Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

Louis stood at the rim of the Library roof and looked down past his toes, into the textured dusk of the shadow farm. At the shadows edge was noonday light. Rectangle-patterned farmland ran away from him. The Serpent River curled away to port and disappeared among low mountains. Beyond the mountains were seas, flatlands, a tiny mountain range, tinier seas, all bluing with distance… and finally the Arch rising up and up. Half hypnotized, Louis waited beneath the bright sky. There was nothing else to be done. He was barely aware of time passing.

The probe came out of the sky on a breath of blue flame. Where the nearly invisible fire touched the rooftop, the plants and soil became an orange inferno. Small Hanging People and blue-robed librarians and wet children ran screaming for the stairwell.

The probe settled into the flame and toppled on its side, slowed by attitude jets. There were tiny jets all around the upper rim, and the big jet underneath. It was twenty feet long and ten feet thick, a cylinder made lumpy by cameras and other instruments.

Louis waited until the fires had mostly gone out. Then he waded through coals to the probe. The roof was empty, as far as he could tell — empty even of bodies. No dead. Good.

The voice of his translator guided him as he cut away the thick molecular sieve in the top of the probe. Presently he had exposed a stepping disc. He asked, “Now what?”

“I’ve reversed the action of the stepping disc in the other probe and removed the filter. Can you get a reading machine?”

“I’ll try. I don’t like any of this.”

“In two years it won’t matter. I give you thirty minutes. Then come, bringing whatever you have.”

A score of blue-robed librarians had almost decided to come after him when Louis appeared in the stairwell. His hood was pulled over his face. The bits of heavy metal they fired at him bounced from his impact armor, and he came on in a jerky step-stop-step walk.

The fusillade slowed and stopped. They retreated before him.

When they had gone far enough, Louis sliced through the top of the stairway below him. The spiral staircase had been moored only at top and bottom. Now it compressed like a spring, ripping side ramps from doorsills. Librarians hung on for dear life. Louis had the top two floors to himself.

And when he turned to the nearest reading room, Harkabeeparolyn was blocking his path with an ax in her hands.

“Once again I need your help,” Louis said.

She swung. Louis caught the ax as it rebounded from the join of his neck and shoulder. She thrashed, trying to wrench it from his grip.

“Watch,” he said. He waved the laser beam through the cable that fed a reading machine. The cable spurted flame and fell apart, sparking.

Harkabeeparolyn screamed, “Lyar Building will pay dearly for this!”

“That can’t be helped. I want you to help me carry a reading machine up to the roof. I thought I was going to have to cut through a wall. This is better.”

“I won’t!”

Louis waved the light through a reading machine. It burned after falling apart. The smell was horrible. “Say when.”

“Vampire lover!”

The machine was heavy, and Louis wasn’t about to let go of the laser. He backed up the stairs; most of the weight was in Harkabeeparolyn’s arms. He told her, “If we drop it we’ll have to go back for another one.”

“Idiot!… You’ve already… ruined the cable!”

He didn’t answer.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I’m trying to save the world from brushing against its sun.”

She almost dropped it then. “But — but the motors! They’re all back in place!”

“So you already knew that much! It’s too little too late. Most of your spaceships never came back. There aren’t enough motors. Keep moving.”

As they reached the roof, the probe lifted and settled beside them on attitude jets. They set the machine down. It wasn’t going to fit. Louis gritted his teeth and sliced the screen free of the rest of the machine. Now it would fit.

Harkabeeparolyn just looked at him. She was too exhausted to comment.

The screen went into the gap where the molecular filter had been, and vanished. What remained, the guts of the machine, was much heavier. Louis managed to heave one end into the gap. He lay down on his back and used his legs to push it inward until it too vanished.

“Lyar Building had nothing to do with this,” he told the librarian. “They didn’t know what I had in mind. Here.” He dropped a swatch of dull black cloth beside her. “Lyar Building can tell you how to fix water condensers and other old machines with this. You can make the whole city independent of the Machine People.”

She watched him with eyes full of horror. It was hard to tell if she heard.

He eased himself feet first into the probe.

And out head first into Needle ’s cargo hold.

He was in a great echoing glass bottle, in near darkness. Twilight-shrouded, half-dismantled spacecraft showed through the transparent walls. The probe had been returned to clamps on the back wall of the cargo hold, eight feet off the gray-painted floor. And Louis nestled in the probe, in the gap where the deuterium filter had been, like an egg in an egg cup.

Louis swung out, hung by his hands, and dropped. He was tired to the bone. One last complication, now, and then he could rest. Safety was just the other side of an impenetrable wall. He could see the sleeping plates…

“Good.” The Hindmost’s voice spoke from somewhere near the ceiling. “Is that the reading screen? I expected nothing so bulky. Did you have to chop it in half?”

“Yah.” He had also dropped the components eight feet to the floor. Fortunately puppeteers were good with tools… ”I hope you’ve got a set of stepping discs in here.”

“I anticipated emergencies. Glance toward the forward left… Louis! ”

A moan of unearthly terror rose behind him. Louis spun around.

Harkabeeparolyn was nestled in the probe, where Louis had been a moment ago. Her hands strangled the stock of a projectile weapon. Her lips were skinned back from her teeth. Her eyes could not find rest. They flicked up, down, left, right, and found no comfort anywhere.

The Hindmost spoke in a monotone. “Louis, who is this that invades my spacecraft? Is it dangerous?”

“No, relax. It’s just a confused librarian. Harkabeeparolyn, go back.”

Her keening rose in pitch. Suddenly she wailed, “I know this place, I’ve seen it in the map room! It’s the starship haven, outside the world! Luweewu, what are you?”

Louis pointed the flashlight-laser at her. “Go back.”

“No! You’ve wrecked the stolen library property. But if — if the world is threatened, I want to help!”

“Help how, you crazy woman? Look: you go back to the Library. Find out where the immortality drug came from before the Fall of the Cities. That’s the place we’re looking for. If there’s any way to move the world without the big motors, that’s where we’ll find the controls.”

She shook her head. “I don’t… How can you know that?”

“It’s their home base. The pro — the Ringworld engineers had to have certain plants growing somewhere close… Tanj… I’m guessing. I’m only guessing. Tanj dammit!” Louis held his head. It was throbbing like a big drum. “I didn’t ask for any of this. I was kidnapped!”

Harkabeeparolyn swung herself out from the probe and dropped. Her coarse blue robe was damp with sweat. She looked a good deal like Halrloprillalar. “I can help. I can read to you.”

“We’ve got a machine for that.”

She came closer. The weapon drooped as if forgotten. “We did it to ourselves, didn’t we? My people took the world’s steering motors for our starships. Can I help set that right?”