N-Space

by Larry Niven

  South, a handful of yelling marksmen were throwing rocks at a copseye, directed by a gesticulating man with wild black hair. The golden basketball was dodging the rocks, but barely. Some cop was baiting them. I wondered where they had got the rocks. Rocks were scarce in King’s Free Park.

  The black-haired man looked familiar. I watched him and his horde chasing the copseye…then forgot them when a girl walked out of a clump of elms.

  She was lovely. Long, perfect legs, deep red hair worn longer than shoulder length, the face of an arrogant angel, and a body so perfect that it seemed unreal, like an adolescent’s daydream. Her walk showed training; possibly she was a model or dancer. Her only garment was a cloak of glowing blue velvet.

  It was fifteen yards long, that cloak. It trailed back from two big gold disks that were stuck somehow to the skin of her shoulders. It trailed back and back, floating at a height of five feet all the way, twisting and turning to trace her path through the trees. She seemed like the illustration in a book of fairy tales, bearing in mind that the original fairy tales were not intended for children.

  Neither was she. You could hear neck vertebrae popping all over the Park. Even the rock throwers had stopped to watch.

  She could sense the attention, or hear it in a whisper of sighs. It was what she was here for. She strolled along with a condescending angel’s smile on her angel’s face, not overdoing the walk, but letting it flow. She turned regardless of whether there were obstacles to avoid, so that fifteen yards of flowing cloak could follow the curve.

  I smiled, watching her go. She was lovely from the back, with dimples.

  The man who stepped up to her a little further on was the same who had led the rock throwers. Wild black hair and beard, hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes, a diffident smile and a diffident walk…Ron Cole. Of course.

  I didn’t hear what he said to the girl in the cloak, but I saw the result. He flinched, then turned abruptly and walked away with his eyes on his feet.

  I got up and moved to intercept him. “Don’t take it personally,” I said.

  He looked up, startled. His voice, when it came, was bitter. “How should I take it?”

  “She’d have turned any man off the same way. That lady has staples in her navel. She’s to look, not to touch.”

  “You know her?”

  “Never saw her before in my life.”

  “Then—?”

  “Her cloak. Now you must have noticed her cloak.”

  The tail end of her cloak was just passing us, its folds rippling an improbably deep, rich blue. Ronald Cole smiled as if it hurt his face. “Yah.”

  “All right. Now suppose you made a pass, and suppose the lady liked your looks and took you up on it. What would she do next? Bearing in mind that she can’t stop walking even for a second.”

  He thought it over first, then asked, “Why not?”

  “If she stops walking she loses the whole effect. Her cloak just hangs there like some kind of tail. It’s supposed to wave. If she lies down with you it’s even worse. A cloak floating at five feet, then swooping into a clump of bushes and bobbing frantically—” Ron laughed helplessly in falsetto. I said, “See? Her audience would get the giggles. That’s not what she’s after.”

  He sobered. “But if she really wanted to, she wouldn’t care about…oh. Right. She must have spent a fortune to get that effect.”

  “Sure. She wouldn’t ruin it for Jacques Casanova himself.” I thought unfriendly thoughts toward the girl in the cloak. There are polite ways to turn down a pass. Ronald Cole was easy to hurt.

  I asked, “Where did you get the rocks?”

  “Rocks? Oh, we found a place where the center divider shows through. We knocked off some chunks of concrete.” Ron looked down the length of the park just as a kid bounced a missile off a golden ball. “They got one! Come on!”

  The fastest commercial shipping that ever sailed was the clipper ship; yet the world stopped building them after just twenty-five years. Steam had come. Steam was faster, safer, more dependable, cheaper in time and men.

  The freeways served America for almost fifty years. Then modern transportation systems cleaned the air and made traffic jams archaic and left the nation with an embarrassing problem. What to do with ten thousand miles of unsightly abandoned freeways?

  King’s Free Park had been part of the San Diego Freeway, the section between Sunset and the Santa Monica interchange. Decades ago the concrete had been covered with topsoil. The borders had been landscaped from the start. Now the Park was as thoroughly covered with green as the much older Griffith Free Park.

