Scatterbrain (2003) SSC

by Larry Niven

  I embedded it in a larger novel, and a larger mystery, a continuation of Louis Wu’s exploration of the Ringworld.

  A.D. 2882

  The Hindmost danced.

  They were dancing as far as the eye could see, beneath a ceiling that was a flat mirror. Tens of thousands of his kind moved in tight patterns that were great mutating curves, heads cocked high and low to keep their orientation. The clicking of their hooves was a part of the music, like a hundred thousand castanets.

  Kick short, kick past, veer. One eye for your counterpartner. In this movement and the next, never glance toward the wall that hides the Brides. Never touch. For millions of years the competition dance, and a wide spectrum of other social vectors, had determined who would mate and who would not.

  Beyond the illusion of the dance loomed the illusion of a window, distant and huge. The Hindmost’s view of Hidden Patriarch was a distraction, a ground-rules hazard, an obstacle within the dance. Extend a head; bow—

  The other three-legged dancers, the vast floor and ceiling, were projections from Hot Needle of Inquiry’s computer memory. Dancing maintained the Hindmost’s skills, his reflexes, his health. This year had been a time for torpor, for recuperation and contemplation; but such states could change in an instant.

  One Earthly year ago, or half of the puppeteer world’s archaic year, or forty Ringworld rotations…the Hindmost and his alien thralls had found a mile-long sailing ship moored below the Map of Mars. They had named it Hidden Patriarch and set sail, leaving the Hindmost behind. The window in the Hindmost’s dance was a real-time view from the webeye device in Hidden Patriarch’s fore crow’s nest.

  What the window showed was more real than the dancers.

  Chmeee and Louis Wu lolled in the foreground. The Hindmost’s servants-in-rebellion both looked a bit the worse for wear. The Hindmost’s medical programs had restored them both to youth, not much more than two years ago. Young and healthy they still were, but soft and slothful, too.

  Hind kick, touch hooves. Whirl, brush tongues.

  The Great Ocean lay beneath a sea of fog. Wind-roiled fog made streamline patterns over the tremendous ship. At the shore the fog piled like a breaking wave. Only the crow’s nests, six hundred feet tall, poked above the fog. Far inland, far across the white blanket, mountain peaks burst through, nearly black, with glittering peaks.

  Hidden Patriarch had come home. The Hindmost was about to lose his alien companions.

  The webeye picked up voices.

  Louis Wu: “I’m pretty sure that’s Mount Hood, and Mount Rainer there. That one I don’t know, but if Mount St. Helens hadn’t blown her top near a thousand years ago, that might be it.”

  Chmeee: “A Ringworld mountain doesn’t explode unless you hit it with a meteor.”

  “Precisely my point. I think we’ll be passing the map of San Francisco Bay inside of ten hours. The kind of wind and waves that build up on the Great Ocean, you’ll need a decent bay for your lander, Chmeee. You can start your invasion there, if you don’t mind being conspicuous.”

  “I like conspicuous.” The Kzin stood and stretched, claws extended. Eight feet of fur tipped everywhere with daggers, a vision out of nightmare. The Hindmost had to remind himself that he faced only a hologram. The Kzin and Hidden Patriarch were 300,000 miles distant from the spacecraft buried beneath the Map of Mars.

  Whirl, forefeet glide left, step left. Ignore the distraction.

  The Kzin sat again. “This ship is fated, don’t you think? Built to invade the Map of Earth. Pirated by Teela after she became a protector, to invade the Map of Mars and the Repair Center. Now Hidden Patriarch returns to invade the Earth again.”

  Within the Hindmost’s crippled interstellar spacecraft, a rising, cooling wind blew through the cabin. The dance moved faster now. Sweat soaked the Hindmost’s elegantly coiffed mane and rolled down his legs.

  The window gave him more than visible light. By radar he could see the great bay, south by the map’s orientation, and a crust of cities the archaic kzinti had built around its shore. The curve of a planet would have hidden that from him.

  Louis said, “I’m going to miss you.”

  For a few moments it might be that his companion hadn’t heard. Then the great mass of orange fur spoke without turning. “Louis. Over there are lords I can defeat and mates to bear my children. There is my place. Not yours. Over there, hominids are slaves, and they’re not quite your species, either. You should not come, I should not stay.”

