Limits by Larry Niven (books to read for 13 year olds txt) 📕

power plant before the first probe broke down. Heatward slope of a hillside. We’ll be coming up on it in a few hours. Is this the kind of thing you want, or am I boring you?”

“I want it all. Did you try that tape?”

The Mayor shook his head, his eyes suddenly evasive.

“Why not?”

“Well,” the Mayor said slowly, “I’m a little leery of what I might remember. It’s all filtered through your brain, isn’t it, Rachel?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t think I’d like remembering being a girl.”

Rachel was mildly surprised. Role-changing was part of the kick. Male or female, an epicurean or a superbly muscled physical culture addict or an intellectual daydreamer, a child again or an old woman…well, some didn’t like it. “I could give you a man’s tape, Curly. There’s McAuliffe’s balloon trip into the big gas giant in Sol system.”

Captain Borg cut in sharply. “What about the Charles Baker Sontag tape? He did a year’s tour in Miramon Lluagor system, Curly. The Lluagorians use balloons for everything. You’d love it.”

Curly was confused. “Just what kind of balloons—”

“Not living things, Curly. Fabric filled with gas. Lluagor has a red dwarf sun. No radiation storms and not much ultraviolet. They have to put their farms in orbit, and they do most of their living in orbit, and it’s all inflated balloons, even the spacecraft. The planet they use mainly for mining and factories, but it’s pretty, too, so they’ve got cities slung under hundreds of gasbags.”

The tractor probe lurched across mile after mile of dim-lit pink salt hills. Rachel remembered a memory tape in Morven’s library: a critical reading of the Elder and Younger Eddas by a teacher of history and poetry. Would Medeans like that? Here you had the Land of the Frost Giants and the Land of the Fire Giants, with Midgard between…and the Ring Sea to stand in for the Midgard Serpent…and no dearth of epic monsters, from what she’d heard.

Captain Borg spoke with an edge in her voice. “Nobody’s going to force you to use a new and decadent entertainment medium from the stars, Curly—”

“Oh, now, I didn’t—”

“But there’s a point you might consider. Distance.”

“Distance?”

“There’s the trade circuit. Earth, Toupan, Lluagor, Sereda, Horvendile, Koschei, Earth again. Six planets circling six stars a few light years apart. The web ramships go round and round, and everyone on the ring gets news, entertainment, seeds and eggs, new inventions. There’s the trade circuit, and there’s Medea. You’re too far from Horvendile, Curly.”

“Oddly enough, we’re aware of that, Captain Borg.”

“No need to get huffy. I’m trying to make a point.”

“Why did you come?”

“Variety. Curiosity. The grass-is-always-greener syndrome. The same thing that made us rammers in the first place.” Captain Borg did not add altruism, the urge to keep the worlds civilized. “But will we keep coming? Curly, Medea is the strangest place that ever had a breathable atmosphere. You’ve got a potential tourist trap here. You could have ramships dropping by every twenty years!”

“We need that.”

“Yes, you do. So remember that rammers don’t build starships. It’s taxpayers that build starships. What do they get out of it?”

“Memory tapes?”

“Yes. It used to be holos. Times change. Holos aren’t as involving as memory tapes, and they take too long to watch. So it’s memory tapes.”

“Does that mean we have to use them?”

“No,” said Captain Borg.

“Then I’ll try your tourist’s view of Lluagor system, when I get time.” Curly stood. “And I better get going. Twenty-five hours to dawn.”

“It only takes ten minutes,” Rachel said.

“How long to recover? How long to assimilate a whole earthyear of someone else’s memories? I better wait.”

After he was gone, Rachel asked, “What was wrong with giving him the Jupiter tape?”

“I remembered McAuliffe was a homosexual.”

“So what? He was all alone in that capsule.”

“It might matter to someone like Curly. I don’t say it would, I say it might. Every world is different.”

“You ought to know.” The rumor mill said that Mayor Curly and Captain Borg had shared a bed. Though he hadn’t shown it…

Too lightly, Captain Borg said, “I should but I don’t.”

“Oh?”

“He’s…closed. It’s the usual problem, I think. He sees me coming back in sixty or seventy years, and me ten years older. Doesn’t want to get too involved.”

“Janice?”

“Dammit, if they’re so afraid of change, how could their parents have busted their asses to settle a whole new world? Change is the one thing…yeah? What is it?”

“Did you ask him, or did he ask you?”

Captain Borg frowned. “He asked me. Why?”

“Nobody’s asked me,” said Rachel.

“Oh…Well, ask someone. Customs differ.”

“But he asked you.”

“I dazzled him with sex appeal. Or maybe not. Rachel, shall I ask Curly about it? There might be something we don’t know. Maybe you wear your hair wrong.”

Rachel shook her head. “No.”

“But…okay. The rest of the crew don’t seem to be having problems.”

Nearly dawn. The sky was thick with dark clouds, but the heatward horizon was clear, with Argo almost fully risen. The dull red disk would never rise completely, not here. Already it must be sinking back.

It was earthnight now; the farming lamps were off. Crops and livestock kept terrestrial time. Rows of green plants stretched away to the south, looking almost black in this light. In the boundary of bare soil between the wilds and the croplands, half a dozen fuxes practiced spear casts. That was okay with Bronze Legs. Humans didn’t spend much time in that border region. They plowed the contents of their toilets into it, to sterilize it of Medean microorganisms and fertilize it for next year’s crops. The fuxes didn’t seem to mind the smell.

Bronze Legs waited patiently beside his howler. He wished Windstorm would do the same.

The two house-sized crawlers were of a pattern familiar to many worlds: long, bulbous pressure hulls mounted on ground-effect platforms. They were decades old, but they had been tended with loving care. Hydrogen fuel cells powered them. One of the crawlers now carried, welded to its roof, a sender capable of reaching Morven in its present equatorial orbit: another good reason for waiting