The Ringworld Engineers Part 8

Shivith smiled. "No. Half a day is okay. A day and a night is too long."

"Do you ever-"

Chmeee stood up suddenly. He set the girl down gently and turned off his translator. "Louis, I need exercise and solitude. This time of confinement has threatened my sanity! Do you need me?"

"No. Hey-"

Chmeee was already over the fence. He turned.

"Don't take off your clothes. At a distance there's no way to tell you're intelligent. Don't kill any of the green elephants."

Chmeee waved and bounded off into the green gra.s.s.

"Your friend is fast," said Shivith.

"I should go too. I have a project in mind."'

Survival and escape had been their concerns during their first visit to the Ringworld. Only later, in the safe and familiar surroundings of Resht on Earth, had Louis Wu's conscience become active. Then he remembered destroying a city.

The shadow squares formed a ring concentric to the Ringworld. There were twenty of them held face-on to the sun by invisibly thin wire. The wire stayed taut because the shadow squares rotated at greater than orbital speed.

Liar, falling free with its drive motors burned away, had struck one of the shadow square wires and torn it loose. The wire, a single strand tens of thousands of miles long, had settled like a smoke cloud over an occupied city.

Louis had needed it to tow the grounded Liar.

They had found an endpoint and moored it to their makeshift vehicle-Halrloprillalar's floating jail-and towed it behind them. Louis couldn't know exactly what had happened to the city, but he could guess. The stuff was as fine as gossamer and strong enough to cut hullmetal. It must have cut the buildings into gravel as its loops contracted.

This time the natives would not suffer because Louis Wu had arrived. He was in current-addiction withdrawal; he didn't need guilt too. His first act on this visit was to start a stampede. He was going to fix that.

It was hard physical work.

He took a break at one point and went up on the flight deck. He was worried about the kzin. Even a human being-a flatlander of five hundred years ago, say, a successful man in middle age-might have been disconcerted to find himself suddenly eighteen years old, his smooth progression toward death interrupted, his blood flowing with powerful and unfamiliar juices, his very ident.i.ty in question: hair thickening and changing color, scars disappearing ...

Well, where was Chmeee?

The gra.s.s was strange. Here in the vicinity of the camp, it was waist-high. To spinward was a vast area cropped almost to the ground. Louis could see the herd moving along the edge, guided by small red humanoids, leaving a swath that was almost dirt-colored.

Give 'em this: the little green elephants were efficient. The red men must have to shift camp fairly frequently.

Louis saw motion in the gra.s.s nearby. He watched patiently until it moved again ... and suddenly it was an orange streak. Louis never saw Chmeee's prey. There were no humanoids around, and that was good enough. He went back to work.

The herdsmen returned to find a feast.

They came in a band, chattering among themselves. They paused to examine the lander without coming too close. Some of them surrounded one of the green elephants. (Lunch?) It may have been coincidence that the spearmen led the rest as they entered the circle of huts.

They stopped in surprise, confronting Louis, and Chmeee with a different girl on his shoulder, and half a ton of dressed meat laid on clean leather.

Shivith introduced the aliens, with a short and fairly accurate account of their claims. Louis was prepared to be called a liar, but it never happened. He met the chief: a woman four feet and a few inches tall, Ginjerofer by name, who bowed and smiled with disconcertingly sharp teeth. Louis tried to bow in the same fashion.

"Shivith told us you like variety in meat," Louis said, and gestured toward what he had taken from the lander's kitchen. Three of the natives turned the green elephant around, aimed it at where the rest of the herd was grazing, and prodded its b.u.t.t with spear hafts to get it going. The tribe converged on lunch. Others came to join them, out of huts Louis had a.s.sumed were empty: a dozen very old men and women. Louis had thought Shivith was old. He was not used to seeing people with wrinkled skin and arthritic joints and old scars. He wondered why they had hidden, and surmised that arrows had been aimed at him and Chmeee while they talked with Shivith and the children.

In a few minutes the natives reduced the meal to bones. They did no talking; they seemed to have no order of precedence. They ate, in fact, like kzinti. Chmeee accepted a gestured offer to join them. He ate most of the moa, which the natives ignored; they preferred red meat.

Louis had carried it in several loads on one of the big repulsion plates. His muscles ached from the strain of moving it. He watched the natives tearing into the feast. He felt good. There was no droud in his head, but he felt good.

