Ringworld (27 page)

Now, much later, he knew that obligations went with such a decision.

"Got to cure her," he said. "How? No physical withdrawal symptoms ... but that won't help her if she decides to walk out of a broken window. How do I cure myself?" For some minor part of him still cried for the tasp, and would never stop.

The addiction was nothing more than a below-threshold memory. Strand her somewhere with her supply of youth drug, and the memory would fade ...

"Tanj. We need her." She knew too much about the engine room of the Improbable. She couldn't be spared.

He'd just have to get Nessus to stop using the tasp. Watch her for awhile. She'd be awfully depressed at first ...

Abruptly Louis's mind registered what his eyes had been seeing for some time.

The car was twenty feet below the observation platform. A cleanly-designed maroon dart with narrow slits for windows, it hovered without power in the roaring wind, caught in an electromagnetic trap nobody had remembered to turn off.

Louis looked once, hard, to be sure that there was a face behind the windscreen. Then he ran upstairs shouting for Prill.

He didn't know the words. But he took her by the elbow and pulled her downstairs and showed her. She nodded and went back up to use the police trap adjustments.

The maroon dart moved tight up against the edge of the platform. The first occupant crawled out, using both hands to hang on, for the wind was howling like a fiend.

It was Teela Brown. Louis felt little surprise.

And the second occupant was so blatantly type-cast that he burst out laughing. Teela looked surprised and hurt.

***

They were passing the Eye storm. The wind roared up through the stairwell that led to the observation platform. It whistled throught the corridors of the first floor, and howled through broken windows higher up. The halls ran with rain.

Teela and her escort and the crew of the Improbable sat about Louis's bedroom, the bridge. Teela's brawny escort talked gravely with Prill in one corner; though Prill kept a wary eye on Speaker-To-Animals and another on the bay window. But the others surrounded Teela as she told her tale.

The police device had blown most of the machinery in Teela's flycycle. The locator, the intercom, the sonic fold, and the kitchen all burned out at once.

Teela was still alive because the sonic fold had had a built-in standing-wave characteristic. She had felt the sudden wind and had hit the retrofield immediately, before the Mach 2 wind could tear her head off. In seconds she had dropped below the municipal upper speed limit. The trap field had been about to blow her drive; it refrained. The wind was tolerable by the time it broke through the stabilizing effect of the sonic fold.

But Teela was nothing like stable. She had brushed death too closely in the Eye storm. This second attack had followed too quickly. She guided the flycycle down, searching in the dark for a place to land.

There was a tiled mall surrounded by shops. It had lights: oval doors that glowed bright orange. The 'cycle landed hard, but by then she didn't care. She was down.

She was dismounting when the vehicle rose again. The motion threw her head over heels. She rose to her hands and knees, shaking her head. When she looked up the flycycle was a dwindling dumbbell shape.

Teela began to cry.

"You must have broken a parking law," said Louis.

"I didn't care why it happened. I felt --" She didn't have the words, but she tried anyway. "I wanted to tell someone I was lost. But there wasn't anyone. So I sat down on one of the stone benches and cried.

"I cried for hours. I was afraid to move away, because I knew you'd be coming for me. Then -- he came." Teela nodded at her escort. "He was surprised to find me there. He asked me something -- I couldn't understand. But he tried to comfort me. I was glad he was there, even if he couldn't do anything."

Louis nodded. Teela would trust anybody. She would inevitably seek help or comfort from the first stranger to come along. And she would be perfectly safe in doing so.

Her escort was unusual.

He was a hero. You could tell. You didn't need to see him fighting dragons. You need only see the muscles, the height, the black metal sword. The strong features, uncannily like the wire-sculpture face in the castle called Heaven. The courteous way he talked to Prill, apparently without realizing that she was of the opposite sex. Because she was another man's woman?

He was clean-shaven. No, that was improbable. More likely he was half Engineer. His hair was long and ash blond and not too clean, and the hairline shaped a noble brow. Around his waist was a kind of kirtle, the skin of some animal.

