“I’ve reserved you seats, sir.” Riley indicated three places near the front of the bus. “Always like to have Navy people with me. I put in nearly forty years. Retired as coxs’n about twenty years ago. I’d have stayed in, but my wife talked me out of it. Civilian life’s no good, you know. Nothing to do. Nothing important. Well, I don’t mean that the way it sounds—”
Ruth smiled. “We understand.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I don’t usually talk so much about myself. Sure glad to see Navy people. You Navy, Sir Kevin?”
“Reserve.” Kevin said. “Sailing Master. I went inactive about the same time you retired.”
Kevin and Ruth took their seats and settled back. Riley produced a hip flask. “Little nip?”
“Thank you, no,” Kevin said.
“You’re thinking it’s a bit early. Guess it is, even for Sparta, but with the short days we tend to do things a little different here.”
“Well, why not?” Kevin said. He reached for the flask. “Good stuff. Irish?”
“What they call Irish most places,” Riley said. “We just call it whiskey. Better strap in—”
The sky was as crowded as the sea. The bus rose through a swarm of light planes and heavy cargo craft and other airfoil-contoured buses, curved wide away from an empty area a minute before some kind of spacecraft came whistling through it, and went east toward the mountains. It followed the tiers of houses and estates up into the clouds. They broke through cloud cover to see that the black mountain tops went up high above them.
“That’s pretty,” Ruth said. “What do you call those mountains?”
“Drakenbergs,” Riley said. “Run down most of the length of the Serpens. Serpens is the continent.”
“Barren up here,” Renner said.
The Serpens had a sharp curled spine, black mountain flanks bare of life. Sparta hadn’t developed foliage to handle that soil, and it held too much heavy metal for most earthly plants. The tour director told them that and more as they flew along the spine of the continent.
The bus dropped back below the tablecloth of clouds and followed the curve of the mountains to where they dipped into the ocean, dropped to half a kilometer altitude, and headed south across the harbor.
“That’s Old Sparta to the left,” Riley said. “Parts date back to CoDominium days. See that green patch with tall buildings around it? That’s the Palace area.”
“Will we go closer?” Ruth asked.
“’Fraid not. There are Palace tours, though.”
Boats of every size moved randomly across the calm water. They continued south. The calm water of the tremendous harbor changed from green to blue, sharply. The sea bottom was visible, still shallow; the boats were fewer, and larger.
“It doesn’t show,” Ruth said.
“Yeah.” Renner had guessed what she meant. “They rule a thousand worlds from here, but…It’s like the zoo on Mote Prime. Sure it’s a different world, sure there’s nothing like it anywhere in the universe, but you get used to that when you travel enough. You expect major differences. But it’s not fair, Ruth. We look for worlds like Earth because that’s where we can live.”
Riley was staring. Other heads had turned from windows. Zoo on Mote Prime?
“Defenses,” Ruth said. “There’s a difference. Sparta must be the most heavily defended world of all.”
“Yeah. And all that means is, there are places the bus won’t go. And questions Mr. Riley won’t answer.”
Riley said, “Well, of course—”
Ruth was smiling. “Don’t test that, all right? I know you. We’re on holiday.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know anything about Sparta’s defenses anyway,” Riley said uncomfortably. “Mr. Renner? You were on the Mote expedition?”
“Yup. Riley, I didn’t keep any secrets, and it’s all been declassified. You can get my testimony under ‘What I Did on My Summer Vacation,’ by Kevin Renner. Published by Athenaeum in 3021. I get a royalty.”
There was a storm to the east. The bus flew west and dropped even lower (the ride became bumpy) to fly above a huge cargo ship. Big stabilizer fins showed with the roll of the waves, waves the size of small hills. There were pleasure boats too, graceful sailing boats that rolled as they climbed up and down the water mountains; their sails were constantly shifting along the masts.
The bus skimmed over a big island patterned in rectangles of farmland. “That’s the Devil Crab,” Riley said. “Two sugar cane plantations and maybe a hundred independents. I’d love to be a farmer. They don’t pay taxes.”
