Larry Niven - A Gift From Earth

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A GIFT FROM EARTH -- Larry Niven
(Version 2002.03.17)
CHAPTER 1 -- THE RAMROBOT
A RAMROBOT had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat. Ramrobots had been first visitors
to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply
culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light.
Long ago the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets. It was a
peculiarity of the first ramrobots that they were not choosy. The Procyon ramrobot, for instance,
had landed on We Made It in spring. Had the landing occurred in summer or winter, when the
planet's axis points through its sun, the ramrobot would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-
hour winds. The Sirius ramrobot had searched out the two narrow habitable bands on Jinx, but had
not been programmed to report the planet's other peculiarities. And the Tau Ceti ramrobot,
Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #4, had landed on Mount Lookitthat. Only the Plateau on Mount
Lookitthat was habitable. The rest of the planet was an eternal searing black calm, useless for
any purpose. The Plateau was smaller than any region a colony project would settle by choice. But
Inter stellar Ramscoop Robot #4 had found a habitable point, and that was all it knew.
The colony slowboats, which followed the ramrobots. had not been built to make round
trips. Their passengers had to stay, always. And so Mount Lookitthat was settled, more than three
hundred years ago.
A flock of police cars fanned out behind the fleeing man. He could hear them buzzing like
summer bumble-bees. Now, too late, they were using all their power. In the air this pushed them to
one hundred miles per hour: fast enough for transportation in as small a region as Mount
Lookitthat, but, just this once, not fast enough to win a race. The running man was only yards
from the edge.
Spurts of dust erupted ahead of the fugitive. At last the Implementation police had
decided to risk damaging the body. The man bit the dust like a puppet thrown in anger, turned over
hugging one knee. Then he was scrambling for the cliff's sharp edge on the other knee and two
hands. He jerked once more, but kept moving...At the very edge he looked up to see a circling car
coming right at him from the blue void beyond.
With the tip of his tongue held firmly between his teeth, Jesus Pietro Castro aimed his
car at the enraged, agonized, bearded face. An inch too low and he'd hit the cliff; an inch too
high and he'd miss the man, miss his chance to knock him back onto the Plateau. He pushed two fan
throttles forward...
Too late. The man was gone.
Later, they stood at the edge and looked down.
Often Jesus Pietro had watched groups of children standing fearful and excited at the void
edge, looking down toward the hidden roots of Mount Lookitthat, daring each other to go closer and
closer. As a child he had done the same. The wonder of that view had never left him.
Forty miles below, beneath a swirling sea of white mist, was the true surface of Mount
Lookitthat the planet. The great plateau on Mount Lookitthat the mountain had a surface less than
half the size of California. All the rest of the world's surface was a black oven, hot enough to
melt lead, at the bottom of an atmosphere sixty times as thick as Earth's.
Matthew Keller had committed, deliberately, one of the worst of possible crimes. He had
crawled off the edge of the Plateau, taking with him his eyes, his liver and kidneys, his miles of
blood tubing, and all twelve of his glands -- taking everything that could have gone into the
Hospital's organ banks to save the lives of those whose bodies were failing. Even his worth as
fertilizer, not inconsiderable on a three-hundred-year-old colony world, was now nil. Only the
water in him would someday return to the upper world to fall as rain on the lakes and rivers and
as snow on the great northern glacier. Already, perhaps, he was dry and flaming, in the awful heat
forty miles below.
Or had he stopped falling, even yet?
Jesus Pietro, Head of Implementation, stepped back with an effort. The formless mist
sometimes brought strange hallucinations and stranger thoughts -- like that odd member of the
Rorschach inkblot set, the one sheet of cardboard which is blank. Jesus Pietro had caught himself
thinking that when his time came, if it ever came, this was the way he would like to go. And that
was treason.
The major met his eye with a curious reluctance.
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"Major," said Jesus Pietro, "why did that man escape you?"
The major spread his hands. "He lost himself in the trees for several minutes. When he
broke for the edge, it took my men a few minutes to spot him."
"How did he reach the trees? No, don't tell me how he broke loose. Tell me why your cars
didn't catch him before he reached the grove."
The major hesitated a split second too long. Jesus Pietro said, "You were playing with
him. He couldn't reach his friends and he couldn't remain hidden anywhere, so you decided to have
a little harmless fun."
The major dropped his eyes.
"You will take his place," said Jesus Pietro.
The playground was grass and trees, swings and teeter-totters, and a slow, skeletal merry-
go-round. The school surrounded it on three sides, a one-story building of architectural coral,
painted white. The fourth side, protected by a high fence of tame vine growing on wooden stakes,
was the edge of Gamma Plateau, a steep cliff overlooking Lake Davidson on Delta Plateau.
Matthew Leiah Keller sat beneath a watershed tree and brooded. Other children played all
around him, but they ignored Matt. So did two teachers on monitor duty. People usually ignored
Matt when he wanted to be alone.
Uncle Matt was gone. Gone to a fate so horrible that the adults wouldn't even talk about
it.
