Chapter 20.
Meat

   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. Louis 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 delight.
   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 coming 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…
   It was thin entertainment.
   Louis schooled himself to memorize the pattern of the city. It might be important. This was the first place they had found with any sign of a still-active civilization.
   He was taking a break, maybe an hour later. He was sitting on the duty oval bunk, staring back at the Eye, and… beyond the Eye, well to the side, was a tiny vivid gray-brown triangle,
   “Mph,” Louis said softly. The triangle was only just big enough to be visible as such. It was set squarely in the gray-white chaos of the infinity horizon. Which meant that it was still day there… although he was looking almost directly to starboard…
   Louis went for his binoculars.
   The binoculars made every detail as clear and sharp as the craters of the Moon. An irregular triangle, red-brown near the base, bright as dirty snow near the apex… Fist-of-God. Vastly larger than they had thought. To be visible this far away, most of the mountain must project above the atmosphere.
   The flycycle fleet had flown around a hundred and fifty thousand miles since the crash. Fist-of-God had to be at least a thousand miles high.
   Louis whistled. Again he raised the binoculars.


   Sitting there in the near-darkaess, Louis gradually became aware of noises overhead.
   He stuck his head up out of the cell.
   Speaker-To-Animals roared, “Welcome, Louis!” He waved at him with the raw, red, half-eaten carcass of something approximately goat-sized. He took a bite the size of a steak, immediately took another, and another. His teeth were for tearing, not for chewing.
   He reached out to pick up a bloody-ended hind leg with the hoof and skin still on. “We saved some for you, Louis! It has been hours dead, but no matter. We should hurry. The leaf-eater prefers not to watch us eat. He is sampling the view from my cell.”
   “Wait’ll he sees mine,” said Louis. “We were wrong about Fist-of-God. Speaker. It’s at least a thousand miles high. The peak isn!t snow-covered, it—”
   “Louis! Eat!”
   Louis found his mouth watering. “There has to be some way to cook that thing…”
   There was. He got Speaker to tear the skin off for him, then wedged the hoof of the beast into a broken stair, stood back and roasted the meat with the flashlight-laser turned to high intensity, wide aperture.
   “The meat is not fresh,” Speaker said dubiously, “but cremation is not the answer.”
   “How’s Nessus? Is he a prisoner, or is he in control?”
   “In partial control, I think. Look up.”
   The spacer-girl was a tiny doll-figure on the observation platform, her feet trailing in space, her face and scalp showing white as she looked down.
   “You see? She will not let him out of her sight.”
   Louis decided the meat was ready. As he ate, he was aware that Speaker watched him without patience, watched as Louis Wu slowly masticated each small bite. But to Louis it seemed that he ate like a ravening beast. He was hungry.
   For the puppeteer’s sake they pushed the bones through the broken window, to fall on the city. They reconvened around the puppeteer’s flycycle.
   “She is partially conditioned,” said Nessus. He was having trouble with his breathing… or with the smells of raw and burnt animal. “I have learned a good deal from her.”
   “Did you learn why she mousetrapped us?”
   “Yes, and more. We have been lucky. She is a spacer, a ramship crewman.”
   “Jackpot!” said Louis Wu.

