Ringworld (24 page)

He pulled himself close against the 'cycle, braced himself with his knees. He began to rock.

Speaker-To-Animals was making curious sounds.

The cycle rocked back and forth, further with each swing. Louis assumed, because he had to, that most of the metal was in the belly of the 'cycle. Otherwise the 'cycle would roll, and wherever he placed himself Louis would be underneath, and therefore Nessus would not have made the suggestion.

The 'cycle rolled far. Louis, nauseated, fought the urge to vomit. If his breathing passages got clogged now, it was all over.

The 'cycle rolled back, and over, and was precisely upside down. Louis lunged across the underside and snatched at the other end of the collapsed balloon. And had it.

The 'cycle continued its roll. Louis was flattened chestdown across the belly of the machine. He waited, clinging.

The inert hulk paused, hesitated, rolled back. His vestibular canals spun, and Louis lost -- what? Yesterday's late lunch? He lost it explosively, in great agonizing heaves, across the metal and across his sleeve; but he didn't shift his position more than an inch.

The flycycle continued to heave like the sea. But Louis was anchored. Presently he dared to look up.

A woman was watching him.

She seemed to be entirely bald. Her face reminded Louis of the wire-sculpture in the banquet hall of the Heaven tower. The features, and the expression. She was as calm as a goddess or a dead woman. And he wanted to blush, or hide, or disappear.

Instead he said, "Speaker, we're being watched. Relay to Nessus."

"A minute, Louis. I am discomposed. I made the mistake of watching you climb."

"Okay. She's -- I thought she was bald, but she isn't. Theres a fringe of hairbearing scalp that crosses over her ears and meets at the base of her skull. She wears the hair long, more than shoulder length." He did not say that her hair was rich and dark falling past one shoulder as she bent slightly forward to watch Louis Wu, nor that her skull was finely and delicately shaped, nor that her eyes seemed to spear him like a martini olive. "I think she's an Engineer; she either belongs to the same race or follows the same customs. Have you got that?"

"Yes. How can you climb so? It seemed that you defied gravity. What are you, Louis?"

Clutching himself to his dead flycycle, Louis laughed. It seemed to take all his strength. "You're a Kdaptist," he said. "Admit it."

"I was raised so, but the teachings did not take."

"Sure they didn't. Have you got Nessus?"

"Yes. I used the siren."

"Relay this. She's about twenty feet from me. She's watching me like a snake. I don't mean she's intensely interested in me; I mean she's not interested in anything else at all. She blinks, but she never looks away.

"She's sitting in a kind of booth. There used to be glass or something in three of the walls, but that's gone, leaving not much more than some stairs and a platform. She's sitting with her legs over the edge. It must have been a way of watching the prisoners.

"She's dressed in ... well, I can't say I go for the style. Knee-length and elbow-length overalls, ballooning out --" But aliens wouldn't be interested in that. "The fabric is artificial, obviously, and either it's new or it's self-cleaning and very durable. She --" Louis interrupted himself, because the girl had said something.

He waited. She repeated it, whatever it was; a short sentence.

Then she stood gracefully and went up the stairs.

"She's gone," said Louis. "Probably lost interest."

"Perhaps she went back to her listening devices."

"Probably right." If there was an eavesdropper in the building, Occam's Razor said it was her.

"Nessus asks you to focus your flashlight-laser to low and wide, and to be seen using it for lighting when next the woman appears. I am not to show the Slaver weapon. The woman could probably kill us both by turning off a switch. She must not see us with weapons."

"Then how can we get rid of the zap guns?"

A moment before Speaker relayed the answer. "We do not. Nessus says that he will try something else. He is coming here."

Louis let his head sag against the metal. The relief he felt was so great that he didn't even question it, until Speaker said, "He will only have us all in the same trap. Louis, how can I dissuade him?"

"Tell him so. No, don't even do that. If he didn't know it was safe he'd stay away."

"How can it be safe?"

"I don't know. Let me rest." The puppeteer must know what he was doing. He could trust Nessus's cowardice. Louis rubbed his cheek against the smooth, cool metal.

***

He dozed.

He was never less than marginally aware of where he was. If his 'cycle stirred or shifted he came wide-eyed out of sleep, clutching metal in his knees and fabric in his fists. His sleep was a running nightmare.

When light flashed through his eyelids he came awake immediately.

