Harry Turtledove - 3xT

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3xT
Table of Contents
Noninterference
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
Kaleidoscope
AND SO TO BED
BLUFF
A DIFFICULT UNDERTAKING
THE WEATHER'S FINE
CRYBABY
HINDSIGHT
GENTLEMEN OF THE SHADE
THE BORING BEAST
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
THE CASTLE OF THE SPARROWHAWK
THE SUMMER GARDEN
THE LAST ARTICLE
THE GIRL WHO TOOK
LESSONS
Earthgrip
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
3 x T
Harry Turtledove
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any
resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Noninterferencecopyright © 1985, 1986, 1987;Kaleidoscope copyright © 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987,
1988, 1990;Earthgrip , copyright © 1987, 1989, 1991; all by Harry Turtledove.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Megabook
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 0-7434-8835-0
Cover art by Kurt Miller
First printing, July 2004
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Turtledove, Harry.
3 x T / by Harry Turtledove.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7434-8835-0 (hc)
1. Science fiction, American. 2. Life on other planets--Fiction. 3. Human-
alien encounters--Fiction. 4. Space flight--Fiction. I. Title: Three times T.
II. Turtledove, Harry. Earthgrip. III. Turtledove, Harry. Noninterference. IV.
Turtledove, Harry. Kaleidoscope. V. Title: Earthgrip. VI. Title: Noninterfer-
ence. VII. Title: Kaleidoscope. VIII. Title.
PS3570.U76A6123 2004
813'.54--dc22
2004007044
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Typeset by Bell Road Press, Sherwood, OR
Printed in the United States of America
Baen Books by HARRY TURTLEDOVE
The War Between the Provinces series:
Sentry Peak
Marching Through Peachtree
Advance and Retreat
The Fox novels:
Wisdom of the Fox
Tale of the Fox
3 x T
Thessalonica
Alternate Generals, editor
Alternate Generals II, editor
Down in the Bottomlands(with L. Sprague de Camp)
Noninterference
For the people who helped me make it
happen and make it better:
Stan and Russ and Owen and Shelly
and Shelley and Tina
I
FEDERACY
STANDARD
YEAR 1186
Sun, stench, racket: market day at Helmand.
The sun was a G-0 star, not much different from Sol. Asked to generate a name for it, the computer
called it Bilbeis. It blazed from the blue cloisonne dome of the sky. Beyond the Margush river and the
canals that drew its waters for the croplands of Helmand and the other river valley towns, the land was a
desert, baked brown and bare.
The stench went with city life. The twelve or fifteen thousand inhabitants of Helmand had no better
notion of sanitation than throwing their rubbish, chamber pots and all, into the narrow, winding streets.
After a few years, the floors of their dwellings would be thirty or forty centimeters below street level.
Then it was time to knock down the whole house and build a new mud-brick structure on the rubble.
Helmand perched on a hill of its own making, a good fifteen meters above the Margush.
As for the racket, expect nothing else when large numbers of people gather to trade, as the folk of
Helmand did once a nineday. And theywere people. Only by such details as hair and skin color, beard
pattern, and shape of features could they be told at a glance from Terrans. There were more subtle
internal differences, but David Ware and Julian Crouzet had no trouble passing as foreigners from a
distant land.
The two Survey Service anthropologists strolled through the marketplace. They paused gratefully in the
long shadow of a temple for the time it took to drink a cup of thin, sour wine.
In their boots, denim coveralls, and caps, they attracted some attention from the people swarming
around them, but not much. The city dwellers were already typical urban sophisticates, though Helmand
and the other towns of the Margush valley represented the first civilization on Bilbeis IV.
Most of the stares came from peasants, in from the fields with produce or livestock to trade for the
things they could not make themselves. Here a farmer weighed out grain to pay for a new bronze sickle
blade, there another quarreled with a potter over how much dried fruit he would have to give for a large
storage jar. The latter man finally threw up his arms in disgust and stomped off to find a better deal.
David Ware had been taping the argument with a camera set in a heavy silver ring. "You think that one's
unhappy," Crouzet murmured, "look at the trader over there."
The fellow at whom he nodded was from the Raidan foothills west of the Margush. He let his gray-green
mustachios grow barbarously long and wore a knee-length tunic of gaudy green and saffron stripes. "You
try to cheat me, you son of a pimp!" he shouted in nasally accented Helmandi, shaking his fist at the fat
stonecutter who sat cross-legged in front of his stall.
"I do not," the stonecutter said calmly. "Seventydiktats of grain is all your obsidian is worth—more than
you would get from some."
