The Ringworld Engineers Part 7

A fortuitous flat s.p.a.ce in the center of the city, half rock and half permafrost, had become a public square; the hordes that thronged it were pale golden flecks just big enough to see. Golden clothing or golden fur? Louis wondered. A great boulder at the back of the square had been carved with the face of a hairy, chubby, jovial baboon.

Louis said, "Don't try to get closer. We'll scare them away if we try to land on fusion drive, and there isn't any other way."

A vertical city with a population of ten thousand, at a guess. Deep-radar showed that they had not dug deep into the rock. In fact, those rocks riddled with rooms looked like dirty permafrost.

"Surely we want to question them regarding their peculiar mountain?"

"I'd love to talk to them," Louis said, and he meant it. "But look at the spectrograph and deep-radar. They don't use metals or plastics, let alone single-crystal stuff. I hate to think what those bridges are made of. They're primitives. They'll think they're living on a mountain."

"I agree. Too much trouble to reach them. Where next? The floating city?"

"Yeah, by way of the sunflower patch."

A shadow square was sliding across the sun's disc.

Chmeee lit the aft motor again and ran their speed to ten thousand miles per hour, then coasted. Not too fast for detail, but fast enough to get them where they were going in about ten hours. Louis studied the racing landscape.

In principle the Ringworld should have been an endless garden. It was not a randomly evolved world, after all, but a made thing.

What they had seen on their first visit could not be considered typical. They had spent most of their time between two big meteoroid punctures: between the eye storm, which was spewing air through a puncture in the Ringworld floor, and the stretched and raised landscape around Fist-of-G.o.d Mountain. Of course the ecology was damaged. The engineers' carefully planned wind patterns must have been ruined.

But here? Louis looked in vain for the pattern of an eye storm, a hurricane turned on its side and flattened. There were no meteoroid punctures here. Yet there were patches of desert, Sahara-size and larger. On the ridges of mountain ranges he found the pearly gleam of naked Ringworld foundation. Winds had stripped away the covering rock.

Had the weather patterns grown this bad, this fast? Or did the Ringworld engineers like deserts? It struck Louis that the Repair Center must have been deserted for a very long time. Halrloprillalar's people might never have found it at all, after the Ringworld engineers vanished. As they had to have vanished, if Louis's guess was right.

"I want three hours' sleep," Chmeee said. "Can you fly the lander if something happens?"

Louis shrugged. "Sure, but what could happen? We're too low for the meteor defense. Even if it's based on the rim wall, it'd be firing on settled land. We'll just cruise awhile."

"Yes. Wake me in three hours." Chmeee reclined his chair and slept.

Louis turned to the fore and aft telescopes for amus.e.m.e.nt and instruction. Night had covered the sunflower region. He ran the view up along the Arch to the nearest of the Great Oceans.

There to spinward of the ocean and almost on the Ringworld median line: that tilted mock volcano was Fist-of-G.o.d Mountain, in a patch of Mars-colored desert much bigger than Mars. Farther to port, a reaching bay of the Great Ocean, itself bigger than worlds.

They had reached the sh.o.r.e of that bay and turned back, last time.

The islands were scattered in cl.u.s.ters across the blue ellipse. One was a small island, disc-shaped, desert colored. One was a disc with a channel cut through it. Strange. But the others were islands in a vast sea ... there, he had found the map of Earth: America, Greenland, Eurasiafrica, Australia, Antarctica, all splayed out from the glare-white North Pole, just as he had seen it in the sky castle long ago.

Were they all maps of real worlds? Prill wouldn't have known. The maps must have been made long before her species came on the scene.

He had left Teela and Seeker somewhere in there. They must still be in the area. Given Ringworld distance and native technology, they could not have gone far in twenty-three years. They were thirty-five degrees up the curve of the Arch-fifty-eight million miles away.

Louis really didn't want to meet Teela again.

Three hours had pa.s.sed. Louis reached out and shook Chmeee's shoulder, gently.

A great arm lashed out. Louis threw himself backward, not far enough.

Chmeee blinked at him. "Louis, never wake me like that. Do you want the autodoc?"

There were two deep gashes just behind his shoulder. He could feel blood seeping into his shirt. "In a minute. Look." He pointed at the map of Earth, tiny islands well separated from the other cl.u.s.ters.

Chmeee looked. "Kzin."

"What?"

"A map of Kzin. There. Louis, I think we were wrong when we a.s.sumed that these were miniature maps. They are full size, one-to-one scale."

