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  STARS AND GODS

  TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN

  Destiny’s Road

  Ringworld’s Children

  Rainbow Mars

  The Draco Tavern

  N-Space

  Playgrounds of the Mind

  Scatterbrain

  Stars and Gods

  TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN AND STEVEN BARNES

  The Descent of Anansi

  Achilles’ Choice

  Saturn’s Race

  Dream Park

  The Barsoom Project

  The California Voodoo Game

  The Moon Maze Game

  WITH JERRY POURNELLE AND STEVEN BARNES

  Beowulf’s Children

  WITH JERRY POURNELLE

  Inferno

  Escape from Hell

  WITH EDWARD M. LERNER

  Fleet of Worlds

  Juggler of Worlds

  Destroyer of Worlds

  Betrayer of Worlds

  The Fate of Worlds

  WITH BRENDA COOPER

  Building Harlequin’s Moon

  LARRY NIVEN

  STARS AND GODS

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a collection of fiction and nonfiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories and novel excerpts are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  STARS AND GODS

  Copyright © 2010 by Larry Niven

  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 978-0-7653-0864-1

  First Edition: August 2010

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART ONE: EXCERPTS FROM THE NOVELS

  Ringworld’s Children (Chapters 1 and 2)

  Introduction to Svetz and the Beanstalk

  Rainbow Mars (Chapters 18 and 19)

  Introduction to Escape from Hell,

  by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

  Escape from Hell (Seventh Circle, Third Round)

  Introduction to Burning Tower,

  by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

  Burning Tower (Chapters 2 and 3)

  Introduction to Building Harlequin’s Moon,

  by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper

  Building Harlequin’s Moon (Chapter 12)

  Larry Niven’s description of genesis for Fleet of Worlds,

  by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

  Fleet of Worlds

  Introduction to Juggler of Worlds,

  by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

  Juggler of Worlds (edited version of Chapter 59)

  PART TWO: STORIES

  Introduction to “Choosing Names”

  “Choosing Names”

  Introduction to “Fly-by-Night”

  “Fly-by-Night”

  Introduction to “The Hunting Park”

  “The Hunting Park”

  “After Mecca”

  “Cadet Amelia”

  “Cat Toy”

  “Chicxulub”

  “The Gatherers’ Guild”

  “The Solipsist at Dinner”

  “Boys and Girls Together”

  PART THREE: NONFICTION FOR SPACE.COM

  “Traveler”

  “Rocket Men”

  “Wet Mars”

  PART FOUR: COLLABORATION WITH JERRY POURNELLE AND STEVEN BARNES

  Introduction to Beowulf’s Children

  Beowulf’s Children

  PART FIVE: COLLABORATION WITH JERRY POURNELLE

  Introduction

  “Where Next, Columbus?”

  PART SIX: COLLABORATION WITH STEVEN BARNES

  Introduction to Achilles’ Choice

  Achilles’ Choice (Chapters 15 and 16)

  PART SEVEN: COLLABORATIONS WITH BRENDA COOPER

  Introduction

  “Choosing Life”

  “Free Floaters”

  “Finding Myself”

  PART EIGHT: DRACO TAVERN STORIES

  Introduction to “The Missing Mass”

  “The Missing Mass”

  Introduction to “Safe Harbor”

  “Safe Harbor”

  PART NINE: MISCELLANEOUS NONFICTION

  Hooking the Reader

  Larry Niven Interview by Brenda Cooper in 2000 AD

  Food Story for the Con Jose Program Book

  “Inconstant Moon Has Passed”

  PREFACE

  We have here a collection of everything that’s been going on in my life for the past six years or so, since I published Scatterbrain. The world has changed some. So have I. I’m seventy-one years old, and feeling it.

  Writing has not become easier, or so it seems. I see more implications in a given idea, so the stories get longer and more detailed. The really good ideas get used up first.

  Hey! Time magazine published a list of required summer reading in their July 13, 2009, issue. Ringworld made the list, forty years after I wrote it! The Count of Monte Cristo made the list too. Just a dozen stories total.

  Where was I? I was saying that writing hasn’t gotten easier, but I seem to be putting books out faster. Part of the reason is collaborations. I’ve done a lot of them, as you can see via this book. Collaborations are less lonely than solo flights. Certainly there are ideas (and fictional universes) that should not be shared… but I’ve started sharing even the Known Space universe. I told Jim Baen I would never do that, but things change.

  And part of the reason is I get offers from folk who know my name. I’ve joined some funny anthologies. And—

  Lisa Snellings Clark is an artist whose work generates stories. She’s put out some collaborations, little story collections, with some of the finest writers around. I want to join that company, and the title is fixed: Strange Light. Three stories so far.

  So: six years, and not much in the way of disasters. The house hasn’t burned down. No surgeries, save for a cataract. Deaths… well, I think I’ve reached that age, and so has the science fiction field.

