by Larry Niven
“You could be right,” she said, surprised.
“You slept on a hard deck last night. Try the water bed. It’s big enough for both of you and a couple more, and Chmeee isn’t using it right now.”
Kawaresksenjajok flung himself bodily onto the fur-covered water bed. He bounced, and waves surged outward beneath the fur. “Luweewu, I like it! it’s like swimming, but dry!”
Stiff-backed with distrust, Harkabeeparolyn sat down on the uneasy surface. Dubiously she asked, “Chmeee?”
“Eight feet tall and covered with orange fur. He’s ... on a mission in the Great Ocean. We’re going to get him now. You may talk him into sharing with you.”
The boy laughed. The woman said, “Your friend must find another playmate. I do not indulge in rishathra.”
Louis chortled. (The underside of his mind thought: tanj!) “Chmeee’s stranger than you think. He’s as likely to want rishathra with a weenie plant. You’d be quite safe unless he wants the whole bed, which is possible. Be careful never to shake him awake. Or you can try the sleeping plates.”
“Do you use the sleeping plates?”
“Yes.” He guessed at the meaning of her expression. “The field can be set to keep two bodies apart.” (*Tanj!* Did the boy’s presence inhibit her?)
She said, “Luweewu, we have inflicted ourselves on you in the middle of your mission. Did you come simply to steal knowledge?”
The correct answer would have been yes. Louis’s answer was at least true. “We’re here to save the Ringworld.”
Thoughtfully she said, “But how can I ...?” And then she was staring past Louis’s shoulder.
The Hindmost waited beyond the forward wall, and he was glorious. Now his claws were tipped with silver, and he wore his mane in gold and silver strands. The short, pale hair over the rest of his body had been brushed to a glow. “Harkabeeparolyn, Kawaresksenjajok, be welcome,” he sang. “Your aid is urgently needed. We have traveled a vast distance between the stars in hope of saving your peoples and your world from a fiery death.”
Louis swallowed laughter. Fortunately his guests had eyes only for the Pierson’s puppeteer.
“Where are you from?” the boy demanded of the puppeteer. “What is it like?”
The puppeteer tried to tell them. He spoke of worlds falling through space at near lightspeed, five worlds arrayed in a pentagon, a Kemplerer rosette. Artificial suns circled four, to grow food for the population of the fifth. The fifth world glowed only by the light of its streets and buildings. Continents blazed yellow-white, oceans dark. Isolated brilliant stars surrounded by mist were factories floating on the sea, their waste heat boiling the water. Waste industrial heat alone kept the world from freezing.
The boy forgot to breathe as he listened. But the librarian spoke softly to herself. “He must come from the stars. He is shaped like no living thing known anywhere.”
The puppeteer spoke of crowded streets, tremendous buildings, parks that were the last refuge of a world’s native life. He spoke of stepping-disc arrays whereby one could walk around the world in minutes.
Harkabeeparolyn shook her head violently. Her voice rose. “Please, we don’t have time. I’m sorry, Kawa! We want to hear more, we need to know more, but—the world, the sun! Louis, I never should have doubted you. What can we do to help?”
The Hindmost said, “Read to me.”
Kawaresksenjajok lay on his back, watching the back of the world roll past him.
Needle ran beneath a featureless black roof in which the Hindmost had set two hologram “windows.” One wide rectangle showed a light-amplified view; the other examined the Ringworld’s underside by infrared light. In infrared the underside of day still glowed brighter than night-shadowed land; and rivers and seas were dark by day and light by night.
“Like the back of a mask, see?” Louis kept his voice down to avoid interrupting Harkabeeparolyn. “That branching river chain: see how it stands out? The seas bulge too. And that line of dents—that’s a whole mountain range.”
“Are your worlds like that?”
“Oh, no. On one of my worlds all that would be solid underneath, and the surface would be happening by accident. Here the world was sculpted. Look, the seas are all the same depth, and they’re spaced out so there’s enough water everywhere.”
“Somebody carved the world like a bas relief?”
“Just like that.”
“Luweewu, that’s scary. What were they like?”
“They thought big, and they loved their children, and they looked like suits of armor.” Louis decided not to say more about the protectors.
The boy pointed. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know.” It was a dimple in the Ringworld’s underside ... with fog in it. “I think it’s a meteor puncture. There’ll be an eye storm above it.”
The reading screen was on the flight deck, facing Harkabeeparolyn through the wall. The Hindmost had repaired the damage and added a braided cable that led into the control panel. As Harkabeeparolyn read aloud, the ship’s computer was reading the tape and correlating it to her voice and to its own stored knowledge of Halrloprillalar’s tongue. That tongue would have changed over the centuries, but not too much, not in a literate society. Hopefully the computer could take over soon.
As for the Hindmost, he had disappeared into the hidden section. The alien had suffered repeated shocks. Louis didn’t begrudge him time off for hysterics.
Needle continued to accelerate. Presently the inverse landscape was speeding past almost too fast for detail. And Harkabeeparolyn’s voice was becoming throaty. Time for a lunch break, Louis decided.
A problem emerged. Louis dialed filets mignons and baked potatoes, with Brie and French bread to follow. The boy stared in horror. So did the woman, but at Louis Wu.
