Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,2
We know the Trinocs bought from you, and we didn’t meet the Trinocs until twenty years ago.”
“Yes, we dealt with the Trinocs. Largely through robots, as I recall.”
“You had a business empire thousands of years old at least, and scores of light years across, at least. And then you left, all of you. You left it all behind. Why?”
“Can this have been forgotten? We fled the explosion of the galactic core!”
“I know about that.” Dimly, Louis even remembered that the chain reaction of novae in the hub of the galaxy had actually been discovered by aliens. “But why run now? The Core suns went nova ten thousand years ago. The blast won’t reach here for another twenty thousand years.”
“Humans,” said the puppeteer, “should not be allowed to run loose. You will only harm yourselves. Do you not see the danger? Radiation along the wave front will make this entire region of the galaxy uninhabitable!”
“Twenty thousand years is a long time.”
“Extermination in twenty thousand years is extermination nonetheless. My species fled in the direction of the Clouds of Magellan. But some of us remained, in case the puppeteer migration should meet danger. Now it has.”
“Oh? What kind of danger?”
“I am not yet free to answer that question. But you may look at this.” The puppeteer reached for something on a table.
And Louis, who had been wondering where the puppeteer kept its hands, saw that the puppeteer’s mouths were its hands.
Good hands, too, he realized, as the puppeteer reached gingerly across to hand Louis a holo print. The puppeteer’s loose, robbery lips extended inches beyond its teeth. They were as dry as human fingers and they were rimmed with little fingerlike knobs. Behind the square teeth, Louis caught a glimpse of a flickering, forking tongue.
He took the holo print and looked into it.
At first it made no sense at all, but he kept looking, waiting for it to resolve. There was a small, intensely white disc that might have been a sun, G0 or K9 or K8, with a shallow chord sliced off along a straight black edge. But the blazing object could not have been a sun. Partially behind it, against a space-black background, was a strip of sky blue. The blue strip was perfectly straight, sharp-edged, solid, and artificial, and wider than the lighted disc.
“Looks like a star with a hoop around it,” said Louis. “What is it?”
“You may keep it to study, if you wish. I can now tell you the reason I brought you here. I propose to form an exploration team of four members, including myself and including you.”
“To explore what?”
“I am not yet at liberty to tell you that.”
“Oh, come now. I’d have to be off my head to jump as blind as that.”
“Happy two hundredth birthday,” said the puppeteer.
“Thanks,” Louis said, bewildered.
“Why did you leave your own birthday party?”
“That’s not your concern.”
“But it is. Indulge me, Louis Wu. Why did you leave your own birthday party?”
“I just decided that twenty-four hours weren’t enough for a two hundredth birthday. So I went ahead and lengthened it by moving ahead of the midnight line. As an alien you wouldn’t understand—”
“You were elated, then, at how well things were going?”
“No, not exactly. No…”
Not elated, Louis remembered. Quite the contrary. Though the party had gone well enough.
He’d started it at one minute past midnight that morning. Why not. His friends were in every time band. There was no reason to waste a single minute of this day. There were sleep sets all over the house for fast, deep cat naps. For those who hated to miss anything there were wakeup drugs, some with interesting side effects, others with none.
There were guests Louts hadn’t seen in a hundred years, and others he met daily. Some had been Louis Wu’s deadly enemies, long ago. There were women he had forgotten entirely, so that he was repeatedly amazed at how his taste had changed.
Predictably, too many hours of his birthday were spent performing introductions. The lists of names to be memorized beforehand! Too many friends had become strangers.
And a few minutes before midnight, Louis Wu had walked into a transfer booth, dialed, and disappeared.
“I was bored stiff,” said Louis Wu. “‘Tell us about your last sabbatical, Louis.’ ‘But how can you stand to be that much alone, Louis? How clever of you to invite the Trinoc ambassador, Louis! Long time no see, Louis.’ ‘Hey, Louis, why does it take three Jinxians to paint a skyscraper?’”
“Why does it?”
“Why does what?”
“The Jinxians.”
“Oh. It takes