by Larry Niven
“Let me look.” Jill bent over him. She probed him a bit, then set herself and pulled hard and steadily on his arm. Blank Sign yelled in pain and despair.
“That’ll do it.” Jill sounded satisfied. “How does it feel?”
“It doesn’t hurt as much.” He smiled, almost.
“What happened?”
“They started pushing me and kicking me to make me go away. I was doing it, I was walking away. I was. Then someone snatched away my sign—” He stopped for a moment, then went off at a tangent. “I wasn’t hurting anyone with my sign. I’m a Psych Major. I’m writing a thesis on what people read into a blank sign. Like the blank sheets in the Rorschach tests.”
“What kind of reactions do you get?”
“Usually hostile. But nothing like that.” Blank Sign sounded bewildered. “Wouldn’t you think a Free Park is the one place you’d find freedom of speech?”
Jill wiped at his face with a tissue from Glenda Hawthorne’s purse. She said, “Especially when you’re not saying anything. Hey, Ron, tell us more about your government by anarchy.”
Ron cleared his throat. “I hope you’re not judging it by this. King’s Free Park hasn’t been an anarchy for more than a couple of hours. It needs time to develop.”
Glenda Hawthorne and Blank Sign must have wondered what the hell he was talking about. I wished him joy in explaining it to them, and wondered if he would explain who had knocked down the copseyes.
This field would be a good place to spend the night. It was open, with no cover and no shadows, no way for anyone to sneak up on us.
And I was learning to think like a true paranoid.
We lay on wet grass, sometimes dozing, sometimes talking. Two other groups no bigger than ours occupied the jousting field. They kept their distance, we kept ours. Now and then we heard voices, and knew that they were not asleep; not all at once, anyway.
Blank Sign dozed restlessly. His ribs were giving him trouble, though Jill said none of them were broken. Every so often he whimpered and tried to move and woke himself up. Then he had to hold himself still until he fell asleep again.
“Money,” said Jill. “It takes a government to print money.”
“But you could get IOUs printed. Standard denominations, printed for a fee and notarized. Backed by your good name.”
Jill laughed softly. “Thought of everything, haven’t you? You couldn’t travel very far that way.”
“Credit cards, then.”
I had stopped believing in Ron’s anarchy. I said, “Ron, remember the girl in the long blue cloak?”
A little gap of silence.
“Yah?”
“Pretty, wasn’t she? Fun to watch.”
“Granted.”
“If there weren’t any laws to stop you from raping her, she’d be muffled to the ears in a long dress and carrying a tear gas pen. What fun would that be? I like the nude look. Look how fast it disappeared after the copseyes fell.”
“Mm-m,” said Ron.
The night was turning cold. Faraway voices; occasional distant shouts, came like thin gray threads in a black tapestry of silence. Mrs. Hawthorne spoke into that silence.
“What was that boy really saying with his blank sign?”
“He wasn’t saying anything,” said Jill.
“Now, just a minute, dear. I think he was, even if he didn’t know it.” Mrs. Hawthorne talked slowly, using the words to shape her thoughts. “Once there was an organization to protest the forced contraception bill. I was one of them. We carried signs for hours at a time. We printed leaflets. We stopped people passing so that we could talk to them. We gave up our time, we went to considerable trouble and expense, because we wanted to get our ideas across.
“Now, if a man had joined us with a blank sign, he would have been saying something.
“His sign says that he has no opinion. If he joins us, he says that we have no opinion either. He’s saying our opinions aren’t worth anything.”
I said, “Tell him when he wakes up. He can put it in his notebook.”
“But his notebook is wrong. He wouldn’t push his blank sign in among people he agreed with, would he?”
“Maybe not.”
“I … suppose I don’t like people with no opinions.” Mrs. Hawthorne stood up. She had been sitting tailor-fashion for some hours. “Do you know if there’s a pop machine nearby?”
There wasn’t, of course. No private company would risk getting their machines smashed once or twice a day. But she had reminded the rest of us that we were thirsty. Eventually we all got up and trooped away in the direction of the fountain.
