Juggler of Worlds

by Larry Niven

  “We should let you rest,” Sigmund decided. “Come on, Feather.”

  Feather nodded. “Take care of yourself. We’ll be back to check on you.”

  Leaving Carlos snoring softly, Sigmund and Feather went to the hospital cafeteria. Sigmund bought two coffees. “He had a close call,” Sigmund said.

  “Too close.” Feather took a sip and grimaced. “You still don’t know how I take coffee? No cream. Earth needs to take better care of him. There aren’t enough geniuses to go around.”

  Sigmund liked and respected Carlos—but he couldn’t yet trust him. Medusa had been busy since Carlos popped up on Jinx. She’d sieved through decades of e-mails, comm calls, transfer-booth records, research queries, financial transactions—of Carlos, and his closest colleagues, and their closest colleagues, and . . .

  Sigmund’s AIde had examined and organized millions of records, terabytes of data. The result was an affinity web of enormous scope—associates and affiliations, friends and relatives and long-ago classmates, fellow investors and former lovers—with ample room for speculation about what the connections, at various removes, of varying types, might mean. The data neither condemned nor exonerated Carlos. At the apex of Earth’s aristocracy, it seemed everyone of significance knew everyone else.

  Then, as Sigmund was looking at Feather, all the pieces came together for him.

  Carlos had almost died, taking his precious genes with him. He needed a bodyguard. Feather was drawn to Carlos. And Carlos seemed receptive enough to Feather’s flirting.

  Sigmund had a natural spy—and an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  FIRST GENERAL PRODUCTS’ abrupt withdrawal and then the Fertility Law unrest . . . Nessus had left behind an economy in serious trouble.

  He had returned, it seemed, to worse. Tumbleweeds blew across the tarmac of Mojave Spaceport, between long rows of idled spacecraft. In the days since Aegis’ return, very few ships had taken off or landed. The public databases tantalized more than they revealed. UN censors had clamped down on something big. He had to know what.

  Not to mention, he needed to distract himself.

  The good news was, transfer-booth abduction still worked.

  “Two years,” Sangeeta Kudrin said. She was newly dyed and coiffed, wearing a slinky black dress. Abduction had not been in her thoughts. “I had dared to hope you were gone for good. It’s Nessus, isn’t it?”

  “Correct.” Two tumultuous years. Nessus wasn’t certain, or could not yet be honest with himself, what had brought him back to Human Space. He was afraid to know why Nike had been so quick to approve his departure. Nessus told himself his return was about duty. He worried endlessly whether it was about guilty secrets: his and Nike’s.

  On the slender reed of such ambiguity rested any hopes of a future with Nike.

  Unseen behind his one-way mirror, Nessus plucked at his mane. He needed to concentrate on whatever new misfortunes had befallen Earth. “I hope to make this brief.”

  Sangeeta said nothing.

  “You prospered during my absence,” Nessus went on. Public databases now gave her title as a UN Undersecretary, no longer a mere Deputy.

  “You kidnapped me before for information. Is that why you’ve taken me now?”

  “It is.” Nessus squirmed in his nest of cushions. “Information about Sigmund Ausfaller.”

  However reluctantly, she complied. Once he ascertained what a pirate was, the pieces began to fall into place. The seedy and idle spaceport. Julian Forward’s failure to respond to hyperwave messages as Nessus approached Sol system. Ausfaller’s failure to follow the clues that two years ago had drawn his attention toward the galactic north.

  Once Sangeeta began, the words tumbled out. “And the Jinx government is still demanding answers about Julian Forward, information Ausfaller refuses to give.” She leaned forward to whisper, “I believe Forward is dead, and that Ausfaller killed him.”

  “So Ausfaller is obsessed now, wondering how Forward made neutronium,” Nessus concluded.

  “Yes, damn you! Haven’t you been listening? No one knows much more. Ausfaller simply won’t talk. After he ended the pirate attacks, no one, not even the ARM Director, would dare challenge Ausfaller to reveal more than he chooses.”