Chapter 21.
The Girl from beyond the Edge

   Her name was Halrloprillalar Hotrufan. She had been riding the ramship… Pioneer, Nessus called it after slight hesitation… for two hundred years.
   The Pioneer ran a twenty-four-year cycle that covered four suns and their systems: five oxygen-atmosphere worlds and the Ringworld. The “year” used was a traditional measurement which had nothing to do with the Ringworld. It may have matched the solar orbit for one of the abandoned worlds.
   Two of the Pioneer’s five worlds had been thick with humanity before the Ringworld was built. Now they were abandoned like the others, covered with random vegetation and the debris of crumbling cities.
   Halrloprillalar had run the cycle eight times. She knew that on these worlds grew plants or animals which had not adapted to the Ringworld because of the lack of a winter-summer cycle. Some plants were spices. Some animals were meat. Otherwise—Halrloprillalar neither knew nor cared.
   Her job had nothing to do with cargos.
   “Nor was she concerned with propulsion or life support. I was unable to learn just what she did,” said Nessus. “The Pioneer carried a crew of thirty-six. Doubtless some were superfluous. Certainly she could have done nothing complex nor crucial to the well-being of ship or crew. She is not very intelligent, Louis.”
   “Did you think to ask about the ratio of sexes aboard ship? How many of the thirty-six were women?”
   “She told me that. Three.”
   “You might as well forget about her profession.”
   Two hundred years of travel, security, adventure. Then at the end of Halrloprillalar’s eighth run, the Ringworld refused to answer the Pioneer’s call.
   The electromagnetic cannon didn’t work.
   As far as telescopes could determine, there was no sign of activity at any spaceport.
   The five worlds of the Pioneer’s circuit were not equipped with electromagnetic cannons for braking. Therefore the Pioneer carried braking fuel, condensed en route from interstellar hydrogen. The ship could land… but where?
   Not on the Ringworld. The meteor defenses would blow them apart.
   They had not received permission to land on the spaceport ledge. And something was wrong there.
   Back to one of the abandoned home worlds? In effect they would be starting a new colony world, with thirty-three men and three women.
   “They were hidebound prisoners of routine, ill-equipped to make such a decision. They panicked,” said Nessus. “They mutinied. The Pioneer’s pilot managed to lock himself in the control room long enough to land the Pioneer on the spaceport ledge. They murdered him for it, for risking the ship and their lives, says Halrloprillalar. I wonder if they did not in truth murder him for breaking tradition, for landing by rocket and without formal permission.”
   Louis felt eyes on him. He looked up.
   The spacer-girl was still watching them. And Nessus was looking back at her with one head, the left.
   So that one held the tasp. And that was why Nessus had been looking steadily upward. She wouldn’t let Nessus out of her sight, and he dared not let her off the tasp’s lovely hook.
   “After the killing of the pilot, they left the ship,” said Nessus. “Then it was that they learned how badly the pilot had hurt them. The cziltang brone was inert, broken.
   “They were stranded on the wrong side of a wall a thousand miles high.
   “I do not know the equivalent of cziltang brone in Interworld or the Hero’s Tongue. I can only tell you what it does. What it does is crucial to us all.”
   “Go ahead,” said Louis Wu.
   The Ringworld engineers had designed fail-safe. In many ways it seemed that they had anticipated the fall of civilization, had planned for it, as if cycles of culture and barbarism were man’s natural lot. The complex structure that was the Ringworld would not fail for lack of tending. The descendants of the Engineers might forget how to tend airlocks and electromagnetic cannon, how to move worlds and build flying cars; civilization might end, but the Ringworld would not.
   The meteor defenses, for instance, were so utterly failsafe that Halrloprillalar—
   “Call her Prill,” Louis suggested.
   –that Prill and her crew never considered that they might not be working.
   But what of the spaceport? How fail-safe would it be, if some idiot left both doors of the airlock open?
   There weren’t any airlocks! Instead, there was the cziltang brone. This machine projected a field which caused the structure of the Ringworld floor, and hence of the rim wall, to become permeable to matter. There was some resistance. While the cziltang brone was going—
   “Osmosis generator,” Louis suggested.
   “Perhaps. I suspect that brone is a modifier, possibly obscene.”
   –air would leak through, but slowly, while the osmosis generator was going. Men could push through in pressure suits, moving as against a steady wind. Machines and large masses could be drawn through by tractors.
   “What of pressurized breathing-air?” Speaker asked.
   But they made that outside, with the transmutors!
   Yes, there was cheap transmutation on the Ringworld. It was cheap only in great quantity, and there were other limits. The machine itself was gigantic. It would make just one element into just one other element. The spaceport’s two transmutors would turn lead into nitrogen and oxygen; lead was easy to store and easy to move through the rim wall.
   The osmosis generators were a fail-safe device. When and airlock fails, a veritable hurricane of breathing-air can be lost. But if the cziltang brone broke down, the worst that could happen would be that the airlock would be closed to space—and incidentally to returning spacemen.


