05-A Gift From Earth

by Larry Niven

  The room was big, and the bar across from the entrance was enormous. Matt shouted, "Harry Kane must do a lot of entertaining."

  "He does! Come with me; we'll meet him!"

  Matt caught snatches of conversation as they pushed their way across the room. The party hadn't been going long, he gathered, and several people knew practically nobody; but they all had drinks. They were of all ages, all professions. Hood had spoken true. If a party crasher wasn't welcome, he'd never know it, because no one would recognize him as one.

  The walls were like the outside, a glowing coral-pink. the floor, covered with a hairy-looking wall-to-wall rug of mutated grass, was flat except at the walls; no doubt it had been sanded flat after the house was finished and the forming balloon removed. But Matt knew that beneath the rug was not tile or hardwood, but the ever-present pink coral.

  They reached the bar, no more jostled than need be. Hood leaned across the bar as far as he could, which because of his height was not far, and called, "Harry! Two vodka sodas, and I'd like you to meet — Dammit, Keller, what's your first name?"

  "Matt."

  "Matt Keller. We've known each other since grade school."

  "Pleasure, Matt," said Harry Kane, and reached over to shake hands. "Glad to see you here, Jay." Harry was almost Matt's height, and considerably broader, and his wide face was dominated by a shapeless nose and an even wider grin. He looked exactly like a bartender. He poured the vodka sodas into glasses in which water had been prefrozen. He handed them across. "Enjoy yourselves," he said, and moved down the bar to serve two newcomers.

  Hood said, "Harry believes the best way to meet everyone right away is to play bartender for the first couple of hours. Afterward he turns the job over to a volunteer."

  "Good thinking," said Matt. "Is your name Jay?"

  "Short for Jayhawk. Jayhawk Hood. One of my ancestors was from Kansas. The jayhawk was a symbolic Kansas bird."

  "Crazy, isn't it, that we needed eight years to learn each other's first names?"

  At that moment a fragment of the crowd noticed Hood and swept down upon them. Hood barely had time to 'grin in answer before they were in the midst of introductions. Matt was relieved. He was sure he had seen Harry Kane pass something to Jay Hood along with his drink, Manners kept him from asking questions, but it stuck in his curiosity, and he wanted to forget it.

  The newcomers were four men and a woman. As an individual, Matt remembered only the woman.

  Her name was Laney Mattson. She was around twenty-six years old, five years older than Matt. In bare feet he would have topped her by a scant half-inch. But she was wearing double-spikes, and her piled confection of auburn hair made her even taller. Not merely tall, she was big, with wide pronounced hips and deep breasts behind an "M" neckline. She looked prettier than she was, Matt thought; she used cosmetics well. And there was a booming exuberance in her every act, an enjoyment as big as herself.

  The men were her age and over, in their late twenties. Any of the four would have looked normal dancing with Laney. They were huge. Matt retained of them only a composite impression of a resonant voice and an enveloping handclasp and a great handsome face smiling down from the pink ceiling. Yet he liked them all. He just couldn't tell them apart.

  Hood surprised him again. Talking along in his dry voice, keeping it raised to an audible bellow, not straining his neck to look anyone in the face, Hood somehow kept control of the conversation. It was he who guided the talk to school days. One of the tall men was moved to speak of a simple trick he'd used to rewire his school's teaching teedee, so that for one day he and his classmates, had watched their lessons both upside down and inside out. Matt found himself telling of the specimen bottle of apple juice he'd sneaked into the Gamma medcheck station, and what he did with it. Someone who'd been listening politely from the edge of the circle mentioned that once he'd stolen a car from a picnicking crew family on Beta Plateau. He'd set the autopilot to circle a constant thousand feet beyond the void edge. It had stayed up for five days before dropping into the mist, with scores of Implementation police watching.

  Matt watched Jay Hood and Laney as they talked. Laney had a long arm draped over Hood's shoulders, and the top of his head reached just to her chin. They were both talking at once, trampling the tail ends of each other's sentences, racing pell-mell through memories and anecdotes and jokes they'd been saving, sharing them with the group but talking for each other.

