N-Space

by Larry Niven

  No warning: she attacked.

  She disappeared into the dark like a vampire leaving her victim. She draped his clothes over him and dropped the heavy flechette gun on his belly. He giggled, and presently dressed.

  She led him stumbling through a black maze and out into the dusk of a winter morning. “There. After all, I know the house.”

  “This is the trouble with not having windows,” he groused.

  “Weem’s beasts like windows too. In rain they can come this far.”

  The graveyard was eight stone markers cut with a vari-saw, letters and numbers cut with a laser. “The names and dates are wrong, except these old ones,” she said. “Horatius hoped it would look like they all died many years ago. I’ll get a chisel or a laser to fix it.”

  There was no small grave. “Lex told me you had a child.”

  “Miranda. He took her with him.”

  “God.” He took her in his arms. “Did you tell the Marines?”

  “No. I…try not to think about Miranda.”

  There was nothing more to see. She told him that the Navy men had found Randus’ skeleton and taken that, and sent out a big copter for the rescue pod. When the lights came on around noon, Terry helped Brenda clean up the mudstains and empty the freezer and fridge.

  “I need money to run the farm,” Brenda said. “Maybe someone will hire me for work in Dagon.”

  “Why not sell the place?”

  “It was ours for too long. It won’t be bad. You can see for yourself, the Saurons left no trace. No trace at all.”

  2656, JUNE [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  Four miles east of the crater. He should be near. He was crossing extensive fields of rice. A dozen men and women worked knee-deep in water that glinted through the stalks like fragments of a shattered mirror. A man stood by with a gun. Terry swooped low, lowered his flaps, hovered. Several figures waved.

  They were all children.

  He set the plane down. The gun-carrier broke off work and came toward him. Terry waded to meet him; what the hell. “Brenda Curtis’s?”

  The boy had an oriental look despite the black, kinky hair. He grinned and said, “Where else would you find all these kids? I’m Tarzan Kakumee.”

  “Terry Kakumee. I’m visiting. You’d be about sixteen?”

  The boy’s jaw dropped. “Seventeen, but that’s Tanith time. Kakumee? Astronaut? You’d be my father!”

  “Yeah. Can I stare a little?”

  They examined each other. Tarzan was an inch or two taller than Terry, narrower in the hips and face and chest, and his square jaw was definitely Brenda’s. Black eyes with an oriental slant: Terry and Brenda both had that. The foolish grins felt identical.

  “I’m on duty,” Tarzan said. “I’ll see you later?”

  “Can’t you come with me? I’m due for lunch.”

  “No, I’ve got my orders. There are Weem’s beasts and other things around here. I once shot a tax collector the size of my arm. It had its suckers in Gerard’s leg and Gerard was screaming bloody murder.” Tarzan grinned. “I blew it right off him.”

  Smaller fields of different colors surrounded a sprawling structure. If that was the farmhouse it had doubled in size…right. He could make out the original farmhouse in the center. The additions had windows.

  Fields of melons, breadfruit, and sugar cane surrounded the house. Three children in a mango grove broke off work to watch him land.

  Brenda came through the door with a man beside her.

  He knew her at once. (But was it her?) She waved both arms and ran to meet him. (She’d changed.) “Terry, I’m so glad to see you! The way you went off—my fault, of course, but I kept wondering what had happened to you out there and why you didn’t come back!” Her dress looked like current Tanith style, cut above the knee and high at the neck. Her grip on his arm was farmhand-strong. “You wouldn’t have had to see me, it just would have been good to know—Well, it is good to know you’re alive and doing all right! Bob, this is Terry Kakumee the astronaut. Terry, Bob Maddox is my neighbor three miles southeast.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Bob Maddox was a brown-haired white man, freckled and tanned. He was large all over, and his hand was huge, big-knuckled and rough with work. “Brenda’s told me about you. How’s your ship?”

  “Truth? Firebee is gradually and gracefully disintegrating. There’s a double hull instead of a Langston Field, and we have to patch it every so often. We got Boat #1 repaired on Phoenix. Maybe we can hold it all together till the Empire gets back out here. You interested in space-flight?”

