The Ringworld Engineers Page 14

  “Your monkey curiosity?”

  “Maybe. Just circle the tanj thing, give us a closer look.”

  Chmeee dropped the lander fast enough to put them in free fall. The kzin’s fur was almost all grown out, a glossy and handsome orange coat, and a reminder of Chmeee’s new youth. Adolescence wasn’t helping his temper. Four Man-Kzin wars, plus a few “incidents” ... Louis kept his mouth shut.

  The lander surged under them. Louis waited until the savage weight left him, then began adjusting the views through the outside cameras. He saw it almost instantly.

  A boxlike vehicle was parked beside the tilted tower. It could have held up to a dozen passengers. The motor housing at its rear should have been enough to lift a spacecraft ... but this was a primitive people. He couldn’t guess what they’d be using to move the vehicle. He pointed and said, “We find an isolated vehicle and swoop down on it, right?”

  “Right.” Chmeee let the lander settle. As he did, Louis studied the situation:

  The tower had speared down into a squarish building; had smashed through the roof and three stories and possibly into a basement. It was the shell of the lesser building that held it upright. White puffs of steam or smoke jetted irregularly from two tower windows. Pale human shapes were dancing before the lower building’s big front entrance—dancing, or holding sprinting contests—and two were resting prone, though in unrestful positions ...

  Just before the single remaining wall of a collapsed building rose to block Louis’s view, it all jumped into his mind’s focus. The pale ones were trying to reach the entrance across a rubble-covered street. Someone in the tower was shooting at them.

  The lander settled. Chmeee stood and stretched. “You seem to have your own luck, Louis. We can take the ones with the guns to be the Machine People. Our strategy will be to come to their aid.”

  It seemed reasonable. “Do you know anything about projectile weapons?”

  “If we assume chemical propellants, a portable weapon will not penetrate impact armor. We can enter the tower via flying belts. Carry stunners. We would not want to kill our future allies.”

  They emerged into full night. Clouds had closed over the sky. Even so, Archlight glowed through in a faint broad band, and the floating city was a tight star-cluster to port. You couldn’t get lost.

  Louis Wu was not comfortable. The impact armor was too stiff; the hood covered most of his face. The padded straps of the flying belt constricted his breathing, and his feet dangled. But nothing was ever again going to feel like an hour under the wire, and that was that. At least he felt relatively safe.

  He hung in the sky and used light-amplified binocular goggles.

  The attackers didn’t seem that formidable. They were quite naked and weaponless. Their hair was silver; their skin was very white. They were slender and pretty; even the men were more pretty than handsome, and beardless.

  They kept to the shadows and the cover provided by fragments of broken buildings, except when one or two would sprint for the great doorway, zigzagging. Louis had counted twenty, eleven of them women. Five more were dead in the street. There might be others already in the building.

  The defenders had stopped firing now. Perhaps they had run out of ammunition. They had been using two windows in the downward-slanting face of the tower, perhaps six stories up. Every window in the tower was broken.

  He eased close to the larger floating shape of Chmeee. “We go in the other side, with lights at low intensity and wide aperture. I go first because I’m human. Right?”

  “Right,” said Chmeee.

  The belts lifted by scrith repulsion, like the lander. There were small thrusters in back. Louis circled round, checked to see Chmeee following, and floated in one of the windows at what he hoped was the right level.

  It was one big room, and it was empty. The smell made him want to sneeze. There was web furniture with the webbing rotted away, and a long glass table, shattered. At the bottom of the sloping floor, a shapeless thing proved to be a pack with shoulder straps. So: they had been here. And the smell—

  “Cordite,” Chmeee said. “Chemical propulsives. If they shoot at us, cover your eyes.” He moved toward a door. He flattened himself against the wall and flung the door suddenly open. A toilet, empty.

  A bigger door hung open with the slant of the floor. With stunner in one hand and flashlight-laser in the other, Louis moved toward it. He felt a driving excitement drowning the fear.

