N-Space

by Larry Niven

  They nodded to each other, and they and the other colonists spent long hours on the telescope hoping, and praying.

  But there was nothing alive up there now. Ridgeback was entirely alone.

  Cynnie never recovered. She would talk only to her brother, refusing even to see her child. She was morose and ate little, spending most of her time watching the sky with something like terrified awe in her eyes.

  And one day, seven months after the accident, she walked into the woods and never returned.

  Doc hadn’t seen Jerry for three weeks.

  The children lived in a community complex which had some of the aspects of a boarding school. The colonists took turns at nursing duty. Jill spent most of her time there since she and Greg were on the outs. Lately, Elise had taken up the habit too. Not that he blamed her; he couldn’t have been very good company the last few months.

  Parents took their children out to the T-shaped complex whenever they felt like it, so that some of the children had more freedom than others. But by and large they all were expected to live there eventually.

  Brew was coming out of the woods with a group of six children when Doc stumbled out into the sunlight and saw Jerry.

  He wore a rough pair of coveralls that fit him well enough, but he would have looked ludicrous if there had been anything to laugh about. Soft brown fur covered every inch of him. As Doc appeared he turned his head with a bird-quick movement, saw his father, and scampered over. Jerry bounced into him, wrapped long arms tight about his rib cage and said, eagerly, “Daddy.”

  There was a slight pause.

  “Hello, Jerry.” Doc slowly bent to the ground, looking into his son’s eyes.

  “Daddy Doc, Daddy Doc,” he chattered, smiling up at his father. His vocabulary was about fifteen words. Jerry was six years old and much too big for his age. His fingers were very long and strong, but his thumbs were small and short and inconsequential. Doc had seen him handle silverware without much trouble. His nose pugged, jaw massive with a receding chin. There were white markings in the fur around his eyes, accentuating the heavy supraorbital ridges, making the poor child look like—

  The poor child. Doc snorted with self-contempt. Listen to me. Why not my child?

  Because I’m ashamed. Because we lock our children away to ease the pain. Because they look like—

  Doc gently disengaged Jerry’s fingers from his shirt, turned and half-ran back to the ship. Shivering, he curled up on one of the cots and cursed himself to sleep.

  Hours later he roused himself and, woozy with fatigue, he went looking for Jase. He found him on a work detail in the north fields, picking fruit.

  “I’m not sure,” he told Jase. “They’re not old enough for me to be sure. But I want your opinion.”

  “Show me,” said Jase, and followed him to the library.

  The picture on the tape was an artist’s rendering of Pithecanthropus erectus. He stood on a grassy knoll looking warily out at the viewer, his long-fingered hand clutching a sharp-edged throwing rock.

  “I’ll smack your head,” said Jase.

  “I’m wrong, then?”

  “You’re calling them apes!”

  “I’m not. Read the copy. Pithecanthropus was a small-brained Pleistocene primate, thought to be a transitional stage between ape and man. You got that? Pith is also called Java Man.”

  Jase glared at the reader. “The markings are different. And there is the fur—”

  “Forget ’em. They’re nothing but guesswork. All the artist had to go on were crumbling bones and some broken rocks.”

  “Broken rocks?”

  “Pith used to break rocks in half to get an edged weapon. It was about the extent of his tool-making ability. All we know about what he looked like comes from fossilized bones—very much like the skeleton of a stoop-shouldered man with foot trouble, topped with the skull of an ape with hydrocephalus.”

  “Very nice. Will Eve’s children be fish?”

  “I don’t know, dammit. I don’t know anything at all. Look, Pith isn’t the only candidate for missing link. Homo Habilis looked a lot more like us and lived about two million years ago. Kenyapithicus Africanus resembled us less, but lived eighteen million years earlier. So I can’t say what we’ve got here. God only knows what the next generation will be like. That depends on whether the children are moving backwards or maybe sideways. I don’t know, Jase, I just don’t know!” The last words were shrill, and Doc punctuated them by slamming his fist against a wire window screen. Then, because he could think of nothing more to say, he did it again. And again. And—

  Jase caught his arm. Three knuckles were torn and bleeding. “Get some sleep,” he said, eyes sad. “I’ll have them send Earth a description of Eve the way she is now. She’s oldest, and best developed. We’ll send them all we have on her. It’s all we can do.”

