Harkabeeparolyn massaged her throat. They watched as the Hindmost ran four stolen tapes through the reading machine.
It took only a few minutes. “This now becomes the computer’s problem,” the puppeteer said. “I’ve programmed in the questions. If the answers are in the tapes, we’ll have them in a few hours, maximum. Louis, what if we don’t like the answers?”
“Let’s hear the questions.”
“Is there a history of repair activity on the Ringworld? If so, did repair machinery approach from any one source? Is repair more frequent in any given locale? Is any section of the Ringworld in better repair than the rest? Locate all references to Pak-like beings. Does the style of armor vary with distance from a central point? What are the magnetic properties of the Ringworld floor and of scrith in general?”
“Good.”
“Did I miss anything?”
“… Yah. We want the most probable source of the immortality drug. It’ll be the Great Ocean, but let’s ask anyway.”
“I will. Why the Great Ocean?”
“Oh, partly because it’s so visible. And partly because we’ve found one surviving sample of the immortality drug, and one only. Halrloprillalar had it. We found her in the vicinity of the Great Ocean.” And partly because we crashed there, Louis thought. The luck of Teela Brown distorts probability. Teela’s luck could have brought us straight to the Repair Center that first time. “Harkabeeparolyn? Can you think of anything we missed?”
Her voice was scratchy. “I don’t understand what you’re doing.”
How to explain? “Our machine remembers everything on your tapes. We tell it to search its memory for answers to given questions.”
“Ask it how to save the Ringworld.”
“We have to be more specific. The machine can remember and correlate and do sums, but it can’t think for itself. It’s not big enough.”
She shook her head.
“What if the answers are wrong?” the Hindmost persisted. “We cannot flee.”
“We try something else.”
“I have thought about this. We must go into polar orbit around the sun, to minimize the risk that a fragment of the disintegrating Ringworld will strike us. I will put Needle in stasis, to wait for rescue. Rescue will not come, but the risk is better than what we face now.”
It could come to that, Louis thought. “Fine. We’ve got a couple of years to try to find better odds.”
“Less than that. If—”
“Shut up.”
The exhausted librarian dropped onto the water bed. Imitation kzin fur surged and rippled under her. She held herself rigid for a moment, then cautiously let herself fall back. The fur continued to ripple. Presently the stiffness left her and she let herself roll with the tide. Kawaresksenjajok murmured sleepy protest and turned over.
The librarian looked most appealing. Louis resisted an urge to join her on the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired. Miserable. Will I ever see my home again? If the end comes — when it comes — I’d like to wait for it on the Library roof. But the flowers will be dead by then, won’t they? Scorched and frozen.”
“Yah.” Louis was touched. Certainly he’d never see his own home again. “I’ll try to get you back. Right now you need sleep. And a back massage.”
“No.”
Strange. Wasn’t Harkabeeparolyn one of the City Builders, Halrloprillalar’s people, who had ruled the Ringworld largely through sex appeal? Sometimes it was difficult to remember that the individuals within an alien species could differ as thoroughly as humans did.
He said, “The Library staff seemed more priests than professionals. Do you practice continence?”
“While we work in the Library, we are continent. But I was continent by choice.” She rose on an elbow to look at him. “We learn that all other species lust to do rishathra with the City Builders. Is that the case with you?”
He admitted it.
“I hope you can control it.”
He sighed, “Oh, tanj, yes. I’m a thousand falans old. I’ve learned how to distract myself.”
“How?”
“Ordinarily I’d go looking for another woman.”
The librarian didn’t laugh. “What if another woman is not available?”
“Oh… exercise to exhaustion. Get drunk on ‘fuel.’ Go on sabbatical, off into interstellar space in a one-man ship. Find some other pleasure to indulge myself. Get involved in work.”
“You should not be drunk,” she said, and she was right. “What pleasure might you try?”
The droud! A touch of current and he wouldn’t care if Harkabeeparolyn turned to green slime before his eyes. Why should he care now? He didn’t admire her… well, maybe he did, a little. But she’d done her part. He could save the Ringworld, or lose it, without more help from her.
“You’ll have your massage anyway,” he said. He stepped wide around her to touch a control on the water bed. Harkabeeparolyn looked startled, then smiled and relaxed completely as the sonic vibrations in the water enfolded her. In a few minutes she was asleep. He set the unit to switch off in twenty minutes.
Then he brooded.
If he hadn’t spent a year with Halrloprillalar, he’d find Harkabeeparolyn unsightly, with her bald head and knife-edge lips and small flat nose. But he had…
He had hair where no City Builder had hair. Was that it? Or the smell of his food on his breath? Or a social signal he didn’t know?
A man who had hijacked a starship, a man who had bet his life on the chance to rescue trillions of other lives, a man who had beaten the ultimate in drug habits, should not be bothered by so minor a distraction as an itch for a lovely roommate. A touch of the wire would give him the dispassionate clarity to see that.
Yah.
Louis went to the forward wall. “Hindmost!”
The puppeteer trotted into view.
“Run the records of the Pak for me. Interviews and medical reports on Jack Brennan, studies of the alien’s corpse, everything you’ve got.” He’d try work.
Louis Wu hovered in midair, in lotus position, with his loose clothing drifting around him. On a screen that floated motionless outside Needle’s hull, a man long dead was lecturing on the origin of humanity.
“Protectors have precious little free will,” he was saying. “We’re too intelligent not to see the right answers. Besides that, there are instincts. If a Pak protector has no living children, he generally dies. He stops eating. Some protectors can generalize; they can find a way to do something for their whole species, and it keeps them alive. I think that was easier for me than it was for Phssthpok.”
“What did you find? What’s the cause that keeps you eating?”
“Warning you about Pak protectors.”
Louis nodded, remembering the autopsy data on the alien. Phssthpok’s brain was bigger than a man’s, but the swelling did not include the frontal lobes. Jack Brennan’s head looked dented in the middle because of his human frontal development and the upward swelling of the back of the skull.
Brennan’s skin was deeply wrinkled leathery armor. His joints were abnormally swollen. His lips and gums had fused into a hard beak. None of this seemed to bother the drastically altered Belt miner.
“All the symptoms of old age are holdovers from the change from breeder to protector,” he was telling a long-dead ARM inquisitor. “Skin thickens and wrinkles; it’s supposed to get like this, hard enough to turn a knife. You lose your teeth to leave room for the gums to harden. Your heart can weaken because you’re supposed to grow a second heart, two-chambered, in the groin.”
Brennan’s voice was a rasp. “Your joints are supposed to expand, to offer a larger moment arm for the muscles. Increased strength. But none of this works quite right without tree-of-life, and there hasn’t been tree-of-life on Earth for three million—”