Ringworld (4 page)

Sleeping plates were designed for two occupants, not one. But there had been other girls at the party ... not as pretty as Teela. Could wise old Louis Wu still be snared by beauty alone?

But something more than beauty looked out of those flat silver eyes. Something highly complex.

"For purposes of fornication," said Louis Wu. He had remembered that he was talking to an alien, who would not understand such complexities. He realized that the puppeteer was still shivering, and added, "Let's go to my office. It's under the hill. No meteors."

***

After the puppeteer left, Louis went looking for Teela. He found her in the library, in front of a reading screen, clicking frames past at a speed high even for a speedreader.

"Hi," she said. She froze a frame and turned. "How's our two-headed friend?"

"Scared witless. And I'm exhausted. I've been playing psychiatrist to a Pierson's puppeteer."

Teela brightened. "Tell me about a puppeteer's sex life."

"All I know is, he isn't allowed to breed. He broods on it. One may assume that he could breed if there weren't a law against it. Aside from that, he stayed off the subject completely. Sorry."

"Well, what did you talk about?"

Louis waved a hand. "Three hundred years of traumas. That's how long Nessus has been in human space. He hardly remembers the puppeteer planet. I get the feeling he's been scared for three hundred years." Louis dropped into a masseur chair. The strain of empathizing with an alien had exhausted his mind, used up his imagination.

"How about you? What are you reading?"

"The Core explosion." Teela waved at the reading screen.

There were stars in clusters and bunches and masses. You couldn't see black, there were so many stars. It might have been a dense star cluster, but it wasn't; it couldn't be. Telescopes wouldn't reach that far, nor would any normal spacecraft.

It was the galactic core, five thousand light years across, a tight sphere of stars at the axis of the galactic whirlpool. One man had reached that far, two hundred years ago, in an experimental puppeteer-built ship. The frame showed red and blue and green stars, all superimposed, the red stars biggest and brightest. In the center of the picture was a patch of blazing white the shape of a bloated comma. Within it were lines and blobs of shadow; but the shadow within the white patch was brighter than any star outside it.

"That's why you need the puppeteer ship," said Teela. "Isn't it?"

"Right."

"How did it happen?"

"The stars are too close together," said Louis. "An average of half a light year apart, all through the core of any galaxy. Near the center, they're packed even tighter. In a galactic core, stars are so close to each other that they can heat each other up. Being hotter, they burn faster. They age faster.

"All the stars of the core must have been just that much closer to going nova, ten thousand years ago.

"Then one star went nova. It let loose a lot of heat and a blast of ganuna rays. The few stars around it got that much hotter. I gather the gamma rays also make for increased stellar activity. So a couple of neighboring stars blew up.

"That made three. The combined heat set off a few more. It was a chain reaction. Pretty soon there was no stopping it. That white patch is all supernovae. If you like, you can get the math of it a little further along in the tape."

"No thanks," she said -- predictably. "I gather it's an over by now?"

"Yeah. That's old light you're looking at, though it hasn't reached this part of the galaxy yet. The chain reaction must have ended ten thousand years ago."

"Then what is everyone excited about?"

"Radiation. Fast particles, all kinds." The masseur chair was beginning to relax him; he settled deeper into its formless bulk and let the standing wave patterns knead his muscles. "Look at it this way. Known space is a little bubble of stars thirty-three thousand light years out from the galactic axis. The novae began exploding more than ten thousand years ago. That means that the wave front from the combined explosion will get here in about twenty thousand years. Right?"

"Sure."

"And the subnuclear radiation from a million novae is traveling right behind the wave front."

"... Oh."

"In twenty thousand years we'll have to evacuate every world you ever heard of, and probably a lot more."

"That's a long time. If we started now, we could do it with the ships we've got. Easily."

"You're not thinking. At three days to the light year, it would take one of our ships about six hundred years to reach the Clouds of Magellan."

"They could stop off to get more food and air ... every year or so."

