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Physically, Puppeteers resemble a centaur with three legs ending in hooved feet and two snake-like heads instead of a humanoid upper body. The heads are very small, with a forked tongue, extensive rubbery lips, rimmed with finger-like knobs, and a single eye per head. The heads do not contain the Puppeteer's brain; it resides near the shoulder in a massive mane-covered hump from which the heads emerge. The sobriquet "Pierson's" comes from the name of the human who made first contact in the early 26th century in the Known Space timeline. According to a Niven story Pierson was a crewman aboard a spaceship at a time when there was a camp revival of the ancient Beany and Cecil TV show featuring Cecil the sea sick sea serpent (a former puppet) and he accordingly described the alien he had met as a Puppeteer, given some ressemblances of the head and neck with Cecil. Most Puppeteers give themselves human names the same as centaurs in Greek mythology, such as Nessus and Chiron.
Biologically, Puppeteers are highly intelligent herbivores; a herd animal, Puppeteers prefer the company (and smell) of their own kind. Their cycle of reproduction is unusual, but Earth cognates exist in the form of digger wasps: the Puppeteers wrongly consider themselves to have three genders (two male, one female), except their two "male" genders are the cognates of human male and female (one has an ovipositor, the other a penis, of sorts) and the "female" is the parasitised host into which the ova and spermatozoa are deposited.
Technically, the Puppeteers are very advanced, centuries or millennia ahead of most other species (including humans). For example, humans invented a method of cheap teleportationTeleportation or teletransportation is the process of moving objects (or more likely with present techniques, fundamental particles) from one place to another by encoding information about the object, transmitting the information to another place, such as in the twenty-fifth century24th century 25th century 26th century more centuries) The 25th century ( Gregorian Calendar) comprises the years 2401-2500. Astronomical predictions for the 25th century Belgian astronomer Jean Meeus asserts that the orbits of all nine planets will be wi called a transfer booth , which requires an enclosed space at either end of the transmission. Puppeteers' version of the transfer booth is the stepping disk , which requires no enclosure — simply step on a disc and you are abruptly elsewhere, often thousands of kilometres away.
Socially, the three most notable traits of Puppeteers are their racial/cultural penchant for cowardice, their tendency to congregate in herds, and their steadfast honesty in honoring agreements. The cowardice is thought in Puppeteer society to originate with the Puppeteer instinct for turning one's back on danger. However, the trait is thought by many to actually originate from their herd instinct, as the instinct to turn one's back is linked to an instinct to kick the hind hoof at an attacker. In RingworldRingworld is the title of a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe. The work is widely considered one of the classics of science fiction literature. It is followed by three sequels, and it ties in to numerous other book, when Nessus and the expeditionaries are threatened, the Puppeteer defends himself quite effectively:
Another noticeable behavioral trait is the coma state, broadly a cognate of the human foetal position — in the same way that ostriches bury their heads in the sand, Puppeteers fold up into a ball, tucking their three legs and two heads underneath the padded cranial bulge. This is, in part, an explosion reflex, learnt from childhood. Their cowardice is also reflected in their architecture and object design, as all the Puppeteer-designed rooms and vessels have no sharp edges, everything curves into everything else, giving a "half-melted" look and meaning that objects are less likely to damage someone inadvertently, through their own carelessness.
In a later Known Space story, the Puppeteers explain that their cowardice is partly a result of a science experiment (the details of which are not given) that proves the Puppeteers have nothing equivalent to an immortal soulThis page is about the core essence of a being. For the music genre, see soul music; for the chief city of South Korea see Seoul. The soul in several philosophical movements and many religious traditions, is the core essence of a being. In some traditions, and therefore death is, for their species, absolute and eternal. As a result, the Puppeteer race is fanatically devoted to its own safety.
A courageous puppeteer isn't merely regarded as insane (as Nessus, one of the protagonists of the book Ringworld, mentions "the majority is always sane"), though, but is insane, showing symptoms we would associate with human mental illness, such as bipolar dysfunction, homicidal tendencies, depression and so on. Incidentally, though, aside from the crew of the Long Shot, in the novel Ringworld, no human has ever met a sane Puppeteer, as no sane Puppeteer would ever leave the safety of the Fleet of Worlds (see below), and even those who do would not venture out without a painless method of suicide, in case circumstances required it.
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