Ringworld

"Yeah."

"He started trying the motors in all the old cars. He said that the drivers used to turn off their motors when they were caught by the traffic police field, so that their motors wouldn't be burned out."

Louis and Speaker and Nessus looked at each other. Half those floating cars may have been still active!

"We found a car that worked," said Teela. "We were chasing you, but we must have missed you in the dark. But luckily the traffic police field caught us for speeding."

"Luckily. I think I heard the sonic boom last night, but I'm not sure," said Louis.

Seeker had stopped talking. He rested comfortably against the wall of the governor's bedroom, gazing at Speaker-To-Animals with a half-smile. Speaker held his eye. Louis had the impression that they were each wondering what it would be like to fight the other.

But Prill looked out the bay window, and on her face was dread. When the wind's howl became a shriek, she shuddered.

Perhaps she had seen formations like the Eye storm. Small asteroid punctures, quickly repaired, always occurring somewhere else; but always photographed for the newstapes or their Ringworld equivalent. Always a thing of fear, the Eye storm. Breathing-air roaring away into interstellar space. A hurricane on its side, with a drain at its bottom as final as the drain in a bathtub, if you should happen to be caught in its suction.

The wind howled momentarily louder. Teela's brows puckered with concern. "I hope the building's massive enough," she said.

Louis was astonished. How she's changed! But the Eye storm had threatened her directly, the last time through …

"I need your help," she said. "I want Seeker, you know."

"Yeah."

"He wants me, too, but he's got a weird sense of honor. I tried to tell him about you, Louis, when I had to get him to the floating building. He got very uncomfortable and stopped sleeping with me. He thinks you own me, Louis."

"Slavery?"

"Slavery for women, I think. You'll tell him you don't own me, won't you?"

Louis felt pain in his throat. "It might save explanations if I just sold you to him. If that's what you want."

"You're right. And it is. I want to travel around the Ringworld with him. I love him, Louis."

"Sure you do. You were made for each other," said Louis Wu. "It was fated that you should meet. The hundred billion couples who have felt exactly that way about each other -"

She was looking at him very doubtfully. "You're not being … sarcastic, are you, Louis?"

"A month ago you didn't know sarcasm from a glass transistor. No, the weird thing is, I'm not being sarcastic. The hundred billion couples don't matter, because they weren't part of a there-ain't-no-justice puppeteer's pla

Suddenly he had everybody's complete attention. Even Seeker stared at him to find out what everyone was looking at.

But Louis had eyes only for Teela Brown.

"We crashed on the Ringworld," he said gently, "because the Ringworld is your ideal environment. You needed to learn things you couldn't learn on Earth, or anywhere in known space, apparently. Maybe there were other reasons — a better boosterspice, for instance, and more room to breathe — but the major reason you're here is to learn."

"To learn what?"

"Pain, apparently. Fear. Loss. You're a different woman since you came here. Before, you were a land of … abstraction. Have you ever stubbed your toe?"

"What a fu

"Have you ever burned your foot?"

She glared at him. She remembered.

"The Liar crashed to bring you here. We traveled a couple of hundred thousand miles to bring you to Seeker. Your flycycle carried you precisely over him, and ran into the traffic police field at just that point, because Seeker is the man you were born to love."

Teela smiled at this, but Louis did not smile back. He said, "Your luck required that you have time to get to know him. Therefore Speaker-To-Animals, and I hung head down -"

"Louis!"

"- over ninety feet of empty space for something like twenty hours. But there's worse."

The kzin rumbled, "It depends on your viewpoint."

Louis ignored him. "Teela, you fell in love with me because it gave you a motive to join the expedition to the Ringworld. You no longer love me because you don't need to. You're here. And I loved you for the same reason, because the luck of Teela Brown used me as a puppet -

"But the real puppet is you. You'll dance to the strings of your own luck for the rest of your life. Finagle knows if you've got free will. You'll have trouble enough using it."

Teela was very pale, and her shoulders were very straight and rigid. If she wasn't crying, it was by an obvious exercise of self-control. She had not had that self-control before.

As for Seeker, he knelt watching the two of them, and he ran his thumb along the edge of the black iron sword. He could hardly be unaware that Teela was being made unhappy. He must still think she belonged to Louis Wu.

And Louis turned to the puppeteer. He was not surprised that Nessus had curled into a ball, tucked his heads into his belly, and withdrawn from the universe.

Louis took the puppeteer by the ankle of his hind leg. He found that he could roll the puppeteer onto his back with little trouble. Nessus weighed not much more than Louis Wn.

And he didn't like it. The ankle trembled in Louis's hand.

"You caused all this," said Louis Wu, "with your monstrous egotism. That egotism bothers me almost as much as the monstrous mistake you made. How you could be so powerful, and so determined, and so stupid, is beyond me. Do you realize yet, that everything that's happened to us here has been a side effect of Teela's luck?"

The ball that was Nessus contracted tighter. Seeker watched in fascination.

"Then you can go home to the puppeteer worlds and tell them that mucking with human breeding habits is a chancy business. Tell them that enough Teela Browns could make a hash of all the laws of probability. Even basic physics is nothing more than probability at the atomic level. Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.

"Tell them that after I get you home," said Louis Wu. "But meanwhile, roll out of there, now. I need the shadow square wire, and you've got to find it for me. We're almost past the Eye storm. Come out of there, Nessus -"

The puppeteer unrolled and stood up. "You shame me, Louis," he began.

"You dare say that here?"

The puppeteer was silent. Presently he turned to the bay window and looked out at the storm.

CHAPTER 23 — The God Gambit

For the natives who worshipped Heaven, there were now two towers in the sky.

As before, the square of the altar swarmed with faces like golden dandelions. "We came on another holy day," said Louis. He tried to find the shaven choir leader, but couldn't.

Nessus was looking wistfully across at the tower called Heaven. The bridge room of the Improbable was level with the castles map room. "Once I had not the opportunity to explore this place. Now I ca

Speaker suggested, "We can break in with the disintegrator tool and lower you by rope or ladder."

"Again this chance must slip by me."

"It is not as dangerous as many things you have done here."

"But when I took risks here, I sought knowledge. Now I have as much knowledge of the Ringworld as my world needs. If I risk my life now it will be to return home with that knowledge. Louis, there is your shadow square wire."

Louis nodded soberly.

Across the spinward section of the city lay a cloud of black smoke. By the way it hugged itself tight against the cityscape, it must have been both dense and heavy. One windowed obelisque near the center poked through the mass. The rest was smothered.