Larry Niven: The Ringworld Engineers

“Got to rig a sling between the flying belts. What can we use? Superconductor isn’t strong enough.”

“We must find something. Louis, I am too badly wounded to scout.”

“We don’t need to. Help me get this suit off Harkabeeparolyn.”

He used the laser. He cut away the front of the pressure suit. He sliced the loose fabric into strips. He punched holes around the edges of what was left of the suit, and threaded strips of the rubberized fabric through it. The other ends he tied to the straps of his flying belt.

The suit had become a Harkabeeparolyn-shaped sling. They put her back into it. She was docile now, but she wouldn’t speak.

Chmeee said, “Clever.”

“Thank you. Can you fly?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try it. If you have to drop out and you feel better later, you’ll still have a flying belt. Maybe we’ll find a landmark big enough that I can come back for you and find you again.”

They set off down the corridor that had brought them here. Chmeee’s gashes were bleeding again, and Louis knew he was hurting. Three minutes into their journey they came to a disc six feet across, floating a foot in the air and piled with gear. They settled beside it.

“We might have known. Teela’s cargo disc, by another of those interesting coincidences,” Louis said.

“Another part of her game?”

“Yah. If we lived, we’d find it.” Everything on the disc was strange to the eye, alien, except a heavy box whose bolts had been melted off. “Do you remember this? It’s the medical kit off Teela’s flycycle.

“It won’t help a kzin. And the medicines are twenty-three Earth years old.”

“Better than nothing, for her. You, you’ve got allergy pills, and there’s nothing here to infect you. We’re not close enough to the Map of Kzin to get kzinti bacteria.”

The kzin looked bad. He shouldn’t have been standing up. He asked, “Can you learn these controls? I don’t trust myself to try them.”

Louis shook his head. “Why bother? You and Harkabeeparolyn get on the disc. It’s already floating. I’ll tow it. You sleep.”

“Good.”

“Get her attached to the pocket ‘doc first. And tie yourselves to the control post, both of you.”

Both of them slept through the next thirty hours while Louis towed the disc. His ribs on the right side were one great red-and-purple bruise.

He stopped when he saw that Harkabeeparolyn was awake.

She babbled of the terrible compulsion that had gripped her, of the horror and delight of the insidious evil that was tree-of-life. Louis had been trying not to think about it. She waxed poetic as hell, and she wouldn’t shut up, and Louis wouldn’t tell her to. She needed to talk.

She wanted the comfort of Louis’s arms around her, and he could give her that too.

He also hooked Teela’s old ‘doc to his own arm for an hour. When the agony in his ribs had receded a little, and when he felt a little less woozy, he gave it back. There was still enough pain to distract him from a smell that was still with him. His flying belt might have brushed against tree-of-life. Or else… perhaps it was in his head. Forever.

Chmeee had grown delirious. Louis made Harkabeeparolyn wear Chmeee’s impact armor. Teela had torn it open in the fight, but it was better than skin for a woman who planned to lie next to a delirious kzin.

The armor probably saved her life at least once, when Chmeee slashed at her because she looked too much like Teela. She tended the kzin as best she could, feeding him water and nutrient from her pressure-suit helmet. By the fourth day Chmeee was rational, but still weak… and ravenous. The syrup in a human’s pressure suit wasn’t enough.

It took them four days in all to reach the approximate position of Needle , and another day cutting through walls until they found a solid block of fused basalt.

A week after it had solidified, the rock was still warm. Louis left his floating disc and passengers far down the tunnel down which Teela had towed Needle . He had his pressure-suit helmet on, with clean air blowing into it, when he held the disintegrator two-handed and pressed the trigger.

A hurricane of dust blew back at him. A tunnel formed ahead of him, and he walked into it.

There was nothing to see, and no sound but the howl of basalt disintegrating and blowing past him, and lightning somewhere behind him where the electron charges were reasserting their prerogatives. Just how much lava had Teela poured? It seemed he’d been at this for hours.

He bumped into something.

Yah. He was looking through a window into a strange place. A living room, with couches and a floating coffee table. But everything looked soft, somehow; there wasn’t a sharp edge or a hard surface anywhere — nothing that any living thing could bump a knee against. Through a further window he could see huge buildings, and a glimpse of black sky between. Pierson’s puppeteers swarmed in the streets. Everything was upside down.

That which he had taken for one of the couches wasn’t. Louis used his flashlight-laser at low intensity. He flicked it on and off. For a good minute nothing happened. Then a flattish white head and neck, emerging to drink from a shallow bowl, jerked in amazement and darted back under its belly.

Louis waited.

The puppeteer stood up. He led Louis around the hull — slowly, because Louis had to make his path with the disintegrator — to where he had placed a stepping-disc transmitter on the outside of the hull. Louis nodded. He went back for his companions.

Ten minutes later he was inside. Eleven minutes later, he and Harkabeeparolyn were eating like kzinti. Chmeee’s hunger was beyond description. Kawaresksenjajok watched him in awe. Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t even noticed.

Ship’s morning, for a spacecraft buried in congealed lava, tens of miles beneath the sunlight.

“Our medical facilities are crippled,” the Hindmost said. “Chmeee and Harkabeeparolyn must heal as best they can.”

He was on the flight deck, speaking via the intercom system; and that might or might-not have been significant. Teela was gone, and the Ringworld might survive. The puppeteer suddenly had a long, long life span to protect. Rubbing shoulders with aliens was contraindicated.

“I have lost contact with both the lander and the probe,” the puppeteer said. “The meteor defense flared at about the time the lander stopped sending, for whatever significance that may have. Signals from the damaged probe stopped just after Teela Brown tried to invade Needle .”

Chmeee had slept (on the water bed, quite alone) and eaten. His restored pelt would bear interesting scars once again, but the wounds were healing. He said, “Teela must have destroyed the probe as soon as she saw it. She could not force herself to leave a dangerous enemy behind her.”

“Behind her? Who?”

“Hindmost, she called you more dangerous than a kzin. A tactical ploy, to insult us both, no doubt.”

“Did she indeed.” Two flat heads looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. “Well. Our resources have dwindled to Needle itself and a single probe. We left that probe on a peak near the floating city. It still has working sensors, and I have signaled it to return, in case we think of a use for it. We should have it available in six local days.

“Meanwhile we seem to have our original problem back, with additional clues and additional complications. How to restore the Ringworld’s stability? We believe that we are in the right place to begin,” the Hindmost said. “Don’t we? Teela’s behavior, inconsistent for a being of acknowledged intelligence… ”

Louis Wu made no comment. Louis was quiet this morning.