N-Space

by Larry Niven

  Brennan stirred. He unfolded his curled body, stretched wide and opened his eyes. He stared unwinking at Phssthpok, stared as if he were reading the protector’s mind. All new protectors did that: orienting themselves through memories they were only now beginning to understand.

  “I wonder if I can make you understand how fast it all was,” said the Brennan-monster. He gazed at the two old men, one twice the age of the other but both past the transition age, and wondered that they should be his judges.

  “In two days we learned each other’s language. His is much faster than mine and fits my mouth better, so we used it. He told me his life story. We discussed the martians, working out the most efficient way to exterminate them—”

  “What?”

  “To exterminate them, Garner. Hell, they’ve killed thirteen men already! We talked practically nonstop, with Phssthpok doing most of the talking, and all the time we were hard at work: calisthenics to build me up, fins for Phssthpok’s suit so he could swim the dust, widgets to get every atom of air and water out of the life support system and take it to the base. I’ve never seen the base; we had to extrapolate the design so we’d know how to re-inflate it and protect it.

  “The third day he told me how to get a tree-of-life crop growing. He had the box open and was telling me how to unfreeze the seeds safely. He was giving me orders just as if I were a voice-box computer. I was about to ask, ‘Don’t I get any choices at all?’ And I didn’t.”

  “I don’t follow,” said Garner.

  “I didn’t get any choices. I was too intelligent. It’s been that way ever since I woke up. I get answers before I can finish formulating the question. If I always see the best answer, then where’s my choice? Where’s my free will? You can’t believe how fast this all was. I saw the whole chain of logic in one flash. I slammed Phssthpok’s head hard against the edge of the freezer. It stunned him long enough so that I could break his throat against the edge. Then I jumped back in case he attacked. I figured I could hold him off until he strangled. But he didn’t attack. He hadn’t figured it out, not yet.”

  “It sounds like murder, Brennan. He didn’t want to kill you?”

  “Not yet. I was his shining hope. He couldn’t even defend himself for fear of bruising me. He was older than me, and he knew how to fight. He could have killed me if he’d wanted to, but he couldn’t want to. It took him thirty-two thousand years of real time to bring us those roots. I was supposed to finish the job.

  “I think he died believing he’d succeeded. He half-expected me to kill him.”

  “Brennan. Why?”

  The Brennan-monster shrugged cantaloupe shoulders. “He was wrong. I killed him because he would have tried to wipe out humanity when he learned the truth.” He reached into the slit balloon that had brought him across twelve miles of fluid dust. He pulled out a jury-rigged something that hummed softly—his air renewal setup, made from parts of Phssthpok’s control board—and dropped it in the boat. Next he pulled out half of a yellow root like a raw sweet potato. He held it under Garner’s nose. “Smell.”

  Luke sniffed. “Pleasant enough. Like a liqueur.”

  “Sohl?”

  “Nice. How’s it taste?”

  “If you knew it would turn you into something like me, would you take a bite of it? Garner?”

  “This instant. I’d like to live forever, and I’m afraid of going senile.”

  “Sohl?”

  “NO. I’m not ready to give up sex yet.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventy-four. Birthday two months from now.”

  “You’re already too old. You were too old at fifty; it would have killed you. Would you have volunteered at forty-five?”

  Sohl laughed. “Not likely.”

  “Well, that’s half the answer. From Phssthpok’s point of view we’re a failure. The other half is that no sane man would turn the root loose on Earth or Belt or anywhere else.”

  “I should hope not. But let’s hear your reasons.”

  “War. The Pak world has never been free from war at any time in its history. Naturally not, with every protector acting to expand and protect his blood line at the expense of all the others. Knowledge keeps getting lost. The race can’t cooperate for a minute beyond the point where one protector sees an advantage in betraying the others. They can’t make any kind of progress because of that continual state of war.

  “And I’m to turn that loose on Earth? Can you imagine a thousand protectors deciding their grandchildren need more room? Your eighteen billion flatlanders live too close to the edge already; you can’t afford the resources.

  “Besides which, we don’t really need tree-of-life. Garner, when were you born? Nineteen forty or thereabouts?”

  “Thirty-nine.”

  “Geriatrics is getting so good so fast that my kids could live a thousand years. We’ll get longevity without tree-of-life, without sacrificing anything at all.

  “Now look at it from Phssthpok’s viewpoint,” the Brennan-monster continued. “We’re a mutation. We’ve settled the solar system and started some interstellar colonies. We will and must refuse the root, and even when it’s forced on us, the resulting mutated protectors are atypical. Phssthpok thought in terms of the long view. We’re not Pak, we’re no use to the Pak, and it’s conceivable that someday we’ll reach the core suns. The Pak will attack us the moment they see us, and we’ll fight back.” He shrugged. “And we’ll win. The Pak don’t unite effectively. We do. We’ll have a better technology than theirs.”

  “We will?”

  “I told you, they can’t keep their technology. Whatever can’t be used immediately, gets lost until someone files it in the Library. Military knowledge never gets filed; the families keep it a deep, dark secret. And the only ones to use the Library are childless protectors. There aren’t many of them, and they aren’t highly motivated.”