   “Also to us,” said Speaker.
   Louis said, “Not so fast. It sounds like the osmosis generator is just what we need to get home. We wouldn’t have to move the Liar at all. Just point the cziltang brone—” He pronounced it as if it started with a sneeze—”at the Ring floor under the Liar. The Liar would sink through the Ring floor like quicksand. Down, and out the other side.”
   “To be trapped in the foamed plastic meteor buffer,” the kzin retorted. Then, “Correction. The Slaver weapon might serve us there.”
   “Quite so. Unfortunately,” said Nessus, “there is no cziltang brone available to us.”
   “She’s here. She got through somehow!”
   “Yes…”
   The magnetohydrodynamicists virtually had to learn a new profession before they could begin to rebuild the cziltang brone. It took them several years. The machine had failed in action: it was partly twisted and partly melted. They had to make new parts; recalibrate; use elements they knew would fail, but maybe they’d hold long enough…
   There was an accident during that time. An osmosis beam, modified by bad calibration, went through the Pioneer. Two crewmen died waist-deep in a metal floor, and seventeen others suffered permanent brain damage in addition to other injuries when certain permeable membranes became too permeable.
   But they got through, the remaining sixteen. They took the idiots with them. They also took the cziltang brone, in case the new Ringworld turned out to be inhospitable.
   They found savagery, nothing but savagery.
   Years later, some of them tried to go back.
   The cziltang brone failed in action, trapping four of them in the rim wall. And that was that. By then they knew that there would be no new parts available anywhere on the Ringworld.


