Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

Chmeee asked, before the Hindmost could, “How would they remove it?”

“Maybe with the cziltang brone from another ship. Were all the fuel tanks empty?” He looked at the ghosts of the other ships. “Yah. Okay, we’ll find the transmuters on the Ringworld… and they won’t be working. The plague will have got to them.”

“Halrloprillalar’s tale of the bacterium that eats superconductor is in our records,” the Hindmost said.

“Well, she really couldn’t tell us all that much,” said Louis. “Her ship left on a long tour. When it came back, there was no more Ringworld civilization. Everything that used superconductors had stopped.” He had wondered how much to believe of Prill’s tale of the Fall of the Cities. But something had destroyed the Ringworld’s ruling civilization. “Superconductor is almost too wonderful. You end up using it in everything.”

“Then we can repair the transmuters,” said the Hindmost.

“Oh?”

“You will find superconducting wire and fabric stored aboard the lander. It is not the same superconductor the Ringworld used. The bacterium will not touch it. I thought we might need trade goods.”

Louis kept his poker face intact, but the Hindmost had made a startling statement. How did puppeteers come to know so much about a mutant plague that killed Ringworld machines? Suddenly Louis didn’t doubt the bacterium at all.

Chmeee hadn’t caught it. “We want to know what the thieves used for transportation. If the rim-wall transport system failed, then our transmuters may be just the other side of the rim wall, abandoned there because they stopped working.”

Louis nodded. “Failing that, we’ve got a lot of territory to search. I think we should be looking for a Repair Center.”

“Louis?”

“There has to be a control and maintenance center somewhere. The Ringworld can’t run itself forever. There’s meteor defense, meteor repair, the attitude jets… the ecology could go haywire — it all has to be watched. Of course the Repair Center could be anywhere. But it’s got to be big. We shouldn’t have that much trouble finding it. And we’ll probably find that it’s been abandoned, because if anyone had been minding the store, he wouldn’t have let the Ringworld slide off center.”

The Hindmost said, “You have been putting your mind to this.”

“We didn’t do too well the first time we came here. We came to explore, remember? Some kind of laser weapon shot us down, and we spent the rest of our time trying to get off alive. We covered maybe a fifth of the width , and learned just about nothing. It’s the Repair Center we should have been looking for. That’s where the miracles are.”

“I had not expected such ambition from a current addict.”

“We’ll start cautiously.” Cautiously for humans, Louis told himself; not for puppeteers. “Chmeee’s right: the machines could have been dumped as soon as they were through the rim wall, when the bacterium got to them.”

Chmeee said, “We should not try to take the lander through the rim wall. I have no faith in an alien machine a thousand years old. We must go over.”

The Hindmost asked, “How would you avoid the meteor defense?”

“We must try to outguess it. Louis, do you still believe that what fired on us was merely an automated defense against meteors?”

“I thought so at the time. It all happened so tanj fast!” Falling sunward, all a little edgy, daunted by the reality of the Ringworld. All but Teela, of course. A momentary flash of violet-white; then Liar was embedded in tenuous violet-glowing gas. Teela had looked out through the hull. “The wing’s gone,” she’d said.

“It didn’t fire on us till we were on a course to intersect the Ringworld surface. It’s got to be automated. I told you why I think there’s nobody in the Repair Center.”

“Nobody to fire on us deliberately. Very well, Louis. Automatics would not be set to fire on the rim transport system, would they?”

“Chmeee, we don’t know who built the rim transport system. Maybe it wasn’t the Ringworld engineers; maybe it was added later, by Prill’s people—”

“It was,” said the Hindmost.

His crew turned to look at the puppeteer’s image on the screen.

“Did I tell you that I spent some time at the telescope? I have learned that the rim transport system is only partly finished. It runs along 40 percent of this rim wall, and does not include the section we occupy now. On the portward rim wall the system is only 15 percent complete. The Ringworld engineers would not have left so minor a subsystem half built, would they? Their own mode of transport may have been the same spacecraft used to supervise construction.”

“Prill’s people came later,” Louis said. “Maybe a lot later. Maybe the rim transport system got too expensive. Maybe they never actually completed their conquest of the Ringworld… but then why were they building starships? Oh, futz, we may never know. Where does this leave us?”

“It leaves us trying to out-think the meteor defense,” Chmeee said.

“Yah. And you were right. If the meteor defense made a habit of firing on the rim wall, nobody would have built anything there.” Louis chewed it a moment longer. There would be holes in his assumptions… but the alternative was to go through the wall via an ancient cziltang brone of unknown dependability. “Okay. We fly over the rim wall.”

The puppeteer said, “You suggest a fearful risk. I prepared as best I could, but I was forced to use human technology. Suppose the lander should fail? I hesitate to risk any of my resources. You would be stranded. The Ringworld is doomed.”

“I hadn’t forgotten,” Louis said.

“First we must search all of the spaceport ledges. There are eleven more ships on this rim wall, and an unknown number on the portward rim—“

And it would be weeks before the Hindmost satisfied himself that no transmutation system was to be found on those ships. 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 attitude, 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 space.”