07-Beowulf Shaeffer Page 6
I told him about the pickpocket, and he laughed, He told me about the time he tried to go outside during a We Made It summer, and I laughed, though I've heard of outworlders being blown away and to Hades doing the same thing. Amazingly, we were off again. It was just like it had been on the ship, even to the end of Elephant's anecdote. "They called me a silly flatlander, of course."
"I've been thinking about that," I said.
"About what?"
"You said you'd give a lot to do something completely original, so the next time someone called you a flatlander, you could back him into a corner and force him to listen to your story. You said it several times."
"I didn't say just that. But I would like to have some story to tell, something like your neutron star episode. If only to tell myself. The silly offworlder wouldn't know, but I'd know."
I nodded. I'd talked about the neutron star episode over gin cards -- a habit I've developed for distracting my opponent -- and Elephant had been suitably impressed.
"I've thought of a couple of things you could do," I said.
"Spill."
"One. Visit the puppeteer homeworld. Nobody's been there, but everyone knows there is one, and everyone knows how difficult it is to find. You could be the first."
"Great." He mused a moment. "Great! And the puppeteers wouldn't stop me because they're gone. Where is the puppeteer homeworld?"
"I don't know."
"What's your second idea?"
"Ask the Outsiders."
"Huh?"
"There's not a system in the galaxy that the Outsiders don't know all about. We don't know how far the puppeteer empire extended, though it was way beyond known space, but we do know about the Outsiders. They know the galaxy like the palm of their -- uh...And they trade for information; it's just about the only business they do. Ask them what's the most unusual world they know of within reach."
Elephant was nodding gently. There was a glazed look in his eyes. I had not been sure he was serious about seeking some unique achievement. He was.
"The problem is," I said, "That an Outsider's idea of what is unique may not -- " I stopped because Elephant was up and half running to a tridphone.
I wasn't sorry. It gave me an opportunity to gape in private.
I've been in bigger homes than Elephant's. Much bigger. I grew up in one. But I've never seen a room that soothed the eye as Elephant's living room did. It was more than a living room; it was an optical illusion, the opposite of those jittering black-and-white images they show in lectures on how we see. These clinical children of op art give the illusion of motion, but Elephant's living room gave the illusion of stillness. A physicist would have loved the soundproofing. Some interior decorator had become famous for his work here, if he hadn't been famous already, in which case he had become rich. How could tall, thin Beowulf Shaeffer fit into a chair designed to the measure of short, wide Elephant? Yet I was bonelessly limp, blissfully relaxed, using only the muscles that held a double-walled glass of an odd-tasting, strangely refreshing soft drink called Tzlotz Beer.
A glass which would not empty. Somewhere in the crystal was a tiny transfer motor connected to the bar, but the bent light in the crystal hid it. Another optical illusion, and one that must have tricked good men into acute alcoholism. I'd have to watch that.
Elephant returned. He walked as if he massed tons, as if any kzinti foolish enough to stand in his path would have a short, wide hole in him. "All done," he said. "Don Cramer'll find the nearest Outsider ship and make my pitch for me. We should hear in a couple of days."
"Okay," said I, and asked him about the cliff. It turned out that we were in the Rocky Mountains and that he owned every square inch of the nearly vertical cliff face. Why? I remembered Earth's eighteen billion and wondered if they'd otherwise have surrounded him up, down, and sideways.
Suddenly Elephant remembered that someone named Dianna must be home by now. I followed him into the transfer booth, watched him dial eleven digits, and waited in a much smaller vestibule while Elephant used the more conventional intercom. Dianna seemed dubious about letting him in until he roared that he had a guest and she should stop fooling around.
Dianna was a small, pretty woman with skin the deep, uniform red of a Martian sky and hair like flowing quicksilver. Her irises had the same polished-silver luster. She hadn't wanted to let us in because we were both wearing our own skins, but she never mentioned it again once we were inside.
Elephant introduced me to Dianna and instantly told her he'd acted to contact the Outsiders.
