The Ringworld Engineers Part 6

"I hadn't forgotten," Louis said.

"First we must search all of the s.p.a.ceport ledges. There are eleven more s.h.i.+ps on this rim wall, and an unknown number on the portward rim-"

And it would be weeks before the Hindmost satisfied himself that no trans.m.u.tation system was to be found on those s.h.i.+ps. Oh, well- "We should go now," Chmeee said. "The secret may be nearly within our grip!"

"We have fuel and supplies. We can afford to wait."

Chmeee reached out and tapped controls. He must have planned this sequence in detail; he must have studied the lander minutely while Louis was dopey with fatigue. The small conical craft lifted a foot from the floor, spun ninety degrees, and the blast of a fusion motor filled the docking chamber with white fire.

"You are being foolish," the Hindmost's liquid contralto reproved them. "I can turn off your drive."

The lander slid clear of the curved docking hatch and lifted at a brutal four gees. When the Hindmost finished speaking, a fall would already have killed them. Louis cursed himself for not foreseeing this. Chmeee's blood was bubbling with youth. Half the kzinti never grew up-they died in fights ...

And Louis Wu, too engrossed in himself and his current-withdrawal depression, had let his options slip by him.

He asked coolly, "Have you decided to do your own exploring, Hindmost?"

The puppeteer's heads quivered indecisively above his control board.

"No? Then well do it our way, thank you very much." Louis turned to Chmeee and said, "Try landing on the rim wall" before he noticed the kzin's peculiarly rigid att.i.tude, blank eyes, and exposed claws. Rage? Would the kzin actually try to ram Hot Needle of Inquiry?

The kzin howled in the Hero's Tongue.

The puppeteer answered in the voice of a kzin; changed his mind and repeated in Interworld. "Two fusion rockets, one mounted aft and one beneath. No thrusters. You need never fire the fusion motors on the ground except for defense. You may lift with repulsers, which repel the Ringworld floor material. You may fly as if using a negative gravity generator, but the repulsers are simpler in design, easier to repair and maintain. Do not use them now. They would repel the rim wall and thrust you into s.p.a.ce."

That explained Chmeee's apparent panic. He was having trouble flying the lander. Not rea.s.suring. But the s.p.a.ceport ledge was far below, and an unnerving wobble at takeoff had almost disappeared. There was steady four-gee thrust under him ... which suddenly cut off. Louis said "Wuff!" as the lander went into free fall.

"We must not rise too far above the rim wall. Search the lockers, Louis. Inventory our equipment."

"You'll warn me before you do that again?"

"I will."

Louis disengaged the crash web and floated down the stairwell.

Here was living s.p.a.ce surrounded by lockers and an airlock. Louis began opening doors. The biggest locker held what must have been a square mile of fine, silky black cloth, and hundreds of miles of black thread on twenty-mile spools. Another locker held modified flying belts, with repulsers over the shoulders and a small thruster. Two small and one large. One for Halrloprillalar, of course. Louis found flashlight-lasers and handheld sonic stunners and a heavy two-handed disintegrator. He found boxes the size of Chmeee's fist, with a s.h.i.+rt clip and a microphone grid, and earplugs (two small and one large) in the same compartment. Those would be translators, with compact computers included. If they worked through the onboard computer they would have been less bulky.

There were large rectangular repulsion plates-for towing cargo through the air? Spools of Sinclair molecule chain, like very thin, very strong thread. Small bars of gold: for trade? Binocular goggles with a light-amplification setting. Impact armor. Louis muttered, "He's thought of everything."

"Thank you." The Hindmost spoke from a screen Louis hadn't noticed. "I had many years to prepare."

Louis was getting tired of finding the Hindmost wherever he went. Funny: he could hear the sounds of a cat fight drifting down from the flight deck. The Hindmost must be holding two conversations at once, instructing Chmeee on the lander's controls. He heard the expression for "att.i.tude jets"- Chmeee's voice roared without benefit of microphone. "Louis, take your place!"

