Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (402 page)

As the pilus widened into a passage, Zorar whispered to her through a message port, “Shall I come and help? I think I should.”

“No, my friend,” Yalnis whispered in reply. “Thank you, but no.”

Tasmin entered, as elegant and perfect as ever. Yalnis surprised herself by taking contrary pride in her own casual appearance. Zorar’s concern and worry reached her. Yalnis should be afraid, but she was not.

“Please release Ekarete,” she said to her ship.

“True,” it said, its voice soft. The net of silk withdrew, resorbed. As soon as one hand came free, Ekarete clutched and scratched and dragged herself loose. She sprang to her feet, blood-smeared and tangle-haired.

She took one step toward Yalnis, then stopped, staring over Yalnis’s shoulder.

Yalnis glanced quickly back.

As if deliberately framed, Seyyan’s craft loomed beyond the transparent dome of the living space, bound in multicolored layers of the heaviest ship silk, each layer permeated with allergens particular to the ship that had created it. Seyyan’s craft lay cramped within the sphere, shrinking from its painful touch, immobilized and put away until time wore the restraints to dust.

Ekarete keened with grief. The wail filled Yalnis’s hearing and thickened the air.

Tasmin hurried to her, putting one arm around her shaking shoulders, covering her with a wing of her dress.

“Take her,” Yalnis said to Tasmin. “Please, take her.”

Tasmin turned Ekarete and guided her to the pilus. The connection’s rim had already begun to swell inward as Yalnis’s ship reacted to the touch of Tasmin’s with inflammation. Tasmin and Ekarete hurried through and disappeared.

Seyyan’s former friends would have to decide how to treat Ekarete. They might abandon her, adopt her, or spawn a new craft for her. Yalnis had no idea what they would choose to do, whether they would decide she was pure fool for her loyalty or pure hero for the same reason.

When the connector had healed over, leaving the wall a little swollen and irritated, when Tasmin’s ship moved safely away, Yalnis took a long deep breath and let it out slowly. Silence and solitude calmed her.

“It’s time, I think,” she said aloud.

“True,” replied her ship.

Yalnis descended to the growing chamber, where the daughter ship lay fat and sleek, bulging toward the outer skin. It had formed as a pocket of Yalnis’s ship, growing inward. A thick neck connected the two craft, but now the neck was thinning, with only an occasional pulse of nutrients and information. The neck would part, healing over on the daughter’s side, opening wide on the outer skin of Yalnis’s ship.

Yalnis stepped inside for the first, and perhaps the only, time.

The living space was very plain, very beautiful in its elegant simplicity, its walls and floor a black as deep and vibrant as space without stars. Its storage bulged with the unique gifts Yalnis’s guests had brought: new foods, new information, new bacteria, stories, songs, and maps of places unimaginably distant.

The soft silver skin of Yalnis’s ship hugged it close, covering its transparent dome.

The new ship awoke to her presence. It created a nest for her. She cuddled into its alien warmth, and slept.

* * * *

She woke to birth pangs, her own and her ship’s. Extensions and monitors retracted from her body.

“Time for launch,” she said to her ship.

“True,” it said, without hesitation or alternation. It shuddered with a powerful labor pang. It had recovered its strength during the long rest.

“Bahadirgul,” Yalnis said, “it’s time.”

Bahadirgul yawned hugely, blinked, and came wide awake.

Yalnis and Bahadirgul combined again. The pleasure of their mental combining matched that of their physical combining, rose in intensity, and exceeded it. At the climax, they presented their daughter with a copy of Yalnis’s memories and the memories of her lover Bahadir.

A moment of pressure, a stab of pain—

Yalnis picked up the blinking gynuncula. Her daughter had Bahadir’s ebony skin and hair of deepest brown, and Yalnis’s own dark blue eyes. Delighted, she showed her to Bahadirgul, wondering, as she always did, how much the companion understood beyond pleasure, satiation, and occasional fear or fury. It sighed and retreated to its usual position, face exposed, calm. The other companions hissed and blinked and looked away. Yalnis let the mesh of her shirt slip over their faces.

Yalnis carried her daughter through the new ship, from farm space to power plant, pausing to wash away the stickiness of birth in the pretty little bathing stream. The delicate fuzz on her head dried as soft as fur.

The daughter blinked at Yalnis. Everyone said a daughter always knew her mother from the beginning. Yalnis believed it, looking into the new being’s eyes, though neither she nor anyone she knew could recall that first moment of life and consciousness.

By the time she returned to the living space at the top of the new ship, the connecting neck had separated, one end healing against the daughter ship in a faint navel pucker, the other slowly opening to the outside. Yalnis’s ship shuddered again, pushing at the daughter ship. The transparent dome pressed out, to reveal space and the great surrounding web of stars.

