Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,69

easily have wandered into kzinti instead of human space.

And hadn’t the Puppeteers been studying the kzinti about that time?

“Tanjit! That’s what I get for letting my mind wander. Discipline, that’s what I need.”

But hadn’t they? Sure they had. Nessus had said so. The puppeteers had been researching the kzinti, investigating whether they could be exterminated safely.

Then the Man-Kzin war had solved their problem. An Outsider ship had wandered into human space to sell We Made It a hyperdrive shunt, while the kzinti armada was sweeping inward from the opposite border. Once human warships had the hyperdrive shunt, the kzinti had ceased to be a threat to man and puppeteer alike.

“They wouldn’t dare,” Louis told himself. He was appalled.

“If Speaker ever—” But that possibility was even worse.

“An experiment in selective breeding,” said Louis. “Selective there-ain’t-no-justice breeding. But they used us. They used us!”

“Yes,” said Speaker-To-Animals.

For an instant Louis was sure he had imagined it. Then he saw Speaker’s transparent, miniature image at the top of his dashboard. He had left the intercom open.

“Tanj for torment! You were listening!”

“Not by choice, Louis. I neglected to switch off my intercom.”

“Oh.” Too late, Louis remembered Speaker grinning at him, supposedly out of hearing range, after Nessus had finished describing a starseed lure. Remembered that kzinti ears were made to serve a hunting carnivore. Remembered that the kzinti smile reflex is intended to free the teeth for battle.

“You mentioned selective breeding,” said Speaker.

“I was just—” Louis floundered.

“The puppeteers pitted our species against each other in order to restrict kzinti expansion. They had a starseed lure, Louis. They used it to guide an Outsider ship into your space, to ensure a human victory. An experiment in selective breeding, you called it.”

“Listen, times a very chancy chain of assumptions. If you’ll just calm down—”

“But we both followed that chain.”

“Um.”

“I was in doubt as to whether to broach the subject to Nessus, or whether to wait until we had accomplished our major objective, which is to leave the Ringworld. Now that you know the situation, I have no choice.”

“But—” Louis closed his mouth. The siren would have drowned him out anyway. Speaker had signaled emergency.

The siren was a maniac mechanical scream, a subsonic and supersonic and jarringly painful sound. Nessus appeared above the dash, crying, “Yes? Yes?”

Speaker roared his answer. “You have meddled in a war in the enemy’s favor! Your action is tantamount to a declaration of war against the Patriarchy!”

Teela had cut in in time to hear the last part. Louis caught her eye, shook his head. Don’t mix in.

The puppeteer’s heads reared like snakes to show his astonishment. His voice was without inflection, as usual. “What are you talking about?”

“The First War with Men. Starseed lures. The Outsider hyperdrive shunt.”

A triangular head dipped out of sight. Louis watched a silver flycycle drop out of formation, and knew it was Nessus.

He was not terribly worried. The other two flycycles looked like silver midges, so far away were they, and so far apart. If the fight had taken place on the ground, someone could have been seriously hurt. Up here, what could happen? The puppeteer’s flycycle had to be faster than Speaker’s. Nessus would have seen to that. He would have made certain he could outrun a kzin when necessary.

Except that the puppeteer wasn’t fleeing. He was looping around at Speaker’s ’cycle.

“I do not wish to kill you,” said Speaker-To-Animals.

“If you intend to attack from the air, you should remember that the range of your tasp may be less than the range of the Slaver digging beam. SNARL!”

The kzinti killing yell was blood-freezing. Louis’s muscles locked in position, as with tetanus. He was only dimly aware of the silver dot that looped away from Speaker’s ’cycle.

But he did notice Teela’s look of open-mouthed admiration.

“I do not intend to kill you,” Speaker-To-Animal add more calmly. “But I will have answers, Nessus. We know that your race can guide starseeds.”

“Yes,” said Nessus. His ’cycle was receding to port at improbable speed. The feral calm of the aliens was an illusion. It existed only because Louis Wu could not read expression in an alien face, and because the aliens could not put human expression into the Interworld language.

Nessus was fleeing for his life, but the kzin had not left his place in formation. He said, “I will have answers, Nessus.”

“You have guessed correctly,” said the puppeteer. “Our investigation of safe methods to exterminate the vicious, carnivorous kzinti showed that your species has a high potential, that you could conceivably be