She dropped her hands. She waited without trying to help as he peeled out of his falling jumper. But as he exposed more skin, she stroked him here, and there, not always where nerves clustered. Each time it was as if she had touched him in the pleasure center of his brain.
He was on fire. If she pushed him away now, he would use force; he must have her -
— But some cool part of him knew that she could chill him as quickly as she had aroused him. He felt like a young satyr, yet he dimly sensed that he was also a puppet.
For the moment he couldn't have cared less.
And still Prill's face showed no expression.
She took him to the verge of orgasm, then held him there, held him there … so that when the moment came it was like being struck by lightning. But the lightning went on and on, a flaming discharge of ecstacy.
When it ended he was barely aware that she was leaving. She must know how thoroughly she had used him up. He was asleep before she reached the door.
And he woke thinking: Why did she do that?
Too tanj analytical, he answered himself. She's lonely. She must have been here a long time. She's mastered a skill, and she hasn't had a chance to practice that skill …
Skill. She must know more anatomy than most professors. A doctorate in Prostitution? There was more to the oldest profession than met the eye. Louis Wu could recognize expertise in any field. This woman had it.
Touch these nerves in the correct order, and the subject will react thus-and-so. The right knowledge can turn a man into a puppet …
… puppet to Teela's luck …
He almost had it then. He came close enough that the answer, when it finally came, was no surprise.
Nessus and Halrloprillalar came backward out of the freezer room. They were followed by the dressed carcass of a flightless bird bigger than a man. Nessus had used a cloth for padding, so that his mouth need not touch the dead meat of the ankle.
Louis took the puppeteer's burden. He and Prill pulled in tandem. He found that he needed both hands, as did she. He answered her nod of greeting and asked, "How old is she?"
Nessus did not show surprise at the question. "I do not know."
"She came to my room last night." That would not do; it would mean nothing to an alien. "You know that the thing we do to reproduce, we also do for recreation?"
"I knew that."
"We did that. She's good at it. She's so good at it that she must have had about a thousand years of practice," said Louis Wu.
"It is not impossible. Prill's civilization had a compound superior to boosterspice in its ability to sustain life. Today the compound is worth whatever the owner cares to ask. One charge is equivalent to some fifty years of youth."
"Do you happen to know how many charges she's taken?"
"No, Louis. But I know that she walked here."
They had reached the stairway leading down to the conical cell block. The bird trailed behind them, bouncing.
"Walked here from where?"
"From the rim wall."
"Two hundred thousand miles?"
"Nearly that."
"Tell me all of it. What happened to them after they reached the right side of the rim wall?"
"I will ask. I do not know it all." And the puppeteer began to question Prill. In bits and pieces the story emerged:
They were taken for gods by the first group of savages they met, and by everyone thereafter, with one general exception.
Godhood solved one problem neatly. The crewmen whose brains had been damaged by backlash from the half-repaired cziltang brone were left to the care of various villages. As resident gods they would be well treated; and as idiots they would be relatively harmless as gods.
The remainder of the Pioneer's crew split up. Nine, including Prill, went to antispinward. Prill's home city was in that direction. Both groups planned to travel along the rim wall, looking for civilization. Both parties swore to send help if they found any.
They were taken for gods by all but the other gods. The Fall of the Cities had left a few survivors. Some were mad. All took the life-extending compound if they could get it. All were looking for enclaves of civilization. None had thought to build his own.
As the Pioneer's crew moved to antispinward, other survivors joined them. They became a respectable pantheon.
In every city they found the shattered towers. These towers had been set floating after the settling of the Ringworld, but thousands of years before the perfection of the youth drug. The youth drug had made later generations cautious. For the most part those who could afford it simply stayed away from the floaters, unless they were elected officials. Then they would install safety devices, or power generators.
A few of the floaters still floated. But most had smashed down into the centers of cities, all in the same instant, when the last power receiver flared and died.
Once the traveling pantheon found a partially recivilized city, inhabited only on the outskirts. The God Gambit would not serve them here. They traded a fortune in the youth drug for a working, self-powered bus.
It did not happen again until much later. By then they had come too far. The spirit had gone out of them, and the bus had broken down. In a half-smashed city, among other survivors of the Fall of the Cities, most of the pantheon simply stopped moving.
But Prill had a map. The city of her birth was directly to starboard. She persuaded a man to join her, and they started walking.
They traded on their godhoods. Eventually they tired of one another, and Prill went on alone. Where her godhood was not enough, she traded small quantities of the youth drug, if she had to. Otherwise -
"There was another way in which she could maintain power over people. She has tried to explain it to me, but I do not understand."
"I think I do," said Louis. "She could get away with it, too. She's got her own equivalent of a tasp."
She must have been quite mad by the time she reached her home city. She took up residence in the grounded police station. She spent hundreds of hours learning how to work the machinery. One of the first things she accomplished was to get it airborne; for the self-powered tower had been landed as a safety precaution after the Fall of the Cities. Subsequently she must have come close enough to dropping the tower and killing herself.
"There was a system for trapping drivers who broke the traffic laws," Nessus finished. "She turned it on. She hopes to capture someone like herself, a survivor from the Fall of the Cities. She reasons that if he is flying a car, he must be civilized."
"Then why does she want him trapped and helpless in that sea of rusted metal?"
"Just in case, Louis. It is a mark of her returning sanity."
Louis frowned into the cell block below. They had lowered the bird's carcass on a ruined metal car, and Speaker had taken possession. "We can lighten this building," said Louis. "We can cut the weight almost in half."
"How?"
"Cut away the basement. But we'll have to get Speaker out of there. Can you persuade Prill?"
"I can try."
CHAPTER 22 — Seeker
Halrloprillalar was terrified of Speaker, and Nessus was leery of letting her out of the influence of the tasp. Nessus claimed to be jumping the tasp on her every time she saw Speaker, so that eventually she would welcome the sight of him. Meanwhile they both shunned the kzin's company.
So it was that Prill and Nessus waited elsewhere while Louis and Speaker lay flat on the floor of the observation platform looking down into the gloom of the cell block.
"Go ahead," said Louis.
The kzin fired both beams.