Ringworld Read online

  “And so you risk your life to travel with a kzin.”

  “Yes,” said Nessus, and shivered all over. “My motivation is strong. It has been implied that if I can demonstrate the worth of my courage, by using it to perform a valuable service for my species, I will be allowed to breed.”

  “Hardly a firm commitment,” said Louis.

  “Then there is other reason to take a kzin. We will face strange environments hiding unknown dangers. Who will protect me? Who would be better equipped than a kzin?”

  “To protect a puppeteer?”

  “Does that sound insane?”

  “It does,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “It also appeals to my sense of humor. What of this one, this Louis Wu?”

  “For us there has been much profitable cooperation with men. Naturally we choose at least one human. Louis Gridley Wu is a proven survival type, in his casual, reckless way.”

  “Casual he is, and reckless. He challenged me to single combat.”

  “Would you have accepted, had not Hroth been present? Would you have harmed him?”

  “To be sent home in disgrace, having caused a major interspecies incident? But that is not the point,” the kzin insisted. “Is it?”

  “Perhaps it is. Louis is alive. You are now aware that you cannot dominate him through fear. Do you believe in results?”

  Louis maintained a discreet silence. If the puppeteer wanted to give him credit for cool intellection, that was fine with Louis Wu.

  “You have spoken of your own motives,” said Speaker. “Speak now of mine. What can it profit me to join your voyage?”

  And they got down to business.

  To the puppeteers, the quantum II hyperdrive shunt was a white elephant. It would move a ship a light year in one-and-a-quarter minutes, where conventional craft would cross that distance in three days. But conventional craft had room for cargo.

  “We built the motor into a General Products Number Four hull, the biggest made by our company. When our scientists and engineers had finished their work, most of the interior was filled with the machinery of the hyperdrive shunt. Our trip outward will be cramped.”

  “An experimental vehicle,” said the kzin. “How thoroughly has it been tested?”

  “The vehicle has made one trip to the galactic core and back.”

  But that had been its only flight! The puppeteers could not test it themselves, nor could they find other races to do the work; for they were in the middle of a migration. The ship would carry practically no cargo, though it was over a mile in diameter. Furthermore, it could not slow down without dropping back into normal space.

  “We do not need it,” said Nessus. “But you do. We plan to turn the ship over to our crew, together with copies of the plans for making more. Doubtless you can improve the design yourselves.”

  “That will buy me a name,” said the kzin. “A name. I must see your ship in action.”

  “During our trip outward.”

  “The Patriarch would give me a name for such a ship. I am sure he would. What name should I choose? Perhaps—“ The kzin snarled on a rising note.

  The puppeteer replied in the same language.

  Louis shifted in irritation. He couldn’t follow the Hero’s Tongue. He considered leaving them to it, then had a better idea. He pulled the puppeteer’s holo from his pocket, scaled it across the room into the kzin’s furry lap.

  The kzin held it delicately in his padded black fingers. “It appears to be a ringed star,” he observed. “What is it?”

  “It relates to our destination,” said the puppeteer. “I cannot tell you more, not now.”

  “How cryptic. Well, when may we depart?”

  “I estimate a matter of days. My agents are even now searching for a qualified fourth member for our exploration team.”

  “And so we wait upon their pleasure. Louis, shall we join your guests?”

  Louis stood up, stretching. “Sure, let’s give ‘em a thrill. Speaker, before we go out there, I have a suggestion. Now, don’t take this as an assault on your dignity. It’s just an idea ...”

  The party had split into sections: tridee-watchers, bridge and poker tables, lovers in pairs and larger groups, tellers of tales, victims of ennui. Out on the lawn, under a hazy early-morning sun, was a mixed group of ennui victims and xenophiles; for the outdoor group included Nessus and Speaker-To-Animals. It also included Louis Wu, Teela Brown, and an overworked bartender.

  The lawn was one of those tended according to the ancient British formula: seed and roll for five hundred years. Five hundred years had ended in a stock market crash, after which Louis Wu had had money and a certain venerable baronial family had not. The grass was green and glossy, obviously the real thing; nobody had ever tampered with its genes in search of dubious improvements. At the bottom of the rolling green slope was a tennis court where diminutive figures ran and jumped and swung their oversized fly swatters with great energy.

