N-Space

by Larry Niven

  Matthew Keller had committed, deliberately, one of the worst of possible crimes. He had crawled off the edge of the Plateau, taking with him his eyes, his liver and kidneys, his miles of blood tubing, and all twelve of his glands—taking everything that could have gone into the Hospital’s organ banks to save the lives of those whose bodies were failing. Even his worth as fertilizer, not inconsiderable on a three-hundred-year-old colony world, was now nil. Only the water in him would someday return to the upper world to fall as rain on the lakes and rivers and as snow on the great northern glacier. Already, perhaps, he was dry and flaming in the awful heat forty miles below.

  Or had he stopped falling, even yet?

  Jesus Pietro, Head of Implementation, stepped back with an effort. The formless mist sometimes brought strange hallucinations and stranger thoughts—like that odd member of the Rorschach inkblot set, the one sheet of cardboard which is blank. Jesus Pietro had caught himself thinking that when his time came, if it ever came, this was the way he would like to go. And that was treason.

  • • •

  “So you’re a miner now?”

  “Right, and regretting it every waking hour. I rue the day Earth sent us those little snakes.”

  “It must be better than digging the holes yourself.”

  “Think so? Are you ready for a lecture?”

  “Just a second.” Hood drained his glass in a heroic gesture. “Ready.” “A mining worm is five inches long and a quarter inch in diameter, mutated from an earthworm. Its grinding orifice is rimmed with little diamond teeth. It ingests metal ores for pleasure, but for food it has to be supplied with blocks of synthetic stuff which is different for each breed of worm—and there’s a breed for every metal. This makes things complicated. We’ve got six breeds out at the mine site, and I’ve got to see that each breed always has a food block within reach.”

  “It doesn’t sound too complicated. Can’t they find their own food?”

  “In theory, sure. In practice, not always. But that’s not all. What breaks down the ores is a bacterium in the worm’s stomach. Then the worm drops metal grains around its food block, and we sweep them up. Now, that bacterium dies very easily. If the bacterium dies, so does the worm, because there’s metal ore blocking his intestines. Then the other worms eat his body to recover the ore. Only, five times out of six it’s the wrong ore.”

  “The worms can’t tell each other apart?”

  “Flaming right they can’t. They eat the wrong metals, they eat the wrong worms, they eat the wrong food blocks; and when they do everything right, they still die in ten days. They were built that way because their teeth wear out so fast. They’re supposed to breed like mad to compensate, but the plain truth is they don’t have time when they’re on the job. We have to keep going back to the crew for more.”

  “So they’ve got you by the gonads.”

  “Sure. They charge what they like.”

  “Could they be putting the wrong chemical cues in some of the food blocks?”

  Matt looked up, startled. “I’ll bet that’s just what they’re doing. Or too little of the right cues; that’d save them money at the same time. They won’t let us grow our own, of course. The—” Matt swallowed the word. After all, he hadn’t seen Hood in years. The crew didn’t like being called names.

  “Time for dinner,” said Hood.

  They finished the beer and went to the town’s one restaurant. Hood wanted to know what had happened to his old school friends, or schoolmates; Hood had not made friends easily. Matt, who knew in many cases, obliged. They talked shop, both professions. Hood was teaching school on Delta. To Matt’s surprise, the introverted boy had become an entertaining storyteller. He had kept his dry, precise tone, and it only made his jokes funnier. They were both fairly good at their jobs, and both making enough money to live on. There was no real poverty anywhere on the Plateau. It was not the colonists’ money the crew wanted, as Hood pointed out over the meat course.

  “I know where there’s a party,” Hood said over coffee.

  “Are we invited?”

  “Yes.”

  Matt had nothing planned for the night, but he wanted reassurance. “Party crashers welcome?”

  “In your case, party crashers solicited. You’ll like Harry Kane. He’s the host.”

  “I’m sold.”

  The sun dipped below the edge of Gamma Plateau as they rode up. They left their bicycles in back of the house. As they walked around to the front, the sun showed again, a glowing red half-disk above the eternal sea of cloud beyond the void edge. Harry Kane’s house was just forty yards from the edge. They stopped a moment to watch the sunset fade, then turned toward the house.

  It was a great sprawling bungalow, laid out in a rough cross, with the bulging walls typical of architectural coral. No attempt had been made to disguise its origin. Matt had never before seen a house which was not painted, but he had to admire the effect. The remnants of the shaping balloon, which gave all architectural coral buildings their telltale bulge, had been carefully scraped away. The exposed walls had been polished to a shining pink sheen. Even after sunset the house glowed softly.

  As if it were proud of its thoroughly colonist origin.

