Protector by Larry Niven

...what can one say about Brennan?  He will always make maximum use of his environment to achieve his ends.  Knowing his environment, knowing his motives, one could predict his actions exactly. 

But his mind.  What goes on in his mind?

I've been reading a lot about vampires, black magic, and icky sex lately, so maybe it's time to clamp on the ol' space helmet and blast off for the sterile environment of outer space.  When I was a kid I read a Larry Niven novel from which by my forties I only remembered two things--lots of communications lasers and Martians who were killed by spraying them with water--the title was not one of those two things.  A few days ago I became determined to figure out what novel featured these lasers and hydrophobic Martians and to read it.  Looking over the Larry Niven paperbacks at Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD I didn't recognize any covers, but something in the back of my mind insisted the book I was looking for had a "P" in the title, and so I purchased World of Ptaavs and Protector.  I decided to try the 1982 Ballantine printing of Protector, the 1973 expansion of the 1967 Galaxy story "The Adults," first, and hit pay dirt, those memorable scenes coming up pretty quickly--mystery solved!

Protector is a novel in two sections.  The first section is set in 2125.  The human race has colonized four other star systems as well as much of our home solar system.  The solar system is split into two main polities.  The UN controls Earth, Luna, Mars, Titan, Mercury and has some rights to Saturn's rings.  The other "nation" is known as "the Belt" and is centered on the asteroid belt, with its government seated on Ceres.  The Belters are brave intelligent individualists with an egalitarian society, while the Earth and UN are a hierarchical and bureaucratic mess, its people used to being ordered about and thus slow to take initiative.  

Into this milieu flies an alien space craft, the first alien space craft ever encountered by humankind!  One of the main characters of this first section of the novel is the sole crewmember of this ship, which he has manned for centuries as it crossed the galaxy, Phssthpok of the Pak people.  The other main character is John Brennan, one of the men who mines the asteroids in a one-man ship; he rendezvous with Phssthpok and is thus the first human to make contact with an extrasolar alien.  Phssthpok kidnaps Brennan and hides out with him on Mars, a barren planet ignored by humans and inhabited by hostile barbaric natives.

Among the subsidiary characters in this first section are Nick Sohl, head of the laissez faire Belt government and a hardy individualist who himself mines asteroids in a one-man ship in his free time.  Sohl assembles a squadron of two spacecraft to hunt for the alien and Brennan; crewing the ships with Sohl are Lucas Garner, an Earthman who is 184 years old and confined to a wheelchair, Belters Einar Nilsson and Nate La Pan, and Tina Jordan, a thirty-four-year-old female computer programmer who was born on Earth and became a Belter at twenty-one.

As the story progresses we learn all about Pak culture and society as well as the culture of the human race of the early 22nd century, and eventually we get the sense of wonder surprise that forms the foundation of the novel--humans (and other primates) are not native to Earth, but are mutant Paks, descendants of Paks who landed on Earth millions of years ago!

The most important thing about Pak biology and the driving element of their history and civilization is that they metamorphize in middle-age, after prime breeding age has ended.  Such metamorphized Paks are called Protectors, and develop super strength, super intelligence, armored skin, etc.  They are driven by undeniable instincts, irresistible biological imperatives, to promote and defend to the death their offspring, and are undeterred by any fear or sense of ethics or morality.  Protectors largely lack free will--they feel compelled to do the best for their descendants, and will always take the most logical course presented to them by their superior brains.  As a result, the Pak home planet is wracked by almost incessant wars as different coalitions of protectors battle each other in an effort to advance their own descendants' interests at the expense of other protectors' descendants.

Protectors have a lifespan that is practically unlimited, but if a protector has no descendants to protect he will lose interest in life and cease eating and die.  However, some protectors are able to transfer their devotion to their offspring to a substitute group or cause, like the entire Pak species, making all Pak, metaphorically, their children.  Phssthpok is one such protector.  When he lost most of his relatives he spent years in a library and learned all about how millions of years ago a ship of Pak colonists had left the Pak home world and run into trouble on Earth.  Phssthpok decided to put together a space ship with supplies the colonizers and their descendants might need and head off to help them.

An important wrinkle in Pak biology is the fact that the metamorphosis to protector can only occur if a certain virus is present in the Pak.  The Pak who colonized Earth back in mastodon days found that the Earth environment was unable to support the plant in which this virus usually lives.  That is why no humans have ever become protectors--until now!  Phssthpok has brought with him a supply of these plants and viruses, and when Brennan eats some he becomes a super smart and super durable protector, devoted to defending the human race!

