Ringworld (22 page)

"And port and starboard."

"These we can ignore," the puppeteer said crisply. "But air moving in from spinward win become fractionally lighter than the surrounding air. It will rise. Air moving in from the opposite direction, from antispinward, will become fractionally heavier - -"

Louis was groping with an improperly visualized picture. "Why?"

"From antispinward it comes, Louis. Its rotational velocity is increased fractionally with respect to the Ring. Centrifugal force causes it to sink slightly.

"It forms the lower eyelid of the eye. The air from spinward, rising, forms the upper eyelid. There is a whirlpool effect, surely, but the axis of the whirlpool is horizontal, where on a planet it would be vertical."

"But it's such a small effect!"

"But it is the only effect, Louis. There is nothing to interfere with its action, or to stop it. It might go on for millenia, building to what you see now."

"Maybe. Maybe." The eye seemed less frightening now. As the puppeteer had said, it must be some kind of storm. It was all the colors of a storm, of black clouds and upper sunlit white clouds and the dark "eye" of the storm acting as the iris of the Eye.

"The problem is the air sink, of course. Why does air disappear near the center of the storm?"

"Maybe a pump is still working in there."

"I doubt that, Louis. If that were so, the air disturbances in this vicinity would be planned."

"Well?"

"Have you noticed the places where the ring foundation material pokes through the soil and the bedrock? Surely such erosion must be unplanned. Have you noticed how such places appeared more frequently as we neared this place? The Eye storm must have upset weather patterns for tens of thousands of miles around, over an area greater than your world or mine."

This time it was Louis who whistled. "Tanj for torment! But then -- oh, now I see. There must be a meteor puncture in the center of the Eye storm."

"Yes. You see the importance of this. The ring floor can be penetrated."

"But not by anything we're armed with."

"True. Still, we must know if the puncture is there."

Already Louis's superstitious panic seemed a remembered dream. The puppeteer's analytical calm was contagious and steadying. Louis Wu looked fearlessly into the eye and said, "We'll have to go in and look. You think it'll be safe, flying through the iris?"

"It should be no more than clear, still air in a partial vacuum."

"Okay. I'll relay the good news. Well all fly through the eye storm."

***

The sky was darkening as they approached the iris. Was night falling overhead? Impossible to tell. The thickening, blackening clouds made darkness enough.

The eye was at least a hundred miles long from corner to corner, and something like forty miles tall. Its outline seemed to blur as they approached. Layers and streamers became visible. The true shape of the eye began to show: a tunnel of churning winds, reasonably uniform, whose cross-section was a picture of a human eye.

But it still looked like an eye as they hurtled toward the iris.

It was like falling into the eye of God. The visual effect was horrifying, terrifying, almost comically overdone. Louis was ready to laugh or scream. Or back out. It would only take one observer to find out whether there was a hole in the Ringworld floor. Louis could go around ...

They were in.

They flew down a black corridor lit by lightning. Lightning flashed almost continuously, ahead and behind and on all sides. For a uniform distance around them the air was clear. Beyond the iris region, opaque black clouds swirled around them, moving at greater than hurricane velocities.

"The leaf-eater was right," Speaker roared. "It is nothing but a storm."

"Funny thing. He was the only one of the four of us who didn't panic when he saw that eye. I guess puppeteers aren't superstitious," screamed Louis Wu.

Teela called, "I see something ahead of us!"

It was a dip in the floor of the tunnel. Louis grinned with tension and rested his hands lightly on the controls. There might be a tanj of a downdraft over that dip.

He was less wary now, less tense, than he had been when they entered the Eye. What could happen where even a puppeteer found safety?

Clouds and lightning whirled around them as they neared the dip.

They braked and hovered over the dip, their flycycle motors fighting the downdraft. Through the muffling action of the sonic folds, the storm screamed in their ears.

It was like looking into a funnel. Obviously there was air disappearing down there; but was it being pumped away at high speed, or was it being spewed at the stars through the black bottom of the Ringworld? They couldn't actually see much ...

Louis did not notice when Teela dropped her 'cycle. She was too far away, the flickering light was too strange, and he was looking down. He saw a tiny speck dwindling into the funnel, but he thought nothing of it.

