by Larry Niven
"Surely a kzin cannot fear an herbivore."
Nessus had not spoken mockingly; but Speaker reacted with rage "What sapient being would not fear such power?"
"You distress me. Fear is the brother of hate. One would expect a kzin to attack what he fears."
The conversation was getting sticky. With the Long Shot millions of miles in their wake, and known space hundreds of light years away, they were all very much within the power of the puppeteers. It the puppeteers found reason to fear them — Change the subject, fast! Louis opened his mouth.
"Hey," said Teela. "You people keep tallang about Kemplerer rosettes. What's a Kemplerer rosette?"
And both aliens started to answer, while Louis wondered why he had thought Teela shallow.
CHAPTER 6 — Christmas Ribbon
"The joke's on me," said Louis Wu. "Now I know where to find the puppeteer world. Very nice, Nessus. You kept your promise."
"I told you that you would find the information more surprising than useful."
"A good joke." said the kzin. "Your sense of humor surprises me, Nessus."
Below, a tiny eel-shaped island surrounded by a black sea. The island rose like a fire salamander, and Louis thought he could pick out tall, slender buildings. Obviously aliens would not be trusted on the mainland.
"We do not joke," said Nessus. "My species has no sense of humor."
"Strange. I would have thought that humor was an aspect of intelligence."
"No. Humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism."
"All the same -"
"Speaker, no sapient being ever interrupts a defense mechanism."
As the ship dropped the lights resolved: sun-panels, along street levels, windows in buildings, light sources, in parking areas. In a last instant Louis glimpsed buldings slender as rapier blades, miles tall. Then the city flashed up to engulf them, and they were down.
Down in a parkland of colorful alien plants.
Nobody moved.
Puppeteers were the second most harmless-looking sentients in known space. They were too shy, too small, too weird to seem dangerous. They were merely funny.
But suddenly Nessus was a member of his species; and his species was mightier than men had dreamed. The mad puppeteer sat quite still, his necks bobbing to observe his chosen underlings. There was nothing funny about Nessus. His race moved worlds, five at a time.
So that Teela's giggle was a shocking sound.
"I was just thinking," she explained. "The only way to keep from having too many little puppeteers is no sex at all. Right, Nessus?"
"Yes."
She giggled again. "No wonder puppeteers don't have a sense of humor."
Through a park that was too regular, too symmetrical, too well tamed, they followed a floating blue light.
The air was thick with the spicy-chemical smell of puppeteer. That smell was everywhere. It had been strong and artificial in the one-room life support system of the transfer ship. It had not diminished when the airlock opened. A trillion puppeteers had flavored the air of this world, and for all of eternity it would smell of puppeteer.
Nessus danced; his small clawed hooves seemed barely to touch the resilient surface of the walk. The kzin glided, catlike, his naked pink tail whipping rhythmically back and forth. The sound of the puppeteer's walk was a tap dance in three-four time. From the kzin came not the slighest whisper of motion.
Teela's walk was almost as silent. Her walk always looked clumsy; but it wasn't. She never stumbled, never bumped anything. Louis, then, was the least graceful of the four.
But why should Louis Wu be graceful? An altered ape, whom evolution had never entirely adapted to walking on flat ground. For millions of years his fathers had walked on all fours where they had to, had used the trees where they could.
The Pleiocene had ended that, with millions of years of drought. The forests had left Louis Wu's ancestors behind, high and dry and starving. In desperation they had eaten meat. They had done better after learning the secret of the antelope's thighbone, whose double-knobbed shoulder joint had left its mark in so many fossil skulls.
Now, on feet still equipped with vestigial fingers, Louis Wu and Teela Brown walked with aliens.
Aliens? They were all aliens here, even mad, exiled Nessus, with his brown and unkempt mane and his restless, searching heads. Speaker, too, was uneasy. His eyes, within their black spectacle markings, searched the alien vegetation for things with poison stings or razor teeth. Instinct, probably. Puppeteers would not permit dangerous beasts in their parks.
