Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,33
think Nessus is crazy.”
“They’re all crazy.”
“Well, they don’t think so, but that doesn’t make you wrong. Still want to go?”
Teela’s answer was the same uncomprehending look she’d given him when he tried to explain whiplash of the heart. “You still want to go,” Louis confirmed sadly.
“Sure. Who wouldn’t? What are the puppeteers afraid of?”
“I understand that,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “The puppeteers are cowards. But I fail to see why they insist on knowing more than they do. Louis, they have already passed the ringed sun, traveling at nearly lightspeed. Those who built the ring assuredly did not have faster-than-light travel. Thus they can be no danger to the puppeteers, now or ever. I fail to understand our role in this matter.”
“It figures.”
“Must I take that as an insult?”
“No, of course not. It’s just that we keep running up against population problems. Why should you understand?”
“Quite so. Explain, if you please.”
Louis had been scanning the tame jungle for a glimpse of Nessus. “Nessus could probably tell this better. Too bad. Okay, imagine a trillion puppeteers on this world. Can you do it?”
“I can smell them individually. The very concept makes me itch.”
“Now imagine them on the Ringworld. Better, yes?”
“Uurr. Yes. With more than eight-to-the-seventh-power times as much room…But still I fail to understand. Do you suppose the puppeteers plan conquest? But how would they transfer themselves to the ring afterward? They do not trust spacecraft.”
“I don’t know. They don’t make war, either. That’s not the point. The point is, is the Ringworld safe to live on?”
“Urrr.”
“You see? Maybe they’re thinking of building their own Ringworlds. Maybe they expect to find an empty one, out there in the Clouds of Magellan. Not an unreasonable hope, by the way. But it doesn’t matter. They have to know if it’s safe before they do anything.”
“Here comes Nessus.” Teela stood up and moved to the invisible wall. “He looks drunk. Do puppeteers get drunk?”
Nessus wasn’t trotting. He came tippy-toe, circling a four-foot chrome-yellow feather with exaggerated wariness, moving one foot at a time, while his flat heads darted this way and that. He had almost reached the lecture dome when something like a large black butterfly settled on his rump. Nessus screamed like a woman, leapt forward as if clearing a high fence. He landed rolling. When he stopped rolling he remained curled into a ball, with his back arched and his legs folded and his heads and necks tucked between his forelegs.
Louis was running. “Depressive cycle,” he shouted over his shoulder. By luck and memory he found the entrance in the invisible dome. He darted out into the park.
All the flowers smelled like puppeteer. (If all the life of the puppeteer world had the same chemical basis, how could Nessus take nourishment from warm carrot juice?) Louis followed a right-angle zigzag of manicured dusty orange hedge and came upon the puppeteer.
He knelt beside him. “It’s Louis,” he said. “You’re safe.” He reached gently into the tangled mop over the puppeteer’s skull and scratched gently. The puppeteer jerked at the touch, then settled down.
This was a bad one. No need to make the puppeteer face the world just yet. Louis asked, “Was that thing dangerous? The one that landed on you.”
“That? No.” The contralto voice was muffled, but beautifully pure, and without inflection. “It was only a…flower-sniffer.”
“How did it go with those-who-lead?”
Nessus winced. “I won.”
“Fine. What did you win?”
“My right to breed, and a set of mates.”
“Is that what has you so scared?” It wasn’t unlikely, Louis thought Nessus could be the counterpart to a male black widow spider, doomed by love. Then again, he might be a nervous virgin…of either sex, or of any sex…
The puppeteer said, “I might have failed, Louis. I faced them down. I bluffed them.”
“Go on.” Louis was aware that Teela and Speaker-To-Animals had joined them. He continued scratching gently in Nessus’s mane. Nessus had not moved.
The muffled, inflectionless contralto voice said, “Those-who-lead offered me the legal right to reproduce my kind if I survive the voyage we must make. But this was not enough. To become a parent I need mates. Who will willingly mate with a straggly-maned maniac?
“It was necessary to bluff. Find me a mate, I told them, or I will withdraw from the voyage. If I withdraw, so will the kzin, I said. They were enraged.”
“I can believe that. You must have been in the manic state.”
“I worked myself up to it. I threatened them with ruin to their plans, and they capitulated. Some selfless volunteer, I