  “Couldn’t you have tried to talk to him?”

  “Garner, I’m not getting through to you. He’d have killed me the moment he figured it out! He was trained to fight protectors. I wouldn’t have had a chance. Then he’d have tried to wipe out the human species. We’d have been much worse to him than hostile aliens. We’re a corruption of the Pak form itself.”

  “But he couldn’t do it. He was all alone.”

  “I’ve thought of half a dozen things he could have tried. None of them sure things, but I couldn’t risk it.”

  “Name one.”

  “Plant tree-of-life all through Congo National Park. Organize the monkey and chimpanzee protectors.”

  My premise was a cute one: that every symptom of aging in man is an aborted version of something designed to make us stronger. In particular, we lose intelligence with age because we were supposed to grow more brain tissue, when the thymus gland dissolves around age 42–45.

  Once I accepted that premise, I was in deep water.

  The toughest challenge for a writer is a character brighter than the author. It’s not impossible. Puzzles the writer needs months to solve, or to design, the character may solve in moments. But God help the writer if his abnormally bright character is wrong!

  This was my first such attempt. I put heavy restraints on the Pak. Homo habilis is the breeding stage, but the adult is a neutered warrior with instincts hard-wired. The characteristic smell of his gene line goes straight to his motivation, without intermediate thought. Means are under his control; goals are not.

  I should not have made a protector the author. It forced me to assume [as a protector would] an abnormally bright reader.

  For my next attempt at superhuman intelligence, see A WORLD OUT OF TIME…but I expect to try again.

  • • •

  • • •

  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 in 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…

  “Flatlander,” 1967

  THE HOLE MAN

  Out of five Hugo Awards, this is the only one that surprised me. I always think I earned it; I’m always half-sure I’ll take it home; except this once. “The Hole Man” is a straightforward crime story rendered distinctive only by an unusual murder weapon.

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

  One day Mars will be gone.

  Andrew Lear says that it will start with violent quakes, and end hours or days later, very suddenly. He ought to know. It’s all his fault.

  Lear also says that it won’t happen for from years to centuries. So we stay, Lear and the rest of us. We study the alien base for what it can tell us, while the center of the world we stand on is slowly eaten away. It’s enough to give a man nightmares.

  It was Lear who found the alien base.

  We had reached Mars: fourteen of us, in the cramped bulbous life-support system of the Percival Lowell. We were circling in orbit, taking our time, correcting our maps and looking for anything that thirty years of Mariner probes might have missed.

  We were mapping mascons, among other things. Those mass concentrations under the lunar maria were almost certainly left by good-sized asteroids, mountains of rock falling silently out of the sky until they struck with the energies of thousands of fusion bombs. Mars has been cruising through the asteroid belt for four billion years. Mars would show bigger and better mascons. They would affect our orbits.

  So Andrew Lear was hard at work, watching pens twitch on graph paper as we circled Mars. A bit of machinery fell alongside the Percival Lowell, rotating. Within its thin shell was a weighted double lever system, deceptively simple: a Forward Mass Detector. The pens mapped its twitchings.

  Over Sirbonis Palus they began mapping strange curves.

  Another man might have cursed and tried to fix it. Andrew Lear thought it out, then sent the signal that would stop the free-falling widget from rotating.

  It had to be rotating to map a stationary mass.

  But now it was mapping simple sine waves.

  Lear went running to Captain Childrey.

  Running? It was more like trapeze artistry. Lear pulled himself along by handholds, kicked off from walls, braked with a hard push of hands or feet. Moving in free fall is hard work when you’re in a hurry, and Lear was a forty-year-old astrophysicist, not an athlete. He was blowing hard when he reached the control bubble.

  Childrey—who was an athlete—waited with a patient, slightly contemptuous smile while Lear caught his breath.

  He already thought Lear was crazy. Lear’s words only confirmed it. “Gravity for sending signals? Dr. Lear, will you please quit bothering me with your weird ideas. I’m busy. We all are.”

  This was not entirely unfair. Some of Lear’s enthusiasms were peculiar. Gravity generators. Black holes. He thought we should be searching for Dyson spheres: stars completely enclosed by an artificial shell. He believed that mass and inertia were two separate things: that it should be possible to suck the inertia out of a spacecraft, say, so that it could accelerate to near lightspeed in a few minutes. He was a wide-eyed dreamer, and when he was flustered he tended to wander from the point.

  “You don’t understand,” he told Childrey. “Gravity radiation is harder to block than electromagnetic waves. Patterned gravity waves would be easy to detect. The advanced civilizations in the galaxy may all be communicating by gravity. Some of them may even be modulating pulsars—rotating neutron stars. That’s where Project Ozma went wrong: they were only looking for signals in the electromagnetic spectrum.”

  Childrey laughed. “Sure. Your little friends are using neutron stars to send you messages. What’s that got to do with us?”

  “Well, look!” Lear held up the strip of flimsy, nearly weightless paper he’d torn from the machine. “I got this over Sirbonis Palus. I think we ought to land there.”

