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  “Suppose I could talk Speaker into letting Nessus rejoin us?”

  “How could you do that?”

  “Suppose I could?”

  “But why?”

  “Nessus still owns the Long Shot. The Long Shot is the only way to get the human race to the Clouds of Magellan in less than centuries. We lose the Long Shot if we leave the Ringworld without Nessus.”

  “How, how crass, Louis!”

  “Look. You claimed that if the puppeteers hadn’t done what they did to the Kzinti we’d all be Kzinti slaves. True. But if the puppeteers hadn’t interfered with the Fertility Laws, you wouldn’t even have been born!”

  She was rigid against him. Her mind showed in her face, and her face was like her eyes: tightly closed.

  He kept trying. “What the puppeteers did, they did a long time ago Can’t you forgive and forget?”

  “No!” She rolled away from him, out from under the heated coveralls and into the icy water. Louis hesitated, then followed her. A cold, wet shock ... he surfaced ... Teela was back at her place beneath the waterfall.

  Smiling in invitation. How could her moods change so suddenly?

  He swam to her.

  “That’s a charming way to tell a man to shut up!” he laughed. She couldn’t possibly have heard him. He couldn’t hear himself, with the water pounding down around him. But Teela laughed back, equally soundlessly, and reached for him.

  “They were stupid arguments anyway!” he screamed.

  The water was cold, cold. Teela was the only warmth. They knelt clasping each other, supported by rough, shallow underwater rock.

  Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could ran away from problems.

  They walked back toward the ‘cycles, shivering a little within their heated cocoons. Louis didn’t speak. He had realized a thing about Teela Brown.

  She had never learned how to resist. She could not say no and make it stick. She could not deliver reproofs of calculated intensity, humorous or jabbing or deadly vicious, as other women could. Teela Brown had not been hurt socially, not often enough to learn these things.

  Louis could browbeat her until doomsday, and she would never know how to stop him. But she could hate him for it. And so he remained silent, for that reason and for another.

  He didn’t want to hurt her.

  They walked in silence, holding hands, making love play with their fingers.

  “All right.” she said suddenly. “If you can talk Speaker into it, you can bring Nessus back.”

  “Thanks,” said Louis. He showed his surprise.

  “It’s only for the Long Shot,” she said. “Besides, you can’t do it.”

  There was time for a meal and for formal exercises: pushups and setups, and for informal exercises: tree climbing.

  Presently Speaker returned to the ‘cycles. His mouth was not bloody. At his ‘cycle he dialed, not for an allergy pill, but for a wet brick-shaped slab of warm liver. The mighty hunter returns, Louis thought, keeping his mouth firmly shut.

  The sky had been overcast when they landed. It was still overcast, a uniform leaden gray, as they took off. And Louis resumed his argument by intercom.

  “But it was so long ago!”

  “A point of honor is not affected by time, Louis, though of course you would not know that. Further, the consequences of the act are very much with us. Why did Nessus select a kzin to travel with him?”

  “He told us that.”

  “Why did he select Teela Brown? The Hindmost must have instructed Nessus to learn if humans have inherited psychic luck. He was also to learn if Kzinti have become docile. He chose me because as ambassador to a characteristically arrogant species, I am likely to demonstrate the docility his people seek.”

  “I’d thought of that too.” Louis had carried the idea even further. Had Nessus been instructed to mention starseed lures, in order to gauge Speaker’s reactions?

  “It matters not. I say that I am not docile.”

  “Will you stop using that word? It warps your thinking.”

  “Louis, why do you intercede for the puppeteer? Why do you wish his company?”

  Good questions, Louis thought. Certainly the puppeteer deserved to sweat a little. And if what Louis suspected was true, Nessus was in no danger at all.

  Was it only that Louis Wu liked aliens?

  Or was it more general than that? A puppeteer was different. Difference was important. A man of Louis Wu’s age would get bored with life itself, without variety. To Louis the company of aliens was a vital necessity.

  The ‘cycles rose, following the slope of the mountains.

  “Viewpoints,” said Louis Wu. “We’re in a strange environment, stranger than any world of men or Kzinti. We may need all the insights we can bring to bear, just to figure out what’s going on.”

  Teela applauded without sound. Nicely argued! Louis winked back. A very human conversation; Speaker couldn’t possibly read its meaning.

  The kzin was saying, “I do not need a puppeteer to explain the, world to me. My own eyes, nose, ears are sufficient.”

  “That’s moot. But you do need the Long Shot. We all need the techniques that ship represents.”

  “For profit? An unworthy motive.”

  “Tanjit, that’s not fair! The Long Shot is for the entire human race, and the Kzinti too!”

  “A quibble. Though the profit is not to you alone, still you sell your honor for profit.”

  “My honor is not in danger,” Louis grated.

  “I think it is,” said Speaker. And he switched off.

  “That’s a handy little gadget, that switch,” Teela observed, with malice. “I knew he’d do that.”

  “So did I. But, Lord Finagle! He’s hard to convince.”

  Beyond the mountains was an endless expanse of fleecy cloud, graying out at the infinity-horizon. The flycycles seemed to float above white cloud, beneath a bright blue sky in which the Arch was an outline at the threshold of visibility.

