The Ringworld Engineers Page 10

He said, “There’s something I want you to investigate. There are mountains along the base of the rim wall. The natives—“

  “For the risks of exploring I selected you and Chmeee.”

  “Can you understand that I might want to minimize those risks?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then hear me out. I think well want to investigate the spill mountains. Before we do, there are just a lot of things we need to know about the rim wall. All you have to—“

  “Louis, why did you call them spill mountains?”

  “The natives call them that. I don’t know why, and neither do they. Suggestive, eh? And they don’t show from the back. Why not? Most of the Ringworld is like the mask of a world, with seas and mountains molded into it. But there’s volume to the spill mountains.”

  “Suggestive, yes. You must learn the answers yourselves. I am called Hindmost, as any leader may be called Hindmost,” the puppeteer said, “because he directs his people from safety, because safety is his prerogative and his duty, because his death or injury would be disaster for all. Louis, you’ve dealt with my kind before!”

  “Tanj, I’m only asking you to risk a probe, not your valuable hide! All we need is a running hologram taken along the rim wall. Put the probe in the rim transport loops and decelerate it to solar orbital speed. You’ll be using the system just as it’s meant to be used. The meteor defense won’t fire on the rim wall—“

  “Louis, you are trying to outguess a weapon programmed hundreds of thousands of years ago by your reckoning. What if something has blocked the rim transport system? What if the laser targeting system has become faulty?”

  “Even at worst, what have you lost?”

  “Half my refueling capability,” said the puppeteer. “I planted stepping-disc transmitters in the probes, behind a filter that will pass only deuterium. The receiver is in the fuel tank. To refuel I need only drop a probe in a Ringworld sea. But if I lose my probes, how will I leave the Ringworld? And why should I take that risk?”

  Louis held tight to his temper. “The volume, Hindmost! What’s inside the spill mountains? There must be hundreds of thousands of those half-cones thirty to forty miles tall, and the backs are flat! One could be the control and maintenance center, or a whole string of them. I don’t think they are, but I want to know before I go anywhere near them. Aside from that, there must be attitude jets for the Ringworld, and the best place for them is the rim wall. Where are they, and why aren’t they working?”

  “Are you quite sure they must be rocket motors? There are other solutions. Gravity generators would serve for attitude control.”

  “I don’t believe it. The Ringworld engineers wouldn’t need to spin the Ringworld if they had gravity generators. It’d make for a much simpler engineering problem.”

  “Control of magnetic effects, then, in the sun and the Ringworld floor.”

  “Mmm ... maybe. Tanj, I’m not sure. I want you to find out!”

  “How can you dare to bargain with me?” The puppeteer seemed more puzzled than angry. “At my whim you remain until the Ringworld grinds against the shadow squares. At my whim you will never taste current again.”

  The translator was finally speaking. “Butt out,” Louis said. He’d been given no volume control for the Hindmost’s voice, but the Hindmost stopped talking.

  The translator said, “Docile? Because I eat plants, must I be docile? Take me out of my armor and I will fight you naked, you ball of orange hair. My space in the longhouse needs a fine new rug.”

  “And what,” Chmeee asked, “of these?” He showed polished black claws.

  “Give me one tiny dagger against your eight. Or give me none, I will fight without.”

  Louis was chortling. He used the intercom. “Chmeee, haven’t you ever seen a bullfight? And this one must be the Patriarch of the herd, the king giant!”

  The giant asked, “Who or what was that?”

  “That was Louis.” Chmeee’s voice dropped. “There is danger for you. I urge you to be respectful. Louis is ... fearsome.”

  Louis was a little startled. What was this? A reverse God Gambit, with the Voice of Louis Wu as guest star? It could work, if Chmeee the ferocious kzin was clearly afraid of an unseen voice ... Louis said, “King of Plant Eaters, tell me why you attacked my worshippers.”

  “Their beasts ate our forage,” said the giant.

