Ringworld

A man dressed in a green blanket charged at Louis Wu, screaming, waving a heavy hammer, doing his best to look dangerous. A golden dandelion with eyes … Louis slashed green laser light across him, and the man kep coming.

Louis, terrified, stood fast and held the beam centered. The man was swinging at Louis's head when a spot on his robe charred, darkened, then flashed green flame. He fell skidding, drilled through the heart.

Clothing the color of your light-sword can be as bad as reflecting armor. Finagle grant that there be no more of those! Louis touched green light to the back of a man's neck …

A native blocked Nessus' flight path! He must have had courage to attack so weird a monster. Louis couldn't get a clear shot, but the man died anyway, for Nessus spun and kicked and finished the turn and ran on. Then -

Louis saw it happen. The puppeteer charged into an intersection, one head held high, one low. The high head was suddenly loose and rolling, bouncing. Nessus stopped, turned, then stood still.

His neck ended in a flat stump, and the stump was pumping blood as red as Louis' own.

Nessus wailed, a high, mournful sound.

The natives had trapped him with shadow square wire.

Louis was two hundred years old. He had lost friends before this. He continued to fight, his light-sword following his eyes almost by reflex. Poor Nessus. But it could be me next …

The natives had fallen back. Their losses must hav been terrifying from their own viewpoint.

Teela stared at the dying puppeteer, her eyes very big, her knuckles pressed against her teeth. Speaker and Seeker were edging back toward the Improbable -

Wait a minute. He's got a spare!

Louis ran at the puppeteer. As he passed Speaker, the kzin snatched the flashlight-laser from him. Louis ducked to avoid the wire trap, stayed low, and used a shoulder block to knock Nessus on his side. It had seemed that the puppeteer was about to start panic ru

Louis pi

He wasn't wearing a belt.

But he had to have a belt!

And Teela handed him her scarf!

Louis snatched it, looped it, dropped it over the puppeteer's severed neck. Nessus had been staring in horror at the stump, at the blood pumping from the single carotid artery. Now he raised his eye to Louis's face; and the eye closed, and he fainted.

Louis pulled the knot tight. Teela's scarf constricted and closed the single artery, two major veins, the larynx, the gullet, everything.

You tied a tourniquet around his neck, doctor? But the blood had stooped.

Louis bent and lifted the puppeteer in a fireman's carry, turned, and ran into the shadow of the broken police building. Seeker ran ahead of him, covering him, his black sword's point tracing little circles as he sought an enemy. Armed natives watched but did not challenge them.

Teela followed Louis. Speaker-To-Animals came last, his flashlight-laser stabbing green lines where men might be hiding. At the ramp the kzin stopped, waited until Teela was safely up the ramp, then — Louis glimpsed him moving away.

But why did he do that?

No time to find out. Louis went up the stairs. The puppeteer became incredibly heavy before Louis reached the bridge. He dropped Nessus beside the buried flycycle, reached for the first aid kit, rubbed the diagnostic patch onto the puppeteer's neck below the tourniquet. The puppeteer's first aid kit was still attached to the 'cycle by an umbilicus, and Louis rightly surmised that it was more complex than his own.

Presently the kitchen controls changed settings all by themselves. A few seconds later, a line snaked out of the dashboard and touched the puppeteer's neck, hunted over the skin, found a spot and sank in.

Louis shuddered. But — intravenous feeding. Nessus must be still alive.

The Improbable was aloft, though he had not felt the takeoff. Speaker was sitting on the bottom step above the landing ramp, looking down at the Heaven tower. He was cradling something carefully in both hands.

He asked, "Is the puppeteer dead?"

"No. He's lost a lot of blood." Louis sank down beside the kzin. He was bone-weary and terribly depressed. "Do puppeteers go into shock?"

"How would I know that? Shock itself is an odd mechanism. We needed centuries of study to know why you humans died so easily under torture." The kzin was clearly concentrating on something else. But he asked, "Was it the luck of Teela Brown?"

"I think so," said Louis.

"Why? How can the puppeteer's injury help Teela?"

"You'd have to see her through my eyes," said Louis. "She was very one-sided when I first met her. Like, well …"

The phrase he'd used sparked a memory, and he said, "There was a girl in a story. The hero was middle-aged and very cynical, and he went looking for her because of the myth about her.

"And when he found her he still wasn't sure that the myth was true. Not until she turned her back. Then he saw that from behind she was empty: she was the mask of a girl, a flexible mask for the whole front of a girl instead of just for a face. She couldn't be hurt, Speaker. That was what this man wanted. The women in his life kept getting hurt, and he kept thinking it was him, and finally he couldn't stand it any more."

"I understand none of this, Louis."

"Teela was like the mask of a girl when she came here. She'd never been hurt. Her personality wasn't human."

"Why is that bad?"

"Because she was designed human, before Nessus made her something else. Tanj him! Do you see what he did? He created god in his own image, his own idealized image, and he got Teela Brown.

"She's just what any puppeteer would give his soul to be. She can't be injured. She can't even be uncomfortable, unless it's for her own benefit.

"That's why she came here. The Ringworld is a lucky place for her to be, because it gives her the range of experience to become fully human. I doubt the Birthright Lotteries produced many like her. They'd have had the same luck. They'd have been aboard the Liar, except that Teela was luckier than any of them.

"Still … there must be scores of Teela Browns left on Earth! The future is going to look somewhat peculiar when they start to learn their power. The rest of us will have to learn to get out of the way quick."

Speaker asked, "What of the leaf-eater's head?"

"She can't sympathize with someone else's pain," said Louis. "Maybe she needed to see a good friend hurt. Teela's luck wouldn't care what that cost Nessus.

"Do you know where I got the tourniquet? Teela saw what I needed and found something that would serve. It's probably the first time in her life she's functioned right in an emergency."

"Why would she need to do so? Her luck should protect her from emergencies."

"She's never known that she can function in an emergency. She's never had that much reason for self-confidence. It's never been true before, either."

"Truly, I do not understand."

"Finding your limits is a part of growing up. Teela couldn't grow up, couldn't become an adult, without facing some kind of physical emergency."

"It must be a very human thing," said Speaker.

Louis interpreted the comment as an admission of total confusion. He did not attempt to answer.

The kzin added, "I wondered if we should have parked the Improbable higher than the tower the natives call Heaven. They may have considered it blasphemy. But such considerations seem futile, while the luck of Teela Brown governs events."

Louis still hadn't seen what the kzin was holding so protectively. "Did you go back for the head? If you did, you wasted your time. We can't possibly freeze it cold enough, soon enough."

"No, Louis." Speaker produced a fist-sized thing the shape of a child's top. "Do not touch it. You might lose fingers."