N-Space

by Larry Niven

  Terry was a round man; he felt rounder by contrast. Sharon Hayes fit right in. She was past fifty, and it showed in the deep wrinkle patterns around eyes and mouth; but regular exercise and a childhood in Tanith gravity had kept her body tight and muscular.

  The airport bar was cool and dry, and crowded now.

  George Callahan was a burly man in his forties, red hair going gray, red fur along his thick arms. He and Sharon seemed to like each other on sight. They settled at a smaller table, and there they dealt with entry forms on Callahan’s pocket computer. (Cargo: a Langston Field generator big enough to shield a small city. Purpose of entry: trade.)

  Terry and Charley drank at the crowd’s expense and tried to describe sixteen years of interstellar trading.

  Terry let Charley do most of the talking. Let him forget the fright mask he wore. “Yes we are heroes, by damn! We saved Phoenix from famine two years ago.” He’d tried to hold his breath when Firebee’s Langston Field generator blew up, but his voice still had a gravelly texture. “We’d just come from Hitchhiker’s Rest. They’ve got a gene-tailored crop called kudzu grain. We went back and filled Firebee with kudzu grain, we were living in the stuff all the way back, and we strewed it across the Phoenix croplands. It came up before twenty-two million people quite ran out of stores. Then it died off, of course, because it isn’t designed for Phoenix conditions, but by then they had their crops growing again. I never felt that good before or since.”

  The barmaids were setting out a free lunch, and someone brought them plates. Fresh food! Charley had his mouth full, so Terry said, “It’s Hitchhiker’s Rest that’s in trouble. That kudzu grain is taking over everything. It really is wonderful stuff, but it eats the houses.”

  He bit into a sandwich: cheese and mystery meat and tomatoes and chili leaf between thick slices of bread. Sharon was working on another. She’d have little room for dinner…or was this lunch? The sun had looked like late afternoon. He asked somebody, “What time is it local?”

  “Ten. Just short of noon.” The woman grinned. “And nights are four hours long.”

  He’d forgotten: Dagon City was seven hundred kilometers short of the north pole. “Okay. I need to use a phone.”

  “I’ll show you.” She was a small brunette, wide at hips and shoulders. When she took Terry’s arm she was about his height.

  Charley was saying, “We don’t expect to get rich. There aren’t any rich worlds. The war hurt everybody, and some are a long time recovering. We don’t try to stop outies. We just go away, and I guess everyone else does too. That means a lot of worlds are cut off.”

  The brunette led him down a hall to a bank of computer screens. He asked, “How do I get Information?”

  “You don’t have a card? No, of course not. Here.” She pushed plastic into a slot. The screen lit with data, and Terry noticed her name: Maria Montez. She tapped QQQ.

  The operator had the look of bony Spartan aristocracy: pale skin, high cheekbones and a small, pursed mouth. “What region?”

  “I don’t know the region. Brenda Curtis.”

  The small mouth pursed in irritation. (Not a recording?) Terry said, “Try south-south. Then west.” Brenda had inherited the farm. She might have returned there, or she might still be working at the hospital.

  “South-south, Brenda Curtis.” The operator tapped at her own keyboard. “Six-two-one-one-six-eight. Do you have that?”

  She was alive! “Yes. Thank you.” He jotted it on his pocket computer.

  Maria was still there…Naturally she’d want her card back. Did he care what she heard? He took his courage in both hands and tapped out the number.

  A girl answered: ten years old, very curly blond hair, cute, with a serious look. “Brenda’s.”

  “Can I talk to Brenda Curtis?”

  “She’s on the roof.”

  “Will you get her, please?”

  “No, we don’t bother her when she’s on the roof.”

  “Oh. Okay. Tell her I called. Terry Kakumee. When should I call back?”

  “After dinner. About eighteen.”

  “Thanks.” Something about the girl…“Is Brenda your mother?”

  “Yes. I’m Reseda Anderssen.” The girl hung up.

  Maria was looking at him. “You know Brenda Curtis?”

  “I used to. How do you know her?”