Implementation police had come to the house at sunset yesterday. They had left with Matt's
big comfortable uncle. Knowing that they were taking him to the Hospital, Matt had tried to stop
those towering, uniformed men; but they'd been gentle and superior and firm, and an eight-year-old
boy had not slowed them down at all. A honey-bee buzzing around four tanks.
One day soon his uncle's trial and conviction would be announced on the colonist tri-vee
programs, along with the charges and the record of his execution. But that didn't matter. That was
just cleaning up. Uncle Matt would not be back.
A sting in his eyes warned Matt that he was going to cry.
Harold Lillard stopped his aimless running around when he realized that he was alone. He
didn't like to be alone. Harold was ten, big for his age, and he needed others around him.
Preferably smaller others, children who could be dominated. Looking rather helplessly around him,
he spotted a small form under a tree near the playground's edge. Small enough. Far enough from the
playground monitors.
He started over.
The boy under the tree looked up.
Harold lost interest. He wandered away with a vacant expression, moving more or less
toward the teeter-totters.
Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #143 left Juno at the end of a linear accelerator. Coasting
toward interstellar space, she looked like a huge metal insect, makeshift and hastily built. Yet,
except for the contents of her cargo pod, she was identical to the last forty of her predecessors.
Her nose was the ramscoop generator, a massive, heavily armored cylinder with a large orifice in
the center. Along the sides were two big fusion motors, aimed ten degrees outward, mounted on
oddly jointed metal structures like the folded legs of a praying mantis. The hull was small,
containing only a computer and an in-system fuel tank.
Juno was invisible behind her when the fusion motors fired. Immediately the cable at her
tail began to unroll. The cable was thirty miles long and was made of braided Sinclair molecule
chain. Trailing at the end was a lead capsule as heavy as the ramrobot itself.
Identical cargo pods had been going to the stars for centuries. But this one was special.
Like Ramrobots #141 and #142, already moving toward Jinx and Wunderland -- like Ramrobot
#144, not yet built -- Ramrobot #143 carried the seeds of revolution. That revolution was already
in process on Earth. On Earth it was quiet, orderly. It would not be so on Mount Lookitthat.
The medical revolution that began with the beginning of the twentieth century had warped
all human society for five hundred years. America had adjusted to Eli Whitney's cotton gin in less
than half that time. As with the gin, the effects would never quite die out. But already society
was swinging back to what had once been normal. Slowly; but there was motion. In Brazil a small
but growing alliance agitated for the removal of the death penalty for habitual traffic offenders.
They would be opposed, but they would win.
On twin spears of actinic light the ramrobot approached Pluto's orbit. Pluto and Neptune
were both on the far side of the sun, and there were no ships nearby to be harmed by magnetic
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effects.
The ramscoop generator came on.
The conical field formed rather slowly, but when it had stopped oscillating, it was two
hundred miles across. The ship began to drag a little, a very little, as the cone scooped up
interstellar dust and hydrogen. She was still accelerating. Her in-system tank was idle now, and
would be for the next twelve years. Her food would be the thin stuff she scooped out between the
stars.
In nearby space the magnetic effects would have been deadly. Nothing with a notochord
could live within three hundred miles of the storm of electromagnetic effects that was a working
ramscoop generator. For hundreds of years men had been trying to build a magnetic shield efficient
enough to let men ride the ramrobots. They said it couldn't be done, and they were right. A
ramrobot could carry seeds and frozen fertile animal eggs, provided they were heavily shielded and
were carried a good distance behind the ramscoop generator. Men must ride the slowboats, carrying
their own fuel, traveling at less than half the speed of light.
For Ramrobot #143, speed built up rapidly over the years. The sun became a bright star,
then a dim orange spark. The drag on the ramscoop became a fearsome thing, but it was more than
compensated for by the increase in hydrogen pouring into the fusion motor. The telescopes in
Neptune's Trojan points occasionally picked up the ramrobot's steady fusion light: a tiny, fierce
blue-white point against Tau Ceti's yellow.
The universe shifted and changed. Ahead and behind the ramrobot the stars crept together,
until Sol and Tau Ceti were less than a light-year apart. Now Sol was dying-ember red, and Tau
Ceti showed brilliant white. The pair of red dwarfs known as L726-8, almost in the ramrobot's
path, had become warm yellow. And all the stars in all the heavens had a crushed look, as if
somebody heavy had sat down on the universe.
Ramrobot #143 reached the halfway point, 5.95 light-years from Sol as measured relative to
Sol, and kept going. Turnover was light-years off, since the ramscoop would slow the ship
throughout the voyage.
But a relay clicked in the ramrobot's computer. It was message time. The ramscoop
flickered out, and the light died in the motors as Ramrobot #143 poured all her stored power into
a maser beam. For an hour the beam went out, straight ahead, reaching toward the system of Tau
Ceti. Then the ramrobot was accelerating again, following close behind her own beam, but with the
beam drawing steadily ahead.
A line of fifteen-year-old boys had formed at the door of the medcheck station, each
holding a conical bottle filled with clear yellowish fluid. One by one they handed their specimen
bottles to the hard-faced, masculine-looking nurse, then stepped aside to wait for new orders.
Matt Keller was third from the end. As the boy in front of him stepped aside, and as the
nurse raised one hand without looking up from her typewriter, Matt examined his bottle critically.