Louis laughed. "Try talking anyone into that. You know what I think? When the light of the Core explosion starts shining through the dust clouds between here and the galactic axis, that's when everyone in human space is suddenly going to get terrified. Then they'll have a century to get out.

"The puppeteers had the right idea. They sent a man to the Core as a publicity stunt because they wanted financing for research. He sent back pictures like that one. Before he'd even landed, the puppeteers were gone; there wasn't a puppeteer on any human world. We won't do it that way. Well wait and we'll wait, and when we finally decide to move we'll have to ship trillions of sentient beings completely out of the galaxy. We'll need the biggest, fastest ships we can build, and we'll need as many as we can get. We need the puppeteer drive now, so that we can start improving it now. The --"

"Okay. I'm going with you."

Louis, interrupted in midlecture, said, "Huh?"

"I'm going with you," said Teela Brown.

"You're out of your mind."

"Well, you're going, aren't you?"

Louis clamped his teeth on the explosion. When he did speak, he spoke more calmly than the situation deserved. "Yes, I'm going. But I've got reasons you don't, and I'm better at staying alive than you are, because I've been at it longer."

"But I'm luckier."

Louis snorted.

"And my reasons for going may not be as good as yours, but they're good enough!" Her voice was high and thin with anger.

"The tanj they are."

Teela tapped the face of the reading screen. A bloated comma of nova light flared beneath her fingernail. "That's not a good reason?"

"We'll get the puppeteer drive whether you come or not. You heard Nessus. There are thousands like you."

"And I'm one of them!"

"All right, you're one of them," Louis flared.

"What are you so tanj protective about? Did I ask for your protection?"

"I apologize. I don't know why I tried to dictate to you. You're a free adult."

"Thank you. I intend to join your crew." Teela had gone icily formal.

The hell of it was, she was a free adult. Not only could she not be coerced; an attempt to order her about would be bad manners and (more to the point) wouldn't work.

But she could be persuaded ...

"Then think about this," said Louis Wu. "Nessus has gone to great lengths to protect the secrecy of this trip. Why? What's he got to hide?"

"That's his business, isn't it? Maybe there's something worth stealing, wherever we're going."

"So what? Where we're going is two hundred light years from here. We're the only ones who can get there."

"The ship itself, then."

Whatever was unusual about Teela, she was no dummy. Louis himself hadn't thought of that. "Then think about our crew," he said. "Two humans, a puppeteer, and a kzin. None of us professional explorers."

"I see what you're doing, but honestly, Louis, I am going. I doubt you can stop me."

"Then you can at least know what you're getting into. Why the odd crew?"

"That's Nessus's problem."

"I'd say it's ours. Nessus gets his orders directly from those-who-lead -- from the puppeteer headquarters. I think he figured out what those orders meant, just a few hours ago. Now he's terrified. Those ... priests of survival have got four games going at once, not counting whatever it is we'll be exploring."

He saw that he had Teela's interest, and he pressed on. "First there's Nessus. If he's mad enough to land on an unknown world, can he possibly be sane enough to survive the experience? Those-who-lead have to know. After they reach the Clouds of Magellan they'll have to set up another commercial empire. The backbone of their commerce is the mad puppeteers.

"Then there's our furry friend. As ambassador to an alien race, he should be one of the most sophisticated kzinti around. Is he sophisticated enough to get along with the rest of us? Or will he kill us for elbow room and fresh meat?

"Third, there's you and your presumed luck, a blue-sky research project if I ever heard of one. Fourth is me, a presumably typical explorer type. Maybe I'm the control.

"You know what I think?" Louis was standing over the girl now, pounding his words home with an oratorical technique he'd mastered while losing an election for the UN in his middle seventies. He would honestly have denied trying to browbeat Teela Brown; but he wanted desperately to convince her. "The puppeteers couldn't care less about whatever planet we're being sent to. Why should they, when they're leaving the galaxy? They're test-ing our little team to destruction. Before we get ourselves killed, the puppeteers can find out a lot about how we interact."