  It wasn't love, Matt decided, though it was like love. It was an immense satisfaction Hood and Laney felt at knowing each other. Satisfaction and pride. It made Matt feel lonely.

  Gradually Matt became aware that Laney was wearing a hearing aid.

  It was so small and so cunningly colored as to be nearly invisible within her ear. Truthfully, Matt couldn't swear that it was there.

  If Laney needed a hearing aid, it was too bad she couldn't hide it better. For centuries more civilized peoples had been wearing specks of laminated plastic buried in the skin above the mastoid bone. Such things did not exist on Mount Lookitthat. A crew, now, would have had his ears replaced from the organ banks ...

  Glasses went empty, and one of Laney's big escorts came back with replacements. The little group grew and shrank and split into other groups with the eternal capriciousness of the cocktail party. For a moment Matt and Jay Hood were left standing alone in a forest of backs and elbows. Hood said, "Want to meet a beautiful girl?"

  "Always." Hood turned to lead the way, and Matt caught a flash of the same odd coloring in his ear that he had noticed in Laney's. Since when had Hood become hard of hearing? It might have been imagination, aided by vodka sodas. For one thing, the tiny instruments seemed too deeply embedded to be removed.

  But an item that size could have been just what Harry Kane passed to Jay Hood along with his drink.

  "It's the easiest way to conduct a raid, sir." Jesus Pietro sat deferentially forward in his chair, hands folded on his desk, the very image of the highly intelligent man dedicated solely to his work. "We know that members always leave the Kane house by twos and fours. We'll pick them up outside the house. If they stop coming out, we'll know they've caught on. Then we'll go into the house itself."

  Behind his mask of deference, Jesus Pietro was annoyed. For the first time in four years he had planned a major raid on the Sons of Earth, and Millard Parlette had picked that night to visit the Hospital. Why tonight? He came only once in two months, thank the Mist Demons. A visit from a crew always upset Jesus Pietro's men.

  At least Parlette had come to him. Once Parlette had summoned him to his own house, and that had been bad. Here, Jesus Pietro was in his element. His office was practically an extension of his personality. The desk had the shape of a boomerang, enclosing him in an obtuse angle for more available working space. He had three guests' chairs of varying degrees of comfort, for crew and Hospital personnel and colonist. The office was big and square, but there was a slight curve to the back wall. Where the other walls were cream colored, easy on the eye, the back wall was smoothly polished dark metal.

  It was part of the outer hull of the Planck. Jesus Pietro's office was right up against the source of half the spiritual strength of Mount Lookitthat, and half the electrical power too: the ship that had brought men to this world. Sitting at his desk, Jesus Pietro felt the power at his back.

  "Our only problem," he continued smoothly, "is that not all of Kane's guests are involved in the conspiracy. At least half will be deadheads invited for camouflage. Telling them apart will take time."

  "I see that," said the old man. His voice squeaked. He wore the tall, skeletal look of a Don Quixote, but his eyes held no madness. They were sane and alert. For nearly two hundred years the Hospital had kept his body, brain, and mind functioning. Probably even he did not know how much of him had been borrowed from colonists convicted of major crimes. "Why tonight?" he asked.

  "Why not, sir?" Jesus Pietro saw what he was driving at, and his mind raced. Millard Parlette was nobody's fool. T
he ancient was one of the few crew willing to accept any kind of responsibility. Most of the thirty thousand crew on Mount Lookitthat preferred to devise ever more complex forms of playing: sports; styles of dress that changed according to half-a-dozen complex, fluctuating sets of rules; rigid and ridiculous social forms. Parlette preferred to work — sometimes. He had chosen to rule the Hospital. He was competent and quick; though he appeared rarely, be always seemed to know what was happening; and he was difficult to lie to.

  Now he said, "Yesterday the ramrobot capsule. Last night your men were scouring the area for spies. Tonight you plan a major raid for the first time in four years. Do you think someone slipped through your fingers?"