"Doesn't look so good," he said.
The nurse looked up in furious impatience. A colonist brat wasting her time!
"I better run it through again," Matt decided aloud. And he drank it.
"It was apple juice," he said later that night. "I almost got caught sneaking it into the
medcheck station. But you really should have seen her face. She turned the damndest color."
"But why?" his father asked in honest bewilderment. "Why antagonize Miss Prynn? You know
she's part crew. And these medical health records go straight to the Hospital"
"I think it was funny," Jeanne announced. She was Matt's sister, a year younger than Matt,
and she always sided with him.
Matt's grin seemed to slip from his face, leaving something dark, something older than his
years. "One for Uncle Matt."
Mr. Keller glared at Jeanne, then at the boy. "You keep thinking like that, Matthew, and
you'll end up in the Hospital, just like he did! Why can't you leave well enough alone?"
His father's evident concern penetrated Matt's mood. "Don't worry, Ghengis," he said
easily. "Miss Prynn's probably forgotten all about it. I'm lucky that way."
"Nonsense. If she doesn't report you, it'd be through sheer kindness."
"Fat chance of that."
In a small recuperation room in the treatment section of the Hospital, Jesus Pietro Castro
sat up for the first time in four days. His operation had been simple though major: he now had a
new left lung. He had also received a peremptory order from Millard Parlette, who was pure crew.
He was to give up smoking immediately.
He could feel the pull of internal surgical adhesive as he sat up to deal with four days
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of paperwork. The stack of forms his aide was setting on the bedside table looked
disproportionately thick. He sighed, picked up a pen, and went to work.
Fifteen minutes later he wrinkled his nose at some petty complaints -- practical joke --
and started to crumple the paper. He unfolded it and looked again. He asked, "Matthew Leigh
Keller?"
"Convicted of treason," Major Jensen said instantly. "Six years ago. He escaped over the
edge of Alpha Plateau, the void edge. The records say he went into the organ banks."
But he hadn't, Jesus Pietro remembered suddenly. Major Jansen's predecessor had gone
instead. Yet Keller had died..."What's he doing playing practical jokes in colonist medcheck
station?"
After a moment of cogitation Major Jensen said, "He had a nephew."
"Be about fifteen now?"
"Perhaps. I'll check."
Keller's nephew, said Jesus Pietro to himself. I could follow standard practice and send
him a reprimand.
No. Let him think he'd got away with it. Give him room to move around in, and one day he'd
replace the body his uncle stole.
Jesus Pietro smiled. He started to chuckle, but pain stabbed him in the ribs and he had to
desist.
The snout projecting from the ramscoop generator was no longer bright and shiny. Its
surface was a montage of big and little pits, craterlets left by interstellar dust grains pushing
their way through the ramscoop field. There was pitting everywhere, on the fusion motors, on the
hull, even on the cargo pod thirty miles behind. The ship looked pebble-finished.
The damage was all superficial. More than a century had passed since the rugged ramscoop
design had suffered its last major change.
Now, eight and a half years beyond Juno, the ramscoop field died for the second time. The
fusion flames became two actinic blue candles generating a twentieth of a gee. Slowly the cargo
spool rewound until the cargo pod was locked in its socket.
The machine seemed to hesitate...and then its two cylindrical motors rose from the hull on
their praying-mantis legs. For seconds they remained at right angles to the hull. Then, slowly,
the legs contracted. But now the motors pointed forward.
A U-shaped bar swung the cargo pod around until it also pointed forward. Slowly the spool
unwound to its full length.
The ramscoop went on again. The motors roared their full strength, and now they fired
their long streams of fusing hydrogen and fused helium through the ramscoop itself.
Eight point three light-years from Sol, almost directly between Sol and Tau Ceti, lie the
twin red dwarf stars L726-8. Their main distinction is that they are the stars of smallest mass
known to man. Yet they are heavy enough to have collected a faint envelope of gas. The ramrobot
braked heavily as her ramscoop plowed through the fringes of that envelope.
She continued braking. The universe stretched on again; the stars resumed their normal
shapes and colors. Eleven point nine light-years from Sol, one hundred million miles above the
star Tau Ceti, the machine came to an effective stop. Her ramscoop went permanently off. [?] A
variety of senses began searching the sky. They stopped. Locked.
Again she moved. She must reach her destination on the remaining fuel in her in-system
tank.
Tau Ceti is a G8 star, about four hundred degrees cooler than Sol and only 45 percent as
strong as its output of light. The world of Mount Lookitthat orbits sixty-seven million miles
away, a moonless world in a nearly circular path.
The ramrobot moved in on Mount Lookitthat the world. She moved cautiously, for there were
fail-safe factors in her computer program. Her senses probed.
Surface temperature: 600 degrees Fahrenheit, with little variation. Atmosphere: opaque,
dense, poisonous near the surface. Diameter: 7650 miles.
Something came over the horizon. In visible light it seemed an island in a sea of fog. A
topography like a flight of broad, very shallow steps, flat plateaus separated by sheer cliffs.
But Ramrobot #143 sensed more than visible light. There was Earth-like temperature, breathable air
at an Earthlike pressure.
