N-Space

by Larry Niven

  He stayed in the shadows, creeping close to the main desk where Elise worked.

  You can’t follow where I must go, he thought regretfully. You and I are the only fully trained medical personnel. You must stay with the others. I’m sorry, darling.

  And he stunned her to sleep silently, moving up to catch her head as it slumped to the table. For the last time, he gently kissed her mouth and her closed eyes.

  The children were in the left wing—one room for each sex, with floors all mattress and no covers, because they could not be taught to use a bed. He sprayed the sound waves up and down the sleeping forms. The parabolic reflector leaked a little, so that his arm was numb to the elbow when he was finished. He shook his hand, trying to get some feeling back into it, then gave up and settled into the hard work of carrying the children to the flyer.

  He hustled them through the warm rain, bending under their weight but still working swiftly. Doc arranged them on the fabric floor in positions that looked comfortable—the positions of sleeping men rather than sleeping animals. For some time he stood looking down at Jerry his son and at Lori his daughter, thinking things he could not afterwards remember.

  He flew north. The flyer was slow and not soundless; it must have awakened people, but he’d have some time before anyone realized what had happened.

  Where the forest had almost petered out he hovered down and landed gently enough that only a slumbering moan rose from the children. Good. He took half of them, including Jerry and Lori, and spread them out under the trees. After he had made sure that they had cover from the air he took the other packages, the books and the medical kit, and hid them under a bush a few yards away from the children.

  He stole one last look at them, his heirs, small and defenseless, asleep. He could see Elise in them, in the color of their hair, as Elise could see him in their eyes and cheeks.

  Kneading his shoulder, he hurried back to the ship. There was more for him to do.

  Skipping the ship off again, he cruised thirty miles west, near the stark ridge of mountains, their somber gray still broken only sparsely by patches of green. There he left the other seven children. Let the two groups develop separately, he thought. They wouldn’t starve, and they wouldn’t die of exposure, not with the pelts they had grown. Many would remain alive, and free. He hoped Jerry and Lori would be among them.

  Doc lifted the flyer off and swept it out to the ocean. Only a quarter mile offshore were the first of the islands, lush now with primitive foliage. They spun beneath him, floating brownish-green upon a still blue sea.

  Now he could feel his heartbeat, taste his fear. But there was resolve, too, more certain and calm than any he had known in his life.

  He cut speed and locked the controls, setting the craft on a gradual decline. Shivering already, he pulled on his life jacket and walked to the emergency hatch, screwing it open quickly.

  The wind whipped his face, the cutting edge of salt narrowing his eyes. Peering against the wall of air pressure he was able to see the island coming up on him now, looming close. The water was only a hundred feet below him, now eighty, sixty…

  The rumbling of the shallow breakers joined with the tearing wind, and, fighting his fear, he waited until the last possible moment before hurling himself from the doorway.

  He remembered falling.

  He remembered hitting the water at awful speed, the spray ripping into him, the physical impact like the blow of a great hand. When his head broke surface Doc wheezed for air, swallowed salty liquid and thrashed for balance.

  In the distance, he saw the flash of light, and a moment later heard the shattering roar as the flyer spent itself on the rocky shore.

  Jase was tired. He was often tired lately, although he still managed to get his work done.

  The fields had only recently become unkempt, as Marlow and Billie and Jill and the others grew more and more inclined to pick their vegetables from their backyard gardens.

  So just he and a few more still rode out to the fields on the tractors, still kept close watch on the herds, still did the hand-pruning so necessary to keep the fruit trees healthy.

  The children were of some help. Ten years ago a few of them had been captured around the foothill area. They had been sterilized, of course, and taught to weed, and carry firewood, and a few other simple tasks.

  Jase leaned on his staff and watched the shaggy figures moving along the street, sweeping and cleaning.

  He had grown old on this world, their Ridgeback. He regretted much that had happened here, especially that night thirty-some years before when Doc had taken the children.

