Limits by Larry Niven (tohfa e dulha read online TXT) 📗

FLARE TIME

If the starship’s arrival had done nothing else for Bronze Legs, this was enough: he was seeing the sky again.

For this past week the rammers had roamed through Touchdown City. The fifty-year-old colony was still small; everybody knew everybody. It was hard to get used to, this influx of oddly-accented strangers stumbling about with vacuous smiles and eyes wide with surprise and pleasure. Even the Medean humans were catching the habit. In his thirty-four earthyears of life Calvin “Bronze Legs” Miller had explored fifteen thousand square miles of the infinite variety that was Medea. Strange, that it took people from another world to make him look up.

Here was a pretty picture: sunset over the wild lands north of the colony. Peaks to the south were limned in bluish-white from the farmlands beyond, from the lamps that kept terrestrial plants growing. Everything else was red, infinite shades of red. To heatward a level horizon cut the great disk of Argo in half. You could feel the heat on your cheek, and watch sullenly glowing storms move in bands across the face of the red-hot superjovian world. To coldward, Phrixus and Helle were two glaring pink dots following each other down to the ridge. The Jet Stream stretched straight across the blue sky, a pinkish-white band of cloud from horizon to horizon. Thirty or forty multicolored balloons, linked in a cluster, were settling to graze a scum-covered rain pool in the valley below him.

Blue-tinged shadows pooled in the valley, and three human shapes moved through the red and orange vegetation. Bronze Legs recognized Lightning Harness and Grace Carpenter even at this distance. The third had a slightly hunchbacked look, and a metal headdress gleamed in her straight black hair. That would be Rachel Subramaniam’s memory-recording equipment. Her head kept snapping left and right, ever eager for new sights.

Bronze Legs grinned. He tried to imagine how this must look to a rammer, an offworlder; he succeeded only in remembering himself as a child. All this strangeness; all this red.

He turned the howler and continued uphill.

At the crest of the ridge a fux waited for him, the pinkish-white suns behind her. She was a black silhouette, four thin legs and two thin arms, a pointed face and a narrow torso bent in an L: a lean, mean centaur-shape.

As he topped the ridge and let the howler settle on its air cushion, the fux backed away several meters. Bronze Legs wondered why, then guessed the answer. It wasn’t the smell of him. Fuxes liked that. She was putting the ridge between herself and the white glare from Touchdown City’s farming lamps. She said, “I am Long Nose.”

“Bronze Legs. I meet you on purpose.”

“I meet you on purpose. How goes your foray to heatward?”

“We start tomorrow at dawn.”

“You postponed it once before.” She was accusing him. The fuxes were compulsive about punctuality; an odd trait in a Bronze Age culture. Like certain traits in humans, it probably tied into their sex lives. Timing could be terribly important when a fux was giving birth.

“The ship from the stars came,” he said. “We waited. We want to take one of the star people along, and the delay lets us recheck the vehicles.”

Long Nose was black with dull dark-red markings. She bore a longbow over one shoulder and a quiver and shovel slung over her lower back. Her snout was sharply pointed, but not abnormally so, for a fux. She might be named for keen curiosity or a keen sense of smell. She said, “I learn that your purpose is more than exploration, but not even the post-males can tell what it is.”

“Power,” said Bronze Legs. The harnessed lightning that makes our machines go comes as light from Argo. In the Hot End the clouds will never hide Argo from our sight. Our lightning makers can run without rest.”

“Go north instead,” said Long Nose. “You will find it safer and cooler too. Storms run constantly in the north; I have been there. Free lightning for your use.”

If she’d been talking to Lightning Harness she would have suffered through an hour’s lecture. How the heat exchangers ran on the flood of infrared light from Argo, focussed by mirrors. How Argo stayed always in the same place in Medea’s sky, so that mirrors could be mounted on a hillside facing to heatward, and never moved again. But the colony was growing, and Medea’s constant storms constantly blocked the mirrors…Bronze Legs only grinned at her. “Why don’t we just do it our way? Who-all is coming?”

“Only six of us. Dark Wind’s children did not emerge in time. Deadeye will desert us early; she will give birth in a day and must stay to guard the…Is ‘nest’ the word you use?”

“Right.” Of all the words that might describe the fuxes’ way of giving birth, “nest” carried the least unpleasant connotations.

“So, she will be guarding her ‘nest’ when we return. She will be male then. Sniffer intends to become pregnant tonight; she will leave us further on, and be there to help us on our return, if we need help.”

“Good.”

“We take a post-male, Harvester, and another six-leg female, Broad Flanks, who can carry him some of the time. Gimpy wants to come. Will she slow us?”

Bronze Legs laughed. He knew Gimpy; a four-leg female as old as some post-males, who had lost her right foreleg to the viciously fast Medean monster humans called a B-70. Gimpy was fairly agile, considering. “She could crawl on her belly for all we care. It’s the crawlers that’ll slow us, and the power plant. We’re moving a lot of machinery: the prefab power plant, housing for technicians, sensing tools, digging tools—”

“What tools should we take?”

“Go armed. You won’t need water bags; we’ll make our own water. We made you some parasols made from mirror-cloth. They’ll help you stand the heat, for awhile. When it gets really hot you’ll have to ride in the crawlers.”

“We will meet you at the crawling machines,