The World of Ptavvs

by Larry Niven

  At twenty hours the cube flickered and was transparent. There was a cheer as Jansky and Snyder hurried forward. As he got closer Jansky saw that the statue had fallen forward, and was no longer under the contact helmet.

  Snyder frowned. Jansky had done a good job of describing the experiment. Now he wondered: Was that sphere really where the alien kept its brain? If it wasn’t, the experiment would be a failure. Even dolphins were deceptive that way. The brain was not in the bulging ‘forehead’, but behind the blowhole.

  Larry Greenberg was sitting up. Even from here he looked bad. His eyes were glassy, unfocused; he made no move to stand up. He looks mad, thought Dorcas Jansky, hoping that Snyder wouldn’t think so. But Snyder was obviously worried.

  Larry climbed to his feet with a peculiar rolling motion. He seemed to stumble, recovered, tottered to the edge of the wire curtain. He looked like he was walking on raw eggs, trying not to break them. He stooped like a weight lifter, bending his knees and not his back, and picked up something from where it lay beside the fallen statue. As Jansky reached the wire Larry turned to him with the thing in his hands.

  Jansky screamed. He was blind! and the skin of his face was coming apart! He threw his arms over his face, feeling the same torment in his arms, and turned to run. Agony lashed his back. He ran until he hit the wall.

  A moment earlier Judy had been sound asleep. Now she was wide awake, sitting straight up in bed, eyes searching the dark for—she didn’t know what. She groped for the light switch, but it wasn’t in the right place. Her swinging arm couldn’t even find the bed control panel. Then she knew that she was on Larry’s side of the bed. She turned on the lamp.

  Where was he? She’d gone to sleep about eighteen, completely beat…He must still be at UCLA. Something had gone wrong, she could feel it!

  Was it just a nightmare?

  If it had been a nightmare she couldn’t remember a single detail. But the mood clung, haunting her. She tried to go back to sleep and seemed strange and awful. The shadows were full of unseen crawling monsters.

  Kzanol bleated and threw his arms out to break his fall.

  And went insane. The impressions poured riotously through his flinching senses and overwhelmed him. With the desperation of a drowning man trying to breathe water, he tried to sort them out before they killed him.

  First and most monstrous were the memories of an unfamiliar breed of slave calling itself Larry Greenberg.

  They were more powerful than anything that had ever reached his Power sense. If Kzanol had not spent so many years controlling alien life forms, growing used to the feel of alien thoughts, his whole personality would have been drowned.

  With a tremendous effort he managed to exclude most of the Greenberg mind from his consciousness. The vertigo didn’t pass. Now his body felt weird, hot and malformed. He tried to open his eye; the muscles wouldn’t work. Then he must have hit the right combination and his eye opened. Twice! He moaned and shut it tight, then tried again. His eye opened twice, two distinct and separate motions, but he kept them open because he was looking down at his own body.

  His body was Larry Greenberg!

  He’d had enough warning. The shock didn’t kill him.

  Gingerly Kzanol began to probe the Greenberg mind. He had to be careful to get only a little information at a time, or he would be swamped. It was very different from ordinary use of the Power; it was a little like practicing with an amplifier helmet.

  He got enough to convince him that he really had been teleported—or telepathed, or some ptavv-sired thing—into an alien slave body.

  He sat up slowly and carefully, using the Greenberg reflexes as much as he dared because he wasn’t used to the strange muscles. The two-eyed vision tended to confuse him, but he could see that he was in a sort of metal mesh enclosure. Outside…Kzanol got the worst shock of all, and again he went insane.

  Outside the enclosure were slaves, of the same strange breed as his present self. Two of them were actually coming toward him. He hadn’t sensed them at all—and he still couldn’t.

  Powerless!

  A thrint is not born with the Power. Generally it takes around two thrintun years for the Power sense to develop, and another year before the young thrint can force a coherent order on a slave. In some cases the Power never comes. If a thrint reaches adulthood without the Power, he is called a ptavv. He is tattooed permanently pink and sold as a slave, unless he is secretly killed by his family. Very secret. There is no better ground for blackmail than the knowledge that a wealthy or prominent family had once produced a ptavv.