  Momentum and the thoroughness of their training had kept them going for eight years. Now the work of making a world slowed and stopped.

  It didn’t matter. The crops and the meat animals had no natural enemies on Ridgeback. Life spread along the continent like a green plague. Already it had touched some of the islands.

  Doc was gathering fruit in the groves. It was a shady place, cool, quiet, and it made for a tranquil day’s work. There was no set quota. You took home approximately a third of what you gathered. Sometimes he worked there, and sometimes he helped with the cattle, examining for health and pregnancy, or herding the animals with the nonlethal sonic stunners.

  He wished that Elise were here with him, so they could laugh together, but that was growing infrequent now. She was growing more involved with the nursery, and he spent little of his time there.

  Jill’s voice hailed him from the bottom of the ladder. “Hey up there, Doc. How about a break?”

  He grinned and climbed down, hauling a sack of oranges.

  “Tired of spending the day reading, I guess,” she said lightly. She offered him an apple. He polished it on his shirt and took a bite. “Just needed to talk to somebody.”

  “Kinda depressed?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s just getting hard to cope with some of the problems.”

  “I guess there have been a few.”

  Jill gave a derisive chuckle. “I sure don’t know Greg anymore. Ever since he set up the brewery and the distillery, he doesn’t really want to see me at all.”

  “Don’t take it so hard,” Doc comforted. “The strain is showing on all of us. Half the town does little more than read or play tapes or drink. Personally, I’d like to know who smuggled the hemp seeds on board.”

  Jill laughed, which he was glad for, then her face grew serious again. “You know, there’d probably be more trouble if we didn’t need someone to look after the kids.” She paused, looking up at Doc. “I spend a lot of my time there,” she said unnecessarily.

  “Why?” It was the first time he’d asked. They bad left the groves and were heading back into town along the gravel road that Greg and Brew and the others had built in better days.

  “We…I came here for a reason. To continue the human race, to cross a new frontier, one that my children could have a part in. Now, now that we know that the colony is doomed, there’s just no motive to anything. No reason. I’m surprised that there isn’t more drinking, more carousing and foursomes and divorces and everything else. Nothing seems to matter a whole lot. Nothing at all.”

  Doc took her by the shoulders and held her. Go on and cry, he silently said to her. God, I’m tired.

  The children grew fast. At nine Eve reached puberty and seemed to shoot skyward. She grew more hair. She learned more words, but not many more. She spent much of her time in the trees in the children’s complex. The older girls grew almost as fast as she did, and the boys.

  Every Saturday Brew and Nat took some of the children walking. Sometimes they climbed the foothills at the base of the continental range; sometimes they wandered through the woods, spending most of their efforts keeping the kids
from disappearing into the trees.

  One Saturday they returned early, their faces frozen in anger. Eve and Jerry were missing. At first they refused to discuss it, but when Jase began organizing a search party, they talked.

  They’d been ready to turn for home when Eve suddenly scampered into the trees. Jerry gave a whoop and followed her. Nat had left the others with Brew while she followed after the refugees.

  It proved easy to find them, and easier still to determine what they were doing with each other when she came upon them.

  Eve looked up at Nat, innocent eyes glazed with pleasure. Nat trembled for a moment, horrified, then drove them both away with a stick, screaming filth at them.

  Over Nat’s vehement objections and Brew’s stony refusal to join, Jase got his search party together and set off. They met the children coming home. By that time Nat had talked to the other mothers and fathers at the children’s complex.

  Jase called a meeting. There was no way to avoid it now, feelings were running too deep.

  “We may as well decide now,” he told them that night. “There’s no question of the children marrying. We could train them to mouth the words of any of our religions, but we couldn’t expect them to understand what they were saying. So the question is, shall we let the children reproduce?”

  He faced an embarrassed silence.

