Limits Larry Niven (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

at dawn.” Long Nose turned and moved downslope into a red-and-orange jungle, moving something like a cat in its final rush at a bird: legs bent, belly low.

They had been walking since early afternoon: twelve hours, with a long break for lunch. Lightning sighed with relief as he set down the farming lamp he’d been carrying on his shoulders. Grace helped him spread the tripod and extend the mount until the lamp stood six meters tall.

Rachel Subramaniam sat down in the orange grass and rubbed her feet. She was puffing.

Grace Carpenter, a Medean xenobiologist and in her early forties, was a large-boned woman, broad of silhouette and built like a farm wife. Lightning Harness was tall and lean and lantern-jawed, a twenty-four-year-old power plant engineer. Both were pale as ghosts beside Rachel. On Medea only the farmers were tanned.

Rachel was built light. Some of her memory-recording equipment was embedded in padding along her back, giving her a slightly hunchbacked look. Her scalp implants were part of a polished silver cap, the badge of her profession. She had spent the past two years under the sunlights aboard a web ramship. Her skin was bronze. To Rachel Medea’s pale citizens had seemed frail, unathletic, until now. Now she was annoyed. There had been little opportunity for hikes aboard Morven; but she might have noticed the muscles and hard hands common to any recent colony.

Lightning pointed uphill. “Company.”

Something spidery stood on the crest of the coldward ridge, black against the suns. Rachel asked, “What is it?”

“Fux. Female, somewhere between seven and eighteen years of age, and not a virgin. Beyond that I can’t tell from here.”

Rachel was astonished. “How can you know all that?”

“Count the legs. Grace, didn’t you tell her about fuxes?”

Grace was chuckling. “Lightning’s showing off. Dear, the fuxes go fertile around age seven. They generally have their first litter right away. They drop their first set of hindquarters with the eggs in them, and that gives them a half a lifetime to learn how to move as a quadruped. Then they wait till they’re seventeen or eighteen to have their second litter, unless the tribe is underpopulated, which sometimes happens. Dropping the second set of hindquarters exposes the male organs.”

“And she’s got four legs. ‘Not a virgin.’ I thought you must have damn good eyes, Lightning.”

“Not that good.”

“What are they like?”

“Well,” said Grace, “the post-males are the wise ones. Bright, talkative, and not nearly so…frenetic as the females. It’s hard to get a female to stand still for long. The males…oh, for three years after the second litter they’re kind of crazy. The tribe keeps them penned. The females only go near them when they want to get pregnant.”

Lightning had finished setting the lamp. “Take a good look around before I turn this on. You know what you’re about to see?”

Dutifully, Rachel looked about her, memorizing.

The farming lamps stood everywhere around Touchdown City; it was less a city than a village surrounded by farmlands. For more than a week Rachel had seen only the tiny part of Medea claimed by humans…until, in early afternoon of this long Medean day, she and Grace and Lightning had left the farmlands. The reddish light had bothered her for a time. But there was much to see; and after all, this was the real Medea.

Orange grass stood knee-high in slender leaves with sharp hard points. A score of flaccid multicolored balloons, linked by threads that resembled spiderweb, had settled on a stagnant pond. There was a grove of almost-trees, hairy rather than leafy, decked in all the colors of autumn. The biggest was white and bare and dead.

Clouds of bugs filled the air everywhere except around the humans. A pair of things glided into the swarms, scooping their dinner out of the air. They had five-meter wingspans, small batlike torsos, and huge heads that were all mouth, with gaping hair-filled slits behind the head, where gill slits would be on a fish. Their undersides were sky blue.

A six-legged creature the size of a sheep stood up against the dead almost-tree, gripped it with four limbs, and seemed to chew at it. Rachel wondered if it was eating the wood. Then she saw myriads of black dots spread across the white, and a long, sticky tongue slurping them up.

Grace tapped Rachel’s arm and pointed into the grass. Rachel saw a warrior’s copper shield painted with cryptic heraldics. It was a flattened turtle shell, and the yellow-eyed beaked face that looked back at her was not turtle-like at all. Something small struggled in its beak. Suddenly the mock turtle whipped around and zzzzed away on eight churning legs. There was no bottom shell to hamper the legs.

The real Medea.

“Now,” said Lightning. He turned on the farming lamp.

White light made the valley suddenly less alien. Rachel felt something within her relaxing…but things were happening all around her.

The flat turtle stopped abruptly. It swallowed hard, then pulled head and limbs under its shell. The flying bug-strainers whipped around and flew hard for the hairy trees. The clouds of bugs simply vanished. The long-tongued beast let go of its tree, turned and scratched at the ground and was gone in seconds.

“This is what happens when a sun flares,” Lightning said. “They’re both flare suns. Flares don’t usually last more than half an hour, and most Medean animals just dig in till it’s over. A lot of plants go to seed. Like this grass—”

Yes, the slender leaves were turning puffy, cottony. But the hairy trees reacted differently; they were suddenly very slender, the foliage pulled tight against the trunks. The balloons weren’t reacting at all.

Lightning said, “That’s why we don’t worry much about Medean life attacking the crops. The lamps keep them away. But not all of them—”

“On Medea every rule has exceptions,” Grace said.

“Yeah. Here, look under the grass.” Lightning pushed cotton-covered leaves aside with his hands, and the air was suddenly full of white fluff. Rachel saw millions of black specks covering the lower stalks. “We call them