Ringworld

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

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

Now Louis had felt what she was fighting.

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

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

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

Once Louis Wu had sworn to live forever.

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. Hes 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 Wn.

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.