The second part of Protector takes place like 250 years later.  Phssthpok is dead and Brennan the Protector, since giving the slip to Sohl and all those people, has been living in the outer solar system, using his super intelligence and the super technology he has built to secretly watch over the human race and promote beneficial developments.  (A standard trope of classic SF, in say Asimov's Foundation books, or Heinlein's' The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or many van Vogt works is that the cognitive elite are able, and perhaps totally justified, in manipulating the masses from behind the scenes, and here it is again in the fiction of Niven, who was born right before Asimov, Heinlein and van Vogt exploded on the scene and I guess is sort of like their heir.)  One of the things Brennan does to keep abreast of developments among the common run of humanity is kidnap individuals, spend a few months with them on his fantabulous green donut and donut hole space station in the outer reaches of the solar system, and then return them to where he seized them, leaving them some money and without any memory of their time with him, memories he has erased from their brains.

One of Brennan's most recent kidnap victims is, apparently a descendent of his.  This guy does all kinds of detective work to figure out what happened to him and puzzles out where Brennan's donut hideout is and goes for a visit.  (Presumably Brennan planned for this to happen.)  Brennan enlists him in the cause of defending the human race--more Pak protectors are on the way, and since they have no connection to the human race they will exterminate us!  Brennan and this guy build super weapons, head for one of the four extrasolar human colonies, fight a running space battle with Pak scout ships-- because of the distances involved this battle lasts years.  Brennan is killed and his descendent becomes a protector; he takes over that colony by subterfuge and force with the plan of creating an army of human protectors to battle the much larger invading army of Pak protectors.  Because the human protectors have experienced a fuller life in a more creative and less rigid society than did Pak protectors, hopefully they will have an edge and save us normies from extermination.

Protector is the kind of hard science fiction that glamorizes logic and science and technology; the characters in the book are always sifting through evidence and figuring stuff out through logic and with their knowledge of science, and the novel also contains reams of talk about lasers and detection systems and propulsion systems and gravity manipulating devices and astronomical phenomena.  I have to admit that I found some of the technical stuff and some aspects of the space battle hard to visualize and to follow.  The Pak space craft, for example, all consist of multiple parts distantly connected by cables because the radiation from the engine can harm the stuff in the cargo pod and I never felt certain that I knew where a cargo pod was in relation to its engine; no doubt this was due more to laziness on my part than any weakness in Niven's prose.  (I didn't google for such things because I like to assess these books cold, but maybe some enterprising fan has produced diagrams of the Pak ships and charts of the course of the running battle between Brennan and the Pak vessels.)  

Protector is also the kind of hard SF that promotes the entrepreneur and the individualist who is skeptical of authority and rules, in particular the government and its petty rules, like taxes.  The Belters who mine the asteroids do so alone, and they personalize their spacesuits by having elaborate pictures, like reproductions of Salvador Dali's The Madonna of Port Lligat, or naked women like the nose art on a WWII bomber, painted on them.  Smuggling--for example, evading payment of a 30% tax on salvage found beyond the orbit of Mars and sold on Luna--is illegal, but nobody considers it immoral; in fact, smugglers are admired in the Belt for their courage and ingenuity.  

This sort of SF is also optimistic about the human race.  We have seen plenty of SF in which elves or robots or aliens are offered as foils for humanity, and serve to show that the human race is a bunch of violent ignorant unsophisticated jerk offs.  In Protector it is the aliens who are the jerk offs, and who show by contrast how awesome human beings can be.  Phssthpok's people love war and have the most primitive sense of morality, one based solely on allegiance to the family or tribe, and they callously exterminate all aliens they meet out of an abundance of caution.  The Paks are almost like robots, acting almost entirely on biological imperatives and instinct, and they have no interest in art or abstract thought.  The humans in Protector read novels and admire scenery and love art and so forth.  We have also seen plenty of SF stories in which humans can't take the pressure of travelling through space, going insane from the stress of crossing the black void between the planets.  In Protector the Belters love space, the way sailors in fiction about the sea love the sea, even though at any moment they can be drowned or rent apart by sharks.  Even Brennan's descendent who helps him in the second part of the book, an Earther, is able to overcome the psychological pressures of being in a tiny space ship for multiple years. 

Protector is a good example of the story if its type, but it is a book about ideas, a series of speculations about what would result from different chemical, biological, physical and social conditions, and is open to criticism from people who may not be fascinated by astronomy and gravity and lasers and that sort of thing and read novels looking for human drama.  This here novel is cold and passionless and the characters are flat and forgettable, serving simply to illustrate Niven's ideas.  It provides an intellectual, not an emotional, experience.

A solid piece of work.  Maybe I'll read World of Ptavvs soon.