The Ringworld Engineers

“We do, yes. He may think more like a Pak protector than you do.”

“Well?”

“Your orders?”

Louis told him.

Harkabeeparolyn had rolled over and was on her feet before she saw Louis stepping out of the corner. Then she gasped, crouched, and disappeared into the ponchos. A lumpy poncho slithered toward a discarded blue robe.

Peculiar behavior. City Builders with a nudity taboo? Should Louis have worn clothing? He did what he considered tactful: he turned his back on her and joined the boy.

The boy was at the wall, looking out at the great dismembered starships. The poncho he wore was too big for him. “Luweewu,” he asked, “were those our ships?”

“Yah.”

The boy smiled. “Did your people build ships that big?”

Louis tried to remember. “The slowboats were almost that size. We needed very big ships before we broke the lightspeed barrier.”

“Is this one of your ships? Can it travel faster than light?”

“It could once. Not any more. I think the number four General Products hulls were even bigger than yours, but we didn’t build those. They were puppeteer ships.”

“That was a puppeteer we were talking to yesterday, wasn’t it? He asked about you. We couldn’t tell him much.”

Harkabeeparolyn had come to join them. She had recovered her composure with her blue librarian’s robe. She asked, “Has our status changed, Luweewu? We were told that you would not be allowed to visit us.” It was an effort for her to look him in the face.

“I’ve taken command,” Louis said.

“So easily?”

“I paid a price—”

The boy’s voice cut in. “Luweewu? We’re moving!”

“It’s all right.”

“Can you make it darker in here?”

Louis shouted the lights out. Immediately he felt more comfortable. The dark hid his nakedness. Harkabeeparolyn’s attitude was contagious.

Hot Needle of Inquiry lifted twelve feet above the spaceport ledge. Quickly, almost furtively, with no display of pyrotechnics, the ship drifted to the edge of the world and off.

“Where are we going?” the woman demanded.

“Under the world. We’ll end up at the Great Ocean.”

There was no sensation of falling, but the spaceport ledge was falling silently upward. The Hindmost let them drop several miles before he activated the thrusters: Needle decelerated and began edging beneath the Ringworld.

The edge of blackness slid across to become the sky. Below was a sea of stars, brighter than anything a Ringworld native could have seen through depths of air and scattered Archlight. But the sky was essence of black. The Ringworld’s sheath of foamed scrith reflected no starlight.

Louis still felt uncomfortable in his nudity. “I’m going back to my room,” he said. “Why don’t you join me? There’s food and a change of clothing, and better beds if you want them.”

Harkabeeparolyn flicked into existence, last in line on the stepping disc, and flinched violently. Louis laughed aloud. She tried to glare at him, but her eyes shied away. Naked!

Louis dialed for a falling jumper and covered himself. “Better?”

“Yes, better. Do you think I am foolish?”

“No, I think you don’t have climate control. You can’t go naked most places, so it looks strange to you. I could be wrong.”

“You could be right,” she said, surprised.

“You slept on a hard deck last night. Try the water bed. It’s big enough for both of you and a couple more, and Chmeee isn’t using it right now.”

Kawaresksenjajok flung himself bodily onto the fur-covered water bed. He bounced, and waves surged outward beneath the fur. “Luweewu, I like it! it’s like swimming, but dry!”

Stiff-backed with distrust, Harkabeeparolyn sat down on the uneasy surface. Dubiously she asked, “Chmeee?”

“Eight feet tall and covered with orange fur. He’s … on a mission in the Great Ocean. We’re going to get him now. You may talk him into sharing with you.”

The boy laughed. The woman said, “Your friend must find another playmate. I do not indulge in rishathra.”

Louis chortled. (The underside of his mind thought: tanj!) “Chmeee’s stranger than you think. He’s as likely to want rishathra with a weenie plant. You’d be quite safe unless he wants the whole bed, which is possible. Be careful never to shake him awake. Or you can try the sleeping plates.”

“Do you use the sleeping plates?”

“Yes.” He guessed at the meaning of her expression. “The field can be set to keep two bodies apart.” (Tanj! Did the boy’s presence inhibit her?)

She said, “Luweewu, we have inflicted ourselves on you in the middle of your mission. Did you come simply to steal knowledge?”

The correct answer would have been yes. Louis’s answer was at least true. “We’re here to save the Ringworld.”

Thoughtfully she said, “But how can I …?” And then she was staring past Louis’s shoulder.

The Hindmost waited beyond the forward wall, and he was glorious. Now his claws were tipped with silver, and he wore his mane in gold and silver strands. The short, pale hair over the rest of his body had been brushed to a glow. “Harkabeeparolyn, Kawaresksenjajok, be welcome,” he sang. “Your aid is urgently needed. We have traveled a vast distance between the stars in hope of saving your peoples and your world from a fiery death.”

Louis swallowed laughter. Fortunately his guests had eyes only for the Pierson’s puppeteer.

“Where are you from?” the boy demanded of the puppeteer. “What is it like?”

The puppeteer tried to tell them. He spoke of worlds falling through space at near lightspeed, five worlds arrayed in a pentagon, a Kemplerer rosette. Artificial suns circled four, to grow food for the population of the fifth. The fifth world glowed only by the light of its streets and buildings. Continents blazed yellow-white, oceans dark. Isolated brilliant stars surrounded by mist were factories floating on the sea, their waste heat boiling the water. Waste industrial heat alone kept the world from freezing.

The boy forgot to breathe as he listened. But the librarian spoke softly to herself. “He must come from the stars. He is shaped like no living thing known anywhere.”

The puppeteer spoke of crowded streets, tremendous buildings, parks that were the last refuge of a world’s native life. He spoke of stepping-disc arrays whereby one could walk around the world in minutes.

Harkabeeparolyn shook her head violently. Her voice rose. “Please, we don’t have time. I’m sorry, Kawa! We want to hear more, we need to know more, but—the world, the sun! Louis, I never should have doubted you. What can we do to help?”

The Hindmost said, “Read to me.”

Kawaresksenjajok lay on his back, watching the back of the world roll past him.

Needle ran beneath a featureless black roof in which the Hindmost had set two hologram “windows.” One wide rectangle showed a light-amplified view; the other examined the Ringworld’s underside by infrared light. In infrared the underside of day still glowed brighter than night-shadowed land; and rivers and seas were dark by day and light by night.

“Like the back of a mask, see?” Louis kept his voice down to avoid interrupting Harkabeeparolyn. “That branching river chain: see how it stands out? The seas bulge too. And that line of dents—that’s a whole mountain range.”

“Are your worlds like that?”

“Oh, no. On one of my worlds all that would be solid underneath, and the surface would be happening by accident. Here the world was sculpted. Look, the seas are all the same depth, and they’re spaced out so there’s enough water everywhere.”

“Somebody carved the world like a bas relief?”

“Just like that.”

“Luweewu, that’s scary. What were they like?”

“They thought big, and they loved their children, and they looked like suits of armor.” Louis decided not to say more about the protectors.