anything concerning starseed lures and puppeteer breeding plans. Can I persuade you to keep silence?”
“Right.”
“Is this what you meant by playing god to my species?”
“That, and one more thing,” said Louis. “The Long Shot. Do you still want to steal it?”
“Perhaps,” said the kzin.
“You can’t do it,” said Louis. “But let’s assume you could. Then what?”
“Then the Patriarchy would have the second quantum hyperdrive.”
“And?”
Prill seemed to be aware that something crucial was happening. She watched them as if ready to stop a fight.
“Soon we would have warships capable of crossing a light year in one-and-one-quarter minutes. We would dominate known space, enslave every species within our reach.”
“And then?”
“Then it ends. This is precisely our ambition, Louis.”
“No. You’d keep conquering. With a drive that good, you’d move outward in all directions, spreading thin, taking every world you found. You’d conquer more than you could hold…and in all that expanded space you’d find something really dangerous. The puppeteer fleet. Another Ringworld, but at the height of its power. Another Slaver race just starting its expansion. Bandersnatchi with hands, grogs with feet, kdatlyno with guns.”
“Scare images.”
“You’ve seen the Ringworld. You’ve seen the puppeteer worlds. There must be more, in the space you could reach with the puppeteer hyperdrive.”
The kzin was silent.
“Take your time” said Louis. “Think it through. You can’t take the Long Shot anyway. You’d kill us all if you tried it.”
The next day the Improbable crossed a long, straight meteoric furrow. They turned to antispinward, directly toward Fist-of-God.
Fist-of-God Mountain had grown large without coming near. Bigger than any asteroid, roughly conical, she had the look of a snow-capped mountain swollen to nightmare size. The nightmare continued, for Fist-of-God continued to swell.
“I don’t understand,” said Prill. She was puzzled and upset. “This formation is not known to me. Why was it built? At the rim there are mountains as high, as decorative, and more useful, for they hold back the air.”
“That’s what I thought,” Louis Wu said. And he would say no more.
That day they saw a small glass bottle resting at the end of the meteoric gouge they had been following.
The Liar was as they had left it: on its back on a frictionless surface. Mentally Louis postponed the celebration. They were not home yet.
In the end Prill had to hover the Improbable so that Louis could cross from the landing ramp. He found controls that would open both doors of the airlock at the same time. But air murmured out around them all the time they were transferring Nessus’ body. They could not reduce the cabin pressure without Nessus, and Nessus was, to all appearances, dead.
But they got him into the autodoc anyway. It was a puppeteer-shaped coffin, form-fitted to Nessus himself, and bulky. Puppeteer surgeons and mechanics must have intended that it should handle any conceivable circumstance. But had they thought of decapitation?
They had. There were two heads in there, and two more with necks attached, and enough organs and body parts to make several complete puppeteers. Grown from Nessus himself, probably; the faces on the heads looked familiar.
Prill came aboard, and landed on her head. Rarely had Louis seen anyone so startled. He had never thought to tell her about induced gravity. Her face showed nothing as she stood up, but her posture—She was awed to silence.
In that ghostly silence of homecoming, Louis Wu suddenly screamed like a banshee.
“Coffeeee!” he yelled. And, “Hot water!” He charged into the stateroom he had shared with Teela Brown. A moment later he put his head out and screamed, “Prill!”
Prill went.
She hated coffee. She thought Louis must be insane to swallow the bitter stuff, and she told him so.
The shower was a long lost, badly missed luxury, once Louis explained the controls.
She went wild over the sleeping plates.
Speaker was celebrating the homecoming in his own fashion. Louis didn’t know everything about the kzin’s stateroom. He did know that the kzin was eating his head off.
“Meat!” Speaker exulted. “I was not happy eating long-dead meat.”
“That stuff you’re eating now is reconstituted.”
“Yes, but it tastes freshly killed!”
That night Prill retired to a couch in the lounge. She appreciated the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. But Louis Wu slept in free fall for the first time in three months.
He slept ten hours, and woke feeling like a tiger. A half-disc of sun flamed beneath his feet.
Back aboard the Improbable, he used the flashlight-laser to free the knobbed end of the shadow square. When he finished, it still had some fused electrosetting plastic attached.
He did