  “Did I say different? You go, I stay. I’m going to miss you.”

  “But against your intellect.”

  “Eh.”

  Chmeee said, “Louis, I heard a tale of you, years ago. I must learn the truth of it.”

  “Say on.”

  “After we returned to our worlds, after we gave over the puppeteer ship to be studied by our respective governments, Chtarra-Ritt invited you to make free of the hunting park outside Blood-of-Chwarambr City. You were the first alien ever to enter that place other than to die. You spent two days and a night within the grounds. What was it like?”

  Louis was still on his back. “Mostly I loved it. Mostly for the honor, I think, but every so often a man has to test his luck.”

  “We heard a tale, the next night at Chtarra-Ritt’s banquet.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “You were in the inner quadrant, among the imports. You found a valuable animal—”

  Louis sat bolt upright. “A white Bengal tiger! I’d found this nice green forest nesting in all that red and orange kzinti plant life and I was feeling kind of safe and cozy and nostalgic. Then this—this lovely-but-oh-futz man-eater stepped out of the bushes and looked me over. Chmeee, he was your size, maybe eight hundred pounds, and underfed. Sorry, go on.”

  “What is it? Bengal tiger?”

  “Something of ours, from Earth. An ancient enemy, you could say.”

  “We were told that you stepped briskly past it to pick up a branch. Confronted the tiger and brandished the branch like a weapon, and said, ‘Do you remember?’ The tiger turned away and left.”

  “Yah.”

  “Why did you do that? Do tigers talk?”

  Louis laughed. “I thought he might go away if I didn’t act like prey. If that didn’t work, I thought I might whack him on the nose. There was this splintered tree, and a hardwood branch that looked just right for a club. And I talked to him because a Kzin might be listening. Being killed as an inept tourist in the Patriarch’s hunting park would be bad enough. Dying as whimpering prey, nyet.”

  “Did you know the Patriarch had set you a guard?”

  “No. I thought there might be monitors, cameras. I watched the tiger go. Turned around and was nose to nose with an armed Kzin. I jumped half out of my skin. Thought he was another tiger.”

  “He said he almost had to stun you. You challenged him. You were ready to club him.”

  “He said stun?”

  “He did.”

  Louis Wu laughed. “He had an ARM stunner with a built-up handle. Your Patriarchy never learned how to make mercy weapons, so they have to buy them from the United Nations, I guess. I set myself to swing the club. He dropped the gun and extended his claws, and I saw he was a Kzin, and I laughed.”

  “How?”

  Louis threw his head back and laughed, mouth wide, all teeth showing. From a Kzin that would have been a direct challenge, and Chmeee’s ears went quite flat.

  “Hahahahah! I couldn’t help it. I was tanj lucky. He wasn’t about to stun me. He’d have killed me with one swipe of his claws, but he got himself under control.”

  “Either way, an interesting story.”

  “Chmeee, a notion has crossed my mind. If we could get off the Ringworld, you’d want to return as Chmeee, wouldn’t you?”

  “Little chance that I would be known. The Hindmost’s rejuvenation treatment erased my scars, too. I would seem little older than my oldest son, who must now be managing my estates.”

 
“Yah. And the Hindmost might not cooperate—”

  “I would not ask!”

  “Would you ask me?”

  Chmeee said, “I would not need to.”

  “I hadn’t quite realized that the Patriarch might accept the word of Louis Wu as to your identity. But he would, wouldn’t he?”

  “I believe he would, Speaker-to-Tigers. But you have chosen to die.”

  Louis snorted. “Oh, Chmeee, I’m dying no faster than you are! I’ve got another fifty years, likely enough, and Teela Brown slagged the Hindmost’s magical medical widgetry.”

  That, the Hindmost thought, was quite enough of that!

  “He must have his own medical facilities on the command deck,” the Kzin said.

  “We can’t get to those.”

  “And the kitchen had medical programs, Louis.”

  “And I’d be begging from a puppeteer.”

  Yet an interruption might infuriate them. Perhaps a distraction?

