Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

He fished the translator out of his vest. “Calling the Hindmost. Calling the Hindmost… ”

“Here, Louis. Your voice holds an odd tremor.”

“Bumpy ride. Any news for me?”

“Chmeee still does not answer calls, nor do the citizens of the floating city. I have landed the second probe in a small sea, without incident. I doubt that anyone will discover it on a sea bottom. In a few days Hot Needle of Inquiry will have full tanks.”

Louis declined to tell the Hindmost about the Sea People. The safer the puppeteer felt, the less likely he was to abandon his project, the Ringworld, and his passengers. “I meant to ask. You’ve got stepping discs on the probes. If you sent a probe for me, I could just step through to Needle . Right?”

“No, Louis. Those stepping discs connect only to Needle ’s fuel tank, through a filter that passes only deuterium atoms.”

“If you took off the filter, would they pass a man?”

“You would still end in the fuel tank. Why do you ask? At best you might save Chmeee a week of travel.”

“That could be worth doing. Something might come up.” Now, why was Louis Wu hiding the rogue kzin’s defection? Louis had to admit that he found the incident embarrassing. He really didn’t want to talk about it… and it might make a puppeteer nervous. “See if you can work out an emergency procedure, just in case we need it.”

“I will. Louis, I locate the lander a day short of reaching the Great Ocean. What does Chmeee expect to find there?”

“Signs and wonders. Things new and different. Tanj, he wouldn’t have to go if we knew what was there.”

“But of course,” the puppeteer said skeptically. He clicked off, and Louis pocketed the translator. He was grinning. What did Chmeee expect to find at the Great Ocean? Love and an army! If the map of Jinx had been stocked with bandersnatchi then what of the map of Kzin?

Sex urge or self-defense or vengeance — any one of these would have driven Chmeee to the map of Kzin. For Chmeee safety and vengeance went together. Unless Chmeee could dominate the Hindmost, how could he return to known space?

But even with an army of kzinti, what could Chmeee expect to do against the Hindmost? Did he think they’d have spacecraft? Louis thought he was in for a disappointment.

But there would certainly be female kzinti.

There was something Chmeee could do about the Hindmost. But Chmeee probably wouldn’t think of it, and Louis couldn’t tell him now. He wasn’t sure he wanted to, yet. It was too drastic.

Louis frowned. The puppeteer’s skeptical tone was worrying. How much had he guessed? The alien was a superb linguist; but because he was an alien, such nuances would never creep into his voice. They had to be put there.

Time would tell. Meanwhile, the dwarf forest had grown thick enough to hide crouching men. Louis kept his eyes moving, searching clumps and folds of hillside ahead. His impact armor would stop a sniper’s bullet, but what if a bandit shot at the driver? Louis could be trapped in mangled metal and burning fuel.

He kept his full attention on the landscape.

And presently he saw that it was beautiful. Straight trunks five feet tall sprouted enormous blossoms at their tips. Louis watched a tremendous bird settle into a blossom, a bird similar to a great eagle except for the long, slender spear of a beak. Elbow root, a larger breed than he’d seen on his first visit, some ninety million miles from here, flourished in a tangle of randomly placed fences. Here grew the sausage plant they’d eaten last night. There, a sudden cloud of butterflies, at this distance looking much like Earth’s butterflies.

It all looked so real. Pak protectors wouldn’t build anything flimsy , would they? But the Pak had had vast faith in their works, and in their ability to repair anything , or even to create new widgets from scratch.

And all of his speculation was based on the word of a man seven hundred years dead: Jack Brennan the Belter, who had known the Pak only through one individual. The tree-of-life had turned Brennan himself into a protector-stage human — armored skin, second heart, expanded braincase, and all. That might have left him insane. Or Phssthpok might have been atypical. And Louis Wu, armed with Jack Brennan’s opinions on Phssthpok the Pak, was trying to think like something admittedly more intelligent than himself.

But there had to be a way to save all this.

Chaparral gave way to sausage-plant plantations to spinward, rolling hills to antispinward. Presently Louis saw his first refueling station ahead. It was a major operation, a chemical factory with the beginnings of a town growing around it.

Vala called him down from his perch. She said, “Close the smoke hole. Stay in the van and do not be seen.”

“Am I illegal?”

“You are uncustomary. There are exceptions, but I would need to explain why you are my passenger. I have no good explanation.”

They pulled up along the windowless wall of the factory. Through the window Louis watched Vala dickering with long-legged, big-chested people. The women were impressive, with large mammaries on large chests, but Louis wouldn’t have called them beautiful. Each woman had long, dark hair covering her forehead and cheeks, enclosing a tiny T-shaped face.

Louis crouched behind the front seat while Vala stowed packages through the passenger’s door. Soon they were moving again.

An hour later, far from any habitation, Vala puffed off the road. Louis climbed down from his gunner’s perch. He was ravenous. Vala had bought food: a large smoked bird and nectar from the giant blossoms. Louis tore into the bird. Presently he asked, “You’re not eating?”

Vala smiled. “Not till night. But I will drink with you.” She took the colored glass bottle around to the back of the vehicle and ran clear fluid into the nectar. She drank, then passed the bottle. Louis drank.

Alcohol, of course. You couldn’t have oil wells on the Ringworld, could you? But you could build alcohol distilleries anywhere there were plants for fermenting. “Vala, don’t some of the, ah, subject races get to like this stuff too much?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you do about it?”

The question surprised her. “They learn. Some become useless from drinking. They supervise each other if they must.”

It was the wirehead problem in miniature, with the same solution: time and natural selection. It didn’t seem to bother Vala… and Louis couldn’t afford to let it bother him. He asked, “How far is it to the city?”

“Three or four hours to the air road, but we would be stopped there. Louis, I have given thought to your problem. Why can’t you just fly up?”

“You tell me. I’m for it if nobody shoots at me. What do you think — would somebody shoot at a flying man, or would they let him talk?”

She sipped from the bottle of fuel and nectar. “The rules are strict. None but the City Builder species may come unless invited. But none have flown to the city either!”

She passed him the bottle. The nectar was sweet: like watered grenadine syrup, with a terrific kick from what must be 200 proof alcohol. He set it down and turned his goggles on the city.

It was vertical towers in a lily-pad-shaped clump, in a jarring variety of styles: blocks, needles tapered at top and bottom, translucent slabs, polyhedral cylinders, a slender cone moored tip down. Some buildings were all window; some were all balconies. Gracefully looping bridges or broad, straight ramps linked them at unpredictable levels. Granted that the builders weren’t quite human, Louis still couldn’t believe that anyone would build such a thing on purpose. It was grotesque.

“They must have come from thousands of miles around,” he said. “When the power stopped, there were buildings with independent power supplies. They all got together. Prill’s people mushed them all up into one city. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”