"What's an Outsider?" she asked.
Elephant gestured with both hands, looked confused, turned helplessly toward me.
"They're hard to describe," I said. "Think of a cat-o'-nine-tails with a big thick handle."
"They live on cold worlds," said Elephant.
"Small, cold, airless worlds like Nereid. They pay rent to use Nereid as a base, don't they, Elephant? And they travel over most of the galaxy in big unpressurized ships with fusion drives and no hyperdrives."
"They sell information. They can tell me about the world I want to find, the most unusual planet in known space."
"They spend most of their time tracking starseeds."
Dianna broke in. "Why?"
Elephant looked at me. I looked at Elephant.
"Say!" Elephant exclaimed. "Why don't we get a fourth for bridge?"
Dianna looked thoughtful. Then she focused her silver eyes on me, examined me from head to foot, and nodded gently to herself. "Sharrol Janss. I'll call her."
While she was phoning, Elephant told me, "That's a good thought. Sharrol's got a tendency toward hero worship. She's a computer analyst at Donovan's Brains Inc. You'll like her."
"Good," I said, wondering if we were still talking about a bridge game. It struck me that I was building up a debt to Elephant. "Elephant, when you contact the Outsiders, I'd like to come along."
"Oh? Why?"
"You'll need a pilot. And I've dealt with Outsiders before."
"Okay, it's a deal."
The intercom rang from the vestibule. Dianna went to the door and came back with our fourth for bridge. "Sharrol, you know Elephant. This is Beowulf Shaeffer, from We Made It. Bey, this is -- "
"You!" I said.
"You!" she said.
It was the pickpocket.
My vacation lasted just four days.
I hadn't known how long it would last, though I did know how it would end. Consequently I threw myself into it body and soul. If there was a dull moment anywhere in those four days, I slept through it, and at that I didn't get enough sleep. Elephant seemed to feel the same way. He was living life to the hilt; he must have suspected, as I did, that the Outsiders would not consider danger a factor in choosing his planet. By their own ethics they were bound not to. The days of Elephant's life might be running short.
Buried in those four days were incidents that made me wonder why Elephant was looking for a weird world. Surely Earth was the weirdest of all.
I remember when we threw in the bridge hands and decided to go out for dinner. This was more complicated than it sounds. Elephant hadn't had a chance to change to flatlander styles, and neither of us was fit to be seen in public. Dianna had cosmetics for us.
I succumbed to an odd impulse. I dressed as an albino.
They were body paints, not pills. When I finished applying them, there in the full-length mirror was my younger self. Blood-red irises, snow-white hair, white skin with a tinge of pink: the teenager who had disappeared ages ago, when I was old enough to use tannin pills. I found my mind wandering far back across the decades, to the days when I was a flatlander myself, my feet firmly beneath the ground, my head never higher than seven feet above the desert sands...They found me there before the mirror and pronounced me fit to be seen in public.
I remember that evening when Dianna told me she had known Elephant forever. "I was the one who named him Elephant," she bragged.
"It's a nickname?"
"O-o-oh." Suddenly all came clear. Gregory Pelton is known among the stars. It is rumored that he owns the thirty-light-year-wide rough sphere called human space, that he earns his income by renting it out. It is rumored that General Products -- the all-embracing puppeteer company, now defunct for lack of puppeteers -- is a front for Gregory Pelton. It's a fact that his great-to-die-eighth-grandmother invented the transfer booth and that he is rich, rich, rich.
I asked, "Why Elephant? Why that particular nickname?"
Dianna and Sharrol looked demurely at the tablecloth.
Elephant said, "Use your imagination, Bey."
"On what? What's an elephant, some kind of animal?"
Three faces registered annoyance. I'd missed a joke.
"Tomorrow," said Elephant, "we'll show you the zoo."
There are seven transfer booths in the Zoo of Earth. That'll tell you how big it is. But you're wrong; you've forgotten the two hundred taxis on permanent duty. They're there because the booths are too far apart for walking.
