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

door had dropped to form a stairway, and the crawler was empty. Rachel went out.

The crawlers, howlers, raft and mobile power plant were parked in a circle, and tents had been set up inside. There was no living human being in sight. Rachel shrugged; she stepped between a howler and the raft, and stopped.

This was nothing like the Medea she’d seen up to now.

Rolling hills were covered with chrome yellow bushes. They stood waist high, and so densely packed that no ground was visible anywhere. Clouds of insects swarmed, and sticky filaments shot up from the bushes to stab into the swarms.

The fuxes had cut themselves a clearing. They tended one who was restless, twitching. Bronze Legs Miller hailed her from their midst.

Rachel waded through the bushes. They resisted her like thick tar. The insects scattered away from her.

“Deadeye’s near her time,” Bronze Legs said. “Poor baby. We won’t move on until she’s dropped her ‘nest.’”

The fux showed no swelling of pregnancy. Rachel remembered what she had been told of the fux manner of bearing children. Suddenly she didn’t want to see it. Yet how could she leave? She would be omitting a major part of the experience of Medea.

She compromised. She whispered earnestly to Bronze Legs, “Should we be here? Won’t they object?”

He laughed. “We’re here because we make good insect repellants.”

“No. We like humans.” Deadeye’s voice was slurred. Now Rachel saw that the left eye was pink, with no pupil. “Are you the one who has been among the stars?”

“Yes.”

The feverish fux reached up to take Rachel’s hand. “So much strangeness in the world. When we know all of the world, it may be we will go among the stars too. You have great courage.” Her fingers were slender and hard, like bones. She let go to claw at the hairless red rash between her front and back legs. Her tail thrashed suddenly, and Bronze Legs dodged.

The fux was quiet for a time. A six-legged fux sponged her back with water; the sponge seemed to be a Medean plant. Deadeye said, “I learned from humans that ‘deadeye’ meant ‘accurate of aim.’ I set out to be the best spear-caster in…” She trailed off into a language of barking and yelping. The odd-looking biped held conversation with her. Perhaps he was soothing her.

Deadeye howled—and fell apart. She crawled forward, pulling against the ground with hands and forefeet, and her hindquarters were left behind. The hindquarters were red and dripping at the juncture, and the tail slid through them: more than a meter of thick black tail, stained with red, and as long as Harvester’s now. The other fuxes came forward, some to tend Deadeye, some to examine the hindquarters…in which muscles were still twitching.

Ten minutes later Deadeye stood up. He made it look easy; given his tail and his low center of mass, perhaps it was. He spoke in his own language, and the fuxes filed away into the yellow bushes. In the human tongue Deadeye said, “I must guard my nest. Alone. Travel safely.”

“See you soon,” Bronze Legs said. He led Rachel after the fuxes. “He won’t want company now. He’ll guard the ‘nest’ till the little ones eat most of it and come out. Then he’ll go sex-crazy, but by that time we’ll be back. How are you feeling?”

“A little woozy,” Rachel said. “Too much blood.”

“Take my arm.”

The color of their arms matched perfectly.

“Is she safe here? I mean he. Deadeye.”

“He’ll learn to walk faster than you think, and he’s got his spear. We haven’t seen anything dangerous around. Rachel, they don’t have a safety hangup.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Sometimes they get killed. Okay, they get killed. Deadeye has his reasons for being here. If his children live, they’ll own this place. Some of the adults’ll stay to help them along. That’s how they get new territory.”

Confusing. “You mean they have to be born here?”

“Right. Fuxes visit. They don’t conquer. After awhile they have to go home. Grace is still trying to figure if that’s physiology or just a social quirk. But sometimes they visit to give birth, and that’s how they get new homes. I don’t think fuxes’ll ever be space travelers.”

“We have it easier.”

“That we do.”

“Bronze Legs, I want to make love to you.”

He missed a step. He didn’t look at her. “No. Sorry.”

“Then,” she said a little desperately, “will you at least tell me what’s wrong? Did I leave out a ritual, or take too many baths or something?”

Bronze Legs said, “Stage fright.”

He sighed when he saw that she didn’t understand. “Look, ordinarily I’d be looking for some privacy for us…which wouldn’t be easy, because taking your clothes off in an unfamiliar domain…never mind. When I make love with a woman I don’t want a billion strangers criticizing my technique.”

“The memory tapes.”

“Right. Rachel, I don’t know where you find men who want that kind of publicity. Windstorm and I, we let a post-male watch us once…but after all, they aren’t human.”

“I could turn off the tape.”

“It records memories, right? Unless you forgot about me completely, which I choose to consider impossible, you’d be remembering me for the record. Wouldn’t you?”

She nodded. And went back to the crawler to sleep. Others would be sleeping in the tents; she didn’t want the company.

The howler’s motor was half old, half new. The new parts had a handmade look: bulky, with file marks. One of the fans was newer, cruder, heavier than the other. Rachel could only hope the Medeans were good with machinery.

The tough-looking redhead asked, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

“I took a howler across most of Koschei,” Rachel told her. She straightened, then swung up onto the saddle. Its original soft plastic seat must have disintegrated; what replaced it looked and felt like tanned skin. “Top speed, a hundred and forty kilometers an hour. Override—this switch—boosts the fans so I can fly. Ten minutes of flight, then the batteries block up and I’ve got to come down. Six slots in the ground-effect skirt