N-Space

by Larry Niven

  Suppose the dictator’s son does govern well? A new dynasty is founded, and the trappings of legitimacy are thrust onto the new royal family. To be sure, the title of “King” may be abandoned. Napoleon chose to be “Emperor of the French,” Cromwell chose “Lord Protector,” and we suppose the US will be ruled by Presidents for a long time—but the nature of the Presidency, and the way one gets the office, may change.

  See, for example, Niven’s use of “Secretary-General” in the tales of Svetz the time-traveler.

  We had a choice in MOTE: to keep the titles as well as the structure of aristocratic empire, or abandon the titles and retain the structure only. We could have abolished “Emperor” in favor of “President,” or “Chairperson,” or “Leader,” or “Admiral,” or “Posnitch.” The latter, by the way, is the name of a particularly important President honored for all time by having his name adopted as the title for Leader…

  We might have employed titles other than Duke (originally meant “leader” anyway) and Count (Companion to the king) and Marquis (Count of the frontier marches). Perhaps we should have. But any titles used would have been translations of whatever was current in the time of the novel, and the traditional titles had the effect of letting the reader know quickly the approximate status and some of the duties of the characters.

  There are hints all through MOTE that the structure of government is not a mere carbon copy of the British Empire or Rome or England in the time of William III. On the other hand there are similarities, which are forced onto the Empire by the technology we assumed.

  Imperial government is not inevitable. It is possible.

  The alternate proposition is that we of nineteen seventy-five are so advanced that we will never go back to the bad old days. Yet we can show you essays “proving” exactly that proposition—and written thou-sands of years ago. There’s a flurry of them every few centuries.

  We aren’t the first people to think we’ve “gone beyond” personal government, personal loyalties, and a state of religion. Maybe we won’t be the last.

  Anyway, MOTE is supposed to be entertainment, not an essay on the influence of science on social organization. (You’re getting that here.)

  The Empire is what it is largely because of the Alderson Drive and Langston Field. Without the Drive an Empire could not form. Certainly an interstellar Empire would look very different if it had to depend on lightspeed messages to send directives and receive reports. Punitive expeditions would be nearly impossible, hideously expensive, and probably futile: you’d be punishing the grandchildren of a generation that seceded from the Empire, or even a planet that put down the traitors after the message went out.

  Even a rescue expedition might never reach a colony in trouble. A coalition of bureaucrats could always collect the funds for such an expedition, sign papers certifying that the ships are on the way, and pocket the money…in sixty years someone might realize what had happened, or not.

  The Langston Field is crucial to the Empire, too. The Navy can survive partial destruction and keep fighting. Ships carry black boxes—plug-in sets of spare parts—and large crews who have little to do unless half of them get killed. That’s much like the navies of fifty years ago.

  A merchant ship might have a crew of forty. A warship of similar size carries a crew ten times as large. Most have little to do for most of the life of the ship. It’s only in battles that the large number of self-programming computers become important. Then the outcome of the battle may depend on having the largest and best-trained crew—and there aren’t many prizes for second place in battle.

  Big crews with little to do demand an organization geared to that kind of activity. Navies have been doing that for a long time, and have evolved a structure that they tenaciously hold onto.

  Without the Field as defense against lasers and nuclear weapons, battles would become no more than offensive contests. They’d last microseconds, not hours. Ships would be destroyed or not, but hardly ever wounded. Crews would tend to be small, ships would be different, including something like the present-day aircraft carriers. Thus technology dictates Naval organization.

  It dictates politics, too. If you can’t get the populace, or a large part of it, under a city-sized Field, then any given planet lies naked to space.

  If the Drive allowed ships to sneak up on planets, materializing without warning out of hyperspace, there could be no Empire even with the Field. There’d be no Empire because belonging to an Empire wouldn’t protect you. Instead there might be populations of planet-bound serfs ruled at random by successive hordes of space pirates. Upward mobility in society would consist of getting your own ship and turning pirate.

