Ringworld

CHAPTER 1 — Louis Wu

In the nighttime heart of Beirut, in one of a row of general-address transfer booths, Louis Wu flicked into reality.

His foot-length queue was as white and shiny as artificial snow. His skin and depilated scalp were chrome yellow; the irises of his eyes were gold; his robe was royal blue with a golden steroptic dragon superimposed. In the instant he appeared, he was smiling widely, showing pearly, perfect, perfectly standard teeth. Smiling and waving. But the smile was already fading, and in a moment it was gone, and the sag of his face was like a rubber mask melting. Louis Wu showed his age.

For a few moments, he watched Beirut stream past him: the people flickering into the booths from unknown places; the crowds flowing past him on foot, now that the slidewalks had been turned off for the night. Then the clocks began to strike twenty-three. Louis Wu straightened his shoulders and stepped out to join the world.

In Resht, where his party was still going full blast, it was already the morning after his birthday. Here in Beirut it was an hour earlier. In a balmy outdoor restaurant Louis bought rounds of raki and encouraged the singing of songs in Arabic and Interworld. He left before midnight for Budapest.

Had they realized yet that he had walked out on his own party? They would assume that a woman had gone with him, that he would be back in a couple of hours. But Louis Wu had gone alone, jumping ahead of the midnight line, hotly pursued by the new day. Twenty-four hours was not long enough for a man's two hundredth birthday.

They could get along without him. Louis's friends could take care of themselves. In this respect, Louis's standards were inflexible.

In Budapest were wine and athletic dances, natives who tolerated him as a tourist with money, tourists who thought he was a wealthy native. He danced the dances and he drank the wines, and he left before midnight.

In Munich he walked.

The air was warm and clean; it cleared some of the fumes from his head. He walked the brightly lighted slidewalks, adding his own pace to their ten-miles-per-hour speed. It occurred to him then that every city in the world had slidewalks, and that they all moved at ten miles per hour.

The thought was intolerable. Not new; just intolerable. Louis Wu saw how thoroughly Munich resembled Cairo and Resht … and San Francisco and Topeka and London and Amsterdam. The stores along the slidewalks sold the same products in all the cities of the world. These citizens who passed him tonight looked all alike, dressed all allke. Not Americans or Germans or Egyptlans, but mere flatlanders.

In three-and-a-half centuries the transfer booths had done this to the infinite variety of Earth. They covered the world in a net of instantaneous travel. The difference between Moskva and Sidney was a moment of time and a tenth-star coin. Inevitably the cities had blended over the centuries, until placenames were only relics of the past. San Francisco and San Diego were the northern and southern ends of one sprawling coastal city. But how many people knew which end was which? Tanj few, these days.

Pessimistic thinking, for a man's two hundredth birthday.

But the blending of the cities was real. Louis had watched it happen. All the irrationalities of place and time and custom, blending into one big rationality of City, worldwide, like a dull gray paste. Did anyone today speak Deutsche, English, Francais, Espanol? Everyone spoke Interworld. Style in body paints changed all at once, all over the world, in one monstrous surge.

Time for another sabbatical? Into the unknown, alone in a singleship, with his skin and eyes and hair their own color, a beard growing randomly over his face …

"Nuts," said Louis to himself. "I just got back from a sabbatical." Twenty years ago.

But it was wearing on toward midnight. Louis Wu found a transfer booth, inserted his credit card in the slot and dialed for Sevilla.

He emerged in a sunlit room.

"What the tanj?" he wondered, blinking. The transfer booth must have blown its zap. In Sevilla there should have been no sunlight. Louis Wu turned to dial again, then turned back and stared.

He was in a thoroughly anonymous hotel room: a setting prosaic enough to make its occupant doubly shocking.

Facing him from the middle of the room was something neither human nor humanoid. It stood on three legs, and it regarded Louis Wu from two directions, from two flat heads mounted on flexible, slender necks. Over most of its startling frame, the skin was white and glovesoft; but a thick, coarse brown mane ran from between the beasts necks, back along its spine, to cover the complex-looking hip joint of the hind leg. The two forelegs were set wide apart, so that the beast's small, clawed hooves formed almost an equilateral triangle.

Louis guessed that the thing was an alien animal. In those flat heads there would be no room for brains. But he noticed the hump that rose between the bases of the necks, where the mane became a thick protective mop … and a memory floated up from eighteen decades behind him.

