Ringworld (28 page)

"I understand none of this, Louis."

"Teela was like the mask of a girl when she came here. She'd never been hurt. Her personality wasn't human."

"Why is that bad?"

"Because she was designed human, before Nessus made her something else. Tanj him! Do you see what he did? He created god in his own image, his own idealized image, and he got Teela Brown.

"She's just what any puppeteer would give his soul to be. She can't be injured. She can't even be uncomfortable, unless it's for her own benefit.

"That's why she came here. The Ringworld is a lucky place for her to be, because it gives her the range of experience to become fully human. I doubt the Birthright Lotteries produced many like her. They'd have had the same luck. They'd have been aboard the Liar, except that Teela was luckier than any of them.

"Still ... there must be scores of Teela Browns left on Earth! The future is going to look somewhat peculiar when they start to learn their power. The rest of us will have to learn to get out of the way quick."

Speaker asked, "What of the leaf-eater's head?"

"She can't sympathize with someone else's pain," said Louis. "Maybe she needed to see a good friend hurt. Teela's luck wouldn't care what that cost Nessus.

"Do you know where I got the tourniquet? Teela saw what I needed and found something that would serve. It's probably the first time in her life she's functioned right in an emergency."

"Why would she need to do so? Her luck should protect her from emergencies."

"She's never known that she can function in an emergency. She's never had that much reason for self-confidence. It's never been true before, either."

"Truly, I do not understand."

"Finding your limits is a part of growing up. Teela couldn't grow up, couldn't become an adult, without facing some kind of physical emergency."

"It must be a very human thing," said Speaker.

Louis interpreted the comment as an admission of total confusion. He did not attempt to answer.

The kzin added, "I wondered if we should have parked the Improbable higher than the tower the natives call Heaven. They may have considered it blasphemy. But such considerations seem futile, while the luck of Teela Brown governs events."

Louis still hadn't seen what the kzin was holding so protectively. "Did you go back for the head? If you did, you wasted your time. We can't possibly freeze it cold enough, soon enough."

"No, Louis." Speaker produced a fist-sized thing the shape of a child's top. "Do not touch it. You might lose fingers."

"Fingers? Oh." The pointed end of the teardrop-shaped thing tapered into a spike; and the point of the spike became the black thread that linked the shadow squares.

"I knew that the natives could manipulate the thread," said Speaker. "They must have done so, to string the trap that caught Nessus. I went back to see how they had done it.

"They had found one of the endpoints. I surmise that the other end is simple wire; that the wire broke in the middle when we rammed it with the Liar, but that this end tore loose from a socket on one of the shadow squares. We were lucky to get even one end."

"Too right. We can trail it behind us. The wire shouldn't get hung up on anything we can't cut through."

"Where do we go from here, Louis?"

"Starboard. Back to the Liar."

"Of course, Louis. We must return Nessus to the Liar's medical facilities. And then?"

"We'll see."

***

He left Speaker guarding the teardrop-shaped handle, while he went up for what was left of the electrosetting plastic. They used a double handful of the stuff to stick the handle to a wall -- and then there wasn't any way to run a current. The Slaver weapon could have served, but it had been lost. It was a frustrating emergency. until Louis found that the battery in his lighter would run enough current through the plastic to set it.

That left the wire end of the teardrop exposed and pointing to port.

"I remember the bridge room as facing starboard," said Speaker. "If not, we must do it over. The wire must trail behind us.

"It might work," said Louis. He wasn't at all sure ... but they certainly couldn't carry the wire. They would simply have to trail it behind them. It probably wouldn't get hung up on anything it couldn't cut through.

They found Teela and Seeker in the engine room with Prill, who was working the lifting motors.

"We're going in different directions," Teela said bluntly. "This woman says she can edge us up against the floating castle. We should be able to walk through a window straight across into the banquet hall."

"Then what? You'll be marooned, unless you can get control of the castle's lifting motors."

"Seeker says he has some knowledge of magic. I'm sure he'll work it out."

Louis would not try to talk her out of it. He was afraid to thwart Teela Brown, as he would not have tried to stop a charging bandersnatch with his bare hands. He said, "If you have any trouble figuring out the controls, just start pulling and pushing things at random."

"I'll remember," she smiled. Then, more soberly, "Take good care of Nessus."

When Seeker and Teela debarked from the Improbable twenty minutes later, it was with no more goodbye than that. Louis had thought of things to say, but had not said them. What could he tell her of her own power? She would have to learn by trial and error, while the luck itself kept her alive.

***

Over the next few hours the puppeteer's body cooled and became as dead. The lights on the first aid kit remained active, if incomprehensible. Presumably the puppeteer was in some form of suspended animation.