We stared down at dusty, compact animals smaller than starseeds or Bandersnatchi but bigger than anything else I'd ever seen. Elephant said, "See?"
"Yeah," I said, because the animals showed a compactness and a plodding invulnerability very like Elephant's. And then I found myself watching one of the animals in a muddy pool. It was using a hollow tentacle over its mouth to spray water on its back. I stared at that tentacle...and stared...
"Hey, look!" Sharrol called, pointing. "Bey's ears are turning red!"
I didn't forgive her till two that morning.
And I remember reaching over Sharrol to get a tabac stick and seeing her purse lying on her other things. I said, "How if I picked your pocket now?"
Orange and silver lips parted in a lazy smile. "I'm not wearing a pocket."
"Would it be in good taste to sneak the money out of your purse?"
"Only if you could hide it on you."
I found a small flat purse with four hundred stars in it and stuck it in my mouth.
She made me go through with it. Ever make love to a woman with a purse in your mouth? Unforgettable. Don't try it if you've got asthma.
I remember Sharrol. I remember smooth, warm blue skin, silver eyes with a wealth of expression, orange and silver hair in a swirling abstract pattern that nothing could mess up. It always sprang back. Her laugh was silver, too, when I gently extracted two handfuls of hair and tied them in a hard double knot, and when I gibbered and jumped up and down at the sight of her hair slowly untying itself like Medusa's locks. And her voice was a silver croon.
I remember the freeways.
They were the first thing that showed coming in on Earth. If we'd landed at night, it would have been the lighted cities, but of course we came in on the day side. Why else would a world have three spaceports? There were the freeways and autostradas and autobahns, strung in an all-enclosing net across the faces of the continents.
From a few miles up you still can't see the breaks. But they're there, where girders and pavement have collapsed. Only two superhighways are still kept in good repair. They are both on the same continent: the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Santa Monica Freeway. The rest of the network is broken chaos.
It seems there are people who collect old groundcars and race them. Some are actually renovated machines, fifty to ninety percent replaced; others are handmade reproductions. On a perfectly flat surface they'll do fifty to ninety miles per hour.
I laughed when Elephant told me about them, but actually seeing them was different.
The rodders began to appear about dawn. They gathered around one end of the Santa Monica Freeway, the end that used to join the San Diego Freeway. This end is a maze of fallen spaghetti, great curving loops of prestressed concrete that have lost their strength over the years and sagged to the ground. But you can still use the top loop to reach the starting line. We watched from above, hovering in a cab as the groundcars moved into line.
"Their dues cost more than the cars," said Elephant. "I used to drive one myself. You'd turn white as snow if I told you how much it costs to keep this stretch of freeway in repair."
"How much?"
He told me. I turned white as snow.
They were off. I was still wondering what kick they got driving an obsolete machine on flat concrete when they could be up here with us. They were off, weaving slightly, weaving more than slightly, foolishly moving at different speeds, coming perilously close to each other before sheering off -- and I began to realize things.
Those automobiles had no radar.
They were being steered with a cabin wheel geared directly to four ground wheels. A mistake in steering and they'd crash into each other or into the concrete curbs. They were steered and stopped by muscle power, but whether they could turn or stop depended on how hard four rubber balloons could grip smooth concrete. If the tires lost their grip, Newton's first law would take over; the fragile metal mass would continue moving in a straight line until stopped by a concrete curb or another groundcar.
"A man could get killed in one of those."
"Not to worry," said Elephant. "Nobody does, usually."
"Usually?"
The race ended twenty minutes later at another tangle of fallen concrete. I was wet through. We landed and met some of the racers. One of them, a thin guy with tangled, glossy green hair and a bony white face with a widely grinning scarlet mouth, offered me a ride. I declined with thanks, backing slowly away and wishing for a weapon. This joker was obviously dangerously insane.
