by Larry Niven
And she thought she'd seen everything. But she hadn't seen this! Grinning, Jason waited for her reaction.
"Jay, it's gorgeous! What is it?"
Jason moved up to circle her waist with one arm. She'd put on weight in the last year, muscle weight, from moving in heavier gravities. He looked out around her shoulder ... and thought of smoke.
There was smoke across the sky, a trail of red smoke wound in a tight spiral coil. At the center of the coil was the source of the fire: a double star. One member was violet-white, a flame to brand holes in a human retina, its force held in check by the polarized window. The companion was small and yellow. They seemed to burn inches apart, so close that their masses had pulled them both into flattened eggs, so close that a red belt of lesser flame looped around them to link their bulging equators together. The belt was hydrogen, still mating in fusion fire, pulled loose from the stellar surfaces by two gravitational wells in conflict.
The gravity war did more than that. It sent a loose end of the red belt flailing away, away and out in a burning Maypole spiral that expanded and dimmed as it rose toward interstellar space, until it turned from flame-red to smoke-red, bracketing the sky and painting a spiral path of stars deep red across half the universe.
"They call it Beta Lyrae," said Jason. "I was here once before, back when I was free and happy. Mph. Hasn't changed much."
"Well, no."
"Now don't you take all this for granted. How long do you think those twins can keep throwing hydrogen away? I give it a million years, and then, pft! No more Beta Lyrae."
"Pity. We'd better hurry and wake Nessus before it disappears."
The being they called Nessus would not have opened his door for them.
Puppeteers were gregarious even among alien species. They'd had to be. For at least tens of thousands of years the puppeteers had ruled a trade empire that included all the races within the sixty-light-year sphere men called "known space" and additional unknown regions whose extent could not be guessed. As innate cowards the puppeteers had to get along with everyone. And Nessus, too, was usually gregarious. But Nessus was mad.
Nessus was cursed with courage.
In a puppeteer, courage is a symptom of insanity. As usual there were other symptoms, other peripheral indications of the central disorder. Nessus was now in the depressive stage of a manic-depressive cycle.
Luckily the depression had not hit him until his business with the Outsiders was over. In the manic stage he had been fun. He had spent every night in a different stateroom. He had charcoal-drawn cartoons which now hung in the astrogation room, cartoons that Jason could hardly believe were drawn by a puppeteer. Humor is generally linked to an interrupted defense mechanism. Puppeteers weren't supposed to have a sense of humor. But now Nessus spent all his time in one room. He wanted to see nobody.
There was one thing he might open his door for.
Jason moved to the control board and pushed the panic button. The alarm was a repeated recording of a woman's scream. It should have brought the puppeteer galloping in as if the angel of death were at his heel. But he trotted through the door seconds later than he should have. His flat, brainless heads surveyed the control room for signs of damage,
The first man to see a puppeteer had done so during a Campish revival of Time for Beany reruns. He had come running back to the scout ship, breathless and terrified, screaming, "Take off! The planet's full of monsters!"
"Whatta they look like?"
"Like a three-legged centaur with two Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent puppets on its hands, and no head."
"Take a pill, Pierson. You're drunk."
Nessus was an atypical puppeteer. His mane was straggly and unkempt. It should have been twisted, brushed, and tied in a manner to show his status in puppeteer society. But it showed no status at all. Perhaps this was appropriate. There was no puppeteer society. The puppeteers had apparently left the galaxy en masse some twelve years earlier, leaving behind only their insane and their genetically deficient.
"What is wrong?" asked Nessus.
"There's nothing wrong," said Jason.
Anne-Marie said, "Have a look out the window. This window."
Their employer obediently moved to the window. He happened to stop just next to one of the cartoons he'd drawn while in the manic phase, and Jason, looking from the puppeteer to the cartoon, found it more difficult than ever to associate the two.
