Ringworld

Larry Niven

Chapter 1.
Chapter 2.
Chapter 3.
Chapter 4.
Chapter 5.
Chapter 6.
Chapter 7.
Chapter 8.
Chapter 9.
Chapter 10.
Chapter 11.
Chapter 12.
Chapter 13.
Chapter 14.
Chapter 15.
Chapter 16.
Chapter 17.
Chapter 18.
Chapter 19.
Chapter 20.
Chapter 21.
Chapter 22.
Chapter 23.
Chapter 24.

Ringworld
by Larry Niven

Chapter 1.
Louis Wu

   In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.
   His foot-length queue was as white and shiny as artificial snow. His skin and depilated scalp were chrome yellow; the irises of his eyes were gold; his robe was royal blue with a golden steroptic dragon superimposed. In the instant he appeared, he was smiling widely, showing pearly, perfect, perfectly standard teeth. Smiling and waving. But the smile was already fading, and in a moment it was gone, and the sag of his face was like a rubber mask melting. Louis Wu showed his age.
   For a few moments, he watched Beirut stream past him: the people flickering into the booths from unknown places; the crowds flowing past him on foot, now that the slidewalks had been turned off for the night. Then the clocks began to strike twenty-three. Louis Wu straightened his shoulders and stepped out to join the world.
   In Resht, where his party was still going full blast, it was already the morning after his birthday. Here in Beirut it was an hour earlier. In a balmy outdoor restaurant Louis bought rounds of raki and encouraged the singing of songs in Arabic and Interworld. He left before midnight for Budapest.
   Had they realized yet that he had walked out on his own party? They would assume that a woman had gone with him, that he would be back in a couple of hours. But Louis Wu had gone alone, jumping ahead of the midnight line, hotly pursued by the new day. Twenty-four hours was not long enough for a man’s two hundredth birthday.
   They could get along without him. Louis’s friends could take care of themselves. In this respect, Louis’s standards were inflexible.
   In Budapest were wine and athletic dances, natives who tolerated him as a tourist with money, tourists who thought he was a wealthy native. He danced the dances and he drank the wines, and he left before midnight.
   In Munich he walked.
   The air was warm and clean; it cleared some of the fumes from his head. He walked the brightly lighted slidewalks, adding his own pace to their ten-miles-per-hour speed. It occurred to him then that every city in the world had slidewalks, and that they all moved at ten miles per hour.
   The thought was intolerable. Not new; just intolerable. Louis Wu saw how thoroughly Munich resembled Cairo and Resht… and San Francisco and Topeka and London and Amsterdam. The stores along the slidewalks sold the same products in all the cities of the world. These citizens who passed him tonight looked all alike, dressed all allke. Not Americans or Germans or Egyptlans, but mere flatlanders.
   In three-and-a-half centuries the transfer booths had done this to the infinite variety of Earth. They covered the world in a net of instantaneous travel. The difference between Moskva and Sidney was a moment of time and a tenth-star coin. Inevitably the cities had blended over the centuries, until placenames were only relics of the past. San Francisco and San Diego were the northern and southern ends of one sprawling coastal city. But how many people knew which end was which? Tanj few, these days.
   Pessimistic thinking, for a man’s two hundredth birthday.
   But the blending of the cities was real. Louis had watched it happen. All the irrationalities of place and time and custom, blending into one big rationality of City, worldwide, like a dull gray paste. Did anyone today speak Deutsche, English, Francais, Espanol? Everyone spoke Interworld. Style in body paints changed all at once, all over the world, in one monstrous surge.
   Time for another sabbatical? Into the unknown, alone in a singleship, with his skin and eyes and hair their own color, a beard growing randomly over his face…
   “Nuts,” said Louis to himself. “I just got back from a sabbatical.” Twenty years ago.
   But it was wearing on toward midnight. Louis Wu found a transfer booth, inserted his credit card in the slot and dialed for Sevilla.
   He emerged in a sunlit room.
   “What the tanj?” he wondered, blinking. The transfer booth must have blown its zap. In Sevilla there should have been no sunlight. Louis Wu turned to dial again, then turned back and stared.
   He was in a thoroughly anonymous hotel room: a setting prosaic enough to make its occupant doubly shocking.
   Facing him from the middle of the room was something neither human nor humanoid. It stood on three legs, and it regarded Louis Wu from two directions, from two flat heads mounted on flexible, slender necks. Over most of its startling frame, the skin was white and glovesoft; but a thick, coarse brown mane ran from between the beasts necks, back along its spine, to cover the complex-looking hip joint of the hind leg. The two forelegs were set wide apart, so that the beast’s small, clawed hooves formed almost an equilateral triangle.
   Louis guessed that the thing was an alien animal. In those flat heads there would be no room for brains. But he noticed the hump that rose between the bases of the necks, where the mane became a thick protective mop… and a memory floated up from eighteen decades behind him.
   This was a puppeteer, a Pierson’s puppeteer. Its brain and skull were under the hump. It was not an animal; it was at least as intelligent as a man. And its eyes, one to a head in deep bone sockets, stared fixedly at Louis Wu from two directions.
   Louis tried the door. Locked.
   He was locked out, not in. He could dial and vanish. But it never occurred to him. One does not meet a Pierson’s puppeteer every day. The species had been gone from known space for longer than Louis Wu had been alive.
   Louis said, “Can I help you?”
   “You can,” said the alien…
   …in a voice to spark adolescent dreams. Had Louis visualized a woman to go with that voice, she would have been Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Marilyn Monroe, and Lorelei Huntz, rolled into one.
   “Tanj!” The curse seemed more than usually appropriate. There Ain’t No Justice! That such a voice should belong to a two-headed alien of indeterminate sex!
   “Be not frightened,” said the alien. “Know that you can escape if need be.”
   “In college there were pictures of things like you. You’ve been gone a long time… or so we thought.”
   “When my species fled known space, I was not among them,” the puppeteer replied. “I remained in known space, for my species had need of me here.”
   “Where have you been hiding? And where on Earth are we?”
   “That need not concern you. Are you Louis Wu, MMGREWPLH?”
   “You knew that? You were after me, in particular?”
   “Yes. We found it possible to manipulate this world’s network of transfer booths.”
   It could be done, Louis realized. It would take a fortune in bribe money, but it could be done. But—”Why?”
   “That will take some explanation—”
   “Aren’t you going to let me out of here?”
   The Puppeteer considered. “I suppose I must. First you should know that I have protection. My armament would stop you should you attack me.”
   Louis Wu made a sound of disgust. “Why would I do that?”
   The puppeteer made no answer.
   “Now I remember. You’re cowards. Your whole ethical system is based on cowardice.”
   “Inaccurate as it is, that judgment will serve us.”
   “Well, it could be worse,” Louis conceded. Every sentient species had its quirks. Surely the puppeteer would be easier to deal with than the racially paranoid Trinocs, or the kzinti with their hair-trigger killer instincts, or the sessile Grogs with their… disturbing substitute for hands.
   The sight of the puppeteer had jarred loose a whole atticfull of dusty memories. Mixed with data on the puppeteers and their commercial empire, their interactions with humanity, their sudden and shocking disappearance—mixed with these were the taste of Louies first tobacco cigarette, the feel of typewriter keys under clumsy, untrained fingers, lists of Interworld vocabulary to be memorized, the sound and taste of English, the uncertainties and embarrassments of extreme youth. He’d studied the puppeteers during a college history course, then forgotten about them for one hundred and eighty years. Incredible, that a man’s mind could retain so much!
   “I’ll stay in here,” he told the puppeteer, “if it makes you more comfortable.”
   “No. We must meet.”
   Muscles bunched and twitched beneath its creamy skin as the puppeteer nerved itself. Then the door to the transfer booth clicked open. Louis Wu stepped into the room.
   The puppeteer backed away a few paces.
   Louis dropped into a chair, more for the puppeteer’s comfort than for his own. He would look more harmless sitting down. The chair was of standard make, a self-adjusting masseur chair, strictly for humans. Louis noticed a faint scent now, reminiscent both of a spice shelf and of a chemistry set, more pleasant than othcrwise.
   The alien rested on its folded hind leg. “You wonder why I brought you here. This will take some explanation. What do you know of my species?”
   “It’s been a long time since college. You had a commercial empire once, didn’t you? What we like to call known space was just a part of it. We knew the Trinocs bought from you, and we didn’t meet the Trinocs until twenty years ago.”
   “Yes, we dealt with the Trinocs. Largely through robots, as I recall.”
   “You had a business empire thousands of years old at least, and scores of light years across, at least. And then you left, all of you. You left it all behind. Why?”
   “Can this have been forgotten? We fled the explosion of the galactic core!”
   “I know about that.” Dimly, Louis even remembered that the chain reaction of novae in the hub of the galaxy had actually been discovered by aliens. “But why run now? The Core suns went nova ten thousand years ago. The blast won’t reach here for another twenty thousand years.”
   “Humans,” said the puppeteer, “should not be allowed to run loose. You will only harm yourselves. Do you not see the danger? Radiation along the wave front will make this entire region of the galaxy uninhabitable!”
   “Twenty thousand years is a long time.”
   “Extermination in twenty thousand years is extermination nonetheless. My species fled in the direction of the Clouds of Masellan. But some of us remained, in case the puppeteer migration should meet danger. Now it has.”
   “Oh? What kind of danger?”
   “I am not yet free to answer that question. But you may look at this.” The puppeteer reached for something on a table.
   And Louis, who had been wondering where the puppeteer kept its hands, saw that the puppeteer’s mouths were its hands.
   Good hands, too, he realized, as the puppeteer reached gingerly across to hand Louis a holo print. The puppeteer’s loose, robbery lips extended inches beyond its teeth. They were as dry as human fingers and they were rimmed with little fingerlike knobs. Behind the square teeth, Louis caught a glimpse of a flickering, forking tongue.
   He took the holo print and looked into it.
   At first it made no sense at all, but he kept looking, waiting for it to resolve. There was a small, intensely white disc that might have been a sun, GO or K9 or K8, with a shallow chord sliced off along a straight black edge. But the blazing object could not have been a sun. Partially behind it, against a space-black background, was a strip of sky blue. The blue strip was perfectly straight. sharp-edged, solid, and artificial, and wider than the lighted disc.
   “Looks like a star with a hoop around it,” said Louis. “What is it?”
   “You may keep it to study, if you wish. I can now tell you the reason I brought you here. I propose to form an exploration team of four members, including myself and including you.”
   “To explore what?”
   “I am not yet at liberty to tell you that.”
   “Oh, come now. I’d have to be off my head to jump as blind as that.”
   “Happy two hundredth birthday,” said the puppeteer.
   “Thanks,” Louis said, bewildered.
   “Why did you leave your own birthday party?”
   “That’s not your concern.”
   “But it is. Indulge me, Louis Wu. Why did you leave your own birthday party?”
   “I just decided that twenty-four hours weren’t enough for a two hundredth birthday. So I went ahead and lengthened it by moving ahead of the midnight line. As an alien you wouldn’t understand—”
   “You were elated, then, at how well things were going?”
   “No, not exactly. No…”
   Not elated, Louis remembered. Quite the contrary. Though the party had gone well enough.
   He’d started it at one minute past midnight that morning. Why not. His friends were in every time band. There was no reason to waste a single minute of this day. There were sleep sets all over the house for fast, deep cat naps. For those who hated to miss anything there were wakeup drugs, some with interesting side effects, others with none.
   There were guests Louts hadn’t seen in a hundred years, and others he met daily. Some had been Louis Wu’s deadly enemies, long ago. There were women he had forgotten entirely, so that he was repeatedly amazed at how his taste had changed.
   Predictably, too many hours of his birthday were spent performing introductions. The lists of names to be memorized beforehand! Too many friends had become strangers.
   And a few minutes before midnight, Louis Wu had walked into a transfer booth, dialed, and disappeared.
   “I was bored stiff,” said Louis Wu. “‘Tell us about your last sabbatical, Louis.’ ‘But how can you stand to be that much alone, Louis? How clever of you to invite the Trinoc ambassador, Louis! Long time no see, Louis.’ ‘Hey, Louis, why does it take three Jinxians to paint a skyscraper?’“
   “Why does it?”
   “Why does what?”
   “The Jinxians.”
   “Oh. It takes one to hold the paint sprayer, and two to shake the skyscraper up and down. I heard that one in kindergarten. All the dead wood of my life, all the old jokes, all in one huge house. I couldn’t take it.”
   “You are a restless man, Louis Wu. Your sabbaticals—it was you who originated the custom, was it not?”
   “I don’t remember where it started. It caught on pretty well. Most of my friends do it now.”
   “But not as often as you. Every forty years or thereabouts, you tire of human companionship. Then you leave the worlds of men and strike for the edge of known space. You remain outside known space, all alone in a singleship, until your need for company reasserts itself. You returned from your last sabbatical, your fourth, twenty years ago.
   “You are restless, Louis Wu. On each of the worlds of human space, you have lived enough years to be known as a native. Tonight you left your own birthday party. Are you becoming restless again?”
   “That would be my problem, wouldn’t it?”
   “Yes. My problem is one of recruiting only. You would be a good choice as a member of my exploration team. You take risks, but you calculate them first. You are not afraid to be alone with yourself. You are cautious enough and clever enough to be still alive after two hundred years. Because you have not neglected your medical needs, your physique is that of a man of twenty. Lastly, and most important, you seem actually to enjoy the company of aliens.”
   “Sure.” Louis knew a few xenophobes, and regarded them as dolts. Life got awfully boring with only humans to talk to.
   “But you would not wish to jump blind. Louis Wu, is it not enough that I, a puppeteer, will be with you? What could you possibly fear that I would not fear first? The intelligent caution of my race is proverbial.”
   “So it is,” said Louis. In point of fact, he was hooked. Xenophilia and restlessness and curiosity combined: wherever the puppeteer was going, Louis Wu was going too. But he wanted to hear more.
   And his bargaining position was excellent. An alien would not live in such a room by choice. This ordinary looking hotel room, this reassuringly normal room from the viewpoint of a man of Earth, must have been furnished especially for recruiting.
   “You won’t tell me what it is you intend to explore,” said Louis. “Will you tell me where it is?”
   “It is two hundred light years from here in the direction of the Lesser Cloud.”
   “But it would take us nearly two years to get there at hyperdrive speeds.”
   “No. We have a ship which will travel considerably faster than a conventional hyperdrive craft. It will cover a light year in five-fourths of a minute.”
   Louis opened his mouth, but nothing came out. One and a quarter minutes?
   “This should not surprise you, Louis Wu. How else could we have sent an agent to the galactic core, to learn of the chain reaction of novae? You should have deduced the existence of such a ship. If my mission is successful, I plan to turn the ship over to my crew, with blueprints with which to build more.
   “This ship, then, is your… fee, salary, what have you. You may observe its flight characteristics when we join the puppeteer migration. There you will learn what it is that we propose to explore.”
   Join the puppeteer migration… “Count me in,” said Louis Wu. The chance to see an entire sentient species on the move! Huge ships carrying thousands or millions of puppeteers each, whole working ecologies…
   “Good.” The puppeteer stood up. “Our crew will number four. We go to choose our third member now.” And he trotted into the transfer booth.
   Louis slipped the cryptic holo into his pocket, and followed. In the booth he tried to read the number on the dial; for it would have told him where in the world he was. But the puppeteer dialed too fast, and they were gone.


   Louis Wu followed the puppeteer out of the booth and into the dim, luxurious interior of a restaurant. He recognized the place by the black-and-gold decor and the space-wasteful configuration of horseshoe booths. Krushenkos, in New York.
   Incredulous whispers followed in the path of the puppeteer. A human headwaiter, imperturbable as a robot, led them to a table. One of the chairs had been removed at that table and replaced by a big square pillow, which the alien placed between hip and hind hoof as it sat down.
   “You were expected,” Louis deduced.
   “Yes. I called ahead. Krushenkos is accustomed to serving alien guests.”
   Now Louis noticed other alien diners: four kzinti at the next table, and a kdatlyno halfway across the room. It figured, with the United Nations Building so close. Louis dialed for a tequila sour and took it as it arrived. “This was a good thought,” he said. “I’m half starved.”
   “We did not come to eat. We came to recruit our third member.”
   “Oh? In a restaurant?”
   The puppeteer raised its voice to answer, but what it said was not an answer. “You never met my kzin, Kchula-Rrit? I keep it as a pet.”
   Louies tequila tried to go down the wrong way. At the table behind the puppeteer, four walls of orange far were each and every one a kzin; and as the puppeteer spoke, they all turned with their needle teeth bared. It looked like a smile, but on a kzin that rictus is not a smile.
   The -Rrit name belongs to the family of the Patriarch of Kzin. Louis, downing the rest of his drink, decided that it didn’t matter. The insult would have been mortal regardless, and you could only be eaten once.
   The nearest kzin stood up.
   Rich orange fur, with black markings over the eyes, covered what might have been a very fat tabby cat eight feet tall. The fat was muscle, smooth and powerful and oddly arranged over an equally odd skeleton. On hands like black leather gloves, sharpened and polished claws slid out of their sheaths.
   A quarter of a ton of sentient carnivore stooped over the puppeteer and said, “Tell me now, why do you think that you can insult the Patriarch of Kzin and live?”
   The puppeteer answered immediately, and without a tremor in its voice. “It was I who, on a world which circles Beta Lyrae, kicked a kzin called Chuft-Captain in the belly with my hind hoof, breaking three struts of his endoskeletal structure. I have need of a kzin of courage.”
   “Continue,” said the kzin of the black eyes. Despite limitations imposed by the structure of his mouth, the kzin’s Interworld was excellent. But his voice showed no sign of the rage he must have felt. For all the emotion shown by kzinti or puppeteer, Louis might have been watching some time-dulled ritual.
   But the meat set before the kzinti was blood-raw and steaming; it had been flash-heated to body temperature just before serving. And all of the kzinti were smiling.
   “This human and I,” said the puppeteer, “will explore a place such as no kzin has ever dreamed. We will need a kzin in our crew. Dare a kzin follow where a puppeteer leads?”
   “It has been said that puppeteers were plant-eaters, that they would lead away from battle and not toward it.”
   “You shall judge. Your fee, if you survive, will be the plans for a new and valuable type of spacecraft, plus a model of the ship itself. You may consider this fee to be extreme hazard pay.”
   The puppeteer, Louis thought, was sparing no pains to insult the kzinti. One never offers a kzin hazard pay. The kzin is not supposed to have noticed the danger!
   But the kzin’s only remark was, “I accept.”
   The other three kzinti snarled at him.
   The first kzin snarled back.
   One kzin alone sounded like a catfight. Four kzinti in heated argument sounded like a major feline war, with atonics. Sonic deadeners went on automatically in the restaurant, and the snarls became remote, but they went on.
   Louis ordered another drink. Considering what he knew of kzinti history, these four must have remarkable restraint. The puppeteer still lived.
   The argument died away, and the four kzinti turned back. He of the black eye-markings said, “What is your name?”
   “I take the human name of Nessus,” said the puppeteer. “My true name is—” Orchestral music flowed for an instant from the puppeteer’s remarkable throats.
   “Well and good, Nessus. You must understand that we four constitute a kzinti embassy to Earth. This is Harch, that is Ftanss, he with the yellow striping is Hroth. I, being only an apprentice and a kzin of low family, bear no name. I am styled by my profession: Speaker-To-Animals.”
   Louis bridled.
   “Our problem is that we are needed here. Delicate negotiations… but these are not your concern. It has been decided that I alone can be replaced. If your new kind of ship proves worth having, I will join you. Otherwise I must prove my courage another way.”
   “Satisfactory,” said the puppeteer, and rose.
   Louis remained seated. He asked, “What is the kzinti form of your title?”
   “In the Hero’s Tongue—” The kzin snarled on a rising note.
   “Then why didn’t you give that as your title? Was it a deliberate insult?”
   “Yes,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “I was angered.”
   Accustomed to his own standards of tact, Louis had expected the kzin to lie. Then Louis would have pretended to believe him, and the kzin would have been more polite in future… too late to back out now. Louis hesitated a fraction of a second before he said, “And what is the custom?”
   “We must fight bare-handed—as soon as you deliver the challenge. Or one of us must apologize.”
   Louis stood up. He was committing suicide; but he’d known tanj well what the custom was. “I challenge you,” he said. “Tooth against tooth, claw against fingernail, since we cannot share a universe in peace.”
   Without lifting his head, the kzin who had been called Hroth spoke up. “I must apologize for my comrade, Speaker-To-Animals.”
   Louis said, “Huh?”
   “This is my function,” said the kzin with the yellow striping. “To be found in situations where one must apologize or fight is kzinti nature. We know what happens when we fight. Today our numbers are less than an eighth of what they were when kzin first met man. Our colony worlds are your colony worlds, our slave species are freed and taught human technology and human ethics. When we must apologize or fight, it is my function to apologize.”
   Louis sat down. It seemed that he would live. He said, “I wouldn’t have your job for anything.”
   “Obviously not, if you would fight a kzin barehanded. But the Patriarch judges me useless for any other purpose. My intelligence is low, my health is bad, my coordination terrible. How else can I keep my name?”
   Louis sipped at his drink and wished for someone to change the subject. He found the humble kzin embarrassing.
   “Let us eat,” said the one called Speaker-To-Animals. “Unless our mission is urgent, Nessus.”
   “Not at all. Our crew is not yet complete. My colleagues will call me when they have located a qualified fourth crewman. By all means let us eat.”
   Speaker-To-Animals said one thing more before he turned back to his table. “Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.”
   “You scream and you leap,” said Louis. “Great.”

