The Ringworld Engineers

An unsettling sight. Louis wasn’t used to that. Intellectually he knew what it was: the sign of age, and the sign of her ancestor, the Pak protector.

They climbed by the light of Louis’s flashlight-laser. People appeared at doorways; Mar Korssil warned them back. Most were City Builders, but there were other species too.

These servants had served the Lyar family for many generations, Laliskareerlyar explained. The Mar family of night watchmen had been policemen serving a Lyar judge. The Machine People cooks had served almost as long. Servants and City Builder masters saw themselves as one family, bound by periodic rishathra and old loyalties. All told, Lyar Building held a thousand people, half of them interrelated City Builders.

Louis stopped to look through a window halfway up. A window, in a stairwell that ran through the core of a building? It was a hologram, a view along one of the rim walls, showing a vast stretch of Ringworld landscape. One of the last of the Lyar treasures, Laliskareerlyar told him with pride and regret. Others had been sold over hundreds of falans to pay water fees.

Louis found himself talking too. He was wary and angry and tired, but there was something about the old City Builder woman that drew him out. She knew about planets. She didn’t question his veracity. She listened. She looked so much like Halrloprillalar that Louis found himself talking about her: about the ancient, immortal ship’s whore who had lived as a half-mad goddess until Louis Wu and his motley crew arrived; how she had helped them, how she had left her ruined civilization with them, how she had died.

Laliskareerlyar asked, “Is that why you didn’t kill Mar Korssil?”

The Night Hunter woman looked at him with great blue eyes.

Louis laughed. “Maybe.” He told them of his conquest of the sunflower patch. He was skirting a dangerous subject, for he saw no point in telling Laliskareerlyar that the world was going to brush against its sun. “I want to leave the world knowing that I’ve done no damage. I’ve got more of that cloth buried near here … Tanj! I can’t think of any way to reach it now.

They had reached the top of the spiral. Louis was huffing. Mar Korssil unlocked a door; there were more stairs beyond. Laliskareerlyar asked, “Are you nocturnal?”

“What? No.”

“We had best wait for day. Mar Korssil, go and send us breakfast. Send Whil, with tools. Then go to sleep.” As Mar Korssil trotted obediently downstairs, the old woman sat cross-legged on ancient carpet. “I expect we must work outside,” she said. “I don’t understand the risk you took. For what? Knowledge? What knowledge?”

It was difficult to lie to her, but the Hindmost might well be listening. “Do you know anything of a machine to change one kind of matter into another? Air into dirt, lead into gold?”

She was interested. “Ancient magicians were said to be able to turn glass into diamonds. But these were children’s tales.”

So much for that. “What of a Repair Center for the world? Are there legends about that? Telling its location?”

She stared. “As if the world were no more than a made thing, a larger version of the city?”

Louis laughed. “Much larger. Much much much larger. No?”

“No.”

“What about an immortality drug? I know that’s real. Halrloprillalar used it.”

“Of course it was real. There is none left in the city, nor anywhere else that I know of. The tale is a favorite with”—the translator used an Interworld phrase—“con men.”

“Does the tale tell where it might have come from?”

A young City Builder woman came puffing up the stairs carrying a shallow bowl. Louis’s fears of poison disappeared at once. The stuff was lukewarm, something like oatmeal, and they ate with their hands from the one bowl.

“The youth drug comes from spinward,” the old woman said, “but I know not how far to spinward. Is this the treasure of knowledge you came for?”

“Any of several treasures. That would be a good one.” There would certainly have been tree-of-life in the Repair Center, Louis thought. I wonder how they’d handle it? Surely no human being would want to be a protector? But there might be hominids who would … Well, those puzzles could wait.

Whil was a burly hominid with a simian face, dressed in a sheet whose original color was lost to time. It was a mad god’s rainbow now. Whil didn’t talk much. His arms were short and thick and looked very strong. He led them up the last flight of steps, carrying his toolbox, and out into the dawn.

They were on the lip of a fu

Laliskareerlyar asked, “Well? Can you fix it?”

“Not from here. There must be machinery below.”

There was, but it wasn’t easy to reach. The crawl space was inches wider than Louis Wu. Whil crawled ahead of him, opening panels, as instructed.

The crawl space was doughnut-shaped, circling the machinery that must circle the fu

The widgetry concealed by the panels was tightly packed, and a total mystery to Louis Wu. It was sparkling clean, except for … yah. He peered closer, not breathing. A wire-thin worm trail of dust had fallen through the widgetry. Louis tried to guess where it had fallen from. He’d have to assume the rest of the machinery was still functional.

He backed out. From Whil he borrowed thick gloves and a pair of needle-nosed pliers. He cut a strip from the edge of the black cloth in his vest and twisted it. He strung it between two contacts and fastened them.

Nothing obvious happened. He continued around the circle, following Whil. In all he found six worm trails of dust. He fastened six twisted strips of superconductor where he thought they belonged.

He wriggled out of the crawl space. “Of course your power source could be long dead,” he said.

“We must see,” said the old woman. She went up the stairs to the roof. Louis and Whil followed.

The smooth face of the fu

Chapter 20

Economics in Lyar

Just below the thick waist of Lyar Building was what seemed to be a combination audience chamber and bedroom. A huge circular bed with a curtained canopy, couches and chairs around small and large tables, a picture-window wall facing the nearer edge of the shadow farm, a bar built to offer a wide variety of potables. That variety was gone. Laliskareerlyar poured from a crystal decanter into a two-handled goblet, sipped, and passed it across to Louis.

He asked, “Do you hold audiences in here?”

She smiled. “Of a sort. Family gatherings.”

Orgies? Very likely, if rishathra was what held the Lyar family together. A family fallen on hard times. Louis sipped from the goblet, tasted nectar-and-fuel. The sharing of cups and food dishes—was fear of poison behind that? But she did it so naturally. And there were no diseases on the Ringworld.

“What you have done for us will increase our status and our funds,” said Laliskareerlyar. “Ask.”

“I need to reach the Library, enter it, and persuade the people who rule there to let me make free use of all their knowledge.”

“That would be very expensive.”

“Not impossible? Good.”

She smiled. “Too expensive. The relationship among the buildings is complicated. The Ten rule the tourist trade—”