Then a woman howled in panic, right in his ear. A heel kicked him hard, just below the floating ribs, and Louis doubled up with a breathy cry. Flailing arms battered him, then closed round his neck in a death-grip hug. The wailing continued.
Louis pried at the arms to free his throat. He called, “Sleepfield off!”
Gravity returned. Louis and his attacker settled onto the lower plate. Harkabeeparolyn stopped screaming. She let her arms be pried away.
The boy Kawaresksenjajok knelt beside her, confused and frightened. He spoke urgent questions in the City Builder language. The woman snarled.
The boy spoke again. Harkabeeparolyn answered him at length. The boy nodded reluctantly. Whatever he’d heard, he didn’t like it. He stepped into the corner, with a parting look that Louis couldn’t interpret at all, and vanished into the cargo hold.
Louis reached out for his translator. “Okay, what’s it all about?”
“I was falling!” she sobbed.
“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Louis told her. “This is how some of us like to sleep.”
She looked up into his face. “Falling?”
“Yah.”
Her expression was easy to interpret. Mad. Quite mad… and a shrug. Visibly she braced herself. She said, “I have made myself know that my usefulness is over, now that your machines can read faster than I can. I can do one thing only to make our mission easier, and that is to ease the pain of your thwarted lust.”
“That’s a relief,” Louis said. He meant it as sarcasm; would she hear it that way? Louis was tanjed if he’d accept that kind of charity.
“If you bathe, and clean your mouth very thoroughly—”
“Hold it. Your sacrifice of your comfort to higher goals is praiseworthy, but it would be bad manners for me to accept.”
She was bewildered. “Luweewu? Do you not want rishathra with me?”
“Thank you, no. Sleepfield on.” Louis floated away from her. From previous experience he sensed a shouting match coming, and that couldn’t be helped. But if she tried physical force, she’d find herself falling.
She surprised him. She said, “Luweewu, it would be terrible for me to have children now.”
He looked down at her face: not enraged, but very serious. She said, “If I mate now with Kawaresksenjajok, I may bring forth a baby to die in the fire of the sun.”
“Then don’t. He’s too young anyway.”
“No, he’s not.”
“Oh. Well. Don’t you have — No, you wouldn’t be carrying contraceptives. Well, can’t you estimate your fertile period and avoid it?”
“I don’t understand. No, wait, I do understand. Luweewu, our species ruled most of the world because of our command of the nuances and variations of rishathra. Do you know how we learned so much about rishathra?”
“Just lucky, I guess?”
“Luweewu, some species are more fertile than others.”
“Oh.”
“Before history began, we learned that rishathra is the way not to have children. If we mate, four falans later there is a child. Luweewu, can the world be saved? Do you know that the world can be saved?”
Oh, to be on sabbatical. Alone in a singleship, light-years from all responsibility to anyone but Louis Wu. Oh, to be under the wire… ”I can’t guarantee anything at all.”
“Then do rishathra with me, to let me stop thinking of Kawaresksenjajok!”
It was not the most flattering proposal of Louis Wu’s young life. He asked, “How do we ease his mind?”
“There is no way. Poor boy, he must suffer.”
Then you can both suffer, Louis thought. But he couldn’t make himself say it. The woman was serious, and she was hurting, and she was right. This was not a time to bring a baby City Builder into the world.
And he wanted her.
He climbed out of free fall and took her to the water bed. He was glad that Kawaresksenjajok had retired to the cargo hold. What would the boy have to say tomorrow morning?
Chapter 26 — Beneath The Waters
Louis woke under gravity, with a smile on his face, a pleasant ache in every muscle, and a grittiness in his eyes. He had slept very little last night. Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t exaggerated her urgency. He had never known (despite his time with Halrloprillalar) that City Builders went into heat.
He shifted, and the big bed surged beneath him. A body rolled against him: Kawaresksenjajok, on his belly, spread out like a starfish and snoring gently.
Harkabeeparolyn, curled in orange fur at the foot of the bed, stirred and sat up. She said, perhaps in apology at leaving him, “I kept waking up and not knowing where I was, with the bed heaving under me.”
Culture shock, he thought. He remembered that Halrloprillalar had liked the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. “There’s plenty of floor. How do you feel?”
“Much better, for the moment. Thank you.”
“Thank you. Are you hungry?”
“Not yet.”
He exercised. His muscles were still hard, but he was out of practice. The City Builders watched him with puzzled expressions. Afterward he dialed breakfast: melon, soufflés Grand Marnier, muffins, coffee. His guests refused the coffee, predictably, and also the muffins.
When the Hindmost appeared he looked rumpled and tired. “The patterns we sought are not evident in the records of the floating city,” he said. “All species build their armor in the shape of a Pak protector. Armor is not the same everywhere, not quite, but the styling does not vary in any pattern. It may be we can blame the spread of City Builder culture for that. Their empire mixed ideas and inventions until we may never trace their origins.”
“What about the immortality drug?”
“You were right. The Great Ocean is seen as a source of horrors and delights, including immortality. The gift is not always a drug. Sometimes it comes without warning, bestowed by whimsical gods. Louis, the legends make no sense to me, a nonhuman.”
“Set the tape up for us. I’ll get our guests to watch it too. Maybe they can explain what I can’t.”
“Aye, aye.”
“What about repairs?”
“There has been no repair activity on the Ringworld in recorded history.”
“You’re kidding!”
“How large a region is covered by the city records? How long a time? Small, and short. Aside from that, I’ve studied the old interviews with Jack Brennan. I gather that protectors have long lives and very long attention spans. They prefer not to use servomechanisms if they can do a job themselves. There was no autopilot aboard Phssthpok’s spacecraft, for instance.”
“That’s not consistent. The spillpipe system is certainly automatic.”
“A very simple brute-force approach. We don’t know why the protectors died or left the Ringworld. Is it possible that they knew their fate, that they had time to automate the spillpipe system? Louis, we don’t need to know any of this.”
“Oh, yah? The meteor defense is probably automatic too. Wouldn’t you like to know more about the meteor defense?”
“I would.”
“And the attitude jets were automatic. Maybe there were manual overrides for all of that. But a thousand hominid species have evolved since the Pak disappeared, and the automatics are still going. Either the protectors always intended to leave — which I can’t believe—”
“Or they took many years to die,” the Hindmost said. “I have my own ideas on that.” And he would say no more.