by Ларри Нивен
«No. You have won. Come back.»
VI.
The Core was a lovely multicolored jewel when it disappeared below the lens of the galaxy. I'd have liked to visit it someday, but there aren't any time machines.
I'd penetrated nearly to the Core in something like a month. I took my time coming home, going straight up along galactic north and flying above the lens where there were no stars to bother me, and still made it in two. All the way I wondered why the puppeteer had tried to cheat me at the last. Long Shot's publicity would have been better than ever, yet the regional president had been willing to throw it away just to leave me broke. I couldn't ask why, because nobody was answering my hyperphone. Nothing I knew about puppeteers could tell me. I felt persecuted.
My come-hither brought me down at the base in the Farside End. Nobody was there. I took the transfer booth back to Sirius Mater, Jinx's biggest city, figuring to contact General Products, turn over the ship, and pick up my pay.
More surprises awaited me.
1) General Products had paid 150,000 stars into my account in the Bank of Jinx. A personal note stated that whether I wrote my article was solely up to me.
2) General Products has disappeared. They are selling no more spacecraft hulls. Companies with contracts have had their penalty clauses paid off. It all happened two months ago, simultaneously on all known worlds.
3) The bar I'm in is on the roof of the tallest building in Sirius Mater, more than a mile above the streets. Even from here I can hear the stock market crashing. It started with the collapse of spacecraft companies with no hulls to build ships. Hundreds of others have followed. It takes a long time for an interstellar market to come apart at the seams, but, as with the Core novas, I don't see anything that can stop the chain reaction.
4) The secret of the indestructible General Products hull is being advertised for sale. General Products's human representatives will collect bids for one year, no bid to be less than one trillion stars. Get in on the ground floor, folks.
5) Nobody knows anything. That's what's causing most of the panic. It's been a month since a puppeteer was seen on any known world. Why did they drop so suddenly out of interstellar affairs?
I know.
In twenty thousand years a flood of radiation will wash over this region of space. Thirty thousand light-years may seem a long, safe distance, but it isn't, not with this big an explosion. I've asked. The Core explosion will make this galaxy uninhabitable to any known form of life.
Twenty thousand years is a long time. It's four times as long as human written history. We'll all be less than dust before things get dangerous, and I for one am not going to worry about it.
But the puppeteers are different. They're scared. They're getting out right now. Paying off their penalty clauses and buying motors and other equipment to put in their indestructible hulls will take so much money that even confiscating my puny salary would have been a step to the good. Interstellar business can go to hell; from now on the puppeteers will have no time for anything but running.
Where will they go? Well, the galaxy is surrounded by a halo of small globular clusters. The ones near the rim might be safe. Or the puppeteers may even go as far as Andromeda. They have the Long Shot for exploring if they come back for it, and they can build more. Outside the galaxy is space empty enough even for a puppeteer pilot, if he thinks his species is threatened.
It's a pity. This galaxy will be dull without puppeteers. Those two-headed monsters were not only the most dependable faction in interstellar business, they were like water in a wasteland of more or less humanoids. It's too bad they aren't brave, like us.
But is it?
I never heard of a puppeteer refusing to face a problem. He may merely be deciding how fast to run, but he'll never pretend the problem isn't there. Sometime within the next twenty millennia we humans will have to move a population that already numbers forty-three billion. How? To where? When should we start thinking about this? When the glow of the Core begins to shine through the dust clouds?
Maybe men are the cowards — at the core.
GHOST: THREE
I said, «And there you were in Sirius Mater, all ready to write my story for me. I guessed then that Ausfaller must have sent you both times.»
«So why did you hire me?»
«I didn't care much. The big question was, How do I tell the human race about the Core explosion? How do I make them believe? I hoped you were an ARM. Maybe you could do something.»
Ander said, «I should have asked you then. There's supposed to be a huge black hole in there, millions of solar masses. Did you see it?»