As the Improbable moved away to starboard the shadow square thread trailed behind, alternately taut and slack. Ancient buildings toppled in the city, cut through scores of times by tangled thread. But the knob stayed put in its bed of electrosetting plastic.

The city of the floating castle could not drop below the horizon. In the next few days it became tiny, then vague, then invisible.

Prill sat by Nessus's side, unable to help him, unwilling to leave him. Visibly, she suffered.

"We've got to do something for her," said Louis. "She's hooked on the tasp, and now it's gone and she's got to go it cold turkey. If she doesn't kill herself, shes likely to kill Nessus or me!"

"Louis, you surely don't want advice from me."

"No. No, I guess not."

To help a suffering human being, one plays good listener. Louis tried it; but he didn't have the language for it, and Prill didn't want to talk. He gritted his teeth when he was alone; but when he was with Prill he kept trying.

She was always before his eyes. His conscience might have healed if he could have stayed away from her, but she would not leave the bridge.

Gradually he was learning the language, and gradually Prill was beginning to talk. He tried to tell her about Teela, and Nessus, and playing god --

"I did think I was a god," she said. "I did. Why did I think so? I did not build the Ring. The Ring is much older than I."

Prill was learning too. She talked a pidgin, a simplified vocabulary of her obsolete language: two tenses, virtually no modifiers, exaggerated pronunciation.

"They told you so," said Louis.

"But I knew."

"Everyone wants to be god." Wants the power without the responsibility; but Louis didn't know those words.

"Then he came. Two Heads. He had machine?"

"He had tasp machine."

"Tasp," she said carefully. "I had to guess that. Tasp made him god. He lost tasp, not god any more. Is Two Heads dead?"

It was hard to tell. "He would think it stupid to be dead," said Louis.

"Stupid to get head cut off," said Prill. A joke. She'd tried to make a joke.

Prill began to take an interest in other things: sex and language lessons and the Ringworld landscape. They ran across a sprinkling of sunflowers. Prill had never seen one. Dodging the plants' frantic attempts to ray them down, they dug up a foot-high bloom and replanted it on the roof of the building. Afterward they turned hard to spinward to avoid denser sunflower concentrations.

When they ran out of food, Prill lost interest in the puppeteer. Louis pronounced her cured.

Speaker and Prill tried the God Gambit in the next native village. Louis waited apprehensively above them, hoping Speaker could carry it off, wanting to shave his head and join them. But his value as an acolyte was nil. After days of practice, he still had little facility with the language.

They came back with offerings. Food.

As days became weeks, they did it again and again. They were good at it. Speaker's fur grew longer, so that once again he was an orange fur panther, "a kind of war god." On Louis's advice he kept his ears folded flat to his head.

Being a god affected Speaker oddly. One night he spoke of it.

"It does not disturb me to play a god," he said. "It disturbs me to play a god badly."

"What do you mean?"

"They ask us questions, Louis. The women ask questions of Prill, and these she answers; and generally I can understand neither the problem nor the solution. The men should question Prill too, for Prill is human and I am not. But they question me. Me! Why must they ask an alien for help in running their affairs?"

"You're a male. A god is a kind of symbol," said Louis, "even when hes real. You're a male synibol."

"Ridiculous. I do not even have external genitalia, as I assume you do."

"You're big and impressive and dangerous-looking. That automatically makes you a virility symbol. I don't think you could lose that aspect without losing your godhood entirely."

"What we need is a sound pickup, so that you can answer odd and embarrassing questions for me."

Prill surprised them. The Improbable had been a police station. In one of the storeroom Prill found a police multiple intercom set with batteries that charged off the building's power supply. When they finished, two of the six sets were working.

"You're smarter than I guessed," Louis told Prill that night. He hesitated then; but he didn't know enough of the language to be tactful. "Smarter than a ship' whore ought to be."

Prill laughed. "You foolish child! You have told me yourself that your ships move very quickly next to ours."

"They do," said Louis. "They move faster than light."

"I think you improve the tale," she laughed. "Our theory says that this cannot be."

"Maybe we use different theories."

She seemed taken aback. Louis had learned to read her involuntary muscle movements rather than her virtually blank face. But she said, "Boredom can be dangerous when a ship takes years to cross between worlds. The ways to amuse must be many and all different. To be a ship's whore needs knowledge of medicine of mind and body, plus love of many men, plus a rare ability to converse. We must know something of the working of the ship, so that we will not cause accidents. We must be healthy. By rule of guild we must learn to play a musical instrument."

Louis gaped. Prill laughed musically, and touched him here and there ...