Chapter 2.
And His Motley Crew

   Louis Wu knew people who closed their eyes when they used a transfer booth. The jump in scenery gave them vertigo. To Louis this was nonsense; but then, some of his friends were much odder than that.
   He kept his eyes open as he dialed. The watching aliens vanished. Someone called, “Hi! He’s back!”
   A mob formed around the door. Louis forced it open against them. “Finagle fool you all! Didn’t any of you go home?” He spread his arms to engulf them, then pushed forward like a snowplow, forcing them back. “Clear the door, you boors! I’ve more guests coming.”
   “Great!” a voice shouted in his ear. Anonymous hands took his hand and forced the fingers around a drinking bulb. Louis hugged the seven or eight of his invited guests within the circle of his arms and smiled at his welcome.
   Louis Wu. From a distance he was an oriental, with pale yellow skin and flowing white hair. His rich blue robe was carelessly draped, so that it should have hampered his movements; but it didn’t.
   Close up, it was all a fraud. His skin was not pale yellow-brown, but a smooth chrome yellow, the color of a comic-book Fu Manchu. His queue was too thick; it was not the white of age, but sheer clean white with a subliminal touch of blue, the color of dwarf star sunlight. As with all flatlanders, cosmetic dyes were the colors of Louis Wu.
   A flatlander. You could tell at a glance. His features were neither Caucasian nor Mongoloid nor Negroid, though there were traces of all three: a uniform blend which must have required centuries. In a gravitational pull of 9.98 meters/second, his stance was unconsciously natural. He gripped a drinking bulb and smiled around at his guests.
   As it happened, he was smiling into a pair of reflective silver eyes an inch from his own.
   One Teela Brown had somehow ended up nose to nose and breast to breast with him. Her skin was blue with a netting of silver threads; her coiffure was streaming bonfire flames; her eyes were convex mirrors. She was twenty years old. Louis had talked to her earlier. Her conversation was shallow, full of cliches and easy enthusiasms; but she was very pretty.
   “I had to ask you,” she said breathlessly. “How did you get a Trinoc to come?”
   “Don’t tell me he’s still here.”
   “Oh, no. His air was running out and he had to go home.”
   “A little white lie,” Louis informed her. “A Trinoc airmaker lasts for weeks. Well, if you really want to know, that particular Trinoc was once my guest and prisoner for a couple of weeks. His ship and crew got themselves killed at the edge of known space, and I had to ferry him to Margrave so they could set up an environment box for him.”
   The girl’s eyes registered delighted wonder. Louis found it pleasantly strange that they were on a level with his own eyes; for Teela Brown’s fragile beauty made her look smaller than she really was. Her eyes shifted over Louis’s shoulder and widened even further. Louis grinned as he turned.
   Nessus the puppeteer trotted out of the transfer booth.


   Louis had thought of this as they were leaving Krushenko’s. He had been trying to persuade Nessus to tell them something of their proposed destination. But the puppeteer was afraid of spy beams.
   “Then come to my place,” Louis had suggested.
   “But your guests!”
   “Not in my office. And my office is absolutely bugproof. Besides, think of the hit you’ll make at the party! Assuming everyone hasn’t gone home by now.”
   The impact was all Louis could have desired. The tap-tap-tap of the puppeteer’s hooves was suddenly the only sound in the room. Behind him, Speaker-To-Animals flickered into existence. The kzin considered the sea of human faces surrounding the booth. Then, slowly, he bared his teeth.
   Someone poured half his drink into a potted palm. The grand gesture. From one of the branches a Gummidgy orchid-thing chattered angrily. People edged away from the transfer booth. There were comments: “You’re okay. I see them too.” “Sober pills? Let me look in my sporan.” “Throws a hell of a party, doesn’t he?” “Good old Louis.” “What did you call that thing?”
   They didn’t know what to make of Nessus. Mostly they ignored the puppeteer; they were afraid to comment on him, afraid of sounding like fools. They reacted even more curiously to Speaker-To-Animals. Once mankind’s most dangerous enemy, the kzin was being treated with awed deference, like some kind of hero.
   “Follow me,” Louis told the puppeteer. With luck the kzin would follow them both. “Excuse us,” he bellowed, and pushed his way into the throng. In response to various excited and/or puzzled questions he merely grinned secretively.
   Safely in his office, Louis barred the door and turned on the bugproofing set. “Okay. Who needs refreshment?”
   “If you can heat some bourbon, I can drink it,” said the kzin. “If you cannot heat it, I can still drink it.”
   “Nessus?”
   “Any kind of vegetable juice will serve. Have you warm carrot juice?”
   “Gah,” said Louis; but he instructed the bar, which produced bulbs of warm carrot juice.
   While Nessus rested on its folded hind leg, the kzin dropped heavily onto an inflated hassock. Under his weight it should have exploded like any lesser balloon. Man’s second oldest enemy looked curious and ridiculous balanced on a hassock too small for him.
   The Man-Kzin wars had been numerous and terrible. Had the kzinti won the first of these, mankind would have been a slave and a meat animal for the rest of eternity. But the kzinti had suffered in the wars which followed. They tended to attack before they were ready. They had little concept of patience, and no concept of mercy or of limited war. Each war had cost them a respectable chunk of population and the punitive confiscation of a couple of kzinti worlds.
   For two hundred and fifty years the kzinti had not attacked human space. They had nothing to attack with. For two hundred and fifty years men had not attacked the kzinti worlds; and no kzin could understand it. Men confused them terribly.
   They were rough and they were tough, and Nessus, an avowed coward, had insulted four fully-grown kzinti in a public restaurant.
   “Tell me again,” said Louis, “about a puppeteer’s proverbial caution. I forget.”
   “Perhaps I was not strictly fair with you, Louis. My species judges me mad.”
   “Oh, fine.” Louis sucked at the bulb an anonymous donor had handed him. It held vodka and droobleberry juice and shaved ice.
   The kzin’s tail lashed restlessly. “Why should we ride with an avowed maniac? You must be madder than most, to wish to ride with a kzin.”
   “You alarm yourselves too easily,” said Nessus, in its soft, persuasive, unbearably sensual voice. “Men have never met a puppeteer who was not mad in the judgment of his own species. No alien has ever seen the puppeteer world, and no sane puppeteer would trust his very life to the fallible life-support system of a spacecraft, or the unknown and possibly deadly dangers of an alien world.”
   “A mad puppeteer, a full grown kzin, and me. Our fourth crew member had better be a psychiatrist.”
   “No, Louis, none of our candidates are psychiatrists.”
   “Well, why not?”
   “I did not select at random.” The puppeteer sucked at its bulb with one mouth and talked with the other. “First, there was myself. Our proposed voyage is intended to benefit my species; hence we must include a representative. Such a one should be mad enough to face an unknown world, yet sane enough to use his intellect to survive. I, as it happens, am just on the borderline.
   “We had reason to include a kzin. Speaker-To-Animals, what I tell you now is secret. We have been observing your species for some considerable time. We knew of you even before you attacked humanity.”
   “Well that you did not show yourselves,” rumbled the kzin.
   “Doubtless. At first we deduced that the kzinti species was both useless and dangerous. Lines of research were initiated to determine whether your species could be exterminated in safety.”
   “I will tie your necks in a bow knot.”
   “You will commit no violence.”
   The kzin stood up.
   “He’s right,” said Louis. “Sit down, Speaker. You don’t stand to profit by murdering a puppeteer.”
   The kzin sat down. Again his hassock did not collapse.
   “The project was cancelled,” said Nessus. “We found that the Man-Kzin wars put sufficient restriction on kzinti expansion, made you less dangerous. We continued to watch.
   “Six times over several centuries, you attacked the worlds of men. Six times you were defeated, having lost approximately two-thirds of your male population in each war. Need I comment on the level of intelligence displayed? No? In any case, you were never in real danger of extermination. Your nonsentient females were largely untouched by war, so that the next generation helped to replace the numbers lost. Still, you steadily lost an empire you had built up over thousands of years.
   “It became apparent to us that the kzinti were evolving at a furious rate.”
   “Evolving?”
   Nessus snarled a word in the Hero’s Tongue. Louis jumped. He had not suspected that the puppeteer’s throats could do that.
   “Yes,” said Speaker-To-Animals, “I thought that was what you said. But I do not understand the application.”
   “Evolution depends on the survival of the fittest. For several hundred kzin years, the fittest of your species were those members with the wit or the forebearance to avoid fighting human beings. The results are apparent. For nearly two hundred kzin years there has been peace between man and kzin.”
   “But there would be no point! We could not win a war!”
   “That did not stop your ancestors.”
   Speaker-To-Animals gulped at his hot bourbon. His tail, naked and pink and ratlike, lashed in turmoil.
   “Your species has been decimated,” said the puppeteer. “All kzinti alive today are descended from those who avoided death in the Man-Kzin wars. Some among us speculate that the kzinti now have the intelligence or the empathy or the self-restraint necessary to deal with races alien to them.”
   “And so you risk your life to travel with a kzin.”
   “Yes,” said Nessus, and shivered all over. “My motivation is strong. It has been implied that if I can demonstrate the worth of my courage, by using it to perform a valuable service for my species, I will be allowed to breed.”
   “Hardly a firm commitment,” said Louis.
   “Then there is other reason to take a kzin. We will face strange environments hiding unknown dangers. Who will protect me? Who would be better equipped than a kzin?”
   “To protect a puppeteer?”
   “Does that sound insane?”
   “It does,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “It also appeals to my sense of humor. What of this one, this Louis Wu?”
   “For us there has been much profitable cooperation with men. Naturally we choose at least one human. Louis Gridley Wu is a proven survival type, in his casual, reckless way.”
   “Casual he is, and reckless. He challenged me to single combat.”
   “Would you have accepted, had not Hroth been present? Would you have harmed him?”
   “To be sent home in disgrace, having caused a major interspecies incident? But that is not the point,” the kzin insisted. “Is it?”
   “Perhaps it is. Louis is alive. You are now aware that you cannot dominate him through fear. Do you believe in results?”
   Louis maintained a discreet silence. If the puppeteer wanted to give him credit for cool intellection, that was fine with Louis Wu.
   “You have spoken of your own motives,” said Speaker. “Speak now of mine. What can it profit me to join your voyage?”
   And they got down to business.
   To the puppeteers, the quantum II hyperdrive shunt was a white elephant. It would move a ship a light year in one-and-a-quarter minutes, where conventional craft would cross that distance in three days. But conventional craft had room for cargo.
   “We built the motor into a General Products Number Four hull, the biggest made by our company. When our scientists and engineers had finished their work, most of the interior was filled with the machinery of the hyperdrive shunt. Our trip outward will be cramped.”
   “An experimental vehicle,” said the kzin. “How thoroughly has it been tested?”
   “The vehicle has made one trip to the galactic core and back.”
   But that had been its only flight! The puppeteers could not test it themselves, nor could they find other races to do the work; for they were in the middle of a migration. The ship would carry practically no cargo, though it was over a mile in diameter. Furthermore, it could not slow down without dropping back into normal space.
   “We do not need it,” said Nessus. “But you do. We plan to turn the ship over to our crew, together with copies of the plans for making more. Doubtless you can improve the design yourselves.”
   “That will buy me a name,” said the kzin. “A name. I must see your ship in action.”
   “During our trip outward.”
   “The Patriarch would give me a name for such a ship. I am sure he would. What name should I choose? Perhaps—” The kzin snarled on a rising note.
   The puppeteer replied in the same language.
   Louis shifted in irritation. He couldn’t follow the Hero’s Tongue. He considered leaving them to it, then had a better idea. He pulled the puppeteer’s holo from his pocket, scaled it across the room into the kzin’s furry lap.
   The kzin held it delicately in his padded black fingers. “It appears to be a ringed star,” he observed. “What is it?”
   “It relates to our destination,” said the puppeteer. “I cannot tell you more, not now.”
   “How cryptic. Well, when may we depart?”
   “I estimate a matter of days. My agents are even now searching for a qualified fourth member for our exploration team.”
   “And so we wait upon their pleasure. Louis, shall we join your guests?”
   Louis stood up, stretching. “Sure, let’s give ‘em a thrill. Speaker, before we go out there, I have a suggestion. Now, don’t take this as an assault on your dignity. It’s just an idea…”


   The party had split into sections: tridee-watchers, bridge and poker tables, lovers in pairs and larger groups, tellers of tales, victims of ennui. Out on the lawn, under a hazy early-morning sun, was a mixed group of ennui victims and xenophiles; for the outdoor group included Nessus and Speaker-To-Animals. It also included Louis Wu, Teela Brown, and an overworked bartender.
   The lawn was one of those tended according to the ancient British formula: seed and roll for five hundred years. Five hundred years had ended in a stock market crash, after which Louis Wu had had money and a certain venerable baronial family had not. The grass was green and glossy, obviously the real thing; nobody had ever tampered with its genes in search of dubious improvements. At the bottom of the rolling green slope was a tennis court where diminutive figures ran and jumped and swung their oversized fly swatters with great energy.
   “Exercise is wonderful,” said Louis. “I could sit and watch it all day.”
   Teela’s laugh surprised him. He thought idly of the millions of jokes she had never heard, the old, old ones nobody ever told any more. Of the millions of jokes Louis knew by heart, 99 percent must be obsolete. Past and present mix badly.
   The bartender floated next to Louis in tilted position. Louis’s head was in Teela’s lap, and his need to reach the keyboard without sitting up was responsible for the bartender’s tilt. He tapped an order for two mochas, caught the bulbs as they dropped from the slot, and handed one to Teela.
   “You look like a girl I knew once,” he said. “Ever hear of a Paula Cherenkov?”
   “The cartoonist? Boston-born?”
   “Yeah. Lives on We Made It, nowadays.”
   “My great-great grandmother. We visited her once.”
   “She gave me a severe case of whiplash of the heart, long ago. You could be her twin.”
   Teela’s chuckle sent vibrations bouncing pleasantly along Louis’s vertebrae. “I promise not to give you a case of whiplash of the heart if you’ll tell me what it is.”
   Louis thought about that. The phrase was his own, created to describe to himself what had happened to him at that time. He hadn’t used it often, but he’d never had to explain it. They always knew what he meant.
   A calm, peaceful morning. If he went to sleep now he’d sleep for twelve hours. Fatigue poisons were giving him an exhaustion high. Teela’s lap was a comfortable resting place for his head. Half of Louis’s guests were women, and many of them had been his wives or lovers in other years. During the first phase of the party, he’d celebrated his birthday privately with three women, three who had been very important to him once, and vice versa.
   Three? Four? No, three. And now it seemed that he was immune to whiplash of the heart. Two hundred years had left too much scar tissue on his personality. And now he rested his head idly and comfortably in the lap of a stranger who looked exactly like Paula Cherenkov.
   “I fell in love with her,” he said. “We’d known each other for years. We’d even dated. Then one night we got to talking, and wham. I was in love. I thought she loved me too.
   “We didn’t go to bed that night—together, I mean. I asked her to marry me. She turned me down. She was working on a career. She didn’t have time to get married, she said. But we planned a trip to Amazon National Park, a sort of one week ersatz honeymoon.
   “The next week was all highs and lows. First, the high. I had the tickets and the hotel reservations. Did you ever fall so hard for someone that you decided you weren’t worthy of him?”
   “No.”
   “I was young. I spent two days convincing myself I was worthy of Paula Cherenkov. I did it, too. Then she called and cancelled the trip. I don’t even remember why. She had some good reason.
   “I took her out to dinner a couple of times that week. Nothing happened. I tried to keep from pressuring her. Chances are she never guessed the pressure I was under. I was going up and down like a yo-yo. Then she lowered the boom. She liked me. We had fun together. We should be good friends.
   “I wasn’t her type,” said Louis. “I thought we were in love. Maybe she thought so too, for about a week. She wasn’t cruel. She just didn’t know what was going on.”
   “But what was the whiplash?”
   Louis looked up at Teela Brown. Silver eyes looked blankly back, and Louis realized that she hadn’t understood a word.
   Louis had dealt with aliens. By instinct or by training, he had learned to sense when some concept was too foreign to be absorbed or communicated. Here was a similar, fundamental gap in translation.
   What a monstrous gulf to separate Louis Wu and a twenty-year-old girl! Could he really have aged that drastically? And if so, was Louis Wu still human?
   Teela, blank-eyed, waited for enlightenment.
   “Tanj!” Louis cursed, and he rolled to his feet. Mud spots slid slowly down his robe and dripped off the hem.
   Nessus the puppeteer was holding forth on the subject of ethics. He interrupted himself (quite literally, speaking with both mouths, to the delight of his admirers) to answer Louis’s query. No, there had been no word from his agents.
   Speaker-To-Animals, similarly surrounded, sprawled like a great orange hill across the grass. Two women were scratching at the for behind his ears. The odd kzinti ears, that could expand like pink chinese parasols or fold flat against the head, were spread wide; and Louis could see the design tattooed on each surface.
   “So,” Louis called to him. “Was I not brilliant?”
   “You were,” the kzin rumbled without stirring.
   Louis laughed inside himself. A kzin is a fearsome beast, yes? But who can fear a kzin who is having his ears scratched? It put Louis’s guests at their ease, and it put the kzin at ease too. Anything above the level of a field mouse likes having its ears scatched.
   “They have been taking turnabout,” the kzin rumbled deeply. “A male approaches the female scratching me and observes that he would enjoy the same attention. The two go off together. Another female moves in as a replacement. How interesting it must be, to belong to a race of two sentient sexes.”
   “Sometimes it makes things awfully complicated.”
   “Indeed?”
   The girt at the kzin’s left shoulder—space-black her skin was, embroidered with stars and galaxies, and her hair was the cold white stream of a comet’s tail—looked up from her work. “Teela, take over,” she said gaily. “I’m hungry.”
   Teela knelt obligingly beside the great orange head. Louis said, “Teela Brown, meet Speaker-To-Animals. May you both be—”
   From nearby came a discordant blast of music.
   “—very happy together. What was that? Oh, Nessus. What—?”
   The music had come from the puppeteer’s remarkable throats. Now Nessus nudged rudely between Louis and the girl. “You are Teela Jandrova Brown, ident number IKLUGGTYN?”
   The girl was startled, but not frightened. “That’s my name. I don’t remember my ident number. What’s the problem?”
   “We have been combing Earth for you for nearly a week. Now I find you at a gathering I reached only by chance! I will have harsh words for my agents.”
   “Oh no,” Louis said softly.
   Teela stood up somewhat awkwardly. “I haven’t been hiding, not from you and not from any other—extraterrestrial. Now, what’s the problem?”
   “Hold it!” Louis stepped between Nessus and the girl. “Nessus, Teela Brown obviously isn’t an explorer. Pick someone else.”
   “But, Louis—”
   “Just a moment.” The kzin was sitting up. “Louis, let the herbivore choose his own team members.”
   “But look at her!”
   “Look at yourself, Louis. Barely two meters long, slender even for a human. Are you an explorer? Is Nessus?”
   “Just what the tanj is going on?” Teela demanded.
   Urgently, Nessus said, “Louis, let us retire to your office. Teela Brown, we must make a proposal to you. You are under no obligation to accept, nor even to listen, but you may find our proposal interesting.”


   The argument continued in Louis’s office. “She fits my qualifications,” Nessus insisted. “We must consider her.”
   “She can’t be the only one on Earth!”
   “No, Louis. Not at all. But we have been unable to contact any of the others.”
   “Just what am I being considered for?”
   The puppeteer started to tell her. It developed that Teela Brown had no interest in space, had never even been as far as the Moon, and had no intention of going beyond the borders of known space. The second quantum hyperdrive did not arouse her cupidity. When she started to look harassed and confused, Louis broke in again.
   “Nessus, just what are the qualifications Teela fits so well?”
   “My agents have been seeking the descendants of winners of the Birthright Lotteries.”
   “I quit. You’re genuinely insane.”
   “No, Louis. My orders come from the Hindmost himself, from the one who leads us all. His sanity is not in question. May I explain?”


