Ringworld (17 page)

"But it worked!" Teela insisted.

The sound was almost a snore, a low and ominous snarl. By now nobody could have mistaken Speaker's expression for a smile.

"It did work!" Teela flared. "You're a peaceful race now, Speaker. You can get along with --"

"Be silent, man!"

"With your equals," she finished generously. "You haven't attacked another species in --"

The kzin produced the modified Slaver digging tool and held it before the intercom so that Teela could see it. She stopped talking suddenly.

"It could have been us," said Louis.

He had their attention. "It could have been us," he repeated. "If the puppeteers had wanted to breed humans for some trait ..." He stopped. "Oh," he said. "Teela. Sure."

The puppeteer did not react.

Teela shifted under Louis's stare. "What's the matter, Louis? Louis!"

"Sorry. Something just occurred to me ... Nessus, speak to us. Speak to us of the Fertility Laws."

"Louis, have you gone crazy?"

"Uurrr," said Speaker-to-Animals. "I would have thought of that myself, given time. Nessus?"

"Yes," said Nessus.

The puppeteees 'cycle was a silver mote, still dwindling to port. It was almost lost against a larger, vaguer bright point ahead, somewhat more distant from the fleet than any two points can be on Earth. The puppeteees intercom image wore the unchanging, unreadable silly face produced by a flat triangular skull and loose, prehensile lips. He could not look dangerous, this one.

"You meddled with the Fertility Laws of Earth."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"We like humans. We trust humans. We have dealt profitably with humans. It is to our advantage to encourage humans, since they will certainly reach the Lesser Cloud before we do."

"Wonderful. You like us. So?"

"We sought to improve you genetically. But what should we improve? Not your intelligence. Intelligence is not your great strength. Nor is your sense of self-preservation, nor your durability, nor your fighting talents."

"So you decided to make us lucky," said Louis. And he began to laugh.

Teela got it then. Her eyes went round and horrified. She tried to say something, but it came out as a squeak.

"Of course," said Nessus. "Please stop laughing, Louis. The decision was sensible. Your species has been incredibly lucky. Your history reads like a series of hair-breath escapes, from intraspecies atomic war, from pollution of your planet with industrial wastes, from ecological upsets, from dangerously massive asteroids, from the vagaries of your mildly variable sun, and even from the Core explosion, which you discovered only by the merost accident. Louis, why are you still laughing?"

Louis was still laughing because he was looking at Teela. Teela was blushing furiously. Her eyes shifted as if seeking a place to hide. It is not pleasant to realize that one is part of a genetics experiment.

"And so we changed the Fertility Laws of Earth. It was surprisingly easy. Our withdrawal from known space caused a stock market crash. Economic manipulation ruined several members of the Fertility Board. We bribed some of these, blackmailed others with the threat of debtor's prison, then used corruption in the Fertility Board as publicity to force a change. It was a hideously expensive undertaking, but quite safe, and partially successful. We were able to introduce the Birthright Lotteries. We hoped to produce a strain of unusually lucky humans."

"Monster!" Teela shouted. "Monster!"

Speaker had sheathed his Slaver digging tool. He said, "Teela, you did not complain when you learned that the puppeteers had manipulated the heredity of my race. They sought to produce a docde kzin To that end they bred us as a biologist breeds stheets, killing the defectives, keeping others. You gloated that this crime was to the benefit of your species. Now you complain. Why?"

Teela, weeping with rage, cut herself out of the intercom.

"A docile kzin," Speaker repeated. "You sought to produce a docile kzin, Nessus. If you think you have produced a docile kzin, come and rejoin us."

The puppeteer did not answer. Somewhere far ahead of the fleet, the silver point of his 'cycle had become too small to see.

"You do not wish to rejoin our fleet? But how can I protect you from this unknown land unless you rejoin the fleet? But I do not blame you. You do well to be wary," said the kzin. His claws were showing, needle-sharp and slightly curved. "Your attempt to produce a lucky human was also a failure."

"No," said Nessus via intercom. "We produced lucky humans. I could not contact them for this ill-fated expedition. They were too lucky."

"You have played god with both our species. Do not attempt to rejoin us."

"I will remain in intercom contact."

Speaker's image disappeared.

"Louis, Speaker has cut me off," said Nessus. "If I have something to tell him, I must pass it through you."

"Fine," said Louis, and cut him off. Almost instantly a tiny light burned where the puppeteer's ghost-head had been. The puppeteer wanted to talk.

Tanj upon him.

Later that day they crossed a sea the size of the Mediterranean. Lows dipped to investigate, and found that the other 'cycles followed him down. The Beet, then, was still under his guidance, despite the fact that nobody would speak to him.

