Limits Larry Niven (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

foliated in gray hair with a spoon-shaped silhouette; and sharp-edged young mountains to the south. But she felt stupid with fatigue, and she had never adjusted to the light and never would: dull red from Argo, pink from two red dwarf suns nearing sunset.

More hours passed. She saw fewer of the red parasites. Once she caught the Daddy-long-legs with another rock demon in its clamshell jaws. The hexapod’s own teeth tore at the side of the spider’s face…the side that was already blind. Flare-loving forms used themselves up fast. Those trees…

Rachel swung her searchlight around. The ground cover, the “black man’s hair,” was gone. A black fog of insects swarmed over bare dirt. But the trees were hairy, with a spoon-shaped silhouette. How far had those trees spread on Medea? She could be in the wrong place.…

She turned left, uphill.

There were low mountains ahead, young mountains, all sharp edges. A kilometer short, Rachel turned to parallel them. The pass had been so narrow. She could go right past it. She slowed down, then, impatient, speeded up again. Narrow it had been, but straight. Perhaps she would see farming lamps shining through it. She noticed clouds forming, and began cursing to drive away thoughts of rain.

When the light came it was more than a glimmer.

She saw a sun, a white sun, a real sun, shining against the mountains. As if flare time had come again! But Phrixus and Helle were pink dots sinking in the west. She swerved toward the glare. The rising ground slowed her, and she remembered the spider plodding patiently behind her; she didn’t turn to look.

The glare grew terribly bright. She slowed further, puzzled and frightened. She pulled the goggles up over her eyes. That was better, but still she saw nothing but that almighty glare at the end of a bare rock pass.

She rode into the pass, into the glare, into a grounded sun.

Her eyes adjusted.…

The rock walls were lined with vehicles: flyers, tractor probes, trucks, crawlers converted to firefighting and ambulance work, anything that could move on its own was there, and each was piled with farming lamps and batteries, and all the farming lamps were on. An aisle had been left between them. Rachel coasted down the aisle. She thought she could make out man-shaped shadows in the red darkness beyond.

They were human. By the pale mane around his head she recognized Mayor Curly Jackson.

Finally, finally, she slowed the howler, let it sink to the ground, and stepped off. Human shapes came toward her. One was Mayor Curly. He took her arm, and his grip drove pain even through the fog of fatigue. “You vicious little idiot,” he said.

She blinked.

He snarled and dropped her arm and turned to face the pass. Half the population of Touchdown City stood looking down the aisle of light, ignoring Rachel…pointedly. She didn’t try to shoulder between them. She climbed into the howler’s saddle to see.

They were there: half a dozen rock demons grouped beneath the long legs of the spider; a black carpet of proto-mice; all embedded in a cloud of bright motes, insects. The monsters strolled up the aisle of light, and the watching men backed away. It wasn’t necessary. Where the light stopped, Rachel’s entourage stopped too.

Mayor Curly turned. “Did it once occur to you that something might be following your lights? Your flare-colored lights? You went through half a dozen domains, and every one had its own predators and its own plant eaters, and you brought them all here, you gutless moron! How many kinds of insects are there in that swarm? How many of them would eat our crops down to the ground before it poisoned them? Those little black things on the ground, they’re plant-eaters too, aren’t they? All flare-loving forms, and you brought them all here to breed! The next time a flare goes off would have been the last time any Medean human being had anything to eat! You’d be safe, of course. All you’d have to do is fly on to another star…”

The only way a human being can turn off her ears is to turn off her mind. Rachel didn’t know whether she fainted or not. Probably she was led away rather than carried. Her next memory began some time later, beneath the light of home, with the sounds and the smells of home around her, strapped down in free fall aboard the web ramship Morven.

On the curve of the wall the mobile power plant and one of the crawlers had finally left the realms of crusted salt. They ran over baked dirt now. The howler was moored in the center of the ground-effect raft, surrounded by piles of crates. It would be used again only by someone willing to wear a spacesuit. The four remaining fuxes were in the crawlers. Argo was out of camera range, nearly overhead. The view shifted and dipped with the motion of the trailing crawler.

“No, the beasts didn’t actually do any harm. We did more damage to ourselves,” Mayor Curly said. He wasn’t looking at Captain Borg. He was watching the holo wall. A cup of coffee cooled in his hand. “We moved every single farming lamp out of the croplands and set them all going in the pass, right? And the flare-loving life forms just stayed there till they died. They aren’t really built to take more than a couple of hours of flare time, what they’d get if both suns flared at once, and they aren’t built to walk away from flarelight either. Maybe some of the insects bred. Maybe the big forms were carrying seeds and insect eggs in their hair. We know the six-legged types tried to breed as soon as we turned off the lamps, but they weren’t in shape for it by then. It doesn’t matter now. I suppose I should…”

He turned and looked at her. “In fact, I do thank you most sincerely for melting that pass down to lava. There can’t be anything living in