Scatterbrain (2003) SSC

by Larry Niven

  The ’doc had snapped her out of a three-week sleep. Like me: awake, alert, ready.

  It didn’t go away, the answer. It just…I still didn’t know where Sharrol was, or Carlos, or the children. What if I was wrong? Feather had mapped my route to Home, every step of the way. I knew exactly where Feather was now, if a line of logic could point my way. But—one wrong assumption, and Feather Filip could pop up behind my ear.

  I could make myself safer, and Sharrol, too, if I mapped out a worst-case scenario.

  Feather’s Plan B: Kill Shaeffer. Take the rest prisoner, to impose her will on Carlos…but Carlos flees with the boat. So, Plan B-1: Feather holds Sharrol at gunpoint. (Alive.) Some days later she waves down a boat. BLAM, and a stolen boat sails toward Shasht. Or stops to stow Sharrol somewhere, maybe on another coral island, maybe imprisoned inside a plastic tent with a live lamplighter horde prowling outside.

  And Carlos? He’s had four months, now, to find Sharrol and Feather. He’s a genius, ask anyone. And Feather wants to get in touch…unless she’s given up on Carlos, decided to kill him.

  If I could trace Carlos’s path, I would find Louis and Tanya and even Sharrol.

  Carlos Plan B-1 follows Plan A as originally conceived by Feather. The kids would be stowed aboard the iceliner as if already registered. Carlos would register and be frozen. Feather could follow him to Home…maybe on the same ship, if she hustled. But—

  No way could Feather get herself frozen with a gun in her hand. That would be the moment to take her, coming out of freeze on Home.

  There, I had a target. On Shasht they could tell me who had boarded the Zombie Queen for Home. What did I have to do to get to Shasht?

  “Feed myself, that’s easy. Collect rainwater, too. Get off the island….” That, at least, was not a puzzle. I couldn’t build a raft. I couldn’t swim to another island. But a sailor lost at sea will die if cast ashore; therefore, local tradition decrees that he must be rescued.

  “Collect some money. Get to Shasht. Hide myself.” Whatever else was lost to me, to us—whoever had died, whoever still lived—there was still the mission, and that was to be free of the United Nations and Earth.

  And Carlos Wu’s ’doc would finger me instantly. It was advanced nanotechnology: it screamed its Earthly origin. It might be the most valuable item on Fafnir, and I had no wealth at all, and I was going to have to abandon it.

  Come daylight, I moved the ’doc. I still wanted to hide it in the lamplighter nest. The gravity lift would lift it but not push it uphill. But I solved it.

  One of the secrets of life: know when and what to give up.

  I waited for low tide, then pushed it out to sea and turned off the lift. The water came almost to the faceplate. Seven hours later it didn’t show at all. And the next emergency might kill me unless it happened at low tide.

  The nights were as warm as the days. As the tourist material had promised, it rained just before dawn. I set up my pants to funnel rainwater into a hole I chopped in the coral.

  The tour guide had told me how to feed myself. It isn’t that rare for a lamplighter nest to die. Sooner or later an unlit island will be discovered by any of several species of swimming things. Some ride the waves at night and spawn in the sand.

  I spent the second night running through the shallows and scooping sunbunnies up in my jacket. Bigger flying fish came gliding off the crests of the breakers. They wanted the sunbunnies. Three or four wanted me, but I was able to dodge. One I had to gut in midair.

  The tour guide hadn’t told me how to clean sunbunnies. I had to fake that. I poached them in seawater, using my pocket torch on high; and I ate until I was bloated. I fed more of them into the biomass reservoir.

  With some distaste, I fed those long human bones in, too. Fafnir fish meat was deficient in metals. Ultimately that might kill me; but the ’doc could compensate for a time.

  There was nothing to build a boat with. The burned-out lamplighter nest didn’t show by daylight, so any passing boat would be afraid to rescue me. I thought of swimming; I thought of riding away on the gravity lift, wherever the wind might carry me. But I couldn’t feed myself at sea, and how could I approach another island?