The shoreline was a single city, and the city was a ruin. Aside from the docks, it did not differ in kind from Zignamuclickclick. Louis did not land. There was nothing to be learned here.

Afterward the land sloped gradually upward, always upward, until ears popped and pressure sensors dropped. The green land became brown scrub, then high desert tundra, then miles and miles of bare rock, then --

Along half a thousand miles' of ridgeback mountain peak, the winds had scraped away scrub and sod and rock. Nothing was left but an exposed backbone of ring foundation material, translucent gray and hideous.

Sloppy upkeep. No Ringworld engineer would have permitted such a thing. The Ringworld civilization, then, must have begun to die long ago. The process would have started here, with bare spots poking through the facade in the places where nobody went ...

Far ahead of the fleet, in the direction Nessus had gone, was an extensive shiny spot in the landscape. At a guess, it was thirty to fifty thousand miles away. A great shiny spot as big as Australia.

More exposed ring floor? Vast, shiny areas of ring foundation poking through once-fertile soil, soil that dies and dries and blows away when the river systems break down. The fall of Zignamuclickclick, the universal power failure, must have been the last stage of the breakdown.

How long had it taken? Ten thousand years?

Longer?

"Tanjit! I wish I could talk it over with someone. It might be important." Louis scowled at the landscape.

Time was different when the sun was always straight overhead. Morning and afternoon were identical. Decisions seemed less than permanent. Reality seemed less than real. It was, Louis thought, like the instant of time spent traveling between transfer booths.

That was it. They were between transfer booths, one at the Liar, one at the rim wall. They only dreamed that they flew above flat gray land in a triangle pattern of flycycles.

They flew to port through frozen time.

How long had it been since anyone had spoken to anyone? It had been hours since Louis had signaled Teela that he wanted to talk to her. Not much later he had signaled Speaker. Lights had burned above their dashboards, ignored, as Louis ignored the light above his own.

"Enough of that," Louis said suddenly. He opened the intercom.

He caught an incredible burst of orchestral music before the puppeteer noticed him. Then --

"We must see to it that the expedition is reunited without bloodshed," said Nessus. "Have you any suggestions, Louis?"

"Yes. It's not polite to start a conversation in the middle."

"I apologize, Louis. Thank you for returning my call. How have you been?"

"Lonely and irritated, and it's all your fault. Nobody wants to talk to me."

"Can I help?"

"Maybe. Did you have anything to do with changing the Fertility Laws?"

"I headed the project."

Louis snorted. "That's the wrong answer. May you be the first victim of retroactive birth control! Teela won't ever speak to me again."

"You should not have laughed at her."

"I know. You know what scares me the most about this whole thing? Not your there-ain't no-justice arrogance," said Louis. "It's the fact that you can make decicions of that magnitude, then do something as downright stupid as, as --"

"Can Teela Brown hear us?"

"No, of course not. Tanj you, Nessus! Do you know what you've done to her?"

"If you knew her ego would be so wounded, why did you speak?"

Louis moaned. He had solved a thought-problem and immediately revealed the solution. It had not occurred to him, it would never have occurred to him, that the solution was better hidden. He didn't think that way.

The puppeteer asked, "Have you thought of a way to reunite the expedition?"

"Yes," said Louis, and he switched off.

Let the puppeteer sweat over that one.

***

The land sloped down and became green again.

They passed another sea, and a great triangular river delta. But the riverbed was dry, and so was the delta. Alterations in the wind currents must have dried up the source.

As Louis dipped low, it became clear that all of the haphazard, meandering channels that made up the delta had been carved permanently into the land. The Ringworld artists had not been content to let the river dig its own channels. And they had been right; the soil wasn't deep enough on the Ringworld. Artifice was necessary.

But the empty channels were ugly. Louis pursed his lips in disapproval, and flew on.

Not far ahead, there were mountains.

Louis had flown all night and well into the morning. He wasn't sure how long. The motionless noon sun was a psychological trap; it either compressed or stretched time, and Louis wasn't sure which.

Emotionally, Louis was on sabbatical. He had almost forgotten the other flycycles. Flying alone over unending, endlessly changing terrain was no different from ranging alone in a singleship, beyond the known stars. Louis Wu was alone with the universe, and the universe was a plaything for Louis Wu. The most important question in the universe became: Is Louis Wu still satisfied with himself?

It came as a shock when a furry orange face formed above the dash.

"You must be tiring," said the kzin. "Do you wish me to fly?"

"I'd rather land. I'm getting cramped."

"Land, then. The controls are yours."

