Juggler of Worlds Read online

  Nessus was a label of convenience. His real name was only reproducible by paired throats or a wind ensemble. Unaware he was in listening range (why reveal how acute his hearing truly was?), Trisha had once described his name as an industrial accident set to waltz time.

  That was no worse, Nessus supposed, than what humans called all his race: Puppeteers.

  “I sense nothing supernatural here,” Nessus said, choosing his words with caution. He did everything with caution. “Scary, I’ll grant you.”

  That got the chuckle Nessus knew it would. Puppeteers were widely seen as cowards—which, essentially, was why this ship flew with a human crew.

  Alas, Nessus thought, I’m just crazy enough to be assigned to lead them.

  KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. On that all intelligent species concurred.

  Species differed on how best to acquire knowledge. Among Nessus’ kind, it was agreed that exploration was madness. It could not be otherwise, when to leave home world and herd was insanity.

  Hence these humans.

  Trial and error had shown humans made excellent explorers. Humans didn’t know about the experiments, of course. Nessus had no intention of revealing them. He didn’t dare. No Puppeteer would.

  The invisible it they distantly orbited was a recently discovered neutron star, designated BVS-1. Like every neutron star, BVS-1 was the extremely compressed remains of a supernova. Implosion had crushed the stellar slag, more massive than many a normal star, into a sphere just 17 kilometers in diameter. Its own gravity kept it that small. A film of ordinary matter coated a slightly thicker layer of free-ranging subatomic particles, which covered—no one knew what, exactly. That inner orb approached the density of an atomic nucleus. Physicists called the core material neutronium or neutron-degenerate matter. Engineers called it unobtainium. Both argued heatedly about its properties.

  Most neutron stars shouted their presence across light-years, transforming cosmic dust and gas into cataclysmic X-ray blasts or gamma-ray bursts. But it wasn’t radiation that kept explorers away from neutron stars and a close look at the mysterious neutronium. It was those in-spiraling clouds of dust and gas themselves, accelerated to relativistic speeds as they were sucked in. No matter how impervious the hull, the pummeling would be fatal to instruments or crew.

  And then there was BVS-1, cold and dark, its presence recently revealed by a gravitational anomaly.

  BVS-1 had long ago devoured its accretion disc and ceased to pulse. Its surface temperature, scarcely warmer than empty space itself, implied it had been a neutron star for at least a billion years. That made it approachable—

  Or so the theory went.

  THEY CIRCLED BVS-1 at the presumed safe distance of two million kilometers. Nessus tried not to dwell on that presumption. Peter and Sonya Laskin had monitored BVS-1 for days from a closer orbit, reporting regularly by hyperwave radio, before swooping in for a close look.

  The Hal Clement had not been heard from since.

  “Any signs of them?” Nessus asked. His calm tone was a lie. Every instinct demanded that he flee—if not from the astronomical enigma, then at least from the unpredictable humans. He wanted to lock himself into his cabin, to curl into a ball, his heads tucked tightly inside, and hide from the universe.

  Trisha shook her head. “No response to our broadcasts. Nothing on radar.”

  “Could be interference,” Raul said hopefully. “Or simple equipment breakdown.”

  True, the Laskins’ comm gear might have failed. That didn’t explain the lack of a radar sighting. “Keep trying,” Nessus ordered. He fought the urge to pluck at his already-disheveled mane. Something had gone badly wrong here.

  This was why his people didn’t explore.

  Raul broke the lengthening silence, his manner apologetic. “Still nothing.”

  Nessus settled astraddle the Y-shaped padded bench that was his post on the bridge. With his lip nodes, far nimbler than human fingers, he operated a human computer console. The Laskins’ planned course was as he remembered. Their hyperbolic plunge would have them skim within two kilometers of BVS-1’s mysterious surface. If their autopilot had erred only slightly and they had somehow impacted . . .

  If he could contemplate that malfunction, why not others? Nessus contemplated the planned hairpin turn, the ship hurled back into space. It had been days since the Laskins went missing. “What if the autopilot didn’t resume orbit after the dive? How far would they coast?”

  Trisha plopped onto an empty crash couch. Her body blocked whatever she did with her console. “I’ll expand our radar search.”