  Maddox hesitated. “Not really. I mean, it’s surprising more of us don’t want to build rocket ships, considering. We weren’t all transportees, our ancestors.”

  Brenda turned at the door. She clapped her hands twice and jerked her thumb. The children who had been climbing over Terry’s rental plane dropped off and scampered happily back toward the mangoes.

  They went in. Reseda Anderssen, busy at a samovar, smiled at them and went out through another door. There was new furniture, couches and small tables and piles of pillows, enough to leave the living room quite cluttered. Brenda saw him looking and said, “Some of the kids sleep in here.”

  It didn’t look it. “You keep them neat.” He noticed noises coming from what he remembered as the kitchen.

  “I’ve got a real knack for teaching. Have some tea?”

  “Borloi tea? I’d better not.”

  “I made Earl Grey.” She poured three cups. She’d always had grace, even with the head injury to scramble the signals. He could see just a trace of her lip pulling up on the left when she spoke. She settled him and Bob on a couch and faced them. “Now talk. Where’ve you been?”

  “Phoenix. Gafia. Hitchhiker’s Rest. Medea. Uhura. We commute. We tried Lenin, but three outie ships came after us. We ran and didn’t come back, and that cuts us off from the planets beyond. And we found a Sauron ship at EST 1310.”

  It was Maddox who stared. “Well, go on! What’s left of it? Were there Saurons?”

  “Bob, we were clever. We knew there was a ship there because we caught the signal every time we used the jump points to get to Medea. We couldn’t get down there because the star’s a flare star and we don’t have a Langston Field.

  “Only, this time we do. Phoenix sold us—actually, they gave us a mucking great Langston Field generator. We left it on. We moved in and matched orbit with the signal ship, and we expanded the field to put both ships inside.”

  “Clever, right. Terry, we Taniths are a little twitchy about Saurons—”

  “Just one. Dead. They rifled it and left it for a message beacon. They left a Sauron on duty. Maybe a flare got him.” The corpse had been a skewed man-shape, a bogey man. Like Randus? “I managed to get into the programming. Now we’re thinking of going on to Sparta. We learned some things they might want to know.”

  “Let me just check on lunch,” Brenda said, and she went.

  It left Terry feeling awkward. Maddox said, “So there are still Sauron supermen out there?”

  “Just maybe. The beacon was set to direct Saurons to a Jump point in that system. Maybe nobody ever got the message. If they did, I don’t know where they went. I ran the record into Firebee’s memory and ran a translation program on it, but I didn’t look at the result. I’d have to go back to Firebee, then come back here.”

  Maddox grimaced. “We don’t have ships to do anything about it. Sparta might. I’d be inclined to leave them the hell alone.”

  “Did they ever catch—?”

  “Nope. Lot of excitement. Every so often some nut comes screaming that he saw a Sauron in the marshes. The Mayor’s got descriptions of a Sauron officer, and he says they don’t check out. How the hell could that thing still be hiding?”

  “Those two must have gone right past your place to get here.”

  “Yeah. Brenda had to backtrack to get to my place. Weeks in the wild, fungus and tax collectors, polluted water, God knows what she ate…Well, yeah, I�
��ve wondered. Maybe they saw we had guns.”

  “That’s not it.”

  Bob hesitated. “Okay, why?”

  He’d spoken without thinking. “You’d think I’m crazy. Anyway, I could be wrong.”

  “Kakumee, everyone knows more about Saurons than the guy he’s talking to. It’s like skewball scores. What I want to know about is, I never saw Brenda’s lip curl up like that when she talks.”

  “Old head injury.”

  “I haven’t seen her face do that since the day she staggered through my gate. I wonder if meeting you again might be upsetting her.”

  Bob Maddox was coming on like a protective husband.

  Terry asked, “Have you thought of marriage?”

  “That’s none of your business, Kakumee—”

  “Brenda’s—”

  “—But I’ve asked, and she won’t.” His voice was still low and reasonably calm. “She’d rather live alone, and I don’t know why. Ventura’s mine.”