The hillman was frantic with frustration. "You lie! See here—I have three beastloads of prime stone. In
my grandfather's day, my animals would have killed themselves hauling back to my village the grain that
stone brought. Seventydiktats —faugh! I could carry that myself."
"In your grandfather's day, we would have used the obsidian for sickles and scythes at harvest time, and
for edging war swords. Bronze was hard to come by then, and even dearer than stone. Now that we
have plenty, we find it more useful. So what good is your obsidian? Oh, I can make some of it into
trinkets, I suppose, but it is no precious stone like turquoise or emerald. The jewelry would be cheap and
move slowly."
Ware turned away with a half-amused, half-cynical snort. "Even in a Bronze Age society, changing
technology throws people out of work."
"That's true at any level of culture," Crouzet said. "I will admit, though, the pace has picked up in
Helmand under Queen Sabium."
"I should say so." Ware's craggy face, normally rather dour, was lit now with enthusiasm. "She's one in a
million."
His companion nodded. As if summoned by the mention of their ruler, a platoon of musicians marched
into the square down the one real thoroughfare Helmand boasted: the road from the palace. They raised
seashell trumpets to their lips and blew a discordant blast. The two Terrans winced. The market-day
hubbub died away.
"Bow your heads!" a herald cried. "Forth comes Sabium, vicegerent of Illil the goddess of the moons
and queen of Helmand." Actually, the word the herald used literally meant "lady king"; Helmandi had no
exact equivalent for "queen," as Sabium was the only female ruler the town had ever known.
Fifteen years before, she had been principal wife of the last king. When he died, his firstborn son was a
babe in arms, and Sabium administered affairs as regent. The town prospered as never before under her
leadership. A few years later, the child-king died, too. Sabium ruled on, now in her own right, and did so
well that no one thought to challenge her.
"I wonder what brings her out," Crouzet said, his eyes on the dirt. "She's missed the last couple of
market days."
Ware nodded. "I didn't think she looked well, either, when she was here."
The royal bodyguard preceded the queen into the square. The troopers carried bronze-headed spears
and maces with wicked spikes. They used their big leather shields to push people out of the way and
clear a path to the raised brick platform in the center of the marketplace.
A retinue of Helmand's nobles followed. The hems of their long woolen robes dragged in the dust; their
wide sleeves flapped languidly as they walked. Not for them the bright colors that delighted the
semisavage obsidian seller: like the bodyguards and most Helmandis, they preferred white or sober
shades of brown, gray, and blue. But gold and silver gleamed on their arms, around their necks, and in
ear and nose rings.
A sedan chair borne by twelve husky servants brought up the rear of the procession. David Ware
whistled softly when he saw it from the corner of his eye. "I'll bet she is sick, then!" he exclaimed. "She
always walked here before."
"We'll know soon enough," Crouzet said calmly. He was a big moon-faced man; his phlegmatic nature
made him a good foil for Ware, who sometimes went off half-cocked.
Skillfully keeping the sedan chair level, the porters carried it to the top of the platform, set it down, and
scurried down the stairs. The white-robed priest of Illil who had accompanied them stayed behind. The
shell-trumpets blared again. The priest drew back the silk curtain that screened the interior of the sedan
chair from view.
"Behold the queen!" the herald shouted.
The crowd in the marketplace raised their heads. Ware lifted his arm as if to scratch, so he could record
Sabium's emergence.
When he saw her, he tried to suppress his involuntary gasp of surprise and dismay but could not. It
hardly mattered. The same sound came from Crouzet beside him and from the throats of everyone close
enough to Sabium to see how ill she truly was.
A month before, Ware thought, she had been a handsome woman, even without making allowances for
the differences between Terran and Helmandi standards of good looks. Her grayish-pink skin, light blue
hair that receded at the temples, and downy cheeks seemed no more strange, after one was used to
them, than Crouzet's blackness or his own knobby-kneed, gangly build. Even the false mustache she
wore to appear more fully a king somehow lent her face dignity instead of making her ridiculous.
Her strength of character was responsible for that, of course. It shone through her violet eyes like sun
through stained glass, animating her aquiline features. One could hear it in her clear contralto, see it in the
brisk pace with which her stocky body moved. No wonder the whole city loved her.
Now she got out of the sedan chair with infinite care, as if every motion hurt. She had to lean on the
priest's arm for a moment. Her body seemed shrunken within the heavy, elaborately fringed robe of state,
shot all through with golden thread. She held the royal crown—a massy silver circlet encrusted with river
pearls and other stones that glowed softly, like moonlight—in her hands instead of wearing it. Her face
was more gray than pink.
"My God, she's dying!" Ware blurted.
