Ringworld

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.

"Wre 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 Rmgworld 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 loooked 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 stooped.

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 hes real. You're a male synibol."

"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? Ihe 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.