N-Space

by Larry Niven

  They scatter without regard to what is in their path. They leave curved channels, microscopically small. Presently all will have found their way to the open air.

  That leaves LL with several million microscopic perforations all leading deep into her abdomen. Most of the channels will intersect one or more loops of intestine.

  Peritonitis is inevitable. LL becomes desperately ill.

  Meanwhile, tens of millions of sperm swarm in the air over Metropolis.

  VIII

  This is more serious than it looks.

  Consider: these sperm are virtually indestructible. Within days or weeks they will die for lack of nourishment. Meanwhile they cannot be affected by heat, cold, vacuum, toxins, or anything short of green kryptonite.* There they are, minuscule but dangerous; for each has supernormal powers.

  Metropolis is shaken by tiny sonic booms. Worm-holes, charred by meteoric heat, sprout magically in all kinds of things: plate glass, masonry, antique ceramics, electric mixers, wood, household pets, and citizens. Some of the sperm will crack lightspeed. The Metropolis night comes alive with a network of narrow, eerie blue lines of Cherenkov radiation.

  And women whom Superman has never met find themselves in a delicate condition.

  Consider: LL won’t get pregnant because there were too many of the blind mindless beasts. But whenever one sperm approaches an unfertilized human egg in its panic flight, it will attack.

  How close is close enough? A few centimeters? Are sperm attracted by chemical cues? It seems likely. Metropolis had a population of millions; and a kryptonian sperm could travel a long and crooked path, billions of miles, before it gives up and dies.

  Several thousand blessed events seem not unlikely.*

  Several thousand lawsuits would follow. Not that Superman can’t afford to pay. There’s a trick where you squeeze a lump of coal into its allotropic diamond form…

  IX

  The above analysis gives us part of the answer. In our experiment in artificial insemination, we must use a single sperm. This presents no difficulty. Superman may use his microscopic vision and a pair of tiny tweezers to pluck a sperm from the swarm.

  X

  In its eagerness the single sperm may crash through LL’s abdomen at transsonic speeds, wreaking havoc. Is there any way to slow it down?

  There is. We can expose it to gold kryptonite.

  Gold kryptonite, we remember, robs a kryptonian of all of his super-normal powers, permanently. Were we to expose Superman himself to gold kryptonite, we would solve all his sex problems, but he would be Clark Kent forever. We may regard this solution as somewhat drastic.

  But we can expose the test tube of seminal fluid to gold kryptonite, then use standard techniques for artificial insemination.

  By any of these methods we can get LL pregnant, without killing her. Are we out of the woods yet?

  XI

  Though exposed to gold kryptonite, the sperm still carries kryptonian genes. If these are recessive, then LL carries a developing human fetus. There will be no more Supermen; but at least we need not worry about the mother’s health.

  But if some or all of the kryptonian genes are dominant…

  Can the infant use his X-ray vision before birth? After all, with such a power he can probably see through he own closed eyelids. That would leave LL sterile. If the kid starts using heat vision, things get even worse.

  But when he starts to kick, it’s all over. He will kick his way out into open air, killing himself and his mother.

  XII

  Is there a solution?

  There are several. Each has drawbacks.

  We can make LL wear a kryptonite* belt around her waist. But too little kryptonite may allow the child to damage her, while too much may damage or kill the child. Intermediate amounts may do both! And there is no safe way to experiment.

  A better solution is to find a host-mother.

  We have not yet considered the existence of a Supergirl.† She could carry the child without harm. But Supergirl has a secret identity, and her secret identity is no more married than Supergirl herself. If she turned up pregnant, she would probably be thrown out of school.

  A better solution may be to implant the growing fetus in Superman himself. There are places in a man’s abdomen where a fetus could draw adequate nourishment, growing as a parasite, and where it would not cause undue harm to surrounding organs. Presumably Clark Kent can take a leave of absence more easily than Supergirl’s schoolgirl alter ego.

  When the time comes, the child would be removed by Caesarian section. It would have to be removed early, but there would be no problem with incubators as long as it was fed. I leave the problem of cutting through Superman’s invulnerable skin, as an exercise for the alert reader.

  The mind boggles at the image of a pregnant Superman cruising the skies of Metropolis. Batman would refuse to be seen with him; strange new jokes would circulate the prisons…and the race of Krypton would be safe at last.

  Surely every child who ever read a comic book has wondered about these matters? But my venture into xenofertility was only party conversation until Bjo Trimble made me type it up.

  It’s generated tremendous levels of feedback, and more damned fun…

  There’s a dramatization: an underground comic that looks very like a DC treatment except for being black and white. It begins as Superman drops and smashes the Kandor bottle, and ends as The Atom (the little one) implants a fertilized egg.

  People read the article to their friends over the phone.

  Kirk Alyn is a wedge-shaped old man, looks like you’d want to look at that age. He played Superman in the serials. He read “Man of Steel…” because a young lady recognized him on an airplane; she handed him a copy of ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS with the article marked, He says he’s always wondered what she had in mind.