  Taken them—where? Some argued for the islands, some for the West side of the mountain range. Some believed that the children had died in the crash of the flyer. Jase had believed that, until the adult Piths were captured. Now, it was hard to say what happened.

  It was growing chill now, the streetlights winking on to brighten the long shadows a setting Tau Ceti cast upon the ground. He drew his coat tighter across his shoulders and walked back to his house. It was a lonelier place to be since June had died, but it was still home.

  Fumbling with the latch, he pushed the door open and reached around for the light switch. As it flicked on, he froze.

  My God.

  “Hello, Jase.” The figure was tall and spare, clothes ragged, but graying hair and beard cut squarely. Three of the children were with him.

  After all this time…

  “Doc…” Jase said, still unbelieving. “It is you, isn’t it?”

  The bearded man smiled uncertainly, showing teeth that were white but chipped. “It’s been a long time, Jase. A very long time.”

  The three Piths were quiet and alert, sniffing the air of this strange place.

  “Are these—?”

  “Yes. Jerry and Lori. And Eve. And a small addition.” One of the three—God, could it be Eve?—sniffed up to Jase. The soft golden fur on her face was tinged with gray, but she carried a young child at her breast.

  Jerry stood tall for a preman, eyeing Jase warily. He carried a sharpened stick in one knobby hand.

  Jase sat down, speechless. He looked up into the burning eyes of the man he had known thirty years before. “You’re still officially under a death sentence, you know.”

  Doc nodded his head. “For kidnapping?”

  “Murder. No one was sure what had happened to you, whether you or any of the children had survived.”

  Doc, too, sat down. For the first time the light in his eyes dimmed. “Yes. We survived. I swam to shore after crashing the flyer, and found the place where I had left the children.” He thought for a moment, then asked quietly. “How is Elise? And all the others?”

  Jase was unable to raise his eyes from the floor. “She died three years ago, Doc. She was never the same after you left. She thought you were dead. That the children were dead. Couldn’t you have at least told her about your plan? Or gotten her a message?”

  Doc’s fingers played absently with his beard as he shook his head. “I couldn’t involve her. I couldn’t. Could you…show me where she’s buried, Jase?”

  “Of course.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Well, none of the people were the same after the children left. Some just seemed to lose purpose. Brew’s dead. Greg drank himself under. Four of the others have died.” Jase paused, thinking. “Do any of the others know you’re here?”

  “No. I slipped in just at dusk. I wasn’t sure what kind of a reception I’d get.”

  “I’m still not sure.” Jase hesitated. “Why did you do it?”

  The room was quiet, save for a scratching sound as Jerry fingered an ear. Fleas? Absurd. Jill had never uncrated them.

  “I had to know, Jase,” he said. There was no uncertainty in his voice. In fact, there was an imperious quality he had never had in the old days. “The question was: Would they breed true? Was the Pith effect only temporary?”

  “Was it?”

  “No. It persi
sted. I had to know if they were regressing or evolving, and they remained the same in subsequent generations, save for natural selection, and there isn’t much of that.”

  Jase watched Lori, her stubby fingers untangling mats in her fur. Her huge brown eyes were alive and vital. She was a lovely creature, he decided. “Doc, what are the children?”

  “What do you think?”

  “You know what I think. An alien species wants our worlds. In a hundred years they’ll land and take them. What they’ll do with the children is anybody’s guess. I—” He couldn’t bring himself to look at Eve. “I wish you’d sterilized them, Doc.”

  “Maybe you do, Jase. But, you see, I don’t believe in your aliens.”

  Jase’s breath froze in his throat.

  “They might want our world,” said Doc, “but why would they want our life forms? Everything but Man is spreading like a plague of locusts. If someone wants Ridgeback, why haven’t they done something about it? By the time they land, terrestrial life will have an unstoppable foothold. Look at all the thousands of years we’ve been trying to stamp out just one life form, the influenza viruses.

