Betrayer of Worlds

by Larry Niven

  And, inevitably, Ol’t’ro thought about countermoves. . . .

  22

  From high atop a rocky promontory, his clothes and hair fluttering in the stiff sea breeze, Louis watched the rising—roaring—tide. Great North Bay was long and serpentine. Its tall, stony sides funneled the flow higher and higher, until the onrushing waters became more wall than waves. The ground vibrated beneath his boots. Spume crashed from the rocks. Even a hundred meters above the surge, spray occasionally spattered his face.

  Three hundred feet, Louis corrected himself. Ancient English units and ancient English speech. English, by way of Spanglish, was the primary source language of Interworld. English all around made Louis feel like an extra in a Shakespeare play, but he understood without too much effort most things he heard. Not these illogical units of measure, though. Getting used to those would take practice.

  Sometime soon Nessus would reappear. Louis did not believe in karma, not exactly, but this idyll would end. And if he followed in his father’s footsteps—

  Beowulf Shaeffer’s bouts of tourism tended to end in existential crises.

  While he could, Louis would enjoy life to the fullest.

  A gust of wind. A face full of spray. Louis laughed with delight. This was so not like being aboard Aegis. It had seemed he would never get off that ship. “It’s beautiful up here.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” Alice Jordan said.

  On Aegis’ arrival on New Terra, Nessus and Ausfaller had (separately? That was not made clear) urgent business to attend to. Ausfaller foisted off Louis on a deputy. And that, once Louis met Alice, was fine with him. He had not seen a woman in a long time.

  Once Alice realized Louis was, contrary to appearances, much nearer in age to her 150 or so years than the twenty years he looked, the assignment seemed fine with her, too.

  Even if Alice had not towered a head taller than everyone else on New Terra, she would have stood out in a crowd. She was confident, if not cocky. Lush black hair broke over her shoulders and spilled down her back. He could get lost in her deep, deep brown eyes, and gaze forever at her lovely, tanned, chiseled features.

  She had led Louis by stepping disc across New Terra. It was a beautiful planet, sparsely settled, its climate temperate from pole to pole. Its pristine seas sparkled. Vast forests, grassy plains, and expansive fields spread across its continents. Great mountains soared into its skies. What New Terrans considered cities, designed from the start around ubiquitous stepping discs, were—what was the word?—neighborhoods. When he put from his mind the necklaces of artificial suns orbiting low overhead, and the scattering of Puppeteer expatriates living among the humans, New Terra was what Earth might have been with maybe one percent of its current population.

  In a word, paradise.

  “Maturity in the body of a twenty-year-old.” Alice rolled contently onto her back. “Isn’t science wonderful? Any more back home like you?”

  “One’s not enough?” Louis pretended to be offended.

  She reached out to pat his arm. “Truthfully? More than one might kill me.”

  Louis turned onto his side, the better to face her. He had been starved for human contact, starved for the company of a woman. And a woman as smart and beautiful and delightful as Alice? Once he met her, the need to know her, to be with her, matched the worst drug craving he had had on Wunderland. Alice was beautiful, and yet . . .

  Maybe it was time for some truth.

  All the while they had been together, amid the patter of flirting, interspersed among insights about New Terran history and culture, Alice had been pumping Louis for information, and with very perceptive questions, too. It had taken him three days to notice. Listening more skeptically, her phrasing hinted at knowledge no native New Terran would have. When he had sprinkled Interworld terms into his still tentative English, she understood more than he would have expected.

  “What were you?” Louis asked suddenly, sharply. “An ARM like your boss?”

  Alice jerked back. “No, a goldskin.”

  Belter cops wore yellow pressure suits, hence, colloquially, they were goldskins. Alice was tall enough to be a Belter. Louis wondered why he had not seen it before. “So what do you want from me?”

  “A way home for the New Terrans,” she said. “But you don’t know the way, any more than Sigmund or I do.”

  Louis knew he was falling for this woman, and he was furious at her deception. “I suppose Nessus brought you here, too?”

  “Do you trust Nessus?” she countered.

  “Yes.” He considered further. “Mostly.”