"I don't think ifs a planet," said Teela.

Louis exploded. "Tanj! What has that got to do with it?"

"Well, after all, Louis. If we're going to get killed exploring it, we might as well know what it is. I think it's a spacecraft."

"You do."

"A big one, a ring-shaped one with a ramscoop field to pick up interstellar hydrogen. I think it's built to funnel the hydrogen into the axis for fusion. You'd get thrust that way, and a sun too. You'd spin the ring for centrifugal force, and you'd roof the inner side with glass."

"Yeah," said Louis, thinking of the odd picture in the holo he'd been given by the puppeteer. He'd spent too little time wondering about their destination. "Could be. Big and primitive and not very easy to steer. But why would those-who-lead be interested?"

"It could be a refugee ship. Core races would learn about stellar processes early, with the suns so close together. They might have predicted the explosion thousands of years ahead ... when there were only two or three supernovas."

"Supernovae. Could be ... and you've snaked me right off the subject. I've told you what kind of game I think the puppeteers are playing. I'm going anyway, for the fun of it. What makes you think you want to go?"

"The Core explosion."

"Altruism is great, but you couldn't possibly be worried about something that's supposed to happen in twenty thousand years. Try again."

"Dammit, if you can be a hero, so can I! And you're wrong about Nessus. He'd back out of a suicide mission. And -- and why would the puppeteers want to know anything about us, or the kzinti either? What would they test us for? They're leaving the galaxy. They'll never have anything to do with us again."

No, Teela wasn't stupid. But -- "You're wrong. The puppeteers have excellent reasons for wanting to know all about us."

Teela's look dared him to back it up.

"We don't know much about the puppeteer migration. We do know that every able-bodied, sane-minded puppeteer now alive is on the move. And we know that they're moving at just below lightspeed. The puppeteers are afraid of hyperspace.

"Now. Traveling at just below lightspeed, the puppeteer fleet should reach the Lesser Cloud of Magellan in about eighty-five thousand years. And what do they expect to find when they get there?"

He grinned at her and gave her the punch line. "Us, of course. Humans and kzinti, at least. Kdatlyno and pierin and dolphins, probably. They know we'll wait until the last minute and then run for it, and they know we'll use faster-then-light drives. By the time the puppeteers reach the Cloud, they'll have to deal with us ... or with whatever kills us off; and by knowing us, they can predict the nature of the killer. Oh, they've got reason enough to study us."

"Okay."

"Still want to go?"

Teela nodded.

"Why?"

"I'll reserve that." Teela's composure was complete. And what could Louis do about it? Had she been under nineteen he would have called one of her parents. But at twenty she was a presumed adult. You had to draw the line somewhere.

As an adult she had freedom of choice; she was entitled to expect good manners from Louis Wu; certain areas of her privacy were sacrosanct. Louis could only persuade; and at that he had failed.

So that Teela didn't have to do what she did next. She suddenly took his hands and, smiling, pleading, said, "Take me with you, Louis. I'm luck, really I am. If Nessus didn't choose right you could wind up sleeping alone. You'd hate that, I know you would."

She had him in a box. He couldn't keep her off Nessus's ship, not when she could go directly to the puppeteer.

"All right," he said. "We'll call him."

And he would hate sleeping alone.

"I want to join the expedition," Teela said into the phonescreen.

The puppeteer howled on a long-drawn E-flat note.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Excuse me," said the puppeteer. "Report to Outback Field, Australia, tomorrow at 0800. Bring personal possessions not to exceed fifty pounds Earth weight. Louis, you will do the same. Ahh --" The puppeteer raised his heads and howled.

Anxiously Louis demanded, "Are you sick?"

"No. I foresee my own death. Louis, I could wish that you had been less persuasive. Farewell. We meet at Outback Field."

The screen went dark.