This was a puppeteer, a Pierson's puppeteer. Its brain and skull were under the hump. It was not an animal; it was at least as intelligent as a man. And its eyes, one to a head in deep bone sockets, stared fixedly at Louis Wu from two directions.

Louis tried the door. Locked.

He was locked out, not in. He could dial and vanish. But it never occurred to him. One does not meet a Pierson's puppeteer every day. The species had been gone from known space for longer than Louis Wu had been alive.

Louis said, "Can I help you?"

"You can," said the alien …

… in a voice to spark adolescent dreams. Had Louis visualized a woman to go with that voice, she would have been Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Marilyn Monroe, and Lorelei Huntz, rolled into one.

"Tanj!" The curse seemed more than usually appropriate. There Ain't No Justice! That such a voice should belong to a two-headed alien of indeterminate sex!

"Be not frightened," said the alien. "Know that you can escape if need be."

"In college there were pictures of things like you. You've been gone a long time … or so we thought."

"When my species fled known space, I was not among them," the puppeteer replied. "I remained in known space, for my species had need of me here."

"Where have you been hiding? And where on Earth are we?"

"That need not concern you. Are you Louis Wu MMGREWPLH?"

"You knew that? You were after me, in particular?"

"Yes. We found it possible to manipulate this world's network of transfer booths."

It could be done, Louis realized. It would take a fortune in bribe money, but it could be done. But — "Why?"

"That will take some explanation -"

"Aren't you going to let me out of here?"

The Puppeteer considered. "I suppose I must. First you should know that I have protection. My armament would stop you should you attack me."

Louis Wu made a sound of disgust. "Why would I do that?"

The puppeteer made no answer.

"Now I remember. You're cowards. Your whole ethical system is based on cowardice."

"Inaccurate as it is, that judgment will serve us."

"Well, it could be worse," Louis conceded. Every sentient species had its quirks. Surely the puppeteer would be easier to deal with than the racially paranoid Trinocs, or the kzinti with their hair-trigger killer instincts, or the sessile Grogs with their … disturbing substitute for hands.

The sight of the puppeteer had jarred loose a whole atticfull of dusty memories. Mixed with data on the puppeteers and their commercial empire, their interactions with humanity, their sudden and shocking disappearance — mixed with these were the taste of Louies first tobacco cigarette, the feel of typewriter keys under clumsy, untrained fingers, lists of Interworld vocabulary to be memorized, the sound and taste of English, the uncertainties and embarrassments of extreme youth. He'd studied the puppeteers during a college history course, then forgotten about them for one hundred and eighty years. Incredible, that a man's mind could retain so much!

"I'll stay in here," he told the puppeteer, "if it makes you more comfortable."

"No. We must meet."

Muscles bunched and twitched beneath its creamy skin as the puppeteer nerved itself. Then the door to the transfer booth clicked open. Louis Wu stepped into the room.

The puppeteer backed away a few paces.

Louis dropped into a chair, more for the puppeteer's comfort than for his own. He would look more harmless sitting down. The chair was of standard make, a self-adjusting masseur chair, strictly for humans. Louis noticed a faint scent now, reminiscent both of a spice shelf and of a chemistry set, more pleasant than othcrwise.

The alien rested on its folded hind leg. "Yon wonder wby I brought you here. This will take some explanation. What do you know of my species?"

"It's been a long time since college. Yon had a comniercial empire once, didn't you? What we like to call known space was just a part of it. We kww 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 Masellan. But some of us remained, in case the puppeteer migmtion showd 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, GO 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 what?"

"The Jinxians."

"Oh. It takes one to hold the paint sprayer, and two to shake the skyscraper up and down. I heard that one in kindergarten. All the dead wood of my life, all the old jokes, all in one huge house. I couldn't take it."

"You are a restless man, Louis Wu. Your sabbaticals — it was you who originated the custom, was it not?"

"I don't remember where it started. It caught on pretty well. Most of my friends do it now."

"But not as often as you. Every forty years or thereabouts, you tire of human companionship. Then you leave the worlds of men and strike for the edge of known space. You remain outside known space, all alone in a singleship, until your need for company reasserts itself. You returned from your last sabbatical, your fourth, twenty years ago.

"You are restless, Louis Wu. On each of the worlds of human space, you have lived enough years to be known as a native. Tonight you left your own birthday party. Are you becoming restless again?"