Renner jumped. “Hey?”
“Population’s dense on Sparta. The cost of land on Serpens is…well, I never tried to buy any, but it’s way up there. If the farmers didn’t get some kind of break, they’d all sell out to the people who build hotels. Then all the food would have to be shipped in from far away, and where would the Emperor get his fresh fruit?”
“Wow! No taxes. What about these guys below us?”
“They don’t pay either. Transport costs are high, and the produce isn’t as fresh when it gets to Serpens. The Serpens farmers can still compete. Even so, this is the way I’d go. Lease an island a thousand klicks from Serpens and raise beef. There’s no room to raise red meat on this part of Serpens.”
They veered away from another rocky island that seemed to be covered with a patchwork of concrete slabs and domes. “There’s some of the defense stuff,” Renner said. “Battle management radars, and I’d bet there are some pretty hefty lasers in there.”
“It’s a good guess, but I wouldn’t know,” Riley said.
Presently the bus turned north and east and flew toward the narrow hooked spit that enclosed the harbor from the west. “That was the prison colony back in CoDominium days,” Riley said. “If you look close, you can see where the old wall was. Ran right across the peninsula.”
“There? It’s mostly parks,” Ruth said. “Or—”
“Rose gardens,” Riley said. “When Lysander III tore down the old prison walls he gave all that area to the public. There’s the rose festival every year. Citizen fraternities compete, and it’s a big deal. We do tours every other day, if you’re interested.”
“Where’s Blaine Institute?” Ruth asked.
“Off east. To the right there. See that mountain covered with buildings?”
“Yes—it looks like an old painting I saw once.”
“That’s the Blaine Institute?” Renner said. “Captain Blaine’s richer than I suspected. And to think I knew him—”
“Did you, Sir?” Riley sounded impressed. “But that’s the Biology section of Imperial University. The Institute is the smaller area next to it.” He offered his binoculars. “And Blaine Manor sits on the hill just east of that. Would you like a tour of the Institute?”
“Thanks, we’ll be there this afternoon,” Ruth said.
The bus crossed the narrow spit and then stayed well out over the harbor. The sun had burned off most of the cloud cover over the city. The skyline was a jumble of shapes: in the center and to the south were massive square skyscrapers, thin towers, tall buildings connected by bridges a thousand feet above street level. North of that were lower granite buildings in a classic style. In the center were the green parks of the Palace district.
Renner looked thoughtful. “Ruth, think about it. The Emperor is over there. Just lob a big fusion bomb in the general direction of the Palace—”
He stopped because everyone on the bus was looking at him.
“Hey! I’m a Naval Reserve officer!” he said quickly. “I’m trying to figure out how you keep someone else from doing it. With this many people on Sparta, and visitors from everywhere, there’s bound to be crazies…”
“We get our share, Sir Kevin.” Riley emphasized the title so everyone would hear it.
“We do check on people coming to Sparta,” Ruth said. Her voice had dropped. “And it’s not all that easy to buy an atom bomb.”
“That might stop a
mateurs.”
“Oh, all right,” Ruth said. “Drop it, huh? It’s a depressing thought.”
“It’s something we live with,” Riley said. “Look, we have ways to spot the crazies. And generally professionals won’t try because it won’t do them any good. Everybody knows the Royal Family’s never all in the same place. Prince Aeneas doesn’t even live on this planet. Blow up Serpens and you’ll get the Fleet mad as hell, but you won’t kill the Empire. One thing we do not do—sir—is tell everybody on a random tour bus all about the defenses!”
“And one thing I don’t do,” Renner answered—and his voice had dropped low, “is guard my mouth. It would prevent me from learning things. Even so: sorry.”
Riley grunted. “Yes, sir. Look over there. Those are the fish farms.” He pointed to a series of brightly colored sea patches divided by low walls. “That’s another good racket. Fish from off-planet don’t do well out in Sparta’s oceans. You want sea bass or ocean cat, it’ll come from here or someplace like it.”