Then, thinned by the howl of the storm, he heard Teela's scream.

Teela's face was clear in the intercom image. She was looking down, and she was terrified.

"What is it?" he bellowed.

He could barely hear her answer. "It's got me!"

He looked down.

The funnel was clear between its whirling conical sides. It was oddly and steadily lit, not by lightning per se, but by cathode-ray effects caused by current differences in a nearly complete vacuum. There was a speck of ... something down there, something that might conceivably have been a flycycle, if anyone were stupid enough to dive a flycycle into a maelstrom merely to get a closer look at a puncture hole into outer space.

Louis felt sick. There was nothing to be done, nothing at all. He wrenched his eyes away --

Only to see Teela's eyes above the dashboard. She was looking down into something dreadful --

And blood was running from her nose.

He saw the terror drain out of her face, to leave a white corpselike calm. She was about to faint. Anoxia? The sonic fold would hold air against vacuum, but it had to be set first.

Half-conscious, she looked up at Louis Wu. Do something, she begged. Do something.

Her head fell forward against the dash.

Louis's teeth were in his lower lip. He could taste the blood. He looked down into the funnel of streaming neon-lit cloud, and it was sickeningly like the whirlpool over a bathtub drain. He found the tiny speck that must be Teela's cycle -- and saw it lunge straight forward and into the sloping, whirling wall of the funnel.

Seconds later he saw the vapor trail appear ahead of him, far down the eye of the horizontal hurricane. A thread of white, sharply pointed. Somehow it never occurred to him to doubt that it was Teela's 'cycle.

"What happened?" Speaker called.

Louis shook his head, declining to answer. He felt numb. Reason was short-circuited; his thoughts traced a circle, round and round.

Teela's intercom image was face down, showing mostly hair. She was unconscious, in an uncontrolled flycycle moving far faster than twice sonic speed. Somebody really ought to do something about that ...

"But she was about to die, Louis. Could Nessus have activated a control we don't know about?"

"No. I'd rather believe that than ... no."

"I think that must be what happened," said Speaker.

"You saw what happened! She fainted, her head hit the control board, and her 'cycle shot out of that drain like hell wouldn't have it! She punched the right controls with her forehead!"

"Nonsense."

"Yeah." Louis wanted to sleep, to stop thinking ...

"Consider the probabilities, Louis!" The kzin got it then, and he left his mouth open while he thought about it. His verdict was, "No. Impossible."

"Yeah."

"She would not have been chosen to join us. If her luck were even partially dependable, Nessus would never have found her. She would have stayed on Earth."

Lightning sparkled, illuminating the long, long tunnel of churning storm cloud. A straight, narrow line pointed dead ahead: the vapor trail from Teela's flycycle. But the 'cycle itself was beyond visibility.

"Louis, we would never have crashed on the Ringworld!"

"I'm still wondering about that."

"Perhaps you had better wonder how to save her life."

Louis nodded. With no real sense of urgency, he pushed the call button for Nessus -- a thing Speaker could not do.

The puppeteer answered instantly, as if he had been waiting for the signal. Louis was surprised to see that Speaker remained on the line. Rapidly he outlined what had happened.

"It appears that we were both wrong about Teela," said Nessus.

"Yeah."

"She is moving under emergency power. Her forehead would not be enough to activate the proper controls. First she must manipulate the override slot. It is difficult to see how she could do that by accident."

"Where is it?" And when the puppeteer had shown him, Louis said, "She might have stuck her finger in it, just out of curiosity."

"Really?"

Speaker interrupted Louis's answer. "But what can we do?"

"When she wakes up, have her signal me," Nessus said crisply. "I can show her how to go back on normal thrust, and how to find us afterward."

"Meanwhile, we can do nothing?"

"That is correct. There is the danger that elements may burn out in the propulsion system. However, her vehicle will avoid obstacles; she will not crash. She is receding from us at approximately Mach four. The worst danger she faces is anoxia, which can lead to brain damage. I suspect she is safe from that."

"Why? Anoxia is dangerous."

"She is too lucky," said Nessus.