  "No, sir!" But that would not satisfy Parlette. "But in this instance I can afford to cover my bet even when it's a sure thing. If a colonist had news of the ramrobot package, he'd be at Kane's place tonight though demons bar the way."

  "I don't approve of gambling," said Parlette. Jesus Pietro uneasily searched his mind for a suitable answer. "And you have chosen not to gamble. Very good, Castro. Now. What has been done with the ramrobot capsule?"

  "I think the organ-bank people have it unpacked, sir. And the ... contents stored. Would you like to see?"

  "Yes.

  Jesus Pietro Castro, Head of implementation, the only armed authority on in entire world, rose hastily to his feet to act as guide. If they hurried, he might get away in time to supervise the raid. But there was no polite way to make a crew hurry.

  Hood had spoken true. Polly Tournquist was beautiful. She was also small and dark and quiet, and Matt definitely wanted to know her better. Polly had long, soft hair the color of a starless night, direct brown eyes, and a smile that came through even when she was trying to look serious. She looked like someone with a secret, Matt thought. She didn't talk; she listened.

  "Parapsychological abilities are not a myth," Hood was insisting. "When the Planck left Earth, there were all kinds of psionics devices for amplifying them. Telepathy had gotten almost dependable. They — "

  "What's 'almost dependable'?"

  "Dependable enough so there were specially trained people to read dolphin minds. Enough so telepaths were called as expert witnesses in murder trials. Enough — "

  "All right, all right," said Matt. It was the first time tonight that he had seen Hood worked up. Matt gathered from the attitudes of the others that Hood rode this hobbyhorse often. He asked, "Where are they now, these witches of yours?"

  "They aren't witches! Look, Kell — Look, Matt. Every one of those psi powers was tied up a little bit with telepathy. They proved that. Now, do you know how they tested our ancestors before they sent them into space for a thirty-year one-way trip?"

  Someone played straight man. "They had to orbit Earth for a while,"

  "Yes. Four candidates in a ferryboat, orbiting for one month. No telepath could take that."

  Polly Tournquist was following the debate like a spectator at a tennis match, swinging her shoulders to face whoever was speaking. Her grin widened; her hair swung gently, hypnotically; she was altogether a pleasure to watch. She knew Matt was watching. Occasionally her eyes would flick toward him as if inviting him to share the joke.

  "Why not, if he's got company?"

  "The wrong company. Anywhere on Earth a latent telepath is surrounded by tens of thousands of minds. In space he has three. And he can't get away from any of them for a single hour, for a full month."

  "How do you know all this, Jay? Books? You damn sure don't have anyone to experiment on."

  Polly's eyes sparkled as she followed the debate. The lobes of Hood's ears were turning red. Polly's raven hair swung wide, and when it uncovered her right ear for an instant, she was almost certainly wearing a tiny, almost invisible hearing aid.

  So she did have a secret. And, finally, Matt thought he knew what it was.

  Three hundred years ago the Planck had come to Mount Lookitthat with six crew members to guard fifty passengers in suspended animation. The story was in an the history tapes, of how the circular flying wing had dipped into the atmosphere and flown for hours above impenetrable mists which the instruments showed to be poisonous and deadly hot. And then a great mass had come over the horizon, a vertical flat-topped mountain forty miles high and hundreds of miles long. It was like a new continent rearing over the impalpable white sea. The crew had gaped, wordless, until Captain Parlette had said, "Lookitthat!"

  Unwritten, but thoroughly known, was the story of the landing. The passengers had been wakened one at a time to find themselves living in an instant dictatorship. Those who fought the idea, and they were few, died. When the Arthur Clarke came down forty years later, the pattern was repeated. The situation had not changed but for population growth, not in the last three hundred years.

  From the beginning there had been a revolutionary group. Its name had changed several times, and Matt had no idea what it was now. He had never known a revolutionary. He had no particular desire to be one. They accomplished nothing, except to fill the Hospital's organ banks. How could they, when the crew controlled every weapon and every watt of power on Mount Lookitthat?