"I don't want to force my company on anyone." As he said it, Louis realized that he meant it. The sabbatical mood had been too easily recaptured.

"Do you feel that Teela would avoid you? You may be right. She has not called even me, though I share her shame."

"You're taking it too hard. No, wait, don't switch off."

"I wish to be alone, Louis. The leaf-eater has shamed me terribly."

"But it was so long ago! No, don't switch off; have pity on a lonely old man. Have you been watching the landscape?"

"Yes."

"Did you notice the bare regions?"

"Yes. In places erosion has cut through bedrock to the indestructible ring floor. Something must have badly upset the wind patterns a very long time ago. Such erosion cannot happen overnight, even on the Ringworld."

"Right."

"Louis, how could a civilization of such size and power fall?"

"I don't know. Let's face it: there's no way to guess, not for us. Even the puppeteers never reached the Ringworld's level of technology. How can we tell what might have knocked them back to the fist-ax level?"

"We must learn more about the natives," said Speaker-To-Animals. "Our evidence thus far indicates that they could not possibly move the ruined Liar anywhere. We must find those who can."

It was the opening Louis had hoped for. "I have some ideas on that score -- an effective way to contact the natives as often as we like."

"Well?"

"I'd like to land before we talk it over."

"Land, then."

Mountains formed a high, blocky range across the path of the flycycle fleet. Their peaks and the passes between glowed with a pearly sheen Louis recognized. Winds roaring over and between the peaks had polished away the rock, exposing the framework of ring floor material.

Louis dropped the fleet toward gently rounded foothills. If his target was the mouth of a silver stream that poured out of the mountains and disappeared into a forest, itself seemingly endless, that covered the foothills like green fur.

Teela called. "What are you doing?" she demanded.

"I'm landing. I'm tired of flying. But don't hang up. I'd like to apologize."

She switched off.

Best I could hope for, Louis told himself without conviction. But she would be more willing to listen now that she knew an apology was coming.

***

"I got the idea from all our talk about 'playing god'," said Louis. Unfortunately he was talking only to Speaker. Teela had dismounted her 'cycle, thrown him one smoking glare and stalked off into the woods.

Speaker nodded his shaggy orange head. His ears twitched like small Chinese fans held in nervous fingers.

"We're reasonably safe on this world," Louis told him, "as long as were in the air. There's no question but that we can get where we're going. We could probably reach the rim wall without ever landing, if it came to that; or we could land only where the ring foundation pokes through. No predatory life could survive on that stuff.

"But we can't learn much without landing. We want to get off this oversized toy, and to do that we're going to need native help. It still looks as though someone is going to have to haul the Liar across four hundred thousand miles of landscape."

"Get to the point, Louis. I need exercise."

"By the time we reach the rim wall we'll want to know a lot more about the Ringworld than we do now."

"Unquestionably."

"Why not play god?"

Speaker hesitated. "You speak with literal precision?"

"Right. We're naturals for Ringworld engineers. We don't have the powers they had, but what we do have must look godlike enough to the natives. You can be the god --"

"Thank you."

"-- Teela and I the acolytes. Nessus would make a good captive demon."

***

Speaker's claws came out. He said, "But Nessus is not with us, and will not be."

"That's the hitch. In --"

"This is not open to argument, Louis."

"Too bad. We need him to make this work."

"Then you must forget it."

Louis was still in doubt about those claws. Were they or were they not under voluntary control? In any case, they were still showing. Had he been speaking over intercom Speaker would certainly have switched off by now.

Which was why Louis had insisted on landing.

"Look at the sheer intellectual beauty of it. You'd make a great god. From a human viewpoint you're impressive as all hell -- though I suppose you'd have to take my word for that."

"Why would we need Nessus?"

"For the tasp, for reward and punishment. As a god, you tear a doubter to shreds and gobbets, then eat the gobbets. That's punishment. For reward, you use the puppeteer's tasp."

"Can we not do without the tasp?"

"But it's such a great way to reward the faithful! A blast of pure pleasure, straight to the brain. No side effects. No hangover. A tasp is supposed to be better than sex!"

"I do not like the ethics. Though the natives are only human, I would not like to addict them to a tasp. It would be more merciful to kill them" said Speaker. "In any case, the puppeteer's tasp works apinst kzinti, not human."

"I think you're wrong."

"Louis, we know that the tasp was designed for use against a kzinti brain structure. I felt it. In this you are right: it was a religious experience, a diabolical experience."

"But we don't know the tasp doesn't work on a human being. I think it does. I know Nessus. Either his tasp works on both of us, or he's carrying two tasps. I wouldn't be here unless he had a way to control humans."

