Larry Niven - Ringworld

As an adult she had freedom of choice; she was entitled to expect good manners from Louis Wu; certain areas of her privacy were sacrosanct. Louis could only persuade; and at that he had failed.

So that Teela didn't have to do what she did next. She suddenly took his hands and, smiling, pleading, said, "Take me with you, Louis. I'm luck, really I am. If Nessus didn't choose right you could wind up sleeping alone. You'd hate that, I know you would."

She had him in a box. He couldn't keep her off Nessus's ship, not when she could go directly to the puppeteer.

"All right," he said. "We'll call him."

And he would hate sleeping alone.

"I want to join the expedition," Teela said into the phonescreen.

The puppeteer howled on a long-drawn E-flat note.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Excuse me," said the puppeteer. "Report to Outback Field, Australia, tomorrow at 0800. Bring personal possessions not to exceed fifty pounds Earth weight. Louis, you will do the same. Ahh -" The puppeteer raised his heads and howled.

Anxiously Louis demanded, "Are you sick?"

"No. I foresee my own death. Louis, I could wish that you had been less persuasive. Farewell. We meet at Outback Field."

The screen went dark.

"See?" Teela crowed. "See what you get for being so persuasive?"

"Me and my silver tongue. Well, I did my oratorical best. Don't blame me if you die horribly."

That night, freely falling in darkness, Louis heard her say, "I love you. I'm going with you because I love you."

"Love you too," he said with sleepy good manners. Then it percolated through, and he said, "That's what you were reserving?"

"Mm hmm."

"You're following me two hundred light years because you can't bear to let me go?"

"Yawp."

"Sleeproom, half-light," said Louis. Dim blue light filled the room.

They floated a foot apart between the sleeping plates. in preparation for space they had cleaned off the skin dyes and hair treatments of flatland style. The hair in Louis's queue was now straight and black; his scalp was gray with stubble. Yellow-brown skin tones, brown eyes with no perceptible slant, changed his image considerably.

The changes in Teela were equally drastic. Her hair was dark and wavy now, tied back from her face. Her skin was nordic-pale. Her oval face was dominated by big brown eyes and a small, serious mouth; her nose was almost unnoticeable. In the sleeping field she floated like oil on water, utterly relaxed.

"But you've never even been as far as the Moon."

She nodded.

"And I'm not the world's greatest lover. You told me that yourself."

She nodded again. There was no reticence in Teela Brown. In two days and nights she had not lied, nor shaded the truth, nor so much as dodged a question. Louis would have known. She had told him of her first two loves: the one who had lost interest in her after half a year, the other, a cousin, who had been offered a chance to emigrate to Mount Lookitthat. Louis had told her little of his own experience, and she had seemed to accept his reticence. But she had none. And she asked the damndest questions.

"Then why me?" he asked.

"I don't know," she confessed. "Could it be the charisma? You're a hero, you know."

He was the only living man to have made first contact with an alien species. Would he ever live down the Trinoc episode?

He made one more try. "Look, I know the world's greatest lover. Friend of mine. It's his hobby. He writes books about it. He's got doctorates in physiology and psychology. For the past hundred and thirty years he's been -"

Teela had her hands over her ears. "Don't" she said. "Don't."

"I just don't want you to get killed somewhere. You're too young."

She wore the puzzled look, that puzzled look, the one that meant hed used proper Interworld words in a nonsense sequence. Whiplash of the heart? Killed somewhere? Louis sighed within himself. "Sleeproom nodes merge," he said, and something happened to the sleeper field. The two regions of stable equilibrium, the anomalies which kept Louis and Teela from falling out of the field, moved together and merged into one. Louis and Teela followed, sliding "downhill" until they bumped and clung.

"I really was sleepy, Louis. But never mind …"

"Think about privacy before you drift away to dreamland. Spacecraft tend to be cramped."

"You mean we couldn't make love? Tanj, Louis, I don't care if they watch. They're aliens."

"I care."

She gave him that puzzled look. "Suppose they weren't aliens. Then would you object?"

"Yes, unless we knew them very well. Does that make me out of date?"

"A little."

"Remember that friend I mentioned? The world's greatest lover? Well, he had a colleague," said Louis, "and she taught me some things he was teaching her. You need gravity for this," he added. "Sleeproom field off." Weight returned.

"You're trying to change the subject," said Teela.

"Yes. I give up."

"Okay, but just keep one thing in mind. One thing. Your puppeteer friend might have wanted four species instead of three. You could just as easily be holding a Trinoc instead of me."

"Horrible thought. Now, we do this in three stages, starting with straddle position … "

"What's straddle position?"

"I'll show you …"

By morning Louis was glad enough that they would be traveling together. When his doubts returned it was too late. It had already been too late for some considerable time.

The Outsiders were traders in information. They bought high and they sold high, but what they bought once they sold again and again, for their trading ground was the entire galactic whorl. In the banks of human space their credit was virtually unlimited.

Presumably they had evolved on some cold, light moon of a gas giant; some world very like Nereid, Neptune's larger moon. Now they lived in the gaps between the stars, in city-sized ships whose sophistication varied enormously, from photon sails to engines theoretically impossible to human science. Where a planetary system held potential customers, and where such a system included a suitable world, the Outsiders would lease space for trade centers, rest and recreation areas, supply dumps. Half a thousand years ago they had leased Nereid.

"And that must be their major trade area," said Louis Wu. "Down there." He pointed with one hand, keeping the other on the controls of the transport ship.

Nereid was an icy, craggy plain beneath bright starlight. The sun was a fat white point giving off as much light as a full Moon; and that light illuminated a maze of low walls. There were hemispherical buildings, and a cluster of small thruster-driven ground-to-orbit ships with passenger sections open to space; but more than half the plain was covered with those low walls.

Speaker-To-Animals, hovering hugely behind Louis, said, "I would know the purpose of the maze. Defense?"

"Basking areas," said Louis. "The Outsiders live on thermoelectricity. They lie with their heads in sunlight and their tails in shadow, and the temperature difference between the two sets up a current. The walls are to make more shadow-borderlines."

Nessus had calmed down during the ten-hour flight. He trotted about the lifesystem of the transport ship, inspecting this and that, poking a head and eye into corners, tossing comments and answers to questions over his shoulder. His pressure suit, a baggy balloon with padding over the hump that concealed his brain, looked light and comfortable; the air and food regenerator packages were improbably small.

He had given them a strange moment just before takeoff. Music had played suddenly through the cabin, complex and lovely, rich in minor tones, like the sad call of a sex-maddened computer. Nessus whistled. With his twin mouths, rich in nerves and muscles appropriate to mouths which were also hands, the puppeteer was a walking orchestra.