  “She runs the orphanage. I know one of her boys. Not hers, I mean, but one of the boys she raised.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  Maria shrug-sniffed. Maybe talking about another woman wasn’t what she’d had in mind. “She moved to a swamp farm after the Battle of Tanith. The City paid her money to keep orphans, and I guess there were a lot of them. Not so many now. Lots of teenagers. They’ve got their own skewball team, and they’ve had the pennant two years running.”

  “She was in bad shape when I knew her. Head wound. Does her lip pull up on one side when she talks?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m glad she’s doing okay.”

  Thinking of her as a patient might have put a different light on things. Maria took his arm again. They made an interesting match, Terry thought. Same height, both rounded in the body, and almost the same shade of hair and skin. She asked, “Was she in the Navy? Like Mr. Laine—”

  “No.”

  “How did she get hurt?”

  “Maria, I’m not sure that’s been declassified. She wasn’t in the Navy, but she got involved with the Sauron thing anyway.” And he wouldn’t tell her any more.

  2640A, NOVEMBER [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  He’d taken Dr. Hartner to dinner partly because he felt sorry for him, partly to get him talking.

  Lex Hartner was thin all over, with a long, narrow face and wispy blond hair. Terry would always remember him as tired…but that was unfair. Every doctor on Tanith lived at the edge of exhaustion after the battle of Tanith.

  “Your friend’ll heal,” he told Terry. “He was lucky. One of the first patients in after the battle. We still had eyes in stock, and we had a regeneration sleeve. His real problem is, we’ll have to take it off him as soon as he can live without it.”

  “Scars be damned?”

  “Oh, he’ll scar. They wouldn’t be as bad if we left the sleeve on him longer. But Napoleon’s coming in with burn cases—”

  “Yeah. I wouldn’t want your job.”

  “This is the hardest part.”

  It was clear to Terry: there was no way to talk Lex into leaving Charley in the sleeve for a little longer. So he changed the subject. “That woman in the hall this morning—”

  Lex didn’t ask who he meant. “We don’t have a name yet. She appeared at a swamp farm south of here. Mrs. Maddox called the hospital. We sent an ambulance. She must have come out of the swamps. From the look of her, she was there for some time.”

  “She didn’t look good.”

  “She’s malnourished. There’s fungus all over her. Bantar cloth doesn’t let air through. You have to wear net underwear, and hers was rotted to shreds. That head wound gouged her skull almost through the bone. Beyond that I just can’t tell, Terry. I don’t have the instruments.”

  Terry nodded; he didn’t have to ask about that.

  There had been one massive burn-through during the Battle of Tanith. Raw plasma had washed across several city blocks for three or four seconds. A hotel had been slagged, and shops and houses, and a stream of flame had rolled up the dome and hovered at the apex while it died. The hospital had lost most of its windows…and every piece of equipment that could be ruined by an electromagnetic pulse.

  “There’s just no way to look inside her head. I don’t want to open her up. She’s coming along nicely, she can say a few words, and she can draw and use sign language. And she tries so hard.”

  All of which Terry told to Charley the next day. They’d told him Charley wasn’t conscious most of the time; but Terry pictured him going nuts from boredom inside that pillow.

  2
656, JUNE [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  The bar had turned noisy. At the big table you could still hear Charley. “Boredom. You spend months getting to and from the Jump points. We’ve played every game program in ship’s memory half to death. I think any one of us could beat anyone on Tanith at Rollerball, Chance, the Mirror Game—”

  “We’ve got a Mirror Game,” someone said. “It’s in the Library.”

  “Great!”

  Someone pushed two chairs into the pattern for Maria and Terry. Charley was saying, “We did find something interesting this trip. There’s a Sauron ship in orbit around EST 1310. We knew it was there, we could hear it every time we used the jump points, but EST 1310 is a flare star. We didn’t dare go after it. But this trip we’re carrying a mucking great Langston Field generator in the cargo hold…”

  Captain Sharon looked dubious. Charley was talking a lot. They’d pulled valuable data from the Sauron wreck, salable data. But so what? Tanith couldn’t reach the ship, and maybe they should be considered customers. And Brenda might hear. Let him talk.