I remember flatlander food, the best in known space, and an odd, mildly alcoholic drink called Taittinger Comtes de Champagne '59. I remember invading an outworlder bar, where the four of us talked shop with a girl rock miner whose inch-wide auburn crest of hair fell clear to the small of her back. I remember flying cross-country with a lift belt and seeing nothing but city enclosing widely separated patches of food-growing land. I remember a submerged hotel off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and a dolphin embassy off Italy, where a mixed group of dolphins and flatlanders seemed to be solving the general problem of sentient beings without hands (there are many, and we'll probably find more). It seemed more a coffee-break discussion than true business.
We were about to break up for bed on the evening of the fourth day when the tridphone rang. Don Cramer had found an Outsider.
I said, disbelieving, "You're leaving right now?"
"Sure!" said Elephant. "Here, take one of these pills. You won't feel sleepy till we're on our way."
A deal is a deal, and I owed Elephant plenty. I took the pill. We kissed Sharrol and Dianna goodbye, Dianna standing on a chair to reach me, Sharrol climbing me like a beanpole and wrapping her legs around my waist. I was a foot and a half taller than either of them.
Calcutta Base was in daylight. Elephant and I took the transfer booth there, to find that the ST¥ had been shipped ahead of us.
Her full name was Slower Than Infinity. She had been built into a General Products No. 2 hull, a three-hundred-foot spindle with a wasp-waist constriction near the tail. I was relieved. I had been afraid Elephant might own a flashy, vulnerable dude's yacht. The two-man control room looked pretty small for a lifesystem until I noticed the bubble extension folded into the nose. The rest of the hull held a one-gee fusion drive and fuel tank, a hyperspace motor, a gravity drag, and belly-landing gear, all clearly visible through the hull, which had been left transparent.
She held fuel, food, and air. She must have been ready for days. We took off twenty minutes after arriving.
Using the fusion drive in Earth's atmosphere would have gotten us into the organ banks, in pieces. Flatlander laws are strict about air pollution. A robot rocket with huge wings lifted us to orbit, using air compressed nearly to degenerate matter as a propellant. We took off from there.
Now there was plenty of time for sleep. It took us a week at one gee just to get far enough out of
the solar system's gravity well to use the hyperdrive. Somewhere in that time I removed my false coloring (it had been false; I'd continued to take tannin-secretion pills against Earth's sunlight), and Elephant turned his skin back to light tan and his beard and hair back to black. For four days he'd been Zeus, with marble skin, a metal-gold beard, and glowing molten-gold eyes. It had fitted him so perfectly that I hardly noticed the change.
Hyperdrive -- and a long, slow three weeks. We took turns hovering over the mass indicator, though at first-quantum hyperdrive speeds we'd have seen a mass at least twelve hours before it became dangerous. I think I was the only man who knew there was a second quantum, a puppeteer secret. The Outsider ship was near the edge of known space, well beyond Tau Ceti.
"It was the only one around," Elephant had said. "Number fourteen."
"Fourteen? That's the same ship I dealt with before."
"Oh? Good. That should help."
Days later he asked, "How'd it happen?"
"The usual way. Number fourteen was on the other side of known space then, and she sent out an offer of information exchange. I was almost to Wunderland, and I caught the offer. When I dropped my passengers, I went back."
"Did they have anything worthwhile?"
"Yah. They'd found the Lazy Eight II."
The Lazy Eight II had been one of the old slowboats, a circular-flying wing taking colonists to Jinx. Something had gone wrong before turnover, and the ship had continued on, carrying fifty passengers in suspended animation and a crew of four, presumed dead. With a ramscoop to feed hydrogen to her fusion drive, she could accelerate forever. She was five hundred years on her way.
"I remember," said Elephant. "They couldn't reach her."
"No. But we'll know where to find her when the state of the art gets that good." Which wouldn't be soon, I thought. A hyperdrive ship not only would have to reach her but would have to carry fuel to match her speed. Her speed was barely less than a photon's, and she was more than five hundred light-years away, seventeen times the diameter of known space.