  “Was there forage elsewhere, that you could avoid risking my anger?”

  Among the males of a herd of cattle or buffalo, one either dominates or submits. There is no middle ground. The giant’s eyes rolled, seeking escape, but there was none. If he couldn’t dominate Chmeee, how could he cow an unseen voice?

  “We had no choice,” he said. “To spinward are the fire plants. To port are the Machine People. To starboard is a high ridge of exposed scrith. Nothing will grow on scrith, and it is too slippery to climb. To antispinward is grass, and nothing to stop us but small savages, until you came! What is your power, Louis? Are my men alive?”

  “I let your men live. In”—fifty miles, running naked and hungry—“... in two days they will be with you. But I can kill you all with a motion of my finger.”

  The giant’s eyes searched the ceiling, pleading. “If you can kill the fire plants, we will worship you.”

  Louis settled back to think. Suddenly it was no longer fun.

  He heard the giant begging Chmeee for information on Louis; he heard Chmeee lying outrageously. They’d played such games before. The God Gambit had kept them alive during their long return to the Liar; Speaker-To-Animals’s reputation as a war god, and the natives’ offerings, had kept them from starvation. Louis hadn’t realized that Speaker / Chmeee enjoyed it.

  Sure, Chmeee was having fun. But the giant was pleading for help, and what could Louis do against sunflowers? Actually, it was hardly a problem. The giants had offended him, hadn’t they? Gods in general were not noted for forgiveness. So Louis opened his mouth, and closed it again, and thought some more, and said, “For your life and the lives of your people, tell me the truth. Can you eat the fire plants if they do not burn you first?”

  The giant answered eagerly. “Yes, Louis. We forage along the border at night, when we grow hungry enough. But we must be far away by dawn! The plants can find us miles away, and they burn anything that moves! They all turn at once, they turn the glare of the sun on us, and we burn!”

  “But you can eat them when the sun isn’t shining.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do the winds blow in this region?”

  “Winds? ... In these parts they blow to spinward. For great distances around, they blow only into the realm of fire plants.”

  “Because the plants heat the air?”

  “Am I a god, to know that?”

  After all, the sunflowers only got a certain amount of sunlight. The way they worked, they’d heat the air around and above them, but the sunlight would never pass the silver blossoms to reach the roots. Dew would condense on the cool soil. The plants would get their moisture that way. And rising hot air would bring a steady wind from the borders of the sunflower patch.

  And the plants burned anything that moved, to turn plant-eating beasts and birds into fertilizer.

  He could do it. He could.

  “You will do most of the work yourself,” Louis said. “The tribe is yours and you will save them. Afterward, you and they will turn toward the dying fire plants. Eat them, or plow them under and plant whatever you like to eat.” Louis grinned at Chmeee’s bewilderment, and continued, “You will never disturb my worshippers, the red people.”

  The armored giant was gloriously happy. “All of this is most welcome news. Our worship is yours. We must seal the covenant by rishathra.”

&nbs
p; “You’re kidding.”

  “What? No, I spoke of this earlier, but Chmeee did not understand. Bargains must be sealed by rishathra, even between men and gods. Chmeee, this is no problem. You are even of proper size for my women.”

  “I am stranger than you think,” Chmeee said.

  From Louis’s ceiling viewpoint it looked like Chmeee was exposing himself to the giant. Certainly something had caused the giant’s startled expression. Louis couldn’t have cared less. Tanj dammit! he thought. I actually thought of an answer! And now this. What do I have to do to—

  Yeah. “I will make for you a servant,” Louis said. “Because I am hurried, he will be dwarf, and mute in your language. Call him Wu. Chmeee, we must confer.”

  Chapter 11 -

  The Grass Giants

  The lander touched down in a malevolent glare of white light. The glare from the longhouse persisted for a minute after the lander stopped moving, then died. Presently the ramp descended. The king giant, fully armored, let it carry him to the ground. He raised his head and bellowed. The sound must have carried for many miles.

