Ringworld

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. Lows clutched his metal raft and waited for developments.

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

Nessus spoke.

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

Then she left them.

"Well?"

"We shall see."

"I get so sick of waiting."

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

Nessus stepped daintily ashore.

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

Nessus made a sound of deftht.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huh?

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

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

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

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

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

Louis reached him by crawling.

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

Now what?

Louis remembered that he was dying of thirst.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Safe. He was safe.

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

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

Speaker?

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

Nessus would know. Meanwhile, let him sleep.

"No justice," Louis repeated under his breath.

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

Still …

His eyes found it and locked. His own flycycle.

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

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

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

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

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

She was dead. She must be.

I came with you, because I love you.

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

He curled up on the concrete and slept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The light was fading.

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

"Speaker!" Louis called.

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

Windows to taunt the prisoner, to show him freedom?

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

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

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

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

And Speaker had copped the cell's oval bed.

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

Louis left him there.

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

What was taking Nessus so long?

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

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

And there were two good reasons why he should.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.