The Ringworld Engineers

The lander surged under them. Louis waited until the savage weight left him, then began adjusting the views through the outside cameras. He saw it almost instantly.

A boxlike vehicle was parked beside the tilted tower. It could have held up to a dozen passengers. The motor housing at its rear should have been enough to lift a spacecraft … but this was a primitive people. He couldn’t guess what they’d be using to move the vehicle. He pointed and said, “We find an isolated vehicle and swoop down on it, right?”

“Right.” Chmeee let the lander settle. As he did, Louis studied the situation:

The tower had speared down into a squarish building; had smashed through the roof and three stories and possibly into a basement. It was the shell of the lesser building that held it upright. White puffs of steam or smoke jetted irregularly from two tower windows. Pale human shapes were dancing before the lower building’s big front entrance—dancing, or holding sprinting contests—and two were resting prone, though in unrestful positions …

Just before the single remaining wall of a collapsed building rose to block Louis’s view, it all jumped into his mind’s focus. The pale ones were trying to reach the entrance across a rubble-covered street. Someone in the tower was shooting at them.

The lander settled. Chmeee stood and stretched. “You seem to have your own luck, Louis. We can take the ones with the guns to be the Machine People. Our strategy will be to come to their aid.”

It seemed reasonable. “Do you know anything about projectile weapons?”

“If we assume chemical propellants, a portable weapon will not penetrate impact armor. We can enter the tower via flying belts. Carry stu

They emerged into full night. Clouds had closed over the sky. Even so, Archlight glowed through in a faint broad band, and the floating city was a tight star-cluster to port. You couldn’t get lost.

Louis Wu was not comfortable. The impact armor was too stiff; the hood covered most of his face. The padded straps of the flying belt constricted his breathing, and his feet dangled. But nothing was ever again going to feel like an hour under the wire, and that was that. At least he felt relatively safe.

He hung in the sky and used light-amplified binocular goggles.

The attackers didn’t seem that formidable. They were quite naked and weaponless. Their hair was silver; their skin was very white. They were slender and pretty; even the men were more pretty than handsome, and beardless.

They kept to the shadows and the cover provided by fragments of broken buildings, except when one or two would sprint for the great doorway, zigzagging. Louis had counted twenty, eleven of them women. Five more were dead in the street. There might be others already in the building.

The defenders had stopped firing now. Perhaps they had run out of ammunition. They had been using two windows in the downward-slanting face of the tower, perhaps six stories up. Every window in the tower was broken.

He eased close to the larger floating shape of Chmeee. “We go in the other side, with lights at low intensity and wide aperture. I go first because I’m human. Right?”

“Right,” said Chmeee.

The belts lifted by scrith repulsion, like the lander. There were small thrusters in back. Louis circled round, checked to see Chmeee following, and floated in one of the windows at what he hoped was the right level.

It was one big room, and it was empty. The smell made him want to sneeze. There was web furniture with the webbing rotted away, and a long glass table, shattered. At the bottom of the sloping floor, a shapeless thing proved to be a pack with shoulder straps. So: they had been here. And the smell—

“Cordite,” Chmeee said. “Chemical propulsives. If they shoot at us, cover your eyes.” He moved toward a door. He flattened himself against the wall and flung the door suddenly open. A toilet, empty.

A bigger door hung open with the slant of the floor. With stu

Beyond the ornately carved wooden door, a broad circular staircase wound down into darkness. Louis shined his light down along loops of railing to where the spiral of stairs and the bottom of the building all crumpled in on itself. The light picked out a two-handed weapon with a shoulder butt, and a box that had spilled tiny golden cylinders; another weapon further down; a coat equipped with straps; more scraps of clothing on the lower stair; a human shape crumpled in the crushed bottom of the stairway—a naked man, seeming darker and more muscular than the attackers.

Louis’s excitement was growing unbearable. Was this really what he had needed all along? Not the droud and wire, but the risk of his life to prove its value! Louis adjusted his flying belt and dropped over the railing.

He fell slowly. There was nothing human on the stairs, but things had been dropped: anonymous clothing, weapons, boots, another shoulder pack. Louis continued dropping … and suddenly knew he’d found the right level. Quick adjustments to his flying belt sent him slamming through a doorway in pursuit of a smell radically different from what Chmeee had called cordite.

He was outside the tower. He barely avoided smashing into a wall; he was still inside the lower, crushed building. Somehow he’d dropped his light. He flicked up the amplification in the binocular goggles and turned right, toward light.

There was a dead woman in the great doorway: one of the attackers. Blood had pooled beneath a projectile wound in her chest. Louis felt a great sadness for her … and a driving urgency that made him fly right over her, through the doors and out.

The amplified Archlight was bright even through cloud cover. He had found the attackers, and the defenders too. They were paired off, pale, slender forms with shorter, darker ones who still wore bits of clothing, a boot or a head covering or a shirt ripped open. In the fury of their mating they ignored the flying man.

But one was not paired with anyone. As Louis stopped his flight she reached up and grasped his ankle, without insistence and without fear. She was silver-haired and very pale, and her finely chiseled face was beautiful beyond words.

Louis turned off the flying belt and dropped beside her. He took her in his arms. Her hands ran over his strange clothing, questing. Louis dropped the stu

He was not aware of anything but himself and her. Certainly he didn’t know that Chmeee had joined them. He knew that, joltingly, when the kzin rapped his new love hard across the head with his laser. The furry alien hand sank its claws in her silver hair and pulled her head back, and pulled her teeth loose from Louis Wu’s throat.