Yalnis’s breasts ached. She sank cross-legged on the warm midnight floor and let her daughter suck, giving her a physical record of dangers and attractions as she and Bahadirgul had given her a mental record of the past.

“Karime,” Yalnis whispered, as her daughter fell asleep. Above them the opening widened. The older ship groaned. The new ship quaked as it pressed out into the world.

“Karime, daughter, live well,” Yalnis said.

She gave her daughter to her ship’s daughter, placing the chubby sleeping creature in the soft nest. She petted the ship-silk surface.

“Take good care of her,” she said.

“True,” the new ship whispered.

Yalnis smiled, stood up, watched the new ship cuddle the new person for a moment, then hurried through the interior connection before it closed.

She slipped out, glanced back to be sure all was well, and returned to her living space to watch.

Yalnis’s ship gave one last heavy shudder. The new ship slipped free.

It floated nearby, getting its bearings, observing its surroundings. Soon—staying near another ship always carried an element of danger, as well as opportunity—it whispered into motion, accelerating itself carefully toward a higher, more distant orbit.

Yalnis smiled at its audacity. Farther from the star, moving through the star’s dust belt, it could collect mass and grow quickly. In a thousand, perhaps only half a thousand, orbits, Karime would emerge to take her place as a girl of her people.

“We could follow,” Yalnis said. “Rest, recoup…”

“False,” her ship whispered, displaying its strength, and its desire, and its need. “False, false.”

“We could go on our adventure.”

“True,” her ship replied, and turned outward toward the web of space, to travel forever, to feast on stardust.

* * * *

Copyright © 2005 by Vonda N. McIntyre.

(1938– )

For an acclaimed writer of hard SF, Larry Niven had a tough time making it through college. That had more to do with his discovery of a bookstore filled with used SF magazines during his second year at the California Institute of Technology than with any lack of academic talent; eventually he earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in psychology from Washburn University in Kansas in 1962, then completed a year of graduate work in math at UCLA before dropping out to focus on writing.

That plan worked surprisingly well. Niven’s first story, “The Coldest Place,” appeared in
Worlds of If
in 1964, and his 1966 story “Neutron Star,” based on a newly discovered phenomenon, won Niven a Hugo. In 1970, Niven’s influential hard SF novel
Ringworld
won both the Hugo and Nebula. Starting in the mid-1970s, he collaborated on a series of commercially and artistically successful books with Jerry Pournelle, most notably
The Mote in God’s Eye
(1974) and the post- apocalyptic novel
Lucifer’s Hammer
(1977). In the 1980s, Niven turned to military SF in the
Man-Kzin Wars
series, and more recently he’s written a number of sequels and prequels to
Ringworld
. He also wrote for comics, particularly Green Lantern, which he wrote the series bible for.

In addition to writing fiction and essays, Niven has long been involved in the intersection of science and politics. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, but later advised President Reagan on the creation of anti-missile defenses. He’s a member of SIGMA, a group of SF writers who give policy advice to the Department of Homeland Security.

First published in
If
, October 1966

I

The Skydiver dropped out of hyperspace an even million miles above the neutron star. I needed a minute to place myself against the stellar background and another to find the distortion Sonya Laskin had mentioned before she died. It was to my left, an area the apparent size of the Earth’s moon. I swung the ship around to face it.

Curdled stars, muddled stars, stars that had been stirred with a spoon.

The neutron star was in the center, of course, though I couldn’t see it and hadn’t expected to. It was only eleven miles across, and cool. A billion years had passed since BVS-1 burned by fusion fire. Millions of years, at least, since the cataclysmic two weeks during which BVS-1 was an X-ray star, burning at a temperature of five billion degrees Kelvin. Now it showed only by its mass.

The ship began to turn by itself. I felt the pressure of the fusion drive. Without help from me, my faithful metal watchdog was putting me in hyperbolic orbit that would take me within one mile of the neutron star’s surface. Twenty-four hours to fall, twenty-four hours to rise…and during that time, something would try to kill me. As something had killed the Laskins.

The same type of autopilot, with the same program, had chosen the Laskins’ orbit. It had not caused their ship to collide with the star. I could trust the autopilot. I could even change its program.

I really ought to.

How did I get myself into this hole?

The drive went off after ten minutes of maneuvering. My orbit was established, in more ways than one. I knew what would happen if I tried to back out now.

All I’d done was walk into a drugstore to get a new battery for my lighter!

* * * *

Right in the middle of the store, surrounded by three floors of sales counters, was the new 2,603 Sinclair intrasystem yacht. I’d come for a battery, but I stayed to admire. It was a beautiful job, small and sleek and streamlined and blatantly different from anything that’s ever been built. I wouldn’t have flown it for anything, but I had to admit it was pretty. I ducked my head through the door to look at the control panel. You never saw so many dials. When I pulled my head out, all the customers were looking in the same direction. The place had gone star-tlingly quiet.

