by Larry Niven
She took the pack off Louis’s back and spilled it out. Louis reached for the translator (the ghouls’ ears came sharply alert as his hand neared the flashlight-laser) and turned up the volume. He asked, “How much do the Night People know?”
“More than we ever thought.” Vala looked like she wanted to say more, but she didn’t.
The male answered. “The world is doomed to fiery destruction in not many falans. Only Louis Wu can save us.” He smiled, showed a daunting expanse of white wedge-shaped teeth. His breath was that of a basilisk.
“I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic,” Louis said. “Do you believe me?”
“Strange events can spark an urge to prophecy in the insane. We know that you carry tools not known elsewhere. Your race is not known either. But the world is large, and we do not know all of it. Your furry friend’s race is stranger yet.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Save us! We dare not interfere.” The ghoul lost a little of his grin, though his lips still didn’t meet. (That would take a conscious effort. Those big teeth ... ) “Why should we care if you are insane? The activities of other species rarely interfere with our own lives. In the end they all belong to us.”
“I wonder if you aren’t the real rulers of the world.” Louis said that for diplomatic relations, then wondered uneasily if it might be true.
The woman answered. “Many species may claim to rule the world, or their own part of it. Would we lay claim to the forest tops of the Hanging People? Or to the airless heights of the Spill Mountain People? And what species would want our domain?” She was laughing at him, that was certain.
Louis said, “There’s a Repair Center for the world somewhere. Do you know where?”
“No doubt you are right,” the male said, “but we do not know where it might be.”
“What do you know about the rim wall? And the Great Oceans?”
“There are too many seas. I know not which you mean. There was activity along the rim wall before the great flames first appeared.”
“*Was* there! What kind of activity?”
“Many lifting devices raised equipment beyond even the level of the Spill Mountain People. There were City Builders and Spill Mountain People in great number, many other species in lesser number. They worked right at the upper edge of the world. Perhaps you can tell us the meaning of it all.”
Louis was dazed. “Tanj dammit. They must have been ...” Remounting the attitude jets, and he probably didn’t want to say so. So much power and ambition, so close, could be bad for a puppeteer’s nerves. “That’s a long way for carrion-eaters to pass messages.”
“Light travels farther than that. Does this news affect your predictions of doom?”
“I’m afraid not.” There might well be a repair crew in action somewhere, but they had almost run out of Bussard ramjets to be remounted. “But with the great flames acting, we should have more than the seven or eight falans I thought we had.”
“Good news. What will you do now?”
For a moment Louis was tempted to abandon the floating city and deal strictly with the ghouls. But he’d come too far, and after all, there were ghouls everywhere. “I’ll wait for night and then go up. Vala, your share of the cloth is in the vehicle. I’d be obliged if you don’t show it to anyone or tell anyone about me for ... a couple of turns should do it. My share you can dig up in a falan if nobody comes for it. And I’ve got this.” He patted a vest pocket, where a square yard of superconductor was folded into the bulk of a handkerchief.
“I wish you wouldn’t take it to the city,” Vala said.
“After all, they’ll think its just cloth unless I tell them different,” Louis said. It was almost a lie. Louis intended to use the superconductor.
The ghouls stared when he took off his shorts—adding detail to his description, no doubt, to help them find his species’ home on the Ringworld. He donned impact armor.
The female suddenly asked, “How did you convince a Machine People woman that you were sane?”
Vala told her, while Louis donned vest and goggles and pocketed the flashlight-laser. The ghouls almost lost their smiles. The woman asked, “Can you save the world?”
“Don’t count on me. Try to find the Repair Center. Spread the word. Try questioning the bandersnatchi—the great white beasts who live in the great swamp to spinward.”
“We know of them.”
“Good. Vala—“
“I go now to tell how my companions died. We may not meet again, Louis.” Valavirgillin picked up the empty pack and walked quickly away.
“We should escort her,” the female ghoul said. They left.
They hadn’t said good luck. Why? The way they lived ... they might all be fatalists. Luck would mean nothing to them.
Louis scanned the textured sky. He was tempted to go now, immediately. Better to wait for night. He spoke into the translator: “Hindmost, are you there?”
Apparently the puppeteer wasn’t.
Louis stretched out under the shelf fungus. The air seemed cleaner near the ground. He sipped meditatively at the fuel-and-nectar bottle Vala had left him.
What were the ghouls? Their position in the ecology seemed very secure. How had they kept their intelligence? Why would they need intelligence? Perhaps they had to fight for their prerogatives on occasion. Or for respect. Complying with a thousand local religions could also require considerable verbal facility.
More to the point: how could they help him? Was there a ghoulish enclave somewhere that remembered the source of the immortality drug? Which, by hypothesis, was made from Pak tree-of-life root ...
One thing at a time. Try the city first.
The pillars of light thinned, then faded out. Other lights appeared in the solid sky: hundreds of lighted windows. None showed directly above him. Who would occupy a basement above a garbage dump? (Someone who couldn’t afford lighting?)