  “And Citizens?”

  “One tried to kill me,” Louis barked. And guiltily, “Right. This whole world was once the Puppeteers’ slave colony.”

  “Remember that. Cowards can be as ruthless as anyone else. Fear only makes Citizens more devious in their plots. When they resort to violence, they apply force overwhelmingly.”

  Louis took her hand. “You’re avoiding my question. Did Nessus bring you here?” And you’re avoiding the question I can’t bring myself to ask. Is anything between us real?

  “Nothing so straightforward.” Alice sighed. “Nessus knows nothing about my background. Sigmund and I would like to keep it that way.”

  Louis waited.

  “Keeping secrets was easier before I got to know you.”

  He waited.

  Before Alice found anything to add, Ausfaller called.

  Louis stepped, emerging into a busy lobby. The stony-faced escorts waiting there closed ranks around him, and together they walked briskly into the bowels of a rambling, windowless building. They left him in an anteroom labeled OFFICE OF THE MINISTER. The willowy blonde aide at the reception desk nodded at Louis but said nothing.

  The door behind the desk opened. “Louis Wu,” Ausfaller said. In person his eyes looked even more brooding and intense than over a hyperwave link. “I’m glad finally to meet you in person. Please come in.”

  Louis walked into the office and stood waiting. Data screens, all blank, covered the walls. The large desk was clear except for a family holo. It was jarring to imagine Ausfaller as a man with a beautiful wife, children, and grandchildren.

  Ausfaller gestured to a cluster of chairs. “Please, sit.”

  “I prefer to stand.”

  “This was never going to be easy.” Ausfaller grimaced. “You should hate me, if not for the reasons you think.”

  You presume to know what I feel? Louis thought but did not bother to ask.

  “Something to drink?” Ausfaller synthed himself a glass of something amber and shrugged at Louis’s silence. “Suit yourself. What is the date in Known Space, Louis? Just the year will be sufficient.”

  “2780 when I left. Maybe 2781 now.”

  “That makes you about one hundred thirty, and I’m closing in on three hundred. And yet you look like a kid and I look younger than your true age. Carlos, Finagle bless him, is a genius.”

  “And as a reward,” Louis said coldly, “you chased him, chased all my family, off Earth.”

  “Let me tell you how that autodoc came about.” Ausfaller sipped his whiskey. “I once rescued Carlos and Beowulf, the astrophysicist and the adventurer, from space pirates. I was almost too late, Louis. Vacuum had severely damaged Carlos’s lungs, and then his body rejected the organs the autodoc on my ship had to offer. He nearly died before we got back to Earth.”

  Ausfaller saved his fathers’ lives? Nessus had said nothing about that. But with Ausfaller’s words, another cryptic, half-overheard conversation from Louis’s childhood made sense. . . .

  Ausfaller was still talking. “That incident is why Carlos abandoned astrophysics for nanotech. After his close call, he turned his attention to making a better ’doc.”

  “So you chased us off Earth,” Louis answered again.

  “I might as well have.” His hands suddenly shaking, Ausfaller drained his glass in one convulsive swig. “The ARM agent who lured—who drove—your family from Earth in
vented threats from me to convince Carlos to go into hiding with her. The same woman who, incidentally, then did her best to kill Bey. Carlos had refused to leave without the rest of you.

  “I’ve done things I’m not proud of, Louis, and they gave credibility to Feather’s claims. It’s a long story.”

  This Feather woman had left Earth with Louis’s parents? Louis remembered his surprise at the records he had found on Fafnir: two Graynor men and two women. Was this Feather the missing woman?

  Louis crossed his arms across his chest. “I’m not going anywhere, at least till Nessus comes back.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Bey came back from the dead, rebuilt by the very autodoc that worked wonders on you and me, just in time to watch me die horribly. A hole blasted through the chest will do that.” Ausfaller waved off Louis’s questions. “Beowulf didn’t kill me, not that I could have blamed him. And yes, Carlos’s autodoc saved me, too. While I was more dead than alive, Nessus found it convenient to kidnap me, selectively wipe my memories, and bring me here.”