"Yes, and heaven help Helmand after she goes," Crouzet agreed. The one thing Sabium had not done
was provide for a successor. Probably, Ware thought, she was too proud to admit to herself that her
body had betrayed her.
She could still force it to obey her for a time, though, and she carried on with the ceremony as if nothing
were wrong. Her voice rang through the square: "Shumukin, son of Galzu, ascend to join me!"
A small, lithe man climbed the steps and went on his knees in front of the queen. Sabium declared, "For
the beauty of your new hymn to Illil, I reward you with half adiktat of refined gold and the title ofludlul. "
The rank was of the lesser nobility; Shumukin went down on his belly in gratitude. The trumpeters at the
edge of the square struck up a new tune, presumably Shumukin's hymn. The crowd applauded.
Shumukin rose, smiling shyly, and stepped to one side.
There was a visible pause while Sabium gathered herself. The priest spoke to her, too softly for the
Terrans to hear. She waved him aside and called out, "M'gishen, son of Nadin, ascend and join me!"
This time the Helmandi was old and stout. He leaned on a stick going up the stairs. The priest held the
cane as he clumsily got to his knees. Sabium said, "For sharing with all of Helmand what you have
learned, I reward you with threediktats of refined gold and the rank ofshaushludlul. " That was a higher
title than the one Shumukin had earned. M'gishen prostrated himself before the queen.
Sabium bent to bid him rise and could not hide a wince of pain. "Tell the people of what you found."
Shifting from foot to foot like a nervous schoolboy, M'gishen obeyed. His thin, reedy voice did not carry
well. He had to start over two or three times before the calls of "Louder!" stopped coming from the back
of the marketplace.
"Everybody knows what a taper is, of course," he said. "You take a wick and dip it in hot tallow. Well, if
you dip it again and again and again, more and more tallow clings, y' see. When you light it then, it gives
off a real glow like an oil lamp, not just a tiny little flame. Lasts as long as a lamp, too, maybe longer. Eh,
well, that's what my new thing is." He reclaimed his stick and limped down the steps.
"Rewards await anyone who learns something new and useful and passes on his knowledge or who
shows himself a worthy poet or sculptor or painter," Sabium said. "I set aside the first morning of every
nineday to judge such things, and hope to see many of you then."
"Amazingly sophisticated attitude to find in such a primitive society," Crouzet remarked.
"I'm sorry, what was that?" David Ware had been watching the priest of Illil help Sabium back into the
sedan chair. The process was slow and agonizing; he saw her bite down hard on her lower lip to distract
herself from the other, greater torment. It was a relief when the silk draperies gave her back her privacy.
Crouzet repeated himself. "Oh, yes, absolutely," Ware agreed. "For this sort of culture it's better than a
patent system; the bureaucracy to run anything like that won't exist here for hundreds of years. But the
up-front reward encourages people to put ideas into the public domain instead of hanging on to them as
family secrets."
"To say nothing of spurring invention." Crouzet's eyes followed the servitors bearing Sabium back to the
palace. "What do you think the odds are of whoever comes after her keeping up what she's started?"
Ware laughed without humor. "What's the old saying? Two chances—slim and none."
"I'm afraid you're right. Sometimes the rule of noninterference is a shame." Survey Service personnel on
worlds without spaceflight were observers only, doing nothing to meddle in local affairs.
When Ware did not reply at once, Crouzet turned to look at him. His colleague's face was a mask of
furious concentration. Crouzet was no telepath, but he did not need to be to know what the other Terran
was thinking. Alarm replaced the black man's usual amused detachment. "For God's sake, David!
There's never justification for breaking the noninterference rule!"
"The hell there isn't," David Ware said.
* * *
Lucrezia Spini played the tape of Queen Sabium in the marketplace for the fourth time. "Yes, it might be
a malignancy," the biologist said. "If I had to make a guess just from seeing this and from the speed of the
illness's advance, I'd say it could well be. But making a real diagnosis on this kind of evidence is pure
guesswork. There are so many ways to fall sick, and on a world like this we'll only learn a tiny fraction of
them."
"What can you do to pin it down more closely?" Ware asked. A flier had brought him and Crouzet back
to theLeeuwenhoek the night before. They had summoned the machine to a field several kilometers
outside Helmand. It was silent; the local fear of demons who dwelt in darkness made the chance of being
observed vanishingly small. TheLeeuwenhoek itself had landed in the northern desert, safe from
detection.
Spini rubbed her chin as she thought; had she been a man, she would have been the type to grow a
beard for the sake of plucking at it. At last she said, "I suppose I could sneak a small infrared sensor onto
the roof of the queen's bedchamber and do a body scan. If there are tumors, they'll show up warmer than
the surrounding normal body areas."
