“Climbing?”
“When I finish you may ask questions, Louis. Secure the flashlight-laser from wherever you put it. Use the beam to puncture the balloon in front of you. You will have to snatch at its fabric as you fall. Use it to climb over the flycycle until you are balanced on top. Then—“
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Let me finish, Louis. The purpose of all this activity is to destroy the zap gun, as you called it. Probably there are two zap guns. One is over the door you entered by, or under it. The other may be anywhere. Your only clue may be that it looks like the first zap gun.”
“Sure, and it may not. Never mind that. How do you expect me to grab at the fabric of an exploding balloon fast enough to—No. I can’t.”
“Louis. How can I reach you if a weapon waits to burn out my machinery?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you expect Speaker to do the climbing?”
“Can’t cats climb?”
Speaker said, “My ancestors were plains cats, Louis. My burnt hand is healing slowly. I cannot climb. In any case, the leaf-eater’s proposition is insane. Surely you see that he is merely looking for an excuse to desert us.”
Louis saw. Perhaps he let the fear show.
“I will not leave you yet,” Nessus said. “I will wait. Perhaps you will conceive a better plan. Perhaps the eavesdropper will show himself. I will wait.”
Louis Wu, wedged upside down and motionless between two shaped balloons, naturally found it difficult to measure time. Nothing changed. Nothing moved. He could hear Nessus whistling in the distance; but nothing else seemed to be happening.
Eventually Louis started counting his own heartbeats. Seventy-two to the minute, he figured.
Precisely ten minutes later he was heard to say, “Seventy-two. One. What am I doing?”
“Were you speaking to me, Louis?”
“Tanjit! Speaker, I can’t take this. I’d rather die now than go crazy first.” He began forcing his arms down.
“I command, Louis, under combat conditions. I order you to remain calm, and wait.”
“Sorry.” Louis forced his arms down, relax, jerk down, relax. There it was: his belt. His hand was too far forward. He forced his elbow back, relax, jerk back ...
“What the puppeteer suggests is suicide, Louis.”
“Maybe.” He had it: the flashlight-laser. Two more jerks freed it from his belt and pointed it forward; he would burn into the dashboard but would not burn himself.
He fired.
The balloon collapsed slowly. As it did, the one at his back pushed him forward into the dashboard. Under the lighter pressure, it was easy to push the flashlight-laser into his belt and to clutch two handfuls of wrinkling, collapsing fabric.
He was also sliding out of his seat. Faster, faster—He gripped with manic force, and when he turned over, falling, his hands did not slip on the fabric. He hung by his hands beneath his flycycle, with a ninety foot drop below and—
“Speaker!”
“Here I am, Louis. I have secured my own weapon. Shall I pop the other balloon for you?”
“Yes!” It was right across his path, blocking him entirely.
The balloon did not collapse. One side of it puffed dust for two seconds, then disappeared in a great puff of air. Speaker had zapped it with one beam of the disintegrator.
“Finagle knows how you can aim that thing,” Louis wheezed. He began to climb.
It was easy going while the fabric held out. Translate: Despite the hours he’d spent with blood flowing to his brain, Louis managed not to let go. But the fabric ended in the vicinity of the foot throttle; and the ‘cycle had rolled half over with his weight, so that he still hung from underneath.
He pulled himself close against the ‘cycle, braced himself with his knees. He began to rock.
Speaker-To-Animals was making curious sounds.
The cycle rocked back and forth, further with each swing. Louis assumed, because he had to, that most of the metal was in the belly of the ‘cycle. Otherwise the ‘cycle would roll, and wherever he placed himself Louis would be underneath, and therefore Nessus would not have made the suggestion.
The ‘cycle rolled far. Louis, nauseated, fought the urge to vomit. If his breathing passages got clogged now, it was all over.
The ‘cycle rolled back, and over, and was precisely upside down. Louis lunged across the underside and snatched at the other end of the collapsed balloon. And had it.
The ‘cycle continued its roll. Louis was flattened chestdown across the belly of the machine. He waited, clinging.
The inert hulk paused, hesitated, rolled back. His vestibular canals spun, and Louis lost—what? Yesterday’s late lunch? He lost it explosively, in great agonizing heaves, across the metal and across his sleeve; but he didn’t shift his position more than an inch.
The flycycle continued to heave like the sea. But Louis was anchored. Presently he dared to look up.
A woman was watching him.
She seemed to be entirely bald. Her face reminded Louis of the wire-sculpture in the banquet hall of the Heaven tower. The features, and the expression. She was as calm as a goddess or a dead woman. And he wanted to blush, or hide, or disappear.
Instead he said, “Speaker, we’re being watched. Relay to Nessus.”
“A minute, Louis. I am discomposed. I made the mistake of watching you climb.”