The shadow farm seemed deserted. Louis heard only the wind. Standing on the shelf fungus gave him a glimpse of distant windows flickering as if with firelight: housing for the farmers around the perimeter.
Louis touched the lift knob on his flying belt and went up.
Chapter 19 -
The Floating City
At something over a thousand feet the smell of fresh air became more pronounced, and the floating city was around him. He circled the blunt tip of an inverted tower: four levels of dark windows, and a garage below that. The big garage door was closed and locked. Louis circled, looking for a broken window. There weren’t any.
These windows must have survived for eleven hundred years. Probably he couldn’t break one if he tried. He didn’t want to enter the city as a burglar anyway.
Instead, he let himself rise along the sewer pipe, hoping to gain privacy that way. There were ramps around him now, but no street lights anywhere. He guided himself to a walkway and settled on it. Now he felt less conspicuous.
There was nobody in sight. The broad ribbon of poured stone curved away among the buildings, left and right, up and down, putting out pseudopods at random. With a thousand feet of empty space below, there were no guardrails. Halrloprillalar’s people must be closer to their brachiating past than Earth’s people. Louis strolled toward the lights, keeping nervously to the center of the walk.
Where was everybody? The city had an insular look, Louis thought. There was housing in plenty, and ramps between the housing areas, but where were the shopping centers, the playhouses, the bars, the malls, parks, sidewalk caf’s [cafes]? Nothing advertised itself, and everything was behind walls.
Either he should find someone to introduce himself to, or he should be hiding. What about that glass slab with the dark windows? If he entered from above, he could
make certain it was deserted.
Someone came down the walk toward him.
Louis called, “Can you understand me?” and heard his words translated into the Machine People tongue.
The stranger answered in the same language. “You should not walk about the city in darkness. You might fall.” He was closer now. His eyes were huge; he was not of the City Builder species. He carried a slender staff as long as himself. With the light behind him, Louis could see no more of him. “Show your arm,” he said.
Louis bared his left arm. Of course it bore no tattoos. He said what he had planned to say from the beginning. “I can repair your water condensers.”
The staff slashed at him.
It rapped his head glancingly as Louis threw himself backward. He rolled and was on his feet, crouching, trained reflexes working fine, with his arms coming up just too late to block the staff. It cracked against his skull. Lights flared behind his eyes and went out.
He was in free fall. Wind roared past him. Even to a man nearly unconscious, the connection was obvious. Louis thrashed in panic in the dark. Blowout in a spacecraft! Where am I? Where are the meteor patches? My pressure suit? The alarm switch?
Switch -- He half remembered. His hands leaped to his chest, found flying-belt controls, twisted the lift knob hard over.
The belt lifted savagely and swung him around, feet down. Louis tried to shake the mists out of his head. He looked up. Through a gap in darkness he saw the solar corona glowing around a shadow square; he saw hard darkness descending to smash him. He twisted the lift knob to stop his rapid rise.
Safe.
His belly was churning and his head hurt. He needed time to think. Clearly his approach had been wrong.
But if the guard had rolled him off the walk ... Louis patted his pockets; everything was there. Why hadn’t the guard robbed him first?
Louis half remembered the answer: he’d jumped, missed the guard, rolled. And passed out in midair. That put a different face on the matter. It might even have been best to wait. Too late now.
So try the other approach.
He swam beneath the city, outward toward the rim. Not too far. There were too many lights along the perimeter. But near the center was a double cone with no lights showing at all. The lower tip was blunt: a carport with a poured-stone ledge protruding. Louis floated into the opening.
He raised the amplification of his goggles. It worried him that he hadn’t done that earlier. Had the blow to his head left him stupid?
Prill’s people, the City Builders, had had flying cars, he remembered. There was no car here. He found a rusted metal track along the floor, and a crude, armless chair at the far end, and bleachers: three rows of raised benches on either side of the track. The wood had aged, the metal was crumbly with rust.
He had to examine the chair before he understood. It was built to run down the track and to flop forward at the end. Louis had found an execution chamber, with provision for an audience.
Would he find courtrooms above? And a jail? Louis had about decided to try his luck elsewhere when a gravelly voice spoke out of the dark, in a speech he hadn’t heard in twenty-three years. “Intruder, show your arm. Move slowly.”
Again Louis said, “I can make your water condensers work,” and heard his translator speak in Halrloprillalar’s tongue. It must have been already in the translator, in storage.
The other stood in a doorway at the top of a flight of stairs. He was Louis’s height, and his eyes glowed. He carried a weapon like Valavirgillin’s. “Your arm is bare. How did you come here? You must have flown.”
“Yes.”
“Impressive. Is that a weapon?”
He must mean the flashlight-laser. “Yes. You see very well in the dark. What are you?”
“I am Mar Korssil, a female of the Night Hunters. Set down your weapon.”
“I won’t.”
“I am reluctant to kill you. Your claim might be true—“
“It is.”
“I am reluctant to wake my master, and I will not let you pass this door. Set down your weapon.”
“No. I’ve already been attacked once tonight. Can you lock that door so that neither of us can open it?”
