N-Space

by Larry Niven

  The real Medea.

  “Now,” said Lightning. He turned on the farming lamp.

  White light made the valley suddenly less alien. Rachel felt something within her relaxing…but things were happening all around her.

  The flat turtle stopped abruptly. It swallowed hard, then pulled head and limbs under its shell. The flying bug-strainers whipped around and flew hard for the hairy trees. The clouds of bugs simply vanished. The long-tongued beast let go of its tree, turned and scratched at the ground and was gone in seconds.

  “This is what happens when a sun flares,” Lightning said. “They’re both flare suns. Flares don’t usually last more than half an hour, and most Medean animals just dig in till it’s over. A lot of plants go to seed. Like this grass—”

  Yes, the slender leaves were turning puffy, cottony. But the hairy trees reacted differently; they were suddenly very slender, the foliage pulled tight against the trunks. The balloons weren’t reacting at all.

  Lightning said, “That’s why we don’t worry much about Medean life attacking the crops. The lamps keep them away. But not all of them—”

  “On Medea every rule has exceptions,” Grace said.

  “Yeah. Here, look under the grass.” Lightning pushed cotton-covered leaves aside with his hands, and the air was suddenly full of white fluff. Rachel saw millions of black specks covering the lower stalks. “We call them locusts. They swarm in flare time and eat everything in sight. Terran plants poison them, of course, but they wreck the crops first.” He let the leaves close. By now there was white fluff everywhere, like a low-lying fog patch moving east on the wind. “What else can I show you? Keep your eyes on the balloons. And are there cameras in that thing?”

  Rachel laughed and touched the metal helmet. Sometimes she could forget she was wearing it; but her neck was thicker, more muscular than the average woman’s. “Cameras? In a sense. My eyes are cameras for the memory tape.”

  The balloons rested just where they had been. The artificial flare hadn’t affected them…wait, they weren’t flaccid any more. They were swollen, taut, straining at the rootlets that held them to the bottom of the pond. Suddenly they rose, all at once, still linked by spiderweb. Beautiful.

  “They use the UV for energy to make hydrogen,” said Grace. “UV wouldn’t bother them anyway; they have to take more of it at high altitude.”

  “I’ve been told…are they intelligent?”

  “Balloons? No!” Grace actually snorted. “They’re no brighter than so much seaweed…but they own the planet. We’ve sent probes to the Hot End, you know. We saw balloons all the way. And we’ve seen them as far coldward…west, you’d say…as far west as the Icy Sea. We haven’t gone beyond the rim of ice yet.”

  “But you’ve been on Medea fifty years?”

  “And just getting started,” Lightning said. He turned off the farming lamp.

  The world was plunged into red darkness.

  The fluffy white grass was gone, leaving bare soil aswarm with black specks. Gradually the hairy trees loosened, fluffed out. Soil churned near the dead tree and released the tree feeder.

  Grace picked up a few of the “locusts.” They were not bigger than termites. Held close to the eye they each showed a translucent bubble on its back. “They can’t swarm,” Grace said with satisfaction. “Our flare didn’t last long enough. They couldn’t make enough hydrogen.”

  “Some did,” Lightning said. There were black specks on the wind; not many.

  “Always something new,” said Grace.

  Tractor probe Junior was moving into the Hot End. Ahead was the vast desert, hotter than boiling water, where Argo stood always at noon. Already the strange dry plants were losing their grip, leaving bare rock and dust. At the final shore of the Ring Sea the waves were sudsy with salt in solution, and the shore was glittering white. The hot steamy wind blew inland, to heatward, and then upward, carrying a freight of balloons.

  The air was full of multicolored dots, all going up into the stratosphere. At the upper reach of the probe’s vision some of the frailer balloons were popping, but the thin membranous corpses still fluttered toward heaven.

  Rachel shifted carefully in her chair. She caught Bronze Legs Miller watching her from a nearby table. Her answering grin was rueful.

  She had not finished the hike. Grace and Lightning had been setting up camp when Bronze Legs Miller came riding down the hill. Rachel had grasped that golden opportunity. She had returned to Touchdown City riding behind Bronze Legs on the howler’s saddle. After a night of sleep she still ached in every muscle.