   For human beings, birth control had long been an easy matter. Nowadays a tiny crystal was inserted under the skin of the patient’s forearm. The crystal took a year to dissolve. During that year the patient would be unable to conceive a child. In earlier centuries clumsier methods had been used.
   Earth’s population had been stabilized, about the middle of the twenty-first century, at eighteen billion. The Fertility Board, a subsection of the United Nations, made and enforced the birth control laws. For more than half a thousand years those laws had remained the same: two children to a couple, subject to the judgment of the Fertility Board. The Board decided who might be a parent how many times. The Board might award extra children to one couple, deny any children at all to another, all on the basis of desirable or undesirable genes.
   “Incredible,” said the kzin.
   “Why? Things were getting pretty tanj crowded, with eighteen billion people trapped in a primitive technology.”
   “If the Patriarchy tried to force such a law on kzinti, we would exterminate the Patriarchy for its insolence.”
   But men were not kzinti. For half a thousand years the laws had held good. Then, two hundred years ago, had come rumors of chicanery in the Fertility Board. The scandal had ultimately resulted in drastic changes in the birth control laws:
   Every human being now had the right to be a parent once, regardless of the state of his genes. In addition, the Birthrights Second and Third could come automatically: for a high tested IQ, or for proven, useful psychic powers, such as Plateau eyes or absolute direction, or for survival genes, like telepathy or natural longevity or perfect teeth.
   One could buy the birthrights at a million stars a shot. Why not? The knack for making money was a tested, proven survival factor. Besides, it cut down on bribery attempts.
   One could fight for the Birthrights in the arena, if one had not yet used up his Birthright First. Winner to earn his Birthrights Second and Third; loser to lose his Birthright First and his life. It evened out.
   “I have seen such battles on your entertainment shows,” said Speaker. “I thought they were fighting for fun.”
   “Nope, they’re serious,” said Louis. Teela giggled.
   “And the lotteries?”
   “It comes out short,” said Nessus. “Even with boosterspice to prevent aging in humans, more die on Earth than are born in any given year… “
   And so each year the Fertility Board totaled up the year’s deaths and emigrations, subtracted the year’s births and immigrations, and put the resulting number of Birthrights into the New Year’s Day lottery.
   Anyone could enter. With luck you could have ten or twenty children—if that was luck. Even convicted criminals could not be excluded from the Birthright Lotteries.
   “I’ve had four children myself,” said Louis Wu. “One by lottery. You’d have met three of them if you’d come twelve hours earlier.”
   “It sounds very strange and complex. When the population of Kzin grows too great, we—”
   “Attack the nearest human world.”
   “Not at all, Louis. We fight each other. The more crowded we grow, the more opportunity exists for one kzin to take offense at another. Our population problem adjusts itself. We have never been within an order of magnitude of your two times eight to the tenth humans on a single planet!”
   “I think I begin to get it,” said Teela Brown. “My parents were both lottery winners.” She laughed somewhat nervously. “Otherwise I wouldn’t even have been born. Come to think of it, my grandfather—”
   “All of your ancestors for five generations were born by reason of winning lottery tickets.”
   “Really! I never knew that!”
   “The records are quite clear,” Nessus assured her.
   “The question remains,” said Louis Wu. “So what?”
   “Those-who-rule in the puppeteer fleet have speculated that the people of Earth are breeding for luck.”
   “Huh!”
   Teela Brown leaned forward in her chair, intensely curious. Doubtless she had never before seen a mad puppeteer.
   “Think of the lotteries, Louis. Think of evolution. For seven hundred years your people bred by the numbers: two birthrights per person, two children per couple. Here and there one might win a third birthright, or be refused his first on adequate grounds: diabetic genes or the like. But most of humanity had two children.
   “Then the law was changed. For the past two centuries, between ten and thirteen percent of each human generation has been born by right of a winning lottery ticket. What determines who will survive and breed? On Earth, luck.
   “And Teela Brown is the daughter of six generations of winning gamblers…”

Chapter 3.
Teela Brown

   Teela was giggling helplessly.
   “Come off it,” said Louis Wu. “You can’t breed for luck the way you breed for shaggy eyebrows!”
   “Yet you breed for telepathy.”
   “That’s not the same. Telepathy isn’t a psychic power. The mechanisms in the right parietal lobe are well mapped. They just don’t work for most people.”
   “Telepathy was once thought to be a form of psi. Now you claim that luck is not.”
   “Luck is luck.” The situation would have been funny, as funny as Teela thought it was; but Louis realized what she did not. The puppeteer was serious. “The law of averages swings back and forth. The odds shift wrong and you’re out of the game, like the dinosaurs. The dice fall your way and—”
   “It is thought that some humans can direct the fall of a die.”
   “So I picked a bad metaphor. The point is—”
   “Yes,” the kzin rumbled. He had a voice to shake walls when he chose to use it. “The point is that we will accept whom Nessus chooses. You own the ship, Nessus. Where, then, is our fourth crewman?”
   “Here in this room!”
   “Now just a tanj minute!” Teela stood up. The silver netting flashed like real metal across her blue skin; her hair floated flaming in the draft from the air conditioner. “This whole thing is ridiculous. I’m not going anywhere. Why should I?”
   “Pick someone else, Nessus. There must be millions of qualified candidates. Where’s the hang-up?”
   “Not millions, Louis. We have a few thousand names, and phone numbers or private transfer booth numbers for most of them. Each can claim five generations of ancestors born by virtue of winning lottery tickets.”
   “Well?”
   Nessus began to pace the floor. “Many disqualify themselves by obvious bad luck. Of the rest, none seem to be available. When we call, they are out. When we call back, the phone computer gives us a bad connection. When we ask for any member of the Brandt family, every phone in South America rings. There have been complaints. It is very frustrating.” Taptaptap, taptaptap.
   Teela said, “You haven’t even told me where you’re going.”
   “I cannot name our destination, Teela. However, you may—”
   “Finagle’s red claws! You won’t even tell us that?”
   “You may examine the holo Louis Wu is carrying. That is the only information I can give you at this time.”
   Louis handed her the holo, the one that showed a baby-blue stripe crossing a black background behind a disc of blazing white. She took her time looking it over; and only Louis noticed how the angry blood flowed into her face.
   When she spoke, she spit the words out one at a time, like the seeds of a tangerine. “This is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of. You expect Louis and me to go charging out beyond known space with a kzin and a puppeteer for company, and all we know about where were going is a length of blue ribbon and a bright spot! That’s—ridiculous!”
   “I take it, then, that you refuse to join us.”
   The girl’s eyebrows went up.
   “I must have a direct answer. Soon my agents may locate another candidate.”
   “Yes,” said Teela Brown. “Yes, I do refuse.”
   “Remember, then, that by human law you must keep secret the things you have been told here. You have been paid a consultant’s fee.”
   “Who would I tell?” Teela laughed dramatically. “Who would believe me? Louis, are you really going on this ridiculous—”
   “Yes.” Louis was already thinking of other things, like a tactful way to get her out of the office. “But not right this minute. There’s still a party going on. Look, do something for me, will you? Switch the musicmaster from tape four to tape five. Then tell anyone who asks that I’ll be out in a minute.”
   When the door had closed behind her, Louis said, “Do me a favor. Do yourselves one, too. Let me be the judge of whether a human being is qualified for a jaunt into the unknown.”
   “You know what qualifications are paramount,” said Nessus. “We do not yet have two candidates to choose from.”
   “You’ve got tens of thousands.”
   “Not really. Many disqualify themselves; others cannot be found. However, you may tell me where that human being fails to fit your own qualifications.”
   “She’s too young.”
   “No candidate can qualify without being of Teela Brown’s generation.”
   “Breeding for luck! No, never mind, I won’t argue the point. I know humans crazier than that. A couple of ‘em are still here at the party. Well, you saw for yourself that she’s no xenophile.”
   “Nor is she a xenophobe. She does not fear either of us.”
   “She doesn’t have the spark. She isn’t—isn’t—”
   “She has no restlessness,” said Nessus. “She is happy where she is. This is indeed a liability. There is nothing she wants. Yet how could we know this without asking?”
   “Okay, pick your own candidates.” Louis stalked from his office.
   Behind him the puppeteer fluted, “Louis! Speaker! The signal! One of my agents has found another candidate!”
   “He sure has,” Louis said disgustedly. Across the living room, Teela Brown was glaring at another Pierson’s puppeteer.


   Louis woke slowly. He remembered donning a sleep headset and setting it for an hour of current. Presumably that had been an hour ago. After the set turned itself off the discomfort of having the thing on his head would have wakened him…
   It wasn’t on his head.
   He sat up abruptly.
   “I took it off you,” said Teela Brown. “You needed the sleep.”
   “Oh boy. What time is it?”
   “A little after seventeen.”
   “I’ve been a bad host. How goes the party?”
   “Down to about twenty people. Don’t worry, I told them what I was doing. They all thought it was a good idea.”
   “Okay.” Louis rolled off the bed. “Thanks. Shall we join what’s left of the party?”
   “I’d like to talk to you first.”
   He sat down again. The muzziness of sleep was slowly leaving him. He asked, “What about?”
   “You’re really going on this crazy trip?”
   “I really am.”
   “I don’t see why.”
   “I’m ten times your age,” said Louis Wu. “I don’t have to work for a living. I don’t have the patience to be a scientist. I did some writing once, but it turned out to be hard work, which was the last thing I expected. What’s left? I play a lot.”
   She shook her head, and firelight shivered on the walls. “It doesn’t sound like playing.”
   Louis shrugged. “Boredom is my worst enemy. It’s killed a lot of my friends. but it won’t get me. When I get bored, I go risk my life somewhere.”
   “Shouldn’t you at least know what the risk is?”
   “I’m getting well paid.”
   “You don’t need the money.”
   “The human race needs what the puppeteers have got. Look, Teela, you were told all about the second quantum hyperdrive ship. It’s the only ship in known space that moves faster than three days to the light year. And it goes almost four hundred times that fast!”
   “Who needs to fly that fast?”
   Louis wasn’t in the mood to deliver a lecture on the Core explosion. “Let’s get back to the party.”
   “No, wait!”
   “Okay.”
   Her hands were large, with long, slender fingers. They glowed in reflected light as she brushed them nervously through her burning hair. “Tanj, I’m messing this up. Louis, are you in love with anyone right now?”
   That surprised him. “I don’t think so.”
   “Do I really look like Paula Cherenkov?”
   In the semidarkness of the bedroom she looked like the burning giraffe in the Dali painting. Her hair glowed by its own light, a stream of orange and yellow flame darkening to smoke. In that light the rest of Teela was shadow touched by the flickering light of her hair. But Louis’s memory filled in the details: the long, perfect legs, the conical breasts, the delicate beauty of her small face. He had first seen her four days ago, on the arm of Tedron Doheny, a spindly crashlander who had journeyed to Earth for the party.
   “I thought you were Paula herself,” he said now. “She lives on We Made It, which is where I met Ted Doheny. When I saw you together I thought Ted and Paula had come on the same ship.
   “Close up, there were differences. You’ve got better legs, but Paula’s walk was more graceful. Paula’s face was—colder, I think. Maybe that’s just memory.”
   From outside the door came bursts of computer music, wild and pure, strangely incomplete without the light patterns to make it whole. Teela shifted restlessly, stirring the firelight shadows on the wall.
   “What have you got in mind? Remember,” said Louis, “the puppeteers have thousands of candidates to choose from. They could find our fourth crewman any day, any minute. Then, off we go.”
   “That’s all right,” said Teela.
   “You’ll stay with me until then?”
   Teela nodded her fiery head.


   The puppeteer dropped in two days later.
   Louis and Teela were out on the lawn, soaking up sunshine and playing a deadly serious game of fairy chess. Louis had spotted her a knight. Now he was regretting it. Teela alternated intellection with intuition; he could never tell which way she would jump. And she played for blood.
   She was chewing gently at her underlip, considering her next move, when the servo slid up and bonged at them. Louis glanced up at the monitor screen, saw two one-eyed pythons looking out of the servo’s chest. “Send him out here,” he said comfortably.
   Teela stood in one sudden, graceless motion. “You two may have secrets.”
   “Maybe. What have you got in mind?”
   “Some reading to catch up on.” She leveled a forefinger at him. “Don’t touch that board!”
   At the door she met the puppeteer coming out. She waved casually as they passed, and Nessus leapt six feet to the side. “I beg your pardon,” he fluted. “You startled me.”
   Teela lifted an eyebrow and went inside.
   The puppeteer stopped next to Louis and folded his legs under him. One head fixed on Louis; the other moved nervously, circling, covering all angles of vision. “Could the woman spy on us?”
   Louis showed his surprise. “Sure. You know there’s no defense against a spy beam, not in the open. So?”
   “Anyone or anything could be watching us. Louis, let us go to your office.”
   “There ain’t no justice.” Louis was perfectly comfortable where he was. “Will you stop bobbing your head around, please? You act scared to death.”
   “I am frightened, though I know my death would matter little. How many meterorites fall to Earth in a year?”
   “I wouldn’t know.”
   “We are perilously close to the asteroid belt here. Yet it does not matter, for we have been unable to contact a fourth crew member.”
   “Too bad,” said Louis. The puppeteer’s behavior puzzled him. If Nessus had been human—But he wasn’t. “You haven’t given up, I trust.”
   “No, but our failures have been galling. For these past four days we have been seeking a Norman Haywood KJMMCWTAD, a perfect choice for our crew.”
   “And?”
   “His health is perfect and vigorous. His age, twenty four-and-a-third terrestrial years. Six generations of his ancestors were all born through winning lottery tickets. Best of all, he enjoys travel; he exhibits the restlessness we need.
   “Naturally we tried to contact him in person. For three days my agent tracked him through a series of transfer booths, always a jump behind him, while Norman Haywood went skiing in Suisse, and surfing in Ceylon, to shops in New York, and to house parties in the Rockies and the Himalayas. Last night my agent caught up to him as he entered a passenger spacecraft bound for Jinx. The ship departed before my agent could conquer his natural fear of your jury-rigged ships.”
   “I’ve had days like that myself. Couldn’t you send him a hyperwave message?”
   “Louis, this voyage is supposed to be secret.”
   “Yah,” said Louis. And he watched a python head circling, circling, searching out unseen enemies.
   “We will succeed,” said Nessus. “Thousands of potential crew members cannot hide forever. Can they, Louis? They do not even know we are seeking them!”
   “You’ll find someone. You’re bound to.”
   “I pray that we do not! Louis, how can I do it? How can I ride with three aliens in an experimental ship designed for one pilot? It would be madness!”
   “Nessus, what’s really bugging you? This whole trip was your idea!”
   “It was not. My orders came from those-who-lead, from two hundred light years away.”
   “Something’s terrified you. I want to know what it is. What have you found out? Do you know what this trip is really all about? What’s changed since you were ready to insult four kzinti in a public restaurant? Hey, easy, easy!”
   Tle puppeteer had tucked his heads and necks between his forelegs and rolled into a ball.
   “Come on,” said Louis. “Come on out.” He ran his hands gently along the backs of the puppeteer’s necks—the parts that showed. The puppeteer shuddered. His skin was soft, like chamois skin, and pleasant to the touch.
   “Come on out of there. Nothing’s going to hurt you here. I protect my guests.”
   The puppeteer’s wail came muffled from under his belly. “I was mad. Mad! Did I really insult four kzinti?”
   “Come on out. You’re safe here. That’s better.” A flat head peeped out of the warm shadow. “Now, you see? Nothing to be afraid of.”
   “Four kzinti? Not three?”
   “My mistake. I miscounted. It was three.”
   “Forgive me, Louis.” The puppeteer exposed his other head as far as the eye. “My manic phase has ended. I am in the depressive leg of my cycle.”
   “Can you do anything about it?” Louis thought of the consequences, if Nessus should hit the wrong leg of his cycle at a crucial time.
   “I can wait for it to end. I can protect myself, to the extent possible. I can try not to let it affect my judgment.”
   “Poor Nessus. You’re sure you haven’t learned anything new?”
   “Do I not know enough already to terrify any sane mind?” The puppeteer stood up somewhat shakily. “Why did I meet Teela Brown? I had thought she would have departed.”
   “I asked her to stay with me until we find your fourth crewmate.”
   “Why?”
   Louis had wondered about that himself. It had little to do with Paula Cherenkov. Louis had changed too much since her time; and he was not a man to force one woman into the mold of another.
   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 testing 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 it’s 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.

Chapter 4.
Speaker-To-Animals

   “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 he’d 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.
   “My motive should be obvious,” said Speaker. The black markings around his eyes had taken on the look of a bandit’s mask in a cartoon. The kzin was neither tense nor relaxed. And he stood where he was almost impossible to attack.
   “I intend to give my world control of the Long Shot. With the Long Shot as a model we will build more such ships. Such ships would give us a killing superiority in the next Man-Kzin war, provided that men do not also have designs for Long Shot. Satisfactory?”
   Louis made his voice sarcastic. “You couldn’t be afraid of where we’re going.”
   “No.” The insult slid right past him. How would a kzin recognize sarcasm? “You will all disrobe now, so that I may know that you are unarmed. When you have done so I will request the puppeteer to don his pressure suit. We two will board the Long Shot. Louis and Teela will stay behind, but I will take your clothing and your luggage and your pressure suits. I will disable this ship. Doubtless the Outsiders, curious as to why you have not returned to Earth, will come to help you long before your lifesystem fails. Do you all understand?”
   Louis Wu, relaxed and ready to take advantage of any slip the kzin might make… Louis Wu glanced at Teela Brown from the corner of his eye and saw a horrible thing. Teela was bracing herself to jump the kzin.
   Speaker would cut her in two.
   Loins would have to move first.
   “Don’t be foolish, Louis. Stand up slowly and move against the wall. You shall be the first toooo…”
   Speaker let the word trail off in a kind of croon.
   Louis halted his leap, caught by a thing he didn’t understand.
   Speaker-To-Animals threw back his big orange head and mewed: an almost supersonic squeal. He threw his arms wide, as if to embrace the universe. The wire blade of his variable-sword cut through a water tank without slowing noticeably; water began dripping out on all four sides of the tank. Speaker didn’t notice. His eyes didn’t see, his ears didn’t hear.
   “Take his weapon,” said Nessus.
   Louis moved. He approached cautiously, ready to duck if the variable-sword should move his way. The kzin was waving it gently, like a baton. Louis took the handle from the kzin’s unresisting fist. He touched the proper stud, and the red ball retracted until it touched the handle.
   “Keep it,” said Nessus. He clamped his jaws on Speaker’s arm and led the kzin to a crash couch. The kzin made no resistance. He was no longer making sounds; he stared into infinity, and his great furry face showed only a vast calm.
   “What happened? What did you do?”
   Speaker-To-Animals, totally relaxed, stared at infinity and purred.
   “Watch,” said Nessus. He moved carefully back from the kzin’s crash couch. He held his fiat heads high and rigid, not so much pointed as aimed, and at no time did his eyes leave the kzin.
   The kzin’s eyes focused suddenly. They flicked from Louis, to Teela, to Nessus. Speaker-To-Animals made plaintive snarling sounds, sat upright, and switched to Interworld.
   “That was very, very nice. I wish—”
   He stopped, started over. “Whatever you did,” he told the puppeteer, “do not do it again.”
   “I judged you to be a sophisticate,” said Nessus. “My judgment was accurate. Only a sophisticate would fear a tasp.”
   Teela said, “Ah.”
   Louis said, “Tasp?”
   The puppeteer addressed himself to Speaker-To-Animals. “You understand that I will use the tasp every time you force me to. I will use it if you make me uneasy. If you attempt violence too often, or if you startle me too often, you will soon become dependent on the tasp. Since the tasp is a surgically implanted part of me, you would have to kill me to possess it. And you would still be ignobly bound by the tasp itself.”
   “Very astute,” said Speaker. “Brilliantly unorthodox tactics. I will trouble you no more.”
   “Tanj! Will somebody tell me what a tasp is?”
   Louis’s igriorance seemed to surprise everybody. It was Teela who answered. “It jolts the pleasure center of the brain.”
   “From a distance?” Louis hadn’t known that that was even theoretically possible.
   “Sure. It does for you just what a touch of current does for a wirehead; but you don’t need to drop a wire into your brain. Usually a tasp is just small enough to aim with one hand.”
   “Have you ever been hit by a tasp? None of my business, of course.”
   Teela grinned derision for his delicacy. “Yes. I know what it feels like. A moment of—well, theres no describing it. But you don’t use a tasp on yourself. You use it on someone who isn’t expecting it. That’s where the fun comes in. Police are always picking up taspers in the parks.”
   “Your tasps,” said Nessus, “induce less than a second of current. Mine induces approximately ten seconds.”
   The effect on Speaker-To-Animals must have been formidable. But Louis saw other implications. “Oh, wow. That’s beautiful. That’s lovely! Who but a puppeteer would go around with a weapon that does good to the enemy?”
   “Who but a prideful sophisticate would fear too much pleasure? The puppeter is quite right,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “I would not risk the tasp again. Too many jolts from the puppeteer’s tasp would leave me his willing slave. I, a kzin, slaved to an herbivore!”
   “Let us board the Long Shot,” Nessus said grandly. “We have wasted enough time on trivialities.”


   Louis was first aboard the Long Shot.
   He was not surprised to find his feet trying to dance on Nereid’s rock surface. Louis knew how to move in low gravity. But his hindbrain stupidly expected gravity to change as he entered the Long Shoes airlock. Braced for the change, he stumbled and almost fell when it didn’t come.
   “I know they had induced gravity then,” he grumbled as he moved into the cabin. “…Oh.”
   The cabin was primitive. There were hard right angles everywhere, suitable for bumping knees and elbows. Everything was bulkier than necessary. Dials were badly placed…
   But, more than primitive, the cabin was small. There had been induced gravity when the Long Shot was built; but, even in a ship a mile wide, there had been no room for the machinery. There was barely room for a pilot.
   Instrument board and mass indicator, a kitchen slot, a crash couch, and a space behind the couch where a man might wedge himself with his head bent to the low ceiling—Louis braced himself in that space and opened the kzin’s variable-sword to three feet.
   Speaker-To-Animals came aboard, moving in self-conscious slow motion. He climbed past Louis without slowing, up into the overhead compartment.
   The overhead compartment had been a recreation room for the ship’s single pilot. Exercise machinery and a reading sereen had been ripped out, and three new crash couches installed. Speaker climbed into one of these.
   Now Louis followed him up the rungs, one-handed. Keeping the variable-sword unostentatiously in sight, he closed the cover on the kzin’s crash couch and flipped a knife switch.
   The crash couch became a mirror-surface egg. Inside, no time would pass until Louis turned off the stasis field. If the ship should happen to ram an antimatter asteroid, even the General Products hull would be ionized vapor; but the kzin’s crash couch would not lose its mirror finish.
   Louis relaxed. It had all been like a kind of ritualistic dance; but its purpose was real enough. The kzin had good reason to steal the ship. The tasp had not altered that. Speaker must not be given an opportunity.
   Louis returned to the pilot’s cabin. He used the ship-to-suit circuit. “Come on in.”
   Something over a hundred hours later, Louis Wu was outside the solar system.