***

The intercom system worked beautifully, despite the fact that the ear plugs were designed for human rather than kzinti ears. Louis developed an ability to think on his feet, operating as the man behind the war god. When he made mistakes, he could tell himself that the Improbable was still faster than the maximum rate of travel of news on the Ringworld. Every contact was a first contact.

Months passed.

The land was slowly rising, slowly becoming barren.

Fist-of-God was visible by daylight and growing larger every day The routine had settled into Louis's thinking. It took some some time to realize what was happening.

It was broad daylight when he went to Prill. "There's something you should know," he said. "Do you know about induced current?" And he explained what he meant.

Then, "Very small electrical currents can be applied to a brain, to produce pleasure or pain directly." He explained that.

And finally, "This is how a tasp works."

That had taken about twenty minutes. Prill said, "I knew that he had a machine. Why describe it now?"

"We're leaving civilization. We won't find many more villages, or even food sources, until we reach our spacecraft. I wanted you to know about the tasp before you decided anything."

"Decided what?"

"Shall we let you off at the next village? Or would you like to ride with us to the Liar, then take the Improbable? We can give you food there too."

"There is room for me aboard the Liar," she said with assurance.

"Sure, but --"

"I am sick of savages. I want to go to civilization."

"You might have trouble learning our ways. For one thing, they grow hair like mine." Louis's hair had grown out long and thick. He had cut the queue. "You'll need a wig."

Prill made a face. "I can adjust." She laughed suddenly. "Would you ride home alone, without me? Ihe big orange one cannot substitute for a woman."

"That's the one argument that always works."

"I can help your world, Louis. Your people know little about sex."

Which statement Louis prudently let slide.

The land grew dry and the air grew thin. Fist-of-God seemed to flee before them. The fruit was gone, and the meat supply was dwindling. This was the barren upward slope that culminated in Fist-of-God itself, a desert Louis had once estimated was larger than the Earth.

Wind whistled around the edges and corners of the Improbable. By now they were almost directly to spinward of the great mountain. The Arch glowed blue and sharpedged, the stars were hard, vivid points.

Speaker looked upward through the big bay window. "Louis, can you locate the galactic core from here?"

"What for? We know where we are."

"Do it anyway."

Louis had tentatively identified some stars, had guessed at certain distorted constellations, in the months he had spent beneath this sky. "There, I think. Behind the Arch."

"Just so. The galactic core lies in the plane of the Ringworld."

"I said that."

"Remember that the Ringworld foundation material will stop neutrinos, Louis. Presumably it will stop other subatomic particles." The kzin was plainly getting at something.

"... That's right. The Ringworld is immune to the Core explosion! When did you figure this out?"

"Just now. I had placed the Core some time ago."

"You'd get some scattering. Heavy radiation around the rim walls."

"But the luck of Teela Brown would place her away from the rim walls when the wave front arrives."

"Twenty thousand years ..." Louis was appalled. "Finagle's bright smile! How can anyone think in such terms?"

"Sickness and death are always bad luck, Louis. By our assumptions, Teela Brown should live forever."

"But ... right. She's not thinking in those terms. It's her luck, hovering over us all like a puppet master."

Nessus had been a corpse at room temperature for two months now. He did not decay. The lights on his first aid kit remained alight, and even changed on occasion. It was his only sign of life.

Louis was gazing at the puppeteer, minutes later, when two thoughts rubbed together. "Puppeteer," he said softly.

"Louis?"

"I just wondered if the puppeteers didn't get their name by playing god with the species around them. They've treated humans and kzinti like puppets; there's no denying that."

"But Teela's luck made a puppet of Nessus."

"We've all been playing god at various levels." Louis nodded at Prill, who was catching perhaps every third word. "Prill and you and me. How did it feel, Speaker? Were you a good god or a bad one?"

"I cannot know. The species was not my own, though I have studied human extensively. I stopped a war, you will remember. I pointed out to each side that it must lose. That had been three weeks ago."

"Yeah. My idea."

"Of course."

"Now you'll have to play god again. To kzinti," said Louis.

"I do not understand."

"Nessus and the other puppeteers have been playing planned breeding games on humans and kzinti. They deliberately brought about a situation in which natural selection would favor a peaceable kzin. Right?"

"Yes."

"What would happen if the Patriarchy learned of this?"

"War," said the kzin. "A heavily provisioned fleet would attack the puppeteer worlds after a two-year flight. Perhaps humanity would join us. Surely the puppeteers have insulted you as badly."

"Surely they have. And then?"

"Then the leaf-eaters would exterminate my species down to the last kitten. Louis, I do not intend to tell anybody anything concerning starseed lures and puppeteer breeding plans. Can I persuade you to keep silence?"

