"Why?"
"The luck of Teela Brown shields us, Louis."
"I don't think so," said Louis Wu.
Speaker, silent, watched them both in the intercom. Only Teela was out of the circuit.
"Your arrogance bothers me," said Louis Wu. "Breeding for a lucky human was arrogant as the Devil. You've heard of the Devil?"
"I have read of the Devil, in books."
"Snob. But your stupidity is worse than your arrogance. You blithely assume that what's good for Teela Brown is good for you. Why should it be?"
Nessus sputtered. Then, "Surely this is natural. If we are both enclosed by the same spacecraft hull, a rupture is bad luck for both of us."
"Sure. But suppose you're passing a place where Teela wants to go, and suppose you don't want to land. A drive failure just then would be lucky for Teela, but not for you."
"What nonsense, Louis! Why would Teela Brown want to go to the Ringworld? She never knew it existed until I told her so!"
"But she's lucky. If she needed to come here without knowing it, she'd come here anyway. Then her luck wouldn't be sporadic, would it, Nessus? It would have been working all the time. Lucky that you found her. Lucky that you didn't find anyone else who qualified. All those bad phone connections, remember?"
"But -"
"Lucky that we crashed. Remember how you and Speaker argued over who was in charge of the expedition? Well, now you know."
"But why?"
"I don't know." Louis raked his fingernails across his scalp in utter frustration. His straight black hair had grown out to the length of a crew cut, excluding the queue.
"Does the question upset you, Louis? It upsets me. What could be here on the Ringworld to attract Teela Brown? This place is, is unsafe. Strange storms and badly programmed machinery and sunflower fields and unpredictable natives all threaten our lives."
"Hah!" Louis barked. "Right. That's part of it, at least. Danger doesn't exist for Teela Brown, don't you see? Any assessment we make of the Ringworld has to take that into account."
The puppeteer opened and closed his mouths several times in rapid succession.
"Does make things difficult, doesn't it?" Louis chortled. For Louis Wu, solving problems was a pleasure in itself. "But it's half the answer. If you assume -"
The puppeteer screamed.
Louis 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 Zignamuclickchek. 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 Ringrworld itself."
"Perhaps the tall buildings came later, during the decline of civilization."
The lights: blazing white tiers of windows, a dozen isolated towers blazing from crown to base They were clustered in what Louis already thought of as the Civic Center because all six of the floating buildings were there.
One thing more: a small suburban patch to spinward of the Civic Center glowed dim orange-white.
On the second floor of one of the beehive houses, the three sat in a triangle around Speaker's map.
Speaker had insisted that they bring the flycycles inside with them. "Security." Their light came from the headlamps of Speaker's own 'cycle, reflected and softened by a curved wall. A table, oddly sculpted to form plates and coaster depressions, had toppled and smashed to dust when Louis brushed against it. Dust was an inch thick on the floor. The paint on the curved wall had crumbled and settled in a soft ridge of sky-blue dust along the baseboard.