N-Space

by Larry Niven

  Dinner turned into a carouse. Alcohol was involved, but we’d left the Monobloc by then. When we split up, Anton was with Michiko. I went home with Phoebe.

  Phoebe had fine legs, as I’d anticipated, though both knees were teflon and plastic. Her face was lovely even in morning sunlight. Wrinkled, of course. She was two weeks short of eighty and wincing in anticipation. She ate breakfast with a cross-country skier’s appetite. We spoke of our lives as we ate.

  She’d come to Santa Maria to visit her oldest grandson. In her youth she’d done critical work in nanoengineering. The Board had allowed her four children. (I’d known I was outclassed.) All were married, scattered across the Earth, and so were the grandkids.

  My two sons had emigrated to the Belt while still in their twenties. I’d visited them once during an investigation, trip paid for by the United Nations—

  “You were an ARM? Really? How interesting! Tell me a story…if you can.”

  “That’s the problem, all right.”

  The interesting tales were all classified. The ARM suppresses dangerous technology. What the ARM buries is supposed to stay buried. I remembered a kind of time compressor, and a field that would catalyze combustion, both centuries old. Both were first used for murder. If turned loose or rediscovered, either would generate more interesting tales yet.

  I said, “I don’t know anything current. They bounced me out when I got too old. Now I run construction robots at various spaceports.”

  “Interesting?”

  “Mostly placid.” She wanted a story? Okay. The ARM enforced more than the killer-tech laws, and some of those tales I could tell.

  “We don’t get many mother hunts these days. This one was wished on us by the Belt—” And I told her about a lunie who’d sired two clones. One he’d raised on the Moon and one he’d left in the Saturn Conserve. He’d moved to Earth, where one clone is any normal citizen’s entire birthright. When we found him he was arranging to culture a third clone…

  I dreamed a bloody dream.

  It was one of those: I was able to take control, to defeat what had attacked me. In the black of an early Sunday morning the shreds of the dream dissolved before I could touch them; but the sensations remained. I felt strong, balanced, powerful, victorious.

  It took me a few minutes to become suspicious of this particular flavor of wonderful, but I’d had practice. I eased out from under Phoebe’s arm and leg and out of bed. I lurched into the medical alcove, linked myself up and fell asleep on the table.

  Phoebe found me there in the morning. She asked, “Couldn’t that wait till after breakfast?”

  “I’ve got four years on you and I’m going for infinity. So I’m careful,” I told her. It wasn’t quite a lie…and she didn’t quite believe me either.

  On Monday Phoebe went off to let her eldest grandson show her the local museums. I went back to work.

  In Death Valley a semicircle of twenty lasers points at an axial array of mirrors. Tracks run across the desert to a platform that looks like strands of spun caramel. Every hour or so a spacecraft trundles along the tracks, poses above the mirrors, and rises into the sky on a blinding, searing pillar of light.

  Here was where I and three companions and twenty-eight robots worked between emergencies. Emergencies were common enough. From time to time Glenn and Skii and ten or twenty machines had to be shipped off to Outback Field or Baikonur, while I held the fort at Death Valley Field.

  All the equipment was old. The original mirrors had all been slaved to one system, and had been replaced again and again. Newer mirrors were independently mounted and had their own computers, but even they were up to fifty years old and losing their flexibility. The lasers had to be replaced somewhat more often. Nothing was ready to fall apart, quite.

  But the mirrors have to adjust their shapes to match distorting air currents all the way up to vacuum; because the distortions themselves must focus the drive beam. A laser at 99.3% efficiency is keeping too much energy, getting too hot. At 99.1% something would melt, lost power would blow the laser into shrapnel, and a cargo would not reach orbit.

  My team had been replacing mirrors and lasers long before I came on the scene. This circuit was nearly complete. We had already reconfigured some robots to begin replacing track.

  The robots worked alone while we entertained ourselves in the monitor room. If the robots ran into anything unfamiliar, they stopped and beeped. Then a story or songfest or poker game would stop just as abruptly.