  “I haven’t met her.”

  “I guess I don’t mind you worrying over Brenda. Have you met any of the kids?”

  “Yeah—”

  Brenda was back. “We can serve any time you get hungry. Terry, can you stay for dinner? You could meet the rest of the children. They’ll be coming in around five.”

  “I’d like that. Bob, feel like lunchtime?”

  “Yeah.”

  The men hung back for a moment. “I’ll leave after dinner,” Terry said. “I tell you, though, I don’t think anything’s bothering Brenda. She’s tougher than that.”

  Bob nodded. “Tough lady. Kakumee, I think she’s working on how to tell you one of the kids is yours.”

  2640B, JANUARY TO MARCH [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  Their idyll lasted two months.

  They made an odd couple. Tall and lean; short and round. He could see it in the mirror, he could see the amusement in strangers and friends too.

  Terry’s rented room was large enough for both. Brenda began buying clothes and other things after she had a job, but she never crowded the closets. Brenda cleaned. Terry did all the cooking. It was the only task he’d ever seen her fail at.

  He was busy much of the time. In a week the work on Boat #2 was finished. There were parts for Boat #1, and he carried them to orbit to work. Boat #1 still wouldn’t be able to make a reentry.

  He talked Napoleon’s purser out of a ruined battleship’s hydrogen tank. Over a period of three weeks (with two two-day leaves in Dagon) Terry and the rest of the crew moved Firebee into it. Had Charley been thinking in terms of a regeneration sleeve for the ship?

  Firebee was now the silliest-looking ship since the original Space Shuttle, and too massive for interstellar capability. Without an auxiliary tank she couldn’t even use a Jump point with any hope of reaching a planet on the far side.

  Captain Shu had done something about that. Firebee now owned a small H2 tank aboard Armadillo, but they’d have to wait for it to arrive. Terry went back down to Dagon City.

  Brenda was still attending the clinic every two days. She was working there too, and trying to arrange something with the local government. She wouldn’t talk about that; she wasn’t sure it would work.

  He made her a different offer. “Four of our crew want to stay. Cropland doesn’t cost much on Tanith. But you’ve got a knack for machines. Let me teach you how to make repairs on Firebee. Come as my apprentice.”

  “Terry—”

  “And wife.”

  “I get motion sickness.”

  “Damn.” There had never been a lover like Brenda. She could play his nervous system like a violin. She knew his moods. She maintained civilization around him. The thought of leaving her made him queasy.

  Armadillo had won an expensive victory in the outer Tanith system. The hulk was just capable of thrust, and it didn’t reach Tanith until months after the battle. Then crews from other ships swarmed over it and took it apart. Firebee’s crew came back with an intact tank and fuel-feed system. Terry had to tear that apart and put it together different, in vacuum. It would ride outside the second hull.

  Firebee was fragile now, fit to be a trader, but never a warship or a miner.

  Charley was in decent shape by then and working out in a local gym. He came up to help weld the fuel tank. He seemed fit for space. “Captain Shu wants to go home, but we’ve got you and me and Sharon Hayes and that kid off Napoleon, Murray Weiss. I say we go interstellar.”

  “I know you do, but think about it, Charley. No defenses. We can haul cargo back and forth between the mining asteroids, and if outies ever come to take over we’d have someplace to run to.”

  “And you could see Brenda every couple of months.”

  The argument terminated when Terry returned to Dagon.

  Brenda was gone. Brenda’s clothes were gone. There was a phone message from Lex Hartner; he looked grim and embarrassed.

  Phoning him felt almost superfluous, but Terry did it.

  “We’ve been seeing each other,” Lex said. “I think she’s carrying my child. Terry, I want to marry her.”

  “Good luck to you.” The days in which an Ihalmiut hunter might gather up a band of friends and hunt down a bride were long ago, far away. He considered it anyway. And went to the stars instead.

  2656, JUNE [TANITH LOCAL TIME]

  Reseda and three younger children served lunch, then joined them at the table. Three more came in from the fields. There was considerable chatter. Terry found he was doing a lot of the talking.