The cartoon showed two human gods. Only the lighting and the proportions showed that they were gods. Otherwise they were as individually human as a very good human artist could have drawn them. One, a child just about to become a teen-ager, was holding the galaxy in his hands. He wore a very strange grin as he looked down at the glowing multicolored spiral. The other figure, a disgruntled patriarch with flowing white hair and beard, was saying, "All right, now that you've had your little joke. .
Nessus claimed it was an attempt to imitate human humor. Maybe. Would an insane puppeteer develop a sense of humor?
Nessus (his real name sounded like a car crash, set to music) was insane. There were circumstances under which he would actually risk his life. But the sudden puppeteer exodus had left a myriad broken promises made to a dozen sentient races. The puppeteers had left Nessus and his fellow exiles with money to straighten things out. So Nessus had rented the Court Jester, rented all twelve staterooms, and gone out to the farthest edge of known space to deal with a ship of the Outsiders.
"I recognize this star," he said now. "Amazing. I really should have suggested this stop myself. Had I not been so depressed, I certainly would have. Thank you, Jason."
"My pleasure, sir." Jason Papandreou really sounded as though he'd invented the gaudy display just to cheer up a down-in-the-mouths puppeteer. Nessus cocked a sardonic head at him, and he hastily added, "We'll be on our way again whenever you're ready."
"I'll scan with deep-radar," Anne-Marie said helpfully.
Jason laughed. "Can you imagine how many ships must have scanned this system already?"
"Just for luck."
A moment later there was a beep. Anne-Marie yelped.
Jason said, "I don't believe it."
"Two in one trip!" his wife caroled. "Jay, that's some sort of record!"
It was. Using deep-radar had been more of a habit than anything else. A deep-radar on high setting was an easy way to find Slaver stasis boxes, since only stasis fields and neutron stars would reflect a hyperwave pulse. But Beta Lyrae must have been searched many times before. Searching was traditional.
Nessus turned from the window. "I suggest that we locate the box, then leave it. You may send a friend for it."
Jason stared. "Leave it? Are you kidding?"
"It is an anomaly. Such a box should have been found long since. It has no reason to be here in the first place. Beta Lyrae probably did not exist a billion and a half. years ago. Why then would the Slavers have come here?"
"War. They might have been running from a tnuctip fleet."
Anne-Marie was sweeping the deep-radar in a narrow beam, following the smoky spiral, searching for the tiny node of stasis her first pulse had found.
"You hired my ship," Jason said abruptly. "If you order me to go on, I'll do it."
"I will not. Your species has come a long way in a short time. If you do not have prudence, you have some workable substitute."
"There it is," said Anne-Marie. "Look, Jay. A little icy blob of a world a couple of billion miles out."
Jason looked. "Shouldn't be any problem. All right, I'll take us down."
Nessus said nothing. He seemed alert enough, but without the nervousness and general excitability that would have meant the onset of his manic stage. At least Beta Lyrae had cured his depression.
The Traitor's Claw was under the ice. Ice showed dark and deep outside her hexagonal ports. In lieu of sight her crew used a mechanical sense like a cross between radar and X-ray vision. The universe showed on her screens as a series of transparent images superimposed: a sha
dow show.
Four Kzinti watched a blob-shaped image sink slowly through other images, coming to a stop at a point no different from any other.
"Chuft-Captain, they're down," said Flyer.
"Of course they're down." Chuft-Captain spoke without heat. "Telepath, how many are there?"
"Two human." There was a quiet, self-hating resignation in Telepath's speech. His tone became disgust as he added, "And a puppeteer."
"Odd. That's a passenger ship. A puppeteer couldn't need all that room."
"I sense only their presence, Chuft-Captain." Telepath was pointedly reminding him that he had not yet taken the drug. He would do so only if ordered. Without an injection of treated extract of sthondat lymph, his powers were low. Little more than the knack for making an accurate guess.
"One human has left the ship," said Flyer. "No, two humans."
"Slaverstudent, initiate hostilities. Assume the puppeteer will stay safely inside."
The planet was no bigger than Earth's moon. Her faint hydrogen atmosphere must have been regularly renewed as the spiral streamer whipped across her orbit. She was in the plane of the hydrogen spiral, which now showed as a glowing red smoke trail cutting the night sky into two unequal parts.
