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

He grinned and climbed down, hauling a sack of oranges.

“Tired of spending the day reading, I guess,” she said lightly. She offered him an apple. He polished it on his shirt and took a bite. “Just needed to talk to somebody.”

“Kinda depressed?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s just getting hard to cope with some of the problems.”

“I guess there have been a few.”

Jill gave a derisive chuckle. “I sure don’t know Greg anymore. Ever since he set up the brewery and the distillery, he doesn’t really want to see me at all.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” Doc comforted. “The strain is showing on all of us. Half the town does little more than read or play tapes or drink. Personally, I’d like to know who smuggled the hemp seeds on board.”

Jill laughed, which he was glad for, then her face grew serious again. “You know, there’d probably be more trouble if we didn’t need someone to look after the kids.” She paused, looking up at Doc. “I spend a lot of my time there,” she said unnecessarily.

“Why?” It was the first time he’d asked. They had left the groves and were heading back into town along the gravel road that Greg and Brew and the others had built in better days.

“We…I came here for a reason. To continue the human race, to cross a new frontier, one that my children could have a part in. Now, now that we know that the colony is doomed, there’s just no motive to anything. No reason. I’m surprised that there isn’t more drinking, more carousing and foursomes and divorces and everything else. Nothing seems to matter a whole lot. Nothing at all.”

Doc took her by the shoulders and held her. Go on and cry, he silently said to her. God, I’m tired.

The children grew fast. At nine Eve reached puberty and seemed to shoot skyward. She grew more hair. She learned more words, but not many more. She spent much of her time in the trees in the children’s complex. The older girls grew almost as fast as she did, and the boys.

Every Saturday Brew and Nat took some of the children walking. Sometimes they climbed the foothills at the base of the continental range; sometimes they wandered through the woods, spending most of their efforts keeping the kids from disappearing into the trees.

One Saturday they returned early, their faces frozen in anger. Eve and Jerry were missing. At first they refused to discuss it, but when Jase began organizing a search party, they talked.

They’d been ready to turn for home when Eve suddenly scampered into the trees. Jerry gave a whoop and followed her. Nat had left the others with Brew while she followed after the refugees.

It proved easy to find them, and easier still to determine what they were doing with each other when she came upon them.

Eve looked up at Nat, innocent eyes glazed with pleasure. Nat trembled for a moment, horrified, then drove them both away with a stick, screaming filth at them.

Over Nat’s vehement objections and Brew’s stoney refusal to join, Jase got his search party together and set off. They met the children coming home. By that time Nat had talked to the other mothers and fathers at the children’s complex.

Jase called a meeting. There was no way to avoid it now, feelings were running too deep.

“We may as well decide now,” he told them that night. “There’s no question of the children marrying. We could train them to mouth the words of any of our religions, but we couldn’t expect them to understand what they were saying. So the question is, shall we let the children reproduce?”

He faced an embarrassed silence.

“There’s no question of their being too young. In biological terms they aren’t, or you could all go home. In our terms, they’ll never be old enough. Anyone have anything to say?”

“Let’s have Doc’s opinion,” a hoarse voice called. There was a trickle of supportive applause.

Doc rose, feeling very heavy. “Fellow colonists…” The smile he was trying on for size didn’t fit his face. He let it drop. There was a desperate compassion in his voice. “This world will never be habitable to mankind until we find out what went wrong here. I say let our children breed. Someday someone on Earth may find out how to cure what we’ve caught. Maybe he’ll know how to let our descendants breed men again. Maybe this problem will only last a generation or two, then we’ll get human babies again. If not, well, what have we lost? Who else is there to inherit Ridgeback?”

“No!” The sound was a tortured meld of hatred and venom. That was Nat, sunhaired loving mother of six, with her face a strained mask of frustration. “I didn’t risk my life and leave my family and, and train for years and bleed and sweat and toil so my labor could fall to…to…a bunch of goddamned monkeys!”

Brew pulled her back to her seat, but by now the crowd was muttering and arguing to itself. The noise grew louder. There was shouting. The yelling, too, grew in intensity.

Jase shouted over the throng. “Let’s talk this out peacefully!”

Brew was standing, screaming at the people who disagreed with him and Natalie. Now it was becoming a shoving match, and Brew was getting more furious.

Doc pushed his way into the crowd, hoping to reach Brew and calm him. The room was beginning to break down into tangled knots of angry, emotionally charged people.

He grabbed the big man’s arm and tried to speak, but the Swede turned bright baleful eyes on him and swung a heavy fist.

Doc felt pain explode in his jaw and tasted blood. He fell to the ground and was helped up again, Brew standing over him challengingly. “Stay out of our lives, Doctor,” he sneered, openly now. “You’ve never helped anything before. Don’t try to start now.”

He tried to speak but felt the pain, and knew his jaw was fractured. A soft hand