Limits Larry Niven (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

so I can go in any direction. The main thing is to keep my balance. Especially when I’m flying.”

Windstorm did not seem reassured. “You won’t get that kind of performance out of a fifty-year-old machine. Treat it tender. And don’t fly if you’re in a hurry, because you’ll be using most of the power just to keep you up. Two more things—” She reached out to put Rachel’s hands on a switch and a knob. Her own hands were large and strong, with prominent veins. “Searchlight. This knob swings it around, and this raises and lowers it. It’s your best weapon. If it doesn’t work, flee. Second thing is your goggles. Sling them around your neck.”

“Where are they?”

Windstorm dug goggles from the howler’s saddlebag: a flexible strap and two large hemispheres of red glass. A similar set swung from her own neck. “You should never have to ask that question again on Medea. Here.”

The other vehicles were ready to go. Windstorm jogged to her own howler, leaving Rachel with the feeling that she had failed a test.

It was past noon of the Medean day. Harvester was riding Giggles, the six-legged virgin. The rest of the fuxes rode the ground-effect raft. The vehicles rode high, above the forest of chrome yellow bushes.

Windstorm spoke from the intercom. “We stay ahead of the crawlers and to both sides. We’re looking for anything dangerous. If you see something you’re afraid of, sing out. Don’t wait.”

Rachel eased into position. The feel of the howler was coming back to her. It weighed half a kiloton, but you still did some of your steering by shifting weight.… “Windstorm, aren’t you tired?”

“I got some sleep while Deadeye was dropping her hindquarters.”

Maybe Windstorm didn’t trust anyone else to supervise the rammer. Rachel was actually relieved. It struck her that most Medeans had lost too many of their “safety hangups.”

The bushes ended sharply, at the shore of a fast-flowing river carrying broad patches of scarlet scum. Some of the patches bloomed with flowers of startling green. Harvester boarded the raft to cross.

There was wheatfield beyond, but the yellow plants were feathery and four meters high. Hemispheres of white rock appeared with suspicious regularity. The expedition had swung around to north-and-heatward. Argo stood above the peaks of a rounded mountain range. Many-limbed birds rode the air above them.

Rachel looked up to see one dropping toward her face.

She could see the hooked beak and great claws aiming at her eyes. Her blind fingers sought the searchlight controls. She switched on the searchlight and swung the beam around and up. Like a laser cannon: first fire, then aim. Calmly, now.

The beam found the bird and illuminated it in blue fire: a fearsome sight. Wings like oiled leather, curved meat-ripping beak, muscular forelegs with long talons: and the hind legs were long, slender, and tipped each with a single sword blade. They weren’t for walking at all, nor for anything but weaponry.

The bird howled, shut its eyes tight, and tried to turn in the air. Its body curled in a ball; its wings folded around it. Rachel dropped the beam to keep it pinned until it smacked hard into the wheatfield.

The intercom said, “Nice.”

“Thank you.” Rachel sounded deceptively calm.

“Grace wants to call a halt,” Windstorm said. “Up by that next boulder.”

“Fine.”

The boulders were all roughly the same size: fairly regular hemispheres one and a half meters across.

Grace and Bronze Legs came out of the crawler lugging instruments on a dolly. They unloaded a box on one side of the boulder, and Grace went to work on it. Bronze Legs moved the dolly around to the other side and unfurled a silver screen. When Rachel tried to speak, Grace shushed her. She fiddled a bit with various dials, then turned on the machine.

A shadow-show formed on the screen: a circle of shadow, and darker shapes within. Grace cursed and touched dials, feather-lightly. The blurred shadows took on detail.

Shadows of bones, lighter shadows of flesh. There were four oversized heads, mostly jaws, overlapping near the center; and four tails near the rim, and a maze of legs and spines between. Four creatures all wrapped intimately around each other to just fill the shell.

“I knew it!” Grace cried. “They were too regular. They had to be eggs or nests or plants or something like that. Windstorm, dear, if we pile this junk back on the dolly, can you tow it to the next rock?”

They did that. The next rock was very like the first: an almost perfect hemisphere with a surface like white plaster. Rachel rapped it with her knuckles. It felt like stone. But the deep-radar shadow showed three big-headed foetuses just filling their environment, plus a tiny one that had failed to grow.

“Well. They all seem to be at the same stage of development,” Grace observed. “I wonder if it’s a seasonal thing?”

Rachel shook her head. “It’s different every time you turn around. Lord! You learn a place, you walk a couple of kilometers, you have to start all over again. Grace, don’t you ever get frustrated? You can’t run fast enough to stay in one place!”

“I love it. And it’s worse than you think, dear.” Grace folded the screen and stacked it on the dolly. “The domains don’t stay the same. We have spillovers from other domains, from high winds and tidal slosh and migration. I’d say a Medean ecology is ruined every ten years. Then I have to learn it all over again. Windstorm, dear, I’d like to look at one more of these rock eggs. Will you tow—”

The windstorm was sudden and violent. “Damn it, Grace, this isn’t the way we planned it! We do our biological research on the way back! After we set up the power system, then we can give the local monsters a chance to wreck us.”

Grace’s voice chilled. “Dear, it seems to me that this bit of research is quite harmless.”

“It uses up time and supplies. We’ll do it on the way back, when we know we’ve