07-Beowulf Shaeffer

by Larry Niven

  "How many hours do you need?" It was generous, but my yes would be a verbal contract. I'd be his prisoner.

  He waved it off. "Until midnight. Then we can renegotiate. I need the recording for Sigmund."

  Ouch. "Until midnight," I said, "present time being ten to noon local."

  "Your first contact with Pierson's puppeteers?"

  Fifteen years flying passengers between the worlds. Then Nakamura Lines collapsed, and I was on the street...on We Made It, because the bankruptcy courts allowed us transport home. Two years later I was ready to accept an offer from anyone. Anyone...

  *****

  ~Neutron Star~

  *****

  I tried to script the story myself, of course. There was a computer program that would do it as an interview. I made lots of notes...too many notes, because any time I tried to write text for myself, I blocked.

  So I advertised for a ghost.

  Ander Smittarasheed answered.

  His type was familiar enough. He was a gaudy flatlander athlete, too aware of the limps and lames around him, very aware that any woman was his for the asking. It all showed in his words and body language.

  Maybe I wouldn't even have hired him, but he just pushed into the situation without giving me a chance to react. Before my caution caught up, I was telling him everything...nearly everything. He turned it into a one-act play between me and the interview program, all in one afternoon. We spent two days polishing before we filmed it. The recording sold instantly to the nets.

  He could write. That in itself was amazing.

  I said, "I couldn't tell you about the blackmail aspect." We weren't shouting now. The undersea dome isn't really glass; it's something that absorbs shock waves, including sound, not to mention tsunamis.

  Ander Smittarasheed grinned at me patronizingly. "Did you think you were putting something over on General Products!"

  "At the time. I still don't know for sure. Maybe I was crazy to think that a spacegoing species wouldn't understand tides."

  "Maybe. But why would they send a human pilot to learn what they already knew?"

  "Mmm...Ander, look at it this way. A university team sets out to investigate a cold neutron star. They make a mistake, probably without informing General Products, but they're using a GP hull. The ship comes back with the pilots dead in vividly gory fashion. General Products works out how it happened, but they'd rather not be seen as making excuses. Why not let someone of the same species solve the problem and then talk for them?"

  "They seem to have had a good deal of faith in you."

  I laughed as if I hadn't a care in the world. "Oh, Ander. I wonder how many times they tried it."

  He thought it over. "No. They showed Sigmund your contract. They would have had to do that several times."

  "Yeah."

  "Beowulf, Sigmund would not have participated while they killed one pilot after another."

  I said, "Mad Bomber Sigmund? Ander, I never had any intention of stealing that ship." I saw his look, but I went on. "Now, that could imply that Sigmund is a bad judge of character. Or it could mean that he braced...oh, a dozen pilots, each in turn. The odds of one of us stealing a ship get pretty good. Remember, if each of us does our job, the hull comes back at the end of the orbit. Those things cost."

  Ander's jaw set. He said, "No."

  All right, no. I'd try again later. Beowulf Shaeffer is a misunderstood innocent. Sigmund Ausfaller isn't quite trustworthy. Change the subject -- "Or do you mean they trusted me to write my own script? I tried that, Ander."

  "You really needed help. 'First neutron star ever discovered,'" he quoted.

  First old, cold neutron star. Good thing he'd spotted that embarrassment. I said, "You couldn't dive that close to a pulsar. Even a GP hull couldn't bash through the accretion disk. I've gotten better at explaining things, Ander."

  I was scampering about inside my head, seeking any hole that might offer an escape.

  Monitoring a citizen can be easy, or cheap, or foolproof; take your choice. Ausfaller was backing Ander with UN money. The United Nations didn't have authority outside Sol system, but Ander could be using ARM funds or equipment.

  But he'd seen me on the balcony for the very first time. He'd sprinted up the slidestairs to intercept me without pausing a moment to call for backup. I'd stake our freedom on that -- their freedom. The UN had no claim on me, but they might well extradite Carlos, or Sharrol, or the children.

