07-Beowulf Shaeffer

by Larry Niven

"Like this snake's fitting mate." She didn't really. No flatlander is as supple as a crashlander. Raised in Earth's gravity, Sharrol was a foot shorter than I, and weighed the same as I did. Stocky.

  The apartment was already in child mode: rounded surfaces everywhere, and all storage was locked or raised to eyeball height (mine). Tanya was five and Louis was four and both were agile as monkeys. I scanned for anything that might be dangerous within their reach. Louis stared at us, solemn, awed. Tanya giggled. We must have looked odder than usual, though given flatlander styles it's a wonder that any kid can recognize its parents. Why do they change their hair and skin color so often? When we hugged them goodbye, Tanya made a game of tugging my hair out of shape and watching it flow back into a feathery crest. We set them down and turned on the Playmate program.

  The lobby transfer booth jumped us three time zones east. We stepped out into a vestibule, facing an arc of picture window. A flock of rainbow-hued fish panicked at the awful sight and flicked away. A huge fish passed in some internal dream.

  For an instant I felt the weight of all those tons of water.

  I looked to see how Sharrol was taking it. She was smiling, admiring.

  "Carlos lives near the Great Barrier Reef, you said. You didn't say he lived in it."

  "It's a great privilege," Sharrol told me. "I spent my first thirty years under water, but not on the Reef. The Reef's too fragile. The UN protects it."

  "You never told me that!"

  She grinned at my surprise. "My dad had a lobster ranch near Boston . Later I worked for the Epcot-Atlantis police. The ecology isn't so fragile there, but -- Bey, I should take you there."

  I said, "Maybe it's why we think alike. I grew up underground. You can't build aboveground on We Made It."

  "You told me. The winds."

  "Sharrol, this isn't like Carlos."

  She'd known Carlos Wu years longer than I had. "Carlos gets an idea and he follows it as far as it'll go. I don't know what he's onto now. Maybe he's always wanted to share me with you. And he brought a date for, um --"

  "Ever met her?"

  "-- balance. No, Carlos won't even talk about Feather Filip. He just smiles mysteriously. Maybe it's love."

  The children! Protect the children! Where are the children? The Surgeon must be tickling my adrenal glands. I'm not awake, but I'm frantic, and a bit randy too. Then the sensations ease off. The Playmate program. It guards them and teaches them and plays with them. They'll be fine. Can't take them to Carlos's place ... not tonight.

  Sharrol was their mother and Carlos Wu had been their father. Earth's Fertility Board won't let an albino have children. Carlos's gene pattern they judge perfect; he's one of a hundred and twenty flatlanders who carry an unlimited birthright.

  A man can love any child. That's hard-wired into the brain. A man can raise another man's children. And accept their father as a friend ... but there's a barrier. That's wired in, too.

  Sharrol knows. She's afraid I'll turn prickly and uncivilized. And Carlos knows. So why ...?

  Tonight was billed as a foursome, sex and tapas. That was a developing custom: dinner strung out as a sequence of small dishes between bouts of recreational sex. Something inherited from the ancient Greeks or Italians, maybe. There's something lovers gain from feeding each other.

  Feather --

  The memory blurs. I wasn't afraid of her then, but I am now. When I remember Feather, the Surgeon puts me to sleep.

  But the children! I've got to remember. We were down. Sharrol was out of the 'doc, but we left Louis and Tanya frozen. We floated their box into the boat. Feather and I disengaged the lift plate and slid it under the 'doc. Beneath that lumpy jacket she moved like a tigress. She spoke my name; I turned ...

  Feather.

  Carlos's sleepfield enclosed most of the bedroom. He'd hosted bigger parties than this in here. Tonight we were down to four, and a floating chaos of dishes Carlos said were Mexican.

  "She's an ARM," Carlos said.

  Feather Filip and I were sharing a tamale too spicy for Sharrol. Feather caught me staring and grinned back. An ARM?

  I'd expected Feather to be striking. She wasn't exactly beautiful. She was strong: lean, almost gaunt, with prominent tendons in her neck, lumps flexing at the corners of her jaws. You don't get strength like that without training in illegal martial arts.

