Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven

by Larry Niven

  His only weapon was his hind leg.

  Thinking that, he remembered the jarring impact as he had planted his foot in the Kzin's side. Two hundred and forty pounds of charging puppeteer applied over five square inches of clawed space boot. The shock wave had jarred up through thigh and hip and spine, jerked at his skull and continued along the necks to snap his teeth shut with a sharp double click. Like kicking a mountain, a soft but solid mountain.

  The next instant he was running, really terrified for the first time in his life. But behind him the Kzin had vented a long whistling scream and folded tightly around himself....

  Nessus went on. He'd trotted across the frozen lake without seeing Kzinti or Kzinti ship. Now the ice was beginning to swell and dip. He'd reached the periphery of the blast area. Now there was a touch of yellow light ahead. Small and faint, but unmistakably yellow against the pink ice.

  Ship lights.

  He went on. He'd never know why. He'd never admit it to himself.

  Thock! Hind boot slamming solidly into hard meat. Whistling shriek of agony between sharp-filed carnivore teeth.

  He wanted to do it again. Nessus had the blood lust.

  He went up a rise, moving slowly, though his feet wanted to dance. He was weaponless, but his suit was a kind of defense. No projectile short of a fast meteorite could harm him. Like a silicone plastic, the pressure suit was soft and malleable under gentle pressures, such as walking, but it instantly became rigid all over when something struck it.

  He topped the rise.

  The ship lights might have come from the Court Jester. They didn't. Nessus saw the airlock opening, and he charged down the slope so the next rise hid him from view.

  The Kzinti ship was down. They must have landed with the gravity polarizer; otherwise he would have seen them. If they had then captured Jason on foot, he might still be alive. He might not. The same went for Anne-Marie.

  Now what? The Kzinti ship was beyond this next rise of ice. At least one Kzin was outside. Were they looking for him? No, they'd hardly expect him here!

  He had reached the trough between the two swells. They were long and shallow and smooth, like waves near an ocean shoreline.

  The top of the swell behind Nessus suddenly sparkled with harsh blue-white sunlight.

  Nessus knew just what to do, and he did it instantly. No point in covering his cranial bulge with his necks; he'd only get his larynxes crushed. The padding would protect his brain, or it wouldn't. He folded his legs under him and tucked his heads tight between his forelegs. He didn't have to think about it. The puppeteer's explosion reflex was no less a reflex for being learned in childhood.

  He saw the light, he curled into a ball, and the ground swell came. It batted him like a beach ball. His rigid, form-fitting shell retained his shape. It could not prevent the ground swell from slamming him away, nor his brain from jarring under its thick skull and its extra padding.

  He woke on his back with his legs in the air. There was a tingly ache along his right side and on the right sides of his necks and legs. Half his body surface would be one bruise tomorrow. The ground still heaved; he must have been unconscious for only a moment.

  He clambered shakily to his feet. The claws were an enormous help on the smooth ice. He shook himself once, then started up the rise.

  Suddenly and silently the Kzinti ship topped the rise. A quarter of a mile down the swell it slid gracefully into space in a spray of ice. It was rotating on its axis, and Nessus could see that one side was red hot. It skimmed through the near-vacuum above the trough, seeming to drift rather than fall. It hit solidly on the shallow far rise and plowed to a stop.

  Still upright. Steam began to surround it as it sank into melting ice.

  Nessus approached without fear. Surely any Kzin inside was dead, and any human too. But could he get in?

  The outer airlock door was missing, ripped from its hinges. The inner door must have been bent, for it leaked a thin fog from the edges. Nessus pushed the cycle button and waited.

  The door didn't move.

  The puppeteer cast an eye around the airlock. There must be telltales to sense whether the outer door was closed and whether there was pressure in the lock. There was one, a sensitized surface in the maimed outer doorway. Nessus pushed it down with his mouth.

  Air sprayed into the enclosure, turned to fog, and blew away. Nessus' other head was casting about for a pressure sensor. He found it next to the air outlet. He swung alongside it and leaned against it so that his suit trapped the air. He leaned into the pressure.

