by Larry Niven
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, she’s 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 yo
u 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 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.”