Ringworld

by Larry Niven

  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 Improbable 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 kept 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 have 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, Spe
aker. 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.