Ringworld (5 page)

"My motive should be obvious," said Speaker. The black markings around his eyes had taken on the look of a bandit's mask in a cartoon. The kzin was neither tense nor relaxed. And he stood where he was almost impossible to attack.

"I intend to give my world control of the Long Shot. With the Long Shot as a model we will build more such ships. Such ships would give us a killing superiority in the next Man-Kzin war, provided that men do not also have designs for Long Shot. Satisfactory?"

Louis made his voice sarcastic. "You couldn't be afraid of where we're going."

"No." The insult slid right past him. How would a kzin recognize sarcasm? "You will all disrobe now, so that I may know that you are unarmed. When you have done so I will request the puppeteer to don his pressure suit. We two will board the Long Shot. Louis and Teela will stay behind, but I will take your clothing and your luggage and your pressure suits. I will disable this ship. Doubtless the Outsiders, curious as to why you have not returned to Earth, will come to help you long before your lifesystem fails. Do you all understand?"

Louis Wu, relaxed and ready to take advantage of any slip the kzin might make ... Louis Wu glanced at Teela Brown from the corner of his eye and saw a horrible thing. Teela was bracing herself to jump the kzin.

Speaker would cut her in two.

Loins would have to move first.

"Don't be foolish, Louis. Stand up slowly and move against the wall. You shall be the first toooo ..."

Speaker let the word trail off in a kind of croon.

Louis halted his leap, caught by a thing he didn't understand.

Speaker-To-Animals threw back his big orange head and mewed: an almost supersonic squeal. He threw his arms wide, as if to embrace the universe. The wire blade of his variable-sword cut through a water tank without slowing noticeably; water began dripping out on all four sides of the tank. Speaker didn't notice. His eyes didn't see, his ears didn't hear.

"Take his weapon," said Nessus.

Louis moved. He approached cautiously, ready to duck if the variable-sword should move his way. The kzin was waving it gently, like a baton. Louis took the handle from the kzin's unresisting fist. He touched the proper stud, and the red ball retracted until it touched the handle.

"Keep it," said Nessus. He clamped his jaws on Speaker's arm and led the kzin to a crash couch. The kzin made no resistance. He was no longer making sounds; he stared into infinity, and his great furry face showed only a vast calm.

"What happened? What did you do?"

Speaker-To-Animals, totally relaxed, stared at infinity and purred.

"Watch," said Nessus. He moved carefully back from the kzin's crash couch. He held his fiat heads high and rigid, not so much pointed as aimed, and at no time did his eyes leave the kzin.

The kzin's eyes focused suddenly. They flicked from Louis, to Teela, to Nessus. Speaker-To-Animals made plaintive snarling sounds, sat upright, and switched to Interworld.

"That was very, very nice. I wish --"

He stopped, started over. "Whatever you did," he told the puppeteer, "do not do it again."

"I judged you to be a sophisticate," said Nessus. "My judgment was accurate. Only a sophisticate would fear a tasp."

Teela said, "Ah."

Louis said, "Tasp?"

The puppeteer addressed himself to Speaker-To-Animals. "You understand that I will use the tasp every time you force me to. I will use it if you make me uneasy. If you attempt violence too often, or if you startle me too often, you will soon become dependent on the tasp. Since the tasp is a surgically implanted part of me, you would have to kill me to possess it. And you would still be ignobly bound by the tasp itself."

"Very astute," said Speaker. "Brilliantly unorthodox tactics. I will trouble you no more."

"Tanj! Will somebody tell me what a tasp is?"

Louis's igriorance seemed to surprise everybody. It was Teela who answered. "It jolts the pleasure center of the brain."

"From a distance?" Louis hadn't known that that was even theoretically possible.

"Sure. It does for you just what a touch of current does for a wirehead; but you don't need to drop a wire into your brain. Usually a tasp is just small enough to aim with one hand."

"Have you ever been hit by a tasp? None of my business, of course."

Teela grinned derision for his delicacy. "Yes. I know what it feels like. A moment of -- well, theres no describing it. But you don't use a tasp on yourself. You use it on someone who isn't expecting it. That's where the fun comes in. Police are always picking up taspers in the parks."

"Your tasps," said Nessus, "induce less than a second of current. Mine induces approximately ten seconds."

The effect on Speaker-To-Animals must have been formidable. But Louis saw other implications. "Oh, wow. That's beautiful. That's lovely! Who but a puppeteer would go around with a weapon that does good to the eneray?"

"Who but a prideful sophisticate would fear too much pleasure? The puppeter is quite right," said Speaker-To-Animals. "I would not risk the tasp again. Too many jolts from the puppeteer's tasp would leave me his willing slave. I, a kzin, slaved to an herbivore!"

"Let us board the Long Shot," Nessus said grandly. "We have wasted enough time on trivialities."