• • •
• • •
From FALLEN ANGELS
James Patrick Baen, the editor and publisher, once told me that he wanted to write a novel.
Jim is more interested in politics than I am. Otherwise he’s pro-technology, pro-space, and perceives a lot of humankind as fools. The way to keep the environment clean is to move the polluting industries into space, strip-mine asteroids instead of real estate…and so forth; you’ve read the sermons.
What the hell: I spent most of that evening carving out a story line with him.
Then I went home and forgot about it until, at a dinner that included the Pournelles, Jim described the story back to me. What he wanted now was a Niven/Pournelle collaboration. He could have had a Niven story years earlier.
FALLEN ANGELS involves a near-future Earth whose space programs have collapsed worldwide after generating a space station or two, maybe a moon base, a handful of ships…They’re hanging on by the skin of their teeth. They’re scoop-diving the Earth’s atmosphere for nitrogen. Greens are in power in the USA, and they’ve cleaned up the environment, shutting down the greenhouse effect. Earth is in an ice age.
A missile wounds a scoop ship and brings it down on the ice cap. The Angels can’t move in Earth’s savage gravity. They must be rescued, and somehow returned to orbit, by the heroic underground: by organized science fiction fandom.
We didn’t see FALLEN ANGELS as a money maker. This one was a gift for the fans, and for pure fun. We were looking down the barrels of the MOAT contract; so we asked an old friend to act as third collaborator, to buy us some time.
Several years later, after he had produced nothing whatever, we invited him out.
I then spoke to Jim Baen as follows: “We need a third collaborator. Jerry and I tried picking one ourselves, and discovered ourselves to be inept. You seem to be good at that. You want a novel, find a writer.”
And he found a quality control specialist named Mike Flynn…who knew nothing of organized science fiction fandom.
I’ve got to tell you, it’s been nothing but fun since then.
Flynn lives on the wrong coast, but he came as far as San Francisco for a convention of quality control specialists—he was a speaker—and I flew up to meet him. [“I’m going to tell funny stories.” A quality control specialist? Yes, he does have funny stories. Very.] We talked story. I introduced him to Patricia Davis (artist) and Adrienne Martine-Barnes (author). I got him to a Westercon, and he met more of us. He’s been attending East Coast conventions. I’ve been writing and sending him biographical squibs of friends.
Flynn doesn’t use the same software or hardware we do. He pulled 70,000 words ahead of us, with Jerry and me backseat driving as best we could, before Baen got us a disk Jerry’s computers could read.
Then…Jerry had shown me good new text for MOAT. Hallelujah! Time to resume work. But first…we spent nine days blitzing FALLEN ANGELS.
We hadn’t worked together in three years. It was intense. Jerry’s huge office, Chaos Manor, is a maze of computers waiting to be critiqued. He set one computer up for me and worked his own simultaneously.
The book changed shape under our hands. A solid block of Flynn’s lecturing on the coming Ice Age got integrated into one hell of a party. I wrote a filksong—not my first, but the first I’ve been proud of—and integrated that too, as sung by an anarchist Jenny trout, daughter of a science fiction writer who vanished on his fiftieth birthday. I’ve told the real-life Leslie Fish about this scene; she thinks it’s hilarious, and she plans to sing the song.
• • •
• • •
WANTED FAN
Wanted fan in Luna City, wanted fan on Dune and Down,
Wanted fan at Ophiuchus, wanted fan in Dydeetown.
All across the sky they want me, am I flattered? Yes I am!
If I could just reach orbit, then I’d be a wanted fan.
Wanted fan for mining coal and wanted fan for drilling oil,
I went very fast through Portland, hunted hard like Gully Foyle.
Built reactors in Seattle against every man’s advice,
Couldn’t do that in Alaska, Fonda says it isn’t nice.
