The Ringworld Engineers (ringworld) Page 11

  Chmeee bounded up through the hatch. Louis asked, “What do you see on the stepping disc?”

  Chmeee picked up the droud.

  Louis’s voice was jagged in his throat. “Break it.”

  The kzin instantly stiff-armed the small instrument into a wall. It didn’t dent. He pried at the casing, got it open, and jabbed at the inside with the hullmetal blade of the knife he’d been using. At last he said, “It’s beyond repair.”

  “Good.”

  “I will wait below.”

  “No, I’ll come with you. I want to check your work. And I want breakfast.” He was feeling twitchy. He wasn’t sure how he felt. Rishathra hadn’t quite lived up to his expectations, and the pure joy of the wire was over forever. But … cheese fondue? Right. And freedom, and pride. In a couple of hours he was going to wipe out a sunflower invasion and shock tanj out of Chmeee. Louis Wu, ex-wirehead, whose brain hopefully had not turned to oatmeal after all.

  ***

  The king giant came back hugging a boulder and moving very slowly. Chmeee started to take it from him, hesitated an instant as he saw its size, and finished the motion. He turned with it in his arms and, with strain just showing in his voice, said, “What must I do with it, Louis?”

  It was tempting. Oh, there are so many possibilities … Give me a minute to think it over … But gods don’t dither, and he couldn’t let Chmeee drop it with the giant watching.

  “Set it on superconductor cloth and wrap it up. Tie it with superconductor wire. Take a lot of turns around the rock, and be lavish with the knots, too. Okay, now I want some stronger wire that’ll stand up to heat.”

  “We have Sinclair molecule chain.”

  “Less than twenty miles of that. I want it shorter than the superconductor wire.” Louis was glad he’d made the inspection. He had overlooked the chance that the superconductor wire wouldn’t be strong enough to hold the cloth-wrapped repulser plate, once the plate reached altitude. But Sinclair chain was fantastic stuff. It ought to hold.

  Chapter 12

  Sunflowers

  Louis flew high and fast to spinward. The veldt showed too much brown: grass cropped first by green elephants and then by giants was having trouble growing back. Ahead, the white line of sunflowers glared across the sea.

  The king giant watched through the transparent airlock doors. “It may be I should have brought armor,” he said.

  Chmeee snorted. “To fight sunflowers? Metal grows hot.”

  “Where,” Louis asked, “did you get the armor?”

  “We made a road for the Machine People. They made us free of the grasslands the road was to go through, and afterward they made armor for the kings of the tribes. We kept moving. We didn’t like their air.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It tastes wrong and smells wrong, Louis. It smells like what they drink sometimes. They pour the same stuff in their machines, but without mixing it with anything.”

  Chmeee asked, “I wondered about the shape of your armor. It is not quite your own shape. I wondered why.”

  “The shape is meant to awe and frighten. Did you not find it so?”

  “No,” said Chmeee. “Is it the shape of those who built the Ringworld?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I do,” Louis said. The giant’s eyes flicked nervously upward.

  The grass, grown tall again, abruptly gave way to forest. The sunflowers had grown bright. Louis dropped the lander to a hundred feet and slowed drastically.

  The forest ended in a long white beach. Louis slowed further and eased the lander down, down, until he was almost skimming the water. The sunflowers lost interest.

  He flew on toward the diminished glare. The sea was calm, rippled by a breeze from astern. The sky was blue and cloudless. Islands went by, small and medium-sized, with beaches and convoluted shores and peaks charred black. Two had been commandeered by sunflowers.

  Fifty miles offshore, the sunflowers were taking an interest again. Louis brought the lander to a halt. “They can’t hope to use us for fertilizer,” he said. “We’re too far away and flying too low.”

  “Brainless plants.” Chmeee coughed contempt.

  The king giant said, “They are clever. They start brush fires. When only ashen ground is left, the fire plants spread their seed.”

