（外文电子版资料）Larry Niven - Crashlander.doc

CRASHLANDER 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 oceans 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 arms 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 dont 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 shed worn many fantastic images, in flatlander style. For too long fear had lurked beneath her surface emotions. Sharrol wasnt made for this world. But wed lived beneath Fafnirs world-spanning ocean for a year and a half, wed conceived and birthed Jeena and s