  The inner door swung open. Nessus fought to maintain his position against the roaring wind. When the door was fully open, he dodged inside. The door slammed just behind him.

  Now. What had happened here?

  The Kzinti lifesystem was a howling hurricane of air replacing what he'd let out. Nessus poked into the kitchen, the control section, and two privacy booths without seeing anything. He moved down the hail and looked into what he remembered would be the interrogation room. Perhaps here....

  He froze.

  Anne-Marie and Jason were in the police web. Obviously; because both were standing, and both were unconscious. They appeared undamaged. But the Kzin!

  Nessus felt the world swim. His heads felt lighter than air. He'd been through a lot ... He turned his eyes away. It occurred to him that the humans must be unconscious from lack of oxygen. The police web must surround them completely, even to their heads. Otherwise the shock would have torn their heads off. Nessus forced himself to move to the police web. He kept his eyes resolutely away from the Kzin.

  There were the controls. Was that the power switch? He tried it. The humans drifted gracefully to the floor. Done.

  And Nessus found his eyes creeping back to the Kzin.

  He couldn't look away.

  The carnivore had struck like a wet snowball thrown with awful force. He was a foot up the wall, all spread out on a border of splashed circulatory fluid, and he stuck.

  Nessus fainted. He woke up, still standing because of the normal tone of his relaxed muscles, to find Anne-Marie shaking him gently and trying to talk to him.

  "I'm worried about him," said Anne-Marie.

  Jason turned away from the Jester's control panel. "He can get treatment on Jinx. There are puppeteers in Sirius Mater."

  "That's still a week away. Isn't there anything we can do for him? He spends all his time in his room. It must be awful to be manic-depressive." She was rubbing the stump where the emergency doc had amputated her arm - a gesture Jason hated. It roused guilt feelings. But she'd get a new arm on Jinx.

  "I hate to tell you," he said, "but Nessus isn't in a depressive stage. He stays in his room because he's avoiding us."

  "Us?"

  "Yah. I think so."

  "But Jay! Us?"

  "Don't take it personally, Anne. We're a symbol." He lowered his head to formulate words. "Look at it this way. You remember when Nessus kicked the Kzin?"

  "Sure. It was beautiful."

  "And you probably know he was nerving himself to fire on the Kzinti ship if I gave him the tnuctipun weapon. Finally, you know that he came voluntarily to the Kzinti ship. I think he was going to fight them if he got the chance. He knew they'd captured me, and he knew they had the weapon. He was ready to fight."

  "Good for him. But Jay-"

  "Dammit, honey, it wasn't good for him. For him, it was purest evil. Cowardice is moral for puppeteers. He was violating everything he'd ever learned!"

  "You mean he's ashamed of himself?"

  "That's part of it. But there's more. It was the way we acted when we woke up.

  "You remember how it was? Nessus was standing and looking at what was left of the Kzinti pilot. You had to shake him a few times before he noticed. Then what did he find out? I, Jason Papandreou, who had been his friend, had planned the whole thing. I had known that the boss Kzin and the Slaver expert were walking to their deaths because the computer form of the weapon had given them the self-
destruct setting and told them it was the matter-conversion beam. I knew that, and I let them walk out and blow themselves to smithereens. I tricked the pilot into putting our heads in the police web, but I left him outside to die. And I was proud of it! And you were proud of me!

  "Now do you get it?"

  "No. And I'm still proud of you."

  "Nessus isn't. Nessus knows that we, whom he probably thought of as funny-looking puppeteers - you may remember we were thinking of him as almost human - he knows we committed a horrible crime. Worse, it was a crime he was thinking of committing himself. So he's transferred his shame to us. He's ashamed of us, and he doesn't want to see us."

  "How far to Jinx?"

  "A week."

  "No way to hurry?"

  "I never heard of one."

  "Poor Nessus."

  The Color of Sunfire

  My contract with the Pleione ended on Silvereyes.