They came upon a dome that glowed like a huge, half-buried pearl. Then the floating light split in two.
"I must leave you," said Nessus. And Louis saw that the puppeteer was terrified.
"I go to confront those-who-lead." He spoke low and urgently. "Speaker, tell me quickly. Should I not return, would you seek me out to slay me for the insult I delivered in Krushenko's Restaurant?"
"Is there risk you will not return?"
"Some risk. Those-who-lead may dislike what I must tell them. I ask again, would you hunt me down?"
"Here on an alien world, amid beings of such awesome power and such lack of faith in a kzin's peaceful intent?" The kzin's tail lashed once, emphatically. "No. But neither would I continue with the expedition."
"That will be suffident." Nessus trotted off, trembling visibly, following the guidelight.
"What's he scared of?" Teela complained. "He's done everything they told him to. Why would they be angry with him?"
"I think he's up to something," said Louis. "Something devious. But what?"
The blue light moved on. They followed it into an irridescent hemisphere …
* * *
Now the dome had vanished. From a triangle of couches, two humans and a kzin looked out into a tame jungle of brilliant alien plants, watching the approach of a strange puppeteer. Either the dome itself was invisible from inside, or the park scene was a projection.
The air smelled of many puppeteers.
The strange puppeteer pushed its way through a last fringe of hanging scarlet tendrils. (Louis remembered when he had thought of Nessus as "it". When had Nessus graduated to "him"? But, Speaker, a familiar alien, had been "him" from the beginning.) The puppeteer stopped there, just short of the presumed boundaries of the pearly dome. Its mane was silver where Nessus's was brown, and was neatly coiffeured in complex ringlets; but its voice was Nessus's thrilling contralto.
"I must apologize for not being present to greet you. You may address me as Chiron."
A projection, then. Louis and Teela murmured polite demurrers. Speaker-To-Animals bared his teeth.
"The one you call Nessus knows all that you are about to learn. His presence was required elsewhere. However, he mentioned your reactions on learning of our engineering skills."
Louis winced. The Puppeteer continued. "This may be fortunate. You will understand the better when you learn of our own reactions to a more ambitious work of engineering."
Half the dome went black.
Annoyingly, it was the side of the dome opposite to the Projected puppeteer. Louis found a control to turn his couch; but he reflected that he would have needed two' swiveled heads with independently operating eyes to watch both halves of the dome at once. The darkened side showed starry space forming a backdrop for a small, blazing disc.
A ringed disc. The scene was a blow-up of the holo in Louis Wu's pocket.
The light source was small and brilliant white, very like a view of Sol as seen from the general neighborhood of Jupiter. The ring was huge in diameter, wide enough to stretch halfway across the darkened side of the dome; but it was narrow, not much thicker than the light source at its axis. The near side was black and, where it cut across the light, sharp-edged. Its further side was a pale blue ribbon across space.
If Louis was growing used to miracles, he was not yet so blas as to make idiotic-sounding guesses. Instead he said, "It looks like a star with a ring around it. What
is it?"
Chiron's reply came as no surprise.
"It is a star with a ring around it," said the puppeteer. "A ring of solid matter. An artifact."
Teela Brown clapped her hands and burst into giggles. She strangled the giggles after a few moments and managed to look wonderfully solemn; but her eyes glowed. Louis understood perfectly. He felt a touch of the same joy. The ringed sun was his/her private toy: a new thing in a mundane universe.
(Take Christmas ribbon, pale blue and an inch wide, the kind you use to wrap presents. Set a lighted candle on a bare floor. Take fifty feet of ribbon, and struig it in a circle with the candle at the center, balancing the ribbon on edge so that the inner side catches the candlelight.)
But the kzin's tail was lashing back and forth, back and forth.
(After all, that wasn't a candle in the middle. That was a sun!)