  “It was Morningstar, a Sauron hornet ship. The Saurons must have gutted it for anything they could use on other ships, then turned it into a signaling beacon. They’d left the computer. They had to have that to work the message sender. We disarmed some booby traps and managed to get into the programming…”

  People drifted away, presumably to run the airport. Others came in. The party was shaping up as a long one. Terry was minded to stay. He’d maintained a pleasant buzz, and Brenda had waited for sixteen years. She’d wait longer.

  At seven he spoke into Maria’s ear. “I’d be pleased to take you to dinner, if you can guide me to a restaurant.”

  She said, “Good! But don’t you like parties?”

  “Oh, hell yes. Stick with the crowd?”

  “Good. Till later.”

  “I still have to make that phone call.”

  She nodded vigorously and fished her card out of a pocket. He got up and went back to the public phones.

  2640A, NOVEMBER [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  When Firebee’s Shuttle #2 came down, there had been no repair facilities left on Tanith. There was little for a Second Engineer to do.

  Napoleon changed that. Napoleon was an old Spartan troopship arriving in the wake of the Battle of Tanith. Word had it that it was loaded with repair equipment. Now Napoleon’s shuttles were bringing stuff down, and Napoleon’s purser was hearing requests from other ships in need of repairs.

  Captain Shu and the others would be cutting their own deals in orbit. Terry and Charley were the only ones on the ground. Terry spent four days going through Shuttle #2, listing everything the little GO craft would need. When he went begging to Napoleon’s Spartan officers, he wanted to know exactly what to ask for. He made three lists: maximum repairs if he could get them, the minimum he could settle for, and a third list no other plaintiff would have made. He hoped.

  He hadn’t visited Charley in four days.

  The tall dark woman in the corridor caught his attention. He would have remembered her. She was eight inches taller than Terry, in a dressing gown too short for her and a puffy shower cap. She was more striking than beautiful: square-jawed and lean enough to show ribs and hip bones where the cloth pulled taut.

  She caught him looking and smiled with one side of her face. “He’o! I member you!” Her lip tugged way up on the left.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Terry said. Six days ago: the head wound case. “Hey, you can talk! That’s good. I’m Terry Kakumee.”

  “Benda Curris.”

  It was an odd name. “Benda?”

  “Br, renda. Cur, tiss.”

  “Brenda. Sorry. What were you doing out there in the swamps?” He instantly added, “Does it tire you to talk?”

  She spoke slowly and carefully. “Yes. I told my story to the Marines and Navy officers and Doctor Hartner. I don’t like it. You wo-wouldn’t like it. They smiled a lot when we all knew I wasn’t pregnant.” She didn’t seem to see Terry’s bewilderment. “You’re Charley’s friend. He’s out of the re-gener-ation sleeve.”

  “Can he have visitors?”

  “Ssure. I’ll take you.”

  Charley wasn’t a pillow any more. He didn’t look good, either. Wasted. Burned. He didn’t move much on the water bed. His lips weren’t quite mobile enough; he sounded a bit like Brenda. “There are four regeneration sleeves on Tanith, and one tank to make the goo, and when they wear out there’s nothing. My sleeve is on a Marine from Tabletop. Burn patient, like me. I asked. I see you’ve met Brenda?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She went through a hell of an experience. We don’t talk about it. So how’s the work coming?”

  “I’ll go to the purser tomorrow. I want all my ducks in a row, but I don’t want everyone getting their requests in ahead of me either. I made a list of things we could give up to other ships. That might help.”

  “Good idea. Very Eskimo.”

  “Charley, it isn’t really. The old traditions have us giving a stranger what he needs whether we need it or not.”

  He noticed Brenda staring at him. She said, “How strange.”

  He laughed a little uncomfortably. “I suppose a stranger wouldn’t ask for what the village had to have. Anyway, those days are almost gone.”

  Brenda listened while they talked about the ship. She wouldn’t understand much of it, though both men tried to explain from time to time. “The Langston Field is your reentry shield and your weapons shield and your true hull. We’ll never get it repaired, but Firebee could still function in the outer system. I’m trying to get the shuttles rebuilt. Maybe we can make her a trader. She sure isn’t part of a Navy anymore.”