  When the Superman movie was about to happen, a Brit videotaped some interviews at the Griffith Park Planetarium. At his behest I described, on videotape, the problems a Kryptonian would face living a normal life on Earth. He held his straight face until he had what he wanted, then cracked up. A real pro.

  And Ben Bova bought reprint rights for Omni magazine. I altered and signed the contract, cashed the check, and waited. Nothing. At Omni’s first anniversary party at Griffith Observatory, I asked Ben, “When will you publish ‘Man of Steel…’”

  He wouldn’t.

  Why not?

  Well, the Superman movie people and the DC Comics people all know about “Man of Steel.” They wouldn’t let Ben illustrate the article, and Omni is such a visual magazine…

  In June of ’88 Superman’s 50th birthday was celebrated with a convention in Cleveland, his true birthplace. They’d promised a statue; it never happened. A panel on crossbreeding of humans and aliens turned out to be just me! I managed to hold the audience by reading this article, then discussing Reed and Sue Richards, Mr. Spock, V-for-Visitors, rishathra…Sex with aliens seems to fascinate people.

  • • •

  * Superman first appeared in Action Comics, June 1938.

  * One should not think of Superman as a Peeping Tom. A biological ability must be used. As a child Superman may never have known that things had surfaces, until he learned to suppress his X-ray vision.

  If millions of people tend shamelessly to wear clothing with no lead in the weave, that is hardly Superman’s fault.

  * One can imagine that the Kent home in Smallville was riddled with holes during Superboy’s puberty. And why did Lana Lang never notice that?

  * And other forms of kryptonite. For instance, there are chunks of red kryptonite that make giants of kryptonians. Imagine ten million earthworm-sized spermatozoa swarming over a Metropolis beach, diving to fertilize the beach balls…but I digress.

  * If the pubescent Superboy plays with himself, we have the same problem over Smallville.

  * For our purposes, all forms of kryptonite are available in unlimited quantities. It has been estimated, from the startling tonnage of
kryptonite fallen to Earth since the explosion of Krypton, that the planet must have outweighed our entire solar system. Doubtless the ‘planet’ Krypton was a cooling black dwarf star, one of a binary pair, the other member being a red giant.

  † She can’t mate with Superman because she’s his first cousin. And only a cad would suggest differently…

  • • •

  Up from the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat came Douglas Hooker, rising like a star.

  “The Ethics of Madness,” 1967

  INCONSTANT MOON

  I

  I was watching the news when the change came, like a flicker of motion at the corner of my eye. I turned toward the balcony window. Whatever it was, I was too late to catch it.

  The moon was very bright tonight.

  I saw that, and smiled, and turned back. Johnny Carson was just starting his monologue.

  When the first commercials came on I got up to reheat some coffee. Commercials came in strings of three and four, going on midnight. I’d have time.

  The moonlight caught me coming back. If it had been bright before, it was brighter now. Hypnotic. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the balcony.

  The balcony wasn’t much more than a railed ledge, with standing room for a man and a woman and a portable barbecue set. These past months the view had been lovely, especially around sunset. The Power and Light Company had been putting up a glass-slab style office building. So far it was only a steel framework of open girders. Shadow-blackened against a red sunset sky, it tended to look stark and surrealistic and hellishly impressive.

  Tonight…

  I had never seen the moon so bright, not even in the desert. Bright enough to read by, I thought, and immediately, but that’s an illusion. The moon was never bigger (I had read somewhere) than a quarter held nine feet away. It couldn’t possibly be bright enough to read by.

  It was only three-quarters full!

  But, glowing high over the San Diego Freeway to the west, the moon seemed to dim even the streaming automobile headlights. I blinked against its light, and thought of men walking on the moon, leaving corrugated footprints. Once, for the sake of an article I was writing, I had been allowed to pick up a bone-dry moon rock and hold it in my hand…

  I heard the show starting again, and I stepped inside. But, glancing once behind me, I caught the moon growing even brighter—as if it had come from behind a wisp of scudding cloud.

  Now its light was brain-searing, lunatic.

  The phone rang five times before she answered.

  “Hi,” I said. “Listen—”

  “Hi,” Leslie said sleepily, complainingly. Damn. I’d hoped she was watching television, like me.

  I said, “Don’t scream and shout, because I had a reason for calling. You’re in bed, right? Get up and—can you get up?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Quarter of twelve.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Go out on your balcony and look around.”

  “Okay.”

  The phone clunked. I waited. Leslie’s balcony faced north and west, like mine, but it was ten stories higher, with a correspondingly better view.

  Through my own window, the moon burned like a textured spotlight.

  “Stan? You there?”

  “Yah. What do you think of it?”

  “It’s gorgeous. I’ve never seen anything like it. What could make the moon light up like that?”

  “I don’t know, but isn’t it gorgeous”?

  “You’re supposed to be the native.” Leslie had only moved out here a year ago.

  “Listen, I’ve never seen it like this. But there’s an old legend,” I said. “Once every hundred years the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clear as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won’t have to look at it.”

  “I used to know all that stuff. Well, listen, I’m glad you woke me up to see it, but I’ve got to get to work tomorrow.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “That’s life. ’Night.”