  Nessus pawed thoughtfully at the deck. Julian’s piracy had diverted Ausfaller from his hunt. Ausfaller had stopped Julian. Julian, the Citizen technology Nessus had provided, the neutronium Julian had made with it—all the evidence had vanished irretrievably down a black hole.

  “Very good. You may go.” Nessus transferred Sangeeta to a remote booth.

  Forward’s death did not bother Nessus—much. The Jinxian had made his own choice to turn renegade. But the innocent crews of eight ships? Those lay heavily on Nessus’ conscience.

  A soft chime eventually announced mealtime. Nessus climbed from his nest of pillows and synthed a small bowl of chopped mixed grasses. He nibbled at the greens without interest, his emotions roiling. Relief that Hearth was safe from ARM pursuit. Terror at being alone, so very far from home. Guilt at more deaths. Worry whether the apparent lifting of the siege of Earth would suffice to undo the economic damage. An enervating miasma of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

  But among the many familiar apprehensions Nessus sensed an intriguing new idea. Another human community also weighed on his mind.

  Someone like Sigmund Ausfaller could be extremely valuable to it.

  36

  A bit of computational legerdemain morphed Medusa’s snake-wreathed head. Now a spider with oddly serpentine legs, she scuttled along the impossibly dense fabric of the affinity network that represented Sigmund’s ongoing investigations. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,” she concluded.

  “Cute.” Feather also participated by hologram, netting from the guest room in Carlos Wu’s house. It was night on that side of the world; Carlos was, supposedly, asleep. She shambled about the room, yawning. “I’m tired, Sigmund. Let’s get on with it.”

  Fair enough. It was late for her. “Here’s the bottom line. For a long time, General Products funds have driven much of the unrest. Oh, we can’t prove it; the laundering was very good. But the correlations between asset transfers from GP, unusual income patterns, tax avoidance, and advocacy for ‘reform’ are too good not to be meaningful.”

  “Carlos likes to say correlation isn’t causation.” She waved off Sigmund’s protest. “No, we don’t discuss your investigation. He was explaining something about his medical research, for a new autodoc.”

  Your investigation. Feather’s current dye job suddenly registered. Sigmund couldn’t remember ever seeing her skin red. On Hobo Kelly, hadn’t Carlos mentioned red was his favorite color? “Feather, the transfers attributable to GP tapered off suddenly. Why?”

  “I don’t know why.” This time, Feather made no effort to cover her yawn. “Frankly, Sigmund, I don’t know why you care. The Puppeteers are long gone. The criminals didn’t just launder that money—by now, they must control it.”

  “The unrest continues without their money,” Medusa pointed out. “Why keep subsidizing the cause once it became self-sustaining?” The AIde began enumerating nonmonetary connections in her network.

  “This is ridiculous, Sigmund,” Feather interrupted. “We’re supposed to be paranoid, but there are limits. Here’s a theory for you. A crime syndicate, not the Puppeteers, triggered the protests. It’s all been a distraction so the ARM wouldn’t notice their real plot until it was completed.”

  Bad attitude, red dye, and something else. What else was setting off his alarm bells? “Their real plot,” he echoed.

  “Futz, Sigmund. Are you really so dense?” Feather stopped pacing to glare directly into her comm unit. “Pressure a few bankers to cede control of abandoned GP accounts. Everything else is a smoke screen.”

  He could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Subverting the transfer booths? Stealing the Elgin futzy Marbles?”

  “That’s so you, Sigmund. Invent alien involvement,
so you can ignore the injustice half the world now protests. It’s a handy excuse for not doing anything about us.” Her eyes blazed. “Not that there is an us, anymore.”

  The dye job. The attitude. And now Sigmund realized what had been eluding him: the emptiness of the room. Feather was a slob, yet the guest room was tidy. No, barren. He knew without accessing the sensors: Her clutter had moved to Carlos’s bedroom.

  Despite the bright morning sun streaming into his office windows, Sigmund suddenly felt ineffably weary. “We’re done here. Get some sleep.” He broke the connection.

  “You didn’t give Feather our other news,” Medusa said. She was once more a conventional gorgon. The elaborate affinity web had dissolved into the cyberspace from which it had come.