  The Amalgamated Regional Militia is the United Nations police, and the United Nations took a powerful interest in Carlos Wu. What was she, Carlos's bodyguard? Was that how they'd met?

  But whenever one of us spoke of the ARM that afternoon, Feather changed the subject.

  I'd have thought Carlos would orchestrate our sleepfield dance. Certified genius that he is, would he not be superb at that, too? But Feather had her own ideas, and Carlos let her lead. Her lovemaking was aggressive and acrobatic. I felt her strength that afternoon. And my own lack, raised as I was in the lower gravity of We Made It.

  And three hours passed in that fashion, while the wonderful colors of the reef darkened to light-amplified night.

  And then Feather reached far out of the field, limber as a snake ... reached inside her backpurse, and fiddled, and frowned, and rolled back and said, "We're shielded."

  Carlos said, "They'll know."

  "They know me," Feather said, "They're thinking that I let them use their monitors because I'm showing off, but now we're going to try something a little kinky. Or maybe I'm just putting them on. I've done it before --"

  "Then --"

  "Find a glitch so I can block their gear with something new. Then they fix it. They'll fix this one too, but not tonight. It's just Feather coming down after a long week."

  Carlos accepted that. "Stet. Sharrol, Beowulf, do you want to leave Earth? We'd be traveling as a group, Louis and Tanya and the four of us. This is for keeps."

  Sharrol said, "I can't." Carlos knew that.

  He said, "You can ride in cold sleep. Home's rotation period is fifty minutes shorter than Earth's. Mass the same, air about the same. Tectonic activity is higher, so it'll smell like there's just a trace of smog --"

  "Carlos, we talked this to death a few years ago." Sharrol was annoyed. "Sure, I could live on Home. I don't like the notion of flying from world to world like a, a corpse, but I'd do it. But the UN doesn't want me emigrating, and Home won't take flat phobes!"

  The flatlander phobia is a bone-deep dread of being cut off from Earth. Fear of flying and/or falling is an extreme case, but no flat phobe can travel in space. You find few flat phobes off Earth; in fact, Earthborn are called flatlanders no matter how well they adjust to life elsewhere.

  But Feather was grinning at Sharrol. "We go by way of Fafnir. We'll get to Home as Shashters. Home has already approved us for immigration --"

  "Under the name Graynor. We're all married," Carlos amplified.

  I said, "Carlos, you've been off Earth. You were on Jinx for a year."

  "Yeah. Bey, Sigmund Ausfaller and his gnomes never lost track of me. The United Nations thinks they own my genes. I'm supervised wherever I go."

  But they keep you in luxury, I thought. And the grass is always greener. And Feather had her own complaint. "What do you know about the ARM?" she asked us.

  "We listen to the vid," Sharrol said.

  "Sharrol, dear, we vet that stuff. The ARM decides what you don't get to know about us. Most of us take psychoactive chemicals to keep us in a properly paranoid mind frame during working hours. We stay that way four days, then go sane for the weekend. If it's making us too crazy, they retire us."

  Feather was nervous and trying to restrain it, but now hard-edged muscles flexed, and her elbows and knees were pulling in protectively against her torso. "But some of us are born this way. We go off chemicals when we go to work. The 'doc doses us back to sanity Thursday afternoon. I've been an ARM schiz for thirty-five years. They're ready to retire me, but they'd never let me go to some other world, knowing what I know. And they don't want a schiz making babies."

  I
didn't say that I could see their point. I looked at Sharrol and saw hope in the set of her mouth, ready to smile but holding off. We were being brought into these plans way late. Rising hackles had pulled me right out of any postcoital glow.

  Feather told me, "They'll never let you go either, Beowulf."

  And that was nonsense. "Feather, I've been off Earth three times since I got here."

  "Don't try for four. You know too much. You know about the Core explosion, and diplomatic matters involving alien races --"

  "I've left Earth since --"

  "-- and Julian Forward's work." She gave it a dramatic pause. "We'll have some advanced weaponry out of that. We would not want the kzinti to know about that, or the trinocs, or certain human domains. That last trip, do you know how much talking you did while you were on Gummidgy and Jinx? You're a friendly, talkative guy with great stories, Beowulf!"

  I shrugged. "So why trust me with this? Why didn't you and Carlos just go?"

