LARRY NIVEN
Inconstant Moon
Larry Niven established his credentials as a master of the hard-science-fiction story with his Nebula Award–winning novel Ringworld, about a ribbonlike planetary body with a million-mile radius and six-hundred-million-mile circumference that rings a remote star and poses unique technical problems in navigation and escape for its human inhabitants. The novel and its sequels Ringworld Engineers and Ringworld Throne are part of Niven’s vast Tales of Known Space saga, an acclaimed future history of humankind’s populating of interstellar space that has accommodated exploration of a wide variety of themes including alien cultures, immortality, time travel, terraforming, genetic engineering, and teleportation. The novels The World of Ptavvs, A Gift from Earth, Protector, The Patchwork Girl, The Integral Trees, and The Smoke Ring, as well as the story collections Neutron Star, The Shape of Space, Crashlander, and Flatlander, elaborate an epic billion-and-a-half-year history that integrates innovative technologies with colorful developments of alien races and human and extraterrestrial interactions. The allure of Niven’s invention can be measured by the seven volumes in the Man-Kzin Wars anthology series, which have attracted his colleagues in hard science fiction to contribute stories, bolstering the plausibility of the series through a shared-world sensibility. Niven has also written the novel A World Out of Time, a far-future projection in which human evolution leads to immortality, and the series of science fiction mystery stories collected in The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton. Much of his work at novel length has been written in collaboration. The Mote in God’s Eye, coauthored by Jerry Pournelle, is a memorable first-contact story about the accidental discovery of an alien race determined to seed our solar system with its proliferating population. Niven and Pournelle have also written a sequel, The Gripping Hand, the disaster novel Lucifer’s Hammer, and Inferno, which transports a science fiction writer to a Dantesque hell. With Steve Barnes, Niven has written Dream Park, The Barsoom Project, and The Voodoo Game, all set in a future amusement park where imagined realities are manifested through virtual reality. Niven has also written a series of fantasies concerned with primitive magic that includes The Magic Goes Away and Time of the Warlock.
I WAS WATCHING the news when the change came, like a flicker of motion at the corner of my eye. I turned toward the balcony window. Whatever it was, I was too late to catch it.
The moon was very bright tonight.
I saw that, and smiled, and turned back. Johnny Carson was just starting his monologue.
When the first commercials came on I got up to reheat some coffee. Commercials came in strings of three and four, going on midnight. I’d have time.
The moonlight caught me coming back. If it had been bright before, it was brighter now. Hypnotic. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the balcony.
The balcony wasn’t much more than a railed ledge, with standing room for a man and a woman and a portable barbecue set. These past months the view had been lovely, especially around sunset. The Power and Light Company had been putting up a glass-slab-style office building. So far it was only a steel framework of open girders. Shadow-blackened against a red sunset sky, it tended to look stark and surrealistic and hellishly impressive.
Tonight . . .
I had never seen the moon so bright, not even in the desert. Bright enough to read by, I thought, and immediately, but that’s an illusion. The moon was never bigger (I had read somewhere) than a quarter held nine feet away. It couldn’t possibly be bright enough to read by.
It was only three-quarters full!
But, glowing high over the San Diego Freeway to the west, the moon seemed to dim even the streaming automobile headlights. I blinked against its light, and thought of men walking on the moon, leaving corrugated footprints. Once, for the sake of an article I was writing, I had been allowed to pick up a bone-dry moon rock and hold it in my hand . . .
I heard the show starting again, and I stepped inside. But, glancing once behind me, I caught the moon growing even brighter—as if it had come from behind a wisp of scudding cloud.
Now its light was brain-searing, lunatic.
THE PHONE RANG five times before she answered.
“Hi,” I said. “Listen—”
“Hi,” Leslie said sleepily, complainingly. Damn. I’d hoped she was watching television, like me.
I said, “Don’t scream and shout, because I had a reason for calling. You’re in bed, right? Get up and—Can you get up?”
“What time is it?”
“Quarter of twelve.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Go out on your balcony and look around.”
“Okay.”
The phone clunked. I waited. Leslie’s balcony faced north and west, like mine, but it was ten stories higher, with a correspondingly better view.
Through my own window, the moon burned like a textured spotlight.
“Stan? You there?”
“Yah. What do you think of it?”
“It’s gorgeous. I’ve never seen anything like it. What could make the moon light up like that?”
“I don’t know, but isn’t it gorgeous?”
“You’re supposed to be the native.” Leslie had only moved out here a year ago.
“Listen, I’ve never seen it like this. But there’s an old legend,” I said. “Once every hundred years the Los Angeles smog rolls away for a single night, leaving the air as clear as interstellar space. That way the gods can see if Los Angeles is still there. If it is, they roll the smog back so they won’t have to look at it.”
“I used to know all that stuff. Well, listen, I’m glad you woke me up to see it, but I’ve got to get to work tomorrow.”
“Poor baby.”
“That’s life. ’Night.”
“ ’Night.”
Afterward I sat in the dark, trying to think of someone else to call. Call a girl at midnight, invite her to step outside and look at the moonlight. . . . and she may think it’s romantic or she may be furious, but she won’t assume you called six others.
So I thought of some names. But the girls who belonged to them had all dropped away over the past year or so, after I started spending all my time with Leslie. One could hardly blame them. And now Joan was in Texas and Hildy was getting married, and if I called Louise I’d probably get Gordie too. The English girl? But I couldn’t remember her number. Or her last name.
Besides, everyone I knew punched a time clock of one kind or another. Me, I worked for a living, but as a freelance writer I picked my hours. Anyone I woke up tonight, I’d be ruining her morning. Ah, well . . .