Limits Larry Niven (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

“So you came out of it with no damage.”

“Not really. The locusts hurt us. We moved the farming lamps in a hurry, but we took our own good time getting them back in place. That was a mistake. Some flare-hating bugs were just waiting to taste our corn.”

“Too bad.”

“And a nest of B-70s killed two children in the oak grove.”

Captain Borg’s mind must have been elsewhere. “You really reamed Rachel out.”

“I did,” Curly said, without satisfaction and without apology.

“She was almost catatonic. We had to take her back up to Morven before she’d talk to anyone. Curly, is there any way to convince her she didn’t make a prize idiot of herself?”

“At a guess I’d say no. Why would anyone want to?”

Captain Borg was using her voice of command now. “I dislike sounding childish, especially to you, Curly, but baby talk may be my best option. The problem is that Rachel didn’t have any fun on Medea.”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

“She won’t even talk about coming down. She didn’t like Medea. She didn’t like the light, or the animals, or the way the fuxes bred. Too bloody. She went through thirty-odd hours of hell with your power plant expedition, and came back tired to death and being chased by things out of a nightmare, and when she finally got to safety you called her a dangerous incompetent idiot and made her believe it. She didn’t even get laid on Medea—”

“What?”

“Never mind, it’s trivial. Or maybe it’s absolutely crucial, but skip it. Curly, I have sampled the official memory tape of Medea, the one we would have tried to peddle when we got back into the trade circuit—”

Curly’s eyes got big. “O-o-oh shit!”

“It comes to you, does it? That tape was an ugly experience. It’s unpleasant, and uncomfortable, and humiliating, and exhausting, and scary, and there’s no sex. That’s Rachel’s view of Medea, and there isn’t any other, and nobody’s going to enjoy it.”

Curly had paled. “What do we do? Put Rachel’s equipment on somebody else?”

“I wouldn’t wear it. No rammer is really manic about her privacy, but there are limits. What about a Medean?”

“Who?”

“Don’t you have any compulsive exhibitionists?”

Curly shook his head. “I’ll ask around, but…no, maybe I won’t. Doesn’t it tell you something, that she couldn’t get screwed? What man could go with a woman, knowing she’ll be peddling the memory of it to millions of strangers? Yuk.”

The crawlers had stopped. Human shapes stepped outside, wearing skintight pressure suits and big transparent bubbles over their heads. They moved around to the ground-effect raft and began opening crates.

“It’s no good. Curly, it’s not easy to find people to make memory tapes. For a skill tape you need a genuine expert with twenty or thirty years experience behind him, plus a sharp-edged imagination and a one-track mind and no sense of privacy. And Rachel’s a tourist. She’s got all of that, and she can learn new skills at the drop of a hat. She’s very reactive, very emotive.”

“And she very nearly wiped us out.”

“She’ll be making tapes till she dies. And every time something reminds her of Medea, her entire audience is going to know just what she thinks of the planet.”

“What’ll happen to us?”

“Oh…we could be worried over nothing. I’ve seen fads before. This whole memory tape thing could be ancient history by the time we get back to civilization.”

Civilization? As opposed to what? Curly knew the answer to that one. He went back to watching the wall.

“And even if it’s not…I’ll be back. I’ll bring another walking memory like Rachel, but more flexible. Okay?”

“How long?”

“One circuit, then back to Medea.”

Sixty to seventy earthyears. “Good,” said Curly, because there was certainly no way to talk her into any shorter journey. He watched men in silver suits setting up the frames for the solar mirrors. There was not even wind in the Hot End, and apparently no life at all. They had worried about that. But Curly saw nothing that could threaten Touchdown City’s power supply for hundreds of years to come.

If Medea was to become a backwash of civilization, a land of peasants, then it was good that the farmlands were safe. Curly turned to Janice Borg to say so. But the rammer’s eyes were seeing nothing on Medea, and her mind was already approaching Horvendile.

THE LOCUSTS

with Steve Barnes

There are no men on Tau Ceti IV.

Near the equator on the ridged ribbon of continent which reaches north and south to cover both poles, the evidence of Man still shows. There is the landing craft, a great thick saucer with a rounded edge, gaping doors and vast empty space inside. Ragged clumps of grass and scrub vegetation surround its base, now. There is the small town where they lived, grew old, and died: tall stone houses, a main street of rock fused with atomic fire, a good deal of machinery whose metal is still bright. There is the land itself, overgrown but still showing the traces of a square arrangement that once marked it as farmland.

And there is the forest, reaching north and south along the sprawling ribbon of continent, spreading even to the innumerable islands which form two-thirds of Ridgeback’s land mass. Where forest cannot grow, because of insufficient water or because the carefully bred bacteria have not yet built a sufficient depth of topsoil, there is grass, an exceptionally hardy hybrid of Buffalo and Cord with an abnormal number of branching roots, developing a dense and fertile sod.

There are flocks of moas, resurrected from a lost New Zealand valley. The great flightless birds roam freely, sharing their grazing land with expanding herds of wild cattle and buffalo.

There are things in the forest. They prefer it there, but will occasionally shamble out into the grasslands and sometimes even into the town. They themselves do not understand why they go: there is no food, and they do not need building materials or other things which may be there for the scavenging. They always leave the town before