"Would you?" Ware tried to hold the eagerness from his voice. He had kept quiet about his gut reaction
back in the marketplace. If Sabium was suffering from some exotic local disease, she would die, and that
was all there was to it. If, on the other hand, she had cancer . . . Time enough to worry about that when
he knew.
"Why not? Either way, I'll learn something." When the anthropologist kept hovering over her, she
laughed at him. "I don't have the answers yet, you know. I have to program the sensor, camouflage it,
and send it out. Come back in three days and I may be able to give you something."
Ware had plenty to keep him busy while he waited but could not help fretting. What if Sabium died while
they were investigating? She had seemed so feeble. Ware also noticed Julian Crouzet giving him
suspicious looks every so often. He pretended not to.
When the appointed day came, he fairly pounced on Lucrezia Spini, barking, "Well?"
She put a hand on his arm. "Easy, David, easy. Anyone would think you were in love with her."
He blinked. That had not occurred to him. He was honest enough with himself to take a long look at the
idea. After a few seconds he said, "You know, I might be, if she came from a civilization comparable to
ours. As is, I admire her tremendously. She's kindly but firm enough to rule, she boosts this culture in
ways it couldn't expect for centuries yet, she's three times as smart as any of the local kings—and she
carries on like a trouper in spite of what she's got. Whatever it is, she deserves better."
"No need to preach. I'm convinced." Spini laughed, but Ware could tell his earnestness had impressed
her. She fed a cassette into the monitor in front of her. "This will interest you."
The screen lit in an abstract pattern of greens, blues, reds, and yellows: an infrared portrait of Sabium's
boudoir. "Ignore these," Spini said, pointing to several brilliant spots of light. "They're lamps, so of course
they show up brightly. Here, now—"
Yes, the pattern at the bottom might have been a reclining figure. "Lucky the Helmandis sleep nude," the
biologist remarked. "In this climate it's no wonder, I suppose. Clothes would have confused the picture,
though. Look here, and here, and especially here—" Her finger moved to one area after another that
glowed yellow or even orange. "Hot spots."
"That's her belly?" Ware asked harshly.
Spini nodded. "Full of tumor. A classical diagnosis. Too bad, if what you say about her is true. If she
were a Terran, I wouldn't give her more than another month, tops, with that much metastatic cancer in
there."
"Just how different biologically are the locals, Lucrezia?" Ware hoped he sounded casual.
He must have, for she answered readily. "Not very. When you were in Helmand, you ate the food,
drank the beer. Some of the desert herbs here synthesize chemicals that look promising as
pharmaceuticals."
"How interesting," the anthropologist said.
* * *
"No," Senior Coordinator Chunder Sen said flatly. With his round brown face and fringe of white hair, he
usually reminded David Ware of a kindly grandfather. Now he sounded downright stern—something
Ware would not have imagined possible—as he declared, "The rule of noninterference must be
inviolable."
Heads nodded in agreement all around the table in theLeeuwenhoek 's mess, which doubled as the
assembly chamber. It was the only compartment that could hold the ship's twenty-person complement at
once. Julian Crouzet had taken pains to sit as far from Ware as he could, as if to avoid any association
with what his colleague was proposing.
"So this is what you were leading up to," Lucrezia Spini exclaimed. It sounded like an accusation.
The anthropologist nodded impatiently. "Of course it is. We ought to cure Queen Sabium, as I said when
I asked for this meeting. It could be done, couldn't it?"
"Technically speaking, I don't see why not. I already told you that the natives' metabolism isn't much
different from ours. With the interferons and other immunological amplifiers we have, we could stimulate
her body to throw off the malignancy. But I don't think we should. Noninterference has been Federacy
policy from the word go, and rightly. Where would we be if more advanced races had tinkered with
Terra when we were just a single primitive world?"
"Maybe better off; who knows?" Ware saw at once he had been too flip. He backed off. "What's the
reasoning behind the rule of noninterference, anyway?"
"Oh, really now, David," Jemala Gürsel snorted. The meteorologist went on: "There's no point to treating
us like so many children. Everyone knows that." She shook a finger at Ware in annoyance.
"Let's get it out in the open and look at it," he persisted.
"Very well." That was Chunder Sen, sounding resigned. As a bureaucrat, he was vulnerable to proper
procedure. "Julian, do the honors, will you?"
"Gladly," the other anthropologist said, "since a chance comment of mine seems to have touched David
off in the first place. There are many sound reasons behind noninterference, but the most telling one is the
one Lucrezia gave—less advanced cultures deserve to develop in their own ways. We have no right to
meddle with them."
