Me. Louis said, “It’s still me. I’ve had some medical work done.”
Harkabeeparolyn turned to her mate and spoke. Louis’s translator said, “You knew!”
“Zelz told me.”
“I’ll get you for this, you little zilth!” But Harkee was laughing, and so was Kawa.
They set their platters down: a heap of brown and yellow roots and a bowl of pink fluid. Harkabeeparolyn settled into Louis’s lap and studied his face from an inch away. “We’ve been lonely,” she said.
It felt natural, as if they’d been doing this forever. It felt as if he had come home.
He said, “You weren’t lonely where I left you.”
“We were told to come.” She nodded at the kitchen.
They had obeyed a protector. That, too, must have seemed very natural. Louis asked, “What were you told?”
“ ‘Sail to starboard.’ ” She shrugged. “From time to time he comes and looks about and alters our course, or tells us of wind and water currents, or ways to catch and cook fish or warm-bloods or tend the garden. He says we don’t eat enough red meat.”
“That might be his ancestry speaking.”
“Louis, you look as young as Kawa. Can you …?”
The puppeteer answered. “Only for Ball People and the Ball Kzinti. To heal local hominids or local kzinti or any other species, a thousand of my kind would need a lifetime of study and testing.”
Harkabeeparolyn scowled.
Kawaresksenjajok and Bram entered with more platters. Here were six big, surpassingly ugly deep-sea fish. Two were still twitching. The others had been broiled with strange looking plants … kzinti vegetables. The bowl of raw vegetables was also from the kzinti hunting park.
Louis looked at the other bowl and asked, “Fish blood?”
Bram said, “Whale blood and a vegetable puree. It would not feed me long. Your kitchen was a wonderful find.”
They sat. Kawaresksenjajok went, and returned with a two– or three-year-old child. She had a full head of orange-blond hair. Louis wouldn’t have taken her for a City Builder. The older boy was not in evidence.
Bram’s cooking was good. A little strange. Bram must have been cooking for City Builder tastes using plants from the hunting park. There would be crucial diet components missing or in short supply.
Louis asked, “How long would this keep me alive?”
Bram said, “A falan before your behavior would begin to deteriorate.” He sipped decorously.
Acolyte had already disposed of the raw fish. Louis asked him, “Are you still hungry?”
“It’s enough. One who satisfies his hunger grows fat and torpid.”
The little girl was crawling toward the edge of the table. Louis pointed; Harkee turned; the child reached the edge, slipped, and clung by her fingers. She had a grip like a monkey or a Hanging Person.
“Thought she’d fall? Hah!” The City Builder woman was laughing at him. “Wrong species.” Abruptly she asked the protector, “May we keep Louis for a time?”
In the instant before he replied, Bram’s glance touched all their faces, judging, deciding. He said, “You may have each other until midday tomorrow. Louis, we should return to Needle soon. We can learn no more until we take the probe over the rim. Hindmost, is that why you let Louis wake?”
“Of course. I’ve had little chance to brief him.”
Again Bram’s eyes took them all in. He said, “I must know the spill mountains and the rim. The protectors on the rim wall must not learn of me. The central question is of protectors. I must know where they are, how many, what species, their intentions and methods and goals.
“I have learned what I can without acting, and avoided attention when I could. The pilfered webeye moves ever closer to the rim wall. The Ghouls must intend to show us something. Kawaresksenjajok, Harkabeeparolyn, you have shown me spill mountain activity far from the working site. You of the Ball People have brought me recordings made at one of the spaceports. I know more of the rim wall now than I guessed was there to learn. Soon I must show myself. Advise me.”
Acolyte spoke. “If others see the probe, they will guess at interstellar invaders. You should prepare to defend the Repair Center—”
“Yes, but the probe implies the puppeteer, not me. I have prepared. Hindmost?”
Louis was thinking: He chopped Acolyte off pretty hard. Why is the kit taking it?
The Hindmost didn’t speak.
Chmeee’s son come to me as my student. Bram has had too long to impress him. Maybe I’ve lost a student. If I’d known I wanted the kit’s respect …
I’d have raced him and beat him. Hah! What’s my next step?
Bram asked, “Harkabeeparolyn, what do you know of protectors?”
She had been a teacher in the floating city’s library, where Kawaresksenjajok had been a student. She said, “I remember pictures of armor collected from tens of thousands of daywalks around us. They all looked very different, fitted for different species, but all had the crested helm and oversized joints. Fanciful old tales tell of saviors and destroyers fearsome to see, with faces like armor, big shoulders, knobby knees and elbows. Neither men nor women can fight them or tempt them. Bram, do you want to hear old stories?”
“When I know what I must hear, I can learn it,” Bram said. “When I ask, ‘What have I forgotten?’ I can only hope for a useful answer. Louis?”
Louis shrugged. “I’m still two falans behind the rest of you.”
Bram looked at them. His hard face permitted little expression. The Hindmost and City Builders watched him anxiously. Acolyte seemed relaxed, perhaps bored.
Bram picked up a chair and moved it to … a skeletal structure in an unused corner. Tubes and metal domes and wires had been fixed to a wooden spine in a manner that seemed not quite useful, not quite random. There had been too many distractions, but now that he came to look at it, Louis would have placed it as representing some brief ancient fad in sculpture. It had that kind of esthetic unity.
But Bram was moving it into place between his knees, plucking the strings …
The Hindmost asked, “Did you finish the Mozart Requiem?”
“We shall see. Record.”
The puppeteer whistled chords of programming music, speaking to the fourth webeye. Louis shrugged his eyebrows at Harkabeeparolyn sitting in his lap. This nonsense was burning up time they might spend together … but the City Builder woman whispered, “Listen.”
The protector’s fingers were suddenly everywhere, and the air exploded with music.
Acolyte strolled out the door and was gone.
The music was strange and rich and precise. The puppeteer was singing accompaniment, but Bram held the structure of it. Louis couldn’t remember where he’d heard anything like it.
It was human music, paced for human nerves. No sound shaped by aliens could have done this to his central nervous system. He felt a roaring optimism … a godlike calm … wistful longing … the power to conquer worlds, or move them.
The music he knew was shaped in computers, not made by toenails softly kicking or stroking stretched surfaces or a bronze plate, fingernails strumming wires, a lipless mouth blowing into pipes with holes in them.
It was making him horny as tanj, and Harkabeeparolyn was half melted in his lap. He thought, You were right, but he wouldn’t interrupt even to whisper that in her ear. Instead he settled back and let the vibrations flood through him.
And when the sound had finally died away, he sat stunned.
“I think we have it,” Bram decided. He set the orchestral sculpture aside. “Hindmost, thank you. Louis, can you describe the effects?”
“Stunning. I, ah … no, I’m sorry, Bram, it’s nonverbal.”
“Might it be used as a tool of diplomacy?”