thousand years of practice,” said Louis Wu.
“It is not impossible. Prill’s civilization had a compound superior to boosterspice in its ability to sustain life. Today the compound is worth whatever the owner cares to ask. One charge is equivalent to some fifty years of youth.”
“Do you happen to know how many charges she’s taken?”
“No, Louis. But I know that she walked here.”
They had reached the stairway leading down to the conical cell block. The bird trailed behind them, bouncing.
“Walked here from where?”
“From the rim wall.”
“Two hundred thousand miles?”
“Nearly that.”
“Tell me all of it. What happened to them after they reached the right side of the rim wall?”
“I will ask. I do not know it all.” And the puppeteer began to question Prill. In bits and pieces the story emerged:
They were taken for gods by the first group of savages they met, and by everyone thereafter, with one general exception.
Godhood solved one problem neatly. The crewmen whose brains had been damaged by backlash from the half-repaired cziltang brone were left to the care of various villages. As resident gods they would be well treated; and as idiots they would be relatively harmless as gods.
The remainder of the Pioneer’s crew split up. Nine, including Prill, went to antispinward. Prill’s home city was in that direction. Both groups planned to travel along the rim wall, looking for civilization. Both parties swore to send help if they found any.
They were taken for gods by all but the other gods. The Fall of the Cities had left a few survivors. Some were mad. All took the life-extending compound if they could get it. All were looking for enclaves of civilization. None had thought to build his own.
As the Pioneer’s crew moved to antispinward, other survivors joined them. They became a respectable pantheon.
In every city they found the shattered towers. These towers had been set floating after the settling of the Ringworld, but thousands of years before the perfection of the youth drug. The youth drug had made later generations cautious. For the most part those who could afford it simply stayed away from the floaters, unless they were elected officials. Then they would install safety devices, or power generators.
A few of the floaters still floated. But most had smashed down into the centers of cities, all in the same instant, when the last power receiver flared and died.
Once the traveling pantheon found a partially recivilized city, inhabited only on the outskirts. The God Gambit would not serve them here. They traded a fortune in the youth drug for a working, self-powered bus.
It did not happen again until much later. By then they had come too far. The spirit had gone out of them, and the bus had broken down. In a half-smashed city, among other survivors of the Fall of the Cities, most of the pantheon simply stopped moving.
But Prill had a map. The city of her birth was directly to starboard. She persuaded a man to join her, and they started walking.
They traded on their godhoods. Eventually they tired of one another, and Prill went on alone. Where her godhood was not enough, she traded small quantities of the youth drug, if she had to. Otherwise—
“There was another way in which she could maintain power over people. She has tried to explain it to me, but I do not understand.”
“I think I do,” said Louis. “She could get away with it, too. She’s got her own equivalent of a tasp.”
She must have been quite mad by the time she reached her home city. She took up residence in the grounded police station. She spent hundreds of hours learning how to work the machinery. One of the first things she accomplished was to get it airborne; for the self-powered tower had been landed as a safety precaution after the Fall of the Cities. Subsequently she must have come close enough to dropping the tower and killing herself.
“There was a system for trapping drivers who broke the traffic laws,” Nessus finished. “She turned it on. She hopes to capture someone like herself, a survivor from the Fall of the Cities. She reasons that if he is flying a car, he must be civilized.”
“Then why does she want him trapped and helpless in that sea of rusted metal?”
“Just in case, Louis. It is a mark of her returning sanity.”
Louis frowned into the cell block below. They had lowered the bird’s carcass on a ruined metal car, and Speaker had taken possession. “We can lighten this building,” said