Anne-Marie finished tucking her hair into her helmet, clamped the helmet to her neck ring, and stepped out to look around. .
"I dub thee Cue Ball," she said.
"Cute," said Jason. "Too bad if she's named already."
They moved through the ship's pressure curtain, Jason toting a bulky portable deep-radar. The escalladder carried them down onto the ice.
They moved away, following the dark image in the deep-radar screen. Jason was a head shorter than his wife and twice as wide; his typical Earther's build looked almost Jinxian next to hers. He moved easily in the low gravity. Anne-Marie, bouncing like a rubber clown, kept pace with him only by dint of longer legs and greater effort.
Jason was standing right over the image of the stasis box, getting ready to mark the ice so they could dig for it, when the image quietly vanished.
A sharp crack jerked his head around. He saw a cloud of steam explode into the near-vacuum, a cloud lit from below by a rosy light. Anne-Marie was already sprinting for the ship in low flying leaps. He turned to follow.
A form like a big roly-poly man shot through the light into what must by then have been a cloud of tiny ice crystals. It was a Kzin in a vac suit, and the thing in its hands was a police stunner. It landed running. Under the conditions its aim was inhumanly accurate.
Jason collapsed like a deflating balloon. Anne-Marie was pinwheeling across the ice, slowly as dreams in the low gravity. The Kzin ignored them both. It was using a jet backpac to speed it along.
The ship's heavy, flush-fitting door started to close over the pressure curtain. Too slowly. Jason clung to consciousness long enough to see the Kzin's backpac carry it up the escalladder and through the pressure curtain. His mind hummed and faded.
Present in the crew's relaxroom were two humans, one puppeteer, and a Kzin. The Kzin was Chuft-Captain. It had to be that way, since the prisoners had not yet had the chance to refuse to talk. Chuft-Captain was a noble, entitled to a partial name. Had he not been alone with the prisoners, he would have been showing fear. His crew watched the proceedings from the control room.
The puppeteer lifted a head at the end of a drunkenly weaving neck. The head steadied, stared hard. In Kzin he said, "What is the purpose of this action?"
Chuft-Captain ignored him. One did not speak as an equal to a puppeteer. Puppeteers did not fight, ever. Hence they were mere herbivorous animals. Prey.
The male human was next to recover from the stunners. He stared in consternation at Chuft-Captain, then looked around him. "So none of us made it," he said.
"No," said the puppeteer. "You may remember I advised--."
"How could I forget? Sorry about that, Nessus. What's happening?"
"Very little at the moment."
The male looked back at Chuft-Captain. "Who're you?"
"You may call me Captain. Depending on future events, you are either my kidnap victims or my prisoners of war. Who are you?"
"Jason Papandreou, of Earth origin." The human tried to gesture, perhaps to point at himself, and found the electronic police-web binding him in an invisible grip. He finished the introductions without gestures.
"Very well," said Chuft-Captain. "Jason, are you in possession of a stasis box, a relic of the Slaver Empire?"
Chuft-Captain gestured to the screen behind the prisoners. Telepath nodded and switched off. The prisoner had lied; it was now permissible to bring in help to question him.
It had been a strange, waiting kind of war.
Legally it was no war at all. The Traitor's Claw showed in the Kzinti records as a stolen ship. If she had been captured at any time, all the Kzinti worlds would have screamed loudly for Chuft-Captain's head as a pirate. Even the ship's name had been chosen for that eventuality.
There had never been a casualty; never; until now, a victory. A strange war, in which the rules were flexible and the dictates of personal honor were often hard to define and to satisfy. Even now ... What does one do with a captured puppeteer? You couldn't eat him; puppeteers were officially a friendly power. A strange war. But better than no war at all. Perhaps it would now get better still.
The Kzin had asked one question and turned away. A bad sign. Apparently the question had been a formality.