“I’m sorry. I forgot. I keep thinking of you as omnivores.”
“Omnivores, yes. We eat plants and flesh both,” the librarian said. “But not decayed food!”
“Don’t get so upset. There’s no bacteria involved.” Properly aged steak, milk attacked by mold ... Louis dumped their plates into the toilet and dialed again. Fruit, crudit’s [crudites] with a separate sour-cream dip which he dumped, and seafood, including sashimi. His guests had never seen salt-water fish before. They liked it, but it made them thirsty.
And watching Louis eat made them unhappy. What was he supposed to do, starve?
They might starve. Where would he get fresh red meat for them? Why, from Chmeee’s side of the autokitchen, of course. Broil it with the laser on wide beam, high intensity. He’d have to get the Hindmost to recharge the laser. That might not be easy, considering the last use to which he’d put it.
Another problem: they might be consuming too much salt. Louis didn’t know what to do about that. Maybe the Hindmost could reset the autokitchen controls.
After lunch Harkabeeparolyn went back to her reading. By now the Ringworld was streaming past too fast for detail. Kawaresksenjajok flicked restlessly from cell to cargo hold and back again.
Louis, too, was restive. He should be studying: reviewing the records of the first voyage, or of Chmeee’s adventures to date on the Map of Kzin. But the Hindmost wasn’t available.
Gradually he became aware of another source of discomfort.
He lusted after the librarian.
He loved her voice. She’d been talking for hours, yet the lilt was still there. She’d told him that she sometimes read to blind children: children without sight. Louis got queasy just thinking about it. He liked her dignity and her courage. He liked the way the robe outlined her shape; and he’d glimpsed her nakedness.
It had been years since Louis Wu had loved a strictly human woman. Harkabeeparolyn came too close. And she wasn�
��t having any. When the puppeteer finally rejoined them, Louis was glad of the distraction.
They talked quietly in Interworld, below the sound of Harkabeeparolyn reading to the computer.
“Where did they come from, these amateur repairmen?” Louis wondered. “Who on the Ringworld would know enough to remount the attitude jets? Yet they don’t seem to know that it’s not enough.”
“Let them alone,” the Hindmost said.
“Maybe they know it’s not enough? Maybe the poor bleeders just can’t think of anything else to do. And there’s the question of where they got their equipment. It could have come from the Repair Center.”
“We face enough complications now. Let them alone.”
“For once I think you’re right. But I can’t help wondering. Teela Brown got her schooling in human space. Big space-built structures are nothing new to her. She’d know what it meant when the sun started sliding around.”
“Could Teela Brown have organized so large an effort?”
“Maybe not. But Seeker would be with her. Was Seeker in your tapes? He was a Ringworld native, and maybe immortal. Teela found him. A little crazy, but he could have done the organizing. He was a king more than once, he said.”
“Teela Brown was a failed experiment. We tried to breed a lucky human being, feeling that puppeteer associates would share the luck. Teela may or may not have been lucky, but her luck was surely not contagious. We do not want to meet Teela Brown.”
Louis shivered. “No.”
“Then we must avoid the attention of the repair crew.”
“Add a postscript to the tape you’re sending to Chmeee,” Louis said. “Louis Wu rejects your offer of sanctuary on the Fleet of Worlds. Louis Wu has taken command of Hot Needle of Inquiry and has destroyed the hyperdrive motor. That should shake him up.”
“It did that for me. Louis, my sensors will not penetrate scrith. Your message will have to wait.”
“How long until we reach him?”
“About forty hours. I have accelerated to a thousand miles per second. At this velocity it takes more than five gravities of acceleration to hold us in our path.”
“We can take thirty gravities. You’re being overcautious.”
“I’m aware of your opinion.”
“You don’t take orders worth a tanj,” Louis said. “Either.”
Chapter 25 -
The Seeds of Empire
Beyond the curved ceiling the Ringworld floor streamed past.
It wasn’t much of a view, not from thirty thousand miles away, passing at a thousand miles per second, and cloaked in foam padding. Presently the boy fell asleep in the orange furs. Louis continued to watch. The alternative was to float here wondering if he’d doomed them all.
And finally the Hindmost told the City Builder woman, “Enough.”
Louis tumbled off the shifting surface.
Harkabeeparolyn massaged her throat. They watched as the Hindmost ran four stolen tapes through the reading machine.
It took only a few minutes. “This now becomes the computer’s problem,” the puppeteer said. “I’ve programmed in the questions. If the answers are in the tapes, we’ll have them in a few hours, maximum. Louis, what if we don’t like the answers?”
“Let’s hear the questions.”
“Is there a history of repair activity on the Ringworld? If so, did repair machinery approach from any one source? Is repair more frequent in any given locale? Is any section of the Ringworld in better repair than the rest? Locate all references to Pak-like beings. Does the style of armor vary with distance from a central point? What are the magnetic properties of the Ringworld floor and of scrith in general?”
“Good.”
“Did I miss anything?”
“... Yeah. We want the most probable source of the immortality drug. It’ll be the Great Ocean, but let’s ask anyway.”
