Larry Niven - Tales of Known Space.pdf

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Introduction:
My Universe and Welcome to It!
TWELVE YEARS AGO I started writing. Eleven years ago I started selling what I wrote. And eleven
years ago I started a future history-the history of Known Space.
The Known Space Series now spans a thousand years of future history, with data on conditions up
to a billion and a half years in the past. Most of the stories take place either in Human Space
(the human-colonized worlds and the space between, a bubble sixty light-years across by Louis Wu's
time) or in Known Space (the much larger bubble of space explored by Human-built ships but
controlled by other species); but arms of exploration reach 200 light-years up along galactic
north, and 33,000 light-years to the galactic core. The series now includes four novels (World of
Ptavvs, Protector, A Gift from Earth, Ringworld) plus the stories in the collection Neutron Star,
plus the book now in your hands, plus one other to be published in February of 1976 to be called
The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton.
Future histories tend to be chaotic. They grow from a common base, from individual stories with
common assumptions; but each story must--to be fair to readers stand by itself. The future
history chronicled in the Known Space Series is as chaotic as real history. Even the styles vary
in these stories, because my writing skills have evolved over eleven years of real time.
But this is the book with the crib sheets. The stories Published here are in chronological
order. I've scattered supplementary notes between them, to explain what is going on between and
around the individual novels and stories, in a region small on the galactic scale but huge in
human experience.
A few general notes are in order here:
1. The tales of Gil the ARM are missing. This book became so big that we had to cut these three
science- fiction/detective stories--60,000 words worth-to make room. Gil's career hits its high
point around 2121 AD, between World of Ptavvs and Protector. We'll be publishing these stories in
one volume sometime next year.
2. I dithered over including "The Coldest Place" and "Eye of an Octopus." They were my first and
sixth story sales, respectively; and they aren't that good. Furthermore, "The Coldest Place" was
obsolete before it ever reached print. But these two stories are part of the fabric of the
series, so I've included them.
3. You may feel that Mars itself is changing as you read through the book. Right you are.
"Eye of an Octopus" is set on pre-Mariner Mars. Mariner IV's photographs of the craters on Mars
sparked "How the Heroes Die." Sometime later, an article in Analog shaped the, new view of the
planet in "At the Bottom of a Hole." If the space probes keep redesigning our planets, what can we
do but write new stories?
4. I was sore tempted to rewrite some of the older, clumsier stories. But how would I have known
where to stop? You would then have been reading updated stories with the facts changed around.
I've assumed that that isn't what you're after. I hope I'm right.
5. The Tales of Known Space cluster around five eras.
First there is the near future, the exploration of interplanetary space during the next quarter-
century.
There is the era of Lucas Garner and Gil "the ARM' Hamilton: 2106-2125 AD. Interplanetary
civilization has loosened its ties with Earth, has taken on a character of its own. Other stellar
systems are being explored and settled. The organ bank problem is at its sociological worst on
Earth. The existence of nonhuman intelligence has become obtrusively plan; humanity must adjust.
There is an intermediate era centering around 2340 AD. In Sol System it is a period of peace
and prosperity. On colony worlds like Plateau times are turbulent. At the edge of Sol System, a
creature that used to be Jack Brennan fights a lone war. The era of peace begins with the subtle
interventions of the Brennan-monster (see Protector); it ends in contact with the Kzinti Empire.
The fourth period, following the Man-Kzin Wars, covers part of the twenty-sixth century AD. It
is a time of easy tourism and interspecies trade, in which the human species neither rules nor is
ruled. New planets have been settled, some of which were wrested from the Kzinti Empire during
the wars.
The fifth period resembles the fourth. Little has changed in two hundred years, at least on the
surface. The thruster drive has replaced the less efficient fusion drives; a new species has
joined the community of worlds. But there is one fundamental change. The Teela Brown gene--the
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"ultimate psychic power"--is spreading through humanity. The teelas have been bred for luck.
A fundamental change in human nature--and the teelas are that--makes life difficult for a writer.
The period following Ringworld might be pleasant to live in, but it is short of interesting
disasters. Only one story survives from this period; "Safe at Any Speed:" a kind of
advertisement. There will be no others.