I shook my head. «Maybe the shell of novas hid it, if it's there at all. Maybe it even caused the chain reaction. Sucking gas and dust and stars for fifteen billion years, maybe its mass passed some kind of threshold and boom! Maybe you'd even find it if you processed the recordings I took. They're proprietary, Ander. Get them from General Products.»
«Well, but they're gone.» But he had that smirk again. «Where did you go after that?»
«Earth. After the galactic core, what else could measure up?»
Ander laughed.
Five teams were fighting over two prey turtles that glowed intermittently among thrashing bodies. The crowd was standing, yelling their heads off. And Ander pulled a flat portable out of his backpurse, ten inches by ten inches by a quarter inch thick, and opened it in my lap. He tapped rapidly.
A picture stood above my lap. Five blue-white points rotated against a black background. They pulled apart, growing slowly brighter, coming toward me. Suddenly they blossomed into blue and white globes; the starscape wheeled; the spheres went murky red and began to recede. Ander tapped, and the picture froze.
Tiny suns circled four of the globes. The fifth glowed of itself, as if the continents of a world had caught fire. Flying planets! And nobody around us was looking at anything but the miniature war beyond the glass.
Ander said, «The puppeteers are still in known space. Receding at relativistic speeds, and they took their planets with them.» He snapped his portable shut. «Five worlds all about the same size, orbiting in a pentagon around each other. Do the math yourself. You'll find that you can put a sun at the center, or not, and the orbits are stable either way. They understand tides just fine, Beowulf. That's what they hid from you.»
My mind lurched. Cowards or not, peaceable or not, I could see how the traditionally paranoid ARM might react to so much sheer brute power. «What are they like? Oxygen worlds? Natural or terraformed? How —»
«Sigmund says we've dropped cameras in their path, not too close. The system goes flying by at point eight lights. We haven't learned much. Free oxygen, liquid water, fusion light sources redder than Sol, and we don't know why the odd one looks so odd. There's nothing else in the system, no asteroids, no cometary halo, just chains of spacecraft moving between the five worlds.»
«Where are they going?»
«Straight north along the galactic axis.»
«That's what I did, coming back from the Core. Get clear of occupied space and then turn … turning five planets could be a bitch.»
«Well, there's nothing but empty space where they're going.»
«Maybe that's what they want.»
Ander mulled it. «Possible.. Meanwhile, we've got to guard them and keep their secret. They won't pass all that close to the Patriarchy, but that's too close. It's not that they can't defend themselves. It's that they're cowards.»
I began to see what he meant. «Free enterprise.»
«No species can control all its members.»
«If some futzer published their location, you could see pirates of every shape and size.»
«Yes, and reporters and news anchors likewise. Any entrepreneur with a money-making offer. Any undertrained ARM out to make a name. Whole fleets lying in wait for the puppeteer worlds to pass. Any kind of fool might cause the puppeteer government to defend themselves in some drastic fashion, with power like that,»
Ander said. «So we have to stop any passing ships from interfering with the fleet and guard their secret, too. Meanwhile, they haven't all left. There are business matters, loose ends being wrapped up.»
«I know. I had dealings with one of their agents myself.»
He perked up. «How did that come about?»
«I had a complaint about a General Products hull.»
«Again?»
FLATLANDER
The most beautiful girl aboard turned out to have a husband with habits so solitary that I didn't know about him until the second week. He was about five feet four and middle-aged, but he wore a hellflare tattoo on his shoulder, which meant he'd been on Kzin during the war thirty years back, which meant he'd been trained to kill adult kzinti with his bare hands, feet, elbows, knees, and whatnot. When we found out about each other, he very decently gave me a first warning and broke my arm to prove he meant it.
The arm still ached a day later, and every other woman on the Lensman was over two hundred years old. I drank alone. I stared glumly into the mirror behind the curving bar. The mirror stared glumly back.
«Hey. You from We Made It. What am I?»