All but Blank Sign.
I’d liked that blank sign gag. How odd, how ominous, that so basic a right as freedom of speech could depend on so slight a thing as a floating copseye.
I was thirsty.
The Park was bright by city lights, crossed by sharp-edged shadows. In such light it seems that one can see much more than he really can. I could see into every shadow; but, though there were stirrings all around us, I could see nobody until he moved. We four, sitting under an oak with our backs to the tremendous trunk, must be invisible from any distance.
We talked little. The Park was quiet except for occasional laughter from the fountain.
I couldn’t forget my thirst. I could feel others being thirsty around me. The fountain was right out there in the open, a solid block of concrete with five men around it.
They were dressed alike, in paper shorts with big pockets. They looked alike: like first-string athletes. Maybe they belonged to the same order, or frat, or ROTC class.
They had taken over the fountain.
When someone came to get a drink, the tall ash-blond one would step forward with his arm held stiffly out, palm forward. He had a wide mouth and a grin that might otherwise have been infectious, and a deep, echoing voice. He would intone, “Go back. None may pass here but the immortal Cthulhu—” or something equally silly.
Trouble was, they weren’t kidding. Or: they were kidding, but they wouldn’t let anyone have a drink.
When we arrived, a girl dressed in a towel had been trying to talk some sense into them. It hadn’t worked. It might even have boosted their egos: a lovely half-naked girl begging them for water. Eventually she’d given up and gone away.
In that light her hair might have been red. I hoped it was the girl in the cloak.
And a beefy man in a yellow business jumper had made the mistake of demanding his Rights. It was not a night for Rights. The blond kid had goaded him into screaming insults, a stream of unimaginative profanity, which ended when he tried to hit the blond kid. Then three of them had swarmed over him. The man had left crawling, moaning of police and lawsuits.
Why hadn’t somebody done something?
I had watched it all from sitting position. I could list my own reasons. One: it was hard to face the fact that a copseye would not zap them both, any second now. Two: I didn’t like the screaming fat man much. He talked dirty. Three: I’d been waiting for someone else to step in.
Mrs. Hawthorne said, “Ronald, what time is it?”
Ron may have been the only man in King’s Free Park who knew the time. People generally left their valuables in lockers at the entrances. But years ago, when Ron was flush with money from the sale of the engraved beer bottles, he’d bought an implant-watch. He told time by one red mark and two red lines glowing beneath the skin of his wrist.
We had put the women between us, but I saw the motion as he glanced at his wrist. “Quarter of twelve.”
“Don’t you think they’ll get bored and go away? It’s been twenty minutes since anyone tried to get a drink,” Mrs. Hawthorne said.
Jill shifted against me in the dark. “They can’t be any more bored than we are. I think they’re get bored and stay anyway. Besides—” She stopped.
I said, “Besides that, we’re thirty now.”
“Right”
“Ron, have you seen any sign of those rock throwers you col
lected? Especially the one who knocked down the copseye.”
“No.”
I wasn’t surprised. In this darkness? “Do you remember his…” and I didn’t even finish.
“… Yes!” Ron said suddenly.
“You’re kidding.”
“No. His name was Bugeyes. You don’t forget a name like that.”
“I take it he had bulging eyes?”
“I didn’t notice.”
Well it was worth a try. I stood and cupped my hands for a megaphone and shouted, “Bugeyes!”
One of the Water Monopoly shouted, “Let’s keep the noise down out there!”
“Bugeyes!”
A chorus of remarks from the Water Monopoly. “Strange habits these peasants—” “Most of them are just thirsty. This character—”
From off to the side: “What do you want?”
“We want to talk to you! Stay where you are!” To Ron I said, “Come on.” To Jill and Mrs. Hawthorne, “Stay here. Don’t get involved.”
We moved out into the open space between us and Bugeyes’ voice.
Two of the five kids came immediately to intercept us. They must have been bored, all right, and looking for action.
We ran for it. We reached the shadows of the trees before those two reached us. They stopped, laughing like maniacs, and moved back to the fountain.