There is something about future histories, and Known Space in particular, that gets to people.
They start worrying about the facts, the mathematics, the chronology. They work out elaborate
charts or they program their computers for close-approach orbits around point-masses. They send
me maps of Human, Kzinti, and Kdatlyno space, dynamic analyses of the Ringworld, ten-thousand-word
plot outlines for the novel that will wrap it all up into a bundle, and treatises on The Grog
Problem. To all of you who have thus entertained me and stroked my ego, thanks.
Thanks are due to Tim Kyger for his aid in compiling the Bibliography, and to Spike MacPhee and
Jerry Boyajian for their assistance with the Timeline. They belong to the above group and they
saved me a lot of research.
-Larry Niven
Los Angeles, California
January, 1975
The Coldest Place
IN THE COLDEST place in the solar system, I hesitated outside the ship for a moment. It was too
dark out there. I fought an urge to stay close by the ship, by the comfortable ungainly bulk of
warm metal which held the warm bright Earth inside it.
"See anything?" asked Eric.
"No, of course not. It's too hot here anyway, what with heat radiation from the ship. You
remember the way they scattered away from the probe."
"Yeah. Look, you want me to hold your hand or something? Go."
I sighed and started off, with the heavy collector bouncing gently on my shoulder. I bounced
too. The spikes on my boots kept me from sliding.
I walked up the side of the wide, shallow crater the ship had created by vaporizing the layered
air all the way down to the water ice level. Crags rose about me, masses of frozen gas with
smooth, rounded edges. They gleamed soft white where the light from my headlamp touched them.
Elsewhere all was as black as eternity. Brilliant stars shone above the soft crags; but the light
made no impression on the black land. The ship got smaller and darker and disappeared.
There was supposed to be life here. Nobody had even tried to guess what it might be like. Two
years ago the Messenger VI probe had moved into close orbit about the planet and then landed about
here, partly to find out if the cap of frozen gasses might be inflammable. In the field of view
of the camera during the landing, things like shadows had wriggled across the, snow and out of the
light thrown by the probe. The films had shown it beautifully. Naturally some wise ones had
suggested that they were only shadows.
I'd seen the films. I knew better. There was life.
Something alive, that hated light Something out there in the dark. Something huge... "Eric, you
there?"
"Where would I go?" he mocked me.
"Well," said I, "if I watched every word I spoke I'd never get anything said." All the same, I
had been tactless. Eric had had a bad accident once, very bad. He wouldn't be going anywhere
unless the ship went along.
"Touché," said Eric.
"Are you getting much heat leakage from your suit?"
"Very little." In fact, the frozen air didn't even melt under the pressure of my boots.
"They might be avoiding even that little. Or they might be afraid of your light." He knew I
hadn't seen anything; he was looking through a peeper in the top of my helmet.
"Okay, I'll climb that mountain and turn it off for awhile."
I swung my head so he could see the mound I meant, then started up it. It was good exercise, and
no strain in the low gravity. I could jump almost as high as on the Moon, without fear of a
rock's edge tearing my suit. It was all packed snow, with vacuum between the flakes.
My imagination started working again when I reached the top. There was black all around; the
world was black with cold. I turned off the light and the world disappeared.
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I pushed a trigger on the side of my helmet and my helmet put the stem of a pipe in my mouth.
The air renewer sucked air-and smoke down past my chin. They make wonderful suits nowadays. I sat
and smoked, waiting, shivering with the knowledge of the cold. Finally I realized I was sweating.
The suit was almost too well insulated.
Our ion drive section came over the horizon, a brilliant star moving very fast, and disappeared
as it hit the planet's shadow. Time was passing. The charge, in my pipe burned out and I dumped
it.
"Try the light," said Eric.
I got up and turned the headlamp on high. The light spread for a mile around; a white fairy
landscape sprang to life, a winter wonderland doubled in spades. I did a slow pirouette, looking,
looking... and saw it.
Even this close it looked like a shadow. It also looked like a very flat, monstrously large
amoeba, or like a pool of oil running across the ice. Uphill it ran, flowing slowly and painfully
up the side of a nitrogen mountain, trying desperately to escape the searing light of my lamp.