  The speech of the puppeteers was more concise and flexible than any human or kzinti tongue. The Hindmost whistle-chirped a few phrases: command [] dance [] drop one level in complexity [] again [] go to webeye six Hidden Patriarch [] transmit/receive [] send visual, sound, no smell, no texture, stunner off. “Chmeee, Louis—”

  They both jumped, then rolled to their feet, staring.

  “Do I interrupt? I desire to show you certain pictures.”

  For a moment they simply watched the dance. The Hindmost could guess how silly he must look. Grins were spreading across both faces; though Louis’s meant laughter and Chmeee’s meant anger. “You’ve been spying,” Chmeee said. “How?”

  “Look up. Don’t destroy it, Chmeee, but look above your head at the mast that supports the radio antenna. Just at the reach of your claws—”

  The alien faces expanded hugely. Louis said, “Like a bronze spiderweb with a black spider at the center. Fractal pattern. Hard to see…hard to see where it stops, too. I thought some Ringworld insect was spinning these.”

  The Hindmost told them, “It’s a camera, microphone, telescope, projector, and some other tools, too. It sprays on. I’ve left them in various places, not just this ship. Louis, can you summon your guests?” Whistle: command [] locate City Builders. “I have something to show you. They should see this, too.”

  “What you’re doing, it looks a little like Tae Kwan Do,” Louis said.

  Command [] Seek: Tae Kwan Do.

  The information surfaced. A fighting style. Ridiculous: his species never fought. The Hindmost said, “I don’t want to lose my muscle tone. The unexpected always comes at the most awkward times.” A second window opened among the dancers: the City Builders were preparing a meal in the huge kitchen. “You must see—”

  Chmeee’s claws swiped at the puppeteer’s eyes. Window Six blinked white and closed.

  Kick. Weave past the Moment’s Leader. Stand. Shift a millimeter; stand. Patience.

  Avoid him they might. They had avoided him for ten hours now, and for half an archaic year before that; but they had to eat.

  The wooden table was tremendous, the size of a kzinti banquet. A year ago the Hindmost had had to turn down the olfactory gain in the webeye, for the stench of old blood rising from the table. The smell was fainter now. Kzinti tapestries and crudely carved frescoes had been removed, too bloody for the hominids’ taste. Some had been moved to Chmeee’s cabin.

  The smell of roasting fish was heavy on the air. Kawaresksenjajok and Harkabeeparolyn were doing things in the makeshift kitchen.

  Their infant daughter seemed happy enough at one end of the table itself. At the other end, the raw half of a huge fish awaited the Kzin’s pleasure.

  Chmeee eyed the fish. “Your luck was good,” he approved. His eyes roved the ceiling and walls. He found what he sought: a glittering fractal spiderweb just under the great orange bulb at the apex of the dome.

  The City Builders entered, wiping their hands. Kawaresksenjajok, a boy not much past adolescence; Harkabeeparolyn, his mate, some years older; both quite bald across the crowns of their heads, their hair descending to cover their shoulder blades. Harkabeeparolyn picked up the baby and gave it suck. Kawaresksenjajok said, “We lose you soon.”

  Chmeee said, “We have a spy. I thought as much, but now we know it. The puppeteer placed cameras among us.”

  The boy laughed at his anger. “We would do the same to him. To seek knowledge is natural!”

  “In less than a day I will be free of the eyes of the puppeteer. Kawa, Harkee, I will miss you greatly. Your company, your knowledge, your skewed wisdom. But my thought will be mine alone!”

  I’m losing them all, the Hindmost thought. Survival suggests that I build a road to take them back to me. He said, “Folk, will you give me an hour to entertain you?”

  The City Builders gaped. The Kzin grinned. Louis Wu said, “Entertain…sure.”

  “If you’ll turn off the light?”

  Louis did that. The puppeteer whistle-sang. He was looking through the display, watching their faces.

  Where the webeye had been, now they saw a window: a view through blowing rain, down past the rim of a vast plate. Far below, pale humanoid shapes swarmed in their hundreds. They seemed gregarious enough. They rubbed against each other without hostility, and here and there they mated without seeking privacy.

  “This is present time,” the Hindmost said. “I’ve been monitoring this site since we restored the Ringworld’s orbit.”

  Kawaresksenjajok said, “Vampires. Flup, Harkee, have you ever seen so many together?”