And there were two radio homing signals.
The signals settled it. Ramrobot #143 didn't even have to decide which to answer, for they
were coming from only a quarter of a mile apart. They came, in fact, from Mount Lookitthat's two
slowboats, and the distance between them was bridged by the sprawling structure of the Hospital,
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so that the spacecraft were no longer spacecraft but odd-looking towers in a sort of bungalow-
castle. But the ramrobot didn't know that and didn't need to.
There were signals. Ramrobot #143 started down.
The floor vibrated gently against the soles of his feet, and from all around came muted,
steady thunder. Jesus Pietro Castro strode down the twisting, intermeshing, labyrinthine passages
of the Hospital.
Though he was in a tearing hurry, it never occurred to him to run. He was not in the
gymnasium, after all. Instead he moved like an elephant, which cannot run but can walk fast enough
to trample a running man. His head was down; his stride was as long as his legs could reach. His
eyes looked ominously out from under prominent brow ridges and bushy white eyebrows. His bandit's
moustache and his full head of hair were also white and bushy, forming a startling contrast to his
swarthy skin. Implementation police sprang to attention as he passed, snapping out of his way with
the speed of pedestrians dodging a bus. Was it his rank they feared or his massive, unstoppable
bulk? Perhaps even they didn't know.
At the great stone arch which was the main entrance to the Hospital, Jesus Pietro looked
up to see a sparkling blue-white star overhead. Even as he found it, it winked out. Moments later
the all-pervading thunder died away.
A jeep was waiting for him. If he'd had to call for one, someone would have been very
sorry. He got in, and the Implementation chauffeur took off at once, without waiting for orders.
The Hospital fell behind, with its walls and its surrounding wasteland of defenses.
The ramrobot package was floating down on its parachutes.
Other cars were in flight, erratically shifting course as their drivers tried to guess
where the white dot would come down. It would be near the Hospital of course. The ramrobot would
have aimed for one or another of the ships; and the Hospital had grown like something living, like
a growth of architectural coral, between the two former spacecraft.
But the wind was strong today.
Jesus Pietro frowned. The parachute would be blown over the edge of the cliff. It would
end not on Alpha plateau, where the crew built their homes and where no colonist could be
tolerated, but in the colonist regions beyond.
It did. The cars swooped after it like a flock of geese, following it over the four-
hundred-foot cliff that separated Alpha Plateau from Beta Plateau, where forests of fruit trees
alternated with fields of grain and vegetables and meadows where cattle gazed. There were no homes
on Beta, for the crew did not like colonists so close. But colonists worked there, and often they
played there.
Jesus Pietro picked up his phone. "Orders," he said. "Ramrobot package one-forty-three is
landing in Beta, sector...twenty-two or thereabouts. Send four squads in after us. Do not under
any circumstances interfere with cars or crew, but arrest any colonist you find within half a mile
of the package. Hold them for questioning only. And get out here fast."
The package skimmed over half an acre of citrus trees and came down at the far edge.
It was a grove of lemon and orange trees. One of the later ramrobot packages had carried
the grove's genetically altered ancestors, along with other miracles of terrestrial biological
engineering. These trees would not harbor any parasites at all. They would grow anywhere. They
would not compete for growth with other similarly altered citrus trees. Their fruit remained
precisely ripe for ten months out of the year; and when they dropped the fruit to release the
seeds, it was at staggered intervals, so that at any time five trees out of six held ripe fruit.
In their grim need for sunlight the trees had spread their leaves and branches into an
opaque chain, so that being in the grove was like being in a virgin forest. Mushrooms grew here,
imported unchanged from Earth.
Polly had already picked a couple of dozen. If anyone had asked, she had gone into the
citrus woods to pick mushrooms. By the time her hypothetical questioner arrived, she would have
hidden her camera.
Considering that the tending season was a month away, a remarkable number of colonists
were abroad on Beta Plateau. In woods, on the plains, climbing cliffs for exercise, hundreds of
men and women were on excursions and picnics. An alert Implementation officer would have found
their distribution improbably even. Too many would have been recognized as Sons of Earth.
But the ramrobot package chose to land in Polly's area. She was near the edge of the woods
when she heard the thump. She moved swiftly but quietly in that direction. With her black hair and
darkly tanned skin she was nearly invisible in the forest dusk. She crawled between two tree
trunks, moved behind another, and peered out.
A large cylindrical object lay on the grass beyond. A string of five parachutes writhed
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away before the wind.
So that's what they look like, she thought. It seemed so small to have come so far...but
it must be only a tiny portion of the total ramrobot. The major portion would be on its way home.
But it was the package that counted. The contents of a ramrobot package were never
trivial. For six months, ever since the maser message arrived, the Sons of Earth had been planning
to capture ramrobot capsule #143. At worst, they could ransom it to the crew. At best, it might be
something to fight with.
She almost stepped out of the woods before she saw the cars. At least thirty of them,
landing all around the ramrobot package.
She stayed hidden.
His soldiers would not have recognized Jesus Pietro, but they would have understood. All
but two or three of the men and women around him were purebred crew. Their chauffeurs, including
his own, had prudently stayed in their cars. Jesus Pietro Castro was obsequious, deferential, and
very careful not to joggle an elbow or to step on a toe or even to find himself in somebody's
path.