  The mountains fell behind. Louis felt a twinge of regret for the forest pool with the waterfall. They would never see it again.

  A wake followed the ‘cycles, a roiling wavefront where three sonic booms touched the cloud cover ahead. Only one detail broke the infinity-horizon. Louis decided that it was either a mountain or a storm, very distant, very large. It was the size of a pinhead held at arms length.

  Speaker broke the silence. “A rift in the cloud cover, Louis. Ahead and to spinward.”

  “I see it.”

  “Do you see how the light shines through? Much light is being reflected from the landscape.”

  True, the edges of the cloud break glowed brightly. Hmmm ... “Could we be flying over Ringworld foundation material? It would be the biggest break yet in the landscaping.”

  “I want to look more closely.”

  “Good,” said Louis.

  He watched the speck that was Speaker’s flycycle curve frantically away to spinward. At Mach 2 Speaker would get no more than a glimpse of the ground.

  There was a problem here. Which to watch? The silver fleck that was Speaker's flycycle, or the small orange cat-face above the dash? One was real, one was detailed. Both offered information, but of different kinds.

  In principle, no answer was entirely satisfactory. In practice, Louis naturally watched both.

  He saw that Speaker was over the rift ...

  The intercom echoed Speaker's yowl. The silver fleck had gone suddenly brighter; and Speaker’s face was a glue of white light. His eyes were closed tight. His mouth was open, screaming.

  The image di
mmed. Speaker had crossed the rift. One arm was thrown across his face. The fur that covered him was smoking black char.

  Beneath the diverging silver speck of Speaker’s flycycle, a bright spot showed on the cloud cover ... as if a spotlight followed Speaker from below.

  “Speaker!” Teela called. “Can you see?”

  Speaker heard and uncovered his face. The orange far was unburned in a broad band across his eyes. Elsewhere the fur was ash-black. Speaker opened his eyes, closed them tight, opened them again. “I'm blind,” he said.

  “Yes, but can you see?”

  In his worry over Speaker, Louis hardly noticed the strangeness of that question. But something in him noted her tone of voice: the anxiety, and beneath that, the suggestion that Speaker had given a wrong answer and should be given a second chance.

  But there wasn’t time. Louis called, “Speaker! Slave your ‘cycle to mine. We’ve got to get to cover.”

  Speaker fumbled at the board. “Done. Louis, what kind of cover?” Pain thickened and distorted his voice.

  “Back to the mountains.”

  “No. We would lose too much time. Louis, I know what attacked me. If I am right, then we are safe as long as we have cloud cover.”

  “Oh?”

  “You will have to investigate.”

  “You need medical attention.”

  “I do indeed, but first you must find us a safe place to land. You must descend where the clouds are most dense ...”

  It was not dark, down here below the clouds. Some light came through, and enough of that was reflected toward Louis Wu. It glared.

  The land was an undulating plain. It was not Ring floor material, but soil and vegetation.

  Louis dropped lower. squinting against the glare.

  ... A single species of plant evenly dispersed across the land, from here to the infinity-horizon. Each plant had a single blossom, and each blossom turned to follow Louis Wu as he dropped. A tremendous audience, silent and attentive.

  He landed and dismounted beside one of the plants. The plant stood a foot high on a knobbly green stalk. Its single blossom was as big as a large man’s face. The back of that blossom was stringy, as if laced with veins or tendons; and the inner surface was a smooth concave mirror. From its center protruded a short stalk ending in a dark green bulb.

  All the flowers in sight watched him. He was bathed in the glare. Louis knew they were trying to kill bun, and he looked up somewhat uneasily; but the cloud cover held.

  “You were right,” he said, speaking into the intercom. “They’re Slaver sunflowers. If the cloud cover hadn’t come up, we’d have been dead the instant we rose over the mountains.”

  “Is there cover where we can hide from the sunflowers? A cave, for example?”

  “I don’t think so. The land’s too flat. The sunflowers can’t focus the light with any precision, but there’s a lot of glare anyway.”

  Teela broke in. “For pity’s sake, what’s the matter with you two? Louis, we’ve got to land! Speaker’s in pain!”

  “Truly, I am in pain, Louis.”

  “Then I vote we risk it. Come down, you two. We’ll just have to hope the clouds hold.”

  “Good!” Teela’s intercom image went into action.

  Louis spent a minute or so searching between the plants. It was as he had surmised. There was no alien survivor anywhere in the domain of the sunflowers. No smaller plant grew between the stalks. Nothing flew. Nothing burrowed beneath the ashy-looking soil. On the plants themselves there were no blights, fungus growths, disease spots. If disease struck one of their own, the sunflowers would destroy it.

  The mirror-blossom was a terrible weapon. Its primary purpose was to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node at its center. But it could also focus to destroy a plant-eating animal or insect. The sunflowers burned all enemies. Everything that lives is the enemy of a photosynthesis-using plant; and everything that lived became fertilizer for the sunflowers.

  “But how did they come here?” Louis wondered. For sunflowers could not coexist with less exotic plant life. Sunflowers were too powerful. Thus they could not be native to the Ringworlders’ original planet.

