Larry Niven: The Ringworld Engineers

And he owed Halrloprillalar. They had needed her help, and Nessus had used a puppeteer’s peculiar brand of force on her. Nessus had conditioned her with a tasp. Louis had let him do it.

She had returned with Louis to human space. She had gone with him into the UN offices in Berlin, and had never come out. If the Hindmost could break her loose and return her to her home, it was more than Louis Wu could do for her.

Chmeee said, “I think the puppeteer must be lying. Delusions of grandeur. Why would puppeteers allow one of unsound mind to rule them?”

“They won’t try it themselves. Risk. Uneasy sits the butt that bears the boss. For puppeteers it makes a kind of sense, picking the brightest of a tiny percentage of megalomaniacs… Or look at it from the other side: a line of Hindmost teaching the rest of the population to keep their heads down — don’t try for too much power, it isn’t safe. It could work either way.”

“You think he told the truth?”

“I don’t know enough. What if he is lying? He’s got us.”

“He’s got you,” said the kzin. “He’s got you by the wire. Why aren’t you ashamed?”

Louis was ashamed. He was fighting to keep the shame from crippling his mind, locking him in black despair. He had no way out of this physical box: walls and floor and ceiling were part of a General Products hull. But there were elements…

“If you’re still thinking about breaking out,” he said, “you’d better think about this. You’ll be getting young. He wouldn’t have lied about that; there wouldn’t be any point. What happens when you get young?”

“Bigger appetite. More stamina. A tendency to fight, and you’d better worry about that, Louis.”

Chmeee had gained bulk as he aged. The black “spectacle” marks around his eyes were nearly all gray, and there was some gray elsewhere. Hard muscle showed when he moved; no sensible younger kzin would fight him. But what mattered were the scars. The fur and a good deal of skin had been burned off over more than half of Chmeee’s body the last time Chmeee had seen the Ringworld. Twenty-three years later the fur had grown back, but it grew in ragged tufts above the scar tissue.

“Boosterspice heals scars,” Louis said. “Your fur will grow out smooth. No white in it either.”

“Well, then, I will be prettier.” The tail slashed air. “I must kill the leaf-eater. Scars are like memories. We do not have them removed.”

“How are you going to prove you’re Chmeee?”

The tail froze. Chmeee looked at him.

“He’s got me by the wire.” Louis had reservations regarding that remark, but he could be speaking for a microphone. A puppeteer would not ignore the possibility of mutiny. “He’s got you by the harem, and the land, and the privileges, and the name that belongs to Chmeee the aging hero. The Patriarch may not believe your story, not unless you’ve got kzinti boosterspice and the Hindmost’s word to back you up.”

“Be silent.”

It was all suddenly too much for Louis Wu. He reached for the droud, and the kzin pounced. Chmeee turned the black plastic case in a black-and-orange hand.

“As you like,” Louis said. He flopped on his back. He was short of sleep anyway…

“How did you come to be a wirehead? How?”

“I,” said Louis, and “What you’ve got to understand,” and “Remember the last time we met?”

“Yes. Few humans have been invited to Kzin itself. You deserved the honor, then.”

“Maybe. Maybe I did. Do you remember showing me the House of the Patriarch’s Past?”

“I do. You tried to tell me that we could improve interspecies relationships. All we need do was let a team of human reporters go through the museum with holo cameras.”

Louis smiled, remembering. “So I did.”

“I had my doubts.”

The House of the Patriarch’s Past had been both grand and grandiose: a huge, sprawling building formed from thick slabs of volcanic rock fused at the edges. It was all angles, and there were laser cannon mounted in four tall towers. The rooms went on and on. It had taken Chmeee and Louis two days to go through it.

The Patriarch’s official past went a long way back. Louis had seen ancient sthondat thighbones with grips worked into them, clubs used by primitive kzinti. He’d seen weapons that could have been classed as hand cannons; few humans could have lifted them. He’d seen silver-plated armor as thick as a safe door, and a two-handed ax that might have chopped down a mature redwood. He’d been talking about letting a human reporter tour the place when they came upon Harvey Mossbauer.

Harvey Mossbauer’s family had been killed and eaten during the Fourth Man-Kzin War. Many years after the truce and after a good deal of monomaniacal preparation, Mossbauer had landed alone and armed on Kzin. He had killed four kzinti males and set off a bomb in the harem of the Patriarch before the guards managed to kill him. They were hampered, Chmeee had explained, by their wish to get his hide intact.

“You call that intact?”

“But he fought. How he fought! There are tapes. We know how to honor a brave and powerful enemy, Louis.”

The stuffed skin was so scarred that you had to look twice to tell its species; but it was on a tall pedestal with a hullmetal plaque, and there was nothing around it but floor. Your average human reporter might have misunderstood, but Louis got the point. “I wonder if I can make you understand,” he said, twenty years later, a wirehead kidnapped and robbed of his droud, “how good it felt, then, to know that Harvey Mossbauer was human.”

“It is good to reminisce, but we were talking of current addiction,” Chmeee reminded him.

“Happy people don’t become current addicts. You have to actually go and get the plug implanted. I felt good that day. I felt like a hero. Do you know where Halrloprillalar was at that time?”

“Where was she?”

“The government had her. The ARM. They had lots of questions, and there wasn’t a tanj thing I could do about it. She was under my protection. I took her back to Earth with me—”

“She had you by the glands, Louis. It’s good that kzinti females aren’t sentient. You would have done anything she asked. She asked to see human space.”

“Sure, with me as native guide. It just didn’t happen. Chmeee, we took the Long Shot and Halrloprillalar home, and we turned them over to a Kzin and Earth coalition, and that’s the last we’ve seen of either one. We couldn’t even talk about it to anyone.”

“The second quantum hyperdrive motor became a Patriarch’s Secret.”

“It’s Top Secret to the United Nations, too. I don’t think they even told the other governments of human space, and they made it tanj clear I’d better not talk. And of course the Ringworld was part of the secret, because how could we have got there without the Long Shot? Which makes me wonder,” Louis said, “how the Hindmost expects to reach the Ringworld. Two hundred light-years from Earth — more, from Canyon — at three days to the light-year if he uses this ship. Do you think he’s got another Long Shot hovering somewhere?”

“You will not distract me. Why did you have a wire implanted?” Chmeee crouched, claws extended. Maybe it was a reflex, beyond conscious control — maybe.

“I left Kzin and went home,” Louis said. “I couldn’t get the ARM to let me see Prill. If I could have got a Ringworld expedition together, she would have had to go as native guide, but, tanj! I couldn’t even talk about it except to the government… and you. You weren’t interested.”

“How could I leave? I had land and a name and children coming. Kzinti females are very dependent. They need care and attention.”