He was two chairs down, and he was glaring. Without the beard he would have had a round, almost petulant face … I think. The beard, short and black and carefully shaped, made him look like a cross between Zeus and an angry bulldog. The glare went with the beard. His square fingers wrapped a large drinking bulb in a death grip. A broad belly matched broad shoulders to make him look massive rather than fat.
Obviously he was talking to me. I asked, «What do you mean, what are you?»
«Where am I from?»
«Earth.» It was obvious. The accent said Earth. So did the conservatively symmetrical beard. His breathing was unconsciously natural in the ship's standard atmosphere, and his build had been forged at one point zero gee.
«Then what am I?»
«A flatlander.»
The glare heat increased. He'd obviously reached the bar way ahead of me. «A flatlander! Damn it, everywhere I go I'm flatlander. Do you know how many hours I've spent in space?»
«No. Long enough to know how to use a drinking bulb.»
«Funny. Very funny. Everywhere in human space a flatlander is a schnook who never gets above the atmosphere. Everywhere but Earth. If you're from Earth, you're a flatlander all your life. For the last fifty years I've been running about in human space, and what am I? A flatlander. Why?»
«Earthian is a clumsy term.»
«What is WeMadeItian?» he demanded.
«I'm a crashlander. I wasn't born within fifty miles of Crashlanding City, but I'm a crashlander anyway.»
That got a grin. I think. It was hard to tell with the beard. «Lucky you're not a pilot.»
«I am. Was.»
«You're kidding. They let a crashlander pilot a ship?»
«If he's good at it.»
«I didn't mean to pique your ire, sir. May I introduce myself? My name's Elephant.»
«Beowulf Shaeffer.»
He bought me a drink. I bought him a drink. It turned out we both played gin, so we took fresh drinks to a card table …
* * *
When I was a kid, I used to stand out at the edge of Crashlanding Port watching the ships come in. I'd watch the mob of passengers leave the lock and move in a great clump toward customs, and I'd wonder why they seemed to have trouble navigating. A majority of the starborn would always walk in weaving lines, swaying and blinking teary eyes against the sun. I used to think it was because they came from different worlds with different gravities and different atmospheres beneath differently colored suns.
Later I learned different.
There are no windows in a passenger spacecraft. If there were, half the passengers would go insane; it takes an unusual mentality to watch the blind-spot appearance of hyperspace and still keep one's marbles. For passengers there is nothing to watch and nothing to do, and if you don't like reading sixteen hours a day, then you drink. It's best to drink in company. You get less lushed, knowing you have to keep up your side of a conversation. The ship's doc has cured more hangovers than every other operation combined, right down to manicures and haircuts.
The ship grounded at Los Angeles two days after I met Elephant. He'd made a good drinking partner. We'd been fairly matched at cards, he with his sharp card sense, I with my usual luck. From the talking we'd done, we knew almost as much about each other as anyone knows about anyone. In a way I was sorry to see him leave.
«You've got my number?»
«Yeah. But like I said, I don't know just what I'll be doing.» I was telling the truth. When I explore a civilized world, I like to make my own discoveries.
«Well, call me if you get a chance. I wish you'd change your mind. I'd like to show you Earth.»
«I decline with thanks. Goodbye, Elephant. It's been fun.»
Elephant waved and turned through the natives' door. I went on to face the smuggler baiters. The last drink was still with me, but I could cure that at the hotel. I never expected to see Elephant again.
* * *
Nine days ago I'd been on Jinx. I'd been rich. And I'd been depressed.
The money and the depression had stemmed from the same source. The puppeteers, those three-legged, two-headed professional cowards and businessmen, had lured me into taking a new type of ship all the way to the galactic core, thirty thousand light years away. The trip was for publicity purposes, to get research money to iron out the imperfections in the very ship I was riding.
I suppose I should have had more sense, but I never do, and the money was good. The trouble was that the Core had exploded by the time I got there. The Core stars had gone off in a chain reaction of novas ten thousand years ago, and a wave of radiation was even then (and even now) sweeping toward known space.