  Within King’s Free Park was an orderly approximation of anarchy. People were searched at the entrances. There were no weapons inside. The copseyes, floating overhead and out of reach, were the next best thing to no law at all.

  There was only one law to enforce. All acts of attempted violence carried the same penalty for attacker and victim. Let anyone raise his hand against his neighbor, and one of the golden basketballs would stun them both. They would wake separately, with copseyes watching. It was usually enough.

  Naturally people threw rocks at copseyes. It was a Free Park, wasn’t it?

  “They got one! Come on!” Ron tugged at my arm. The felled copseye was hidden, surrounded by those who had destroyed it. “I hope they don’t kick it apart. I told them I need it intact, but that might not stop them.”

  “It’s a Free Park. And they bagged it.”

  “With my missiles!”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know. They were playing baseball when I found them. I told them I needed a copseye. They said they’d get me one.”

  I remember Ron quite well now. Ronald Cole was an artist and an inventor. It would have been two sources of income for another man, but Ron was different. He invented new art forms. With solder and wire and diffraction gratings and several makes of plastics kits, and an incredible collection of serendipitous junk, Ron Cole made things the like of which had never been seen on Earth.

  The market for new art forms has always been low, but now and then he did make a sale. It was enough to keep him in raw materials, especially since many of his raw materials came from basements and attics. There was an occasional big sale, and then, briefly, he would be rich.

  There was this about him: he knew who I was, but he hadn’t remembered my name. Ron Cole had better things to think about than what name belonged with whom. A name was only a tag and a conversational gambit. “Russel! How are you?” A signal. Ron had developed a substitute.

  Into a momentary gap in the conversation he would say, “Look at this,” and hold out—miracles.

  Once it had been a clear plastic sphere, golfball-sized, balanced on a polished silver concavity. When the ball rolled around on the curved mirror, the reflections were fantastic.

  Once it had been a twisting sea serpent engraved on a Michelob beer bottle, the lovely vase-shaped bottle of the early 1960s that was too big for standard refrigerators.

  And once it had been two strips of dull silvery metal, unexpectedly heavy. “What’s this?”

  I’d held them in the palm of my hand. They were heavier than lead. Platinum? But nobody carries that much platinum around. Joking, I’d asked, “U-235?”

  “Are they warm?” he’d asked apprehensively. I’d fought off an urge to throw them as far as I could and dive behind a couch.

  But they had been platinum. I never did learn why Ron was carrying them about. Something that didn’t pan out.

  Within a semicircle of spectators, the felled copseye lay on the grass. It was intact, possibly because two cheerful, conspicuously large men were standing over it, waving everyone back.

  “Good,” said Ron. He knelt above the golden sphere, turned it with his long artist’s fingers. To me he said, “Help me get it open.”

  “What for? What are you after?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute. Help me get—Never mind.” The hemispherical cover came off. For the first ti
me ever, I looked into a copseye.

  It was impressively simple. I picked out the stunner by its parabolic reflector, the cameras, and a toroidal coil that had to be part of the floater device. No power source. I guessed that the shell itself was a power-beam antenna. With the cover cracked there would be no way for a damn fool to electrocute himself.

  Ron knelt and studied the strange guts of the copseye. From his pocket he took something made of glass and metal. He suddenly remembered my existence and held it out to me, saying, “Look at this.”

  I took it, expecting a surprise, and I got it. It was an old hunting watch, a big wind-up watch on a chain, with a protective case. They were in common use a couple of hundred years ago. I looked at the face, said, “Fifteen minutes slow. You didn’t repair the whole works, did you?”

  “Oh, no.” He clicked the back open for me.

  The works looked modern. I guessed, “Battery and tuning fork?”

  “That’s what the guard thought. Of course that’s what I made it from. But the hands don’t move; I set them just before they searched me.”

  “Aha. What does it do?”

