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

of hellfire was rising, cooling, expanding into the vacuum above the lesser hell of a red dwarf star.

They were six-legged rock demons all around them, and a few on the roofs. All were dead, from heatstroke or dehydration. A far larger number were gathering all along the Ring Sea shore. Now they swarmed uphill in a wave of silver. They paired off as they came, and stopped by twos in the rocks to mate.

The diminished wave swept around the expedition and petered out. Now the mountains were covered with writhing forms: an impressive sight. “They make the beast with twelve legs,” Bronze Legs said. “Look at the size of those bellies! Hey, Grace, aren’t the beasts themselves bigger than they were?”

“They have to be. They’ve got to form those eggs. Dammit, don’t distract me.”

The intercom lit. Grace wasn’t about to notice anything so mundane. The paired rock demons were growing quiet, but they were still linked head to tail. Bronze Legs opened the intercom.

Lightning’s voice said, “I’ve got Duty Officer Toffler aboard Morven.”

“Okay. Toffler, this is Miller. We’ve got an emergency.”

“Sorry to hear it.” The male voice sounded sleepy. “What can we do about it?”

“You’ll have to call Touchdown City. Can you patch me through, or shall I record a message?”

“Let’s check…” The voice went away. Bronze Legs watched a nearby pair of rock demons crawling away from each other. The thick torsos seemed different. A belly swelling that had extended the length of the torso was now a prominent swelling between the middle and hind legs. It was happening fast. The beasts seemed gaunt, all bone and skin, except for the great spherical swelling. With fore and middle legs they scratched at the earth, digging, digging.

“Miller, you’d better record. By the time we got their attention they’d be over the horizon. We’ll have them in another hour.”

“Good—”

“But I don’t see how they can help either. Listen, Miller, is there something we can do with an interstellar message laser? At this range we can melt a mountain or boil a lake, and be accurate to—”

“Dammit, Toffler, we’re not in trouble! Touchdown City’s in trouble, and they don’t know it yet!”

“Oh? Okay, set to record.”

“To Mayor Curly Jackson, Touchdown City. We’ve weathered the flare. We don’t know if the fuxes survived yet. The rammer, Rachel Subramaniam, is on the way to you on a howler. She has no reason to think she’s dangerous, but she is. By the time you spot her you’d be too late to stop her. If you don’t move damn quick, the human colony on Medea could be dead within the year. You’ll need every vehicle you can get your hands on…”

The expedition had crossed a great bay of the Ring Sea in twelve hours. Rachel could cross it in three; but she’d be rid of what followed her moments after she left shore. She had heard Lightning mention the parasitic fungus that floated on this arm of the Ring Sea, that was deadly to fuxes and any Medean life…unless the flare had burned it away.

The flare was long over. She rode through the usual red-lit landscape, in a circle of the white light from headlights, taillights, searchlight. She hungered and thirsted for the light of farming lamps, the color of Sol, of ship’s sunlights; the sign that she had come at last to Touchdown City.

But she hungered more for the fungus that would kill the rock demons and the Daddy-long-legs. She hated them for their persistence, their monstrous shapes, their lust for her flesh. She hated them for being themselves! Let them rot, slow or quick. Then three hours to cross the bay, half an hour more to find and navigate that rubble-strewn pass, and downhill toward the bluewhite light.

That was the shoreline ahead.

Ominously blood-colored beasts milled there. One by one they turned toward the howler.

Rachel cursed horribly and without imagination. She had seen these things before. The expedition’s searchlights had pinned a tremendous thousand-legged worm, and these things had been born from its flesh. They were dog-sized, tailless quadrupeds. Flare time must have caught a lot of the great myriapods, brought vast populations of parasites to life, for this many to be still active this long after the flare.

More than active. They leapt like fleas…toward Rachel. She turned to heatward. Weak as she felt now, one could knock her out of the saddle.

Her entourage turned with her. Two more rock demons had dropped out. Eight followed, and the great spider, and a loyal population of proto-mice, exposed now that the bushes had ended. And hordes of insects. Rachel’s reason told her that she was taking this all too personally. But what did they see in her? She wasn’t that much meat, and the spider wasn’t that hungry. It reached down now and then to pluck a proto-mouse, and once it plucked up a rock demon, with equal nonchalance. The demon raved and snapped and died within the spider’s clamshell mouth, but it clawed out an eye, too.

And the demons had the proto-mice for food, but they had to streak down to the water every so often to cool off, and fight their way back through the blood-red quadrupeds, eating what they killed. The mice had fed well on the yellow bushes, and who knew about the tiny might-be-insects? What did they all want with Rachel?

After a couple of hours the shore curved south, and now it was white tinged with other colors: a continuous crust of salt. Rachel’s climate suit worked well, but her face and hands were hot. The wind was hot with Argo-heat and the heat of a recent flare. The Daddy-long-legs had solved its heat problem. It waded offshore, out of reach of the red parasites, pacing her.

It was five hours before the shore turned sharply to coldward. Rachel turned with it, staying well back from shore, where blood-colored quadrupeds still prowled. She worried now about whether she could find the pass. There would be black, tightly curled ground cover, and trees