by Larry Niven
"Power beam receivers?"
"Power is generated on the shadow squares by thermoelectricity, then beamed to the Ringworld. Presumably the beam, too, is fail-safe. We did not detect it coming in. It must have shut itself down when the receivers failed."
"Surely," said Speaker, "one could make a different superconductor. We know of two basic molecular structures, each with many variations for different temperature ranges."
"There are at least four basic structures," Nessus corrected him. "You are quite right, the Ringworld should have survived the Fall of the Cities. A younger, more vigorous society would have. But consider the difficulties they faced.
"Much of their leadership was dead, killed in falling buildings when the power failed.
"Without power they could do little experimenting to find other superconductors. Stored power was generally confiscated for the personal use of men with political power, or was used to run enclaves of civilization in the hope that someone else was doing something about the emergency. The fusion drives of the ramships were unavailable, as the cziltang brones used superconductors. Men who might have accomplished something could not meet; the computer that ran the electromagnetic cannon was dead, and the cannon itself had no power."
Louis said, "For want of a nail, the kingdom fell."
"I know the story. It is not strictly applicable," said Nessus. "Something could have been done. There was power to condense liquid helium. With the power beams off, the repair of a power receiver would have been useless; but a cziltang brone could have been adapted to a metal superconductor cooled by liquid helium. A cziltang brone would have given access to spaceports. Ships might have flown to the shadow squares, reopened the power beams so that other liquid-helium-cooled superconductors could be adapted to the power beam receivers.
"But all this would have required stored power. The power was used to light street lamps, or to support the remaining floating buildings, or to cook meals and freeze foods! And so the Ringworld fell."
"And so did we," said Louis Wu.
"Yes. We were lucky to run across Halrloprillalar. She has saved us a needless journey. There is no longer any need to continue toward the rim wall."
Louis's head throbbed once, hard. He was going to have a headache.
"Lucky," said Speaker-To-Animals. "Indeed. If this is luck, why am I not joyful? We have lost our goal, our last meager hope of escape. Our vehicles are ruined. One of our party is missing in this maze of city."
"Dead," said Louis. When they looked at him without comprehension, he pointed into the dusk. Teela's flycycle was obvious enough, marked by one of four sets of headlamps.
He said, "We'll have to make our own luck from now on."
"Yes. You will remember, Louis, that Teela's luck is sporadic. It had to be. Else she would not have been aboard the Liar. Else we would not have crashed." The puppeteer paused, then added, "My sympathies, Louis."
"She will be missed," Speaker rumbled.
Louis nodded. It seemed he should be feeling more. But the incident in the Eye storm had somehow altered his feelings for Teela. She had seemed, for that time, less human than Speaker or Nessus. She was myth. The aliens were real.
"We must find a new goal," said Speaker-To-Animals. "We need a way to take the Liar back to space. I confess I have no ideas at all."
"I do," Louis said.
Speaker seemed startled. "Already?"
"I want to think about it some more. I'm not sure it's even sane, let alone workable. In any case, we're going to need a vehicle. Let's think about that."
"A sled, perhaps. We can use the remaining flycycle to tow it. A big sled, perhaps the wall of a building."
"We can better that. I am convinced that I can persuade Halrloprillalar to guide me through the machinery that lifts this building. We may find that the building itself can become our vehicle."
"Try that," said Louis.
"And you?"
"Give me time."
* * *
The core of the building was all machinery. Some was lifting machinery; some ran the air conditioning and the water condensers and the water-taps; and one insulated section was part of the electromagnetic trap generators. Nessus worked. Louis and Prill stood by, awkwardly ignoring one another.
Speaker was still in prison. Prill had refused to let him up.
"She is afraid of you," Nessus had said. "We could press the point, no doubt. We could put you aboard one of the flycycles. If I refused to board until you were on the platform, she would have to lift you."
"She might lift me halfway to the ceiling, then drop me. No."
But she had taken Louis.
He studied her while pretending to ignore her. Her mouth was narrow, virtually lipless. Her nose was small and straight and narrow. She had no eyebrows.
Small wonder if she seemed to have no expression. Her face seemed little more than markings on a wigmaker's dummy.
After two hours of work, Nessus pulled his heads out of an access panel. "I cannot give us motive power. The lift fields will do no more than lift us. But I have freed a correcting mechanism designed to keep us over one spot. The building is now at the mercy of the winds."