  Usually the beep meant that the robot had found an acute angle, an uneven surface, a surface not strong enough to bear a loaded robot, a bend in a pipe, a pipe where it shouldn’t be…a geometrical problem. The robots couldn’t navigate just anywhere. Sometimes we’d have to unload it and move the load to a cart, by hand. Sometimes we had to pick it up with a crane and move it or turn it. Lots of it was muscle work.

  Phoebe joined me for dinner Thursday evening.

  She’d whipped her grandson at laser tag. They’d gone through the museum at Edwards AFB. They’d skied…He needed to get serious about that, and maybe get some surgery too…

  I listened and smiled and presently tried to tell her about my work. She nodded; her eyes glazed. I tried to tell her how good it was, how restful, after all those years in the ARM.

  The ARM: that got her interest back. Stet. I told her about the Henry Program.

  I’d been saving that. It was an embezzling system good enough to ruin the economy. It made Zachariah Henry rich. He might have stayed rich if he’d quit in time…and if his system hadn’t been so good, so dangerous, he might have ended in prison. Instead…well, let his tongue whisper secrets to the ears in the organ banks.

  I could speak of it because they’d changed the system. I didn’t say that it had happened twenty years before I’d joined the ARM. But I was still running out of declassified stories. I told her, “If a lot of people know something can be done, somebody’ll do it. We can suppress it and suppress it again—”

  She pounced. “Like what?”

  “Like…well, the usual example is the first cold fusion system. They did it with palladium and platinum, but half a dozen other metals work. And organic superconductors: the patents listed a wrong ingredient. Various grad students tried it wrong and still got it. If there’s a way to do it, there’s probably a lot of ways.”

  “That was before there was an ARM. Would you have suppressed superconductors?”

  “No. What for?”

  “Or cold fusion?”

  “No.”

  “Cold fusion releases neutrons,” she said. “Sheathe the generator with spent uranium, what do you get?”

  “Plutonium, I think. So?”

  “They used to make bombs out of plutonium.”

  “Bothers you?”

  “Jack, the fission bomb was it in the mass murder department. Like the crossbow. Like the Ayatollah’s Asteroid.” Phoebe’s eyes held mine. Her voice had dropped; we didn’t want to broadcast this all over the restaurant. “Don’t you ever wonder just how much of human knowledge is lost in that…black limbo inside the ARM building? Things that could solve problems. Warm the Earth again. Ease us through the light-speed wall.”

  “We don’t suppress inventions unless they’re dangerous,” I said.

  I could have backed out of the argument; but that too would have disappointed Phoebe. Phoebe liked a good argument. My problem was that what I gave her wasn’t good enough. Maybe I couldn’t get angry enough…Maybe my most forceful arguments were classified…

  Monday morning, Phoebe left for Dallas and a granddaughter. There had been no war, no ultimatum, but it felt final.

  Thursday evening I was back in the Monobloc.

  So was Anton. “I’ve played it,” he said. “Can’t talk about it, of course.”

  He looked mildly bored. His hands looked like they were trying to break chunks off the edge of the table.

  I nodded placidly.

  Anton shouldn’t have told me about the bro
adcast from the Angel’s Pencil. But he had; and if the ARM had noticed, they’d better hear him mention it again.

  Company joined us, sampled and departed. Anton and I spoke to a pair of ladies who turned out to have other tastes. (Some bends like to bug the straights.) A younger woman joined us for a time. She couldn’t have been over thirty, and was lovely in the modern style…but hard, sharply defined muscle isn’t my sole standard of beauty…

  I remarked to Anton, “Sometimes the vibes just aren’t right.”

  “Yeah. Look, Jack, I have carefully concealed a prehistoric Calvados in my apt at Maya. There isn’t really enough for four—”

  “Sounds nice. Eat first?”

  “Stet. There’s sixteen restaurants in Maya.”

  A score of blazing rectangles meandered across the night, washing out the stars. The eye could still find a handful of other space artifacts, particularly around the moon.

  Anton flashed the beeper that would summon a taxi. I said, “So you viewed the call. So why so tense?”