"Right."

"Is this what you meant by playing god to my species?"

"That, and one more thing," said Louis. "The Long Shot. Do you still want to steal it?"

"Perhaps," said the kzin.

"You can't do it," said Louis. "But let's assume you could. Then what?"

"Then the Patriarchy would have the second quantum hyperdrive."

"And?"

Prill seemed to be aware that something crucial was happening. She watched them as if ready to stop a fight.

"Soon we would have warships capable of crossing a light year in one-and-one-quarter minutes. We would dominate known space, enslave every species within our reach."

"And then?"

"Then it ends. This is precisely our ambition, Louis."

"No. You'd keep conquering. With a drive that good, you'd move outward in all directions, spreading thin, taking every world you found. You'd conquer more than you could hold ... and in all that expanded space you'd find something really dangerous. The puppeteer fleet. Another Ringworld, but at the height of its power. Another Slaver race just starting its expansion. Bandersnatchi with hands, grogs with feet, kdatlyno with guns."

"Scare images."

"You've seen the Ringworld. You've seen the puppeteer worlds. There must be more, in the space you could reach with the puppeteer hyperdrive."

The kzin was silent.

"Take your time" said Louis. "Think it through. You can't take the Long shot anyway. You'd kill us all if you tried it."

The next day the Improbable crossed a long, straight meteoric furrow. They turned to antispinward, directly toward Fist-of-God.

***

Fist-of-God Mountain had grown large without coming near. Bigger than any asteroid, roughly conical, she had the look of a snow-capped mountain swollen to nightmare size. The nightmare continued, for Fist-of-God continued to swell.

"I don't understand," said Prill. She was puzzled and upset. "This formation is not known to me. Why was it built? At the rim there are mountains as high, as decorative, and more useful, for they hold back the air."

"That's what I thought," Louis Wu said. And he would say no more.

That day they saw a small glass bottle resting at the end of the meteoric gouge they had been following.

The Liar was as they had left it: on its back on a frictionless surface. Mentally Louis postponed the celebration. They were not home yet.

In the end Prill had to hover the Improbable so that Louis could cross from the landing ramp. He found controls that would open both doors of the airlock at the same time. But air murmured out around them all the time they were transferring Nessus' body. They could not reduce the cabin pressure without Nessus, and Nessus was, to all appearances, dead.

But they got him into the autodoc anyway. It was a puppeteer-shaped coffin, form-fitted to Nessus himself, and bulky Puppeteer surgeons and mechanics must have intended that it should handle any conceivable circumstance. But had they thought of decapitation?

They had. There were two heads in there, and two more with necks attached, and enough organs and body parts to make several complete puppeteers. Grown from Nessus himself, probably; the faces on the heads looked familiar.

Prill came aboard, and landed on her head. Rarely had Louis seen anyone so startled. He had never thought to tell her about induced gravity. Her face showed nothing as she stood up, but her posture -- She was awed to silence.

In that ghostly silence of homecoming, Louis Wu suddenly screamed like a banshee.

"Coffeeee!" he yelled. And, "Hot water!" He charged into the stateroom he had shared with Teela Brown. A moment later he put his head out and screamed, "Prill!"

Prill went.

***

She hated coffee. She thought Louis must be insane to swallow the bitter stuff, and she told him so.

The shower was a long lost, badly missed luxury, once Louis explained the controls.

She went wild over the sleeping plates.

Speaker was celebrating the homecoming in his own fashion. Louis didn't know everything about the kzin's stateroom. He did know that the kzin was eating his head off.

"Meat!" Speaker exulted. "I was not happy eating long-dead meat."

"That stuff you're eating now is reconstituted."

"Yes, but it tastes freshly killed!"

That night Prill retired to a couch in the lounge. She appreciated the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. But Louis Wu slept in free fall for the first time in three months.

He slept ten hours, and woke feeling like a tiger. A half-disc of sun flamed beneath his feet.

***

Back aboard the Improbable, he used the flashlight laser to free the knobbed end of the shadow square. When he finished, it still had some fused electrosetting plastic attached.

He did not try to carry it to the Liar. The black thread was far too dangerous, the Ring floor far too slippery. Louis moved on all fours on the frictionless surface, and he pulled the knob behind him.

He found Speaker silently watching from the airlock.

Louis entered the airlock via Prill's stepladder, pushed past the kzin and went aft. Speaker continued to watch.

The farthest point aft in the wreck of the Liar was a channel the size of a man's thigh. It had passed wiring to machinery in the Liar's wing, when the Liar had had a wing. Now it was sealed by a metal hatch. Louis opened the hatch, tossed the knobbed end of the win through and outside.

