by Larry Niven
“I don’t understand. No, wait, I do understand. Luweewu, our species ruled most of the world because of our command of the nuances and variations of rishathra. Do you know how we learned so much about rishathra?”
“Just lucky, I guess?”
“Luweewu, some species are more fertile than others.”
“Oh.”
“Before history began, we learned that rishathra is the way not to have children. If we mate, four falans later there is a child. Luweewu, can the world be saved? Do you know that the world can be saved?”
Oh, to be on sabbatical. Alone in a singleship, light-years from all responsibility to anyone but Louis Wu. Oh, to be under the wire … “I can’t guarantee anything at all.”
“Then do rishathra with me, to let me stop thinking of Kawaresksenjajok!”
It was not the most flattering proposal of Louis Wu’s young life. He asked, “How do we ease his mind?”
“There is no way. Poor boy, he must suffer.”
Then you can both suffer, Louis thought. But he couldn’t make himself say it. The woman was serious, and she was hurting, and she was right. This was not a time to bring a baby City Builder into the world.
And he wanted her.
He climbed out of free fall and took her to the water bed. He was glad that Kawaresksenjajok had retired to the cargo hold. What would the boy have to say tomorrow morning?
Chapter 26
Beneath the Waters
Louis woke under gravity, with a smile on his face, a pleasant ache in every muscle, and a grittiness in his eyes. He had slept very little last night. Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t exaggerated her urgency. He had never known (despite his time with Halrloprillalar) that City Builders went into heat.
He shifted, and the big bed surged beneath him. A body rolled against him: Kawaresksenjajok, on his belly, spread out like a starfish and snoring gently.
Harkabeeparolyn, curled in orange fur at the foot of the bed, stirred and sat up. She said, perhaps in apology at leaving him, “I kept waking up and not knowing where I was, with the bed heaving under me.”
Culture shock, he thought. He remembered that Halrloprillalar had liked the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. “There’s plenty of floor. How do you feel?”
“Much better, for the moment. Thank you.”
“Thank you. Are you hungry?”
“Not yet.”
He exercised. His muscles were still hard, but he was out of practice. The City Builders watched him with puzzled expressions. Afterward he dialed breakfast: melon, soufflés Grand Marnier, muffins, coffee. His guests refused the coffee, predictably, and also the muffins.
When the Hindmost appeared he looked rumpled and tired. “The patterns we sought are not evident in the records of the floating city,” he said. “All species build their armor in the shape of a Pak protector. Armor is not the same everywhere, not quite, but the styling does not vary in any pattern. It may be we can blame the spread of City Builder culture for that. Their empire mixed ideas and inventions until we may never trace their origins.”
“What about the immortality drug?”
“You were right. The Great Ocean is seen as a source of horrors and delights, including immortality. The gift is not always a drug. Sometimes it comes without warning, bestowed by whimsical gods. Louis, the legends make no sense to me, a nonhuman.”
“Set the tape up for us. I’ll get our guests to watch it too. Maybe they can explain what I can’t.”
“Aye, aye.”
“What about repairs?”
“There has been no repair activity on the Ringworld in recorded history.”
“You’re kidding!”
“How large a region is covered by the city records? How long a time? Small, and short. Aside from that, I’ve studied the old interviews with Jack Brennan. I gather that protectors have long lives and very long attention spans. They prefer not to use servomechanisms if they can do a job themselves. There was no autopilot aboard Phssthpok’s spacecraft, for instance.”
“That’s not consistent. The spillpipe system is certainly automatic.”
“A very simple brute-force approach. We don’t know why the protectors died or left the Ringworld. Is it possible that they knew their fate, that they had time to automate the spillpipe system? Louis, we don’t need to know any of this.”
“Oh, yah? The meteor defense is probably automatic too. Wouldn’t you like to know more about the meteor defense?”
“I would.”
