was shocked. He had not expected the puppeteer to take it so badly. The puppeteer wailed in two tones, then, without apparent haste, he tucked his heads under himself. Louis saw only the straggly mane that covered his brain case.
And Teela was on the intercom.
“You’ve been talking about me,” she said without heat. (She was unable to hold a grudge, Louis realized. Did that make the ability to hold a grudge a survival factor?) “I tried to follow what you were saying, but I couldn’t. What happened to Nessus?”
“My big mouth. I scared him. Now how are we going to find you?”
“Can’t you tell where I am?”
“Nessus has the only locator. Probably for the same reason he saw to it that we didn’t know how to operate the emergency thrust.”
“I wondered about that,” said Teela.
“He wanted to be sure he could run away from an angry kzin. Never mind that. How much did you understand?”
“Not much. You kept asking each other why I wanted to come here. Louis, I didn’t. I came with you, because I love you.”
Louis nodded. Sure, if Teela needed to come to the Ringworld, she had had to have a motive to ride with Louis Wu. It was hardly flattering.
She loved him for the sake of her own luck. Once he had thought she loved him for himself.
“I’m passing over a city,” Teela said suddenly. “I can see some lights. Not many. There must have been a big, durable power source. Speaker could probably find it on his map.”
“Is it worth looking at?”
“I told you, there are lights. Maybe—” The sound went off without a click, without a warning.
Louis considered the empty space above his dashboard. Then he called, “Nessus.” There was no response.
Louis activated the siren.
Nessus came out of it like a family of snakes in a burning zoo. Under other circumstances it would have been funny: the two necks frantically untangling, posing like two question marks above the dashboard; then Nessus barking, “Louis! What is it?”
Speaker had answered the call instantly. Apparently sitting at attention, he waited for instructions and enlightenment.
“Something’s happened to Teela.”
“Good,” said Nessus. And the heads withdrew.
Grimly, Louis flicked the siren off, waited a moment, flipped it on again. Nessus reacted as before. This time Louis spoke first.
“If we don’t find out what happened to Teela, I’ll kill you,” he said.
“I have the tasp,” said Nessus. “We designed it to work equally well on kzinti and human. You have seen its effect on Speaker.”
“Do you think it would stop me from killing you?”
“Yes, Louis, I do.”
“What,” Louis asked carefully, “will you bet?”
The puppeteer considered. “To rescue Teela can hardly be as dangerous as to take that gamble. I had forgotten that she is your mate.” He glanced down. “She no longer registers on my locator. I cannot tell where she is.”
“Does that mean her ’cycle’s been damaged?”
“Yes, extensively. The sender was near one thruster unit of her flycycle. Perhaps she ran afoul of another working machine, akin to the one which burned our communicator discs.”
“Um. But you know where she was when she dropped out of the conversation.”
“Ten degrees to spinward of port. I do not know the distance, but we can estimate this from the speed tolerances of her flycycle.”
They flew ten degrees to port of spinward, a slanting line across Speaker’s hand-drawn map. For two hours there had been no lights; and Louis had begun to wonder if they were lost.
Thirty-five hundred miles from the rolling hurricane that was the Eye storm, the line across Speaker’s map ended at a seaport. Beyond the seaport was a bay the size of the Atlantic Ocean. Teela couldn’t have flown further than that. The seaport would be their last chance…
Suddenly, beyond the crest of a deceptively gradual slope of hill, there were lights.
“Pull up,” Louis whispered fiercely, not knowing why he whispered. But Speaker had already stopped them in midair.
They hovered, studying the lights and the terrain.
The terrain: city. City everywhere. Below, shadowy in the blue Archlight, were houses like beehives with rounded windows, separated by curved sidewalks too narrow to be called streets. Ahead: more of the same, and then taller buildings further on, until all was skyscrapers and floaters.
“They built differently,” Louis whispered. “The architecture—it’s not like Zignamuclickclick. Different styles…”
“Skyscrapers,” said Speaker. “With so much room on the Ringworld, why build so tall?”
“To prove they can do it. No, that’s asinine,” said Louis. “There’d be no point, if they could build something like the Ringworld itself.”
“Perhaps the tall buildings came