  So I was shaping a bribe to offer Ander, and telling myself that he wasn't too big to be killed if things broke right, and hoping that none of that showed at all while I played for time.

  I asked, "What's your concern with puppeteers? They're harmless. They're cowards."

  "Are cowards harmless?"

  "And they're gone."

  Ander smiled at me. "And you were the one who sent them. Beowulf, why would they deal with you a second time? You blackmailed them."

  "They don't mind blackmail; they use it themselves. And what I thought I knew might not be true." I caught that smirk again and snapped, "All right, what?"

  "Tides," Ander said. "We've been watching their, ah, retreat. The Pierson's puppeteers understand tides very well, Beowulf, whether or not they ever had a moon."

  "All right." I believed him and wasn't surprised.

  "By the way, that information is absolutely proprietary -- "

  "Man with a secret, hah? Even so, I think they were taking a shot at me when they hired me the second time."

  *****

  ~At the Core~

  *****

  I said, "And there you were in Sirius Mater, all ready to write my story for me. I guessed then that Ausfaller must have sent you both times."

  "So why did you hire me?"

  "I didn't care much. The big question was, How do I tell the human race about the Core explosion? How do I make them believe? I hoped you were an ARM. Maybe you could do something."

  Ander said, "I should have asked you then. There's supposed to be a huge black hole in there, millions of solar masses. Did you see it?"

  I shook my head. "Maybe the shell of novas hid it, if it's there at all. Maybe it even caused the chain reaction. Sucking gas and dust and stars for fifteen billion years, maybe its mass passed some kind of threshold and boom! Maybe you'd even find it if you processed the recordings I took. They're proprietary, Ander. Get them from General Products."

  "Well, but they're gone." But he had that smirk again. "Where did you go after that?"

  "Earth. After the galactic core, what else could measure up?"

  Ander laughed.

  Five teams were fighting over two prey turtles that glowed intermittently among thrashing bodies. The crowd was standing, yelling their heads off. And Ander pulled a flat portable out of his backpurse, ten inches by ten inches by a quarter inch thick, and opened it in my lap. He tapped rapidly.

  A picture stood above my lap. Five blue-white points rotated against a black background. They pulled apart, growing slowly brighter, coming toward me. Suddenly they blossomed into blue and white globes; the starscape wheeled; the spheres went murky red and began to recede. Ander tapped, and the picture froze.

  Tiny suns circled four of the globes. The fifth glowed of itself, as if the continents of a world had caught fire. Flying planets! And nobody around us was looking at anything but the miniature war beyond the glass.

  Ander said, "The puppeteers are still in known space. Receding at relativistic speeds, and they took their planets with them." He snapped his portable shut. "Five worlds all about the same size, orbiting in a pentagon around each other. Do the math yourself. You'll find that you can put a sun at the center, or not, and the orbits are stable either way. They understand tides just fine, Beowulf. That's what they hid from you."

  My mind lurched. Cowards or not, peaceable or not, I could see how the traditionally paranoid ARM might react to so much sheer brute power. "What are they like? Oxygen worlds? Natural or terraformed? How -- "

  "Sigmund says
we've dropped cameras in their path, not too close. The system goes flying by at point eight lights. We haven't learned much. Free oxygen, liquid water, fusion light sources redder than Sol, and we don't know why the odd one looks so odd. There's nothing else in the system, no asteroids, no cometary halo, just chains of spacecraft moving between the five worlds."

  "Where are they going?"

  "Straight north along the galactic axis."

  "That's what I did, coming back from the Core. Get clear of occupied space and then turn...turning five planets could be a bitch."

  "Well, there's nothing but empty space where they're going."

  "Maybe that's what they want."

  Ander mulled it. "Possible...Meanwhile, we've got to guard them and keep their secret. They won't pass all that close to the Patriarchy, but that's too close. It's not that they can't defend themselves. It's that they're cowards."

  I began to see what he meant. "Free enterprise."

  "No species can control all its members."

  "If some futzer published their location, you could see pirates of every shape and size."

