by Larry Niven
If Nessus knew that much about him . . . “Why would you want my help?”
“You are Louis Wu, the son of Carlos Wu, among the most brilliant minds of Earth’s many billions. Your mother was born Sharrol Janss. Beowulf Shaeffer, your stepfather, was an adventurer and explorer without peer. He was of great service to my people more than once. He skimmed the surface of a neutron star and lived to tell of it. He traveled to the galactic core and discovered that it had exploded. He . . .”
Louis! An explosion of memories, like fireworks in the brain. His name from the distant past. And those astonishing disclosures about his family. Accompanying Nessus was a way to recover it all.
Nessus was still speaking. “There is another condition. Things that you will see cannot be revealed. Your memories will be edited before I return you to Known Space.”
“Edited,” Nathan—no, Louis!—repeated.
Something warbled softly in Nessus’ sash. “A proximity alarm. Whatever you decide, decide quickly. Twenty seconds after I leave, this stepping disc will explode.”
“Edited how?”
Nessus thrust a head into a pocket—and vanished.
Twenty seconds! Nineteen. Eighteen. Seventeen.
The count ticked down in Louis’s mind. His heart pounded.
Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.
He stared at the circle on the ground. You arrive in Wonderland down a rabbit hole. You don’t leave that way.
Nine. Eight.
From downstream: a noise, indistinct. Probably a perimeter patrol. What would the Resistance leaders think of finding him near an exploded alien device?
And how big an explosion? Run, he told himself. His legs were rooted to the spot.
From two short paces away, the disc stared back.
His stepfather—the infamous Beowulf Shaeffer!—trusted Puppeteers to keep their word. All the words. Including the words in the fine print.
Six. Five.
Beyond that disc were truths he had sought all his life. His past. His roots. If he did not go, could he live with himself?
Four. Three. Two.
Louis stepped—
NEVERLAND
4
Nessus flicked into the isolation booth aboard Aegis.
Tonguing his transport controller again, he reappeared on a disc outside the booth on the reflecting side of the one-way glass. Shuffling off the disc he caught a glimpse of himself: twitchy, disheveled, wild-eyed. The manic state into which he had worked himself had all but dissipated.
At any second Louis might arrive.
Nessus was almost too drained to care. Courage and caution—madness and sanity—must balance. Escape into catatonia would no longer be denied. Half a deck away, his cabin was too distant to attain. His heads darted between his legs. His knees started to buckle. . . .
Had he reconfigured the booth’s stepping disc? If not, Louis would flick out!
Nessus shook with fear. How could he not remember how he had left the booth disc configuration! Only one way: he was too near complete collapse to function. Checking the transport controller would do nothing useful. He would only wonder anew in a moment.
Somehow Nessus withdrew his heads from between his legs. He grasped the stepping disc by its rim and lifted it from the deck. The disc slipped from his teeth; he overbalanced and stumbled backward against the hull.
Nessus braced himself with his hind leg; his hoof scraped paint from the wall. He gripped the disc again and heaved. His hind leg, straightening, pushed him away from the wall. The disc tipped up, up . . . and over. It crashed to the deck, dark side up. Upside down.
Control settings and address modes no longer mattered. With its active surface flush against the deck, safety interlocks rendered the disc inert.
Nessus bleated to himself, the double-throated glissando edged with hysteria. He could have engaged the same failsafe circuits simply by remaining on the disc.
Louis flicked into the isolation booth.
Nessus collapsed. Eyes squeezed shut, heads pressed against his belly, he squeezed and squeezed the fleshy ball of self until he could scarcely breathe.
Until the only sound in the universe was the muffled beating of his hearts.
What the . . . ?
A curved, clear wall. Louis turned, squinting against sudden brightness. He was inside a capped cylinder. It had no door! The room beyond was all but empty. He saw only a floor-standing mirror, a dark circle on the floor, and a leather-covered hassock.