Jason wriggled once more against the force field. He was embedded like a fly in flypaper. It must be a police web. Since the last war the Kzinti worlds had been living in probationary status. Though they might possess and use police restraint-devices, they were allowed no weapons of war.
Against two unarmed humans and a puppeteer, they hardly needed them.
Anne-Marie stirred. Jason said, "Easy, honey."
"Easy? Oh, my neck. What happened?" She tried to move her arm. Her head, above the soft grip of the police web, jerked up in surprise; her eyes widened. And she saw the Kzin.
She screamed.
The Kzin watched in obvious irritation. Nessus merely watched.
"All right," said Jason. "That won't do us any good."
"Jay, they're Kzinti!"
"Right. And they've got us. Oh, hell, go ahead and scream."
That shocked her. She looked at him long enough to read his helplessness, then turned back to the Kzin. Already she was calmer. Jason didn't have to worry about his wife's courage. He'd seen it tested before.
She had never seen a Kzin; all she knew about them she had heard from Jason, and little of that had been good. But she was no xenophobe. There was more sympathy of feeling between Anne-Marie and Nessus than there was between Nessus and Jason. She could face the Kizn.
But Jason couldn't read the puppeteer's expression. It was Nessus he was worried about. Puppeteers hated pain worse than they feared death. Let the Kzin threaten Nessus with pain and there was no telling what he'd do. Without the puppeteer they might have a chance to conceal the stasis box.
It might be very bad if the Kzinti got into a stasis box.
A billion and a half years ago there had been a war. The Slavers, who controlled most of the galaxy at the time, had also controlled most of the galaxy's sentient species. One such slave species, the tnuctipun, had at last revolted. The Slavers had had a power like telepathic hypnosis, a power that could control the mind of any sentient being. The tnuctipun slaves had possessed high intelligence, higher technology, and a slyness more terrifying than any merely mental power. Slavers and tnuctipun slaves alike, and every sentient being then in the galaxy, had died in that war.
Scattered through known and unknown space were the relics of that war, waiting to be found by species which had become sentient since the war's end. The Slavers had left stasis boxes, containers in stasis fields, which had survived unchanged through a billion and a half years of time. The tnuctipun had left mutated remnants of their biological engineering: the Frumious b
andersnatch of Jinx's shorelines; the stage tree, which was to be found on worlds scattered all across known space; the tiny coldworld sunflower with its rippling, reflective blossoms.
Stasis boxes were rare and dangerous. Often they held abandoned Slaver weapons. One such weapon, the variable-sword, had recently revolutionized human society, bringing back swordplay, and dueling on many worlds. Another was being used for peaceful ends; the disintegrator was too slow to make a good weapon. If the Kzinti found a new weapon, and if it were good enough...
Their Kzinti captor was a big one, thought Jason, though even a small one was a big one. He stood eight feet tall, as erect as a human on his short, hind legs. The orange shade of his fur might have been inconspicuous to a Kzin's natural prey, but to human eyes it blazed like neon. He was thick all over, arms, legs, torso; he might have been a very fat cat dipped in orange dye, with certain alterations. You would have had to discount the naked-pink ratlike tail; the strangely colored irises, which were round instead of slitted; and especially the head, rendered nearly triangular by the large cranial bulge, more than large enough to hold a human brain.
"The trap you stumbled into is an old one," said the Kzin. "One ship or another has been waiting on this world since the last war. We have been searching out Slaver stasis boxes for much longer than that, hoping to find new weapons. .
A door opened and a second Kzin entered. He stayed there in the dilated doorway, waiting for the leader's attention. There was something about his appearance...
"But only recently did we hit upon this idea. You may know," said their orange captor, "that ships often stop off to see this unusual star. Ships of most species also have the habit of sending a deep-radar pulse around every star they happen across. No student of Slavers has ever found method behind the random dispersion of stasis boxes throughout this region of space.
"Several decades ago we did find a stasis box. Unfortunately it contained nothing useful, but we eventually found out how to turn the stasis field on and off. It made good bait for a trap. For forty Kzin years we have waited for ships to happen by with stasis boxes in their holds. You are our second catch."