Niven, Larry - Man Kzin Wars 03

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MAN-KZIN WARS III

Larry Niven with

Poul Anderson, J.E. Pournelle, and

S.M. Stirling

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.

form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises EO. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-72008-2 Cover art by Steve Hickman

First Printing, August 1990 Second Printing, August 1991

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

CONTENTS

MADNESS HAS ITS PLACE, Larry Niven

THE ASTEROID QUEEN, J.E. Pournelle & S.M. Stirling

INCONSTANT STAR, Poul Anderson

MADNESS HAS ITS PLACE

Larry Niven

Chapter I

A lucky few of us know the good days before they're gone.

I remember my eighties. My job kept me in shape, and gave me

enough variety to keep my mind occupied. My love life was imperfect

but interesting. Modern medicine makes the old fairy tales look insipid;

I almost never worried about my health.

Those were the good days, and I knew them. I could remember worse.

I can remember when my memory was better too. That's what this file

is for. I keep it updated for that reason, and also to maintain my sense

of purpose.

The Monobloc had been a singles bar since the 2320s.

In the '30s I'd been a regular. I'd found Charlotte there. We held our

wedding reception at the Monobloc, then dropped out for twenty-eight

years. My first marriage, hers too, both in our forties. After the children

grew up and moved away, after Charlotte left me too, I came back.

The place was much changed.

I remembered a couple of hundred bottles in the hologram bar display.

Now the display was twice as large and seemed more realistic-better

equipment, maybe-but only a score of bottles in the middle were

liquors. The rest were flavored or carbonated water, high-energy

drinks, electrolytes, a thousand kinds of tea; food to match, raw

vegetables and fruits kept fresh by high-tech means, arrayed with

low-cholesterol dips; bran in every conceivable form short of injections.

The Monobloc had swallowed its neighbors. It was bigger, with

curtained alcoves, and a small gym upstairs for working out or for

dating.

Herbert and Tina Schroeder still owned the place. Their marriage had

been open in the '30s. They'd aged since. So had their clientele. Some

of us had married or drifted away or died of alcoholism; but word of

mouth and the Velvet Net had maintained a continuous tradition.

Twenty-eight years later they looked better than ever… wrinkled, of

course, but lean and muscular, both ready for the Gray Olympics. Tina

let me know before I could ask: she and Herb were lockstepped now.

To me it was like coming home.

For the next twelve years the Monobloc was an intermittent part of my

life.

I would find a lady, or she would find me, and we'd drop out. Or we'd

visit the Monobloc and sometimes trade partners; and one evening

we'd go together and leave separately. I was not evading marriage.

Every woman I found worth knowing, ultimately seemed to want to

know someone else.

I was nearly bald even then. Thick white hair covered my arms and legs

and torso, as if my head hairs had migrated. Twelve years of running

construction robots had turned me burly. From time to time some

muscular lady would look me over and claim me. I had no trouble

finding company.

But company never stayed. Had I become dull? The notion struck me

as funny.

* * *

I had settled myself alone at a table for two, early on a Thursday

evening in 2375. The Monobloc was half empty. The earlies were all

keeping one eye on the door when Anton Brillov came in.

Anton was shorter than me, and much narrower, with a face like an

axe. I hadn't see him in thirteen years. Still, I'd mentioned the

Monobloc once or twice; he must have remembered.

I semaphored my arms. Anton squinted, then came over, exaggeratedly

cautious until he saw who it was.

“Jack Strather!”

“Hi, Anton. So you decided to try the place?”

“Yah.” He sat. “You look good.” He looked a moment longer and

said, “Relaxed. Placid. How's Charlotte?”

“Left me after I retired. Just under a year after. There was too much of

me around and I… maybe I was too placid? Anyway. How are you?”

“Fine.”

Twitchy. Anton looked twitchy. I was amused. “Still with the Holy

Office?”

“Only citizens call it that, Jack.”

“I'm a citizen. Still gives me a kick. How's your chemistry?”

Anton knew what I meant and didn't pretend otherwise. “I'm okay. I'm

down.”

“Kid, you're looking over both shoulders at once.”

Anton managed a credible laugh. “I'm not the kid any more. I'm a

weekly.”

The ARM had made me a weekly at forty-eight. They couldn't turn me

loose at the end of the day any more, because my body chemistry

couldn't shift fast enough. So they kept me in the ARM building

Monday through Thursday, and gave me all of Thursday afternoon to

shed the schitz madness. Twenty years of that and I was even less

flexible, so they retired me.

