Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,6

she was very pretty.

“I had to ask you,” she said breathlessly. “How did you get a Trinoc to come?”

“Don’t tell me he’s still here.”

“Oh, no. His air was running out and he had to go home.”

“A little white lie,” Louis informed her. “A Trinoc airmaker lasts for weeks. Well, if you really want to know, that particular Trinoc was once my guest and prisoner for a couple of weeks. His ship and crew got themselves killed at the edge of known space, and I had to ferry him to Margrave so they could set up an environment box for him.”

The girl’s eyes registered delighted wonder. Louis found it pleasantly strange that they were on a level with his own eyes; for Teela Brown’s fragile beauty made her look smaller than she really was. Her eyes shifted over Louis’s shoulder and widened even further. Louis grinned as he turned.

Nessus the puppeteer trotted out of the transfer booth.

Louis had thought of this as they were leaving Krushenko’s. He had been trying to persuade Nessus to tell them something of their proposed destination. But the puppeteer was afraid of spy beams.

“Then come to my place,” Louis had suggested.

“But your guests!”

“Not in my office. And my office is absolutely bugproof. Besides, think of the hit you’ll make at the party! Assuming everyone hasn’t gone home by now.”

The impact was all Louis could have desired. The tap-tap-tap of the puppeteer’s hooves was suddenly the only sound in the room. Behind him, Speaker-To-Animals flickered into existence. The kzin considered the sea of human faces surrounding the booth. Then, slowly, he bared his teeth.

Someone poured half his drink into a potted palm. The grand gesture. From one of the branches a Gummidgy orchid-thing chattered angrily. People edged away from the transfer booth. There were comments: “You’re okay. I see them too.” “Sober pills? Let me look in my sporan.” “Throws a hell of a party, doesn’t he?” “Good old Louis.” “What did you call that thing?”

They didn’t know what to make of Nessus. Mostly they ignored the puppeteer; they were afraid to comment on him, afraid of sounding like fools. They reacted even more curiously to Speaker-To-Animals. Once mankind’s most dangerous enemy, the kzin was being treated with awed deference, like some kind of hero.

“Follow me,” Louis told the puppeteer. With luck the kzin would follow them both. “Excuse us,” he bellowed, and pushed his way into the throng. In response to various excited and/or puzzled questions he merely grinned secretively.

Safely in his office, Louis barred the door and turned on the bugproofing set. “Okay. Who needs refreshment?”

“If you can heat some bourbon, I can drink it,” said the kzin. “If you cannot heat it, I can still drink it.”

“Nessus?”

“Any kind of vegetable juice will serve. Have you warm carrot juice?”

“Gah,” said Louis; but he instructed the bar, which produced bulbs of warm carrot juice.

While Nessus rested on its folded hind leg, the kzin dropped heavily onto an inflated hassock. Under his weight it should have exploded like any lesser balloon. Man’s second oldest enemy looked curious and ridiculous balanced on a hassock too small for him.

The Man-Kzin wars had been numerous and terrible. Had the kzinti won the first of these, mankind would have been a slave and a meat animal for the rest of eternity. But the kzinti had suffered in the wars which followed. They tended to attack before they were ready. They had little concept of patience, and no concept of mercy or of limited war. Each war had cost them a respectable chunk of population and the punitive confiscation of a couple of kzinti worlds.

For two hundred and fifty years the kzinti had not attacked human space. They had nothing to attack with. For two hundred and fifty years men had not attacked the kzinti worlds; and no kzin could understand it. Men confused them terribly.

They were rough and they were tough, and Nessus, an avowed coward, had insulted four fully-grown kzinti in a public restaurant.

“Tell me again,” said Louis, “about a puppeteer’s proverbial caution. I forget.”

“Perhaps I was not strictly fair with you, Louis. My species judges me mad.”

“Oh, fine.” Louis sucked at the bulb an anonymous donor had handed him. It held vodka and droobleberry juice and shaved ice.

The kzin’s tail lashed restlessly. “Why should we ride with an avowed maniac? You must be madder than most, to wish to ride with a kzin.”

“You alarm yourselves too easily,” said Nessus, in its soft, persuasive, unbearably sensual voice. “Men have never