  But they were over water! … Skip it. “King of the Grass Giants, this is your hour. Drop the rock overboard. Don’t snag the wire.” Louis opened the airlock and lowered the ramp. The king giant went forth into the ominous glare. The boulder fell twenty feet into the water, trailing black and silver wires.

  Spotlights seemed to wink at them from the far shore as clusters of the plants tried to burn the lander, then lost interest. They sought motion, but they wouldn’t fire on running water, would they? On a waterfall, say? The plants did best on half-arid worlds … “Chmeee. Take the repulser plate outside. Set it for, oh, eighteen miles. See that the wires don’t foul.”

  The black rectangle rose. Wire trailed, black and silver. The thread of Sinclair chain should have been invisibly thin, but it glowed silver, and a bright nimbus glowed around the dwindling repulser plate. The plate was a black dot now, harder to see than the bright halo around it. At that altitude it was a target for hordes of sunflower blossoms.

  A superconductor will pass an electric current with no resistance whatever. It is this property that makes it so valuable to industry. But superconductors have another property. A superconductor is always the same temperature throughout.

  Air and dust particles, and Sinclair wire, glowed by sunflower light. But the superconductor cloth and wire remained black. Good. Louis blinked away the dazzle and looked down at the water. “King of the Grass People,” he said, “come inside before you’re hurt.”

  Where the two wires entered the water, the water boiled. A streamer of steam blew into the white glare to spinward. Louis set the lander drifting to starboard. Already a fair patch of water was steaming.

  The Ringworld engineers had built only two deep oceans, the Great Oceans, counterbalanced opposite each other. The rest of the Ringworld’s seas were twenty-five feet deep throughout. Like humans, they apparently used only the top of a sea. That was to Louis’s advantage. It was making it easier to boil a sea.

  The steam cloud reached for shore.

  Gods don’t gloat. That was a pity. “We will watch until you are satisfied,” he told the king giant.

  “Uurrr,” said Chmeee.

  “I begin to see,” the king giant said, “but …”

  “Speak.”

  “The fire plants burn away clouds.”

  Louis swallowed uneasiness. “We will watch. Chmeee, you may offer our guest lettuce. It may be that you will want to eat with a door between you.”

  ***

  They were fifty miles to starboard of the anchored wire, on the port side of a tall, bare island. The island blocked half the glare of those sunflowers still interested in cremating the lander … but most of the sunflowers were distracted anyway. Some of the glare focused on the hovering black rectangle; some, on the steam cloud.

  For the water was steaming for a couple of square miles around the wire and submerged boulder. The steam ran in a spreading cloud across the sea, fifty miles to shore, and there it caught fire. Five miles inland it ran, burning like a firestorm, and then it was gone.

  Louis focused the telescope on the patch of steam. He could see water boiling. Plants would be starting to die. A five-mile strip of plants was getting no sunlight; plants around them were wasting their light on a steam cloud instead of making sugar with it. But a five-mile strip was nothing, nothing. The patch was half the size of a world.

  He saw something else that made him swing the view straight upward.

  The silver wire was falling, drifting to spinward in the wind. The sunflowers had burned through Sinclair molecule chain. Louis softly spoke a one-syllable word meaning impotence. But the thread of superconductor was still black.

  It wo
uld hold. Sure it would.

  It would be no hotter than boiling water, and everywhere the same temperature. More light from the plants wouldn’t change that; it would only boil the water faster. And this was a big sea. And water vapor doesn’t just vanish. Heat it and it rises.

  “God eats well,” the king giant said. He was munching on a head of Boston butter lettuce: his twentieth or maybe thirtieth. He stood beside Chmeee, watching, and like Chmeee he did not speculate on what was happening outside.

  Sea water boiled merrily. The sunflowers were sure as tanj determined to knock down that bit of potential fertilizer, that possible sunflower-eating bird. They couldn’t judge altitude or distance. Evolution wouldn’t let them keep that up until they starved. Time off for each blossom to focus on the green photosynthetic node, while others took turns.

  Quietly Chmeee said, “Louis. The island.”