Daylight poured through the horizontal slit that had served them as a doorway. Within that glare Nessus's flycycle was a black silhouette. The flycycle was upside down, and so was the puppeteer, held by seat webbing rather than crash balloons.

The slit closed behind him.

"Welcome," said Speaker, slurring the words. "Can you turn me upright?"

"Not yet. Has the girl reappeared?"

"No."

"She will. Humans are curious, Speaker. She cannot have seen members of our species before."

"What of it? I want to be right side up," Speaker moaned.

The puppeteer did something to his dashboard. A miracle happened: his flycycle turned over.

Louis said one word. "How?"

"I turned everything off after I knew that the bandit signal had my controls. If the lifting field had not caught me, I could have turned on my motors before I struck pavement. Now," the puppeteer said briskly, "the next step should be easy. When the girl appears, act friendly. Louis, you may attempt to have sex with her if you think you might succeed. Speaker, Louis is to be our master; we are to be his servitors. The woman may be xenophobic; it would lull her to believe that a human being commands these aliens."

Louis actually laughed. Somehow the nightmarish half-sleep had rested him. "I doubt she'll be feeling friendly, let alone seductive. You didn't see her. She's as cold as the black caves of Pluto, at least where I'm concerned, and I can't really blame her." She had watched him lose his lunch across his sleeve -- generally an unromantic sight.

The puppeteer said, "She will be feeling happy whenever she looks at us. She will cease to feel happy when she tries to leave us. If she brings one of us closer to her, her joy will increase --"

"Tanjit, yes!" cried Louis.

"You see? Good. In addition, I have been practicing the Ringworld language. I believe my pronunciation is correct, and my grammar. If I only knew what more of the words meant ..."

***

Speaker had stopped complaining long ago. Inverted above a lethal drop, with burns all over him and one hand charred to the bone, he had raged at Louis and Nessus for being unable to help him. But he had been quiet for hours now.

In the dim quiet, Louis dozed.

In his sleep he heard bells, and woke.

She tinkled as she came down the steps. There were bells on her mocassins. Her garment was different too, a top-shaped, high-necked dress fitted with half a dozen big bulging pockets. Her long black hair fell forward over one shoulder.

The serene dignity in her face had not changed.

She sat down with her feet over the edge of the platform, and she watched Louis Wu. She did not shift position; neither did Louis. For several minutes they held each other's eyes.

Then she reached into one of the big pockets and produced something fist-sized and orange. She tossed it toward Louis, aiming it so that it would go past him, a few inches beyond his reach.

He recognized it as it went by him. A knobby, juicy fruit he had found on a bush two days ago. He had dropped several into the intake hopper of his kitchen, without tasting them.

The fruit splattered red across the roof of a cell. Suddenly Louis's mouth was trying to water, and he was taken with a raging thirst.

She tossed him another. It came closer this time. He could have touched it if he had tried, but he would also have overturned the 'cycle. And she knew it.

Her third shot tapped his shoulder. He clung to his two fistfuls of balloon and thought black thoughts.

Then Nessus's flycycle drifted into view.

And she smiled.

The puppeteer had been floating behind the truck-sized derelict. Upside down again, he drifted obliquely toward the viewing platform as if wafted there by a stray induced current, and, as he passed Louis, he asked, "Can you seduce her?"

Louis snarled. Then, realizing that the puppeteer really wasn't mocking him, he said, "I think she thinks I'm an animal. Forget it."

"Then we need different tactics."

Louis rubbed his forehead against the cool metal. He had seldom felt so miserable. "You're in charge," he said. "She won't buy me as an equal, but she might buy you. She won't see you as competition; you're too alien."

The puppeteer had drifted past him. Now he said something in what sounded to Louis like the language of the shaven choir-leading priest: the holy language of the Engineers.

The girl did not respond. But ... she wasn't smiling exactly, but the corners of her mouth did seem to turn up slightly, and there was more animation in her eyes.

Nessus must be using low power. Very low power.

He spoke again, and this time she answered. Her voice was cool and musical, and if she sounded imperious to Louis Wu, he was predisposed to hear that quality.

The puppeteer's voice became identical to the girl's. What developed then was a language lesson.

To Louis Wu, uneasily balanced above a lethal drop, it was bound to be dull. He picked up a word here and there. At one point she tossed Nessus one of the fist-sized orange fruits, and they established that it was a thrumb. And Nessus kept it.

