The Ringworld Engineers

Kawaresksenjajok’s nails in Louis’s arm were drawing blood. Harkabeeparolyn seemed frozen. Louis braced for the impact.

Darkness.

There was formless, milky light from the deep-radar screen. Something else was glowing somewhere: green and red and orange stars. Those were dials on the flight deck.

“Hindmost!”

No answer.

“Hindmost, give us some light! Use the spotlight! Let us see what’s threatening us!”

“What happened?” Harkabeeparolyn asked plaintively. Louis’s eyes were adjusting; he could see her sitting on the floor, hugging her knees.

Cabin lights came on. The Hindmost turned from the controls. He looked shrunken: half curled up already. “I can’t do this any more, Louis.”

“We can’t use the controls. You know that. Give us a spotlight so we can see out.”

The puppeteer touched controls. A white diffused light bathed the hull in front of the flight deck.

“We are embedded in something.” One head glanced down; the other said, “Lava. The outer hull is at seven hundred degrees. Lava was poured over us while we were in stasis and is now cooled.”

“Sounds like someone was ready for us. Are we still upside down?”

“Yes.”

“So we can’t accelerate up. Just down.”

“Yes.”

“Want to try it?”

“What are you asking? I want to start over from just before you burned out the hyperdrive motor—”

“Come on, now.”

“—or from just before I decided to kidnap a man and a kzin. That was probably a mistake.”

“We’re wasting time.”

“There is no place to radiate Needle’s excess heat. Using the thrusters would bring us an hour or two closer to the moment when we must go into stasis and await developments.”

“Hold off for a while, then. What are you getting from deep-radar?”

“Igneous rock in all directions, cracked with cooling. Let me expand the field … Louis? Scrith floor some six miles below us, below Needle’s roof. A much thi

Louis was begi

He was answered in unexpected fashion.

He heard a howl of inhuman pain and rage as Chmeee burst from the stepping disc, ru

Louis had leaped for the shower. He flipped it on full blast, jumped the water bed, put his shoulder into Chmeee’s armpit, and heaved. Chmeee’s flesh was hot beneath the fur.

The kzin stood and followed the pull into the stream of cold water. He moved about, getting water over every part of himself; then he huddled with his face in the stream. Presently he said, “How did you know?”

“You’ll smell it in a minute,” Louis said. “Scorched fur. What happened?”

“Suddenly I was burning. A dozen red lights glowed on the board. I leaped for the stepping disc. The lander is still on autopilot, if it isn’t destroyed.”

“We may have to find out. Needle’s embedded in lava. Hindmost?” Louis turned toward the flight deck.

The puppeteer was curled up with his heads beneath his belly.

One shock too many. It was easy to see why. A screen on the flight deck showed a half-familiar face.

The same face, enlarged, was looking out of the rectangle that had been a deep-radar projection. A mask of a face, like a human face molded out of old leather, but not quite. It was hairless. The jaws were hard, toothless crescents. From deep under a ridge of brow, the eyes looked speculatively out at Louis Wu.

Chapter 30

Wheels Within Wheels

“It appears you’ve lost your pilot,” the leathery-faced intruder told them. It floated outside the hull: the distorted head and melon-sized shoulders of a protector, a ghost within the black rock that enclosed them.

Louis could only nod. The shocks had come too fast, from the wrong directions. He was aware that Chmeee stood beside him, dripping water, silently studying a potential enemy. The City Builders were mute. If Louis read their faces right, they were closer to awe or rapture than fear.

The protector said, “That traps you thoroughly. Soon enough you must go into stasis, and we need not discuss what happens after that. I am relieved. I wonder if I could make myself kill you.”

Louis said, “We thought you were all dead.”

“The Pak died off a quarter of a million years ago.” The protector’s fused lips and gums distorted some of the consonants, but it was speaking Interworld. Why Interworld? “A disease took them. You were right to assume that the protectors were all dead. But tree-of-life is alive and well beneath the Map of Mars. Sometimes it is discovered. I speculate that the immortality drug was made here when a protector needed funding for some project.”

“How did you learn Interworld?”

“I grew up with it. Louis, don’t you know me?”

It was like a knife in the gut. “Teela. How?”

Her face was hard as a mask. How could it show expression? She said, “A little knowledge. You know the adage? Seeker was looking for the base of the Arch. I paraded my superior education before him: I told him that the Arch had no base, that the world was a ring. He became badly upset. I told him that if he was looking for the place from which the world could be ruled, he should look for the construction shack.”

“Repair Center,” said Louis. A glance toward the flight deck showed the Hindmost as an elongated white footstool decorated in ruby and lavender gems.

“Of course it would become the Repair Center, and the center of power too,” the protector said. “Seeker remembered tales of the Great Ocean. It seemed a likely choice, protected by the natural barriers of distance, storm, and a dozen predatory ecologies. Astronomers had studied the Great Ocean from vantages far along the Arch, and Seeker remembered enough to make us maps.

“We were sixteen years crossing the Great Ocean. There should be legends made from that voyage. Did you know that the Maps are stocked? The kzinti have colonized the Map of Earth. We could not have continued if we had not captured a kzinti colony ship. There are islands in the Great Ocean that are large life forms, their backs covered in vegetation, who dive when a sailor least expects it—”

“Teela! How? How could you get to be like this?”

“A little knowledge, Louis. I never did reason out the origin of the Ringworld engineers, not until too late.”

“But you were lucky!”

The protector nodded. “Bred for luck, by Pierson’s puppeteers meddling with Earth’s Fertility Laws to make the Birthright Lotteries. You assumed it worked. It always seemed stupid to me. Louis, do you want to believe that six generations of Birthright Lottery wi

He didn’t answer.

“Only one?” She seemed to be laughing at him. “Consider the luck of all the descendants of all the wi

“Did it happen to him too?”

“Seeker died, of course. We both went mad with the hunger for tree-of-life root, but Seeker was a thousand years too old. It killed him.”

“I should never have left you,” Louis said.

“I gave you no choice. I had none myself—if you believe in luck. I have little choice now. Instincts are very strong in a protector.”