It was black night when they emerged from the iris of the eye storm. Then were no stars; but faint blue Archlight reached through an occasional break in the cloud cover.

"I have reconsidered," Speaker said. "Nessus, you may rejoin us if you will."

"I will," said the puppeteer.

"We need your alien insights. You have demonstrated great ingenuity. You must understand that I will not forget the crime your species has committed against mine."

"I would not wish to tamper with your memory, Speaker."

Louis Wu hardly noticed the triumph of practicality over honor, intelligence over xenophobia. Where the cloud bank met the infinity-horizon he searched for the mark of Teela's vapor trail. But it had entirely disappeared.

Teela was still unconscious. Her intercom image stiffed restlessly, and Louis shouted, "Teela!" But she did not answer.

"We were wrong about her," said Nessus. "But I cannot understand why. Why should we have crashed, if her luck is so powerful?"

"Exactly what I have been telling Louis!"

"But," said the puppeteer, "if her luck has no power, how could she have activated the emergency thruster? I believe I was right from the first. Teela Brown has psychic luck."

"Then why was she picked in the first place? Why did the Liar crash? Answer me!"

"Stop it," said Louis.

They ignored him. Nessus was saying, "Her luck is clearly undependable."

"If her luck had failed her just once, she would be dead."

"Were she dead or damaged, I would not have selected her. We must allow for coincidence," said Nessus. "You must remember, Speaker, that the laws of probability do provide for coincidence."

"But they do not provide for magic. I cannot believe in breeding for luck."

"You'll have to," said Louis.

This time they heard him. He continued, "I should have known much earlier. Not because she kept missing disasters. It was the little things, things in her personality. She's lucky, Speaker. Believe it."

"Louis, how can you credit this nonsense?"

"She's never been hurt. Never."

"How can you know?"

"I know. She knew all about pleasure, nothing about pain. Remember when the sunflowers blasted you? She asked you if you could see. 'I'm blinded,' you said. She said, 'Yes, but can you see?' She didn't believe you.

"Then, oh, right after the crash. She tried to walk barefoot up a lava slope that was just short of melting hot."

"She is not very intelligent, Louis."

"She is intelligent, tanjit! Shes just never been hurt! When she burned her feet, she charged straight down the slope onto a surface a dozen times more slippery than ice -- and she never fell down!

"But you don't need details," said Louis. "All you've got to do is watch her walk. Clumsy. Every second, it looks like she's going to fall over. But she doesn't. She doesn't knock things over with her elbows. She doesn't spill things or drop things. She never did. She never learned not to, don't you see? So she's not graceful."

"This would not be apparent to nonhumans," Speaker said dubiously. "I must take your word for it, Louis. Still, how can I believe in psychic luck?"

"I do. I have to."

"If her luck were dependable," said Nessus, "she would never have tried to walk on recently molten rock. Yet the luck of Teela Brown does protect us sporadically. Reassuring, is it not? You three would be dead had not clouds shielded you when you crossed the sunflower field."

"Yeah," said Louis; but he remembered that the clouds had parted long enough to sear the skin of Speaker-To-Animals. He remembered the stairs of Heaven which had carried Teela Brown nine flights upward, while Louis Wu had had to walk. He felt the bandages on his hand, and remembered Speaker's hand charred to the bone, while TeeWs translator burned in its saddle case. "Her luck seems to protect her somewhat better than it protects us," he said.

"And why not? But you seem upset, Louis."

"Maybe I am ..." Her friends would long since have stopped telling her their troubles. Teela didn't understand troubles. Describing pain to Teela Brown would be like trying to describe color to a blind man.

Whiplash of the heart? Teela had never been thwarted in love. The man she wanted came to her, and stayed until she had almost tired of him, then volunteered to go.

Sporadic or not, Teela's odd power made her ... a little different from human, perhaps. A woman, surely, but with different strengths and talents, and blind spots, too ... And this was a woman Louis had loved. It was very odd.

"She loved me too," Louis mused. "Strange. I'm not her type. And if she hadn't loved me, then --"

"What? Louis, are you speaking to me?"