"See?" Teela crowed. "See what you get for being so persuasive?"

"Me and my silver tongue. Well, I did my oratorical best. Don't blame me if you die horribly."

That night, freely falling in darkness, Louis heard her say, "I love you. I'm going with you because I love you."

"Love you too," he said with sleepy good manners. Then it percolated through, and he said, "That's what you were reserving?"

"Mm hmm."

"You're following me two hundred light years because you can't bear to let me go?"

"Yawp."

"Sleeproom, half-light," said Louis. Dim blue light filled the room.

They floated a foot apart between the sleeping plates. in preparation for space they had cleaned off the skin dyes and hair treatments of flatland style. The hair in Louis's queue was now straight and black; his scalp was gray with stubble. Yellow-brown skin tones, brown eyes with no perceptible slant, changed his image considerably.

The changes in Teela were equally drastic. Her hair was dark and wavy now, tied back from her face. Her skin was nordic-pale. Her oval face was dominated by big brown eyes and a small, serious mouth; her nose was almost unnoticeable. In the sleeping field she floated like oil on water, utterly relaxed.

"But you've never even been as far as the Moon."

She nodded.

"And I'm not the world's greatest lover. You told me that yourself."

She nodded again. There was no reticence in Teela Brown. In two days and nights she had not lied, nor shaded the truth, nor so much as dodged a question. Louis would have known. She had told him of her first two loves: the one who had lost interest in her after half a year, the other, a cousin, who had been offered a chance to emigrate to Mount Lookitthat. Louis had told her little of his own experience, and she had seemed to accept his reticence. But she had none. And she asked the damndest questions.

"Then why me?" he asked.

"I don't know," she confessed. "Could it be the charisma? You're a hero, you know."

He was the only living man to have made first contact with an alien species. Would he ever live down the Trinoc episode?

He made one more try. "Look, I know the world's greatest lover. Friend of mine. It's his hobby. He writes books about it. He's got doctorates in physiology and psychology. For the past hundred and thirty years he's been --"

Teela had her hands over her ears. "Don't" she said. "Don't."

"I just don't want you to get killed somewhere. You're too young."

She wore the puzzled look, that puzzled look, the one that meant hed used proper Interworld words in a nonsense sequence. Whiplash of the heart? Killed somewhere? Louis sighed within himself. "Sleeproom nodes merge," he said, and something happened to the sleeper field. The two regions of stable equilibrium, the anomalies which kept Louis and Teela from falling out of the field, moved together and merged into one. Louis and Teela followed, sliding "downhill" until they bumped and clung.

"I really was sleepy, Louis. But never mind ..."

"Think about privacy before you drift away to dreamland. Spacecraft tend to be cramped."

"You mean we couldn't make love? Tanj, Louis, I don't care if they watch. They're aliens."

"I care."

She gave him that puzzled look. "Suppose they weren't aliens. Then would you object?"

"Yes, unless we knew them very well. Does that make me out of date?"

"A little."

"Remember that friend I mentioned? The world's greatest lover? Well, he had a colleague," said Louis, "and she taught me some things he was teaching her. You need gravity for this," he added. "Sleeproom field off." Weight returned.

"You're trying to change the subject," said Teela.

"Yes. I give up."

"Okay, but just keep one thing in mind. One thing. Your puppeteer friend might have wanted four species instead of three. You could just as easily be holding a Trinoc instead of me."

"Horrible thought. Now, we do this in three stages, starting with straddle position ... "

"What's straddle position?"

"I'll show you ..."

By morning Louis was glad enough that they would be traveling together. When his doubts returned it was too late. It had already been too late for some considerable time.

***

The Outsiders were traders in information. They bought high and they sold high, but what they bought once they sold again and again, for their trading ground was the entire galactic whorl. In the banks of human space their credit was virtually unlimited.