  “No, I’ve got another idea. Do you know what a locust is?”

  “I know what they are. I’ve never seen one.”

  “As individuals they’re something like a short grasshopper. As individuals, they hide or sleep in the daytime and come out at night. In open country you can hear them chirping after dusk, but otherwise nobody notices them. But they’re out there, eating and breeding and breeding and eating, getting more numerous over a period of years, until one day there are too many for the environment to produce enough food.

  “Then comes the change. On Earth it hasn’t happened in a long time because they aren’t allowed to get that numerous. But it used to be that when there were enough of them, they’d grow bigger and darker and more aggressive. They’d come out in the daytime. They’d eat everything in sight, and when all the food was gone, and when there were enough of them, they’d suddenly take off all at once.

  “That’s when you’d get your plague of locusts. They’d drop from the air in a cloud thick enough and broad enough to darken the sky, and when they landed in a farmer’s field he could kiss his crops goodbye. They’d raze it to the soil, then take off again, leaving nothing.”

  Jase took off his glasses and wiped them. “I don’t see what it is you’re getting at.”

  “Why do they do it? Why were locusts built that way?”

  “Evolution, I guess. After the big flight they’d be spread over a lot of territory. I’d say they’d have a much bigger potential food supply.”

  “Right. Now consider this. Take a biped that’s man-shaped, enough so to use a tool, but without intelligence. Plant him on a world and watch him grow. Say he’s adaptable; say he eventually spread over most of the fertile land masses of the planet. Now what?

  “Now an actual physical change takes place. The brain expands. The body hair drops away. Evolution had adapted him to his climate, but that was when he had hair. Now he’s got to use his intelligence to keep from freezing to death. He’ll discover fire. He’ll move out into areas he couldn’t live in before. Eventually he’ll cover the whole planet, and he’ll build spacecraft and head for the stars.”

  Jase shook his head. “But why would they change back, Doc?”

  “Something in the genes, maybe. Something that didn’t mutate.”

  “Not how, Doc. We know it’s possible. Why?”

  “We’re going back to being grasshoppers. Maybe we’ve reached our evolutionary peak. Natural selection stops when we start protecting the weak ones, instead of allowing those with defective genes to die a natural death.”

  He paused, smiling. “I mean, look at us, Jase. You walk with a cane now. I haven’t been able to read for five years, my eyes have weakened so. And we were the best Earth had to offer; the best minds, the finest bodies. Chris only squeaked by with his glasses because he was such a damn good meteorologist.”

  Jase’s face held a flash of long-forgotten pain. “And I guess they still didn’t choose carefully enough.”

  “No,” Doc agreed soberly. “They didn’t. On Earth we protected the sick, allowed them to breed, instead of letting them die…with pacemakers, with insulin, artificial kidneys and plastic hip joints and trusses. The mentally ill and retarded fought in the courts for the right to reproduce. Okay, it’s humane. Nature isn’t humane. The infirm will do their job by dying, and no morality or humane court rulings or medical advances will change the natural course of things for a long, long time.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know how stable they are. It could be millions of years, or…?” Doc shrugged. “We’ve changed the course of our own development. Perhaps a simpler creature is needed to colonize a world. Something that has no choice but to change or die. Jase, remember the Cold War?”

  “I read about it.”

  “And the Belt Embargo? Remember diseromide, and smog, and the spray-can thing, and the day the fusion seawater distillery at San Francisco went up and took the Bay area with it, and four states had to have their water flown in for a month?”

  “So?”

  “A dozen times we could have wiped out all life on Earth. As soon as we’ve used our intelligence to build spacecraft and seed another world, intelligence becomes a liability. Some old anthropologist even had a theory that a species needs abstract intelligence before it can prey on its own kind. The development of fire gave Man time to sit back and dream up ways to take things he hadn’t earned. You know how gentle the children are, and you can remember how the carefully chosen citizens of Ridgeback acted the night we voted on the children’s right to reproduce.”