Louis glided up the stairwell. He was barely into his chair when Chmeee lit the fusion motors. The lander slowed and hovered just at the edge of the rim wall.

The top of the rim wall was broad enough for the lander, but not much more than that. And how was the Ringworld meteor defense taking all this?

*They had been within the arc of the Ringworld, falling toward the inner ring of shadow squares, when violet light bathed the s.p.a.cecraft Lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Liar's hull had instantly enclosed itself in a bubble of no-time. When time began again, the hull and its occupants had suffered no damage. But Liar's delta wing, with its thrusters and fusion motors and pods of sensing instruments, had become ionized vapor. And the hull was falling toward the Ringworld.

They had speculated, later, that the violet laser was no more than an automated meteor defense. They had guessed that it might be based on the shadow squares. It was all guesswork, they had never learned anything about the Ringworld weapon.*

The rim transport system was a late addition. The Ringworld engineers would not have taken it into account when programming the meteor defense. But Louis had seen old recordings of it in action, in a building abandoned by Halrloprillalar's species. It had worked; the meteor defense had not fired on the linear accelerator loops or the s.h.i.+ps they enclosed. And Louis gripped his chair arms hard, waiting for violet flame, as Chmeee settled the lander on the rim wall.

But it didn't come.

Chapter 8 -.

Ringworld From a thousand miles above the Earth-from, say, a s.p.a.ce station in a two-hour orbit-the Earth is a great sphere. The kingdoms of the world revolve below. Details disappear around the horizon's curve; other, hidden features rotate into view. At night, glowing cities outline the continents.

But from a thousand miles above the Ringworld, the world is flat, and the kingdoms thereof are all there at once.

The rim wall was of the same stuff as the Ringworld floor. Louis had walked on it, in places where eroded landscape let it show through. It had been grayish, translucent, and terribly slippery. Here the surface had been roughened for traction. But the pressure suit and backpack made Chmeee and Louis top-heavy. They moved with care. That first step would be a beauty.

At the bottom of a thousand miles of gla.s.sy cliff were broken layers of cloud, and seas: bodies of water from ten thousand to a couple of million square miles in area, spread more or less uniformly across the land, and linked by networks of rivers. As Louis raised his eyes, the seas grew smaller with distance ... smaller and a little hazy ... too small to see, until sea and fertile land and desert and cloud all blended into a blue knife-edge against black s.p.a.ce.

To left and right it was the same, until the eye found a blue band swooping up from the infinity beyond the horizon. The Arch rose and narrowed and curved over and above itself, baby blue checked with midnight blue, to where a narrow ribbon of Arch lost itself behind a shrunken sun.

This part of the Ringworld had just pa.s.sed its maximum distance from the sun. but a Sol-type star could still burn your eyes out. Louis blinked and shook his head, his eyes and mind dazzled. Those distances could grab your mind and hold it, leave you looking into infinity for hours or days. You could lose your soul to those distances. What was one man when set against an artifact so huge?

He was Louis Wu. There was nothing like him on all the Ringworld. He held to that. Forget the infinities: concentrate on detail.

There, thirty-five degrees up the Arch: a faintly bluer patch.

Louis worked the magnification on his goggles. They locked onto the faceplate, but you had to hold your head very still. The patch was all ocean, an ellipse stretching nearly across the Ringworld, with cl.u.s.ters of islands showing through cloud cover.

He found the other Great Ocean higher up on the other branch of the Arch. It was a ragged four-pointed star, dotted with similar cl.u.s.ters of tiny islands-tiny at this distance, at which the Earth would be a naked-eye object, barely.

It was getting to him again. Deliberately he looked down, studying the near distance.

Almost below, a couple of hundred miles to spinward, a half-cone of mountain leaned drunkenly against the rim wall. It seemed oddly regular. It was layered in half-circles: a bare, dirt-colored peak; far below, a band of white, probably snow and ice; then green spreading down and out into foothills.

