Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson (41 page)

THE FAR END
by Larry Niven

Larry Niven
made his first sale to
Worlds of If
magazine in 1964, and soon established himself as one of the best new writers of “hard” science fiction since Heinlein. By the end of the ’70s, Niven had won several Hugo and Nebula Awards, and become famous for his “Known Space” universe, which was also home to the catlike warrior race the Kzin, a probable inspiration for
Star Trek’
s Klingons, since written about by both Niven and many other authors in the long-running
Man-Kzin Wars
series. His novel
Ringworld
was one of the bestselling novels of the decade, and one of the most acclaimed, and spawned sequels
The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne,
and
Ringworld’s Children.
Niven is also a prolific collaborator; he’s written eleven novels in collaboration with Jerry Pournelle—the best-known of which are probably
The Mote in God’s Eye, Inferno,
and
Lucifer’s Hammer—
as well as the four-volume
Fleet of Worlds
sequence and other non-series novels with Edward M. Lerner, the four-volume
Dreampark
sequence and other non-series novels with Steven Barnes, and collaborations with Brenda Cooper, David Gerrold, and with Michael Flynn and Jerry Pournelle and with Steven Barnes and Jerry Pournelle
.
Niven’s solo novels include
Protector, World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth, Destiny’s Road, Rammer, Rainbow Mars, Smoke Ring,
and the three-volume “The Magic Goes Away” series. His copious short work has been gathered in the three-volume
Larry Niven Short Stories,
as well as in
Tales of Known Space, Inconstant Moon, Neutron Star, N-Space, Playgrounds of the Mind, The Draco Tavern, Crashlander, Flatlander, The Flight of the Horse, A Hole in Space,
and others. His most recent books are a new collection,
Stars and Gods,
and a new “Dreampark” novel with Steven Barnes
, The Moon Maze Game.

In the incisive story that follows, Larry Niven shows us what may be the end of the Time Patrol itself . . .

When Anthony Wells Doheny
was recruited for the Time Patrol, he was just past fifty. That was in July of 2008, with (in Tony’s view) bad times coming. He’d seen enough movies: bad times always follow the first black president. Big Brother Government was already fighting two Mideast wars and throwing tax money away with both fists. Gas prices were going insane.

Tony was recruited because he wrote science fiction. Some was brilliant; but some came too close to reality. Many writers wrote of time travel, but Doheny stumbled on too much detail. He wasn’t the first to be inducted for such a reason, after a faked death.

He was recruited in spite of his phobia for getting lost.

They made him an agent in place, covering Los Angeles County from 1900 to 2000, owning a little grocery store in Beverly Hills. He had pickup points for newspapers in various other years. He didn’t have to travel except in emergencies, and there hadn’t been any. He knew where danger would lie. Knowing the future meant no surprises; it gave him a wonderful sense of security.

He played the stock market a little. Bet on Bill Gates; avoid Ponzi schemes; remember a few trends. He liked a few local restaurants which would disappear too soon. He could no longer write science fiction. What the Patrol had done to his mind prevented him from revealing anything a time traveler might know. From time to time he wrote a little fantasy.

In a newspaper from August 1965, he found a weird photograph.

Finally, a chance to meet another time traveler or two! Knowing the future meant no surprises; he’d come to realize that he’d chosen a dull life. He sent a message at once, jotted in careful block letters on a scratchpad. “Found a ray gun, August 1965. Please advise.” Rolled it up, shoved it into a tube and watched it vanish. He could track the ray gun while he waited.

The tube had just left his fingers when a flickering blur appeared above his living room rug. Now it focused like a camera view and settled down to the usual bulky-looking wheelless timecycle. The rider—stayed blurred.

A Danellian. Tony wasn’t expecting that! He stared . . . tried to stare. His eyeballs jittered. This wasn’t a fog; it carried
too much
information, as if he were seeing scores of men and monsters all superimposed. Ancient Hebrews must have seen such entities. Their angels were terrible to look upon and impossible to describe. Indian gods showed a blur of probabilistic arms. He smelled . . . ionization? Ozone?