“Okay. She’s—I thought she was bald, but she isn’t. There’s a fringe of hairbearing scalp that crosses over her ears and meets at the base of her skull. She wears the hair long, more than shoulder length.” He did not say that her hair was rich and dark falling past one shoulder as she bent slightly forward to watch Louis Wu, nor that her skull was finely and delicately shaped, nor that her eyes seemed to spear him like a martini olive. “I think she’s an Engineer; she either belongs to the same race or follows the same customs. Have you got that?”
“Yes. How can you climb so? It seemed that you defied gravity. What are you, Louis?”
Clutching himself to his dead flycycle, Louis laughed. It seemed to take all his strength. “You’re a Kdaptist,” he said. “Admit it.”
“I was raised so, but the teachings did not take.”
“Sure they didn’t. Have you got Nessus?”
“Yes. I used the siren.”
“Relay this. She’s about twenty feet from me. She’s watching me like a snake. I don’t mean she’s intensely interested in me; I mean she’s not interested in anything else at all. She blinks, but she never looks away.
“She’s sitting in a kind of booth. There used to be glass or something in three of the walls, but that’s gone, leaving not much more than some stairs and a platform. She’s sitting with her legs over the edge. It must have been a way of watching the prisoners.
“She’s dressed in ... well, I can’t say I go for the style. Knee-length and elbow-length overalls, ballooning out—“ But aliens wouldn’t be interested in that. “The fabric is artificial, obviously, and either it’s new or it’s self-cleaning and very durable. She—“ Louis interrupted himself, because the girl had said something.
He waited. She repeated it, whatever it was; a short sentence.
Then she stood gracefully and went up the stairs.
“She’s gone,” said Louis. “Probably lost interest.”
“Perhaps she went back to her listening devices.”
“Probably right.” If there was an eavesdropper in the building, Occam’s Razor said it was her.
“Nessus asks you to focus your flashlight-laser to low and wide, and to be seen using it for lighting when next the woman appears. I am not to show the Slaver weapon. The woman coul
d probably kill us both by turning off a switch. She must not see us with weapons.”
“Then how can we get rid of the zap guns?”
A moment before Speaker relayed the answer. “We do not. Nessus says that he will try something else. He is coming here.”
Louis let his head sag against the metal. The relief he felt was so great that he didn’t even question it, until Speaker said, “He will only have us all in the same trap. Louis, how can I dissuade him?”
“Tell him so. No, don’t even do that. If he didn’t know it was safe he’d stay away.”
“How can it be safe?”
“I don’t know. Let me rest.” The puppeteer must know what he was doing. He could trust Nessus’s cowardice. Louis rubbed his cheek against the smooth, cool metal.
He dozed.
He was never less than marginally aware of where he was. If his ‘cycle stirred or shifted he came wide-eyed out of sleep, clutching metal in his knees and fabric in his fists. His sleep was a running nightmare.
When light flashed through his eyelids he came awake immediately.
Daylight poured through the horizontal slit that had served them as a doorway. Within that glare Nessus’s flycycle was a black silhouette. The flycycle was upside down, and so was the puppeteer, held by seat webbing rather than crash balloons.
The slit closed behind him.
“Welcome,” said Speaker, slurring the words. “Can you turn me upright?”
“Not yet. Has the girl reappeared?”
“No.”
“She will. Humans are curious, Speaker. She cannot have seen members of our species before.”
“What of it? I want to be right side up,” Speaker moaned.
The puppeteer did something to his dashboard. A miracle happened: his flycycle turned over.
Louis said one word. “How?”
“I turned everything off after I knew that the bandit signal had my controls. If the lifting field had not caught me, I could have turned on my motors before I struck pavement. Now,” the puppeteer said briskly, “the next step should be easy. When the girl appears, act friendly. Louis, you may attempt to have sex with her if you think you might succeed. Speaker, Louis is to be our master; we are to be his servitors. The woman may be xenophobic; it would lull her to believe that a human being commands these aliens.”
Louis actually laughed. Somehow the nightmarish half-sleep had rested him. “I doubt she’ll be feeling friendly, let alone seductive. You didn’t see her. She’s as cold as the black caves of Pluto, at least where I’m concerned, and I can’t really blame her.” She had watched him lose his lunch across his sleeve—generally an unromantic sight.
The puppeteer said, “She will be feeling happy whenever she looks at us. She will cease to feel happy when she tries to leave us. If she brings one of us closer to her, her joy will increase—“
“Tanjit, yes!” cried Louis.
“You see? Good. In addition, I have been practicing the Ringworld language. I believe my pronunciation is correct, and my grammar. If I only knew what more of the words meant ...”
Speaker had stopped complaining long ago. Inverted above a lethal drop, with burns all over him and one hand charred to the bone, he had raged at Louis and Nessus for being unable to help him. But he had been quiet for hours now.
In the dim quiet, Louis dozed.
In his sleep he heard bells, and woke.
She tinkled as she came down the steps. There were bells on her moccasins. Her garment was different too, a top-shaped, high-necked dress fitted with half a dozen big bulging pockets. Her long black hair fell forward over one shoulder.
The serene dignity in her face had not changed.