  “If I work it right, I think it’ll knock down every copseye in King’s Free Park.”

  For a minute or so I was laughing too hard to speak. Ron watched me with his head on one side, clearly wondering if I thought he was joking.

  I managed to say, “That ought to cause all kinds of excitement.”

  Ron nodded vigorously. “Of course it all depends on whether they use the kind of circuits I think they use. Look for yourself; the copseyes aren’t supposed to be foolproof. They’re supposed to be cheap. If one gets knocked down, the taxes don’t go up much. The other way is to make them expensive and foolproof, and frustrate a lot of people. People aren’t supposed to be frustrated in a Free Park.”

  “So?”

  “Well, there’s a cheap way to make the circuitry for the power system. If they did it that way, I can blow the whole thing. We’ll see.” Ron pulled thin copper wire from the cuffs of his shirt.

  “How long will this take?”

  “Oh, half an hour.”

  That decided me. “I’ve got to be going. I’m meeting Jill Hayes pit the Wilshire exits. You’ve met her, a big blond girl, my height—”

  But he wasn’t listening. “Okay, see you,” he muttered. He began placing the copper wire inside the copseye, with tweezers. I left.

  Crowds tend to draw crowds. A few minutes after leaving Ron, I joined a semicircle of the curious to see what they were watching.

  A balding, lantern-jawed individual was putting something together: an archaic machine, with blades and a small gasoline motor. The T-shaped wooden handle was brand new and unpainted. The metal parts were dull with the look of ancient rust recently removed.

  The crowd speculated in half whispers. What was it? Not part of a car; not an outboard motor, though it had blades; too small for a motor scooter, too big for a motor skateboard…

  “Lawn mower,” said the white-haired lady next to me. She was one of those small, birdlike people who shrivel and grow weightless as they age, and live forever. Her words meant nothing to me. I was about to ask, when—

  The lantern-jawed man finished his work, and twisted something, and the motor started with a roar. Black smoke puffed out. In triumph he gripped the handles. Outside, it was a prison offense to build a working internal combustion machine. Here—

  With the fire of dedication burning in his eyes, he wheeled his infernal machine across the grass. He left a path as flat as a rug. It was a Free Park, wasn’t it?

  The smell hit everyone at once: a black dirt in the air, a stink of half-burned hydrocarbons attacking nose and eyes. I gasped and coughed. I’d never smelled anything like it.

  The crescent of crowd roared and converged.

  He squawked when they picked up his machine. Someone found a switch and stopped it. Two men confiscated the tool kit and went to work with screwdriver and hammer. The owner objected. He picked up a heavy pair of pliers and tried to commit murder.

  A copseye zapped him and the man with the hammer, and they both hit the lawn without bouncing. The rest of them pulled the lawn mower apart and bent and broke the pieces.

  “I’m half-sorry they did that,” said the old woman. “Sometimes I miss the sound of lawn mowers. My dad used to mow the lawn on Sunday mornings.”

  I said, “It’s a Free Park.”

  “Then why can’t he build anything he pleases?”

  “He can. He did. Anything he’s free to build, we’re free to kick apart.” And my mind finished, Like Ron’s rigged copseye.

  Ron was good with tools. It would not surprise me a bit if he knew enough about copseyes to knock out the whole system.

  Maybe someone ought to stop him.

  But knocking down copseyes wasn’t illegal. It happened all the time. It was part of the freedom of the Park. If Ron could knock them all down at once, well…

  Maybe someone ought to stop him.

  I passed a flock of high school girls, all chittering like birds, all about sixteen. It might have been their first trip inside a Free Park. I looked back because they were so cute, and caught them staring in awe and wonder at the dragon on my back.

  A few years and they’d be too blasé to notice. It had taken Jill almost half an hour to apply it this morning: a glorious red-and-gold dragon breathing flames across my shoulder, flames that seemed to glow by their own light. Lower down were a princess and a knight in golden armor, the princess tied to a stake, the knight fleeing for his life. I smiled back at the girls, and two of them waved.

