Larry Niven: The Ringworld Engineers

The web of superconductor cables had its nexus in the scrith twenty miles beneath the north pole of the Map of Mars. They found a central pillar twenty miles tall, a sheath of scrith enclosing the cooling pumps for the Map of Mars. The complex at the bottom must be the control center, they decided. They found a maze of huge airlocks, and each had to be passed by solving some kind of design puzzle. The Hindmost handled that.

They passed through the last door. Beyond was a brightly lighted dome, and dry-looking soil with a podium in the center, and a smell that sent Louis spinning around, running for his life, towing a bewildered Kawaresksenjajok by his thin wrist. The airlock was closed before the boy started to fight. Louis batted him across the head and kept going. They had passed through three airlocks before he let them stop.

Presently Chmeee joined them. “The path led across a patch of soil beneath artificial sunlights. The automated gardening equipment has failed, and few plants still grow, but I recognized them.”

“So did I,” said Louis.

“I knew the smell. Mildly unpleasant.”

The boy was crying. “I didn’t smell anything! Why did you throw me around like that? Why did you hit me?”

“Flup,” said Louis. It had finally occurred to him that Kawaresksenjajok was too young; the smell of tree-of-life wouldn’t mean anything to him.

So the City Builder boy stayed with the aliens. But Louis Wu didn’t see what went on in the control room. He returned to Needle alone.

The probe was still far around the Ringworld, light-minutes distant. A hologram window, glowing within the black basalt outside Needle ’s wall, looked out through the probe’s camera: a dimmed telescopic view of a sun somewhat less active than Sol. The Hindmost must have set that up before he left.

The bone in Harkabeeparolyn’s arm was healing slightly crooked; Teela’s old portable ‘doc couldn’t set it. But it was healing. Louis worried more about her emotional state.

With nothing of her own world around her, and flame about to take everything she remembered — call it culture shock. He found her on the water bed watching the magnified sun. She nodded when he greeted her. Hours later she hadn’t moved.

Louis tried to get her talking. It wasn’t good. She was trying to forget her past, all of it.

He found a better approach when he tried to explain the physical situation. She knew some physics. He didn’t have access to Needle ’s computer and hologram facilities, so he drew diagrams on the walls. He waved his arms a lot. She seemed to understand.

On the second night after his return, he woke to see her cross-legged on the water bed, watching him thoughtfully, holding the flashlight-laser in her lap. He met its glassy stare, then swung his arm in circles to turn himself over and went back to sleep. He woke up next morning, so what the tanj.

That afternoon he and Harkabeeparolyn watched a flame rise from the sun, licking out and out and out. They said very little.

One falan later: ten Ringworld rotations.

Far up the arc of the Ringworld, twenty-one candle flames glowed brightly, as brightly as the corona of the hyperactive sun showing around the edges of a shadow square.

Needle was still embedded in basalt beneath the Map of Mars. Needle ’s crew watched in a hologram window, courtesy of the probe’s cameras. The probe had been brought to rest at the cliff edge of the Map of Mars, on carbon dioxide snow, where martians were not likely to tamper with it.

Between those two rows of candle flames, plants and animals and people would be dying. In numbers that would make human space look empty, the plants would be withering or growing strangely. Insects and animals would breed, but not according to their kind. Valavirgillin would be wondering why her father had died and why she was throwing up so often and whether it was part of the general doom and what was the Star People man doing about it all?

But none of that showed from fifty-seven million miles away. They saw only the flames of the Bussard ramjets burning enriched fuel.

“I am pleased to announce,” the Hindmost said, “that the center of mass of the Ringworld is moving back toward the sun. In another six or seven rotations we can set the meteor defense as we found it, to fire on meteors. Five percent of attitude jet efficiency will be enough to hold the structure in place.”

Chmeee grunted in satisfaction. Louis and the City Builders continued to awe into the hologram glowing in a depth of black basalt.

“We have won,” the Hindmost said. “Louis, you set me a task whose magnitude compares only to the building of the Ringworld itself, and you set my life at stake. I can accept your arrogance now that we have won, but there are limits. I will hear you congratulate me or I will cut off your air.”

“Congratulations,” said Louis Wu.

The woman and boy on either side of him began to cry.

Chmeee snorted. “To the victor belongs the right to gloat, at minimum. Do the dead and dying bother you? Those worth your respect would have volunteered.”

“I didn’t give them the chance. Look, I’m not asking you to be guilt-ridden—”

“Why should I be? I mean no offense, but the dead and dying are all hominids. They are not of your species, Louis, and they are certainly not of mine, nor of the Hindmost’s. I am a hero. I have saved the equivalent of two inhabited worlds, and their populations are of my species, or nearly so.”

“All right, I see your point.”

“And now, with advanced technology to back me, I intend to carve out an empire.”

Louis found himself smiling. “Sure, why not? On the Map of Kzin.”

“I thought of that. I believe I prefer the Map of Earth. Teela told us that kzinti explorers rule the Map of Earth. In spirit they may resemble my world-conquering people more nearly than the decadents of the Map of Kzin.”

“You know, you’re probably right.”

“Furthermore, they of the Map of Earth have fulfilled an ancient daydream of my people.”

“Oh?”

“Conquering Earth, you idiot.”

It had been long since Louis Wu laughed. Conquering plains apes! “ Sic transit gloria mundi. How do you plan to get there?”

“It should be no great feat to free Needle and guide it back to Mons Olympus—”

“My ship,” the Hindmost said gently, but his voice cut through Chmeee’s. “My controls. Needle goes where I will it.”

An edge in Chmeee’s voice. “And where might that be?”

“Nowhere. I feel no strong urge to justify myself,” the Hindmost said. “You are not my species, and how can you harm me? Will you burn out my hyperdrive motor again? Yet you are allies. I will explain.”

Chmeee was up against the forward wall, giving the puppeteer his full attention. Claws extended. Fur fluffed around his neck. Naturally.

“I have violated tradition,” said the Hindmost. “I have continued to function when death might touch me at any second. My life has been at stake for nearly two decades, with the risk rising almost asymptotically. The risk is over, and I am exiled, but I live. I want to rest. Can you empathize with my need to take a long rest? In Needle I have as many of the comforts of home as I will ever see. My ship is safely buried in rock, between two layers of scrith, which compares in strength to Needle ’s own hull. I have quiet and safety. If later I feel the need to explore, a billion cubic miles of the Ringworld Repair Center is just outside. I am just where I want to be, and I will stay.”

Louis and Harkabeeparolyn did rishathra that night. (No: they made love.) They hadn’t done that in some time. Louis had feared that the urge was gone. Afterward she told him.