   “I don’t understand how barbarism could come so fast,” said Louis. “You said the Pioneer ran a twenty-four year cycle?”
   “Twenty-four years in ship’s time, Louis.”
   “Oh. That does make a difference.”
   “Yes. To a ship traveling at one Ringworld gravity of thrust, stars tend to be three to six years apart. The actual distances were large. Prill speaks of an abandoned region two hundred light years closer to the mean galactic plane, where three suns clustered within ten light years of each other.”
   “Two hundred light years… near human space, do you think?”
   “Perhaps in human space. Oxygen-atmosphere planets do not in general tend to cluster as closely as they do in the vicinity of Sol. Halrloprillalar speaks of long-term terraforming techniques applied to these worlds, many centuries before the building of the Ringworld. These techniques took too long. They were abandoned halfway by the impatient humans.”
   “That would explain a lot. Except… no, never mind.”
   “Primates, Louis? There is evidence enough that your species evolved on Earth. But Earth might have been a convenient base for a terraforming project aimed at worlds in nearby systems. The engineers might have brought pets and servants.”
   “Like apes and monkeys and Neanderthals…” Louis made a chopping gesture. “It’s just speculation. It’s not something we need to know.”
   “Granted.” The puppeteer munched a vegetable brick while he talked. “The loop followed by the Pioneer was more than three hundred light years long. There was time for extensive change during a voyage, though such change was rare. Prill’s society was a stable one.”
   “Why was she so sure that the whole Ringworld had gone barbarian? How much exploring did they do?”
   “Very little, but enough. Prill was right. There will be no repairs for the cziltang brone. The entire Ringworld must be barbarous by now.”
   “How?”
   “Prill tried to explain to me what happened here, as one of her crew explained it to her. He had oversimplified, of course. It may be that the process started years before the Pioneer departed on its last circuit…”
   There had been ten inhabited worlds. When the Ringworld was finished, all of these had been abandoned, left to go their way without the benefit of man.
   Consider such a world:
   The land is covered with cities in all stages of development. Perhaps slums were made obsolete, but somewhere there are still slums, if only preserved for history. Across the land one can find all the by-products of living: used containers, broken machines, damaged books or film tapes or scrolls, anything that cannot be reused or reprocessed at a profit, and many things which could be. The was have been used as garbage dumps for a hundred thousand years. Somewhere in that time, they were dumping useless radioactive end products of fission.
   How strange is it if the sea life evolves to fit the new conditions?
   How strange, if new life evolves capable of living on the garbage?
   “That happened on Earth once,” said Louis Wu. “A yeast that could eat polyethyline. It was eating the plastic bags off the supermarket shelves. It’s dead now. We had to give up polyethyline.”
   Consider ten such worlds.
   Bacteria evolved to eat zinc compounds, plastics, paints, wiring insulation, fresh rubbish, and rubbish thousands of years obsolete. It would not have mattered but for the ramships.
   The ramships came routinely to the old worlds, seeking forms of life that had been forgotten or that had not adapted to the Ringworld. They brought back other things: souvenirs, objets d’art which had been forgotten or merely postponed. Many museums were still being transferred, one incredibly valuable piece at a time.
   One of the ramships brought back a mold capable of breaking down the structure of a room-temperature superconductor much used in sophisticated machinery.
   The mold worked slowly. It was young and primitive and, in the beginning, easily killed. Variations may have been brought to the Ringworld several times by several ships, until one variation finally took hold.
   Because it did work slowly, it did not ruin the ramship, until long after the ramship had landed. It did not destroy the spaceport’s cziltang brone until crewmen and spaceport workmen had carried it inside. It did not get into the power beam receivers until the shuttles that traveled through the electromagnetic cannon on the rim wall had carried it everywhere on the Ringworld.
   “Power beam receivers?”
   “Power is generated on the shadow squares by thermoelectricity, then beamed to the Ringworld. Presumably the beam, too, is fail-safe. We did not detect it coming in. It must have shut itself down when the receivers failed.”
   “Surely,” said Speaker, “one could make a different superconductor. We know of two basic molecular structures, each with many variations for different temperature ranges.”
   “There are at least four basic structures,” Nessus corrected him. “You are quite right, the Ringworld should have survived the Fall of the Cities. A younger, more vigorous society would have. But consider the difficulties they faced.
   “Much of their leadership was dead, killed in falling buildings when the power failed.
   “Without power they could do little experimenting to find other superconductors. Stored power was generally confiscated for the personal use of men with political power, or was used to run enclaves of civilization in the hope that someone else was doing something about the emergency. The fusion drives of the ramships were unavailable, as the cziltang brones used superconductors. Men who might have accomplished something could not meet; the computer that ran the electromagnetic cannon was dead, and the cannon itself had no power.”
   Louis said, “For want of a nail, the kingdom fell.”
   “I know the story. It is not strictly applicable,” said Nessus. “Something could have been done. There was power to condense liquid helium. With the power beams off, the repair of a power receiver would have been useless; but a cziltang brone could have been adapted to a metal superconductor cooled by liquid helium. A cziltang brone would have given access to spaceports. Ships might have flown to the shadow squares, reopened the power beams so that other liquid-helium-cooled superconductors could be adapted to the power beam receivers.
   “But all this would have required stored power. The power was used to light street lamps, or to support the remaining floating buildings, or to cook meals and freeze foods! And so the Ringworld fell.”
   “And so did we,” said Louis Wu.
   “Yes. We were lucky to run across Halrloprillalar. She has saved us a needless journey. There is no longer any need to continue toward the rim wall.”
   Louis’s head throbbed once, hard. He was going to have a headache.
   “Lucky,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “Indeed. If this is luck, why am I not joyful? We have lost our goal, our last meager hope of escape. Our vehicles are ruined. One of our party is missing in this maze of city.”
   “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.”

Chapter 22.
Seeker

   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 known 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.
   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. He’s 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 Wu.
   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.

