Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

Her hair was pure, clean white. Perhaps she’d been born with white hair, because she wasn’t old. A woman of Earth would have been about to take her first shot of boosterspice. She was straight and slender, and pretty, Louis thought. Flat-chested, of course, but nicely built. Halrloprillalar had taught Louis to find a bald head and a well-shaped skull sexy. If she would smile… but even to Fortaralisplyar she was rude and imperious. “Yes?”

“I am Fortaralisplyar. Have you my contract?”

She tapped at the keyboard of the reading machine. “Yes. Is this the one?”

“He is.”

Now she looked at Louis. “Luweewu, can you understand me?”

“I can, with the aid of this.”

When the translator spoke, her calm cracked, but only for a moment. She said, “I am Harkabeeparolyn. Your master has purchased your right to unlimited research for three days, with an option to purchase an additional three days. You may roam the Library at will, barring the residential sections, the doors marked in gold. You may use any machine unless it is marked thus.” She showed him: an orange tic-tac-toe grid. “To use these, you need help. Come to me or to anyone whose collar is cut like mine. You may use the dining room. For sleep or a bath you must return to Lyar Building.”

“Good.”

The librarian looked puzzled. Louis was a little startled himself. Why had he said that with such force? It struck him that Lyar Building felt more like home to him than the apartment on Canyon ever had.

Fortaralisplyar paid out silver coins, bowed to Louis, and departed. The librarian turned back to her reading screen. (Harkabeeparolyn. He was tired of six-syllable names, but he’d better memorize it.) Harkabeeparolyn glanced around when Louis said, “There’s a place I’d like to find.”

“In the Library?”

“I hope so. I saw a place like it long ago. You stood at the center of a circle, and the circle was the world. The screen at the center turned, and you could make any part of the world show big—”

“We have a map room. Climb the stairs all the way up.” She turned away.

A tight spiral of metal stairs wound up the Library’s axis. Anchored only at the top and bottom, it was springy under his weight as he climbed. He passed doors marked in gold, all closed. Higher up, arched openings led to banks of reading screens with chairs. Louis counted forty-six City Builders using reading screens, and two elderly Machine People, and a compact, very hairy male you-name-it, and a ghoul woman all alone in one room.

The top floor was the map room. He knew when he had reached it.

They had found the first map room in an abandoned floating palace. Its wall was a ring of blue mottled with white. There had been globes of ten oxygen-atmosphere worlds, and a screen that would show a magnified view. But the scenes it showed were thousands of years old. They showed a bustling Ringworld civilization: glowing cities; craft zipping through rectangular loops along the rim wall; aircraft as big as this library: spacecraft much bigger.

They had not been looking for a Repair Center then. They’d been looking for a way off the Ringworld. Clearly the old tapes had been almost useless.

They’d been in too much of a hurry. So: twenty-three years later, in another kind of desperation, we try again…

Louis Wu emerged from the stairwell with the Ringworld glowing around him. Where the sun would have been, there was Louis Wu’s head. The map was two feet tall and almost four hundred feet in diameter. The shadow squares were the same height, but much closer in, hovering over a thousand square feet of jet black floor flecked with thousands of stars. The ceiling, too, was black spattered with stars.

Louis walked toward one of the shadow squares, and through it. Holograms, right, as with that earlier map room. But this time there were no globes of Earthlike worlds.

He turned to inspect the back of a shadow square. No detail showed: nothing but a dead-black rectangle, slightly curved.

The magnification screen was in use.

A three-foot-by-two-foot rectangular screen, with controls below, was mounted on a circular track that ran between the shadow squares and the Ringworld. The boy had an expanded view of one of the mounted Bussard ramjets. It showed as a glare of bluish light. The boy was trying to squint past it.

He must have just reached adolescence. Very fine brown hair covered his entire scalp, thickening at the back. He wore a librarian’s blue robes. His collar was wide and square, almost a cape, with a single notch cut into it.

Louis asked, “May I look over your shoulder?”

The boy turned. His features were small and nearly unreadable, as with any City Builder. It made him look older. “Are you allowed such knowledge?”

“Lyar Building has purchased full privileges for me.”

“Oh.” The boy turned back. “We can’t see anything anyway. In two days they’ll turn off the flames.”

“What are you watching?”

“The repair crew.”

Louis squinted into the glare. A storm of blue-white light filled the screen, with darkness at its core. The attitude jet was a dim pinkish dot at the center of the darkness.

Electromagnetic lines of force gathered the hot hydrogen of the solar wind, guided and compressed it to fusion temperatures, and fired it back at the sun. Machinery strove with single-minded futility to hold the Ringworld against the gravity of its star. But this was all that showed: blue-white light and a pinkish dot on the line of the rim wall.

“They’re almost finished,” the boy said. “We thought they’d call us for help, but they never came.” He sounded wistful.

“Maybe you don’t have the tools to hear them calling.” Louis tried to keep his voice calm. Repair crew! “They must be finished anyway. There aren’t any more motors.”

“No. Look.” The boy set the view zipping along the rim wall. The view stopped, jarringly, well beyond the blue glare. Louis saw bits of metal falling along the rim wall.

He studied them until he was certain. Bars of metal, a great spool-shaped cylinder — those were the dismantled components of what he had seen through Needle ’s telescope. That was the scaffolding for remounting the Ringworld’s attitude jets.

The repair crew must have decelerated this equipment to solar orbital speed by using a segment of the rim transport system. But how did they plan to reverse the procedure? The machinery would have to be accelerated to Ringworld rotational speed at its destination.

By friction with the atmosphere? Those materials could be as durable as scrith. If so, heating would not be a problem.

“And here.” The view skidded again, spinward along the rim wall to the spaceport ledge. The four great City Builder ships showed clear. Hot Needle of Inquiry was a speck. Louis would have missed it if he hadn’t known just where to look: a mile from the only ship that still sported a Bussard ramjet around its waist.

“There, you see?” The boy pointed to the pair of copper-colored toroids. “There’s only one motor left. When the repair crew mounts that, they’ll be finished.”

Megatons of construction equipment were falling down the rim wall, no doubt accompanied by hordes of construction men of unknown species, all aimed at Needle ’s parking space. The Hindmost would not be pleased.

“Finished, yes,” Louis said. “It won’t be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Never mind. How long have they been working, this repair team? Where did they come from?”

“Nobody wants to tell me anything,” the boy said. “Flup. Odorous flup. What’s everybody so excited about? Why am I asking you? You don’t know either.”

Louis let that pass. “Who are they? How did they find out about the danger?”