The Ringworld Engineers

They had speculated, later, that the violet laser was no more than an automated meteor defense. They had guessed that it might be based on the shadow squares. It was all guesswork, they had never learned anything about the Ringworld weapon.

The rim transport system was a late addition. The Ringworld engineers would not have taken it into account when programming the meteor defense. But Louis had seen old recordings of it in action, in a building abandoned by Halrloprillalar’s species. It had worked; the meteor defense had not fired on the linear accelerator loops or the ships they enclosed. And Louis gripped his chair arms hard, waiting for violet flame, as Chmeee settled the lander on the rim wall.

But it didn’t come.

Chapter 8

Ringworld

From a thousand miles above the Earth—from, say, a space station in a two-hour orbit—the Earth is a great sphere. The kingdoms of the world revolve below. Details disappear around the horizon’s curve; other, hidden features rotate into view. At night, glowing cities outline the continents.

But from a thousand miles above the Ringworld, the world is flat, and the kingdoms thereof are all there at once.

The rim wall was of the same stuff as the Ringworld floor. Louis had walked on it, in places where eroded landscape let it show through. It had been grayish, translucent, and terribly slippery. Here the surface had been roughened for traction. But the pressure suit and backpack made Chmeee and Louis top-heavy. They moved with care. That first step would be a beauty.

At the bottom of a thousand miles of glassy cliff were broken layers of cloud, and seas: bodies of water from ten thousand to a couple of million square miles in area, spread more or less uniformly across the land, and linked by networks of rivers. As Louis raised his eyes, the seas grew smaller with distance … smaller and a little hazy … too small to see, until sea and fertile land and desert and cloud all blended into a blue knife-edge against black space.

To left and right it was the same, until the eye found a blue band swooping up from the infinity beyond the horizon. The Arch rose and narrowed and curved over and above itself, baby blue checked with midnight blue, to where a narrow ribbon of Arch lost itself behind a shrunken sun.

This part of the Ringworld had just passed its maximum distance from the sun. but a Sol-type star could still burn your eyes out. Louis blinked and shook his head, his eyes and mind dazzled. Those distances could grab your mind and hold it, leave you looking into infinity for hours or days. You could lose your soul to those distances. What was one man when set against an artifact so huge?

He was Louis Wu. There was nothing like him on all the Ringworld. He held to that. Forget the infinities: concentrate on detail.

There, thirty-five degrees up the Arch: a faintly bluer patch.

Louis worked the magnification on his goggles. They locked onto the faceplate, but you had to hold your head very still. The patch was all ocean, an ellipse stretching nearly across the Ringworld, with clusters of islands showing through cloud cover.

He found the other Great Ocean higher up on the other branch of the Arch. It was a ragged four-pointed star, dotted with similar clusters of tiny islands—tiny at this distance, at which the Earth would be a naked-eye object, barely.

It was getting to him again. Deliberately he looked down, studying the near distance.

Almost below, a couple of hundred miles to spinward, a half-cone of mountain leaned drunkenly against the rim wall. It seemed oddly regular. It was layered in half-circles: a bare, dirt-colored peak; far below, a band of white, probably snow and ice; then green spreading down and out into foothills.

The mountain was quite isolated. In the spinward direction the rim wall was a flat vertical cliff out to the limit of the binocular goggles—almost. If that bump at the very limit of vision was another such mountain, it was a futz of a long way away. At the distance you could almost see the Ringworld starting to curve upward.

There was another such bump in the antispinward direction. Louis scowled. File for future study.

Far to port (ahead) and a bit to spinward (right) was a region of glittering white, brighter than land, brighter than sea. A midnight-blue edge of night was sweeping toward it. Salt, was Louis’s first thought. It was big. It had engulfed a couple of dozen Ringworld seas, and those seas varied in size from Lake Huron to the Mediterranean. Brighter points came and went like ripples …

Ah. “Sunflower patch.”

Chmeee looked. “The one that burned me was bigger.”

Slaver sunflowers were as old as the Slaver Empire, which had died more than a billion years ago. The Slavers seemed to have planted sunflowers around their estates, for defense. You still found these plants on some of the worlds of known space. Cleaning them out was a difficult business. You couldn’t just burn them out with laser ca

What sunflowers were doing on the Ringworld was a mystery. But Speaker-To-Animals had been flying above a Ringworld landscape when a rift in the clouds exposed him to the plants beneath. The scars were almost gone …

Louis raised the magnification on his goggles. A smoothly curved borderline marked off the blue-green-brown of an Earthlike world from the silver sunflower patch. The border curved inward to half enclose one of the larger seas.

“Louis? Look for a short black line, just beyond the sunflowers and a bit to antispinward.”

“I see it.” A black dash on the infinite noonday landscape, perhaps a hundred thousand miles from where they stood. Now, what would that be? A vast tar pit? No, petrochemicals would never form on the Ringworld. A shadow? What could cast a shadow in the Ringworld’s permanent noon?

“Chmeee, I think its a floating city.”

“Yes … At worst it will be a center of civilization. We should consult them.”

They had found floating buildings in some of the old cities. Why not a floating city? They’d be seeing it edge on, of course. “What we should do,” Louis said, “is touch down a fair distance away and ask the natives about them. I’d hate to come on them cold. If they’re good enough to keep that city going, they could be tough. Say we touch down near the edge of the sunflower patch—”

“Why there?”

“The sunflowers would be fouling up the ecology. Maybe the locals could use some help. We’d be surer of our welcome. Hindmost, what do you think?”

There was no answer.

“Hindmost? Calling the Hindmost … Chmeee, I think he can’t hear us. The rim wall’s blocking his signals.”

Chmeee said, “We will not remain free long. I saw a pair of probes mounted in the cargo bay, behind the lander. The puppeteer will use them as relays. Is there anything you would like to say during this temporary freedom?”

“I’d say we covered it all last night.”

“Not quite. Our motives are not quite the same, Louis. I take it that you are eager to save your life. Beyond that you want free access to current. For myself, I want my life and my freedom, but I also want satisfaction. The Hindmost has kidnapped a kzin. He must be made to regret it.”

“I can buy that. He kidnapped me too.”

“What does a wirehead know of thwarted honor? Do not let me find you blocking my path, Louis.”

“I’m just going to diffidently remind you,” Louis said, “that I got you off the Ringworld. Without me you would never have taken the Long Shot home to earn your name.

“You were not a current addict then.”

“I am not a current addict now. And don’t you call me a liar.”

“I am not ac—”

“Hold it.” Louis pointed. The corner of his eye had caught something moving against the stars. A moment later the voice of the Hindmost spoke in their ears.