  Given Drive and Field, though, Empires are possible. What’s more likely? A representative confederacy? It would hardly inspire the loyalty of the military forces, whatever else it might do. (In the War Between the States, the Confederacy’s main problem was that the troops were loyal to their own State, not the central government.)

  Each stellar system independent? That’s reasonable, but is it stable? Surely there might be pressures toward unification of at least parts of interstellar space.

  How has unification been achieved in the past? Nearly always by conquest or colonization or both. How have they been held together? Nearly always by loyalty to a leader, an Emperor, or a dynasty, generally buttressed by the trappings of religion and piety. Even Freethinkers of the last century weren’t ashamed to profess loyalty to the Widow of Windsor…

  Government over large areas needs emotional ties. It also needs stability. Government by 50%-plus-one hasn’t enjoyed particularly stable politics—and it lasts only so long as the 50%-minus-one minority is willing to submit. Is heredity a rational way to choose leaders? It has this in its favor: the leader is known from an early age to be destined to rule, and can be educated to the job. Is that preferable to education based on how to get the job? Are elected officials better at governing, or at winning elections?

  Well, at least the counter-case can be made. That’s all we intended to do. We chose a stage of Empire in which the aristocracy was young and growing and dynamic, rather than static and decadent; when the aristocrats are more concerned with duty than with privilege; and we made no hint that we thought that stage would last forever.

  RANDOM DETAILS

  Robert Heinlein once wrote that the best way to give the flavor of the future is to drop in, without warning, some strange detail. He gives as an example, “The door dilated.”

  We have a number of such details in MOTE. We won’t spoil the book by dragging them all out in a row. One of the most obvious we use is the personal computer, which not only does computations, but also puts the owner in contact with any nearby data bank; in effect it will give the answer to any question whose answer is known and that you think to ask.

  Thus no idiot block gimmicks in MOTE. Our characters may fail to guess something, or not put information together in the right way, but they won’t forget anything important. The closest that comes to happening is when Sally Fowler can’t quite remember where she filed the tape of a conversation, and she doesn’t take long to find it then.

  On the other hand, people can be swamped with too much information, and that does happen.

  There were many other details, all needed to keep the story moving. A rational kind of space suit, certainly different from the clumsy things used now. Personal weapons. The crystal used in a banquet aboard MacArthur: crystal strong as steel, cut from the windshield of a wrecked First Empire reentry vehicle, indicating the higher technology lost in that particular war. Clothing and fashion; the status of women; myriads of details of everyday life.

  Not that all of these differ from the present. Some of the things we kept the same probably will change in a thousand years. Others…well, the customs associated with wines and hard liquors are old and stable. If we’d changed everything, and made an attempt to portray every detail of our thousand-year-advanced future, the story would have gotten bogged dow
n in details.

  MOTE is probably the only novel ever to have a planet’s orbit changed to save a line.

  New Chicago, as it appeared in the opening scenes of the first draft of MOTE, was a cold place, orbiting far from its star. It was never a very important point, and Larry Niven didn’t even notice it.

  Thus when he introduced Lady Sandra Liddell Leonovna Bright Fowler, he used as viewpoint character a Marine guard sweating in hot sunlight. The Marine thinks, “She doesn’t sweat. She was carved from ice by the finest sculptor that ever lived.”

  Now that’s a good line. Unfortunately it implies a hot planet. If the line must be kept, the planet must be moved.

  So Jerry Pournelle moved it. New Chicago became a world much closer to a cooler sun. Its year changed, its climate changed, its whole history had to be changed…

  Worth it, though. Sometimes it’s easier to build new worlds than think up good lines.

  • • •

  • • •

  A bandersnatch is twice the size of a brontosaur. Its skeleton is flexible but has no joints; the only breaks in its smooth white skin are the tufts of sensory bristles on either side of its tapering blank head. It moves on a rippling belly foot. Bandersnatchi live in the lowlands of Jinx, browsing off the gray yeast along the shorelines. You’d think they were the most helpless things in known space…until you saw one bearing down on you like a charging mountain. Once I saw an ancient armored car crushed flat across a lowlands rock, straddled by the broken bones of the beast that ran it down.