"By now you know," said Chiron, "that we have been moving north along the galactic axis for the past two hundred and four of your Earth years. In kzin years -"
"Two hundred and seventeen."
"Yes. During that time we have naturally observed the space ahead of us for signs of danger and the unexpected. We had known that the star EC-1752 was ringed with an uncharacteristically dense and narrow band of dark matter. It was assumed that the ring was dust or rock. Yet it was surprisingly regular.
"Some ninety days ago our fleet of worlds reached a position such that the ring occluded the star itself. We saw that the ring was sharply bounded. Further investigation revealed that the ring is not gas nor dust, nor even asteroidal rock, but a solid band of considerable tensile strength. Naturally we were terrified."
Speaker-To-Animals asked, "How were you able to deduce its tensile strength?"
"Spectroanalysis and frequency shifts gave us a relative difference in velocities. The ring is clearly rotating about its primary at 770 miles per second, a velocity high enough to compensate for the pull of gravity from the primary, and to provide an additional centripetal acceleration of 9.94 meters per second. Consider the tensile strength needed to prevent the structure from disintegrating under such a pull!"
"Gravity," said Louis.
"Apparently."
"Gravity. A touch less than Earth's. There's somebody living there, on the inner surface. Hooo," said Louis Wu, for the full impact was beginning to hit him, and the little hairs were rising along his spinal column. He heard the swish, swish of the kzin's tail cutting air.
It was not the first time men had met their superiors. Thus far men had been lucky …
Abruptly Louis stood up and walked toward the dome wall. It didn't work. The ring and the star receded before him until he touched a smooth surface. But he saw something he hadn't noticed before.
The ring was checkered. There were regular rectangular shadows along its blue back.
"Can you give us a better picture?"
"We can expand it," said the contralto voice. The G2 star jerked forward, then shot blazing off to the right, so that Louis was looking down on the lighted inner surface of the ring. Blurred as it was, Louis could only guess that the brighter, whiter areas might be cloud, that regions of faintly deeper blue might be land where lighter blue was sea.
But the shadowed areas were quite visible. The ring seemed to be laid out in rectangles: a long strip of glowing baby blue followed by a shorter strip of deep, navy blue, followed by another long strip of light blue. Dots and dashes.
"Something's causing those shadows," he said. "Something in orbit?"
"Yes, just that. Twenty rectangular shapes orbit in a Kemplerer rosette much nearer the primary. We do not know their purpose."
"You wouldn't. It's been too long since you had a sun. These orbiting rectangles must be there to separate night from day. Otherwise it would always be high noon on the ring."
"You will understand now why we called for your help. Your alien insights were bound to be of value."
"Uh huh. How big is the ring? Have you studied it much? Have you sent probes?"
"We have studied the ring as best we could without slowing our velocity and without otherwise attracting notice to ourselves. We have sent no probes, of course. Since they would have to be remotely controlled by hyperwave, such probes might be traced back to us."
"You can't track a hyperwave signal. It's theoretically impossible."
"Perhaps those who built the ring have evolved different theories."
"Mmm."
"But we have studied the ring with other instruments." As Chiron spoke, the scene on the dome wall changed to blacks and whites and grays. Outlines shifted and wavered. "We have taken photographs and holographs in all electromagnetic frequencies. If you are interested -"
"They don't show much detail."
"No. The light is too much bent by gravitational fields and solar wind and intervening dust and gasses. Our telescopes cannot find further detail."
"So you haven't really learned much."
"I would say that we have learned a good deal. One puzzling point. The ring apparently stops on the close order of 40 percent of neutrinos."
Teela merely looked bewildered; but Speaker made a startled sound, and Louis whistled very low.
That eliminated everything.
Normal matter, even the terrifically compressed matter in the heart of a star, would stop almost no neutrinos. Any neutrino stood a fifty-fifty chance of getting through several light years' thickness of lead.
An object in a Slaver stasis field reflected all neutrinos. So did a General Products hull.