  “There’s no question of their being too young. In biological terms they aren’t, or you could all go home. In our terms, they’ll never be old enough. Anyone have anything to say?”

  “Let’s have Doc’s opinion,” a hoarse voice called. There was a trickle of supportive applause.

  Doc rose, feeling very heavy. “Fellow colonists…” The smile he was trying on for size didn’t fit his face. He let it drop. There was a desperate compassion in his voice. “This world will never be habitable to mankind until we find out what went wrong here. I say let our children breed. Someday someone on Earth may find out how to cure what we’ve caught. Maybe he’ll know how to let our descendants breed men again. Maybe this problem will only last a generation or two, then we’ll get human babies again. If not, well, what have we lost? Who else is there to inherit Ridgeback?”

  “No!” The sound was a tortured meld of hatred and venom. That was Nat, sunhaired loving mother of six, with her face a strained mask of frustration. “I didn’t risk my life and leave my family and, and train for years and bleed and sweat and toil so my labor could fall to…to…a bunch of goddamned monkeys!”

  Brew pulled her back to her seat, but by now the crowd was muttering and arguing to itself. The noise grew louder. There was shouting. The yelling, too, grew in intensity.

  Jase shouted over the throng. “Let’s talk this out peacefully!”

  Brew was standing, screaming at the people who disagreed with him and Natalie. Now it was becoming a shoving match, and Brew was getting more furious.

  Doc pushed his way into the crowd, hoping to reach Brew and calm him. The room was beginning to break down into tangled knots of angry, emotionally charged people.

  He grabbed the big man’s arm and tried to speak, but the Swede turned bright baleful eyes on him and swung a heavy fist.

  Doc felt pain explode in his jaw and tasted blood. He fell to the ground and was helped up again, Brew standing over him challengingly. “Stay out of our lives, Doctor,” he sneered, openly now. “You’ve never helped anything before. Don’t try to start now.”

  He tried to speak but felt the pain, and knew his jaw was fractured. A soft hand took his arm and he turned to see Elise, big green eyes luminous with pity and fear. Without struggling, he allowed her to take him to the ship infirmary.

  As they left the auditorium he could hear the shouting and struggling, Jase on the microphone trying to calm them, and the coldly murderous voices that screamed for “no monkey grandchildren.”

  He tried to turn his head towards the distant sound of argument as Elise set the bone and injected quick-healing serums. She took his face and kissed him softly, with more affection than she had shown in months, and said, “They’re afraid, Harry.” Then kissed him again, and led him home.

  Doc raged inwardly at his jaw that week. Its pain prevented him from joining in the debate which now flared in every corner of the colony.

  Light images swam across his closed eyes as the sound of fists pounding against wood roused him from dreamless sleep. Doc threw on a robe and padded barefoot across the cool stone floor of his house, peering at the front door with distaste before opening it. Jase was there, and some of the others, somber and implacable in the morning’s cool light.

  “We’ve decided, Doc,” Jase said at last. Doc sensed what was coming. “The children are not to breed. I’m sorry, I know how you feel—” Doc grunted. How could Jase know how he felt when he wasn’t sure himself? “We’re going to have to ask you to perform the sterilizations…” Doc’s hearing faded down to a low fuzz, and he barely heard the words. This is the way the world ends…

  Jase looked at his friend, feeling the distaste between them grow. “All right. We’ll give you a week to change your mind. If not, Elise or Greg will have to do it.” Without saying anything more they left.

  Doc moped around that morning, even though Elise swore to him that she’d never do it. She fussed over him as they fixed breakfast in the kitchen. The gas stove burned methane reclaimed from waste products, the flame giving more heat control than the microwaves some of the others had. Normally Doc enjoyed scrambling eggs and wok-ing fresh slivered vegetables into crisp perfection, but nothing she said or did seemed to lift him out of his mood.

  He ate lightly, then got dressed and left the house. Although she was concerned, Elise did not follow him.

  He went out to the distillery, where Greg spent much of his time under the sun, drunk and playing at being happy. “Would you?” The pain still muffled Doc’s words. “Would you sterilize them?”