"That would be my problem, wouldn't it?"

"Yes. My problem is one of recruiting only. Yon would be a good choice as a member of my exploration team. You take risks, but you calculate them first. You are not afraid to be alone with yourself. You are cautious enough and clever enough to be still alive after two hundred years. Because you have not neglected your medical needs, your physique is that of a man of twenty. Lastly, and most important, you seem actually to enjoy the company of aliens."

"Sure." Louis knew a few xenophobes, and regarded them as dolts. Life got awfully boring with only humans to talk to.

"But you would not wish to jump blind. Louis Wu, is it not enough that I, a puppeteer, will be with you? What could you possibly fear that I would not fear first? The intelligent caution of my race is proverbial."

"So it is," said Louis. In point of fact, he was hooked. Xenophilia and restlessness and curiosity combined: wherever the puppeteer was going, Louis Wu was going too. But he wanted to hear more.

And his bargaining position was excellent. An alien would not live in such a room by choice. This ordinarylooking hotel room, this reassuringly normal room from the viewpoint of a man of Earth, must have been furnished especially for recruiting.

"You won't tell me what it is you intend to explore," said Louis. "Will you tell me where it is?"

"It is two hundred light years from here in the direction of the Lesser Cloud."

"But it would take us nearly two years to get there at hyperdrive speeds."

"No. We have a ship which will travel considerably faster than a conventional hyperdrive craft. It will cover a light year in five-fourths of a minute."

Louis opened his mouth, but nothing came out. One and a quarter minutes?

"This should not surprise you, Louis Wu. How else could we have sent an agent to the galactic core, to learn of the chain reaction of novae? You should have deduced the existence of such a ship. If my mission is successful, I plan to turn the ship over to my crew, with blueprints with which to build more.

"This ship, then, is your … fee, salary, what have you. You may observe its flight characteristics when we join the puppeteer migration. There you will learn what it is that we propose to explore."

Join the puppeteer ndgration … "Count me in," said Louis Wu. The chance to see an entire sentient species on the move! Huge ships carrying thousands or millions of puppeteers each, whole working ecologies …

"Good." The puppeteer stood up. "Our crew will number four. We go to choose our third member now." And he trotted into the transfer booth.

Louis slipped the cryptic holo into his pocket, and followed. In the booth he tried to read the number on the dial; for it would have told him where in the world he was. But the puppeteer dialed too fast, and they were gone.

Louis Wu followed the puppeteer out of the booth and into the dim, luxurious interior of a restaurant. He recognized the place by the black-and-gold decor and the space-wasteful configuration of horseshoe booths. Krushenkos, in New York.

Incredulous whispers followed in the path of the puppeteer. A human headwaiter, imperturbable as a robot, led them to a table. One of the chairs had been removed at that table and replaced by a big square pillow, which the alien placed between hip and hind hoof as it sat down.

"You were expected," Louis deduced.

"Yes. I called ahead. Krushenkos is accustomed to serving alien guests."

Now Louis noticed other alien diners: four kzinti at the next table, and a kdatlyno halfway across the room. It figured, with the Umted Nations Building so close. Louis dialed for a tequila sour and took it as it arrived. "This was a good thought," he said. "I'm half starved."

"We did not come to eat. We came to recruit our third member."

"Oh? In a restaurant?"

The puppeteer raised its voice to answer, but what it said was not an answer. "You never met my kzin, Kchula-Rrit? I keep it as a pet."

Louies tequila tried to go down the wrong way. At the table behind the puppeteer, four walls of orange far were each and every one a kzin; and as the puppeteer spoke, they all turned with their needle teeth bared. It looked like a smile, but on a kzin that rictus is not a smile.

The -Rrit name belongs to the family of the Patriarch of Kzin. Louis, downing the rest of his drink, decided that it didn't matter The insult would have been mortal regardless, and you could only be eaten once.

The nearest kzin stood up.

Rich orange fur, with black markings over the eyes, covered what might have been a very fat tabby cat eight feet tall. The fat was muscle, smooth and powerful and oddly arranged over an equally odd skeleton. On hands like black leather gloves, sharpened and polished claws slid out of their sheaths.

A quarter of a ton of sentient carnivore stooped over the puppeteer and said, "Tell me now, why do you think that you can insult the Patriarch of Kzin and live?"

