Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

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 buttons, 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 glassy 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 transmutation device. “A spacecraft crew would have come through from the spaceport 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.”

“Yah. 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 spaceport. 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.