***

Louis was first aboard the Long Shot.

He was not surprised to find his feet trying to dance on Nereid's rock surface. Louis knew how to move in low gravity. But his hindbrain stupidly expected gravity to change as he entered the Long Shoes airlock. Braced for the change, he stumbled and almost fell when it didn't come.

"I know they had induced gravity then," he grumbled as he moved into the cabin. "... Oh."

The cabin was primitive. There were hard right angles everywhere, suitable for bumping knees and elbows. Everything was bulkier than necessary. Dials were badly placed ...

But, more than primitive, the cabin was small. There had been induced gravity when the Long Shot was built; but, even in a ship a mile wide, there had been no room for the machinery. There was barely room for a pilot.

Instrument board and mass indicator, a kitchen slot, a crash couch, and a space behind the couch where a man might wedge himself with his head bent to the low ceiling -- Louis braced himself in that space and opened the kzin's variable-sword to three feet.

Speaker-To-Animals came aboard, moving in self-conscious slow motion. He climbed past Louis without slowing, up into the overhead compartment.

The overhead compartment had been a recreation room for the ship's single pilot. Exercise machinery and a reading sereen had been ripped out, and three new crash couches installed. Speaker climbed into one of these.

Now Louis followed him up the rungs, one-handed. Keeping the variable-sword unostentatiously in sight, he closed the cover on the kzin's crash couch and flipped a knife switch.

The crash couch became a mirror-surface egg. Inside, no time would pass until Louis turned off the stasis field. If the ship should happen to ram an antimatter asteroid, even the General Products hull would be ionized vapor; but the kzin's crash couch would not lose its mirror finish.

Louis relaxed. It had all been like a kind of ritualistic dance; but its purpose was real enough. The kzin had good reason to steal the ship. The tasp had not altered that Speaker must not be given an opportunity.

Louis returned to the pilot's cabin. He used the ship-to-suit circuit. "Come on in."

Something over a hundred hours later, Louis Wu was outside the solar system.

There are singularities in the mathematics of hyperspace. One such singularity surrounds every sufficiently large mass in the Einsteinian universe. Outside of these singularities, ships can travel faster than light. Inside, they disappear if they try it.

Now the Long Shot, some eight light-hours from Sol, was beyond Sol's local singularity.

And Louis Wu was in free fall.

There was tension in his gonads and discomfort in his diaphragm, and his stomach thought he wanted to belch. These sensations would pass. There was a paradoxical urge to fly ...

He had flown many times in free fall, in the huge transparent bubble of the Outbound Hotel, which circled Earth's Moon. Here, he would smash something vital if he so much as flapped his arms.

He had chosen to accelerate outward under two gravities. For something like five days he had worked and eaten and slept in the pilot's crash couch. Despite the excellent facilities of the couch, he was dirty and unkempt; despite fifty hours of sleep, he was exhausted.

Louis felt his future foreshadowed. For him, the keynote of the expedition would be discomfort.

The sky of deep space looked not much different from the lunar night sky. In the solar system the planets add little to a naked-eye view. One remarkably bright star glared in the galactic south; and that star was Sol.

Louis used flywheel controls. The Long Shot rotated, and stars went by beneath his feet.

Twenty-seven, three hundred and twelve, one thousand even -- Nessus had given him these coordinates just before Louis closed the crash couch on him. They were the location of the puppeteer migration. And now Louis realized that this was not in the direction of either of the Clouds of Magellan. The puppeteer had lied to him.

But, Louis thought, it was about two hundred light years away. And it was along the galactic axis. Perhaps the puppeteers had chosen to move out of the galaxy along the shortest direction, then travel above the plane of the galaxy to reach the Lesser Cloud. Thus they would avoid interstellar debris: suns, dust clouds, hydrogen concentrations ...

It didn't particularly matter. Louis's hands, like a pianist's about to begin a concert, hovered over the instrument panel.

Descended.

The Long Shot vanished.

Louis kept his eyes away from the transparent floor. He had already stopped wondering why there were no covers for all that window space. The sight of the Blind Spot had driven good men mad; but there were those who could take it. The Long Shot's pilot must have been such a man.

He looked instead at the mass pointer: a transparent sphere above the instrument panel, with a number of blue lines radiating from its center. This one was oversized, despite limitations on cabin space. Louis settled back and watched the lines.

They changed visibly. Louis could fix his eye on a line and watch it sweep slowly across the curvature of the sphere. It was unusual and unnerving. At normal hyperdrive speeds the lines would remain fixed for hours.

Louis flew with his left hand on the panic switch.

The kitchen slot to his right fed him odd-tasting coffee and, later, a handmeal that came apart in his hands, into separate strata of meat and cheese and bread and some kind of leaf. The autokitchen must be hundreds of years overdue for reprogramming. Radial lines in the mass indicator grew large, and swept upward like the second hand on a watch, and shrank to nothing. A fuzzy blue line at the bottom of the sphere grew long, and longer ... Louis pulled the panic switch.