"He fed me," Teela said. "He took care of me. Four men tried to jump us yesterday, and he fought them off with just his sword! And he's learned a lot of Interworld in just a couple of days."

"Has he?"

"He's had a lot of practice with languages."

"This was the most unkindest cut of all."

"What?"

"Never mind. Go on."

"He's old, Louis. He got a massive dose of something like boosterspice, long ago. He says he took it from an evil magician. He's so old that his grandparents remembered the Fall of the Cities.

"Do you know what he's doing?"

Her smile became impish. "He's on a kind of quest. Long ago he took an oath that he would walk to the base of the Arch. He's doing that. He's been doing it for hundreds of years."

"The base of the Arch?"

Teela nodded. She was smiling very prettily, and she obviously appreciated the joke, but in her eyes there was something more.

Louis had seen love in Teela's eyes, but never tenderness.

"You're proud of him for it! You little idiot, don't you know there isn't any Arch?"

"I know that, Louis."

"Then why don't you tell him?"

"If you tell him, I'll hate you. Hes spent too much of his life doing this. And he does good. He knows a few simple skills, and he carries them around the Ringworld as he travels to spinward."

"How much information can he carry? He can't be too intelligent."

"No, he's not." From the way she said it, it didn't matter. "But if I travel with him I can teach a great many people a great deal."

"I knew that was coming," said Louis. But it still hurt.

Did she know that it hurt? She wouldn't look at him. "We'd been in the mall a day or so before I realized that you'd follow my flycycle, not me. He'd told me about Hal-- Hal-- about the goddess and the floating tower that trapped cars. So we went there.

"We stayed near the altar, waiting to spot your flycycles. Then the building started to fall apart. Afterward, Seeker --"

"Seeker?"

"He calls himself that. When someone asks him why, he can explain that he's on his way to the base of the Arch, and tell them about his adventures on the way ... you see?"

"Yeah."

"He started trying the motors in all the old cars. He said that the drivers used to turn off their motors when they were caught by the traffic police field, so that their motors wouldn't be burned out."

Louis and Speaker and Nessus looked at each other. Half those floating cars may have been still active!

"We found a car that worked," said Teela. "We were chasing you, but we must have missed you in the dark. But luckily the traffic police field caught us for speeding."

"Luckily. I think I heard the sonic boom last night, but I'm not sure," said Louis.

Seeker had stopped talking. He rested comfortably against the wall of the governor's bedroom, gazing at Speaker-To-Animals with a half-smile. Speaker held his eye. Louis had the impression that they were each wondering what it would be like to fight the other.

But Prill looked out the bay window, and on her face was dread. When the wind's howl became a shriek, she shuddered.

Perhaps she had seen formations like the Eye storm. Small asteroid punctures, quickly repaired, always occurring somewhere else; but always photographed for the newstapes or their Ringworld equivalent. Always a thing of fear, the Eye storm. Breathing-air roaring away into interstellar space. A hurricane on its side, with a drain at its bottom as final as the drain in a bathtub, if you should happen to be caught in its suction.

The wind howled momentarily louder. Teela's brows puckered with concern. "I hope the building's massive enough," she said.

Louis was astonished. How she's changed! But the Eye storm had threatened her directly, the last time through ...

"I need your help," she said. "I want Seeker, you know."

"Yeah."

"He wants me, too, but he's got a weird sense of honor. I tried to tell him about you, Louis, when I had to get him to the floating building. He got very uncomfortable and stopped sleeping with me. He thinks you own me, Louis."

"Slavery?"

"Slavery for women, I think. You'll tell him you don't own me, won't you?"

Louis felt pain in his throat. "It might save explanations if I just sold you to him. If that's what you want."

"You're right. And it is. I want to travel around the Ringworld with him. I love him, Louis."

"Sure you do. You were made for each other," said Louis Wu. "It was fated that you should meet. The hundred billion couples who have felt exactly that way about each other --"

She was looking at him very doubtfully. "You're not being ... sarcastic, are you, Louis?"