I can’t blame them for staring. A number of aliens were in the store, mainly shopping for souvenirs, but they were staring too. A puppeteer is unique. Imagine a headless, three-legged centaur wearing two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on his arms, and you’ll have something like the right picture. But the arms are weaving necks, and the puppets are real heads, flat and brainless, with wide flexible lips. The brain is under a bony hump set between the bases of the necks. This puppeteer wore only its own coat of brown hair, with a mane that extended all the way up its spine to form a thick mat over the brain. I’m told that the way they wear the mane indicates their status in society, but to me it could have been anything from a dock worker to a jeweler to the president of General Products.

I watched with the rest as it came across the floor, not because I’d never seen a puppeteer, but because there is something beautiful about the dainty way they move on those slender legs and tiny hooves. I watched it come straight toward me, closer and closer. It stopped a foot away, looked me over and said, “You are Beowulf Shaeffer, former chief pilot for Nakamura Lines.”

Its voice was a beautiful contralto with not a trace of accent. A puppeteer’s mouths are not only the most flexible speech organs around, but also the most sensitive hands. The tongues are forked and pointed, the wide, thick lips have little fingerlike knobs along the rims. Imagine a watchmaker with a sense of taste in his fingertips…

I cleared my throat. ‘That’s right.”

It considered me from two directions. “You would be interested in a high-paying job?”

“I’d be fascinated in a high-paying job.”

“I am our equivalent of the regional president of General Products. Please come with me, and we will discuss this elsewhere.”

I followed it into a displacement booth. Eyes followed me all the way. It was embarrassing, being accosted in a public drugstore by a two-headed monster. Maybe the puppeteer knew it. Maybe it was testing me to see how badly I needed money.

My need was great. Eight months had passed since Nakamura Lines folded. For some time before that, I had been living very high on the hog, knowing that my back pay would cover my debts. I never saw that back pay. It was quite a crash, Nakamura Lines. Respectable middle-aged businessmen took to leaving their hotel windows without their lift belts. Me, I kept spending. If I’d started living frugally, my creditors would have done some checking…and I’d have ended in debtor’s prison.

The puppeteer dialed thirteen fast digits with its tongue. A moment later we were elsewhere. Air puffed out when I opened the booth door, and I swallowed to pop my ears.

“We are on the roof of the General Products building.” The rich contralto voice thrilled along my nerves, and I had to remind myself that it was an alien speaking, not a lovely woman. “You must examine this spacecraft while we discuss your assignment.”

I stepped outside a little cautiously, but it wasn’t the windy season. The roof was at ground level. That’s the way we build on We Made It. Maybe it has something to do with the fifteen-hundred-mile-an-hour winds we get in summer and winter, when the planet’s axis of rotation runs through its primary, Procyon. The winds are our planet’s only tourist attraction, and it would be a shame to slow them down by planting skyscrapers in their path. The bare, square concrete roof was surrounded by endless square miles of desert, not like the deserts of other inhabited worlds, but an utterly lifeless expanse of fine sand just crying to be planted with ornamental cactus. We’ve tried that. The wind blows the plants away.

The ship lay on the sand beyond the roof. It was a #2 General Products hull: a cylinder three hundred feet long and twenty feet through, pointed at both ends and with a slight wasp-waist constriction near the tail. For some reason it was lying on its side, with the landing shocks still folded in at the tail.

Ever notice how all ships have begun to look the same? A good ninety-five percent of today’s spacecrafts are built around one of the four General Products hulls. It’s easier and safer to build that way, but somehow all ships end as they began: mass-produced look-alikes.

The hulls are delivered fully transparent, and you use paint where you feel like it. Most of this particular hull had been left transparent. Only the nose had been painted, around the life-system. There was no major reaction drive. A series of retractable attitude jets had been mounted in the sides, and the hull was pierced with smaller holes, square and round—for observational instruments. I could see them gleaming through the hull.

* * * *

The puppeteer was moving toward the nose, but something made me turn toward the stern for a closer look at the landing shocks.

They were bent. Behind the curved, transparent hull panels, some tremendous pressure had forced the metal to flow like warm wax, back and into the pointed stern.

“What did this?” I asked.

“We do not know. We wish strenuously to find out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you heard of the neutron star BVS-1?”

I had to think a moment. “First neutron star ever found, and so far the only. Someone located it two years ago by stellar displacement.”

“BVS-1 was found by the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx. We learned through a go-between that the Institute wished to explore the star. They needed a ship to do it. They had not yet sufficient money. We offered to supply them with a ship’s hull, with the usual guarantees, if they would turn over to us all data they acquired through using our ship.”

“Sounds fair enough.” I didn’t ask why they hadn’t done their own exploring. Like most sentient vegetarians, puppeteers find discretion to be the
only
part of valor.

