massive enough,” she said.
Louis was astonished. How she’s changed! But the Eye storm had threatened her directly, the last time through…
“I need your help,” she said. “I want Seeker, you know.”
“Yah.”
“He wants me, too, but he’s got a weird sense of honor. I tried to tell him about you, Louis, when I had to get him to the floating building. He got very uncomfortable and stopped sleeping with me. He thinks you own me, Louis.”
“Slavery?”
“Slavery for women, I think. You’ll tell him you don’t own me, won’t you?”
Louis felt pain in his throat. “It might save explanations if I just sold you to him. If that’s what you want.”
“You’re right. And it is. I want to travel around the Ringworld with him. I love him, Louis.”
“Sure you do. You were made for each other,” said Louis Wu. “It was fated that you should meet. The hundred billion couples who have felt exactly that way about each other—”
She was looking at him very doubtfully. “You’re not being…sarcastic, are you, Louis?”
“A month ago you didn’t know sarcasm from a glass transistor. No, the weird thing is, I’m not being sarcastic. The hundred billion couples don’t matter, because they weren’t part of a there-ain’t-no-justice puppeteer’s planned breeding experiment.”
Suddenly he had everybody’s complete attention. Even Seeker stared at him to find out what everyone was looking at.
But Louis had eyes only for Teela Brown.
“We crashed on the Ringworld,” he said gently, “because the Ringworld is your ideal environment. You needed to learn things you couldn’t learn on Earth, or anywhere in known space, apparently. Maybe there were other reasons—a better boosterspice, for instance, and more room to breathe—but the major reason you’re here is to learn.”
“To learn what?”
“Pain, apparently. Fear. Loss. You’re a different woman since you came here. Before, you were a land of…abstraction. Have you ever stubbed your toe?”
“What a funny word. I don’t think so.”
“Have you ever burned your foot?”
She glared at him. She remembered.
“The Liar crashed to bring you here. We traveled a couple of hundred thousand miles to bring you to Seeker. Your flycycle carried you precisely over him, and ran into the traffic police field at just that point, because Seeker is the man you were born to love.”
Teela smiled at this, but Louis did not smile back. He said, “Your luck required that you have time to get to know him. Therefore Speaker-To-Animals, and I hung head down—”
“Louis!”
“—over ninety feet of empty space for something like twenty hours. But there’s worse.”
The kzin rumbled, “It depends on your viewpoint.”
Louis ignored him. “Teela, you fell in love with me because it gave you a motive to join the expedition to the Ringworld. You no longer love me because you don’t need to. You’re here. And I loved you for the same reason, because the luck of Teela Brown used me as a puppet—
“But the real puppet is you. You’ll dance to the strings of your own luck for the rest of your life. Finagle knows if you’ve got free will. You’ll have trouble enough using it.”
Teela was very pale, and her shoulders were very straight and rigid. If she wasn’t crying, it was by an obvious exercise of self-control. She had not had that self-control before.
As for Seeker, he knelt watching the two of them, and he ran his thumb along the edge of the black iron sword. He could hardly be unaware that Teela was being made unhappy. He must still think she belonged to Louis Wu.
And Louis turned to the puppeteer. He was not surprised that Nessus had curled into a ball, tucked his heads into his belly, and withdrawn from the universe.
Louis took the puppeteer by the ankle of his hind leg. He found that he could roll the puppeteer onto his back with little trouble. Nessus weighed not much more than Louis Wu.
And he didn’t like it. The ankle trembled in Louis’s hand.
“You caused all this,” said Louis Wu, “with your monstrous egotism. That egotism bothers me almost as much as the monstrous mistake you made. How you could be so powerful, and so determined, and so stupid, is beyond me. Do you realize yet, that everything that’s happened to us here has been a side effect of Teela’s luck?”
The ball that was Nessus contracted tighter. Seeker watched in fascination.
“Then you can go home to the puppeteer worlds and tell them that mucking with human breeding habits is a chancy business. Tell them that enough Teela Browns could make a hash of all the laws