An unfamiliar red giant glared beneath his feet.

"Too fast," Louis snarled. "Too tanj fast!" In any normal ship you only had to check the mass indicator every six hours or so. On the Long Shot you hardly dared blink!

Louis let his eyes drop to the bright, fuzzy red disc and its starry background.

"Tanj! I'm already out of known space!"

He wheeled the ship to see the stars. A foreign sky streamed beneath him. "They're mine, all mine!" Louis chortled, rubbing his hands together. On sabbaticals Louis Wu was his own entertainment.

The red star returned to view, and Louis let it swing another ninety degrees. He'd let his ship get too close to the star, and now he'd have to circle around it.

He was then an hour and a half on his way.

He was three hours on his way when he dropped out again.

The foreign stars didn't bother him. City lights drowned the starlight over most of the Earth; and Louis Wu had been raised a flatlander. He had not seen a star until he was twenty-six. He checked to be sure he was in clear space, he closed covers on instrument panels, and then, finally, he stretched.

"Wow. My eyes feel like boiled onions."

Releasing himself from the crash web, he floated, flexing his left hand. For three hours he had flown with that hand closed on the hyperdrive switch. From elbow to fingertips it felt like a single cramp.

Under the ceiling were rungs for isometric exercises. Louis used them. The kinks left his muscles, but he was still tired.

Mmmm. Wake Teela? It would be nice to talk to her now. Lovely idea there. Next time I go on sabbatical I'll take a woman in stasis. Get the best of both worlds. But he looked and felt like something washed from a flooded graveyard. Unfit for polite company. Oh, well.

He should not have let her board the Long Shot.

Not for his own sake! He was glad enough that she had stayed over those two days. It had been like the story of Louis Wu and Paula Cherenkov, rewritten for a happy ending. Perhaps it had been better.

Yet there was something shallow about Teela. It wasn't only her age. Louis's friends were of all ages, and some of the youngest were very deep indeed. Certainly they suffered most. As if hurting were part of the learning process. Which it probably was.

No, there was a lack of empathy in Teela, a lack of the ability to feel someone else's pain ... Yet she could sense another's pleasure, and respond to pleasure, and create pleasure. She was a marvelous lover: painfully beautiful, almost new to the art, sensuous as a cat and startlingly uninhibited ...

Now of which would qualify her as an explorer.

Teela's life had been happy and dull. Twice she had fallen in love, and twice she had been first to tire of the affair. She had never been in a bad stress situation, never been really hurt. When the time came, when Teela found her first genuine emergency, she would probably panic.

"But I picked her as a lover," said Louis to himself. "Damn Nessus!" If Teela had ever been found in a stress situation, Nessus would have rejected her as unlucky!

It had been a mistake to bring her. She would be a liability. He would spend too much of his time protecting her when he should be protecting himself.

What kinds of stress situations might they face? The puppeteers were good businessmen. They did not overpay. The Long Shot was a fee of unheard-of value. Louis had the chilly suspicion that they would earn it.

"Sufficient unto the day," Louis said to himself.

And he returned to his crash couch and slept for an hour under the sleep headset. Waking, he swung the ship, into line and dropped back into the Blind Spot.

Five-and-a-half hours from Sol he dropped out again.

The puppetwes coordinates defined a small rectangular section of the sky as seen from Sol plus a radial distance in that direction. At that distance, those coordinates defined a cube half a light year on a side. Somewhere in that volume, presumably, was a fleet of ships. Also in that volume, unless instruments had fouled him up, were Lous Wu and the Long Shot.

Somewhere far behind him was a bubble of stars some seventy light years in diameter. Known space was small and very far away.

No point in searching for the fleet. Louis wouldn't know what to look for. He went to wake Nessus.

***

Anchored by his teeth to an exercise rung, Nessus peered over Louis's shoulder. "I need certain stars for reference. Center that green-white giant and throw it on the scope screen ..."

The pilot's cabin was crowded. Louis hunched over the instrument panel, protecting buttons ftm the puppeteer's careless hooves.

"Spectroanalysis ... yes. Now the blue-and-yellow double at two o'clock ...

"I have my bearings. Swing to 348, 72."

"What exactly am I looking for, Nessus? A cluster of fusion flames? No, you'd be using thrusters."

"You must use the scope. When you see it, you will know."

On the scope screen was a sprinkling of anonymous stars. Louis ran the magnification up until ... "Five dots in a regular pentagon. Right?"

"That is our destination."

"Good. Let me check the distance. -- Tanj! That's wrong, Nessus. They're too far away."

No comment.