  On the fourth evening a great winged shape passed over the island, then dived into the sea. Later I heard a slapping sound as that flyer and a companion kicked themselves free of the water, soared, passed over the crater, and settled into it. They made a great deal of noise. Presently the big one glided down to the water and was gone.

  At dawn I fed myself again, on the clutch of eggs that had been laid in the body of the smaller flyer: male or female, whichever. The dime disk hadn’t told me about this creature. A pity I wouldn’t have the chance to write it up.

  At just past sunset on the eighth night I saw a light flicker blue-green-red.

  My mag specs showed a boat that wasn’t moving.

  I fired a flare straight up, and watched it burn blue-white for twenty minutes. I fired another at midnight. Then I stuffed my boots partway into my biggest pockets, inflated my shoulder floats, and walked into the sea until I had to swim.

  I couldn’t see the boat with my eyes this close to water level. I fired another flare before dawn. One of those had to catch someone awake…and if not, I had three more. I kept swimming.

  It was peaceful as a dream. Fafnir’s ecology is very old, evolved on a placid world not prone to drifting continents and ice ages, where earthquakes and volcanoes know their place.

  The sea had teeth, of course, but the carnivores were specialized; they knew the sounds of their prey. There were a few terrifying exceptions. Reason and logic weren’t enough to wash out those memories, holograms of creatures the match for any white shark.

  I grew tired fast. The air felt warm enough, the water did, too, but it was leeching the heat from my flesh and bones. I kept swimming.

  A rescuer should have no way of knowing that I had been on an island. The farther I could get, the better. I did not want a rescuer to find Carlos Wu’s ’doc.

  At first I saw nothing more of the boat than the great white wings of its sails. I set the pocket torch on wide focus and high power, to compete with what was now broad daylight, and poured vivid green light on the sails.

  And I waited for it to turn toward me, but for a long time it didn’t. It came in a zigzag motion, aimed by the wind, never straight at me. It took forever to pull alongside.

  A woman with fluffy golden hair studied me in some curiosity, then stripped in two quick motions and dived in.

  I was numb with cold, hardly capable of wiggling a finger. This was the worst moment, and I couldn’t muster strength to appreciate it. I passively let the woman noose me under the armpits, watched the man lift me aboard, utterly unable to protect myself.

  Feather could have killed me before the ’doc released me. Why wait? I’d worked out what must have happened to her; it was almost plausible; but I couldn’t shake the notion that Feather was waiting above me, watching me come aboard.

  There was only a brawny golden man with slanted brown eyes and golden hair bleached nearly as white as mine. Tor, she’d called him, and she was Wil. He wrapped me in a silver bubble blanket and pushed a bulb of something hot into my hands.

  My hands shook. A cup would have splashed everything out. I got the bulb to my lips and sucked. Strange taste, augmented with a splash of rum. The warmth went to the core of me like life itself.

  The woman climbed up, dripping. She had eyes like his, a golden tan like his. He handed her a bulb. They looked me over amiably. I tried to say something; my teeth turned into castanets. I sucked and listened to them arguing over who and what I might be, and what could have torn up my jacket that way.

  When I had my teeth under some kind of control, I said, “I’m Persial January Hebert, and I’m eternally in your debt.”

  Leaving all our Earthly wealth behind us was a pain. Feather could help: she contrived to divert a stream of ARM funds to Fafnir, replacing it from Carlos’s wealth.r />
  Riiight. But Sharrol and I would be sponging off Carlos…and maybe it wouldn’t be Carlos. Feather controlled that wealth for now, and Feather liked control. She had not said that she expected to keep some for herself. That bothered me. It must have bothered Carlos, too, though we never found privacy to talk about it.

  I wondered how Carlos would work it. Had he known Feather Filip before he reached Jinx? I could picture him designing something that would be useless on Earth: say, an upgraded version of the mass driver system that runs through the vacuum across Jinx’s East Pole, replacing a more normal world’s Pinwheel launcher. Design something, copyright it on Jinx under a pseudonym, form a company. Just in case he ever found the means to flee Sol system.

