"Yes. How can you climb so? It seemed that you defied gravity. What are you, Louis?"
Clutching himself to his dead flycycle, Louis laughed. It seemed to take all his strength. "You're a Kdaptist," he said. "Admit it."
"I was raised so, but the teachings did not take."
"Sure they didn't. Have you got Nessus?"
"Yes. I used the siren."
"Relay this. She's about twenty feet from me. She's watching me like a snake. I don't mean she's intensely interested in me; I mean she's not interested in anything else at all. She blinks, but she never looks away.
"She's sitting in a kind of booth. There used to be glass or something in three of the walls, but that's gone, leaving not much more than some stairs and a platform. She's sitting with her legs over the edge. It must have been a way of watching the prisoners.
"She's dressed in … well, I can't say I go for the style. Knee-length and elbow-length overalls, ballooning out -" But aliens wouldn't be interested in that. "The fabric is artificial, obviously, and either it's new or it's self-cleaning and very durable. She -" Louis interrupted himself, because the girl had said something.
He waited. She repeated it, whatever it was; a short sentence.
Then she stood gracefully and went up the stairs.
"She's gone," said Louis. "Probably lost interest."
"Perhaps she went back to her listening devices."
"Probably right." If there was an eavesdropper in the building, Occam's Razor said it was her.
"Nessus asks you to focus your flashlight-laser to low and wide, and to be seen using it for lighting when next the woman appears. I am not to show the Slaver weapon. The woman could probably kill us both by turning off a switch. She must not see us with weapons."
"Then how can we get rid of the zap guns?"
A moment before Speaker relayed the answer. "We do not. Nessus says that he will try something else. He is coming here."
Louis let his head sag against the metal. The relief he felt was so great that he didn't even question it, until Speaker said, "He will only have us all in the same trap. Louis, how can I dissuade him?"
"Tell him so. No, don't even do that. If he didn't know it was safe he'd stay away."
"How can it be safe?"
"I don't know. Let me rest." The puppeteer must know what he was doing. He could trust Nessus's cowardice. Louis rubbed his cheek against the smooth, cool metal.
He dozed.
He was never less than marginally aware of where he was. If his 'cycle stirred or shifted he came wide-eyed out of sleep, clutching metal in his knees and fabric in his fists. His sleep was a running nightmare.
When light flashed through his eyelids he came awake immediately.
Daylight poured through the horizontal slit that had served them as a doorway. Within that glare Nessus's flycycle was a black silhouette. The flycycle was upside down, and so was the puppeteer, held by seat webbing rather than crash balloons.
The slit closed behind him.
"Welcome," said Speaker, slurring the words. "Can you turn me upright?"
"Not yet. Has the girl reappeared?"
"No."
"She will. Humans are curious, Speaker. She cannot have seen members of our species before."
"What of it? I want to be right side up," Speaker moaned.
The puppeteer did something to his dashboard. A miracle happened: his flycycle turned over.
Louis said one word. "How?"
"I turned everything off after I knew that the bandit signal had my controls. If the lifting field had not caught me, I could have turned on my motors before I struck pavement. Now," the puppeteer said briskly, "the next step should be easy. When the girl appears, act friendly. Louis, you may attempt to have sex with her if you think you might succeed. Speaker, Louis is to be our master; we are to be his servitors. The woman may be xenophobic; it would lull her to believe that a human being commands these aliens."
Louis actually laughed. Somehow the nightmarish half-sleep had rested him. "I doubt she'll be feeling friendly, let alone seductive. You didn't see her. She's as cold as the black caves of Pluto, at least where I'm concerned, and I can't really blame her." She had watched him lose his lunch across his sleeve — generally an unromantic sight.
The puppeteer said, "She will be feeling happy whenever she looks at us. She will cease to feel happy when she tries to leave us. If she brings one of us closer to her, her joy will increase -"
"Tanjit, yes!" cried Louis.
"You see? Good. In addition, I have been practicing the Ringworld language. I believe my pronunciation is correct, and my grammar. If I only knew what more of the words meant …"
Speaker had stopped complaining long ago. Inverted above a lethal drop, with burns all over him and one hand charred to the bone, he had raged at Louis and Nessus for being unable to help him. But he had been quiet for hours now.
In the dim quiet, Louis dozed.
In his sleep he heard bells, and woke.
She tinkled as she came down the steps. There were bells on her mocassins. Her garment was different too, a top-shaped, high-necked dress fitted with half a dozen big bulging pockets. Her long black hair fell forward over one shoulder.
The serene dignity in her face had not changed.
She sat down with her feet over the edge of the platform, and she watched Louis Wu. She did not shift position; neither did Louis. For several minutes they held each other's eyes.
Then she reached into one of the big pockets and produced something fist-sized and orange. She tossed it toward Louis, aiming it so that it would go past him, a few inches beyond his reach.
He recognized it as it went by him. A knobby, juicy fruit he had found on a bush two days ago. He had dropped several into the intake hopper of his kitchen, without tasting them.
The fruit splattered red across the roof of a cell. Suddenly Louis's mouth was trying to water, and he was taken with a raging thirst.
She tossed him another. It came closer this time. He could have touched it if he had tried, but he would also have overturned the 'cycle. And she knew it.
Her third shot tapped his shoulder. He clung to his two fistfuls of balloon and thought black thoughts.
Then Nessus's flycycle drifted into view.
And she smiled.
The puppeteer had been floating behind the truck-sized derelict. Upside down again, he drifted obliquely toward the viewing platform as if wafted there by a stray induced current, and, as he passed Louis, he asked, "Can you seduce her?"
Louis snarled. Then, realizing that the puppeteer really wasn't mocking him, he said, "I think she thinks I'm an animal. Forget it."
"Then we need different tactics."
Louis rubbed his forehead against the cool metal. He had seldom felt so miserable. "You're in charge," he said. "She won't buy me as an equal, but she might buy you. She won't see you as competition; you're too alien."
The puppeteer had drifted past him. Now he said something in what sounded to Louis like the language of the shaven choir-leading priest: the holy language of the Engineers.
The girl did not respond. But … she wasn't smiling exactly, but the corners of her mouth did seem to turn up slightly, and there was more animation in her eyes.
Nessus must be using low power. Very low power.
He spoke again, and this time she answered. Her voice was cool and musical, and if she sounded imperious to Louis Wu, he was predisposed to hear that quality.
The puppeteer's voice became identical to the girl's. What developed then was a language lesson.
To Louis Wu, uneasily balanced above a lethal drop, it was bound to be dull. He picked up a word here and there. At one point she tossed Nessus one of the fist-sized orange fruits, and they established that it was a thrumb. And Nessus kept it.