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 He was not surprised that Nessus had curled into a ball, tucked his heads into his belly, and withdrawn from the universe.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 Wn.
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 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.
CHAPTER 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.
"Wre 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 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.