Part 16 (1/2)
”Why?”
”An alien had my electric source. He wanted to give me orders. But I was ashamed before that.”
”The City Builders never had wires in their skulls. We would have found them when we searched the ruined cities. Where is this custom practiced?” she asked. Then she rolled away from him and stared at him in horror.
It was the sin he regretted most often: not keeping his mouth shut. He said, ”I'm sorry.”
”You said strips of that cloth would -- What is that cloth?”
”It conducts electric current and magnetic fields with no loss. Superconductor, we call it.”
”Yes, that was what failed the City Builders. The ... superconductor rotted. Your cloth will rot too, will it not? How long?”
”No. It's a different kind.”
She screamed it at him. ”*How do you know that, Louis Wu?*”
”The Hindmost told me. The Hindmost is an alien who brought us here against our will. He left us with no way home.”
”This Hindmost, he took you as slaves?”
”He tried to. Humans and kzinti, we make poor slaves.”
”Is his word good?”
Louis grimaced. ”No. And he took the superconductor cloth and wire when he fled his world. He didn't have time to make it. He must have known where it was, in storage. Like the other things he brought, the stepping discs: it must have been readily available.” And he knew instantly that something was wrong, but it took him a moment to know what it was.
The translator had stopped speaking too soon.
Then it spoke with a very different voice. ”Louis, is it wise to, tell her these things?”
”She guessed part of it,” Louis said. ”She was about to blame me for the Fall of the Cities. Give me back my translator.”
”Can I allow you this ugly suspicion? Why would my people perform so malicious an act?”
”Suspicion? You son of a b.i.t.c.h.” Vala knelt watching him with big eyes, listening to him talk to himself in gibberish. She couldn't hear the Hindmost's voice in his earphones. Louis said, ”They kicked you out as Hindmost and you ran. You grabbed what you could and ran. Stepping discs and superconductor cloth and wire and a s.h.i.+p. Discs were easy. You must make them by the million. But where would you find superconductor cloth just waiting for you? And you knew it wouldn't rot on the Ringworld!”
”Louis, why would we do such a thing?”
”Trade advantage. Give me back my translator!”
Valavirgillin got up. She pulled the pot a little out from the fire, stirred it, tasted. She disappeared toward the vehicle and returned with two wooden bowls, which she filled with a dipper.
Louis waited uneasily. The Hindmost could leave him stranded, with no translator. Louis wasn't good with languages ...
”All right, Louis. It wasn't planned this way, and it happened before my time. We were searching for a way to expand our territory with minimal risk. The Outsiders sold us the location of the Ringworld.”
The Outsiders were cold, fragile beings who roamed throughout the galaxy in slower-than-light craft. They traded in knowledge. They might well have known of the Ringworld, and sold the information to puppeteers, but ... ”Wait a minute. Puppeteers are afraid of s.p.a.ceflight.”
”I overcame that fear. If the Ringworld had proved suitable, then one s.p.a.ceflight in an individual's lifetime is no great risk. We would have flown in stasis, of course. From what the Outsiders told us, and from what we learned via telescopes and automatic probes, the Ringworld seemed ideal. We had to investigate.”
”An Experimentalist faction?”
”Of course. Still, we hesitated to contact so powerful a civilization. But we a.n.a.lyzed Ringworld superconductors through laser spectroscopy. We made a bacterium that could feed on it. Probes seeded the superconductor plague across the Ringworld. You guessed as much?”
”That much, yeah.”
”We were to follow with trading s.h.i.+ps. Our traders would come opportunely to the rescue. They would learn all we needed to know, and gain allies too.” Clear and musical, the puppeteer's voice held no trace of guilt, nor even embarra.s.sment.
Vala set the bowls down and knelt across from him. Her face was in shadow. From her viewpoint the translation could not have ended at a worse moment.
Louis said, ”Then the Conservatives won an election, I take it.”
”Inevitable. A probe found att.i.tude jets. We knew of the Ringworld's instability, of course, but we hoped for some more sophisticated means of dealing with it. When the pictures were made public, the government fell. We have had no chance to return to the Ringworld until-”
”When? When did you spread the plague?”
”Eleven hundred and forty years ago by Earth time. The Conservatives ruled for six hundred years. Then the threat of the kzinti put Experimentalists back in power. When the time seemed opportune, I sent Nessus and his team to the Ringworld. If the structure had survived for eleven hundred years after the fall of the culture that kept it in repair, it would have been worth investigating. I could have sent a trade and rescue team. Unfortunately-”
Valavirgillin had the flashlight-laser in her lap, pointed at Louis Wu.
”-unfortunately the structure was damaged. You found meteor holes and landscape eroded down to the scrith. It now seems-”
”This is an emergency. This is an emergency.” Louis held his voice steady. How had she done that? He'd watched her kneel with a steaming bowl of stew in each hand. Could the thing have been taped to her back? Skip it. At least she hadn't fired yet.
”I hear you,” said the Hindmost.
”Can you turn off the flashlight-lasers by remote control?”
”I can do better than that. I can explode it, killing him who holds it.”
”Can't you just turn it off?”
”No.”
”Then give me back my translator function tanj quick. Testing-”
The box spoke Machine People speech. Vala answered immediately. ”Whom or what were you talking to?”
”To the Hindmost, the being who brought me here. May I a.s.sume that I have not yet been attacked?”
She hesitated before answering. ”Yes.”
”Then our agreements are still in force, and I'm still gathering data with intent to save the world. Do you have reason to doubt that?” The night was warm, but Louis felt very naked.
The dead eye of the flashlight-laser remained dead. Vala asked, ”Did the Hindmost's race cause the Fall of the Cities?”