"You speculate wildly."

"Shall we call him and ask him?"

"No."

"What's the harm in asking him?"

"There would be no purpose in it."

"I forgot. No curiosity," said Louis. Monkey curiosity was not powerful in most sentient species.

"Were you playing on my curiosity? I see. You tried to commit me to a course of action. Louis, the puppeteer may find his own way to the rim wall. Until then, he travels alone."

And before Louis could answer, the kzin turned and bounded into a thicket of elbow root. It ended the discussion as effectively as if he had switched off an intercom.

***

The world had caved in on Teela Brown. She sobbed miserably, wrackingly, in an orgy of self-pity.

She had found a wonderful place for her mourning.

Dark green was the motif. The vegetation was lush overhead, too thick to permit the direct passage of sunlight. But it thinned out near the ground, to make walking easy. It was a somber paradise for nature lovers.

Flat, vertical rock walls, kept constantly wet by a waterfall, surrounded a deep, clear pool. Teela was in the pool. The falling water nearly drowned out her sobbing, but the rock walls amplified the sound like a shower stall. It was as if Nature wept with her.

She had not noticed Louis Wu.

Stranded on an alien world, even Teela Brown would not have gone far without her first aid kit. It was a small, flat box on her belt, and it had a finding circuit built into it. Louis had followed its signal to Teelas clothes, which were piled on a natural granite tabletop at the poors edge.

Dark green illumination, the roar of a waterfall, and the echoed sound of sobbing. Teela was almost under the falling water. She must be sitting on something, for her arms and shoulders were out of the pool. Her head was bent, and her dark hair streamed forward to cover her face.

There was no point in waiting for her to come to him. Louis took off his clothes, piled them beside Teela's. He frowned at the chill in the air, shrugged, and dove in.

He saw his mistake instantly.

On sabbatical, Louis did not commonly ran across Earthlike worlds. Those he did land on were generally as civilized as Earth itself. Louis was not stupid. If it had occurred to him to wonder about the temperature of the water ...

But it didn't.

The water was runoff water from snow-capped mountains. Louis tried to scream with the cold, but his head was already underwater. He did have sense enough not to inhale.

His head broke water. He splashed and gasped with the cold and the need for air.

Then he began to enjoy it.

He knew how to tread water; though he had learned in warmer waters than these! He stayed afloat, kicking rhythmically, feeling the currents from the plunging waterfall eddy over his skin.

Teela had seen him. She sat beneath the waterfall, waiting. He swam to her.

He would have had to scream into her face to tell her anything. Apologies and words of love would have been misplaced. But he could touch her.

She did not flinch away. But she bent her head, and her hair hid her again. Her rejection was almost telepathically intense.

Louis respected it.

He swam about, stretching muscles cramped by eighteen hours in a flycycle seat. The water felt wonderful. But at some point the numbness of the cold became an ache, and Louis decided he was courting pneumonia.

He touched Teela on the arm and pointed toward shore. This time she nodded and followed.

They lay beside the pool, shivering, wrapped in each other's arms, with the thermocontrolled coveralls open and spread around them like blankets. Gradually their chilled bodies soaked up the heat.

"I'm sorry I laughed," Louis said.

She nodded, accepting the fact of his apology, without forgiveness.

"It was funny, you know. The puppeteers, the cowards of the universe, having the gall to breed humans and kzinti like two strains of cattle! They must have known what a chance they were taking." He knew he was talking too much, but he had to explain, to justify himself. "And then look what they did with it! Breeding for a reasonable kzin, that wasn't a bad idea. I know a little about the Man-Kzin wars; I know the kzinti used to be pretty fierce. Speaker's ancestors would have blasted Zignamuclickclick down to the Ring floor. Speaker stopped.

"But breeding humans for luck --"

"You think they made a mistake, making me what I am."

"Tanjit, do you think I'm trying to insult you? I'm trying to say that it's a funny idea. For puppeteers to do it is even funnier. So I laughed."

"Do you expect me to giggle?"

"That'd be going too far."

"All right."

She didn't hate him for laughing. She wanted comfort, not revenge. There was comfort in the heat of the coveralls, and comfort in the heat of two bodies pressed together.

Louis began to stroke Teeld's back. It made her relax.

"I'd like to get the expedition back together again," he said presently. He felt her stiffen. "You don't like that idea."

"No."

"Nessus?"

"I hate him. I hate him! He bred my ancestors likelike beasts!" She relaxed minutely. "But Speaker would blast him out of the sky if he tried to come back. So it's all right."

"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 couln'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 loveplay with their fingers.

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