Teaser

THE HEADLESS CORPSE-MAN

A corpse was no surprise, given what I remembered. I looked it over. It had been wearing local man’s clothing: boots, loose pants with a rope tie, a jacket encrusted with pockets. The jacket was pierced with a great ragged hole front and back. That could only have been made by Feather’s horrible ARM weapon. This close, the head…I’d thought it must be under the water, but there was no head at all. There were clean white bones, and a neck vertebra cut smoothly in half.

I was hyperventilating. Dizzy. I sat down next to the skeleton so that I wouldn’t fall. My empty stomach heaved. This was much worse than anything I’d imagined. I knew who this was…

♦ ♦ ♦

Beowulf Shaeffer, wandering crashlander, generally too lazy to stay out of trouble, but bright enough to think his way out once he was in…as long as he kept his head!

also by Larry Niven

By Larry Niven
Published by Ballantine Books:

The Known Space series:

A GIFT FROM EARTH

THE LONG ARM OF GIL HAMILTON

NEUTRON STAR

PROTECTOR

RINGWORLD

THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS

TALES OF KNOWN SPACE:
The Universe of Larry Niven

WORLD OF PTAVVS

Other titles:

ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS

CONVERGENT SERIES

THE FLIGHT OF THE HORSE

A HOLE IN SPACE

THE INTEGRAL TREES

LIMITS

THE SMOKE RING

A WORLD OUT OF TIME

CRASHLANDER

With Steven Barnes:

THE CALIFORNIA VOODOO GAME

With David Gerrold:

THE FLYING SORCERERS

With Jerry Pournelle:

FOOTFALL

LUCIFER’S HAMMER

Dedication

For my Mother:
for all that I owe you.

✴
GHOST: ONE

We had wonderful seats ten rows back from the glass.

Two hundred feet below the ocean’s surface sunlight flooded down through seaweed forests in a thousand flickering golden beams. Players swirled in shoals among the forest roots like half a hundred color-coded fighting fish.

Grandstands had been set against the city dome. Beyond the glass was the playing domain for ten color-marked teams, each team being five humans and a dolphin. Sixty players, down to fifty now, the humans using breathers and oversized fins.

The prey were local life-forms, three flattened turtles armed with hind flippers as wide as wings. Their painted shells glowed like captured suns, red, yellow, violet. The point was to move the prey through the arches, paraboloids painted in the same blazing colors. A player might pull a prey against his chest to swim with it, or hold it at arm’s length and steer by the strength of his arms while the prey did the work, or even leave it swimming toward the sand during a melee, hoping a teammate could get it before it disappeared.

Sharrol was entranced. When a swarm of Entertainment Guild Players carried the violet prey through the violet arch, she bellowed with the rest.

I don’t understand water war. She watched the game; I watched her.