  Greg looked at him blearily, still hung over from the previous evening’s alcoholic orgy. “You don’t understand, man.” There was a stirring sound from the sheltered bedroom behind the distillery, and a woman’s waking groan. Doc knew it wasn’t Jill. “You just don’t understand.”

  Doc sat down, wishing he had the nerve to ask for a drink. “Maybe I don’t. Do you?”

  “No. No, I don’t. So I’ll follow the herd. I’m a builder. I build roads, and I build houses. I’ll leave the moralizing to you big brains.”

  Doc tried to say something and found that no words would come. He needed something. He needed…

  “Here, Doc. You know you want it.” Greg handed him a canister with a straw in it. “Best damn vodka in the world.” He paused, and the slur dropped from his voice. “And this is the world, Doc. For us. For the rest of our lives. You’ve just got to learn to roll with it.” He smiled again and mixed himself an evil-looking drink.

  Greg’s guest had evidently roused herself and dressed. Doc could hear her now, singing a snatch of song as she left. He didn’t want to recognize the voice.

  “Got any orange juice?” Doc mumbled, after sipping the vodka.

  Greg tossed him an orange. “A real man works for his pleasures.”

  Doc laughed and took another sip of the burning fluid. “Good lord. What is that mess you’re drinking?”

  “It’s a Black Samurai. Sake and soy sauce.”

  Doc choked. “How can you drink that?”

  “Variety, my friend. The stimulation of the bizarre.”

  Doc was silent for a long time. Senses swimming he watched the sun climb, feeling the warmth as morning melted into afternoon. He downed a slug of his third screwdriver and said irritably, “You can’t do it, Greg. If you sterilize the children, it’s over.”

  “So what? It’s over anyway. If they wanna let a drunk slit the pee pees of their…shall we say atavistic progeny? Yeah, that sounds nice. Well, if they want me to do it, I guess I’ll have to do it.” He looked at Doc very carefully. “I do have my sense of civic duty. How about you, Doc?”
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  “I tried.” He mumbled, feeling the liquor burning his throat, feeling the light-headedness exert its pull. “I tried. And I’ve failed.”

  “You’ve failed so far. What were your goals?”

  “To keep—” he took a drink. Damn, that felt good. “To keep the colony healthy. That’s what. It’s a disaster. We’re at each other’s throats. We kill our babies—”

  Doc lowered his head, unable to continue.

  They were both silent, then Greg said, “If I’ve gotta do it, I will, Doc. If it’s not me, it’ll be someone else who reads a couple of medical texts and wants to play doctor. I’m sorry.”

  Doc sat, thinking. His hands were shaking. “I can’t do that.” He couldn’t even feel the pain anymore.

  “Then do what you gotta do, man,” and Greg’s voice was dead sober.

  “Will you…can you help me?” Doc bit his lip. “This is my civic duty, you know?”

  “Yea, I know.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”

  A few minutes passed, then Doc said drunkenly, “There’s got to be a way. There just has to be.”

  “Wish I could help, Doc.”

  “I wish you could too,” Doc said sincerely, then rose and staggered back to his house.

  It rained the night he made his decision, one of the quick, hot rains that swept from the coast to the mountains in a thunderclap of fury. It would make a perfect cover.

  He gathered his medical texts, a Bible and a few other books, regretting that most of the information available to him was electronically encoded. Doc took one of the silent stunners from the armory. The nonlethal weapons had only been used as livestock controllers. There had never been another need, until now. From the infirmary he took a portable medical kit, stocking it with extra bandages and medicine, then took it all to the big cargo flyer.

  It was collapsible, with a fabric fuselage held rigid by highly compressed air in fabric structural tubing. He put it in one of the soundless electric trucks and inflated it behind the children’s complex.

  There was plenty of room inside the fence for building and for a huge playground with fruit trees and all the immemorial toys of the very young. After the children had learned to operate a latch, Brew had made a lock for the gate and given everyone a key. Doc clicked it open and moved in.