  Me, I went to my oldest friend on Earth. General Products owed Elephant a considerable sum, and Elephant—Gregory Pelton—owed me. He got General Products to arrange for credit on Home and Fafnir. Feather wouldn’t have approved the breach in secrecy, but the aliens who run General Products don’t reveal secrets. We’d never even located their home world.

  And Feather must have expected to control Carlos’s funding and Carlos with it.

  And Sharrol…was with me.

  She’d trusted me. Now she was a flat phobe broke and stranded on an alien world, if she still lived, if she wasn’t the prisoner of a homicidal maniac. Four months, going on five. Long enough to drive her crazy, I thought.

  How could I hurry to her rescue? The word hurry was said to be forgotten on Fafnir; but perhaps I’d thought of a way.

  They let me sleep. When I woke there was soup. I was ravenous. We talked while we ate.

  The boat was Gullfish. The owners were Wilhelmin and Toranaga, brother and sister, both recently separated from mates and enjoying a certain freedom. Clean air, exercise, celibacy, before they returned to the mating dance, its embarrassments and frustrations and rewards.

  There was a curious turn to their accents. I tagged it as Australian at first, then as Plateau softened by speech training, or by a generation or two in other company. This was said to be typical of Fafnir. There was no Fafnir accent. The planet had been settled too recently and from too many directions.

  Wil finished her soup, went to a locker, and came back with a jacket. It was not quite like mine, and new, untouched. They helped me into it, and let me fish through the pockets of my own ragged garment before they tossed it in the locker.

  They had given me my life. By Fafnir custom my response would be a gift expressing my value as perceived by myself…but Wil and Tor hadn’t told me their full names. I hinted at this; they failed to understand. Hmm.

  My dime disk hadn’t spoken of this. It might be a new custom: the rescuer conceals data, so that an impoverished rescuee need not be embarrassed. He sends no life gift instead of a cheap one. But I was guessing. I couldn’t follow the vibes yet.

  As for my own history—

  “I just gave up,” I blurted. “It was so stupid. I hadn’t—hadn’t tried everything at all.”

  Toranaga said, “What kind of everything were you after?”

  “I lost my wife four months ago. A rogue wave—you know how waves crossing can build into a mountain of water? It rolled our boat under. A trawler picked me up, the Triton.” A civil being must be able to name his rescuer. Surely there must be a boat named Triton? “There’s no record of anyone finding Milcenta. I bought another boat and searched. It’s been four months. I was doing more drinking than looking lately, and three nights ago something rammed the boat. A torpedo ray, I think. I didn’t sink, but my power was out, even my lights. I got tired of it all and just started swimming.”

  They looked at each other, then at their soup. Sympathy was there, with a trace of contempt beneath.

  “Middle of the night, I was cold as the sea bottom, and it crossed my mind that maybe Mil was rescued under another name. We aren’t registered as a partnership. If Mil was in a coma, they’d check her retina prints—”

  “Use our caller,” Wilhelmin said.

  I thanked them. “With your permission, I’ll establish some credit, too. I’ve run myself broke, but there’s credit at Shasht.”

  They left me alone in the cabin.

  The caller was set into a well in the cabin table. It was a portable—just a projector plate and a few keys that would get me a display of virtual keys and a screen—but a sailor’s portable, with a watertight case and several small cleats. I found the master program unfamiliar but user-friendly.

  I set up a search program for Milcenta Adelaide Graynor, in any combination. Milcenta was Sharrol and Adelaide was Feather, as determined by their iceliner tickets and retina prints. Milcenta’s name popped up at once.

  I bellowed out of the hatch. “They saved her!” Wil and Tor bolted into the cabin to read over my shoulder.

  Hand of Allah, a fishing boat. Milcenta but not Adelaide! Sharrol had been picked up alone. I’d been at least half-right: she’d escaped from Feather. I realized I was crying.

  And—“No life gift.” That was the other side of it: if she sent a proper gift, the embarrassment of needing to be rescued at sea need never become public record. We’d drilled each other on such matters. “She must have been in bad shape.”