  An adult thrint who loses his Power is less predictable. If he doesn’t go thrint-catatonic he may commit suicide; or he may go on a killing spree, slaughtering either every slave or every thrint that crosses his path; or he may compulsively forget even the existence of a Power. The Powerloss is more crippling than going blind or deaf, more humiliating than castration. If a man could lose his intelligence, yet retain the memory of what he had lost, he might feel as Kzanol felt; for the Power is what separates Thrint from animal.

  Still daring to hope, Kzanol looked directly at the nearest alien and ordered it to STOP! The sense wasn’t working, but maybe…The slaves kept coming.

  They were looking at him! Helplessly he cast about for some way to stop them from looking. They were witnessing his shame, these animals, these undersized whitefoods who now considered him an equal! And he saw the disintegrator, lying near the abandoned Kzanol body’s outflung hand.

  He got to his feet all right, but when he tried to hop he almost fell on his face. He managed to walk over, looking like a terrified novice trying to move in low gravity. The nearest slave had reached the cage. Kzanol bent his funny knees until he could pick up the disintegrator, using both hands because his new fingers looked so fragile and delicate and helpless. With a growl that somehow got stuck in his throat, he turned the digging instrument on the aliens. When they were all cowering on the floor or against the walls he whirled and ran, smashed into the wire, backed off and disintegrated a hole for himself and ran for the door.

  He had to let the Greenberg mind through to open the door for him.

  For a long time he thought only of running.

  There were green lights below, spaced sparsely over the land between the cities. You had to fly high to see two lights at a time.

  Between cities most cars did fly that high, especially if the driver was the cautious type. The lights were service stations. Usually a car didn’t need servicing more than twice a year, but it was nice to be able to see help when you were in open country. The loneliness could get fierce.

  It was also nice to know you could land near a green light without finding yourself on top of a tree or halfway over a cliff.

  Kzanol, in the body of the Earthman, Greenberg, steered very wide of the cities. He avoided the green lights too. He couldn’t have faced a slave in his present shape. When he left the physics building he had gone straight to the haven of his Volkswagen, clutching his disintegrator, and gone straight up. Then he had faced the problem of destination. He didn’t really want to go anywhere. When he reached altitude he set the car for New York, knowing that he could change back to California before he got there. Henceforth he let the car drive itself, except when he had to steer around a city.

  At one hours he had to bring the car down.

  The drive had been grueling. Only his mad urge to flee had kept him going; and he was beginning to know that he had nowhere to flee to. He felt aches and pains that were sheer torture to him, although Greenberg would have ignored them from habit. His fingers were cramped and sore; they seemed more delicate than ever. He was not mistaken in this. The Greenberg memory told him why the little finger of his left hand ached constantly: a baseball accident that had healed wrong. And Greenberg had taken this injury for granted! Kzanol was almost afraid to use his hands for anything. There were other pains. His cramped muscles ached from sitting in one position for five hours. His right leg was in agony from
its constant pressure on the throttle during override maneuvers. He itched everywhere that clothing pressed against his body.

  He brought the car down in the middle of a stunted wood in Arizona. Hurriedly he got out and stripped the clothes off the body he was occupying. Much better! He tossed them into the right-hand seat—he might need them again sometime—got back in and turned on the heater. Now he itched where he touched the seat, but he could stand it.

  He had been letting Greenberg’s reflexes drive the car, and in the process had gotten used to the presence of Greenberg in his mind. He could draw on the memory set with little discomfort and without fear. But he had not become used to the alien body he now wore, and he had no slightest intention of adjusting to the loss of the Power. He had to get his body back.

  He knew where it was: he’d seen it when he got the disintegrator. The Greenberg memories filled in the details for him. Obviously he had thrown the disintegrator when he put out his arms to protect himself. The body would keep until he found some way of getting back to it.

