Limits

  LIMITS

  LARRY NIVEN

  Phoenix Pick

  An Imprint of Arc Manor

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  Limits copyright © 1985 by Larry Niven. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or repr o duced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick, Phoenix Science Fiction Classics, Phoenix Rider, Manor Thrift, The Stellar Guild and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor, LLC, Rockville , Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  Digital Edition

  ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-61242-070-7

  ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-61242-069-1

  Published by Phoenix Pick

  an imprint of Arc Manor

  P. O. Box 10339

  Rockville, MD 20849-0339

  www.ArcManor.com

  ===LIMITS===

  INTRODUCTION

  Half my output used to be short stories.

  It’s common knowledge in this field that the money is in novels; but it’s also true that stories come in their own length. Stretching an idea beyond its length is even worse than over-compressing it. Ordinarily I would have continued to write short stories.

  What happened was, I hit a bump in my career.

  A novice writer should try anything, not just to pay the rent, but because he needs practice, versatility, skills. Later he must learn to turn down bad offers: the first bump.

  The second bump comes when he learns to turn down good offers.

  I’m a slow learner.

  I learned to say no; but that was only a couple of years ago. Show me a contract and I flinch; but if I committed myself years ago, it gets signed; and then the book must be written.

  Footfall, being written with Jerry Pournelle, is a year and a half overdue and finished. But everything else is backed up behind it.

  I didn’t know whether The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring would be one book or two; it was conceived as Siamese twins. It’s two, and The Smoke Ring is awaiting Footfall.

  So are a children’s book to be written with Jerry Pournelle and Wendy All; and The Legacy of Heorot, with Jerry (again) and Steven Barnes. A collection of the Warlock stories needed rewriting to remove redundancies. I’ve been rewriting speeches into articles for the Philcon.

  Where would I find time to write short stories?

  But I did.

  In 1983, Fred Saberhagen wrote me with a strange proposal. How would I like to write a Berserker story?

  The idea: Fred will ask half a dozen friends to write tales of human-Berserker encounters. Fred will shuffle them into the order he likes, and write a beginning and an ending to turn it all into a novel.

  Sure I wanted to write a Berserker story! I didn’t have to do any research; it was all in my head. I’ve been reading them long enough. I wrote “A Teardrop Falls” and sent copies to Fred and to Omni, which bought it for an indecently large sum considering that I hadn’t even built my own background.

  I’ve since seen other Berserker pastiches in the magazines, and I await the novel with some eagerness.

  There was to be a new magazine on the stands, a meld of fact and fiction aimed at the general reading public. Its name: Cosmos. Its editor: Diana King.

  Diana commissioned a story for that magazine from me and Jerry Pournelle. Topic: probably asteroid mining. Tone: space advocacy, and light. “What we’d really like to be writing,” I said, “is ‘To Bring Home the Steel,’ by Don Kingsbury. Only it’s already done.”

  Call it a character flaw: I have to be inspired. Jerry and I gathered one evening to plot the story. I didn’t get going until we realized who it was that scared Jackie Halfie into leaving Earth.

  What happened? Cosmos became Omni. Diana King resigned and was replaced by Ben Bova. Ben rejected “Spirals” because it was too long. The story ultimately appeared in Jim Baen’s Destinies.

  Collaborations are hard work. The only valid excuse for collaborating is this: there is a story you would like to write, and you don’t have the skills you’d need to write it alone.

  Exceptions? Sure! Jerry and I wrote “Spirals” together because it was more fun that way. And there is a classic exception, a way of collaborating that holds no risks at all.

  Here’s how it works. You’ve got a story in your trunk. Somewhere in there is a terrific story idea; but it never jelled. You broke your heart over it when you didn’t yet have the skills, and now you can’t throw it away and you can’t bear to look at the damn thing either.

  Then you meet a writer who seems to have the skills you would have needed. Hand him the manuscript! “Can you do anything with this?”

  Look: you’ve already done your share of the work, and it’s earned you nothing. He’s done no work at all. If he says “No,” you’ve lost nothing. He’s lost nothing. If he says “Yes,” it’s his risk. Maybe you can get reinspired.

  It was that way with “The Locusts.” I’d only recently met Steven Barnes. The direction he was taking, he would soon become the best of the New Wave writers. Well, I couldn’t have that…

  I handed him “The Locusts,” and he made it work. Ultimately I watched that story lose him his first Hugo Award. We’ve since written two novels together.

  At the Phoenix World Science fiction convention in 1979, I told James Baen that I had run out of anything to say about the Warlock’s Era.

  Jim made me a proposal. “We’ll invite some good people to write stories set in the Warlock’s world. You be editor. I’ll do all the work, you take all the credit.”

  I don’t think either of us believed it would work out that way, and it didn’t. (I didn’t expect Jim to leave Ace Books!) I also had my doubts as to whether one writer would want to work in another’s universe. But we tried it. I hoped, wistfully, that reading stories set in my own universe might reinspire me.

