to be right side up,” Speaker moaned.
The puppeteer did something to his dashboard. A miracle happened: his flycycle turned over.
Louis said one word. “How?”
“I turned everything off after I knew that the bandit signal had my controls. If the lifting field had not caught me, I could have turned on my motors before I struck pavement. Now,” the puppeteer said briskly, “the next step should be easy. When the girl appears, act friendly. Louis, you may attempt to have sex with her if you think you might succeed. Speaker, Louis is to be our master; we are to be his servitors. The woman may be xenophobic; it would lull her to believe that a human being commands these aliens.”
Louis actually laughed. Somehow the nightmarish half-sleep had rested him. “I doubt she’ll be feeling friendly, let alone seductive. You didn’t see her. She’s as cold as the black caves of Pluto, at least where I’m concerned, and I can’t really blame her.” She had watched him lose his lunch across his sleeve—generally an unromantic sight.
The puppeteer said, “She will be feeling happy whenever she looks at us. She will cease to feel happy when she tries to leave us. If she brings one of us closer to her, her joy will increase—”
“Tanjit, yes!” cried Louis.
“You see? Good. In addition, I have been practicing the Ringworld language. I believe my pronunciation is correct, and my grammar. If I only knew what more of the words meant…”
Speaker had stopped complaining long ago. Inverted above a lethal drop, with burns all over him and one hand charred to the bone, he had raged at Louis and Nessus for being unable to help him. But he had been quiet for hours now.
In the dim quiet, Louis dozed.
In his sleep he heard bells, and woke.
She tinkled as she came down the steps. There were bells on her moccasins. Her garment was different too, a top-shaped, high-necked dress fitted with half a dozen big bulging pockets. Her long black hair fell forward over one shoulder.
The serene dignity in her face had not changed.
She sat down with her feet over the edge of the platform, and she watched Louis Wu. She did not shift position; neither did Louis. For several minutes they held each other’s eyes.
Then she reached into one of the big pockets and produced something fist-sized and orange. She tossed it toward Louis, aiming it so that it would go past him, a few inches beyond his reach.
He recognized it as it went by him. A knobby, juicy fruit he had found on a bush two days ago. He had dropped several into the intake hopper of his kitchen, without tasting them.
The fruit splattered red across the roof of a cell. Suddenly Louis’s mouth was trying to water, and he was taken with a raging thirst.
She tossed him another. It came closer this time. He could have touched it if he had tried, but he would also have overturned the ’cycle. And she knew it.
Her third shot tapped his shoulder. He clung to his two fistfuls of balloon and thought black thoughts.
Then Nessus’s flycycle drifted into view.
And she smiled.
The puppeteer had been floating behind the truck-sized derelict. Upside down again, he drifted obliquely toward the viewing platform as if wafted there by a stray induced current, and, as he passed Louis, he asked, “Can you seduce her?”
Louis snarled. Then, realizing that the puppeteer really wasn’t mocking him, he said, “I think she thinks I’m an animal. Forget it.”
“Then we need different tactics.”
Louis rubbed his forehead against the cool metal. He had seldom felt so miserable. “You’re in charge,” he said. “She won’t buy me as an equal, but she might buy you. She won’t see you as competition; you’re too alien.”
The puppeteer had drifted past him. Now he said something in what sounded to Louis like the language of the shaven choir-leading priest: the holy language of the Engineers.
The girl did not respond. But…she wasn’t smiling exactly, but the corners of her mouth did seem to turn up slightly, and there was more animation in her eyes.
Nessus must be using low power. Very low power.
He spoke again, and this time she answered. Her voice was cool and musical, and if she sounded imperious to Louis Wu, he was predisposed to hear that quality.
The puppeteer’s voice became identical to the girl’s.
What developed then was a language lesson.
To Louis Wu, uneasily balanced above a lethal drop, it was bound to be dull. He picked up a word here