Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

What was the Hindmost doing that he couldn’t answer a call?

Could a human even guess at the answer?

Continue the survey, then.

Louis ran the scale down until he could see both rim walls. He looked for Fist-of-God Mountain near the Ringworld’s median line, to port of the Great Ocean. Not there. He expanded the scale. A patch of desert bigger than the Earth was still small against the Ringworld, but there it was, reddish and barren, and the pale dot near the center was… Fist-of-God, a thousand miles tall, capped with naked scrith.

He skimmed to port, tracing the path they had taken following Liar ’s crash. Long before he was ready, he had reached water, a wide-flung arm of the Great Ocean. They had stopped within sight of that bay. Louis drifted back, looking for what would be an oblong of permanent cloud, seen from above.

But the eye storm wasn’t there.

“Calling the Hindmost! In the names of Kdapt and Finagle and Allah I summon thee, God tanj it! Calling—”

“I am here, Louis.”

“Okay! I’m in a library in the floating city. They’ve got a map room. Look up Nessus’s records of the map room we—”

“I remember,” the puppeteer said coolly.

“Well, that map room showed old tapes. This one is running on present time!”

“Are you safe?”

“Safe? Oh, safe enough. I’ve been using superconductor cloth to make friends and influence people. But I’m trapped here. Even if I could bribe my way out of the city, I’d still have to get past the Machine People station on Sky Hill. I’d rather not shoot my way out.”

“Wise.”

“What’s new at your end?”

“Two data. First, I have holograms of both of the other spaceports. All of the eleven ships have been rifled.”

“The Bussard ramjets gone? All of them?”

“Yes, all.”

“What else?”

“You cannot expect rescue from Chmeee. The lander has set down on the Map of Kzin in the Great Ocean,” the puppeteer reported. “I should have guessed. The kzin has defected, taking the lander with him!”

Louis cursed silently. He should have recognized that cool, emotionless tone. The puppeteer was badly upset; he was losing control of the finer nuances of human speech. “Where is he? What’s he doing?”

“I watched through the lander’s cameras as he circled the Map of Kzin. He found a capacious seagoing ship—”

“I found it too.”

“Your conclusions?”

“They tried to explore or colonize the other Maps.”

“Yes. In known space the kzinti eventually conquered other stellar systems. On the Map of Kzin they must have looked across the ocean. They were not likely to develop space travel, of course.”

“No.” The first step in learning space travel is to put something in orbit. On Kzin, low orbital velocity was around six miles per second. On the Map of Kzin, the equivalent was seven hundred and seventy miles per second. “They couldn’t have built too many of these ships either. Where would they get the metals? And the voyages would take decades, at least. I wonder how they even knew there were other Maps.”

“We may guess that they launched telescopic camera equipment aboard rockets. The instruments would have to perform quickly. A missile could not go into orbit. It would rise and fall back.”

“I wonder if they reached the Map of Earth? It’s another hundred thousand miles past Mars… and Mars wouldn’t make a good staging area.” What would kzinti have found on the Map of Earth? Homo habilis alone, or Pak protectors too? “There’s the Map of Down to starboard, and I don’t know the world to antispinward.”

“We know it. The natives are communal intelligences. We expect that they will never develop space travel. Their ships would need to support an entire hive.”

“Hospitable?”

“No, they would have fought the kzinti. And the kzinti have clearly given up the conquest of the Great Ocean. They seem to be using the great ship to block off a harbor.”

“Yah. I’d guess it’s a seat of government too. You were telling me about Chmeee.”

“After learning what he could by circling above the Map of Kzin, he hovered above the great ship. Aircraft rose and attacked him with explosive missiles. Chmeee allowed this, and the missiles did no harm. Then Chmeee destroyed four aircraft. The rest continued the attack until weapons and fuel were exhausted. When they returned to the ship, Chmeee followed them down. The lander presently rests on a landing platform on the great ship’s conning tower. The attack continues. Louis, is he seeking allies against me?”

“If it’s any comfort to you, he won’t find anything that can go up against a General Products hull. They can’t even hurt the lander.”

Long pause; then “Perhaps you’re right. The aircraft use hydrogen-burning jets and missiles propelled by chemical explosives. In any case, I must rescue you myself. You must expect the probe at dusk.”

“Then what? There’s still the rim wall. You told me stepping discs won’t send through scrith.”

“I used the second probe to place a pair of stepping discs on the rim wall as a relay.”

“If you say so. I’m in a building shaped like a top, at the port-by-spinward perimeter. Set the probe to hover until we decide what to do with it. I’m not sure I want to leave yet.”

“You must.”

“But all the answers we need could be right here in the Library!”

“Have you made any progress?”

“Bits and pieces. Everything Halrloprillalar’s people knew is somewhere in this building. I want to question the ghouls too. They’re scavengers, and they seem to be everywhere.”

“You only learn to ask more questions. Very well, Louis. You have several hours. I will bring the lander to you at dusk.”

The cafeteria was halfway down the building. Louis gave thanks for a bit of luck: the City Builders were omnivores. The meat-and-mushroom stew could have used salt, but it filled the vacuum in his belly.

Nobody used enough salt. And all the seas were fresh water, except for the Great Oceans. He might be the only hominid on the Ringworld who needed salt, and he couldn’t live without it forever.

He ate quickly. Time pressed on the back of his neck. The puppeteer was already skittish. Surprising that he hadn’t already fled, leaving Louis and the renegade Chmeee and the Ringworld to their similar fates. Louis could almost admire the puppeteer for waiting to rescue his press-ganged crewman.

But the puppeteer might change his mind when he saw the repair crew coming at him. Louis intended to be back aboard Needle before the Hindmost turned his telescope in that direction.

He went back to the upper rooms.

The reading screens he tried all gave unreadable script and no pictures and no voice. Finally, at one of a bank of screens, his eye caught a familiar collar.

“Harkabeeparolyn?”

The librarian turned. Small flat nose; lips like a slash; bald scalp and a fine, delicate skull; long, wavy white hair… and a nice flare to her hips, and fine legs. In human terms she’d have been about forty. City Builders might age more slowly than human beings, or faster; Louis didn’t know.

“Yes?”

There was a snap in her voice. Louis jumped. He said, “I need a voice-programmed screen and a tape to tell me the characteristics of scrith.”

She frowned. “I don’t know what you mean. Voice-programmed?”

“I want the tape to read to me out loud.”

Harkabeeparolyn stared, then laughed. She tried to strangle the laugh, and couldn’t; and it was too late anyway. They were the center of attention. “There is no such thing. There never has been,” she tried to whisper, but the giggle bubbled up and made her voice louder than she wanted. “Why, can’t you read?”