Suddenly she stood up and left.

Louis said, "Well?"

"She must have become bored," said Nessus. "She gave no warning."

"I'm dying of thirst. Could I have that thrumb?"

"Thrumb is the color of the peel, Louis." He edged his 'cycle alongside Louis and handed him the fruit.

Louis was only just desperate enough to free one hand. That meant he had to bite dumgh the thick peel and tear it away with his teeth. At some point he reached real fruit and bit into it. It was the best thing he had tasted in two hundred years.

When he had quite finished the fruit, he asked, "Is she coming back?"

"We may hope so. I used the tasp at low power that it might affect her below the conscious level. She will miss it. The lure will become stronger every time she sees me. Louis, should we not make her fall in love with you?"

"Forget it. She think I'm a native, a savage. Which brings up the question: what is she?"

"I could not say. She did not try to hide it, but it did not come across, either. I do not know enough language. Not yet."

Nessus had landed to explore the dimness below. Cut off from the intercom, Louis tried to watch what the puppeteer was doing. Eventually he gave that up.

Much later, he heard footsteps. No bells this time.

He cupped his hands and shouted downward. "Nessus!"

The sound bounced off the walls and focused itself horrendously in the apex of the cone. The puppeteer jumped to his feet, swarmed aboard his 'cycle and took off. Cast off, more likely. No doubt he had left the motor going to hold the 'cycle down against the trapping field. Now he simply cut the motor.

He was back among the hovering metal when the footsteps stopped somewhere above them.

"What the tanj is she doing?" Louis whispered.

"Patience. You could not expect her to be conditioned by one exposure to a tasp at low power."

"Try to get it into your thick, brainless heads. I can not keep my balance indefinitety!"

"You must. How can I help?"

"Water," said Louis, with a tongue like two yards of flannel rolled up.

"Are you thirsty? But how can I get water to you? If you turn your head you may lose your balance."

"I know. Forget it." Louis shuddered. Strange, that Louis Wu the spacer should be so afraid of heights. "How's Speaker?"

"I fear for him, Louis. He has been unconscious for uncomfortably long."

"Tanj, tanj --"

Footsteps.

She must have a mania for changing clothes, Louis thought. What she wore now was all overlapping pleats in orange and green. Like previous garments, it showed nothing at all of her shape.

She knelt at the edge of the observation platform, coolly watching them. Lows clutched his metal raft and waited for developments.

He saw her soften. Her eyes went dreamy; the corners of her small mouth turned up.

Nessus spoke.

She seemed to consider. She said something that might have been an answer.

Then she left them.

"Well?"

"We shall see."

"I get so sick of waiting."

Suddenly the puppeteer's flycycle was floating upward. Up and forward. It bumped against the edge of the observation platform like a rowboat making dock.

Nessus stepped daintily ashore.

***

The girl came to greet him. What she held in her left hand had to be a weapon. But with her other hand she touched the puppeteer's head, hesitated, then ran her fingernails down his secondary spine.

Nessus made a sound of deftht.

She turned and walked upstairs. Not once did she glance back. She seemed to assume that Nessus would follow like a dog; and he did.

Good, thought Louis. Be subservient. Make her trust you.

But when the oddly matched sounds of their footsteps faded away, the cell block became a tremendous tomb.

Speaker was thirty feet away across the Sargasso Sea of metal. Four padded black fingers and a puff of orange face showed around the green crash balloons. Louis had no way of getting near. The kzIn might be dead already.

Among the white bones below were at least a dozen skulls. Bones, and age, and rusted metal, and silence. Louis Wu clung to his 'cycle and waited for his strength to give out.

***

He was dozing, not many minutes later, when something changed. His balance shifted --

Louis's life depended on his balance. The momentary disorientation sent him into rigid panic. He looked wildly about him, moving only his eyes.

The metal vehicles were all around him, motionless. But something was moving ...

A distant car bumped, screeched like tearing metal and went up.

Huh?

No. It had grounded against the upper ring of cells. The whole Sargasso was sinking uniformly through space.

One by one, noisily, the cars and flying packs docked and were left behind.

Louis's 'cycle smacked jarringly into concrete, turned half around in the turbulence of electromagnetic forces, and toppled. Louis let go and rolled clear.

Immediately he was trying to get to his feet. But he couldn't get his balance; he couldn't stay upright. His hands were claws, contorted with pain, useless. He lay panting on his side, thinking that it must already be too late. Speaker's flycycle must have landed on Speaker.

