Betrayer of Worlds

by Larry Niven

  He got out his notepad and began sketching nothing in particular. But every drawing he started turned into some horror from aboard the Pak ship. Someday, maybe, he could exorcise a few demons this way. It was too soon and he ripped those pages from the book.

  “Louis,” Nessus finally called over the intercom, “please join me on the bridge.”

  Louis dumped plate, drink bulbs, and utensils into the recycler. He found Nessus alone on the bridge. Achilles must have lost this round.

  “Ah, Louis. I require your services as copilot.”

  “Of course.” Louis took his seat. “Will Achilles be sharing piloting duties with us?”

  Frostily: “No.”

  “To Hearth, then?”

  “Not just yet. We have cleanup to do first.”

  Not a characterization to which Achilles would have taken kindly. Louis supposed that was the source of the quarrel. “The Pak derelict?” he guessed.

  “Yes. Lest clues remain of Citizen involvement, Achilles had planned to detonate a second nuclear device aboard the Pak ship. He lost the bomb, like everything else on Argo.”

  “I don’t suppose this ship carries a nuke.”

  For an instant, Nessus looked himself in the eyes. “Only in a manner of speaking.”

  Louis considered. “Ah, the fusion drive.”

  “Correct. While you hold the drive flame on the wreck, I will keep my mouths to the hyperdrive controls.”

  Ready to jump at the first inkling of danger. “And Achilles disapproved of that plan?”

  Another look-himself-in-the-eyes moment. (An ironic laugh, Louis decided the gesture signified.) “No,” Nessus said, “he and I found something more . . . fundamental about which to disagree.”

  No need to worry about that, Louis decided, until he survived this escapade. “While the main drive fires, our aft sensors will be blind. I’ll need a probe with remote sensors. Ideally something expendable.”

  Expendable made Nessus twitch. Still, he lipped and tongued his console and two holograms opened. The first holo was a computer graphic showing Aegis, the Pak wreck, and a streaking dot to represent a newly launched probe. The second image showed the view from the probe itself.

  Nessus said, “I have launched a short-range probe and linked it to your left joystick.”

  Louis positioned the robot craft for a side view of the derelict, then returned his left hand to the propulsion controls. With thrusters, he nudged Aegis to within a hundred meters of the derelict and aimed the ship’s main drive straight at his target. “Ready when you are.”

  With mouths muffled by their grips on hyperdrive controls, Nessus said, “Proceed.”

  White-hot fusion flame spewed from Aegis’ stern. The plasma, splashing and searing, engulfed the Pak vessel. Bow thrusters strained to offset the force of the main drive. Aegis bucked and thrummed with the contending energies. The Pak ship drifted under the pounding of the plasma stream.

  Louis’s hands danced. He balanced forward and reverse thrusts, maintaining the slight separation between ships. He fine-tuned his aim with attitude thrusters. Cabin gravity and inertial dampeners masked all but the occasional faint quaver.

  It was like riding the whirlwind or surfing a tidal wave. Louis laughed in exhilaration—and again at Nessus’ startled, one-eyed glance.

  Not even twing could long absorb such vast energies. The hull began to glow a dull red. Fire must rage within, all-consuming. The hull waxed a brighter red, then turned orange, then, with the first hints of yellow—

  The derelict split like overripe fruit. Glowing gases—the final remains of bodies, supplies, equipment, everything—sprayed out.

  And faster than Louis could say “go,” his external displays went blank. They were in hyperspace.

  As quickly they returned. “Head for Argo,” Nessus ordered.

  “And once we’re there?” Louis wondered aloud. He didn’t think a fusion drive could scratch a GP hull, let alone destroy it.

  “Then,” Nessus said, “things become interesting.”

  . . .

  Using attitude thrusters in short, gentle pulses, Louis positioned Aegis. Radar echoes marked the remains of Argo. He matched his course to the hulk’s stately tumble, then edged closer.

  Aegis had been built in a General Products #2 hull, a slender cylinder about one hundred meters in length. Argo, with its GP #4 hull, was a sphere more than three hundred meters in diameter.