Louis grinned. "Or a tow. Tie a line to your flycycle and pull the building behind you."
"There is no need. The flycycle uses a reactionless thruster. We can keep it within the building."
"You thought of it first, hmm? But that thruster's awfully powerful. If the 'cycle tore itself loose in here -"
"Yesss -" The puppeteer turned to Prill and spoke slowly and at length in the language of the Ringworld gods. Presently he said to Louis, "There is a supply of electrosetting plastic. We can embed the flycycle in plastic, leaving only the controls exposed."
"Isn't that a little drastic?"
"Louis, if the flycycle tore itself loose, I could be hurt."
"Well … maybe. Can you land the building when you need to?"
"Yes, I have altitude control."
"Then we don't need a scout vehicle. Okay, we'll do it."
* * *
Louis was resting, not sleeping. He lay on his back on the big oval bed. His eyes were open, staring through the bubble window in the ceiling.
A glow of solar corona showed over the edge of the shadow square. Dawn was not far off ; but still the Arch was blue and bright in a black sky.
"I must be out of my mind," said Louis Wu.
And, "What else can we do?"
The bedroom had probably been part of the governor's suite. Now it was a control room. He and Nessus had mounted the flycycle in the walk-in closet, poured plastic over and around it, then — with Prill's help — run a current through the plastic. The closet had been just the right size.
The bed smelled of age. It crinkled when he moved.
"Fist-of-God," Louis Wu said into the dark. "I saw it. A thousand miles high. It doesn't make sense they'd build a mountain that high, not when …" He let it trail off.
And suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, shouting, "Shadow square wire!"
A shadow entered the bedroom.
Louis froze. The entrance was dark. Yet, by its fluid motion and by the distribution of subtle shadings of curvature, a naked woman was walking toward him.
Hallucination? The ghost of Teela Brown? She had reached him before he could decide. Totally self-confident, she sat beside him on the bed. She reached out and touched his face and ran her fingertips down his cheek.
She was nearly bald. Though her hair was dark and long and full-bodied, so that it bobbed as she walked, it was only an inch-wide fringe growing from the base of her skull. In the dark the features of her face virtually disappeared. But her body was lovely. He was seeing the shape of her for the first time. She was slim, muscled with wire like a professional dancer. Her breasts were high and heavy.
If her face had matched her figure …
"Go away," Louis said, not roughly. He took her wrist, interrupted what her fingertips were doing to his face. It had felt like
a barber's facial massage, definitely relaxing. He stood up, pulled her gently to her feet, took her by the shoulders. If he simply turned her around and patted her on the rump-?
She ran her fingertips along the side of his neck. Now she was using both hands. She touched him on the chest, and here, and there, and suddenly Louis Wu was blind with lust. His hands closed like clamps on her shoulders.
She dropped her hands. She waited without trying to help as he peeled out of his falling jumper. But as he exposed more skin, she stroked him here, and there, not always where nerves clustered. Each time it was as if she had touched him in the pleasure center of his brain.
He was on fire. If she pushed him away now, he would use force; he must have her -
— But some cool part of him knew that she could chill him as quickly as she had aroused him. He felt like a young satyr, yet he dimly sensed that he was also a puppet.
For the moment he couldn't have cared less.
And still Prill's face showed no expression.
* * *
She took him to the verge of orgasm, then held him there, held him there … so that when the moment came it was like being struck by lightning. But the lightning went on and on, a flaming discharge of ecstacy.
When it ended he was barely aware that she was leaving. She must know how thoroughly she had used him up. He was asleep before she reached the door.
And he woke thinking: Why did she do that?
Too tanj analytical, he answered himself. She's lonely. She must have been here a long time. She's mastered a skill, and she hasn't had a chance to practice that skill …
Skill. She must know more anatomy than most professors. A doctorate in Prostitution? There was more to the oldest profession than met the eye. Louis Wu could recognize expertise in any field. This woman had it.
Touch these nerves in the correct order, and the subject will react thus-and-so. The right knowledge can turn a man into a puppet …
… puppet to Teela's luck …
He almost had it then. He came close enough that the answer, when it finally came, was no surprise.
