The Ringworld Engineers

She shook her head.

“What if the answers are wrong?” the Hindmost persisted. “We ca

“We try something else.”

“I have thought about this. We must go into polar orbit around the sun, to minimize the risk that a fragment of the disintegrating Ringworld will strike us. I will put Needle in stasis, to wait for rescue. Rescue will not come, but the risk is better than what we face now.”

It could come to that, Louis thought. “Fine. We’ve got a couple of years to try to find better odds.”

“Less than that. If—”

“Shut up.”

The exhausted librarian dropped onto the water bed. Imitation kzin fur surged and rippled under her. She held herself rigid for a moment, then cautiously let herself fall back. The fur continued to ripple. Presently the stiffness left her and she let herself roll with the tide. Kawaresksenjajok murmured sleepy protest and turned over.

The librarian looked most appealing. Louis resisted an urge to join her on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired. Miserable. Will I ever see my home again? If the end comes—when it comes—I’d like to wait for it on the Library roof. But the flowers will be dead by then, won’t they? Scorched and frozen.”

“Yah.” Louis was touched. Certainly he’d never see his own home again. “I’ll try to get you back. Right now you need sleep. And a back massage.”

“No.”

Strange. Wasn’t Harkabeeparolyn one of the City Builders, Halrloprillalar’s people, who had ruled the Ringworld largely through sex appeal? Sometimes it was difficult to remember that the individuals within an alien species could differ as thoroughly as humans did.

He said, “The Library staff seemed more priests than professionals. Do you practice continence?”

“While we work in the Library, we are continent. But I was continent by choice.” She rose on an elbow to look at him. “We learn that all other species lust to do rishathra with the City Builders. Is that the case with you?”

He admitted it.

“I hope you can control it.”

He sighed, “Oh, tanj, yes. I’m a thousand falans old. I’ve learned how to distract myself.”

“How?”

“Ordinarily I’d go looking for another woman.”

The librarian didn’t laugh. “What if another woman is not available?”

“Oh … exercise to exhaustion. Get drunk on ‘fuel.’ Go on sabbatical, off into interstellar space in a one-man ship. Find some other pleasure to indulge myself. Get involved in work.”

“You should not be drunk,” she said, and she was right. “What pleasure might you try?”

The droud! A touch of current and he wouldn’t care if Harkabeeparolyn turned to green slime before his eyes. Why should he care now? He didn’t admire her … well, maybe he did, a little. But she’d done her part. He could save the Ringworld, or lose it, without more help from her.

“You’ll have your massage anyway,” he said. He stepped wide around her to touch a control on the water bed. Harkabeeparolyn looked startled, then smiled and relaxed completely as the sonic vibrations in the water enfolded her. In a few minutes she was asleep. He set the unit to switch off in twenty minutes.

Then he brooded.

If he hadn’t spent a year with Halrloprillalar, he’d find Harkabeeparolyn unsightly, with her bald head and knife-edge lips and small flat nose. But he had …

He had hair where no City Builder had hair. Was that it? Or the smell of his food on his breath? Or a social signal he didn’t know?

A man who had hijacked a starship, a man who had bet his life on the chance to rescue trillions of other lives, a man who had beaten the ultimate in drug habits, should not be bothered by so minor a distraction as an itch for a lovely roommate. A touch of the wire would give him the dispassionate clarity to see that.

Yah.

Louis went to the forward wall. “Hindmost!”

The puppeteer trotted into view.

“Run the records of the Pak for me. Interviews and medical reports on Jack Bre

Louis Wu hovered in midair, in lotus position, with his loose clothing drifting around him. On a screen that floated motionless outside Needle’s hull, a man long dead was lecturing on the origin of humanity.

“Protectors have precious little free will,” he was saying. “We’re too intelligent not to see the right answers. Besides that, there are instincts. If a Pak protector has no living children, he generally dies. He stops eating. Some protectors can generalize; they can find a way to do something for their whole species, and it keeps them alive. I think that was easier for me than it was for Phssthpok.”

“What did you find? What’s the cause that keeps you eating?”

“Warning you about Pak protectors.”

Louis nodded, remembering the autopsy data on the alien. Phssthpok’s brain was bigger than a man’s, but the swelling did not include the frontal lobes. Jack Bre

Bre

“All the symptoms of old age are holdovers from the change from breeder to protector,” he was telling a long-dead ARM inquisitor. “Skin thickens and wrinkles; it’s supposed to get like this, hard enough to turn a knife. You lose your teeth to leave room for the gums to harden. Your heart can weaken because you’re supposed to grow a second heart, two-chambered, in the groin.”

Bre

Louis jumped when fingers tugged at his jumper. “Luweewu? I’m hungry.”

“Okay.” He was tired of studying anyway; it wasn’t telling him much that was useful.

Harkabeeparolyn was still asleep. The smell of meat broiling in a flashlight-laser beam woke her. Louis dialed fruits and cooked vegetables for them, and showed them where to dump anything they didn’t like.

He took his own di

It bothered him to have dependents. Granted that both were Louis Wu’s victims. But he couldn’t even teach them to get their own meals! The settings were marked in Interworld and the Hero’s Tongue.

Was there any way to put them to work?

Tomorrow. He’d think of something.

The computer was begi

The castle occupied the peak of a rocky hill. Herds of piglike beasts, yellow with an orange stripe, grazed the yellow grass veldt below. The lander circled about the castle, then settled into the courtyard in a cloud of arrows.

Nothing happened for several minutes.

Then orange blurred from several arched doorways at once, too fast to see.

They stopped, flattened like rugs and clutching weapons, against the base of the lander. They were kzinti, but they seemed distorted. There had been divergence over a quarter of a million years.

Harkabeeparolyn spoke at Louis’s shoulder. “Are these your companion’s kind?”

“Close enough. They seem a little shorter and a little darker, and … the lower jaw seems more massive.”

“He abandoned you. Why don’t you leave him?”

Louis laughed. “Why, to get you a bed? We were in battle conditions when I let a vampire seduce me. He was disgusted. As far as Chmeee knows, I abandoned him.”