  Beyond the ornately carved wooden door, a broad circular staircase wound down into darkness. Louis shined his light down along loops of railing to where the spiral of stairs and the bottom of the building all crumpled in on itself. The light picked out a two-handed weapon with a shoulder butt, and a box that had spilled tiny golden cylinders; another weapon further down; a coat equipped with straps; more scraps of clothing on the lower stair; a human shape crumpled in the crushed bottom of the stairway—a naked man, seeming darker and more muscular than the attackers.

  Louis’s excitement was growing unbearable. Was this really what he had needed all along? Not the droud and wire, but the risk of his life to prove its value! Louis adjusted his flying belt and dropped over the railing.

  He fell slowly. There was nothing human on the stairs, but things had been dropped: anonymous clothing, weapons, boots, another shoulder pack. Louis continued dropping ... and suddenly knew he’d found the right level. Quick adjustments to his flying belt sent him slamming through a doorway in pursuit of a smell radically different from what Chmeee had called cordite.

  He was outside the tower. He barely avoided smashing into a wall; he was still inside the lower, crushed building. Somehow he’d dropped his light. He flicked up the amplification in the binocular goggles and turned right, toward light.

  There was a dead woman in the great doorway: one of the attackers. Blood had pooled beneath a projectile wound in her chest. Louis felt a great sadness for her ... and a driving urgency that made him fly right over her, through the doors and out.

  The amplified Archlight was bright even through cloud cover. He had found the attackers, and the defenders too. They were paired off, pale, slender forms with shorter, darker ones who still wore bits of clothing, a boot or a head covering or a shirt ripped open. In the fury of their mating they ignored the flying man.

  But one was not paired with anyone. As Louis stopped his flight she reached up and grasped his ankle, without insistence and without fear. She was silver-haired and very pale, and her finely chiseled face was beautiful beyond words.

  Louis turned off the flying belt and dropped beside her. He took her in his arms. Her hands ran over his strange clothing, questing. Louis dropped the stunner, pulled off his vest and flying belt—his fingers were clumsy—his impact armor, his undersuit. He took her without finesse. His urgency was greater than any consideration for her. But she was as eager as he.

  He was not aware of anything but himself and her. Certainly he didn’t know that Chmeee had joined them. He knew that, joltingly, when the kzin rapped his new love hard across the head with his laser. The furry alien hand sank its claws in her silver hair and pulled her head back, and pulled her teeth loose from Louis Wu’s throat.

  Chapter 15 -

  The Machine People

  The wind blew dust up Louis Wu’s nostrils; it whipped his hair in a storm around his face. Louis brushed it back and opened his eyes. The light was blinding-bright. His fumbling hands found a plastic patch on his neck, then binocular goggles covering his face. He pulled them loose.

  He rolled away from the woman and sat up.

  Now it was dim. Almost dawn: the terminator line split the world into light and dark. Louis ached in every muscle. He felt as if he’d been beaten. Paradoxically, he felt wonderful. For too many years he had used sex only rarely, and only
as cover, because wireheads traditionally have no interest in such things. Last night his whole soul had been involved.

  The woman? She was about Louis’s height, and on the stocky side of pretty. Not flat-chested, but not busty either. Her black hair was bound in a long braid, and there was a disconcerting fringe of beard along her jaw. She slept the sleep of exhaustion, and she’d earned it. They both had. Now he was beginning to remember. But his memories didn’t make much sense.

  He’d been making love—no, he’d been head over heels in love with the pale, slender woman with the red lips. Seeing his blood on her mouth, feeling the sting in his neck, had left him only with a terrible sense of loss. He’d howled when Chmeee twisted her head around until her neck snapped. He’d fought when the kzin plucked him off the dead woman. The kzin had tucked him under one arm; he was still raging, still fighting, while Chmeee fished the medkit out of Louis’s vest and slapped a patch on his neck and tucked the medkit away again.

  Then Chmeee had killed them, all the pretty silver-haired men and women, spearing them accurately through their heads with the brilliant ruby needle of his flashlight-laser. Louis remembered trying to stop him, and being thrown rolling across the broken pavement. He’d staggered to his feet, and seen someone else moving, and moved toward her. Her, the dark-haired woman, the only defender left alive. They’d moved into each other’s arms.

  Why had he done that? And Chmeee had tried to get his attention ... hadn’t he? Louis remembered a shrieking as of tigers at war.