  Movies: none yet. When I started writing, I deliberately gave up the notion of restricting my special effects to things that could be put on a screen. Now, wow! They can do anything! And they’re using it to make movies like Meteor, in which incoming rocks can be shot down by bazookas.

  So here is the best I’ve been able to write in the past six years and more. Enjoy.

  PART ONE

  EXCERPTS FROM THE NOVELS

  RINGWORLD’S CHILDREN

  1

  LOUIS WU

  Louis Wu woke aflame with new life, under a coffin lid.

  “Dracula,” he murmured; but the analogy had a dubious flavor. Boosterspice was centuries old. Nobody need turn vampire just to live a long time.

  Displays glowed above his eyes. Bone composition, blood, deep reflexes, urea and potassium and zinc balance: he could identify most of these. The damage listed was
n’t great. Wounds; fatigue; torn ligaments and extensive bruises; two ribs cracked; all relics of the battle with Bram. All healed now, rebuilt cell by cell.

  He’d felt dead and cooling when he climbed in, eighty-four days ago, the display said. Sixty-seven Ringworld days, about nine falans.

  He’d been under repair for twice that long the first time he lay in this box. Then, his internal plumbing systems had been leaking into each other, and he’d been eleven years without the longevity drug called boosterspice. He’d been old.

  Testosterone was high, adrenalin high and rising.

  Louis pushed steadily up against the lid. The lid wouldn’t move faster, but his body craved action. He slid out and dropped to a stone floor, cold beneath his bare feet.

  He was naked. He stood in a vast cavern. Where was Needle?

  The spacecraft Hot Needle of Inquiry had been embedded in stone, last he looked, and Carlos Wu’s experimental nanotech repair system had been in the crew quarters. Now its components sat within, a nest of instruments and cables on a floor of cooled lava. The ’doc had been partly pulled apart. Everything was still running.

  Tunesmith must have been studying its workings while it healed Louis Wu.

  Nearby, Hot Needle of Inquiry had been filleted like a finless fish. A slice of hull running almost nose to tail had been cut away, exposing housing, cargo, docking for a lander now destroyed, thruster plates, and the hyperdrive motor housing. More than half of the ship’s volume was tanks. The rim of the cut had been lined with copper or bronze, and cables in the metal led to instruments and a generator.

  The cut section had been pulled aside by massive machinery. It too was rimmed in bronze laced with cables.

  The hyperdrive motor had run the length of the ship. Now it was laid out on the lava, in a nest of instruments. Tunesmith again. The Hindmost wouldn’t have needed to study that.

  Louis wandered over to look.

  It had been repaired.

  Louis had stranded the Hindmost in Ringworld space by chopping the hyperdrive nearly in half, long years ago. Dismounted, it looked otherwise ready to take Needle between the stars… and the design looked altered.

  I could go home, Louis thought, tasting the notion. He liked it.

  Where was everybody? Louis looked around him, feeling the adrenaline surge. He was starting to shiver with cold.

  He’d be two hundred and sixty-odd years old by now, wouldn’t he? Easy to lose track here. But the nano machines in Carlos Wu’s experimental ’doc had read his DNA and repaired everything down through the cell nuclei. Louis had done this dance before. His body thought it was just past puberty.

  Keep it cool, boy. Nobody’s challenged you yet.

  The spacecraft, the hull section, the ’doc, machines to move and repair these masses and crude-looking instruments arrayed to study them, all formed a tight cluster within vaster spaces. The cavern was tremendous and nearly empty. Louis saw float plates like stacks of poker chips, and beyond those a tilted tower of tremendous toroids that ran from a hole in the floor right up to the roof. Four Needle-sized cylinders lay near its base, within more of Tunesmith’s machinery. Those were new.

  He’d passed through this place once before. Louis looked up, knowing what to expect.

  Five or six miles up, he thought. The repair center was forty miles high, so this level was near the roof. Louis could make out its contours. Think of it as the back of a mask… the mask of an asteroid-sized shield volcano.

  Needle had smashed down through the crater in Mons Olympus, into the repair center that underlay the one-to-one scale Map of Mars. Teela Brown the protector had trapped them there, had moved the ship eight hundred miles through these corridors, then poured molten rock around them. For all these years the ship had been trapped. Now Tunesmith had brought it back to the workstation under Mons Olympus.

  Why?

  He knew Tunesmith the Night Person, but not well. He barely knew Tunesmith the protector. He’d watched the protector fight, and that was about it. But Louis had set the trap that made him a protector, and now Tunesmith held Louis’s life in his hands.

  He’d be smarter than Louis. Trying to outguess a protector was… futz… was silly but inevitable.

  So. Needle was an interstellar spacecraft, and that huge, tilted tower was a linear accelerator, a launching system. Tunesmith might need a spacecraft. Meanwhile he’d leave Needle gutted. Louis Wu and the Hindmost might use it to run, and he couldn’t have that.

  Louis walked until Needle loomed: a hundred-and-ten-foot-diameter cylinder with a flattened belly. Not much of the ship was missing… the hyperdrive, the ’doc, what else? The crew section was wide open, the floor eighty feet up. Under the floor, all of the kitchen and recycling systems were exposed.

