by Larry Niven
“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 gamma 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 ifs a planet,” said Teela.
Louis exploded. “Tanj! What has that got to do with it?”
“Well, after all, Louis. If we’re going to get killed exploring it, we might as well know what it is. I think it’s a spacecraft.”
“You do.”
“A big one, a ring-shaped one with a ramscoop field to pick up interstellar hydrogen. I think it’s built to funnel the hydrogen into th
e 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 tha
t 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.