  It did. Dian Girard is an old friend, and writing “Talisman” with her was a delightful experience. I wrote “The Lion in His Attic” on my own, by moving my favorite restaurant and restaurateur 14,000 years into the past. (That’s Mon Grenier, in Reseda, owned and run by Andre Lion.) Both stories have appeared in More Magic, three years overdue.

  “The Roentgen Standard” was party conversation among some of the crazier members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Most of what I did that night was listen. When Omni bought the article, I earmarked half the money as a LASFS contribution.

  The LASFS turned the money over to the Viking Fund, lest mankind sever communications with Mars.

  Beginning around 1970, Harlan Ellison enlisted a team to build a solar system and to write stories within it. The project was to become a book, Harlan’s World: Medea. When the book appears, Harlan will assuredly tell the tale of Medea’s creation in detail; and so I need not.

  But my patience is legendary—read: half imaginary—and I don’t write stories to be read only by an editor. “Flare Time” must be ten years old by now. I managed to get Harlan’s reluctant permission to publish “Flare Time” in a British anthology, Andromeda, and, some years later,
in Amazing Stories. I took the right to publish it here.

  I like bars. Gavagan’s Bar, Jorkens and the Billiards Club, the White Hart, Callahan’s Saloon: I like the ambience, the decor, the funny chemicals. I wanted one for my own.

  I wanted a vehicle for dealing with philosophical questions.

  I wanted to write vignettes. How else would I find time to write anything but novels?

  I found it all in the Draco Tavern. The chirpsithra in particular claim to own the galaxy (though they only use tidally locked worlds of red dwarf stars) and to have been civilized for billions of years. It may be so. If confronted with any easily described, sufficiently universal philosophical question, the chirps may certainly claim to have solved it. Best yet, the Draco Tavern reminds me of those wonderful multispecies gatherings on the old Galaxy covers [Other tales in the Draco Tavern series may be found in my Convergent Series, published by Del Rey Books in 1979.}

  On the subject of limits:

  We are the creators. A writer accepts what limits he chooses, and no others. Often enough, it’s the limits that make the story.

  And we know it. In historical fiction the author may torture probability and even move dates around if it moves his main character into the most interesting event-points; but he would prefer not to, because events form the limits he has chosen. In fantasy he makes the rules, and is bound only by internal consistency. In science fiction he accepts limits set by the universe; and these are the most stringent of all; but only if he so chooses.

  One penalty for so choosing is this: the readers may catch him in mistakes. I’ve been caught repeatedly. It’s part of the game, and I’m willing to risk it.

  I’ve also been known to give up a law or two for the sake of a story. I’ve broken the lightspeed barrier to move my characters about. I gave up conservation of rotation for a series of tales on teleportation.

  You’ll find fantasy here too; but observe how the stories are shaped by the limits I’ve set. Most of my stories have puzzles in them, and puzzles require rules. I seem to be happiest with science fiction, “the literature of the possible,” where an army of scientists is busily defining my rules for me.

  What have we here?

  Long stories, short stories, very short stories, new and old. Collaborations. Science fiction and fantasy and economic theory.

  Have fun.

  THE LION IN HIS ATTIC

  Before the quake it had been called Castle Minterl; but few outside Minterl remembered that. Small events drown in large ones. Atlantis itself, an entire continent, had drowned in the tectonic event that sank this small peninsula.

  For seventy years the seat of government had been at Beesh, and that place was called Castle Minterl. Outsiders called this drowned place Nihilil’s Castle, for its last lord, if they remembered at all. Three and a fraction stories of what had been the south tower still stood above the waves. They bore a third name now: Rordray’s Attic.

  The sea was choppy today. Durily squinted against bright sunlight glinting off waves. Nothing of Nihilil’s Castle showed beneath the froth.

  The lovely golden-haired woman ceased peering over the side of the boat. She lifted her eyes to watch the south tower come toward them. She murmured into Karskon’s ear, “And that’s all that’s left.”

  Thone was out of earshot, busy lowering the sails; but he might glance back. The boy was not likely to have seen a lovelier woman in his life; and as far as Thone was concerned, his passengers were seeing this place for the first time. Karskon turned to look at Durily, and was relieved. She looked interested, eager, even charmed.

  But she sounded shaken. “It’s all gone! Tapestries and banquet hall and bedrooms and the big ballroom…the gardens…all down there with the fishes, and not even merpeople to enjoy them…that little knob of rock must have been Crown Hill…Oh, Karskon, I wish you could have seen it.” She shuddered, though her face still wore the mask of eager interest. “Maybe the riding-birds survived. Nihilil kept them on the roof.”

  “You couldn’t have been more than…ten? How can you remember so much?”

  A shrug. “After the Torovan invasion, after we had to get out…Mother talked incessantly about palace life. I think she got lost in the past. I don’t blame her much, considering what the present was like. What she told me and what I saw myself, it’s all a little mixed up after so long. I saw the travelling eye, though.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “Mother was there when a messenger passed it to the king. She snatched it out of his hand, playfully, you know, and admired it and showed it to me. Maybe she thought he’d give it to her. He got very angry, and he was trying not to show it, and that was even more frightening. We left the palace the next day. Twelve days before the quake.”