  Dessert was mangoes still hot from the sun.

  Brenda went away and came back wearing a bantar-cloth coverall. It was the garment she’d worn the day she reached the hospital, like as not, but much cleaner. The three adults spend the afternoon pulling weeds in the sugar cane. Brenda and Bob Maddox instructed him by turns.

  Terry had never done field work. He found he was enjoying himself, sweating in the sun.

  The sun arced around the horizon, dropping gradually. Other children came flocking from the rice fields shortly after five. The adults pulled weeds for a little longer, then joined the children in the courtyard. He could smell his own sweat, and Bob’s, different by race or by diet.

  Twenty children all grinned at some shared joke. Brenda must have briefed them. When?

  “Brenda, I can sort them out,” Terry said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “The Mayor already told me Reseda was his. The freckled girl must be Ventura Maddox. Hello, Ventura!” She was big for twelve, tanned dark despite the freckles, and round in the face, like Bob himself. A tall girl, older, had Brenda’s tightly kinked black hair, pale skin and a pointed chin. “I don’t know her name, but she’s…Lex’s?” Lex’s face, but it would still be a remarkable thing.

  “Yes, that’s Sepulveda.”

  “Hello, Sepulveda. And the boy—” Tarzan grinned at him but didn’t wave. Tactful: he didn’t know whether they were supposed to have met. “—is mine.”

  “Right again. Terry, meet Tarzan.”

  “Hello, Tarzan. Brenda, I set down in the rice field before I got here.”

  She laughed. “Dammit, Terry! I had it all planned.”

  “And they’re named for suburbs of some city on Earth.”

  “I never thought you’d see that.”

  A different crew served dinner. Bob and Brenda took one end of the table. Terry and Tarzan talked as if nobody else was present, but every so often he noticed how the other children were listening.

  But tracks in his mind ran beneath what he was saying. They look good together. He’s spent time with these children, probably watched them grow up. She should marry him.

  She can’t! Unless I’m all wrong from beginning to end.

  Wouldn’t that be nice? “We’ve been carrying kudzu grain in the cargo ever since. Someday we’ll find another famine—”

  She must have been carrying Tarzan when she took up with Lex. She held his attention while she carried Tarzan to term, and she held him after Le
x knew Tarzan wasn’t his, and then she had Sepulveda. She could have held him if she’d married him, but she didn’t. Held him anyway.

  Quite a woman. And then she gave him up. Why?

  Terry took the car up into the orange sunset glow and headed north. En route he used his card and the car phone to get a hotel room. By nine he had checked into the Arco-Elsewhere and was calling Maria.

  “Want to see the best hotel on the planet? Or shall I get a cab and come to you?”

  “I guess I’ll come there. Hey, why not? It’s close to work.”

  He used an operator to track down Charley and Sharon, and wasn’t surprised to find they had rooms in the same hotel. “Call me for breakfast,” Sharon said groggily. “I’m not on Dagon time yet.”

  Charley seemed alert. “Terry! How’s Brenda?”

  “Brenda’s running the planet, or at least twenty kids’ worth of planet. One of the boys is mine. She looks wonderful. Got a burly protector, likable guy, wants to be her fiancé but isn’t.”

  “You’ve got a kid! What’s he like?”

  Terry had to sort out his impressions. “She raised ’em all well. He’s self-confident, delighted to see me, taller than me…If he saves civilization I’ll take half the credit.”

  “That good, huh?”

  “Easily.”

  “I’ve been working. We’ve sold the big Langston Field generator. Farmer, lots of land, he may be thinking about becoming a suburb for the wealthy. I got a good price, Terry. He thought he could beat me at the Mirror Game—”

  “He bet you?”

  “He did. And I’ve signed up for eight tons of borloi, but I’ll have to see how much bulk that is before—”

  “Borloi!”

  “Sure, Terry, borloi had medical uses too. We’ll deal with a government at our next stop, give it plenty of publicity too. That way it’ll be used right.”

  “I’m glad to see you’ve put some brain sweat into this. What occurs to me is—”

  The door went bingbong.