Ringworld (26 page)

"Dead," said Louis. When they looked at him without comprehension, he pointed into the dusk. Teela's flycycle was obvious enough, marked by one of four sets of headlamps.

He said, "We'll have to make our own luck from now on."

"Yes. You will remember, Louis, that Teela's luck is sporadic. It had to be. Else she would not have been aboard the Liar. Else we would not have crashed." The puppeteer paused, then added, "My sympathies, Louis."

"She will be missed," Speaker rumbled.

Louis nodded. It seemed he should be feeling more. But the incident in the Eye storm had somehow altered his feelings for Teela. She had seemed, for that time, less human than Speaker or Nessus. She was myth. The aliens were real.

"We must find a new goal," said Speaker-To-Animals. "We need a way to take the Liar back to space. I confess I have no ideas at all."

"I do," Louis said.

Speaker seemed startled. "Already?"

"I want to think about it some more. I'm not sure it's even sane, let alone workable. In any case, we're going to need a vehicle. Let's think about that."

"A sled, perhaps. We can use the remaining flycycle to tow it. A big sled, perhaps the wall of a building."

"We can better that. I am convinced that I can persuade Halrloprillalar to guide me through the machinery that lifts this building. We may find that the building itself can become our vehicle."

"Try that," said Louis.

"And you?"

"Give me time."

***

The core of the building was all machinery. Some was lifting machinery; some ran the air conditioning and the water condensers and the water-taps; and one insulated section was part of the electromagnetic trap generators. Nessus worked. Louis and Prill stood by, awkwardly ignoring one another.

Speaker was still in prison. Prill had refused to let him up.

"She is afraid of you," Nessus had said. "We could press the point, no doubt. We could put you aboard one of the flycycles. If I refused to board until you were on the platform, she would have to lift you."

"She might lift me halfway to the ceiling, then drop me. No."

But she had taken Louis.

He studied her while pretending to ignore her. Her mouth was narrow, virtually lipless. Her nose was small and straight and narrow. She had no eyebrows.

Small wonder if she seemed to have no expression. Her face seemed little more than markings on a wigmaker's dummy.

After two hours of work, Nessus pulled his heads out of an access panel. "I cannot give us motive power. The lift fields will do no more than lift us. But I have freed a correcting mechanism designed to keep us over one spot. The building is now at the mercy of the winds."

Louis grinned. "Or a tow. Tie a line to your flycycle and pull the building behind you."

"There is no need. The flycycle uses a reactionless thruster. We can keep it within the building."

"You thought of it first, hmm? But that thruster's awfully powerful. If the 'cycle tore itself loose in here --"

"Yesss --" The puppeteer turned to Prill and spoke slowly and at length in the language of the Ringworld gods. Presently he said to Louis, "There is a supply of electrosetting plastic. We can embed the flycycle in plastic, leaving only the controls exposed."

"Isn't that a little drastic?"

"Louis, if the flycycle tore itself loose, I could be hurt."

"Well ... maybe. Can you land the building when you need to?"

"Yes, I have altitude control."

"Then we don't need a scout vehicle. Okay, we'll do it."

***

Louis was resting, not sleeping. He lay on his back on the big oval bed. His eyes were open, staring through the bubble window in the ceiling.

A glow of solar corona showed over the edge of the shadow square. Dawn was not far off ; but still the Arch was blue and bright in a black sky.

"I must be out of my mind," said Louis Wu.

And, "What else can we do?"

The bedroom had probably been part of the governor's suite. Now it was a control room. He and Nessus had mounted the flycycle in the walk-in closet, poured plastic over and around it, then -- with Prill's help -- run a current through the plastic. The closet had been just the right size.

The bed smelled of age. It crinkled when he moved.

"Fist-of-God," Louis Wu said into the dark. "I saw it. A thousand miles high. It doesn't make sense they'd build a mountain that high, not when ..." He let it trail off.

And suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, shouting, "Shadow square wire!"

A shadow entered the bedroom.

Louis froze. The entrance was dark. Yet, by its fluid motion and by the distribution of subtle shadings of curvature, a naked woman was walking toward him.

Hallucination? The ghost of Teela Brown? She had reached him before he could decide. Totally self-confident, she sat beside him on the bed. She reached out and touched his face and ran her fingertips down his cheek.

She was nearly bald. Though her hair was dark and long and full-bodied, so that it bobbed as she walked, it was only an inch-wide fringe growing from the base of her skull. In the dark the features of her face virtually disappeared. But her body was lovely. He was seeing the shape of her for the first time. She was slim, muscled with wire like a professional dancer. Her breasts were high and heavy.