Slowly, the hassock swelled and contracted. Swelled and contracted. Breathed? Nessus, apparently, with his heads and legs curled under his torso.
“Nessus! Let me out! Nessus! Someone!” And a few seconds later, a bit plaintively, “Anyone?”
The only response was painfully loud echoing inside the little booth. The “hassock” did not stir.
Louis pounded the clear wall with his fist—once. The wall was hard. “Tanj it, Nessus! Let me out!”
Once the echoes trailed off: silence.
What did he know about Puppeteers? Not much. Louis studied the “hassock.” By starlight he had been unable to discern color. Nessus (as much as Louis could see) was off-white with scattered patches of tan. His mane was a darker brown.
Behind Nessus, the wall held a slight curve. On every surface, recessed handholds (well, mouth holds). A ship, then. The room was big: this was a cargo hold.
For three months his first thought upon waking and his last thought at night had involved getting off Wunderland. About getting—somehow—to a ship. A bitter laugh bubbled out of Louis. Be careful what you wish for.
He kept looking around. Anywhere but the mirror. Anywhere.
The fleshy mass looked as tightly clenched as ever. Would he know when Nessus began to recover from his fear? Shouting accomplished no more than it had before.
Depression settled over him like fog. Nathan or Louis, what did it matter? He was a druggie, a danger to himself and useless to anyone else. Face it. Face what you are.
He turned, finally, toward the mirror. A hollow-eyed figure stared back. Louis began to shake. “You promised a cure for my addiction!” he screamed.
Nessus did not stir.
Louis slumped against the side of the booth. He was trapped until Nessus recovered from his panic attack.
It looked like the cure would be going cold turkey.
Time passed. Nessus didn’t move.
Louis switched to studying the walls beyond his cell. Standing on tiptoe he noticed a broad scratch in the curved gray wall behind Nessus. Those long gray curls on the deck beside him were peels of paint.
A long disused synapse fired: General Products hull. A Puppeteer would choose nothing less.
Back when Puppeteers had traded in Known Space, General Products Corporation was the core of their commercial empire. More than anything else, GP sold spaceship hulls. No one knew how a GP hull was built or of what it was made, only that the indemnity if one failed was enormous. (Another childhood memory: his fathers talking. Evidently, GP hulls were not quite impregnable. But the piddling little surface-to-air missile that reduced Clementine to a flaming ruin would not have scratched a GP hull.)
The price of indestructible hulls soared after the Puppeteers withdrew from Known Space. The GP hulls left behind had been reconfigured mostly as warships, top-of-the-line cruise ships, and yachts for the superrich. The largest model GP hull, a sphere roughly three hundred meters in diameter, was used to transport whole new colonies. The tramp freighters Louis generally flew—as often as not working for his passage—were scruffy, human-manufactured ships.
Louis had flown only once in a GP hull. He remembered that GP hull material was transparent. That light passed through was a feature. You painted whatever parts you wanted opaque.
Recalling obscure history, like studying every seam, scratch, and dent on the unreachable walls, was a distraction. So what was he distracting himself from? The quaking in his limbs, of course: harbinger of the seizures destined
to come.
Tired of looking at Nessus, unwilling to face the mirror, he began yet another survey of the room.
Through the scratched-clear swath behind Nessus: motion. Something drifting. Seaweed? And . . . bubbles? And something else—
An eye! Enormous!
Captive of a comatose alien, in a tiny prison, aboard an alien ship, beneath the sea, with Finagle knew what nosing about outside. Trapped without food or water, without as much as a chamber pot.
He needed a pill! He needed an escape from the miasma of fear and doubt and mind-crushing depression. His hands shook and he broke into a sweat. His head buzzed and spun, and he kept expecting to vomit. Instead, his bowels let loose. Then he vomited, all over himself. A moan bubbled out of him as the seizures began.
Nessus did not stir.