  Charley said, “The Tanith asteroids aren’t mined out.”

  “So?”

  “Asteroids. Metal. Build a metal shell around Firebee for a hull.”

  “Charley, you’d double her mass!”

  “We could still run her around the inner system. If we could get a tank from some wrecked ship, a detachable fuel tank, we’d be interstellar again.” His eyes flicked to Brenda and he said, “With more fuel we could still get to the Jump points and back. Everything’d be slower, we couldn’t outrun anything…have to stay away from bandits…”

  “You’re onto something. Charley, we don’t really want to be asteroid miners for five years. But if we could find two good tanks—”

  “Ahhh! One for a hull. Big. Off a battleship, say.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Terry, I’m tired,” Charley said suddenly, plaintively. “Take Brenda to dinner? They let her out.”

  “Brenda? I’d be honored.”

  She smiled one-sided.

  November was twelve days long on Tanith, and there wasn’t any December. Every so often they put the same number on two consecutive years, to stay even with Spartan time.

  In November Dagon City was dark eighteen hours out of twenty-one-plus. The street lighting was back, but snatchers were still a problem. Maybe Terry’s uniform protected him; and he went armed, of course.

  He took her to a place that was still passable despite the shortages.

  He did most of the talking. She’d never heard of the Nuliajuk migration. He told her how the CoDominium had moved twenty thousand Eskimos, tribes all mixed together, to a world too cold for the comfort of other peoples.

  They’d settled the equator, where the edges of the icecaps almost met. They’d named the world for a myth-figure common to all the tribes, though names differed: the old woman at the bottom of the sea who brought game or withheld it. There was native sea life, and the imported seals and walruses and bears throve too. Various tribes taught each other their secrets. Some had never seen a seal, some had never built an igloo.

  The colony throve; but the men studied fusion and Langston Field engineering, and many wound up on Navy and merchant ships. Eskimos don’t really like to freeze. The engine room of a Navy ship is a better place, and Eskimos of all tribes have a knack with
tools.

  Nuliajuk was near Sol and Sparta. It might still be part of the shrinking Empire, but Terry had never seen it. He was a half-breed, born in a Libertarian merchant ship. What he knew of Nuliajuk came from his father.

  And Brenda had lived all her life on a Tanith farm. “I took my education from a TV wall. No hands-on, but I learned enough to fix our machines. We had a fusion plant and some Gaineses and Tofflers. Those are special tractors. Maybe the Saurons left them alone.”

  “Saurons?”

  “Sorry.” Her grimace twisted her whole face around. “I spent the last four days talking about nothing else. I own that farm now. I don’t own anything else.” She studied him thoughtfully. Her face in repose was symmetrical enough, square-jawed, strong even by Tanith standards. “Would you like to see it?”

  “What?”

  “Would you like to see my farm? Can you borrow a plane?”

  They set it up for two days hence.

  2656, JUNE [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  Brenda’s face lit when she saw him. “Terry! Have you gotten rich? Have you saved civilization? Have you had fun?”

  “No, yes, yes. How are you?”

  “You can see, can’t you? It’s all over, Terry. No more nightmares.” He’d never seen her bubble like this. There was no slur in her voice…but he could see the twitch at the left side of her mouth. Her face was animated on the right, calmer on the left. Her hair bloomed around her head like a great black dandelion, teased, nearly a foot across. The scar must have healed completely. She’d gained some weight.

  He remembered that he had loved her. (But he didn’t remember her having nightmares.)

  “They tell me you opened an orphanage.”

  “Yeah, I had twenty kids in one schlumph,” she said. “The city gave me financing to put the farm back on its legs, and there were plenty of workmen to hire, but I thought I’d go nuts taking care of the children and the farm both. It’s easier now. The older kids are my farmers, and they learn to take care of the younger ones. Two of them got married and went off to start their own farm. Three are in college, and the oldest boy’s in the Navy. I’m back down to twenty kids.”