  If he could climb that high he’d have his breakfast, and clothing, too. He didn’t see any obvious route.

  He couldn’t guess where Tunesmith might place a stepping disk, or where it would lead.

  The Hindmost’s command deck was exposed. It was three stories tall, with lower ceilings than a Kzin would need. Louis saw how he could climb to the lower floor. A protector would have no trouble at all.

  Black holes and starseeds! What must the Hindmost be thinking?

  Pierson’s puppeteers were cowards. When the Hindmost built Needle, he had isolated his command deck from any intruders, including his alien crew. There were no doors at all, just stepping disks booby-trapped a thousand ways. Now… the puppeteer must feel stripped naked.

  Louis crouched beneath the edge of some flat-topped mass, maybe the breathing-air system. Leapt, pulled up and kept climbing. The ’doc had left him thin, almost gaunt; he wasn’t lifting much weight. Fifty feet up, he hung by his fingers for a moment.

  This was the lowest floor of the Hindmost’s cabin, his most private area. There would be defenses. Would someone have turned them off?

  He pulled up and was in forbidden space.

  The first thing he saw was the Hindmost. The next was his own droud sitting on a table.

  He’d destroyed that. He’d given it to Chmeee and watched the Kzin smash it.

  So, a replacement. Bait for Louis Wu the wirehead. Louis’s hand crept into the hair at the back of his head, under the queue. Plug it in, let the battery trickle current into the pleasure center of his brain… where was the socket?

  Louis laughed wildly. It wasn’t there! The autodoc’s nano machines had rebuilt him without it!

  Louis thought it over. Then he took the droud.

  The Hindmost lay like a jeweled footstool, his three legs and both heads tucked protectively beneath his torso. Louis’s lips curled. He stepped forward to sink his hand into the jeweled mane and shake the puppeteer out of his funk.

  He caught himself. Why did he want the Hindmost awake?

  “Do not touch anything.”

  Louis flinched violently. The voice was a blast of contralto music, the Hindmost’s voice with the sound turned up, and it spoke Interworld. “Whatever you desire, instruct me.”

  Needle’s autopilot knew him, knew his language at least, and it hadn’t killed him. Louis found his voice. “Were you expecting me?”

  “Yes. I may give you some limited freedom here. Find a current source next to—”

  “No. Breakfast,” Louis said as his belly suddenly screamed that it was empty, dying. “I need food.”

  “There is no kitchen for your kind here.”

  A shallow ramp wound round the walls to the upper floors. “I’ll be back,” Louis said.

  He walked, then ran up the ramp. He eased around the wall above a drop of eighty feet—not difficult, just scary—and was in crew quarters.

  A pit showed where the ’doc had been removed. Crew quarters was not otherwise changed. Louis went to the kitchen wall and dialed cappuccino and a fruit plate. He ate. He dressed, pants and blouse and a vest that was all pockets, the droud bulging one of the pockets. Finished the fruit, then dialed up an omelet, potatoes, another cappuccino and a waffle. br />
  He thought while he ate. What was his desire?

  He needed the Hindmost to tell him what was going on… but puppeteers were manipulative and secretive.

  Information?

  A little leverage?

  He dumped the breakfast dishes in the recycler toilet. He climbed around the wall, carefully. “Hindmost’s Voice,” he said.

  “At your command. You need not risk a fall. Here is a stepping disk link,” and a cursor showed him a spot on the floor of crew quarters.

  “Show me the Meteor Defense Room.”

  “That term is unknown.” A hologram window sprang up in the portside wall. “Is this the place you mean?”

  Meteor Defense was a vast, dark space. At the edge of the Voice’s window, under a glare of light, the bones of an ancient protector had been laid out for study.

  Three long swinging booms ended in chairs equipped with lap keyboards. In the far shadows stood pillars with large plates on top, mechanical mushrooms—“What are those?”

  “Service stacks,” the Hindmost’s Voice said, “each made from eight of the float plates you found on arrival, topped by a stepping disk.”

  “Sounds useful.”

  The display Louis was looking for was not at once obvious. It was as black as the room around it. He saw it when a boom swung across it. One of the booms ended in a knobby, angular shadow.

  All protectors look something like medieval armor.

  The protector was watching an oval display screen thirty feet high, fifty wide. The camera would be somewhere on the Ringworld itself, looking away from the sun. Louis knew better than to expect asteroids or worlds. The Ringworld engineers had cleared all that out. This drift of moving lights would be spacecraft held by several species. Now the view focussed on a gauzy, fragile Outsider ship; now on a glass needle, tenant unknown; now an ARM warship.

  Tunesmith’s concentration seemed total. He zoomed on a spray of stars occluded by a foggy lump, a proto-comet. Tiny angular machines drifted around it, marked by blinking cursor circles. A lance of light glared much brighter: some warship’s fusion drive. Here came another, zipping across the screen. No weapon fired.