  If this was a nest of rebels, then they had worked out a good cover. Many of the merrymakers had no hearing aids, and these seemed to be the ones who didn't know anyone here. Like Matt himself. In the midst of a reasonably genuine open-house brawl, certain people listened to voices only they could hear.

  Matt let his imagination play. They'd have an escape hatch somewhere — those of the inner circle — and if the police showed, they would use it during a perfectly genuine panic. Matt and his brethren of the outer circle would be expendable.

  "But why should all of these occult powers be connected to mind-reading? Does that make sense to you, Jay?"

  "Certainly. Don't you see that telepathy is a survival trait? When human beings evolved psi powers, they must have evolved telepathy first. All the others came later, because they're less likely to get you out of a bad situation....

  Matt dismissed the idea of leaving. Safer? Sure. But here he had, for a time, escaped from his persnickety mining worms and their venal crewish growers and the multiple, other problems that made his life what it was. And his curiosity bump itched madly. He wanted to know how they thought, how they worked, how they protected themselves, what they had in mind. He wanted to know —

  He wanted to know Polly Tournquist. Now more than ever. She was small and lovely and delicate looking, an every man who had ever looked at her must have wanted to protect her. What was such a girl doing throwing her life away? Really, that was all she was doing. Sooner or later the organ banks would run short of healthy livers or live skin or lengths of large intestine at a time when there was a dearth of crime on the Plateau. Then Implementation would throw a raid, and Polly would be stripped down to her component parts.

  Matt had a sudden urge to talk her out of it, get her to leave here with him and move to another part of the Plateau. Would they be able to hide out in a region so limited?

  Possibly not, but —

  But she didn't even know he'd guessed. If she found out, he could die for his knowledge. He'd have to put a fail-safe on his mouth.

  It spoiled things. If Matt could have played the observer, the man who watched and said nothing ... But he wasn't an observer. He was involved now. He knew Jay and liked him, he'd liked Laney Mattson and Harry Kane at sight, and he could have fallen in love with Polly Tournquist. These people were putting their lives on the line. And his too! And he could do nothing about it.

  The middle-aged man with the brush cut was still at it. "Jay," he said with a poor imitation of patience, "you're trying to tell us that Earth had psi powers under good control when the founding fathers left. Well, what have they done since? They've made all kinds of progress m biological engineering. Their ships improve constantly. Now the ramrobots go home all by themselves. But what have they done about psi powers? Nothing. Just nothing. And why?"

  "Because — "

&n
bsp; "Because it's all superstition. Witchcraft. Myths."

  Oh, shut up, Matt thought. It was all cover for what was really going on, and he wasn't a part of that. He dropped back out of the circle, hoping nobody would notice him — except Polly. Nobody did. He eased toward the bar for a refill.

  Harry Kane was gone, replaced by a kid somewhat younger than Matt, one who wouldn't last another half hour if he kept sampling his own wares. When Matt tasted his drink, it was mostly vodka. And when he turned around, there was Polly, laughing at his puckered face.

  The half-dozen suspects were deeply asleep along one wall of the patrol wagon. A white-garbed Implementation medic looked up as Jesus Pietro entered. "Oh, there you are, sir. I think these three must be deadheads. The others had mechanisms in their ears."

  The night outside was as black as always on moonless Mount Lookitthat. Jesus Pietro had left Millard Parlette standing before the glass wall of the organ banks, contemplating ... whatever he might be contemplating. Eternal life? Not likely. Even Millard Parlette, one hundred and ninety years old, would die when his central nervous system wore out. You couldn't transplant brains without transplanting memories. What had Parlette been thinking? His expression had been very odd.

  Jesus Pietro took a suspect's head in his hands and rolled it to look in the ears. The body rolled too, limply, passively. "I don't see anything."

  "When we tried to remove the mechanism, it evaporated. So did the old woman's. This girl still has hers."

  "Good." He bent to look. Far down in the left ear, too deep for fingers to reach it, was something colored dead black with a rim of fleshy pink. He said, "Get a microphone.