and shot, and I got all of this by rumor. Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t.”

  “They made you a brood mare too, didn’t they?”

  “Oh, sure. The second generation Sauron women, we like having children. I don’t know if they fiddled with our genes or if they just kept the survivors for…for breeding after the revolt. They gave us a TV wall and let us learn. I think the first group was suffering from sensory deprivation. Most of the children were bottled, but we tended them, and every so often they’d let us carry a child to term, after they were sure it’d survive. I had two. One was Miranda.”

  “Survive?” He was sitting up now too, with the remains of his collins.

  “Mating two Saurons is a bad idea. The doctors don’t give a shit about side effects. Out of ten children you get a couple of soldiers and an officer and a couple of girls. They’re the heterozygotes. The homozygotes die. Paired genes for infrared eyes give blindness. Paired genes for fast blood clotting gets you strokes and heart attacks in your teens. You get albinos. You get freaks who die of shock just because the adrenal glands got too big.”

  “Yuk.”

  “Can you see why I don’t want to find the Saurons? But these are good genes—” Her hands moved down her body, inviting him to witness: good genes, yes. “As long as you don’t backbreed. My children are an asset to the human race, Terry.”

  “I—”

  “Six of us escaped. We killed some doctors on the way. Once we reached the barracks it was easy. The XYYs will do anything for us. They smuggled us into four of the troop ships. I don’t know what happened to the others. I got aboard Deimos as a soldier. None of the officers ever saw me. We were part of the attack on Tanith. When I saw we had a good burn-through in the Dagon City shield, the whole plan just popped into my mind. I grabbed a soldier and we took an escape pod and ran it from there.”

  “You’re incredible.” He pulled back to look at her. Not quite a woman…not quite his woman, ever.

  “Terry, did you wonder if I might kill you?”

  “Yeah. I thought you’d want to know where the Saurons went first.”

  “You bet your life on that?”

  “I bet on you.”

  “Fool.”

  “I’m not dead yet,” he pointed out.

  “Bad bet, love. When I knew you knew, I assumed you’d made a record somewhere, somehow, that would spill it all if you died. I couldn’t find it in the city records. But suppose I decided to wipe out everyone who might know? Everyone you might have talked to. Charley, Sharon, Maria—”

  Oh my God.

  “—Lex, Bob because you might have talked to him, George Callahan in case Sharon talked, maybe a random lawyer; do you think I can’t trace your phone c
alls? Okay, calm down now.” Hands where his neck joined his shoulders, fingers behind the shoulder blades, rubbing smooth and hard. The effort distorted her voice. “We Saurons…we have to decide…not to kill. I’ve decided. But you’ve got a…real blind spot there, Terry. You put some people in danger.”

  “I guess I just don’t think that way. I had to know whether you’d kill me, before I told you anything useful. I had to know what you are.”

  “What am I?” she asked.

  “I’m not dead. Nobody’s dead since you reached the hospital.”

  “Except Van.”

  “Yeah. Van. But if any of this got out, you’d be dead and Tarzan would be dead and, hell, they’d probably kill every kid who ever lived with you, just in case you trained them somehow. So.”

  “So,” she said. “Now what?”

  2656 AD, APRIL [FIREBEE CLOCK TIME]

  Firebee approached the Alderson jump point with a load of borloi and bantar cloth.

  Tanith’s sun had turned small. Terry searched the sky near that hurtingly bright point for some sign of Tanith itself. But stars don’t waver outside an atmosphere, and he couldn’t find the one point among many.

  “We made some good memories there,” Sharon said. “Another two minutes…Troops, are we really going to try to reach Sparta?”

  Charley called from aft. “Sparta’s a long way away. See what they buy on Gaea first.”

  Terry said, “I’m against it. Sparta’s got six Alderson points. If they’re not at war they’ll be the center of all local trade. This beloved wreck won’t be worth two kroner against that competition. We might have to join a guild too, if they let us.”

  “Isn’t there a chance the Emperor would buy the data we got from Morningstar?”

  “I’ll run through those records, Captain, but my guess is we’ve got nothing to sell. There won’t be anything Sparta doesn’t have.”

  She nodded. “Okay. Jumping now.”

  And Firebee was gone.

  Jerry Pournelle says I invented the Sauron supermen for THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE. I don’t remember. I did not [then!] have any mental portrait of these super-soldiers. It was just words.

  A year ago he told me he was putting together an anthology of stories of the Sauron supermen. Would I like to get in on that?

  I try not to make a promise until I know I can keep it. So we started downstairs for coffee…and I was beginning to describe a story before we hit bottom.

  My pleasure in my own stories does not always depend on character development; but I am well satisfied with Brenda.

  • • •

  • • •

  He had miscalculated, the blithering toad—a moon is too big a thing for one man’s revenge! Its weight would destroy a world for one man’s pride!

  And then it was drifting down, down like a monstrous soap bubble—Shoogar hadn’t miscalculated—down to where Purple capered on the black-scarred hill.

  THE FLYING SORCERERS [with David Gerrold], 1971

  THE RETURN OF

  WILLIAM PROXMIRE

  Through the peephole in Andrew’s front door the man made a startling sight.

  He looked to be in his eighties. He was breathing hard and streaming sweat. He seemed slightly more real than most men: photogenic as hell, tall and lean, with stringy muscles and no potbelly, running shoes and a day pack and a blue windbreaker, and an open smile. The face was familiar, but from where?

  Andrew opened the front door but left the screen door locked. “Hello?”

  “Doctor Andrew Minsky?”

  “Yes.” Memory clicked. “William Proxmire, big as life.”