  Architectural coral was another gift of the ramrobots. A genetic manipulation of ordinary sea coral, it was the cheapest building material known. The only real cost was in the plastic balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral’s special airborne food. All colonists lived in buildings of coral. Not many would have built in stone or wood or brick even were it allowed. But most attempted to make their dwellings look somewhat like those on Alpha plateau. With paint, with wood and metal and false stone-sidings, with powered sandpaper disks to flatten the inevitable bulges, they tried to imitate the crew.

  In daylight or darkness Harry Kane’s house was flagrantly atypical.

  The noise hit them as they opened the door. Matt stood still while his ears adjusted to the noise level—a survival trait his ancestors had developed when Earth’s population numbered nineteen billion, even as it did that night, eleven point nine light-years away. During the last four centuries a man of Earth might as well have been stone deaf if he could not carry on a conversation with a thousand drunks bellowing in his ears. Matt’s people had kept some of their habits too. The great living room was jammed, and the few chairs were largely being ignored.

  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.

  • • •

  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.

  • • •

  An officer had found the housecleaner nest, a niche in the south wall, near the floor. The man reached in and carefully removed two unconscious adult housecleaners and four pups, put them on the floor, reached in to remove the nest and the food dish. The niche would have to be searched.

  Jesus Pietro’s clothes dried slowly, in wrinkles. He sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his belly. Presently he opened his eyes, sighed, and frowned slightly.

  —Jesus Pietro, this is a very strange house.

  —Yes. Almost garishly colonist. (Overtones of disgust.)

  Jesus Pietro looked at the pink coral walls, the flat-sanded floor which curved up at the edge of the rug to join the walls. Not a bad effect if a woman were living here. But Harry Kane was a bachelor.

  —How much would you say a house like this cost?

  —Oh, about a thousand stars, not including furnishings. Furnishings would cost twice that. Rugs, ninety stars if you bought one and let it spread. Two housecleaners, mated, fifty stars.

  —And how much to put a basement under such a house?

  —Mist Demons, what an idea! Basements have to be dug by hand, by human beings! It’d cost twenty thousand stars easily. You could build a school for that. Who would ever think of digging a basement under an architectural coral house?

  —Who indeed?

  Jesus Pietro stepped briskly to the door. “Major Jansen!”

  • • •

  Geologists (don’t give me a hard time about that word) believed that Mount Lookitthat was geologically recent. A few hundreds of thousands of years ago, part of the planet’s skin had turned molten. Possibly a convection current in the interior had carried more than ordinarily hot magma up to melt the surface; possibly an asteroid had died a violent, fiery death. A slow extrusion had followed, with viscous magma rising and cooling and rising and cooling until a plateau with fluted sides and an approximately flat top stood forty miles above the surface.

  It had to be recent. Such a preposterous anomaly could not long resist the erosion of Mount Lookitthat’s atmosphere.

  And because it was recent, the surface was jagged. Generally the northern end was higher, high enough to hold a permanent sliding glacier, and too high and too cold for comfort. Generally rivers and streams ran south, to join either the Muddy or the Long Fall, both of which had carved deep canyons for themselves through the southland. Both canyons ended in spectacular waterfalls, the tallest in the known universe. Generally the rivers ran south; but there were exceptions, for the surface of Mount Lookitthat was striated, differentiated, a maze of plateaus divided by cliffs and chasms.

  Some plateaus were flat; some of the cliffs were straight and vertical. Most of these were in the south. In the north the surface was all tilted blocks and strange lakes with deep, pointed bottoms, and the land would have been cruel to a mountain goat. Nonetheless these regions would be settled someday, just as the Rocky Mountains of Earth were now part of suburbia.

  The slowboats had landed in the south, on the highest plateau around. The colonists had been forced to settle lower down. Though they were the more numerous, they covered less territory, for the crew had cars, and flying cars can make a distant mountain-home satisfactory where bicycles will not. Yet Alpha Plateau was Crew Plateau, and for many it was better to live elbow to elbow with one’s peers than out in the boondocks in splendid isolation.

  So Alpha Plateau was crowded.

  What Matt saw below him were all houses. They varied enormously in size, in color, in style, in building material. To Matt, who had lived out his life in architectural coral, the dwellings looked like sheer havoc, like debris from the explosion of a time machine. There was even a clump of deserted, crumbling coral bungalows, each far bigger than a colonist’s home. Two or three were as large as Matt’s old grade school. When architectural coral first came to the Plateau, the crew had reserved it for their own use. Later it had gone permanently out of style.

  None of the nearby buildings seemed to be more than two stories tall. Someday there would be skyscrapers if the crew kept breeding. But in the distance two squat towers rose from a shapeless construction in stone and metal. The Hospital, without a doubt. And straight ahead.

  Matt was beginning to feel the strain of flying. He had to divide his attention between the dashboard, the ground, and the Hospital ahead. It was coming closer, and he was beginning to appreciate its size.