Louis woke to an unbelievable stench, his nose centimeters above a puddle of vomit, urine, and excrement. His limbs were contorted and his joints screamed. His neck was on fire and his head pressed against the booth wall at an unnatural angle. Only the narrowness of the cylinder had kept his head from flopping into the filth. His filth.
For now the seizures had stopped. He unfolded himself and stood. It felt like he had been beaten by a team of experts, had been detoxing for days. His wrist implant showed he had been trapped for only three hours. Almost a day, though, since his last pill. Black despair crashed down on him.
Nessus remained a tightly wound mass.
“Nessus!” No response. “Nessus, you useless piece of . . .” Louis trailed off. A hint of clarity had returned. Might a Puppeteer take offense at an insult?
He did know they were cowards. “Fire!” he screamed. Nessus twitched and Louis dared to hope.
The twitch faded away.
Because despite everything, shreds of sentience must lurk in that rolled-up mass. If Puppeteer ships carried anything capable of combustion, they would brim with fire detectors and suppression equipment. There would be fire alarms, and they would not sound like hysterical humans. Nessus wasn’t buying it.
Louis tried to take heart from his failure. Shouting “fire” had involved more forethought than anything else he had done since stepping aboard.
No door: he must be in a teleport unit. The circle on the floor beside Nessus: was that what Nessus called a stepping disc? Had the circle by the resistance camp been that dark, Louis could not imagine how he would have seen it. That disc had been the color of—
He scraped aside some of his filth with a shoe. That color.
Of course: he had flicked from one stepping disc to another. Craning his neck, he saw most of the cylinder’s cap was the same light color.
Hmm. Another stepping disc affixed to a clear ceiling. That disc shimmered.
He reached up and brushed his fingertips lightly over the ceiling disc. It had a film of some sort, he decided. A molecular filter. Something to admit oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. Three hours in this little enclosed space—without fresh air he would have died by now.
Too bad the filter didn’t remove the stink.
Finagle! Here he stood between stepping discs and he had just now thought about any of this? Add confusion to his withdrawal symptoms.
How did Nessus control the discs? He had plunged a head into a pocket just before disappearing from the jungle. A device in his pocket, then.
Louis had no such device. He clasped his hands behind his back, pretending not to notice their renewed shaking. Maybe the discs also had built-in controls, underneath or out of sight along an edge.
Top and bottom discs were almost flush with the cylinder sides. Louis could scarcely force a finger between disc and wall, but he sensed a slight recess in the edge. There might be controls within, but even if he found them, he could not see what he was doing.
With which disc would he experiment? Not the one that kept him breathing, even if he could manage to detach it. He’d have to try the disc on which he stood.
How could he upend it?
That disc in the jungle had been a bomb. Blind experimentation might explode this one. He would try it anyway. It wasn’t as though he had a lot of choices.
He’d have to get above the disc.
He set one foot against the wall, set his back against the other, and raised his other foot. Slowly he climbed. The creep upward, pressing hard against the walls, made back and leg muscles scream. Like rock climbing, he told himself. Never mind that this cylinder is as slippery as glass; the fall couldn’t really hurt him.
From maybe twenty-five centimeters above the floor, he reached around his hips, toward the floor. He jammed all four fingers into the gap at the edge of the disc—and one foot slipped. He cracked his head as he splashed into the filth.
He tried again with the same result.
Nessus didn’t hear or didn’t care.
With feet spaced a bit farther apart, Louis managed on his third try to stay suspended as he forced the fingertips of his right hand into the gap. The disc lifted, breaking suction with a disgusting slurp. Then it slipped from his grasp and he fell.
The shakes got him again. Louis lost track of how many times he made the attempt. Finally he had the disc angled upward at about twenty degrees. With his back and leg muscles trembling from strain, he crept higher, wondering if he could possibly climb high enough to set the disc on its edge.
He couldn’t.
The disc slipped and fell. Wham! He slammed onto the disc, the breath knocked out of him. But not before he had glimpsed the disc’s underside in the mirror. The disc’s bottom was dark, like the circle outside the cylinder.