  “The Handicapped,” 1968

  BRENDA

  2656 AD, MARCH [FIREBEE CLOCK TIME]

  Human-settled worlds all look alike from high orbit. Terry thought that the CoDominium explorers must have had it easy.

  Alderson jump. ZZZTT! One white pinpoint among myriads has become a flood of white light. Nerve networks throughout ship and crew are strummed in four dimensions. Wait for the blur to go away. You had a hangover this bad, once. It lasted longer.

  Now search the ecliptic a decent distance from the sun. Look for shadows in the neudar screen: planets. Big enough? Small enough? Colors: blue with a white froth of clouds, if men are to breathe the air. Is there enough land? How big are the icecaps? Three or four months to move close, and look.

  Nuliajuk’s icecaps had covered half the surface. If they ever melted, Nuliajuk would be all water. A cold world. Nobody else would settle, but what about Eskimos? So Terry Kakumee’s ancestors had found a home, four centuries ago.

  Tanith had no icecaps at all, and almost no axial tilt. Half land, but plenty of rainfall: the equatorial oceans boiled where they were shallow enough. Salt deserts around the equator. Swamps across both poles. Transportees had settled the north pole.

  Terry Kakumee floated against the big window at Firebee’s nose. It was sixteen years since he’d seen Tanith.

  Tanith was a growing crescent, blue with white graffiti, and a blazing highlight across the northern pole. Summer. One serious mountain, The Warden, stood six kilometers tall. It had been white-tipped in winter. Dagon City would be in the foothills, south.

  The clouds were sparse. The city itself didn’t show, but he found a glare-point that had to be the old spaceport.

  Brenda’s farm would be south of that.

  Sharon Hayes drifted up behind him. “I’ve been talking to the Dagon Port Authority. One George Callahan, no rank given, tells me they don’t have much in the way of repair facilities, but we’re intensely welcome. I’ve got a dinner date.”

  “Good.” On a world this far from what civilization was left near Sparta, the population would feel cut off. Ships would be welcome. “What about fuel?”

  “They can make liquid hydrogen. There’s a tanker. Callahan gave me a course down. Four hours from now, and we’ll have to lower Firebee’s orbit. Time to move, troops. Are we all going down?”

  She meant that for Charley. Charley Laine (cargo and purser) was almost covered in burn scars. His face was a smooth mask. There was an unmarred patch along his jaw that he had to shave, and good skin in strips along his back and the backs of his arms and legs, and just enough unburned scalp to grow a decent queue. Sometimes he didn’t want to face strangers. He said, “Somebody’d better stay on duty, Captain Sharon. Did you ask about outies?”

  “They haven’t been raided since the Battle. They do have a couple of high-thrust mining ships. Charley, I think Firebee’s safe enough.”

  Charley let out a breath. “I’ll come. I can’t be the only war vet on Tanith. There was—I wonder—”

  “Brenda,” Terry said.

  “Yeah. I wonder about Brenda sometimes.”

  “I wonder too.”

  2640A, NOVEMBER [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  Lieutenant Kakumee had been Second Engineer aboard the recon ship Firebee during the destruction of the Sauron Second Fleet. The enemy’s gene-tailored warriors were dead or fled, but they had left their mark. Damaged ships were limping in from everywhere in Tanith system. Firebee would orbit Tanith until she could be refitted or rifled for parts.

  Firebee’s midsection was a blob of metal bubbles where the Langston Field generator had vaporized itself and half melted the hull around it. It was the only hit Firebee bad taken. Charley Laine had been caught in the flare.

  They’d taken him to St. Agnes Hospital in Dagon City.