  She found the ship adrift, millions of kilometers from where they had searched. It did not answer hails. Raul brought them alongside.

  Through his view port, Nessus studied the Hal Clement. It had a ferocious spin. Why had the Laskins spun up their ship like that?

  “We can’t board for a look while it’s spinning,” Nessus said. “Any ideas?”

  Raul rubbed his chin. “Nessus, are the landing struts on the other ship steel? Ours are.”

  Nessus retrieved the specs. “Steel, yes.”

  “Then we use our magnetic docking couplers for drag. Like all our equipment, the couplers are way overengineered. We slow the Hal Clement’s spin while our attitude thrusters keep us at a safe distance.”

  There were several bursts of keyboarding, and then Raul slapped the console in frustration. “Tanj! It’s going to take a while.”

  Of course their systems were overengineered. Nessus would not otherwise have set hoof aboard. “Proceed,” he said.

  And so Raul managed the braking pulses, adjusting the pulse rate as spin bled away. Trisha and the nav computer muttered to each other. Nessus . . . fretted.

  Until—

  Trisha whistled. “That’s why they’re spinning and so far off-course. The rotation of a massive object—tiny though it is, BVS-1 outmasses Sol—warps nearby space. I ran the numbers and it comes down to this. The spin the Hal Clement picked up and the kink from its planned trajectory show BVS-1 rotates about every two and a half minutes.”

  “Interesting,” Nessus said atonally. In truth, he couldn’t imagine how knowing the spin of the neutron star could possibly matter. If his kind had any curiosity, though, they’d probably be as foolishly brave as these humans.

  All that interested Nessus at that moment was the still-silent ship. It had finally slowed down enough for meaningful observation—and cautious boarding. Its landing struts looked odd somehow. That had to be in his imagination. Peter and Sonya could not possibly have landed. If they had, they could not have launched.

  Trisha and Nessus checked Raul’s suit gauges twice before allowing him into the air lock. Their comm link checked out. So did his helmet cam. Holding a gas pistol, Raul jetted the few meters to the derelict. A dimple of curdled sky, where gravity bent even starlight, showed the general location of BVS-1.

  Something was terribly wrong. Nessus could tell Trisha felt it, too. She leaned forward anxiously as Raul disappeared into the air lock of the Laskins’ ship.

  “Nessus, Trish, are you there?” Raul’s camera relayed the inner hatch of the air lock. They watched his gloved finger stretch toward the controls. Status lamps flashed. The hatch began to cycle. “Life-support systems all register nominal.”

  “We’re here,” Nessus said. “I suggest you keep your suit sealed anyway.”

  “Will do,” Raul said.

  Nessus watched the inner hatch open. Raul and camera moved inward, panned along a corridor, turned a corner—

  The next thing Nessus saw, as his heads whipped uncontrollably to a point of safety between his front legs, was the underside of his belly.

  4

  Sigmund sat alone at a small table in the packed ship’s lounge. Beyond his left elbow lay a coat of blue paint, a supposedly impregnable hull, and an unknowable amount of . . . he didn’t know what.

  No one did.

  The good thing about hyperspace was hyperdrive. Hyperdrive travel correspon
ded, in normal space, to a light-year every three days. The bad thing about hyperspace was no one knew what it was. Every so often, a hyperdrive ship disappeared. Scientists declaimed learnedly that the pilot must have flown too close to a mathematical singularity, the warping of space near a stellar mass.

  What happened in such cases was unclear. Perhaps the errant ship fell down a wormhole, only to emerge unreachably, incommunicably, far, far away. Perhaps the ship became trapped forever in hyperspace. Or, just maybe, the ship ceased to exist. The math was ambiguous.

  Compared to the less-than-nothingness centimeters away, odd scents and strange constellations were inconsequential. Sigmund yearned for a world. Any world.

  He took more comfort from the beer in his drink bulb than in General Products Corporation’s assurances about indestructible-hull technology. Invulnerability hardly sufficed when his whole ship could disappear.

  General Products being a Puppeteer company, and Puppeteers being Puppeteers, little was known about the hull material beyond its truly impressive warranty. Die because of a GP hull failure and your heirs would become very rich.