  “Isn’t it a gorgeous sight?” Mayor Curly Jackson wasn’t eating. He watched avidly, with his furry chin in his hands and his elbows on the great oaken table—the dignitaries’ table the Medeans were so proud of; it had taken forty years to grow the tree.

  Medea had changed its people. Even the insides of buildings were different from those of other worlds. The communal dining hall was a great dome lit by a single lamp at its zenith. It was bright, and it cast sharp shadows. As if the early colonists, daunted by the continual light show—the flare suns, the bluish farming lamps, the red-hot storms moving across Argo—had given themselves a single sun indoors. But it was a wider, cooler sun, giving yellower light than a rammer was used to.

  One great curve of the wall was a holograph projection screen. The tractor probe was tracing the path the expedition would follow and broadcasting what it saw. Now it moved over hills of white sea salt. The picture staggered and lurched with the probe’s motion, and wavered with rising air currents.

  Captain Janice Borg, staring avidly with a forkful of curry halfway to her mouth, jumped as Mayor Curly lightly punched her shoulder. The Mayor was blue eyes and a lump of nose poking through a carefully tended wealth of blond hair and beard. He was darkened by farming lamps. Not only did he supervise the farms; he farmed. “See it, Captain? That’s why the Ring Sea is mostly fresh water.”

  Captain Borg’s hair was auburn going gray. She was handsome rather than pretty. Her voice of command had the force of a bullwhip; one obeyed by reflex. Her off-duty voice was a soft, dreamy contralto. “Right. Right. The seawater moves always to the Hot End. It starts as glaciers, doesn’t it? They break off in the Icy Sea and float heatward. Any salt goes that way too. In the Hot End the water boils away…and you get some tides, don’t you? Argo wobbles a little?”

  “Well, it’s Medea that wobbles a little, but—”

  “Right, so the seawater spills off into the salt flats at high tide and boils away there. And the vapor goes back to the glaciers along the Jet Stream.” She turned suddenly to Rachel and barked, “You getting all this?”

  Rachel nodded, hiding a smile. More than two hundred years had passed on the settled worlds while Captain Borg cruised the trade circuit. She didn’t really understand memory tapes. They were too recent.

  Rachel looked about the communal dining hall and was conscious as always of the vast unseen audience looking through her eyes, listening through her ears, feeling the dwindling aches of a stiff hike, tasting blazing hot Medean curry through her mouth. It was all going into the memory tape, with no effort on her part.

  Curly said, “We picked a good site for the power plant before the first probe broke down. Heatward slope of a hillside. We’ll be coming up on it in a few hours. Is this the kind of thing you want, or am I boring you?”

  “I want it all. Did you try that tape?”

  The Mayor shook his head, his eyes suddenly evasive.

  “Why not?”

  “Well,” the Mayor said slowly, “I’m a little leery of what I might remember. It’s all filtered through your brain, isn’t it, Rachel?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t think I’d like remembering being a girl.”

  Rachel was mildly surprised. Role-changing was part of the kick. Male or female, an epicurean or a superbly muscled physical culture addict or an intellectual daydreamer, a child again or an old woman…well, some didn’t lik
e it. “I could give you a man’s tape, Curly. There’s McAuliffe’s balloon trip into the big gas giant in Sol system.”

  Captain Borg cut in sharply. “What about the Charles Baker Sontag tape? He did a year’s tour in Miramon Lluagor system, Curly. The Lluagorians use balloons for everything. You’d love it.”

  Curly was confused. “Just what kind of balloons—”

  “Not living things, Curly. Fabric filled with gas. Lluagor has a red dwarf sun. No radiation storms and not much ultraviolet. They have to put their farms in orbit, and they do most of their living in orbit, and it’s all inflated balloons, even the spacecraft. The planet they use mainly for mining and factories, but it’s pretty, too, so they’ve got cities slung under hundreds of gasbags.”

  The tractor probe lurched across mile after mile of dim-lit pink salt hills. Rachel remembered a memory tape in Morven’s library: a critical reading of the Elder and Younger Eddas by a teacher of history and poetry. Would Medeans like that? Here you had the Land of the Frost Giants and the Land of the Fire Giants, with Midgard between…and the Ring Sea to stand in for the Midgard Serpent…and no dearth of epic monsters, from what she’d heard.

