N-Space

by Larry Niven

“Company.” Terry went to open the door. Maria was in daytime dress, with a large handbag. “Come on in. Check out the bathroom, it’s really sybaritic. I’m on the phone.” He returned. “Borloi, right? It’s not worth stealing on the way out, but after we jump we tell the whole population of Gaea about it? Shrewd. We’ll be a target for any thief who wants to sell eight tons of borloi on the black market.”

  “Good point. What do you think?”

  “Oh, I think we raise the subject with Sharon, and then I think we’ll do it anyway.”

  “Let’s meet for breakfast. Eight? Someone I want you to meet.”

  “Good.” He hung up. He called, “I can offer you three astronauts for breakfast.”

  Maria came out to the sound of bathwater running. “Sounds delicious. It has to be early, Terry. Tomorrow’s a working day.”

  “Oh, it’ll be early. Early to bed?” He’d wanted to use the city computer files, but he was tired too. It wasn’t the time change; the shorter days would have caught him up by now. It was stoop labor in high G.

  Maria said, “I want to try that spa. Come with me? You look like you need it. And tell me about your day.”

  They all met for breakfast in Charley’s suite.

  Charley had a groupie. Andrea Soucek was a university student, stunningly beautiful, given to clichés. She was goshwowed-out by the presence of three star-travelers. Sharon had George Callahan. Terry had Maria.

  The conversation stayed general for awhile. Then George had to leave, and so did Maria. Over coffee it degenerated into shop talk, while Andrea Soucek listened in half-comprehending awe.

  Eight tons of dry borloi (they’d freeze-dry it by opening the airlock) would fill more than half the cargo hold. Not much mass, though. The rest of the cargo space could go to heavy machinery. Their next stop, Gaea, had a small population unlikely to produce much for export, unlikely to buy much of the borloi. Most of it would be with them on two legs of their route.

  Sharon asked, “Tanith doesn’t manufacture much heavy machinery, do they?”

  “I haven’t found any I can buy. I’m working on it,” Charley said.

  Terry had an idea. “We want to freeze-dry the borloi anyway. We could pack it between the hull and the sleeve. Plenty of room for light stuff in the cargo hold.”

  “Hmm. Yeah! Any drug-running raider attacks us, his first shot would blow the borloi all across the sky! No addicts on our conscience.”

  “Rape the addicts. Evolution in action,” Sharon said. “What kind of idiot would hook himself on borloi when the source is light-years away? Get ’em out of the gene pool.”

  Andrea began to give her an argument. All humans were worthwhile, all could be saved. And borloi was a harmless vice—

  Terry returned to his room carrying a mug of coffee.

  The aristocratic phone operator recognized him by now. “Mr. Kakumee! Who may I track down for you?”

  “Lex Hartner, M.D., surgeon. Lived in Dagon City, Dryland sector, fifteen years ago.”

  “Fifteen years? Thanks a lot.” But she’d stopped showing irritation. “Mmm. Not Dryland…He doesn’t appear to be anywhere in Dagon.”

  “Try some other cities, please. He won’t be outside a city.”

  Almost a minute crawled by. “I have a Lex Hartner in Coral Beach.”

  It was Lex. He was older, grayer; his cheeks sagged in Tanith gravity. “Terry Kakumee?”

  “Hello. I met your daughter yesterday.”

  The sagging disappeared. “How is she?”

  “She’s wonderful. All of Brenda’s kids are wonderful. Are you wondering whether to tell me I’ve got a boy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s wonderful too.”

  “Of course he is.” Lex smiled at last. “How’s Brenda?”

  “She’s wonderful. I asked her to marry me too, Lex. I mean sixteen years ago.”

  “Who else has she turned down?”

  “Brawny farmer type named Maddox. Lex, I don’t think she needs a man.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. Would you believe Charley Laine is fine too? He looks like you’d expect, but his groupie is prettier than mine, if not as smart.”

  “I did a good job there, didn’t I?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Is it too late to say I’m sorry?”

  “No, forget that. She didn’t need me. Lex, you did an autopsy on the corpse of a Sauron superman. Remember?”

