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

The third and largest vehicle was the power plant itself, fully assembled and tested, mounted on the ground-effect systems from two crawlers and with a crawler’s control cabin welded on in front. It trailed a raft: yet another ground effect system covered by a padded platform with handrails. The fuxes would be riding that.

All vehicles were loaded and boarded well ahead of time. Windstorm Wolheim moved among them, ticking off lists in her head and checking them against what she could see. The tall, leggy redhead was a chronic worrier.

Phrixus (or maybe Helle) was suddenly there, a hot pink point near Argo. The fuxes picked up their spears and trotted off northward. Bronze Legs lifted his howler on its air cushion and followed. Behind him the three bigger vehicles whispered into action, and Windstorm ran for her howler.

Rachel was in the passenger seat of the lead crawler, looking out through the great bubble windscreen. In the Hot End the crawlers would house the power plant engineers. Now they were packed with equipment. Square kilometers of thin silvered plastic sheet, and knock-down frames to hold it all, would become solar mirrors. Black plastic and more frames would become the radiator fins, mounted on the back of that hill in the Hot End. There were spools of superconducting cable and flywheels for power storage. Rachel kept bumping her elbow on the corner of a crate.

The pinkish daylight was dimming, graying, as the Jet Stream spread to engulf the sky. The fuxes were far ahead, keeping no obvious formation. In this light they seemed a convocation of mythical monsters: centaurs, eight-limbed dragons, a misshapen dwarf. The dwarf was oddest of all. Rachel had seen him close: A nasty caricature of a man, with a foxy face, huge buttocks, exaggerated male organs, and (the anomaly) a tail longer than he was tall. Yet Harvester was solemn and slow-moving, and he seemed to have the respect of fuxes and humans both.

The vehicles whispered along at thirty kilometers an hour, uphill through orange grass, swerving around hairy trees. A fine drizzle began. Lightning Harness turned on the wipers.

Rachel asked, “Isn’t this where we were a few days back?”

“Medean yesterday. That’s right,” said Grace.

“Hard to tell. We’re going north, aren’t we? Why not straight east?”

“It’s partly for our benefit, dear. We’ll be in the habitable domains longer. We’ll see more variety; we’ll both learn more. When we swing around to heatward we’ll be nearer the north pole. It won’t get hot so fast.”

“Good.”

Bronze Legs and a woman Rachel didn’t know flanked them on the one-seater ground-effect vehicles, the howlers. Bronze Legs wore shorts, and in fact his legs were bronze. Black by race, he’d paled to Rachel’s color during years of Medean sunlight. Rachel asked, half to herself, “Why not just Bronze?”

Grace understood. “They didn’t mean his skin.”

“What?”

“The fuxes named him for the time his howler broke down and stranded him forty miles from civilization. He walked home. He was carrying some heavy stuff, but a troop of fuxes joined him and they couldn’t keep up. They’ve got lots of energy but no stamina. So they named him Bronze Legs. Bronze is the hardest metal they knew, till we came.”

The rain had closed in. A beast like yesterday’s flying bug strainers took to the air almost under the treads. For a moment it was face to face with Rachel, its large eyes and tremendous mouth all widened in horror. A wing ticked the windshield as it dodged.

Lightning cursed and turned on the headlights. As if by previous agreement, lights sprang to life on the howlers and the vehicles behind. “We don’t like to do that,” said Lightning.

“Do what?”

“Use headlights. Every domain is different. You never know what the local life will do when a flare comes, not till you’ve watched it happen. Here it’s okay. Nothing worse than locusts.”

Even the headlights had a yellowish tinge, Rachel thought.

The gray cliffs ahead ran hundreds of kilometers to heatward and coldward. They were no more than a few hundred feet high, but they were fresh and new. Medea wobbled a little in its course around Argo, and the tides could raise savage quakes. All the rocks had sharp angles; wind and life had not had a chance to wear them down.

The pass was new too, as if God had cleft the spine of the new mountains with a battle-ax. The floor of it was filled with rubble. The vehicles glided above the broken rock, riding high, with fans on maximum.

Now the land sloped gently down, and the expedition followed. Through the drizzle Bronze Legs glimpsed a grove of trees, hairy trees like those near Touchdown City, but different. They grew like spoons standing on end, with the cup of the spoon facing Argo. The ground was covered with tightly curled black filaments, a plant the color and texture of Bronze Legs’ own hair.

They had changed domain. Bronze Legs hadn’t been in this territory, but he remembered that Windstorm had. He called, “Anything unexpected around here?”

“B-70s.”

“They do get around, don’t they? Anything else?”

“It’s an easy slope down to the shore,” Windstorm called, “but then there’s a kind of parasitic fungus floating on the ocean. Won’t hurt us, but it can kill a Medean animal in an hour. I told Harvester. He’ll make the others wait for us.”

“Good.”

They rode in silence for a bit. Drizzle made it hard to see much. Bronze Legs wasn’t worried. The B-70s would stay clear of their headlights. This was explored territory; and even after they left it, the probes had mapped their route.

“That professional tourist,” Windstorm called suddenly. “Did you get to know her?”

“Not really. What about her? Mayor Curly said to be polite.”

“When was I ever not polite? But I didn’t grow up with her, Bronze Legs. Nobody did. We know more about fuxes than we do about rammers, and this one’s peculiar for a rammer! How could a woman give up all her privacy like that?”

“You tell me.”

“I wish I