made his eyes doubly prominent, and there was a wistful look…Speaker asked, “Can you eat the leaf-eater’s food?”
“I’m afraid to try,” said Louis. The vast, echoing cavity of his belly suddenly made all his other problems trivial, except one.
“I think that of the three of us, I alone have no food supply,” said the kzin.
That wistful look…the hair stood up on Louis’s neck. In a steady voice, he said, “You know you have a food supply. The question is, will you use it?”
“Certainly not, Louis. If honor requires me to starve within reach of meat, then I will starve.”
“Good.” Louis turned over and pretended to go back to sleep.
And when he woke up, some hours later, he knew that he had been asleep. His hindbrain, he decided, must trust Speaker’s word completely. If the kzin said he would starve, he would starve.
His bladder was full, and there was a stink in his nostrils, and his muscles ached obtrusively. The pit solved one problem, and the puppeteer’s flycycle supplied water to wash the muck off his sleeve. Then Louis limped down a flight of steps to reach his own flycycle and first-aid kit.
But the kit was not a simple box of medicines; it mixed dosages on command, and made its own diagnoses. A complex machine; and the zap guns had burnt it out.
The light was fading.
Cells with trap doors over them, and small transparent panes around the trap doors. Louis dropped to his belly to look into a cell. Bed, peculiar-looking toilet, and—daylight coming through a picture window.
“Speaker!” Louis called.
They used the disintegrator to break in. The picture window was big and rectangular, a strange luxury for a prison cell. The glass was gone but for a few sharp crystal teeth around the edges.
Windows to taunt the prisoner, to show him freedom?
The window faced to port. It was half-daylight; the shadow of the terminator was coming in from spinward like a black curtain. Ahead was the harbor: cubes that must be warehouses, rotting docks, cranes of elegantly simplistic design, and one tremendous ground-effect ship in drydock. All rust-red skeletons.
To left and right stretched mile after mile of twisting shore. A stretch of beach, then a line of docks, then a stretch of beach…The scheme must have been built into the shore itself, a stretch of shallow beach like Waikiki, then deep water meeting steep shore perfect for a harbor, then more shallow beach.
Beyond, the ocean. It seemed to go on forever, until it faded in the infinity-horizon. Try to look across the Atlantic…
Dusk came on like a curtain, right to left. The surviving lights of the Civic Center brightened, while city and dock and ocean merged in darkness. To antispinward the golden light of day still glowed.
And Speaker had copped the cell’s oval bed.
Louis smiled. He looked so peaceful, the kzin warrior. Sleeping away his injuries, was he? The burns must have weakened him. Or was he trying to sleep away his growing hunger?
Louis left him there.
In the near-darkness of the prison he found Nessus’s ’cycle. His hunger was such that he choked down a food brick intended for a puppeteer gullet, ignoring the peculiar taste. The gloom had begun to bother him, so he turned on the headlamps on the puppeteer’s flycycle, then hunted down the other flycycles and turned them on too. By the time he finished the place was pretty bright, and all the shadows were intricate and strange.
What was taking Nessus so long?
There wasn’t much entertainment in the ancient floating prison. You could spend just so much time sleeping, and Louis had used his quota. You could spend just so much time wondering what the tanj the puppeteer was doing up there, before you began to wonder if he was selling you out.
After all, Nessus wasn’t just an alien. He was a Pierson’s puppeteer, with a record a mile long for manipulating humans to his own ends. If he could reach an understanding with a (presumed) Ringworld Engineer, he might abandon Louis and Speaker right now, no hesitation. A puppeteer might have no reason not to.
And there were two good reasons why he should.
Speaker-To-Animals would almost certainly make some last-ditch attempt to take the Long Shot from Louis Wu, to reserve the second quantum hyperdrive for kzinti alone. A puppeteer could get hurt in the resulting battle. Safer to leave Speaker now—and to leave Louis Wu, because he probably wouldn’t stand for such a betrayal.
Besides, they knew too much. With Teela dead, only Speaker and Louis knew