Ringworld Read online

  “I would not wish to tamper with your memory, Speaker.”

  Louis Wu hardly noticed the triumph of practicality over honor, intelligence over xenophobia. Where the cloud bank met the infinity-horizon he searched for the mark of Teela’s vapor trail. But it had entirely disappeared.

  Teela was still unconscious. Her intercom image stiffed restlessly, and Louis shouted, “Teela!” But she did not answer.

  “We were wrong about her,” said Nessus. “But I cannot understand why. Why should we have crashed, if her luck is so powerful?”

  “Exactly what I have been telling Louis!”

  “But,” said the puppeteer, “if her luck has no power, how could she have activated the emergency thruster? I believe I was right from the first. Teela Brown has psychic luck.”

  “Then why was she picked in the first place? Why did the Liar crash? Answer me!”

  “Stop it,” said Louis.

  They ignored him. Nessus was saying, “Her luck is clearly undependable.”

  “If her luck had failed her just once, she would be dead.”

  “Were she dead or damaged, I would not have selected her. We must allow for coincidence,” said Nessus. “You must remember, Speaker, that the laws of probability do provide for coincidence.”

  “But they do not provide for magic. I cannot believe in breeding for luck.”

  “You’ll have to,” said Louis.

  This time they heard him. He continued, “I should have known much earlier. Not because she kept missing disasters. It was the little things, things in her personality. She’s lucky, Speaker. Believe it.”

  “Louis, how can you credit this nonsense?”

  “She’s never been hurt. Never.”

  “How can you know?”

  “I know. She knew all about pleasure, nothing about pain. Remember when the sunflowers blasted you? She asked you if you could see. ‘I’m blinded,’ you said. She said, ‘Yes, but can you see?’ She didn’t believe you.

  “Then, oh, right after the crash. She tried to walk barefoot up a lava slope that was just short of melting hot.”

  “She is not very intelligent, Louis.”

  “She is intelligent, tanjit! She’s just never been hurt! When she burned her feet, she charged straight down the slope onto a surface a dozen times more slippery than ice—and she never fell down!

  “But you don’t need details,” said Louis. “All you’ve got to do is watch her walk. Clumsy. Every second, it looks like she’s going to fall over. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t knock things over with her elbows. She doesn’t spill things or drop things. She never did. She never learned not to, don’t you see? So she’s not graceful.”

  “This would not be apparent to nonhumans,” Speaker said dubiously. “I must take your word for it, Louis. Still, how can I believe in psychic luck?”

  “I do. I have to.”

  “If her luck were dependable,” said Nessus, “she would never have tried to walk on recently molten rock. Yet the luck of Teela Brown does protect us sporadically. Reassuring, is it not? You three would be dead had not clouds shielded you when you crossed the sunflower field.”

  “Yeah,” said Louis; but he remembered that the clouds had parted long enough to sear the skin of Speaker-To-Animals. He remembered the stairs of Heaven which had carried Teela Brown nine flights upward, while Louis Wu had had to walk. He felt the bandages on his hand, and remembered Speaker’s hand charred to the bone, while Teela's translator burned in its saddle case. “Her luck seems to protect her somewhat better than it protects us,” he said.

  “And why not? But you seem upset, Louis.”

  “Maybe I am ...” Her friends would long since have stopped telling her their troubles. Teela didn’t understand troubles. Describing pain to Teela Brown would be like trying to describe color to a blind man.

  Whiplash of the heart? Teela had never been thwarted in love. The man she wanted came to her, and stayed until she had almost tired of him, then volunteered to go.

  Sporadic or not, Teela’s odd power made her ... a little different from human, perhaps. A woman, surely, but with different strengths and talents, and blind spots, too ... And this was a woman Louis had loved. It was very odd.

  “She loved me too,” Louis mused. “Strange. I’m not her type. And if she hadn’t loved me, then—“

  “What? Louis, are you speaking to me?”

  “No, Nessus, I’m speaking to me ...” Was that her real reason for joining Louis Wu and his Motley Crew? Then the mystery was compounded. Luck made Teela fall in love with an unsuitable man, motivating her to join an expedition both uncomfortable and disastrous, so that she had several times brushed close to violent death. It didn’t make sense.

  Teela’s intercom image looked up. Blank eyes and empty face ... puzzled ... filling suddenly with stark terror. Her eyes, wide and white, looking down. Teela’s lovely oval face was ugly with insanity.

  “Easy,” said Louis. “Take it easy. Relax. You’re all right now.”

  “But—“ A falsetto squeak was Teela’s voice.

  “Were out of it. It’s way behind us. Look behind you. Tanj you, look behind you!”

  She turned. For a long moment Louis saw only soft dark hair. When she turned back, she had better control of herself.

  “Nessus,” said Louis, “tell her.”

  The puppeteer said, “You have been moving at Mach four for more than half an hour. To bring your flycycle back to normal speed, insert your index finger in the slot marked with a green rim—“

  Though still frightened, Teela was capable of following orders.

  “Now you must rejoin us. My signal indicates that your course has followed a curve. You are to port and spinward of us. As you have no indicator, I will have to guide you to us by ear. For the present, turn directly to antispinward.”