  “Consider Feather’s only tasking to be protection of Carlos.” Sigmund massaged his temples. He told himself he wished them happiness.

  But given Feather’s attitude, he saw no reason to share Medusa’s other progress tracing laundered funds. To be reminded condescendingly that correlation isn’t causation?

  The Institute of Knowledge had accepted a large endowment of laundered GP funds just before it cut direct funding to Julian Forward. Julian Forward had taken other laundered GP funds, then laid siege to Sol system.

  In his bones, Sigmund knew: Hidden Puppeteers were still at work.

  37

  Nature Preserve 1 was a thoroughly Citizen world. There was no real danger here—only shame and misery.

  Baedeker shivered in the cab of his hovering combine. The sounds of howling wind and the unhappy grinding of jammed machinery entered through the open window. Eventually he raised the window, colder but no wiser than when he had lowered it.

  It would be easy enough to float back to town. The looming wall of black cloud, riven intermittently with great jagged strokes of lightning, was ample justification. Then, when morning came and the storm had passed, when much of the crop lay in ruin, he would be that much further behind in his quota.

  Twittering unhappily, he raised the heat setting in his coveralls. The garment was bright orange—Rehabilitation Corps orange—except for the clear, permeable portions that protected his heads. He climbed down from the cab’s right-side door, to the side he had already harvested. He walked leaning into the wind, crop stubble crunching beneath his booted hooves. Even the lightest expanses of sky overhead were a sullen, featureless gray.

  A bloody mass clogged the intake: the burrower he had glimpsed in his path. Cursing in minor chords, he popped open an access panel. He disconnected power to the mechanism and began hacking out the carcass with a pry bar from the combine’s toolbox. If the storm held off, he might still get the field harvested today. In this, his new station in life, he had only such tiny successes to appreciate, and them but rarely.

  The animal remains had lodged deep inside. He chopped and slashed, gore spattering his coveralls, brooding how far in life he had fallen.

  There was a time, not that long ago, when he had been respected and well rewarded. Deservedly so: He had skills and expertise of vital importance to the Concordance. He had held a position of honor and great responsibility within the General Products Corporation. He ate natural foods from the farm planets, instead of slaving on one and living on synthesized gruel.

  He wasn’t Baedeker then, not until the end of that halcyon era.

  He called himself Baedeker now, the better to remind himself every day exactly how—and by whose doing—he had been humiliated and banished. The better to concentrate on finding a way back.

  It began with the scruffy scout named Nessus. . . .

  NESSUS DOCKED AN interstellar scout ship due for overhaul and upgrades at the General Products hull factory that orbited Hearth. He teleported aboard—with three intruders.

  “Scouts,” these three were also to be considered. That was ludicrous. The important work of scouting belonged only in the jaws of Citizens. Other species should not be allowed to enter, let alone tour, this factory. Baedeker had protested, but Nessus, for all his unkempt disreputability, had powerful friends.

  “My name is . . .” Baedeker began reluctantly. The translator choked on his mellifluous name. “I will be showing you”—under protest—“around the facility.” My facility.

  “For today, we’ll call you Baedeker,” Nessus interrupted. That didn’t translate back to Citizen.

  Baedeker tried to distract these “guests” with talk of coming in-cabin upgrades, trivia like adjustable crash couches and finger-friendly keyboards. He offered only vague generalities about the facility’s main purpose: the construction of impregnable hulls.

  The “scout” named Eric would not be dissuaded. He kept pressing for a tour of the fabrication volume.

  “It is not allowed,” Baedeker said. “That region is a controlled vacuum.”

  Eric said, “I’ll wear my pressure suit. It’s aboard—”

  “It is not allowed,” Baedeker repeated, his heads pivoting emphatically left/right, left/right, on their neck hinges. In the facility’s microgravity conditions, only hoof claws hooked through fabric loops kept him on the deck. “The traces of gas and dust that cling to the outside of your suit would contaminate the process.”

  “I don’t understand,” another said. Omar? “Nessus, you told us only large quantities of antimatter could harm Explorer’s hull. How can a bit of dust harm anything?”

