at all. If you have a goal, I am content to follow you. But if it may involve fighting, I should know something about it.”
“Um.”
“I should know something about it regardless, in order to decide whether it will involve fighting.”
“Well put.”
Speaker waited.
“We’re going after the shadow square wire,” said Louis. “Remember the wire we ran into after the meteor defenses wrecked us? Later it started falling over the city of the floating tower, loop after loop, endlessly. There should be at least tens of thousands of miles of it, more than we could possibly need for what I’ve got in mind.”
“What do you have in mind, Louis?”
“Getting hold of the shadow square wire. Odds are the natives will just give it to us, if Prill asks politely, and if Nessus uses the tasp.”
“And after that?”
“After that, we’ll find out just how crazy I am.”
The tower moved to starboard like a steamship of the sky. Starships were never so roomy. As for ships of the air, there was nothing comparable in known space. Six decks to climb around in! Luxury!
There were luxuries missing. The food supply aboard the flyscraper consisted of frozen meat, perishable fruit, and the kitchen of Nessus’s flycycle. Food for puppeteers lacked nourishment for humans, according to Nessus. Thus Louis’s breakfast and lunch were meat broiled by a flashlight-laser, and knobbly red fruit.
And there was no water.
And no coffee.
Prill was persuaded to find some bottles of an alcoholic beverage. They held a belated christening ceremony in the bridge room, with Speaker courteously backed into a far corner and Prill hovering warily near the door. Nobody would accept Louis’s suggestion of the name Improbable; and so there were four christenings, in order, in four different languages.
The beverage was…well, sour. Speaker couldn’t take it, and Nessus didn’t try. But Prill consumed one bottle, sealed the others, and put them carefully away.
The christening became a language lesson. Louis learned a few of the rudiments of the Ringworld Engineer’s speech. He found that Speaker was learning much faster than he was. It figured. Speaker and Nessus had both been trained to deal with human languages, modes of thinking, limitations in speech and hearing. This was only more of the same.
They broke for dinner. Again Nessus ate alone, using his flycycle kitchen, while Louis and Prill ate broiled meat and Speaker ate raw, elsewhere.
Afterward the language lesson went on. Louis hated it. The others were so far ahead of him that he felt like a cretin.
“But Louis, we must learn the language. Oar rate of travel is low, and we must forage for our food. Frequently we will need to deal with natives.”
“I know. I never liked languages.”
Darkness fell. Even this far from the Eye storm, cloud cover was complete, and the night was like the inside of a dragon’s mouth. Louis called a halt to the lesson. He was tired and irritable and vastly unsure of himself. The others left him to his rest.
They would be passing the Eye storm in about ten hours.
He was floating at the edge of a restless sleep when Prill came back. He felt hands stroking him lasciviously, and he reached out.
She backed out of reach. She spoke in her own language, but simplified it into a pidgin for Louis’s understanding.
“You are leader?”
Bleary-eyed, Louis considered. “Yes,” he said, because the actual situation was too complex.
“Make the two-headed one give me his machine.”
“What?” Louis fumbled for words. “His which?”
“The machine that make me happy. I want it. You take it from him.”
Louis laughed, for he thought he understood her.
“You want me? You take it,” Prill said angrily.
The puppeteer had something she wanted. She had no lever to use on him, for he was not a man. Louis Wu was the only man around. Her power would bend him to her will. It had always worked before; for was she not a goddess?
Perhaps Louis’s hair had misled her. She may have assumed that he was one of the hairy lower class, by his bare face perhaps half Engineer, but no more. Then he must have been born after the Fall of the Cities. No youth drug. He must be in the first flush of youth.
“You were quite right,” Louis said in his own tongue. Prill’s fists clenched in anger, for his mockery was clear. “A thirty-year-old man would be putty in your hands. But I’m older than that.” And he laughed again.
“The machine. Where does he keep it?” In the darkness she leaned toward him, all lovely suggestive shadow.