"The machine that make me happy. I want it. You take it from him."
Louis laughed, for he thought he understood her.
"You want me? You take it," Prill said angrily.
The puppeteer had something she wanted. She had no lever to use on him, for he was not a man. Louis Wu was the only man around. Her power would bend him to her will. It had always worked before; for was she not a goddess?
Perhaps Louis's hair had misled her. She may have assumed that he was one of the hairy lower class, by his bare face perhaps half Engineer, but no more. Then he must have been born after the Fall of the Cities. No youth drug. He must be in the first flush of youth.
"You were quite right," Louis said in his own tongue. Prill's fists clenched in anger, for his mockery was clear. "A thirty-year-old man would be putty in your hands. But I'm older than that." And he laughed again.
"The machine. Where does he keep it?" In the darkness she leaned toward him, all lovely suggestive shadow. Her scalp gleamed softly; her black hair spilled over her shoulder. The breath caught in Louis's throat.
He found the words to say, "Glue against his bone, under skin. One head."
Prill made a sound like a growl. She must have understood; the gadget was surgically implanted. She turned and left.
Louis thought briefly of following her. He wanted her more than he was willing to admit. But she would own him if he let her, and her motives did not jibe with Louis Wu's.
The whistle of the wind rose gradually. Louis's sleep became shallow … and merged into an erotic dream.
His eyes opened.
Prill knelt facing him, straddling him like a succubus. Her fingers moved lightly over the skin of his chest and belly. Her hips moved rhythmically, and Louis moved in response. She was playing him like a musical instrument.
"When I finish I will own you," she crooned. The pleasure showed in her voice, but it was not the pleasure of a woman taking pleasure from a man. It was the thrill of wielding power.
Her touch was a joy as thick as syrup. She knew a terribly ancient secret: that every woman is born with a tasp, and that its power is without limit if she can learn to use it. She would use it and withhold it, use it and withhold it, until Louis begged for the right to serve her …
Something changed in her. Her face could not show it; but he heard the crooning sound of her pleasure, and he felt the change in her motion. She moved, and they came together, and the slam! that rolled across them then seemed entirely subjective.
She lay beside him all that night. Occasionally they woke and made love, and went back to sleep. If Prill felt disappointment at these times, she did not show it, or Louis did not see it. He knew only that she was no longer playing him like an instrument. They were playing a duet.
Something had happened to Prill. He suspected what it was.
The morning dawned gray and stormy. Wind howled around the ancient building. Rain lashed the bay window of the bridge, and stormed through broken windows higher up. The Improbable was very close to the Eye storm.
Louis dressed and left the bridge.
He saw Nessus in the hallway. "You!" he shouted.
The puppeteer shied. "Yes, Louis?"
"What did you do to Prill last night?"
"Show proper gratitude, Louis. She was trying to control you, to condition you into subservience. I heard."
"You used the tasp on her!"
"I gave her three seconds at half-power while you were engaged in reproductive activity. Now it is she who is conditioned."
"You monster! You egotistical monster!"
"Come no closer, Louis."
"Prill is a human woman with free will!"
"What of your own free will?"
"It was in no danger! She can't control me!"
"Is there something else bothering you? Louis, you are not the first human couple I have watched in reproductive activity. We felt that we must know all about your species. Come no closer, Louis."
"You hadn't the right!" Certainly Louis never intended harm to the puppeteer. He clenched his fists in rage, but he did not intend to use them. In rage he stepped forward -
Then Louis was in ecstasy.
In the heart of the purest joy he had ever known, Louis know that Nessus was using the tasp on him. Without allowing himself to realize the consequences, Louis kicked out and up.
He used all the strength he could divert from his enjoyment of the tasp. It was not great, but he used it, and he kicked the puppeteer in the larynx, beneath the left jaw.
The consequences were hideous. Nessus said, "Glup!" and stumbled back, and turned off the tasp.
And turned off the tasp!
The weight of all the sorrow that men are heir to came down on the shoulders of Louis Wu. Louis turned his back on the puppeteer and walked away. He wanted to weep; but more than that, he wanted the puppeteer not to see his face.
He wandered at random, seeing only his own inner blackness. It was only coincidence that brought him to the stairwell.
He had kaown full well what he was doing to Prill. Balanced over a drop of ninety feet, he had been eager enough to see Nessus use the tasp on Prill. He had seen wireheads; he knew what it did to them.
Conditioned! Like an experimental pet! And she knew! Last night had been her last valiant attempt to break loose from the power of the tasp.
Now Louis had felt what she was fighting.
"I shouldn't have done it," said Louis Wu. "I take it back." Even in black despair, that was funny. You can't take back such a choice.
It was coincidence that he went down the stairwell instead of up. Or his hindbrain may have remembered a slam! that his forebrain had hardly noticed.
The wind roared around him, hurling rain from every direction, as he reached the platform. It took some of his attention outside himself. He was losing the grief that came with the loss of the tasp.
Once Louis Wu had sworn to live forever.
Now, much later, he knew that obligations went with such a decision.
"Got to cure her," he said. "How? No physical withdrawal symptoms … but that won't help her if she decides to walk out of a broken window. How do I cure myself?" For some minor part of him still cried for the tasp, and would never stop.
The addiction was nothing more than a below-threshold memory. Strand her somewhere with her supply of youth drug, and the memory would fade …
"Tanj. We need her." She knew too much about the engine room of the Improbable. She couldn't be spared.
He'd just have to get Nessus to stop using the tasp. Watch her for awhile. She'd be awfully depressed at first …
Abruptly Louis's mind registered what his eyes had been seeing for some time.
The car was twenty feet below the observation platform. A cleanly-designed maroon dart with narrow slits for windows, it hovered without power in the roaring wind, caught in an electromagnetic trap nobody had remembered to turn off.
Louis looked once, hard, to be sure that there was a face behind the windscreen. Then he ran upstairs shouting for Prill.
He didn't know the words. But he took her by the elbow and pulled her downstairs and showed her. She nodded and went back up to use the police trap adjustments.
The maroon dart moved tight up against the edge of the platform. The first occupant crawled out, using both hands to hang on, for the wind was howling like a fiend.
It was Teela Brown. Louis felt little surprise.
And the second occupant was so blatantly type-cast that he burst out laughing. Teela looked surprised and hurt.
They were passing the Eye storm. The wind roared up through the stairwell that led to the observation platform. It whistled throught the corridors of the first floor, and howled through broken windows higher up. The halls ran with rain.