N-Space Part 63

Were the warcats real? Could we fight them with current tech? How long did Sol system have? And the other systems, the more spa.r.s.ely settled colony worlds? Was it enough to make tapes and blueprints of the old murder machines, or did we have to set to building clandestine factories? Phoebe and I were spilling ideas past each other as fast as they came, and I had quite forgotten that I was doing something dangerous.

I noticed myself noticing that I was thinking much faster than thoughts could spill from my lips. I remembered knowing that Phoebe was brighter than I was, and that didn't matter, either. But Anton was losing his Thursday edge.

We slept. The old airbed was a big one. We woke to fruit and bread and dived back in.

We reinvented the navy, using only what Anton had recorded of seagoing navies. We had to. There had never been s.p.a.ce navies; the long peace had fallen first.

I'm not sure when I slid into schitz mode. I'd spent four days out of seven without the 'doc every week for forty-one years, excluding vacations. You'd think I'd remember the feel of my brain chemistry changing. Sometimes I do, but it's the central me that changes, and there's no way to control that.

Anton's machines were long out of date, and none had been developed even for interplanetary war. Mankind had found peace too soon. Pity. But if the warcats' gravity generators could be copied before the warcats arrived, that alone could save us!

Then again, whatever the cats had for weapons, kinetic energy was likely to be the ultimate weapon however the ma.s.s was moved. Energy considerations don't lie . . . I stopped trying to antic.i.p.ate individual war machines; what I needed was an overview.

Anton was saying very little.

I realized that I had been wasting my time making medical programs. Chemical enhancement was the most trivial of what we'd need to remake an army. Extensive testing would be needed, and then we might not get soldiers at all unless they retained some civil rights or unless officers killed enough of them to impress the rest. Our limited pool of schitzies had better be trained as our officers. For that matter, we'd better start by taking over the ARM. They had all the brightest schitzies.

As for Anton's work in the ARM archives, the most powerful weapons had been entirely ignored. They were too obvious.

I saw how Phoebe was staring at me, and Anton, too, both gape-jawed.

I tried to explain that our task was nothing less than the reorganization of humanity. Large numbers might have to die before the rest saw the wisdom in following our lead. The warcats would teach that lesson, but if we waited for them, we'd be too late. Time was breathing hot on our necks.

Anton didn't understand. Phoebe was following me, though not well, but Anton's body language was pulling him back and closing him up while his face stayed blank. He feared me worse than he feared warcats.

I began to understand that I might have to kill Anton. I hated him for that.

We did not sleep at all on Friday. By Sat.u.r.day noon we should have been exhausted. I'd caught catnaps from time to time -- we all had -but I was still blazing with ideas. In my mind the pattern of an interstellar invasion was shaping itself like a vast three-dimensional map.

Earlier I might have killed Anton because he knew too much or too little, because he would steal Phoebe from me. Now I saw that that was foolish. Phoebe wouldn't follow him. He simply didn't have the . . . the internal power. As for knowledge, he was our only access to the ARM!

Sat.u.r.day evening we ran out of food . . . and Anton and Phoebe saw the final flaw in their plan.

I found it hugely amusing. My 'doc was halfway across Santa Maria. They had to get me there. Me, a schitz.

We talked it around. Anton and Phoebe wanted to check my conclusions. Fine: we'd give them the schitz treatment. But for that we needed my disk (in my pocket) and my 'doc (at the apt). So we had to go to my apt.

With that in mind, we shaped plans for a farewell baccha.n.a.l.

Anton ordered supplies. Phoebe got me into a taxi. When I thought of other destinations, she was persuasive. And the party was waiting . . .

We were a long time reaching the 'doc. There was beer to be dealt with, and a pizza the size of Arthur's round table. We sang, though Phoebe couldn't hold a tune. We took ourselves to bed. It had been years since my urge to rut had run so high, so deep, backed by a sadness that ran deeper yet and wouldn't go away.