  "Yes, and reporters and news anchors likewise. Any entrepreneur with a money-making offer. Any undertrained ARM out to make a name. Whole fleets lying in wait for the puppeteer worlds to pass. Any kind of fool might cause the puppeteer government to defend themselves in some drastic fashion, with power like that," Ander said. "So we have to stop any passing ships from interfering with the fleet and guard their secret, too. Meanwhile, they haven't all left. There are business matters, loose ends being wrapped up."

  "I know. I had dealings with one of their agents myself."

  He perked up. "How did that come about?"

  "I had a complaint about a General Products hull."

  "Again?"

  *****

  ~Flatlander~

  *****

  "But he never went back," I said.

  "It happens I know why," Ander said, and then the crowd drowned us out. Administration and Structure swirled together; Entertainment saw a chance and arrowed into the dance behind its dolphin. The depleted fourth team, Police, hung back in a nervous arc. All the teams looked to be milling without purpose, and from listening to Sharrol I could guess why.

  So I said, "Prey submerged." The last of the prey turtles must have escaped into the sand. For the next few minutes I watched the game with a concentration that would have surprised Sharrol.

  This was the story I was telling Ander: If I hadn't been led here by a woman, why was I here? I must love the game! "There! Yellow prey!" I shouted as sand stirred. An instant later the glowing mock turtle emerged outside the melee and flapped clownishly toward safety. A Police swimmer dove to capture it, his dolphin keeping station to block for him, and everyone converged too late: he was swimming like mad, and so was the prey; he was through the yellow arch at the point of a great angry cloud --

  And that was the end. I bellowed over the crowd's roar: "Dinner!"

  "Oh?"

  "I missed brunch. I'm starving."

  I didn't want to fight the crowds trying to leave. We crossed the slidebridge instead, this time in comparative quiet. The booths lined below us were whirlpools in a surging sea of escapees.

  Ander's hand was above my elbow, companionably. I was a prisoner, and that was hard to ignore. Make conversation? I asked, "Did you know there's an ice age going on Earth?"

  "Sure."

  "Well, I never even wondered. I did wonder why Cuba wasn't much hotter than Nome."

  Ander said, "The whole planet's a web of superconductor cable. We had to restart the Gulf Stream five hundred years ago, and it just went from there. Nome imports heat; Cuba imports cold. Even so, Earth would be pretty cold if we weren't getting so much power from the orbiting satellites."

  "Uh huh. What are you going to do when the ice age turns off?"

  "Move." Ander grinned. "Where did you go after the antimatter system?"

  "I moved in with Sharrol in Nome."

  He looked at me. "You? Settled down like a Grog on a rock?"

  Maybe he had the right to sneer. Ander and I had toured singles nodes together on two worlds, blowing off steam after marathon work sessions. I held my temper and said, "You can spend a lifetime seeing Earth."

  "Where do you want to eat?"

  I said, "The Pequod Grill is good." Good and expensive, and an offworlder would have heard of it. Just the place a destitute B. Shaeffer might pick if someone else was paying. And nobody would ask me where Sharrol was.

  We had almost reached the transfer booths. Just to pull Ander's chain, I turned suddenly into the phone booth to see if I could break his grip.

  He pulled me back effortlessly. "What?"

  "I thought I'd phone and see if the Grill's full up," I said, and remembered. I couldn't use my pocket phone. It was in the wrong name.

  "I'll do it." He used a card. It took him ten seconds to get a reservation. There are mistakes you don't pay for.

  We pushed into a transfer booth. He said, "So there you were, nesting -- "

  I said, "It was love, stet? We weren't lockstepped...well, we were, a little. I didn't know any women on Earth. Sharrol had some playmates, but a lot of the men she knew were moaning and clutching themselves." I grinned, remembering. "Rasheed. 'Lockstepped, sure, but you can't mean me!' with a great dramatic wave of his arms, like he could have been joking. There were some couples we played with, but not so much of that, either, after a while. We talked about having children. Then we looked into it."

