Larry Niven: The Ringworld Engineers

Louis wrenched himself free of the urge to gape and stare. He turned and went inside, in no obvious haste. He locked his balcony doors and reset the alarms, and then he dug his droud out of its hiding place in the table. His hands trembled.

It was Speaker-To-Animals he had seen, for the first time in twenty years. Speaker-To-Animals, once an ambassador to human space; Speaker, who with Louis Wu and a Pierson’s puppeteer and a very odd human girl had explored a minuscule section of the enormous structure called the Ringworld; who had earned his full name from the Patriarch of Kzin for the treasure he brought back. You could die, now, for calling him by a profession, but what was his new name? Something that started with a cough, like a German ch, or like the warning cough a lion might give: Chmeee , that was it. But what could he be doing here? With a true name and land and a harem already mostly pregnant, Chmeee had had no intention of leaving Kzin ever again. The idea of his playing tourist on an annexed human world was ridiculous.

Could he possibly know that Louis Wu was in the canyon?

He had to get out, now. Up the canyon wall to his ship.

And that was why Louis Wu was playing with the timer in his droud, squinting as he used tiny instruments on tiny settings. His hands trembled irritatingly… The timing would have to be changed anyway, now that he was leaving Canyon’s twenty-seven-hour day. He knew his target. There was another world in human space whose surface was largely barren moonscape. He could land a ship undetected in the vacuum at the West End of Jinx… and set the timing on the droud now… and take a few hours under the wire now to nerve himself. It all made perfect sense. He gave himself two hours.

Almost two hours passed before the next invader came. Rapt in the joy of the wire, Louis would not have been disturbed in any case. He found the invader something of a relief.

The creature stood solidly braced on a single hind leg and two wide-spaced forelegs. Between the shoulders rose a thick hump: the braincase, covered by a rich golden mane curled into ringlets and glittering with jewels. Two long, sinuous necks rose from either side of the braincase, ending in flat heads. Those loose-lipped mouths had served the puppeteers as hands for all of their history. One mouth clutched a stunner of human make, a long, forked tongue curled around the trigger.

Louis Wu had not seen a Pierson’s puppeteer in twenty-two years. He thought it quite lovely.

And it had appeared from nowhere. This time Louis had seen it blink into existence in the middle of his yellow grass rug. He had worried needlessly; the ARM had not been involved at all. The problem of the Canyonite burglars was solved.

“Stepping discs!” Louis cried joyfully. He launched himself at the alien. This would be easy, puppeteers were cowards—

The stunner glowed orange. Louis Wu spilled onto the carpet, every muscle limp. His heart labored. Black spots formed before his eyes.

The puppeteer stepped delicately around the two dead men. It looked down at him from two directions; and then it reached for him. Two sets of flat-topped teeth clamped on his wrists, not hard enough to hurt. The puppeteer dragged him backward across the rug and set him down.

The apartment vanished.

It could not be said that Louis Wu was worried. He felt no such unpleasant sensation. Dispassionately (for the uniform joy in the wire allows an abstraction of thought normally impossible to mortals) he was readjusting his world picture.

He had seen the system of stepping discs on the Pierson’s puppeteers’ home world. It was an open teleportation system, far superior to the closed transfer booths used on the human worlds.

Apparently a puppeteer had had stepping discs installed in Louis’s apartment; had sent two Canyonites to fetch him; when that failed, had come himself. The puppeteers must want him badly.

That was doubly reassuring. The ARM was not involved at all. And puppeteers had a million years of tradition to back their philosophy of enlightened cowardice. They could hardly want his life; they could have had it more cheaply, with less risk. He should find it easy to cow them.

He was still lying on a patch of yellow grass and binding mat. It must have been sitting on the stepping disc. There was a huge orange fur pillow across the room from him… no, it was a kzin slumped with his eyes open, asleep or paralyzed or dead — and in fact it was Speaker. Louis was glad to see him.

They were in a spacecraft, a General Products hull. Beyond the transparent walls space-bright sunlight glared off sharp-edged lunar rocks. A patch of green-and-violet lichen told him he was still on Canyon.

But he wasn’t worried.

The puppeteer released his wrists. Ornaments glittered in its mane: not natural jewels, but something like black opals. One flat brainless head bent and pulled the droud out of the plug in Louis’s skull. The puppeteer stepped onto a rectangular plate and vanished, with the droud.

The kzin’s eyes had been watching him for some time. Now the paralyzed kzin cleared his throat experimentally and rumbled, “Loo-ee Woo.”

“Uh,” said Louis. He had been thinking of killing himself, but there was no way. He could barely wiggle his fingers.

“Louis, urr you wirehead?”

“Ungle,” said Louis, to buy time. It worked. The kzin gave up the effort. And Louis — whose only real concern was for his missing droud — Louis followed an old reflex. He looked around him to learn just how bad his situation was.

The hexagon of indoor grass under him marked the stepping-disc receiver. A black circle beyond would be the transmitter. Otherwise the floor was transparent, as were the portside hull and the aft wall.

The hyperdrive shunt ran nearly the length of the ship, beneath the floor. Louis had to recognize the machinery from first principles. It was not of human manufacture; it had the half-melted look of most puppeteer construction. So: the ship had faster-than-light capability. It seemed he was slated for a long trip.

Through the aft wall Louis could see into a cargo hold with a curved hatch in the side. The hold was nearly filled by a skewed cone thirty feet tall and twice that long. The peak was a turret with ports for weapons and/or sensing instruments. Below the turret, a wraparound window. Lower still, a hatch that would drop to form a ramp.

It was a lander, an exploration vehicle. Human-built, Louis thought, and custom-built. It had none of that half-melted look. Beyond the lander he glimpsed a silver wall, probably a fuel tank.

He had not yet seen a door into his own compartment.

With some effort Louis flopped his head to the other side. Now he was looking forward into the ship’s flight deck. A big section of the ship was opaque green wall, but he could see past it to a curved array of screens, dials with tiny close-set numbers, knobs shaped to a puppeteer’s jaws. The pilot’s control couch was a padded bench with crash webbing and indentations for the hip and shoulders of a Pierson’s puppeteer. There was no door in that wall.

To starboard — well, their cell was at least fairly large. He saw a shower, a pair of sleeping plates, and an expanse of rich fur covering what might be a kzin’s water bed, and between them a bulky structure Louis recognized as a food recycler and dispenser, of Wunderland make. Beyond the beds was more green wall and no airlock, and that took care of that. They were in a box with no openings.

The ship was puppeteer-built: a General Products #3 hull, a cylinder flattened along the belly and rounded at the ends. The puppeteer trading empire had sold millions of such ships. They were advertised as invulnerable to any threat save gravity and visible light. About the time Louis Wu was being born, the puppeteer species had fled known space on a dash for the Clouds of Magellan. Now, two hundred odd years later, you still saw General Products hulls everywhere. Some had had a dozen generations of owners.