N-Space

by Larry Niven

  The dead men from the battlefield streamed toward Vatch’s place of refuge. They wore kilts of gray and amber. Less than a hundred of them, casualties in a war between two medium-sized companies, a war which would not have been fought at all if the cost could not be partly defrayed by holovision rights. When they came close Vatch began to recognize individuals. There was Erwin Mudd, whose stew he had stolen. There was Roy Tanner the Lluagorian, the rammer, the medic. Death cancels all friendships. There—Enough. Forget about costumes, Tomás.

  Enough, and too late. The nightwalkers swarmed around the rock and began trying to climb. Vatch stood above the crack, sword ready. The sword was all he had.

  Hands came over the edge. He struck at them.

  He looked, around in time to see more hands coming up everywhere along the perimeter. He yelled and circled madly, striking, striking. They were not climbing the rock itself; they were climbing over each other to reach the top. And his sword, its edge dulled by repeated blows against rock and bone, was turning into a club…

  Suddenly he stopped.

  Fantasy? Real? What kind of biology…?

  He spilled his medical kit open and snatched at the bottle of Spectrum Cure. More than his life was at stake here. He was trying to save his sanity.

  The pistol grip fitted his hand neatly. A nightwalker pulled itself over the edge and tottered toward him and he sprayed Spectrum Cure between its eyes. An eroded face appeared near his feet; he sprayed Spectrum Cure into its mouth. Then he stepped back and watched.

  The first one dropped like a sack. The second let go and disappeared from view.

  Nightwalkers were coming up all around him. Vatch moved among them in calm haste, spraying life into them, and they stopped moving. In his mind he gloated. It should have worked, and it had.

  For if anything in this experience was real, then it had to be caused by the biology of Sereda. So: something could infect the dead, to make them move. Bacterium? Fungus? Virus? Whatever it was, it had to have evolved by using dead lopers and other native life forms to spread itself.

  It would walk the infected corpse until there was no sugar or oxygen left in the blood or muscle tissues of the host. That alone could carry the disease further than it could travel by itself. And if it found another host to infect along the way, well and good.

  But the first step in infection would be to restart the heart. It had to be, or the bacterium couldn’t spread throughout the host.

  And if the heart was going…

  The Spectrum Cure seemed to be healing them right up. He’d cured about eight of them. They lay at the base of the rock and did not move. Other nightwalkers clustered around them. For the moment they had given up on Vatch’s rock.

  Vatch watched some of them bend over the bodies of those he had injected. They might have been nibbling at the flesh above the hearts. A minute of that, and then they fell over and lay as dead as the ones they had been trying to rescue.

  Good enough, thought Vatch. He flashed the light on his bottle to check the supply of Spectrum Cure.

  It was just short of dead empty.

  Vatch sighed. The horde of dead men had drawn away from the casualties—the dead dead ones—and gone back to trying to climb the rock. Some would make it. Vatch picked up his sword. An afterthought: he injected himself. Even if they got to him, they would not rouse him from death before morning.

  The scrabbling of finger bones against rock became a cricket chorus.

  Vatch stood looking down at them. Most of these had only been dead for hours. Their faces were intact, though slack. Vatch looked for Roy Tanner.

  He circled the edge rapidly, striking occasionally at a reaching arm, but peering down anxiously. Where the blazes was Roy Tanner?

  There, pulling himself over the lip of the crack.

  In fact they were all swarming into the crack and climbing over each other. Their dead brains must be working to some extent. The smell of them was terrific. Vatch breathed through his mouth, closed his imagination tight shut, and waited.

  The nightwalker remains of Roy Tanner pulled itself up on the rock. Vatch sprayed it in the face, turned the body over in haste, and found it: Roy Tanner’s medical kit, still intact. He spilled out the contents and snatched up Roy’s bottle of Spectrum Cure.

  He sprayed it before him, and then into the crack, like an insecticide. He held his aim until they stopped moving…and then, finally, he could roll away from the choking smell. It was all right now. Roy had fallen early in the battle. His bottle had been nearly full.

