Teela and her escort and the crew of the Improbable sat about Louis's bedroom, the bridge. Teela's brawny escort talked gravely with Prill in one corner; though Prill kept a wary eye on Speaker-To-Animals and another on the bay window. But the others surrounded Teela as she told her tale.
The police device had blown most of the machinery in Teela's flycycle. The locator, the intercom, the sonic fold, and the kitchen all burned out at once.
Teela was still alive because the sonic fold had had a built-in standing-wave characteristic. She had felt the sudden wind and had hit the retrofield immediately, before the Mach 2 wind could tear her head off. In seconds she had dropped below the municipal upper speed limit. The trap field had been about to blow her drive; it refrained. The wind was tolerable by the time it broke through the stabilizing effect of the sonic fold.
But Teela was nothing like stable. She had brushed death too closely in the Eye storm. This second attack had followed too quickly. She guided the flycycle down, searching in the dark for a place to land.
There was a tiled mall surrounded by shops. It had lights: oval doors that glowed bright orange. The 'cycle landed hard, but by then she didn't care. She was down.
She was dismounting when the vehicle rose again. The motion threw her head over heels. She rose to her hands and knees, shaking her head. When she looked up the flycycle was a dwindling dumbbell shape.
Teela began to cry.
"You must have broken a parking law," said Louis.
"I didn't care why it happened. I felt -" She didn't have the words, but she tried anyway. "I wanted to tell someone I was lost. But there wasn't anyone. So I sat down on one of the stone benches and cried.
"I cried for hours. I was afraid to move away, because I knew you'd be coming for me. Then — he came." Teela nodded at her escort. "He was surprised to find me there. He asked me something — I couldn't understand. But he tried to comfort me. I was glad he was there, even if he couldn't do anything."
Louis nodded. Teela would trust anybody. She would inevitably seek help or comfort from the first stranger to come along. And she would be perfectly safe in doing so.
Her escort was unusual.
He was a hero. You could tell. You didn't need to see him fighting dragons. You need only see the muscles, the height, the black metal sword. The strong features, uncannily like the wire-sculpture face in the castle called Heaven. The courteous way he talked to Prill, apparently without realizing that she was of the opposite sex. Because she was another man's woman?
He was clean-shaven. No, that was improbable. More likely he was half Engineer. His hair was long and ash blond and not too clean, and the hairline shaped a noble brow. Around his waist was a kind of kirtle, the skin of some animal.
"He fed me," Teela said. "He took care of me. Four men tried to jump us yesterday, and he fought them off with just his sword! And he's learned a lot of Interworld in just a couple of days."
"Has he?"
"He's had a lot of practice with languages."
"This was the most unkindest cut of all."
"What?"
"Never mind. Go on."
"He's old, Louis. He got a massive dose of something like boosterspice, long ago. He says he took it from an evil magician. He's so old that his grandparents remembered the Fall of the Cities.
"Do you know what he's doing?"
Her smile became impish. "He's on a kind of quest. Long ago he took an oath that he would walk to the base of the Arch. He's doing that. He's been doing it for hundreds of years."
"The base of the Arch?"
Teela nodded. She was smiling very prettily, and she obviously appreciated the joke, but in her eyes there was something more.
Louis had seen love in Teela's eyes, but never tenderness.
"You're proud of him for it! You little idiot, don't you know there isn't any Arch?"
"I know that, Louis."
"Then why don't you tell him?"
"If you tell him, I'll hate you. Hes spent too much of his life doing this. And he does good. He knows a few simple skills, and he carries them around the Ringworld as he travels to spinward."
"How much information can he carry? He can't be too intelligent."
"No, he's not." From the way she said it, it didn't matter. "But if I travel with him I can teach a great many people a great deal."
"I knew that was coming," said Louis. But it still hurt.
Did she know that it hurt? She wouldn't look at him. "We'd been in the mall a day or so before I realized that you'd follow my flycycle, not me. He'd told me about Hal- Hal- about the goddess and the floating tower that trapped cars. So we went there.
"We stayed near the altar, waiting to spot your flycycles. Then the building started to fall apart. Afterward, Seeker -"
"Seeker?"
"He calls himself that. When someone asks him why, he can explain that he's on his way to the base of the Arch, and tell them about his adventures on the way … you see?"
"Yeah."
"He started trying the motors in all the old cars. He said that the drivers used to turn off their motors when they were caught by the traffic police field, so that their motors wouldn't be burned out."
Louis and Speaker and Nessus looked at each other. Half those floating cars may have been still active!
"We found a car that worked," said Teela. "We were chasing you, but we must have missed you in the dark. But luckily the traffic police field caught us for speeding."
"Luckily. I think I heard the sonic boom last night, but I'm not sure," said Louis.
Seeker had stopped talking. He rested comfortably against the wall of the governor's bedroom, gazing at Speaker-To-Animals with a half-smile. Speaker held his eye. Louis had the impression that they were each wondering what it would be like to fight the other.
But Prill looked out the bay window, and on her face was dread. When the wind's howl became a shriek, she shuddered.
Perhaps she had seen formations like the Eye storm. Small asteroid punctures, quickly repaired, always occurring somewhere else; but always photographed for the newstapes or their Ringworld equivalent. Always a thing of fear, the Eye storm. Breathing-air roaring away into interstellar space. A hurricane on its side, with a drain at its bottom as final as the drain in a bathtub, if you should happen to be caught in its suction.
The wind howled momentarily louder. Teela's brows puckered with concern. "I hope the building's massive enough," she said.
Louis was astonished. How she's changed! But the Eye storm had threatened her directly, the last time through …
"I need your help," she said. "I want Seeker, you know."
"Yeah."
"He wants me, too, but he's got a weird sense of honor. I tried to tell him about you, Louis, when I had to get him to the floating building. He got very uncomfortable and stopped sleeping with me. He thinks you own me, Louis."
"Slavery?"
"Slavery for women, I think. You'll tell him you don't own me, won't you?"
Louis felt pain in his throat. "It might save explanations if I just sold you to him. If that's what you want."
"You're right. And it is. I want to travel around the Ringworld with him. I love him, Louis."
"Sure you do. You were made for each other," said Louis Wu. "It was fated that you should meet. The hundred billion couples who have felt exactly that way about each other -"
She was looking at him very doubtfully. "You're not being … sarcastic, are you, Louis?"
"A month ago you didn't know sarcasm from a glass transistor. No, the weird thing is, I'm not being sarcastic. The hundred billion couples don't matter, because they weren't part of a there-ain't-no-justice puppeteer's planned breeding experiment."
Suddenly he had everybody's complete attention. Even Seeker stared at him to find out what everyone was looking at.