* * *
Nessus and Halrloprillalar came backward out of the freezer room. They were followed by the dressed carcass of a flightless bird bigger than a man. Nessus had used a cloth for padding, so that his mouth need not touch the dead meat of the ankle.
Louis took the puppeteer's burden. He and Prill pulled in tandem. He found that he needed both hands, as did she. He answered her nod of greeting and asked, "How old is she?"
Nessus did not show surprise at the question. "I do not know."
"She came to my room last night." That would not do; it would mean nothing to an alien. "You know that the thing we do to reproduce, we also do for recreation?"
"I knew that."
"We did that. She's good at it. She's so good at it that she must have had about a thousand years of practice," said Louis Wu.
"It is not impossible. Prill's civilization had a compound superior to boosterspice in its ability to sustain life. Today the compound is worth whatever the owner cares to ask. One charge is equivalent to some fifty years of youth."
"Do you happen to know how many charges she's taken?"
"No, Louis. But I know that she walked here."
They had reached the stairway leading down to the conical cell block. The bird trailed behind them, bouncing.
"Walked here from where?"
"From the rim wall."
"Two hundred thousand miles?"
"Nearly that."
"Tell me all of it. What happened to them after they reached the right side of the rim wall?"
"I will ask. I do not know it all." And the puppeteer began to question Prill. In bits and pieces the story emerged:
They were taken for gods by the first group of savages they met, and by everyone thereafter, with one general exception.
Godhood solved one problem neatly. The crewmen whose brains had been damaged by backlash from the half-repaired cziltang brone were left to the care of various villages. As resident gods they would be well treated; and as idiots they would be relatively harmless as gods.
The remainder of the Pioneer's crew split up. Nine, including Prill, went to antispinward. Prill's home city was in that direction. Both groups planned to travel along the rim wall, looking for civilization. Both parties swore to send help if they found any.
They were taken for gods by all but the other gods. The Fall of the Cities had left a few survivors. Some were mad. All took the life-extending compound if they could get it. All were looking for enclaves of civilization. None had thought to build his own.
As the Pioneer's crew moved to antispinward, other survivors joined them. They became a respectable pantheon.
In every city they found the shattered towers. These towers had been set floating after the settling of the Ringworld, but thousands of years before the perfection of the youth drug. The youth drug had made later generations cautious. For the most part those who could afford it simply stayed away from the floaters, unless they were elected officials. Then they would install safety devices, or power generators.
A few of the floaters still floated. But most had smashed down into the centers of cities, all in the same instant, when the last power receiver flared and died.
Once the traveling pantheon found a partially recivilized city, inhabited only on the outskirts. The God Gambit would not serve them here. They traded a fortune in the youth drug for a working, self-powered bus.
It did not happen again until much later. By then they had come too far. The spirit had gone out of them, and the bus had broken down. In a half-smashed city, among other survivors of the Fall of the Cities, most of the pantheon simply stopped moving.
But Prill had a map. The city of her birth was directly to starboard. She persuaded a man to join her, and they started walking.
* * *
They traded on their godhoods. Eventually they tired of one another, and Prill went on alone. Where her godhood was not enough, she traded small quantities of the youth drug, if she had to. Otherwise -
"There was another way in which she could maintain power over people. She has tried to explain it to me, but I do not understand."
"I think I do," said Louis. "She could get away with it, too. She's got her own equivalent of a tasp."
She must have been quite mad by the time she reached her home city. She took up residence in the grounded police station. She spent hundreds of hours learning how to work the machinery. One of the first things she accomplished was to get it airborne; for the self-powered tower had been landed as a safety precaution after the Fall of the Cities. Subsequently she must have come close enough to dropping the tower and killing herself.
"There was a system for trapping drivers who broke the traffic laws," Nessus finished. "She turned it on. She hopes to capture someone like herself, a survivor from the Fall of the Cities. She reasons that if he is flying a car, he must be civilized."
"Then why does she want him trapped and helpless in that sea of rusted metal?"
"Just in case, Louis. It is a mark of her returning sanity."
Louis frowned into the cell block below. They had lowered the bird's carcass on a ruined metal car, and Speaker had taken possession. "We can lighten this building," said Louis. "We can cut the weight almost in half."
"How?"
"Cut away the basement. But we'll have to get Speaker out of there. Can you persuade Prill?"
"I can try."
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.
