The Ringworld Engineers

“I can use it. Talk slowly. What are you doing there?”

Louis sighed. “Heating the sea.”

The creature’s self-possession was remarkable. The idea of heating a sea didn’t faze him. He asked the mobile building, “How hot?”

“Very hot at this end. How many are you?”

“Thirty-four of us now,” said the amphibian. “We were eighteen when we came here fifty-one falans past. Will the starboard part of the sea grow hot?”

Louis sagged with relief. He’d had visions of hundreds of thousands of people cooked because Louis Wu had played god. He croaked, “You tell me. The river inlet’s at that end. How much warmth can you stand?”

“Some. We will eat better; fish like warmth. It is polite to ask before you destroy even part of a home. Why are you doing this?”

“To kill off the fire plants.”

The amphibian considered. “Good. If the fire plants die, we can send a messenger upstream to Fuboobish’s Son’s Sea. They must think us long dead.” He added, “I forget my ma

Louis needed a moment to regain his voice. “None of us mate in water.”

“Few do,” said the amphibian, with no obvious disappointment.

“How did you come here?”

“We were exploring downstream. Rapids carried us into the realm of the fire plants. We could not go ashore, to walk. We must let the river carry us to this place, which I named Tuppugop’s Sea, for myself. It is a good place, though one must be wary of the fire plants. Can you really kill them with fog?”

“I think so.”

“I must move my people,” the amphibian said. He disappeared without a splash.

“I thought you would kill him,” Chmeee told the ceiling, “for his impudence.”

“It’s his home,” said Louis. He turned off the intercom. He was weary of the game. I’m boiling someone’s home, he thought, and I don’t even know it’ll work! He wanted the droud. Nothing else could help, nothing but the vegetable happiness of current ru

That, and time. Time passed, and the spell passed, and he opened his eyes.

Now he could see neither the black wire nor the boiling of the water. It was all a vast fog bank drifting to spinward, catching fire as it reached shore, ten miles inward and gone. Then only the flare of sunflowers … and a pair of parallel lines at the horizon.

White line above, black below, across fifty degrees of horizon.

Water vapor doesn’t just disappear. Heated, it had gone up, and recondensed in the stratosphere. White edge of cloud, blazing under sunflower attack; black shadow across a tremendous patch of sunflowers. It must be five hundred to a thousand miles away, to be seen so near to its own shadow, and hundreds of miles across. And it was spreading—excruciatingly slowly, but it was spreading.

In the stratosphere the air would be forced outward from the center of the sunflower patch. Some of the cloud would rain out, but some water vapor would meet the steam from the boiling sea and flow inward, recirculating.

His arms hurt. Louis realized that he had a death grip on the chair arms. He let go. He turned on the intercom.

“Louis has kept his promise,” the king giant was saying, “but the dying plants may be out of our reach. I don’t know—”

“We’ll spend the night here,” Louis told them. “In the morning we’ll know better.”

He set the lander on the antispinward side of the island. Seaweed had washed ashore in great heaps. Chmeee and the king giant spent an hour stuffing seaweed into a hatch in the lander’s hull, feeding the converter-kitchen with raw material. Louis took the opportunity to call Hot Needle of Inquiry.

The Hindmost was not on the flight deck. He must be in the hidden part of Needle. “You have broken your droud,” he said.

“I know it. Have you done anything—”

“I have a replacement.”

“I don’t care if you’ve got a dozen. I quit. Do you still want the Ringworld engineers’ transmuter?”

“Of course.”

“Then let’s cooperate a little. The Ringworld control center has to be somewhere. If it’s been built into one of the spill mountains, then the transmuters that came off the ships on the spaceport ledge have to be there. I want to know everything about the situation before I go into it.”

The Hindmost thought it through.

Behind his flat weaving hands, massive buildings glowed with light. A wide street, with stepping discs at intersections, dwindled to a vanishing point. The street swarmed with puppeteers. Their coiffeured manes glowed in glorious variety; they seemed always to move in groups. In a sliver of sky between buildings, two farming worlds hovered, each surrounded by orbiting points of light. There was a background sound like alien music, or like a million puppeteers holding conversations too far away to be heard clearly.

The Hindmost had a piece of his lost civilization here: tapes and a holo wall and, probably, the smell of his own kind constantly in the air. His furniture was all soft curves, with no sharp corners to bump a knee on. An oddly shaped indentation in the floor was probably a bed.

“The back of the rim wall is quite flat,” the Hindmost said abruptly. “My deep-radar won’t penetrate it. I can afford to risk one of my probes. It will still serve as a relay between Needle and the lander; in fact, it will serve better as it rises higher. Accordingly I will place a probe in the rim wall transport system.”

“Good enough.”

“Do you really think the repair center is—”

“No, not really, but we’ll find enough surprises to keep us entertained. It should be checked out.”

“One day we must decide who rules this expedition,” the puppeteer said. He disappeared from the screen.

There were no stars that night.

Morning was a brightening of chaos. From the flight deck nothing showed but a formless pearly glow: no sky, no sea, no beach. Louis was tempted to re-create Wu, just to step out and see if the world was still there.

Instead he took the lander up. There was sunlight at three hundred feet. Below was nothing but white cloud, growing brighter at the spinward horizon. The fog had spread a long way inland.

The repulser plate was still in place, a black dot just overhead.

Two hours after dawn, a wind swept the fog away. Louis dropped the lander to sea level before the edge reached shore. Minutes later a bright nimbus formed around the repulser plate.

The king giant had been at the airlock doors all morning, watching, absently stuffing his face with lettuce. Chmeee too had been almost silent. They turned toward the ceiling when Louis spoke.

“It will work,” he said, and finally he believed it. “Soon you will find an alley of dead sunflowers leading to a much bigger patch of them under a permanent cloud deck. Sow your seeds. If you’d rather eat live fire plants, forage at night on both sides of the streamer of fog. You may want a base on some island in this sea. You’ll want boats.”

“We can make our own plans now,” the king giant said. “It will help to have Sea People near, even so few. They trade service for metal tools. They can build our boats. Will grass grow in all this rain?”

“I don’t know. You’d better seed the burned-off islands too.”

“Good … For our special heroes we carve their likeness on a rock, with a few words. We are migratory; we can’t carry large statues with us. Is this adequate?”

“Certainly.”

“What is your likeness?”

“I’m a little bigger than Chmeee, with more hair around the shoulders, and the hair is your own color. Carnivore teeth, with fangs. No external ears. Don’t go to too much trouble. Where shall we take you now?”