If her face had matched her figure ...

"Go away," Louis said, not roughly. He took her wrist, interrupted what her fingertips were doing to his face. It had felt like a barber's facial massage, definitely relaxing. He stood up, pulled her gently to her feet, took her by the shoulders. If he simply turned her around and patted her on the rump-?

She ran her fingertips along the side of his neck. Now she was using both hands. She touched him on the chest, and here, and there, and suddenly Louis Wu was blind with lust. His hands closed like clamps on her shoulders.

She dropped her hands. She waited without trying to help as he peeled out of his falling jumper. But as he exposed more skin, she stroked him here, and there, not always where nerves clustered. Each time it was as if she had touched him in the pleasure center of his brain.

He was on fire. If she pushed him away now, he would use force; he must have her --

-- But some cool part of him knew that she could chill him as quickly as she had aroused him. He felt like a young satyr, yet he dimly sensed that he was also a puppet.

For the moment he couldn't have cared less.

And still Prill's face showed no expression.

***

She took him to the verge of orgasm, then held him there, held him there ... so that when the moment came it was like being struck by lightning. But the lightning went on and on, a flaming discharge of ecstacy.

When it ended he was barely aware that she was leaving. She must know how thoroughly she had used him up. He was asleep before she reached the door.

And he woke thinking: Why did she do that?

Too tanj analytical, he answered himself. She's lonely. She must have been here a long time. She's mastered a skill, and she hasn't had a chance to practice that skill ...

Skill. She must know more anatomy than most professors. A doctorate in Prostitution? There was more to the oldest profession than met the eye. Louis Wu could recognize expertise in any field. This woman had it.

Touch these nerves in the correct order, and the subject will react thus-and-so. The right knowledge can turn a man into a puppet ...

... puppet to Teela's luck ...

He almost had it then. He came close enough that the answer, when it finally came, was no surprise.

***

Nessus and Halrloprillalar came backward out of the freezer room. They were followed by the dressed carcass of a flightless bird bigger than a man. Nessus had used a cloth for padding, so that his mouth need not touch the dead meat of the ankle.

Louis took the puppeteer's burden. He and Prill pulled in tandem. He found that he needed both hands, as did she. He answered her nod of greeting and asked, "How old is she?"

Nessus did not show surprise at the question. "I do not know."

"She came to my room last night." That would not do; it would mean nothing to an alien. "You know that the thing we do to reproduce, we also do for recreation?"

"I knew that."

"We did that. She's good at it. She's so good at it that she must have had about a thousand years of practice," said Louis Wu.

"It is not impossible. Prill's civilization had a compound superior to boosterspice in its ability to sustain life. Today the compound is worth whatever the owner cares to ask. One charge is equivalent to some fifty years of youth."

"Do you happen to know how many charges she's taken?"

"No, Louis. But I know that she walked here."

They had reached the stairway leading down to the conical cell block. The bird trailed behind them, bouncing.

"Walked here from where?"

"From the rim wall."

"Two hundred thousand miles?"

"Nearly that."

"Tell me all of it. What happened to them after they reached the right side of the rim wall?"

"I will ask. I do not know it all." And the puppeteer began to question Prill. In bits and pieces the story emerged:

They were taken for gods by the first group of savages they met, and by everyone thereafter, with one general exception.

Godhood solved one problem neatly. The crewmen whose brains had been damaged by backlash from the half-repaired cziltang brone were left to the care of various villages. As resident gods they would be well treated; and as idiots they would be relatively harmless as gods.

The remainder of the Pioneer's crew split up. Nine, including Prill, went to antispinward. Prill's home city was in that direction. Both groups planned to travel along the rim wall, looking for civilization. Both parties swore to send help if they found any.

They were taken for gods by all but the other gods. The Fall of the Cities had left a few survivors. Some were mad. All took the life-extending compound if they could get it. All were looking for enclaves of civilization. None had thought to build his own.

As the Pioneer's crew moved to antispinward, other survivors joined them. They became a respectable pantheon.

In every city they found the shattered towers. These towers had been set floating after the settling of the Ringworld, but thousands of years before the perfection of the youth drug. The youth drug had made later generations cautious. For the most part those who could afford it simply stayed away from the floaters, unless they were elected officials. Then they would install safety devices, or power generators.

A few of the floaters still floated. But most had smashed down into the centers of cities, all in the same instant, when the last power receiver flared and died.

Once the traveling pantheon found a partially recivilized city, inhabited only on the outskirts. The God Gambit would not serve them here. They traded a fortune in the youth drug for a working, self-powered bus.

