Betrayer of Worlds by Larry Niven, Edward M. Lerner Read Free Book Online Page B

from Home to Fafnir, hunting for his past—but to a suspicious eye, the Graynors in the public archives on Fafnir were not the Graynors
he
knew. Not to mention that the Fafnir version of the family had included a second woman.
    His family must have had a second wife to pass itself off as the strangers in the holos. Who was she?
Where
was she?
    Fafnir was a water world, with one small continent and lots of coral islands. Its gravity was mildly oppressive. Its day lasted only twenty-two standard hours. (Twenty-two, he remembered. The meaning of
standard
eluded him.) And if that was not enough, plenty of Kzinti—like eight-foot-tall erect tigers—had remained behind after their Patriarchy lost yet another war and ceded the planet to human settlers.
    Not exactly Earth-like.
    Home
was supposedly the most Earth-like of the human-settled worlds. Its active plate tectonics had produced several continents. It had all-but-standard gravity and a day more than twenty-three hours long. Even parts of the biosphere were Earth-like. Some mutated native pathogen had wiped out the first batch of settlers.
    For all that, his mother often hid indoors, shaking and muttering, with every curtain tightly drawn. If Home gave her panic attacks—flat phobia, in the vernacular—how could she have grown up on Fafnir?
    Obviously, she hadn’t.
    Mother’s flat phobia suggested she (and all the “Graynors”?) were from Earth. When Nathan finally made it to Earth, he understood. Eons of evolution could not be denied: Earth looked, smelled, and
felt
like home.
    A DNA sample might have told local authorities who he was. Nathan had tortured himself for months: Should he try to find out? Suppose Earth was his birth world. He had been taken away as a child, surely innocent. But his parents . . .
    If his suspicions were correct, they had gone to extraordinary lengths to escape. To hide. But why? From whom? Were they criminals or refugees?His imagination failed him. Not knowing, he would not risk setting the authorities back on their trail.
    And while Nathan waffled, he had met Paula Cherenkov. And lost her. And fled his own misery to Wunderland. And found new miseries.
    And become Louis Wu, champion of—and not-quite-prisoner to—the fabled Puppeteers.
    The rush of memories made the hunger for drugs that much worse.
    The more information Nessus doled out—and the more old memories that stimulated—the clearer it became: Louis’s family had been driven into hiding. Now it gnawed at Louis that he had added to their pain by abandoning them.
    What if he
did
make it home? Would Nessus have left intact any memory of Louis’s personal history?
    Voice had not noticed Louis’s distraction. “Freeze display,” Louis snapped. He would have to go back to pick up the thread. He jiggled his drink bulb. All but empty. He strode briskly to the relax room, telling himself it was only for coffee—
    And the tanjed synthesizer refused to make painkillers. Not, anyway, unless Nessus entered an authorization.
    Louis told himself he only wanted to know if he could get pills. His addiction wasn’t broken unless he had a
choice
to lapse.
    Knowing himself for a liar, Louis went to his cabin in the hope of sleep.

7

    Insanity ebbed and flowed. Right now insanity was at low tide, and it was all Nessus could do not to hide in his own belly. He had rallied sufficiently merely to cower in his cabin, monitoring Louis through reports from Voice and widely strewn sensors.
    The shipboard AI was yet more insanity, but without Voice for company Nessus might long ago have succumbed to catatonia. The farther the Fleet of Worlds raced from the little corner of the galaxy humans so arrogantly called Known Space, the more grueling these solo trips became. After 135 years of steady acceleration, more than thirty light-years farther.
    Earth years and light-years. After so much time spent away from Hearth, Nessus even thought in those terms. He even, sometimes, found himself thinking