“Nice touch, Jenny. They’ll be expecting you to rhyme it with ‘ice’.”
“You don’t really think the nukes could have saved Alaska, do you, Jenny?”
Alaska had been beneath the ice for fifteen years…
Wanted fan for plain sedition, like the singing of this tune.
If NASA hadn’t failed us we’d have cities on the Moon.
If it{ weren’t for fucking NASA we’d at least have walked on Mars
hadn’t been for NASA
If I never can make orbit, then I’ll never reach the stars.
Naders Raiders want my freedom, OSHA wants my scalp and hair,
If I’m wanted in Wisconsin, be damned sure I won’t be there!
If the E-P-A still wants me, I’ll avoid them if I can.
They’re tearing down the cities, so I’ll be a wanted fan!
Wanted fan on Jinx and Sparta and the Hub’s ten million stars,
Wanted fan for singing silly in a thousand spaceport bars.
If it’s what we really want, we’ll build a starship when we can;
If I could just make orbit then I’d be a wanted fan.
Maybe we’ll bill this as “unfinished” at its first appearance and complete it during the book, as in “The Green Hills of Earth.” We can show verses later replaced:
Wanted fan for mining coal and wanted fan for building nukes;
Wanted fan by William Proxmire and a maddened horde of kooks.
Washington D-C still wants me ’cause I tried to build a dam
If they’re tearing down the cities I’ll help anywhere I can.
At least, Jenny Trout would.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Final draft of song describes the Angels, maybe writ by Gordon himself:
Wanted fan for building spacecraft, wanted fan for scooping air,
Using microwaves for power, building habitats up there.
Oh the glacier caught us last time; next time we’ll try to land!
And when the ice is conquered, it’ll be by wanted fans.
(quasi-repeat)
And when the stars are conquered, it’ll be by wanted fans!
• • •
• • •
THE CALIFORNIA VOODOO GAME
DREAM PARK was complex, a mystery wrapped in a fantasy embedded in science fiction. THE BARSOOM PROJECT added complications: espionage and a retrospective murder and the terraforming of Mars. THE CALIFORNIA VOODOO GAME…well, we’re handling it, but that’s an awful lot of threads we’re trying to weave together. We’re running the Game through an abandoned building the size of a small city, as five teams of Gamers compete against each other in a fantasy domain based on voodoo as it might have evolved through centurie
s of the California environment.
And I worked in a formal puzzle, a Martin Gardner-style puzzle, the only such that I’ve ever invented.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
“Look,” Acacia said. “We’ve accumulated 12,300 points. If we can get to 13,000, we can get a tunnel through the mirrors. But we have to risk the same number of points to get it, and on a level four puzzle.”
“What categories are left?”
She tapped out a request, and categories began to appear:
1. Historical Trivia
2. Famous Battles
3. Killer Konundrums
4. Minor Masters.
Corby’s rather protruding eyes studied them. Finally he said: “I fear history was always my weakest subject.”
“I might be able to handle that—”
“Not at level four. They’ll pull out some fourth-century Mesopotamian bullshit, trust me. Minor Masters is probably third-rate composers, painters or actors of the eighteenth century. At fourth level their names won’t even be in the Britannica. I like Killer Konundrums.”
She rubbed his shoulder affectionately. “I’m gonna trust you.”
“With a face like mine, who can blame you?”
It was a face, Acacia decided, that only a mother or a desperate Loremaster could love.
She made her choice. The screen blanked, then cleared. A cool synthesized voice spoke while words crawled across the screen.
“A hunter leaves home one morning. He walks a mile south and finds nothing. He walks a mile west, sees a bird, runs it down and spears it for his supper. He walks a mile north and is home again. Tell me: what probable color is the bird, and why?”
Acacia stared, perplexity creasing her lovely face. “I’ve heard that one,” she said. “It’s too easy. The bear is white.”
“Bird, not bear. So the answer can’t be, ‘It’s white, it’s a polar bear, he’s at the North Pole.’ So.”