Ringworld

He had kaown full well what he was doing to Prill. Balanced over a drop of ninety feet, he had been eager enough to see Nessus use the tasp on Prill. He had seen wireheads; he knew what it did to them.

Conditioned! Like an experimental pet! And she knew! Last night had been her last valiant attempt to break loose from the power of the tasp.

Now Louis had felt what she was fighting.

"I shouldn't have done it," said Louis Wu. "I take it back." Even in black despair, that was fu

It was coincidence that he went down the stairwell instead of up. Or his hindbrain may have remembered a slam! that his forebrain had hardly noticed.

The wind roared around him, hurling rain from every direction, as he reached the platform. It took some of his attention outside himself. He was losing the grief that came with the loss of the tasp.

Once Louis Wu had sworn to live forever.

Now, much later, he knew that obligations went with such a decision.

"Got to cure her," he said. "How? No physical withdrawal symptoms … but that won't help her if she decides to walk out of a broken window. How do I cure myself?" For some minor part of him still cried for the tasp, and would never stop.

The addiction was nothing more than a below-threshold memory. Strand her somewhere with her supply of youth drug, and the memory would fade …

"Tanj. We need her." She knew too much about the engine room of the Improbable. She couldn't be spared.

He'd just have to get Nessus to stop using the tasp. Watch her for awhile. She'd be awfully depressed at first …

Abruptly Louis's mind registered what his eyes had been seeing for some time.

The car was twenty feet below the observation platform. A cleanly-designed maroon dart with narrow slits for windows, it hovered without power in the roaring wind, caught in an electromagnetic trap nobody had remembered to turn off.

Louis looked once, hard, to be sure that there was a face behind the windscreen. Then he ran upstairs shouting for Prill.

He didn't know the words. But he took her by the elbow and pulled her downstairs and showed her. She nodded and went back up to use the police trap adjustments.

The maroon dart moved tight up against the edge of the platform. The first occupant crawled out, using both hands to hang on, for the wind was howling like a fiend.

It was Teela Brown. Louis felt little surprise.

And the second occupant was so blatantly type-cast that he burst out laughing. Teela looked surprised and hurt.

They were passing the Eye storm. The wind roared up through the stairwell that led to the observation platform. It whistled throught the corridors of the first floor, and howled through broken windows higher up. The halls ran with rain.

Teela and her escort and the crew of the Improbable sat about Louis's bedroom, the bridge. Teela's brawny escort talked gravely with Prill in one corner; though Prill kept a wary eye on Speaker-To-Animals and another on the bay window. But the others surrounded Teela as she told her tale.

The police device had blown most of the machinery in Teela's flycycle. The locator, the intercom, the sonic fold, and the kitchen all burned out at once.

Teela was still alive because the sonic fold had had a built-in standing-wave characteristic. She had felt the sudden wind and had hit the retrofield immediately, before the Mach 2 wind could tear her head off. In seconds she had dropped below the municipal upper speed limit. The trap field had been about to blow her drive; it refrained. The wind was tolerable by the time it broke through the stabilizing effect of the sonic fold.

But Teela was nothing like stable. She had brushed death too closely in the Eye storm. This second attack had followed too quickly. She guided the flycycle down, searching in the dark for a place to land.

There was a tiled mall surrounded by shops. It had lights: oval doors that glowed bright orange. The 'cycle landed hard, but by then she didn't care. She was down.

She was dismounting when the vehicle rose again. The motion threw her head over heels. She rose to her hands and knees, shaking her head. When she looked up the flycycle was a dwindling dumbbell shape.

Teela began to cry.

"You must have broken a parking law," said Louis.

"I didn't care why it happened. I felt -" She didn't have the words, but she tried anyway. "I wanted to tell someone I was lost. But there wasn't anyone. So I sat down on one of the stone benches and cried.

"I cried for hours. I was afraid to move away, because I knew you'd be coming for me. Then — he came." Teela nodded at her escort. "He was surprised to find me there. He asked me something — I couldn't understand. But he tried to comfort me. I was glad he was there, even if he couldn't do anything."

Louis nodded. Teela would trust anybody. She would inevitably seek help or comfort from the first stranger to come along. And she would be perfectly safe in doing so.

Her escort was unusual.

He was a hero. You could tell. You didn't need to see him fighting dragons. You need only see the muscles, the height, the black metal sword. The strong features, unca

He was clean-shaven. No, that was improbable. More likely he was half Engineer. His hair was long and ash blond and not too clean, and the hairline shaped a noble brow. Around his waist was a kind of kirtle, the skin of some animal.

"He fed me," Teela said. "He took care of me. Four men tried to jump us yesterday, and he fought them off with just his sword! And he's learned a lot of Interworld in just a couple of days."

"Has he?"

"He's had a lot of practice with languages."

"This was the most unkindest cut of all."

"What?"

"Never mind. Go on."

"He's old, Louis. He got a massive dose of something like boosterspice, long ago. He says he took it from an evil magician. He's so old that his grandparents remembered the Fall of the Cities.

"Do you know what he's doing?"

Her smile became impish. "He's on a kind of quest. Long ago he took an oath that he would walk to the base of the Arch. He's doing that. He's been doing it for hundreds of years."

"The base of the Arch?"

Teela nodded. She was smiling very prettily, and she obviously appreciated the joke, but in her eyes there was something more.

Louis had seen love in Teela's eyes, but never tenderness.

"You're proud of him for it! You little idiot, don't you know there isn't any Arch?"

"I know that, Louis."

"Then why don't you tell him?"

"If you tell him, I'll hate you. Hes spent too much of his life doing this. And he does good. He knows a few simple skills, and he carries them around the Ringworld as he travels to spinward."

"How much information can he carry? He can't be too intelligent."

"No, he's not." From the way she said it, it didn't matter. "But if I travel with him I can teach a great many people a great deal."

"I knew that was coming," said Louis. But it still hurt.

Did she know that it hurt? She wouldn't look at him. "We'd been in the mall a day or so before I realized that you'd follow my flycycle, not me. He'd told me about Hal- Hal- about the goddess and the floating tower that trapped cars. So we went there.

"We stayed near the altar, waiting to spot your flycycles. Then the building started to fall apart. Afterward, Seeker -"

"Seeker?"

"He calls himself that. When someone asks him why, he can explain that he's on his way to the base of the Arch, and tell them about his adventures on the way … you see?"