  “What I told you is correct,” Nessus answered. “I was speaking of completed hulls. During construction, hulls are fragile.”

  Eric had been attentive, and he was not without a certain cunning. “Extreme sensitivity to gravitational variations. Extreme sensitivity to trace contaminants. It sounds like a very-large-scale nanotech process.”

  Baedeker shrieked like a slow-motion boiler explosion. His howl did not translate. Nessus responded in like manner, but longer and even louder, threatening to call Nike himself.

  In normal tones, as though Baedeker had not spoken, Nessus went on. “General Products Corporation does not often disclose this information. Given what you now know, it is best that you hear the rest. It would be unfortunate if you lost trust in your ship.”

  Then the dining-hall rumors were true! The Concordance was turning over a fully equipped interstellar scout ship to such as these—unsupervised. Baedeker was appalled. He resolved, during the upcoming overhaul, to integrate monitoring devices into Explorer’s telemetry. He would know what these “scouts” did, and where they went. And he would control explosives inside their indestructible hull, lest they stray.

  Nessus had not stopped. “Explorer’s hull is impervious to damage. If not, would I have ventured out in it? Still, there is a fact I had not shared. The hull takes its strength from its unique form: It is a single supermolecule grown atom by atom by nanotechnology. During construction, the incomplete hull is unstable. The slightest chemical contamination or unbalanced force can tear it to pieces. That’s why there is no artificial gravity here, and why communication here”—and his sweeping head gestures suggested the totality of the enormous orbital factory—“uses optical fibers.”

  Caterwauling in outrage, Baedeker stormed out. None but Citizens—and few of them—needed to know such details. Nothing good could come of this.

  He seethed until Nessus and companions took a shuttle to Hearth. He did not calm down until sensors and remote-controlled explosives were hidden aboard Explorer.

  • • •

  WITH A GRUNT, Baedeker pried loose the last chunk of burrower rib cage. Blood and gobbets of flesh speckled his coveralls. Wind wailed, and he further raised the temperature of the garment before reconnecting power to the intake.

  Explorer had gone out without Citizen supervision, and Baedeker prided himself on his foresight. He monitored its telemetry. He ran samples of surreptitiously reported conversations through a translator. He took comfort in what he overheard—

  While Nessus’ “scouts” bypassed Baedeker’s sensors, relayed their communications through a hyperwave buoy, an
d disabled the detonators. Unwatched, they penetrated one of the most secret and secure facilities of the Concordance, located a weapon of great potency, and—dooming Baedeker to this place—destroyed a General Products hull to get the weapon out.

  And with that weapon, Nessus’ “scouts” had extorted a prize of inestimable value from the Concordance.

  The cab was still warm, and the storm front had stalled. Baedeker resumed harvesting, the combine spewing a steady stream of grains through its towed stepping disc into a distant warehouse. All the chaff, dirt, bits of stalk and leaves, and burrower bits fell back to the ground.

  The clatter of hailstones finally started Baedeker on the long way back to the barn. Hail could not harm him inside the cab; he twitched nonetheless, while the sturdy fabric of his coveralls frustrated his efforts to pluck at his mane.

  Turning over a Concordance ship was the fundamental error. Nessus’ error! The safeguards Baedeker had undertaken to install—on his own initiative—had been circumvented, but was that his fault? And how could he be blamed because three unsupervised scouts had discovered antimatter somewhere out among the stars!

  But he was blamed. Scouts were too few to hold accountable, and someone must pay. He could not alter the past. He could not say where—no one could!—vast quantities of antimatter could be found. He couldn’t be expected to—

  Baedeker cut through the self-pity with a strident, double-throated blat of disgust. What can you do? Can anyone disintegrate a General Products hull without using antimatter?

  To his sudden, utter amazement, Baedeker realized that, just possibly, he could.

  38

  “Your money has been well spent,” Ander said. He was newly returned from Jinx and still feeding his bulked-up weight. “Including the generous bonus.”

  “I don’t remember offering a bonus.” Sigmund didn’t bother adding that two kilos of Kobe beef was a bonus.

  Ander merely smiled and crooked a finger at the woman pushing the dessert cart.