  “So why should I hate you, Ausfaller? Because your paranoia made this Feather woman’s treachery possible?”

  Ausfaller shook his head. “That would be fair, but my failings go deeper. No, Louis, hate me because at a critical time I wasn’t paranoid enough. Had I suspected what Feather had in mind, I might have stopped her. Avoided a lot of pain . . . for everyone.”

  More pain for Ausfaller than anyone else, Louis sensed. What had Feather been to the ARM? “Why are you telling me this . . . Sigmund?”

  “The Pak Library. I need you to trust me enough not to blindly trust Nessus. I need you to consider the implications on this world of your actions, and of his. And if you can bring yourself to do it, I would like you to keep me in the loop.”

  “I see no reason to trust anyone at this point,” Louis snapped.

  Ausfaller offered his hand. “That’s good enough for now.”

  Unable to sleep, Louis groped past the edge of the sleeper field for the touchpoint. He was on his feet, tapping the field ON again, faster than Alice could stir. His bare feet made no sound as he crept to the door. He paused in the doorway for a glimpse of her by the dim glow of the hall lamp. Tanj, but she was beautiful.

  That was the only thing he knew.

  His mind was tied in knots by an eerie realization: Alice, Sigmund, and he were alike. They all had their demons. They all struggled with the burdens of worlds. Strange twists of fate had led them here: far from home, lost. Was Alice—or even Sigmund?—less worthy of forgiveness than he?

  Louis tiptoed back to the bedroom, just to cuddle. Whatever their flaws, whatever the dawn would bring, Louis and Alice needed each other tonight.

  . . .

  Alice emerged from the bedroom, yawning. “You’re up early.”

  “Uh-huh,” Louis said. He had linked the living-room wallpaper to a beach camera, and all around them virtual waves broke on long expanses of bone-white sand. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  She stood next to him and took his hand. “The waves are so peaceful.”

  When his mind could grapple no longer with human frailties and second chances, it had woken up to the other matter troubling him: Great North Bay. And so, with the audio muted, he had stared for an hour at the shore. In that time the tide had surged far up the beach.

  “New Terra has no moon,” Louis said softly. “It’s one world, all alone in space. How can it have tides?”

  She squeezed his hand. “A gift from Baedeker, long before he became Hindmost. He found a way to make the planetary drive wobble just a bit. It simulates the tides New Terra had as one world among the Fleet of Worlds.”

  “A Puppeteer gift? I don’t know what to say.”

  “Neither did Sigmund.” On four walls, sea and sand sparkled under the brilliance of a dozen suns. A comber, like quicksilver, swirled and splashed up the beach. For a time Alice seemed lost in the beauty. Then she grinned, amusement lighting her eyes. “There is nothing like a random act of kindness to screw with a paranoid’s head.”

  23

  Achilles circled the small cylinder into which his life had receded, the clop-clop-clop of his hooves offering the only sound. He had food and fresh juices, delivered four times daily; mounds of soft cushions; even, to occupy his mind, a limited-functionality pocket computer.

  He ignored it all.

  His cell was one seamless enclosure of General Products hull material. None of the tricks he knew for defeating the supermolecule would serve here. Nothing entered his cell, not even the food he ate or the oxygen he breathed, except by action of stepping discs. Nothing left, not even bodily waste or the carbon dioxide he exhaled, except by the action of stepping discs. Here he would remain until someone let him out. A prisoner of the state. More specifically, to judge from the great seal on the outer room’s wall, a prisoner within Clandestine Directorate—and how Nike must gloat about that.

  A prisoner, too, of his thoughts, for Achilles did not know how not to plot and scheme.

  Misappropriating, even losing, a ship? That was a trivial offense. Reckless endangerment of the Concordance? More problematical, but not without ambiguity. Much could be rationalized as policy differences, and tradition afforded a great deal of discretion to those who ventured off-world. His friends and allies throughout the government could argue foreign-affairs subtleties and raise doubts forever.

  If he still had friends and allies.

  For there was the final matter: the attempted murder of a Citizen, with premeditation. That was a crime against, not some abstraction like the Concordance, but the very notion of herd.