  Each of the empty slowboats had been built to house six crew in adequate comfort and fifty colonists in stasis. Each slowboat also included a cargo hold, two water-fueled reaction motors and a water fuel tank. And all of this had to be fitted into a hollow double-walled cylinder the shape of a beer can from which the top and bottom have been removed with a can opener. The slowboats had been circular flying wings. In transit between worlds they had spun on their axes to provide centrifugal gravity; and the empty space inside the inner hull, now occupied only by two intersecting tailfins, had once held two throwaway hydrogen balloons.

  They were big. Since Matt could not see the inner emptiness which the crew called the Attic, they looked far bigger. Yet they were swamped by the haphazard-looking stone construction of the Hospital. Most of it was two stories high, but there were towers which climbed halfway up the ships’ hulls. Some would be power stations, others—he couldn’t guess. Flat, barren rock surrounded the Hospital in a half-mile circle, rock as naked as the Plateau had been before the slowboats brought a carefully selected ecology.

  • • •

  “Matt!” Laney called over her shoulder. She was standing inches from the void.

  “Get back from there!”

  “No! Come here!”

  Matt went. So did Mrs. Hancock. The three of them stood at the edge of the grass, looking down into their shadows.

  The sun was at their backs, shining down at forty-five degrees. The water-vapor mist which had covered the southern end of the Plateau that morning now lay just beyond the void edge, almost at their feet. And they looked into their shadows—three shadows reaching down into infinity, three contoured black tunnels growing smaller and narrower as they bored through the lighted mist, until they reached their blurred vanishing points. But for each of the three it seemed that only his own shadow was surrounded by a small, vivid, perfectly circular rainbow.

  A fourth shadow joined them, moving slowly and painfully. “Oh, for a camera,” mourned Harry Kane.

  “I never saw it like that before,” said Matt.

  “I did, once, a long time ago. It was like I’d had a vision. Myself, the representative of Man, standing at the edge of the world with a rainbow about his head. I joined the Sons of Earth that night.”

  • • •

  • • •

  Orson popped open one of the cans, drank, and made a face at Snow Goose. “You brought me all the way to Hell for sugar-free 7-Up?”

  THE BARSOOM PROJECT, 1989

  FOR A FOGGY NIGHT

  This is the story Jerry Pournelle quotes to demonstrate why he writes with me. I’m the crazy one.

  He comes to me with a map of a city-sized building; I put a high diving board at the edge of the roof. I put a surfer on a tidal wave in LUCIFER’S HAMMER; he moves the beach to where it would work. Jerry puts High Frontier weapons in the grip of the invading fithp, but mine is the vision of baby elephants in tennis shoes gliding out of the sky under paper airplanes.

  And I wrote the story that demonstrates that fog is the visible sign of a merging of time tracks…

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  The bar was selling a lot of Irish coffee that night. I’d bought two myself. It was warm inside, almost too warm, except when someone pushed through the door. Then a puff of chill, damp fog would roll in.

  Beyond the window was grey chaos. The fog picked up all the various city lights: ye
llow light leaking from inside the bar, passing automobile headlights, white light from frosted street globes, and the rainbow colors of neon signs. The fog stirred all the lights together into a cold gray-white paste and leaked it back through the windows.

  Bright spots drifted past at a pedestrian’s pace. Cars. I felt sorry for the drivers. Rolling through a gray formless limbo, running from street globe to invisible street globe, alert for the abrupt, dangerous red dot of a traffic light: an intersection; you couldn’t tell otherwise…I had friends in San Francisco; there were other places I could be. But it wasn’t my city, and I was damned if I’d drive tonight.

  A lost night. I’d finished my drink. One more, and I’d cross the street to my hotel.

  “You’d best wait until the fog thins out,” said the man next to me.

  He was a stranger, medium all over; medium height and weight, regular features, manicured nails, feathery brown hair, no scars. The invisible man. I’d never have looked his way if he hadn’t spoken. But he was smiling as if he knew me.

  I said, “Sorry?”

  “The point is, your hotel might not be there when you’ve crossed the street. Don’t be surprised,” he added. “I can read minds. We’ve learned the knack, where I come from.”

  There are easy ways to interrupt a conversation with a stranger. A blank stare will do it. But I was bored and alone, and a wacky conversation might be just what I needed.

  I said, “Why shouldn’t my hotel be exactly where I left it?”

  He frowned into his scotch-and-soda, then took a swallow. “Do you know the theory of multiple world lines? It seems that whenever a decision is made, it’s made both ways. The world becomes two or more worlds, one for each way the decision can go. Ah, I see you know of it. Well, sometimes the world lines merge again.”

  “But—”

  “That’s exactly right. The world must split on the order of a trillion times a second. What’s so unbelievable about that? If you want a real laugh, ask a physicist about furcoated particles.”