Juggler of Worlds Read online

  Praise for Fleet of Worlds

  “A far-future SF mystery/adventure set two centuries before the discovery of the Ringworld by humans . . . intriguing human and alien characters and lucid scientific detail.”

  —Library Journal

  “A new Known Space book, particularly one with new information about Puppeteers and their doings behind the scenes of human history, needs recommending within the science fiction community about as much as a new Harry Potter novel does—well, anywhere. But Niven and Lerner have produced a novel that can stand on its own as well as part of the Known Space franchise.”

  —Locus

  “If you’re a Niven fan, just go buy the book. It’s that good! . . . It’s the finest Known Space work in many, many years that I’ve had the pleasure to read. This is an essential read for anyone interested in how good science fiction can be.”

  —The Green Man Review

  “A very worthy addition to the ongoing Known Space future history.”

  —Sci Fi Weekly

  “As we have long expected from Niven, it’s a great read, and Lerner—as Analog readers know—has the knack as well. You’ll enjoy this one.”

  —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  “Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner have teamed up to write the prequel [to Ringworld], and it’s well worth reading, whether you’ve read Ringworld and its subsequent books or not.”

  —SFRevu

  “If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a lot of knowledge can rock worlds.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN

  AND EDWARD M. LERNER

  Fleet of Worlds

  Juggler of Worlds

  TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN

  N-Space

  Playgrounds of the Mind

  Destiny’s Road

  Rainbow Mars

  Scatterbrain

  The Draco Tavern

  Ringworld’s Children

  WITH STEVEN BARNES

  Achilles’ Choice

  The Descent of Anansi

  Saturn’s Race

  WITH JERRY POURNELLE AND STEVEN BARNES

  The Legacy of Heorot

  Beowulf’s Children

  WITH BRENDA COOPER

  Building Harlequin’s Moon

  TOR BOOKS BY EDWARD M. LERNER

  Fools’ Experiments

  Small Miracles

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.

  JUGGLER OF WORLDS

  Copyright © 2008 by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-5784-7

  First Edition: September 2008

  First Mass Market Edition: June 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the readers who work on a book long after it’s

  closed, and really get their money’s worth: Thanks for

  the help.

  CONTENTS

  Dramatis Personae

  THEY

  A MISSION OF GRAVITY

  INTO THIN SPACE

  MOST UNUSUAL

  EYE OF THE STORM

  VINDICATED

  BESIEGED

  BECALMED

  BETRAYED

  THE OUTSIDERS

  REVELATIONS

  REDEMPTION

  EPILOGUE

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  KNOWN-SPACE HUMANS1

  ROLE

  Max Addeo

  Amalgamated Regional Militia (ARM) exec, later high-ranking United Nations (UN) official

  Sigmund Ausfaller

  ARM agent

  Fiona (“Feather”) Filip

  ARM agent

  Julian Forward

  Physicist (native of Jinx, in the Sirius system)

  Andrea Girard

  ARM agent

  Dianna Guthrie

  Girlfriend of Gregory Pelton

  Sharrol Janss

  Wife (at separate times) to Beowulf Shaeffer and Carlos Wu

  Sangeeta Kudrin

  High-ranking UN official

  Calista Melencamp

  Secretary-General of the UN

  Anne-Marie Papandreou

  Crew of Court Jester; wife of Jason Papandreou (native of Wunderland, in the Alpha Centauri system)

  Jason Papandreou

  Owner-pilot of Court Jester (a ship chartered by Nessus)

  Gregory Pelton

  Wealthy industrialist

  Beowulf Shaeffer

  Starship pilot and xenophile (native of We Made It, in the Procyon system)

  Ander Smittarasheed

  Freelance writer; sometimes agent of Sigmund Ausfaller

  Carlos Wu

  Physicist and all-around genius

  OTHER HUMANS

  ROLE

  Sabrina Gomez-Vanderhoff

  Governor of Nature Preserve 4 (NP4)/New Terra

  Sven Hebert-Draskovics

  NP4 archivist

  Eric Huang-Mbeke

  Member of NP4’s independence movement; engineer

  Penelope Mitchell-Draskovics

  Sven’s cousin; government agronomist

  Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs

  Member of NP4’s independence movement; navigator and a math whiz

  Omar Tanaka-Singh

  Member of NP4’s independence movement

  KZINTI2

  ROLE

  Chuft-Captain

  Commanding officer of the spy ship Traitor’s Claw; has earned a partial name

  Maintainer-of-Equipment

  Renegade citizen of the colony world Spearpoint

  Slaverstudent

  Crewman on Traitor’s Claw

  Telepath

  Crewman on Traitor’s Claw

  PUPPETEERS

  ROLE

  Achilles

  Concordance scout (first known to Ausfaller as Adonis)

  Baedeker

  Engineer at General Products Corporation

  Nessus

  Concordance scout

  Nike

  Leader of “Permanent Emergency” faction of the Experimentalist party / later, Hindmost

  Vesta

  Nike’s aide

  1Earth resident, unless otherwise noted.