  “The sky’s full of ruined ships,” Terry told him. “Most of them have damaged Langston Field generators. First thing that goes in a battle. We’ll never get replacements.”

  Charley didn’t answer. He might have heard; he might have felt the touch of Terry’s hand. He looked like a tremendous pillow stuck with tubes in various places.

  “Without a Langston Field we don’t have a ship. I’d give Firebee a decent burial if I could get her down. You’ll be healed a long time before any part of her flies again,” Terry said. He believed that Charley would heal. He might never look quite human again, and if he walked he’d never run; but his central nervous system wasn’t damaged, and his heart beat, and his lungs sucked air through the hole at one end of the pillow, while regeneration went on inside.

  Terry heard urgent voices through the door. Patients healthy enough for curiosity stirred restlessly.

  “Something’s going on.” Terry patted the padded hand. “I’ll come back and tell you about it.”

  At first glance she wasn’t that badly hurt.

  She was slumped in an armchair in the lobby. Half a dozen people swarmed about her: a doctor, two nurses, two MPs and a thick-necked Marine in a full leg cast who was trying to stay out of the way and see too. She was wearing a bantar cloth coverall. It was a mess: sky-blue with a green-and-scarlet landscape on the back, barely visible under several pounds of mud and swamp mold.

  Bantar cloth had been restricted to Navy use up to eighty years ago. It was nearly indestructible. It wasn’t high style, but farmers and others in high-risk jobs wore bantar cloth at half the price of a tractor. Whatever had happened to the woman, it would have been worse without that.

  She had black ancestry with some white (skin like good milk chocolate, but weathered by fatigue and the elements) and oriental (the tilt of the eyes). Thick, tightly coiled black hair formed a cushion around her head. It carried its own share of mud. A nasty gash cut through the hair. It ran from above her left eye back to the crown of her head. A nurse had cleaned it with alcohol; it was bleeding.

  She drained a paper cup of water. A doctor—Charley’s doctor, Lex Hartner—handed her another, and she drained that too. “No more,” Hartner said. “We’ll get you some broth.”

  She nodded and said, “Uh.” Her lip curled way up on the left. She tried to say something else. Stroke? Nonsense, she couldn’t be past thirty. The head wound—

  Poor woman.

  Hartner said, “We’ll get that soup into you before we look you over. How long were you out there?”

  “Wumble.” Her lip curled up; then half her face wrinkled in frustration. The other half rem
ained slack. She held up one finger, then lifted another.

  “A week or two?”

  She nodded vigorously. Her eyes met Terry’s. He smiled and turned away, feeling like an intruder. He went back to talk to Charley.

  2656, JUNE [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  The wrecked ships that had haloed the planet after the Battle of Tanith were long gone. Shuttle #1 descended through a sky that seemed curiously empty.

  What had been the Tanith spaceport still glared like a polished steel dish. Seen from low angle the crater became a glowing eye with a bright pupil.

  The big Langston Field dome had protected Dagon City during the battle. The smaller dome at the spaceport had absorbed a stream of guided meteors, then given all of the energy back as the field collapsed.

  A new port had grown around the crater’s eastern rim. Terry and Charley, riding as passengers while Sharon flew, picked out a dozen big aircraft, then a horde of lighter craft. The crater must make a convenient airfield. The gleaming center was a small lake. Have to avoid that.

  Both of Firebee’s shuttles had lost their hover capability. They’d been looking for repair facilities for six years now. Shuttle #1 came in a little fast because of the way the crater dipped, coasted across and braked to a stop at the rim.

  Tanith was hot and humid, with a smell of alien vegetation. The sun was low. Big autumn-colored flutterbys formed a cloud around them as they emerged. These were new to Terry. He’d never seen a Tanith summer.

  They had drawn a crowd of twenty-odd, still growing. Terry noticed how good they looked: shorter than average, but all well muscled, none obtrusively fat. A year in Tanith’s 1.14 gravity made anyone look good. The early strokes and heart attacks didn’t show.