But nothing known would stop 40 percent of neutrinos, and let the rest through.
"Something new, then." said Louis. "Chiron, how big is this ring? How massive is it?"
"The ring masses two times ten to the thirtieth power in grams, measures .95 times ten to the eighth power miles in radius, and something less than ten to the sixth power miles across."
Louis was not comfortable thinking in abstract powers of ten. He tried to translate the numbers into pictures.
He had been right to think of inch-wide Christmas ribbon, balanced on edge and strung in a loop. The ring was more than ninety million miles in radius — about six hundred million miles long, he estimated — but less than a million miles across, edge to edge. It massed a little more than the planet Jupiter …
"Somehow that doesn't seem massive enough," he said. "Something that big should weigh as much as a good sized sun."
The kzin agreed. "One has the ludicrous picture of millions of beings trying to live on a construct no thicker than bookfilm."
"Your intuition is wrong," said the puppeteer with silver curls. "Consider the dimensions. If the ring were a ribbon of hullmetal, for example, it would be approximately fifty feet thick."
Fifty feet? That was hard to believe.
But Teela's eyes had been turned to the ceiling, and her lips had been moving silently but rapidly. "He's right," she said. "The math works out. But what's it for? Why would anyone build such a thing?"
"Room."
"Room?"
"Room to live," Louis amplified. "That's what it's all about. Six hundred trillion square miles of surface area is three million times the surface area of the Earth. It'd be like having three million worlds all mapped flat and joined edge to edge. Three million worlds within aircar distance. That'd solve any population problem.
"And what a problem they must have had! You don't go into a project like that one just for kicks."
"A point," said the kzin. "Chiron, have you searched neighboring stars for other, similar rings?"
"Yes, we -"
"And found none. As I thought. If the race that built the ring had known of faster-than-light travel, they would have settled other stars. They would not have needed the ring. Therefore there is only one ring."
"Yes."
"I am reassured. We are superior to the ringmakers in at least one respect." The kzin stood suddenly. "Are we to explore the habitable surface of the ring?"
"A physical landing
might prove to be overambitious."
"Nonsense. We must inspect the vehicle you have prepared for us. Is its landing gear sufficiently versatile? When may we depart?"
Chiron whistled, a startled burst of discord. "You must be mad. Consider the power of those who built this ring! They make my own civilization seem savages!"
"Or cowards."
"Very well. You may go to inspect your craft when the one you call Nessus returns. For the time previous to that event, there are more data regarding the ring."
"You try my patience," said Speaker. But he sat down.
You liar, thought Louis. You take it well, and I'm proud of you. His own stomach was queasy as he returned to his couch. A baby blue ribbon stretched across the stars; and man had met superior beings — again.
The kzinti had been first.
When men first used fusion drives to cross the gaps between the stars, the kzinti were already using the gravity polarizer to power their interstellar warships. It made their ships faster and more maneuverable than human ships.
Man's resistance to the kzinti fleet would have been nominal, had it not been for the Kzinti Lesson: A reaction drive is a weapon devastating in direct proportion to it's efficiency as a drive.
Their first foray into human space had been a terrific shock to the kzinti. Human society had been peaceful for centuries, for so long that they had virtually forgotten war. But human interstellar ships used fusion-powered photon drives, launched by a combination of photon sail and asteroid-based laser cannon.
So the kzinti telepathe continued to report that the human worlds had no weapons at all … while giant laser cannon chopped at the kzinti ships, and smaller mobile cannon darted in and out on the light pressure of their own beams …
Slowed by unexpected human resistance and by the barrier of lightspeed, the war had run for decades instead of years. But the kzinti would have won eventually.
Except that an Outsider ship had stumbled across the small human colony on We Made It. They had sold the mayor the secret of the Outsider hyperdrive shunt, on credit. We Made It had not known of the kzinti war; but they learned of it fast enough when they had built a few faster-than-light ships.