"A month ago you didn't know sarcasm from a glass transistor. No, the weird thing is, I'm not being sarcastic. The hundred billion couples don't matter, because they weren't part of a there-ain't-no-justice puppeteer's planned breeding experiment."

Suddenly he had everybody's complete attention. Even Seeker stared at him to find out what everyone was looking at.

But Louis had eyes only for Teela Brown.

"We crashed on the Ringworld," he said gently, "because the Ringworld is your ideal environment. You needed to learn things you couldn't learn on Earth, or anywhere in known space, apparently. Maybe there were other reasons -- a better boosterspice, for instance, and more room to breathe -- but the major reason you're here is to learn."

"To learn what?"

"Pain, apparently. Fear. Loss. You're a different woman since you came here. Before, you were a land of ... abstraction. Have you ever stubbed your toe?"

"What a funny word. I don't think so."

"Have you ever burned your foot?"

She glared at him. She remembered.

"The Liar crashed to bring you here. We traveled a couple of hundred thousand miles to bring you to Seeker. Your flycycle carried you precisely over him, and ran into the traffic police field at just that point, because Seeker is the man you were born to love."

Teela smiled at this, but Louis did not smile back. He said, "Your luck required that you have time to get to know him. Therefore Speaker-To-Animals, and I hung head down --"

"Louis!"

"-- over ninety feet of empty space for something like twenty hours. But there's worse."

The kzin rumbled, "It depends on your viewpoint."

Louis ignored him. "Teela, you fell in love with me because it gave you a motive to join the expedition to the Ringworld. You no longer love me because you don't need to. You're here. And I loved you for the same reason, because the luck of Teela Brown used me as a puppet --

"But the real puppet is you. You'll dance to the strings of your own luck for the rest of your life. Finagle knows if you've got free will. You'll have trouble enough using it."

Teela was very pale, and her shoulders were very straight and rigid. If she wasn't crying, it was by an obvious exercise of self-control. She had not had that self-control before.

As for Seeker, he knelt watching the two of them, and he ran his thumb along the edge of the black iron sword. He could hardly be unaware that Teela was being made unhappy. He must still think she belonged to Louis Wu.

And Louis turned to the puppeteer. He was not surprised that Nessus had curled into a ball, tucked his heads into his belly, and withdrawn from the universe.

Louis took the puppeteer by the ankle of his hind leg. He found that he could roll the puppeteer onto his back with little trouble. Nessus weighed not much more than Louis Wn.

And he didn't like it. The ankle trembled in Louis's hand.

"You caused all this," said Louis Wu, "with your monstrous egotism. That egotism bothers me almost as much as the monstrous mistake you made. How you could be so powerful, and so determined, and so stupid, is beyond me. Do you realize yet, that everything that's happened to us here has been a side effect of Teela's luck?"

The ball that was Nessus contracted tighter. Seeker watched in fascination.

"Then you can go home to the puppeteer worlds and tell them that mucking with human breeding habits is a chancy business. Tell them that enough Teela Browns could make a hash of all the laws of probability. Even basic physics is nothing more than probability at the atomic level. Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.

"Tell them that after I get you home," said Louis Wu. "But meanwhile, roll out of there, now. I need the shadow square wire, and you've got to find it for me. We're almost past the Eye storm. Come out of there, Nessus --"

The puppeteer unrolled and stood up. "You shame me, Louis," he began.

"You dare say that here?"

The puppeteer was silent. Presently he turned to the bay window and looked out at the storm.

For the natives who worshipped Heaven, there were now two towers in the sky.

As before, the square of the altar swarmed with faces like golden dandelions. "We came on another holy day," said Louis. He tried to find the shaven choir leader, but couldn't.

Nessus was looking wistfully across at the tower called Heaven. The bridge room of the Improbable was level with the castles map room. "Once I had not the opportunity to explore this place. Now I cannot reach it," the puppeteer mourned.