That circle, presuming it was a stepping disc, was upside down. If it operated at all, transferring there would teleport him into the deck. Doubtless Puppeteers built fail-safes to prevent that.
Surrendering to the shakes, Louis let depression wash over him.
Another bout of seizures and hopelessness passed. Nessus had yet to stir.
The Puppeteer did not respond to Louis’s shouts. Not to “Help!” (disinterested in helping another?) or “Fire!” (what harm was there in trying again?) or the more general “Danger!”
Danger, if anything, curled up the Puppeteer even tighter. Too vague, Louis decided. By this stage in his terror, Nessus must be beyond anything but hiding from an undefined danger.
There was a germ of an idea here. Louis chewed his lower lip, trying to coax out the thought. Suppose some peril loomed against which Nessus could take action? The hull was indestructible, but Nessus wasn’t. What about a big explosion alongside the hull?
An emergency restraint field had saved Louis during Clementine’s crash, but only because he had been in the pilot couch. Would even Puppeteers equip cargo bays with emergency restraints?
“Submarine approaching!” Louis shouted. “Nessus! Torpedoes in the water! Nuclear warheads.”
Shuddering seismically, Nessus unfolded. His necks writhed like serpents. His heads swiveled, searching everywhere for danger. “Torpedoes?” he bleated, leaping to his hooves.
“My mistake. Just some fish,” Louis said.
Seeming not to hear, Nessus galloped for the hatch. The cargo hold echoed with the clops of his hooves.
“No torpedoes!” Louis screamed.
Nessus skidded to a halt partway out the hatch. One head plucked at his mane. “No submarine?”
“No,” Louis answered, as firmly as his shakes allowed. “Now get me the tanj out of this cell!”
5
An alert lamp pulsed. A timer began counting down the final hour. The moment Nessus had anticipated—and dreaded—was at hand. Louis Wu would emerge soon from the autodoc.
And then Nessus must judge whether the man was up to the challenge.
Beowulf Shaeffer was the one Nessus sought. Needed. Shaeffer was special. A neutron star, the galactic core explosion, a black hole, an entire solar system of antimatter: he had survived encounters with them all—only to be undone by some mundane accident.
Unless, of course, Louis lied.
And yet: maybe the luck of Beowulf Shaeffer had finally run out.
Nessus had thought a great deal in recent years about luck and unintended consequences. He continued to fret, worrying and plucking at his mane, as the autodoc countdown reached ten minutes. Five. Two.
Nessus sidled onto a stepping disc he had set onto the deck. This autodoc was monstrously large, too bulky for anywhere but Aegis’ main cargo hold. Big as befit the autodoc’s unique capabilities.
Shaeffer had hidden himself well. Too well. Nessus had surreptitiously hired private investigators and criminals across the worlds of Human Space. None of his minions had found any trace of Shaeffer, either under his own name or any alias Shaeffer was ever known to have used. Not for decades.
Dead? Concealed beyond hope of discovery? Nessus could live with either. Better those than the final possibility: that Nessus was too late. That another had already found Shaeffer.
For Nessus was not the only Puppeteer familiar with Shaeffer’s extraordinary talents. . . .
. . .
Brimming with energy, bursting with life, Louis woke.
Scores of readouts, all in the green, shimmered in the clear dome that hung scant centimeters over his face. A ’doc, of course. He had been too weak to get in unaided. Nessus had had to help.
“Ship’s gravity is higher than Wunderland’s,” Nessus had offered while guiding and pushing from behind.
A fact, perhaps, but not the essential truth. Exhaustion and the shakes had defeated Louis’s solo attempts to climb into the intensive care cavity. That, alas, he remembered clearly. Of the dreams that followed, he recalled only bits and fragments. Only enough to be certain that there had been dreams, that the autodoc had been exercising his engrams, maintaining memories for a brain otherwise too inactive, or too drug-addled, to do it for itself.
Nessus’ polite fiction made the Puppeteer seem less alien.