  The ex-Senator smiled acknowledgment. “I’ve only just finished reading about you in the Tribune, Dr. Minsky. May I come in?”

  It had never been Andrew Minsky’s ambition to invite William Proxmire into his home. Still—“Sure. Come in, sit down, have some coffee. Or do your stretches.” Andrew was a runner himself when he could find the time.

  “Thank you.”

  Andrew left him on the rug with one knee pulled against his chest. From the kitchen he called, “I never in my life expected to meet you face to face. You must have seen the article on me and Tipler and Penrose?”

  “Yes. I’m prepared to learn that the media got it all wrong.”

  “I bet you are. Any politician would. Well, the Tribune implied that what we’ve got is a time machine. Of course we don’t. We’ve got a schematic based on a theory. Then again, it’s the new improved version. It doesn’t involve an infinitely long cylinder that you’d have to make out of neutronium—”

  “Good. What would it cost?”

  Andrew Minsky sighed. Had the politician even recognized the reference? He said, “Oh…hard to say.” He picked up two cups and the coffee pot and went back in. “Is that it? You came looking for a time machine?”

  The old man was sitting on the yellow rug with his legs spread wide apart and his fingers grasping his right foot. He released, folded his legs heel to heel, touched forehead to toes, held, then stood up with a sound like popcorn popping. He said, “Close enough. How much would it cost?”

  “Depends on what you’re after. If you—”

  “I can’t get you a grant if you can’t name a figure.”

  Andrew set his cup down very carefully. He said, “No, of course not.”

  “I’m retired now, but people still owe me favors. I want a ride. One trip. What would it cost?”

  Andrew hadn’t had enough coffee yet. He didn’t feel fully awake. “I have to think out loud a little. Okay? Mass isn’t a problem. You can go as far back as you like if…mmm. Let’s say under sixty years. Cost might be twelve, thirteen million if you could also get us access to the proton-antiproton accelerator at Washburn University, or maybe CERN in Switzerland. Otherwise we’d have to build that too. By the way, you’re not expecting to get younger, are you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Good. The theory depends on maneuverings between event points. You don’t ever go backward. Where and when, Senator?”

  William Proxmire leaned forward with his hands clasped. “Picture this. A Navy officer walks the deck of a ship, coughing, late at night in the 1930s. Suddenly an arm snakes around his neck, a needle plunges into his buttocks—”

  “The deck of a ship at sea?”

  Proxmire nodded, grinning.

  “You’re just having fun, aren’t you? Something to do while jogging, now that you’ve retired.”

  “Put it this way,” Proxmire said. “I read the article. It linked up with an old daydream of mine. I looked up your address. You were within easy running distance. I hope you don’t mind?”

  Oddly enough, Andrew found he didn’t. Anything that happened before his morning coffee was recreation.

  So dream a little. “Deck of a moving ship. I was going to say it’s ridiculous, but it isn’t. We’ll have to deal with much higher velocities. Any point on the Earth’s surface is spinning at up to half a mile per second and circling the sun at eighteen miles per. In principle I think we could solve all of it with one stroke. We could scan one patch of deck, say, over a period of a few seconds, then integrate the record into the program. Same coming home.”

  “You can do it?”

  “Well, if we can’t solve that one we can’t do anything else either. You’d be on a tight schedule, though. Senator, what’s the purpose of the visit?”

  “Have you ever had daydreams about a time machine and a scope-sighted rifle?”

  Andrew’s eyebrows went up. “Sure, what little boy hasn’t? Hitler, I suppose? For me it was always Lyndon Johnson. Senator, I do not commit murder under any circumstances.”

  “A time machine and a scope-sighted rifle, and me,” William Proxmire said dreamily. “I get more anonymous letters than you’d believe, even now. They tell me that every space advocate daydreams about me and a time machine and a scope-sighted rifle. Well, I started daydreaming too, but my fantasy involves a time machine and a hypod
ermic full of antibiotics.”

  Andrew laughed. “You’re plotting to do someone good behind his back?”

  “Right.”

  “Who?”

  “Robert Anson Heinlein.”

  All laughter dropped away. “Why?”

  “It’s a good deed, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “You know the name? Over the past forty years or so I’ve talked to a great many people in science and in the space program. I kept hearing the name Robert Heinlein. They were seduced into science because they read Heinlein at age twelve. These were the people I found hard to deal with. No grasp of reality. Fanatics.”

  Andrew suspected that the Senator had met more of these than he realized. Heinlein spun off ideas at a terrific rate. Other writers picked them up…along with a distrust for arrogance combined with stupidity or ignorance, particularly in politicians.

  “Well, Heinlein’s literary career began after he left the Navy because of lung disease.”

  “You’re trying to destroy the space program,”

  “Will you help?”

  Andrew was about to tell him to go to hell. He didn’t. “I’m still talking. Why do you want to destroy the space program?”

  “I didn’t, at first. I was opposed to waste,” Proxmire said. “My colleagues, they’ll spend money on any pet project, as if there was a money tree out there somewhere—”

  “Milk price supports,” Andrew said gently. For several decades now, the great state of Wisconsin had taken tax money from the other states so that the price they paid for milk would stay up.

  Proxmire’s lips twitched. “Without milk price supports, there would be places where families with children can’t buy milk.”

  “Why?”

  The old man shook his head hard. “I’ve just remembered that I don’t have to answer that question anymore. My point is that the government has spent far more taking rocks from the Moon and photographs from Saturn. Our economy would be far healthier if that money had been spent elsewhere.”

  “I’d rather shoot Lyndon. Eliminate welfare. Save a lot more money that way.”