The mountain was quite isolated. In the spinward direction the rim wall was a flat vertical cliff out to the limit of the binocular goggles-almost. If that b.u.mp at the very limit of vision was another such mountain, it was a futz of a long way away. At the distance you could almost see the Ringworld starting to curve upward.

There was another such b.u.mp in the antispinward direction. Louis scowled. File for future study.

Far to port (ahead) and a bit to spinward (right) was a region of glittering white, brighter than land, brighter than sea. A midnight-blue edge of night was sweeping toward it. Salt, was Louis's first thought. It was big. It had engulfed a couple of dozen Ringworld seas, and those seas varied in size from Lake Huron to the Mediterranean. Brighter points came and went like ripples ...

Ah. "Sunflower patch."

Chmeee looked. "The one that burned me was bigger."

Slaver sunflowers were as old as the Slaver Empire, which had died more than a billion years ago. The Slavers seemed to have planted sunflowers around their estates, for defense. You still found these plants on some of the worlds of known s.p.a.ce. Cleaning them out was a difficult business. You couldn't just burn them out with laser cannon. The silver blossoms would throw the beam back at you.

What sunflowers were doing on the Ringworld was a mystery. But Speaker-To-Animals had been flying above a Ringworld landscape when a rift in the clouds exposed him to the plants beneath. The scars were almost gone ...

Louis raised the magnification on his goggles. A smoothly curved borderline marked off the blue-green-brown of an Earthlike world from the silver sunflower patch. The border curved inward to half enclose one of the larger seas.

"Louis? Look for a short black line, just beyond the sunflowers and a bit to antispinward."

"I see it." A black dash on the infinite noonday landscape, perhaps a hundred thousand miles from where they stood. Now, what would that be? A vast tar pit? No, petrochemicals would never form on the Ringworld. A shadow? What could cast a shadow in the Ringworld's permanent noon?

"Chmeee, I think its a floating city."

"Yes ... At worst it will be a center of civilization. We should consult them."

They had found floating buildings in some of the old cities. Why not a floating city? They'd be seeing it edge on, of course. "What we should do," Louis said, "is touch down a fair distance away and ask the natives about them. I'd hate to come on them cold. If they're good enough to keep that city going, they could be tough. Say we touch down near the edge of the sunflower patch-"

"Why there?"

"The sunflowers would be fouling up the ecology. Maybe the locals could use some help. We'd be surer of our welcome. Hindmost, what do you think?"

There was no answer.

"Hindmost? Calling the Hindmost ... Chmeee, I think he can't hear us. The rim wall's blocking his signals."

Chmeee said, "We will not remain free long. I saw a pair of probes mounted in the cargo bay, behind the lander. The puppeteer will use them as relays. Is there anything you would like to say during this temporary freedom?"

"I'd say we covered it all last night."

"Not quite. Our motives are not quite the same, Louis. I take it that you are eager to save your life. Beyond that you want free access to current. For myself, I want my life and my freedom, but I also want satisfaction. The Hindmost has kidnapped a kzin. He must be made to regret it."

"I can buy that. He kidnapped me too."

"What does a wirehead know of thwarted honor? Do not let me find you blocking my path, Louis."

"I'm just going to diffidently remind you," Louis said, "that I got you off the Ringworld. Without me you would never have taken the Long Shot home to earn your name.

"You were not a current addict then."

"I am not a current addict now. And don't you call me a liar."

"I am not ac-"

"Hold it." Louis pointed. The corner of his eye had caught something moving against the stars. A moment later the voice of the Hindmost spoke in their ears.

"Please forgive the hiatus. What have you decided to do?"

"Explore," Chmeee said curtly. He turned back to the lander.

"Give me details. I am not happy about risking one of my probes merely to maintain communications. The primary purpose of these probes was to refuel Needle."

"Return your probe to safety," Chmeee told the puppeteer. "When we return we will report in full."