  “A man isn’t likely to forget that. They rot fast in the swamps. It was pretty well chewed, too.”

  “Was there enough left for a gene analysis?”

  “Some. Not enough to make me famous. It matched what the Navy already knew. I didn’t find anything inhuman, anything borrowed from animals.”

  “Yeah. Anything startling?”

  “Nope. It’s all in the records.”

  “A Sauron and a Weem’s beast, you don’t expect them to go to a photo finish.”

  “It must have been something to see. From a distance, that is. Brenda never wanted to talk about it, but that was a long time ago. Maybe she’d talk now.”

  “Okay, thanks. Lex, I still think of you as a friend. I won’t be on Tanith very long. Everything I do is on the city account for awhile—”

  “Maybe I’ll come into town.”

  “Call me when and if, and everything goes on the card. I’m at the Arco-Elsewhere.”

  Next he linked into the Dagon City computer files.

  Matters relating to Saurons had been declassified. Navy ships had transferred much of their data to city computers on Tanith and other worlds. Terry found a picture he’d seen before: a Sauron, no visible wounds, gassed in an attack on Medea. It rotated before him, a monster out of nightmare. Randus?

  An XYY, the text said. All of the Sauron soldiers, any who had left enough meat to be analyzed, had had freaky gene patterns—males with an extra Y gene, where XY was male and XX was female—until the Battle of Tanith. There they’d found some officers.

  Those pictures were of slides and electron-microscope photographs. No officer’s corpse had survived unshredded. Their gene patterns included the XY pair, but otherwise resembled those of the XYY berserkers.

  Results of that gene pattern were known. Eyes that saw deep into the infrared; the altered eye structure could be recognized. Blood that clotted fast to block a wound. Rapid production of endorphins to block pain. Stronger bones. Bigger adrenal glands. Powerful muscles. Skin that changed color fast, from near-white (to make vitamin D in cold, cloudy conditions, where a soldier had to cover most of his skin or die) to near-black (to prevent lethal sunburn in field conditions under a hotter sun). Officers would have those traits too.

  Nothing new yet.

  Ah, here was Lex Hartner’s autopsy report on Randus himself. XYY genes. Six-times-lethal damage from a Weem’s beast’s teeth, and one wound…one narrow wound up through the base of the skull into the cerebellum, that must have paralyzed or killed him at once.

  A Sauron superman working in a rice paddy might not expect something to come at him out of the water.

  Terry studied some detail pictures of a Weem’s beast. It was something like a squat crocodile, with huge pads for front paws, claws inward-pointing to hold prey, a single dagger of a front tooth…That might have made the brain puncture if the thing was biting Randus’s head. Wouldn’t the lower teeth have left other marks on, say, the forehead?

  So.

  And a stranger, human-looking but with big bones and funny eyes, had run loose on Tanith for sixteen years. Had a man with a small daughter appeared somewhere, set up a business, married perhaps? By now he would have an identity and perhaps a position of power.

  Saurons were popularly supposed to have been exterminated. Terry had never found any record of an attack on whatever world had bred the monsters, and he didn’t now, though it must have happened. No mention of further attempts to track down fleets that might have fled across the sky. The Navy had left some
stuff classified.

  Early files on the Curtis family had been scrambled. He found a blurred family picture: a dark man, a darker woman, five children; he picked out a gawky eleven-year-old (the file said) who might have grown to be Brenda. The file on the Maddoxes was bigger, with several photographs. The men all looked like Bob Maddox, all muscle and confidence and freckled tans. The women were not much smaller and tended to be freckled and burly.

  So.

  An XY officer, a male, might have wanted children. Might have had children. They were gene-tailored, but the doctors had used mostly human genes; maybe all-human, despite the tales. They weren’t a different species, after all. What would such children look like? How would they grow up?

  The Polar Datafile interview was fun. The Other Worlds interview the next day felt more like work. Charley’s voice gave out, so they called it off for a few days.