  For something like six hours they had watched each other: Tomás Vatch on the lip of the rock, seven nightwalkers below. They stood in a half circle, well out of range of Vatch’s spray gun, and they stared unblinking into Vatch’s flashlight.

  Vatch was dreadfully tired. He had circled the rock several times, leaping the crack twice on each pass. “Cured” corpses surrounded the base and half filled the crack. He had seen none of them move. By now he was sure. There were only these seven left.

  “I want to sleep,” he told them. “Can’t you understand? I won. You lost. Go away. I want to sleep.” He had been telling them this for some time.

  This time it seemed that they heard.

  One by one they turned and stumbled off in different directions. Vatch watched, amazed, afraid to believe. Each nightwalker seemed to find a patch of level ground it liked. There it fell and did not move.

  Vatch waited. The east was growing bright. It wasn’t over yet, but it would be soon. With burning eyes he watched for the obvious dead to move again.

  Red dawn touched the tips of glacier-spilled rocks. The orange dwarf sun made a cool light; he could almost look straight into it. He watched the shadows walk down the sides of the rocks to the ground.

  When the light touched the seven bodies, they had become bright green patches, vaguely man-shaped.

  Vatch watched until each patch had sprouted a bud of yellow in its center. Then he dropped to the ground and started walking north.

  • • •

  • • •

  The landscape was marked by queer sharp lines. Here there was the green patchwork quilt of cultivated fields, there a lifeless landscape, almost lunar but for the softening of erosion. It was strange to see a broad river meandering unconcerned from cultivation to desert. There were no weeds. Nothing grew wild. The forest grove they were passing now had the same sharp borders and orderly arrangement as the broad strips of flower beds they had passed earlier.

  THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE, 1974

  FLARE TIME

  For the full story of how this tale came to be written, read Medea: Harlan’s World. It’s the definitive study of how a shared universe should be orchestrated, from its creation by invitation, to the generation of ideas on and around a stage at a university, to the stories themselves.

  Medea will not tell you that Larry Niven was driven to the edge of insanity by delays in publication! This is one of the best stories I’ve ever written, and in seven years almost nobody had read it! It had appeared in two very small markets. I repossessed it from Harlan [the contract was long defunct] in order to get it into my own collection, LIMITS, then returned to him the right to publish it in Medea, all because I wasn’t willing to beg again.

  The other side of that coin is that Medea did indeed become a book.

  Eight creative people once set forth to produce another shared universe. Good things emerged; but no book. In the case of THRAXISP we were eight creators all created equal.

  You must have a dictator.

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

  If the starship’s arrival had done nothing else for Bronze Legs, this was enough: he was seeing the sky again.

  For this past week the rammers had roamed through Touchdown City. The fifty-year-old colony was still small; everybody knew everybody. It was hard to get used to, this influx of oddly-accented strangers stumbling about with vacuous smiles and eyes wide w
ith surprise and pleasure. Even the Medean humans were catching the habit. In his thirty-four earthyears of life Calvin “Bronze Legs” Miller had explored fifteen thousand square miles of the infinite variety that was Medea. Strange, that it took people from another world to make him look up.

  Here was a pretty picture: sunset over the wild lands north of the colony. Peaks to the south were limned in bluish-white from the farmlands beyond, from the lamps that kept terrestrial plants growing. Everything else was red, infinite shades of red. To heatward a level horizon cut the great disk of Argo in half. You could feel the heat on your cheek, and watch sullenly glowing storms move in bands across the face of the red-hot superjovian world. To coldward, Phrixus and Helle were two glaring pink dots following each other down to the ridge. The Jet Stream stretched straight across the blue sky, a pinkish-white band of cloud from horizon to horizon. Thirty or forty multicolored balloons, linked in a cluster, were settling to graze a scum-covered rain pool in the valley below him.

  Blue-tinged shadows pooled in the valley, and three human shapes moved through the red and orange vegetation. Bronze Legs recognized Lightning Harness and Grace Carpenter even at this distance. The third had a slightly hunchbacked look, and a metal headdress gleamed in her straight black hair. That would be Rachel Subramaniam’s memory recording equipment. Her head kept snapping left and right, ever eager for new sights.

