Juggler of Worlds

by Larry Niven

  “I stepped into your room the moment she left, dragged you to the disc, and got you out. By the time the maid and hotel security got to your room, all they found was too much blood.” And patches of ash, after the rigged stepping discs in both men’s hotel rooms incinerated.

  “Leaving the police to assume Ander had an accomplice.” Sigmund cocked his head. “Perhaps he did. You.”

  “No!” Nessus said. “I cannot prove that, but no. Ander acted out of greed.”

  “You’re not beyond bribery, are you, Nessus? You bought my boss once. Why shouldn’t I believe you worked with Ander to get Carlos’s magic autodoc?”

  Nessus resisted the urge to vanish. He dare not imply guilt—however much he felt. “I corrupted officials more than once. That’s how I got access to the Fafnir police report on your apparent death. But no, I did not have anything to do with the attack.”

  “Cops aren’t big believers in coincidence. Paranoids certainly aren’t. So explain: Somehow you had Carlos’s autodoc.”

  Nessus shifted weight between his hooves. “The thing is, Sigmund, I didn’t. Right at the end, though, I was in the next room. I heard Ander and Beowulf talking. I heard that the autodoc was hidden on an island, and the approximate longitude. After that, I had to search.”

  “My heart had been shot out.” Sigmund inched closer. “I wouldn’t have survived any search.”

  Nessus somehow stood his ground. “No, you wouldn’t. We went straight from your hotel room to my ship. I put you into a stasis field. It’s where you stayed until I retrieved the ’doc.”

  After he was ordered to Jinx, and went with the Papandreous in search of Outsiders. After, in his desperation, he assaulted a Kzin. After he defied the summons of the Hindmost to first scour a thousand islands, one by one. Nessus kept to himself how he had hesitated even then, unsure how Sigmund would respond.

  Now Nessus would find out if all that had been for naught.

  Sigmund stopped his advance. “And what of Ander?”

  “Dead in a shoot-out with Fafnir police.” Nessus surrendered to nerves, pawing at the deck with a hoof. “A squad of Kzinti.”

  “Serves the bastard right,” Sigmund snarled. “And Bey?”

  “Beowulf Shaeffer?” For once, Nessus could answer without evasion. “His name does not appear anywhere in the investigation report.”

  “What names do?”

  “Hotel staff, waiters, bartenders, and bar customers. The authorities were thorough enough. They even pulled someone out of deep freeze just before his iceliner was going to leave. The man had had dinner with Ander a few days earlier. It turns out they met at the water wars.”

  “And this corpsicle’s name?”

  Nessus needed a moment to remember the name. “Martin Graynor. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Sigmund pondered, then slowly shook his head. “It doesn’t.”

  For once, Nessus thought, I’m not the one pretending.

  63

  “You’d like to believe, Sigmund,” Kirsten called out. “So far you don’t.”

  Sigmund had been stuck in the corridor, steeling him self to move. Spaceships still terrified him; on the bridge, there could be no pretending he was anywhere but. Willing himself forward, he went onto the bridge. “Sensors in the halls?”

  “Good ears—and skulking in the halls. It had to be you.” She patted the seat next to hers. “Sit.”

  The crash couch might have come from the bridge of Hobo Kelly or Seeker. Thinking of either ship made him queasy. Still, the couch really could have come from ships he’d been on. On the armrests, the layout of controls was identical. The fabric crinkled as he squirmed, no different from a thousand times before. It made sense: Why wouldn’t the Puppeteers import human-engineered equipment for their servants?

  It meant he could hot-wire the emergency protective field of the crash couch into a restraint field. There was no one he needed to restrain just now, but the idea was comforting.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Kirsten prompted.

  Did he? Sven said Kirsten was a genius. She had found the first hints of the colony’s true past hidden in the computer of this very ship. Surprising himself, Sigmund decided to give it a try. “Believe what? That some Puppeteers aren’t evil?”

  “Most are like us. They want nothing more than to be left alone to live their lives.”

  “Why did Nessus want to meet me here? On a ship?”