"That's exactly what I thought you'd say," Ware told him, "and it sounds very noble, but it doesn't bear
much relation to reality. Truth is, we interfere every time we come into contact with a local."
"Nonsense!" Crouzet snapped, and that was one of the milder reactions. Coordinator Chunder Sen, a
devout Hindu, could not have looked more pained if he had suddenly discovered he'd been eating beef
the last six weeks.
Ware did not mind. He felt filled with a sudden crazy confidence, like a gambler who knows the next
card will make his straight, the next roll will be a seven. "It isn't nonsense," he insisted. "The physicists
have known for a couple of thousand years that the act of observation affects what's being observed."
"Don't throw old Heisenberg at us out of context," said Moshe Sharett, the chief engineer. "He's only
relevant at the atomic level. For large-scale phenomena, the observer effect is negligible."
"Who says Helmand's a large-scale phenomenon? Fifteen thousand people or so strikes me as being
awfully different from the sextillions of atoms chemists and physicists play with."
Sharett scratched at an ear. Several other people frowned thoughtfully. Julian Crouzet, though, said, "I
defy you to show me how walking through the streets of Helmand could twist the culture out of shape."
"Even that might. Suppose we bumped into someone and made him late for an important meeting, so a
decision was taken that he would have changed if he'd been there. But walking about isn't all we do, you
know. Remember that scrawny vendor we bought wine from? The grain we gave him could well have
kept him and his whole family from starving. We might have changed a thousand years of bloodlines if a
child that would have died grows up to breed."
"Oh, come now," Courzet said. "If we hadn't bought from him, someone else would."
"Would they? Not many people did, or his ribs wouldn't have shown so clearly. Julian, I'm afraid we did
him a good turn, whether we wanted to or not. Let's give ourselves up."
Crouzet threw his hands in the air. "Spare me your sarcasm. What if we did? It's a long way from going
in and healing Queen Sabium."
"Of course it is," Ware said at once, "but the difference is one of degree, not of kind—that's the point
I'm trying to make. It's interference either way. For once, let it have a purpose. Here; I'm going to show
two tapes and then I'm done."
He walked over to the big vision screen that took up most of one wall. The first tape was the one he and
Crouzet had made of Sabium in the marketplace. "Give us a running translation for those who don't know
Helmandi, will you, Jorge?" he said. "You're smoother than I am."
Jorge Morales, the ship's linguist, was a self-important little man. He jumped a bit but did as Ware asked
him. The anthropologist nodded to himself. After two minutes of translating, Morales would think any
attack on the tape was an attack on him personally.
But there were no attacks. Sabium's courage impressed the company of theLeeuwenhoek even more
than her wisdom. In the dead silence that filled the mess hall, Ware inserted the other tape. "This has two
parts," he said. "The first one is from a spy camera I had planted in the palace bedroom the other day."
Seen from above, attendants bustled around Sabium. One offered food and drink, most of which she
declined. Others helped her take off the stifling royal robes; she accepted that attention with relief, as she
did the cloth soaked in cool water that a serving maid pressed to her forehead.
Some of the water ran down her face and got into her false mustaches, which began to come off. She
said something that made her attendants laugh. "What was that?" Moshe Sharett asked.
"Something to the effect that that was one thing her husband hadn't had to put up with," Morales replied.
Several of the people watching the screen grinned; not all of them were those Ware expected to back
him.
After a while the servants bowed their way out, leaving Sabium alone in the chamber, a small, tired
woman wearing only a thin shift that covered her to midthigh. Much of the flesh had melted from her legs
and arms, but the fabric of the shift stretched tight across her swollen belly, as if she were pregnant.
If she had not known how ill she was that day in the marketplace, she did now. She pressed herself here
and there and flinched more than once in the self-examination. When she was done, she shrugged and
spoke, though she did not think anyone was there to hear her. This time, Ware did the translating himself:
" 'Another day gone. Now to do the best I can with the ones I have left.' "
Sabium rose, stripped off the shift with an involuntary grunt of pain, and blew out the lamps. The leather
thongs supporting the mattress creaked as the bedchamber went dark.
摘要：

3xTTableofContentsNoninterferenceIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIXXXIXIIKaleidoscopeANDSOTOBEDBLUFFADIFFICULTUNDERTAKINGTHEWEATHER'SFINECRYBABYHINDSIGHTGENTLEMENOFTHESHADETHEBORINGBEASTTHEROADNOTTAKENTHECASTLEOFTHESPARROWHAWKTHESUMMERGARDENTHELASTARTICLETHEGIRLWHOTOOKLESSONSEarthgripIIIIIIIVVVIVIIVIIIIX3xTHarryT...

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