When I was too relaxed to lift a finger, we staggered singing to the 'doe with me hanging limply between them. I produced my dime disk, but Anton took it away. What was this? They moved me onto the table and set it working. I tried to explain: they had to lie down, put the disk here . . . But the circuitry found my blood loaded with fatigue poisons and put me to sleep.

Sunday noon: Anton and Phoebe seemed embarra.s.sed in my presence. My own memories were bizarre, embarra.s.sing. I'd been guilty of egotism, arrogance, self-centered lack of consideration. Three dark blue dots oil Phoebe's shoulder told me that I'd brushed the edge of violence. But the worst memory was of thinking like some red-handed conqueror, and out loud.

They'd never love me again.

But they could have brought me into the apt and straight to the 'doe. Why didn't they'

While Anton was out of the room, I caught Phoebe's smile in the corner of my eye and saw it fade as I turned. An old suspicion surfaced and has never faded since.

Suppose that the women I love are all attracted to Mad Jack. Somehow they recognize my schitz potential, though they find my sane state dull. There must have been a place for madness throughout most of human history. So men and women seek in each other the capacity for madness . . .

And so what? Schitzies kill. The real Jack Strather is too dangerous to be let loose.

And yet . . . it had been worth doing. From that strange fifty-hour session I remembered one real insight. We spent the rest of Sunday discussing it, making plans, while my central nervous system returned to its accustomed unnatural state. Sane Jack.

Anton Brillov and Phoebe Garrison held their wedding reception in the Mon.o.bloc. I stood as best man, bravely cheerful, running over with congratulations, staying carefully sober.

A week later I was among the asteroids. At the Mon.o.bloc they said that Jack Strather had fled Earth after his favored lady had deserted him for his best friend.

III.

Things ran smoother for me because John junior had made a place for himself in Ceres.

Even so, they had to train me. Twenty years earlier I'd spent a week in the Belt. It wasn't enough. Training and a Belt citizen's equipment used up most of my savings and two months of 'my time.

Time had brought me to Mercury, and the lasers, eight years before.

Lightsails are rare in the inner solar system. Between Venus and Mercury there are still lightsail races, an expensive, uncomfortable, and dangerous sport. Cargo craft once sailed throughout the Asteroid Belt, until fusion motors became cheaper and more dependable.

The last refuge of the lightsail is a huge, empty region: the cometary halo, Pluto and beyond. The lightsails are all cargo craft. That far from Sol their thrust must be augmented by lasers, the same Mercury lasers that sometimes hurl an unmanned probe into interstellar s.p.a.ce.

These were different from the launch lasers I was familiar with. They were enormously larger. In Mercury's lower gravity, in Mercury's windless environment, they looked like crystals caught in spiderwebs. When the lasers fired, the fragile support structures wavered like a spiderweb in the wind.

Each stood in a wide black pool of solar collector, as if tar paper had been scattered at random. A collector sheet that lost fifty percent of its power was not removed. We would add another sheet but continue to use all the available power.

Their power output is dangerous to the point of fantasy. For safety's sake the Mercury lasers have to be continuously linked to the rest of the solar system across a lightspeed delay of several hours. The newer solar collectors also pick up broadcasts from s.p.a.ce or from the control center in Challenger Crater. Mercury's lasers must never lose contact. A beam that strayed where it wasn't supposed to could do untold damage.

They were s.p.a.ced all along the planet's equator. They were hundreds of years apart in design, size, technology. They fired while the sun was up and feeding their square miles of collectors, with a few fusion generators for backup. They flicked from target to target as the horizon moved. When the sun set, it set for thirty-odd Earth days, and that was plenty of time to make repairs "In general, that is." Kathry Perritt watched my eyes to be sure I eras paying attention. I felt like a schoolboy again. "In general we can repair and update each laser station in turn and still keep ahead of the dawn. But come a quake, we work in broad daylight and like it."

"Scary," I said too cheerfully.