  The borloi arrived in several planeloads. Terry didn’t notice any special attempts at security. On many worlds there would have been a police raid followed by worldwide publicity. Memo: call all possible listeners in Gaea system immediately after jump. Sell to government only. Run if anything looks funny.

  They flew half the borloi to orbit and packed it into Firebee’s outer hull, with no objection from Sharon. The work went fast. The next step was taken slowly, carefully.

  The Langston Field generator from Phoenix system was too big for either boat.

  Sharon put Firebee in an orbit that would intersect the atmosphere. With an hour to play with, they moved the beast out of the cargo hold with an armchair-type pusher frame and let it get a good distance away. They all watched as Terry beamed the signal that turned it on.

  The generator became a black sphere five hundred meters across.

  Charley and Terry boarded Shuttle #1. Sharon set Firebee accelerating back to orbit.

  When the black sphere intersected the atmosphere there was little in the way of reentry flame. Despite the massive machine at the center, the huge sphere was a near-vacuum. It slowed rapidly and drifted like a balloon. Boat #1 overshot, then circled back.

  Air seeped through the black forcefield to fill the vacuum inside. It ceased to be a balloon.

  It touched down in the marshes south and east of Dagon City, more or less as planned. No signal would penetrate the field. Terry and Charley had to go into the Field with a big inflatable cargo raft, mount it beneath the generator and turn it off.

  At that point it became the owner’s problem. He’d arranged for two heavy-lift aircraft. Firebee’s crew waited until the planes had landed, then took Boat #1 back to Dagon.

  They were back at the hotel thirty-six hours after they’d left. Maria found the door open and Terry lolling in the spa. “I think I’m almost dissolved,” he told her.

  Lex didn’t call. Brenda didn’t call.

  They ferried the rest of the borloi up a day later. Some went into the outer hull. The rest they packed around the cargo hold, leaving racks open in the center. Dried borloi for padding, to shield whatever else Charley found to carry.

  It was morning when they landed, with time for sightseeing. Andrea and Charley opted to rent equipment and do some semiserious mountain climbing in the foothills of The Warden. Terry called Maria, but she couldn’t get off work, and couldn’t see him tonight either. That made mountain climbing less attractive. Terry hiked around Dagon City for a while, looked through the major shopping mall, then went back to the hotel.

  He was half asleep with his shoes off when the phone chimed.

  The face was Brenda’s. Terry rubbed his palms together and tapped the answer pad.

  “Hi, Terry. I’m in the lobby. Can I come up?”

  “Sure, Brenda. Can I order you a drink? Lunch?”

  “Get me a rum collins.”

  Terry rang off, then ordered from room service. His palms were sweating.

  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. Has Bob Maddox told her? Probably not.

  She walked in like she owned the hotel, smiling as if nobody was supposed to know. Her dress was vivid orange; it went well with her color. The drink trolley followed her in. When it had rolled out she asked, “How long are you going to be on Tanith?”

  “Two weeks, give or take a week. Charley has to find us something to sell. Besides borloi, that is.”

  “Have you tried bantar cloth? It’s just about the only hi-tech stuff we make enough of. Don’t take clothing. Styles change. Get bolts, and be sure you’ve got the tools to shape it.”

  “Yeah…Brenda, is there anything you can’t do?”

  “Cook. And I’m not the marrying type.”

  “I know that now.”

  “But I have children. Do you like Tarzan?”

  He smiled and relaxed a little. “Good job there. I’m glad I met him.”

  “Let’s do it again.”

  His drink slopped. Somehow he hadn’t expected this. “Hold it, Brenda. I’m with another woman this trip.”

  “Maria? Terry, Maria’s with Fritz Marsden tonight and all tomorrow. Fritz is one of mine. He works at the fusion plant at Randall’s Point, and he only gets into town every couple of weeks. Maria isn’t going to give him up for a, well, a transient.”

  He sipped at his drink to give himself time to think. When he took the glass from his lips, she pulled it out of his hand without spilling it and set it down. She pulled him to his feet with a fist in his belt. “I’m not asking for very much, am I?”

  “Ah, no. Child support? We’ll be leaving funds behind us anyway. Are you young enough?” Was she serious?