  Bronze Legs grinned. He tried to imagine how this must look to a rammer, an offworlder; he succeeded only in remembering himself as a child. All this strangeness; all this red.

  He turned the howler and continued uphill.

  At the crest of the ridge a fux waited for him, the pinkish-white suns behind her. She was a black silhouette, four thin legs and two thin arms, a pointed face and a narrow torso bent in an L: a lean, mean centaur-shape.

  As he topped the ridge and let the howler settle on its air cushion, the fur backed away several meters. Bronze Legs wondered why, then guessed the answer. It wasn’t the smell of him. Fuxes liked that. She was putting the ridge between herself and the white glare from Touchdown City’s farming lamps. She said, “I am Long Nose.”

  “Bronze Legs. I meet you on purpose.”

  “I meet you on purpose. How goes your foray to heatward?”

  “We start tomorrow at dawn.”

  “You postponed it once before.” She was accusing him. The fuxes were compulsive about punctuality; an odd trait in a Bronze Age culture. Like certain traits in humans, it probably tied into their sex lives. Timing could be terribly important when a fux was giving birth.

  “The ship from the stars came,” he said. “We waited. We want to take one of the star people along, and the delay lets us recheck the vehicles.”

  Long Nose was black with dull dark-red markings. She bore a longbow over one shoulder and a quiver and shovel slung over her lower back. Her snout was sharply pointed, but not abnormally so, for a fux. She might be named for keen curiosity or a keen sense of smell. She said, “I learn that your purpose is more than exploration, but not even the post-males can tell what it is.”

  “Power,” said Bronze Legs. “The harnessed lightning that makes our machines go comes as light from Argo. In the Hot End the clouds will never hide Argo from our sight. Our lightning makers can run without rest.”

  “Go north instead,” said Long Nose. “You will find it safer and cooler too. Storms run constantly in the north; I have been there. Free lightning for your use.”

  If she’d been talking to Lightning Harness she would have suffered through an hour’s lecture. How the heat exchangers ran on the flood of infrared light from Argo, focused by mirrors. How Argo stayed always in the same place in Medea’s sky, so that mirrors could be mounted on a hillside facing to heatward, and never moved again. But the colony was growing, and Medea’s constant storms constantly blocked the mirrors…Bronze Legs only grinned at her. “Why don’t we just do it our way? Who-all is coming?”

  “Only six of us. Dark Wind’s children did not emerge in time. Deadeye will desert us early; she will give birth in a day and must stay to guard the…Is ‘nest’ the word you use?”

  “Right.” Of all the words that might describe the fuxes’ way of giving birth, “nest” carried the least unpleasant connotations.

  “So, she will be guarding her ‘nest’ when we return. She will be male then. Sniffer intends to become pregnant tonight; she will leave us further on, and be there to help us on our return, if we need help.”

  “Good.”

  “We take a post-male, Harvester, and another six-leg female, Broad Flanks, who can carry him some of the time. Gimpy wants to come. Will she slow us?”

  Bronze Legs laughed. He knew Gimpy; a four-leg female as old as some post-males, who had lost her right foreleg to the viciously fast Medean monster humans called a B-70. Gimpy was fairly agile, considering. “She could crawl on her belly for all we care. It’s the crawlers that’ll slow us, and the power plant. We’re moving a lot of machinery: the prefab power plant, housing for technicians, sensing tools, digging tools—”

  “What tools should we take?”

  “Go armed. You won’t need water bags; we’ll make our own water. We made you some parasols made from mirror-cloth. They’ll help you stand the heat, for awhile. When it gets really hot you’ll have to ride in the crawlers.”

  “We will meet you at the crawling machines, at dawn.” Long Nose turned and moved downslope into a red-and-orange jungle, moving something like a cat in its final rush at a bird: legs bent, belly low.