He moved forward. At intervals he checked the position of the wire by using it to slice a Jinxian sausage dialed from the Liar's kitchen. Then he marked the spot with bright yellow paint. When he finished, the path of the virtually invisible thread was marked in a line of yellow splotches running through the Lkw.

When the wire drew taut, it would certainly cut through some internal partitions of the ship. The yellow paint allowed Louis to gauge the path it would take, and to assure himself that the wire would not damage any part of the life-support system. But the paint had another purpose. It would warn them all to keep away from the wire, lest they lose fingers or worse.

Louis left the airlock, waited for Speaker to follow him out. Then he closed the outer door.

At this point Speaker asked, "Is this why we came?"

"Tell you in a minute," said Louis. He walked aft along the General Products hull, picked up the knob in both hands, and tugged gently. The wire hold.

He put his back into it. He pulled with all his strength. The wire did not budge. The airlock door held it fast.

"There's just no way to give it a stronger test. I wasn't sure the airlock door would be a close enough fit. I wasn't sure the wire wouldn't abrade a General products hull. I'm still not sure. But yes, this is why we came."

"What shall we do next?"

"We open the airlock door." He did it. "We let the thread slide freely through the Liar while we carry the handle back to the Improbable and cement it in place." And they did that

The thread that had linked the shadow squares turned invisibly away to starboard. It had been dragged for thousands of miles behind the Improbable, because there was no way to get it aboard the flying building. Perhaps it trailed all the way back to the tangle of thread in the City Beneath Heaven; a tangle like a cloud of smoke, that might have held millions of miles of the stuff.

Now it entered the Liar's double airlock, circled through the Liar's fuselage, out the wiring channel, and back to a blob of electrosetting plastic on the underside of the flying building.

"So far so good," said Louis. "Now I'll need Prill. No, tanj it! I forgot. Prill doesn't have a pressure suit."

"A pressure suit?"

"We're taking the Improbable up Fist-of-God Mountain. The building isn't airtight. Well need pressure suits, and Prill doesn't have one. We'll have to leave her here."

"Up Fist-of-God Mountain," Speaker repeated. "Louis: one flycycle has not the power to drag the Liar up that slope. You propose to burden the motor with the additional mass of a floating building."

"No, no, no. I don't want to drag the Liar. All I want to do is pull the shadow square wire behind us. It should slide freely through the Liar, unless I give Prill the word to close the airlock door."

Speaker thought about it. "That should work, Louis. If the puppeteer's flycycle has not the power we need, we can cut away chunks of the building to make it lighter. But why? What do you expect to find at the top?"

"I could tell you in one word; and then you'd laugh in my face. Speaker, if I'm wrong, I swear you'll never know," said Louis Wu.

And he thought: I'll have to tell Prill what to do. And plug the Liar's wiring channel with plastic. It won't stop the thread from sliding, but it should make the Liar nearly airtight.

The Improbable was not a spaceship. Her lifting power was electromagnetic, thrusting against the Ring foundation itself. And the Ring floor sloped up toward Fist-of-God; for Fist-Of-God was hollow. Naturally the Improbable tended to tilt, to slide back down against the push of the puppeteer's flycycle.

To that problem, Speaker had already found the answer.

They were living in pressure suits, before the journey had properly began. Louis sucked pap through a tube, and thought yearningly of steak broiled with a flashlight-laser. Speaker sucked reconstituted blood, and thought his own thoughts.

They certainly didn't need the kitchen. They cut that part of the building loose, and improved the tilt of the building to boot.

They cut away air conditioning and police equipment. The generators that had ruined their flycycles went only after they had been positively identified as separate from the lifting motors. Walls went. Some walls were needed for their shade; for heating became a problem in the direct sunlight.

Day by day they neared the crater at the top of Fist-of-God, a crater that would have swallowed most asteroids. The lip of the crater looked like no impact crater Louis had ever seen. Shards like obsidian spearheads formed a jagged ring. Spearheads the size of mountains themselves. There was a gap between two such peaks ... they could enter there ...

"I take it," said Speaker, "that you wish to enter the crater itself."

"That's right."

"Then it is good that you noticed the pass. The slope above is too steep for our drive. We should reach the pass very soon."

Speaker was steering the Improbable by modifying the flycycle thrust. That had been necessary since they cut away the stabilizing mechanism in a final attempt to reduce the building's weight. Louis had grown used to the bizarre appearance of the kzin: the five transparent concentric balloons of his pressure suit, the fishbowl helmet with its maze of tongue controls half hiding the kzin's face, the tremendous backpack.