Most of the natives left then, to tend the herd. Shivith and Ginjerofer and some of the older ones stayed. Chmeee asked Louis, "Is this moa an artifact or a bird? The Patriarch might want such birds for his hunting parks."

"There's a real bird," Louis said. "Ginjerofer, this should make us even for the stampede."

"We thank you," she said. There was blood on her lips and chin. Her lips were full, and redder than her skin. "Forget the stampede. Life is more than not being hungry. We love to meet people who are different. Are your worlds really so much smaller than ours? And round?"

"Round like b.a.l.l.s. If mine were far up the Arch, you would see only a white point."

"Will you go back to these small places to tell of us?"

The translators must be feeding to recorders aboard Needle. Louis said, "One day."

"You will have questions."

"Yeah. Do the sunflowers ruin your grazing ground?"

He had to point before she understood. "The brightness to spinward? We know nothing of it."

"Did you ever wonder? Ever send scouts?"

She frowned. "This is the way of it. My fathers and mothers tell that we have been moving to antispinward since they were little. They remember that they had to go around a great sea, but they did not come too close, because the beasts would not eat the plants that grow around the sh.o.r.e. There was a brightness to spinward then, but it is stronger now. As for scouts-a party of the young went to see for themselves. They met giants. The giants killed their beasts. They had to return quickly then. They had no meat."

"It sounds like the sunflowers are moving faster than you are."

"Okay. We can move faster than we do."

"What do you know about the floating city?"

Ginjerofer had seen it all her life. It was a landmark, like the Arch itself. Sometimes when the night was cloud-covered, one could still find the yellow glow of the city, but that was all she knew. The city was too far even for rumor.

"But we hear tales from large distances, if they are worth telling. They may be garbled. We hear of the people of the spill mountains, who live between the cold white level and the foothills, where air is too dense. They fly between the spill mountains. They use sky sleds when they can get them, but there are no new sky sleds, so that for hundreds of years they must use balloons. Will your seeing-things see that far?"

Louis put the binocular goggles on her and showed her the enlargement dial. "Why did you call them spill mountains? Is that the same word you use when you spill water?"

"Yes. I don't know why we call them that. Your eyepiece only shows me larger mountains ..." She turned to spinward. The goggles almost covered her small face. "I can see the sh.o.r.e, and a glare across."

"What else do you hear from travelers?"

"When we meet we talk most of dangers. There are brainless meat-eaters to antispinward that kill people. They look something like us, but smaller, and they are black and hunt at night. And there are ..." She frowned. "We don't know the truth of this. There are mindless things that urge one to do rishathra with them. One does not live through the act."

"But you can't do rishathra. They can't be dangerous to you."

"Even to us, we are told."

"What about diseases? Parasites?"

None of the natives knew what he meant! Fleas, hookworm, mosquitoes, measles, gangrene: there was nothing like that on the Ringworld. Of course he should have guessed that. The Ringworld engineers just hadn't brought them. He was startled nonetheless. He wondered if he might have brought disease to the Ringworld for the first time ... and decided that he had not. The autodoc would have cured him of anything dangerous.

But the natives were that much like civilized humans. They grew old, but not sick.

Chapter 10 -.

The G.o.d Gambit Hours before nightfall, Louis was exhausted.

Ginjerofer offered them the use of a hut, but Chmeee and Louis elected to sleep in the lander. Louis fell between the sleeping plates while Chmeee was still setting up defenses.

He woke in the dead of night.

Chmeee had activated the image amplifier before he went to sleep. The landscape glowed bright as a rainy day. The daylit rectangles of the Arch were like ceiling light panels: too bright to do more than glance at. But most of the nearer Great Ocean was in shadow.

The Great Oceans lured him. They were flamboyant. They should not have been. If Louis was right about the Ringworld engineers, flamboyance was not their style. They built with simplicity and efficiency, and they planned in very long time spans, and they fought wars.

But the Ringworld was flamboyant in its own way, and impossible to defend. Why hadn't they built a lot of little Ringworlds instead? And why the Great Oceans? They didn't fit either.

He could be wrong from the start. That had happened before! Yet the evidence- Was there something moving in the gra.s.s?

Louis activated the infrared scanner.