Chapter 5.
Rosette

   There are singularities in the mathematics of hyperspace. One such singularity surrounds every sufficiently large mass in the Einsteinian universe. Outside of these singularities, ships can travel faster than light. Inside, they disappear if they try it.
   Now the Long Shot, some eight light-hours from Sol, was beyond Sol’s local singularity.
   And Louis Wu was in free fall.
   There was tension in his gonads and discomfort in his diaphragm, and his stomach thought he wanted to belch. These sensations would pass. There was a paradoxical urge to fly…
   He had flown many times in free fall, in the huge transparent bubble of the Outbound Hotel, which circled Earth’s Moon. Here, he would smash something vital if he so much as flapped his arms.
   He had chosen to accelerate outward under two gravities. For something like five days he had worked and eaten and slept in the pilot’s crash couch. Despite the excellent facilities of the couch, he was dirty and unkempt; despite fifty hours of sleep, he was exhausted.
   Louis felt his future foreshadowed. For him, the keynote of the expedition would be discomfort.
   The sky of deep space looked not much different from the lunar night sky. In the solar system the planets add little to a naked-eye view. One remarkably bright star glared in the galactic south; and that star was Sol.
   Louis used flywheel controls. The Long Shot rotated, and stars went by beneath his feet.
   Twenty-seven, three hundred and twelve, one thousand even—Nessus had given him these coordinates just before Louis closed the crash couch on him. They were the location of the puppeteer migration. And now Louis realized that this was not in the direction of either of the Clouds of Magellan. The puppeteer had lied to him.
   But, Louis thought, it was about two hundred light years away. And it was along the galactic axis. Perhaps the puppeteers had chosen to move out of the galaxy along the shortest direction, then travel above the plane of the galaxy to reach the Lesser Cloud. Thus they would avoid interstellar debris: suns, dust clouds, hydrogen concentrations…
   It didn’t particularly matter. Louis’s hands, like a pianist’s about to begin a concert, hovered over the instrument panel.
   Descended.
   The Long Shot vanished.
   Louis kept his eyes away from the transparent floor. He had already stopped wondering why there were no covers for all that window space. The sight of the Blind Spot had driven good men mad; but there were those who could take it. The Long Shot’s pilot must have been such a man.
   He looked instead at the mass pointer: a transparent sphere above the instrument panel, with a number of blue lines radiating from its center. This one was oversized, despite limitations on cabin space. Louis settled back and watched the lines.
   They changed visibly. Louis could fix his eye on a line and watch it sweep slowly across the curvature of the sphere. It was unusual and unnerving. At normal hyperdrive speeds the lines would remain fixed for hours.
   Louis flew with his left hand on the panic switch.
   The kitchen slot to his right fed him odd-tasting coffee and, later, a handmeal that came apart in his hands, into separate strata of meat and cheese and bread and some kind of leaf. The autokitchen must be hundreds of years overdue for reprogramming. Radial lines in the mass indicator grew large, and swept upward like the second hand on a watch, and shrank to nothing. A fuzzy blue line at the bottom of the sphere grew long, and longer… Louis pulled the panic switch.
   An unfamiliar red giant glared beneath his feet.
   “Too fast,” Louis snarled. “Too tanj fast!” In any normal ship you only had to check the mass indicator every six hours or so. On the Long Shot you hardly dared blink!
   Louis let his eyes drop to the bright, fuzzy red disc and its starry background.
   “Tanj! I’m already out of known space!”
   He wheeled the ship to see the stars. A foreign sky streamed beneath him. “They’re mine, all mine!” Louis chortled, rubbing his hands together. On sabbaticals Louis Wu was his own entertainment.
   The red star returned to view, and Louis let it swing another ninety degrees. He’d let his ship get too close to the star, and now he’d have to circle around it.
   He was then an hour and a half on his way.
   He was three hours on his way when he dropped out again.
   The foreign stars didn’t bother him. City lights drowned the starlight over most of the Earth; and Louis Wu had been raised a flatlander. He had not seen a star until he was twenty-six. He checked to be sure he was in clear space, he closed covers on instrument panels, and then, finally, he stretched.
   “Wow. My eyes feel like boiled onions.”
   Releasing himself from the crash web, he floated, flexing his left hand. For three hours he had flown with that hand closed on the hyperdrive switch. From elbow to fingertips it felt like a single cramp.
   Under the ceiling were rungs for isometric exercises. Louis used them. The kinks left his muscles, but he was still tired.
   Mmmm. Wake Teela? It would be nice to talk to her now. Lovely idea there. Next time I go on sabbatical I’ll take a woman in stasis. Get the best of both worlds. But he looked and felt like something washed from a flooded graveyard. Unfit for polite company. Oh, well.
   He should not have let her board the Long Shot.
   Not for his own sake! He was glad enough that she had stayed over those two days. It had been like the story of Louis Wu and Paula Cherenkov, rewritten for a happy ending. Perhaps it had been better.
   Yet there was something shallow about Teela. It wasn’t only her age. Louis’s friends were of all ages, and some of the youngest were very deep indeed. Certainly they suffered most. As if hurting were part of the learning process. Which it probably was.
   No, there was a lack of empathy in Teela, a lack of the ability to feel someone else’s pain… Yet she could sense another’s pleasure, and respond to pleasure, and create pleasure. She was a marvelous lover: painfully beautiful, almost new to the art, sensuous as a cat and startlingly uninhibited…
   None of which would qualify her as an explorer.
   Teela’s life had been happy and dull. Twice she had fallen in love, and twice she had been first to tire of the affair. She had never been in a bad stress situation, never been really hurt. When the time came, when Teela found her first genuine emergency, she would probably panic.
   “But I picked her as a lover,” said Louis to himself. “Damn Nessus!” If Teela had ever been found in a stress situation, Nessus would have rejected her as unlucky!
   It had been a mistake to bring her. She would be a liability. He would spend too much of his time protecting her when he should be protecting himself.
   What kinds of stress situations might they face? The puppeteers were good businessmen. They did not overpay. The Long Shot was a fee of unheard-of value. Louis had the chilly suspicion that they would earn it.
   “Sufficient unto the day,” Louis said to himself.
   And he returned to his crash couch and slept for an hour under the sleep headset. Waking, he swung the ship, into line and dropped back into the Blind Spot.
   Five-and-a-half hours from Sol he dropped out again.
   The puppeters coordinates defined a small rectangular section of the sky as seen from Sol plus a radial distance in that direction. At that distance, those coordinates defined a cube half a light year on a side. Somewhere in that volume, presumably, was a fleet of ships. Also in that volume, unless instruments had fouled him up, were Lous Wu and the Long Shot.
   Somewhere far behind him was a bubble of stars some seventy light years in diameter. Known space was small and very far away.
   No point in searching for the fleet. Louis wouldn’t know what to look for. He went to wake Nessus.


   Anchored by his teeth to an exercise rung, Nessus peered over Louis’s shoulder. “I need certain stars for reference. Center that green-white giant and throw it on the scope screen…”
   The pilot’s cabin was crowded. Louis hunched over the instrument panel, protecting buttons ftm the puppeteer’s careless hooves.
   “Spectroanalysis… yes. Now the blue-and-yellow double at two o’clock…
   “I have my bearings. Swing to 348, 72.”
   “What exactly am I looking for, Nessus? A cluster of fusion flames? No, you’d be using thrusters.”
   “You must use the scope. When you see it, you will know.”
   On the scope screen was a sprinkling of anonymous stars. Louis ran the magnification up until… “Five dots in a regular pentagon. Right?”
   “That is our destination.”
   “Good. Let me check the distance.—Tanj! That’s wrong, Nessus. They’re too far away.”
   No comment.
   “Well, they couldn’t be ships, even if the distance meter isn’t working. The puppeteer fleet must be moving at just under lightspeed. We’d see the motion.”
   Five dim stars, in a regular pentagon. They were a fifth of a light year distant and quite invisible to the naked eye. At present scope magnificatim they would have to be full sized planets. In the scope screen one was faintly less blue, faintly dimmer than the others.
   A Kemplerer rosette. How very odd.
   Take three or more equal masses. Set them at the points of an equilateral polygon and give them equal angular velocities about their center of mass.
   Then the figure has stable equilibrium. The orbits of the masses may be circular or elliptical. Another mass may occupy the center of mass of the figure, or the center of mass may be empty. It doesn’t matter. The figure is stable, like a pair of Trojan points.
   The difficulty is that there are several easy ways in which a mass can be captured by a Trojan point. (Consider the Trojan asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit.) But there is no easy way for five masses to fall accidentally into a Kemplerer rosette.
   “That’s wild,” Louis murmured. “Unique. Nobody’s ever found a Kemplerer rosette…” He let it trail off.
   Here between the stars, what could be lighting those objects?
   “Oh, no you don’t,” said Louis Wu. “You’ll never make me believe it. What kind of an idiot do you take me for?”
   “What is it that you will not believe?”
   “You know tanj well what I won’t believe!”
   “As you please. That is our destination, Louis. If you will take us within range, a ship will be sent to match our velocity.”
   The rendezvous ship was a #3 hull, a cylinder with rounded ends and a flattened belly, painted shocking pink, and windowless. There were no engine apertures. The engines must be reactionless: thrusters of the human type, or something more advanced.
   On Nessus’s orders Louis had let the other ship do the maneuvering. The Long Shot, on fusion drives alone, would have required months to match velocities with the puppeteer “fleet”. The puppeteer ship had done it in less than an hour, blinking into existence alongside the Long Shot with her access tube already reaching like a glass snake toward the Long Shot’s airlock.
   Disembarking would be a problem. There wasn’t room to release all the crew from stasis at once. More important, this would be Speaker’s last chance to take control of the ship.
   “Do you think he will obey my tasp, Louis?”
   “No. I think he’ll risk one more, shot at stealing the ship. Tell you what we’d better do…”
   They disconnected the instrument panel from the Long Shot’s fusion motors. It was nothing that the kzin couldn’t fix, given a little time and a touch of the mechanical intuition possessed by any toolmaker. But he would not have the time…
   Louis watched the puppeteer move through the tube. Nessus was carrying Speaker’s pressure suit. His eyes were tightly closed; which was a pity, because the view was magnificent.
   “Free fall,” said Teela when he opened her crash couch. “I don’t feel so good. Better guide me, Louis. What’s happening? Are we there?”
   Louis told her a few details while he guided her to the airlock. She listened, but Louis guessed she was concentrating on the pit of her stomach. She looked acutely uncomfortable. “There’ll be gravity on the other ship,” he told her.
   Her eyes found the tiny rosette where Loius pointed. It was a naked-eye object now, a pentagon of five white stars. She turned with astounded questions in her eyes. The motion spun her semicircular canals; and Louis saw her expression change in the moment before she bolted into the airlock.
   Kemplerer rosettes were one thing. Free-falt sickness was something else again. Louis watched her recede against the unfamiliar stars.
   As the couch cover opened, Louis said, “Don’t do anything startling. I’m armed.”
   The kzin’s orange face did not change expression. “Have we arrived?”
   “Yeah. I’ve disconnected the fusion drive. You’d never reconnect it in time. We’re in the sights of a pair of big ruby lasers.”
   “Suppose I were to escape in hyperdrive? No, my mistake. We must be within a singularity.”
   “You’re in for a shock. We’re in five singularities.”
   “Five? Really? But you lied about the lasers, Louis. Be ashamed.”
   At any rate, the kzin left his couch peaceably enough. Loins followed with the variable-sword at the ready. In the airlock the kzin stopped, suddenly caught by the sight of an expanding pentagon of stars.
   He could hardly have had a better view.
   The Long Shot, edging close in hyperdrive, had stopped half a light-hour ahead of the puppeteer “fleet”: something less than the average distance between Earth and Jupiter. But the “fleet” was moving at terrible speed, falling just behind its own light, so that the light which reached the Long Shot came from much further away. When the Long Shot stopped the rosette had been too small to see. It had been barely visible when Teela left the lock. Now it was impressively large, and growing at enormous speed.
   Five pale blue dots in a pentagon, spreading across the sky, growing, spreading…
   For a flashing instant there were five worlds around the Long Shot. Then they were gone, not fading but gone, their receding light reddened to invisibility. And Speaker-To-Animals held the variable-sword.
   “Finagle’s eyes!” Louis exploded. “Don’t you have any curiosity at all?”
   The kzin considered. “I have curiosity, but my pride is much stronger.” He retracted the wire blade and handed the variable-sword back to Louis. “A threat is a challenge. Shall we go?”


   The puppeteer ship was a robot. Beyond the airlock the lifesystem was all one big room. Four crash couches, as varied in design as their intended occupants, faced each other in a circle around a refreshment console.
   There were no windows.
   There was gravity, to Louis’s relief. But it was not quite Earth’s gravity; nor was the air quite Earth’s air. The pressure was a touch too high. There were smells, not unpleasant but odd. Louis smelled ozone, hydrocarbons, puppeteer—dozens of puppeteers—and other smells he never expected to identify.
   There were no corners. The curved wall merged into floor and ceiling; the couches and the refreshment console all looked half melted. In the puppeteer world there would be nothing hard or sharp, nothing that could draw blood or raise a bruise.
   Nessus sprawled bonelessly in his couch. He looked ridiculously, ludicrously comfortable.
   “He won’t talk,” Teela laughed.
   “Of course not,” said the puppeteer. “I would only have had to start over when you arrived. Doubtless you have been wondering about—”
   “Flying worlds,” the kzin interrupted.
   “And Kemplerer rosettes,” said Louis. A barely audible hum told him that the ship was moving. He and Speaker stowed their luggage and joined the others in the couches. Teela handed Louis a red, fruity drink in a squeezebulb.
   “How much time have we got?” he asked the puppeteer.
   “An hour until we land. Then you will be briefed on our final destination.”
   “That should be long enough. Okay, speak to us. Why flying worlds? Somehow it doesn’t seem safe to throw habitable worlds about with such gay abandon.”
   “Oh, but it is, Louis!” The puppeteer was terribly earnest. “Much safer than this craft, for instance; and this craft is very safe compared to most human-designed craft. We have had much practice in the moving of worlds.”
   “Practice! How did that happen?”
   “To explain this, I must speak of heat… and of population control. You will not be embarrassed or offended?”
   They signified negative. Louis had the grace not to laugh; Teela laughed.
   “What you must know is that population control is very difficult for us. There are only two ways for one of us to avoid becoming a parent. One is major surgery. The other is total abstinence from sexual congress.”
   Teela was shocked. “But that’s terrible!”
   “It is a handicap. Do not misunderstand me. Surgery is not a substitute for abstinence; it is to enforce abstinence. Today such surgery can be reversed; in the past it was impossible. Few of my species will willingly undergo such surgery.”
   Louis whistled. “I should think so. So your population control depends on will power?”
   “Yes. Abstinence has unpleasant side effects, with us as with most species. The result has traditionally been overpopulation. Half a million years ago we were half a trillion in human numbering. In kzinti numbering—”
   “My mathematics is good,” said the kzin. “But these problems do not seem to relate to the unusual nature of your fleet.” He was not complaining, merely commenting. From the refreshment console Speaker had procured a double-handed flagon of kzinti design and half a gallon’s capacity.
   “But it does relate, Speaker. Half a trillion civilized beings produce a good deal of heat as a by-product of their civilization.”
   “Were you civilized so long ago?”
   “Certainly. What barbarian culture would support so large a population? We had long since run out of farming land, and had been forced to terraform two worlds of our system for agriculture. For this it was necessary to move them closer to our sun. You understand?”
   “Your first experience in moving worlds. You used robot ships, of course.”
   “Of course… After that, food was not a problem. Living space was not a problem. We built high even then, and we like each other’s company.”
   “Herd instinct, I’ll bet. Is that why this ship smells like a herd of puppeteers?”
   “Yes, Louis. It is reassuring to us to smell the presence of our own kind. Our sole and only problem, at the time of which I speak, was heat.”
   “Heat?”
   “Heat is produced as a waste product of civilization.”
   “I fail to understand,” said Speaker-To-Animals.
   Louis, who as a flatlander understood perfectly, forebore to comment. (Earth was far more crowded than Kzin.)
   “An example. You would wish a light source at night, would you not, Speaker? Without a light source you must sleep, whether or not you have better things to do.”
   “This is elementary.”
   “Assume that your light source is perfect, that is, it gives off radiation only in the spectra visible to kzinti. Nonetheless, all light which does not escape through the window will be absorbed by walls and furniture. It will become randomized heat.
   “Another example. Earth produces too little natural fresh water for its eighteen billions. Salt water must be distilled through fusion. This produces heat. But our world, so much more crowded, would die in a day without the distilling plants.
   “A third example. Transportation involving changes in velocity always produces heat. Spacecraft filled with grain from the agricultural worlds produce heat on reentry and distribute it through our atmosphere. They produce more heat on takeoff.”
   “But cooling systems—”
   “Most kinds of cooling systems only pump heat around, and produce more heat for power.”
   “U-u-urr. I begin to understand. The more puppeteers, the more heat is produced.”
   “Do you understand, then, that the heat of our civilization was making our world uninhabitable?”
   Smog, thought Louis Wu. Internal combustion engines. Fission bombs and fusion rockets in the atmosphere. Industrial garbage in the lakes and oceans. It’s often enough that we’ve half-killed ourselves in our own waste products. Without the Fertility Board, would the Earth be dying now in its own waste heat?
   “Incredible,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “Why didn’t you leave?”
   “Who would trust his life to the many deaths of space? Only such a one as me. Should we settle worlds with our insane?”
   “Send cargos of frozen fertilized ova. Run the ships with crews of the insane.”
   “Discussions of sex make me uncomfortable. Our biology is not adapted to such methods, but doubtless we could evolve something analogous… but to what purpose? Our population would be the same, and our world would still have been dying of its own waste heat.”
   Irrelevantly, Teela said, “I wish we could see out.”
   The puppeteer was astounded. “Are you sure? Are you not subject to the fear of falling?”
   “On a puppeteer ship?”
   “Ye-es. In any case, our watching cannot increase the danger. Very well.” Nessus spoke musically in his own tongue, and the ship vanished.
   They could see themselves and each other; they could see four crash couches resting on emptiness, and the refreshment console in the middle. All else was black space. But five worlds glowed in white splendor behind Teela’s dark hair.
   They were of equal size: perhaps twice the angular diameter of the full Moon as seen from Earth. They formed a pentagram. Four of the worlds were circled by strings of tiny, glaring lights: orbital suns giving off artificial yellow-white sunlight. These four were alike in brightness and appearance: misty blue spheres, their continental outlines invisible at this distance. But the fifth…
   The fifth world had no orbital lights. It glowed by its own light, in patches the shapes of continents and the colors of sunlight. Between the patches was a black that matched the black of surrounding space; and this black, too, was filled with stars. The black of space seemed to encroach on continents of sunlight.
   “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” said Teela, with tears in her voice. And Louis, who had seen many things, was inclined to agree.
   “Incredible,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “I hardly dared believe it. You took your worlds with you.”
   “Puppeteers don’t trust spacecraft,” Louis said absently. There was a touch of cold in the thought that he might have missed this; that the puppeteer might have chosen someone in his place. He might have died without seeing the puppeteer rosette…
   “But how?”
   “I had explained,” said Nessus, “that our civilization was dying in its own waste heat. Total conversion of energy had rid us of all waste products of civilization, save that one. We had no choice but to move our world outward from its primary.”
   “Was that not dangerous?”
   “Very. Then was much madness that year. For that reason it is famous in our history. But we had purchased a reactionless, inertialess drive from the Outsiders. You may guess their price. We are still paying in installments. We had moved two agricultural worlds; we had experimented with other, useless worlds of our system, using the Outsider drive.
   “In any case, we did it. We moved our world.
   “In later millenia our numbers reached a full trillion. The dearth of natural sunlight had made it necessary to light our streets during the day, producing more heat. Our sun was misbehaving.
   “In short, we found that a sun was a liability rather than an asset. We moved our world to a tenth of a light year’s distance, keeping the primary only as an anchor. We needed the farming worlds and it would have been dangerous to let our world wander randomly through space. Otherwise we would not have needed a sun at all.”
   “So,” said Louis Wu. “That’s why nobody ever found the puppeteer world.”
   “That was part of the reason.”
   “We searched every yellow dwarf sun in known space, and a number outside it. Wait a minute, Nessus. Somebody would have found the farming planets. In a Kemplerer rosette.”
   “Louis, they were searching the wrong suns.”
   “What? You’re obviously from a yellow dwarf.”
   “We evolved under a yellow dwarf star somewhat like Procyon. You may know that in half a million years Procyon will expand into the red giant stage.”
   “Finagles heavy hands. Did your sun blow up into a red giant?”
   “Yes. Shortly after we finished moving our world, our sun began the period of expansion. Your fathers were still using the upper thigh bone of an antelope to crack skulls. When you began to wonder where our world was, you were searching the wrong orbits, about the wrong Suns.
   “We had brought suitable worlds from nearby systems, increasing our agricultural worlds to four and setting them in a Kemplerer rosette. It was necessary to move them all when the sun began to expand, and to supply them with sources of ultraviolet to compensate for the reddened radiation. You will understand that when the time came to abandon the galaxy, two hundred years ago, we were well prepared. We had had practice in moving worlds.”
   The rosette of worlds had been expanding for some time. Now the puppeteer world glowed beneath their feet, rising, rising to engulf them. Scattered stars in the black seas had expanded, to become scares of small islands. The continents burned like sunfire.
   Long ago, Louis Wu had stood at the void edge of Mount Lookitthat. The Long Fall River, on that world, ends in the tallest waterfall in known space. Louis’s eyes had followed it down as far as they could penetrate the void mist. The featureless white of the void itself had grasped at his mind, and Louis Wim, half hypnotized, had sworn to live forever. How else could he see all there was to we?
   Now he reaffirmed that decision. And the puppeteer world rose about him.
   “I am daunted,” said Speaker-To-Animals. His naked pink tail lashed in agitation, though his furry face and burry voice carried no emotion. “Your lack of courage had deserved our contempt, Nessus, but our contempt has blinded us. Truly you are dangerous. Had you feared us enough, you would have ended our race. Your power is terrible. We could not have stopped you.”
   “Surely a kzin cannot fear an herbivore.”
   Nessus had not spoken mockingly; but Speaker reacted with rage. “What sapient being would not fear such power?”
   “You distress me. Fear is the brother of hate. One would expect a kzin to attack what he fears.”
   The conversation was getting sticky. With the Long Shot millions of miles in their wake, and known space hundreds of light years away, they were all very much within the power of the puppeteers. If the puppeteers found reason to fear them—Change the subject, fast! Louis opened his mouth.
   “Hey,” said Teela. “You people keep talking about Kemplerer rosettes. What’s a Kemplerer rosette?”
   And both aliens started to answer, while Louis wondered why he had thought Teela shallow.