She looked at me. "You feel nice and cool? That's a million tons of soil, old man, and a layer cake of mirror sheeting on top of that, and these old heat exchangers are still the most powerful ever built. Daylight doesn't scare you? You'll get over that."

Kathry was a sixth-generation Belter from Mercury, taller than m(~ by seven inches, not very strong, but extremely dexterous. She way my boss. I'd be sharing a room with her . . . and yes, she rapidly let me know that she expected us to be bedmates. '

I was all for that. Two months in Ceres had shown me that Belters respond to social signals I don't know. I had no idea how to seduce anyone.

Sylvia and Myron had been born on Mars in an enclave of arcologists digging out the cities beneath the deserts. Companions from birth, they'd married at p.u.b.erty. They were addicted to news broadcasts. News could get them arguing. Otherwise they behaved as ii they could read each other's minds; they hardly talked to each other or to anyone else.

We'd sit around the duty room and wait and polish our skills as storytellers. Then one of the lasers would go quiet, and a tractor the size of some old Chicago skysc.r.a.per would roll.

Rarely was there much of a hurry. One laser would fill in for another until the Monster Bug arrived. Then the robots, riding the Monster Bug like one of Anton's aircraft carriers, would scatter ahead of us and set to work.

Two years after my arrival my first quake shook down six lasers in four different locations and ripped a few more loose from the sunlight collectors. Landscape had been shaken into new shapes. The robots had some trouble. Sometimes Kathry could reprogram them. Otherwise her team had to muscle them through, with Kathry to shout orders and me to supply most of the muscle.

Of the six lasers, five survived. They seemed built to survive almost anything. The robots were equipped to spin new support structure and to lift the things into place, with a separate program for each design.

Maybe John junior hadn't used influence in my behalf. Flatlander muscles were useful when the robots couldn't get over the dust pools or through the broken rock. For that matter, maybe it wasn't some Belt tradition that had made Kathry claim me on sight. Sylvia and Myron were lockstepped, and I might have been female or bend. Maybe she thought she was lucky.

After we'd remounted the lasers that had survived, Kathry said, "They're all obsolete, anyway. They're not being replaced."

:'That's not good," I said.

"Well, good and bad. Lightsail cargo is slow. If the light wasn't almost free, why bother? The interstellar probes haven't sent much back yet, and we might as well wait. At least the Belt Speakers think so."

"Do I gather I've fallen into a kind of a blind alley?"

She glared at me. "You're an immigrant flatlander. Were you expecting to be First Speaker for the Belt? You thinking of moving on?"

"Not really. But if the job's about to fold-"

"Another twenty years, maybe. Jack, I'd miss you. Those two-"

"It's all right, Kathry. I'm not going." I waved both arms at the blazing dead landscape, said "I like it here," and smiled into her bellow of laughter.

I beamed a tape to Anton when I got the chance.

"If I was ever angry, I got over it, as I hope you've forgotten anything I said or did while I was, let's say, running on automatic. I've found another life in deep s.p.a.ce, not much different from what I was doing on Earth . . . though that may not last. These lightsail pusher lasers are a blast from the past. Time gets them, the quakes get them, and they're not being replaced. Kathry says twenty years.

"You said Phoebe left Earth, too. Working with an asteroid mining setup? I f you're still trading tapes, tell her I'm all right and I hope she is, too. Her career choice was better than mine, I expect. . ."

I couldn't think of anything else to do.

Three years after I expected it Kathry asked, "Why did you come out here? It's none of my business, of course-"

Customs differ: I'd been three years in her bed before she had worked up to this. I said, "Time for a change" and "I've got children and grandchildren on the moon and Ceres and Floating Jupiter."

"Do you miss them?"

I had to say yes. The result was that I took half a year off to bounce around the solar system.