  The engineers must have scouted nearby stars for their useful or decorative plants. Perhaps they had even come as far as Silvereyes, in human space. And they must have decided that the sunflowers were decorative.

  “But they would have fenced them in. Any idiot would have that much sense. Give them, say, a plot of ground with a high, broad ring of bare Ring flooring around it. That would keep them in.

  “Only it didn’t. Somehow a seed got across. No telling how far they’ve spread by now,” said Louis to himself. And he shuddered. This must be the “bright spot” he and Nessus had noticed ahead of them. As far as the eye could see, no living thing challenged the sunflowers.

  In time, if they were given time, the sunflowers would rule the Ringworld.

  But that would take much time. The Ringworld was roomy. Roomy enough for anything.

  Chapter 15 -

  Dream-Castle

  Louis, musing, was only half aware of two flycycles dropping beside his own. He was jerked from his reverie when Speaker barked, “Louis! You will take the Slaver disintegrator from my ‘cycle and use it to dig us a hiding-hole. Teela, come and tend my injuries.”

  “A hiding-hole?”

  “Yes. We must burrow like animals and wait for nightfall.”

  “Yeah.” Louis shook himself. Speaker should not have had to think of that, injured as he was. Obviously they could not risk a break in the clouds. All the sunflowers needed to murder them was a point-source of light. But at night—

  Louis avoided looking at Speaker while he searched Speaker’s cycle. One look had been enough. The kzin was burnt black across most of his body. Fluids leaked through the oily ash that had been fur. Flesh showed bright red in wide cracks. The smell of burnt hair was strong and terrible.

  Louis found the disintegrator: a double-barreled shotgun with a fluid-seeming handle. The weapon next to it made him grin sourly. If Speaker had suggested burning off the sunflowers with flashlight-lasers, Louis probably would have gone along with it, fuddled as he was.

  He took the weapon and withdrew quickly, feeling queasy, ashamed of his weakness. He hurt with the pain of Speaker’s burns. Teela, who knew nothing of pain, could help Speaker better than Louis could.

  Low aimed the gun thirty degrees downward. He was wearing the breathing-helmet from his pressure suit. As he was in no hurry, he flipped only one of the two triggers.

  The pit formed fast. Louis couldn’t see how fast, for the dust was all around him after the first instant. A hurricane blew at him from where the beam fell. Louis had to lean hard into the wind.

  In the cone of the beam the electron became a neutral particle. Soil and rock, torn to atoms by the mutual repulsion of the nuclei, reached him as a fog of monatomic dust. Louis was glad of the breathing-helmet.

  Presently he turned off the disintegrator. The pit looked big enough to fit the three of them and the flycycles too.

  So quickly, he thought. And he wondered how fast the tool would dig with both beams on. But then there would be a current flow, he thought, borrowing Speaker’s euphemism. At the moment he wasn’t looking for that much excitement.

  Teela and Speaker had dismounted. Speaker was now hairless over most of his body. A large orange patch still covered him where he sat and a broad orange band crossed his eyes. Elsewhere his nude skin was veined red-violet, showing clusters of deep red cracks. Teela was spraying him with something that foamed white where it touched.

  The stench of burnt hair and meat stayed Louis from coming too close. “It’s done,” he said.

  The k
zin looked up. “I can see again, Louis.”

  “Good!” He’d been worried.

  “The puppeteer brought military medical supplies, vastly superior to Kzinti civilian medicines. He should not have had access to military supplies.” The kzin sounded angry. Perhaps he suspected bribery; and perhaps he was right.

  “I’m going to call Nessus,” Louis said. And he circled the pair. White foam now covered the kzin from head to foot. There was no smell at all.

  “I know where you are,” he told the puppeteer.

  “Marvelous. Where am I, Louis?”

  “You’re behind us. You circled round behind us as soon as you were out of sight. Teela and Speaker don’t know. They can’t think like puppeteers.”

  “Do they expect a puppeteer to break trail for them? Perhaps it is best they continue to think so. What chance is there that they will permit me to rejoin them?”

  “Not now. Maybe later. Let me tell you why I called ...” And he told the puppeteer about the sunflower field. He was detailing the extent of Speaker’s injuries when Nessus’s flat face dropped below the level of the intercom camera.

  Louis waited a few moments for the puppeteer to reappear. Then he switched off. He was sure that Nessus would not remain long in catatonic withdrawal. The puppeteer was too sanely careful of his life.

  Ten hours of daylight remained. The team waited it out in the disintegrator-dug trench.

  Speaker slept through it. They walked him into the trench, then used a spray from the Kzinti medkit to put him to sleep. The white stuff had congealed on him to the consistency of a foam rubber pillow.

  “The world’s only bouncy kzin,” said Teela.

  Louis tried to sleep. He dozed for a time. Once he half woke to bright daylight and to the sharp black shadow of the slope failing across him. He stirred and went back to sleep ...

  And woke later in a cold sweat. Shadows! If he had sat up to look, he’d have been burnt crisp!

  But the clouds were back, safely blocking the vengeance of the sunflowers.

  Finally one horizon dimmed. As the sky darkened, Louis set about waking the others.