  Something large and black stood waist-deep in the water offshore. It was not human and not otter, but a little of both. It waited patiently, watching the lander with large brown eyes.

  Louis spoke calmly, but with effort. “Is this sea peopled?”

  “We did not know it,” said the king giant.

  Louis slid the lander toward the beach. The humanoid waited without fear. He was covered with short, oily black fur, and nicely streamlined: thick neck, drastically sloping shoulders, a broad nose flattened against his chinless face.

  Louis activated the microphones. “Do you use the speech of the Grass Giants?”

  “I can use it. Talk slowly. What are you doing there?”

  Louis sighed. “Heating the sea.”

  The creature’s self-possession was remarkable. The idea of heating a sea didn’t faze him. He asked the mobile building, “How hot?”

  “Very hot at this end. How many are you?”

  “Thirty-four of us now,” said the amphibian. “We were eighteen when we came here fifty-one falans past. Will the starboard part of the sea grow hot?”

  Louis sagged with relief. He’d had visions of hundreds of thousands of people cooked because Louis Wu had played god. He croaked, “You tell me. The river inlet’s at that end. How much warmth can you stand?”

  “Some. We will eat better; fish like warmth. It is polite to ask before you destroy even part of a home. Why are you doing this?”

  “To kill off the fire plants.”

  The amphibian considered. “Good. If the fire plants die, we can send a messenger upstream to Fuboobish’s Son’s Sea. They must think us long dead.” He added, “I forget my manners. Rishathra is acceptable to us if you will state your sex, and if you can function underwater.”

  Louis needed a moment to regain his voice. “None of us mate in water.”

  “Few do,” said the amphibian, with no obvious disappointment.

  “How did you come here?”

  “We were exploring downstream. Rapids carried us into the realm of the fire plants. We could not go ashore, to walk. We must let the river carry us to this place, which I named Tuppugop’s Sea, for myself. It is a good place, though one must be wary of the fire plants. Can you really kill them with fog?”

  “I think so.”

  “I must move my people,” the amphibian said. He disappeared without a splash.

  “I thought you would kill him,” Chmeee told the ceiling, “for his impudence.”

  “It’s his home,” said Louis. He turned off the intercom. He was weary of the game. I’m boiling someone’s home, he thought, and I don’t even know it’ll work! He wanted the droud. Nothing else could help, nothing but the vegetable happiness of current running in his brain; nothing else would stop the black rage that had him pounding the arms of his chair and making animal noises with his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

  That, and time. Time passed, and the spell passed, and he opened his eyes.

  Now he could see neither the black wire nor the boiling of the water. It was all a vast fog bank drifting to spinward, catching fire as it reached shore, ten miles inward and gone. Then only the flare of sunflowers … and a pair of parallel lines at the horizon.

  White line above, black below, across fifty degrees of horizon.

  Water vapor doesn’t just disappear. Heated, it had gone up, and recondensed in the stratosphere. White edge of cloud, blazing under sunflower attack; black shadow across a tremendous patch of sunflowers. It must be five hundred to a thousand miles away, to be seen so near to its own shadow, and hundreds of miles across. And it was spreading—excruciatingly slowly, but it was spreading.

  In the stratosphere the air would be forced outward from the center of the sunflower patch. Some of the cloud would rain out, but some water vapor would meet the steam from the boiling sea and flow inward, recirculating.

  His arms hurt. Louis realized that he had a death grip on the chair arms. He let go. He turned on the intercom.

  “Louis has kept his promise,” the king giant was saying, “but the dying plants may be out of our reach. I don’t know—”

  “We’ll spend the night here,” Louis told them. “In the morning we’ll know better.”

  ***

  He set the lander on the antispinward side of the island. Seaweed had washed ashore in great heaps. Chmeee and the king giant spent an hour stuffing seaweed into a hatch in the lander’s hull, feeding the converter-kitchen with raw material. Louis took the opportunity to call Hot Needle of Inquiry.

  The Hindmost was not on the flight deck. He must be in the hidden part of Needle. “You have broken your droud,” he said.