"Well, they couldn't be ships, even if the distance meter isn't working. The puppeteer fleet must be moving at just under lightspeed. We'd see the motion."

Five dim stars, in a regular pentagon. They were a fifth of a light year distant and quite invisible to the naked eye. At present scope magnificatim they would have to be full sized planets. In the scope screen one was faintly less blue, faintly dimmer than the others.

A Kemplerer rosette. How very odd.

Take three or more equal masses. Set them at the points of an equilateral polygon and give them equal angular velocities about their center of mass.

Then the figure has stable equilibrium. The orbits of the masses may be circular or elliptical. Another mass may occupy the center of mass of the figure, or the center of mass may be empty. It doesn't matter. The figure is stable, like a pair of Trojan points.

The difficulty is that there are several easy ways in which a mass can be captured by a Trojan point. (Consider the Trojan asteroids in Jupiter's orbit.) But there is no easy way for five masses to fall accidentally into a Kemplerer rosette.

"That's wild," Louis murmured. "Unique. Nobody's ever found a Kemplerer rosette ..." He let it trail off.

Here between the stars, what could be lighting those objects?

"Oh, no you don't," said Louis Wu. "You'll never make me believe it. What kind of an idiot do you take me for?"

"What is it that you will not believe?"

"You know tanj well what I won't believe!"

"As you please. That is our destination, Louis. If you will take us within range, a ship will be sent to match our velocity."

The rendezvous ship was a #3 hull, a cylinder with rounded ends and a flattened belly, painted shocking pink, and windowless. There were no engine apertures. The engines must be reactionless: thrusters of the human type, or something more advanced.

On Nessus's orders Louis had let the other ship do the maneuvering. The Long Shot, on fusion drives alone, would have required months to match velocities with the puppeteer "fleet". The puppeteer ship had done it in less than an hour, blinking into existence alongside the Long Shot with her access tube already reaching like a glass snake toward the Long Shot's airlock.

Disembarking would be a problem. There wasn't room to release all the crew from stasis at once. More important, this would be Speaker's last chance to take control of the ship.

"Do you think he will obey my tasp, Louis?"

"No. I think he'll risk one more, shot at stealing the ship. Tell you what we'd better do ..."

They disconnected the instrument panel from the Long Shot's fusion motors. It was nothing that the kzin couldn't fix, given a little time and a touch of the mechanical intuition possessed by any toolmaker. But he would not have the time ...

Louis watched the puppeteer move through the tube. Nessus was carrying Speaker's pressure suit. His eyes were tightly closed; which was a pity, because the view was magnificent.

"Free fall," said Teela when he opened her crash couch. "I don't feel so good. Better guide me, Louis. Wbat's happening? Are we there?"

Louis told her a few details while he guided her to the airlock. She listened, but Louis guessed she was concentrating on the pit of her stomach. She looked acutely uncomfortable. "There'll be gravity on the other ship," he told her.

Her eyes found the tiny rosette where Loius pointed. It was a naked-eye object now, a pentagon of five white stars. She turned with astounded questions in her eyes. The motion spun her semicircular canals; and Louis saw her expression change in the moment before she bolted into the airlock.

Kemplerer rosettes were one thing. Free-falt sickness was something else again. Louis watched her recede against the unfamiliar stars.

As the couch cover opened, Louis said, "Don't do anything startling. I'm armed."

The kzin's orange face did not change expression. "Have we arrived?"

"Yeah. I've disconnected the fusion drive. You'd never reconnect it in time. We're in the sights of a pair of big ruby lasers."

"Suppose I were to escape in hyperdrive? No, my mistake. We must be within a singularity."

"You're in for a shock. We're in five singularities."

"Five? Really? But you lied about the lasers, Louis. Be ashamed."

At any rate, the kzin left his couch peaceably enough. Loins followed with the variable-sword at the ready. In the airlock the kzin stopped, suddenly caught by the sight of an expanding pentagon of stars.

He could hardly have had a better view.

The Long Shot, edging close in hyperdrive, had stopped half a light-hour ahead of the puppeteer "fleet": something less than the average distance between Earth and Jupiter. But the "fleet" was moving at terrible speed, falling just behind its own light, so that the light which reached the Long Shot came from much further away. When the Long Shot stopped the rosette had been too small to see. It had been barely visible when Teela left the lock. Now it was impressively large, and growing at enormous speed.

Five pale blue dots in a pentagon, spreading across the sky, growing, spreading ...

For a flashing instant there were five worlds around the Long Shot. Then they were gone, not fading but gone, their receding light reddened to invisibility. And Speaker-To-Animals held the variable-sword.

"Finagle's eyes!" Louis exploded. "Don't you have any curiosity at all?"

The kzin considered. "I have curiosity, but my pride is much stronger." He retracted the wire blade and handed the variable-sword back to Louis. "A threat is a challenge. Shall we go?"