Speaker's flycycle, easily recognizable, lay on its side two tiers up. Speaker was there -- and he wasn't under the 'cycle. He must have been under it before the 'cycle fell on its side, but even then the balloons would have protected him to some extent.

Louis reached him by crawling.

The kzin was alive and breathing, but unconscious. The weight of the flycycle had not broken his neck, possibly because he didn't really have a neck. Louis clawed the flashlight-laser from his belt, used its green needle beam to free Speaker from his balloons.

Now what?

Louis remembered that he was dying of thirst.

His head seemed to have stopped spinning. He stood, wobbly-legged, to look for the only functional water source he knew.

The cell block was all concentric circular ledges, each ledge the roof of a ring of cell blocks. Speaker had grounded on the fourth ring from the center.

Louis found one 'cycle with tattered crash-balloon fabric draped across it. There was another, one tier down and across the central pit, equipped with a human-style saddle. The third -- Nessus's 'cycle -- had grounded a tier below Speakees.

Louis went down to it. His feet jarred him as they hit the steps. His muscles were too tired to absorb the shock.

He shook his head at the sight of the dashboard. Nobody would be stealing Nessus's flycycle! The controls were incredibly cryptic. But he did identify the water spout.

The water was warm, tasteless as distilled water, and utterly delicious.

When Louis had quenched his thirst, he tried a brick from the kitchen slot. It tasted very strange. Louis decided not to eat it yet. There might be additives deadly to human metabolism. Nessus would know.

He carried water to Speaker in his shoe, the first container he thought of. He dribbled it into the kzin's mouth, and the kzin swallowed it in his sleep, and smiled. Louis went back for another load, and ran out of stamina before he could reach the puppeteer's flycycle.

So he curled up on the flat construction plastic and closed his eyes.

Safe. He was safe.

He should have been asleep instantly, the way he felt. But something nagged at him. Abused muscles, cramps in hands and thighs, the fear of falling that would not let him go even now ... and something more ...

He sat up. "No justice," he mumbled.

Speaker?

The kzin was sleeping curled around himself, with his ears tight to his head and his Slaver weapon hugged tight to his belly so that only the double snout showed. His breathing was regular, but very fast. Was that good?

Nessus would know. Meanwhile, let him sleep.

"No justice," Louis repeated under his breath.

He was alone and lonely, without the advantage of being on sabbatical. He was responsible for the well-being of others. His own life and health depended on how well Nessus gulled the crazy, half-bald woman who was keeping them prisoner. Small wonder if he couldn't sleep.

Still ...

His eyes found it and locked. His own flycycle.

His own flycycle with the broken crash balloons trailing, and Nessus's flycycle here beside him, and Speaker's flycycle beside Speaker, and the flycycle with the human-shape saddle and no crash balloons. Four flycycles.

Frantic for water, he'd missed the implications the first time round. Now ... Teela's flycycle. It must have been behind one of the bigger vehicles. And no crash balloons. No crash balloons.

She must have fallen off when the 'cycle turned over.

Or been torn away when the sonic fold failed at Mach 2.

What was it Nessus had said? Her luck is clearly undependable. And Speaker: It her luck had failed her just once, she would be dead.

She was dead. She must be.

I came with you, because I love you.

"Bad luck," said Louis Wu. "Bad luck you met me."

He curled up on the concrete and slept.

Much later, he woke with a jolt to find Speaker-To-Animals looking down into his face. The lurid orange fur mask made his eyes doubly prominent, and there was a wistful look ... Speaker asked, "Can you eat the leaf-eater's food?"

"I'm afraid to try," said Louis. The vast, echoing cavity of his belly suddenly made all his other problems trivial, except one.

"I think that of the three of us, I alone have no food supply," said the kzin.

That wistful look the hair stood up on Louis's neck. In a steady voice, he said, "You know you have a food supply. The question is, will you use it?"

"Certainly not, Louis. If honor requires me to starve within reach of meat, then I will starve."

"Good." Louis turned over and pretended to go back to sleep.

And when he woke up, some hours later, he knew that he had been asleep. His hindbrain, he decided, must trust Speaker's word completely. If the kzin said he would starve, he would starve.