  “We’re landing in Mare Cimmerium, as you perfectly well know. The lander is already deployed and ready to board. Dr. Lear, we’ve spent four days mapping this area. It’s flat. It’s in a green-brown area. When spring comes next month, we’ll find out whether there’s life there! And everybody wants it that way except you!”

  Lear was still holding the graph paper before him like a shield. “Please. Take one more circuit over Sirbonis Palus.”

  Childrey opted for the extra orbit. Maybe the sine waves convinced him. Maybe not. He would have liked inconveniencing the rest of us in Lear’s name, to show him for a fool.

  But the next pass showed a tiny circular feature in Sirbonis Palus. And Lear’s mass indicator was making sine waves again.

  The aliens had gone. During our first few months we always expected them back any minute. The machinery in the base was running smoothly and perfectly, as if the owners had only just stepped out.

  The base was an inverted pie plate two stories high, and windowless. The air inside was breathable, like Earth’s air three miles up, but with a bit more oxygen. Mars’ air is far thinner, and poisonous. Clearly they were not of Mars.

  The walls were thick and deeply eroded. They leaned inward against the internal pressure. The roof was somewhat thinner, just heavy enough for the pressure to support it. Both walls and roof were of fused Martian dust.

  The heating system still worked—and it was also the lighting system: grids in the ceiling glowing brick red. The base was always ten degrees too warm. We didn’t find the off switches for almost a week: they were behind locked panels. The air system blew gusty winds until we fiddled with it.

  We could guess a lot about them from what they’d left behind. They must have come from a world smaller than Earth, circling a red dwarf star in close orbit. To be close enough to be warm enough, the planet would have to be locked in by tides, turning one face always to its star. The aliens must have evolved on the lighted side, in a permanent red day, with winds constantly howling over the border from the night side.

  And they had no sense of privacy. The only doorways that had doors in them were airlocks. The second floor was a hexagonal metal gridwork. It would not block you off from your friends on the floor below. The bunk room was an impressive expanse of mercury-filled waterbed, wall to wall. The rooms were too small and cluttered, the furniture and machinery too close to the doorways, so that at first we were constantly bumping elbows and knees. The ceilings were an inch short of six feet high on both floors, so that we tended to walk stooped even if we were short enough to stand upright. Habit. But Lear was just tall enough to knock his head if he stood up fast, anywhere in the base.

  We thought they must have been smaller than human. But their padded benches seemed human-designed in size and shape. Maybe it was their minds that were different: they didn’t need psychic elbow room.

  The ship had been bad enough. Now this. Within the base was instant claustrophobia. It put all of our tempers on hair triggers.

  Two of us couldn’t take it.

  Lear and Childrey did not belong on the same planet.

  With Childrey, neatness was a compulsion. He had enough for all of us. During those long months aboard Percival Lowell, it was Childrey who led us in calisthenics. He flatly would not let anyone skip an exercise period. We eventually gave up trying.

  Well and good. The exercise kept us alive. We weren’t getting the healthy daily exercise anyone gets walking around the living room in a one-gravity field.

  But after a month on Mars, Childrey was the only man who still appeared fully dressed in the heat of the alien base. Some of us took it as a reproof, and maybe it was, because Lear had been the first to doff his shirt for keeps. In the mess Childrey would inspect his silverware for water spots, then line it up perfe
ctly parallel.

  On Earth, Andrew Lear’s habits would have been no more than a character trait. In a hurry, he might choose mismatched socks. He might put off using the dishwasher for a day or two if he were involved in something interesting. He would prefer a house that looked “lived in.” God help the maid who tried to clean up his study. He’d never be able to find anything afterward.

  He was a brilliant but one-sided man. Backpacking or skin diving might have changed his habits—in such pursuits you learn not to forget any least trivial thing—but they would never have tempted him. An expedition to Mars was something he simply could not turn down. A pity, because neatness is worth your life in space.

  You don’t leave your fly open in a pressure suit.

  A month after the landing, Childrey caught Lear doing just that.

  The “fly” on a pressure suit is a soft rubber tube over your male member. It leads to a bladder, and there’s a spring clamp on it. You open the clamp to use it. Then you close the clamp and open an outside spigot to evacuate the bladder into vacuum.

  Similar designs for women involve a catheter, which is hideously uncomfortable. I presume the designers will keep trying. It seems wrong to bar half the human race from our ultimate destiny.

  Lear was addicted to long walks. He loved the Martian desert scene: the hard violet sky and the soft blur of whirling orange dust, the sharp close horizon, the endless emptiness. More: he needed the room. He was spending all his working time on the alien communicator, with the ceiling too close over his head and everything else too close to his bony elbows.

  He was coming back from a walk, and he met Childrey coming out. Childrey noticed that the waste spigot on Lear’s suit was open, the spring broken. Lear had been out for hours. If he’d had to go, he might have bled to death through flesh ruptured by vacuum.

  We never learned all that Childrey said to him out there. But Lear came in very red about the ears, muttering under his breath. He wouldn’t talk to anyone.