“And the attitude jets were automatic. Maybe there were manual overrides for all of that. But a thousand hominid species have evolved since the Pak disappeared, and the automatics are still going. Either the protectors always intended to leave—which I can’t believe—”
“Or they took many years to die,” the Hindmost said. “I have my own ideas on that.” And he would say no more.
***
Louis found fine entertainment that morning. The tales of the Great Ocean were good stuff, with heroes and royalty and feats of detection and magic and fearsome monsters, and a flavor different from the fairy tales of any human culture. Love was not eternal. The City Builder hero’s (or heroine’s) companions were always of the opposite sex, their loyalty was held by imaginatively described rishathra, and their conveniently strange powers were taken for granted. Magicians were not automatically evil; they were random dangers to be avoided, not fought.
Louis found the common denominators he was looking for. Always there was the vastness of the sea and the terror of the storms and the sea monsters.
Some of those would be sharks, sperm whales, killer whales, Gummidgy destroyers, Wunderland shadowfish, or trapweed jungles. Some were intelligent. There were sea serpents miles long, with steaming nostrils (implying lungs?) and large mouths lined with sharp teeth. There was a land that burned any ship that approached, invariably leaving one survivor. (Fantasy, or sunflowers?) Certain islands were sea beasts of sedentary inclination, such that a whole ecology could establish itself on a beast’s back, until a shipload of sailors disturbed the creature. Then it would dive. Louis might have believed that one if he hadn’t seen the same legend in Earth’s literature.
He did believe the ferocious storms. Over that long a reach, storms could build terribly, even without the Coriolis effect that gives rise to hurricanes on any normal world. On the Map of Kzin he’d seen a ship as big as a city. It might take a ship that size to weather Great Ocean storms.
He did not disbelieve the notion of magicians, not completely. They (in three legends) seemed to be of the City Builder race. But unlike the magicians of Earthly legend, they were mighty fighters. And all three wore armor.
“Kawaresksenjajok? Do magicians always wear armor?”
The boy looked at him strangely. “You mean in stories, don’t you? No. Except, I guess they always do around the Great Ocean. Why?”
“Do magicians fight? Are they great fighters?”
“They don’t have to be.” The questioning was making the boy uneasy.
Harkabeeparolyn broke in. “Luweewu, I may know more of children’s tales than Kawa does. What are you trying to learn?”
“I’m looking for the home of the Ringworld engineers. These armored magicians could be them, except they’re too late in history.”
“Then it isn’t them.”
“But what sparked the legends? Statues? Mummies pulled out of a desert? Racial memories?”
She thought it over. “Magicians usually belong to the species that is telling the story. Descriptions vary: height, weight, what they eat. Yet they have traits in common. They are terrible fighters. They do not take a moral stand. They are not to be defeated, but avoided.”
***
Like a submarine beneath polar ice, Hot Needle of Inquiry cruised beneath the Great Ocean.
The Hindmost had slowed the ship. They had a good view of the long, intricately curved ribbon of continental shelf falling behind them. Beyond, the floor of the Great Ocean was as active as the land: mountains
high enough to rise above the water; undersea canyons showing as ridges five and six miles high.
What was above them now—a pebbled roof, dark even under light amplification, that seemed obtrusively close even though it was three thousand miles above—should be the Map of Kzin. The computer said it was. Kzin must have been tectonically active when the Map was carved. The sea beds bulged strongly; the mountain ranges were deep and sharp of outline.
Louis could identify nothing. Foam-shrouded contours weren’t enough. He needed to see sunlight patterns and yellow-and-orange jungle. “Keep the cameras rolling. Are you getting a signal from the lander?”
From his post at the controls the Hindmost turned one head back. “No, Louis, the scrith blocks it. Do you see the nearly circular bay, there where the big river ends? The great ship is moored across its mouth. Nearly across the Map, the Y-shape where two rivers join—that is the castle where the lander now rests.”
“Okay. Drop a few thousand miles. Give me an overview … or underview.”
Needle sank beneath its carved roof. The Hindmost said, “You made this same tour in the Lying Bastard. Do you expect to find changes now?”
“No. Getting impatient?”