  She gestured at Carlos. He grinned and said, "I insisted."

  "And we need a pilot," Feather said. "That's you, Beowulf. But I can bust us loose. I've set up something nobody but an ARM would ever dream of."

  She told us about it.

  To the kzinti the world was only a number. Kzinti don't like ocean sports. The continent was Shasht, 'Burrowing Murder.' Shasht was nearly lifeless, but the air was breathable and the mines were valuable. The kzinti had dredged up megatons of sea bottom to fertilize a hunting jungle, and they got as far as seeding and planting before the Fourth Man-Kzin War.

  After the war humankind took Shasht as reparations, and named the world Fafnir.

  On Fafnir, Feather's investigations found a family of six: two men, two women, two children. The Graynors were ready to emigrate. Local law would cause them to leave most of their wealth behind; but then they'd lost most of it already backing some kind of recreational facilities on the continent.

  "I've recorded them twice. The Graynors'll find funding waiting for them at Wunderland. They won't talk. The other Graynor family will emigrate to Home --"

  "That's us?"

  Feather nodded. Carlos said, "But if you and the kids won't come, Feather'll have to find someone else."

  I said, "Carlos, you'll be watched. I don't suppose Feather can protect you from that."

  "No. Feather's taken a much bigger risk --"

  "They'll never miss it." She turned to me. "I got hold of a little stealth lander, Fourth War vintage, with a cold sleep box in back for you, Sharrol. We'll take that down to Fafnir. I've got an inflatable boat to take us to the Shasht North spaceport, and we'll get to Home on an Outbound Enterprises iceliner. Sharrol, you'll board the liner already frozen; I know how to bypass that stage." Feather was excited now. She gripped my arm and said, "We have to go get the lander, Beowulf. It's on Mars."

  Sharrol said, "Tanya's a flat phobe too."

  Feather's fingers closed with bruising force. I sensed that the lady didn't like seeing her plans altered.

  "Wait one," Carlos said. "We can fix that. We're taking my 'doc, aren't we? It wouldn't be plausible, let alone intelligent, for Carlos Wu to go on vacation without his 'doc. Feather, how big is the lander's freezebox?"

  "Yeah. Right. It'll hold Tanya ... better yet, both children. Sharrol can ride in your 'doc."

  We talked it around. When we were satisfied, we went home.

  Three days out, three days returning, and a week on Mars while the ARM team played with the spacecraft Boy George. It had to be Feather and me. I would familiarize myself with Boy George, Feather would supervise the ARM crews ... and neither of us were flat phobes.

  I bought a dime disk, a tourist's guide to Fafnir system, and I studied it.

  Kzinti and human planetologists call Fafnir a typical water world in a system older than Sol. The system didn't actually retain much more water than Earth did; that isn't the problem. But the core is low in radioactives. The lithosphere is thick: no continental drift here. Shallow oceans cover 93 percent of the planet. The oceans seethe with life, five billion years evolved, twice as old as Earth's.

  And where the thick crust cracked in early days, magma oozed through to build the world's single continent. Today a wandering line of volcanoes and bare rock stretches from the south pole nearly to the north. The continent's mass has been growing for billions of years.

  On the opposite face of a lopsided planet, the ocean has grown shallow. Fafnir's life presently discovered the advantages of coral building. That side of the world is covered with tens of thousands of coral islands. Some stand up to twenty meters tall: relics of a deeper ocean.

  The mines are all on Shasht. So also are all the industry, both spaceports, and the seat of government. But the life -- recreation, housing, families -- is all on the islands.

  Finding the old lander had indeed been a stroke of luck. It was an identical backup for the craft that set Sinbad Jabar down on Meerowsk in the Fourth War, where he invaded the harem of the Patriarch's Voice. The disgrace caused the balance of power among the local kzinti to become unstable. The human alliance took Meerowsk and renamed the planet, and it was Jabar's Prize until a later, pacifistic generation took power. Jabar's skin is displayed there still.

  Somehow Feather had convinced the ARMs that (1) this twin of Jabar's lander was wanted for the Smithsonian Luna, and (2) the Belt peoples would raise hell if they knew it was to be removed from Mars. The project must be absolutely secret.