  “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 cancel
led 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.”

  “No, Louis. My orders come from the Hindmost himself, from the one who leads us all. His sanity is not in question. May I explain?”

  For human beings, birth control had long been an easy matter. Nowadays a tiny crystal was inserted under the skin of the patient’s forearm. The crystal took a year to dissolve. During that year the patient would be unable to conceive a child. In earlier centuries clumsier methods had been used.

  Earth’s population had been stabilized, about the middle of the twenty-first century, at eighteen billion. The Fertility Board, a subsection of the United Nations, made and enforced the birth control laws. For more than half a thousand years those laws had remained the same: two children to a couple, subject to the judgment of the Fertility Board. The Board decided who might be a parent how many times. The Board might award extra children to one couple, deny any children at all to another, all on the basis of desirable or undesirable genes.

  “Incredible,” said the kzin.

  “Why? Things were getting pretty tanj crowded, with eighteen billion people trapped in a primitive technology.”

  “If the Patriarchy tried to force such a law on Kzinti, we would exterminate the Patriarchy for its insolence.”

  But men were not Kzinti. For half a thousand years the laws had held good. Then, two hundred years ago, had come rumors of chicanery in the Fertility Board. The scandal had ultimately resulted in drastic changes in the birth control laws:

  Every human being now had the right to be a parent once, regardless of the state of his genes. In addition, the Birthrights Second and Third could come automatically: for a high tested IQ, or for proven, useful psychic powers, such as Plateau eyes or absolute direction, or for survival genes, like telepathy or natural longevity or perfect teeth.

  One could buy the birthrights at a million stars a shot. Why not? The knack for making money was a tested, proven survival factor. Besides, it cut down on bribery attempts.

  One could fight for the Birthrights in the arena, if one had not yet used up his Birthright First. Winner to earn his Birthrights Second and Third; loser to lose his Birthright First and his life. It evened out.

  “I have seen such battles on your entertainment shows,” said Speaker. “I thought they were fighting for fun.”

  “Nope, they’re serious,” said Louis. Teela giggled.

  “And the lotteries?”

  “It comes out short,” said Nessus. “Even with boosterspice to prevent aging in humans, more die on Earth than
are born in any given year ... “

  And so each year the Fertility Board totaled up the year’s deaths and emigrations, subtracted the year’s births and immigrations, and put the resulting number of Birthrights into the New Year’s Day lottery.

  Anyone could enter. With luck you could have ten or twenty children—if that was luck. Even convicted criminals could not be excluded from the Birthright Lotteries.

  “I’ve had four children myself,” said Louis Wu. “One by lottery. You’d have met three of them if you’d come twelve hours earlier.”

  “It sounds very strange and complex. When the population of Kzin grows too great, we—“

  “Attack the nearest human world.”

  “Not at all, Louis. We fight each other. The more crowded we grow, the more opportunity exists for one kzin to take offense at another. Our population problem adjusts itself. We have never been within an order of magnitude of your two times eight to the tenth humans on a single planet!”

  “I think I begin to get it,” said Teela Brown. “My parents were both lottery winners.” She laughed somewhat nervously. “Otherwise I wouldn’t even have been born. Come to think of it, my grandfather—“

  “All of your ancestors for five generations were born by reason of winning lottery tickets.”

  “Really! I never knew that!”

  “The records are quite clear,” Nessus assured her.

  “The question remains,” said Louis Wu. “So what?”

  “Those-who-rule in the puppeteer fleet have speculated that the people of Earth are breeding for luck.”

  “Huh!”

  Teela Brown leaned forward in her chair, intensely curious. Doubtless she had never before seen a mad puppeteer.

  “Think of the lotteries, Louis. Think of evolution. For seven hundred years your people bred by the numbers: two birthrights per person, two children per couple. Here and there one might win a third birthright, or be refused his first on adequate grounds: diabetic genes or the like. But most of humanity had two children.