Speaker suggested, "We can break in with the disintegrator tool and lower you by rope or ladder."

"Again this chance must slip by me."

"It is not as dangerous as many things you have done here."

"But when I took risks here, I sought knowledge. Now I have as much knowledge of the Ringworld as my world needs. If I risk my life now it will be to return home with that knowledge. Louis, there is your shadow square wire."

Louis nodded soberly.

Across the spinward section of the city lay a cloud of black smoke. By the way it hugged itself tight against the cityscape, it must have been both dense and heavy. One windowed obelisque near the center poked through the mass. The rest was smothered.

It had to be shadow square wire. But there was so much of it!

"But how can we transport that?"

Louis could only say, "I can't imagine. Let's go down for a closer look."

***

They settled their broken police building to spinward of the place of the altar.

Nessus did not turn off the lifting motors. He barely touched down. What had been an observation platform above prison cells became the Improbable's landing ramp. The mass of the building would have crushed it.

"Wre going to have to find a way to handle the stuff," said Louis. "A glove made of the same kind of thread might do it. Or we could wind it on a spool made of Ringworld foundation material."

"We have neither. We must talk to the natives," said Speaker. "They may have old legends, old tools, old holy relics. More, they have had three days to learn how to deal with the wire."

"Then I must come with you." The puppeteer's reluctance was evident in his sudden fit of shivering. "Speaker, your command of the language is inadequate. We must leave Halrloprillalar to lift the building if there is need. Unless -- Louis, could Teela's native lover be persuaded to bargain for us?"

It itched Louis to hear Seeker referred to in such terms. He said, "Even Teela won't call him a genius. I wouldn't trust him to do our bargaining."

"Nor would I. Louis, do we really need the shadow square wire?"

"I don't know. If I'm not spinning drug dreams, then we need it. Otherwise --"

"Never mind, Louis. I will go."

"You don't have to trust my judgment --"

"I will go." The puppeteer was shivering again. The oddest thing about Nessus's voice was that it could be so clear, so precise, yet never show a trace of emotion. "I know that we need the wire. What coincidence caused the wire to fall so neatly across our path? All coincidence leads back to Teela Brown. If we did not need the wire, it would not be here."

Louis relaxed. Not because the statement made sense, for it did not. But it reinforced Louis's own tenuous conclusions. And so Louis hugged that comfort to his bosom and did not tell the puppeteer what nonsense he was talking.

They filed down the landing ramp and out from under the shadow of the Improbable. Louis carried a flashlight-laser. Speaker-To-Animals carried the Slaver weapon. His muscles moved like fluid as he walked; they showed prominently through his half-inch of new orange fur. Nessus went apparently unarmed. He preferred the tasp, and the hindmost position.

Seeker walked to the side, carrying his black iron sword at the ready. His big, heavily calloused feet were bare, and so was the rest of him but for the yellow skin he wore for a loincloth. His muscles rippled like the kzin's.

Teela walked unarmed.

These two would have been waiting aboard the Impprobable but for the bargaining that had taken place that morning. It was Nessus's fault. Louis had used the puppeteer as his interpreter when he offered to sell Teela Brown to the swordsman Seeker.

Seeker had nodded gravely, and had offered one capsule of the Rmgworld youth drug, worth about fifty years of life.

"I'll take it," Louis had said. It was a handsome offer, although Louis had no intention of putting the stuff in his mouth. Certainly the drug had never been tested on anyone who, like Louis Wu, had been taking boosterspice for some one hundred and seventy years.

As Nessus afterward explained in the Interworld tongue, "I didn't want to insult him, Louis, or to imply that you held Teela cheaply. I raised his price. He now owns Teela, and you have the capsule to analyze when and if we return to Earth. In addition, Seeker will act as our bodyguard against any possible enemy, until we have possession of the shadow square wire."

"He's going to protect us all with his four-foot kitchen knife?"

"It was only to flatter him, Louis."

Teela had insisted on coming with him, of course. He was her man, and he was going into danger. Now Louis wondered if the puppeteer had counted on that. Teela was Nessus's own carefully bred good luck charm ...

