Larry Niven: Ringworld

"Exercise is wonderful," said Louis. "I could sit and watch it all day."

Teela's laugh surprised him. He thought idly of the millions of jokes she had never heard, the old, old ones nobody ever told any more. Of the millions of jokes Louis knew by heart, 99 percent must be obsolete. Past and present mix badly.

The bartender floated next to Louis in tilted position. Louis's head was in Teela's lap, and his need to reach the keyboard without sitting up was responsible for the bartender's tilt. He tapped an order for two mochas, caught the bulbs as they dropped from the slot, and handed one to Teela.

"You look like a girl I knew once," he said. "Ever hear of a Paula Cherenkov?"

"The cartoonist? Boston-born?"

"Yeah. Lives on We Made It, nowadays."

"My great-great grandmother. We visited her once."

"She gave me a severe case of whiplash of the heart, long ago. You could be her twin."

Teela's chuckle sent vibrations bouncing pleasantly along Louis's vertebrae. "I promise not to give you a case of whiplash of the heart if you'll tell me what it is."

Louis thought about that. The phrase was his own, created to describe to himself what had happened to him at that time. He hadn't used it often, but he'd never had to explain it. They always knew what he meant.

A calm, peaceful morning. If he went to sleep now he'd sleep for twelve hours. Fatigue poisons were giving him an exhaustion high. Teela's lap was a comfortable resting place for his head. Half of Louis's guests were women, and many of them had been his wives or lovers in other years. During the first phase of the party, he'd celebrated his birthday privately with three women, three who had been very important to him once, and vice versa.

Three? Four? No, three. And now it seemed that he was immune to whiplash of the heart. Two hundred years had left too much scar tissue on his personality. And now he rested his head idly and comfortably in the lap of a stranger who looked exactly like Paula Cherenkov.

"I fell in love with her," he said. "We'd known each other for years. We'd even dated. Then one night we got to talking, and wham. I was in love. I thought she loved me too.

"We didn't go to bed that night — together, I mean. I asked her to marry me. She turned me down. She was working on a career. She didn't have time to get married, she said. But we planned a trip to Amazon National Park, a sort of one week ersatz honeymoon.

"The next week was all highs and lows. First, the high. I had the tickets and the hotel reservations. Did you ever fall so hard for someone that you decided you weren't worthy of him?"

"No."

"I was young. I spent two days convincing myself I was worthy of Paula Cherenkov. I did it, too. Then she called and cancelled the trip. I don't even remember why. She had some good reason.

"I took her out to dinner a couple of times that week. Nothing happened. I tried to keep from pressuring her. Chances are she never guessed the pressure I was under. I was going up and down like a yo-yo. Then she lowered the boom. She liked me. We had fun together. We should be good friends.

"I wasn't her type," said Louis. "I thought we were in love. Maybe she thought so too, for about a week. She wasn't cruel. She just didn't know what was going on."

"But what was the whiplash?"

Louis looked up at Teela Brown. Silver eyes looked blankly back, and Louis realized that she hadn't understood a word.

Louis had dealt with aliens. By instinct or by training, he had learned to sense when some concept was too foreign to be absorbed or communicated. Here was a similar, fundamental gap in translation.

What a monstrous gulf to separate Louis Wu and a twenty-year-old girl! Could he really have aged that drastically? And if so, was Louis Wu still human?

Teela, blank-eyed, waited for enlightenment.

"Tanj!" Louis cursed, and he rolled to his feet. Mud spots slid slowly down his robe and dripped off the hem.

Nessus the puppeteer was holding forth on the subject of ethics. He interrupted himself (quite literally, speaking with both mouths, to the delight of his admirers) to answer Louis's query. No, there had been no word from his agents.

Speaker-To-Animals, similarly surrounded, sprawled like a great orange hill across the grass. Two women were scratching at the for behind his ears. The odd kzinti ears, that could expand like pink chinese parasols or fold flat against the head, were spread wide; and Louis could see the design tattooed on each surface.

"So," Louis called to him. "Was I not brilliant?"

"You were," the kzin rumbled without stirring.

Louis laughed inside himself. A kzin is a fearsome beast, yes? But who can fear a kzin who is having his ears scratched? It put Louis's guests at their ease, and it put the kzin at ease too. Anything above the level of a field mouse likes having its ears matched.

"They have been taking turnabout," the kzin rumbled deeply. "A male approaches the female scratching me and observes that he would enjoy the same attention. The two go off together. Another female moves in as a replacement. How interesting it must be, to belong to a race of two sentient sexes."

"Sometimes it makes things awfully complicated."

"Indeed?"

The girt at the kzin's left shoulder — space-black her skin was, embroidered with stars and galaxies, and her hair was the cold white stream of a comet's tail — looked up from her work. "Teela, take over," she said gaily. "I'm hungry."

Teela knelt obligingly beside the great orange head. Louis said, "Teela Brown, meet Speaker-To-Animals. May you both be -"

From nearby came a discordant blast of music.

"- very happy together. What was that? Oh, Nessus. What -?"

The music had come from the puppeteer's remarkable throats. Now Nessus nudged rudely between Louis and the girl. "You are Teela Jandrova Brown, ident number IKLUGGTYN?"

The girl was startled, but not frightened. "That's my name. I don't remember my ident number. What's the problem?"

"We have been combing Earth for you for nearly a week. Now I find you at a gathering I reached only by chance! I will have harsh words for my agents."

"Oh no," Louis said softly.

Teela stood up somewhat awkwardly. "I haven't been hiding, not from you and not from any other — extraterrestrial. Now, what's the problem?"

"Hold it!" Louis stepped between Nessus and the girl. "Nessus, Teela Brown obviously isn't an explorer. Pick someone else."

"But, Louis -"

"Just a moment." The kzin was sitting up. "Louis, let the herbivore choose his own team members."

"But look at her!"

"Look at yourself, Louis. Barely two meters long, slender even for a human. Are you an explorer? Is Nessus?"

"Just what the tanj is going on?" Teela demanded.

Urgently, Nessus said, "Louis, let us retire to your office. Teela Brown, we must make a proposal to you. You are under no obligation to accept, nor even to listen, but you may find our proposal interesting."

The argument continued in Louis's office. "She fits my qualifications," Nessus insisted. "We must consider her."

"She can't be the only one on Earth!"

"No, Louis. Not at all. But we have been unable to contact any of the others."

"Just what am I being considered for?"

The puppeteer started to tell her. It developed that Teela Brown had no interest in space, had never even been as far as the Moon, and had no intention of going beyond the borders of known space. The second quantum hyperdrive did not arouse her cupidity. When she started to look harassed and confused, Louis broke in again.

"Nessus, just what are the qualifications Teela fits so well?"

"My agents have been seeking the descendants of winners of the Birthright Lotteries."

"I quit. You're genuinely insane."