  Captain Borg spoke with an edge in her voice. “Nobody’s going to force you to use a new and decadent entertainment medium from the stars, Curly—”

  “Oh, now, I didn’t—”

  “But there’s a point you might consider. Distance.”

  “Distance?”

  “There’s the trade circuit. Earth, Toupan, Lluagor, Sereda, Horvendile, Koschei, Earth again. Six planets circling six stars a few light-years apart. The web ramships go round and round, and everyone on the ring gets news, entertainment, seeds and eggs, new inventions. There’s the trade circuit, and there’s Medea. You’re too far from Horvendile, Curly.”

  “Oddly enough, we’re aware of that, Captain Borg.”

  “No need to get huffy. I’m trying to make a point.”

  “Why did you come?”

  “Variety. Curiosity. The grass-is-always-greener syndrome. The same thing that made us rammers in the first place.” Captain Borg did not add altruism, the urge to keep the worlds civilized. “But will we keep coming? Curly, Medea is the strangest place that ever had a breathable atmosphere. You’ve got a potential tourist trap here. You could have ramships dropping by every twenty years!”

  “We need that.”

  “Yes, you do. So remember that rammers don’t build starships. It’s taxpayers that build starships. What do they get out of it?”

  “Memory tapes?”

  “Yes. It used to be holos. Times change. Holos aren’t as involving as memory tapes, and they take too long to watch. So it’s memory tapes.”

  “Does that mean we have to use them?”

  “No,” said Captain Borg.

  “Then I’ll try your tourist’s view of Lluagor system, when I get time.” Curly stood. “And I better get going. Twenty-five hours to dawn.”

  “It only takes ten minutes,” Rachel said.

  “How long to recover? How long to assimilate a whole earthyear of someone else’s memories? I better wait.”

  After he was gone, Rachel asked, “What was wrong with giving him the Jupiter tape?”

  “I remembered McAuliffe was a homosexual.”

  “So what? He was all alone in that capsule.”

  “It might matter to someone like Curly. I don’t say it would, I say it might. Every world is different.”

  “You ought to know.” The rumor mill said that Mayor Curly and Captain Borg had shared a bed. Though he hadn’t shown it…

  Too lightly, Captain Borg said, “I should but I don’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s…closed. It’s the usual problem, I think. He sees me coming back in sixty or seventy years, and me ten years older. Doesn’t want to get too involved.”

  “Janice?”

  “Dammit, if they’re so afraid of change, how could their parents have busted their asses to settle a whole new world? Change is the one thing…yeah? What is it?”

  “Did you ask him, or did he ask you?”

  Captain Borg frowned. “He asked me. Why?”

  “Nobody’s asked me,” said Rachel.

  “Oh…Well, ask someone. Customs differ.”

  “But he asked you.”

  “I dazzled him with sex appeal. Or maybe not. Rachel, shall I ask Curly about it? There might be something we don’t know. Maybe you wear your hair wrong.”

  Rachel shook her head. “No.”

  “But…okay. The rest of the crew don’t seem to be having problems.”

  Nearly dawn. The sky was thick with dark clouds, but the heatward horizon was clear, with Argo almost fully risen. The dull red disk would never rise completely, not here. Already it must be sinking back.

  It was earthnight now; the farming lamps were off. Crops and livestock kept terrestrial time. Rows of green plants stretched away to the south, looking almost black in this light. In the boundary of bare soil between the wilds and the croplands, half a dozen fuxes practiced spear casts. That was okay with Bronze Legs. Humans didn’t spend much time in that border region. They plowed the contents of their toilets into it, to sterilize it of Medean microorganisms and fertilize it for next year’s crops. The fuxes didn’t seem to mind the smell.

  Bronze Legs waited patiently beside his howler. He wished Windstorm would do the same.

  The two house-sized crawlers were of a pattern familiar to many worlds: long, bulbous pressure hulls mounted on ground-effect platforms. They were decades old, but they had been tended with loving care. Hydrogen fuel cells powered them. One of the crawlers now carried, welded to its roof, a sender capable of reaching Morven in its present equatorial orbit: another good reason for waiting for the web ramship’s arrival.