The sky would always be overcast this close to the Eye storm. In the gray-white noon light they filed toward a vertical black cloud tens of stories high.

"Don't touch it," Louis called, remembering what the priest had told him on his last visit to this city. A girl had lost some fingers trying to pick up the shadow square wire.

Close up, it still loooked like black smoke. You could look through it into the mined city, to see the windowed beehive-bungalows of suburbia and a few flat glass towers that would have been department stores if this were a world of human space. They were there within the cloud, as if a fire were raging in there somewhere.

You could see the black thread, if your eye was within an inch of it; but then your eye would water and the thread would disappear. The thread was that close to being invisibly thin. It was much too much like Sinclair monofilament; and Sinclair monofilament was dangerous.

"Try the Slaver gun," said Louis. "See if you can cut it, Speaker."

A string of sparkling lights appeared within the cloud.

Probably it was blasphemy. You fight with light? But the natives must have planned to destroy the strangers much earlier. When the Christmas lights appeared within the cloud of black thread, maniac shrieks answered from all directions. Men robed in particolored blankets poured from the buildings around, screaming and waving ... swords and clubs?

The poor leucos, thought Louis. He flicked his flashlight-laser beam to high and narrow.

Light-swords, laser weapons, had been used on all the worlds. Louis's training was a century old, and the war he had trained for hadn't happened after all. But the rules were too simple to forget.

The slower the swing, the deeper the cut.

But Louis swung his beam in wide quick swipes. Men stumbled back, their arms wrapped around their abdomens, their golden fur faces betraying nothing. With many enemies, swing fast. Cut half an inch deep, cut many of them. Slow them down!

Louis felt pity. The fanatics had only swords and clubs. They hadn't a chance ...

But one smashed a sword across Speaker's weapon arm, hard enough to cut. Speaker dropped the Slaver weapon. Another man snatched it and threw it. He was dead in the instant, for Speaker swiped at him with his good hand and clawed the spine out of him. A third man caught the weapon, turned, and ran. He didn't try to use it. He just ran with it. Louis couldn't hit him with the laser; they were trying to kill him.

Always swing across the torso.

Louis had killed nobody as yet. Now, while the enemy seemed to hesitate, Louis took a moment to kill the two men nearest him. Don't let the enemy close.

How were the others doing?

Speaker-To-Animals was killing with his hands, his good hand a claw for ripping, his bandaged one a weighted club. Somehow he could dodge a sword point while reaching for the man behind it. He was surrounded, but the natives would not press him. He was alien orange death, eight feet tall, with pointed teeth.

Seeker stood at bay with his black iron sword. Three men were down before him, and others stood back, and the sword dripped. Seeker was a dangerous, skillful swordsman. The natives knew about swords. Teela stood behind him, safe for the moment in the ring of fighting, looking worried, like a good heroine.

Nessus was running for the Improbable, one head held low and forward, one high. Low to see around corners, high for the long view.

Louis was unharmed, picking off enemies as they showed themselves, helping others when he could. The flashlight-laser moved easily in his hand, a wand of killing green light.

Never aim at a mirror. Reflecting armor could be a nasty shock to a laser artist. Here they'd apparently forgotten that trick.

A man dressed in a green blanket charged at Louis Wu, screaming, waving a heavy hammer, doing his best to look dangerous. A golden dandelion with eyes ... Louis slashed green laser light across him, and the man kep coming.

Louis, terrified, stood fast and held the beam centered. The man was swinging at Louis's head when a spot on his robe charred, darkened, then flashed green flame. He fell skidding, drilled through the heart.

Clothing the color of your light-sword can be as bad as reflecting armor. Finagle grant that there be no more of those! Louis touched green light to the back of a man's neck ...

A native blocked Nessus' flight path! He must have had courage to attack so weird a monster. Louis couldn't get a clear shot, but the man died anyway, for Nessus spun and kicked and finished the turn and ran on. Then --

Louis saw it happen. The puppeteer charged into an intersection, one head held high, one low. The high head was suddenly loose and rolling, bouncing. Nessus stopped, turned, then stood still.