Chapter 6.
Christmas Ribbon

   “The joke’s on me,” said Louis Wu. “Now I know where to find the puppeteer world. Very nice, Nessus. You kept your promise.”
   “I told you that you would find the information more surprising than useful.”
   “A good joke.” said the kzin. “Your sense of humor surprises me, Nessus.”
   Below, a tiny eel-shaped island surrounded by a black sea. The island rose like a fire salamander, and Louis thought he could pick out tall, slender buildings. Obviously aliens would not be trusted on the mainland.
   “We do not joke,” said Nessus. “My species has no sense of humor.”
   “Strange. I would have thought that humor was an aspect of intelligence.”
   “No. Humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism.”
   “All the same—”
   “Speaker, no sapient being ever interrupts a defense mechanism.”
   As the ship dropped the lights resolved: sun-panels, along street levels, windows in buildings, light sources, in parking areas. In a last instant Louis glimpsed buldings slender as rapier blades, miles tall. Then the city flashed up to engulf them, and they were down.
   Down in a parkland of colorful alien plants.
   Nobody moved.
   Puppeteers were the second most harmless-looking sentients in known space. They were too shy, too small, too weird to seem dangerous. They were merely funny.
   But suddenly Nessus was a member of his species; and his species was mightier than men had dreamed. The mad puppeteer sat quite still, his necks bobbing to observe his chosen underlings. There was nothing funny about Nessus. His race moved worlds, five at a time.
   So that Teela’s giggle was a shocking sound.
   “I was just thinking,” she explained. “The only way to keep from having too many little puppeteers is no sex at all. Right, Nessus?”
   “Yes.”
   She giggled again. “No wonder puppeteers don’t have a sense of humor.”
   Through a park that was too regular, too symmetrical, too well tamed, they followed a floating blue light.
   The air was thick with the spicy-chemical smell of puppeteer. That smell was everywhere. It had been strong and artificial in the one-room life support system of the transfer ship. It had not diminished when the airlock opened. A trillion puppeteers had flavored the air of this world, and for all of eternity it would smell of puppeteer.
   Nessus danced; his small clawed hooves seemed barely to touch the resilient surface of the walk. The kzin glided, catlike, his naked pink tail whipping rhythmically back and forth. The sound of the puppeteer’s walk was a tap dance in three-four time. From the kzin came not the slighest whisper of motion.
   Teela’s walk was almost as silent. Her walk always looked clumsy; but it wasn’t. She never stumbled, never bumped anything. Louis, then, was the least graceful of the four.
   But why should Louis Wu be graceful? An altered ape, whom evolution had never entirely adapted to walking on flat ground. For millions of years his fathers had walked on all fours where they had to, had used the trees where they could.
   The Pleiocene had ended that, with millions of years of drought. The forests had left Louis Wu’s ancestors behind, high and dry and starving. In desperation they had eaten meat. They had done better after learning the secret of the antelope’s thighbone, whose double-knobbed shoulder joint had left its mark in so many fossil skulls.
   Now, on feet still equipped with vestigial fingers, Louis Wu and Teela Brown walked with aliens.
   Aliens? They were all aliens here, even mad, exiled Nessus, with his brown and unkempt mane and his restless, searching heads. Speaker, too, was uneasy. His eyes, within their black spectacle markings, searched the alien vegetation for things with poison stings or razor teeth. Instinct, probably. Puppeteers would not permit dangerous beasts in their parks.
   They came upon a dome that glowed like a huge, half-buried pearl. Then the floating light split in two.
   “I must leave you,” said Nessus. And Louis saw that the puppeteer was terrified.
   “I go to confront those-who-lead.” He spoke low and urgently. “Speaker, tell me quickly. Should I not return, would you seek me out to slay me for the insult I delivered in Krushenko’s Restaurant?”
   “Is there risk you will not return?”
   “Some risk. Those-who-lead may dislike what I must tell them. I ask again, would you hunt me down?”
   “Here on an alien world, amid beings of such awesome power and such lack of faith in a kzin’s peaceful intent?” The kzin’s tail lashed once, emphatically. “No. But neither would I continue with the expedition.”
   “That will be sufficent.” Nessus trotted off, trembling visibly, following the guidelight.
   “What’s he scared of?” Teela complained. “He’s done everything they told him to. Why would they be angry with him?”
   “I think he’s up to something,” said Louis. “Something devious. But what?”
   The blue light moved on. They followed it into an irridescent hemisphere…


   Now the dome had vanished. From a triangle of couches, two humans and a kzin looked out into a tame jungle of brilliant alien plants, watching the approach of a strange puppeteer. Either the dome itself was invisible from inside, or the park scene was a projection.
   The air smelled of many puppeteers.
   The strange puppeteer pushed its way through a last fringe of hanging scarlet tendrils. (Louis remembered when he had thought of Nessus as “it”. When had Nessus graduated to “him”? But, Speaker, a familiar alien, had been “him” from the beginning.) The puppeteer stopped there, just short of the presumed boundaries of the pearly dome. Its mane was silver where Nessus’s was brown, and was neatly coiffeured in complex ringlets; but its voice was Nessus’s thrilling contralto.
   “I must apologize for not being present to greet you. You may address me as Chiron.”
   A projection, then. Louis and Teela murmured polite demurrers. Speaker-To-Animals bared his teeth.
   “The one you call Nessus knows all that you are about to learn. His presence was required elsewhere. However, he mentioned your reactions on learning of our engineering skills.”
   Louis winced. The Puppeteer continued. “This may be fortunate. You will understand the better when you learn of our own reactions to a more ambitious work of engineering.”
   Half the dome went black.
   Annoyingly, it was the side of the dome opposite to the Projected puppeteer. Louis found a control to turn his couch; but he reflected that he would have needed two’ swiveled heads with independently operating eyes to watch both halves of the dome at once. The darkened side showed starry space forming a backdrop for a small, blazing disc.
   A ringed disc. The scene was a blow-up of the holo in Louis Wu’s pocket.
   The light source was small and brilliant white, very like a view of Sol as seen from the general neighborhood of Jupiter. The ring was huge in diameter, wide enough to stretch halfway across the darkened side of the dome; but it was narrow, not much thicker than the light source at its axis. The near side was black and, where it cut across the light, sharp-edged. Its further side was a pale blue ribbon across space.
   If Louis was growing used to miracles, he was not yet so blas‚ as to make idiotic-sounding guesses. Instead he said, “It looks like a star with a ring around it. What is it?”
   Chiron’s reply came as no surprise.
   “It is a star with a ring around it,” said the puppeteer. “A ring of solid matter. An artifact.”
   Teela Brown clapped her hands and burst into giggles. She strangled the giggles after a few moments and managed to look wonderfully solemn; but her eyes glowed. Louis understood perfectly. He felt a touch of the same joy. The ringed sun was his/her private toy: a new thing in a mundane universe.
   (Take Christmas ribbon, pale blue and an inch wide, the kind you use to wrap presents. Set a lighted candle on a bare floor. Take fifty feet of ribbon, and string it in a circle with the candle at the center, balancing the ribbon on edge so that the inner side catches the candlelight.)
   But the kzin’s tail was lashing back and forth, back and forth.
   (After all, that wasn’t a candle in the middle. That was a sun!)
   “By now you know,” said Chiron, “that we have been moving north along the galactic axis for the past two hundred and four of your Earth years. In kzin years—”
   “Two hundred and seventeen.”
   “Yes. During that time we have naturally observed the space ahead of us for signs of danger and the unexpected. We had known that the star EC-1752 was ringed with an uncharacteristically dense and narrow band of dark matter. It was assumed that the ring was dust or rock. Yet it was surprisingly regular.
   “Some ninety days ago our fleet of worlds reached a position such that the ring occluded the star itself. We saw that the ring was sharply bounded. Further investigation revealed that the ring is not gas nor dust, nor even asteroidal rock, but a solid band of considerable tensile strength. Naturally we were terrified.”
   Speaker-To-Animals asked, “How were you able to deduce its tensile strength?”
   “Spectroanalysis and frequency shifts gave us a relative difference in velocities. The ring is clearly rotating about its primary at 770 miles per second, a velocity high enough to compensate for the pull of gravity from the primary, and to provide an additional centripetal acceleration of 9.94 meters per second. Consider the tensile strength needed to prevent the structure from disintegrating under such a pull!”
   “Gravity,” said Louis.
   “Apparently.”
   “Gravity. A touch less than Earth’s. There’s somebody living there, on the inner surface. Hooo,” said Louis Wu, for the full impact was beginning to hit him, and the little hairs were rising along his spinal column. He heard the swish, swish of the kzin’s tail cutting air.
   It was not the first time men had met their superiors. Thus far men had been lucky…
   Abruptly Louis stood up and walked toward the dome wall. It didn’t work. The ring and the star receded before him until he touched a smooth surface. But he saw something he hadn’t noticed before.
   The ring was checkered. There were regular rectangular shadows along its blue back.
   “Can you give us a better picture?”
   “We can expand it,” said the contralto voice. The G2 star jerked forward, then shot blazing off to the right, so that Louis was looking down on the lighted inner surface of the ring. Blurred as it was, Louis could only guess that the brighter, whiter areas might be cloud, that regions of faintly deeper blue might be land where lighter blue was sea.
   But the shadowed areas were quite visible. The ring seemed to be laid out in rectangles: a long strip of glowing baby blue followed by a shorter strip of deep, navy blue, followed by another long strip of light blue. Dots and dashes.
   “Something’s causing those shadows,” he said. “Something in orbit?”
   “Yes, just that. Twenty rectangular shapes orbit in a Kemplerer rosette much nearer the primary. We do not know their purpose.”
   “You wouldn’t. It’s been too long since you had a sun. These orbiting rectangles must be there to separate night from day. Otherwise it would always be high noon on the ring.”
   “You will understand now why we called for your help. Your alien insights were bound to be of value.”
   “Uh huh. How big is the ring? Have you studied it much? Have you sent probes?”
   “We have studied the ring as best we could without slowing our velocity and without otherwise attracting notice to ourselves. We have sent no probes, of course. Since they would have to be remotely controlled by hyperwave, such probes might be traced back to us.”
   “You can’t track a hyperwave signal. It’s theoretically impossible.”
   “Perhaps those who built the ring have evolved different theories.”
   “Mmm.”
   “But we have studied the ring with other instruments.” As Chiron spoke, the scene on the dome wall changed to blacks and whites and grays. Outlines shifted and wavered. “We have taken photographs and holographs in all electromagnetic frequencies. If you are interested—”
   “They don’t show much detail.”
   “No. The light is too much bent by gravitational fields and solar wind and intervening dust and gasses. Our telescopes cannot find further detail.”
   “So you haven’t really learned much.”
   “I would say that we have learned a good deal. One puzzling point. The ring apparently stops on the close order of 40 percent of neutrinos.”
   Teela merely looked bewildered; but Speaker made a startled sound, and Louis whistled very low.
   That eliminated everything.
   Normal matter, even the terrifically compressed matter in the heart of a star, would stop almost no neutrinos. Any neutrino stood a fifty-fifty chance of getting through several light years’ thickness of lead.
   An object in a Slaver stasis field reflected all neutrinos. So did a General Products hull.
   But nothing known would stop 40 percent of neutrinos, and let the rest through.
   “Something new, then.” said Louis. “Chiron, how big is this ring? How massive is it?”
   “The ring masses two times ten to the thirtieth power in grams, measures .95 times ten to the eighth power miles in radius, and something less than ten to the sixth power miles across.”
   Louis was not comfortable thinking in abstract powers of ten. He tried to translate the numbers into pictures.
   He had been right to think of inch-wide Christmas ribbon, balanced on edge and strung in a loop. The ring was more than ninety million miles in radius—about six hundred million miles long, he estimated—but less than a million miles across, edge to edge. It massed a little more than the planet Jupiter…
   “Somehow that doesn’t seem massive enough,” he said. “Something that big should weigh as much as a good sized sun.”
   The kzin agreed. “One has the ludicrous picture of millions of beings trying to live on a construct no thicker than bookfilm.”
   “Your intuition is wrong,” said the puppeteer with silver curls. “Consider the dimensions. If the ring were a ribbon of hullmetal, for example, it would be approximately fifty feet thick.”
   Fifty feet? That was hard to believe.
   But Teela’s eyes had been turned to the ceiling, and her lips had been moving silently but rapidly. “He’s right,” she said. “The math works out. But what’s it for? Why would anyone build such a thing?”
   “Room.”
   “Room?”
   “Room to live,” Louis amplified. “That’s what it’s all about. Six hundred trillion square miles of surface area is three million times the surface area of the Earth. It’d be like having three million worlds all mapped flat and joined edge to edge. Three million worlds within aircar distance. That’d solve any population problem.
   “And what a problem they must have had! You don’t go into a project like that one just for kicks.”
   “A point,” said the kzin. “Chiron, have you searched neighboring stars for other, similar rings?”
   “Yes, we—”
   “And found none. As I thought. If the race that built the ring had known of faster-than-light travel, they would have settled other stars. They would not have needed the ring. Therefore there is only one ring.”
   “Yes.”
   “I am reassured. We are superior to the ringmakers in at least one respect.” The kzin stood suddenly. “Are we to explore the habitable surface of the ring?”
   “A physical landing might prove to be overambitious.”
   “Nonsense. We must inspect the vehicle you have prepared for us. Is its landing gear sufficiently versatile? When may we depart?”
   Chiron whistled, a startled burst of discord. “You must be mad. Consider the power of those who built this ring! They make my own civilization seem savages!”
   “Or cowards.”
   “Very well. You may go to inspect your craft when the one you call Nessus returns. For the time previous to that event, there are more data regarding the ring.”
   “You try my patience,” said Speaker. But he sat down.
   You liar, thought Louis. You take it well, and I’m proud of you. His own stomach was queasy as he returned to his couch. A baby blue ribbon stretched across the stars; and man had met superior beings—again.
   The kzinti had been first.
   When men first used fusion drives to cross the gaps between the stars, the kzinti were already using the gravity polarizer to power their interstellar warships. It made their ships faster and more maneuverable than human ships.
   Man’s resistance to the kzinti fleet would have been nominal, had it not been for the Kzinti Lesson: A reaction drive is a weapon devastating in direct proportion to it’s efficiency as a drive.
   Their first foray into human space had been a terrific shock to the kzinti. Human society had been peaceful for centuries, for so long that they had virtually forgotten war. But human interstellar ships used fusion-powered photon drives, launched by a combination of photon sail and asteroid-based laser cannon.
   So the kzinti telepathe continued to report that the human worlds had no weapons at all… while giant laser cannon chopped at the kzinti ships, and smaller mobile cannon darted in and out on the light pressure of their own beams…
   Slowed by unexpected human resistance and by the barrier of lightspeed, the war had run for decades instead of years. But the kzinti would have won eventually.
   Except that an Outsider ship had stumbled across the small human colony on We Made It. They had sold the mayor the secret of the Outsider hyperdrive shunt, on credit. We Made It had not known of the kzinti war; but they learned of it fast enough when they had built a few faster-than-light ships.
   Against hyperdrive the kzinti hadn’t a prayer.
   Later, the puppeteers had come to set up trading posts in human space…
   Man had been very lucky. Three times he had met races technologically superior to him. The kzinti would have crushed him without the Outsider hyperdrive. The Outsiders, again, were clearly his superiors; but they wanted nothing that man could give them, except supply bases and information, and these they could buy. In any case the Outsiders, fragile beings of Helium II metabolism, were too vulnerable to heat and gravity to make good warriors. And the puppeteers, powerful beyond dreams, were too cowardly.
   Who had built the Ringworld? And… were they warriors?
   Months later, Louis was to see Speaker’s lie as his personal turning point. He might have backed out then—on Teela’s behalf, of course. The Ringworld was terrifying enough as an abstraction in numbers. To think of approaching it in a spacecraft, of landing on it…
   But Louis had seen the kzin in terror of the puppeteers’ flying worlds. Speaker’s lie was a magnificent act of courage. Could Louis show himself a coward now?
   He sat down and turned to face the glowing projection; and as his eyes brushed Teela he silently cursed her for an idiot. Her face was alive with wonder and delight. She was as eager as the kzin pretended to be. Was she too stupid to be afraid?
   There was an atmosphere on the ring’s inner side. Spectroanalysis showed the air to be as thick as Earth’s, and of approximately the same composition: definitely breathable to man and kzin and puppeteer. What kept it from blowing away was a thing to be guessed at. They would have to go and look.
   In the system of the G2 sun there was nothing at all but the ring itself. No planets, no asteroids, no comets.
   “They cleaned it out,” said Louis. “They didn’t want anything to hit the ring.”
   “Naturally,” said the puppeteer with silver curls. “If something did strike the ring, it would strike at a minimum of 770 miles per second, the speed of rotation of the ring itself. No matter how strong the material of the ring, there would always be the danger of an object missing the outer surface and crossing the sun to strike the unprotected, inhabited inner surface.”
   The sun itself was a yellow dwarf somewhat cooler than Sol and a touch smaller. “We will need heat suits on the ring,” said the kzin—rubbing it in, Louis thought.
   “No,” said Chiron. “The temperature of the inner surface is quite tolerable, to all of our species.”
   “How would you know that?”
   “The frequency of the infrared radiation emitted by the outer surface—”
   “You see me exposed as a fool.”
   “Not at all. We have been studying the ring since its discovery, while you have had a few eights of minutes. The infrared frequency indicates an average temperature of 290 degrees absolute, which of course applies to the inner as well as the outer surface of the ring. For you this will be some ten degrees warmer than optimum, Speaker-To-Animals. For Louis and Teela it is optimum.
   “Do not let our attention to details mislead or frighten you,” Chiron added. “We would not permit a landing unless the ring engineers themselves insisted. We merely wish you to be ready for any eventuality.”
   “You don’t have any detail of surface formations?”
   “Unfortunately, no. The resolving power of our instruments is insufficient.”
   “We can do some guessing,” said Teela. “The thirty hour day-night cycle, for instance. Their original world must have turned that fast. Do you suppose that’s their original system?”
   “We assume that it is, since they apparently did not have hyperdrive,” said Chiron. “But presumably they could have moved their world to another system, using our own technique.”
   “And should have,” the kzin rumbled, “rather than destroy their own system in the course of building their ring. I think we will find their own system somewhere nearby, as denuded of worlds as this one. They would have used terraforming techniques to settle all of the worlds of their own system, before adapting this more desperate expedient.”
   Teela said, “Desperate?”
   “Then, when they had finished building their ring around the sun, they would have been forced to move all their worlds into this system to transfer their populations.”
   “Maybe not,” said Louis. “They might have used big STL ships to settle their ring if it was close enough to their own system.”
   “Why desperate?”
   They looked at her.
   “I would have thought they built the ring for—for—” Teela floundered. “Because they wanted to.”
   “For kicks? For scenery? Finagles fist! Teela, think of the resources they’d have had to divert. Remember, they must have had a hell of a population problem. By the time they needed the ring for living room, they probably couldn’t afford to build it. They built it anyway, because they needed it.”
   “Mmm,” said Teela, looking puzzled.
   “Nessus returns,” said Chiron. Without another word the puppeteer turned and trotted away into the park.

Chapter 7.
Stepping Discs

   “That was rude,” said Teela.
   “Chiron doesn’t want to meet Nessus. Didn’t I tell you? They think Nessus is—crazy.”
   “They’re all crazy.”
   “Well, they don’t think so, but that doesn’t make you wrong. Still want to go?”
   Teela’s answer was the same uncomprehending look she’d given him when he tried to explain whiplash of the heart. “You still want to go,” Louis confirmed sadly.
   “Sure. Who wouldn’t? What are the puppeteers afraid of?”
   “I understand that,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “The puppeteers are cowards. But I fail to see why they insist on knowing more than they do. Louis, they have already passed the ringed sun, traveling at nearly lightspeed. Those who built the ring assuredly did not have faster-than-light travel. Thus they can be no danger to the puppeteers, now or ever. I fail to understand our role in this matter.”
   “It figures.”
   “Must I take that as an insult?”
   “No, of course not. It’s just that we keep running up against population problems. Why should you understand?”
   “Quite so. Explain, if you please.”
   Louis had been scanning the tame jungle for a glimpse of Nessus. “Nessus could probably tell this better. Too bad. Okay, imagine a trillion puppeteers on this world. Can you do it?”
   “I can smell them individually. The very concept makes me itch.”
   “Now imagine them on the Ringworld. Better, yes?”
   “Uurr. Yes. With more than eight-to-the-seventh-power times as much room… But still I fail to understand. Do you suppose the puppeteers plan conquest? But how would they transfer themselves to the ring afterward? They do not trust spacecraft.”
   “I don’t know. They don’t make war, either. That’s not the point. The point is, is the Ringworld safe to live on?”
   “Urrr.”
   “You see? Maybe they’re thinking of building their own Ringworlds. Maybe they expect to find an empty one, out there in the Clouds of Magellan. Not an unreasonable hope, by the way. But it doesn’t matter. They have to know if it’s safe before they do anything.”
   “Here comes Nessus.” Teela stood up and moved to the invisible wall. “He looks drunk. Do puppeteers get drunk?”
   Nessus wasn’t trotting. He came tippy-toe, circling a four-foot chrome-yellow feather with exaggerated wariness, moving one foot at a time, while his flat heads darted this way and that. He had almost reached the lecture dome when something like a large black butterfly settled on his rump. Nessus screamed like a woman, leapt forward as if clearing a high fence. He landed rolling. When he stopped rolling he remained curled into a ball, with his back arched and his legs folded and his heads and necks tucked between his forelegs.
   Louis was running. “Depressive cycle,” he shouted over his shoulder. By luck and memory he found the entrance in the invisible dome. He darted out into the park.
   All the flowers smelled like puppeteer. (If all the life of the puppeteer world had the same chemical basis, how could Nessus take nourishment from warm carrot juice?) Louis followed a right-angle zigzag of manicured dusty orange hedge and came upon the puppeteer.
   He knelt beside him. “It’s Louis,” he said. “You’re safe.” He reached gently into the tangled mop over the puppeter’s skull and scratched gently. The puppeteer jerked at the touch, then settled down.
   This was a bad one. No need to make the puppeteer face the world just yet. Louis asked, “Was that thing dangerous? The one that landed on you.”
   “That? No.” The contralto voice was muffled, but beaufifully pure, and without inflection. “It was only a flower-sniffer.”
   “How did it go with those-who-lead?”
   Nessus winced. “I won.”
   “Fine. What did you win?”
   “My right to breed, and a set of mates.”
   “Is that what has you so scared?” It wasn’t unlikely, Louis thought Nessus could be the counterpart to a male black widow spider, doomed by love. Then again, he might be a nervous virgin… of either sex, or of any sex…
   The puppeteer said, “I might have failed, Louis. I faced them down. I bluffed them.”
   “Go on.” Louis was aware that Teela and Speaker-To-Animals had joined them. He continued scratching gently in Nessus’s mane. Nessus had not moved.
   The muffled, inflectionless contralto voice said, “Those-who-lead offered me the legal right to reproduce my kind if I survive the voyage we must make. But this was not enough. To become a parent I need mates. Who will willingly mate with a straggly-maned maniac?
   “It was necessary to bluff. Find me a mate, I told them, or I will withdraw from the voyage. If I withdraw, so will the kzin, I said. They were enraged.”
   “I can believe that. You must have been in the manic state.”
   “I worked myself up to it. I threatened them with ruin to their plans, and they capitulated. Some selfless volunteer, I said, must agree to mate with me if I return from the ring.”
   “Beautiful. Nice going. Did you get volunteers?”
   “One of our sexes is… property. Nonsentient; stupid. I needed only one volunteer. Those-who-lead—”
   Teela broke in. “Why don’t you just say leaders?”
   “I had tried to translate into your terms,” said the puppeteer. “A more accurate translation of the term would be, those-who-lead-from-behind. There is a selected chairman or speaker-for-all or… the accurate translation of his title is Hindmost.
   “It was the Hindmost who accepted me as his mate. He said that he would not ask another to so sacrifice his self-respect.”
   Louis whistled. “That’s something. Go ahead and cringe, you deserve it. Better to be scared now, now that it’s all over.”
   Nessus stirred, relaxing somewhat.
   “That pronoun,” said Louis. “It bugs me. Either I should be calling you she, or I should be calling the Hindmost she.”
   “This is indelicate of you, Louis. One does not discuss sex with an alien race.” A head emerged from between Nessus’s legs and focused, disapproving. “You and Teela would not mate in my sight, would you?”
   “Oddly enough, the subject did come up once, and Teela said—”
   “I am offended,” the puppeteer stated.
   “Why?” asked Teela. The puppeteer’s exposed head dived for cover. “Oh, come out of there! I won’t hurt you.”
   “Truly?”
   “Truly. I mean honest. I think you’re cute.”
   The puppeteer unrolled completely. “Did I hear you call me cute?”
   “Yeah.” She looked up at the orange wall of Speaker-To-Aninials and, “You too,” she said generously.
   “I do not mean to give offense,” said the kzin. “But do not ever say that again. Ever.”
   Teela looked puzzled.