  “So you gave that to them, Doc. They are reproducing. And when we’re gone they’ll spread all over the world. But are they human?”

  Doc pondered, wondering what to say. For many years he had talked only to the children. The children never interrupted, never disagreed…“I had to know that too. Yes. They’re human.”

  Jase looked closely at the man he had called friend so many years ago. Doc was so sure. He didn’t discuss; he lectured. Jase felt an alienness in him that was deeper than the mere passage of time.

  “Are you going to stay here now?”

  “I don’t know. The children don’t need me any more, though they’ve treated me like a god. I can’t pass anything on to them. I think our culture has to die before theirs can grow.”

  Jase fidgeted, uncomfortable. “Doc. Something I’ve got to tell you. I haven’t told anyone. It’s thirty years now, and nobody knows but me.”

  Doc frowned. “Go on.”

  “Remember the day Roy died? Something in the Orion blew all the motors at once? Well, he talked to Cynnie first. And she talked to me, before she disappeared. Doc, he got a laser message from Earth, and he knew he couldn’t ever send it down. It would have destroyed us. So he blew the motors.”

  Doc waited, listening intently.

  “It seems that every child being born on Earth nowadays bears an uncanny resemblance to Pithecanthropus erectus. They were begging us to make the Ridgeback colony work. Because Earth is doomed.”

  “I’m glad nobody knew that.”

  Jase nodded. “If intelligence is bad for us, it’s bad for Earth. They’ve fired their starships. Now they’re ready for another cycle.”

  “Most of them’ll die. They’re too crowded.”

  “Some will survive. If not there, then, thanks to you, here.” He smiled. A touch of the old Jase in his eyes. “They’ll have to become men, you know.”

  “Why do you put it like that?”

  “Because Jill uncrated the wolves, to help thin out the herds.”

  “They’ll cull the children, too,” Doc nodded. “I couldn’t help them become men, but I think that will do it. They will have to band together, and find tools, and fire.” His voice took on a dreamy quality. “Eventually, the wolves will come out of the darkness to join them at thei
r campfires, and Man will have dogs again.” He smiled. “I hope they don’t overbreed them like we did on earth. I doubt if chihuahuas have ever forgotten what we did to them.”

  “Doc,” Jase said, urgently, “will you trust me? Will you wait for a minute while I leave? I…I want to try something. If you decide to go there may never be another chance.”

  Doc looked at him, mystified. “Alright, I’ll wait.”

  Jase limped out of the door. Doc sat, watching his charges, proud of their alertness and flexibility, their potential for growth in the new land.

  There was a creaking as the door swung open.

  The woman’s hair had been blond, once. Now it was white, heavy wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, years of hardship and disappointment souring what had once been beauty.

  She blinked, at first seeing only Doc.

  “Hello, Nat,” he said to her.

  She frowned. “What…?” Then she saw Eve.

  Their eyes locked, and Nat would have drawn back save for Jase’s insistent hand at her back.

  Eve drew close, peering into her mother’s face as if trying to remember her.

  The old woman stuttered, then said, “Eve?” The Pith cocked her head and came closer, touching her mother’s hand. Nat pulled it back, eyes wide.

  Eve cooed, smiling, holding her baby out to Nat.

  At first she flinched, then looked at the child, so much like Eve had been, so much…and slowly, without words or visible emotion, she took the child from Eve and cradled it, held it, and began to tremble. Her hand stretched out helplessly, and Eve came closer, took her mother’s hand and the three of them, mother, child and grandchild, children of different worlds, held each other. Nat cried for the pain that had driven them apart, the love that had brought them together.

  Doc stood at the edge of the woods, looking back at the colonists who waved to them, asking for a swift return.

  Perhaps so. Perhaps they could, now. Enough time had passed that understanding was a thing to be sought rather than avoided. And he missed the company of his own kind.