Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

Chmeee wasn’t in sight. Louis found the vest a good distance away, gripped in a vampire’s dead hand. He couldn’t find the stunner. By now he was really worried. Something ugly was thrusting out of his memory. He was running when he reached the place where they’d grounded the lander.

A chunk of rock too big for three men to lift was holding down a generous pile of black superconductor cloth. Chmeee’s parting gift. The lander was gone.

I’ll have to get over this sooner or later, Louis thought. Why not now? A friend had taught him this cantrip, this bit of magic for recovering from shock or grief. Sometimes it worked.

He was sitting on what had been a porch railing, though the porch now sat alone in a sand-covered walkway. He had donned his impact armor and the vest with all the pockets. He had put clothing between himself and a vast and lonely world. Not modesty, but fear.

That had used up all his ambition. Now he sat. Thoughts drifted aimlessly. He thought of a working droud as far away as the Earth from its moon, and a two-headed ally who would not risk landing here even to save Louis Wu. He thought of the Ringworld engineers and their idealized ecology, which had included nothing like mosquitoes or vampire bats; and his lips quirked into the beginning of a smile, then settled into a dead man’s expression, which is no expression at all.

He knew where Chmeee had gone. He smiled again to think how little good it did him. Had Chmeee told him that? No matter. Survival or the mating urge or vengeance on the Hindmost would all drive Chmeee in the same direction. But would any of these motives bring him back to rescue Louis Wu?

And he thought how little one death mattered, with the Ringworld’s trillions all doomed to intimate contact with their sun.

Well, Chmeee might return. Louis ought to get off his butt and do something about reaching the floating city. They’d been headed there; Chmeee would expect to find him there, if some whim brought the kzin back for the ally who had failed him so badly. Or Louis might actually learn something valuable. Or… he’d have to survive somewhere in the year or two left to him. I’ll have to get over this sometime. Why not now?

Somebody yelled.

The black-haired woman had dressed herself in shorts and shirt and a backpack. She held a projectile weapon at her side, pointed at Louis Wu. With her other arm she gestured and yelled again.

Vacation was over. Louis became acutely aware that his hood was around his neck. If she tried a head shot — well, she might just give him time to pull the hood over his face, and then it wouldn’t matter if she fired or not. The impact suit would stop the projectiles while he ran. What he really needed was the flying belt. Or did he?

“Okay,” said Louis, and he smiled and raised his hands to the sides. What he really needed was an ally. With one hand he reached slowly into his vest, withdrew the translator, clipped it just under his throat. “This will talk for us, as soon as it learns to.”

She motioned with the gun: Go ahead of me .

Louis walked as far as the flying belt, then stooped and picked it up, without jerky motions. Thunder cracked. A stone six inches from Louis Wu’s foot jumped wildly away. He dropped the harness and stepped back.

Tanj, she wasn’t talking! She’d decided he couldn’t speak her language, and that was that. How would the translator learn anything?

With his hands in the air, he watched her fiddle one-handed with the flying belt while she kept the gun more or less on him. If she touched the wrong controls, he’d lose the belt and the cloth too. But she set the belt down, studied Louis’s face a moment, then stepped back and gestured.

Louis picked up the flying belt. When she gestured toward her vehicle, he shook his head. He went to where Chmeee had left an acre or so of superconductor cloth, weighted down by a boulder far too heavy to move.

The gun never left him as he strapped the harness around the rock and activated the flying belt. He wrapped his arms around the rock — and the harness, for fear it would slip — and lifted. The rock came up. He turned full around and let go. It settled slowly to the ground.

Was that respect in her eyes? Was it for his technology or his strength? He turned off the belt, picked up it and the superconductor cloth, and moved ahead of her to her vehicle. She opened double doors in its side. He set his burden down and looked around.

Couches around three sides; a tiny stove in the center, and a hatch in the roof for a smoke hole. Stacks of baggage behind the rear seat. Another couch in front, facing forward.

He backed out. He turned back toward the tower, took one step forward, and looked at her. She got the idea. She dithered, then gestured him on.

The dead were beginning to smell. He wondered if she would bury or burn them. But she walked among the bodies without stopping. It was Louis who stopped, to probe with his fingers in a woman’s silver hair.

There was too much hair, too little skull. Beautiful she was, but her brain was smaller than a human brain. He sighed and went on.

The woman followed him through the shell of the lower building, into the tower’s spiral staircase, and down. A dead man of her species lay broken in the crushed basement, and the flashlight-laser was next to him. When he glanced back at the woman, he saw tears in her eyes.

He reached for the flashlight-laser and she fired past him. The ricochet thumped him on the hip, and he shied violently inside the suddenly rigid shell. He backed against the shattered wall while she picked up the device.

She found the switch, and light jumped around them in a wide beam. She found the focus; the beam narrowed. She nodded and dropped the device in her pocket.

On their walk back to the vehicle Louis casually pulled the impact-suit hood over his face, as if the sunlight were too bright. She might have all she wanted from Louis Wu, or she might be short of water, or she might not want his company.

She didn’t shoot him. She climbed into the car and locked the doors, with a key. For an instant Louis saw himself marooned with no water and no tools. But she gestured him close to the right-hand window, where the driving controls were. She began to show him how to drive.

It was the breakthrough Louis had hoped for. He repeated the words she called through the window, and added his own words. “Steering ring. Turn. Activator. Key. Throttle. Retrothrottle.” She was pretty good with gestures. A hand zipping through air plus a finger tracing a needle’s path were “airspeed gauge.”

It startled her when the translator began talking back to her. She let the language lesson continue for a bit. Then she unlocked the door, backed across the seat with the gun ready, and said, “Get in. Drive.”

The machine was noisy and balky. It translated every little bump directly to the driver’s couch until Louis learned to steer around cracks in the road, rubble, or drifts of sand. The woman watched him silently. Did she have no curiosity? It occurred to him that she had lost a dozen companions to the vampires. Under the circumstances she was functioning well enough.

Presently she said, “I am Valavirgillin.”

“I am Louis Wu.”

“Your devices are strange. The speaker, the lifter, the variable light — what more have you?”

“Tanj dammit! I left the eyepieces.”

She pulled the binocular goggles out of a pocket. “I found these.”

She may have found the stunner too. Louis didn’t ask. “Good. Put them on and I’ll show you how they work.”

She smiled and shook her head. She must be afraid he’d jump her. She asked, “What were you doing in the old city? Where did you find these things?”

“They are mine. I brought them from a far star.”