  2Unless otherwise noted, a low-status individual yet to earn a name.

  THEY

  Earth date: 2637

  1

  Sigmund Ausfaller woke up shivering, prone on a cold floor. His head pounded. Tape bound his wrists and ankles to plasteel chains.

  He had always known it would end horribly. Only the when, where, how, why, and by whom of it all had eluded him.

  That fog was beginning to lift.

  How had he gotten here, wherever here was? As though from a great distance, Sigmund watched himself quest for recent memories. Why was it such a struggle?

  He remembered the pedestrian concourse of an open-air mall, shoppers streaming. They wore every color of the rainbow, clothing and hair and skin, in every conceivable combination and pattern. Overhead, fluffy clouds scudded across a clear blue sky. The sun was warm on his face. Work, for once
, had been laid aside. He’d been content.

  Happiness is the sworn enemy of vigilance. How could he have been so careless?

  Sigmund forced open his eyes. He was in a nearly featureless room. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were resilient plastic. Light came from one wall. I could be anywhere, Sigmund thought—and then two details grabbed his attention.

  The room wasn’t quite a box. The glowing wall had a bit of a curve to it.

  There were recessed handholds in walls, floor, and ceiling.

  Panic struck. He was on a spaceship! Was gravity a hair higher than usual? Lower? He couldn’t tell.

  Plasteel chains clattered dully as Sigmund sat up. He had watched enough old movies to expect chains to clink. Even as the room spun around him and everything faded to black, he found the energy to feel cheated.

  COLD PLASTIC PRESSED against Sigmund’s cheek. He opened his eyes a crack to see the same spartan room. Cell.

  This time he noticed that one link of his chains had been fused to a handhold in the deck.

  Had he passed out from a panic attack? Where was he?

  Sigmund forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply until the new episode receded. Fear could only muddy his thoughts. More deep breaths.

  He had never before blacked out from panic. He could not believe that this blackout stemmed from panic. Yes, his faint had closely followed the thought he might be aboard a spaceship. It also had occurred just after he had sat up. Sigmund remembered his thoughts having been fuzzy. They seemed sharper now.

  He’d been drugged! Doped up and barely awake, he’d sat up too fast. That was why he had passed out.

  More cautiously this time, Sigmund got into a sitting position. His head throbbed. He considered the pain dispassionately. Less disabling than the last time, he decided. Perhaps the drugs were wearing off.

  Some odd corner of his mind felt shamed by his panic attacks. Most Earthborn had flatland phobia worse than he, and so what? True, he’d been born on Earth, but his parents had been all over Known Space. Somehow they took pleasure in strange scents, unfamiliar night skies, and wrong gravity.

  On principle, Sigmund had been to the moon twice. He had had to know: Could he leave Earth should the need ever arise? The second time, it was to make sure the success of that first trip wasn’t a fluke.

  He listened carefully. The soft whir of a ventilation fan. Hints of conversation, unintelligible. His own heartbeat. None of the background power-plant hum that permeated the spaceships he’d been on. Gravity felt as normal as his senses could judge.

  Recognizing facts, spotting patterns, drawing inferences . . . he managed, but slowly, as though his thoughts swam through syrup. Traces of drugs remained in his system. He forced himself to concentrate.

  If this was a ship, it was still on Earth. Someone meant to panic him, Sigmund decided. Someone wanted something from him. Until they got it, he’d probably remain alive.

  They.

  For as long as Sigmund could remember, there had always been some they to worry about.

  But even as Sigmund formed that thought, he knew “always” wasn’t quite correct. . . .

  IN THE BEGINNING, they were unambiguous enough: the Kzinti.

  The Third Man-Kzin War broke out in 2490, the year Sigmund was born. He was five before he knew what a Kzin was—something like an upright orange cat, taller and much bulkier than a man, with a naked, rat-like tail. By then, the aliens had been defeated. The Kzinti Patriarchy ceded two colony worlds to the humans as reparations. In Sigmund’s lifetime, they had attacked human worlds three more times. They’d lost those wars, too.

  Fafnir was one of the worlds that changed hands after the third war. His parents had wanderlust and not a trace of flatland phobia. They left him in the care of an aunt, and went to Fafnir in 2500 for an adventure.

  And found one.

  Conflict erupted that year between humans on Fafnir and the Kzinti settlers who had remained behind. His parents vanished, in hostilities that failed to rise to the level of a numeral in the official reckoning of Man-Kzin Wars. It was a mere “border incident.”

  Everyone knew the Kzinti ate their prey.

  So they, for a long time, were Kzinti. Sigmund hated the ratcats, and everyone understood. And he hated his parents for abandoning him. The grief counselors told his aunt that that was normal. And he hated his aunt, as much as she reminded him of Mom—or perhaps because she did—for allowing Mom and Dad to leave him with her.

