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CRASHLANDER

by Larry Niven

(c) 1994 by Larry Niven

v1.0 (29-Aug-1999)

If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute.



GHOST: ONE

We had wonderful seats ten rows back from the glass.

Two hundred feet below the ocean's surface sunlight flooded down through seaweed forests in a thousand flickering golden beams. Players swirled in shoals among the forest roots like half a hundred color-coded fighting fish.

Grandstands had been set against the city dome. Beyond the glass was the playing domain for ten color-marked teams, each team being five humans and a dolphin. Sixty players, down to fifty now, the humans using breathers and oversized fins.

The prey were local life-forms, three flattened turtles armed with hind flippers as wide as wings. Their painted shells glowed like captured suns, red, yellow, violet. The point was to move the prey through the arches, paraboloids painted in the same blazing colors. A player might pull a prey against his chest to swim with it, or hold it at arm's length and steer by the strength of his arms while the prey did the work, or even leave it swimming toward the sand during a melee, hopmg a teammate could get it before it disappeared.

Sharrol was entranced. When a swarm of Entertainment Guild Players carried the violet prey through the violet arch, she bellowed with the rest.

I don't understand water war. She watched the game; I watched her.

Sharrol was dressed Shashter style, a fancy cloak over a body stocking with windows in it that would serve for swimming. She was small even by flatlander standards, beginning to bulge with our second child. Strong jaw, pale skin, straight black hair: the real Sharrol. On Earth she'd worn many fantastic images, in flatlander style.

For too long fear had lurked beneath her surface emotions. Sharrol wasn't made for this world. But we'd lived beneath Fafnir's world-spanning ocean for a year and a half, we'd conceived and birthed Jeena and started a sister for her, and we'd come to see this place as our own. Gradually the fear had been etched away. I saw no sign of it now. Sharrol was at home.

Light beams danced down through the water and played over the wonderful landscape of Sharrol Janss. But I'd missed brunch. I nudged her and said, "I'm going for provisions."

She didn't turn. "Good! Handmeal, red, yes on veggies. Popcorn. Juice, any."

I left my backpurse in the seat. I glanced back when I reached the aisle. Sharrol was lovely in profile, and entirely absorbed in the game.

***

The stands didn't include food stalls. You had to go under the stands and all the way across the Strand, by elevated slidebridge, and into a fair-sized food court.

Or you could walk twenty yards along the glass, use a transfer booth, and save fifteen minutes.

I flicked in on the second-floor balcony. I looked over the railing at several long lines. The longest was a window for handmeals. My attention snagged on a face below.

He caught me looking.

Or not. I didn't wait to be sure. I stepped to the lone phone booth at the end of the row of transfer booths. Found a coin and dialed. I did not want this call registered on my pocket phone.

We might have had a whole lifetime, I thought. We'd been promised that, but it had been a lie. But we'd had our year and a half.