  To do that he would need a way to operate the men who operated the contact machine. He would need a great deal of technological help to break the Kzanol body out of stasis; he’d seen, as Greenberg, the rusted spot on his back. But to get all this help he needed the Power. How? His human brain didn’t have the Power in it.

  But he did have one chance. Humans had space travel, remembered Kzanol/Greenberg. Pitiful space travel: ships that took decades to cross between the inhabited worlds, and days even to cruise the planets of the ‘solar system’. But space travel it was.

  If he could find the F124 system, and if it were close enough to reach, he could get the amplifier helmet. And Greenberg had had rudimentary telepathy.

  The helmet could boost his tiny talent into a semblance of thrintun Power.

  Where was he now? He must have missed F124, Kzanol decided, and gone on to a haphazard collision with this planet Earth. Where and when had he landed? Could he reach the lost planet within Greenberg’s lifetime?

  Greenberg’s body wanted dinner (it was 1:20 hours), water, and a cigarette. Kzanol had no difficulty in ignoring the hunger and thirst, for a thrint would kill himself if he ate enough to satisfy his hunger, and rupture his storage sac if he drank until he wasn’t thirsty. The battle for food had been very fierce among the thrint’s dumb ancestors. But he had cigarettes. He smoked and found he liked it, although he had to fight an urge to chew it.

  Where was he? He let Larry Greenberg’s memory come to the surface. High school. History class, with lousy grades. The race for space; Moon colonies; Mars colonies. The Belt. The economics behind the Belt. Overpopulation on Earth. Sanction against the Belt, during an argument over the use of the Jovian moons. There was a lot of extraneous material coming through, but Kzanol was getting a good picture of the solar system. He was on the third planet, and it was binary; he had been extremely lucky to hit it.

  The U.N. power sender on Mercury. Failure of the economic sanction. Industrial warfare. Why was the Belt being treated as a villain? Forget it. Belt mining of Saturn’s rings for water. Saturn’s rings. Rings!

  “Youch!” Kzanol hurled the cigarette butt away and stuffed his burnt fingers in his mouth.

  F124. So this is F124, he thought. It doesn’t look like F124. He started to shiver, so he turned up the heater.

  V

  At one-thirty Judy got up and went out. The nightmare feeling had become too much to bear, alone in the dark. And Larry hadn’t called.

  A cab dropped to the corner in answer to her ring. She didn’t know the address of the UCLA Physics Building, but there was a phone in the cab. She had Information type the address on the cab destination board. The cab whirred and rose.

  Judy leaned back into the soft seat. She was tired, even though she couldn’t sleep.

  The building was blazing with light. She could see that before the cab started down.

  As it got closer she noticed other details.

  The big square vehicle was an ambulance, one with large capacity. Those little cars with the extended motor housings were police. There were tiny figures moving around…

  Automatically Kzanol lit his last cigarette. His mouth and throat were raw; was that normal? He remembered that it wasn’t, except when he had been smoking far too much.

  …And then the Time of Ripening would come. Suddenly everyone would be in a hurry; Dad and Granpa would return to the house very late and bone-tired, and the slaves never rested at all. All day and night there was the sound of trees being felled, and the low whirr of the stripping plant.

  Before he was old enough to help, he used to watch the trees go into the stripping plant. They would go in looking like any other mpul tree: perfectly straight, with the giant green flower at the top, and the dark blue stalk ending in a tapering tap root. In the stripping plant the flower and the soft bark and the tap root would be removed. The logs would come out shining in the sun, with nothing left but the solid fuel rocket core and the thin steel-crystal skin beneath the bark. Then the logs would be shipped to all the nearby civilized worlds, in ships which lifted on other stage tree logs.

  But first there was the testing. A log was selected at random and fitted into the testing block. Grandfather and Dad would be standing by, each looking like he had sucked a soured gnal. They watched with single-minded concentration as the log was fired, ready to disapprove a whole crop at the slightest sign of misfire. Kzanol used to try to imitate their expressions. The little tnuctip technicians would be running around setting instruments and looking harried and important. They seemed too small to be intelligent animals, but they were. Their quaint biological science had mutated the stage trees out of useless mpul trees, and created the sunflowers which guarded the house and the gigantic, mindless yeast-eating whitefoods which fed the family and the carnivorous tnuctipun themselves. They had been given more freedom than any other slave race, because they had proven the worth of their free-thinking brains.