  The third and largest vehicle was the power plant itself, fully assembled and tested, mounted on the ground-effect systems from two crawlers and with a crawler’s control cabin welded on in front. It trailed a raft: yet another ground effect system covered by a padded platform with handrails. The fuxes would be riding that.

  All vehicles were loaded and boarded well ahead of time. Windstorm Wolheim moved among them, ticking off lists in her head and checking them against what she could see. The tall, leggy redhead was a chronic worrier.

  Phrixus (or maybe Helle) was suddenly there, a hot pink point near Argo. The fuxes picked up their spears and trotted off northward. Bronze Legs lifted his howler on its air cushion and followed. Behind him the three bigger vehicles whispered into action, and Windstorm ran for her howler.

  Rachel was in the passenger seat of the lead crawler, looking out through the great bubble windscreen. In the Hot End the crawlers would house the power plant engineers. Now they were packed with equipment. Square kilometers of thin silvered plastic sheet, and knock-down frames to hold it all, would become solar mirrors. Black plastic and more frames would become the radiator fins, mounted on the back of that hill in the Hot End. There were spools of superconducting cable and flywheels for power storage. Rachel kept bumping her elbow on the corner of a crate.

  The pinkish daylight was dimming, graying, as the Jet Stream spread to engulf the sky. The fuxes were far ahead, keeping no obvious formation. In this light they seemed a convocation of mythical monsters: centaurs, eight-limbed dragons, a misshapen dwarf. The dwarf was oddest of all. Rachel had seen him close: A nasty caricature of a man, with a foxy face, huge buttocks, exaggerated male organs, and (the anomaly) a tail longer than he was tall. Yet Harvester was solemn and slow-moving, and he seemed to have the respect of fuxes and humans both.

  The vehicles whispered along at thirty kilometers an hour, uphill through orange grass, swerving around hairy trees. A fine drizzle began. Lightning Harness turned on the wipers.

  Rachel asked, “Isn’t this where we were a few days back?”

  “Medean yesterday. That’s right,” said Grace.

  “Hard to tell. We’re going north, aren’t we? Why not straig
ht east?”

  “It’s partly for our benefit, dear. We’ll be in the habitable domains longer. We’ll see more variety; we’ll both learn more. When we swing around to heatward we’ll be nearer the north pole. It won’t get hot so fast.”

  “Good.”

  Bronze Legs and a woman Rachel didn’t know flanked them on the one-seater ground-effect vehicles, the howlers. Bronze Legs wore shorts, and in fact his legs were bronze. Black by race, he’d paled to Rachel’s color during years of Medean sunlight. Rachel asked, half to herself, “Why not just Bronze?”

  Grace understood. “They didn’t mean his skin.”

  “What?”

  “The fuxes named him for the time his howler broke down and stranded him forty miles from civilization. He walked home. He was carrying some heavy stuff, but a troop of fuxes joined him and they couldn’t keep up. They’ve got lots of energy but no stamina. So they named him Bronze Legs. Bronze is the hardest metal they knew, till we came.”

  The rain had closed in. A beast like yesterday’s flying bug strainers took to the air almost under the treads. For a moment it was face to face with Rachel, its large eyes and tremendous mouth all widened in horror. A wing ticked the windshield as it dodged.

  Lightning cursed and turned on the headlights. As if by previous agreement, lights sprang to life on the howlers and the vehicles behind. “We don’t like to do that,” said Lightning.

  “Do what?”

  “Use headlights. Every domain is different. You never know what the local life will do when a flare comes, not till you’ve watched it happen. Here it’s okay. Nothing worse than locusts.”

  Even the headlights had a yellowish tinge, Rachel thought.

  The gray cliffs ahead ran hundreds of kilometers to heatward and coldward. They were no more than a few hundred feet high, but they were fresh and new. Medea wobbled a little in its course around Argo, and the tides could raise savage quakes. All the rocks had sharp angles; wind and life had not had a chance to wear them down.

  The pass was new too, as if God had cleft the spine of the new mountains with a battle-ax. The floor of it was filled with rubble. The vehicles glided above the broken rock, riding high, with fans on maximum.