"The collector!" Eric demanded. I lifted the collector above my head and aimed it like a
telescope at the fleeing enigma, so that Eric could find it in the collectors peeper. The
collector spat fire at both ends and jumped up and away. Eric was controlling it now.
After a moment I asked, "Should I come back?"
"Certainly not. Stay there. I can't bring the collector back to the ship! You'll have to wait
and carry it back with you.
The pool-shadow slid over the edge of the hill. The flame of the collector's rocket went after
it, flying high, growing smaller. It dipped below the ridge. A moment later I heard Eric mutter,
"Got it." The bright flame reappeared, rising fast, then curved toward me.
When the thing was hovering near me on two lateral rockets I picked it up by the tail and carried
it home.
"No, no trouble," said Eric.
"I just used the scoop to nip a piece out of his flank, if, so I may speak. I got about ten cubic
centimeters of strange flesh."
"Good," said I. Carrying the collector carefully in one hand, I went up the landing leg to the
airlock. Eric let me in.
I peeled off my frosting suit in the blessed artificial light of ship's day.
"Okay," said Eric.
"Take it up to the lab. And don't touch it."
Eric can be a hell of an annoying character. I've got a brain," I snarled, "even if you can't
see it." So can I There was a ringing silence while we each tried to dream up an apology. Eric
got there first.
"Sorry," he said.
"Me too." I hauled the collector off to the lab on a cart.
He guided me when I got there.
"Put the whole package in that opening. Jaws first. No, don't close it yet. Turn the thing until
these lines match the lines on the collector. Okay. Push it in a little. Now close the door.
Okay, Howie, I'll take it from there..." There were chugging sounds from behind the little door.
"Have to wait till the lab's cool enough. Go get some coffee," said Eric.
"I'd better check your maintenance."
"Okay, good. Go oil my prosthetic aids."
"Prosthetic aids"--that was a hot one. I'd thought it up myself. I pushed the coffee button so
it would be ready when I was through, then opened the big door in the forward wall of the cabin.
Eric looked much like an electrical network, except for the gray mass at the top which was his
brain. In all directions from his spinal cord and brain, connected at the walls of the
intricately shaped glass-and-soft-plastic vessel which housed him, Eric's nerves reached out to
master the ship. The instruments which mastered Eric--but he was sensitive about having it put
that way--were banked along both sides of the closet. The blood pump pumped rhythmically, seventy
beats a minute.
"How do I look?" Eric asked.
"Beautiful. Are you looking for flattery?"
"Jackass! Am I still alive?"
"The instruments think so. But I'd better lower your fluid temperature a fraction." I did. Ever
since we'd landed I'd had a tendency to keep temperatures too high.
"Everything else looks okay. Except your food tank is getting low."
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"Well, it'll last the trip."
"Yeah.
'Scuse me. Eric, coffees ready." I went and got it. The only thing I really worry about is his
"liver." It's too complicated. It could break down too easily. If it stopped making blood sugar
Eric would be dead.
If Eric dies I die, because Eric is the ship. If I die Eric dies, insane, because he can't sleep
unless I set his prosthetic aids.
I was finishing my coffee when Eric yelled.
"Hey!"
"What's wrong?" I was ready to run in any direction.
"It's only helium!"
He was astonished and indignant. I relaxed.
"I get it now, Howie. Helium II. That's all our monsters are. Nuts."
Helium II, the superfluid that flows uphill.
"Nuts doubled. Hold everything, Eric. Don't throw away your samples. Check them for
contaminants."
"For what?"
"Contaminants. My body is hydrogen oxide with contaminants. If the contaminants in the helium
are complex enough it might be alive."
"There are plenty of other substances," said Eric, "but I can't analyze them well enough. We'll
have to rush this stuff back to Earth while our freezers can keep it cool."
I got up.
"Take, off right now?"
"Yes, I guess so. We could use another sample, but we're just as likely to wait here while this
one deteriorates."
"Okay, I'm strapping down now. Eric?"
"Yeah? Takeoff in fifteen minutes, we have to wait for the ion-drive section. You can get up."
"No, I'll wait. Eric, I hope it isn't alive. I'd rather it was just helium II acting like it's
supposed to act."
