The Ringworld Engineers

Was that respect in her eyes? Was it for his technology or his strength? He turned off the belt, picked up it and the superconductor cloth, and moved ahead of her to her vehicle. She opened double doors in its side. He set his burden down and looked around.

Couches around three sides; a tiny stove in the center, and a hatch in the roof for a smoke hole. Stacks of baggage behind the rear seat. Another couch in front, facing forward.

He backed out. He turned back toward the tower, took one step forward, and looked at her. She got the idea. She dithered, then gestured him on.

The dead were begi

There was too much hair, too little skull. Beautiful she was, but her brain was smaller than a human brain. He sighed and went on.

The woman followed him through the shell of the lower building, into the tower’s spiral staircase, and down. A dead man of her species lay broken in the crushed basement, and the flashlight-laser was next to him. When he glanced back at the woman, he saw tears in her eyes.

He reached for the flashlight-laser and she fired past him. The ricochet thumped him on the hip, and he shied violently inside the suddenly rigid shell. He backed against the shattered wall while she picked up the device.

She found the switch, and light jumped around them in a wide beam. She found the focus; the beam narrowed. She nodded and dropped the device in her pocket.

On their walk back to the vehicle Louis casually pulled the impact-suit hood over his face, as if the sunlight were too bright. She might have all she wanted from Louis Wu, or she might be short of water, or she might not want his company.

She didn’t shoot him. She climbed into the car and locked the doors, with a key. For an instant Louis saw himself marooned with no water and no tools. But she gestured him close to the right-hand window, where the driving controls were. She began to show him how to drive.

It was the breakthrough Louis had hoped for. He repeated the words she called through the window, and added his own words. “Steering ring. Turn. Activator. Key. Throttle. Retrothrottle.” She was pretty good with gestures. A hand zipping through air plus a finger tracing a needle’s path were “airspeed gauge.”

It startled her when the translator began talking back to her. She let the language lesson continue for a bit. Then she unlocked the door, backed across the seat with the gun ready, and said, “Get in. Drive.”

The machine was noisy and balky. It translated every little bump directly to the driver’s couch until Louis learned to steer around cracks in the road, rubble, or drifts of sand. The woman watched him silently. Did she have no curiosity? It occurred to him that she had lost a dozen companions to the vampires. Under the circumstances she was functioning well enough.

Presently she said, “I am Valavirgillin.”

“I am Louis Wu.”

“Your devices are strange. The speaker, the lifter, the variable light—what more have you?”

“Tanj dammit! I left the eyepieces.”

She pulled the binocular goggles out of a pocket. “I found these.”

She may have found the stu

She smiled and shook her head. She must be afraid he’d jump her. She asked, “What were you doing in the old city? Where did you find these things?”

“They are mine. I brought them from a far star.”

“Do not mock me, Louis Wu.”

Louis looked at her. “Did the people who built the cities have such things?”

“They had things that speak. They could raise buildings in the air; why not themselves?”

“What of my companion? Have you found his like on the Ringworld?”

“He seemed monstrous.” She flushed. “I had no chance to study him.”

No, she’d been distracted. Nuts. “Why do you point a gun at me? The desert is enemy to both of us. We should help each other.”

“I have no reason to trust you. Now I wonder if you are mad. Only the City Builders traveled between the stars.”

“You are mistaken.”

She shrugged. “Must you drive so slowly?”

“I need practice.”

But Louis was getting the hang of it. The road was straight and not too rough, and there was nothing coming at him. There were drifts of sand across the road. Valavirgillin had told him not to slow for these.

And he was moving at a fair clip toward his destination. He asked, “What can you tell me about the floating city?”

“I have never been there. The children of the City Builders use it. They no longer build, nor do they rule, but our custom is that they keep the city. They have many visitors.”

“Tourists? People who go only to see the city?”

She smiled. “For that and other reasons. One must be invited. Why must you know these things?”

“I have to get to the floating city. How far may I drive with you?”

Now she laughed. “I think that you will not be invited there. You are not famous nor powerful.”

“I’ll think of something.”

“I go as far as the school at River’s Return. There I must tell them what happened.”

“What did happen? What were you doing there in the desert?”

She told him. It wasn’t easy. There were gaps in the translator’s vocabulary. They worked around the gaps and filled them in.

The Machine People ruled a mighty empire.

Traditionally an empire is a cluster of nearly independent kingdoms. The various kingdoms must pay taxes, and they follow the emperor’s commands as regards war, banditry control, maintenance of communication, and sometimes an official religion. Otherwise they follow their own customs.

And that was doubly true within the Machine Empire, where, for instance, the way of life of a herd-keeping carnivore was in competition with the life style of the Grass People; was useful to the traders, who bought the carnivores’ tooled leather goods; and was irrelevant to the ghouls. In some territories many species worked in cooperation, and all allowed free passage to the ghouls. The various species followed their own customs because they were built to.

Ghoul was Louis Wu’s word. Valavirgillin called them something like Night People. They were the garbage collectors and the morticians too, which was why Valavirgillin had not buried her dead. The ghouls had speech. They could be taught to give last rites in the local hominid religions. They formed an information source for the Machine People. Legend said that they had done the same for the City Builders when the City Builders ruled.

According to Valavirgillin, the Machine Empire was an empire of trade, and it taxed only its own merchants. The more she talked, the more exceptions Louis found. The kingdoms maintained the roads that linked the empire, if their people were capable of it, which (for instance) the tree-living Hanging People were not. The roads marked the borders between territories held by different species of hominid. Wars of conquest across the roads were forbidden; and so the roads prevented wars (sometimes!) merely by existing.

The empire had the power to draft armies to battle bandits and thieves. The large patches of land the empire took for trading posts tended to become full colonies. Because roads and vehicles linked the empire, the kingdoms thereof were required to distill chemical fuel and hold it available. The empire purchased mines (by forced sale?), mined its own ore, and leased the right to manufacture machinery according to the empire’s specifications.

There were schools for traders. Valavirgillin and her companions were students and a teacher from the school at River’s Return. They had set out on a field trip to a trade center bordering the jungle lands of the Hanging People—brachiators, Louis gathered, who traded in nuts and dried fruit—and the Herders, carnivores who dealt in leather goods and handicrafts. (No, they were not small and red. A different species.) They had veered for a side trip to an ancient desert city.