After I visited my lids acid grandkids, I stayed three weeks with Phoebe. She's second in command of a mining setup on a two-kilometer asteroid orbiting beyond Jupiter. They've been refining the metal ores and shaping them into scores of kilometers of electromagnetic ma.s.s driver, then running the slag down the ma.s.s driver: a rocket with real rocks in it and an arbitrarily high exhaust velocity, limited only by the length of the ma.s.s driver, which they keep extending. The asteroid will reach Ceres as mostly refined metal.

I think Phoebe was bored; she was seriously glad to see me. Still, I came back early. My being away from Mercury made us both antsy.

Another year pa.s.sed, and once again Kathry wanted to know, "Why Mercury?"

I said, "What I did on Earth was a lot like this. The difference is, on Earth I'm dull. Here-am I dull?"

"You're fascinating. You won't talk about the ARM, so you're fascinating and mysterious. I can't believe you'd be dull just because of where you are. Why did you leave, really?"

So I said, "There was a woman."

"What was she like?"

"She was smarter than me. I was a little dull for her. So she left, and that would have been okay. But she came back to my best friend." I shifted uncomfortably and said, "Not that they drove me off Earth."

No?

"No. I've got everything I once had herding construction robots on Earth, plus one thing I wasn't bright enough to miss. I lost my sense of purpose when I left the ARM."

I noticed that Myron was listening. Sylvia was watching the holo walls, the three that showed the face of Mercury: rocks blazing like coals in the fading twilight, with only the robots and the lasers to give the illusion of life. The fourth wall generally carried newscasts. Just then it showed a view up the trunk into the waving branches of the tremendous redwoods they've been growing for three hundred years in Hovestraydt City on the moon.

"These are the good times," I said. "You have to notice or they'll go right past. We're holding the stars together and having a fine time doing it. Notice how much dancing we do? On Earth I'd be too old and creaky for that-" Sylvia was shaking my shoulder. "Sylvia. what.: I heard it as soon as I stopped talking: "Tombaugh Station relayed this picture, the last broadcast from the Fantasy Prince. Once again, the Fantasy Prince has apparently been - "

Starscape glowed within the fourth holo wall. Something came out of nowhere, moving h.e.l.lishly fast, and stopped so quickly that it might have been a toy. It was egg-shaped, studded with what my memory said were weapons.

Phoebe won't have made her move yet. The warcats will have to be deep in the solar system before her asteroid mine can be a deterrent. Then one or another warcat ship will find streams of slag sprayed across its path, impacting at comet speeds and higher.

By now Anton must know whether the ARM actually has plans of its own to repel an interstellar invasion.

Me, I've already done my part. I worked on the computer shortly after I first arrived. n.o.body's tampered with it since. The dime disk is in place.

We kept the program relatively simple.

Until and unless the warcats destroy something that's being pushed by a laser from Mercury, nothing will happen. The warcats must condemn themselves. Then the affected laser will lock on to the warcat ship . . . and so will every Mercury laser that's getting sunlight. Twenty seconds, then the system goes back to normal until another target disappears.

If the warcats can be persuaded that Sol system is defended, maybe they'll give us time to build defenses.

Asteroid miners dig deep for fear of solar storms and meteors. Phoebe might survive the warcat weapons. We might survive here, too, with shielding built to block the h.e.l.lish sun and laser cannon to battle incoming ships. But that's not the way to bet.

We might get one ship.

It might be worth doing.

The President was still laughing. "Somebody told me once that I'm not fit to mold the future because I'm only allowed to think up to the next election. Who is it that plans for the future of the human race?"

"Speaking."

FOOTFALL, 1985.

NIVEN'S LAWS .

From time to time I publish this list; from time to time I update it. I don't think it's possible to track its publishing history. time to time I publish this list; from time to time I update it. I don't think it's possible to track its publishing history. The most recent appearance was in NIVEN'S LAWS The most recent appearance was in NIVEN'S LAWS from Owlswick Press. In this version I've amplified a little. from Owlswick Press. In this version I've amplified a little.

To the best I've been able to tell in fifty years of observation, this is how the universe works. I hope I didn't leave anything out.