  “Steady,” Louis muttered to himself. “Steady.” With glacial slowness, Aegis crept into the gap once sealed by cargo-bay hatches. The opening was a tight fit. Like stuffing the pit back inside an olive, he thought inanely.

  Radar also showed flotsam adrift inside. As he brought Aegis to a halt at the center of the vast, empty cavern, something clanged against the hull and bounced off.

  “Piece of cake,” Louis lied. “Your turn.”

  Nessus sat astraddle the Y-shaped pilot’s couch. He began systematically scanning Argo’s interior with a comm laser, a ghostly green dot tracing closely spaced, parallel arcs around the ship. Despite interstellar darkness, it took image enhancement to detect the laser beam’s faint reflection from the transparent GP hull.

  “What are we looking for?” Louis asked.

  “Your aiming point.”

  Another tanj Puppeteer secret, then. Like why shining light through the transparent hull served any useful purpose.

  The faint green dot returned to where scanning had begun and the survey repeated. Partway through a third iteration, the sweep stopped. As the green dot expanded into a small, even fainter circle, Louis sensed a shimmer. Something within the hull wall.

  “There.” Nessus lifted one head from his console. Straightening that neck he pointed at the ethereal circle. “Take up position with our bow pressed firmly to that spot.”

  “How precise do we need to be?” Louis asked.

  Nessus plucked at his mane. “Very.”

  The AI aboard remained a secret from their sullen guest. For now, Achilles sulked in his cabin; he would not necessarily remain there.

  “Voice,” Louis tapped into a console comp, “watch this.”

  Louis dragged a copy of the dim visible-light image over the radar image. He inserted a fingertip into the composite holo to mark reference points—scraps of deck still clinging, here and there, to the hull—and finally to Nessus’ mysterious green spot.

  Hands back on the console, Louis typed. “Can you guide me to the laser-designated target?”

  “Yes,” flashed on the screen. The display blanked, clearing question and answer.

  To the all-but-subliminal accompaniment of Voice’s flashed course corrections, Louis nudged Aegis forward. There was a thump as hulls collided, inertial dampeners absorbing the impact.

  “We bounced,” Voice flashed.

  It took four tries, but finally Louis hit the target dead on, with just the right momentum and gentle thruster pressure. Aegis clung like a remora to a shark—only attached from the inside.

  Louis glanced across the bridge. “Whatever you need to do, do it quick.”

  Nessus seemed even more manically wild-eyed than usual. His mouths clutched the hyperdrive controls!

  On Louis’s console every instrument blanked out—except one. The mass pointer flared to life, blue lines radiating from its center to show nearby stars. As abruptly they dropped to normal space. A few seconds later, radar picked up a debris field. Argo had broken apart!

  Louis knew it was useless to ask why.

  Something clattered off Aegis’ hull and Nessus flinched. “We are still here,” Nessus said, his voice giddy with relief. “Once again, Achilles was mistaken.”

  15

  Louis tossed and turned, afloat between the plates of his cabin’s sleeper field. He had too much pent-up energy, and too much on his mind, to sleep. The tension between the two Puppeteers was palpable, and Louis did not relish the long trip to Hearth.

  As he reached for the touchpoint to collapse the sleeper field,
his doorbell chimed.

  He did not have a doorbell.

  If Louis had had eyes and ears in his hands, he would not knock, either. A Puppeteer could easily imitate a doorbell chime. “Who is it?”

  “Nessus,” came the soft answer. “May I enter?”

  A second surprise. Nessus had never visited Louis in his cabin. “A moment.” Louis dressed hurriedly, even while doubting Nessus would care about human nudity, and unlatched the hatch. “Please come in.”

  Nessus quick-stepped through the doorway. He backed into a corner and, twitchier than usual, closed the hatch behind him. “We must speak.”

  Louis said, “You first.”

  Nessus pawed once, nervously, at the deck. “I have instructions for you, Louis, matters you are not to discuss while Achilles remains aboard.”

  Had the Puppeteer had a onetime lapse in his Interworld skills? “While Achilles is around.”