  “You really dislike ships, don’t you? People here are descended from explorers. I couldn’t quite believe it when Nessus told us about flat phobes.” Kirsten did something with the console, and the bridge screen de-opaqued. A tarmac stretched before them, with surprisingly few ships on it. “See, we’re on the ground.

  “To answer your question, it wasn’t you Nessus had in mind when he picked the ship. He chose this place to reassure Eric, Omar, and me. Understand this, Sigmund: We can’t entirely trust him, either. Yes, he’s been an intermediary, sometimes arguing our case. He’s still a Citizen. If circumstances ever came down to a stark choice between Concordance interests or New Terra’s—”

  “That’s an excellent point,” Nessus said. He stood in the hatchway, as though ready to bolt—as he probably was. “Sigmund, your task is to see to it such circumstances never arise.”

  BALANCED ON A knife’s edge. It was a quintessentially human saying, but apt. The question remained: Could Sigmund be turned from adversary to ally?

  Nessus said, “You still have doubts, I think.”

  “With cause, certainly.” Sigmund got out of his crash couch to face him. “You have much to answer for.”

  More than you know, Nessus thought. More than he could possibly reveal without inciting an attack. The problem was, only information could bring Sigmund to trust him. After much agonizing, Nessus had decided what secret he could disclose. “As a show of good faith, I’m going to tell you about Gregory Pelton and the antimatter.”

  Sigmund and Kirsten twitched at that statement. Antimatter had that effect on sentient beings. “Go on,” Sigmund said cautiously.

  “I’ll start with what I think you know. Pelton wanted to do something spectacular. He and Beowulf Shaeffer took Pelton’s ship, Slower than Infinity, to an Outsider vessel. There, they bought the coordinates of the ‘most unusual world.’ How am I doing?”

  “Max Addeo earned what you paid him,” Sigmund said.

  As did Sangeeta Kudrin, a detail Nessus did not plan to share. “You also know that Pelton and Shaeffer made an emergency call to Jinx after their hull dissolved. What you don’t know is that Pelton contacted one of my colleagues, in hiding on Jinx. It was he who deduced what had happened. The most unusual planet and its star are made of antimatter. The antimatter solar wind eventually destroyed the hull. General Products paid the warranty in full.”

  “Who is this colleague?” Sigmund asked.

  “He’s sometimes known as Achilles. Foolishly, he revealed what had happened. Fortunately, Pelton remained obsessed with a spectacular personal accomplishment. He kept what he knew secret from the government.”

  “But not from me,” Sigmund said.

  Let him feel smug, Nessus thought. “Pelton’s adventure came soon after the discovery of the core explosion. The Concordance was already in a panic. Because Pelton’s crippled ship entered Sirius system at relativistic speed, the antimatter system must also be moving at like speeds. That meant he must have gotten a lift from the Outsiders. It was deemed enough to just monitor the problem, until, with its terrific speed, the anti-matter receded beyond human reach.”

  Sigmund nodded. “My expert reached the same conclusion about Outsider involvement. It didn’t make me any less vigilant.”

  Nessus did not want to explain having left Sigmund, dying, in stasis for almost three Earth years. He chose his next words especially carefully. “Then, seemingly, you died. Your mysterious murder and disappearance gave your ‘in-the-event-of-my-death’ messages great credibility—even before Pelton fled to asyl
um on Jinx. Suddenly the ARM is in an emergency effort to find and secure the antimatter system.”

  “Suddenly?” Sigmund folded his arms across his chest. “I’d say it’s about time.”

  No, it was one more reason to consider a preemptive strike against Earth. “The Hindmost deemed it urgent that we find the antimatter before the ARM did. Buying the coordinates from the Outsiders no longer seemed a waste of resources. For technical reasons”—fearing my ship was bugged—“I hired a human ship and crew for the mission. We found Ship Fourteen. . . .”

  Sigmund looked skeptical.

  Sigmund was unique, but this was all so beyond the scope of his experience. Was even this carefully edited glimpse of the truth too much? What would you think, Sigmund, about the Outsiders having a Tnuctipun stasis box?

