of probability. Even basic physics is nothing more than probability at the atomic level. Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.
“Tell them that after I get you home,” said Louis Wu. “But meanwhile, roll out of there, now. I need the shadow square wire, and you’ve got to find it for me. We’re almost past the Eye storm. Come out of there, Nessus—”
The puppeteer unrolled and stood up. “You shame me, Louis,” he began.
“You dare say that here?”
The puppeteer was silent. Presently he turned to the bay window and looked out at the storm.
C H A P T E R 23
The God Gambit
For the natives who worshipped Heaven, there were now two towers in the sky.
As before, the square of the altar swarmed with faces like golden dandelions. “We came on another holy day,” said Louis. He tried to find the shaven choir leader, but couldn’t.
Nessus was looking wistfully across at the tower called Heaven. The bridge room of the Improbable was level with the castles map room. “Once I had not the opportunity to explore this place. Now I cannot reach it,” the puppeteer mourned.
Speaker suggested, “We can break in with the disintegrator tool and lower you by rope or ladder.”
“Again this chance must slip by me.”
“It is not as dangerous as many things you have done here.”
“But when I took risks here, I sought knowledge. Now I have as much knowledge of the Ringworld as my world needs. If I risk my life now it will be to return home with that knowledge. Louis, there is your shadow square wire.”
Louis nodded soberly.
Across the spinward section of the city lay a cloud of black smoke. By the way it hugged itself tight against the cityscape, it must have been both dense and heavy. One windowed obelisque near the center poked through the mass. The rest was smothered.
It had to be shadow square wire. But there was so much of it!
“But how can we transport that?”
Louis could only say, “I can’t imagine. Let’s go down for a closer look.”
They settled their broken police building to spinward of the place of the altar.
Nessus did not turn off the lifting motors. He barely touched down. What had been an observation platform above prison cells became the Improbable’s landing ramp. The mass of the building would have crushed it.
“We’re going to have to find a way to handle the stuff,” said Louis. “A glove made of the same kind of thread might do it. Or we could wind it on a spool made of Ringworld foundation material.
“We have neither. We must talk to the natives,” said Speaker. “They may have old legends, old tools, old holy relics. More, they have had three days to learn how to deal with the wire.”
“Then I must come with you.” The puppeteer’s reluctance was evident in his sudden fit of shivering. “Speaker, your command of the language is inadequate. We must leave Halrloprillalar to lift the building if there is need. Unless—Louis, could Teela’s native lover be persuaded to bargain for us?”
It itched Louis to hear Seeker referred to in such terms. He said, “Even Teela won’t call him a genius. I wouldn’t trust him to do our bargaining.”
“Nor would I. Louis, do we really need the shadow square wire?”
“I don’t know. If I’m not spinning drug dreams, then we need it. Otherwise—”
“Never mind, Louis. I will go.”
“You don’t have to trust my judgment—”
“I will go.” The puppeteer was shivering again. The oddest thing about Nessus’s voice was that it could be so clear, so precise, yet never show a trace of emotion. “I know that we need the wire. What coincidence caused the wire to fall so neatly across our path? All coincidence leads back to Teela Brown. If we did not need the wire, it would not be here.”
Louis relaxed. Not because the statement made sense, for it did not. But it reinforced Louis’s own tenuous conclusions. And so Louis hugged that comfort to his bosom and did not tell the puppeteer what nonsense he was talking.
They filed down the landing ramp and out from under the shadow of the Improbable. Louis carried a flashlight-laser. Speaker-To-Animals carried the Slaver weapon. His muscles moved like fluid as he walked; they showed prominently through his half-inch of new orange fur. Nessus went apparently unarmed. He preferred the tasp, and the hindmost position.
Seeker walked to the side, carrying his black iron sword at the ready. His big, heavily