“Two humans named Peter Laskin and Sonya Laskin wished to use the ship. They intended to come within one mile of the surface in a hyperbolic orbit. At some point during their trip, an unknown force apparently reached through the hull to do this to the landing shocks. The unknown force also seems to have killed the pilots.”

“But that’s impossible. Isn’t it?”

“You see the point. Come with me.” The puppeteer trotted toward the bow.

I saw the point, all right. Nothing, but nothing can get through a General Products hull. No kind of electromagnetic energy except visible light. No kind of matter, from the smallest subatomic particle to the fastest meteor. That’s what the company’s advertisements claim, and the guarantee backs them up. I’ve never doubted it, and I’ve never heard of a General Products hull being damaged by a weapon or by anything else.

On the other hand, a General Products hull is as ugly as it is functional. The puppeteer-owned company could be badly hurt if it got around that something
could
get through a company hull. But I didn’t see where I came in.

We rode an escalladder into the nose.

The lifesystem was in two compartments. Here the Laskins had heat-reflective paint. In the conical control cabin the hull had been divided into windows. The relaxation room behind it was a windowless reflective silver. From the back wall of the relaxation room an access tube ran aft, opening on various instruments and the hyperdrive motors.

There were two acceleration couches in the control cabin. Both had been torn loose from their mountings and wadded into the nose like so much tissue paper, crushing the instrument panel. The backs of the crumpled couches were splashed with rust brown. Flecks of the same color were all over everything, the walls, the windows, the viewscreens. It was as if something had hit the couches from behind: something like a dozen paint-filled toy balloons, striking with tremendous force.

“That’s blood,” I said.

“That is correct. Human circulatory fluid.”

II

Twenty-four hours to fall.

I spent most of the first twelve hours in the relaxation room, trying to read. Nothing significant was happening, except that a few times I saw the phenomenon Sonya Laskin had mentioned in her last report. When a star went directly behind the invisible BVS-1, a halo formed. BVS-1 was heavy enough to bend light around it, displacing most stars to the sides; but when a star went directly behind the neutron star, its light was displaced to all sides at once. Result: a tiny circle which flashed once and was gone almost before the eye could catch it.

I’d known next to nothing about neutron stars the day the puppeteer picked me up. Now I was an expert. But I still had no idea what was waiting for me when I got down there.

All the matter you’re ever likely to meet will be normal matter, composed of a nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons in quantum energy states. In the heart of any star there is a second kind of matter: for there, the tremendous pressure is enough to smash the electron shells. The result is degenerate matter: nuclei forced together by pressure and gravity, but held apart by the mutual repulsion of the more or less continuous electron ‘gas’ around them. The right circumstances may create a third type of matter.

Given: a burnt-out white dwarf with a mass greater than 1.44 times the mass of the Sun— Chandrasekhar’s Limit, named for an Indian-American astronomer of the nineteen hundreds. In such a mass the electron pressure alone would not be able to hold the electrons back from the nuclei. Electrons would be forced against protons—to make neutrons. In one blazing explosion most of the star would change from a compressed mass of degenerate matter to a closely packed lump of neutrons: neutronium, theoretically the densest matter possible in this universe. Most of the remaining normal and degenerate matter would be blown away by the liberated heat.

For two weeks the star would give off X rays, as its core temperature dropped from five billion degrees Kelvin to five hundred million. After that it would be a light-emitting body perhaps ten to twelve miles across: the next best thing to invisible. It was not strange that BVS-1 was the first neutron star ever found.

Neither is it strange that the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx would have spent a good deal of time and trouble looking. Until BVS-1 was found, neutronium and neutron stars were only theories. The examination of an actual neutron star could be of tremendous importance. Neutron stars could give us the key to true gravity control.

Mass of BVS-1 : 1.3 times the mass of Sol, approximately.

Diameter of BVS-1 (estimated): eleven miles of neutronium, covered by half a mile of degenerate matter, covered by maybe twelve feet of ordinary matter.

Escape velocity: 130,000 mps, approximately.

Nothing else was known of the tiny black star until the Laskins went in to look. Now the Institute knew one thing more. The star’s spin.

* * * *

“A mass that large can distort space by its rotation,” said the puppeteer. “The Institute ship’s projected hyperbola was twisted across itself in such a way that we can deduce the star’s period of rotation to be two minutes, twenty-seven seconds.”

The bar was somewhere in the General Products building. I don’t know just where, and with the transfer booths it doesn’t matter. I kept staring at the puppeteer bartender. Naturally only a puppeteer would be served by a puppeteer bartender, since any biped would resent knowing that somebody made his drink with his mouth. I had already decided to get dinner somewhere else.

“I see your problem,” I said. “Your sales will suffer if it gets out that something can reach through one of your hulls and smash a crew to bloody smears. But where do I fit in?”