  A tnuctip would set off the log. The flame would shoot out over the valley, blue-white and very straight, darkening at the end to red smoke, while instruments measured the log’s precise thrust and Grandfather smiled in satisfaction. The flame shook the world with its sound, so that little Kzanol used to fear that the thrust was increasing the planet’s rotation…

  Kzanol/Greenberg reached to knock the ash off his last cigarette and saw his second-to-last burning in the ash tray, two-thirds smoked. He hadn’t done that since high school! He cursed a thrintun curse and almost strangled on it; his throat positively wasn’t built for overtalk.

  He wasn’t gaining anything with his reminiscing, either.

  Wherever in the universe he was, he still had to reach a spaceport. He needed the amplifier. Later he could figure out why there were aliens on F124, and why they thought they had been here longer than was possible. He started the motor and punched for Topeka, Kansas.

  He’d have to steal a ship anyway. It might as well be an armed ship (since this region of space was lawless by definition, having no thrintun), and there was a military spaceport near Topeka.

  Wait a moment, he thought. This couldn’t be F124. There were too many planets! F124 had only eight, and here there were nine. Now that he had started he noticed other discrepancies. The asteroid belt of F124 had been far thicker, and her moon had had a slight rotation, he remembered. He was in the wrong system!

  Merely a coincidence! Kzanol grinned. And what a coincidence? The habitable planet, the ringed planet, the ordered sizes of the worlds…come to think of it, he was the only thrint ever to have found two slave planets. He would be the richest being in the galaxy! He didn’t care, now, if he never found the map.

  But of course he still needed the amplifier.

  Judy felt that she was on the verge of a tantrum. “But can’t they talk at all?” she begged, knowing she was being unreasonable.

  Lloyd Masney’s patience was wearing thin. “Mrs. Greenberg,” he said heavily. “You know that Docto
r Jansky is having his eyes and face replaced at this moment. Also a wide patch of skin on his back, which was taken of almost down to the spinal cord. The others are almost as badly off. Dr. Snyder has no eye damage, but the part of his face that he didn’t cover with his hands is being replaced, and the palms, of his hands, and some skin from his back. Knudsen did have his spinal cord opened, and some ribs too. The autodoc won’t let us wake any of them up, even under police priority, except for Mr. Trimonti. He is being questioned while the ’doc replaces skull and scalp from the back of his head. He has had a bad shock, and he is under local anesthetic, and you may not disturb him! You may hear the transcription of our interview when we have it. Meanwhile, may I offer you some coffee?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Judy. She thought he was giving her a chance to get a grip on herself, and was grateful. When he came back with the coffee she sipped it for a few moments, covertly studying the police lieutenant.

  He was a burly man who walked like he had bad feet. No wonder if he did; his hands and feet were both tiny in proportion to the rest of his body. He had straight white hair and a dark complexion. His bushy mustache was also white. He seemed almost as impatient as she. She had not yet seen him sitting normal fashion; now his legs were draped over one arm of his swivel chair while his shoulders rested against the other.

  “Have you any idea where he is now?” She couldn’t restrain herself.

  “Sure,” said Masney unexpectedly. “He just crossed the Kansas-Colorado border at a height of nine thousand feet. I guess he doesn’t know how to short out his license sender. But then, maybe he just didn’t bother.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t like cities,” said the old man in the corner. Judy had thought he was asleep. He had been introduced as Lucas Garner, an Arm of the U. N. Judy waited for him to go on, but he seemed to think he had explained himself. Masney explained for him.

  “You see, we don’t advertise the fact that all our override beamers are in the cities. I figure that if he knows enough to go around the cities, which he’s been doing, he must know enough to short out his license so that we can’t follow him. Luke, have you got some reason to think he doesn’t like cities?”