Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

Desert sloped down and away. The impact that made Fist-of-God had cremated all life over a region comfortably larger than the Earth. Far, far away, a hundred thousand miles away, the blue of distance became the blue of sea; and only Needle ’s thousand-mile height let them see that far.

“Get us moving,” Louis said. “Then give us a view from the lander’s cameras. Let’s see how Chmeee’s doing.”

“Aye aye.”

Six rectangular windows floated beyond the hull. Six cameras showed the lander’s flight deck, lower deck, and four outside views.

The flight deck was empty. Louis scanned for emergency lights and found none.

The autodoc was still a great coffin, closed.

Something was wrong with the outside cameras. The view wavered and shifted and streamed with glowing colors. Louis was able to make out the courtyard, the arrow slits, several kzinti standing guard in leather armor. Other kzinti sprinted to and fro on an fours: blurred streaks.

Flames! The defenders had built a bonfire around the lander!

“Hindmost? Can you lift the lander from here? You said you had remote controls.”

“I could take off,” the Hindmost said, “but it would be dangerous. We are… twelve minutes of arc to spinward and a bit to port of the Map of Kzin — a third of a million miles. Would you expect me to fly the lander with a lightspeed delay of three and a half seconds? The life-support system is holding well.”

Four kzinti streaked across the courtyard to throw open massive gates. A wheeled vehicle pulled in and stopped. It was larger than the Machine People vehicle that had brought Louis to the floating city. Projectile weapons were mounted on its four fenders. Kzinti emerged and stood studying the lander.

Had the castle’s lord called on a neighbor for help? Or had a neighbor come to claim rights to an impregnable flying fort?

The vehicles guns swiveled to face the cameras, and spat. Flame bloomed; the cameras shuddered. The great orange cats ducked, then rose to study the results.

No emergency lights showed on the flight deck.

“These savages haven’t the means to harm the lander,” the Hindmost said.

Explosive projectiles sprayed the lander again.

“I’ll just take your word for it,” Louis said. “Continue monitoring. Are we close enough that I can get to the lander by stepping discs?”

The puppeteer looked himself in the eyes. He held the pose for several seconds.

Then he spoke. “We are two hundred thousand miles to spinward of the Map of Kzin, and a hundred and twenty thousand miles to port. The portward distance is irrelevant. The spinward distance would be lethal. It gives Needle and the lander a relative velocity of eight-tenths of a mile per second.”

“Too much?”

“Our technology is not miraculous, Louis! Stepping discs can absorb kinetic energies of up to two hundred feet per second, no more.”

The explosions had scattered the bonfire. Armored kzinti guards were building it up again.

Louis bit down on a bad word. “All right. The fastest way to get me there is to run us straight to antispinward until I can use the stepping discs. Then we can take our time running to starboard.”

“Aye, aye. What speed?”

Louis opened his mouth and left it open while he thought. “Now, that is one fascinating question,” he said. “What does the Ringworld meteor defense consider a meteor? Or an invading spacecraft?”

The puppeteer reached behind him, chewed at the control. “I’ve cut our acceleration. We should discuss this. Louis, I don’t understand how the City Builders knew it was safe to build a rim transport system. They were right, but how did they know?”

Louis shook his head. He could see why the Ringworld protectors might program the meteor defense not to fire on the rim walls. A safe corridor for their own ships — or maybe they found that the computer was firing on the attitude jets whenever the attitude jets fired a high-velocity plume of gas. “I’d say the City Builders started with small ships and built up. They tried it and it worked.”

“Stupid. Dangerous.”

“We already know they did things like that.”

“You have my opinion. At your orders, Louis: what speed?”

The high desert sloped gradually down: a baked and lifeless land, an ecology shattered and heated to incandescence thousands of falans ago. What had struck that blow from underneath the Ringworld? A comet wouldn’t normally be that big. There were no asteroids, no planets; they had been cleaned out of the system during the building of the Ringworld.

Needle ’s velocity was already respectable. The land ahead was beginning to turn green. There were silver threads of river.

“On the first expedition we flew at Mach 2, using flycycles,” Louis said. “That’d take us… eight days before I can use the stepping discs. Too tanj long. I’m assuming the meteor defense fires on things that move fast relative to the surface. How fast is fast?”

“The easy way to find out is to accelerate until something happens.”

“I do not believe I heard a Pierson’s puppeteer say that.”

“Have faith in puppeteer engineering, Louis. The stasis field will function. No weapon can harm us in stasis. At worst we will return to normal status after we strike the surface, and proceed henceforth at a lower speed. There are hierarchies of risk, Louis. The most dangerous thing we can do during the next two years is hide.”

“I don’t — if it was Chmeee saying — but a Pierson’s… give me a minute.” Louis closed his eyes and tried to think. Then “See how this sounds. First we loft the ruined probe, the one we left in the Library—”

“I moved it.”

“Where?”

“To the nearest high mountain with an exposed scrith crest. The safest place I could think of. The probe is still valuable, though it can no longer manufacture fuel.”

“That’s a good place. Don’t try to fly it. Just turn on every sensor on the probe, and every sensor aboard Needle and the lander. Turn most of them in the direction of the shadow squares. Now, where else would you put a meteor defense? Bear in mind that it can’t seem to fire at anything under the Ringworld floor.”

“I have no ideas.”

“Okay. We aim cameras all over the Arch. Cameras on the shadow squares. Cameras on the sun. Cameras on the Map of Kzin and the Map of Mars.”

“Definitely.”

“We stay at an altitude of a thousand miles. Shall we dismount the probe in the cargo hold? Set it to following us?”

“Our only source of fuel? No.”

“Then start accelerating until something happens. How does it sound?”

“Aye, aye,” said the Hindmost, and he turned to the controls. And Louis, who would have welcomed more discussion, more time to nerve himself up, kept his silence.

The cameras caught it, but none of Needle ’s passengers did. Even if they’d been looking up, they wouldn’t have caught it. They would have seen glare-white stars and the checkered blue Arch glowing against black space, and a black circle at the peak of the Arch, where Needle ’s flare shielding blocked out the naked sun.

But they weren’t even looking up.

Below the ruin of the hyperdrive motor, the land was green with life. Jungle and swamp and wild land prevailed, with an occasional ragged crazy quilt of cultivated farmland. Of the Ringworld hominids they’d seen so far, not many would make farmers.

There were covies of boats on flat seas. Once they crossed a spider web of roads half an hour wide, seven thousand miles wide. The telescope showed steeds carrying riders or pulling small carts. No powered vehicles. A City Builder culture must have fallen here, and stayed down.