  “I don’t know. What’s the worst that can happen?” She had unzipped his shirt and was pulling it loose. And with wild hope he thought, It could be!

  She stripped him naked, then stepped back to examine him. “I don’t think you’ve gained or lost an ounce. Same muscle tone too. You people don’t even wrinkle.”

  “We wrinkle all at once. You’ve changed incredibly.”

  “I wanted to. I needed to. Terry, am I coming on too strong? You’re tense. Let me show you something else I learned. Face down on the bed—” She helped him irresistibly. “I’ll keep my dress on. Okay? And if you’ve got anything like massage oil around, tell me now.”

  “I’ve never had a massage of any kind.”

  The next hour was a revelation. She kept telling him to relax, and somehow he did that, while she tenderized muscles he’d strained moving borloi bags in free-fall. He wondered if he’d been wrong; he wondered if he was going to die; he wondered why he’d never tried this before.

  “I took massage training after you left. I used it at the hospital. I never had to work through a Nuliajuk’s fat padding before…No sweat, I can reach the muscle underneath.”

  “Hell, you could reach through the ribs!”

  “Is this too hard? Were you having trouble in orbit?”

  “Nope. Everything went fine.”

  “Then why the tension? Turn over.” She rolled him over and resumed work on his legs, then his arms and shoulders. “You didn’t used to be shy with me.”

  “Am I shy now?”

  “You keep tensing up.” Her skirt was hiked up and she straddled his hips to work on his belly. “Good muscle here. Ease up—Well.”

  He had a respectable erection.

  She caressed him. “I was afraid you’d changed.” She slid forward and, hell, she didn’t have panties.

  “I kept my promise,” she gloated.

  “True,” he croaked. “Take it off.”

  She pulled her dress over her head. There was still a brassiere; no woman would go without one in Tanith gravity. She took that off too.

  She was smoothly dark, with no pale areas anywhere. His hands remembered her breasts as smaller. Four kids—and it had been too long, far too long. He cried out, and it might have been ecstasy or grief or both.

  She rolled away, then slid up al
ong the length of him. “And that was a massage.”

  “Well, I’ve been missing something.”

  “I did you wrong all those years ago. Did you hate me? Is that why you’re so tense?”

  “That wasn’t it.” He felt good: relaxed, uncaring. She’d come here only to seduce him, to mend fences, to revive memories. Or she already knew, and he might as well learn. “There’s a Sauron message sender, galactic south of the Coal Sack. It was there to send Sauron ships to a certain Jump point.”

  “So?”

  “Would you like to know where they were supposed to go? I could find out.”

  “No.”

  “Flat-out no? Suppose they come back?”

  “Cut the crap, Terry. Hints and secrets. You never did that to me before.”

  “I’m sorry, love—”

  “Why did two Saurons go around the Maddox farm and straight to us? You told Bob you knew.”

  “Because they’re white.”

  Brenda’s face went uncannily blank. Then she laughed. “Poor Bob! He’d think you were absolutely loony.”

  “He sure would. I didn’t want to know this, Brenda. Why don’t you want to find the Saurons?”

  “What would I want with them? I want to see my children safe—”

  “Send them.”

  “Not likely! Terry, how much have you figured out?”

  “I think I’ve got it all. I keep testing it, Brenda, and it fits every time.”

  She waited, her nose four centimeters from his, her breath on his face. The scent of her was very faint.

  He said, “You saw to it that three of your own children were out in the rice paddy, including Tarzan. The girl you kept at the house was Reseda, the blond, the girl with the least obvious of Sauron genes. You invited Bob over. Maybe he’d get rid of me before the kids came back.”

  “Just my luck. He likes you.”

  “They took away your scent. No enemy could smell you out. They gave you an epicanthic fold to protect your eyes. The flat, wide nose is less vulnerable and pulls in more air.” He pushed his fingers into her hair. Spongy, resilient, thick. She didn’t flinch; she smiled in pleasure.

  “And this kind of hair to protect your skulls. It’d take an impact. You grow your own skewball helmets!”