“Now you’ve got it,” said Mann.
“Excuse me?”
“Think it out the way I did. The puppeteers are cowards. They couldn’t relieve their population pressure by migration. So the population of the home world went up and up. So did the power expenditure per capita.
“It’s the same on Earth. It never snows on the big cities, because the people are putting out too much power. Street lights, house lights—why, if a reading lamp put out only visible light, the only light that didn’t get absorbed by the walls would be the fraction that escaped to space through windows. Then there are refrigerators, air conditioning, transfer booths, crematoriums, neon signs, the frequencies of tridee transmission, messages lasered in from the Moon and asteroids. How about underwater street lights in the continental shelf cities? And dolphin industries? It all has to go somewhere. And Earth’s population is only eighteen billion.”
“How many puppeteers are there?”
Mann shrugged, “I didn’t get that close. A trillion, I’d guess, and all fanatics for comfort. They must use total conversion for power. Would you believe—”
“Instantly.”
“You’re kind. I found the puppeteer planet two light-weeks out from its primary. The sun was no more than a blurred pink dot.”
I closed my mouth.
“I’ll be damned,” Mann said wonderingly. “You meant it. You haven’t called me a liar yet. But it makes sense to put a planet out there. With all the heat they were putting out, they needed a sun like they needed an armed kzinti invasion. A long, long time ago they must have moved their world out to where they could radiate enough heat away to keep the planet habitable. When the sun blew up like a big red balloon, the chances are they hardly noticed.”
“No wonder they were never found. Why do you suppose they kept a sun at all?”
“They probably wanted an anchor, to keep them from drifting all over space.”
“Um.”
“You should have seen it, the way it blazed against the stars. Not like a planet. The continents flamed like yellow-star sunlight. I could have read a book in the light that came through my windows.”
“They let you get that close?”
“Who’d have dared attack me?” He was taking to himself now, and his thoughts were nowhere in this room. “The continents flamed like sunfire, but the oceans were black as space, with light scattered across them to mark islands, maybe. Points of light like bright stars. It was as if black, starry space pushed its edges through black, starry seas to the borders of the burning continents. I’m the only man alive who’s ever seen it. The Jinxian saw it, he and his pirate crew, but they’re dead. All dead.”
“How do you know?”
“I killed them.”
“Did you have reason?”
“Ample reason. Points of honor,” said Mann. He knocked his vodka back with a flip of the wrist. “The Jinxian gave me the coordinates as he was dying. Revenge, he thought. He was right. I should have gone straight to We Made It, but I had to see the planet for myself. And then I came to Silvereyes, which was closer, and I went to the puppeteer embassy, and it was gone.”
“Oh,” I said, for I had the whole picture.
“That’s right. While I was looking for their planet, the puppeteers found out about the Core explosion. So they fled the worlds of men, and where did that leave me? The Institute decided I’d misused my ship. Presently they confiscated it.”
“Surely you could have gotten something out of it. You knew where the puppeteer world was.”
“Did I?” He grinned mockingly.
“Sure. A news agency would have paid you plenty for the biggest scoop of the generation. Even if the puppeteers had left their world empty behind them.”
“But they didn’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“They didn’t have to travel in hyperspace, because they weren’t coming back. The relativistic time lag wouldn’t inconvenience them. They felt safer in normal space. That meant there was no limit to the mass they could move.”
“Eventually, my host, you will strain even my credulity.”
“Why boggle at this? They’d already moved their world once. They hated spacecraft. This is no random guess. When I couldn’t find an embassy I decided to go straight to the puppeteers themselves. I left a message behind in a safe deposit box, to protect myself, like any blackmailer. The puppeteer world was gone when I got there. Gone like a dream. I turned back to Silvereyes, and there the Institute confiscated my ship. Ship and score and riches beyond dreams, all gone.
“Now I have only the memory of a world that shone by its own light, that blazed in the colors of sunfire and darkness.” He hefted the Hrodenu. “And this. I thank you. Every man should own one good thing.”
A pretty compliment. “It was well traded,” I told him. “And the vodka is almost gone. Shall we go drinking and dining? You can play guide for me, since you’ve been here for forty years.”
And so Mann donned clothing and we went to Grushenko’s, I and the finest liar in known space. There, hours later, we traded tales with a pair of sloe-eyed computer programmers. One girl, by luck, turned out to have a father-fixation; and so we were well paired.
It was a fine night to be down. The only uncomfortable moment came when Mann retold his tale of the puppeteer world, and produced a pocket holograph. Somehow the luck of the gift held, and Mann didn’t see my jaw drop.
There in the holograph, a light the color of the sun blazed against starry space. The blazing figure had the shape of a fiery amoeba, but two reaching pseudopods had been lopped at their tips by arcs of a circle.
“I wonder where it is now,” said Mann. The beauty he saw in the holograph, the beauty I could not see, was all the beauty there is.
Larry Niven, Three Books of Known Space
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