Ron and I, we lay on our bellies in the shadows of low bushes. Across too much shadowless grass, four men in paper shorts stood at parade rest at the four corners of the fountain. The fifth man watched for a victim.
A boy walked out between us into the moonlight. His eyes were shining, big, expressive eyes, maybe a bit too prominent. His hands were big, too—with knobby knuckles. One hand was full of acorns.
He pitched them rapidly, one at a time, overhand. First one, then another of the Water Monopoly twitched and looked in our direction. Bugeyes kept throwing.
Quite suddenly, two of them started toward us at a run. Bugeyes kept throwing until they were almost on him; then he threw his acorns in a handful and dived into the shadows.
The two of them ran between us. We let the first go by: the wide-mouthed blond spokesman, his expression low and murderous now. The other was short and broad-shouldered, an intimidating silhouette, seemingly all muscle. A tackle. I stood up in front of him, expecting him to stop in surprise; and he did, and I hit him in the mouth as hard as I could.
He stepped back in shock. Ron wrapped an arm around his throat.
He bucked. Instantly. Ron hung on. I did something I’d seen often enough on television: linked my fingers and brought both hands down on the back of his neck.
The blond spokesman should be back by now; and I turned, and he was. He was on me before I could get my hands up. We rolled on the ground, me with my arms pinned to my sides,him unable to use his hands without letting go. It was lousy planning for both of us. He was squeezing the breath out of me. Ron hovered over us, waiting for a chance to hit him.
Suddenly there were others, a lot of others. Three of them pulled the blond kid off me, and a beefy, bloody man in a yellow business jumper stepped forward and crowned him with a rock.
The blond kid went limp.
The man squared off and threw a straight left hook with the rock in his hand. The blond kid’s head snapped back, fell forward.
I yelled, “Hey!” jumped forward, got hold of the arm that held the rock.
Someone hit me solidly in the side of the neck.
I dropped. It felt like all my strings had been cut. Someone was helping me to my feet—Ron—voices babbling in whispers, one shouting, “Get him—”
I couldn’t see the blond kid. The other one, the tackle, was up and staggering away. Shadows came from between the trees to play pileup on him. The woods were alive, and it was just a little patch of woods. Full of angry, thirsty people.
Bugeyes reappeared, grinning widely. “Now what? Go somewhere else and try it again?”
“Oh, no. It’s getting very vicious out tonight. Ron, we’ve got to stop them. They’ll kill him!”
“It’s a Free Park. Can you stand now?”
“Ron, they’ll kill him!”
The rest of the Water Trust was charging to the rescue. One of them had a tree branch with the leaves stripped off. Behind them, shadows converged on the fountain.
We fled.
I had to stop after a dozen paces. My head was trying to explode. Ron looked back anxiously, but I waved him on. Behind me the man with the branch broke through the trees and ran toward me to do murder.
Behind him, all the noise suddenly stopped.
I braced myself for the blow.
And fainted.
He was lying across my legs, with the branch still in his hand. Jill and Ron were pulling at my shoulders. A pair of golden moons floated overhead.
I wriggled loose. I felt my head. It seemed intact.
Ron said, “The copseyes zapped him before he got to you.”
“What about the others? Did they kill them?”
“I don’t know.” Ron ran his hands through his hair. “I was wrong. Anarchy isn’t stable. It comes apart too easily.”
“Well, don’t do any more experiments. Okay?”
People were beginning to stand up. They streamed toward the exits, gathering momentum, beneath the yellow gaze of the copseyes.
Afterthoughts
Near thirty years ago I was just getting into the swing of constructive daydreaming: letting my imagination flow until I had something, then guiding it.
A violent picture ran through my mind, with no story around it at first. I saw men building a campfire out of what they did not know to be stage tree logs ...
The stage tree came from World of Ptavvs. I had developed an elaborate background for the race that ruled the galaxy over a billion years ago. The stage tree was the cheapest part of their spacecraft launch industry, an organically grown solid fuel rocket: tree on the outside, chemicals in the core around a star-shaped hollow.