They glowed by their own heat. They were bigger than dogs, like a blend of human and jackal: horrid supernatural things in this unnatural light. Louis spent a moment locating the sonic stun cannon in the lander's turret and another swinging it toward the interlopers. Four of them, moving on all fours through the gra.s.s.

They stopped not far from the huts. They were there for some minutes. Then they moved off, and now they were hunched half erect. Louis turned off the infrared scanner.

In augmented Archlight it was clear: they were carrying the day's garbage, the remains of the feast. Ghouls. The meat probably wasn't ripe enough for them yet.

Yellow eyes in his peripheral vision: Chmeee was wide-awake. Louis said, "The Ringworld's old. A hundred thousand years at least."

"What makes you say that?"

"The Ringworld engineers wouldn't have brought jackals. There's been time enough for some branch of the hominids to fit that niche in the ecology."

"A hundred thousand years wouldn't be enough," said Chmeee.

"It might. I wonder what else the engineers didn't bring. They didn't bring mosquitoes."

"You are facetious. But they would not have brought bloodsuckers of any kind."

"No. Or sharks, or cougars." Louis laughed. "Or skunks. What else? Venomous snakes? Mammals couldn't live like snakes. I don't think any mammals secrete poison in their mouths."

"Louis, it would take millions of years for hominids to evolve in so many directions. We must consider whether they evolved on the Ringworld at all!"

"They did, unless I'm completely wrong. As for how long it took, there's a small matter of mathematics. If we a.s.sume they started evolving a hundred thousand years ago, from a base popu..." Louis let the sentence trail off.

A good distance away-moving at fair speed, considering their burdens-the jackal-hominids suddenly stopped, turned back, seemed to pose for a moment, then dropped into the gra.s.s and vanished. A touch of the infrared sensor showed four glowing spots fanning out and away.

"Company to spinward," Chmeee said quietly.

The newcomers were big. They were Chmeee's size, and they weren't trying to hide. Forty bearded giants marched through the night as if they owned it. They were armed and armored. They moved in a wedge formation, with bowmen on the forward arms of the triangle and swordsmen inside, and the one fully armored man at the point. Others had plates of thick leather to guard arms and torsos, but that one, the biggest of the giants, wore metal: a gleaming sh.e.l.l that bulged at elbows, knuckles, shoulders, knees, hips. The forward-jutting mask was open, with a pale beard and wide nose showing inside.

"I was right. I was right all along. But why a Ringworld? Why did they build a Ringworld? How in Finagle's Name did they expect to defend it?"

Chmeee finished swinging the stun cannon around. "Louis, what are you talking about?"

"The armor. Look at the armor. Haven't you ever been in the Smithsonian Inst.i.tute? And you saw the pressure suits in the Ringworlder s.p.a.ceship."

"Uurrr ... yes. We have a more immediate problem."

"Don't shoot yet. I want to see ... Yeah, I was right. They're going past the village."

"Would you say that the little red ones are our allies? It was only coincidence that we met them first."

"I'd say they are. Tentatively."

The microphone picked up a high-pitched scream, interrupted by a bellow. The archers drew arrows simultaneously, fitted them to bows. Two small red sentries were bounding toward the huts at impressive speed. They were ignored.

"Fire," Louis said softly.

The arrows went wild. The giants crumpled. Two or three green elephants bellowed and tried to get to their feet, paused, then settled back. One had a couple of arrows in its flank.

"They were after the herd," Chmeee said.

"Yeah. We don't really want them slaughtered, do we? Tell you what, you stay here with the stun cannon and I'll go out and negotiate."

"I don't take your orders, Louis."

"Do you have other suggestions?"

"No. Save at least one giant to answer questions."

This one had fallen on his back. He was not just bearded, he was maned: only his eyes and nose showed in a ma.s.s of golden hair that spilled over face and head and shoulders. Ginjerofer squatted and forced his mouth open with two small hands. The warrior's jaw was ma.s.sive. His teeth were flat-topped molars, well worn down. All of them.

"See," Ginjerofer said, "a plant-eater. They wanted to kill the herd, to take their gra.s.s."

Louis shook his head. "I wouldn't have thought the compet.i.tion would be so fierce."

"We didn't know. But they come from spinward, where our herds have cropped the gra.s.s close. Thank you for killing them, Louis. We must have a great feast."

Louis's stomach lurched. "They're only sleeping. And they've got minds, like you, like me."