“This plastic.” Grieving Tube’s pronunciation was the exact imitation of Valavirgillin’s. “Does it have a name in our tongues?”
“I think not. Louis described stuff that could be made from the nasty residue after one makes fuel. Scentless. Taking any shape. He showed me one or two plastic things. Otherwise, I was guessing.
“Tarbavala Labs has produced results … answers … nothing we can sell. Tarb and our parents are taking care of our children while I scramble for money to keep our concerns going. I thought a trading expedition would serve me. Persuading hominid cultures to make alcohol commands a bounty. Trade is wealth on top of that.”
“How long have you been gone?”
“Nearly ten falans.”
“Too long?”
“I don’t know. I’ve mated. Tarb never bargained for that.” Vala shook her head. “I need sleep.”
“I will watch.”
Chapter 13
Sawur’s Law
Louis was alone when he woke, and hungry. He pulled on his zipsuit and walked out through crackling brush.
The village seemed empty.
There was warmth in the ashes of last night’s fire. He found the last of his roots and cut it open. It was almost like eggplant. Not a bad breakfast.
Noonday sun—of course—but it felt like noon, like he’d wasted half the day. He boarded his cargo stack and went up for a look around. There they were, instantly obvious: Comet Sawur leading a tail of children through the upstream arch.
He caught them leaving the arch, left the cargo sock and joined the tail.
They walked along the river. Louis drew maps of the Ringworld for them, and spoke of its builders and its age and its fate, and tried to tell them which parts were guesswork. He drew the double superconducting toroids they’d found remounted on the City Builder spacecraft: Bussard ramjets taken from their mountings on the rim wall. He did not speak of what it had cost him to fuel the rest.
Some of the boys had disappeared. Now they were back. They’d found hundreds of bird nests perched in forked trees. The entire horde ran off, and Louis and Sawur followed slowly.
Sawur said, “I cannot work out your sleep pattern.”
“I talked long last night with two whom you may never meet.”
“People of the Night? They’re said to know all and to rule everything under the Arch. The dead belong to them. Louis, we have guested visitors who speak to such folk, but why do you?”
“I’ll talk to anyone,” Louis admitted. “Sawur, I enjoyed it. I may have learned a little. I think the child wanted to talk and her father didn’t move fast enough to stop her. Then Tunesmith gave away more than he knew, and now I almost know how their empire communicates over all that vast distance along the Arch.”
Sawur’s jaw sagged. Louis said hastily, “Not my secret to tell, Sawur, not even if I knew it. Even so, they don’t know everything. They’ve got problems, I’ve got problems—”
“You do, yes,” she said sharply. “You wouldn’t wake this morning, but you were talking to your dreams. What torments you, Louis?”
But they had nearly walked into an explosion of small nets.
The children had crept around the grove, surrounded it. Now the nets were flying. In an hour they had caught an amazing number of pigeon-sized birds.
Weavers seemed to have no interest in eggs, but Louis collected a dozen. They looked and felt like slick plastic, like free-fall drinking bulbs with no nipple. Worth a try.
In mid-afternoon they were back in the village. While the children plucked the birds, Louis and Sawur went off alone. They sat on a flat rock and watched the older Weavers building the fire.
Sawur asked again, “What torments a teacher?”
Louis laughed. Teachers don’t have torments? But how to explain to a Weaver …?
“I made a fool of myself, long ago. It must have taken the Web Dweller four or five falans just to realize how stupid I’ve been, why Louis Wu wasn’t talking to him. But we’re talking now, and that’s not the problem.
“Sawur, the Web Dweller captured me and Chmeee to be his servants. Very reprehensible, of course, but he has gifts to pay for such a theft. He has seeds to be chewed to make an old hominid young, or a Kzin.”
Sawur nibbled her lip. “Well. He can. Will he?”
“For value received. And he has a device, an autodoc. It can heal serious wounds, scars and missing limbs. Likely it can repair damage even boosterspice won’t touch.
“Sawur, to rebuild a man requires extreme medical techniques. If he can build me young, I believe he can build me docile. Chmeee and I both made poor slaves. The Hindmost can make me a better servant. A perfect servant. Until the right before last, I had an excuse for keeping myself out of his machines. Now I don’t.”
Sawur asked, “Have his machines had you before?”
That was a good question. “He had me in frozen sleep for two years. He may have done some medical work on me. He could have done anything he wanted.”
“But he didn’t.”
“I don’t think he did. I don’t feel any different.”
Sawur was silent.
Louis laughed suddenly, turned and hugged her. “Never mind. I cut his hyperdrive motor apart! He can’t go back to the stars, and that’s why he had to save the Arch. If he made me a servant, he made me a bad one.”
Sawur stared, then laughed loud. “But Louis, you trapped yourself, too!”
“I’d made a promise.” To Valavirgillin of the Machine People. “I said I’d save the Ringworld or die trying.”
Sawur was silent.
“He thought he had a wirehead.” Louis heard the gap in translation: wirehead had no equivalent in Sawur’s tongue. “He thought I would do anything he asked for electric current through the pleasure center of my brain … as a Weaver might sell her freedom for, say, alcohol? He didn’t know I could throw it off. He knows now.”
Sawur said, “So, what if he makes you young and docile? But what if you first determine that you will ignore his commands?”
“Sawur. He can change my mind.”
“Ah.”
Louis brooded for a time. Presently he said, “I’m clever and agile and the Web Dweller knows in if he made me a better servant, I might become stupid or slow. I can tell myself he’d be a fool to alter me very much. It’s hellishly tempting. I’m afraid I’ll believe it, Sawur.”
“Would he keep a promise to you?”
Another good question.
Nessus, rejected by his species … Nessus the mad puppeteer had demanded that the Hindmost mate with him, should he return from the Ringworld. The Hindmost had agreed. And kept the covenant.
But that was a bargain between equals … no, it wasn’t. Nessus had been presumed mad, mad for centuries.
Throughout known space, puppeteers had kept their contracts with a variety of species.
He’d forgotten Sawur; he jumped when she spoke. “You’ve given me my youth and snatched it away, if I believe your crazy dream. But I’ll tell you this,” she said with a whip in her voice. “The older I am, the more I would give to be young again. If you don’t ever intend to deal with the Web Dweller, that’s one thing. If you do, then the last thing you want is to wait until you’re old and sick.”
She was, he decided, dead right.
That night they cooked their meat—and the Sailors their fish, and Louis his eggs and a river weed he’d found edible—and went to sit beneath the cliff.
Louis found himself looking for Tunesmith in the brush. There was no sign of the Ghoul, but he would be listening.