Ringworld

Speaker's flycycle, easily recognizable, lay on its side two tiers up. Speaker was there — and he wasn't under the 'cycle. He must have been under it before the 'cycle fell on its side, but even then the balloons would have protected him to some extent.

Louis reached him by crawling.

The kzin was alive and breathing, but unconscious. The weight of the flycycle had not broken his neck, possibly because he didn't really have a neck. Louis clawed the flashlight-laser from his belt, used its green needle beam to free Speaker from his balloons.

Now what?

Louis remembered that he was dying of thirst.

His head seemed to have stopped spi

The cell block was all concentric circular ledges, each ledge the roof of a ring of cell blocks. Speaker had grounded on the fourth ring from the center.

Louis found one 'cycle with tattered crash-balloon fabric draped across it. There was another, one tier down and across the central pit, equipped with a human-style saddle. The third — Nessus's 'cycle — had grounded a tier below Speakees.

Louis went down to it. His feet jarred him as they hit the steps. His muscles were too tired to absorb the shock.

He shook his head at the sight of the dashboard. Nobody would be stealing Nessus's flycycle! The controls were incredibly cryptic. But he did identify the water spout.

The water was warm, tasteless as distilled water, and utterly delicious.

When Louis had quenched his thirst, he tried a brick from the kitchen slot. It tasted very strange. Louis decided not to eat it yet. There might be additives deadly to human metabolism. Nessus would know.

He carried water to Speaker in his shoe, the first container he thought of. He dribbled it into the kzin's mouth, and the kzin swallowed it in his sleep, and smiled. Louis went back for another load, and ran out of stamina before he could reach the puppeteer's flycycle.

So he curled up on the flat construction plastic and closed his eyes.

Safe. He was safe.

He should have been asleep instantly, the way he felt. But something nagged at him. Abused muscles, cramps in hands and thighs, the fear of falling that would not let him go even now … and something more …

He sat up. "No justice," he mumbled.

Speaker?

The kzin was sleeping curled around himself, with his ears tight to his head and his Slaver weapon hugged tight to his belly so that only the double snout showed. His breathing was regular, but very fast. Was that good?

Nessus would know. Meanwhile, let him sleep.

"No justice," Louis repeated under his breath.

He was alone and lonely, without the advantage of being on sabbatical. He was responsible for the well-being of others. His own life and health depended on how well Nessus gulled the crazy, half-bald woman who was keeping them prisoner. Small wonder if he couldn't sleep.

Still …

His eyes found it and locked. His own flycycle.

His own flycycle with the broken crash balloons trailing, and Nessus's flycycle here beside him, and Speaker's flycycle beside Speaker, and the flycycle with the human-shape saddle and no crash balloons. Four flycycles.

Frantic for water, he'd missed the implications the first time round. Now … Teela's flycycle. It must have been behind one of the bigger vehicles. And no crash balloons. No crash balloons.

She must have fallen off when the 'cycle turned over.

Or been torn away when the sonic fold failed at Mach 2.

What was it Nessus had said? Her luck is clearly undependable. And Speaker: It her luck had failed her just once, she would be dead.

She was dead. She must be.

I came with you, because I love you.

"Bad luck," said Louis Wu. "Bad luck you met me."

He curled up on the concrete and slept.

Much later, he woke with a jolt to find Speaker-To-Animals looking down into his face. The lurid orange fur mask made his eyes doubly prominent, and there was a wistful look … Speaker asked, "Can you eat the leaf-eater's food?"

"I'm afraid to try," said Louis. The vast, echoing cavity of his belly suddenly made all his other problems trivial, except one.

"I think that of the three of us, I alone have no food supply," said the kzin.

That wistful look the hair stood up on Louis's neck. In a steady voice, he said, "You know you have a food supply. The question is, will you use it?"

"Certainly not, Louis. If honor requires me to starve within reach of meat, then I will starve."

"Good." Louis turned over and pretended to go back to sleep.

And when he woke up, some hours later, he knew that he had been asleep. His hindbrain, he decided, must trust Speaker's word completely. If the kzin said he would starve, he would starve.

His bladder was full, and there was a stink in his nostrils, and his muscles ached obtrusively. The pit solved one problem, and the puppeteer's flycycle supplied water to wash the muck off his sleeve. Then Louis limped down a flight of steps to reach his own flycycle and first-aid kit.

But the kit was not a simple box of medicines; it mixed dosages on command, and made its own diagnoses. A complex machine; and the zap guns had burnt it out.

The light was fading.

Cells with trap doors over them, and small transparent panes around the trap doors. Louis dropped to his belly to look into a cell. Bed, peculiar-looking toilet, and — daylight commg through a picture window.

"Speaker!" Louis called.

They used the disintegrator to break in. The picture window was big and rectangular, a strange luxury for a prison cell. The glass was gone but for a few sharp crystal teeth around the edges.

Windows to taunt the prisoner, to show him freedom?

The window faced to port. It was half-daylight; the shadow of the terminator was coming in from spinward like a black curtain. Ahead was the harbor: cubes that must be warehouses, rotting docks, cranes of elegantly simplistic design, and one tremendous ground-effect ship in drydock. All rust-red skeletons.

To left and right stretched mile after mile of twisting shore. A stretch of beach, then a line of docks, then a stretch of beach … The scheme must have been built into the shore itself, a stretch of shallow beach like Waikiki, then deep water meeting steep shore perfect for a harbor, then more shallow beach.

Beyond, the ocean. It seemed to go on forever, until it faded in the infinity-horizon. Try to look across the Atlantic …

Dusk came on like a curtain, right to left. The surviving lights of the Civic Center brightened, while city and dock and ocean merged in darkness. To antispinward the golden light of day still glowed.

And Speaker had copped the cell's oval bed.

Louis smiled. He looked so peaceful, the kzin warrior. Sleeping away his injuries, was he? The burns must have weakened him. Or was he trying to sleep away his growing hunger?

Louis left him there.

In the near-darkness of the prison he found Nessus's 'cycle. His hunger was such that he choked down a food brick intended for a puppeteer gullet, ignoring the peculiar taste. The gloom had begun to bother him, so he turned on the headlamps on the puppeteer's flycycle, then hunted down the other flycycles and turned them on too. By the time he finished the place was pretty bright, and all the shadows were intricate and strange.

What was taking Nessus so long?

There wasn't much entertainment in the ancient floating prison. You could spend just so much time sleeping, and Louis had used his quota. You could spend just so much time wondering what the tanj the puppeteer was doing up there, before you began to wonder if he was selling you out.

After all, Nessus wasn't just an alien. He was a Pierson's puppeteer, with a record a mile long for manipulating humans to his own ends. If he could reach an understanding with a (presumed) Ringworld Engineer, he might abandon Louis and Speaker right now, no hesitation. A puppeteer might have no reason not to.