  “Which way is that?”

  “Turn left until you are aimed at one base of the Arch.”

  “I can’t see the Arch. I’ll have to go above the clouds.” She seemed almost composed now.

  Tanj, but she’d been frightened! Louis couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone that frightened. Certainly he’d never seen Teela that frightened.

  Had he ever seen Teela frightened?

  Louis turned to look over his shoulder. The land was dark beneath the clouds; but the eye storm, a vast distance behind them, glowed blue in the Archlight. It watched them go with total concentration, and no sign of regret.

  Louis was deep in his own thoughts when a voice spoke his name. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Aren’t you mad?”

  “Mad?” He thought about it. It occurred to him, briefly, that by normal standards she had done an incredibly stupid thing, diving her ‘cycle like that. And so he probed for anger as he would have probed for an old toothache. And he found nothing.

  Normal standards didn’t fit Teela Brown.

  The tooth was dead.

  “I guess not. What did you see down there, anyway?”

  “I could have been killed,” Teela said with mounting anger. “Don’t shake your head at me, Louis Wu! I could have been killed! Don’t you care?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She jerked back as if he’d slapped her. Then—he saw her hand move, and she was gone.

  She was back a moment later. “There was a hole,” she cried furiously, “And mist at the bottom. Well?”

  “How big?”

  “How should I know?” And she was gone again.

  Right. How could she have guessed scale, in that flickering neon light?

  She risks her own life, Louis thought, then blames me for not getting angry. An attention-getting device
? How long has she been doing it?

  Anyone else would die young, with a habit like that.

  “But not her,” said Louis Wu. “Not ...”

  Am I afraid of Teela Brown?

  “Or have I finally flipped?” It had happened to others his age. A man as old as Louis Wu must have seen impossible things happen again and again. For such a man, the line between fantasy and reality sometimes blurred. He might become ultra conservative, rejecting the impossible even after it had become fact ... like Kragen Perel, who would not believe in the thruster drive because it violated the second law of motion. Or he might believe anything ... like Zero Hale, who kept buying fake Slaver relics.

  Either way lay ruin and madness.

  “No!” When Teela Brown escapes certain death by banging her head on a flycycle dashboard, that’s more than coincidence!

  But why did the Liar crash?

  A silver fleck edged between Louis and the smaller silver fleck to spinward. “Welcome back,” said Louis.

  “Thank you,” said Nessus. He must have used emergency thrust to catch up so fast. Speaker had issued his invitation only ten minutes ago.

  Two triangular heads, small and transparent, considered Louis from above the dash. “I feel safe now. When Teela joins us in half an hour, I will feel safer still.”

  “Why?”

  “The luck of Teela Brown shields us, Louis.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Louis Wu.

  Speaker, silent, watched them both in the intercom. Only Teela was out of the circuit.

  “Your arrogance bothers me,” said Louis Wu. “Breeding for a lucky human was arrogant as the Devil. You’ve heard of the Devil?”

  “I have read of the Devil, in books.”

  “Snob. But your stupidity is worse than your arrogance. You blithely assume that what’s good for Teela Brown is good for you. Why should it be?”

  Nessus sputtered. Then, “Surely this is natural. If we are both enclosed by the same spacecraft hull, a rupture is bad luck for both of us.”

  “Sure. But suppose you’re passing a place where Teela wants to go, and suppose you don’t want to land. A drive failure just then would be lucky for Teela, but not for you.”

  “What nonsense, Louis! Why would Teela Brown want to go to the Ringworld? She never knew it existed until I told her so!”

  “But she’s lucky. If she needed to come here without knowing it, she’d come here anyway. Then her luck wouldn’t be sporadic, would it, Nessus? It would have been working all the time. Lucky that you found her. Lucky that you didn’t find anyone else who qualified. All those bad phone connections, remember?”

  “But—“

  “Lucky that we crashed. Remember how you and Speaker argued over who was in charge of the expedition? Well, now you know.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.” Louis raked his fingernails across his scalp in utter frustration. His straight black hair had grown out to the length of a crew cut, excluding the queue.

  “Does the question upset you, Louis? It upsets me. What could be here on the Ringworld to attract Teela Brown? This place is, is unsafe. Strange storms and badly programmed machinery and sunflower fields and unpredictable natives all threaten our lives.”

  “Hah!” Louis barked. “Right. That’s part of it, at least. Danger doesn’t exist for Teela Brown, don’t you see? Any assessment we make of the Ringworld has to take that into account.”

  The puppeteer opened and closed his mouths several times in rapid succession.

  “Does make things difficult, doesn’t it?” Louis chortled. For Louis Wu, solving problems was a pleasure in itself. “But it’s half the answer. If you assume—“

  The puppeteer screamed.

  Louis was shocked. He had not expected the puppeteer to take it so badly. The puppeteer wailed in two tones, then, without apparent haste, he tucked his heads under himself. Louis saw only the straggly mane that covered his brain case.

  And Teela was on the intercom.

