"That's the one argument that always works."
"I can help your world, Louis. Your people know little about sex."
Which statement Louis prudently let slide.
CHAPTER 24 — Fist-of-God
The land grew dry and the air grew thin. Fist-of-God seemed to flee before them. The fruit was gone, and the meat supply was dwindling. This was the barren upward slope that culminated in Fist-of-God itself, a desert Louis had once estimated was larger than the Earth.
Wind whistled around the edges and corners of the Improbable. By now they were almost directly to spinward of the great mountain. The Arch glowed blue and sharpedged, the stars were hard, vivid points.
Speaker looked upward through the big bay window. "Louis, can you locate the galactic core from here?"
"What for? We know where we are."
"Do it anyway."
Louis had tentatively identified some stars, had guessed at certain distorted constellations, in the months he had spent beneath this sky. "There, I think. Behind the Arch."
"Just so. The galactic core lies in the plane of the Ringworld."
"I said that."
"Remember that the Ringworld foundation material will stop neutrinos, Louis. Presumably it will stop other subatomic particles." The kzin was plainly getting at something.
"… That's right. The Ringworld is immune to the Core explosion! When did you figure this out?"
"Just now. I had placed the Core some time ago."
"You'd get some scattering. Heavy radiation around the rim walls."
"But the luck of Teela Brown would place her away from the rim walls when the wave front arrives."
"Twenty thousand years …" Louis was appalled. "Finagle's bright smile! How can anyone think in such terms?"
"Sickness and death are always bad luck, Louis. By our assumptions, Teela Brown should live forever."
"But … right. She's not thinking in those terms. It's her luck, hovering over us all like a puppet master."
Nessus had been a corpse at room temperature for two months now. He did not decay. The lights on his first aid kit remained alight, and even changed on occasion. It was his only sign of life.
Louis was gazing at the puppeteer, minutes later, when two thoughts rubbed together. "Puppeteer," he said softly.
"Louis?"
"I just wondered if the puppeteers didn't get their name by playing god with the species around them. They've treated humans and kzinti like puppets; there's no denying that."
"But Teela's luck made a puppet of Nessus."
"We've all been playing god at various levels." Louis nodded at Prill, who was catching perhaps every third word. "Prill and you and me. How did it feel, Speaker? Were you a good god or a bad one?"
"I cannot know. The species was not my own, though I have studied human extensively. I stopped a war, you will remember. I pointed out to each side that it must lose. That had been three weeks ago."
"Yeah. My idea."
"Of course."
"Now you'll have to play god again. To kzinti," said Louis.
"I do not understand."
"Nessus and the other puppeteers have been playing planned breeding games on humans and kzinti. They deliberately brought about a situation in which natural selection would favor a peaceable kzin. Right?"
"Yes."
"What would happen if the Patriarchy learned of this?"
"War," said the kzin. "A heavily provisioned fleet would attack the puppeteer worlds after a two-year flight. Perhaps humanity would join us. Surely the puppeteers have insulted you as badly."
"Surely they have. And then?"
"Then the leaf-eaters would exterminate my species down to the last kitten. Louis, I do not intend to tell anybody anything concerning starseed lures and puppeteer breeding plans. Can I persuade you to keep silence?"
"Right."
"Is this what you meant by playing god to my species?"
"That, and one more thing," said Louis. "The Long Shot. Do you still want to steal it?"
"Perhaps," said the kzin.
"You can't do it," said Louis. "But let's assume you could. Then what?"
"Then the Patriarchy would have the second quantum hyperdrive."
"And?"
Prill seemed to be aware that something crucial was happening. She watched them as if ready to stop a fight.
"Soon we would have warships capable of crossing a light year in one-and-one-quarter minutes. We would dominate known space, enslave every species within our reach."
"And then?"
"Then it ends. This is precisely our ambition, Louis."
"No. You'd keep conquering. With a drive that good, you'd move outward in all directions, spreading thin, taking every world you found. You'd conquer more than you could hold … and in all that expanded space you'd find something really dangerous. The puppeteer fleet. Another Ringworld, but at the height of its power. Another Slaver race just starting its expansion. Bandersnatchi with hands, grogs with feet, kdatlyno with guns."
"Scare images."
"You've seen the Ringworld. You've seen the puppeteer worlds. There must be more, in the space you could reach with the puppeteer hyperdrive."
The kzin was silent.
"Take your time" said Louis. "Think it through. You can't take the Long shot anyway. You'd kill us all if you tried it."
The next day the Improbable crossed a long, straight meteoric furrow. They turned to antispinward, directly toward Fist-of-God.
Fist-of-God Mountain had grown large without coming near. Bigger than any asteroid, roughly conical, she had the look of a snow-capped mountain swollen to nightmare size. The nightmare continued, for Fist-of-God continued to swell.
"I don't understand," said Prill. She was puzzled and upset. "This formation is not known to me. Why was it built? At the rim there are mountains as high, as decorative, and more useful, for they hold back the air."
"That's what I thought," Louis Wu said. And he would say no more.
That day they saw a small glass bottle resting at the end of the meteoric gouge they had been following.
The Liar was as they had left it: on its back on a frictionless surface. Mentally Louis postponed the celebration. They were not home yet.
In the end Prill had to hover the Improbable so that Louis could cross from the landing ramp. He found controls that would open both doors of the airlock at the same time. But air murmured out around them all the time they were transferring Nessus' body. They could not reduce the cabin pressure without Nessus, and Nessus was, to all appearances, dead.
But they got him into the autodoc anyway. It was a puppeteer-shaped coffin, form-fitted to Nessus himself, and bulky Puppeteer surgeons and mechanics must have intended that it should handle any conceivable circumstance. But had they thought of decapitation?
They had. There were two heads in there, and two more with necks attached, and enough organs and body parts to make several complete puppeteers. Grown from Nessus himself, probably; the faces on the heads looked familiar.
Prill came aboard, and landed on her head. Rarely had Louis seen anyone so startled. He had never thought to tell her about induced gravity. Her face showed nothing as she stood up, but her posture — She was awed to silence.
In that ghostly silence of homecoming, Louis Wu suddenly screamed like a banshee.
"Coffeeee!" he yelled. And, "Hot water!" He charged into the stateroom he had shared with Teela Brown. A moment later he put his head out and screamed, "Prill!"
Prill went.
She hated coffee. She thought Louis must be insane to swallow the bitter stuff, and she told him so.