  “Yes, if she didn’t call you,” Wilhelmin said. “And she didn’t go home either?”

  I told Martin Graynor’s story: “We sold our home. We were on one last cruise before boarding an iceliner. She could be anywhere by now, if she thought the wave killed me. I’ll have to check.”

  I did something about money first. There was nothing aboard Gullfish that could read Persial January Hebert’s retina prints, but I could at least establish that money was there.

  I tried to summon passenger records from the iceliner Zombie Queen. This was disallowed. I showed disappointment and some impatience; but of course records wouldn’t be shown to Hebert. They’d be opened to Martin Wallace Graynor.

  They taught me to sail.

  Gullfish was built for sails, not for people. The floors weren’t flat. Ropes lay all over every surface. The mast stood upright through the middle of the cabin. You didn’t walk in, you climbed. There were no lift plates; you slept in an odd-shaped box small enough to let you brace yourself in storms.

  I had to learn a peculiar slang, as if I were learning to fly a spacecraft, and for the same reason. If a sailor hears a yell, he has to know what is meant, instantly.

  I was working hard, and my body was adjusting to the shorter day. Sure I had insomnia; but nobody sleeps well on a small boat. The idea is to snap awake instantly, where any stimulus could mean trouble. The boat was giving my body time to adjust to Fafnir.

  Once I passed a mirror, and froze. I barely knew myself.

  That was all to the good. My skin was darkening and, despite sunblock, would darken further. But—when we landed, my hair had been cut to Fafnir styles. It had grown during four months in the ’doc. The ’doc had “cured” my depilation treatment: I had a beard too. I was far too conspicuous, a pink-eyed, pale-skinned man with long, wild, white hair.

  My hosts hadn’t said anything. They must have put it down to the pattern of neurosis that had me sailing like a zombie in search of my dead wife, until my love of life left me entirely. I went to Tor in some embarrassment and asked if they had anything like a styler aboard.

  They had scissors. Riiight. Wil tried to shape my hair, laughed at the result, and suggested I finish the job at Booty Island.

  So I tried to forget the rest of the world and just sail. It was what Wilhelmin and Toranaga were doing. One day at a time. Islands and boats grew more common as we neared the Central Isles. Another day for Feather to forget me, or lose me. Another day of safety for Sharrol, if Feather followed me to her. I’d have to watch for that.

  And peace would have been mine, but that my ragged vest was in a locker that wouldn’t open to my fingerprints.

  Wil and Tor talked about themselves, a little, but I still didn’t know their identities. They slept in a locked cabin.
I noticed also an absence. Wil was a lovely woman, not unlike Sharrol herself; but her demeanor and body language showed no sign that she considered herself female, or me male, let alone that she might welcome a pass.

  It might mean anything, in an alien culture: that my hairstyle or shape of nose or skin color were distasteful, or I didn’t know the local body language, or I lacked documentation for my gene pattern. But I wondered if they wanted no life gift, in any sense, from a man they might have to give to the police.

  What would a police detective think of those holes? Why, he’d think some kinetic weapon had torn a hole through the occupant, killing him instantly, after which someone (the killer?) had stolen the vest for himself. And if Wil and Tor were thinking that way…What I did at the caller, might it be saved automatically?

  Now there was a notion.

  I borrowed the caller again. I summoned the encyclopedia and set a search for a creature with boneless arms. There were several on Fafnir, all small. I sought data on the biggest, particularly those local to the North Coral Quadrant. There were stories…no hard evidence….

  And another day passed, and I learned that I could cook while a kitchen was rolling randomly.

  At dinner that night Wil got to talking about Fafnir sea life. She’d worked at Pacifica, which I gathered was a kind of underwater zoo; and had I ever heard of a Kdatlyno life-form like a blind squid?

  “No,” I said. “Would the kzinti bring one here?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. The kzinti aren’t surfers,” Tor said, and we laughed.

  Wil didn’t. She said, “They meant it for the hunting jungle. On Kdat the damn things can come ashore and drag big animals back into the ocean. But they’ve pretty well died out around Shasht, and we never managed to get one for Pacifica.”