  Security devices no bigger than a basketball rode the glowing sky, but the casual eye would not find those. One had to assume they were there. Patterns in their monitor chips would match the vision and sound patterns of a mugging, a rape, an injury, a cry for help. Those chips had gigabytes to spare for words and word patterns the ARM might find of interest.

  So: no key words.

  Anton said, “Jack, they tell a hell of a story. A…foreign vehicle pulled alongside Angela at four-fifths of legal max. It tried to cook them.”

  I stared. A spacecraft matched course with the Angel’s Pencil at eighty percent of lightspeed? Nothing man-built could do that. And warlike? Maybe I’d misinterpreted everything. That can happen when you make up your code as you go along.

  But how could the Pencil have escaped? “How did Angela manage to phone home?”

  A taxi dropped. Anton said, “She sliced the bread with the, you know, motor. I said it’s a hell of a story.”

  Anton’s apartment was most of the way up the slope of Maya, the pyramidal arcology north of Santa Maria. Old wealth.

  Anton led me through great doors, into an elevator, down corridors. He played tour guide: “The Fertility Board was just getting some real power about the time this place went up. It was built to house a million people. It’s never been fully occupied.”

  “So?”

  “So we’re en route to the east face. Four restaurants, a dozen little bars. And here we stop—”

  “This your apt?”

  “No. It’s empty, it’s always been empty. I sweep it for bugs, but the authorities…I think they’ve never noticed.”

  “Is that your mattress?”

  “No. Kids. They’ve got a club that’s two generations old. My son tipped me off to this.”

  “Could we be interrupted?”

  “No. I’m monitoring them. I’ve got the security system set to let them in, but only when I’m not here. Now I’ll set it to recognize you. Don’t forget the number: Apt 23309.”

  “What is the ARM going to think we’re doing?”

  “Eating. We went to one of the restaurants, then came back and drank Calvados…which we will do, later. I can fix the records at Buffalo Bill. Just don’t argue about the credit charge, stet?”

  “But—Yah, stet.” Hope you won’t be noticed; that’s the real defense. I was thinking of bailing out…but curiosity is part of what gets you into the ARM. “Tell your story. You said she ‘sliced the bread with the, you know, motor’?”

  “Maybe you don’t remember. Angel’s Pencil isn’t your ordinary Bussard ramjet. The field scoops up interstellar hydrogen to feed a fusion-pumped laser. The idea was to use it for communications too. Blast a message halfway across the galaxy with that. A Belter crewman used it to cut the alien ship in half.”

  “There’s a communication you can live without. Anton…What they taught us in school. A sapient species doesn’t reach space unless the members learn to cooperate. They’ll wreck the environment, one way or another, war or straight libertarianism or overbreeding…remember?”

  “Sure.”

  “So do you believe all this?”

  “I think so.” He smiled painfully. “Director Bernhardt didn’t. He classified the message and attached a memo too. Six years of flight aboard a ship of limited size, terminal boredom coupled with high intelligence and too much time, elaborate practical jokes, yadda yadda. Director Harms left it classified…with the cooperation of the Belt. Interesting?”

  “But he had to have that.”

  “But they had to agree. There’s been more since. Angel’s Pencil sent us hundreds of detailed photos of the alien ship. It’s unlikely they could be faked. There are corpses. Big sort-of cats, orange, two-and-a-half meters tall, big feet and elaborate hands with thumbs. We’re in mucking great trouble if we have to face those.”

  “Anton, we’ve had three hundred and fifty years of peace. We must be doing something right. The odds say we can negotiate.”

  “You haven’t seen them.”

  It was almost funny. Jack was trying to make me nervous. Twenty years ago the terror would have been fizzing in my blood. Better living through chemistry! This was all frightening enough; but my fear was a cerebral thing, and I was its master.

  I wasn’t nervous enough for Anton. “Jack, this isn’t just vaporware. A lot of those photos show what’s maybe a graviton generator, maybe not. Director Harms set up a lab on the moon to build one for us.”

  “Funded?”

  “Heavy funding. Somebody believes in this. But they’re getting results! It works!”

  I mulled it. “Alien contact. As a species we don’t seem to handle that too well.”