Half a million miles from the map of Earth was another cl.u.s.ter. As with the Earth map, the oceans were distorted by the polar projection, but the continents were not "That is Kzin," Louis said. "Why didn't I notice? And that disc with a channel cut through it-that's Jinx. The smaller red-orange blob must be Mars." Louis blinked away dizziness. His shirt was wet with blood. "We can take this up later. Help me down to the autodoc."

Chapter 9 -.

The Herdsmen He slept in the autodoc.

Four hours later-with a trace of tightness behind and below his shoulder to remind him never to touch a sleeping kzin-Louis took his seat.

It was still night outside. Chmeee had the Great Ocean on the screen. He asked, "How are you?"

"Restored to health, thanks be to modern medicine."

"You were not distracted by your wounds. Yet there must have been pain and shock."

"Oh, I suppose Louis Wu at fifty would have gone into hysterics, but futz, I knew the autodoc was right there. Why?"

"It seemed to me at first that you must have the courage of a kzin. Then I wondered if current addiction has left you unable to respond to any lesser stimulus."

"We'll just a.s.sume it's courage, okay? How are you making out?"

"Well enough." The kzin pointed. "Earth. Kzin. Jinx; the two peaks rise right out of the atmosphere, as do the East and West Poles of Jinx. So does the Map of Mars. This is Kdat, the slave planet-"

"Not anymore."

"The kdatlyno were our slaves. So were the pierin, and this is their world, I think. Here, you would know: is this the home world of the Trinocs?"

"Yeah, and they'd settled this one next to it, I think. We can ask the Hindmost if he's got maps."

"We can be sure enough."

"Granted. Okay, what is it? It's not a roster of Earth-like worlds. And there are half a dozen I can't identify at all."

Chmeee snorted. "Obvious to the meanest intelligence, Louis. It is a roster of potential enemies, intelligent or near-intelligent beings who may one day threaten the Ringworld. Pierin, kzinti, martians, human, Trinoc."

"But where does Jinx fit in? Oh. Chmeee, they couldn't have thought the banders.n.a.t.c.hi might come at them with warships. They're big as dinosaurs, and handless. And Down has intelligent natives, too. So where is it?"

"There."

"Yeah. That's kind of impressive. The Grogs aren't all that obvious a menace. They spend their whole lives sitting on one rock."

"The Ringworld engineers found all of these species, and left the Maps as a message for their descendants. Are we agreed? But they did not find the puppeteer world."

"Oh?"

"And we know they landed on Jinx. We found a banders.n.a.t.c.h skeleton during the first expedition."

"So we did. They may have visited all these worlds."

The quality of the light changed, and Louis saw the shadow of night receding to antispinward. He said, "Nearly time to land."

"Where do you suggest?"

The sunflower field ahead was brightening with sunlight. "Turn us left. Follow the terminator line. Keep going till you see real dirt. We want to be down before dawn."

Chmeee bent their path in a great curve. Louis pointed. "Do you see where the border dips toward us, where the sunflowers are spreading around both sides of a sea? I think the sunflowers must have trouble crossing water. Land us on the far sh.o.r.e."

The lander dipped into atmosphere. Flame built up before and around the lander, throwing a white glaze over the view. Chmeee held the lander high, shedding their velocity slowly, dipping lower when he could. The sea fled beneath them. Like all Ringworld seas, it was built for convenience, with a highly convoluted sh.o.r.eline, forming bays and beaches, and a gentle offsh.o.r.e slope to a uniform depth. There were seaweed forests and numerous islands and beaches of clean white sand. A vast gra.s.sy plain ran to antispinward.

The sunflower plague reached two arms around to engulf the sea. A river meandered in S-curves through the sunflowers to the delta where it entered the sea. To port the sunflowers were edging up against a swampy outflow river. Louis could sense the frozen motion, slow as the march of glaciers.

The sunflowers noticed the lander.

Light exploded from below. The window darkened instantly, leaving Chmeee and Louis dazzled.

"Fear not," Chmeee said. "We can't hit anything at this height."

"The stupid plants probably took us for a bird. Can you see yet?"

"I can see the instruments."

"Drop us to five miles. Put them behind us."

The window cleared a few minutes later. Behind them the horizon blazed; the sunflowers were still trying. Ahead ... yeah. "Village."

Chmeee dropped for a closer look. The village was a closed double ring of huts. "Land in the center?"

"I wouldn't. Land at the edge, and I wish I knew what they consider crops."

"I won't burn anything."

A mile above the village, Chmeee braked the lander with the fusion drive. He settled on the tall gra.s.sy stuff that covered the plain. At the last moment Louis saw the gra.s.s move-saw three things like green dwarf elephants stand up, raise short, flattened trunks to bleat warning, and begin running.