“I will. Why the Great Ocean?”
“Oh, partly because it’s so visible. And partly because we’ve found one surviving sample of the immortality drug, and one only. Halrloprillalar had it. We found her in the vicinity of the Great Ocean.” And partly because we crashed there, Louis thought. The luck of Teela Brown distorts probability. Teela’s luck could have brought us straight to the Repair Center that first time. “Harkabeeparolyn? Can you think of anything we missed?”
Her voice was scratchy. “I don’t understand what you’re doing.”
How to explain? “Our machine remembers everything on your tapes. We tell it to search its memory for answers to given questions.”
“Ask it how to save the Ringworld.”
“We have to be more specific. The machine can remember and correlate and do sums, but it can’t think for itself. It’s not big enough.”
She shook her head.
“What if the answers are wrong?” the Hindmost persisted. “We cannot flee.”
“We try something else.”
“I have thought about this. We must go into polar orbit around the sun, to minimize the risk that a fragment of the disintegrating Ringworld will strike us. I will put Needle in stasis, to wait for rescue. Rescue will not come, but the risk is better than what we face now.”
It could come to that, Louis thought. “Fine. We’ve got a couple of years to try to find better odds.”
“Less than that. If—“
“Shut up.”
The exhausted librarian dropped onto the water bed. Imitation kzin fur surged and rippled under her. She held herself rigid for a moment, then cautiously let herself fall back. The fur continued to ripple. Presently the stiffness left her and she let herself roll with the tide. Kawaresksenjajok murmured sleepy protest and turned over.
The librarian looked most appealing. Louis resisted an urge to join her on the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired. Miserable. Will I ever see my home again? If the end comes—when it comes—I’d like to wait for it on the Library roof. But the flowers will be dead by then, won’t they? Scorched and frozen.”
“Yeah.” Louis was touched. Certainly he’d never see his own home again. “I’ll try to get you back. Right now you need sleep. And a back massage.”
“No.”
Strange. Wasn’t Harkabeeparolyn one of the City Builders, Halrloprillalar’s people, who had ruled the Ringworld largely through sex appeal? Sometimes it was difficult to remember that the individuals within an alien species could differ as thoroughly as humans did.
He said, “The Library staff seemed more priests than professionals. Do you practice continence?”
“While we work in the Library, we are continent. But I was continent by choice.” She rose on an elbow to look at him. “We learn that all other species lust to do rishathra with the City Builders. Is that the case with you?”
He admitted it.
“I hope you can control it.”
He sighed, “Oh, tanj, yes. I’m a thousand falans old. I’ve learned how to distract myself.”
“How?”
“Ordinarily I’d go looking for another woman.”
The librarian didn’t laugh. “What if another woman is not available?”
“Oh ... exercise to exhaustion. Get drunk on ‘fuel.’ Go on sabbatical, off into interstellar space in a one-man ship. Find some other pleasure to indulge myself. Get involved in work.”
“You should not be drunk,” she said, and she was right. “What pleasure might you try?”
The droud! A touch of current and he wouldn’t care if Harkabeeparolyn turned to green slime before his eyes. Why should he care now? He didn’t admire her ... well, maybe he did, a little. But she’d done her part. He could save the Ringworld, or lose it, witho
ut more help from her.
“You’ll have your massage anyway,” he said. He stepped wide around her to touch a control on the water bed. Harkabeeparolyn looked startled, then smiled and relaxed completely as the sonic vibrations in the water enfolded her. In a few minutes she was asleep. He set the unit to switch off in twenty minutes.
Then he brooded.
If he hadn’t spent a year with Halrloprillalar, he’d find Harkabeeparolyn unsightly, with her bald head and knife-edge lips and small flat nose. But he had ...
He had hair where no City Builder had hair. Was that it? Or the smell of his food on his breath? Or a social signal he didn’t know?
A man who had hijacked a starship, a man who had bet his life on the chance to rescue trillions of other lives, a man who had beaten the ultimate in drug habits, should not be bothered by so minor a distraction as an itch for a lovely roommate. A touch of the wire would give him the dispassionate clarity to see that.
Yeah.
Louis went to the forward wall. “Hindmost!”
The puppeteer trotted into view.
“Run the records of the Pak for me. Interviews and medical reports on Jack Brennan, studies of the alien’s corpse, everything you’ve got.” He’d try work.
Louis Wu hovered in midair, in lotus position, with his loose clothing drifting around him. On a screen that floated motionless outside Needle’s hull, a man long dead was lecturing on the origin of humanity.
“Protectors have precious little free will,” he was saying. “We’re too intelligent not to see the right answers. Besides that, there are instincts. If a Pak protector has no living children, he generally dies. He stops eating. Some protectors can generalize; they can find a way to do something for their whole species, and it keeps them alive. I think that was easier for me than it was for Phssthpok.”
“What did you find? What’s the cause that keeps you eating?”
“Warning you about Pak protectors.”
Louis nodded, remembering the autopsy data on the alien. Phssthpok’s brain was bigger than a man’s, but the swelling did not include the frontal lobes. Jack Brennan’s head looked dented in the middle because of his human frontal development and the upward swelling of the back of the skull.
