Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

She stood there with her mouth open and the two pieces in her hands.

“I am perfectly willing to take suggestions from a friend and ally,” he told her. “I’m sick of taking orders. I got plenty of that from my furry companion. Let’s be friends.”

She dropped what she was holding and raised her hands.

“You’ve got more bullets and more guns in the back of the vehicle. Arm yourself.” Louis turned away. He sliced his beam down the dead tree in zigzag fashion. A dozen logs fell burning. Louis strolled over and kicked the logs into a tighter pile around the stump. He played the laser into their midst and watched the fire catch.

Something thumped him between the shoulder blades. For an instant the impact suit went stiff. He heard a single crack of thunder.

Louis waited for a bit, but the second shot didn’t come. He turned and walked back to the vehicle and Vala. He said to her, “Don’t you ever, ever, ever do that again.”

She looked pale and frightened. “No. I won’t.”

“Shall I help you carry your cooking things?”

“No, I can… Did I miss you?”

“No.”

“Then how ?”

“One of my tools saved me. I brought it a thousand times the distance light travels in a falan, and it’s mine .”

She made a kind of arm-flapping gesture and turned away.

There was a plant that grew along the ground like so many links of green-and-yellow-striped sausage, with rootlets sprouting between the links. Valavirgillin sliced some of these into a pot. She added water, then some seed pods from a sack in the vehicle. She set the pot on the burning logs.

Tanj, Louis could have done that himself. Dinner was going to be crude.

The sun was entirely gone now. A tight cluster of stars to port must be the floating city. The Arch swooped up the black sky in horizontal bands of glowing blue and white. Louis felt that he was on some tremendous toy.

“I wish I had some meat,” Vala said.

Louis said, “Give me the goggles.”

He turned away from the fire before he put the goggles on. He turned up the light amplification. The pairs of eyes that had been watching from beyond the reach of the firelight resolved. Louis was glad he hadn’t fired at random. Two large shapes and a smaller one were a family of ghouls.

But one bright-eyed shadow was small, and furry. Louis snipped it headless with the long bright thread from his flashlight-laser. The ghouls flinched. They whispered among themselves. The female started toward the dead animal, but stopped to give Louis precedence. Louis picked up the body and watched her back away.

The ghouls seemed diffident enough. But their place in the ecology was very secure. Vala had told him what happened when a people went to the great effort of burying or burning their dead. The ghouls attacked the living. They owned the night. With magic gleaned from scores of local religions, they were said to be able to turn invisible. Even Vala half believed it.

But they weren’t bothering Louis. Why would they? Louis would eat the furry beast, and one day Louis himself would die, and the ghouls would claim their due.

While they watched him, he examined the creature: rabbitlike, but with a long, flat-ended tail and no forepaws at all. Not a hominid. Good.

When he looked up, there was a faintly glowing violet flame far to port.

Holding his breath, holding himself very still, Louis raised both the light amplification and the magnification. Even his pulse in his temples was blurring the picture now, but he knew what he saw. The magnified flame was eye-hurting violet, and it fanned out like a rocket firing in vacuum. Its bottom was clipped off by a straight black line: the edge of the portward rim wall.

He lifted the goggles. Even after his eyes adjusted, the violet flame was barely visible, but it was still there. Tenuous… and tremendous.

Louis returned to the fire and dropped the beast at Vala’s feet. He walked into the darkness to starboard and donned the goggles again.

The flame to starboard showed much larger, but of course that rim wall was much closer.

Vala skinned the little furry beast and dropped it into the pot without removing the entrails. When she had finished, Louis led her by the arm into the darkness. “Wait a little, then tell me if you see a blue flame far away.”

“Yes, I see it.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“No, but I think my father does. There was something he wouldn’t talk about, the last time he came back from the city. There are more. Turn your eyes to the base of the Arch to spinward.”

A daylit, blue-and-white horizontal stripe was bright enough to make him squint. Louis covered it with the edge of his hand… and now, with the goggles to help, he could make out two small candle flames on the rims of the Arch, and two above them, tinier yet.

Valavirgillin said, “The first appeared seven falans ago, near the base of the spinward Arch. Then more to spinward, and these large flames to port and starboard, then more small ones on the antispinward Arch. Now there are twenty-one. They only show for two days each turn, when the sun is brightest.”

Louis heaved a gusty sigh of relief.

“Louis, I don’t know what it means when you do that. Are you angry or frightened or relieved?”

“I don’t know either. Let’s say relieved. We’ve got more time than I thought.”

“Time for what?”

Louis laughed. “Haven’t you had enough of my madness yet?”

She bridled. “After all, I can choose whether to believe you or not!”

Louis got mad. He didn’t hate Valavirgillin, but she was a thorny character, and she had already tried to kill him once. “Fine. If this ring-shaped structure you live on is left to itself, it will brush against the shadow squares — the objects that cover the sun when night comes — in five or six falans. That will kill everything. There won’t be anything left alive when you brush against the sun itself—”

She screamed, “And you sigh with relief?”

“Easy, take it easy. The Ringworld is not being left alone. Those flames are motors for moving it. We’re almost at the closest point to the sun, and they’re using braking thrust — they’re firing inward, sunward. Like this.” He sketched the situation for her in the dirt with a pointed stick. “See? They’re holding us back.”

“You say now that we will not die?”

“The motors may not be strong enough for that. But they’ll hold us back. We could have ten or fifteen falans.”

“I do hope you are mad, Louis. You know too much. You know that the world is a ring, and that is secret.” She shrugged as one shifts a heavy weight. “Yes, I have had enough of it. Will you tell me why you have not suggested rishathra?”

He was surprised. “I would have thought you’d had enough of rishathra to last a lifetime.”

“That is not funny. Rishathra is the way to seal a truce!”

“Oh. All right. Back to the fire?”

“Of course, we need light.”

She pulled the pot a little back from the flame, to cook more slowly. “We must discuss terms. Will you agree not to harm me?” She sat down across from him on the ground.

“I agree not to harm you unless I am attacked.”

“I make you the same concession. What else do you want from me?”

She was brisk and matter-of-fact, and Louis fell into the spirit of the thing. “You will transport me as far as you can, subject to your own needs. I expect that’s as far as, ah, River’s Return. You will treat the artifacts as mine. You will not turn them or me over to any authority. You will give me advice, to the best of your knowledge and ability, that will get me into the floating city.”