It bothered me, losing all those fascinating life-forms .. .
... The fire catches slowly, then burns briskly. Suddenly the logs are going off like so much dynamite!
Well, why shouldn't some of those life-forms have survived in evolved form?
A Relic of the Empire was set in Beowulf Shaeffer's time, but it linked Lucas Garner's era to the cosmos of the Man-Kzin Wars and after. From that point on I was elaborating a future history. The kzinti were already involved via "The Warriors." I set A Gift from Earth in an intermediate era. In Ringworld even the sunflowers of Slaver times were found to have survived. Early tales of planetary exploration became part of the fabric.
It was fun fitting pieces together.
In 1968 or so Norman Spinrad persuaded me that restricting my stories to Known Space was stunting my growth as a writer. So I gave it up. Well, I did! A few days later I started writing Ringworld.
Writing Ringworld made me realize how tangled and complex my basic assumptions had become. There were too many unlikely miracles left over from individual stories: stasis fields, teleportation booths, an invulnerable spacecraft hull, Teela Brown, made lucky by generations of a puppeteer breeding program. Every story set later in time must be examined for reasons why a transfer booth or stasis field or General Products hull, or sheer luck, will not solve the problem.
The Ringworld was settled, as was Earth, by Pak breeders and had been built by Pak protectors. But the story was too complex already; I couldn't open that topic, too! In Ringworld I let Louis Wu deduce the wrong answer.
Protectors didn't surface on the Ringworld until The Ringworld Engineers.
It took me twenty-five years to really find the handle on the Teela Brown gene. It's there, in The Ringworld Throne.
I like to leave the playground open when I leave. It delights me when readers go further than the story and begin to rebuild the playground equipment. I pass on a few interesting suggestions from readers:
Mathematically, the Ringworld can b
e treated very simply, as a suspension bridge with no endpoints. The Ringworld floor (now called scrith) needs a tensile strength equivalent to the force that holds an atomic nucleus together. MIT students noticed the Ringworld's instability right away, and a high school class in Florida noticed that most of the topsoil would end up in the sea bottoms in a few thousand years. For them I designed the Ringworld's attitude jets and flup circulation system.
A metal base with a stasis field around it can be used as the floor of a settlement on an antimatter planet.
Hank Stine suggested Matt Keller's interestingly limited psychic power, later known as "Plateau eyes."
Dan Alderson published two thousand words on the Grog problem as raised in Handicap. His conclusion: the Grogs can be controlled, if need be, by Bandersnatchi (as first seen in World of Ptavvs.) The dinosaur-sized sapient creatures are demonstrably immune to hypnotic telepathy. However, they must be spacelifted to Jinx.
"There Is a Tide" was suggested in a conversation with Tom Digby and Dan Alderson. Dan also gave me details for the meteor defense used in The Ringworld Engineers. I miss him a lot.
Many readers have done mathematical treatments of the problem raised in the short story "Neutron Star." Maximum stress: a million gees at perihelion, at Shaeffer's head and feet, experienced for a very short time. But Shaeffer's ship leaves the neutron star spinning outrageously and keeps the spin I Shaeffer won't survive unless the ship's been programmed to shed that spin. See Crashlander to see why General Products would have done that.
For quick access to details of Known Space, see Chaosium's old Ringworld game or The Guide to Larry Niven's Ringworld by Kevin Stein and The Man-Kzin Wars, eight volumes and counting, all from Baen Books. But these books include ideas that were not mine. For my ideas alone, use the Timeline and Bibliography in this book, absolutely current as of October 1995.
In an early version of Tales of Known Space I told you that the series was complete and invited you to dream up your own stories.
I should have phrased that better! The invitation is to daydream, to criticize or elaborate, to use the playground equipment to your heart's content... not to violate my copyrights, for Kdapt's sake! The Man-Kzin Wars are the only legitimate source of Known Space stories not written by Larry Niven, and I'm the editor; the writers enter by invitation only.