by Larry Niven
Ye gods, how long had I slept? All those dreams…dream-memories.
I tried to move. I was shrink-wrapped in elastic. I wiggled my arm up across my chest, with considerable effort, and up to the displays. It took me a few seconds to figure them out.
Biomass tank: near empty. Treatment: pages of data, horrifying…terminated, successful. Date: Omygod. Four months! I was out for four months and eleven days! Open:
The dark glass lid retracted, sunlight flared, and I shut my eyes tight. After a while I pulled myself over the rim of the Intensive Care Cavity and rolled out.
My balance was all wrong. I landed like a lumpy sack, on sand, and managed not to yell or swear. Who might hear? Sat up, squinting painfully, and looked around.
I was still on the island.
It was weathered coral, nearly symmetrical, with a central peak. The air was sparkling clear, and the ocean went on forever, with another pair of tiny islands just touching the horizon.
I was stark naked and white as a bone, in the glare of a yellow-white dwarf sun. The air was salty and thick with organic life, sea life.
Where was everybody?
I tried to stand; wobbled; gave it up and crawled around into the shadow of the ’doc. I still felt an amazing sense of well-being, as if I could solve anything the universe could throw at me.
During moments of half wakefulness I’d somehow worked out where I must be. Here it stood, half coffin and half chemical lab, massive and abandoned on the narrow black sand beach. A vulnerable place to leave such a valuable thing; but this was where I’d last seen it, ready to be loaded into the boat.
Sunlight could damage me in minutes, kill me in hours; but Carlos Wu’s wonderful ’doc was no ordinary Mall autodoctor. It’ was state-of-the-art, smarter than me in some respects. It would cure anything the sun could do to me.
I pulled myself to my feet and took a few steps. Ouch! The coral cut my feet. The ’doc could cure that, too, but it hurt.
Standing, I could see most of the island. The center bulged up like a volcano. Fafnir coral builds a flat island with a shallow cone rising at the center, a housing for a symbiote, the lamplighter. I’d hovered the lander above the cone while belly jets scorched out the lamplighter nest, until it was big enough to hold the lander.
Just me and the ’doc and a dead island. I’d have to live in the ’doc. Come out at night, like a vampire. My chance of being found must be poor if no passing boat had found me in these past four-plus months.
I climbed. The coral cut my hands and feet, and knees. From the cone I’d be able to see the whole island.
The pit was two hundred feet across. The bottom was black and smooth, and seven or eight feet below me. Feather had set the lander to melt itself down, slowly, radiating not much heat over many hours. Several inches of rainwater now covered the slag, and something sprawled in the muck.
It might be a man…a tall man, possibly raised in low gravity. Too tall to be Carlos. Or Sharrol, or Feather, and who was left?
I jumped down. Landed clumsily on the smooth slag and splashed full length in the water. Picked myself up, unhurt. My toes could feel an oblong texture, lines and ridges, the shapes within the lander that wouldn’t melt. Police could determine what this thing had been, if they ever looked; but why would they look?
The water felt good on my ruined feet. And on my skin. I was already burned. Albinos can’t take yellow dwarf sunlight.
A corpse was no surprise, given what I remembered. I looked it over. It had been wearing local clothing for a man: boots, loose pants with a rope tie, a jacket encrusted with pockets. The jacket was pierced with a great ragged hole front and back. That could only have been made by Feather’s horrible ARM weapon. This close, the head…I’d thought it must be under the water, but there was no head at all. There were clean white bones, and a neck vertebra cut smoothly in half.
I was hyperventilating. Dizzy. I sat down next to the skeleton so that I wouldn’t fall.
These long bones looked more than four months dead. Years, decades…wait, now. We’d scorched the nest, but there would be lamplighter soldiers left outside. Those would have swarmed down and stripped the bones.
I found I was trying to push my back through a wall of fused coral. My empty stomach heaved. This was much worse than anything I’d imagined. I knew who this was.
Sunlight burned my back. My eyes were going wonky in the glare. Time was not on my side: I was going to be much sicker much quicker than I liked.
I made myself pull the boots loose, shook the bones out and put them on. They were too big.
The jacket was a sailor’s survival jacket, local style. The shoulders looked padded: shoulder floats. The front and sides had been all pockets, well stuffed; but front and back had been torn to confetti.
I stripped it off him and began searching pockets.
No wallet, no ID. Tissue pack. The shrapnel remains of a hand computer. Several pockets were sealed: emergency gear, stuff you wouldn’t want to open by accident; some of those had survived.
A knife of exquisite sharpness in a built-in holster. Pocket torch. A ration brick. I bit into the brick and chewed while I searched. Mag specs, one lens shattered, but I put them on anyway. Without dark glasses my pink albino eyes would go blind.
Sunblock spray, unharmed: good. A pill dispenser, broken, but in a pocket still airtight. Better! Tannin secretion pills!
The boots were shrinking, adapting to my feet. It felt friendly, reassuring. My most intimate friends on this island.
I was still dizzy. Better let the ’doc take care of me now; take the pills afterward. I shook broken ribs out of the jacket. Shook the pants empty. Balled the clothing and tossed it out of the hole. Tried to follow it.
My fingers wouldn’t reach the rim.
“After all this, what a stupid way to die,” I said to the memory of Sharrol Janz. “What do I do now? Build a ladder out of bones?” If I got out of this hole, I’d think it through before I ever did anything.
I knelt; I yelled and jumped. My fingers, palms, forearms gripped rough coral. I pulled myself out and lay panting, sweating, bleeding, crying.
I limped back to the ’doc, wearing boots now, holding the suit spread above me for a parasol. I was feverish with sunburn.
I couldn’t take boots into the ICC. Wait. Think. Wind? Waves? I tied the clothes in a bundle around the boots and set it on the ’doc next to the faceplate. I climbed into the Intensive Care Cavity and pulled the lid down.
Sharrol would wait an hour longer, if she was still alive. And the kids. And Carlos.
I did not expect to fall asleep.
Asleep, feverish with sunburn. The Surgeon program tickles blocks of nerves, plays me like a complex toy. In my sleep I feel raging thirst, hear a thunderclap, taste cinnamon or coffee, clench a phantom fist.
My skin wakes. Piloerection runs in ripples along my body, then a universal tickle, then pressure…like that feather-crested snakeskin Sharrol put me into for Carlos’s party….
Sharrol, sliding into her own rainbow-scaled bodysuit, stopped halfway. “You don’t really want to do this, do you?”
“I’ll tough it out. How do I look?” I’d never developed the least sense of flatlander style. Sharrol picked my clothes.
“Half man, half snake,” she said. “Me?”
“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 his parents. Why do they change their hair and skin color so often? When we hu
gged them good-bye 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 underwater, 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 above ground 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 120 flatlanders who carry an unlimited birthright.
A man can love any child. That’s hardwired 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 six 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 the 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.”
“Yah. 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. 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 mindframe 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 to
o 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 seabottom 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.”