  Well, not his heirs. Sigmund had none. He expected none. He didn’t take it personally—the Fertility Board felt that way about all natural paranoids. Truth be told, 18 billion people on Earth were several billion too many. He couldn’t fault the board for preferring sane progeny.

  That didn’t mean he liked it. He sucked on his beer bulb, hunting for happier thoughts.

  The sudden collapse of Nakamura Lines meant ships everywhere were filled to capacity. Every stateroom aboard was taken. Passengers stood three deep at the small bar. Only Sigmund and a battle-scarred Kzin had tables to themselves. Even the Jinxians shared their tiny tables.

  Jinxians: That wasn’t a happy thought, but Sigmund tried to keep his expression neutral.

  Jinx was the human-colonized moon, marginally habitable, of a gas-giant planet orbiting Sirius A. The surface gravity on Jinx was 1.78 standard. Living there shaped a person. Jinxians were built like boulders, short and squat, with arms as thick as Sigmund’s legs, and legs like old tree trunks.

  Why would anyone live there? Raise families there? Flatlanders and spacers alike chalked it up to Jinxian craziness.

  Not Sigmund. Jinx was the kind of world on which to raise an army of supermen.

  A waiter came by, insinuating himself with admirable grace through milling crowds and between full tables. Sigmund accepted a fresh beer bulb while the opportunity presented itself, but his dark thoughts remained fixed on Jinx.

  Not even supermen could threaten Earth—not without first defeating Earth’s vastly larger fleets. Hence, the unsubstantiated certainty that had set Sigmund onto this trip. Where better for the Jinxians to seek technological superiority than in that world’s immodestly named Institute of Knowledge?

  The institute’s sprawling museum and vast public data banks suggested openness, but much of its research remained “proprietary” to its scientists. That secrecy seemed not to bother people. Why would it, what with the institute being a public, not-for-profit organization? A myriad of endowments, corporate sponsorships, academic alliances, and government grants funded its operations.

  Sigmund took a long sip of beer, and resisted the urge to smile. He’d once been one hell of a forensic financial analyst. And so, on Jinx, he’d mined the public record.

  He had not braved hyperspace and alien worlds for nothing.

  Most of the institute’s academic alliances were with government-run Jinxian universities. Much of the corporate sponsorship came from businesses holding Jinxian government contracts. The endowments came from the Jinxian elites, with countless ties to current and retired officials.

  Money laundering was money laundering.

  With a mind of its own, Sigmund’s left hand crept to his stomach. Autodocs only removed physical scars.

  Passengers kept wandering in and out of the lounge. The ratcat bared his teeth when anyone approached him. Sigmund’s scowl was a pale substitute. He wasn’t surprised when a shadow fell across his table.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Sigmund looked up to a willowy blonde with twinkling green eyes. Earth willowy, not Belter skeletal. Her voice had a throaty quality. She eyed him frankly.

  He pointed to an empty seat. “Help yourself.”

  She sat. “I’m Pamela,” she said. “I’ve never met a Wunderlander.”

  “Sigmund.” He stroked the beard he’d grown for the trip. More than a home world, the beard implied a station in life. The beard’s most prominent feature was a waxed spike sprouting from the right side of his jaw. Close-cropped stubble covered the rest of his chin. He had dyed his whiskers snow-white to contrast with his black suit. “Ah, the beard. Funny story, that.”

  A funny style, as well. Its singular “virtue” was the absurd amount of time required for its maintenance. On Wunderland, the human-settled planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, asymmetric beards were all the rage among the idle rich. Pamela probably thought he was from one of the Nineteen Families of original settlers—parasites all.

  “I’d love to hear it.” Pamela smiled at the returning waiter. “Vurguuz.”

  Vurguuz was a Wunderland concoction. Sigmund had tried it. Once. Years ago. He remembered a fist to the solar plexus and a minty-sweet aftertaste.

  So Pamela wanted to impress him. . . .

  “An interesting choice,” he said. “It makes my story even droller.” He said no more until her order arrived and she took a squeeze. Her eyes grew round.