  Karskon asked, “What about the other—?” But warning pressure from her hand cut him off.

  Thone had finished rolling up the sail. As the boat thumped against the stone wall he sprang upward, onto what had been a balcony, and moored the bow line fast. A girl in her teens came from within the tower to fasten the stern line for him. She was big as Thone was big: not yet fat, but hefty, rounded of feature. Thone’s sister, Karskon thought, a year or two older.

  Durily, seeing no easier way out of the boat, reached hands up to them. They heaved as she jumped. Karskon passed their luggage up, leaving the cargo for others to move, and joined them.

  Thone made introductions. “Sir Karskon, Lady Durily, this is Estrayle, my sister. Estrayle, they’ll be our guests for a month. I’ll have to tell Father. We bring red meat in trade.”

  The girl said, “Oh, very good! Father will love that. How was the trip?”

  “Well enough. Sometimes the spells for wind just don’t do anything. Then there’s no telling where you wind up.” To Karskon and Durily he said, “We live on this floor. These outside stairs take you right up past us. You’ll be staying on the floor above. The top floor is the restaurant.”

  Durily asked, “And the roof?”

  “It’s flat. Very convenient. We raise rabbits and poultry there.” Thone didn’t see the look that passed across Durily’s face. “Shall I show you to your rooms? And then I’ll have to speak to Father.”

  Nihilil’s Castle dated from the last days of real magic. The South Tower was a wide cylindrical structure twelve stories tall, with several rooms on each floor. In this age nobody would have tried to build anything so ambitious.

  When Rordray petitioned for the right to occupy these ruins, he had already done so. Perhaps the idea amused Minterl’s new rulers. A restaurant in Nihilil’s Castle! Reached only by boats! At any rate, nobody else wanted the probably haunted tower.

  The restaurant was the top floor. The floor below would serve as an inn; but as custom decreed that the main meal was served at noon, it was rare for guests to stay over. Rordray and his wife and eight children lived on the third floor down.

  Though “Rordray’s Attic” was gaining some reputation on the mainland, the majority of Rordray’s guests were fishermen. They often paid their score in fish or in smuggled wines. So it was that Thone found Rordray and Merle hauling in lines through the big kitchen window.

  Even Rordray looked small next to Merle. Merle was two and a half yards tall, and rounded everywhere, with no corners and no indentations: his chin curved in one graceful sweep down to his wishbone, his torso expanded around him like a tethered balloon. There was just enough solidity, enough muscle in the fat, that none of it sagged at all.

  And that was considerable muscle. The flat-topped fish they were wrestling through the window was as big as a normal man; but Merle and Rordray handled it easily. They settled the corpse on its side on the center table, and Merle asked, “Don’t you wish you had an oven that size?”

  “I do,” said Rordray. “What is it?”

  “Dwarf island-fish. See the frilly spines all over the top of the thing? Meant to be trees. Moor at an island, go ashore. When you’re all settled the island dives under you, then snaps the crew
up one by one while you’re trying to swim. But they’re magical, these fish, and with the magic dying away—”

  “I’m wondering how to cook the beast.”

  That really wasn’t Merle’s department, but he was willing to advise. “Low heat in an oven, for a long time, maybe an eighth of an arc,” meaning an eighth of the sun’s path from horizon to horizon.

  Rordray nodded. “Low heat, covered. I’ll fillet it first. I can fiddle up a sauce, but I’ll have to see how fatty the meat is…All right, Merle. Six meals in trade. Anyone else could have a dozen, but you—”

  Merle nodded placidly. He never argued price. “I’ll start now.” He went through into the restaurant section, scraping the door on both sides, and Rordray turned to greet his son.

  “We have guests,” said Thone, “and we have red meat, and we have a bigger boat. I thought it proper to bargain for you.”

  “Guests, good. Red meat, good. What have you committed me to?”

  “Let me tell you the way of it.” Thone was not used to making business judgments in his father’s name. He looked down at his hands and said, “Most of the gold you gave me, I had spent. I had spices and dried meat and vegetables and pickle and the rest. Then a boat pulled in with sides of ox for sale. I was wondering what I could sell, to buy some of that beef, when these two found me at the dock.”

  “Was it you they were looking for?”

  “I think so. The lady Durily is of the old Minterl nobility, judging by her accent. Karskon speaks Minterl but he might be of the new nobility, the invaders from Torov. Odd to find them together—”

  “You didn’t trust them. Why did you deal with them?”

  Thone smiled. “Their offer. The fame of Rordray’s Attic has spread throughout Minterl, so they say. They want a place to honeymoon; they had married that same day. For two weeks’ stay they offered…well, enough to buy four sides of ox and enough left over to trade Strandhugger in on a larger boat, large enough for the beef and two extra passengers.”