“Of course not, Louis.”
“I know more than I did then. Maybe I’ll pick up details we missed. Like—what’s that, sticking out near the south pole?”
The Hindmost gave them an expanded view. A long, narrow, utterly black triangle with a textured surface, it dropped straight down from the center of the Map of Kzin. “A radiator fin,” the puppeteer said. “The antarctic must be kept refrigerated, of course.”
The Ringworlders were utterly bewildered. “I don’t understand,” Harkabeeparolyn said. “I thought I knew some science, but … what is it?”
“Too complicated. Hindmost—”
“Luweewu, I am not a fool or a child!”
She couldn’t be much over forty, Louis thought. “All right. The whole point is to imitate a planet. A spinning ball, right? Sunlight falls almost level at the poles of a spinning ball, so it’s cold. So this imitation world has to be cooled at the poles. Hindmost, give us more magnification.”
The fin’s textured surface became myriad adjustable horizontal flaps, silver above, black below. Summer and winter, he thought; and he heard himself say, “I can’t believe it.”
“Luweewu?”
He spread his hands helplessly. “Every so often I lose it. I think I’ve accepted it all, and then all of a sudden it’s too big. Too tanj big.”
Tears were brimming in Harkabeeparolyn’s eyes. “I believe it now. My world is an imitation of a real world.”
Louis put his arms around her. “It’s real. Feel this? You’re as real as I am. Stamp your foot. The world is as real as this ship. Just bigger. Way way bigger.”
The Hindmost said, “Louis?”
A bit of telescope work had found him more fins, smaller ones, around the Map’s perimeter. “Naturally the arctic regions must be cooled too.”
“Yah. I’ll be all right in a minute. Take us toward Fist-of-God, but take your time. The computer can find it?”
“Yes. Might we find it plugged? You said that the eye storm has been plugged or repaired.”
“Plugging Fist-of-God wouldn’t be easy. The hole’s bigger than Australia, and clear above the atmosphere.” He rubbed his closed eyes hard.
I can’t let this happen to me, he thought. What happens is real. What’s real, I can manipulate with my brain. Tanj, I should never have used the wire. It’s screwed up my sense of reality. But … cooling fins under the poles?
They were out from under the Map of Kzin. Deep-radar showed nothing of pipes beneath the contoured sea bottoms. Which must mean that the meteor shielding was foamed scrith. The pipes had to be there, or else flup would fill the ocean beds.
Those ridges on the Ringworld’s underside—those long, long undersea canyons. A dredge in each of the deepest canyons, an outlet at one end: you could keep the whole ocean bed clear.
“Veer a little, Hindmost. Take us under the Map of Mars. Then under the Map of Earth. It won’t take us too far out of our way.”
“Nearly two hours.”
“Risk it.”
***
Two hours. Louis dozed in the sleeping field. He knew that an adventurer snatches sleep when he can. He woke well ahead of time, with sea bottom still gliding past above Needle’s roof. He watched it slow and stop.
The Hindmost said, “Mars is missing.”
Louis shook his head violently. Wake up! “What?”
“Mars is a cold, dry, nearly airless world, isn’t it? The entire Map should be cooled, and desiccated too, somehow, and raised nearly above the atmosphere.”
“Yah. All of that.”
“Then look up. We should be beneath the Map of Mars. Do you see a fin far larger than that beneath the Map of Kzin? Do you see a nearly circular cavity bulging twenty miles inward?”
There was nothing above their heads but the inverted contours of a sea bottom.
“Louis, this is disturbing. If our computer memory is failing us …” The Hindmost’s legs folded. His heads dipped downward, inward.
“The computer memory is fine,” Louis said. “Relax. The computer’s fine. See if the ocean temperature is higher above us.”
The Hindmost hesitated, half into fetal position. Then, “Aye, aye.” The puppeteer busied himself at the controls.
Harkabeeparolyn asked, “Do, I understand you? One of your worlds is missing?”
“One of the smaller ones. Sheer carelessness, my dear.”