  Louis asked, “Well?”

  “Before I brought our probe back to the Great Ocean, I used it to spray webeyes. You’re seeing that region we first explored, on the highest structure I could find, to give me the best view. Alas for my view, rain and cloud have obscured it ever since. But, Louis, you can see that there is life here.”

  “Vampires.”

  “Kawaresksenjajok, Harkabeeparolyn, this is to port of where you lived. Can you see that life is thriving here? You could return.”

  The woman was waiting, postponing judgment. The boy was torn. He said a word in his own language, untranslatable.

  “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver,” said Louis Wu.

  “Louis, you have evaded me ever since we saved the Ringworld. Always you speak as if we turned a blowtorch hundreds of thousands of miles across on inhabited terrain. I’ve questioned your numbers. You don’t listen. See for yourself, they still live!”

  “Wonderful,” Louis said. “The vampires lived through it!”

  “More than vampires. Watch.” The Hindmost whistled; the view zoomed on distant mountains.

  Thirty-odd hominids marched through a pass between peaks. Twenty-one vampires; six of the small red-skinned herders they’d seen on their last visit; five of a bigger, darker hominid creature; two of a small-headed variety, perhaps not sapient. All of the prey were naked, and none were trying to escape. They were tired but joyful. Each member of another species had a vampire companion. Only a few vampires wore clothing against the chill and the rain. The clothing was clearly borrowed, cut to fit something other than what wore it.

  Vampires weren’t sapient at all, or so the Hindmost had been told. He wondered if animals would keep slaves or livestock…but never mind. “Louis, Chmeee, do you see? Here are other species, also alive. I even saw a City Builder once.”

  Louis Wu said, “I don’t see cancer and I don’t see mutations, but they must be there. Hindmost, I got my information from Teela Brown. Teela was a protector, brighter than you and me. One and a half trillion deaths, she said.”

  The Hindmost said, “Teela was intelligent, but I see her as human, Louis. Even after her change: human. Humans don’t look directly at danger. Puppeteers you call cowards, but not to look is cowardice—”

  “Drop it. It’s been a year. Cancers can take ten or twenty. Mutations take a whole generation.”

  “Protectors have their limits! Teela had no notion
of the power of my computers. You left me to make the adjustments, Louis—”

  “Drop it.”

  “I will continue to look,” the puppeteer said.

  The Hindmost danced. The marathon would continue until he made a mistake. He was pushing himself toward exhaustion; his body would heal and then grow strong.

  He had not bothered to eavesdrop through the aliens’ dinner. Chmeee had not slashed the webeye, but they would not speak secrets in its view.

  They need not. A year past, while his motley crew was still trying to settle the matter of Teela Brown and the Ringworld’s instability, the Hindmost’s flying probe had sprayed webeyes all over Hidden Patriarch.

  He would rather have been concentrating on the dance.

  Time enough for that. Chmeee would be gone soon. Louis would revert to silence. In another year he, too, might leave the ship, leave the Hindmost’s control. The City Builder librarians…work on them?

  They were lost to him already, in a sense. The Hindmost controlled Needle’s medical facilities. If they saw that he used his power for extortion, they saw nothing but the truth. But he had been too direct. Chmeee and Louis had both refused medical attention.

  They were walking briskly down a shadowed corridor, Louis Wu and Chmeee. Reception was poor in so little light, but they wouldn’t see the web. The Hindmost caught only part of the dialogue. He played it back several times afterward.

  Louis: “—dominance game. The Hindmost has to control us. We’re too close to him, we could conceivably hurt him.”

  Chmeee: “I’ve tried to see a way.”

  Louis: “How hard? Never mind. He left us alone for a year, then interrupted himself in the middle of an exercise routine. Why bother? Nothing about that broadcast looked urgent.”

  Chmeee: “I know how you think. He overheard us, didn’t he? If I can return to the Patriarchy, I won’t need the Hindmost to recover my properties. I have you. You do not exact a price.”

  Louis: “Yah.”

  The Hindmost considered interrupting. To say what?

  Chmeee: “By my lost lands he controlled me, but how did he control you? He had you by the wire, but you gave up your addiction. The autodoc in the lander was destroyed, but surely the kitchen has a program to make boosterspice?”