  “Maybe this one can’t be handled at all.”

  “What else is being done?”

  “Nothing, or damn close. Silly suggestions, career-oriented crap designed to make a bureau bigger…Nobody wants to use the magic word. War.”

  “War. Three hundred fifty years out of practice, we are. Maybe C. Cretemaster will save us.” I smiled at Anton’s bewilderment. “Look it up in the ARM records. There’s supposed to be an alien of sorts living in the cometary halo. He’s the force that’s been keeping us at peace this past three and a half centuries.”

  “Very funny.”

  “Mmm. Well, Anton, this is a lot more real for you than for me. I haven’t yet seen anything upsetting.”

  I hadn’t called him a liar. I’d only made him aware that I knew nothing to the contrary. For Anton there might be elaborate proof; but I’d seen nothing, and had heard only a scary tale.

  Anton reacted gracefully. “Of course. Well, there’s still that bottle.”

  Anton’s Calvados was as special as he’d claimed, decades old and unique. He produced cheese and bread. Good thing: I was ready to eat his arm off. We managed to stick to harmless topics and parted friends.

  The big catlike aliens had taken up residence in my soul.

  Aliens aren’t implausible. Once upon a time, maybe. But an ancient ETI in a stasis field had been in the Smithsonian since the opening of the twenty-second century, and a quite different creature—C. Cretemaster’s real-life analog—had crashed on Mars before the century had ended.

  Two spacecraft matching course at near lightspeed; that was just short of ridiculous. Kinetic energy considerations…why, two such ships colliding might as well be made of antimatter! Nothing short of a gravity generator could make it work. But Anton was claiming a gravity generator.

  His story was plausible in another sense. Faced with warrior aliens, the ARM would do only what it could not avoid. They would build a gravity generator because the ARM must control such a thing. Any further move was a step toward the unthinkable. The ARM took sole credit (and other branches of the United Nations also took sole credit) for the fact that Man had left war behind. I shuddered to think what force it would take to turn the ARM toward war.

  I would continue to demand proof of Anton’s story. Looking f
or proof was one way to learn more, and I resist seeing myself as stupid. But I believed him already.

  On Thursday we returned to suite 23309.

  “I had to dig deep to find out, but they’re not just sitting on their thumbs,” he said. “There’s a game going in Aristarchus Crater, Belt against flatlander. They’re playing peace games.”

  “Huh?”

  “They’re making formats for contact and negotiation with hypothetical aliens. The models all have the look of those alien corpses, cats with bald tails, but they all think differently—”

  “Good.” Here was my proof. I could check this claim.

  “Good. Sure. Peace games.” Anton was brooding. Twitchy. “What about war games?”

  “How would you run one? Half your soldiers would be dead at the end…unless you’re thinking of rifles with paint bullets. War gets more violent than that.”

  Anton laughed. “Picture every building in Chicago covered with scarlet paint on one side. A nuclear war game.”

  “Now what? I mean, for us.”

  “Yah. Jack, the ARM isn’t doing anything to put the human race back on a war footing.”

  “Maybe they’ve done something they haven’t told you about.”

  “Jack, I don’t think so.”

  “They haven’t let you read all their files, Anton. Two weeks ago you didn’t know about peace games in Aristarchus. But okay. What should they be doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How’s your chemistry?”

  Anton grimaced. “How’s yours? Forget I said that. Maybe I’m back to normal and maybe I’m not.”

  “Yah, but you haven’t thought of anything. How about weapons? Can’t have a war without weapons, and the ARM’s been suppressing weapons. We should dip into their files and make up a list. It would save some time, when and if. I know of an experiment that might have been turned into an inertialess drive if it hadn’t been suppressed.”

  “Date?”

  “Early twenty-second. And there was a field projector that would make things burn, late twenty-third.”

  “I’ll find ’em.” Anton’s eyes took on a faraway look. “There’s the archives. I don’t mean just the stuff that was built and then destroyed. The archives reach all the way back to the early twentieth. Stuff that was proposed, tanks, orbital beam weapons, kinetic energy weapons, biologicals—”