  “I know it. Have you done anything—”

  “I have a replacement.”

  “I don’t care if you’ve got a dozen. I quit. Do you still want the Ringworld engineers’ transmuter?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then let’s cooperate a little. The Ringworld control center has to be somewhere. If it’s been built into one of the spill mountains, then the transmuters that came off the ships on the spaceport ledge have to be there. I want to know everything about the situation before I go into it.”

  The Hindmost thought it through.

  Behind his flat weaving hands, massive buildings glowed with light. A wide street, with stepping discs at intersections, dwindled to a vanishing point. The street swarmed with puppeteers. Their coiffeured manes glowed in glorious variety; they seemed always to move in groups. In a sliver of sky between buildings, two farming worlds hovered, each surrounded by orbiting points of light. There was a background sound like alien music, or like a million puppeteers holding conversations too far away to be heard clearly.

  The Hindmost had a piece of his lost civilization here: tapes and a holo wall and, probably, the smell of his own kind constantly in the air. His furniture was all soft curves, with no sharp corners to bump a knee on. An oddly shaped indentation in the floor was probably a bed.

  “The back of the rim wall is quite flat,” the Hindmost said abruptly. “My deep-radar won’t penetrate it. I can afford to risk one of my probes. It will still serve as a relay between Needle and the lander; in fact, it will serve better as it rises higher. Accordingly I will place a probe in the rim wall transport system.”

  “Good enough.”

  “Do you really think the repair center is—”

  “No, not really, but we’ll find enough surprises to keep us entertained. It should be checked out.”

  “One day we must decide who rules this expedition,” the puppeteer said. He disappeared from the screen.

  ***

  There were no stars that night.

  Morning was a brightening of chaos. From the flight deck nothing showed but a formless pearly glow: no sky, no sea, no beach. Louis was tempted to re-create Wu, just to step out and see if the world was still there.

  Instead he took the lander up. There was sunlight at three hundred feet. Below was nothing but white cloud, growing brighter at the spinward horizon. The fog had spread a long way inland.

  The repulser plate was still in place, a black dot just over
head.

  Two hours after dawn, a wind swept the fog away. Louis dropped the lander to sea level before the edge reached shore. Minutes later a bright nimbus formed around the repulser plate.

  The king giant had been at the airlock doors all morning, watching, absently stuffing his face with lettuce. Chmeee too had been almost silent. They turned toward the ceiling when Louis spoke.

  “It will work,” he said, and finally he believed it. “Soon you will find an alley of dead sunflowers leading to a much bigger patch of them under a permanent cloud deck. Sow your seeds. If you’d rather eat live fire plants, forage at night on both sides of the streamer of fog. You may want a base on some island in this sea. You’ll want boats.”

  “We can make our own plans now,” the king giant said. “It will help to have Sea People near, even so few. They trade service for metal tools. They can build our boats. Will grass grow in all this rain?”

  “I don’t know. You’d better seed the burned-off islands too.”

  “Good … For our special heroes we carve their likeness on a rock, with a few words. We are migratory; we can’t carry large statues with us. Is this adequate?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What is your likeness?”

  “I’m a little bigger than Chmeee, with more hair around the shoulders, and the hair is your own color. Carnivore teeth, with fangs. No external ears. Don’t go to too much trouble. Where shall we take you now?”

  “To our camp. Then I think I must take a few women and scout the edges of the sea.”

  “We can do that now.”

  The king giant laughed. “Our thanks, Louis, but my warriors will be in an ugly mood when they return. Naked, hungry, defeated. It may go better for them when they learn that I am gone for a few days. I am no god. A hero must have warriors happy with his rule. He cannot be fighting every waking hour.”

  Part Two

  Chapter 13

  Origins

  The lander cruised five miles up at just under sonic speed.

  Thirteen thousand miles was no great distance for the lander. Louis’s caution irked the kzin. “Two hours and we can be dropping onto the floating city, or rising from underneath! One hour, without serious discomfort!”