The probe settled onto the rim wall on several small jets. It was a lumpy cylinder twenty feet long. The Hindmost said, "You speak frivolously. It is my landing craft you risk. Do you plan to search the base of the rim wall?"

That thrilling contralto, that lovely woman's voice, was the same that every puppeteer trader had learned from his predecessor. Possibly they learned another to influence women. To men it was a voice that pushed b.u.t.tons, and Louis resented that. He said, "There are cameras on the lander, aren't there? Just watch."

"I have your droud. Explain."

Neither Louis nor Chmeee bothered to answer.

"Very well. I have locked open the stepping-disc link between the lander and Needle. The probe will function as a relay for this, too. As for your droud, Louis, you may have it when you learn to obey."

And that, thought Louis, defined his problem nicely.

Chmeee said, "It is good to know that we can flee our mistakes. Are there range limits to stepping discs?"

"Energy limits. The stepping-disc system can absorb only a limited kinetic energy difference. Needle and the lander should have no relative velocity when you flick across. You are advised to stay directly to port of Needle."

"This fits our plans."

"But if you abandon the lander, I still control your means of escape from the Ringworld. Do you hear me, Chmeee, Louis? The Ringworld will impact the shadow squares in just more than Earth's year."

Chmeee lifted the lander on puppeteer-developed repulsers. A burst from the aft fusion motor edged the craft forward and off the edge.

Flying on Ringworld-floor-material repulsers was not like using antigravity, Louis noted. Repelled by both the rim wall and the landscape, the lander fell in a swooping curve. Chmeee stopped their descent at forty miles.

Louis displayed a telescope view on one of the screens. Floating on repulsers alone, above most of the atmosphere, the lander was very steady and utterly quiet: a good telescope mount.

Rocky soil lapped up in foothills to the base of the rim wall. Louis ran the telescope slowly along that border, at high magnification. Barren brown soil against gla.s.sy gray. An anomaly would be easy to spot.

"What do you expect to find?" Chmeee asked.

Louis didn't mention the watching puppeteer, who thought they were searching for an abandoned trans.m.u.tation device. "A s.p.a.cecraft crew would have come through from the s.p.a.ceport ledge about here. But I don't see anything big in the way of abandoned machinery. We aren't really interested in little stuff, are we? They wouldn't have left anything valuable unless it was just too tanj big to move, and then they'd have left almost everything they had."

He stopped the telescope. "What do you make of that?"

It stood thirty miles tall against the base of the rim wall: a half-cone, with a weathered look, as if smoothed by a hundred million years of wind. Ice glittered in a broad belt around its lower slope. The ice was thick and showed the flow patterns of glaciers.

"The Ringworld imitates the topography of Earthlike worlds," said Chmeee. "From what I know of Earthlike worlds, this mountain doesn't fit the pattern."

"Yeah. It's inartistic. Mountains come in chains, and they aren't this regular. But, you know, it's worse than that. Everything on the Ringworld is contoured in. Remember when we took the Liar underneath? Sea bottoms bulging, dents for mountains and gullies for mountain ranges, riverbeds like veins in a weight lifter's arm? Even the river deltas are carved into the structure. The Ringworld isn't thick enough to let the landscape carve itself."

"There are no tectonic processes to do the carving, for that matter."

"Then we should have seen that mountain from the back, from the s.p.a.ceport. I didn't. Did you?"

"I'll take us closer."

That turned out to be difficult. The closer the lander came to the rim wall, the more fusion thrust was needed to hold it there ... or to lift the lander if the repulsers were turned off.

They came within fifty miles, and that was close enough to find the city. Great gray rocks protruded through the ice floes, and some of these showed myriad black-shadowed doors and windows. Focus closer and the doorways had balconies and awnings, and hundreds of slender suspension bridges ran up, down, and sideways. Stairways were hacked into the rock; they ran in strange branching curves, half a mile tall and more. One dipped all the way to the foothills, to the tree line.