  “You’ve been talking about me,” she said without heat. (She was unable to hold a grudge, Louis realized. Did that make the ability to hold a grudge a survival factor?) “I tried to follow what you were saying, but I couldn’t. What happened to Nessus?”

  “My big mouth. I scared him. Now how are we going to find you?”

  “Can’t you tell where I am?”

  “Nessus has the only locator. Probably for the same reason he saw to it that we didn’t know how to operate the emergency thrust.”

  “I wondered about that,” said Teela.

  “He wanted to be sure he could run away from an angry kzin. Never mind that. How much did you understand?”

  “Not much. You kept asking each other why I wanted to come here. Louis, I didn’t. I came with you, because I love you—“

  Louis nodded. Sure, if Teela needed to come to the Ringworld, she had had to have a motive to ride with Louis Wu. It was hardly flattering.

  She loved him for the sake of her own luck. Once he had thought she loved him for himself.

  “I’m passing over a city,” Teela said suddenly. “I can see some lights. Not many. There must have been a big, durable power source. Speaker could probably find it on his map.”

  “Is it worth looking at?”

  “I told you, there are lights. Maybe—“ The sound went off without a click, without a warning.

  Louis considered the empty space above his dashboard. Then he called, “Nessus.” There was no response.

  Louis activated the siren.

  Nessus came out of it like a family of snakes in a burning zoo. Under other circumstances it would have been funny: the two necks frantically untangling, posing like two question marks above the dashboard; then Nessus barking, “Louis! What is it?”

  Speaker had answered the call instantly. Apparently sitting at attention, he waited for instructions and enlightenment.

  “Something’s happened to Teela.”

  “Good,” said Nessus. And the heads withdrew.

  Grimly, Louis flicked the siren off, waited a moment, flipped it on again. Nessus reacted as before. This time Louis spoke first.

  “If we don’t find out what happened to Teela, I’ll kill you,” he said.

  “I have the tasp,” said Nessus. “We designed it to work equally well on Kzinti and human. You have seen its effect on Speaker.”

  “Do you think it would stop me from killing you?”

  “Yes, Louis, I do.”

  “What,” Louis asked carefully, “will you bet?”

  The puppeteer considered. “To rescue Teela can hardly be as dangerous as to take that gamble. I had forgotten that she is your mate.” He glanced down. “She no longer registers on my locator. I cannot tell where she is.”

  “Does that mean her ‘cycle’s been damaged?”

  “Yes, extensively. The sender was near one thruster unit of her flycycle. Perhaps she ran afoul of another working machine, akin to the one which burned our communicator discs.

  “Um. But you know where she was when she dropped out of the conversation.”

  “Ten degrees to spinward of port. I do not know the distance, but we can estimate this from the speed tolerances of her flycycle.”

  They flew ten degrees to port of spinward, a slanting line across Speaker’s hand-drawn map. For two hours there had been no lights; and Louis had begun to wonder if they were lost.

  Thirty-five hundred miles from the rolling hurricane that was the Eye storm, the line across Speaker’s map ended at a seaport. Beyond the seaport was a bay the size of the Atlantic Ocean. Teela couldn’t have flown further than that. The seaport would be their last
chance ...

  Suddenly, beyond the crest of a deceptively gradual slope of hill, there were lights.

  “Pull up,” Louis whispered fiercely, not knowing why he whispered. But Speaker had already stopped them in midair.

  They hovered, studying the lights and the terrain.

  The terrain: city. City everywhere. Below, shadowy in the blue Archlight, were houses like beehives with rounded windows, separated by curved sidewalks too narrow to be called streets. Ahead: more of the same, and then taller buildings further on, until all was skyscrapers and floaters.

  “They built differently,” Louis whispered. “The architecture—it’s not like Zignamuclickclik. Different styles ...”

  “Skyscrapers,” said Speaker. “With so much room on the Ringworld, why build so tall?”

  “To prove they can do it. No, that’s asinine,” said Louis. “There’d be no point, if they could build something like the Ringworld itself.”

  “Perhaps the tall buildings came later, during the decline of civilization.”

  The lights: blazing white tiers of windows, a dozen isolated towers blazing from crown to base They were clustered in what Louis already thought of as the Civic Center because all six of the floating buildings were there.

  One thing more: a small suburban patch to spinward of the Civic Center glowed dim orange-white.

  On the second floor of one of the beehive houses, the three sat in a triangle around Speaker’s map.

  Speaker had insisted that they bring the flycycles inside with them. “Security.” Their light came from the headlamps of Speaker’s own ‘cycle, reflected and softened by a curved wall. A table, oddly sculpted to form plates and coaster depressions, had toppled and smashed to dust when Louis brushed against it. Dust was an inch thick on the floor. The paint on the curved wall had crumbled and settled in a soft ridge of sky-blue dust along the baseboard.

  Louis felt the age of the city settling on him.

  “When the map room tapes were made, this was one of the largest of Ringworld cities,” Speaker said. His crescent claw moved across the map. “The original city was a planned city, a semicircle with its flat side along the sea. The tower called Heaven must have been built much later, when the city had already spread wings far along the coast.”