“These aren’t balls,” she said thoughtfully.
“No. Peeled like a round fruit, the peel spread flat.”
The Hindmost called, “The temperatures in this vicinity vary. Ignoring the regions around fins, I find temperatures from forty to eighty degrees Fahrenheit.”
“The water should be warmer around the Map of Mars.”
“The Map of Mars is not in evidence, and the water is not warmer.”
“Wha…at? But that’s weird.”
“If I understand you—yes, there is a problem.” The puppeteer’s necks arched out and curved around until he was looking into his own eyes. Louis had seen Nessus do that, and wondered if it was puppeteer laughter. It could be concentration. It was making Harkabeeparolyn queasy, but she couldn’t seem to look away.
Louis paced. Mars had to be refrigerated. Then where? …
The puppeteer whistled an odd harmonic. “The grid?”
Louis stopped in midstride. “The grid. Right. And that would mean … futz! That easy?”
“We make progress of sorts. Our next move?”
They’d learned a good deal, looking at undersides of worlds. So—“Take us on to the Map of Earth, basement level, please.”
“Aye, aye,” said the Hindmost. Needle continued to spinward.
So much ocean, Louis thought. So little land. Why had the Ringworld Engineers wanted so much salt sea in two single bodies? Two for balance, of course, but why so large?
Reservoirs? Partly. Preserves for the sea life of an abandoned Pak world? A conservationist would call that praiseworthy; but these were Pak protectors. Whatever they did was done for the safety of themselves and their blood descendants.
The Maps, Louis thought, were a superb piece of misdirection.
Despite the contoured ocean floor, Earth was easy to recognize. Louis pointed out the flat curves of the continental shelves as they passed beneath Africa, Australia, the Americas, Greenland … fins under Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean … the Ringworlders watched and nodded politely. Why would they care? It wasn’t their home.
Yah, he’d do his best to get Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok home, if there was nothing else he could do for them. Louis Wu was as close to Earth now as he would ever be.
More sea bottom passed above them.
Then shoreline: a flat curve of continental shelf bordering a maze of gulfs and bays and river deltas and pe
ninsulas and island clusters and raggedy detail too fine for the human eye. Needle ran on to port of spinward. They passed beneath hollow mountain ranges and flat seas. A finely ruled line ran straight to spinward, and at its near end, a glint of light—
Fist-of-God.
Something huge had struck the Ringworld long ago. The fireball had pushed the Ringworld floor upward into the shape of a tilted cone, then ripped through. Pointing almost away from that great funnel shape was the track of a much later meteorite: a crippled General Products spacecraft, with its passengers frozen in stasis, had touched down at a horizontal seven hundred and seventy miles per second. Futz, they’d actually bent the scrith!
Hot Needle of Inquiry rose into a spotlight beam: raw sunlight flooding vertically through the crater in Fist-of-God Mountain. Shards of scrith, stretched thin when that old fireball broke through, stood like minor peaks around a volcano cone. The ship lifted above them.
Desert sloped down and away. The impact that made Fist-of-God had cremated all life over a region comfortably larger than the Earth. Far, far away, a hundred thousand miles away, the blue of distance became the blue of sea; and only Needle’s thousand-mile height let them see that far.
“Get us moving,” Louis said. “Then give us a view from the lander’s cameras. Let’s see how Chmeee’s doing.”
“Aye aye.”
Chapter 27
The Great Ocean
Six rectangular windows floated beyond the hull. Six cameras showed the lander’s flight deck, lower deck, and four outside views.
The flight deck was empty. Louis scanned for emergency lights and found none.
The autodoc was still a great coffin, closed.
Something was wrong with the outside cameras. The view wavered and shifted and streamed with glowing colors. Louis was able to make out the courtyard, the arrow slits, several kzinti standing guard in leather armor. Other kzinti sprinted to and fro on all fours: blurred streaks.
Flames! The defenders had built a bonfire around the lander!
“Hindmost? Can you lift the lander from here? You said you had remote controls.”