As a result, his vision was blocked when Millard Parlette, a real descendant of the first
Captain of the Planck, opened the capsule and reached in. He did see what the ancient held up to
the sunlight, the better to examine it.
It was a rectangular solid with rounded edges, and it had been packed in a resilient
material which was now disintegrating. The bottom half was metal. The top was a remote descendant
of glass, hard as the cheaper steel alloys, more transparent than a windowpane. And in the top
half floated something shapeless.
Jesus Pietro felt his mouth fall open. He looked harder. His eyelids squinted, his pupils
dilated. Yes, he knew what this was. It was what the maser message had promised six months ago.
A great gift, and a great danger.
"This must be our most carefully guarded secret," Millard Parlette was saying in a voice
like a squeaky door. "No word must ever leak out. If the colonists saw this, they'd blow it out of
all proportion. We'll have to tell Castro to -- Castro! Where the Mist Demons is Castro?"
"Here I am, sir."
Polly fitted the camera back in its case and began to work her way deeper into the woods.
She'd taken several pictures, and two were telescopic shots of the thing in the glass case. Her
eyes hadn't seen it clearly, but the film would show it in detail.
She went up a tree with the camera about her neck. The leaves and branches tried to push
her back, but she fought through, deeper and deeper into the protecting leaves. When she stopped,
there was hardly a square inch of her that didn't feel the gentle pressure. It was dark as the
caves of Pluto.
In a few minutes the police would be all through here. They would wait only until the crew
was gone before converging on this area. It was not enough that Polly be invisible. There must be
enough leaves to block any infrared light leaving her body.
She could hardly blame herself for losing the capsule. The Sons of Earth had been unable
to translate the maser message, but the crew had. They knew the capsule's worth. But so did Polly -
- now. When the eighteen thousand colonists of Mount Lookitthat knew what was in that capsule...
Night came. The Implementation police had collected all the colonists they could find.
None had seen the capsule after it came down, and all would be released after questioning. Now the
police spread out with infrared detectors. There were several spots of random heat in Polly's
grove, and all were sprayed with sonic stunners. Polly never knew she'd been hit. When she woke
next morning, she was relieved to find herself still in her perch. She waited until high noon,
then moved toward the Beta-Gamma Bridge with her camera hidden under the mushrooms.
CHAPTER 2 -- THE SONS OF EARTH
FROM THE bell tower of Campbelltown came four thunderous ringing notes. The sonic wave-
fronts marched out of town in order, crossing fields and roads, diminishing as they came. They
overran the mine with hardly a pause. But men looked up, lowering their tools.
Matt smiled for the first time that day. Already he could taste cold beer.
The bicycle ride from the mine was all downhill. He reached Cziller's as the place was
beginning to fill up. He ordered a pitcher, as usual, and downed the first glassful without
drawing breath. A kind of bliss settled on him, and he poured his second glass carefully down the
side to avoid a head. He sat sipping it while more and more freed workmen poured into the taproom.
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Tomorrow was Saturday. For two days and three nights he could forget the undependable
little beasties who earned him his living.
Presently an elbow hit him in the neck. He ignored it: a habit his ancestors had brought
from crowded Earth and retained. But the second time the elbow poked him, he had the glass to his
lips. With beer dripping wetly down his neck, be turned to deliver a mild reproof.
"Sorry," said a short dark man with straight black hair. He had a thin, expressionless
face and the air of a tired clerk. Matt looked more closely.
"Hood," he said.
"Yes, my name is Hood. But I don't recognize you." The man put a question in his voice.
Matt grinned, for he liked flamboyant gestures. He wrapped his fingers in his collar and pulled
his shirt open to the waist. "Try again," he invited.
The clerkish type shied back, and then his eyes caught the tiny scar on Matt's chest.
"Keller."
"Right," said Matt, and zipped his shirt up.
"Keller. I'll be d-damned," said Hood. You could tell somehow that he saved such words for
emergencies. "It's been at least seven years. What have you been doing lately?"
"Grab that seat." Hood saw his opportunity and was into the stool next to Matt before the
occupant was fully out of it. "I've been playing nursemaid to mining worms. And you?" Hood's smile
suddenly died. "Er-you don't still hold that scar against me, do you?"
"No!" Matt said with explosive sincerity. "That whole thing was my fault. Anyway it was a
long time ago." It was. Matt had been in the eighth grade that fall day when Hood came into Matt's
classroom to borrow the pencil sharpener. It was the first time he'd ever seen Hood: a boy about
Matt's size, though obviously a year older, an undersized, very nervous upperclassman.
Unfortunately the teacher was out of the room. Hood had marched the full length of the room, not
looking at anyone, sharpened his pencil, and turned to find his escape blocked by a mob of
yelling, bounding eighth graders. To Hood, a new arrival at the school, they must have looked like
a horde of cannibals. And in the forefront was Matt, using a chair in the style of an animal
trainer. Exit Hood, running, wild with terror. He had left the sharpened point of his pencil in
Matt's chest. It was one of the few times Matt had acted the bully. To him, the scar was a badge
of shame.
