The Ringworld Engineers

As Chmeee and Louis came near, the natives stirred.

They came over the fence in a bounding swarm, screaming at each other in falsetto. They were small and red and human-shaped, and they ran like demons. They carried nets and spears. Louis saw Chmeee draw his stu

Chmeee asked, “Have we been insulted?”

“No, they’re off to turn the stampede, of course. I can’t even fault their sense of proportion. Let’s go. Maybe somebody’s home.”

Somebody was. A couple of dozen red-ski

The compound within the circle of huts was bare earth. A border of rocks marked a burnt-out campfire. A one-legged red man came out of one building and approached, using a crutch, moving at a pace Louis would have considered jogging. He wore a kilt of cured hide marked with decorative lacing. His ears were large and stood out from his head, and one had been torn, long ago. His teeth were filed … were they? The children were all smiling and laughing, and their teeth were filed, even those of the babies. Nope. They must grow that way.

The old man stopped at the fence. He smiled and asked a question.

“I don’t speak your language yet,” Louis said.

The old man nodded. He gestured with an upward sweep of his arm: invitation?

One of the older children found the courage to leap. He (she; the children wore no kilts) landed on Chmeee’s shoulder, settled herself comfortably in the fur, and began to explore. Chmeee stood very still. He asked, “What should I do now?”

“She isn’t armed. Don’t tell her how dangerous you are.” Louis climbed over the fence. The old man stood back for him. Chmeee followed, carefully, with the girl still on his shoulder, clinging to the thick fur around his neck.

They settled near the fireplace, Louis and Chmeee and the one-legged red man, surrounded by children. They began to teach the native language to the translating widgets. For Louis it was routine. Oddly, it also seemed routine to the old man; even the voices of the translators didn’t surprise him.

His name was Shivith hooki-Furlaree something. His voice was high and piping. His first intelligible question was “What do you eat? You don’t have to say.”

“I eat plants and sea life and meat treated with fire. Chmeee eats meat without fire,” Louis said, and that seemed sufficient.

“We eat meat without fire too. Chmeee, you are an unusual visitor.” Shivith hesitated. “I have to tell you this. We do not do rishathra. Don’t be angry.” At the word rishathra the translator only beeped.

Chmeee asked, “What is rishathra?”

The old man was surprised. “We thought that the word was the same everywhere.” He began to explain. Chmeee was oddly silent as they delved into the subject, working around the unknown words:

Rishathra was sex outside of one’s own species.

Everyone knew the word. Many species practiced it.

For some, it could be a means of mutual birth control; for others, the first move in a trade agreement. For some it was taboo. The People didn’t need a taboo. They just couldn’t do it. The sexual signals were wrong; it might be a matter of distinct pheromones. “You must come from far away, not to know this,” the old man said.

Louis spoke of himself, how he had come from the stars beyond the Arch. No, neither he nor Chmeee had ever practiced rishathra, though there was great variety among his species. (He remembered a Wunderland girl a foot taller and fifteen pounds lighter than himself, a feather in his arms.) He spoke of the variety of worlds and of intelligent life, but he skirted the subject of wars and weaponry.

The tribes of the People herded many kinds of animals. They liked variety, but they didn’t like starving, and it was not usually possible to keep herds of different animals at the same time. Tribes of the People kept track of each other, to trade feasts. Sometimes they traded herds. It was like trading entire life styles: you could spend half a falan in mutual instruction before parting. (A falan was ten turns, ten Ringworld rotations, seventy-five days of thirty hours each.)

Would the herders worry that there were strangers in the village? Shivith said they wouldn’t. Two strangers were no threat.

When would they return? At midday, Shivith said. They had had to hurry; there had been a stampede. Otherwise they would have stopped to talk.

Louis asked, “Do you need to eat meat right after it’s been killed?”

Shivith smiled. “No. Half a day is okay. A day and a night is too long.”

“Do you ever—”

Chmeee stood up suddenly. He set the girl down gently and turned off his translator. “Louis, I need exercise and solitude. This time of confinement has threatened my sanity! Do you need me?”

“No. Hey—”

Chmeee was already over the fence. He turned.

“Don’t take off your clothes. At a distance there’s no way to tell you’re intelligent. Don’t kill any of the green elephants.”

Chmeee waved and bounded off into the green grass.

“Your friend is fast,” said Shivith.

“I should go too. I have a project in mind.”‘

Survival and escape had been their concerns during their first visit to the Ringworld. Only later, in the safe and familiar surroundings of Resht on Earth, had Louis Wu’s conscience become active. Then he remembered destroying a city.

The shadow squares formed a ring concentric to the Ringworld. There were twenty of them held face-on to the sun by invisibly thin wire. The wire stayed taut because the shadow squares rotated at greater than orbital speed.

Liar, falling free with its drive motors burned away, had struck one of the shadow square wires and torn it loose. The wire, a single strand tens of thousands of miles long, had settled like a smoke cloud over an occupied city.

Louis had needed it to tow the grounded Liar.

They had found an endpoint and moored it to their makeshift vehicle—Halrloprillalar’s floating jail—and towed it behind them. Louis couldn’t know exactly what had happened to the city, but he could guess. The stuff was as fine as gossamer and strong enough to cut hullmetal. It must have cut the buildings into gravel as its loops contracted.

This time the natives would not suffer because Louis Wu had arrived. He was in current-addiction withdrawal; he didn’t need guilt too. His first act on this visit was to start a stampede. He was going to fix that.

It was hard physical work.

He took a break at one point and went up on the flight deck. He was worried about the kzin. Even a human being—a flatlander of five hundred years ago, say, a successful man in middle age—might have been disconcerted to find himself suddenly eighteen years old, his smooth progression toward death interrupted, his blood flowing with powerful and unfamiliar juices, his very identity in question: hair thickening and changing color, scars disappearing …

Well, where was Chmeee?

The grass was strange. Here in the vicinity of the camp, it was waist-high. To spinward was a vast area cropped almost to the ground. Louis could see the herd moving along the edge, guided by small red humanoids, leaving a swath that was almost dirt-colored.

Give ‘em this: the little green elephants were efficient. The red men must have to shift camp fairly frequently.

Louis saw motion in the grass nearby. He watched patiently until it moved again … and suddenly it was an orange streak. Louis never saw Chmeee’s prey. There were no humanoids around, and that was good enough. He went back to work.