Larry Niven - The Ringworld Engineers

“I feel like a goddess,” Harkabeeparolyn said. “Nobody else could have such a view.”

“I knew a goddess,” Louis said. “At least she thought she was. She was a City Builder too. She was part of a spacecraft crew; she probably saw what you’re seeing now.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

Fist-of-God Mountain shrank slowly. The Earth’s moon could have nestled in that vast shell. One had to see the mountain over such a distance, standing behind a landscape vaster than the habitable surfaces of all the worlds of known space, to appreciate its size. Louis wasn’t feeling godlike. He felt tiny. Vulnerable.

The autodoc lid aboard the lander hadn’t moved. Louis asked, “Hindmost, could Chmeee have had other wounds?”

The puppeteer was out of sight somewhere, but his voice came clear. “Of course.”

“He could be dying in there.”

“No. Louis, I’m busy. Don’t bother me!”

The telescope view had become a blur. The bright land a thousand miles below was visibly moving now; Needle ’s velocity had passed five miles per second. Orbital speed for Earth.

Cloud decks shone bright enough to hurt the eyes. Far aft, a checkerboard pattern of cultivation was thinning out. Directly below, the land dipped, then leveled off into hundreds of miles of flat grassland. The flatlands extended to right and left as far as the eye could see. Rivers that fed into the flats became swamps, suddenly green.

You could trace a ragged line of contoured bays, inlets, islands, peninsulas: the mark of Ringworld shoreline, designed for the convenience of boats and shipping. But that was the spinward border. Then several hundred miles of flat, salt-poisoned land. Then the blue line of ocean. Louis felt the hair stir on his neck at this fresh memento of the Fist-of-God impact. Even this far away, the shoreline of the Great Ocean had been lifted; the sea had receded seven or eight hundred miles.

Louis rubbed dazzled eyes. It was too bright down there. Violet highlights—

Then blackness.

Louis closed his eyes tight. When he opened them it was as if he had left them closed: black as the inside of a stomach.

Harkabeeparolyn screamed. Kawaresksenjajok thrashed. His arm struck Louis’s shoulder, and the boy gripped Louis’s arm with both hands and hung on. The woman’s scream cut off abruptly. Then she said, in a voice with teeth in it, “Luweewu, where are we?”

Louis said, “I take a wild guess and say we’re at the bottom of the ocean.”

“You are correct,” said the Hindmost’s contralto. “I have a good view by deep-radar. Shall I turn on a spotlight?”

“Sure.”

The water was murky. Needle wasn’t as deep as it might have been. There were fish nosing about; there was even a seaweed forest anchored nearby.

The boy released Louis and pressed his nose to the wall. Harkabeeparolyn stared too, but she was shivering. She asked, “Luweewu, can you tell me what happened? Can you make it make sense?”

“We’ll find out,” said Louis. “Hindmost, take us up. Back to a thousand miles altitude.”

“Aye, aye.”

“How long were we in stasis?”

“I cannot tell. Needle ’s chronometer stopped, of course. I will signal the probe to send data, but the lightspeed delay is sixteen minutes.”

“How fast were we moving?”

“Five point eight one miles per second.”

“Then take us up to five even and hold us there while we see what we’ve got.”

The signals from the lander resumed as Needle approached the surface. Fire still surrounded the lander. The autodoc was still closed. Chmeee should have emerged by now, Louis thought.

Blue light grew around them. Needle broke free of the ocean and surged upward into sunlight. The deck barely quivered as the ocean dropped away at twenty gravities of acceleration.

The view aft was instructive.

Forty or fifty miles behind them, huge combers rolled across the flat beach that had been an undersea continental shelf. A grooved line ran straight back from the shore. Needle had not struck water. The fireball had struck land and kept going.

Farther back, the beach became grassland. Farther yet, forest. It was all burning. Thousands of square miles of firestorm, flame streaming inward from all sides, pouring straight upward in the center, like the steam rushing in over a sunflower patch far, far away. Needle ’s impact could not have caused all of that.

“Now we know,” the Hindmost said. “The meteor defense is programmed to fire on inhabited territory. Louis, I am awed. The power expended compares to nothing less than the project that set the Fleet of Worlds in motion. Yet the automatics must do this repeatedly.”

“We know the Pak thought big. How was it done?”

“Don’t bother me for a while. I’ll let you know.” The Hindmost disappeared.

It was annoying. The puppeteer had all the instruments. He could lie his heads off, and how would Louis know? At this point the puppeteer couldn’t even change the arrangement…

Harkabeeparolyn was tugging at his arm. He snapped, “What?”

“Louis, I don’t ask this lightly. My sanity flinches. Forces batter me, and I can’t even describe them. Please, what has happened to us?”

Louis sighed. “I’d have to tell you about stasis fields and the Ringworld meteor defense. Also about Pierson’s puppeteers and General Products hulls and Pak.”

“I am ready.”

And he talked, and she nodded and asked questions, and he talked. He couldn’t be certain how much she understood, and of course he himself knew a lot less than he wanted to. Mostly he was telling her that Louis Wu knew what he was talking about. And when she was sure of that, she became calmer, which was what he was after.

Presently she took him to the water bed — ignoring the presence of Kawaresksenjajok, who grinned at them over his shoulder, once, then went back to watching the Great Ocean move past.

In rishathra there was reassurance. Spurious, perhaps. Who cared?

There sure was a lot of water down there.

From a thousand miles up, one could see a long way before the blanket of air blocked the view. And for most of that distance, there wasn’t a single island! The contours of sea bottom showed, and some of that was shallow enough. But the only islands were far behind, and those had probably been underwater peaks before Fist-of-God distorted the land.

There were storms. One looked in vain for the spiral patterns that meant hurricane and typhoon. But there were cloud patterns that looked like rivers in the air. As you watched them, they moved: even from this height, they moved.

The kzinti who dared that vastness had not been cowards, and those who returned had not been fools. That pattern of islands on the starboard horizon — you had to squint to be sure it was really there — must be the Map of Earth. And it was lost in all that blue.

A cool, precise contralto voice eased into his thoughts. “Louis? I have reduced our maximum velocity to four miles per second.”

“Okay.” Four, five — who cared?

“Louis, where did you say the meteor defense was located?”

Something in the puppeteer’s tone… ”I didn’t say. I don’t know.”

“The shadow squares, you said. You’re on record. It must be the shadow squares if the meteor defense can’t guard the Ringworld’s underside.” No overtones, no emotion showing in that voice.

“Do I gather I was wrong?”

“Now, pay attention, Louis. As we passed four point four miles per second, the sun flared. I have it on visual record. We didn’t see it because of the flare shielding. The sun extruded a jet of plasma some millions of miles long. It is difficult to observe because it came straight at us. It did not arch over in the sun’s magnetic field, as flares commonly do.”