  Sigmund handed her his spare beer. She sucked the bulb dry in one convulsive swig. “I’m from Earth,” Sigmund said. “I just liked the exotic look. Wunderland is the final stop on my grand tour. When in Rome, and all that.” Jinx was neither the first nor the last stop on his itinerary, neither the shortest nor the longest stopover, the better to disguise his interest. He signaled for two more beers.

  “That is funny.” Pamela coughed, her eyes tearing. “Two flatlanders. Still, I like the beard.”

  The best disguises are simple, Sigmund thought. Across Human Space, most people disdained the Wunderlander aristos. At home, revolutionaries fought to overthrow them. Only an oblivious buffoon would travel aping one.

  Who’d ever suspect him of being an ARM on a covert mission?

  The brazen twinkle had returned to Pamela’s eyes. She laid a warm hand on Sigmund’s arm. “Sigmund, tell me about your grand tour.”

  Starships offered few diversions. Drinking shipboard was expensive. The obvious alternative for consenting adults was free. Sigmund couldn’t imagine perky little Pamela matching the athletic send-off Feather had given him—nor that Feather would expect him to abstain. He patted Pamela’s hand. “It’s so crowded here. Perhaps we could adjourn—”

  Pamela was looking past him. The whole lounge had fallen silent. Glancing over his shoulder, Sigmund saw the ship’s captain approaching. Sigmund had taken his turn at the captain’s dinner table. It was hard to see the genial host chatting up his first-class customers in the grim-faced man now approaching.

  “Ausfaller?” the captain said.

  “Yes.” Sigmund’s reflexive thought was of the Kzin passenger. There had been six Man-Kzin Wars. Why not a seventh? ARM HQ might expect him to take custody of the alien.

  “Come with me, sir.”

  Sigmund followed the captain to the liner’s bridge. And once Sigmund had decoded the priority hyperwave radio message from ARM HQ, he felt like he’d had the vurguuz.

  5

  Arching one neck, the Puppeteer accepted the proffered ID. It set the disc on its desk and began a thorough examination. Apart from the few padded, backless benches and the oval desk, the office suited We Made It norms. The wall holos all showed scenes of human worlds.

  The mundane decor didn’t surprise Sigmund. Puppeteers didn’t give clues about their worlds—never a name or description, much less a location or representation.

  He trusted the aliens as little as they trusted
him.

  Sigmund had never met a Puppeteer in person until today. The flunkies and functionaries had passed him along, one to the next, and now to this latest one, almost too fast to form impressions. What had struck him was how everyone in the outer offices appeared to have assumed a humanized name. Satyrs and centaurs, fates and furies, heroes and muses . . . when time permitted, he intended to ponder the aliens’ evident fascination with human myths.

  This one, Sigmund decided, was a decision maker. Standing, it matched Sigmund’s height. That was the only similarity.

  The Puppeteer stood on two forelegs set far apart and one complexly jointed hind leg. Two long and flexible necks emerged from between its muscular shoulders. Each flat, triangular head had an ear, an eye, and a mouth whose tongue and knobbed lips also served as a hand. Its leathery skin was off-white with patches of tan. Its elaborately coiffed and ornamented brown mane covered the bony braincase between those sinuous necks.

  Apparently Sigmund’s ID passed inspection. “You are quite far from home, Mr. Ausfaller. I do not understand the United Nations interest.” Like the Puppeteers in the outer office, it spoke perfect Interworld in a startling contralto.

  It? Puppeteer genders were as mysterious as their origins. Despite their feminine voices, all were addressed as he. “Might I ask your name?” Sigmund asked.

  Heads turned; for a moment, the Puppeteer looked himself in the eyes.

  The mannerism meant nothing to Sigmund. Nor did its aural accompaniment, like a large glass window shattering in slow motion.

  “More relevant is my responsibility within General Products Corporation. In human terms, I am the regional president here on We Made it.”

  If the Puppeteer chose not to offer a name, Sigmund did not mind assigning one. Broken Glass seemed the obvious choice, but for the many demigods in the outer office.

  Sigmund’s work and personality alike demanded attention to detail, and he’d noted many subtle distinctions among the aliens. Black, brown, and green eyes. Variations in height and build. Dissimilar skin patterns, in patches of brown, tan, and white.