Presumably they had evolved on some cold, light moon of a gas giant; some world very like Nereid, Neptune's larger moon. Now they lived in the gaps between the stars, in city-sized ships whose sophistication varied enormously, from photon sails to engines theoretically impossible to human science. Where a planetary system held potential customers, and where such a system included a suitable world, the Outsiders would lease space for trade centers, rest and recreation areas, supply dumps. Half a thousand years ago they had leased Nereid.

"And that must be their major trade area," said Louis Wu. "Down there." He pointed with one hand, keeping the other on the controls of the transport ship.

Nereid was an icy, craggy plain beneath bright starlight. The sun was a fat white point giving off as much light as a full Moon; and that light illuminated a maze of low walls. There were hemispherical buildings, and a cluster of small thruster-driven ground-to-orbit ships with passenger sections open to space; but more than half the plain was covered with those low walls.

Speaker-To-Animals, hovering hugely behind Louis, said, "I would know the purpose of the maze. Defense?"

"Basking areas," said Louis. "The Outsiders live on thermoelectricity. They lie with their heads in sunlight and their tails in shadow, and the temperature difference between the two sets up a current. The walls are to make more shadow-borderlines."

Nessus had calmed down during the ten-hour flight. He trotted about the lifesystem of the transport ship, inspecting this and that, poking a head and eye into corners, tossing comments and answers to questions over his shoulder. His pressure suit, a baggy balloon with padding over the hump that concealed his brain, looked light and comfortable; the air and food regenerator packages were improbably small.

He had given them a strange moment just before takeoff. Music had played suddenly through the cabin, complex and lovely, rich in minor tones, like the sad call of a sex-maddened computer. Nessus whistled. With his twin mouths, rich in nerves and muscles appropriate to mouths which were also hands, the puppeteer was a walking orchestra.

He had insisted that Louis fly the craft, and his confidence in Louis's ability was such that he had not strapped down. Louis suspected special, secret gadgets to protect the passengers of the puppeteer-built ship.

Speaker had come aboard with a twenty-pound luggage case which, when opened, had held little more than a collapsed microwave oven for heating meat. That, and a haunch of raw something-or-other, of kzinti rather than terrestrial origin. For some reason Louis had expected the kzin's pressure suit to look like bulky medieval armor. It didn't. It was a multiple balloon, transparent, with a monstrously heavy backpack and a fishbowl helmet packed with esoteric-looking tongue controls. Though it held no identifiable weapons, the backpack had a look of battle gear, and Nessus had insisted that he store it.

The kzin had spent most of the voyage napping.

And now they all stood looking over Louis's shoulder.

"I'll drop us next to the Outsider ship," said Louis.

"No. Take us east. We have been using an isolated area to park the Long Shot."

"What for? Would the Outsiders spy on you?"

"No. The Long Shot uses fusion drives instead of thrusters. The heat of takeoffs and landings would disturb the Outsiders."

"Why Long Shot?"

"It was so named by Beowulf Shaeffer, the only sentient being ever to fly that ship. He took the only extant holographs of the Core explosion. Is not Long Shot a gambler's term?"

"Maybe he didn't expect to come back. I'd better tell you: I've never flown anything with a fusion drive. My ship rides on reactionless thrusters, just like this one."

"You must learn," said Nessus.

"Wait," said Speaker-To-Animals. "I myself have had experience with fusion-driven spacecraft. Therefore I will pilot the Long Shot."

"Impossible. The pilot's crash couch is designed to fit a human frame. The control panels follow human custom."

The kzin made angry noises deep in his throat.

"There, Louis. Ahead of us."

The Long Shot was a transparent bubble over a thousand feet in diameter. As Louis guided their craft to circle the behemoth, he could find no cubic inch of her that was not packed with the green-and-bronze machinery of hyperspace shunt motors. Her hull was a General Products #4 hull, easily recognized by one familiar with spacecraft, so big that it was commonly used only to ship entire prefab colonies. But she didn't look like a spacecraft. She was the tremendous counterpart of some primitive orbital satellite, built by a race whose limited resources and limited technology required that every smallest bit of space be used.