Chapter 23.
The God Gambit

   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.
   “We’re 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 Ringworld 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 looked 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 stopped.
   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.”
   “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 he’s real. You’re a male symbol.”
   “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? The 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.

Chapter 24.
Fist-of-God

   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 ship.
   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 held.
   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.
   “Calling Prill,” Louis said into the intercom. “Calling Halrloprillalar. Are you there, Prill?”
   “I am.”
   “Stay there. We’ll be through in twenty minutes.”
   “Good. You’ve been long enough at it.”
   The Arch seemed to blaze above them. A thousand miles above the Ringworld, they could see how the Arch merged into the rim walls and the flat landscape. Like the first man in space, a thousand years ago, looking down on an Earth that, by Jahweh and his mighty hammer, really was round.
   “We couldn’t have known,” said Louis Wu, not loudly. But Speaker looked up from his work.
   Louis didn’t notice the kzin’s odd look. “It would have saved us so much trouble. We could have turned back after we found the shadow square wire. Tanj, we could have dragged the Liar straight up Fist-of-God Mountain behind our flycycles! But then Teela wouldn’t have met Seeker.”
   “The luck of Teela Brown again?”
   “Sure.” Louis shook himself. “Have I been talking to myself?”
   “I have been listening.”
   “We should have known,” said Louis. The gap between the sharp peaks was very near. He felt the urge to babble. “The Engineers would never have built a mountain this high here. They’ve got over a billion miles of thousand-mile-high mountains, if you count both rim walls.”
   “But Fist-of-God is real, Louis.”
   “No, no, no. It’s just a shell. Look down; what do you see?”
   “Ringworld foundation material.”
   “We thought it was dirty ice when we first saw it. Dirty ice, in hard vacuum! But forget that aspect. Remember the night you explored a giant map of the Ringworld? You couldn’t find Fist-of-God. Why not?”
   The kzin didn’t answer.
   “It wasn’t there, that’s why not. It wasn’t there when the map was made. Prill, are you there?”
   “I am here. Why would I leave you?”
   “Good. Close the airlock doors. Repeat, close the airlock doors now. Don’t cut yourself on the thread.”
   “My people invented this thread, Louis.” Prill’s voice was garbled with static. She was off for a minute, then: “Both doors are closed.”
   The Improbable was passing between the standing shards of mountain. Tense as Louis was, he would have been still more tense; but subconsciously he was expecting a kind of canyon or pass between those peaks.
   “Louis, just what do you expect to find in Fist-of-God crater?”
   “Stars,” said Louis Wu.
   The kzin was tense too. “Do not mock me! In all honor—”
   –And they were through. There wasn’t any pass. There was only a broken eggshell of Ringworld foundation material, stretched by terrific stresses to a few feet of thickness; and beyond that, the crater in Fist-of-God Mountain.
   They were falling. And the crater was full of stars.


   Louis Wu had an excellent imagination. In his mind’s eye the event was perfectly clear.
   He saw the, system of the Ringworld, sterile, tidily clean, empty of ramships, empty but for a G2 star and a daisy chain of shadow squares and the Ringworld.
   He saw a foreign body passing near, too near. He watched its hyperbolic fall from interstellar space, and he saw its path interrupted—by the underside of the Ringworld.
   In his vision the foreign body was about the size of the Earth’s Moon.
   It must have been ionized plasma in the first seconds. A meteorite can be cooled by ablation, by the boiling away of its own skin. But here the vaporized gas could not expand; it had forced its way into a deforming pocket of the Ringworld floor. The landscape had deformed upward, its carefully planned ecology and rainfall patterns shot to hell over a region greater than the surface of the Earth. All that desert… and Fist-of-God itself, raised a full thousand miles upward before the incredibly tough Ring floor ripped to let the fireball through.
   Fist-Of-God? Tanj, yes! Watching from a Ringworld prison cell, Louis Wu had seen it clear in his mind’s eye. It must have been visible clear to both rims: a ball of hellfire the size of the Earth’s Moon ripping up through the floor of the Ringworld like a strong man’s fist through a cardboard box.
   The natives could be thankful that the Ring floor had deformed as much as it did. The hole was easily big enough to let all the air out of the Ringworld; but it was a thousand miles too high…