In just over twenty thousand years we'll all be in deadly danger.
You're not worried? It didn't bother me much, either. But every puppeteer in known space vanished overnight, heading for Finagle knows what other galaxy.
I was depressed. I missed the puppeteers and hated knowing I was responsible for their going. I had time and money and a black melancholia to work off. And I'd always wanted to see Earth.
Earth smelled good. There was a used flavor to it, a breathed flavor, unlike anything I've ever known. It was the difference between spring water and distilled water. Somewhere in each breath I took were molecules breathed by Dante, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Heinlein, Carter, and my own ancestors. Traces of past industries lingered in the air, sensed if not smelled: gasoline, coal fumes, tobacco and burnt cigarette filters, diesel fumes, ale breweries. I left the customs house with inflated lungs and a questing look.
I could have taken a transfer booth straight to the hotel. I decided to walk a little first.
Everyone on Earth had made the same decision.
The pedwalk held a crowd such as I had never imagined. They were all shapes and all colors, and they dressed in strange and eldritch ways. Shifting colors assaulted the eye and sent one reeling. On any world in human space, any world but one, you know immediately who the natives are. Wunderland? Asymmetrical beards mark the nobility, and the common people are the ones who quickly step out of their way. We Made It? The pallor of our skins in summer and winter, in spring and fall, the fact that we all race upstairs, above the buried cities and onto the blooming desert, eager to taste sunlight while the murderous winds are at rest. Jinx? The natives are short, wide, and strong; a sweet little old lady's handshake can crush steel. Even in the Belt, within the solar system, a Belter strip haircut adorns both men and women. But Earth —!
No two looked alike. There were reds and blues and greens, yellows and oranges, plaids and stripes. I'm talking about hair, you understand, and skin. All my life I've used tannin-secretion pills for protection against ultraviolet, so that my skin color has varied from its normal pinkish-white (I'm an albino) to (under blue-white stars) tuxedo black. But I'd never known that other
skin-dye pills existed. I stood rooted to the pedwalk, letting it carry me where it would, watching the incredible crowd swarm around me. They were all knees and elbows. Tomorrow I'd have bruises.
«Hey!»
The girl was four or five heads away, and short. I'd never have seen her if everyone else hadn't been short, too. Flatlanders rarely top six feet. And there was this girl, her hair a topological explosion in swirling orange and silver, her face a faint, subtle green with space-black eyebrows and lipstick, waving something and shouting at me.
Waving my wallet.
I forced my way to her until we were close enough to touch, until I could hear what she was saying above the crowd noise.
«Stupid! Where's your address? You don't even have a place for a stamp!»
«What?»
She looked startled. «Oh! You're an offworlder.»
«Yeah!» My voice would give out fast at this noise level.
«Well, look …» She shoved her way closer to me. «Look, you can't go around town with an offworlder's wallet. Next time someone picks your pocket he may not notice till you're gone.»
«You picked my pocket?»
«Sure! Think I found it? Would I risk my precious hand under all those spike heels?»
«How if I call a cop?»
«Cop? Oh, a stoneface.» She laughed merrily. «Learn or go under, man. There's no law against picking pockets. Look around you.»
I looked around me, then looked back fast, afraid she'd disappear. Not only my cash but my Bank of Jinx draft for forty thousand stars was in that wallet. Everything I owned.
«See them all? Sixty-four million people in Los Angeles alone. Eighteen billion in the whole world. Suppose there was a law against picking pockets? How would you enforce it?» She deftly extracted the cash from my wallet and handed the wallet back. «Get yourself a new wallet, and fast. It'll have a place for your address and a window for a tenth-star stamp. Put your address in right away, and a stamp, too. Then the next guy who takes it can pull out the money and drop your wallet in the nearest mailbox — no sweat. Otherwise you lose your credit cards, your ident, everything.» She stuffed two hundred-odd stars in cash between her breasts, flashing me a parting smile as she turned.