She sat down with her feet over the edge of the platform, and she watched Louis Wu. She did not shift position; neither did Louis. For several minutes they held each other’s eyes.
Then she reached into one of the big pockets and produced something fist-sized and orange. She tossed it toward Louis, aiming it so that it would go past him, a few inches beyond his reach.
He recognized it as it went by him. A knobby, juicy fruit he had found on a bush two days ago. He had dropped several into the intake hopper of his kitchen, without tasting them.
The fruit splattered red across the roof of a cell. Suddenly Louis’s mouth was trying to water, and he was taken with a raging thirst.
She tossed him another. It came closer this time. He could have touched it if he had tried, but he would also have overturned the ‘cycle. And she knew it.
Her third shot tapped his shoulder. He clung to his two fistfuls of balloon and thought black thoughts.
Then Nessus’s flycycle drifted into view.
And she smiled.
The puppeteer had been floating behind the truck-sized derelict. Upside down again, he drifted obliquely toward the viewing platform as if wafted there by a stray induced current, and, as he passed Louis, he asked, “Can you seduce her?”
Louis snarled. Then, realizing that the puppeteer really wasn’t mocking him, he said, “I think she thinks I’m an animal. Forget it.”
“Then we need different tactics.”
Louis rubbed his forehead against the cool metal. He had seldom felt so miserable. “You’re in charge,” he said. “She won’t buy me as an equal, but she might buy you. She won’t see you as competition; you’re too alien.”
The puppeteer had drifted past him. Now he said something in what sounded to Louis like the language of the shaven choir-leading priest: the holy language of the Engineers.
The girl did not respond. But ... she wasn’t smiling exactly, but the corners of her mouth did seem to turn up slightly, and there was more animation in her eyes.
Nessus must be using low power. Very low power.
He spoke again, and this time she answered. Her voice was cool and musical, and if she sounded imperious to Louis Wu, he was predisposed to hear that quality.
The puppeteer’s voice became identical to the girl’s. What developed then was a language lesson.
To Louis Wu, uneasily balanced above a lethal drop, it was bound to be dull. He picked up a word here and there. At one point she tossed Nessus one of the fist-sized orange fruits, and they established that it was a thrumb. And Nessus kept it.
Suddenly she stood up and left.
Louis said, “Well?”
“She must have become bored,” said Nessus. “She gave no warning.”
“I’m dying of thirst. Could I have that thrumb?”
“Thrumb is the color of the peel, Louis.” He edged his ‘cycle alongside Louis and handed him the fruit.
Louis was only just desperate enough to free one hand. That meant he had to bite through the thick peel and tear it away with his teeth. At some point he reached real fruit and bit into it. It was the best thing he had tasted in two hundred years.
When he had quite finished the fruit, he asked, “Is she coming back?”
“We may hope so. I used the tasp at low power that it might affect her below the conscious level. She will miss it. The lure will become stronger every time she sees me. Louis, should we not make her fall in love with you?”
“Forget it. She think I’m a native, a savage. Which brings up the question: what is she?”
“I could not say. She did not try to hide it, but it did not come across, either. I do not know enough language. Not yet.”
Chapter 20 -
Meat
Nessus had landed to explore the dimness below. Cut off from the intercom, Louis tried to watch what the puppeteer was doing. Eventually he gave that up.
Much later, he heard footsteps. No bells this time.
He cupped his han
ds and shouted downward. “Nessus!”
The sound bounced off the walls and focused itself horrendously in the apex of the cone. The puppeteer jumped to his feet, swarmed aboard his ‘cycle and took off. Cast off, more likely. No doubt he had left the motor going to hold the ‘cycle down against the trapping field. Now he simply cut the motor.
He was back among the hovering metal when the footsteps stopped somewhere above them.
“What the tanj is she doing?” Louis whispered.
“Patience. You could not expect her to be conditioned by one exposure to a tasp at low power.”
“Try to get it into your thick, brainless heads. I can not keep my balance indefinitely!”
“You must. How can I help?”
“Water,” said Louis, with a tongue like two yards of flannel rolled up.
“Are you thirsty? But how can I get water to you? If you turn your head you may lose your balance.”
“I know. Forget it.” Louis shuddered. Strange, that Louis Wu the spacer should be so afraid of heights. “How’s Speaker?”
“I fear for him, Louis. He has been unconscious for uncomfortably long.”
“Tanj, tanj—“
Footsteps.
She must have a mania for changing clothes, Louis thought. What she wore now was all overlapping pleats in orange and green. Like previous garments, it showed nothing at all of her shape.
She knelt at the edge of the observation platform, coolly watching them. Lows clutched his metal raft and waited for developments.
He saw her soften. Her eyes went dreamy; the corners of her small mouth turned up.
Nessus spoke.
She seemed to consider. She said something that might have been an answer.
Then she left them.
“Well?”
“We shall see.”
“I get so sick of waiting.”
Suddenly the puppeteer’s flycycle was floating upward. Up and forward. It bumped against the edge of the observation platform like a rowboat making dock.