Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,28

One would expect a kzin to attack what he fears.”

The conversation was getting sticky. With the Long Shot millions of miles in their wake, and known space hundreds of light years away, they were all very much within the power of the puppeteers. If the puppeteers found reason to fear them—

Change the subject, fast! Louis opened his mouth.

“Hey,” said Teela. “You people keep talking about Kemplerer rosettes. What’s a Kemplerer rosette?”

And both aliens started to answer, while Louis wondered why he had thought Teela shallow.

C H A P T E R 6

Christmas Ribbon

“The joke’s on me,” said Louis Wu. “Now I know where to find the puppeteer world. Very nice, Nessus. You kept your promise.”

“I told you that you would find the information more surprising than useful.”

“A good joke.” said the kzin. “Your sense of humor surprises me, Nessus.”

Below, a tiny eel-shaped island surrounded by a black sea. The island rose like a fire salamander, and Louis thought he could pick out tall, slender buildings. Obviously aliens would not be trusted on the mainland.

“We do not joke,” said Nessus. “My species has no sense of humor.”

“Strange. I would have thought that humor was an aspect of intelligence.”

“No. Humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism.”

“All the same—”

“Speaker, no sapient being ever interrupts a defense mechanism.”

As the ship dropped the lights resolved: sun-panels, along street levels, windows in buildings, light sources, in parking areas. In a last instant Louis glimpsed buildings slender as rapier blades, miles tall. Then the city flashed up to engulf them, and they were down.

Down in a parkland of colorful alien plants.

Nobody moved.

Puppeteers were the second most harmless-looking sentients in known space. They were too shy, too small, too weird to seem dangerous. They were merely funny.

But suddenly Nessus was a member of his species; and his species was mightier than men had dreamed. The mad puppeteer sat quite still, his necks bobbing to observe his chosen underlings. There was nothing funny about Nessus. His race moved worlds, five at a time.

So that Teela’s giggle was a shocking sound.

“I was just thinking,” she explained. “The only way to keep from having too many little puppeteers is no sex at all. Right, Nessus?”

“Yes.”

She giggled again. “No wonder puppeteers don’t have a sense of humor.”

Through a park that was too regular, too symmetrical, too well tamed, they followed a floating blue light.

The air was thick with the spicy-chemical smell of puppeteer. That smell was everywhere. It had been strong and artificial in the one-room life support system of the transfer ship. It had not diminished when the airlock opened. A trillion puppeteers had flavored the air of this world, and for all of eternity it would smell of puppeteer.

Nessus danced; his small clawed hooves seemed barely to touch the resilient surface of the walk. The kzin glided, catlike, his naked pink tail whipping rhythmically back and forth. The sound of the puppeteer’s walk was a tap dance in three-four time. From the kzin came not the slightest whisper of motion.

Teela’s walk was almost as silent. Her walk always looked clumsy; but it wasn’t. She never stumbled, never bumped anything. Louis, then, was the least graceful of the four.

But why should Louis Wu be graceful? An altered ape, whom evolution had never entirely adapted to walking on flat ground. For millions of years his fathers had walked on all fours where they had to, had used the trees where they could.

The Pleiocene had ended that, with millions of years of drought. The forests had left Louis Wu’s ancestors behind, high and dry and starving. In desperation they had eaten meat. They had done better after learning the secret of the antelope’s thighbone, whose double-knobbed shoulder joint had left its mark in so many fossil skulls.

Now, on feet still equipped with vestigial fingers, Louis Wu and Teela Brown walked with aliens.

Aliens? They were all aliens here, even mad, exiled Nessus, with his brown and unkempt mane and his restless, searching heads. Speaker, too, was uneasy. His eyes, within their black spectacle markings, searched the alien vegetation for things with poison stings or razor teeth. Instinct, probably. Puppeteers would not permit dangerous beasts in their parks.

They came upon a dome that glowed like a huge, half-buried pearl. Then the floating light split in two.

“I must leave you,” said Nessus. And Louis saw that the puppeteer was terrified.

“I go to confront those-who-lead.” He spoke low and urgently. “Speaker, tell me quickly. Should I not return, would you seek me out to slay me