  They had been walking since early afternoon: twelve hours, with a long break for lunch. Lightning sighed with relief as he set down the farming lamp he’d been carrying on his shoulders. Grace helped him spread the tripod and extend the mount until the lamp stood six meters tall.

  Rachel Subramaniam sat down in the orange grass and rubbed her feet. She was puffing.

  Grace Carpenter, a Medean xenobiologist and in her early forties, was a large-boned woman, broad of silhouette and built like a farm wife. Lightning Harness was tall and lean and lantern-jawed, a twenty-four-year-old power plant engineer. Both were pale as ghosts beside Rachel. On Medea only the farmers were tanned.

  Rachel was built light. Some of her memory recording equipment was embedded in padding along her back, giving her a slightly hunchbacked look. Her scalp implants were part of a polished silver cap, the badge of her profession. She had spent the past two years under the sunlights aboard a web ramship. Her skin was bronze. To Rachel, Medea’s pale citizens had seemed frail, unathletic, until now. Now she was annoyed. There had been little opportunity for hikes aboard Morven; but she might have noticed the muscles and hard hands common to any recent colony.

  Lightning pointed uphill. “Company.”

  Something spidery stood on the crest of the coldward ridge, black against the suns. Rachel asked, “What is it?”

  “Fux. Female, somewhere between seven and eighteen years of age, and not a virgin. Beyond that I can’t tell from here.”

  Rachel was astonished. “How can you know all that?”

  “Count the legs. Grace, didn’t you tell her about fuxes?”

  Grace was chuckling. “Lightning’s showing off. Dear, the fuxes go fertile around age seven. They generally have their first litter right away. They drop their first set of hindquarters with the eggs in them, and that gives them a half a lifetime to learn how to move as a quadruped. Then they wait till they’re seventeen or eighteen to have their second litter, unless the tribe is underpopulated, which sometimes happens. Dropping the second set of hindquarters exposes the male organs.”

  “And she’s got four legs. ‘Not a virgin.’ I thought you must have damn good eyes, Lightning.”

  “Not that good.”

  “What are they like?”

  “Well,” said Grace, “the post-males are the wise ones. Bright, talkative, and not nearly so…frenetic as the females. It’s hard to get a female to stand still for long. The males…oh, for three years aft
er the second litter they’re kind of crazy. The tribe keeps them penned. The females only go near them when they want to get pregnant.”

  Lightning had finished setting the lamp. “Take a good look around before I turn this on. You know what you’re about to see?”

  Dutifully, Rachel looked about her, memorizing.

  The farming lamps stood everywhere around Touchdown City; it was less a city than a village surrounded by farmlands. For more than a week Rachel had seen only the tiny part of Medea claimed by humans…until, in early afternoon of this long Medean day, she and Grace and Lightning had left the farmlands. The reddish light had bothered her for a time. But there was much to see; and after all, this was the real Medea.

  Orange grass stood knee-high in slender leaves with sharp hard points. A score of flaccid multicolored balloons, linked by threads that resembled spiderweb, had settled on a stagnant pond. There was a grove of almost-trees, hairy rather than leafy, decked in all the colors of autumn. The biggest was white and bare and dead.

  Clouds of bugs filled the air everywhere except around the humans. A pair of things glided into the swarms, scooping their dinner out of the air. They had five-meter wingspans, small batlike torsos, and huge heads that were all mouth, with gaping hair-filled slits behind the head, where gill slits would be on a fish. Their undersides were sky blue.

  A six-legged creature the size of a sheep stood up against the dead almost-tree, gripped it with four limbs, and seemed to chew at it. Rachel wondered if it was eating the wood. Then she saw myriads of black dots spread across the white, and a long, sticky tongue slurping them up.

  Grace tapped Rachel’s arm and pointed into the grass. Rachel saw a warrior’s copper shield painted with cryptic heraldics. It was a flattened turtle shell, and the yellow-eyed beaked face that looked back at her was not turtle-like at all. Something small struggled in its beak. Suddenly the mock turtle whipped around and zzzzed away on eight churning legs. There was no bottom shell to hamper the legs.