"And where do we sit?" Louis inquired. "On top?"

"The cabin is underneath. Land beneath the curve of the hull."

Louis brought his ship down on dark ice, then slid her carefully forward, under the bulging belly of the Long Shot.

There were lights in the lifesystem; they gleamed through the Long Shot's hull. Louis saw two tiny rooms, the lower just big enough to hold a crash couch and a mass indicator and a horseshoe-shaped bank of instruments, the upper room no larger. He felt the kzin move up behind him.

"Interesting," said the kzin. "I presume that Louis is intended to ride in the lower compartment, and we three in the upper."

"Yes. The fitting of three crash couches into so small a space gave us considerable difficulty. Each is equipped with a stasis field for maximum safety. Since we will ride in stasis, it matters little that there is no room to move about."

The kzin snorted, and Louis felt him leave his shoulder. He let the ship settle a last few inches, then snapped off a succession of switches.

"I have a point to make," he said. "Teela and I are collecting the same fee between us that Speaker-To-Animals is collecting alone."

"Do you wish additional pay? I will consider your suggestions."

"I want something you don't need any more," Louis told the puppeteer. "Something your race left behind them." He'd picked a good moment for bargaining. He didn't expect it to work, but it was certainly worth a try. "I want the location of the puppeteer planet."

Nessus's heads swung out from his shoulders, then turned back to face each other. For a moment Nessus held his own stare before asking, "Why?"

"Once upon a time the location of the puppeteer world was the most valuable secret in known space. Your own kind would have paid a fortune in blackmail to keep that secret," said Louis. "That was what made it valuable. Fortune hunters searched every G and K star in sight looking for the puppeteer world. Even now, Teela and I could sell the information to any news network for good money."

"But if that world is outside known space?"

"Ah-h-h," said Louis. "My history teacher used to wonder about that. The information would still be worth money."

"Before we depart for our ultimate destination," the puppeteer said carefully, "you will know the coordinates of the puppeteer world. I think you will find the information more surprising than useful." Again, for a heartbeat, the puppeteer peered into his own eyes.

He broke the pose. "I direct your attention to four conical projections --"

"Yeah." Louis had already noticed the open-mouthed cones, pointing outward and downward around the double cabin. "Are those the fusion motors?"

"Yes. You will find that the ship behaves very like a ship driven by reactionless thrusters, except that there is no internal gravity. Our designers had little room to spare. Concerning the operation of the quantum Il hyperdrive, there is a thing I must warn you about --"

"I have a variable-sword," said Speaker-To-Animals. "I urge calm."

It took a moment for the words to register. Then Louis turned, slowly, making no sudden gestures.

The kzin stood against a curved wall. In one clawed fist he held something like an oversized jumprope handle. Ten feet from the handle, held expertly at the level of the kzin's eyes, was a small, glowing red ball. The wire which joined ball to handle was too thin to be visible, but Louis didn't doubt it was there. Protected and made rigid by a Slaver stasis field, the wire would cut through most metals, including -- if Louis should choose to hide behind it -- the back of Louis's crash couch. And the kzin had chosen a position such that he could strike anywhere in the cabin.

At the kzin's feet Louis saw the unidentified haunch of alien meat. It had been ripped open, and, of course, it had been hollow.

"I would have preferred a more merciful weapon," said Speaker-To-Animals. "A stunner would have been ideal. I could not procure one in time. Louis, take your hands off the controls and put them on the back of your couch."

Louis did. He had thought of playing with the cabin gravity; but the kzin would have cut him in two if he'd tried it.

"Now, if you will all remain calm, I will tell you what will happen next."

"Tell us why," Louis suggested. He was estimating chances. The red bulb was an indicator to tell Speaker where his invisibly thin wire blade ended. But if Louis could grab that end of the blade, and keep from losing his fingers in the process -- No. The bulb was too small.