Mar Korssil tossed something through the door; it jingled as it struck. She closed the door behind her. “Fly for me,” she said. Her voice was still a gravelly bass.
Louis lifted a few feet, then settled back.
“Impressive.” Mar Korssil came down the stairs with her weapon at ready. “We have time to talk. In the morning we will be found. What do you offer, and what do you want?”
“Was I right in guessing that your water condenser doesn’t work? Did it stop at the Fall of the Cities?”
“It has never worked to my knowledge. Who are you?”
“I am Louis Wu. Male. Call my species the Star People. I come from outside the world, from a star too dim to see. I have stuff to repair at least some of the water condensers in the city, and I have hidden much more. It may be that I can give you lighting too.”
Mar Korssil studied him with blue eyes as big as goggles. She had formidable claws on her fingers, and buck teeth like axheads. What was she, a rodent-hunting carnivore? She said, “If you can repair our machines, that is good. As to repairing those of other buildings, my master will decide. What do you want?”
“A great deal of knowledge. Access to whatever the city holds in the way of stored knowledge, maps, histories, tales—“
“You cannot expect us to send you to the Library. If your claim is true, you are too valuable. Our building is not wealthy, but we may buy knowledge from the Library if you have specific questions.”
It was becoming obvious: the floating city was no more a city than Pericles’ Greece had been a nation. The buildings were independent, and he was in the wrong building. “Which building is the library?” he asked.
“At the port-by-spinward perimeter, a cone moored tip down ... Why do you ask?”
Louis touched his chest, rose, moved toward the outer night.
Mar Korssil fired. Louis fell sprawling. Flames blazed against his chest. He yelled and jerked the harness loose and rolled away. The flying-belt controls burned, a smoky yellow flame with blue-white flashes in it.
Louis found the flashlight-laser in his hand, pointed at Mar Korssil. The Night Hunter seemed not to notice. “Do not make me do that again,” she said. “Are you wounded?”
Those words saved her life; but Louis had to kill something. “Drop the weapon or I slice you in half,” he said, “like this.” He waved the laser beam through the execution chair; it flamed and fell apart.
Mar Korssil didn’t move.
“I only want to leave your building,” Louis said. “You’ve marooned me. I’ll have to enter your building, but I’ll leave by the first ramp I find. Drop the weapon or die.”
A woman’s voice spoke from the stairway. “Drop the gun, Mar Korssil.”
The Night Hunter did.
The woman came down the stairs. She was taller than Louis, and slender. Her nose was tiny, her lips invisibly thin. Her head was bald, but rich white hair flowed down her back from behind her cars and the back of her neck. Louis guessed that the white hair was a mark of age. She showed no fear of him. He asked, “Do you rule here?”
“I and my mate-of-record rule. I am Laliskareerlyar. Did you call yourself Luweewu?”
“Close enough.”
She smiled. “There is a peephole. Mar Korssil signaled from the garage: an unusual act. I came to watch and listen. I am sorry about your flying device. There are none left in all the city.”
“If I repair your water condenser, will you set me free? And I need advice.”
“Consider your bargaining position. Can you resist my guards who wait outside?”
Louis had almost resigned himself to killing his way out. He made one more try. The floor seemed to be the usual poured stone. He ran the laser beam in a slow circle, and a patch of stone a yard across dropped into the night. Laliskareerlyar lost her smile. “Perhaps you can. It shall be as you say. Mar Korssil, come with us. Stop anyone who tries to interfere. Leave your gun where it lies.”
They climbed a spiral escalator that no longer ran. Louis counted fourteen loops, fourteen stories. He wondered if he had been wrong about Laliskareerlyar’s age. The City Builder woman climbed briskly and had breath left over for conversation. But her hands and face were wrinkled as if worn too long.
An unsettling sight. Louis wasn’t used to that. Intellectually he knew what it was: the sign of age, and the sign of her ancestor, the Pak protector.
They climbed by the light of Louis’s flashlight-laser. People appeared at doorways; Mar Korssil warned them back. Most were City Builders, but there were other species too.
These servants had served the Lyar family for many generations, Laliskareerlyar explained. The Mar family of night watchmen had been policemen serving a Lyar judge. The Machine People cooks had served almost as long. Servants and City Builder masters saw themselves as one family, bound by periodic rishathra and old loyalties. All told, Lyar Building held a thousand people, half of them interrelated City Builders.
Louis stopped to look through a window halfway up. A window, in a stairwell that ran through the core of a building? It was a hologram, a view along one of the rim walls, showing a vast stretch of Ringworld landscape. One of the last of the Lyar treasures, Laliskareerlyar told him with pride and regret. Others had been sold over hundreds of falans to pay water fees.
Louis found himself talking too. He was wary and angry and tired, but there was something about the old City Builder woman that drew him out. She knew about planets. She didn’t question his veracity. She listened. She looked so much like Halrloprillalar that Louis found himself talking about her: about the ancient, immortal ship’s whore who had lived as a half-mad goddess until Louis Wu and his motley crew arrived; how she had helped them, how she had left her ruined civilization with them, how she had died.