   There was a dusty orange hedge, ten feet tall and perfectly straight, equipped with cobalt blue tentacles that hung limp. From the look of them, the hedge had once been carnivorous. It was the border to the park; and Nessus led his little group toward it.
   Louis was expecting a gap in the hedge. He was unprepared when Nessus walked straight into it. The hedge parted for the puppeteer and closed after him.
   They followed.
   They walked out from under a sky-blue sky; but when the hedge had dosed after them, the sky was black and white. Against the black sky of perpetual night, drifting clouds blazed white in the light cast upon their underbellies by miles of city. For the city was there, looming over them.
   At first glance it differed from Earthly cities only in degree. The buildings were thicker, blockier, more uniform; and they were higher, terribly high, so that the sky was all lighted windows and lighted balconies with straight hairline cracks of darkness marking the zenith. Here were the right angles denied to puppeteer furniture; here on the buildings where a right angle was far too big to bash a careless knee.
   But why had the city not loomed similarly over the park? On Earth there were few buildings more than a mile high. Here, none were less. Louis guessed at light-bending fields around the park’s borders. He never got around to asking. It was the least of the miracles of the puppeteer world.
   “Our vehicle is at the other end of the island,” said Nessus. “We can be there in a minute or less, using the stepping discs. I will show you.”
   “You feel all right now?”
   “Yes, Teela. As Louis says, the worst is over.” The puppeteer pranced lightly ahead of them. “The Hindmost is my love. I need only return from the Ringworld.”
   The path was soft. To the eye it was concrete set with iridescent particles, but to the feet it was damp, spongy soil. Presently, after walking a very long block, they came to an intersection. “We must go this way,” said Nessus, nodding ahead of him. “Do not step on the first disc. Follow me.”
   At the center of the intersection was a large blue rectangle. Four blue discs surrounded the rectangle, one at the mouth of each walk. “You may step on the rectangle if you wish,” said Nessus, “but not on inappropriate discs. Follow me.” He circled the nearest disc, crossed the intersection, trotted onto the disc on the opposite side, and vanished.
   For a stunned moment nobody moved. Then Teela yelled like a banshee and ran at the disc. And was gone.
   Speaker-To-Animals snarled and leapt. No tiger could have aimed as accurately. Then Louis was alone.
   “By the Mist Demons,” he said wonderingly. “They’ve got open transfer booths.”
   And he walked forward.
   He was standing on a square at the center of the next intersection, between Nessus and Speaker. “Your mate ran ahead,” said Nessus. “I hope she will wait for us.”
   The puppeteer walked off the rectangle in the direction he was facing. Three paces brought him to a disc. And he was gone.
   “What a layout!” Louis said admiringly. He was alone, for the kzin had already followed Nessus. “You just walk. That’s all. Three paces takes you a block. It’s like magic. And you can make the blocks as long as you like!” He strode forward.
   He wore seven league boots. He ran lightly on his toes, and the scene jumped every three paces. The circular signs on the corners of buildings must be address codes, so that once a pedestrian reached his destination he would know it. Then he would circle the discs to got to the middle of the block.
   Along the street were shop windows Louis would have liked to explore. Or were they something else entirely? But the others were blocks ahead. Louis could see them bickering at the end of that canyon of buildings. He increased his pace.
   At the end of a footstep the aliens were before him, blocking his path.
   “I feared you would miss the turn,” said Nessus. And he led off to the left.
   “Wait—” But the kzin had vanished too. Where the blazes was Teela?
   She must have gone ahead. Louis turned left and walked. Seven league boots. The city went by like a dream. Louis ran with visions of sugarplums dancing in his head. Freeway paths through the cities, the discs marked in a different color, ten blocks apart. Long-distance discs a hundred miles apart, each marking the center of a city, the receiver squares a full block across. Paths to cross oceans: one step to an island! Islands for stepping stones!
   Open transfer booths. The puppeteers were fearfully advanced. The disc was only a yard across, and you didn’t have to be entirely on it before it would operate. One footstep and you were stepping off the next receiver square. It beat the tanj out of slidewalks!
   As he ran, Louis’s mind conjured up a phantom puppeteer hundreds of miles tall, picking his way delicately along a chain of islands; stepping with care lest he miss an island and get his ankles wet. Now the phantom grew larger, and his stepping stones were worlds… the puppeteers were fearfully advanced…
   He was out of stepping disc, at the shore of a calm black sea. Beyond the edge of the world, four fat full moons rose in a vertical line against the stars. Halfway to the horizon was a smaller island, brilliantly lighted. The aliens were waiting for him.
   “Where’s Teela?”
   “I do not know,” said Nessus.
   “Mist Demons! Nessus, how do we find her?”
   “She must find us. There is no need to worry, Louis. When—”
   “She’s lost on a strange world! Anything could happen!”
   “Not on this world, Louis. There is no world as as ours. When Teela reaches the edge of this island, she will find that the stepping discs to the next islands will not work for her. She will follow the discs around the shoreline until she finds one that does work.”
   “Do you think its a lost computer we’re talking about? Teela’s a twenty-year-old girl!”
   Teela popped into place beside him. “Hi. I got a little lost. What’s all the excitement?”
   Speaker-To-Animals mocked him with a dagger-toothed grin. Louis, avoiding Teela’s puzzled / questioning eyes, felt heat rising in his cheeks. But Nessus said only, “Follow me.”
   They followed the puppeteer where stepping discs formed a line along the shore. Presently there was a dirty brown pentagram. They stepped onto it…
   They stood on bare rock, brilliantly lit by sun tubes. An island of rock the size of a private spaceport. In its center stood one tall building and a single spacecraft.
   “Behold our vehicle,” said Nessus.
   Teela and Speaker showed disappointment; for the kzin’s ears disappeared into their flaps, while Teela looked wistfully back toward the island they had just left, toward a wall of light formed by miles-high buildings standing shoulder to shoulder against interstellar night. But Louis looked, and he felt the relief loosening overtight muscles. He had had enough of miracles. The stepping discs, the tremendous city, the four tributary worlds hanging, pumpkin-colored, above the horizon… all were daunting. The ship was not. It was a General Products #2 hull fitted into a triangular wing, the wing studded with thruster units and fusion motors. Familiar hardware, all of it, and no questions asked.
   The kzin proved him wrong. “This seems an odd design from the viewpoint of a puppeteer engineer. Nessus, would you not feel safer if the ship were entirely within the hull?”
   “I would not. This ship represents a major innovation in design. Come, I will show you.” Nessus trotted toward the ship.
   The kzin had raised a good point.
   General Products, the puppeteer-owned trading company, had sold many diversified wares in known space; but its fortunes had been founded on the General Products hull. There had been four varieties from a globe the size of a basketball to another globe more than a thousand feet in diameter: the #4 hull, the hull of the Long Shot. The #3 hull, a round-ended cylinder with a flattened belly, made a good multicrewed passenger ship. Such a ship had landed them on the puppeteer world a few hours ago. The #2 hull was a wasp-waisted cylinder, narrow and needle-tapered at both ends. Ordinarily it was just roomy enough for one pilot.
   The General Products hull was transparent to visible light. To all other forms of electromagnetic energy, and to matter in any form, it was impervious. The company’s reputation backed that guarantee, and the guarantee had held for hundreds of years and for millions of ships. A General Products hull was the ultimate in safety.
   The vehicle before them was based on a General Products #2 hull.
   But… as far as Louis could see, only the life-support system and the hyperdrive shunt were within the hull. Everything else—a pair of flat thruster units aimed downward, two small fusion motors facing forward, larger fusion motors on the wing’s trailing edges, and a pair of tremendous pods on the wingtips—pods which must contain detection and communications equipment, since Louis could find no such equipment anywhere else—all this was on the great delta wing!
   Half the ship was on the wing, exposed to any danger that could worry a puppeteer. Why not use a #3 hull and put everything inside?
   The puppeteer had led them beneath the delta wing, to the tapered stem of the hull section. “Our purpose was to make as few breaks in the hull as possible,” said Nessus. “You see?”
   Through the glasslike hull Louis saw a conduit as thick as his thigh leading through the hull into the wing section. Things looked complex at that point, until Louis tumbled to the fact that the conduit was designed to slide back into the hull in one section. Then he picked out the motor that did it all, and the metal door that would seal off the opening.
   “An ordinary ship,” said the puppeteer, “requires many breaks in its hull: for sensors which do not use visible light, for reaction motors if such are used, for apertures leading to fuel tanks. Here we have only two breaks, the conduit and the airlock. One passes passengers and the other passes information. Both can be closed off.
   “Our engineers have coated the hull’s inner surface with a transparent conductor. When the airlock is closed and the aperture for the wiring conduit is sealed, the interior is an unbroken conducting surface.”
   “Stasis field,” Louis guessed.
   “Exactly. If danger threatens, the entire life-support system goes into Slaver-type stasis for a period of several seconds. No time passes in stasis; hence nothing can harm the passengers. We are not so foolish as to trust to the hull alone. Lasers using visible light can penetrate a General Products hull, killing passengers and leaving the ship unharmed. Antimatter can disintegrate a General Products hull entirely.”
   “I didn’t know that.”
   “It is not widely advertised.”
   Louis moved back under the delta wing to where Speaker-To-Animals was inspecting the motors. “Why so many motors?”
   The kzin snorted. “Surely a human cannot have forgotten the Kzinti Lesson.”
   “Oh.” Naturally any puppeteer who had studied kzinti or human history would know the Kzinti Lesson. A reaction drive is a weapon, powerful in direct ratio to its efficiency. Here were thrusters for peaceful use, and fusion drives for weapons capability.
   “Now I know how you learned to handle fusion-drive craft.”
   “Naturally I have been trained in war, Louis.”
   “Just in case of another Man-Kzin war.”
   “Must I demonstrate my skill as a warrior, Louis?”
   “You shall,” the puppeteer interrupted. “Our engineers intended that this ship be flown by a kzin. Would you care to inspect the controls, Speaker?”
   “Shortly. I will also need performance data, test flight records, and so forth. Is the hyperdrive shunt of standard type?”
   “Yes. There have been no test flights.”
   Typical, Louis thought as they walked toward the airlock. They just built the thing and left it here to wait for us. They had to. No puppeteer was willing to test-fly it.
   Where was Teela?
   He was about to call out when she reappeared on the pentagramic receiver plate. She had been playing with the stepping-discs again, ignoring the ship entirely. She followed them aboard, still looking wistfully back toward the puppeteer city beyond the black water.
   Louis waited for her at the inner airlock door. He was ready to blast her for her carelessness. You’d think that after getting lost once she might learn a little caution!
   The door opened. Teela was radiant. “Oh, Louis, I’m so glad I came! That city—it’s such fun!” She grasped his hands and squeezed, beaming inarticulately. Her smile was like sunlight.
   He couldn’t do it. “It’s been fun,” he said, and kissed her hard. He moved toward the control room with his arm around Teela’s slim waist, his thumb tracing the rim of her hip.
   He was sure now. Teela Brown had never been hurt; had never learned caution; did not understand fear. Her first pain would come as a horrifying surprise. It might destroy her entirely.
   She’d be hurt over Louis Wu’s dead body.
   The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.


   A General Products #2 hull is twenty feet wide and three hundred feet long, tapering to points fore and aft.
   Most of the ship was outside the hull, on the thin, oversized wing. The lifesystem was roomy enough to include three living-bedrooms, a long, narrow lounge, a control cabin, and a bank of lockers, plus kitchen, autodocs, reclaimers, batteries, etc. The control panel was fitted out according to kzinti custom, and was labeled in kzinti. Louis felt he could fly the ship in an emergency, but it would have taken a big emergency to make him try it.
   The lockers held an ominous plethora of exploration gear. There was nothing Louis could have pointed to, saying, “That’s a weapon.” But there were things which could be used as weapons. There were also four flycycles, four flying backpacks (lift belt plus catalytic ramjet), food testers, phials of dietary additives, medkits, air sensors and filters. Someone was sure as tanj convinced that this ship would be landing somewhere.
   Well, why not? A species as powerful as the Ringworlders, and as sealed in by their presumed lack of hyperdrive craft, might invite them to land. Perhaps this was what the puppeteers were expecting.
   There was nothing aboard that Nessus could not point to and say, “That is not a weapon. That we took aboard for such-and-such a purpose.”
   There were three species aboard; four, if one thought of male and female human as of different species, which was something a kzin or a puppeteer might well do. (Suppose Nessus and the Hindmost were of the same sex? Why shouldn’t it take two males and a nonsentient female to produce a baby?) Then the presumed Ringworlders could see at a glance that many kinds of sentient life could deal amicably with each other.
   Yet too many of these items—the flashlight-lasers, the dueling stunners—could be used as weapons.
   They took off on reactionless thrusters, to avoid damaging the island. Half an hour later they had left the feeble gravity wells of the puppeteer rosette. It occurred to Louis then that aside from Nessus, whom they had brought with them, and aside from the projected image of the puppeteer Chiron, they had seen not a single puppeteer on the puppeteer world.


   After they had entered hyperdrive, Lotus spent an hour-and-a-half inspecting every item in the lockers. Better safe than surprised, he told himself. But the weaponry and the other equipment left a bitter aftertaste, a foreboding.
   Too many weapons, and not one weapon that could not be used for something else. Flashlight-lasers. Fusion reaction motors. When they held a christening ceremony on the first day in hyperdrive, Louis suggested that the ship be called Lying Bastard. For their own reasons, Teela and Speaker agreed. For his own reason, Nessus did not object.
   They were in hyperdrive for a week, covering a little more than two light years. When they dropped back into Einsteinian space they were within the system of the ringed G2 star; and the foreboding was still with Louis Wu.
   Someone was sure as tanj convinced that they would land on the Ringworld.

