calloused feet were bare, and so was the rest of him but for the yellow skin he wore for a loincloth. His muscles rippled like the kzin’s.
Teela walked unarmed.
These two would have been waiting aboard the Improbable but for the bargaining that had taken place that morning. It was Nessus’s fault. Louis had used the puppeteer as his interpreter when he offered to sell Teela Brown to the swordsman Seeker.
Seeker had nodded gravely, and had offered one capsule of the Ringworld youth drug, worth about fifty years of life.
“I’ll take it,” Louis had said. It was a handsome offer, although Louis had no intention of putting the stuff in his mouth. Certainly the drug had never been tested on anyone who, like Louis Wu, had been taking boosterspice for some one hundred and seventy years.
As Nessus afterward explained in the Interworld tongue, “I didn’t want to insult him, Louis, or to imply that you held Teela cheaply. I raised his price. He now owns Teela, and you have the capsule to analyze when and if we return to Earth. In addition, Seeker will act as our bodyguard against any possible enemy, until we have possession of the shadow square wire.”
“He’s going to protect us all with his four-foot kitchen knife?”
“It was only to flatter him, Louis.”
Teela had insisted on coming with him, of course. He was her man, and he was going into danger. Now Louis wondered if the puppeteer had counted on that. Teela was Nessus’s own carefully bred good luck charm…
The sky would always be overcast this close to the Eye storm. In the gray-white noon light they filed toward a vertical black cloud tens of stories high.
“Don’t touch it,” Louis called, remembering what the priest had told him on his last visit to this city. A girl had lost some fingers trying to pick up the shadow square wire.
Close up, it still looked like black smoke. You could look through it into the mined city, to see the windowed beehive-bungalows of suburbia and a few flat glass towers that would have been department stores if this were a world of human space. They were there within the cloud, as if a fire were raging in there somewhere.
You could see the black thread, if your eye was within an inch of it; but then your eye would water and the thread would disappear. The thread was that close to being invisibly thin. It was much too much like Sinclair monofilament; and Sinclair monofilament was dangerous.
“Try the Slaver gun,” said Louis. “See if you can cut it, Speaker.”
A string of sparkling lights appeared within the cloud.
Probably it was blasphemy. You fight with light? But the natives must have planned to destroy the strangers much earlier. When the Christmas lights appeared within the cloud of black thread, maniac shrieks answered from all directions. Men robed in particolored blankets poured from the buildings around, screaming and waving…swords and clubs?
The poor leucos, thought Louis. He flicked his flashlight-laser beam to high and narrow.
Light-swords, laser weapons, had been used on all the worlds. Louis’s training was a century old, and the war he had trained for hadn’t happened after all. But the rules were too simple to forget.
The slower the swing, the deeper the cut.
But Louis swung his beam in wide quick swipes. Men stumbled back, their arms wrapped around their abdomens, their golden fur faces betraying nothing. With many enemies, swing fast. Cut half an inch deep, cut many of them. Slow them down!
Louis felt pity. The fanatics had only swords and clubs. They hadn’t a chance…
But one smashed a sword across Speaker’s weapon arm, hard enough to cut. Speaker dropped the Slaver weapon. Another man snatched it and threw it. He was dead in the instant, for Speaker swiped at him with his good hand and clawed the spine out of him. A third man caught the weapon, turned, and ran. He didn’t try to use it. He just ran with it. Louis couldn’t hit him with the laser; they were trying to kill him.
Always swing across the torso.
Louis had killed nobody as yet. Now, while the enemy seemed to hesitate, Louis took a moment to kill the two men nearest him. Don’t let the enemy close.
How were the others doing?
Speaker-To-Animals was killing with his hands, his good hand a claw for ripping, his bandaged one a weighted club. Somehow he could dodge a sword point while reaching for the man behind it. He was surrounded, but the natives would not