His bladder was full, and there was a stink in his nostrils, and his muscles ached obtrusively. The pit solved one problem, and the puppeteer's flycycle supplied water to wash the muck off his sleeve. Then Louis limped down a flight of steps to reach his own flycycle and first-aid kit.

But the kit was not a simple box of medicines; it mixed dosages on command, and made its own diagnoses. A complex machine; and the zap guns had burnt it out.

The light was fading.

Cells with trap doors over them, and small transparent panes around the trap doors. Louis dropped to his belly to look into a cell. Bed, peculiar-looking toilet, and -- daylight commg through a picture window.

"Speaker!" Louis called.

They used the disintegrator to break in. The picture window was big and rectangular, a strange luxury for a prison cell. The glass was gone but for a few sharp crystal teeth around the edges.

Windows to taunt the prisoner, to show him freedom?

The window faced to port. It was half-daylight; the shadow of the terminator was coming in from spinward like a black curtain. Ahead was the harbor: cubes that must be warehouses, rotting docks, cranes of elegantly simplistic design, and one tremendous ground-effect ship in drydock. All rust-red skeletons.

To left and right stretched mile after mile of twisting shore. A stretch of beach, then a line of docks, then a stretch of beach ... The scheme must have been built into the shore itself, a stretch of shallow beach like Waikiki, then deep water meeting steep shore perfect for a harbor, then more shallow beach.

Beyond, the ocean. It seemed to go on forever, until it faded in the infinity-horizon. Try to look across the Atlantic ...

Dusk came on like a curtain, right to left. The surviving lights of the Civic Center brightened, while city and dock and ocean merged in darkness. To antispinward the golden light of day still glowed.

And Speaker had copped the cell's oval bed.

Louis smiled. He looked so peaceful, the kzin warrior. Sleeping away his injuries, was he? The burns must have weakened him. Or was he trying to sleep away his growing hunger?

Louis left him there.

In the near-darkness of the prison he found Nessus's 'cycle. His hunger was such that he choked down a food brick intended for a puppeteer gullet, ignoring the peculiar taste. The gloom had begun to bother him, so he turned on the headlamps on the puppeteer's flycycle, then hunted down the other flycycles and turned them on too. By the time he finished the place was pretty bright, and all the shadows were intricate and strange.

What was taking Nessus so long?

There wasn't much entertainment in the ancient floating prison. You could spend just so much time sleeping, and Louis had used his quota. You could spend just so much time wondering what the tanj the puppeteer was doing up there, before you began to wonder if he was selling you out.

After all, Nessus wasn't just an alien. He was a Pierson's puppeteer, with a record a mile long for manipulating humans to his own ends. If he could reach an understanding with a (presumed) Ringworld Engineer, he might abandon Louis and Speaker right now, no hesitation. A puppeteer might have no reason not to.

And there were two good reasons why he should.

Speaker-To-Animals would almost certainly make some last-ditch attempt to take the Long Shot from Louis Wu, to reserve the second quantum hyperdrive for kzinti alone. A puppeteer could get hurt in the resulting battle. Safer to leave Speaker now -- and to leave Louis Wu, because he probably wouldn't stand for such a betrayal.

Besides, they knew too much. With Teela dead, only Speaker and Louis knew about the puppeteer experiments in guided evolution. The starseed lure, the Fertility Laws -- if Nessus had been ordered to divulge such information, to gauge his crewmates' reactions, probably he had also been ordered to abandon them sometime during the trip.

These were not even new thoughts. Louis had been alert for some such action ever since Nessus had admitted to guiding an Outsider ship to Procyon via starseed lure. His paranoia was justified in a way. But there wasn't a tanj thing he could do about it.

To save his mind, Louis broke into another cell. He cut across suspected locks with his flashlight-laser turned to high and narrow, and on the fourth try the door came up.

A terrible stench came up too. Louis held his breath, stuck his head and his flashlight-laser in long enough to find out why. Someone had died in there, after the ventilation had quit. The corpse was hunched up against the picture window with a heavy pitcher in his hand. The pitcher was broken. The window was intact.

The cell next door proved to be empty. Louis took possession.

He had crossed the pit to get a cell with a starboard view. He could see the rolling hurricane directly before him. Its size was respectable, considering that they had left it twenty-five hundred miles behind. A big, brooding blue eye.

To spinward was a tall, narrow floating building as big as a passenger starship. Briefly Louis daydreamed that it was a starship, hidden here in superb misdirection, and that all they had to do to get off the world was ...