"Good," said Hood, his relief showing. "So you're a miner now?"
"Right, and regretting it every waking hour. I rue the day Earth sent us those little
snakes."
"It must be better than digging the holes yourself."
"Think so? Are you ready for a lecture?"
"Just a second." Hood drained his glass in a heroic gesture. "Ready."
"A mining worm is five inches long and a quarter inch in diameter, mutated from an
earthworm. Its grinding orifice is rimmed with little diamond teeth. It ingests metal ores for
pleasure, but for food it has to be supplied with blocks of synthetic stuff which is different for
each breed of worm -- and there's a breed for every metal. This makes things complicated. We've
got six breeds out at the mine site, and I've got to see that each breed always has a food block
within reach."
"It doesn't sound too complicated. Can't they find their own food?"
"In theory, sure. In practice, not always. But that's not all. What breaks down the ores
is a bacterium in the worm's stomach. Then the worm drops metal grains[?] around its food block,
and we sweep them up. Now, that bacterium dies very easily. If the bacterium dies, so does the
worm, because there's metal ore blocking his intestines. Then the other worms eat his body to
recover the ore. Only, five times out of six it's the wrong ore."
"The worms can't tell each other apart?"
"Flaming right they can't. They eat the wrong metals, they eat the wrong worms, they eat
the wrong food blocks; and when they do everything right, they still die in ten days. They were
built that way because their teeth wear out so fast. They're supposed to breed like mad to
compensate, but the plain truth is they don't have time when they're on the job. We have to keep
going back to the crew for more."
"So they've got you by the gonads."
"Sure. They charge what they like."
"Could they be putting the wrong chemical cues in some of the food blocks?"
Matt looked up, startled. "I'll bet that's just what they're doing. Or too little of the
right cues; that'd save them money at the same time. They won't let us grow our own, of course.
The -- " Matt swallowed the word. After all, he hadn't seen Hood in years. The crew didn't like
being called names.
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"Time for dinner," said Hood.
They finished the beer and went to the town's one restaurant. Hood wanted to know what had
happened to his old school friends, or schoolmates; Hood had not made friends easily. Matt, who
knew in many cases, obliged. They talked shop, both professions. Hood was teaching school on
Delta. To Matt's surprise, the introverted boy had become an entertaining storyteller. He had kept
his dry, precise tone, and it only made his jokes funnier. They were both fairly good at their
jobs, and both making enough money to live on. There was no real poverty anywhere on the Plateau.
It was not the colonists' money the crew wanted, as Hood pointed out over the meat course.
"I know where there's a party," Hood said over coffee.
"Are we invited?"
"Yes.
Matt had nothing planned for the night, but he wanted reassurance. "Party crashers
welcome?"
"In your case, party crashers solicited. You'll like Harry Kane. He's the host."
"I'm sold."
The sun dipped below the edge of Gamma Plateau as they rode up. They left their bicycles
in back of the house. As they walked around to the front, the sun showed again, a glowing red half-
disk above the eternal sea of cloud beyond the void edge. Harry Kane's house was just forty yards
from the edge. They stopped a moment to watch the sunset fade, then turned toward the house.
It was a great sprawling bungalow, laid out in a rough cross, with the bulging walls
typical of architectural coral. No attempt had been made to disguise its origin. Matt had never
before seen a house which was not painted, but he had to admire the effect. The remnants of the
shaping balloon, which gave all architectural coral buildings their telltale bulge, had been
carefully scraped away. The exposed walls had been polished to a shining pink sheen. Even after
sunset the house glowed softly.
As if it were proud of its thoroughly colonist origin.
Architectural coral was another gift of the ramrobots. A genetic manipulation of ordinary
sea coral, it was the cheapest building material known. The only real cost was in the plastic
balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral's special airborne food. All
colonists lived in buildings of coral. Not many would have built in stone or wood or brick even
were it allowed. But most attempted to make their dwellings look somewhat like those on Alpha
plateau. With paint, with wood and metal and false stone-sidings, with powered sandpaper disks to
flatten the inevitable bulges, they tried to imitate the crew.
In daylight or darkness Harry Kane's house was flagrantly atypical.
The noise hit them as they opened the door. Matt stood still while his ears adjusted to
the noise level -- a survival trait his ancestors had developed when Earth's population numbered
nineteen billion, even as it did that night, eleven point nine light-years away. During the last
four centuries a man of Earth might as well have been stone deaf if he could not carry on a
conversation with a thousand drunks bellowing in his ears. Matt's people had kept some of their
habits too. The great living room was jammed, and the few chairs were largely being ignored.
The room was big, and the bar across from the entrance was enormous. Matt shouted, "Harry
Kane must do a lot of entertaining."
"He does! Come with me; we'll meet him!"