  Keep it simple, Nessus told himself. “I had means at my disposal human ships do not. I gave my crew the coordinates to search for the Outsiders. Once we rendezvoused, I spent much of General Products’ remaining wealth purchasing the location of the antimatter system. Unlike Gregory Pelton, I also thought to buy their silence. They will not disclose this information to their next visitors.

  “Happily, it’s barely grazing Known Space. That course, combined with its great speed, will make exploiting the antimatter virtually impossible.”

  “And that’s supposed to comfort me, Nessus?”

  “Probably not,” Nessus said, “nor is it my intent. You’re of no use to me or New Terra if you feel comfortable.”

  “YOU WERE QUIET,” Sigmund said. “What do you conclude?”

  Kirsten brushed unruly bangs from her forehead. “That Nessus knows more than he shared.”

  “He always does. Nothing he said contradicts what I know.” Sigmund jammed his hands in his pockets. It was that or try to put a fist through a plasteel bulkhead.

  What in his head, besides the location of Earth, had the Puppeteer messed with?

  64

  “There,” Eric said unnecessarily.

  An image floated before Sigmund, downlinked from an orbiting telescope. The instrument’s normal assignment was scanning for space junk as New Terra sped through the interstellar darkness. Now, at Sigmund’s request, it displayed a much more likely threat.

  Five balls hung in the center of the room, rotating about their center of mass. Sigmund had seen something like it once before—but not quite like this. Not so close. Not so real.

  Hobo Kelly had glimpsed the Fleet of Worlds from a distance of light-years. (From what direction? he asked himself. The answer still defied him.) New Terra was only 0.03 light-years out in front of the Fleet. (Defined in Hearth years, of course. The length of an Earth year was too valuable a clue for the world they sought. Of course it was gone.) New Terra pulled ahead slowly, using their planetary drive at full acceleration. The Puppeteers, not surprisingly, ran theirs well below the rated capability.

  “It’s the only sky we ever knew,” Eric said. “And now, except through a ’scope, we can’t see it at all.”

  Sigmund blinked, unable to grasp that.

  Five worlds, four ringed with tiny suns, one on fire, as before—but not just as before. On four worlds, the continental outlines were crisp, whorls of storm cloud wispy and sharp. And on the fifth . . . “Eric, what’s wrong with the image of Hearth?”

  Eric peered. “Nothing.”

  Sigmund put a finger into the holo. “Don’t you see this interference? It’s like a diffraction grid.”

  Eric shook his head. “It’s not interference. There is diffraction, but it’s from real structures on the surface.”

  “A trillion Puppeteers.” Eric nodded confirmation, but the number was too large, without meaning. The pattern in the holo made it terrifyingly real. “On a world propelled through space, buildings so large, covering the planet, that we see a grid from”—it was awkward, but Sigmund knew he had to start thinking in English units—“185 billion miles away.”

  With a savage twist, he turned off the projection. If he dwelled too long on the power of the Puppeteers, he would never be able to act.

  SIGMUND, FEELING LIKE a condemned man, zigzagged to his appointment with the governor of the world. Penelope accompanied him more for support than as a guide. Everywhere, strangers came up to them and greeted him warmly. He was news here.

  Terrific, he thought. More people to disappoint.

  Stepping discs transported them to fields and valleys, mountaintops and pedestrian malls, to every corner of the continent of Arcadia. There was much of this world he had yet to see, but Arcadia was where Puppeteers had settled their human servants. He was in no hurry to encounter the Puppeteer exiles and prisoners who had chosen freedom on New Terra over repatriation to a prison elsewhere.

  Arcadia was a bit larger than Europe, with climates ranging from Hawaiian to Northern Californian, and a population below that of Greater Peoria. This place could be heaven, if the Puppeteers weren’t about to—

  No, tanj it! He was here to stop that. If only his mind weren’t so . . . off.

  Here and there something triggered a flash in his tortured memory. Worlds uninhabitable except in the depths of their deepest rifts or on the tops of their highest plateaus. A planet scoured by winds so fierce they drove the population underground for much of the year. Another world, of crushing gravity. Fafnir, a world almost drowned, the place he wished he could forget, was clearest in his mind. Death made an impression on a person, he supposed.

