morning we will be found. What do you offer, and what do you want?”
“Was I right in guessing that your water condenser doesn’t work? Did it stop at the Fall of the Cities?”
“It has never worked to my knowledge. Who are you?”
“I am Louis Wu. Male. Call my species the Star People. I come from outside the world, from a star too dim to see. I have stuff to repair at least some of the water condensers in the city, and I have hidden much more. It may be that I can give you lighting too.”
Mar Korssil studied him with blue eyes as big as goggles. She had formidable claws on her fingers, and buck teeth like axheads. What was she, a rodent-hunting carnivore? She said, “If you can repair our machines, that is good. As to repairing those of other buildings, my master will decide. What do you want?”
“A great deal of knowledge. Access to whatever the city holds in the way of stored knowledge, maps, histories, tales—”
“You cannot expect us to send you to the Library. If your claim is true, you are too valuable. Our building is not wealthy, but we may buy knowledge from the Library if you have specific questions.”
It was becoming obvious: the floating city was no more a city than Pericles’ Greece had been a nation. The buildings were independent, and he was in the wrong building. “Which building is the library?” he asked.
“At the port-by-spinward perimeter, a cone moored tip down… Why do you ask?”
Louis touched his chest, rose, moved toward the outer night.
Mar Korssil fired. Louis fell sprawling. Flames blazed against his chest. He yelled and jerked the harness loose and rolled away. The flying-belt controls burned, a smoky yellow flame with blue-white flashes in it.
Louis found the flashlight-laser in his hand, pointed at Mar Korssil. The Night Hunter seemed not to notice. “Do not make me do that again,” she said. “Are you wounded?”
Those words saved her life; but Louis had to kill
Mar Korssil didn’t move.
“I only want to leave your building,” Louis said. “You’ve marooned me. I’ll have to enter your building, but I’ll leave by the first ramp I find. Drop the weapon or die.”
A woman’s voice spoke from the stairway. “Drop the gun, Mar Korssil.”
The Night Hunter did.
The woman came down the stairs. She was taller than Louis, and slender. Her nose was tiny, her lips invisibly thin. Her head was bald, but rich white hair flowed down her back from behind her cars and the back of her neck. Louis guessed that the white hair was a mark of age. She showed no fear of him. He asked, “Do you rule here?”
“I and my mate-of-record rule. I am Laliskareerlyar. Did you call yourself Luweewu?”
“Close enough.”
She smiled. “There is a peephole. Mar Korssil signaled from the garage: an unusual act. I came to watch and listen. I am sorry about your flying device. There are none left in all the city.”
“If I repair your water condenser, will you set me free? And I need advice.”
“Consider your bargaining position. Can you resist my guards who wait outside?”
Louis had almost resigned himself to killing his way out. He made one more try. The floor seemed to be the usual poured stone. He ran the laser beam in a slow circle, and a patch of stone a yard across dropped into the night. Laliskareerlyar lost her smile. “Perhaps you can. It shall be as you say. Mar Korssil, come with us. Stop anyone who tries to interfere. Leave your gun where it lies.”
They climbed a spiral escalator that no longer ran. Louis counted fourteen loops, fourteen stories. He wondered if he had been wrong about Laliskareerlyar’s age. The City Builder woman climbed briskly and had breath left over for conversation. But her hands and face were wrinkled as if worn too long.
An unsettling sight. Louis wasn’t used to that. Intellectually he knew what it was: the sign of age, and the sign of her ancestor, the Pak protector.
They climbed by the light of Louis’s flashlight-laser. People appeared at doorways; Mar Korssil warned them back. Most were City Builders, but there were other species too.
These servants had served the Lyar family for many generations, Laliskareerlyar explained. The Mar family of night watchmen had been policemen serving a Lyar judge. The Machine People cooks had served almost as long. Servants and City Builder masters saw themselves as one family, bound by periodic rishathra and old loyalties. All told, Lyar Building held a thousand people, half of them interrelated City Builders.
Louis stopped to look through a window halfway up. A window, in a stairwell that ran through the core of a building? It was a hologram, a view along one of the rim walls, showing a vast stretch of Ringworld landscape. One of the last of the Lyar treasures, Laliskareerlyar told him with pride and regret. Others had been sold over hundreds of falans to pay water fees.
Louis found himself talking too. He was wary and angry and tired, but there was something about the old City Builder woman that drew him out. She knew about planets. She didn’t question his veracity. She listened. She looked so much like Halrloprillalar that Louis found himself talking about her: about the ancient, immortal ship’s whore who had lived as a half-mad goddess until Louis Wu and his motley crew arrived; how she had helped them, how she had left her ruined civilization with them, how she had died.
Laliskareerlyar asked, “Is that why you didn’t kill Mar Korssil?”
The Night Hunter woman looked at him with great blue eyes.
Louis laughed. “Maybe.” He told them of his conquest of the sunflower patch. He was skirting a dangerous subject, for he saw no point in telling Laliskareerlyar that the world was going to brush against its sun. “I want to leave the world knowing that I’ve done no damage. I’ve got more of that cloth buried near here… Tanj! I can’t think of any way to reach it now.
They had reached the top of the spiral. Louis was huffing. Mar Korssil unlocked a door; there were more stairs beyond. Laliskareerlyar asked, “Are you nocturnal?”
“What? No.”
“We had best wait for day. Mar Korssil, go and send us breakfast. Send Whil, with tools. Then go to sleep.” As Mar Korssil trotted obediently downstairs, the old woman sat cross-legged on ancient carpet. “I expect we must work outside,” she said. “I don’t understand the risk you took. For what? Knowledge? What knowledge?”
It was difficult to lie to her, but the Hindmost might well be listening. “Do you know anything of a machine to change one kind of matter into another? Air into dirt, lead into gold?”
She was interested. “Ancient magicians were said to be able to turn glass into diamonds. But these were children’s tales.”
So much for that. “What of a Repair Center for the world? Are there legends about that? Telling its location?”
She stared. “As if the world were no more than a made thing, a larger version of the city?”
Louis laughed. “Much larger. Much much much larger. No?”
“No.”
“What about an immortality drug? I
“Of course it was real. There is none left in the city, nor anywhere else that I know of. The tale is a favorite with” — the translator used an Interworld phrase — “con men.”
“Does the tale tell where it might have come from?”
A young City Builder woman came puffing up the stairs carrying a shallow bowl. Louis’s fears of poison disappeared at once. The stuff was lukewarm, something like oatmeal, and they ate with their hands from the one bowl.
“The youth drug comes from spinward,” the old woman said, “but I know not how far to spinward. Is this the treasure of knowledge you came for?”
“Any of several treasures. That would be a good one.” There would certainly have been tree-of-life in the Repair Center, Louis thought. I wonder how they’d handle it? Surely no human being would want to be a protector? But there might be hominids who would… Well, those puzzles could wait.
Whil was a burly hominid with a simian face, dressed in a sheet whose original color was lost to time. It was a mad god’s rainbow now. Whil didn’t talk much. His arms were short and thick and looked very strong. He led them up the last flight of steps, carrying his toolbox, and out into the dawn.