Chapter 8.
Ringworld

   The puppeteer worlds had been moving at nearly lightspeed along galactic north. Speaker had circled in hyperspace to galactic south of the G2 sun, with the result that the Liar, as it fell out of the Blind Spot, was already driving straight into the Ringworld system at high velocity.
   The G2 star was a blazing white point. Louis, returning from other stars, had seen Sol looking very like this from the edge of the solar system. But this star wore a barely visible halo. Louis would remember this, his first sight of the Ringworld. From the edge of the system, the Ringworld was a naked-eye object.
   Speaker ran the big fusion motors up to full power. He tilted the flat thruster discs out of the plane of the wing, lining their axes along ship’s aft, and added their thrust to the rockets. The Liar backed into the system blazing like twin suns, decelerating at nearly two hundred gravities.
   Teela didn’t know that, because Louis didn’t tell her. He didn’t want to worry her. If the cabin gravity were interrupted for an instant—they’d all be flattened like bugs beneath a heel.
   But the cabin gravity worked with unobtrusive perfection. Throughout the lifesystem there was only the gentle pull of the puppeteer world, and the steady, muted tremor of the fusion motors. For the rumble of the drives forced its way through the only available opening, through a wiring conduit no thicker than a man’s thigh; and once inside, it was everywhere.
   Even in hyperdrive, Speaker preferred to fly in a transparent ship. He liked a good field of view, and the Blind Spot didn’t seem to affect his mind. The ship was still transparent, except for private cabins, and the resulting view took getting used to.
   The lounge and the control cabin, wall and floor and ceiling, all of which curved into one another, were not so much transparent as invisible. In the apparent emptiness were blocks of solidity: Speaker in the control couch, the horseshoe-shaped bank of green and orange dials which surrounded him, the neon-glowing borders of doorways, the cluster of couches around the lounge table, the block of opaque cabins aft; and, of course, the flat triangle of the wing. Beyond and around these were the stars. The universe seemed very close… and somewhat static; for the ringed star was directly aft, bidden behind the cabins, and they could not watch it grow.
   The air smelled of ozone and puppeteers.
   Nessus, who should have been cowering in terror with the rumble of two hundred gravities in his ears, seemed perfectly comfortable sitting with the others around the lounge table.
   “They will not have hyperwave,” he was saying. “The mathematics of the system guarantees it. Hyperwave is a generalization of hyperdrive mathematics, and they cannot have hyperdrive.”
   “But they might have discovered hyperwave by accident.”
   “No, Teela. We can try the hyperwave bands, since there is nothing else to try while we are decelerating but—”
   “More tanj waiting!” Teela stood up suddenly and half-ran from the lounge.
   Louis answered the puppeteer’s questioning look with an angry shrug.
   Teela was in a foul mood. The week in hyperdrive had bored her stiff, and the prospect of another day-and-a-half of deceleration, of continued inaction, had her ready to climb walls. But what did she expect from Louis? Could he change the laws of physics?
   “We must wait,” Speaker agreed. He spoke from the control cabin, and he may have missed the emotional overtones of Teela’s last words. “The hyperwave zaps are clear of signals. I will guarantee that the Ringworld engineers are not trying to speak to us by any known form of hyperwave.”
   The subject of communications had become general. Until they could reach the Ringworld engineers, their presence in this inhabited system smacked of banditry. Thus far there had been no sign that their presence had been detected.
   “My receivers are open,” said Speaker. “If they attempt to communicate in electromagnetic frequencies, we will know it.”
   “Not if they try the obvious,” Louis retorted.
   “True. Many species have used the cold hydrogen line to search for other minds circling other stars.”
   “Like the kdatlyno. They cleverly found you.”
   “And we cleverly enslaved them.”
   Interstellar radio is noisy with the sound of the stars. But the twenty-one centimeter band is conveniently silent, swept clean for use by endless cubic light years of cold interstellar hydrogen. It was the line any species would pick to communicate with an alien race. Unfortunately the nova-hot hydrogen in the Liar’s exhaust was making that band useless.
   “Remember,” said Nessus, “that our projected freely falling orbit must not cross the ring itself.”
   “You have said so too many times, Nessus. My memory is excellent.”
   “We must not appear a danger to the inhabitants of the ring. I trust you will not forget.”
   “You are a puppeteer. You trust nothing,” said Speaker.
   “Cool it,” Louis said wearily. The bickering was an annoyance he didn’t need. He went to his cabin to sleep.
   Hours passed. The Liar fell toward the ringed star, slowing, preceded by twin spears of nova light and nova heat.
   Speaker found no sign of coherent light impinging on the ship. Either the Ringworlders hadn’t noticed the Liar yet, or they didn’t have com lasers.
   During the week in hyperspace, Speaker had shared hours of leisure with the humans. Louis and Teela had developed a taste for the kzin’s cabin: for the slightly higher gravity and the holoscapes of orange-yellow jungle and ancient alien fortress, for the sharp and changing smells of an alien world. Their own cabin was unimagmatively decorated, with cityscapes and with farming seas half-covered with genetically tailored seaweeds. The kzin liked their cabin better than they did.
   They had even tried sharing a meal in the kzin’s cabin. But the kzin ate like a starved wolf, and he complained that the man’s-food smelled like burnt garbage, and that was that.
   Now Teela and Speaker talked in low tones at one end of the lounge table. Louis listened to the silence and the distant thunder of the fusion drives.
   He was used to depending for his life on a cabin gravity system. His own yacht would do thirty gee. But his own yacht used thrusters, and thrusters were silent.
   “Nessus,” he said into the drone of suns burning.
   “Yes, Louis?”
   “What do you know about the Blind Spot that we don’t?”
   “I do not understand the question.”
   “Hyperspace terrifies you. This—this backing through space on a pillar of fire—doesn’t. Your species built the Long Shot, they must know something about hyperspace that we don’t.”
   “Perhaps so. Perhaps we do know something.”
   “What? Unless it’s one of your precious secrets.”
   Speaker and Teela were listening now. Speaker’s ears, which, folded, could vanish into depressions in his fur, were spread like translucent pink parasols.
   “We know that we have no undying part,” said Nessus. “I will not speak for your race. I have not the right. My species has no immortal part. Our scientists have proved this. We are afraid to die, for we know that death is permanent.”
   “And?”
   “Ships disappear in the Blind Spot. No puppeteer would go too near a singularity in hyperdrive; yet still they disappeared, in the days when our ships carried pilots. I trust the engineers who built the Liar. Hence I trust the cabin gravity. It will not fail us. But even the engineers fear the Blind Spot.”
   There was a ship’s night, during which Louis slept poorly and dreamed spectacularly, and a ships day, during which Teela and Louis found each other impossible to live with. She was not frightened. Louis suspected he would never see her frightened. She was merely bored stiff.
   That evening, in the space of half an hour, the ringed star came out from behind the sternward block of living-sleeping cabins. The star was small and white, a shade less intense than Sol, and it nestled in a shallow pencil-line of arc blue.
   They stood looking over Speaker’s shoulder as Speaker activated the scope screen. He found the arc-blue line of the Ringworld’s inner surface, touched the expansion button. One question answered itself amost immediately.
   “Something at the edge,” said Louis.
   “Keep the scope centered on the rim,” Nessus ordered.
   The rim of the ring expanded in their view. It was a wall, rising inward toward the star. They could see its black, space-exposed outer side silhouetted against the sunlit blue landscape. A low rim wall, but low only in comparison to the ring itself.
   “If the ring is a million miles across,” Louis estimated, “The rim wall must be at least a thousand miles high. Well, now we know. That’s what holds the air in.”
   “Would it work?”
   “It should. The ring’s spinning for about a gravity. A little air might leak over the edges over the thousands of years, but they could replace it. To build the ring at all, they must have had cheap transmutation—a few tenth-stars per kiloton—not to mention a dozen other impossibilities.”
   “I wonder what it looks like from the inside.”
   Speaker heard, and he touched a control point, and the view slid. The magnification was not yet great enough to pick up details. Bright blue and brighter white slid across the scope screen, and the blurred straight edge of a navy blue shadow…
   The further rim slid into view. Here the rim wall was tilted outward.
   Nessus, standing in the doorway with his heads poised above Speaker’s shoulders, ordered, “Give us what magnification you can.”
   The view expanded.
   “Mountains,” said Teela. “How lovely.” For the rim wall was irregular, sculptured like eroded rock, and was the color of the Moon. “Mountains a thousand miles high.”
   “I can expand the view no further. For greater detail we must approach closer.”
   “Let us first attempt to contact them,” said the puppeteer. “Are we at rest?”
   Speaker consulted the ship’s brain. “We are approaching the primary at perhaps thirty miles per second. Is that slow enough?”
   “Yes. Begin transmissions.”
   No laser light was falling on the Liar.
   Testing for electromagnetic radiation was more difficult. Radio, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays—the whole spectrum had to be investigated, from the room-temperature heat given off by the dark side of the Ringworld, up to light quanta energetic enough to split into matter-antimatter pairs. The twenty-one centimeter band was empty; and so were its easy multiples and divisors, which might have been used merely because the hydrogen absorption band was so obvious. Beyond that point Speaker-To-Animals was playing blind man’s bluff with his receivers.
   The great pods of communications equipment on the Liar’s wing had opened. The Liar was sending radio messages on the hydrogen absorption frequency and others, bathing successive portions of the ring’s inner surface with laser light of ten different frequencies, and sending Interworld-Morse in alternate blasts of the fusion motors.
   “Our autopilot would eventually translate any possible message,” said Nessus. “We must assume that their ground-based computers are at least as capable.
   Speaker’s reply was venomous. “Can your leucotomized computers translate total silence?”
   “Concentrate your sendings at the rim. If they have spaceports, the spaceports must be at the rim. To land a spacecraft anywhere else would be horribly dangerous.”
   In the Hero’s Tongue Speaker-To-Animals snarled something horribly insulting. Effectively it ended the conversation; but Nessus stayed where he had been for hours now, with his heads poised alertly above the kzin’s shoulders.
   The Ringworld waited beyond the hull, a checkered blue ribbon trailing across the sky.
   “You tried to tell me about Dyson spheres,” said Teela.
   “And you told me to go pick lice out of my hair.” Louis had found a description of Dyson spheres in the ship’s library. Excited by the idea, he had made the mistake of interrupting Teela’s game of solitaire to tell her about it.
   “Tell me now,” she coaxed.
   “Go pick lice out of your hair.”
   She waited.
   “You win,” said Louis. For the past hour he had been staring broodingly out at the ring. He was as bored as she was.
   “I tried to tell you that the Ringworld is a compromise, an engineering compromise between a Dyson sphere and a normal planet.
   “Dyson was one of the ancient natural philosophers, pre-Belt, almost pre-atomic. He pointed out that a civilization is limited by the energy available to it. The way for the human race to use all the energy within its reach, he said, is to build a spherical shell around the sun and trap every ray of sunlight.
   “Now if you’ll quit giggling for just a minute, you’ll see the idea. The Earth traps only about half a billionth of the sun’s output. If we could use all that energy…
   “Well, it wasn’t crazy then. There wasn’t even a theoretical basis for faster-than-light travel. We never did invent hyperdrive, if you’ll recall. We’d never have discovered it by accident, either, because we’d never have thought to do our experiments out beyond the singularity.
   “Suppose an Outsider ship hadn’t stumbled across a United Nations ramrobot? Suppose the Fertility Laws hadn’t worked out? With a trillion human beings standing on each other’s shoulders, and the ramships the fastest thing around, how long could we get along on fusion power? We’d use up all the hydrogen in Earth’s oceans in a hundred years.
   “But there’s more to a Dyson sphere than collecting solar power.
   “Say you make the sphere one astronomical unit in radius. You’ve got to clear out the solar system anyway, so you use all the solar planets in the construction. That gives you a shell of, say, chrome steel a few yards thick. Now you put gravity generators all over the shell. You’d have a surface area a billion times as big as the Earth’s surface. A trillion people could wander all their lives without ever meeting one another.”
   Teela finlly got a full sentence in edgewise. “You’re using the gravity generators to hold everything down?”
   “Yeah, against the inside. We cover the inside with soil.”
   “What if one of the gravity generators broke down?”
   “Picky, picky, picky. Well… you’d get a billion people drifting up into the sun. All the air swarming up after them. A tornado big enough to swallow the Earth. Not a prayer of getting a repair crew in, not through that kind of a storm…”
   “I don’t like it,” Teela said decisively.
   “Let’s not be hasty. There may be ways to make a gravity generator foolproof.”
   “Not that. You couldn’t see the stars.”
   Louis hadn’t thought of that aspect. “Never mind. The point about Dyson spheres is that any sentient, industrial race is eventually going to need one. Technological civilizations tend to use more and more power as time goes on. The ring is a compromise between a normal planet and a Dyson sphere. With the ring you get only a fraction of the available room, and you block only a fraction of the available sunlight; but you can see the stars, and you don’t have to worry about gravity generators.”
   From the control room Speaker-to-Animal snarled something complicated, a sound powerful enough to curse the very air of the cabin. Teela giggled.
   “If the puppeteers have been thinking along the same lines as Dyson,” Louis continued, “they might very well expect to find the Clouds of Magellan riddled with Ringworlds, edge to edge.”
   “And that’s why we were called in.”
   “I’d hate to bet on a puppeteer’s thoughts. But if I had to, that’s the way I’d bet.”
   “No wonder you’ve been spending all your time in the library.”
   “Infuriating!” screamed the kzin. “Insulting! They deliberately ignore us! They pointedly turn their backs to invite attack!”
   “Improbable,” said Nessus. “If you cannot find radio transmissions, then they do not use radio. Even if they were routinely using radio lasers, we would detect some leakap.”
   “They do not use lasers, they do not use radio, they do not use hyperwave. What are they using for communication? Telepathy? Wntten messages? Big mirrors?”
   “Parrots,” Louis suggested. He got up to join them at the door to the control room. “Huge parrots, specially bred for their oversized lungs. They’re too big to fly. They just sit on hilltops and scream at each other.”
   Speaker turned to look Louis in the eye. “For four hours I have tried to contact the Ringworld. For four hours the inhabitants have ignored me. Their contempt has been absolute. Not a word have they vouchsafed me. My muscles are trembling for lack of exercise, my fur is matted, my eyes refuse to focus, my sthondat-begotten room is too small, my microwave heater heats all meat to the same temperature, and it is the wrong temperature, and I cannot get it fixed. Were it not for your help and your suggestions, Louis, I would despair.”
   “Can they have lost their civilization?” Nessus mused. “It would be silly of them, considering.”
   “Perhaps they are dead,” Speaker said viciously. “That too would be silly. Not to contact us has been silly. Let us land and find out.”
   Nessus whistled in panic. “Land on a world which may have killed its indigenous species? Are you mad?”
   “How else can we learn?”
   “Of course,” Teela chimed in. “We didn’t come all this way just to fly in circles!”
   “I forbid it. Speaker, continue your attempts to contact the Ringworld.”
   “I have ended such attempts.”
   “Repeat them.”
   “I will not.”
   In stepped Louis Wu, volunteer diplomat. “Cool it, furry buddy. Nessus, he’s right. The Ringworlders don’t have anything to say to us. Otherwise we’d know it by now.”
   “But what can we do other than keep trying?”
   “Go on about our business. Give the Ringworlders time to make up their minds about us.”
   Reluctantly the puppeteer agreed.


   They drifted toward the Ringworld.
   Speaker had aimed the Liar to pass outside the Ringworld’s edge: a concession to Nessus. The puppeteer feared that hypothetical Ringworlders would take it as a threat if the ship’s course should intersect the ring itself. He also claimed that fusion drives of the Liar’s power had the look of weapons; and so the Liar moved on thrusters alone.
   To the eye there was no way of judging scale. Over the hours the ring shifted position. Too slowly. With cabin gravity to compensate for from zero to thirty gee of thrust, the inner ear could not sense motion. Time passed in a vacuum, and Louis, for the first time since leaving Earth, was ready to gnaw his fingernails.
   Finally the ring was edge-on to the Liar. Speaker used the thrusters, braking the ship into a circular orbit around the rim; and then he sent them drifting in toward the ring.
   Now there was motion.
   The rim of the Ringworld grew from a dim line occluding a few stars, to a black wall. A wall a thousand miles high, featureless, though any features would have been blurred by speed. Half a thousand miles away, blocking ninety degrees of sky, the wall sped past at a hellish 770 miles per second. Its edges converged to vanishing points, to points at infinity at either end of the universe; and from each point at infinity, a narrow line of baby blue shot straight upward.
   To look into the vanishing point was to step into another universe, a universe of true straight lines, right angles, and other geometric abstractions. Louis stared hypnotized into the vanishing point. Which point was it, the source or the sink? Did the black wall emerge or vanish in that meeting place?
   …from out of the point at infinity, something came at them.
   It was a ledge, growing like another abstraction along the base of the rim wall. First the ledge appeared; then, mounted on the ledge, a row of upright rings. Straight at the Liar they came, straight at the bridge of Louis’s nose. Louis shut his eyes and threw his arms up to protect his head. He heard a whimper of fear.
   Death should have come in that instant. When it didn’t, he opened his eyes. The rings were going by in a steady stream; and he realized that they were no more than fifty miles across.
   Nessus was curled in a ball. Teela, her palms pressed flat against the transparent hull, was staring avidly outward. Speaker was fearless and attentive at the control board. Perhaps he was better than Louis at judging distance.
   Or perhaps he was faking it. The whimper could have come from Speaker.
   Nessus uncurled. He looked out at the rings, which were smaller now, converging. “Speaker, you must match velocities with the Ringworld. Hold us in position by thrusting at one gravity. We must inspect this.”
   Centrifugal force is an illusion, a manifestation of the law of inertia. Reality is centripetal force, a force applied at right angles to the velocity vector of a mass. The mass resists, tends to move in its accustomed straight line.
   By reason of its velocity and the law of inertia, the Ringworld tended to fly apart. Its rigid structure would not allow that. The Ringworld applied its own centrifugal force to itself. The Liar, matching speed at 770 miles per second, had to match that centripetal force.
   Speaker matched it. The Liar hovered next to the rim wall, balanced on .992 gee of thrust, while her crew inspected the spaceport.
   The spaceport was a narrow ledge, so narrow as to be a dimensionless line until Speaker moved the ship inward. Then it was wide, wide enough to dwarf a pair of tremendous spacecraft. The craft were flat nosed cylinders, both of the same design: an unfamiliar design, yet clearly the design of a fusion-ramship. These ships were intended to fuel themselves, picking up interstellar hydrogen in scoops of electromagnetic force. One had been cannibalized for parts, so that it stood with its guts open to vacuum and its intimate structure exposed to alien eyes.
   Windows showed around the upper run of the intact ship, allowing those eyes to gauge that ship’s size. In the random starlight, the glitter of windows was precisely like crystal candy sprinkled on a cake. Thousands of windows. That ship was big.
   And it was dark. The entire spaceport was dark. Perhaps the beings who used it did not need light in the “visible” frequencies. But to Louis Wu, the spaceport looked abandoned.
   “I don’t understand the rings,” said Teela.
   “Electromagnetic cannon,” Louis answered absently. “For takeoffs.”
   “No,” said Nessus.
   “Oh?”
   “The cannon must have been intended for landing the ships. One can even surmise the method used. The ship must go into orbit alongside the rim wall. It will not attempt to match the ring’s velocity, but will position itself twenty-five miles from the base of the rim wall. As the ring rotates, the coils of the electromagnetic cannon will scoop up the ship and accelerate it to match the velocity of the ring. I compliment the ring engineers. The ship need never come close enough to the ring to be dangerous.”
   “You could also use the ring for takeoff.”
   “No. Observe the facility to our left.”
   “I’ll be tanjed,” said Louis Wu.
   The “facility” was little more than a trap door big enough to hold one of the ramships.
   It figured. 770 miles per second was ramscoop speed. The ring’s launching facility was merely a structure for tumbling the ship off into the void. The pilot would immediately accelerate away on ramscoop-fusion power.
   “The spaceport facility seems to be abandoned,” said Speaker.
   “Is there power in use?”
   “My instruments sense none. There are no anomolous hot spots, no large-scale electromagnetic activities. As for the sensors which operate the linear accelerator, they may use less power than we can sense.”
   “Your suggestion?”
   “The facilities may still be in operational condition. We can test this by proceeding to the mouth of the linear accelerator and entering.”
   Nessus curled himself into a ball.
   “Wouldn’t work,” said Louis. “There could be a key signal to start the thing, and we don’t know it. It might react only to a metal hull. If we tried to go through the cannon at the speed of the Ringworld, we’d hit one of the coils and blow everything to bits.”
   “I have flown ships under similar conditions during simulated war maneuvers.”
   “How long ago?”
   “Perhaps too long. Never mind. Your suggestion?”
   “The underside,” said Louis. The puppeteer uncurled at once.


   They hovered beneath the Ringworld floor, matching velocities, thrusting outward at 9.94 meters per second. “Spotlights,” said Nessus.
   The spots reached across half a thousand miles; but if their light touched the back of the ring, it did not return. The spots were for landings.
   “Do you still trust your engineers, Nessus?”
   “They should have anticipated this contingency.”
   “But I did. I can light the Ringworld, if I may use the fusion drives,” said the kzin.
   “Do so.”
   Speaker used all four: the pair facing forward, and the larger motors facing back. But on the forward pair, the pair intended for emergency braking and possibly for weapons, Speaker choked the nozzle wide open. Hydrogen flowed though the tube too fast, emerged half-burnt. Fusion-tube temperature dropped until the exhaust, usually hotter than the core of a nova, was as cool as the surface of a yellow dwarf star. Light thrust forward in twin spears to fall across the black underside of the Ringworld.
   First: the underside was not flat. It dipped and rose; there were bulges and indentations.
   “I thought it would be smooth,” said Teela.
   “Sculptured,” said Louis. “I’ll make you a bet. Whereever we see a bulge, there’s a sea on the sunlit side. Where we see a dent, there’s a mountain.”
   But the formations were tiny, unnoticeable until Speaker drew the ship close. The Lying Bastard drifted in from the Ringworld’s edge, half a thousand miles beneath her underbelly. Sculptured bulges and sculptured indentations, they drifted by, irregular, somehow pleasing…
   For many centuries excusion boats had drifted in like manner across the surface of Earth’s Moon. The effect here was much the same: airless pits and peaks, sharp-edged blacks and whites, exposed on the Moon’s dark side by the powerful spotlights carried by all such boats.
   Yet there was a difference. At any height above the Moon, you could always see the lunar horizon, sharp and toothy against black space and gently curved.
   There were no teeth in the Ringworld’s horizon, and no curves. It was a straight line, a geometer’s line, unimaginably distant; barely visible as black-against-black. How could Speaker stand it? Louis wondered. Hour after hour, driving the Liar across and beneath the belly of this… artifact.
   Louis shuddered. Gradually he was learning the size, the scale of the Ringworld. It was unpleasant, like all learning processes.
   He drew his eyes away from that terrible horizon, back to the illuminated area below/above them.
   Nessus said, “All the seas seem to be of the same order of magnitude.”
   “I’ve seen a few ponds,” Teela contradicted him. “And look, there’s a river. It has to be a river. But I haven’t seen any big oceans.”
   Seas there were in plenty, Louis saw—if he was right, and those flat bulges were seas. Though they were not all the same size, they seemed evenly distributed, so that no region was without water. And—”Flat. All the seas have flattened bottoms.”
   “Yes,” said Nessus.
   “That proves it. All the seas are shallow. The Ringworlders aren’t sea-dwellers. They use only the top of an ocean. Like us.”
   “But all the seas have squiggly shapes,” said Teela. “And the edges are always ragged. You know what that means?”
   “Bays. All the bays anyone can use.”
   “Though your Ringworlders are land-dwellers, they do not fear boats,” said Nessus. “Else they would not need the bays. Louis, these people will resemble humans in outlook. Kzinti hate water, and my species fears to drown.”
   You can learn a lot about a world, Louis thought, by looking at its underside. Someday he would write a monograph on the subject…
   Teela said, “It must be nice to carve your world to order.”
   “Don’t you like your world, playmate?”
   “You know what I mean.”
   “Power?” Louis liked surprises; he was indifferent to power. He was not creative; he did not make things; he preferred to find them.
   He saw something ahead of them. A deeper bulge… and a projecting fin, black in the light of the throttled drives, hundreds of thousands of square miles in area.
   It the others were seas, this was an ocean, the king of all oceans. It went by them endlessly; and its underbelly was not flat. It looked like a topographical map of the Pacific Ocean: valleys and ridges, shallows and depths and peaks tall enough to be islands.
   “They wanted to keep their sea life,” Teela guessed. “They needed one deep occan. The fin must be to keep the depths cool. A radiator.”
   An ocean not deep enough, but easily broad enough, to swallow the Earth.
   “Enough of this,” the kzin said suddenly. “Now we must see the inner surface.”
   “First then are measurements to take. Is the ring truly circular? A minor deviation would spill the air into space.”
   “We know that there is air, Nessus. The distribution of water on the inner surface will tell us how the ring deviates from circularity.”
   Nessus surrendered. “Very well. As soon as we reach the further rim.”
   There were meteor wormholes. Not many, but they were there. Louis thought with amusement that the Ringworlders had been remiss in cleaning out their solar system. But no, these must have come from outside, from between the stars. One conical crater floated by in the fusion light and Louis saw a glint of light at the bottom. something shiny, reflecting.
   It must be a glimpse of the ring floor. The ring floor, a substance dense enough to stop 40 percent of neutrinos, and presumably very rigid. Above/inward from the ring floor, soil and seas and cities, and above these, air. Below/outward from the ring floor, a spongy material, like foam plastic perhaps, to take the brunt of a meteoroid impact. Most meteoroids would vaporise within the thick foamed material; but a few would get through, to leave conical holes with shiny bottoms…
   Far down the length of the Ringworld, almost beyond its infinitely gentle curve, Louis’s eyes found a dimple. That must have been a big one, he thought. Big enough to show by starlight, that far away.
   He did not call attention to the meteoroid dimple. His eyes and mind were not yet used to the proportions of the Ringworld

Chapter 9.
Shadow Squares

   Blazing, the G2 sun dawned beyond the straight black rim of the ring. It was uncomfortably bright until Speaker touched a polarizer; and then Louis could look at the disc, and he found an edge of shadow cutting its arc. Shadow square.
   “We must be careful,” Nessus warned. “If we were to match velocities with the ring and hover above the inner surface, we would surely be attacked.”
   Speaker’s answer came in a slurred rumble. The kzin must be tiring after so many hours behind the horseshoe of controls. “By what weapon would we be attacked? We have shown that the Ringworld engineers do not have so much as a working radio station.”
   “We cannot guess at the nature of their communications. Telepathy, perhaps, or resonant vibrations in the ring floor, or electrical impulses in metal wires. Similarly, we know nothing of their weaponry. Hovering over their surface, we would be a serious threat. They would use what weapons they have.”
   Louis nodded his agreement. He was not naturally cautious, and the Ringworld held him by the curiosity bump; but the puppeteer was right.
   Hovering over the surface, the Liar would be a potential meteor. A big one. Moving at merely orbital speed, such a mass was a hellish danger; for one touch of atmosphere would send it shrieking down at several hundred miles per second. Moving at faster than orbital speed, holding a curved path with the drives, the ship would be a lesser but a surer threat; for if the drive were to fail, “centrifugal force” would hurl the ship outward/down at populated lands. The Ringworlders would not take meteors lightly. Not when a single puncture in the ring floor would drain all the world’s breathing-air and spew it at the stars.
   Speaker turned from the control board. It put him eye to eye with the puppeteer’s flat heads. “Your orders, then.”
   “First you must slow the ship to orbital speed.”
   “Then?”
   “Accelerate toward the sun. We can inspect the ring’s habitable surface to some extent as it diminishes below us. Our major target shall be the shadow squares.”
   “Such caution is unnecessary and humiliating. We have no slightest interest in the shadow squares.”
   Tanj! Louis thought. Tired and hungry as he was, would he now be called on to play peacemaker for the aliens? It had been too long since any of them had eaten or slept. If Louis was tired, the kzin must be exhausted, spoiling for a fight.
   The puppeteer was saying, “We have a definite interest in the shadow squares. Their area intercepts more sunlight than does the Ringworld itself. They would make ideal thermoelectric generators for the Ringworld’s power supply.”
   The kzin snarled something venomous in the Hero’s Tongue. His reply in Interworld seemed ludicrously mild. “You are unreasonable. We surely have no interest in the source of the Ringworld’s power. Let us land, find a native, and ask him about his power sources.”
   “I refuse to consider landing.”
   “Do you question my skill at the controls?”
   “Do you question my decisions as leader?”
   “Since you broach the subject—”
   “I still carry the tasp, Speaker. My word governs the disposal of the Long Shot and the second quantum hyperdrive, and I am still Hindmost aboard this ship. You will bear in mind—”
   “Stop,” said Louis. They looked at him.
   “Your arguments are premature,” said Louis. “Why not turn our telescopes on the shadow squares? That way you’ll both have more facts to shout at each other. It’s more fun that way.”
   Nessus faced himself, eye to eye. The kzin sheathed his claws.
   “On a more pragmatic level,” said Louis, “We’re all bushed. Tired. Hungry. Who wants to fight on an empty stomach? I’m going to catch an hour under a sleep set. I suggest you do the same.”
   Teela was shocked. “You don’t want to watch? Well be seeing the inner side!”
   “You watch. Tell me what happens.” He left.