  “’Night.”

  Afterward I sat in the dark, trying to think of someone else to call. Call a girl at midnight, invite her to step outside and look at the moonlight…and she may think it’s romantic or she may be furious, but she won’t assume you called six others.

  So I thought of some names. But the girls who belonged to them had all dropped away over the past year or so, after I started spending all my time with Leslie. One could hardly blame them. And now Joan was in Texas and Hildy was getting married, and if I called Louise I’d probably get Gordie too. The English girl? But I couldn’t remember her number. Or her last name.

  Besides, everyone I knew punched a time clock of one kind or another. Me, I worked for a living, but as a freelance writer I picked my hours. Anyone I woke up tonight, I’d be ruining her morning. Ah, well…

  The Johnny Carson Show was a swirl of gray and a roar of static when I got back to the living room. I turned the set off and went back out on the balcony.

  The moon was brighter than the flow of headlights on the freeway, brighter than Westwood Village off to the right. The Santa Monica Mountains had a magical pearly glow. There were no stars near the moon. Stars could not survive that glare.

  I wrote science and how-to articles for a living. I ought to be able to figure out what was making the moon do that. Could the moon be suddenly larger?

  …Inflating like a balloon? No. Closer, maybe. The moon, falling?

  Tides! Waves fifty feet high…and earthquakes! San Andreas Fault splitting apart like the Grand Canyon! Jump in my car, head for the hills…no, too late already…

  Nonsense. The moon was brighter, not bigger. I could see that. And what could possibly drop the moon on our heads like that?

  I blinked, and the moon left an afterimage on my retinae. It was that bright.

  A million people must be watching the moon right now, and wondering, like me. An article on the subject would sell big…if I wrote it before anyone else did…

  There must be some simple, obvious explanation.

  Well, how could the moon grow brighter? Moonlight reflected sunlight. Could the sun have gotten brighter? It must have happened after sunset, then, or it would have been noticed…

  I didn’t like that idea.

  Besides, half the Earth was in direct sunlight. A thousand correspondents for Life and Time and Newsweek and Associated Press would all be calling in from Europe, Asia, Africa…unless they were all hiding in cellars. Or dead. Or voiceless, because the sun was blanketing everything with static, radio and phone systems and television…television. Oh my God.

  I was just barely beginning to be afraid.

  All right, start over. The moon had become very much brighter. Moonlight, well, moonlight was reflected sunlight; any idiot knew that. Then…something had happened to the sun.

  II

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Me,” I said, and then my throat froze solid. Panic! What was I going to tell her?

  “I’ve been watching the moon,” she said dreamily. “It’s wonderful. I even tried to use my telescope, but I couldn’t see a thing; it was too bright. It lights up the whole city. The hills are all silver.”

  That’s right, she kept a telescope on her balcony. I’d forgotten.

  “I haven’t tried to go back to sleep,” she said. “Too much light.”

  I got my throat working again. “Listen, Leslie love, I started thinking about how I woke you up and how you probably couldn’t get back to sleep, what with all this light. So let’s go out for a midnight snack.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “No, I’m serious. I mean it. Tonight isn’t a night for sleeping. We may never have a night like this again. To hell with your diet. Let’s celebrate. Hot fudge sundaes, Irish coffee—”

  “That’s different. I’ll get dressed.”

  “I’ll be right
over.”

  Leslie lived on the fourteenth floor of Building C of the Barrington Plaza. I rapped for admission, and waited.

  And waiting, I wondered without any sense of urgency: Why Leslie?

  There must be other ways to spend my last night on Earth, than with one particular girl. I could have picked a different particular girl, or even several not too particular girls, except that that didn’t really apply to me, did it? Or I could have called my brother, or either set of parents—

  Well, but brother Mike would have wanted a good reason for being hauled out of bed at midnight. “But, Mike, the moon is so beautiful—” Hardly. Any of my parents would have reacted similarly. Well, I had a good reason, but would they believe me?

  And if they did, what then? I would have arranged a kind of wake. Let ’em sleep through it. What I wanted was someone who would join my…farewell party without asking the wrong questions.

  What I wanted was Leslie. I knocked again.

  She opened the door just a crack for me. She was in her underwear. A stiff, misshapen girdle in one hand brushed my back as she came into my arms. “I was about to put this on.”

  “I came just in time, then.” I took the girdle away from her and dropped it. I stooped to get my arms under her ribs, straightened up with effort, and walked us to the bedroom with her feet dangling against my ankles.

  Her skin was cold. She must have been outside.

  “So” she demanded. “You think you can compete with a hot fudge sundae, do you?”

  “Certainly. My pride demands it.” We were both somewhat out of breath. Once in our lives I had tried to lift her cradled in my arms, in conventional movie style. I’d damn near broken my back. Leslie was a big girl, my height, and almost too heavy around the hips.

  I dropped us on the bed, side by side. I reached around her from both sides to scratch her back, knowing it would leave her helpless to resist me, ah ha hahahaha. She made sounds of pleasure to tell me where to scratch. She pulled my shirt up around my shoulders and began scratching my back.