by Larry Niven
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 eneray?"
"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 …
Now 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 puppetwes 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.