"No, Nessus, I'm speaking to me ..." Was that her real reason for joining Louis Wu and his Motley Crew? Then the mystery was compounded. Luck made Teela fall in love with an unsuitable man, motivating her to join an expedition both uncomfortable and disastrous, so that she had several times brushed close to violent death. It didn't make sense.

Teela's intercom image looked up. Blank eyes and empty face ... puzzled ... filling suddenly with stark terror. Her eyes, wide and white, looking down. Teela's lovely oval face was ugly with insanity.

"Easy," said Louis. "Take it easy. Relax. You're all right now."

"But --" A falsetto squeak was Teela's voice.

"Were out of it. It's way behind us. Look behind you. Tanj you, look behind you!"

She turned. For a long moment Louis saw only soft dark hair. When she turned back, she had better control of herself.

"Nessus," said Louis, "tell her."

The puppeteer said, "You have been moving at Mach four for more than half an hour. To bring your flycycle back to normal speed, insert your index finger in the slot marked with a green rim --"

Though still frightened, Teela was capable of following orders.

"Now you must rejoin us. My signal indicates that your course has followed a curve. You are to port and spinward of us. As you have no indicator, I will have to guide you to us by ear. For the present, turn directly to antispinward."

"Which way is that?"

"Turn left until you are aimed at one base of the Arch."

"I can't see the Arch. I'll have to go above the clouds." She seemed almost composed now.

Tanj, but she'd been frightened! Louis couldn't remember ever seeing anyone that frightened. Certainly he'd never seen Teela that frightened.

Had he ever seen Teela frightened?

Louis turned to look over his shoulder. The land was dark beneath the clouds; but the eye storm, a vast distance behind them, glowed blue in the Archlight. It watched them go with total concentration, and no sign of regret.

Louis was deep in his own thoughts when a voice spoke his name. "Yeah," he said.

"Aren't you mad?"

"Mad?" He thought about it. It occurred to him, briefly, that by normal standards she had done an incredibly stupid thing, diving her 'cycle like that. And so he probed for anger as he would have probed for an old toothache. And he found nothing.

Normal standards didn't fit Teela Brown.

The tooth was dead.

"I guess not. What did you see down there, anyway?"

"I could have been killed," Teela said with mounting anger. "Don't shake your head at me, Louis Wu! I could have been killed! Don't you care?"

"Don't you?"

She jerked back as if hed slapped her. Then -- he saw her hand move, and she was gone.

She was back a moment later. "There was a hole," she cried furiously, "And mist at the bottom. Well?"

"How big?"

"How should I know?" And she was gone again.

Right. How could she have guessed scale, in that flickering neon light?

She risks her own life, Louis thought, then blames me for not getting angry. An attention-getting device? How long has she been doing it?

Anyone else would die young, with a habit like that.

"But not her," said Louis Wu. "Not ..."

Am I afraid of Teela Brown?

"Or have I finally flipped?" It had happened to others his age. A man as old as Louis Wu must have seen impossible things happen again and again. For such a man, the line between fantasy and reality sometimes blurred. He might become ultra conservative, rejecting the impossible even after it had become fact ... like Kragen Perel, who would not believe in the thruster drive because it violated the second law of motion. Or he might believe anything ... like Zero Hale, who kept buying fake Slaver relics.

Either way lay ruin and madness.

"No!" When Teela Brown escapes certain death by banging her head on a flycycle dashboard, that's more than coincidence!

But why did the Liar crash?

A silver fleck edged between Louis and the smaller silver fleck to spinward. "Welcome back," said Louis.

"Thank you," said Nessus. He must have used emergency thrust to catch up so fast. Speaker had issued his invitation only ten minutes ago.

Two triangular heads, small and transparent, considered Louis from above the dash. "I feel safe now. When Teela joins us in half an hour, I will feel safer still."

"Why?"

"The luck of Teela Brown shields us, Louis."

"I don't think so," said Louis Wu.

Speaker, silent, watched them both in the intercom. Only Teela was out of the circuit.

"Your arrogance bothers me," said Louis Wu. "Breeding for a lucky human was arrogant as the Devil. You've heard of the Devil?"

"I have read of the Devil, in books."