"Why? Don't you want to be famous, like me?"
"Oh, sure, but I hate to think of life out there. It's just too alien. Too cold. Even on Pluto
you could not make life out of helium II."
"It could be migrant, moving to stay on the night side of the pre-dawn crescent. Pluto's day is
long enough for that. You're right, though; it doesn't get colder than this even between the
stars. Luckily I don't have much imagination."
Twenty minutes later we took off. Beneath us all was darkness and only Eric, hooked into the
radar, could see the ice dome contracting until all of it was visible: the vast layered ice cap
that covers the coldest spot in the solar system, where midnight crosses the equator on the black
back of Mercury.
---------------------------------------------------
This, my first story, became obsolete before it was printed. Mercury does have an atmosphere,
and rotates once for every two of its years.
The sequel which follows fared somewhat better.
LN ---------------------------------------------------
BECALMED IN HELL
I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and dry and cool, almost too
cool, like a modern office building in the dead of the summer. Beyond the two small windows it
was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure
equivalent to three hundred feet beneath the ocean.
"There goes a fish," I said, just to break the monotony.
"So how's it cooked?"
"Can't tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried
jellyfish." Eric sighed noisily.
"Do I have to?"
"You have to. Only way you'll see anything worthwhile in this--this--" Soup? Fog? Boiling maple
syrup?
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"Searing black calm."
"Right."
"Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news of the Mariner II probe.
An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light
or any breath of wind from ever reaching the surface."
I shivered.
"What's the outside temperature now?"
"You'd rather not know. You've always had too much imagination, Howie."
"I can take it, Doc."
"Six hundred and twelve degrees."
"I can't take it, Doc!"
This was Venus, Planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of three decades ago.
Our ship hung below the Earth to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless
in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft
as long as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric's job, to regulate the
tank's pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples
after each ten mile drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter
intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely
confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world in the solar system.
"Temperature just went up to six-thirteen," said Eric.
"Look, are you through hitching?"
"For the moment."
"Good. Strap down. We're taking off."
"Oh frabjous day!" I started untangling the crash webbing over my couch.
"We've done everything we came to do. Haven't we?"
"Am I arguing? Look, I'm strapped down."
"Yeah."
I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it myself. We'd spent four months
getting to Venus in order to spend a week circling her and less than two days in her upper
atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible waste of time.
But he was taking too long.
"What's the trouble, Eric?"
"You'd rather not know."
He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman monotone; he wasn't making the extra effort to
get human expression out of his "prosthetic" vocal apparatus. Only a severe shock would affect
him that way.
"I can take it," I said.
"Okay. I can't feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like I've just had a spinal
anesthetic."
The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it.
"See if you can send motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams by guess-and-hope even
if you can't feel them."
"Okay." One split second later, "They don't. Nothing happens. Good thinking though."
I tried to think of something to say while I untied myself from the couch. What came out was,
"It's been a pleasure knowing you, Eric. I've liked being half of this team, and I still do."
"Get maudlin later. Right now, start checking my attachments. Carefully."
I swallowed my comments and went to open the access door in the cabin's forward wall. The floor
swayed ever so gently beneath my feet.
Beyond the four-foot-square access door was Eric. Eric's central nervous system, with the brain
perched at the top and the spinal cord coiled in a loose spiral to fit more compactly into the
transparent glass-and-sponge-plastic housing. Hundreds of wires from all over the ship led to the
glass walls, where they were joined to selected nerves which spread like an electrical network
from the central coil of nervous tissue and fatty protective membrane.
Space leaves no cripples; and don't call Eric a cripple, because he doesn't like it. In a way
he's the ideal spaceman. His life support system weighs only half of what mine does, and takes up
a twelfth as much room. But his other prosthetic aids take up most of the ship. The ramjets were
hooked into the last pair of nerve trunks, the nerves which once moved his legs, and dozens of
finer nerves in those trunks sensed and regulated fuel feed, ram temperature, differential
acceleration, intake aperture dilation, and spark pulse. These connections were intact. I checked
them four different ways without finding the slightest reason why they shouldn't be working.
"Test the others," said Eric.
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