  Short blond hair and golden skin, the tallest girl in sight, wearing not even a nudist’s shoulder pouch: Jill Hayes stood squarely in front of the Wilshire entrance, visibly wondering where I was. It was five minutes after three.

  There was this about living with a physical culture nut. Jill insisted on getting me into shape. The daily exercises were part of that, and so was this business of walking half the length of King’s Free Park.

  I’d balked at doing it briskly, though. Who walks briskly in a Free Park? There’s too much to see. She’d given me an hour; I’d held out for three. It was a compromise, like the paper slacks I was wearing despite Jill’s nudist beliefs.

  Sooner or later she’d find someone with muscles, or I’d relapse into laziness, and we’d split. Meanwhile…we got along. It seemed only sensible to let her finish my training.

  She spotted me, yelled, “Russel! Here!” in a voice that must have reached both ends of the park. In answer I lifted my arm, semaphore-style, slowly over my head and back down.

  And every copseye in King’s Free Park fell out of the sky, dead.

  Jill looked about her at all the startled faces and all the golden bubbles resting in bushes and on the grass. She approached me somewhat uncertainly. She asked, “Did you do that?”

  I said, “Yah. If I wave my arms again they’ll all go back up.”

  “I think you’d better do it,” she said primly. Jill had a fine poker face. I waved my arm grandly over my head and down, but of course the copseyes stayed where they had fallen.

  Jill said, “I wonder what happened to them?”

  “It was Ron Cole. You remember him. He’s the one who engraved some old Michelob beer bottles for Steuben—”

  “Oh, yes. But how?”

  We went off to ask him.

  A brawny college man howled and charged past us at a dead run. We saw him kick a copseye like a soccer ball. The golden cover split, but the man howled again and hopped up and down hugging his foot.

  We passed dented golden shells and broken resonators and bent parabolic reflectors. One woman looked flushed and proud; she was wearing several of the copper toroids as bracelets. A kid was collecting the cameras. Maybe he thought he could sell them outside.

  I never saw an intact copseye after the first minute.

  They weren’t all busy kicking copseyes apart. Jill stared at the conservatively dressed
group carrying POPULATION BY COPULATION signs, and wanted to know if they were serious. Their grim-faced leader handed us pamphlets that spoke of the evil and the blasphemy of man’s attempts to alter himself through gene tampering and extra-uterine growth experiments. If it was a put-on, it was a good one.

  We passed seven little men, each three to four feet high, traveling with a single tall, pretty brunette. They wore medieval garb. We both stared; but I was the one who noticed the makeup and the use of UnTan. African pigmies, probably part of a U.N.-sponsored tourist group; and the girl must be their guide.

  Ron Cole was not where I had left him.

  “He must have decided that discretion is the better part of cowardice. May be right, too,” I surmised. “Nobody’s ever knocked down all the copseyes before.”

  “It’s not illegal, is it?”

  “Not illegal, but excessive. They can bar him from the park, at the very least.”

  Jill stretched in the sun. She was all golden and big. Scaled down, she would have made a nice centershot for a men’s videozine. She said, “I’m thirsty. Is there a fountain around?”

  “Sure, unless someone’s plugged it by now. It’s a—”

  “Free Park. Do you mean to tell me they don’t even protect the fountains?”

  “You make one exception, it’s like a wedge. When someone ruins a fountain, they wait and fix it that night. That way if I see someone trying to wreck a fountain, I’ll generally throw a punch at him. A lot of us do. After a guy’s lost enough of his holiday to the copseye stunners, he’ll get the idea, sooner or later.”

  The fountain was a solid cube of concrete with four spigots and a hand-sized metal button. It was hard to jam, hard to hurt. Ron Cole stood near it, looking lost.

  He seemed glad to see me, but still lost. I introduced him. “You remember Jill Hayes.” He said, “Certainly. Hello, Jill,” and, having put her name to its intended purpose, promptly forgot it.

  Jill said, “We thought you’d made a break for it.”