Read Online Juggler of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner - Free Book Online
Authors: Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner
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problem. The ongoing corruption scandal in the Beijing city council. Starving mountain lions had attacked a hiker camped on Mount Shasta. Celebrity gossip.
“What’s the extent of the transfer-booth outage?” Sigmund asked. Others had silently gathered to watch. Someone reached past him to call up a map. A blotchy area ebbed and flowed, amoeba-like: the time-lapse view of the service disruption. Sporadically, a pseudopod reached out to graze Mojave Spaceport.
Mojave was the only spaceport Puppeteers seemed to be avoiding. Because, cowards that they were, they shunned the area affected by the outage?
Things aren’t always what they seem. Were Puppeteers gathering in GP buildings? Were they avoiding Mojave Spaceport?
A sick conviction seized Sigmund. A data-collection malfunction needn’t mean the system couldn’t work. It was a billing problem—and, by extension, a problem with tracking people’s movements. Or Puppeteers’ movements. “Any unusual flight activity at Mojave in the last few days?”
General Products had long stored an unsold colony ship at Mojave. Like all modern colony ships, it used GP’s largest-model hull. Sigmund had seen #4s, and they were monsters, spheres a good third of a kilometer in diameter. A ship like that would carry a
lot
of Puppeteers. Every Puppeteer on Earth, perhaps? Boarded unseen through transfer booths?
The colony ship had taken off yesterday.
When inspectors began reporting back that GP buildings around the planet were empty, Sigmund wasn’t at all surprised.
MURMURS AND MUTTERS, intense whispers and heartfelt cussing, purposefully quick footsteps—all the sounds of a major investigation. Fear and dread gnawed at Sigmund’s gut.
He found the time to smile at Feather. They wouldn’t be sent on a mother hunt anytime soon.
The vastness commonly referred to as Known Space encompassed an approximate sphere of about 60 light-years in diameter.
To apply that description,
known
, took breathtaking hubris. Few solar systems in that enormous volume had ever been surveyed, much less settled. The gulfs between stars were, since the advent of hyperdrive, circumvented rather than traversed. Most of “Known Space” remained defiantly unknown—including, in a timely example, the location, presumably somewhere in the region, of the Puppeteer world or worlds.
To our ignorance, Sigmund mused, we can add a new mystery. All the Puppeteers who once visited the settled worlds of Known Space—worlds of all races, not only humans—had vanished. No one could say to where.
Jinx, abruptly, was no longer Sigmund’s designated worry. As the reports trickled in, sometimes unsolicited, as often triggered by Earth’s frantic hyperwave queries, ARM HQ had decreed the need for a special task force to investigate the Puppeteer disappearances.
And they had named Sigmund to direct it.
He’d reported as ordered to HQ in New York. His new office was barren, as ascetic as his black suit. He set the walls to window mode, and gazed out over Manhattan. Freighters clogged the harbor. Cargo planes filled the skies over the bustling megalopolis. It seemed normal, and yet—
A few klicks to the south, amid the tallest of Manhattan’s office towers, the biggest stock market in Sol system was imploding.
Sun glinted from the kilometers-tall spires of the financial community. People said that once you reached terminal velocity, the final seconds before impact were peaceful. No one could tell Sigmund how they knew that.
That wasn’t a constructive train of thought. He blanked the walls again, wondering where to start. Three-Vs droned in neighboring offices.
Across Known Space, slow-motion catastrophe unfolded. General Products had wiped out three races’ hull-production industries—and now GP was gone. Rebuilding the lost construction capacity would be the labor of years.
Economic crisis began with starship builders and interstellar cruise lines.It spread to their subcontractors and investors.
“What’s the extent of the transfer-booth outage?” Sigmund asked. Others had silently gathered to watch. Someone reached past him to call up a map. A blotchy area ebbed and flowed, amoeba-like: the time-lapse view of the service disruption. Sporadically, a pseudopod reached out to graze Mojave Spaceport.
Mojave was the only spaceport Puppeteers seemed to be avoiding. Because, cowards that they were, they shunned the area affected by the outage?
Things aren’t always what they seem. Were Puppeteers gathering in GP buildings? Were they avoiding Mojave Spaceport?
A sick conviction seized Sigmund. A data-collection malfunction needn’t mean the system couldn’t work. It was a billing problem—and, by extension, a problem with tracking people’s movements. Or Puppeteers’ movements. “Any unusual flight activity at Mojave in the last few days?”
General Products had long stored an unsold colony ship at Mojave. Like all modern colony ships, it used GP’s largest-model hull. Sigmund had seen #4s, and they were monsters, spheres a good third of a kilometer in diameter. A ship like that would carry a
lot
of Puppeteers. Every Puppeteer on Earth, perhaps? Boarded unseen through transfer booths?
The colony ship had taken off yesterday.
When inspectors began reporting back that GP buildings around the planet were empty, Sigmund wasn’t at all surprised.
MURMURS AND MUTTERS, intense whispers and heartfelt cussing, purposefully quick footsteps—all the sounds of a major investigation. Fear and dread gnawed at Sigmund’s gut.
He found the time to smile at Feather. They wouldn’t be sent on a mother hunt anytime soon.
The vastness commonly referred to as Known Space encompassed an approximate sphere of about 60 light-years in diameter.
To apply that description,
known
, took breathtaking hubris. Few solar systems in that enormous volume had ever been surveyed, much less settled. The gulfs between stars were, since the advent of hyperdrive, circumvented rather than traversed. Most of “Known Space” remained defiantly unknown—including, in a timely example, the location, presumably somewhere in the region, of the Puppeteer world or worlds.
To our ignorance, Sigmund mused, we can add a new mystery. All the Puppeteers who once visited the settled worlds of Known Space—worlds of all races, not only humans—had vanished. No one could say to where.
Jinx, abruptly, was no longer Sigmund’s designated worry. As the reports trickled in, sometimes unsolicited, as often triggered by Earth’s frantic hyperwave queries, ARM HQ had decreed the need for a special task force to investigate the Puppeteer disappearances.
And they had named Sigmund to direct it.
He’d reported as ordered to HQ in New York. His new office was barren, as ascetic as his black suit. He set the walls to window mode, and gazed out over Manhattan. Freighters clogged the harbor. Cargo planes filled the skies over the bustling megalopolis. It seemed normal, and yet—
A few klicks to the south, amid the tallest of Manhattan’s office towers, the biggest stock market in Sol system was imploding.
Sun glinted from the kilometers-tall spires of the financial community. People said that once you reached terminal velocity, the final seconds before impact were peaceful. No one could tell Sigmund how they knew that.
That wasn’t a constructive train of thought. He blanked the walls again, wondering where to start. Three-Vs droned in neighboring offices.
Across Known Space, slow-motion catastrophe unfolded. General Products had wiped out three races’ hull-production industries—and now GP was gone. Rebuilding the lost construction capacity would be the labor of years.
Economic crisis began with starship builders and interstellar cruise lines.It spread to their subcontractors and investors.
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