Ringworld

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 hed 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 co

"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 fu

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 ca

"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."