   He woke groggy and ravenous. Hunger pulled him from between sleeping plates, then kept him in the cabin long enough to dial a handmeal. Eating one-handed, he strolled out into the lounge.
   “What’s happening?”
   Teela answered, rather coldly, across the top of a reading screen. “You missed everything. Slaver ships, Mist Demons, space dragons, cannibal starseeds, all attacking at once. Speaker had to fend them off with his bare hands. You’d have loved it.”
   “Nessus?”
   The puppeteer answered from the control room. “Speaker and I have agreed to move on to the shadow squares. Speaker is alseep. We will be in clear space soon.”
   “Anything new?”
   “Yes, considerable. Let me show you.”
   The puppeteer did things to the scope screen controls. He must have studied kzinti symbology, somewhere.
   The view in the scope screen was like Earth seen from a great height. Mountains, lakes. valleys, rivers, large bare spots that might be desert.
   “Desert?”
   “So it would seem, Louis. Speaker took temperature and humidity spectra. Evidence accumulates that the Ringworld has reverted to savagery, at least in part. Why else would there be deserts?
   “We found another deep salt ocean on the opposite side of the ring, as big as the one on this side. Spectra confirmed the salt. Clearly the engineers found it necessary to balance such tremendous masses of water.”
   Louis bit into his handmeal.
   “Your suggestion was a good one,” Nessus remarked. “You may be our most skilled diplomat, despite Speaker’s training and mine. It was after we turned the scope on the shadow squares that Speaker agreed to a closer look.”
   “Oh? Why?”
   “We found a peculiarity. The shadow squares are moving at a speed comfortably greater than orbital velocity.” Louis stopped chewing.
   “That is not impossible,” the puppeteer added. “The shadow squares may hold matching stable elliptical orbits. They need not maintain a constant distance from the primary.”
   Louis swallowed mightily to clear the way for speech. “That’s crazy. The length of the day would vary!”
   Teela said, “We thought it might be to separate summer from winter, by making the nights shorter and then longer. But that doesn’t make sense either.”
   “No, it doesn’t. The shadow squares make their circuit in less than a month. Who needs a three-week year?”
   “You see the problem,” said Nessus. “The abnormality was too small to detect from our own system. What causes it? Does gravity increase anomalously near the primary, requiring a higher orbital speed? In any case, the shadow objects merit a closer look.”


   Passing time was marked by the sharp black edge of a shadow square passing across the sun.
   Presently the kzin left his room, exchanged civilities with the humans in the lounge, and replaced Nessus in the control room.
   Shortly thereafter he emerged. There was no sound to indicate trouble; but Louis suddenly saw that the puppeteer was backing away from a murderous kzinti glare. Speaker was ready to kill.
   “Okay,” Louis said resignedly. “What’s the trouble?”
   “This leaf-eater,” the kzin began, and strangled on his anger. He started over. “Our schizophrenic leader-from-behind has had us in a minimum-fuel orbit since I went to rest. At this rate it will take us four months to reach the belt of shadow squares.” And Speaker began to curse in the Hero’s Tongue.
   “You put us in that orbit yourself,” the puppeteer said mildly.
   The kzin’s voice rose in volume. “It was my intention to leave the Ringworld slowly, so that we might have a long look at the inner surface. We might then accelerate directly toward the shadow squares, arriving within hours instead of months!”
   “There is no need to bellow, Speaker. If we accelerate toward the shadow squares, our projected orbit will intersect the Ringworld. I wish to avoid that.”
   “He can aim for the sun,” said Teela.
   They all turned to look at her.
   “If the Ringworlders are afraid that we’ll hit them,” Teela explained patiently, “then they’re probably projecting our course. If our projected course hits the sun, then we’re not dangerous. See?”
   “That would work,” said Speaker.
   The puppeteer shuddered. “You are the pilot. Do as you like, but do not forget—”
   “I do not intend to fly us through the sun. In due time I will match our course to the shadow squares.” And the kzin stomped back into the control room. It is not easy for a kzin to stomp.
   Presently the ship turned parallel to the ring. There was little sense of anything happening; the kzin, following orders, was using thrusters only. Speaker killed the ship’s orbital velocity, so that the ship was falling toward the sun; and then he swung the nose inward and began to increase velocity.
   The Ringworld was a broad blue band marked with ripples and clots of blazing white cloud. It was receding visibly now. Speaker was in a hurry.
   Louis dialed two bulbs of mocha and handed one to Teela.
   He could understand the kzin’s anger. The Ringworld terrified him. He was convinced he would have to land… and desperate to get it over with before he lost his nerve.
   Presently Speaker returned to the lounge. “We will reach the shadow square orbit in fourteen hours. Nessus, we warriors of the Patriarchy are taught patience from childhood, but you leaf-eaters have the patience of a corpse.”
   “We’re moving,” said Louis, and half rose. For the ship’s nose was swinging aside from the sun.
   Nessus screamed and leapt the length of the lounge. He was in the air when the Liar lit up like the interior of a flashbulb. The ship lurched—
   Discontinuity.
   –The ship lurched despite the cabin gravity. Louis snatched at the back of a chair and caught it; Teela fell with incredible accuracy into her own crash couch; the puppeteer was folded into a ball as he struck a wall. All in an intense violet glare. The darkness lasted only an instant, to be replaced by glowing light the color of a UV tube.
   It was coming from outside, from all around the hull.
   Speaker must have finished aiming the Liar and turned it over to the autopilot. And then, thought Louis, the autopilot must have reviewed Speaker’s course, decided that the sun was a meteoroid large enough to be dangerous, and taken steps to avoid it.
   The cabin gravity was back to normal. Louis picked himself off the floor. He was unhurt. So, apparently, was Teela. She was standing along the wall, peering steraward through the violet light.
   “Half my instrument board is dead,” Speaker announced.
   “So are half your instruments,” said Teela. “The wing’s gone.”
   “Excuse me?”
   “The wing’s gone.”
   So it was. So was everything that had been attached to the wing: thrusters, fusion plants, communication equipment pods, landing gear. The hull had been polished clean. Nothing was left of the Liar save what had been protected by the General Products hull.
   “We have been fired upon,” said Speaker. “We are still being fired upon, probably by X-ray lasers. This ship is now in a state of war. Accordingly I take command.”
   Nessus was not arguing. He was still curled in a ball. Louis knelt beside him and probed with his hands.
   “Finagle knows I’m no doctor for aliens. I can’t see that he’s been hurt.”
   “He is merely frightened. He attempts to hide in his own belly. You and Teela will strap him down and leave him.”
   Louis was not surprised to find himself obeying orders. He was badly shaken. A moment ago this had been a spacecraft. Now it was little more than a glass needle falling toward the sun.
   They lifted the puppeteer into the crash couch, his own, and tied him down with the crash web.
   “We face no peaceful culture,” said the kzin. “An X-ray laser is invariably a weapon of war. Were it not for our invulnerable hull we would be dead.”
   Louis said, “The Slaver stasis field must have gone on too. No telling how long we were in stasis.”
   “A few seconds,” Teela corrected him. “That violet light has to be the fog of metal from our wing, fluorescing.”
   “Excited by the laser. Right. It’s dissipating, I think.” True enough, the glow was already less intense.
   “Unfortunate that our automatics are so single-mindedly defensive. Trust a puppeteer to know nothing of attack weapons!” said Speaker. “Even our fusion motors were on the wing. And still the enemy fire on us! But they will learn what it means to attack a kzin.”
   “You’re going to chase them down?”
   Speaker did not recognize sarcasm. “I am.”
   “With what?” Louis exploded. “You know what they left us? A hyperdrive and a lifesystem, that’s what they left us! We haven’t got so much as a pair of attitude jets. You’ve got delusions of grandeur if you think we can fight a war in this!”
   “So the enemy believes! Little do they know—”
   “What enemy?”
   “—that in challenging a kzin—”
   “Automatics, you dolt! An enemy would have started shooting the moment we came in range!”
   “I too have wondered at their unusual strategy.”
   “Automatics! X-ray lasers for blasting meteors. Programmed to shoot down anything that might hit the ring. The moment our projected freely falling orbit intercepted the ring, pow! Lasers.”
   “That… is possible.” The kzin began closing panels over dead portions of the control board. “But I hope you are wrong.”
   “Sure. It’d help if you had someone to blame, wouldn’t it?”
   “It would help if our course did not intercept the ring.” The kzin had closed off half the board. He continued to close panels as he talked. “Our velocity is high. It will take us out of the system, beyond the local discontinuity, to where we can use the hyperdrive to return to the puppeteer fleet. But first we must miss the ring.”
   Louis hadn’t thought that far ahead. “You had to be in a hurry, didn’t you?” he said bitterly.
   “At least we will miss the sun. The automatics will not have fired until our projected course circled the sun.”
   “The lasers are still on,” Teela reported. “I can see stars through the glow, but the glow is still there. That means were still aimed at the ring surface, doesn’t it?”
   “It does if the lasers are automatic.”
   “If we hit the ring, will we be killed?”
   “Ask Nessus. His race built the Liar. See if you can get him to unroll.”
   The kzin snorted in disgust. By now he had closed off most of the control board. Only a pitiful few lights still glowed to show that part of the Liar lived on.
   Teela Brown bent over the puppeteer, who was still curled into a ball behind the fragile netting of his crash web. Contrary to Louis’s prediction, she had shown not the least sign of panic since the beginning of the laser attack. Now she slid her hands along the bases of the puppeteer’s necks, scratching gently, as she had seen Louis do once before.
   “You’re being a silly coward,” she rebuked the frightened puppeteer. “Come on and show your heads. Come on, look at me. You’ll miss all the excitement!”


   Twelve hours later, Nessus was still effectively in catatonia.
   “When I try to coax him out, he only curls up tighter,” Teela was near tears. They had retired to their room for dinner, but Teela couldn’t eat anything. “I’m doing it wrong, Louis. I know it.”
   “You keep stressing excitement. Nessus isn’t after excitement,” Louis pointed out. “Forget it. He isn’t hurting himself or us. When he’s needed he’ll uncurl, if only to protect himself. Meanwhile let him hide in his own belly.”
   Teela paced awkwardly, half-stumbling; she still hadn’t completely adjusted to the difference between ship’s gravity and Earth’s gravity. She started to speak, changed her mind, changed it again, and blurted, “Are you scared?”
   “Yeah.”
   “I thought so,” she nodded, and resumed pacing. Presently she asked, “Why isn’t Speaker scared?”
   For the kzin had been nothing but active since the attack: cataloguing weaponry, doing primitive trig calculations to plot their course, occasionally delivering concise, reasonable orders in a manner to command instant obedience.
   “I think Speaker’s terrified. Remember how he acted when he saw the puppeteer worlds? He’s terrified, but he won’t let Nessus know it.”
   She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I don’t! Why is everyone frightened but me?”
   Love and pity tore at Louis’s insides with a pain so old, so nearly forgotten that it was almost now. I’m new here, and everyone knows but me! “Nessus was half right,” he tried to explain “You’ve never been hurt at all, have you? You’re too lucky to be hurt. We’re afraid of being hurt, but you don’t understand, because it’s never happened to you.”
   “That’s crazy. I’ve never broken a bone or anything—but that’s not a psi power!”
   “No. Luck isn’t psi. Luck is statistics, and you’re a mathematical fluke. Out of forty-three billion human beings in known space, it would have been surprising if Nessus hadn’t found someone like you. Don’t you see what he did?
   “He took the group of people who were descendants of winners of the Birthright Lotteries. He says there were thousands, but it’s a good bet that if he hadn’t found what he was after in those thousands, he would have started looking through the larger group of people with one or more ancestors born through the Lotteries. That gives him tens of millions of choices…”
   “What was he after?”
   “You. He took his several thousand people and started eliminating the unlucky ones. Here a man broke his finger when he was thirteen. This girl had personality problems. That one had acne. This man gets in fights and loses. That one won a fight, but lost the lawsuit. This guy flew model rockets until he burnt a thumbnail off. This girl loses constantly at roulette… You see? You’re the girl who’s always won. The toast never falls on the buttered side.”
   Teela was looking thougbtful. “It’s a probability thing then. But, Louis, I don’t always win at roulette.”
   “But you never lost enough to hurt you.”
   “No.”
   “That’s what Nessus looked for.”
   “You’re saying I’m some kind of freak.”
   “No, tanj it! I’m saying you’re not. Nessus kept eliminating candidates who were unlucky, until he wound up with you. He thinks found some basic principle. All he’s really found is the far end of a normal curve.
   “Probability theory says you exist. It also says that the next time you flip a coin, your chances of losing are just as good as mine: fifty-fifty, because Lady Luck has no memory at all.”
   Teela dropped into a chair. “A fine good luck charm I turned out to be. Poor Nessus. I failed him.”
   “Serves him right.”
   The corners of her mouth twitched. “We could check it out.”
   “What?”
   “Dial a piece of toast. Start flipping it.”


   The shadow square was blacker than black, of the expensively achieved, definitive black used in high school black-body experiments. One corner notched an acute angle into the blue broken line of the Ringworid. With that notch as a mark, a brain and eye could sketch in the rest of it, a narrow oblong of space-blackness, suspiciously void of stars. Already it cut off a good chunk of sky; and it was growing.
   Louis wore bulbous goggles of a material that developed black spots under the impact of too much vertically impinging light. Polarization in the hull was no longer enough. Speaker, who was in the control room controlling whatever was left to control, also wore a pair. They had found two separate leases, each on a short strap, and managed to force them on Nessus.
   To Louis’s goggled eyes, the sun, twelve million miles distant, was a blurred rim of flame around a wide, solid black disc. Everything was hot to the touch. The breathing-air plant was a howling wind.
   Teela opened her cabin door and hastily shut it again. Presently she reappeared wearing goggles. She joined Louis at the lounge table.
   The shadow square was a looming absence. It was as if a wet cloth had swept across a blackboard, erasing a swath of chalk-mark stars.
   The howl of the air plant made speech impossible.
   How would it dump the heat, out here where the sun was a looming furnace? It couldn’t, Louis decided. It must be storing the heat. Somewhere in the breathing-air circuit was a point as hot as a star, growing hotter by the second.
   One more thing to worry about.
   The black oblong continued to swell.
   It was the size that made it seem to approach so slowly. The shadow square was as broad as the sun, nearly a million miles across, and much longer: two-and-a-half million miles long. Almost suddenly, it became tremendous. Its edge slid across the sun, and there was darkness.
   The shadow square covered half the universe. Its borders were indefinite, black-on-black, terrible to see.
   Part of the ship glowed white behind the block of cabins. The air plant was radiating waste heat while it had the chance. Louis shrugged and turned back to watch the shadow square.
   The scream of breathing-air stopped. It left a ringing in the ears.
   “Well,” Teela said awkwardly.
   Speaker came out of the control room. “A pity the scope screen is no longer connected to anything. There are so many questions it could answer.”
   “Like what?” Louis half-shouted.
   “Why are the shadow squares moving at more than orbital velocity? Are they indeed power generators for the engineers? What holds them face-down to the sun? All the questions the leaf-eater asked could be answered, if we had a working scope screen.”
   “Are we going to hit the sun?”
   “Of course not. I told you that, Louis. We will be behind the shadow square for half an hour. Then, an hour later, we will pass between the next shadow square and the sun. If the cabin becomes too hot we can always activate the stasis field.”
   The ringing silence closed in. The shadow square was a featureless field of black, without boundaries. A human eye can draw no data from pure black.
   Presently the sun came out. Again the cabin was filled with the howl of the air plant.
   Louis searched the sky ahead until he found another shadow square. He was watching its approach when the lightning struck again.
   It looked like lightning. It came like lightning, without warning. There was a moment of terrible light, white with a violet tinge. The ship lurched—
   Discontinuity.
   –lurched, and the light was gone. Louis reached under his goggles with two forefingers to rub dazzled eyes.
   “What was that?” Teela exclaimed.
   Louis’s vision cleared slowly. He saw that Nessus had exposed a goggled head; that Speaker was at work in one of the lockers; that Teela was staring at him. No, at something behind him. He turned.
   The sun was a wide black disc, smaller than it had been, outlined in yellow-white flame. It had shrunk considerably during the moment in stasis. The moment must have lasted hours. The scream of the air plant had faded to an irritating whine.
   Something else burned out there.
   It was a looping thread of black, very narrow, outlined in violet-white. There seemed to be no endpoints. One end faded into the black patch that hid the sun. The other diminished ahead of the Liar, until it was too small to see.
   The thread was writhing like an injured earthworm.
   “We seem to have hit something,” Nessus said calmly. It was as if he had never been away. “Speaker, you must go outside to investigate. Please don your suit.”
   “We are in a state of war,” the kzin answered. “I command.”
   “Excellent. What will you do now?”
   The kzin had sense enough to remain silent. He had nearly finished donning the multiple balloon and heavy backpack which served him as a pressure suit. Obviously he intended to go out for a look.


   He went out on one of the flycycles: a dumbbell-shaped thruster-powered vehicle with an armchair seat in the constriction.
   They watched him maneuver alongside the writhing thread of black. It had cooled considerably; for the fringe of brightness around the goggle-induced black had dimmed from violet-white through white-white to orange-white. They watched Speaker’s dark bulk leave the flycycle and move about near the heated, writhing wire.
   They could hear him breathing. Once they heard a startled snarling sound. But he never said a word into the suit phone. He was out there a full half-hour, while the heated thing darkened to near-invisibility.
   Presently he returned to the Liar. When he entered the lounge, he had their complete and respectful attention.
   “It was no thicker than thread,” said the kzin. “You will notice that I hold half a grippy.”
   He held up the ruined tool for them to see. The grippy had been cut cleanly along a plane surface, and the cut surface polished to mirror brightness.
   “When I was close enough to see how thin the thread was, I swung the grippy at it. The thread cut cleanly through the steel. I felt only the slightest of togs.”
   Louis said, “A variable-sword would do that.”
   “But a variable-sword blade is a metal wire enclosed in a Slaver stasis field. It cannot bend. This—thread was in constant motion, as you saw.”
   “Something new, then.” Something that cut like a variable-sword. Light, thin, strong, beyond human skill. Something that stayed solid at temperatures where a natural substance would become a plasma. “Something really new. But what was it doing in our way?”
   “Consider. We were passing between shadow squares when we hit something unidentified. Subsequently we found a seemingly infinite length of thread, at a temperature comparable to the interior of a hot star. Obviously we hit the thread. It retained the heat of impact. I surmise that it was strung between the shadow squares.”
   “Probably was. But why?”
   “We can only speculate. Consider,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “The Ringworld engineers used the shadow squares to provide intervals of night. To fulfill their purpose, the rectangles must occlude sunlight. They would fail if they drifted edge-on to the sun.
   “The Ringworld engineers used their strange thread to join the rectangles together in a chain. They spun the chain at faster than orbital speed in order to put tension on the threads. The threads are taut, the rectangles are held flat to the ring.”
   It made an odd picture. Twenty shadow squares in a Maypole dance, their edges joined by threads cut to lengths of five million miles… “We need that thread,” said Louis. “There’s no limit to what we could do with it.”
   “I had no way to bring it aboard. Or to cut a length of it, for that matter.”
   The Puppeteer interposed. “Our course may have been changed by the collision. Is there any way to determine if we will miss the Ringworld?”
   Nobody could think of one.
   “We may miss the ring, yet the collision may have taken too much of our momentum. We may fall forever in an elliptical orbit,” lamented the puppeteer. “Teela, your luck has played us false.”
   She shrugged. “I never told you I was a good luck charm.”
   “It was the Hindmost who so misinformed me. Were he here now, I would have rude words for my arrogant fiance.”


   Dinner that night became a ritual. The crew of the Liar took a last supper in the lounge. Teela Brown was hurtingly beautiful across the table, in a flowing, floating black-and-tangerine garment that couldn’t have weighed as much as an ounce.
   Behind her shoulder, the Ringworld was slowly swelling. Occasionally Teela turned to watch it. They all did. But where Louis had to guess at the feelings of the aliens, in Teela he saw only eagerness. She felt it, as he did: they would not miss the Ringworld.
   In his lovemaking that night there was a ferocity that startled, then delighted her. “So that’s what fear does to you! I’ll have to remember.”
   He could not smile back. “I keep thinking that this could be the last time.” With anyone, he added, to himself.
   “Oh, Louis. Were in a General Products hull!”
   “Suppose the stasis field doesn’t go on? The hull might survive the impact, but we’d be jelly.”
   “For Finagle’s sake, stop worrying!” She ran her fingernails across his back, reaching around from both sides. He pulled her close, so that she couldn’t see his face…
   When she was deeply asleep, floating like a lovely dream between the sleeping plates, he left her. Exhausted, satiated, he lolled in a hot bathtub with a bulb of cold bourbon balanced on the rim.
   There had been pleasures to sample one more time.


   Baby blue with white streaks, navy blue with no details, the Ringworld spread across the sky. At first only the cloud cover showed detail: storms, parallel streamers, woolly fleece, all diminutive. Growing. Then outlines of seas… the Ringworld was approximately half water…
   Nessus was in his couch, strapped down, curled protectively around himself. Speaker and Teela and Louis Wu, strapped down and watching.
   “Better watch this,” Louis advised the puppeteer. “Topography could be important later.”
   Nessus obliged: one flat python head emerged to watch the impending landscape.
   Oceans, bent lightning-forks of river, a string of mountains.
   No sign of life below. You’d have to be less than a thousand miles up to see signs of civilization. The Ringworld went past, snatching detail away almost before it could be recognized. Detail wasn’t going to matter, it was being pulled from beneath them. They would strike unknown, unseen territory.
   Estimated intrinsic velocity of ship: two hundred miles per second. Easily enough to carry them safely out of the system, had not the Ringworld intervened.
   The land rose up and sidewise, 770 miles per second sidewise. Slantwise, a salamander-shaped sea came at them, growing, underneath, gone. Suddenly the landscape blazed violet!
   Discontinuity.