  He wasn’t sure exactly when arrangements had been made for this meeting, only that Omar had decided it was time. Sigmund’s new friends all worked for the government one way or another. Coming up to the appointed hour, he and Penelope stepped to the courtyard within the modest government center. Before heading off to her lab, there to match wits with an emergent plant pest, she wished him luck and pointed out the building where he was expected.

  Any big-city mayor back home would have turned up his nose at the complex. Sigmund dredged up a memory of the Secretary-General’s mountaintop retreat. This was much better.

  Sigmund walked into the lobby and gave his name to the receptionist. He did not wait long before a young man approached. “This way,” he said, escorting Sigmund a short distance to a modest office. “Governor.” The aide closed the door on his way out.

  A woman with striking violet eyes came out from behind a massive desk to greet Sigmund. Her office was devoid of ornamentation other than a few plants and what seemed like family holos. “Sabrina Gomez-Vanderhoff.”

  He couldn’t remember seeing anyone on New Terra wearing such a variety of colors and textures. Clothing and jewelry here signaled position and status and—well, he was not entirely sure all they could represent. With the nanotech here, jewelry could be generated on a whim. The appearance of clothes was programmable. He just didn’t get it.

  Clothes on Earth reflected more than a download, and they were wildly idiosyncratic. Rainbows of clothes and skin dyes—those were crystal clear in his memories.

  Probably because those memories were useless.

  His own sweater and slacks were programmed to black. It occurred to Sigmund he hadn’t seen much black here. What message was he sending?

  Sigmund offered his hand. She looked at it, puzzled, and he returned it to his side. “Sorry, it’s an Earth custom. Governor, I am very pleased to meet you. Sigmund Ausfaller.”

  “Except at state occasions, we’re informal. Sabrina is fine.” She eyed him appraisingly. “I’m told you’ve been through a lot. Are you ready to talk? Have you had time to acclimate?” She motioned to a conference table and chairs, whose padded legs betrayed a Puppeteer influence.

  Time was a luxury he doubted they could afford. “Now is fine, Sabrina.”

  “So tell me about yourself and Earth.”

  He talked until he was hoarse. They paused while an aide brought ice water, and Sigmund talked some more. Sabrina’s curiosity was insatiable.

  And her interest changed nothing. “Sabrina, I can’t re unite your peo
ple with Earth. I’ve lost it all. Where Earth is. What sort of sun it circles. Its planetary neighbors.” An image flashed through his head, tantalizing and impossible, this time of people living on an Easter egg. His mind was hopelessly jinxed. “What any human world, or its sun, looks like. Everything is gone. Nessus saw to that.”

  Disappointment was plain on her face. “Still, we have to keep looking. What else can we do? Anything you remember is more than we had before. Maybe you’ll recognize something that will bring back more memories.”

  Fly randomly about interstellar space, hoping to recognize something. If that was the best available course of action, New Terra was doomed. No, tanj it! If it killed him—again—he would not sacrifice a world to the Puppeteers.

  Sigmund’s mind seethed, unable to transform defiance into a plan.

  “If I do find Earth, it would probably mean war. Nessus has clear limits on what he’ll do to help us. It excludes anything that will harm his people. That’s why my brain was scrubbed.”

  “War was the resolution of conflict between political entities by coercive, even lethal means. Sociological maturity and a sufficiency of resources made war obsolete.”

  Sigmund looked all around, without seeing who spoke.

  “Thank you, Jeeves,” Sabrina said. “Sigmund, this is a copy of the artificial intelligence resident on our ancestor’s ramscoop. His English is unedited.”

  Of course the Puppeteer-approved dialect lacked the word war. The concept would have implied a possible recourse against tyranny. “I have more bad news,” Sigmund said. “Your ancestors left Earth at a very special time. Those ‘political entities’ had combined into one world government. Technology and spaceflight provided ample food and resources.”

  And the Fertility Laws had kept people from outgrowing those limits. Sigmund let that go. He had made several attempts to understand New Terran sexual politics. Sometimes he got blank looks, other times red faces. By Earth standards, these people were prudes.

  Sabrina leaned forward. “War was obsolete among our people? That hardly sounds like bad news, Sigmund.”