Ringworld

Louis was resting, not sleeping. He lay on his back on the big oval bed. His eyes were open, staring through the bubble window in the ceiling.

A glow of solar corona showed over the edge of the shadow square. Dawn was not far off ; but still the Arch was blue and bright in a black sky.

"I must be out of my mind," said Louis Wu.

And, "What else can we do?"

The bedroom had probably been part of the governor's suite. Now it was a control room. He and Nessus had mounted the flycycle in the walk-in closet, poured plastic over and around it, then — with Prill's help — run a current through the plastic. The closet had been just the right size.

The bed smelled of age. It crinkled when he moved.

"Fist-of-God," Louis Wu said into the dark. "I saw it. A thousand miles high. It doesn't make sense they'd build a mountain that high, not when …" He let it trail off.

And suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, shouting, "Shadow square wire!"

A shadow entered the bedroom.

Louis froze. The entrance was dark. Yet, by its fluid motion and by the distribution of subtle shadings of curvature, a naked woman was walking toward him.

Hallucination? The ghost of Teela Brown? She had reached him before he could decide. Totally self-confident, she sat beside him on the bed. She reached out and touched his face and ran her fingertips down his cheek.

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 ecstacy.

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 pla

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.