“Hello,” he said. “Welcome.” Sir? Danellians were at the far end of time.

“Thank you,” the entity said. “What’ve you got?”

The Los Angeles Times was spread over the coffee table. The article was on the fourth page, continued from front page headlines describing a riot in the Watts district, downtown LA. The riot would last six days.

The photograph showed an alley, a peaceful scene. It looked flawed. Glare white cut across it along a narrow dashed line. At one end of the line a dark-skinned woman half-knelt with something in her hand. At the other was a little white glare point, and a big black cat levitating along a brick wall, claws raking.

“Cat toy,” the Danellian said.

“Yessir, but I never saw—”

“Laser. It’s too early for lasers. Good call, Doheny. What have you done so far?”

“Nothing. You got here fast.”

“Time travel is like that. Let’s get to work. I think I recognize that item. It’s a weapons laser turned to low power. Best cat toy ever invented, barring the end strips on fanfold paper, but it can burn holes through bricks and men if you turn it high, and of course it’s too early for lasers. We’ll fix it.” The Danellian was fiddling with something on his timecycle. “Give me the date off the paper.”

“August 11th, 1965.”

“I’ll have it in a minute.”

“Can I offer you anything?” Greatly daring, “Coffee?”

“Yeah, thanks. Cappuccino if you’ve got it, or is
that
too early?”

“You’d have to go to a restaurant. Romanoff’s is good. Chasens too. I don’t have a steam widget.”

“Just coffee, then. And I smoke tobacco.”

“A
Danellian
smokes tobacco?”

The blur laughed, a crackling sound. “I’m older than I look. You like your air clean? Where’re you from?”

Tony started a hot plate up, filled a teapot with water, opened a cupboard and looked at half a dozen varieties of flavored instant coffee. “Twenty-ought-eight, West LA, till they put me here.” His mind was racing. Danellians were from far in the future, but how far? And when was this one born? Could he be
billions
of years old?

“No wonder tobacco scares you,” the Danellian said. “There, I’ve got August 11th, morning. Got the right alley. There’s the cat. Fast forward . . . and here comes the woman. Now I’ll just follow her back.”

“I never saw equipment like that.”

“We don’t give every agent every tool we’ve got. This time I just brought what I had. I was working on something else when your call came through. Way outside Sol system, actually. Interesting world . . . there she goes, or here she came . . . .”

Tony was behind the agent’s shoulder by now, staying safely away from the blur of what might have been a folded wing. In an oval frame he saw a timecycle pop up, the woman roll and throw herself aboard feet first, the timecycle gone. In the background a shattered grocery store window healed itself while a flaming vodka bottle hurled itself at a cluster of gangly teenagers.

“I know her. Hot damn. It’s Rora Jee Vishwathy, the last Exaltationist. Playing with a cat. I didn’t know she had it in her.”

The Danellian paused the frame, then began inching it forward. Here came the woman’s timecycle again. She left it in a jump, handstand, roll.

“Pause,” the Danellian murmured. He reached a blurred appendage, one of uncountable several, into the frame and fiddled with controls. “There. It’ll go back to the Big Bang.
Not
what she’s expecting. Next—”

The view unfroze. The cycle was gone. The woman picked herself up. Blue jeans and a leather jacket, tee shirt with a half-hidden message in black script, black hair in cornrows. She walked away with something like a mechanical pencil clutched in her right hand. Men robbing a gas station, filling bottles with gasoline, watched her pass and didn’t quite dare to approach her. Tony and the blur watched her in fast-forward until she reached the alley.

The Danellian slowed its display to real time. They watched her play with the cat.

She looked up once as a sudden glare lit the alley. The photographer was already in a shuffling run, clutching his bulky camera. She lifted the light weapon to point at him, thumbed a dial, thought it over and lowered her arm.

“And that’s that. The paper’s got its photograph.” The Danellian zoomed on the woman as she approached the cat. He froze the view and got off the timecycle.

“Doheny, you go after her.”

