The Ringworld Engineers

Chapter 15

The Machine People

The wind blew dust up Louis Wu’s nostrils; it whipped his hair in a storm around his face. Louis brushed it back and opened his eyes. The light was blinding-bright. His fumbling hands found a plastic patch on his neck, then binocular goggles covering his face. He pulled them loose.

He rolled away from the woman and sat up.

Now it was dim. Almost dawn: the terminator line split the world into light and dark. Louis ached in every muscle. He felt as if he’d been beaten. Paradoxically, he felt wonderful. For too many years he had used sex only rarely, and only as cover, because wireheads traditionally have no interest in such things. Last night his whole soul had been involved.

The woman? She was about Louis’s height, and on the stocky side of pretty. Not flat-chested, but not busty either. Her black hair was bound in a long braid, and there was a disconcerting fringe of beard along her jaw. She slept the sleep of exhaustion, and she’d earned it. They both had. Now he was begi

He’d been making love—no, he’d been head over heels in love with the pale, slender woman with the red lips. Seeing his blood on her mouth, feeling the sting in his neck, had left him only with a terrible sense of loss. He’d howled when Chmeee twisted her head around until her neck snapped. He’d fought when the kzin plucked him off the dead woman. The kzin had tucked him under one arm; he was still raging, still fighting, while Chmeee fished the medkit out of Louis’s vest and slapped a patch on his neck and tucked the medkit away again.

Then Chmeee had killed them, all the pretty silver-haired men and women, spearing them accurately through their heads with the brilliant ruby needle of his flashlight-laser. Louis remembered trying to stop him, and being thrown rolling across the broken pavement. He’d staggered to his feet, and seen someone else moving, and moved toward her. Her, the dark-haired woman, the only defender left alive. They’d moved into each other’s arms.

Why had he done that? And Chmeee had tried to get his attention … hadn’t he? Louis remembered a shrieking as of tigers at war.

“Pheromones,” he said. “And they looked so harmless!” He stood up and looked about him in sheer horror. The dead were all around him: the dark ones with wounded necks, the pale ones with blood on their mouths and black char marks in their silver hair.

The guns hadn’t been enough. What the vampires had was worse than a tasp. They put out a superstimulus cloud of pheromones, human scent-signals of sexual readiness. One of the vampires, or a pair, must have reached the tower. And the defenders had come out, ru

But why, with the vampires dead, had he and the dark-haired woman …?

The wind tossed at Louis’s hair. Yah. The vampires were dead, but he and the dark-haired woman were still in a cloud of pheromones. They’d mated in frenzy … “If the wind hadn’t come up we’d still be Doing It. Yah. Now, where the tanj did I leave … everything?”

He found the impact armor and the flying belt. The undersuit was torn to shreds. What about the vest? He saw that the woman’s eyes were open. She sat up suddenly, with a horror in her eyes that Louis could well understand. He said to her, “I’ve got to have the vest because the translator’s in it. I hope Chmeee doesn’t frighten you off before I can—”

Chmeee. How had this looked to him?

Chmeee’s great hand engulfed Louis’s skull and twisted it backward. Louis clung to the woman with his body and his mind, and thrust, thrust, but his eyes were filled with that orange beast-face, and his ears with screaming insults. It was distracting …

Chmeee wasn’t in sight. Louis found the vest a good distance away, gripped in a vampire’s dead hand. He couldn’t find the stu

A chunk of rock too big for three men to lift was holding down a generous pile of black superconductor cloth. Chmeee’s parting gift. The lander was gone.

I’ll have to get over this sooner or later, Louis thought. Why not now? A friend had taught him this cantrip, this bit of magic for recovering from shock or grief. Sometimes it worked.

He was sitting on what had been a porch railing, though the porch now sat alone in a sand-covered walkway. He had do

That had used up all his ambition. Now he sat. Thoughts drifted aimlessly. He thought of a working droud as far away as the Earth from its moon, and a two-headed ally who would not risk landing here even to save Louis Wu. He thought of the Ringworld engineers and their idealized ecology, which had included nothing like mosquitoes or vampire bats; and his lips quirked into the begi

He knew where Chmeee had gone. He smiled again to think how little good it did him. Had Chmeee told him that? No matter. Survival or the mating urge or vengeance on the Hindmost would all drive Chmeee in the same direction. But would any of these motives bring him back to rescue Louis Wu?

And he thought how little one death mattered, with the Ringworld’s trillions all doomed to intimate contact with their sun.

Well, Chmeee might return. Louis ought to get off his butt and do something about reaching the floating city. They’d been headed there; Chmeee would expect to find him there, if some whim brought the kzin back for the ally who had failed him so badly. Or Louis might actually learn something valuable. Or … he’d have to survive somewhere in the year or two left to him. I’ll have to get over this sometime. Why not now?

Somebody yelled.

The black-haired woman had dressed herself in shorts and shirt and a backpack. She held a projectile weapon at her side, pointed at Louis Wu. With her other arm she gestured and yelled again.

Vacation was over. Louis became acutely aware that his hood was around his neck. If she tried a head shot—well, she might just give him time to pull the hood over his face, and then it wouldn’t matter if she fired or not. The impact suit would stop the projectiles while he ran. What he really needed was the flying belt. Or did he?

“Okay,” said Louis, and he smiled and raised his hands to the sides. What he really needed was an ally. With one hand he reached slowly into his vest, withdrew the translator, clipped it just under his throat. “This will talk for us, as soon as it learns to.”

She motioned with the gun: Go ahead of me.

Louis walked as far as the flying belt, then stooped and picked it up, without jerky motions. Thunder cracked. A stone six inches from Louis Wu’s foot jumped wildly away. He dropped the harness and stepped back.

Tanj, she wasn’t talking! She’d decided he couldn’t speak her language, and that was that. How would the translator learn anything?

With his hands in the air, he watched her fiddle one-handed with the flying belt while she kept the gun more or less on him. If she touched the wrong controls, he’d lose the belt and the cloth too. But she set the belt down, studied Louis’s face a moment, then stepped back and gestured.

Louis picked up the flying belt. When she gestured toward her vehicle, he shook his head. He went to where Chmeee had left an acre or so of superconductor cloth, weighted down by a boulder far too heavy to move.

The gun never left him as he strapped the harness around the rock and activated the flying belt. He wrapped his arms around the rock—and the harness, for fear it would slip—and lifted. The rock came up. He turned full around and let go. It settled slowly to the ground.