Over the next few hours the puppeteer's body cooled and became as dead. The lights on the first aid kit remained active, if incomprehensible. Presumably the puppeteer was in some form of suspended animation.
As the Improbable moved away to starboard the shadow square thread trailed behind, alternately taut and slack. Ancient buildings toppled in the city, cut through scores of times by tangled thread. But the knob stayed put in its bed of electrosetting plastic.
The city of the floating castle could not drop below the horizon. In the next few days it became tiny, then vague, then invisible.
Prill sat by Nessus's side, unable to help him, unwilling to leave him. Visibly, she suffered.
"We've got to do something for her," said Louis. "She's hooked on the tasp, and now it's gone and she's got to go it cold turkey. If she doesn't kill herself, shes likely to kill Nessus or me!"
"Louis, you surely don't want advice from me."
"No. No, I guess not."
To help a suffering human being, one plays good listener. Louis tried it; but he didn't have the language for it, and Prill didn't want to talk. He gritted his teeth when he was alone; but when he was with Prill he kept trying.
She was always before his eyes. His conscience might have healed if he could have stayed away from her, but she would not leave the bridge.
Gradually he was learning the language, and gradually Prill was beginning to talk. He tried to tell her about Teela, and Nessus, and playing god -
"I did think I was a god," she said. "I did. Why did I think so? I did not build the Ring. The Ring is much older than I."
Prill was learning too. She talked a pidgin, a simplified vocabulary of her obsolete language: two tenses, virtually no modifiers, exaggerated pronunciation.
"They told you so," said Louis.
"But I knew."
"Everyone wants to be god." Wants the power without the responsibility; but Louis didn't know those words.
"Then he came. Two Heads. He had machine?"
"He had tasp machine."
"Tasp," she said carefully. "I had to guess that. Tasp made him god. He lost tasp, not god any more. Is Two Heads dead?"
It was hard to tell. "He would think it stupid to be dead," said Louis.
"Stupid to get head cut off," said Prill. A joke. She'd tried to make a joke.
Prill began to take an interest in other things: sex and language lessons and the Ringworld landscape. They ran across a sprinkling of sunflowers. Prill had never seen one. Dodging the plants' frantic attempts to ray them down, they dug up a foot-high bloom and replanted it on the roof of the building. Afterward they turned hard to spinward to avoid denser sunflower concentrations.
When they ran out of food, Prill lost interest in the puppeteer. Louis pronounced her cured.
Speaker and Prill tried the God Gambit in the next native village. Louis waited apprehensively above them, hoping Speaker could carry it off, wanting to shave his head and join them. But his value as an acolyte was nil. After days of practice, he still had little facility with the language.
They came back with offerings. Food.
As days became weeks, they did it again and again. They were good at it. Speaker's fur grew longer, so that once again he was an orange fur panther, "a kind of war god." On Louis's advice he kept his ears folded flat to his head.
Being a god affected Speaker oddly. One night he spoke of it.
"It does not disturb me to play a god," he said. "It disturbs me to play a god badly."
"What do you mean?"
"They ask us questions, Louis. The women ask questions of Prill, and these she answers; and generally I can understand neither the problem nor the solution. The men should question Prill too, for Prill is human and I am not. But they question me. Me! Why must they ask an alien for help in running their affairs?"
"You're a male. A god is a kind of symbol," said Louis, "even when hes real. You're a male synibol."
"Ridiculous. I do not even have external genitalia, as I assume you do."
"You're big and impressive and dangerous-looking. That automatically makes you a virility symbol. I don't think you could lose that aspect without losing your godhood entirely."
"What we need is a sound pickup, so that you can answer odd and embarrassing questions for me."
Prill surprised them. The Improbable had been a police station. In one of the storeroom Prill found a police multiple intercom set with batteries that charged off the building's power supply. When they finished, two of the six sets were working.
"You're smarter than I guessed," Louis told Prill that night. He hesitated then; but he didn't know enough of the language to be tactful. "Smarter than a ship' whore ought to be."
Prill laughed. "You foolish child! You have told me yourself that your ships move very quickly next to ours."
"They do," said Louis. "They move faster than light."
"I think you improve the tale," she laughed. "Our theory says that this cannot be."
"Maybe we use different theories."
She seemed taken aback. Louis had learned to read her involuntary muscle movements rather than her virtually blank face. But she said, "Boredom can be dangerous when a ship takes years to cross between worlds. The ways to amuse must be many and all different. To be a ship's whore needs knowledge of medicine of mind and body, plus love of many men, plus a rare ability to converse. We must know something of the working of the ship, so that we will not cause accidents. We must be healthy. By rule of guild we must learn to play a musical instrument."
Louis gaped. Prill laughed musically, and touched him here and there …
The intercom system worked beautifully, despite the fact that the ear plugs were designed for human rather than kzinti ears. Louis developed an ability to think on his feet, operating as the man behind the war god. When he made mistakes, he could tell himself that the Improbable was still faster than the maximum rate of travel of news on the Ringworld. Every contact was a first contact.
Months passed.
The land was slowly rising, slowly becoming barren.
Fist-of-God was visible by daylight and growing larger every day The routine had settled into Louis's thinking. It took some some time to realize what was happening.
It was broad daylight when he went to Prill. "There's something you should know," he said. "Do you know about induced current?" And he explained what he meant.
Then, "Very small electrical currents can be applied to a brain, to produce pleasure or pain directly." He explained that.
And finally, "This is how a tasp works."
That had taken about twenty minutes. Prill said, "I knew that he had a machine. Why describe it now?"
"We're leaving civilization. We won't find many more villages, or even food sources, until we reach our spacecraft. I wanted you to know about the tasp before you decided anything."
"Decided what?"
"Shall we let you off at the next village? Or would you like to ride with us to the Liar, then take the Improbable? We can give you food there too."
"There is room for me aboard the Liar," she said with assurance.
"Sure, but -"
"I am sick of savages. I want to go to civilization."
"You might have trouble learning our ways. For one thing, they grow hair like mine." Louis's hair had grown out long and thick. He had cut the queue. "You'll need a wig."
Prill made a face. "I can adjust." She laughed suddenly. "Would you ride home alone, without me? Ihe big orange one cannot substitute for a woman."
"That's the one argument that always works."
"I can help your world, Louis. Your people know little about sex."
Which statement Louis prudently let slide.
CHAPTER 24 — Fist-of-God