  Silvereyes was Earthlike, blue-on-blue under shredded white cloud. Earthlike, except for the sunflower fields. Every world, even every habitable world, has its own strange signature. The atmospheric bands and prolate shape of Jinx, the freeway lines girding Earth, the cue-ball white of Mount Lookitthat, and now, finally, the silver sunflower fields of Silvereyes, Beta Hydri I.

  There were five such fields spaced around the planet. Five oval fields of sunflowers, each the approximate size of, say, Mongolia or Iran. If you caught the planet just right, with two of the fields showing in daylight, they looked like gleaming silver eyes peering into space. Clouds couldn't block that glare, could barely dim it. The eyes peered blindly up to watch us land.

  Earth, Jinx, Wunderland, We Made It--for three years I had lived with the Pleione, hauling goods among the home worlds. Each time we went up we were richer. My contract was up, my money was banked, and I was down for good. I would be a landowner on Silvereyes, at least long enough to know whether I liked it.

  The spaceport was at the edge of one of the huge sun-flower fields. From the fence to the horizon the sunflowers grew, thick, knotted grey stalks two feet high, topped each by a rippling blossom with a silver mirror surface. Each towel-sized mirror blossom was turned toward the late afternoon sun, and each was curved into a paraboloid of rotation, its focus on a black photosynthetic knot protruding from the blossom.

  Nothing lived in that field besides sunflowers. Any trespassing plant or animal would have been blasted for fertilizer, blasted to ash in the blinding focus of rippling solar mirrors.

  I gawked at the sunflowers for awhile, thinking philosophical thoughts. Then, carrying my luck-gift, I walked to a transfer booth. I dropped a coin in the slot and dialed at random.

  Tomorrow I would look for property to buy. Tonight I would celebrate.

  Luck brought me out in a private residence somewhere in the world. A stick-thin householder unfolded himself from his masseur chair to stare inquiringly at me. I called, "What town is this?"

  "Bradbury's Landing," said the worthy. "Do I know you?"

  "Doubtful." I opened the door to place my luck-gift in a shelf outside the booth. It was a copy of a Hrodenu touch-sculpture, lacking something of the original no doubt, but a good piece, and expensive. "A luck-gift for the first silverman I was to meet. If you'll name me the best bar in town, I'll not disturb you further."

  "Try Grushenko's," he said immediately. "But let me offer you a drink first. My name is Mann."

  I would have refused. To take something in return might spoil the luck. But now I had a better look at him, and I knew he wasn't a silverman after all.

  He was a Wunderlander. The asymmetric beard made it certain, though his attenuated seven foot frame showed his low gravity origin. He had the dignity to go with the beard, the straight posture, the unconscious air of nobility. A wonder it had lasted, for he must be desperately poor.

  And poor men don't leave their own worlds. They can't afford to. Curious. . . .

  "Taken," I said. "And I'll trade you tales."

  "A good custom," said Mann. "I followed it at one time." He dipped into a cupboard and brought out a bottle. "I'd offer you your choice, but there is only vodka. It's good in droobleberry juice, or chilled and tossed back over the palate."

  "Chilled then. I plan to be drunk before the night ends. Is it night here?"

  "Barely." He seemed startled. "What did you do, dial at random?"

  "Yes."

  He laughed. He pulled out a worn low-temp container, opened it and dipped the bottle. The liquid inside boiled and smoked. Liquid nitrogen. He held the bottle until water started to freeze out of the vodka, then poured. He bowed as he handed me the drink.

  I bowed and handed him the touch-sculpture copy, though the luck had gone out of the gesture. A pity I hadn't met a silverman.

  "Call me Richard," he said. "Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann. And who shall tell his tale first?"

  "Yourself," I said. I'd chosen my own tale, of a bandersnatch hunt near the Jinxian shoreline, and of the telepathic woman who needed a bandersnatch skeleton to complete her collection. But she kept fainting, with no apparent medical cause. She was an experienced huntress. Though she knew about bandersnatchi, her habit was to read the mind of her prey. Sensory deprivation kept putting her to sleep. . . .

