Ringworld by Larry Niven

Speaker's pressure suit. His eyes were tightly closed; which was a pity, because the view was magnificent.
    "Free fall," said Teela when he opened her crash couch. "I don't feel so good. Better guide me, Louis. Wbat's happening? Are we there?"
    Louis told her a few details while he guided her to the airlock. She listened, but Louis guessed she was concentrating on the pit of her stomach. She looked acutely uncomfortable. "There'll be gravity on the other ship," he told her.
    Her eyes found the tiny rosette where Loius pointed. It was a naked-eye object now, a pentagon of five white stars. She turned with astounded questions in her eyes. The motion spun her semicircular canals; and Louis saw her expression change in the moment before she bolted into the airlock.
    Kemplerer rosettes were one thing. Free-falt sickness was something else again. Louis watched her recede against the unfamiliar stars.
    As the couch cover opened, Louis said, "Don't do anything startling. I'm armed."
    The kzin's orange face did not change expression. "Have we arrived?"
    "Yeah. I've disconnected the fusion drive. You'd never reconnect it in time. We're in the sights of a pair of big ruby lasers."
    "Suppose I were to escape in hyperdrive? No, my mistake. We must be within a singularity."
    "You're in for a shock. We're in five singularities."
    "Five? Really? But you lied about the lasers, Louis. Be ashamed."
    At any rate, the kzin left his couch peaceably enough. Loins followed with the variable-sword at the ready. In the airlock the kzin stopped, suddenly caught by the sight of an expanding pentagon of stars.
    He could hardly have had a better view.
    The Long Shot, edging close in hyperdrive, had stopped half a light-hour ahead of the puppeteer "fleet": something less than the average distance between Earth and Jupiter. But the "fleet" was moving at terrible speed, falling just behind its own light, so that the light which reached the Long Shot came from much further away. When the Long Shot stopped the rosette had been too small to see. It had been barely visible when Teela left the lock. Now it was impressively large, and growing at enormous speed.
    Five pale blue dots in a pentagon, spreading across the sky, growing, spreading ...
    For a flashing instant there were five worlds around the Long Shot. Then they were gone, not fading but gone, their receding light reddened to invisibility. And Speaker-To-Animals held the variable-sword.
    "Finagle's eyes!" Louis exploded. "Don't you have any curiosity at all?"
    The kzin considered. "I have curiosity, but my pride is much stronger." He retracted the wire blade and handed the variable-sword back to Louis. "A threat is a challenge. Shall we go?"
    ***
    The puppeteer ship was a robot. Beyond the airlock the lifesystem was all one big room. Four crash couches, as varied in design as their intended occupants, faced each other in a circle around a refreshment console.
    There were no windows.
    There was gravity, to Louis's relief. But it was not quite Earth's gravity; nor was the air quite Earth's air. The pressure was a touch too high. There were smells, not unpleasant but odd. Louis smelled ozone, hydrocarbons, puppeteer -- dozens of puppeteers -- and other smells he never expected to identify.
    There were no corners. The curved wall merged into floor and ceiling; the couches and the refreshment console all looked half melted. In the puppeteer world there would be nothing hard or sharp, nothing that could draw blood or raise a bruise.
    Nessus sprawled bonelessly in his couch. He looked ridiculously, ludicrously comfortable.
    "He won't talk," Teela laughed.
    "Of course not," said the puppeteer. "I would only have had to start over when you arrived. Doubtless you have been wondering about --"
    "Flying worlds," the kzin interrupted.
    "And Kemplerer rosettes," said Louis. A barely audible hum told him that the ship was moving. He and Speaker stowed their luggage and joined the others in the couches. Teela handed