It did not happen again until much later. By then they had come too far. The spirit had gone out of them, and the bus had broken down. In a half-smashed city, among other survivors of the Fall of the Cities, most of the pantheon simply stopped moving.

But Prill had a map. The city of her birth was directly to starboard. She persuaded a man to join her, and they started walking.

***

They traded on their godhoods. Eventually they tired of one another, and Prill went on alone. Where her godhood was not enough, she traded small quantities of the youth drug, if she had to. Otherwise --

"There was another way in which she could maintain power over people. She has tried to explain it to me, but I do not understand."

"I think I do," said Louis. "She could get away with it, too. She's got her own equivalent of a tasp."

She must have been quite mad by the time she reached her home city. She took up residence in the grounded police station. She spent hundreds of hours learning how to work the machinery. One of the first things she accomplished was to get it airborne; for the self-powered tower had been landed as a safety precaution after the Fall of the Cities. Subsequently she must have come close enough to dropping the tower and killing herself.

"There was a system for trapping drivers who broke the traffic laws," Nessus finished. "She turned it on. She hopes to capture someone like herself, a survivor from the Fall of the Cities. She reasons that if he is flying a car, he must be civilized."

"Then why does she want him trapped and helpless in that sea of rusted metal?"

"Just in case, Louis. It is a mark of her returning sanity."

Louis frowned into the cell block below. They had lowered the bird's carcass on a ruined metal car, and Speaker had taken possession. "We can lighten this building," said Louis. "We can cut the weight almost in half."

"How?"

"Cut away the basement. But we'll have to get Speaker out of there. Can you persuade Prill?"

"I can try."

Halrloprillalar was terrified of Speaker, and Nessus was leery of letting her out of the influence of the tasp. Nessus claimed to be jumping the tasp on her every time she saw Speaker, so that eventually she would welcome the sight of him. Meanwhile they both shunned the kzin's company.

So it was that Prill and Nessus waited elsewhere while Louis and Speaker lay flat on the floor of the observation platform looking down into the gloom of the cell block.

"Go ahead," said Louis.

The kzin fired both beams.

Thunder boomed and echoed within the cell block. A brilliant point the color of lightning appeared high on the wall, just beneath the ceiling. It moved slowly clockwise, leaving a redly glowing trail.

"Cut chunks," Louis directed. "If that mass lets go all at once, we'll be shaken loose like fleas on a shaven dog."

Speaker obligingly changed the angle of his cutting.

Still, the building lurched when the first chunk of cable and construction plastic fell away. Louis hugged the floor. Through the gap he saw sunlight, and city, and people.

He did not have a view straight down until half a dozen masses had been cut loose.

He saw an altar of wood, and a model of silvery metal whose shape was a flat rectangle surmounted by a parabolic arch. It was there for an instant, before a mass of cell block structure struck next to it and splashed fragments in all directions. Then it was sawdust and crumpled tinsel. But the people had fled long since.

***

"People!" he complained to Nessus. "In the heart of an empty city, miles from the fields! That's an all-day round trip. What were they doing there?"

"They worship the goddess Halrloprillalar. They are Prill's food source."

"Ah. Offerings."

"Of course. What difference does it make, Louis?"

"They might have been hit."

"Perhaps some of them were."

"And I thought I saw Teela down there. Just for an instant."

"Nonsense, Louis. Shall we test our motive power?"

The puppeteer's flycycle was buried in a gelatinous mound of translucent plastic. Nessus stood alongside the exposed control panel. The bay window gave them an imposing view of the city: the docks, the flat-sided towers of the Civic Center, the spreading jungle that had probably been a park. All several thousand feet below.

Louis struck an attitude: parade rest. An inspiration to his crew, the heroic commander stands astride the bridge. The damaged rocket motors may explode at the first touch of thrust; but it must be tried. The kzinti battleships must be stopped before they reach Earth!

"It'll never work," said Louis Wu.

"Why not, Louis? The stresses should not exceed --"

"A flying castle, for Finagle's sake! I only just realized how insane the whole thing is. We must have been out of our minds! Tootling home in the upper half of a skyscraper --" The building shifted then, and Louis staggered. Nessus had started the thruster.

The city drifted past the bay window, gathering speed. Acceleration eased off. It had never been higher than a foot per second squared. Top speed seemed to be about one hundred miles per hour, and the castle was rock steady.

"We centered the flycycle correctly," said Nessus. "The floor is level, as you will note, and the structure shows no tendency to rotate."

"It's still silly."