Matt caught snatches of conversation as they pushed their way across the room. The party
hadn't been going long, he gathered, and several people knew practically nobody; but they all had
drinks. They were of all ages, all professions. Hood had spoken true. If a party crasher wasn't
welcome, he'd never know it, because no one would recognize him as one. The walls were like the
outside, a glowing coral-pink. The floor, covered with a hairy-looking wall-to-wall rug of mutated
grass, was flat except at the walls; no doubt it had been sanded flat after the house was finished
and the forming balloon removed. But Matt knew that beneath the rug was not tile or hardwood, but
the ever-present pink coral. They reached the bar, no more jostled than need be. Hood leaned
across the bar as far as he could, which because of his height was not far, and called, "Harry!
Two vodka sodas, and I'd like you to meet -- Dammit, Keller, what's your first name?"
"Matt."
"Matt Keller. We've known each other since grade school."
"Pleasure, Matt," said Harry Kane, and reached over to shake hands. "Glad to see you here,
Jay." Harry was almost Matt's height, and considerably broader, and his wide face was dominated by
a shapeless nose and an even wider grin. He looked exactly like a bartender. He poured the vodka
sodas into glasses in which water had been pre-frozen. He handed them across. "Enjoy yourselves,"
he said, and moved down the bar to serve two newcomers. Hood said, "Harry believes the best way to
meet everyone right away is to play bartender for the first couple of hours. Afterward he turns
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the job over to a volunteer."
"Good thinking," said Matt. "Is your name Jay?"
"Short for Jayhawk. Jayhawk Hood. One of my ancestors was from Kansas. The jayhawk was a
symbolic Kansas bird."
"Crazy, isn't it, that we needed eight years to learn each other's first names?" At that
moment a fragment of the crowd noticed Hood and swept down upon them. Hood barely had time to grin
in answer before they were in the midst of introductions. Matt was relieved. He was sure he had
seen Harry Kane pass something to Jay Hood along with his drink, Manners kept him from asking
questions, but it stuck in his curiosity, and he wanted to forget it. The newcomers were four men
and a woman. As an individual, Matt remembered only the woman. Her name was Laney Mattson. She was
around twenty-six years old, five years older than Matt. In bare feet he would have topped her by
a scant half-inch. But she was wearing double-spikes, and her piled confection of auburn hair made
her even taller. Not merely tall, she was big, with wide pronounced hips and deep breasts behind
an "M" neckline. She looked prettier than she was, Matt thought; she used cosmetics well. And
there was a booming exuberance in her every act, an enjoyment as big as herself. The men were her
age and over, in their late twenties. Any of the four would have looked normal dancing with Laney.
They were huge. Matt retained of them only a composite impression of a resonant voice and an
enveloping handclasp and a great handsome face smiling down from the pink ceiling. Yet he liked
them all. He just couldn't tell them apart. Hood surprised him again. Talking along in his dry
voice, keeping it raised to an audible bellow, not straining his neck to look anyone in the face,
Hood somehow kept control of the conversation. It was he who guided the talk to school days. One
of the tall men was moved to speak of a simple trick he'd used to rewire his school's teaching tri-
vee, so that for one day he and his classmates, had watched their lessons both upside down and
inside out. Matt found himself telling of the specimen bottle of apple juice he'd sneaked into the
Gamma medcheck station, and what he did with it. Someone who'd been listening politely from the
edge of the circle mentioned that once he'd stolen a car from a picnicking crew family on Beta
Plateau. He'd set the autopilot to circle a constant thousand feet beyond the void edge. It had
stayed up for five days before dropping into the mist, with scores of Implementation police
watching. Matt watched Jay Hood and Laney as they talked. Laney had a long arm draped over Hood's
shoulders, and the top of his head reached just to her chin. They were both talking at once,
trampling the tail ends of each other's sentences, racing pell-mell through memories and anecdotes
and jokes they'd been saving, sharing them with the group but talking for each other. It wasn't
love, Matt decided, though it was like love. It was an immense satisfaction Hood and Laney felt at
knowing each other. Satisfaction and pride. It made Matt feel lonely. Gradually Matt became aware
that Laney was wearing a hearing aid. It was so small and so cunningly colored as to be nearly
invisible within her ear. Truthfully, Matt couldn't swear that it was there. If Laney needed a
hearing aid, it was too bad she couldn't hide it better. For centuries more civilized peoples had
been wearing specks of laminated plastic buried in the skin above the mastoid bone. Such things
did not exist on Mount Lookitthat. A crew, now, would have had his ears replaced from the organ
banks...Glasses went empty, and one of Laney's big escorts came back with replacements. The little
group grew and shrank and split into other groups with the eternal capriciousness of the cocktail
party. For a moment Matt and Jay Hood were left standing alone in a forest of backs and elbows.
Hood said, "Want to meet a beautiful girl?"
"Always." Hood turned to lead the way, and Matt caught a flash of the same odd coloring in
his ear that he had noticed in Laney's. Since when had Hood become hard of hearing? It might have
been imagination, aided by vodka sodas. For one thing, the tiny instruments seemed too deeply
embedded to be removed. But an item that size could have been just what Harry Kane passed to Jay
Hood along with his drink.
"It's the easiest way to conduct a raid, sir." Jesus Pietro sat deferentially forward in
his chair, hands folded on his desk, the very image of the highly intelligent man dedicated solely
to his work. "We know that members always leave the Kane house by twos and fours. We'll pick them
up outside the house. If they stop coming out, we'll know they've caught on. Then we'll go into
the house itself."