  Ander said, "You?" I wasn't sure how to read his expression. A little disgust, a little pity.

  I dialed the Pequod.

  We flicked in on the roof, under a rolling curve of greenblack water. The daylight was fading. Ander led off toward the restaurant twelve floors down. He seemed to be familiar with the Pequod. Might even be registered here.

  Test that. "I need to visit a 'cycler, Ander. Long day."

  "Me, too," he said. "This way."

  In the 'cycler he maneuvered himself between me and the door, and I let him. Amusing scenarios came to mind: If I needed a booth, he could watch the door, but what if he needed a booth? Not that it mattered. I didn't want to escape, not until I could know I was loose. I wanted to speak of lost treasure.

  But I needed to know how much he already knew. Why was I here? Who had come with me? How? How was I surviving? I waited in the hope that he might speak of those things, and of Carlos Wu's autodoc, too.

  So we didn't talk much until we were settled at a table, with drinks. Ander wasn't interested in local cuisine. He ordered beef -- no imagination. I found crew snapper on the menu, billed as an order for two. Heh heh.

  I asked, "What happened to Greg Pelton's expedition?"

  Ander said, "Antimatter planet. The more he thought about it, the more he needed to know. He kept expanding his plans until some government gnome took notice. After that it just inflated. Government projects can do that. Everyone wants in; they always think there's infinite money, and suddenly it's gone from science fiction to fantasy.

  I don't even know if Pelton's still involved. The UN has probes in the system. Meanwhile the current plan calls for a base on the planet."

  I laughed. "Oh, sure!"

  He grinned at me. "Set on a metal dish in stasis, inside a roller sphere also in stasis. It is antimatter, after all."

  He wasn't making it up. He was too amused. "Civil servants love making plans. You can't get caught in a mistake if you're only making plans, and it can pay your salary for life. And I shouldn't have heard that much, Beowulf, nor should you. If a terrorist knew where to find infinite masses of antimatter, things could get sticky."

  "And that is why you weren't asked to ghostwrite the tour guide," I surmised.

  Ander smiled. He said, "Back to work. You've met Outsiders. Would you consider them a threat?"

  "No."

  He waited. I said, "They're fragile. Superfluid helium metabolism and no real skeleton, I think. Any place we consid
er interesting, they die. But never mind that, Ander -- "

  "They've got the technology to take accelerations that would reduce you or me to a film of neutrons."

  "Not the point. Can you tell me why they honor contracts? They've got ships to run away from any obligation. I think it must be built into their brains, Ander. They honor contracts, and they keep their promises. They're trustworthy."

  He nodded, in no way dissatisfied. "Grogs? Are they dangerous?"

  "Tanj straight they're dangerous."

  He laughed. "Well, finally! Kzinti?"

  "Sure."

  "Puppeteers. Where are they going?"

  "Anywhere they want to." He kept looking, so I said, "Clouds of Magellan? That's not the interesting question. The Outsiders can boost a ship or a planet to near lightspeed. Can the puppeteers do that too? Or will they have to summon Outsiders to change their course?"

  "And stop."

  "Yeah. I'd say they have the Outsider drive. They bought it or they built it."

  "Or they've got a research project that'll get it for them."

  "I...futz." Hire Outsiders to push five planets up to four-fifths of lightspeed, then try to figure out how to slow them down. Was that as risky as it sounded? I began to believe it wasn't. There was nothing dangerous in the path of the puppeteer fleet. They had thousands of years to solve the puzzle.

  Ander asked again: "Are the puppeteers a threat?"

  He had generated in me a mulish urge to defend them. "They honor their contracts."

  "They're manipulative bastards, Beowulf. You know that."

  "So are the ARMs. Your people have been in my face since I reached Earth. Do you know what Sharrol and I had to go through to have children?"

  "The Fertility Board turned you down, of course."

  "Yeah."

  "What did you do?"

  "Sharrol used to play with a Carlos Wu. Carlos had an open birthright. So we worked something out. Then I went traveling."