I said, “You do have to remember. When you're in the ARM building,

you're a paranoid schizophrenic. You have to be able to file that when

you're outside.”

“Hah. How can anyone-”

“You get used to the schitz. After I quit, the difference was amazing.

No fears, no tension, no ambition.”

“No Charlotte?”

“Well… I turned boring. And what are you doing here?”

Anton looked around him. “Much the same thing you are, I guess.

Jack, am I the youngest one here?”

“Maybe.” I looked around, double-checking. A woman was distracting

me, though I could see only her back and a flash of a laughing profile.

Her back was slender and strong, and a thick white braid ran down her

spine, centered, two and a half feet of clean, thick white hair. She was

in animated conversation with a blond companion of Anton's age plus a

few.

But they were at a table for two: they weren't inviting company. I

forced my attention back. “We're gray singles, Anton. The young ones

tend to get the message quick. We're slower than we used to be. We

date. You want to order?”

Alcohol wasn't popular here. Anton must have noticed, but he ordered

guava juice and vodka and drank as if he needed it. This looked worse

than Thursday jitters. I let him half finish, then said, “Assuming you can

tell me-”

“I don't know anything.”

“I know the feeling. What should you know?”

A tension eased behind Anton's eyes. “There was a message from the

Angel's Pencil.”

“Pencil… oh.” My mental reflexes had slowed down. The Angel's

Pencil had departed twenty years ago for… was it Epsilon Eridani?

“Come on, kid, it'll be in the boob cubes before you have quite finished

speaking. Anything from deep space is public property.”

“Hah! No. It's restricted. I haven't seen it myself. Only a reference, and

it must be more than ten years old.”

That was peculiar. And if the Belt stations hadn't spread the news

through the solar system, that was peculiar. No wonder Anton was

antsy. ARMs react that way to puzzles.

Anton seemed to jerk himself back to here and now, back to the gray

singles regime. “Am I cramping your style?”

“No problem. Nobody hurries in the Monobloc. If you see someone

you like-” My fingers danced over lighted symbols on the rim of the

table. “This gets you a map. Locate where she's sitting, put the cursor

on it. That gets you a display… hmm.”

I'd set the cursor on the white-haired lady. I liked the readout. “Phoebe

Garrison, seventy-nine, eleven or twelve years older than you. Straight.

Won a Second in the Gray Jumps last year… that's the America's

skiing Matches for seventy and over. She could kick your tail if you

don't watch your manners. It says she's smarter than we are, too.

“Point is, she can check you out the same way. Or me. And she

probably found this place through the Velvet Net, which is the

computer network for unlocked lifestyles.”

“So. Two males sitting together-”

“Anyone who thinks we're bent can check if she cares enough. Bends

don't come to the Monobloc anyway. But if we want company, we

should move to a bigger table.”

We did that. I caught Phoebe Garrison's companion's eye. They played

with their table controls, discussed, and presently wandered over.

Dinner turned into a carouse. Alcohol was involved, but we'd left the

Monobloc by then. When we split up, Anton was with Michiko. I went

home with Phoebe.

Phoebe had fine legs, as I'd anticipated, though both knees were teflon

and plastic. Her face was lovely even in morning sunlight. Wrinkled, of

course. She was two weeks short of eighty and wincing in anticipation.

She ate with a cross-country skier's appetite. We told of our lives as

we ate.

She'd come to Santa Maria to visit her oldest grandson. In her youth

she'd done critical work in nanoengi-neering. The Board had allowed

her four children. (I'd known I was outclassed.) All were married,

scattered across the Earth, and so were the grandkids.

My two sons had emigrated to the Belt while still in their twenties. I'd

visited them once during an investigation, trip paid for by the United

Nations-

“You were an ARM? Really? How interesting! Tell me a story… if you

can.”

“That's the problem, all right.”

The interesting tales were all classified. The ARM suppresses

dangerous technology. What the ARM buries is supposed to stay

buried. I remembered a kind of time compressor, and a field that would

catalyze combustion, both centuries old. Both were first used for

murder. If turned loose or rediscovered, either would generate more

interesting tales yet.

I said, “I don't know anything current. They bounced me out when I

got too old. Now I run construction robots at various spaceports.”

“Interesting?”

“Mostly placid.” She wanted a story? Okay. The ARM enforced more

than the killer-tech laws, and some of those tales I could tell.