  “No!” Nessus fixed Louis with a two-headed stare. “As long as he is on Aegis. Achilles is a highly skilled technologist and I am not. Some of our supplies or seemingly innocuous shipboard devices might be altered to serve him as sensors. We might fail to notice.”

  “Bugs,” Louis translated. “Cameras and listening devices.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I see.” Louis leaned back against a wall, frowning, thinking it through. “So you gamble in telling me this now.”

  Nessus looked himself in the eyes. “I gamble that bugging a human was not his priority. That, and that not even Achilles can easily bypass the biometric hatch lock I have activated for your cabin. The sensor pad outside your door is presently in setup mode. Press your hand to the pad to complete its initialization. Within your cabin, at least, you will have privacy.”

  From Achilles, perhaps. How many sensors had Nessus planted? He could have enabled the lock long ago. Louis asked, “What are my instructions?”

  “To begin, no interaction with Voice outside this cabin.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “All of us, in our own ways, pick and choose among rules. It would be impractical to testify against Achilles if my own . . . shortcuts . . . became known.”

  Shortcuts like an illicit AI. Nessus had just volunteered that he could be coerced! He needed Louis’s cooperation, obviously. But was this revelation a token of trust, a sign of desperation, or a subtle reminder that Louis was expendable?

  The one certainty was that Nessus revealed nothing without premeditation.

  “What else, Nessus?”

  “Codes for you to memorize.” Nessus plucked at his mane. “I take another shortcut.”

  “What sort of codes?”

  “Galactic coordinates and control sequences for emergency communications. Clandestine Directorate maintains its own network. If something should happen to me”—with one mouth, Nessus twisted and gnawed on a tress deep within his mane—“use them.”

  “And don’t reveal them to Achilles.”

  For a moment, Nessus stopped tugging at his mane. “If something happened to me, who but Achilles would be responsible?”

  Finagle, Nessus was serious about this. Louis held out his pocket comp, activating the unit with his voice- and thumbprints. “Go on. What are the codes?”

  Nessus dictated long strings of digits and still insisted Louis memorize the information. He already had a head full of transfer-booth addresses, totally useless information. This data was no harder to memorize.

  And, hopefully, equally useless.

  After Louis correctly recited the codes enough times, Nessus went on. “Next, no discussion with Achilles of our mission or how we happened to find him. For your own safety, Louis, you have never heard of Sigmund Ausfaller, Beowulf Shaeffer, New Terra, or the Gw’oth. And you are unaware of any nonstandard autodoc we might carry, for Baedeker believes it embodies advanced nanotechnology that could be misused. If Carlos Wu should be mentioned, Wu is an exceedingly common human name and Carlos Wu means nothing to you.”

  “I suppose I won’t be discussing those subjects with you, either.”

  “Not while Achilles is on this ship. Not until engineers I trust have scoured it for sensors.”

  That did not leave many topics. “Tell me this, Nessus. I can understand Citizens taking human names to interact with us, for yourselves and your ships. But why mythological names?”

  “You will not be offended?” Long pause. “Humanity’s enduring myths speak essential truths about you. We find them fascinating.”

  “And the name you picked must speak an essential truth about you.”

  Nessus plucked at his mane and said nothing.

  Nessus definitely sounded mythological, but it was too obscure for Louis. Maybe Voice would know, if he would admit to it. On the other hand . . .

  Achilles. The legendary warrior favored of the gods, all but invulnerable. The loner who sulked in his tent to protest his share of Trojan booty. Argo was little better. It was the sailing ship aboard which Jason and a band of adventurers sought to plunder the Golden Fleece.

  “What do our shipmate’s choices say about him?” Louis marveled.

  Nessus put a mouth to the door latch. “If ever you find yourself in doubt whether to share information with Achilles, remember your own question.”

  Louis raced around Aegis. He circled decks. He ran from bow to stern and back again, scaling and descending stairways three steps at a go. When mere speed palled, he flung himself to the deck to do push-ups, then jumped up and ran some more. He tumbled and shadowboxed and chinned himself from handholds recessed into the ceiling. Then he started over.

  The flight to Hearth would be a long one.

  It already was.

