Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

The fifth bracket stayed on the screen for a moment. Its tip held nothing at all. Then the Hindmost flipped back to the fourth hologram.

It was somewhat blurred by the probe’s velocity. There was heavy lifting machinery anchored to the rim wall next to the bracket: a crude fusion generator; a powered winch; a drum and a hook floating unsupported below it. The cable depending from the drum must be invisibly thin, Louis thought. It could be shadow square wire.

“A repair team already at work? Uurrr. Are they mounting attitude jets or dismounting them? How many are mounted?”

“The probe will tell us,” the Hindmost said. “I direct your attention to another problem. Recall to your mind those toroids that circle the waist of the one intact Ringworld spacecraft. We surmise that they generate the electromagnetic scoop fields for Bussard ramjets.”

Chmeee studied the screen. “The Ringworld ships were all of the same design. I wondered why. You may be right.”

Louis said, “I don’t understand. What has—”

Two one-eyed snakes looked out of a screen at him. “Halrloprillalar’s species built part of a transportation system that would give them endless room to colonize and explore. Why didn’t they continue? All of the Ringworld was theirs through the rim transport system. Why would they make the effort to reach the stars?”

It made an ugly pattern. Louis didn’t want to believe it, but it fit too well. “They got the motors for free. They dismounted a few of the Ringworld attitude jets, built ships around them, and reached the stars. And nothing went obviously wrong. So they dismounted a few more. I wonder how many they used.”

“The probe will tell us in time,” the puppeteer said. “They seem to have left a few motors still mounted. Why did they not move the Ringworld back into position before the instability grew so great? Chmeee’s question is a good one. Are motors being remounted, or stolen to be used in ships so that a few more of Halrloprillalar’s race may escape?”

Louis’s laugh was bitter. “How does this sound? They left a few jets in place. Then came a plague that killed off most of their machinery. Some of them panicked. They took all the ships they had, and they built more ships in a hurry and dismounted most of the attitude jets to do it. They’re still at it. They’re leaving the Ringworld to its fate.”

Chmeee said, “Fools. They did it to themselves.”

“Did they? I wonder.”

“But this is just the possibility I find ominous,” said the puppeteer. “Would they not have taken as much of their civilization as they could move? Certainly they would have taken transmutation machinery.”

Oddly, Louis was not even tempted to laugh. But what answer could he make?

The kzin found an answer. “They would take all they could reach. Anything near the spaceport ledges. Anything near the rim wall, where the rim transport system was available. We must search inward, and we must search out the Repair Center. Any of Prill’s people found there would have been trying to save the Ringworld, not leave it.”

“Perhaps.”

Louis said, “It would help if we knew just when the plague started eating their superconductors.”

If he thought the Hindmost would flinch, he was wrong. The puppeteer said, “You will likely learn that before I do.”

“I think you know already.”

“Call me if you learn anything.” The snaky heads disappeared.

Chmeee was looking at him strangely, but he said nothing. Louis returned to the flight controls.

The terminator line was a vast shadow encroaching from spinward when Chmeee spotted the city. They had followed a sand-filled riverbed to port of the dry sea. The river forked here, and the city nestled in the fork.

Prill’s people had built tall, even where there was no obvious need. The city had not been wide, but it had been tall, until floating buildings smashed down into the lesser structures below. One slender tower still stood, but at a slant. It had driven itself like a spear into the lower levels. A road ran from port, along the outer edge of one branch of the dry river, then across a bridge so massively braced that it had to belong to the Machine People. Halrloprillalar’s people would have used stronger materials or would have floated it.

Chmeee said, “The city will have been looted.”

“Well, yes, given that someone built a road to do the looting. Why don’t you take us down anyway?”

“Your monkey curiosity?”

“Maybe. Just circle the tanj thing, give us a closer look.”

Chmeee dropped the lander fast enough to put them in free fall. The kzin’s fur was almost all grown out, a glossy and handsome orange coat, and a reminder of Chmeee’s new youth. Adolescence wasn’t helping his temper. Four Man-Kzin wars, plus a few “incidents”… Louis kept his mouth shut.

The lander surged under them. Louis waited until the savage weight left him, then began adjusting the views through the outside cameras. He saw it almost instantly.

A boxlike vehicle was parked beside the tilted tower. It could have held up to a dozen passengers. The motor housing at its rear should have been enough to lift a spacecraft… but this was a primitive people. He couldn’t guess what they’d be using to move the vehicle. He pointed and said, “We find an isolated vehicle and swoop down on it, right?”

“Right.” Chmeee let the lander settle. As he did, Louis studied the situation:

The tower had speared down into a squarish building; had smashed through the roof and three stories and possibly into a basement. It was the shell of the lesser building that held it upright. White puffs of steam or smoke jetted irregularly from two tower windows. Pale human shapes were dancing before the lower building’s big front entrance — dancing, or holding sprinting contests — and two were resting prone, though in unrestful positions…

Just before the single remaining wall of a collapsed building rose to block Louis’s view, it all jumped into his mind’s focus. The pale ones were trying to reach the entrance across a rubble-covered street. Someone in the tower was shooting at them.

The lander settled. Chmeee stood and stretched. “You seem to have your own luck, Louis. We can take the ones with the guns to be the Machine People. Our strategy will be to come to their aid.”

It seemed reasonable. “Do you know anything about projectile weapons?”

“If we assume chemical propellants, a portable weapon will not penetrate impact armor. We can enter the tower via flying belts. Carry stunners. We would not want to kill our future allies.”

They emerged into full night. Clouds had closed over the sky. Even so, Archlight glowed through in a faint broad band, and the floating city was a tight star-cluster to port. You couldn’t get lost.

Louis Wu was not comfortable. The impact armor was too stiff; the hood covered most of his face. The padded straps of the flying belt constricted his breathing, and his feet dangled. But nothing was ever again going to feel like an hour under the wire, and that was that. At least he felt relatively safe.

He hung in the sky and used light-amplified binocular goggles.

The attackers didn’t seem that formidable. They were quite naked and weaponless. Their hair was silver; their skin was very white. They were slender and pretty; even the men were more pretty than handsome, and beardless.

They kept to the shadows and the cover provided by fragments of broken buildings, except when one or two would sprint for the great doorway, zigzagging. Louis had counted twenty, eleven of them women. Five more were dead in the street. There might be others already in the building.

The defenders had stopped firing now. Perhaps they had run out of ammunition. They had been using two windows in the downward-slanting face of the tower, perhaps six stories up. Every window in the tower was broken.