The puppeteer answered immediately, and without a tremor in its voice. "It was I who, on a world which circles Beta Lyrae, kicked a kzin called Chuft-Captain in the belly with my hind hoof, breaking three struts of his endoskeletal structure. I have need of a kzin of courage."

"Continue," said the kzin of the black eyes. Despite limitations imposed by the structure of his mouth, the kzin's Interworld was excellent. But his voice showed no sign of the rage he must have felt. For all the emotion shown by kzinti or puppeteer, Louis might have been watching some time-dulled ritual.

But the meat set before the kzinti was blood-raw and steaming; it had been flash-heated to body temperature just before serving. And all of the kzinti were smiling.

"This human and I," said the puppeteer, "will explore a place such as no kzin has ever dreamed. We will need a kzin in our crew. Dare a kzin follow where a puppeteer leads?"

"It has been said that puppeteers were plant-eaters, that they would lead away from battle and not toward it."

"You shall judge. Your fee, if you survive, will be the plans for a new and valuable type of spacecraft, plus a model of the ship itself. You may consider this fee to be extreme hazard pay."

The puppeteer, Louis thought, was sparing no pains to insult the kzinti. One never offers a kzin hazard pay. The kzin is not supposed to have noticed the danger!

But the kzin's only remark was, "I accept."

The other three kzinti snarled at him.

The first kzin snarled back.

One kzin alone sounded like a catfight. Four kzinti in heated argument sounded like a major feline war, with atonics. Sonic deadeners went on automatically in the restaurant, and the snarls became remote, but they went on.

Louis ordered another drink. Considering what he knew of kzinti history, these four must have remarkable restraint. The puppeteer still lived.

The argument died away, and the four kzinti turned back. He of the black eye-markings said, "What is your name?"

"I take the human name of Nessus," said the puppeteer. "My true name is -" Orchestral music flowed for an instant from the puppeteer's remarkable throats.

"Well and good, Nessus. You must understand that we four constitute a kzinti embassy to Earth. This is Harch, that is Ftanss, he with the yellow striping is Hroth. I, being only an apprentice and a kzin of low family, bear no name. I am styled by my profession: Speaker-To-Animals."

Louis bridled.

"Our problem is that we are needed here. Delicate negotiations … but these are not your concern. It has been decided that I alone can be replaced. If your new kind of ship proves worth having, I will join you. Otherwise I must prove my courage another way."

"Satisfactory," said the puppeteer, and rose.

Louis remained seated. He asked, "What is the kzinti form of your title?"

"In the Hero's Tongue -" The kzin snarled on a rising note.

"Then why didn't you give that as your title? Was it a deliberate insult?"

"Yes," said Speaker-To-Animals. "I was angered."

Accustomed to his own standards of tact, Louis had expected the kzin to lie. Then Louis would have pretended to believe him, and the kzin would have been more polite in future … too late to back out now. Louis hesitated a fraction of a second before he said, "And what is the custom?"

"We must fight bare-handed — as soon as you deliver the challenge. Or one of us must apologize."

Louis stood up. He was committing suicide; but he'd known tanj well what the custom was. "I challenge you," he said. "Tooth against tooth, claw against fingernail, since we cannot share a universe in peace."

Without lifting his head, the kzin who had been called Hroth spoke up. "I must apologize for my comrade, Speaker-To-Animals."

Louis said, "Huh?"

"This is my function," said the kzin with the yellow striping. "To be found in situations where one must apologize or fight is kzinti nature. We know what happens when we fight. Today our numbers are less than an eighth of what they were when kzin first met man. Our colony worlds are your colony worlds, our slave species are freed and taught human technology and human ethics. When we must apologize or fight, it is my function to apologize."

Louis sat down. It seemed that he would live. He said, "I wouldn't have your job for anything."

"Obviously not, if you would fight a kzin barehanded. But the Patriarch judges me useless for any other purpose. My intelligence is low, my health is bad, my coordination terrible. How else can I keep my name?"

Louis sipped at his drink and wished for someone to change the subject. He found the humble kzin embarrassing.

"Let us eat," said the one called Speaker-To-Animals. "Unless our mission is urgent, Nessus."

"Not at all. Our crew is not yet complete. My colleagues will call me when they have located a qualified fourth crewman. By all means let us eat."

Speaker-To-Animals said one thing more before he turned back to his table. "Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap."

"You scream and you leap," said Louis. "Great."