Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

Light glared back from the bronze surface. Metal vapor spewed. Liquid metal ran. Louis let the beam chew deep, then played it around, burning or melting anything that looked interesting. A pity he’d never studied hyperdrive system engineering.

The laser grew warm in his hand. He’d been at this for some minutes. He shifted the beam to one of the six mountings that held the motor suspended in its vacuum chamber. It didn’t melt; it softened and settled. He attacked another. The motor’s great mass sagged and twisted.

The narrow beam flickered, strobelike, then faded. Battery dead. Louis tossed the flashlight-laser away from him, remembering that the puppeteer could make it explode in his hand.

He strolled to the forward wall of his cage. The puppeteer wasn’t in sight, but presently Louis heard the sound of a steam calliope dying in agony.

The puppeteer trotted around the opaque green section and stood facing him. Muscles quivered beneath his skin.

“Come,” said Louis Wu, “let us reason together.”

Without haste, the puppeteer tucked both heads beneath his forelegs and let his legs fold under him.

Louis Wu woke clearheaded and hungry. For a few minutes he rested, savoring free fall; then he reached out and killed the field. His watch said he’d slept seven hours.

Needle ’s guests were sleeping beneath one of the tremendous clamps that had held the lander in place during flight. The white-haired woman slept restlessly, tangled in her ponchos, with one bare leg sticking out. The brown-haired boy slept like a baby.

There was no way to wake them, and no point. The wall wouldn’t carry sound, and the translator didn’t work. And the stepping-disc link would carry no more than a few pounds. Had the puppeteer really expected some kind of complex conspiracy? Louis smiled. His mutiny had been simplicity itself.

He dialed a toasted-cheese handmeal and ate while he padded to the forward wall of his cell.

In repose the Hindmost was a smooth egg shape, covered in hide, with a cloud of white hair tufting the big end. His legs and his heads were hidden beneath him. He hadn’t moved in seven hours.

Louis had seen Nessus do that. It was a puppeteer’s response to shock: to tuck himself into his navel and make the universe disappear. Well and good, but nine hours seemed excessive. If the puppeteer had been driven into catatonia by Louis’s shock treatment, that could be the end of everything.

The puppeteer’s ears were in his heads. Louis’s words must carry through a thickness of meat and bone. He shouted, “Let me offer you several points to ponder!”

The puppeteer did not respond. Louis raised his voice in soliloquy. “This structure is sliding into its sun. There are things we can do about that, but we can’t do any of them while you contemplate your navel. Nobody but you can control any of Needle ’s instruments, sensors, drives, etcetera, and that’s just the way you planned it. So: every minute you spend imitating a footstool, you and I and Chmeee come one minute closer to an opportunity no astrophysicist could resist.”

He finished his handmeal while he waited, Puppeteers were superb linguists, in any number of alien languages. Would a puppeteer respond to a narrative hook?

And in fact the Hindmost exposed one head far enough to ask, “What opportunity?”

“The chance to study sunspots from underneath.”

The head withdrew under the puppeteer’s belly.

Louis bellowed, “The repair team is coming!”

Head and neck reappeared and bellowed in response. “What have you done to us? What have you done to me, to yourself, to two natives who might have fled the fire? Did you have thought for anything besides mere vandalism?”

“I did. You said it once. Some day we must decide who rules this expedition. This is the day,” said Louis Wu. “Let me tell you why you should be taking my orders.”

“I never guessed that a wirehead would lust for mere power.”

“Make that point one. I’m better at guessing than you are.”

“Proceed.”

“We’re not leaving here. Even the Fleet of Worlds is out of reach at slower-than-light speeds. If the Ringworld goes, we all go. We’ve got to put it back in position somehow.

“Third point. The Ringworld engineers have been dead for at least a quarter of a million years,” Louis said carefully. “Chmeee would say a couple of million. The hominids couldn’t have mutated and evolved while the Ringworld engineers were alive. They wouldn’t have allowed it. They were Pak protectors.”

Louis had expected horror or terror or surprise. The puppeteer showed only resignation. “Xenophobes,” he said. “Vicious and hardy and very intelligent.”

He must have suspected.

“My ancestors,” said Louis. “They built the Ringworld, and they built whatever system is supposed to hold it in place. Which of us has a better chance of thinking like a Pak protector? One of us has to try.”

“These arguments would mean nothing if you had left us the chance to run. Louis, I trusted you.”

“I wouldn’t like to think you were that stupid. We didn’t volunteer for this expedition. Kzinti and humans, we make poor slaves.”

“Did you have a fourth argument?”

Louis grimaced. “Chmeee is disappointed in me. He wants to force you to his will. If I can tell him you’re taking my orders, he’ll be impressed. And we need him.”

“We do, yes. He may think more like a Pak protector than you do.”

“Well?”

“Your orders?”

Louis told him.

Harkabeeparolyn had rolled over and was on her feet before she saw Louis stepping out of the corner. Then she gasped, crouched, and disappeared into the ponchos. A lumpy poncho slithered toward a discarded blue robe.

Peculiar behavior. City Builders with a nudity taboo? Should Louis have worn clothing? He did what he considered tactful: he turned his back on her and joined the boy.

The boy was at the wall, looking out at the great dismembered starships. The poncho he wore was too big for him. “Luweewu,” he asked, “were those our ships?”

“Yah.”

The boy smiled. “Did your people build ships that big?”

Louis tried to remember. “The slowboats were almost that size. We needed very big ships before we broke the lightspeed barrier.”

“Is this one of your ships? Can it travel faster than light?”

“It could once. Not any more. I think the number four General Products hulls were even bigger than yours, but we didn’t build those. They were puppeteer ships.”

“That was a puppeteer we were talking to yesterday, wasn’t it? He asked about you. We couldn’t tell him much.”

Harkabeeparolyn had come to join them. She had recovered her composure with her blue librarian’s robe. She asked, “Has our status changed, Luweewu? We were told that you would not be allowed to visit us.” It was an effort for her to look him in the face.

“I’ve taken command,” Louis said.

“So easily?”

“I paid a price—”

The boy’s voice cut in. “Luweewu? We’re moving!”

“It’s all right.”

“Can you make it darker in here?”

Louis shouted the lights out. Immediately he felt more comfortable. The dark hid his nakedness. Harkabeeparolyn’s attitude was contagious.

Hot Needle of Inquiry lifted twelve feet above the spaceport ledge. Quickly, almost furtively, with no display of pyrotechnics, the ship drifted to the edge of the world and off.

“Where are we going?” the woman demanded.

“Under the world. We’ll end up at the Great Ocean.”

There was no sensation of falling, but the spaceport ledge was falling silently upward. The Hindmost let them drop several miles before he activated the thrusters: Needle decelerated and began edging beneath the Ringworld.