"Nothing that works is silly. And now, where shall we go?"

Louis was silent.

"Where shall we go, Louis? Speaker and I have no plans. What direction, Louis?"

"Starboard."

"Very well. Directly starboard?"

"Right. We've got to get past the Eye storm. Then turn forty-five degrees or so to antispinward."

"Do you seek the city of the tower called Heaven?"

"Yes. Can you find it?"

"That should be no problem, Louis. Three hours flying time brought us here; we should be back at the tower in thirty hours. And then?"

"Depends."

***

The picture was so vivid. It was pure deduction and imagination, yet -- so vivid. Louis Wu tended to daydream in color.

So vivid. But was it real?

It was frightening, how suddenly his confidence in the flying tower had leaked away. Yet the tower was flying. It didn't need Louis Wu to make it go.

***

"The leaf-eater seems content to follow your lead," said Speaker.

The flycycle hummed quietly to itself a few feet away. Landscape flowed past the bay window. The Eye storm was off to the side, its gray gaze large and daunting.

"The leaf-eater's out of his mind," said Louis. "I take it you've got better sense."

"Not at all. If you have a goal, I am content to follow you. But if it may involve fighting, I should know something about it."

"Um."

"I should know something about it regardless, in order to decide whether it will involve fighting."

"Well put."

Speaker waited.

"We're going after the shadow square wire," said Louis. "Remember the wire we ran into after the meteor defenses wrecked us? Later it started falling over the city of the floating tower, loop after loop, endlessly. There should be at least tens of thousands of miles of it, more than we could possibly need for what I've got in mind."

"What do you have in mind, Louis?"

"Getting hold of the shadow square wire. Odds are the natives will just give it to us, if Prill asks politely, and if Nessus uses the tasp."

"And after that?"

"After that, we'll find out just how crazy I am."

***

The tower moved to starboard like a steamship of the sky. Starships were never so roomy. As for ships of the air, there was nothing comparable in known space. Six decks to climb around in! Luxury!

There were luxuries missing. The food supply aboard the flyscraper consisted of frozen meat, perishable fruit, and the kitchen of Nessus's flycycle. Food for puppeteers lacked nourishment for humans, according to Nessus. Thus Louis's breakfast and lunch were meat broiled by a flashlight-laser, and knobbly red fruit.

And there was no water.

And no coffee.

Prill was persuaded to find some bottles of an alcoholic beverage. They held a belated christening ceremony in the bridge room, with Speaker courteously backed into a far corner and Prill hovering warily near the door. Nobody would accept Louis's suggestion of the name Improbable; and so there were four christenings, in order, in four different languages.

The beverage was ... well, sour. Speaker couldn't take it, and Nessus didn't try. But Prill consumed one bottle, sealed the others, and put them carefully away.

The christening became a language lesson. Louis learned a few of the rudiments of the Ringworld Engineer's speech. He found that Speaker was learning much faster than he was. It figured. Speaker and Nessus had both been trained to deal with human languages, modes of thinking, limitations in speech and hearing. This was only more of the same.

They broke for dinner. Again Nessus ate alone, using his flycycle kitchen, while Louis and Prill ate broiled meat and Speaker ate raw, elsewhere.

Afterward the language lesson went on. Louis hated it. The others were so far ahead of him that he felt like a cretin.

"But Louis, we must learn the language. Oar rate of travel is low, and we must forage for our food. Frequently we will need to deal with natives."

"I know. I never liked languages."

Darkness fell. Even this far from the Eye storm, cloud cover was complete, and the night was like the inside of a dragon!s mouth. Louis called a halt to the lesson. He was tired and irritable and vastly unsure of himself. The others left him to his rest.

They would be passing the Eye storm in about ten hours.

***

He was floating at the edge of a restless sleep when Prill came back. He felt hands stroking him lasciviously, and he reached out.

She backed out of reach. She spoke in her own language, but simplified it into a pidgin for Louis's understanding.

"You are leader?"

Bleary-eyed, Louis considered. "Yes," he said, because the actual situation was too complex.

"Make the two-headed one give me his machine."

"What?" Louis fumbled for words. "His which?"

"The machine that make me happy. I want it. You take it from him."

Louis laughed, for he thought he understood her.

"You want me? You take it," Prill said angrily.

The puppeteer had something she wanted. She had no lever to use on him, for he was not a man. Louis Wu was the only man around. Her power would bend him to her will. It had always worked before; for was she not a goddess?

Perhaps Louis's hair had misled her. She may have assumed that he was one of the hairy lower class, by his bare face perhaps half Engineer, but no more. Then he must have been born after the Fall of the Cities. No youth drug. He must be in the first flush of youth.