"The natives must be herders," Louis said. "We've started a stampede." More green beasts were joining the exodus. "Well, good flight, Captain."

The instruments showed Earthlike atmosphere. Hardly surprising. Louis and Chmeee donned impact armor: leathery stuff, not unpleasantly stiff, which would go rigid as steel under impact from spear, arrow, or bullet. They added sonic stunners, translators, binocular goggles. The ramp carried them down into waist-high gra.s.s.

The huts were close together and joined by fences. The sun was right overhead ... of course. It was dawn, and the natives ought to be just stirring. No windows on the outsides of the huts-except for one twice the height of the others, and that one had a balcony. Perhaps they'd been seen already.

As Chmeee and Louis came near, the natives stirred.

They came over the fence in a bounding swarm, screaming at each other in falsetto. They were small and red and human-shaped, and they ran like demons. They carried nets and spears. Louis saw Chmeee draw his stunner, and drew his own. The red humanoids darted past Louis and Chmeee and kept going.

Chmeee asked, "Have we been insulted?"

"No, they're off to turn the stampede, of course. I can't even fault their sense of proportion. Let's go. Maybe somebody's home."

Somebody was. A couple of dozen red-skinned children watched them from behind the fences as they approached. They were thin; even the babies were lean as greyhound puppies. Louis stopped at the fence and smiled at them. They paid him scant attention. Most of them cl.u.s.tered around Chmeee.

The compound within the circle of huts was bare earth. A border of rocks marked a burnt-out campfire. A one-legged red man came out of one building and approached, using a crutch, moving at a pace Louis would have considered jogging. He wore a kilt of cured hide marked with decorative lacing. His ears were large and stood out from his head, and one had been torn, long ago. His teeth were filed ... were they? The children were all smiling and laughing, and their teeth were filed, even those of the babies. Nope. They must grow that way.

The old man stopped at the fence. He smiled and asked a question.

"I don't speak your language yet," Louis said.

The old man nodded. He gestured with an upward sweep of his arm: invitation?

One of the older children found the courage to leap. He (she; the children wore no kilts) landed on Chmeee's shoulder, settled herself comfortably in the fur, and began to explore. Chmeee stood very still. He asked, "What should I do now?"

"She isn't armed. Don't tell her how dangerous you are." Louis climbed over the fence. The old man stood back for him. Chmeee followed, carefully, with the girl still on his shoulder, clinging to the thick fur around his neck.

They settled near the fireplace, Louis and Chmeee and the one-legged red man, surrounded by children. They began to teach the native language to the translating widgets. For Louis it was routine. Oddly, it also seemed routine to the old man; even the voices of the translators didn't surprise him.

His name was Shivith hooki-Furlaree something. His voice was high and piping. His first intelligible question was "What do you eat? You don't have to say."

"I eat plants and sea life and meat treated with fire. Chmeee eats meat without fire," Louis said, and that seemed sufficient.

"We eat meat without fire too. Chmeee, you are an unusual visitor." Shivith hesitated. "I have to tell you this. We do not do rishathra. Don't be angry." At the word rishathra the translator only beeped.

Chmeee asked, "What is rishathra?"

The old man was surprised. "We thought that the word was the same everywhere." He began to explain. Chmeee was oddly silent as they delved into the subject, working around the unknown words: Rishathra was s.e.x outside of one's own species.

Everyone knew the word. Many species practiced it.

For some, it could be a means of mutual birth control; for others, the first move in a trade agreement. For some it was taboo. The People didn't need a taboo. They just couldn't do it. The s.e.xual signals were wrong; it might be a matter of distinct pheromones. "You must come from far away, not to know this," the old man said.

Louis spoke of himself, how he had come from the stars beyond the Arch. No, neither he nor Chmeee had ever practiced rishathra, though there was great variety among his species. (He remembered a Wunderland girl a foot taller and fifteen pounds lighter than himself, a feather in his arms.) He spoke of the variety of worlds and of intelligent life, but he skirted the subject of wars and weaponry.

The tribes of the People herded many kinds of animals. They liked variety, but they didn't like starving, and it was not usually possible to keep herds of different animals at the same time. Tribes of the People kept track of each other, to trade feasts. Sometimes they traded herds. It was like trading entire life styles: you could spend half a falan in mutual instruction before parting. (A falan was ten turns, ten Ringworld rotations, seventy-five days of thirty hours each.) Would the herders worry that there were strangers in the village? Shivith said they wouldn't. Two strangers were no threat.

When would they return? At midday, Shivith said. They had had to hurry; there had been a stampede. Otherwise they would have stopped to talk.

Louis asked, "Do you need to eat meat right after it's been killed?"