  But what of his tale? He must be churchrat poor. I was not judging only by his small apartment nor by his aged clothing. He himself was aged. Half his beard and most of his hair were white. His withered skin look like he'd slept in it. A man who doesn't buy boosterspice is a man on the edge of starvation.

  Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann tossed a jigger of vodka back over his palate. "Would you believe that I once had it in my power to blackmail the entire puppeteer species?"

  "Certainly," I said. "You're my host."

  "Meaning I could tell you anything at all." He laughed. "But this is true. Once I knew the location of the puppeteer home world. You may remember that that was the species' most closely guarded secret, before their exodus."

  "I remember. They pulled up stakes about forty years ago." My family had gone broke in the crash. Half the interworld businesses in known space had folded for lack of the puppeteers. One day their commercial empire had offices on every known habitable world. The next, they were gone, their commitments paid off in cash.

  Rumors were rife. The most consistent was that the galactic core had exploded in a chain reaction of novae, and the puppeteers had found out about it. The radiation wave wouldn't be reaching known space for another twenty thousand years, which you'd say is a good long time. But the puppeteers were cowards. They had left, in the fastest species migration on record.

  Luckily I'd already earned my spaceman's papers. With no money left, I'd have had to drop out of grad school.

  A thought hit me. "Is that how you lost your money? In the puppeteer crash?"

  He looked at me from under shaggy white brows. His eyes were black and deep. "Yes and no. I wasn't in the stock market. I was tracing relics of tnuctipun biological engineering, flying my ship on a government grant. I set my ship down on a world orbiting Mira Ceti,

  and there I met a Jinxian."

  "You were tracing what?"

  "Old plants, genetically tailored by the tnuctipun, left behind when the tnuctipun were wiped out. They've been mutating for more than a billion years. I was tracing stage trees, but those sunflowers outside are more of the same."

  "Oh, really?"

  "The Slavers used them for defense, surrounding their plantations with sunflower borders. The tnuctipun used them to attack the plantations. Afterward, the sunflowers throve. A built-in heat beam is more effective against predators than mere thorns.

  "Then there are the air plants. Another tailored plant, once used to replace air on Slaver ships. Later they learned to hold their air in bubbles. Now they cover dozens of known asteroid belts. But I digress," said Mann.

  I assured him I'd been fascinated. He smiled and refilled our glasses. I was sipping at my own vodka, for it was stinging cold. I'd have choked myself if I'
d tried to drink it like he did.

  "The Jinxian," he said, "had found the puppeteer system. He was making pirate raids on them. Idiot. He'd have been rich beyond dreams if he'd simply blackmailed them. They're cowards, the puppeteers. They were afraid that if men knew where their world was, someday they might try to rob them. Like the Jinxian, raiding their ships, or worse. An armed invasion, a hundred years from now, or a thousand, or ten thousand. You see?"

  "Yah. He told you where their world was?"

  "As he was dying," said Rich Mann. "Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nil. That was what he said."

  "Just one world, I assume."

  "Of course. Not one puppeteer in a million would be brave enough or insane enough to trust itself in a fragile spacecraft. Each of their representatives to other worlds was more or less insane. How could they colonize other worlds? By sending maniacs?"

  "I used to wonder why nobody ever found that world. It must be somewhere in known space, or not far outside. People must have looked. Newsmen, fortune hunters, hobbyists. Spacemen aren't known for a repressed curiosity."

  "They didn't know what they were looking for." Mann lay back in a fading masseur chair whose machinery had long ceased working. Once I would have commented on the odd contours of his beard, covering his right cheek entirely, sprouting in a single waxed spike at the left point of his chin, shaved off entirely below the part in his hair. But I'd seen too many odd customs on too many odd worlds. I'd even found people to comment on my own customs, and to laugh at them.

  "I found out," he said. "That was my mistake. I should have gone straight back to civilization, looked up the puppeteer embassy and made a deal. Memory erasure of those coordinates, for a fee of a hundred million stars. Right then, no hesitation. They'd have jumped at the chance.

  "But I had to see for myself. What was it you said about spacemen and curiosity?