  Giants began jogging toward the lander.

  Chmeee descended, then Wu. Wu was small, partly hairless, and harmless-looking. He smiled a lot; he looked about him with charming enthusiasm, as if seeing the world for the first time ...

  The longhouse was a fair distance away. It was mud and grass, reinforced with vertical members. The row of sunflowers planted on the roof shifted restlessly, now turning their concave mirror faces and green photosynthetic nodes to the sun, now flashing at the giants converging from all directions.

  Chmeee was asking, “What if an enemy attacked in the daytime? How can you reach the longhouse? Or do you store your weapons elsewhere?”

  The giant considered before giving away secrets of defense. But Chmeee served Louis, and it was well not to offend him ... “See you the pile of brush to antispinward of the longhouse? If danger threatens, a man must approach from behind that pile and wave a sheet. The sunflowers fire the damp wood. Under cover of smoke we may then enter and take weapons.” He glanced at the lander and added, “An enemy fast enough to reach us before we can reach weapons is too strong for us anyway. Perhaps the sunflowers would surprise him.”

  “May Wu choose his own mate?”

  “Does he have that much volition? I had thought to lend him my wife Reeth, who has practiced Rishathra before. She is small, and the Machine People are not so different from Wu.”

  “Acceptable,” Chmeee said without a glance at Wu.

  A hundred of the giants surrounded them now. No more seemed to be coming. The kzin asked, “Are these all?”

  “These and my warriors are all of my tribe. There are twenty-six tribes on the veldt. We stay together when we can, but none speaks for all,” the king giant said.

  Of the hundred or so, eight were males, and all of the eight were markedly scarred; three were actual cripples. None but the king giant showed the wrinkles and whitening hair of age.

  The rest were females ... rather, they were women. They stood six and a half to seven feet tall, small next to their men: brown-skinned, dignified, naked. Their hair was golden and spilled in wealth down their backs; it was generally a mass of tangles. None bore any kind of decoration. Their legs were thick, their feet large and hard. A few of the women were white-haired. Their heavy breasts gave a good indication of their relative ages. They examined their guests with pleasure and wonder while the armored giant told what he knew of them.

  And Chmeee, with his translator off, spoke low. “If you prefer one or another female, I must say so now.”

  “No, they’re all about equally ... attractive.”

  “We can still end this situation. You must be mad to make such a promise!”

  “I can do it. Hey, don’t you want revenge for your burnt pelt?”

  “Revenge on a plant? You are mad. Our time is precious, and in just over a year they will all be dead—sunflowers, giants, little red carnivores, and all!”

  “Yeah ...”

  “Your help is no help at all, if they knew it. How long will your project take? A day? A month? You hurt our own project.”

  “Maybe I am mad. Chmeee, I have to carry this through. In all the time since I left the Ringworld I haven’t had reason to be proud of myself. I have to prove—“

  The king giant was saying, “Louis himself will tell you that the threat of the fire plants is over for us. He will tell us our part—“

  Wu, self-effacing, as was his nature, stepped behind the great kzin; and none of the giants particularly noticed that he was talking to his hand. Half a minute later the time-delayed Voice of Louis boomed from the lander, saying, “Hear me, for your day has come to make the places of the fire plants clean for all the breeds of men. My work will go before you as a cloud. You must gather the seeds of what you wish to grow where fire plants grow now ...”

  In the first light of dawn, when the sun shone overhead as a mere splinter of light at the edge of a shadow square, the giants were up and moving.

  They liked to sleep touching each other. The king giant was the center of a circle of women, with Wu at its edge, his small, half-bald head pillowed on a woman’s shoulder, his legs hooked over a man’s long bony legs. The dirt floor was covered in flesh and hair.

  Waking, they moved in order, those nearest the door untangling themselves and picking up bags and sickle-swords and moving out, then those farther in. Wu moved out with them.