Tony stepped back involuntarily. “Can’t you just reach into the frame?”

“No, she’s got too firm a grip. You were trained.”

“Well, yes, but dammit! Watts, and I’m white!”

“Training is expensive. Have you defrauded us?
I
can’t go. I don’t look like anything Earthly.”

Tony nodded reluctantly. He owed the Corps; payment was due. “What’s my mission?”

The smells hit him hard. Photochemical smog, sewage, gasoline, gunpowder. A store was burning merrily. It was flickering firelit dark: streetlights had been smashed, and no moon penetrated the gaps between buildings.

The man who had photographed the Exaltationist was running down the street, clutching his bulky camera. Rora Jee pointed the weapon at him, then dropped her aim. The cat approached her. She knelt, rubbed his back, then looked up at Tony.

He aimed his stunner and pulled the trigger.

She aimed the light weapon. White light burned through his cotton jacket and got lost on the superconducting cloth beneath. He felt a touch of warmth. But the stunner wasn’t dropping her. Whining with fear, Tony raised the beam for a head shot.

She fell. She must have been wearing something too, but not on her head.

He eased the timecycle into the alley. Had anyone seen him, a white man attacking a black woman in Watts? No, he’d have heard shouting. He spared a moment of amused pity for the photographer, who had missed the shot of his life.

With a grunt and a heave he draped the woman across the timecycle’s rear saddle. She was sweaty and limp as a noodle, and heavy. She was still clutching the weapon. He wrestled it loose and pocketed it. The cat watched.

Tony boarded the timecycle and was gone. No witness but the cat. Did that count? Tony wasn’t sure. Quantum physics was mysterious.

Tony Doheny rolled the woman off the cycle onto the thick rug, lowering her carefully. She still smelled of exertion and a missed bath or two. Good hard body, a hard pretty face, not at all alien. He slid a pillow under her head. He took the light-weapon out of his pocket and dropped it on the coffee table.

The Danellian knelt above Rora Jee. Tony was looking at the blurred, many-limbed shape when the Danellian . . . focused.

Tony must have gasped. The Danellian turned and found him staring.

“Looking at me isn’t easy, is it?” he—clearly male—said kindly. “It’s a quantum effect. Is that my coffee? Good.” Six limbs: legs, huge wings, hands. One gnarly hand reached for the mug. He sniffed. “You lose some aroma when it’s instant. Well, what you’re seeing, Agent Doheny, is all of the possible paths that lead to
me
. With quantum physics, you don’t get your choice. You get everything that could have happened.” He sipped.

Tony said, “Not any more.”

“Say what?”

“You look like a winged monkey. Shall I show you a mirror? Except for your face. I could swear I’ve seen you before.”

“Mirrors don’t work.
I
don’t see myself blurred. But no quantum effect means—”

“Manse Everard? You’re the man who recruited me!”

The Danellian nodded. “I called myself Manse Everard for awhile. Long ago in personal time. Hello, Rora. How are you?”

Only her lips moved. “Paralyzed. I suppose you think you’ve won. Frozen the universe.”

“I suppose so,” the Danellian said.

Tony persisted. “Why do you look like a winged monkey?”

“Hah. Well. There’s this
really
interesting planet. Tony, Rora Jee, most rocky worlds are bigger than Earth, if they’re massive enough to hold an oxy-and-water atmosphere. A lot of them form out where water is normally ice, so the planet picks up a shell of water. Diomede has an ocean hundreds of kilometers deep. Islands that are all seaweed and coral, and winged almost-mammals the size of a man. I took a shape such that I could pass for one, not to the Diomedeans themselves but to some human traders on the surface. That was just in case I got into trouble. I could get help from Nick Van Rijn’s people in the Polesotechnic League without arousing much suspicion.

“All of that should have been beside the point. I didn’t have an interest in the Diomedeans. The interesting part of Diomede is down below the ocean, where the pressure is so great that it gives you a shell of water crystal in the forms of Ice-7, Ice-10, and Ice-11. It’s white hot and solid. At the interface, you get an ecology.”