  Ultimately the ARM crews grew tired of Feather's supervision, or else her company. Rapidly after that, Feather grew tired of watching me read. "We'll only be on Fafnir two days, Beowulf. What are you learning? It's a dull, dull, dull place. All the land life is Earth imports --"

  "Their lifestyle is strange, Feather. They travel by transfer booths and dirigible balloons and boats, and almost nothing in between. A very laid-back society. Nobody's expected to be anywhere on time --"

  "Nobody's watching us here. You don't have to play tourist."

  "I know." If the ARM had Boy George bugged ... but Feather would have thought of that.

  Our ship was in the hands of ARM engineers, and that made for tension. But we were getting on each other's nerves. Not a good sign, with a three-week flight facing us.

  Feather said, "You're not playing. You are a tourist!"

  I admitted it. "And the first law of tourism is: read everything." But I switched the screen off and said, in the spirit of compromise, "All right. Show me. What is there to see on Mars?"

  She hated to admit it. "Nothing."

  We left Mars with the little stealth lander in the fuel tank. The ARM was doing things the ARM didn't know about. And I continued reading ...

  Fafnir's twenty-two-hour day has encouraged an active life. Couch potatoes court insomnia: it's easier to sleep if you're tired. But hurrying is something else. There are transfer booths, of course. You can jump instantly from a home on some coral extrusion to the bare rock of Shasht ... and buy yourself an eleven-hour time lag.

  Nobody's in a hurry to go home. They go by dirigible. Ultimately the floatliner companies wised up and began selling round-trip tickets for the same price as one-way.

  "I do know all this, Beowulf."

  "Mph? Oh, good."

  "So what's the plan?" Feather asked. "Find an island with nothing near it and put down, right? Get out and dance around on the sand while we blow the boat up and load it and go. How do we hide the lander?"

  "Sink it."

  "Read about lamplighters," she said, so I did.

  After the war and the settlement, UN advance forces landed on Shasht, took over the kzinti structures, then began to explore. Halfway around the planet were myriads of little round coral islands, each with a little peak at the center. At night the peaks glowed with a steady yellow light. Larger islands were chains of peaks, each with its yellow glow in the cup. Lamplighters were named before anyone knew what they were.

  Close up ... well, they've been called piranha ant nests. The bioluminescence
attracts scores of varieties of flying fish. Or, lured or just lost, a swimming thing may beach itself, and then the lamplighter horde flows down to the beach and cleans it to the bones.

  You can't build a home or beach a boat until the nest has been burned out. Then you have to wait another twelve days for the soldiers caught outside the nest to die. Then cover the nest. Use it for a basement, put your house on it. Otherwise the sea may carry a queen to you, to use the nest again.

  "You're ahead of me on this," I admitted. "What has this lander got for belly rockets?"

  "Your basic hydrogen and oxygen," Feather said. "High heat and a water-vapor exhaust. We'll burn the nest out."

  "Good."

  Yo! Boy, when Carlos's 'doc is finished with you, you know it!

  Open.

  The sky was a brilliant sprawl of stars, some of them moving-spacecraft, weather eyes, the wheel -- and a single lopsided moon. The island was shadow-teeth cutting into the starscape. I slid out carefully, into a blackness like the inside of my empty belly, and yelled as I dropped into seawater.

  The water was hip deep, with no current to speak of. I wasn't going to drown, or be washed away, or lost. Fafnir's moon was a little one, close in. Tides would be shallow.

  Still I'd been lucky: I could have wakened under water.

  How did people feel about nudity here? But my bundle of clothes hadn't washed away. Now the boots clasped my feet like old friends. The sleeves of the dead man's survival jacket tailed way past my hands until I rolled them up, and of course the front and back were in shreds. The pants were better: too big, but with elastic ankle bands that I just pulled up to my knees. I swallowed a tannin secretion dose. I couldn't have done that earlier. The 'doc would have read the albino gene in my DNA and "cured" me of an imposed tendency to tan.

  There was nothing on all of Fafnir like Carlos's 'doc. I'd have to hide it before I could ever think about rescue.

  "Our medical equipment," Carlos had called it; and Feather had answered, "Hardly ours."

  Carlos was patient. "It's all we've got, Feather. Let me show you how to use it. First, the diagnostics --"