  The herd looked out, first and foremost, for itself.

  Nessus had found the device left to destroy Aegis. He had recorded Achilles frantically looking for the device, had captured Achilles reacting to the device dangling from Nessus’ jaw. There was no ambiguity here, no excuse of policy differences. The proof was incontrovertible, and condemnation certain.

  So why had the tribunal not begun? To allow appalled followers to fade away? Perhaps. If so, the plan must be succeeding. Few had come to visit; few of them had exhibited any true loyalty. Vesta, for all his rash words during the flight to Hearth, had yet to come to see Achilles.

  And maybe his enemies thought to delay the tribunal until his resolve cracked.

  That would never happen.

  On his next circuit of the cell, Achilles paused to nibble at a bowl of grain mush. He scarcely noticed what he ate. It was sufficient that he eat, and exercise, and maintain his health. The tribunal would happen. When it did he would need his wits about him. For the herd looked out—first, foremost, and always—for itself.

  As always, he would have to look out for himself.

  He had been too young to understand much. A preschool outing. Thirty or so playmates gamboling in freshly mown pasture. Teachers and a few parents, his own among them, watching. The worlds high overhead, blue and white and brown, some round and others crescent. In the distance, on all sides, the warm yellow-orange glow of arcology walls. A utility vehicle of some kind, its rear deck piled with potted plants. Waving from the floater’s clear-sided cab, a park worker dressed in protective coveralls.

  He remembered a kickball gone astray, bouncing into the pasture. He remembered cantering after the ball, and happy shrieking—

  And the shrieks turning to horror.

  His heads had swiveled frantically. What could be wrong?

  In the clear-sided cab, the driver had slumped over the controls. The floater swerved—straight at him!

  Shaking with fright, he took a tentative step to the right. The runaway floater wobbled and weaved, still coming toward him. Somehow he managed several quick steps to the left.

  Weaving and wobbling, impossible to predict, the floater sped closer. In hindsight, the erratic movements came of cargo shifting and from the dying driver’s spasms.

  Then it was all too obvious that the floater was stalking him.

  He rem
embered squealing, paralyzed with fear, his hearts pounding in his chest. He remembered the desire, the urge, the need to collapse, to embrace the ground, to hide in a tightly rolled ball—but the heavily laden vehicle hovered low to the ground. It would crush him, not float over him.

  Familiar voices: playmates, friends, the teacher, the parents. And his parents! Yodeling distress. Urging him to run. Ululating in fear and dread.

  As rooted to the spot as he.

  Somehow he broke the spell of fear. He took a step. And another. And another. He built up speed and, as the floater was almost upon him, toppled into one of the holes that had been dug for the potted shrubs waiting to be replanted.

  The floater ran over him, scraping his hindquarters, parting his sparse, childish mane. A lip’s breadth lower and the floater would have shattered his cranium. He was too terrified to cry.

  With a slow-motion crunch the vehicle, its motor revving, came to a halt embedded in a massive redthorn hedge. The plants’ insectivore tendrils lashed and snapped futilely at their attacker.

  His playmates, keeping their distance, craned their necks to see what had become of him. None had ever seen blood before, and they howled in horror and fascination.

  His parents galloped to him. “Are you all right,” a parent wailed. To this day, he could not remember which. Nor care.

  No one had come while it still mattered. Not friends, teacher, or parents. No one.

  And so, from the tender age of four, the lesson was deeply etched: the world was out to get him, and he could depend only on himself.

  So be it.

  The waiting area might comfortably have held ten or more, but Nessus had the room to himself. He synthed a portion of warm carrot juice, for it had the power to calm him.

  Well, ordinarily it did.

  Achilles was too dangerous to give a public trial and too well connected to simply disappear. Hence, this secret tribunal. There would be no impartial reconciler to preside, no voluminous files of precedent, no council of herdmates to sift the evidence. Witnesses for and against Achilles would present their evidence, sing their claims, plead any extenuating circumstances. The Hindmost, bound only by mercy and the dignity of his office—and the practical constraints of politics—would render a verdict.