Juggler of Worlds by Niven Larry & Lerner Edward M

Author:Niven, Larry & Lerner, Edward M. [Niven, Larry & Lerner, Edward M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780765357847
Amazon: 0765357844
Goodreads: 6037543
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction
Published: 2008-09-16T07:00:00+00:00

37

Nature Preserve 1 was a thoroughly Citizen world. There was no real danger here—only shame and misery.

Baedeker shivered in the cab of his hovering combine. The sounds of howling wind and the unhappy grinding of jammed machinery entered through the open window. Eventually he raised the window, colder but no wiser than when he had lowered it.

It would be easy enough to float back to town. The looming wall of black cloud, riven intermittently with great jagged strokes of lightning, was ample justification. Then, when morning came and the storm had passed, when much of the crop lay in ruin, he would be that much further behind in his quota.

Twittering unhappily, he raised the heat setting in his coveralls. The garment was bright orange—Rehabilitation Corps orange—except for the clear, permeable portions that protected his heads. He climbed down from the cab’s right-side door, to the side he had already harvested. He walked leaning into the wind, crop stubble crunching beneath his booted hooves. Even the lightest expanses of sky overhead were a sullen, featureless gray.

A bloody mass clogged the intake: the burrower he had glimpsed in his path. Cursing in minor chords, he popped open an access panel. He disconnected power to the mechanism and began hacking out the carcass with a pry bar from the combine’s toolbox. If the storm held off, he might still get the field harvested today. In this, his new station in life, he had only such tiny successes to appreciate, and them but rarely.

The animal remains had lodged deep inside. He chopped and slashed, gore spattering his coveralls, brooding how far in life he had fallen.

There was a time, not that long ago, when he had been respected and well rewarded. Deservedly so: He had skills and expertise of vital importance to the Concordance. He had held a position of honor and great responsibility within the General Products Corporation. He ate natural foods from the farm planets, instead of slaving on one and living on synthesized gruel.

He wasn’t Baedeker then, not until the end of that halcyon era.

He called himself Baedeker now, the better to remind himself every day exactly how—and by whose doing—he had been humiliated and banished. The better to concentrate on finding a way back.

It began with the scruffy scout named Nessus. . . .

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