   The crater was fall of stars.
   And there wasnt any gravity; there wasn’t anything for the lifting motors to push against. Louis hadn’t really thought this far ahead.
   “Grab something,” he bellowed, “and hang on! If you fall through the bay window, there’ll be no rescue.”
   “Naturally not,” said Speaker. He was wrapped around a naked metal beam. Louis had found another.
   “Was I right? Stars!”
   “Yes, Louis, but how did you know?”
   There was gravity, a steady, heavy pull on the Improbable. The skeleton of a buildiag turned on its side, and the bay window was up.
   “It’s holding,” Louis said fiercely. He wriggled to get right side up on the beam. “It better! I hope Prill strapped down; she’ll have a bouncy ride, up the side of Fist-of-God Mountain, riding at the end of ten thousand miles of shadow square wire. Up and over the lip, then—”
   They looked up at the underside of the Ringworld. An infinity of sculptured surface. In the middle, a tremendous conical meteor puncture, shiny at the bottom. As the Improbable swung like a plumb bob beneath the Ringworld, the sun flashed suddenly in the bottom of the crater.
   “—Out and down. Then we’ll be tied to the Liar, and the Liar will be on its way to clear space at 770 miles per second. Plenty of time for the wire to pull us together; but if that doesn’t work, we’ve got the thruster motor in Nessus’s flycycle.
   “How did I know? I’ve been telling you that. Didn’t I mention the landscape?”
   “No.”
   “That was the clincher. All the peaks of foundation material showing through the rock, and the fall of civilization only fifteen hundred years old! It was because those two asteroid punctures had fouled up the wind patterns. Do you realize that most of the traveling we did was between those two punctures?”
   “Very indirect reasoning, Louis.”
   “It worked.”
   “Yes. And so I will live to see another sunset,” the kzin said softly.
   Louis felt an electric thrill. “You too?”
   “Yes, I watch sunsets on occasion. Let us speak of the Long Shot.”
   “…What did you say?”
   “If I could steal the Long Shot from you, my kind would dominate known space until a stronger species impinged on our expanding sphere. We would forget all we have learned so painfully, regarding cooperation with alien species.”
   “True,” Louis said into the dark. The pull from the stolen shadow square wire was steady now. The Liar must be well on its way up Fist-of-God’s ten degree slope.
   “We might not get that far, while the luck of many Teela Browns protects Earth. Yet honor would compel me to make the attempt,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “How could I lead my species away from the honorable path of war? The kzinti gods would revile me.”
   “I warned you about playing god. It hurts.”
   “Fortunately the difficulty does not arise. You have said that I would destroy the Long Shot if I tried to take it. The risk is too great. We will need the puppeteer hyperdrive to escape the wave front from the Core explosion.”
   “True enough,” said Louis. The kzin would back into the nearest gravity well if he tried to take the Long Shot into hyperdrive. Knowing that, Louis asked, “But suppose I were lying?”
   “I could not hope to outwit a being of your intelligence.”
   Sunfire flashed again in Fist-of-God crater.
   “Think how short a way we came,” said Louis. One hundred and fifty thousand miles in five days, the same distance back in two months. A seventh of the short way across the Ringworld. And Teela and Seeker think they’re going the long way round.”
   “Fools.”
   “We never saw the rim wall. They will. I wonder what else we missed? If the Ringworld ramships got as far as Earth, they may have picked up some blue whales and sperm whales, before we made them extinct. We never got out onto the ocean.
   “The people they’ll meet. There’s no end to the ways a culture can go. And the room… the Ringworld’s so big…”
   “We can’t go back, Louis.”
   “No, of course not.”
   “Not until we can deliver our secret to our respective worlds. And acquire an intact ship.”