  Nessus and Achilles could not share a room without arguing. That they did argue was plain, even though, not speaking Puppeteer, Louis could only guess about what they disputed.

  Still, setting aside musical embellishments, Louis knew scattered words from his studies. Gw’o and Gw’oth were not Puppeteer terms. Neither was Jm’ho, the Gw’oth home world, nor Tn’ho, the leading city-state, nor the Tn’Tn’ho, its monarch.

  So some quarreling was about policy toward the Gw’oth. Nessus had admitted to such differences even before Achilles set hoof aboard.

  Only now it meant more to Louis. Now he knew two Puppeteers, and he could compare.

  There were similarities, of course. Nessus and Achilles shared the well-known caution of their kind, carefully skirting door frames and furniture. They had many mannerisms in common. Virtual companions in the digital wallpaper accompanied both along the ship’s corridors, and pungent scent wafted from the air vents wherever they trod. That they were here at all, far from Hearth and herd, marked both as—Nessus’ term, not Louis’s—insane.

  And yet the longer Louis shared the ship with them, the more different the Puppeteers seemed.

  Nessus discussed; Achilles decreed. Nessus fretted before sending Louis into danger; if Achilles felt remorse for his lost crew, he had yet to show it. Nessus came across, somehow, as a bit daunted by his responsibilities. Achilles was smug about his authority and insistent about his prerogatives.

  Louis stopped shadowboxing to resume his dash about Aegis. Other than consult with Voice in his cabin, exercise was one of Louis’s few outlets.

  Any more time in that tiny room would make Louis scream.

  Not to mention that what little Voice would reveal about New Terra also made Louis want to scream.

  New Terra, until recently, was a world of slaves. That had to be why Nessus erased Louis’s ability to find Known Space. Louis could not show the New Terrans the path home.

  (But Ausfaller was from Earth! Did Nessus trust Ausfaller not to show the way? Or had Ausfaller, too, had his memories altered? It pained Louis to suspect he and the ARM had anything in common.)

  And that was why Louis’s memories would be purged again before he went home, lest he lead an expedition to New Terra and the Fleet. Beings far braver than Puppeteers would fear humanity’s retri
bution if the Puppeteers’ crimes were to become known.

  Raiding Pak ships. Consorting with Puppeteers. Whole human worlds unsuspected. A corner of Louis’s mind regretted the stories he could never tell his fathers.

  Chest heaving, legs aching, Louis eased his pace to a lope. He ended his cool-down routine at the relax room, synthing a drink bulb of iced tea. He drained it and got another.

  He had weeks left on this trip. He could not spend that long running, speculating, and raging inwardly at ancient injustices. Gw’oth, New Terra, and his own past were off-limits.

  The Pak and their Library were not.

  Suddenly ravenous, Louis ordered a five-course meal and several bulbs of wine. Imagining ways to crack open the Library would take his best efforts.

  In the bare confines of his “cabin”—nowhere aboard this tiny ship befitted his stature as a cabinet minister—Achilles brooded.

  He had much about which to brood:

  —The criminal ineptness of his New Terran hirelings, and the peril into which they had carelessly plunged him.

  —Baedeker and Nike conspiring against him. How convenient for them if that dangerous maneuver with Argo had eliminated their mutual rival.

  —Nessus’ insolent refusal to acknowledge Achilles’ stature, or obey his orders, or even explain how Aegis had happened upon him.

  —The daily indignity of Nessus ruling aboard this ship.

  —The utter humiliation of wearing a stun anklet, as if he were some common criminal.

  —Locked cabins and storerooms, and whatever petty secrets Nessus hid therein.

  —The uncertain future of the Pak artifacts he had had the genius to pursue.

  —The thinly veiled threats of a trial when he returned to the Fleet.

  Achilles circled his tiny cabin, stomping. Nessus: stomp! Nike: stomp! Baedeker: stomp! Stomp!

  His enemies stymied him at every turn. They had persecuted him for far too long.

  Rule over an arcology had been within his bite until Nessus—a lowly neophyte scout!—had denounced him. Banished to serve as a scout himself, Achilles had distinguished himself and returned to Hearth in triumph.