“We don't get many mother hunts these days. This one was wished on

us by the Belt-” And I told her of a lunie who's sired two clones. One

he'd raised on the Moon and one he'd left in the Saturn Conserve. He'd

moved to Earth, where one clone is any normal citizen's entire

birthright. When we found him he was arranging to culture a third

clone…

I dreamed a bloody dream.

It was one of those: I was able to take control, to defeat what had

attacked me. In the black of an early Sunday morning the shreds of the

dream dissolved before I could touch them; but the sensations

remained. I felt strong, balanced, powerful, victorious.

It took me a few minutes to become suspicious of this particular flavor

of wonderful, but I'd had practice. I eased out from under Phoebe's

arm and leg and out of bed. I lurched into the medical alcove, linked

myself up and fell asleep on the table.

Phoebe found me there in the morning. She asked, “Couldn't that wait

till after breakfast?”

“I've got four years on you and I'm going for infinity. So I'm careful,” I

told her. It wasn't quite a lie… and she didn't quite believe me either.

On Monday Phoebe went off to let her eldest grandson show her the

local museums. I went back to work.

In Death Valley a semicircle of twenty lasers points at an axial array of

mirrors. Tracks run across the desert to a platform that looks like

strands of spun caramel. Every hour or so a spacecraft trundles along

the tracks, poses above the mirrors, and rises into the sky on a

blinding, searing pillar of light.

Here was where I and three companions and twenty-eight robots

worked between emergencies. Emergencies were common enough.

From time to time Glenn and Skü and ten or twenty machines had to be

shipped off to Outback Field or Baikonur, while I held the fort at Death

Valley Field.

All of the equipment was old. The original mirrors had all been slaved

to one system, and those had been replaced again and again. Newer

mirrors were independently mounted and had their own computers, but

even these were up to fifty years old and losing their flexibility. The

lasers had to be replaced somewhat more often. Nothing was ready to

fall apart, quite.

But the mirrors have to adjust their shapes to match distorting air

currents all the way up to vacuum, because the distortions themselves

must focus the drive beam. A laser at 99.3% efficiency is keeping too

much energy, getting too hot. At 99.1% something would melt, lost

power would blow the laser into shrapnel, and a cargo would not reach

orbit.

My team had been replacing mirrors and lasers long before I came on

the scene. This circuit was nearly complete. We had already

reconfigured some robots to begin replacing track.

The robots worked alone while we entertained ourselves in the monitor

room. If the robots ran into anything unfamiliar, they stopped and

beeped. Then a story or songfest or poker game would stop just as

abruptly.

Usually the beep meant that the robot had found an acute angle, an

uneven surface, a surface not strong enough to bear a loaded robot, a

bend in a pipe, a pipe where it shouldn't be… a geometrical problem.

The robots couldn't navigate just anywhere. Sometimes we'd have to

unload it and move the load to a cart, by hand. Sometimes we had to

pick it up with a crane and move it or turn it. Lots of it was muscle

work.

Phoebe joined me for dinner Thursday evening.

She'd whipped her grandson at laser tag. They'd gone through the

museum at Edward AFB. They'd skied… he needed to get serious

about that, and maybe get some surgery too…

I listened and smiled and presently tried to tell her about my work. She

nodded; her eyes glazed. I tried to tell her how good it was, how

restful, after all those years in the ARM.

The ARM: that got her interest back. Stet. I told her about the Henry

Program.

I'd been saving that. It was an embezzling system good enough to ruin

the economy. It made Zachariah Henry rich. He might have stayed rich

if he'd quit in time… and if his system hadn't been so good, so

dangerous, he might have ended in prison. Instead… well, let his

tongue whisper secrets to the ears in the organ banks.

I could speak of it because they'd changed the system. I didn't say that

it had happened twenty years before I joined the ARM. But I was still

running out of declassified stories. I told her, “If a lot of people know

something can be done, somebody'll do it. We can suppress it and

suppress it again-”

She pounced. “Like what?”

“Like… well, the usual example is the first cold fusion system. They did

it with palladium and plati-num, but half a dozen other metals work.

And organic superconductors: the patents listed a wrong ingredient.

Various grad students tried it wrong and still got it. If there's a way to

do it, there's probably a lot of ways.”

“That was before there was an ARM. Would you have suppressed

superconductors?”

^No. What for?“

“Or cold fusion?”

“No.”

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摘要：

MAN-KZINWARSIIILarryNivenwithPoulAnderson,J.E.Pournelle,andS.M.StirlingThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©1990byLarryNivenAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportions...

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