"You were quite right," Louis said in his own tongue. Prill's fists clenched in anger, for his mockery was clear. "A thirty-year-old man would be putty in your hands. But I'm older than that." And he laughed again.

"The machine. Where does he keep it?" In the darkness she leaned toward him, all lovely suggestive shadow. Her scalp gleamed softly; her black hair spilled over her shoulder. The breath caught in Louis's throat.

He found the words to say, "Glue against his bone, under skin. One head."

Prill made a sound like a growl. She must have understood; the gadget was surgically implanted. She turned and left.

Louis thought briefly of following her. He wanted her more than he was willing to admit. But she would own him if he let her, and her motives did not jibe with Louis Wu's.

***

The whistle of the wind rose gradually. Louis's sleep became shallow ... and merged into an erotic dream.

His eyes opened.

Prill knelt facing him, straddling him like a succubus. Her fingers moved lightly over the skin of his chest and belly. Her hips moved rhythmically, and Louis moved in response. She was playing him like a musical instrument.

"When I finish I will own you," she crooned. The pleasure showed in her voice, but it was not the pleasure of a woman taking pleasure from a man. It was the thrill of wielding power.

Her touch was a joy as thick as syrup. She knew a terribly ancient secret: that every woman is born with a tasp, and that its power is without limit if she can learn to use it. She would use it and withhold it, use it and withhold it, until Louis begged for the right to serve her ...

Something changed in her. Her face could not show it; but he heard the crooning sound of her pleasure, and he felt the change in her motion. She moved, and they came together, and the slam! that rolled across them then seemed entirely subjective.

She lay beside him all that night. Occasionally they woke and made love, and went back to sleep. If Prill felt disappointment at these times, she did not show it, or Louis did not see it. He knew only that she was no longer playing him like an instrument. They were playing a duet.

Something had happened to Prill. He suspected what it was.

***

The morning dawned gray and stormy. Wind howled around the ancient building. Rain lashed the bay window of the bridge, and stormed through broken windows higher up. The Improbable was very close to the Eye storm.

Louis dressed and left the bridge.

He saw Nessus in the hallway. "You!" he shouted.

The puppeteer shied. "Yes, Louis?"

"What did you do to Prill last night?"

"Show proper gratitude, Louis. She was trying to control you, to condition you into subservience. I heard."

"You used the tasp on her!"

"I gave her three seconds at half-power while you were engaged in reproductive activity. Now it is she who is conditioned."

"You monster! You egotistical monster!"

"Come no closer, Louis."

"Prill is a human woman with free will!"

"What of your own free will?"

"It was in no danger! She can't control me!"

"Is there something else bothering you? Louis, you are not the first human couple I have watched in reproductive activity. We felt that we must know all about your species. Come no closer, Louis."

"You hadn't the right!" Certainly Louis never intended harm to the puppeteer. He clenched his fists in rage, but he did not intend to use them. In rage he stepped forward --

Then Louis was in ecstasy.

In the heart of the purest joy he had ever known, Louis know that Nessus was using the tasp on him. Without allowing himself to realize the consequences, Louis kicked out and up.

He used all the strength he could divert from his enjoyment of the tasp. It was not great, but he used it, and he kicked the puppeteer in the larynx, beneath the left jaw.

The consequences were hideous. Nessus said, "Glup!" and stumbled back, and turned off the tasp.

And turned off the tasp!

The weight of all the sorrow that men are heir to came down on the shoulders of Louis Wu. Louis turned his back on the puppeteer and walked away. He wanted to weep; but more than that, he wanted the puppeteer not to see his face.

***

He wandered at random, seeing only his own inner blackness. It was only coincidence that brought him to the stairwell.

He had kaown full well what he was doing to Prill. Balanced over a drop of ninety feet, he had been eager enough to see Nessus use the tasp on Prill. He had seen wireheads; he knew what it did to them.

Conditioned! Like an experimental pet! And she knew! Last night had been her last valiant attempt to break loose from the power of the tasp.

Now Louis had felt what she was fighting.

"I shouldn't have done it," said Louis Wu. "I take it back." Even in black despair, that was funny. You can't take back such a choice.

It was coincidence that he went down the stairwell instead of up. Or his hindbrain may have remembered a slam! that his forebrain had hardly noticed.

The wind roared around him, hurling rain from every direction, as he reached the platform. It took some of his attention outside himself. He was losing the grief that came with the loss of the tasp.

Once Louis Wu had sworn to live forever.