"Snob. But your stupidity is worse than your arrogance. You blithely assume that what's good for Teela Brown is good for you. Why should it be?"

Nessus sputtered. Then, "Surely this is natural. If we are both enclosed by the same spacecraft hull, a rupture is bad luck for both of us."

"Sure. But suppose you're passing a place where Teela wants to go, and suppose you don't want to land. A drive failure just then would be lucky for Teela, but not for you."

"What nonsense, Louis! Why would Teela Brown want to go to the Ringworld? She never knew it existed until I told her so!"

"But she's lucky. If she needed to come here without knowing it, she'd come here anyway. Then her luck wouldn't be sporadic, would it, Nessus? It would have been working all the time. Lucky that you found her. Lucky that you didn't find anyone else who qualified. All those bad phone connections, remember?"

"But --"

"Lucky that we crashed. Remember how you and Speaker argued over who was in charge of the expedition? Well, now you know."

"But why?"

"I don't know." Louis raked his fingernails across his scalp in utter frustration. His straight black hair had grown out to the length of a crew cut, excluding the queue.

"Does the question upset you, Louis? It upsets me. What could be here on the Ringworld to attract Teela Brown? This place is, is unsafe. Strange storms and badly programmed machinery and sunflower fields and unpredictable natives all threaten our lives."

"Hah!" Louis barked. "Right. That's part of it, at least. Danger doesn't exist for Teela Brown, don't you see? Any assessment we make of the Ringworld has to take that into account."

The puppeteer opened and closed his mouths several times in rapid succession.

"Does make things difficult, doesn't it?" Louis chortled. For Louis Wu, solving problems was a pleasure in itself. "But it's half the answer. If you assume --"

The puppeteer screamed.

Louis was shocked. He had not expected the puppeteer to take it so badly. The puppeteer wailed in two tones, then, without apparent haste, he tucked his heads under himself. Louis saw only the straggly mane that covered his brain case.

And Teela was on the intercom.

"You've been talking about me," she said without heat. (She was unable to hold a grudge, Louis realized. Did that make the ability to hold a grudge a survival factor?) "I tried to follow what you were saying, but I couldn't. What happened to Nessus?"

"My big mouth. I scared him. Now how are we going to find you?"

"Can't you tell where I am?"

"Nessus has the only locator. Probably for the same reason he saw to it that we didn't know how to operate the emergency thrust."

"I wondered about that," said Teela.

"He wanted to be sure he could run away from an angry kzin. Never mind that. How much did you understand?"

"Not much. You kept asking each other why I wanted to come here. Louis, I didn't. I came with you, because I love you --"

Louis nodded. Sure, if Teela needed to come to the Ringworld, she had had to have a motive to ride with Louis Wu. It was hardly flattering.

She loved him for the sake of her own luck. Once he had thought she loved him for himself.

"I'm passing over a city," Teela said suddenly. "I can see some lights. Not many. There must have been a big, durable power source. Speaker could probably find it on his map."

"Is it worth looking at?"

"I told you, there are lights. Maybe --" The sound went off without a click, without a warning.

Louis considered the empty space above his dashboard. Then he called, "Nessus." There was no response.

Louis activated the siren.

Nessus came out of it like a family of snakes in a burning zoo. Under other circumstances it would have been funny: the two necks frantically untangling, posing like two question marks above the dashboard; then Nessus barking, "Louis! What is it?"

Speaker had answered the call instantly. Apparently sitting at attention, he waited for instructions and enlightenment.

"Something's happened to Teela."

"Good," said Nessus. And the heads withdrew.

Grimly, Louis flicked the siren off, waited a moment, flipped it on again. Nessus reacted as before. This time Louis spoke first.

"If we don't find out what happened to Teela, I'll kill you," he said.

"I have the tasp," said Nessus. "We designed it to work equally well on kzinti and human. You have seen its effect on Speaker."

"Do you think it would stop me from killing you?"

"Yes, Louis, I do."

"What," Louis asked carefully, "will you bet?"

The puppeteer considered. "To rescue Teela can hardly be as dangerous as to take that gamble. I had forgotten that she is your mate." He glanced down. "She no longer registers on my locator. I cannot tell where she is."