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

locusts. They swarm in flare time and eat everything in sight. Terran plants poison them, of course, but they wreck the crops first.” He let the leaves close. By now there was white fluff everywhere, like a low-lying fog patch moving east on the wind. “What else can I show you? Keep your eyes on the balloons. And are there cameras in that thing?”

Rachel laughed and touched the metal helmet. Sometimes she could forget she was wearing it; but her neck was thicker, more muscular than the average woman’s. “Cameras? In a sense. My eyes are cameras for the memory tape.”

The balloons rested just where they had been. The artificial flare hadn’t affected them…wait, they weren’t flaccid anymore. They were swollen, taut, straining at the rootlets that held them to the bottom of the pond. Suddenly they rose, all at once, still linked by spiderweb. Beautiful.

“They use the UV for energy to make hydrogen,” said Grace. “UV wouldn’t bother them anyway; they have to take more of it at high altitude.”

“I’ve been told…are they intelligent?”

“Balloons? No!” Grace actually snorted. “They’re no brighter than so much seaweed…but they own the planet. We’ve sent probes to the Hot End, you know. We saw balloons all the way. And we’ve seen them as far coldward…west, you’d say…as far west as the Icy Sea. We haven’t gone beyond the rim of ice yet.”

“But you’ve been on Medea fifty years?”

“And just getting started,” Lightning said. He turned off the farming lamp.

The world was plunged into red darkness.

The fluffy white grass was gone, leaving bare soil aswarm with black specks. Gradually the hairy trees loosened, fluffed out. Soil churned near the dead tree and released the tree feeder.

Grace picked up a few of the “locusts.” They were not bigger than termites. Held close to the eye they each showed a translucent bubble on its back. “They can’t swarm,” Grace said with satisfaction. “Our flare didn’t last long enough. They couldn’t make enough hydrogen.”

“Some did,” Lightning said. There were black specks on the wind; not many.

“Always something new,” said Grace.

Tractor probe Junior was moving into the Hot End. Ahead was the vast desert, hotter than boiling water, where Argo stood always at noon. Already the strange dry plants were losing their grip, leaving bare rock and dust. At the final shore of the Ring Sea the waves were sudsy with salt in solution, and the shore was glittering white. The hot steamy wind blew inland, to heatward, and then upward, carrying a freight of balloons.

The air was full of multicolored dots, all going up into the stratosphere. At the upper reach of the probe’s vision some of the frailer balloons were popping, but the thin membranous corpses still fluttered toward heaven.

Rachel shifted carefully in her chair. She caught Bronze Legs Miller watching her from a nearby table. Her answering grin was rueful.

She had not finished the hike. Grace and Lightning had been setting up camp when Bronze Legs Miller came riding down the hill. Rachel had grasped that golden opportunity. She had returned to Touchdown City riding behind Bronze Legs on the howler’s saddle. After a night of sleep she still ached in every muscle.

“Isn’t it a gorgeous sight?” Mayor Curly Jackson wasn’t eating. He watched avidly, with his furry chin in his hands and his elbows on the great oaken table—the dignitaries’ table the Medeans were so proud of; it had taken forty years to grow the tree.

Medea had changed its people. Even the insides of buildings were different from those of other worlds. The communal dining hall was a great dome lit by a single lamp at its zenith. It was bright, and it cast sharp shadows. As if the early colonists, daunted by the continual light show—the flare suns, the bluish farming lamps, the red-hot storms moving across Argo—had given themselves a single sun indoors. But it was a wider, cooler sun, giving yellower light than a rammer was used to.

One great curve of the wall was a holograph projection screen. The tractor probe was tracing the path the expedition would follow and broadcasting what it saw. Now it moved over hills of white sea salt. The picture staggered and lurched with the probe’s motion, and wavered with rising air currents.

Captain Janice Borg, staring avidly with a forkful of curry halfway to her mouth, jumped as Mayor Curly lightly punched her shoulder. The Mayor was blue eyes and a lump of nose poking through a carefully tended wealth of blond hair and beard. He was darkened by farming lamps. Not only did he supervise the farms; he farmed. “See it, Captain? That’s why the Ring Sea is mostly fresh water.”

Captain Borg’s hair was auburn going gray. She was handsome rather than pretty. Her voice of command had the force of a bullwhip; one obeyed by reflex. Her off-duty voice was a soft, dreamy contralto. “Right. Right. The seawater moves always to the Hot End. It starts as glaciers, doesn’t it? They break off in the Icy Sea and float heatward. Any salt goes that way too. In the Hot End the water boils away…and you get some tides, don’t you? Argo wobbles a little?”

“Well, it’s Medea that wobbles a little, but—”

“Right, so the seawater spills off into the salt flats at high tide and boils away there. And the vapor goes back to the glaciers along the Jet Stream.” She turned suddenly to Rachel and barked, “You getting all this?”

Rachel nodded, hiding a smile. More than two hundred years had passed on the settled worlds while Captain Borg cruised the trade circuit. She didn’t really understand memory tapes. They were too recent.

Rachel looked about the communal dining hall and was conscious as always of the vast unseen audience looking through her eyes, listening through her ears, feeling the dwindling aches of a stiff hike, tasting blazing hot Medean curry through her mouth. It was all going into the memory tape, with no effort on her part.

Curly said, “We picked a good site for the