  Outside the distant lander, a one-armed giant with a marred face said a quick farewell to Chmeee and came jogging toward the longhouse. Last night’s guards would be sleeping inside during the day, and some older women had stayed too.

  The giants turned and stared openly when Wu began climbing the wall.

  The grass and mud surface was crumbly, but the roof was only twelve feet high. Louis pulled himself up between two sunflowers.

  The plants stood a foot tall on knobbly green stalks. Each had a single oval blossom, mirror-surfaced, nine to twelve inches across. A short stalk poked from the mirror’s center and ended in a dark-green bulb. The back of the blossom was stringy, laced with some vegetable analogue of muscle fibers. And all of the blossoms were throwing sunlight at Louis Wu; but there wasn’t enough sunlight to hurt him yet.

  Louis wrapped his hands around a thick sunflower stalk and rocked it gently. There was no give; the roots were dug deep into the roof. He took off his shirt and held it between the blossom and the sun. The mirror-blossom wavered and rippled in indecision, then folded forward to enclose the green bulb.

  Mindful of his audience, Wu climbed down with some attention to style. A white glare followed him as he went to join Chmeee.

  The kzin said, “I spent part of this night talking to a guard.”

  “Learn anything?”

  “He has the utmost confidence in you, Louis. They’re gullible.”

  “So were the carnivores. I wondered if it was just good manners.”

  “I think not. The carnivores and the herbivores expect anything at all to walk in from the horizon at any moment. They know that there are people with strange shapes and godlike powers. They made me wonder what we may meet next. Uurrr, and the sentry knew that we are not of the race that built the Ringworld. Is this significant?”

  “Maybe. What else?”

  “There will be no problem with the other tribes. Cattle they may be, but with minds. Those who stay on the veldt will collect seeds for those who choose to invade sunflower territory. They will give women to the young adult men if they go. Perhaps a third of them will leave when you have worked your magic. The rest will have enough grass. They will not need to move toward the red people.”

  “Okay.”

  “I
asked about long-term weather.”

  “Good! Well?”

  “The guard is an old man,” Chmeee said. “When he was young and had both legs—before something marred him; the translator said ‘ogre’—the sun was always the same brightness and the days were always the same length. Now the sun seems sometimes brighter and sometimes dimmer, and when the sun is bright, the days seem too short, and vice versa. Louis, he remembers how it started. Twelve falans ago, which would be one hundred and twenty rotations of the constellations, there was a time of dark. Dawn never came for what would have been two or three days. They saw the stars, and a ghost-flame spreading overhead. Then all was as it should be for some falans. When the uneven days came, it was long before they noticed; they don’t have clocks.”

  “Seems predictable enough. Except—“

  “But the long night, Louis. What does that sound like?”

  Louis nodded. “The sun flared up. The shadow square ring closed somehow. Maybe the wire that holds it together can be reeled in by automatics.”

  “Then the flare jet pushed the Ringworld off center. Now the days grow more uneven. It frightens all of the races the giants trade with.”

  “And well it should.”

  “I wish there were something we could do.” The kzin’s tail lashed once. “But we battle sunflowers instead. Did you enjoy yourself this night?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you should be smiling.”

  “If you really wanted to know, you could have watched. Everyone else did. There aren’t any walls in that big building; they all crowd in together. Anyway, they like watching.”

  “I can’t tolerate the smell.”

  Louis laughed. “It’s strong. Not bad, just strong. And I had to stand on a stool. And the women were ... docile.”

  “Females should be docile.”

  “Not human females! They’re not even stupid. I couldn’t talk, of course, but I listened.” Louis’s forefinger tapped the knob in his ear. “I listened to Reeth organizing the clean-up squad. She’s good. Hey, you were right, they’re organized just like a herd of cattle! The females are all wives of the king giant. None of the other males ever gets laid, except that sometimes the king giant declares a holiday and then goes away so he won’t have to watch. Fun’s over when he comes back, and officially nothing happened. Everyone’s a little miffed because we brought him back from the raid two days early.”