Behind his mask of deference, Jesus Pietro was annoyed. For the first time in four years
he had planned a major raid on the Sons of Earth, and Millard Parlette had picked that night to
visit the Hospital. Why tonight? He came only once in two months, thank the Mist Demons. A visit
from a crew always upset Jesus Pietro's men.
At least Parlette had come to him. Once Parlette had summoned him to his own house, and
that had been bad. Here, Jesus Pietro was in his element. His office was practically an extension
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of his personality. The desk had the shape of a boomerang, enclosing him in an obtuse angle for
more available working space. He had three guests' chairs of varying degrees of comfort, for crew
and Hospital personnel and colonist. The office was big and square, but there was a slight curve
to the back wall. Where the other walls were cream colored, easy on the eye, the back wall was
smoothly polished dark metal.
It was part of the outer hull of the Planck. Jesus Pietro's office was right up against
the source of half the spiritual strength of Mount Lookitthat, and half the electrical power too:
the ship that had brought men to this world. Sitting at his desk, Jesus Pietro felt the power at
his back.
"Our only problem," he continued smoothly, "is that not all of Kane's guests are involved
in the conspiracy. At least half will be deadheads invited for camouflage. Telling them apart will
take time."
"I see that," said the old man. His voice squeaked. He wore the tall, skeletal look of a
Don Quixote, but his eyes held no madness. They were sane and alert. For nearly two hundred years
the Hospital had kept his body, brain, and mind functioning. Probably even he did not know how
much of him had been borrowed from colonists convicted of major crimes. "Why tonight?" he asked.
"Why not, sir?" Jesus Pietro saw what he was driving at, and his mind raced. Millard
Parlette was nobody's fool. The ancient was one of the few crew willing to accept any kind of
responsibility. Most of the thirty thousand crew on Mount Lookitthat preferred to devise ever more
complex forms of playing: sports; styles of dress that changed according to half-a-dozen complex,
fluctuating sets of rules; rigid and ridiculous social forms. Parlette preferred to work --
sometimes. He had chosen to rule the Hospital. He was competent and quick; though he appeared
rarely, be always seemed to know what was happening; and he was difficult to lie to. Now he said,
"Yesterday the ramrobot capsule. Last night your men were scouring the area for spies. Tonight you
plan a major raid for the first time in four years. Do you think someone slipped through your
fingers?"
"No, sir!" But that would not satisfy Parlette. "But in this instance I can afford to
cover my bet even when it's a sure thing. If a colonist had news of the ramrobot package, he'd be
at Kane's place tonight though demons bar the way."
"I don't approve of gambling," said Parlette. Jesus Pietro uneasily searched his mind for
a suitable answer. "And you have chosen not to gamble. Very good, Castro. Now. What has been done
with the ramrobot capsule?"
"I think the organ-bank people have it unpacked, sir. And the...contents stored. Would you
like to see?"
"Yes.
Jesus Pietro Castro, Head of Implementation, the only armed authority on an entire world,
rose hastily to his feet to act as guide. If they hurried, he might get away in time to supervise
the raid. But there was no polite way to make a crew hurry.
Hood had spoken true. Polly Tournquist was beautiful. She was also small and dark and
quiet, and Matt definitely wanted to know her better. Polly had long, soft hair the color of a
starless night, direct brown eyes, and a smile that came through even when she was trying to look
serious. She looked like someone with a secret, Matt thought. She didn't talk; she listened.
"Para-psychological abilities are not a myth," Hood was insisting. "When the Planck left
Earth, there were all kinds of psionic devices for amplifying them. Telepathy had gotten almost
dependable. They -- "
"What's 'almost dependable'?"
"Dependable enough so there were specially trained people to read dolphin minds. Enough so
telepaths were called as expert witnesses in murder trials. Enough -- "
"All right, all right," said Matt. It was the first time tonight that he had seen Hood
worked up. Matt gathered from the attitudes of the others that Hood rode this hobbyhorse often. He
asked, "Where are they now, these witches of yours?"
"They aren't witches! Look, Kell -- Look, Matt. Every one of those psi powers was tied up
a little bit with telepathy. They proved that. Now, do you know how they tested our ancestors
before they sent them into space for a thirty-year one-way trip?" Someone played straight man.
"They had to orbit Earth for a while."
"Yes. Four candidates in a ferryboat, orbiting for one month. No telepath could take
that." Polly Tournquist was following the debate like a spectator at a tennis match, swinging her
shoulders to face whoever was speaking. Her grin widened; her hair swung gently, hypnotically; she
was altogether a pleasure to watch. She knew Matt was watching. Occasionally her eyes would flick
toward him as if inviting him to share the joke.
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file:///F|/rah/Larry%20Niven/Niven,%20Larry%20-%20A%20Gift%20From%20Earth.txtAGIFTFROMEARTH--LarryNiven(Version2002.03.17)CHAPTER1--THERAMROBOTARAMROBOThadbeenthefirsttoseeMountLookitthat.Ramrobotshadbeenfirstvisitorstoallthesettledworlds.Theinterstellarramscooprobots,withanunrestrictedfuelsupply...

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