His neck ended in a flat stump, and the stump was pumping blood as red as Louis' own.

Nessus wailed, a high, mournful sound.

The natives had trapped him with shadow square wire.

Louis was two hundred years old. He had lost friends before this. He continued to fight, his light-sword following his eyes almost by reflex. Poor Nessus. But it could be me next ...

The natives had fallen back. Their losses must hav been terrifying from their own viewpoint.

Teela stared at the dying puppeteer, her eyes very big, her knuckles pressed against her teeth. Speaker and Seeker were edging back toward the Improbable --

Wait a minute. He's got a spare!

Louis ran at the puppeteer. As he passed Speaker, the kzin snatched the flashlight-laser from him. Louis ducked to avoid the wire trap, stayed low, and used a shoulder block to knock Nessus on his side. It had seemed that the puppeteer was about to start panic running.

Louis pinned the puppeteer and fumbled for a belt.

He wasn't wearing a belt.

But he had to have a belt!

And Teela handed him her scarf!

Louis snatched it, looped it, dropped it over the puppeteer's severed neck. Nessus had been staring in horror at the stump, at the blood pumping from the single carotid artery. Now he raised his eye to Louis's face; and the eye closed, and he fainted.

Louis pulled the knot tight. Teela's scarf constricted and closed the single artery, two major veins, the larynx, the gullet, everything.

You tied a tourniquet around his neck, doctor? But the blood had stooped.

Louis bent and lifted the puppeteer in a fireman's carry, turned, and ran into the shadow of the broken police building. Seeker ran ahead of him, covering him, his black sword's point tracing little circles as he sought an enemy. Armed natives watched but did not challenge them.

Teela followed Louis. Speaker-To-Animals came last, his flashlight-laser stabbing green lines where men might be hiding. At the ramp the kzin stopped, waited until Teela was safely up the ramp, then -- Louis glimpsed him moving away.

But why did he do that?

No time to find out. Louis went up the stairs. The puppeteer became incredibly heavy before Louis reached the bridge. He dropped Nessus beside the buried flycycle, reached for the first aid kit, rubbed the diagnostic patch onto the puppeteer's neck below the tourniquet. The puppeteer's first aid kit was still attached to the 'cycle by an umbilicus, and Louis rightly surmised that it was more complex than his own.

Presently the kitchen controls changed settings all by themselves. A few seconds later, a line snaked out of the dashboard and touched the puppeteer's neck, hunted over the skin, found a spot and sank in.

Louis shuddered. But -- intravenous feeding. Nessus must be still alive.

***

The Improbable was aloft, though he had not felt the takeoff. Speaker was sitting on the bottom step above the landing ramp, looking down at the Heaven tower. He was cradling something carefully in both hands.

He asked, "Is the puppeteer dead?"

"No. He's lost a lot of blood." Louis sank down beside the kzin. He was bone-weary and terribly depressed. "Do puppeteers go into shock?"

"How would I know that? Shock itself is an odd mechanism. We needed centuries of study to know why you humans died so easily under torture." The kzin was clearly concentrating on something else. But he asked, "Was it the luck of Teela Brown?"

"I think so," said Louis.

"Why? How can the puppeteer's injury help Teela?"

"You'd have to see her through my eyes," said Louis. "She was very one-sided when I first met her. Like, well ..."

The phrase he'd used sparked a memory, and he said, "There was a girl in a story. The hero was middle-aged and very cynical, and he went looking for her because of the myth about her.

"And when he found her he still wasn't sure that the myth was true. Not until she turned her back. Then he saw that from behind she was empty: she was the mask of a girl, a flexible mask for the whole front of a girl instead of just for a face. She couldn't be hurt, Speaker. That was what this man wanted. The women in his life kept getting hurt, and he kept thinking it was him, and finally he couldn't stand it any more."