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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 ecstasy.

  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.”

  L
ouis 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.

  Louis struck an attitude: parade rest. An inspiration to his crew, the heroic commander stands astride the bridge. The damaged rocket motors may explode at the first touch of thrust; but it must be tried. The Kzinti battleships must be stopped before they reach Earth!

  “It’ll never work,” said Louis Wu.

  “Why not, Louis? The stresses should not exceed—“

  “A flying castle, for Finagle’s sake! I only just realized how insane the whole thing is. We must have been out of our minds! Tootling home in the upper half of a skyscraper—“ The building shifted then, and Louis staggered. Nessus had started the thruster.

  The city drifted past the bay window, gathering speed. Acceleration eased off. It had never been higher than a foot per second squared. Top speed seemed to be about one hundred miles per hour, and the castle was rock steady.

  “We centered the flycycle correctly,” said Nessus. “The floor is level, as you will note, and the structure shows no tendency to rotate.”

  “It’s still silly.”

  “Nothing that works is silly. And now, where shall we go?”

  Louis was silent.

  “Where shall we go, Louis? Speaker and I have no plans. What direction, Louis?”

  “Starboard.”

  “Very well. Directly starboard?”

  “Right. We’ve got to get past the Eye storm. Then turn forty-five degrees or so to antispinward.”

  “Do you seek the city of the tower called Heaven?”

  “Yes. Can you find it?”

  “That should be no problem, Louis. Three hours flying time brought us here; we should be back at the tower in thirty hours. And then?”

  “Depends.”

  The picture was so vivid. It was pure deduction and imagination, yet—so vivid. Louis Wu tended to daydream in color.

  So vivid. But was it real?

  It was frightening, how suddenly his confidence in the flying tower had leaked away. Yet the tower was flying. It didn’t need Louis Wu to make it go.

  “The leaf-eater seems content to follow your lead,” said Speaker.

  The flycycle hummed quietly to itself a few feet away. Landscape flowed past the bay window. The Eye storm was off to the side, its gray gaze large and daunting.

  “The leaf-eater’s out of his mind,” said Louis. “I take it you’ve got better sense.”

  “Not at all. If you have a goal, I am content to follow you. But if it may involve fighting, I should know something about it.”

  “Um.”

  “I should know something about it regardless, in order to decide whether it will involve fighting.”

  “Well put.”

  Speaker waited.

  “We’re going after the shadow square wire,” said Louis. “Remember the wire we ran into after the meteor defenses wrecked us? Later it started falling over the city of the floating tower, loop after loop, endlessly. There should be at least tens of thousands of miles of it, more than we could possibly need for what I’ve got in mind.”

  “What do you have in mind, Louis?”

  “Getting hold of the shadow square wire. Odds are the natives will just give it to us, if Prill asks politely, and if Nessus uses the tasp.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that, we’ll find out just how crazy I am.”

  The tower moved to starboard like a steamship of the sky. Starships were never so roomy. As for ships of the air, there was nothing comparable in known space. Six decks to climb around in! Luxury!

  There were luxuries missing. The food supply aboard the flyscraper consisted of frozen meat, perishable fruit, and the kitchen of Nessus’s flycycle. Food for puppeteers lacked nourishment for humans, according to Nessus. Thus Louis’s breakfast and lunch were meat broiled by a flashlight-laser, and knobbly red fruit.

  And there was no water.

  And no coffee.

  Prill was persuaded to find some bottles of an alcoholic beverage. They held a belated christening ceremony in the bridge room, with Speaker courteously backed into a far corner and Prill hovering warily near the door. Nobody would accept Louis’s suggestion of the name Improbable; and so there were four christenings, in order, in four different languages.

  The beverage was ... well, sour. Speaker couldn’t take it, and Nessus didn’t try. But Prill consumed one bottle, sealed the others, and put them carefully away.

  The christening became a language lesson. Louis learned a few of the rudiments of the Ringworld Engineer’s speech. He found that Speaker was learning much faster than he was. It figured. Speaker and Nessus had both been trained to deal with human languages, modes of thinking, limitations in speech and hearing. This was only more of the same.

  They broke for dinner. Again Nessus ate alone, using his flycycle kitchen, while Louis and Prill ate broiled meat and Speaker ate raw, elsewhere.

  Afte
rward the language lesson went on. Louis hated it. The others were so far ahead of him that he felt like a cretin.

  “But Louis, we must learn the language. Oar rate of travel is low, and we must forage for our food. Frequently we will need to deal with natives.”

  “I know. I never liked languages.”

  Darkness fell. Even this far from the Eye storm, cloud cover was complete, and the night was like the inside of a dragon’s mouth. Louis called a halt to the lesson. He was tired and irritable and vastly unsure of himself. The others left him to his rest.

  They would be passing the Eye storm in about ten hours.

  He was floating at the edge of a restless sleep when Prill came back. He felt hands stroking him lasciviously, and he reached out.

  She backed out of reach. She spoke in her own language, but simplified it into a pidgin for Louis’s understanding.

  “You are leader?”

  Bleary-eyed, Louis considered. “Yes,” he said, because the actual situation was too complex.

  “Make the two-headed one give me his machine.”

  “What?” Louis fumbled for words. “His which?”

  “The machine that make me happy. I want it. You take it from him.”

  Louis laughed, for he thought he understood her.

  “You want me? You take it,” Prill said angrily.

  The puppeteer had something she wanted. She had no lever to use on him, for he was not a man. Louis Wu was the only man around. Her power would bend him to her will. It had always worked before; for was she not a goddess?

  Perhaps Louis’s hair had misled her. She may have assumed that he was one of the hairy lower class, by his bare face perhaps half Engineer, but no more. Then he must have been born after the Fall of the Cities. No youth drug. He must be in the first flush of youth.

  “You were quite right,” Louis said in his own tongue. Prill’s fists clenched in anger, for his mockery was clear. “A thirty-year-old man would be putty in your hands. But I’m older than that.” And he laughed again.

  “The machine. Where does he keep it?” In the darkness she leaned toward him, all lovely suggestive shadow. Her scalp gleamed softly; her black hair spilled over her shoulder. The breath caught in Louis’s throat.