The Ringworld Engineers

“No. Look.” The boy set the view zipping along the rim wall. The view stopped, jarringly, well beyond the blue glare. Louis saw bits of metal falling along the rim wall.

He studied them until he was certain. Bars of metal, a great spool-shaped cylinder—those were the dismantled components of what he had seen through Needle’s telescope. That was the scaffolding for remounting the Ringworld’s attitude jets.

The repair crew must have decelerated this equipment to solar orbital speed by using a segment of the rim transport system. But how did they plan to reverse the procedure? The machinery would have to be accelerated to Ringworld rotational speed at its destination.

By friction with the atmosphere? Those materials could be as durable as scrith. If so, heating would not be a problem.

“And here.” The view skidded again, spinward along the rim wall to the spaceport ledge. The four great City Builder ships showed clear. Hot Needle of Inquiry was a speck. Louis would have missed it if he hadn’t known just where to look: a mile from the only ship that still sported a Bussard ramjet around its waist.

“There, you see?” The boy pointed to the pair of copper-colored toroids. “There’s only one motor left. When the repair crew mounts that, they’ll be finished.”

Megatons of construction equipment were falling down the rim wall, no doubt accompanied by hordes of construction men of unknown species, all aimed at Needle’s parking space. The Hindmost would not be pleased.

“Finished, yes,” Louis said. “It won’t be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Never mind. How long have they been working, this repair team? Where did they come from?”

“Nobody wants to tell me anything,” the boy said. “Flup. Odorous flup. What’s everybody so excited about? Why am I asking you? You don’t know either.”

Louis let that pass. “Who are they? How did they find out about the danger?”

“Nobody knows. We didn’t know anything about them till they started putting up the machines.”

“How long ago?”

“Eight falans.”

Fast work, Louis thought. Just over a year and a half, plus whatever time it took them to get ready. Who were they? Intelligent, quick, decisive, not overwhelmed by large projects and large numbers—they might almost be … but the protectors were long gone. They had to be.

“Have they done other repairs?”

“Teacher Wilp thinks they’ve been unblocking the spillpipes. We’ve seen fog around some of the spill mountains. Wouldn’t that be a big thing, unblocking a spillpipe?”

Louis thought about it. “Big, all right. If you could get the sea-bottom dredges going again … you’d still have to heat the pipes. They run under the world. The sea-bottom ooze in a blocked pipe would freeze, I think.”

“Flup,” said the boy.

“What?”

“The brown stuff that comes out of a spillpipe is called flup.”

“Oh.”

“Where are you from?”

Louis gri

More clumsily than the boy had, Louis ran the view along the path the lander had taken since leaving the rim wall. He found a continent-sized expanse of white cloud where the sunflower patch had been. Farther to port was a wide green swamp, then a river that had cut itself a new bed, leaving the old as a twisting brown track through the yellow-brown desert. He followed the dry riverbed. He showed the boy the city of vampires; the boy nodded.

The boy wanted to believe. Men from the stars, come to help us! Yet he was afraid to look gullible. Louis gri

The land turned green again. The Machine People road was easy to follow; in most places the land was clearly different to either side. Here the river curved back to join its old bed. He ran the scale up again and was looking down on the floating city. “Us,” he said.

“I’ve seen that. Tell me about the vampires.”

Louis hesitated. But after all, the boy’s species were this world’s experts at interspecies sex. “They can make you want to do rishathra with them. When you do, you get bitten on the neck.” He showed the boy the healed wound in his throat. “Chmeee killed the vampire that, uh, attacked me.”

“Why didn’t the vampires get him?”

“Chmeee’s like nothing in the world. He’s as likely to be seduced by a sausage plant.”

“We make perfume from vampires,” the boy said.

“What?” Something wrong with the translator?

The boy smiled too wisely. “One day you’ll see. I’ve got to go. Will you be here later?”

Louis nodded.

“What’s your name? Mine’s Kawaresksenjajok.”

“Luweewu.”

The boy left by the stairwell. Louis stood frowning at the screen.

Perfume? The smell of vampires in Panth Building … and now Louis remembered the night Halrloprillalar came to his bed, twenty-three years ago. She’d been trying to control him. She’d said so. Had she used vampire scent on him?

It couldn’t matter now. “Calling the Hindmost,” he said. “Calling the Hindmost.”

Nothing.

The screen wasn’t built to swivel. It faced always outward, away from the shadow squares. A

He reduced the scale on the screen. He sent the viewpoint swooping to spinward at impossible speed until he was looking down on a world of water. He dropped like an angel in a death dive. This was fun. The Library’s facilities were considerably better than Needle’s telescope.

The Map of Earth was old. Half a million years had distorted the continents. Or more? A million? Two? A geologist would have known.

Louis shifted to starboard of antispinward until the Map of Kzin filled the screen: islands clustered around a plate of glare ice. And how old was this Map’s togography? Chmeee might know.

Louis expanded the view. He hummed as he worked. He skimmed above yellow-and-orange jungle. His view crossed a broad silver band of river, and he followed it toward the sea. At the junctures of rivers there ought to be cities.

He almost skimmed past it. A delta where two rivers joined; a pale grid pattern imposed on jungle colors. Some human cities had “green belts,” but in this kzinti city they must cover more territory than the buildings. At maximum magnification Louis could just make out patterns of streets.

The kzinti had never liked big cities. Their sense of smell was too acute. This city was almost as big as the Patriarch’s seat of government on Kzin.

They had cities. What else? If they had any kind of industry, they’d need … seaports? Mining towns? Keep skimming.

Here the jungle was scrawny. The yellow-brown of barren soil showed through in a pattern that wasn’t city-shaped at all. It looked like a melted archery target. At a guess, it was a very large and very old strip mine.

Half a million years ago, or more, a sampling of kzinti had been dropped here. Louis didn’t expect to find mining towns. They’d be lucky to have anything left to mine. For half a million years they had been confined to one world, a world whose surface ended a few hundred feet down. But it seemed the kzinti had kept their civilization.

They had brains, these near-cats. They had ruled a respectable interstellar civilization. Tanj, it was kzinti who had taught humans to use gravity generators! And Chmeee must have reached the Map of Kzin hours ago, in his search for allies against the Hindmost.

Louis had followed the river to the sea. Now he skimmed his god’s-eye view “south” along the shoreline of the Map’s largest continent. He expected ports, though the kzinti didn’t use ships much. They didn’t like the sea. Their seaports were industrial cities; nobody lived there for pleasure.