  The same year his parents disappeared, the Puppeteers emerged from beyond the rim of Human Space. A species more unlike the Kzinti could not be imagined. Puppeteers looked like two-headed, three-legged, wingless ostriches. The heads on their sinuous necks reminded him of sock puppets. The brain, Aunt Susan told him, hid under the thick mop of mane between the massive shoulders.

  So they came to include these other aliens, these harmless-seeming newcomers, because Sigmund didn’t believe in coincidence. And then they came to include all aliens—because, really, how could anyone truly know otherwise?

  That was when Aunt Susan took him to a psychotherapist. Sigmund remembered the stunned look on her face after his first session. After she spoke alone with the therapist. Sigmund remembered her sobbing all that night in her bedroom.

  He had a sickness, or sicknesses, he couldn’t spell, much less understand: a paranoid personality disorder. Monothematic delusion with delusional misidentification syndrome. He didn’t know if he believed the supposed silver lining: that it was treatable.

  What Sigmund did believe was the other consolation Dr. Swenson offered Aunt Susan—that paranoia is an affliction of the brightest.

  In time, Sigmund understood. Trauma can cause stress can cause biochemical imbalances can cause mental illness. A day and a night asleep in an autodoc corrected the biochemical imbalance in his brain. But a single chemical tweak wasn’t enough: Knowing the world is out to get you is its own stress. Three months of therapy with Dr. Swenson addressed the paranoid behaviors Sigmund had already learned.

  Dr. Swenson was right: Sigmund was very smart. Smart enough to figure out what the therapist wanted to hear. Smart enough to learn what thoughts to keep to himself.

  TREMBLING, SIGMUND TRIED again to shake off the drugs. Reliving old horrors served no useful purpose—especially now. He needed to focus.

  Start with them. They weren’t Kzinti: The room was too small. Kzinti would have gone crazy.

  They wanted something from him; how he responded might be the only control he had in this situation. Who might they be?

  Others might see in him only a middle-aged, midlevel financial analyst. A United Nations bureaucrat. A misanthrope dressed always in black, in a world where everyone else wore vibrant colors.

  Sigmund saw more. All those years ago, Dr. Swenson had been far more correct than he knew. Sigmund was more than bright. He was brilliant—in the mind, where it counted, not in gaudy display.

  Who were they? Probably somebody Sigmund was investigating. That narrowed it down. The bribe-taking customs officials at Quito Spaceport? The sysadmin at the UN ID data center who moonlighted in identity laundering?

  Sigmund’s gut said otherwise. It was his other ongoing investigation: the Trojan Mafia. The gang, known by its reputed base in the Trojan Asteroids, engaged in every kind of smuggling, from artworks to weapons to experimental medicines. They killed for hire—and, more often, just to keep the authorities at bay. They were into extortion, money laundering . . . everything. Every other analyst in Investigations refused to touch them.

  Surely that was who.

  How was more speculative. A “chance” encounter in the pedestrian mall near his home, he guessed, by someone with a fast-acting hypo-sedative. He stumbles; his assailant, to all appearances a Good Samaritan, helps him to the nearest transfer booth.

  Where? Other than somewhere on Earth, Sigmund wasn’t prepared to guess. On a world bristling with transfer booths, he could have been teleported instantaneously almost anywhere.


  And when? Blinking to de-blur his vision, Sigmund raised his hands. His left wrist hurt—not much, but it hurt. The time display had frozen. Ironic that, since the subcutaneous control pips felt melted: tiny beads beneath his thumb. Clock, weather, compass, calculator, maps, all the utility functions he normally summoned by fingernail pressure . . . all gone. He guessed his implant had been fried with a magnetic pulse. It fit the program of disorientation.

  They weren’t as smart as they thought. The room had no sanitary facilities, not so much as a chamber pot, and so far he felt no need to pee. His black suit was clean, if rumpled. It wasn’t an ironclad case, but Sigmund guessed he had been snatched from that pedestrian mall no more than a few hours ago.

  Footsteps! They approached along the unseen corridor beyond the out-of-reach door. The door flew open.

  A tall figure, easily two meters tall, stood in the doorway. A tall fringe of hair bobbed on an otherwise bald head: a Belter crest. And did not Hector, mightiest of the Trojans, famously wear a helmet with a plume of horsehair?

  It all fit with the Trojan Mafia.

  Sigmund blinked in the suddenly bright light, unable to make out details.

  “Good,” the Belter said. “I see you’re awake. There’s someone who wants to speak with you.”

  • • •

  “YOU SEEM UNSURPRISED, Mr. Ausfaller.”

  An eerie calm came over Sigmund. “Someone had to put through all the requests for reassignment. Someone had to tolerate one unproductive investigation after another.”

  “Your boss,” his captor said.

  “Someone had to authorize those transfers. Someone had to accept the department’s persistent failures.” Sigmund mustered all the irony he could. “Sir.”