  “Pheromones,” he said. “And they looked so harmless!” He stood up and looked about him in sheer horror. The dead were all around him: the dark ones with wounded necks, the pale ones with blood on their mouths and black char marks in their silver hair.

  The guns hadn’t been enough. What the vampires had was worse than a tasp. They put out a superstimulus cloud of pheromones, human scent-signals of sexual readiness. One of the vampires, or a pair, must have reached the tower. And the defenders had come out, running, shedding guns and clothing in a haste that sent one over the banister to his death.

  But why, with the vampires dead, had he and the dark-haired woman ...?

  The wind tossed at Louis’s hair. Yeah. The vampires were dead, but he and the dark-haired woman were still in a cloud of pheromones. They’d mated in frenzy ... “If the wind hadn’t come up we’d still be Doing It. Yeah. Now, where the tanj did I leave ... everything?”

  He found the impact armor and the flying belt. The undersuit was torn to shreds. What about the vest? He saw that the woman’s eyes were open. She sat up suddenly, with a horror in her eyes that Louis could well understand. He said to her, “I’ve got to have the vest because the translator’s in it. I hope Chmeee doesn’t frighten you off before I can—“

  Chmeee. How had this looked to him?

  Chmeee’s great hand engulfed Louis’s skull and twisted it backward. Louis clung to the woman with his body and his mind, and thrust, thrust, but his eyes were filled with that orange beast-face, and his ears with screaming insults. It was distracting ...

  Chmeee wasn’t in sight. Louis found the vest a good distance away, gripped in a vampire’s dead hand. He couldn’t find the stunner. By now he was really worried. Something ugly was thrusting out of his memory. He was running when he reached the place where they’d grounded the lander.

  A chunk of rock too big for three men to lift was holding down a generous pile of black superconductor cloth. Chmeee’s parting gift. The lander was gone.

  I’ll have to get over this sooner or later, Louis thought. Why not now? A friend had taught him this cantrip, this bit of magic for recovering from shock or grief. Sometimes it worked.

  He was sitting on what had been a porch railing, though the porch now sat alone in a sand-covered walkway. He had donned his impact armor and the vest with all the pockets. He had put clothing between himself and a vast and lonely world. Not modesty, but fear.

  That had used up all his ambition. Now he sat. Thoughts drifted aimlessly. He thought of a working droud as far away as the Earth from its moon, and a two-headed ally who would not risk landing here even to save Louis Wu. He thought of the Ringworld engineers and their idealized ecology, which had included nothing like mosquitoes or vampire bats; and his lips quirked into the beginning of a smile, then settled into a dead man’s expression, which is no expression at all.

  He knew where Chmeee had gone. He smiled again to think how little good it did him. Had Chmeee told him that? No matter. Survival or the mating urge or vengeance on the Hindmost would all drive Chmeee in the same direction. But would any of these motives bring him back to rescue Louis Wu?

  And he thought how little one death mattered, with the Ringworld’s trillions all doomed to intimate contact with their sun.

  Well, Chmeee might return. Louis ought to get off his butt and do something about reaching the floating city. They’d been headed there; Chmeee would expect to find him there, if some whim brought the kzin back for the ally who had failed him so badly. Or Louis might actually learn something valuable. Or ... he’d have to survive somewhere in the year or two left to him. I’ll have to get over this sometime. Why not now?

  Somebody yelled.

  The black-haired woman had dressed herself in shorts and shirt and a backpack. She held a projectile weapon at her side, pointed at Louis Wu. With her other arm she gestured and yelled again.

  Vacation was over. Louis became acutely aware that his hood was around his neck. If she tried a head shot—well, she might just give him time to pull the hood over his face, and then it wouldn’t matter if she fired or not. The impact suit would stop the projectiles while he ran. What he really needed was the flying belt. Or did he?

  “Okay,” said Louis, and he smiled and raised his hands to the sides. What he really needed was an ally. With one hand he reached slowly into his vest, withdrew the translator, clipped it just under his throat. “This will talk for us, as soon as it learns to.”

  She motioned with the gun: Go ahead of me.

  Louis walked as far as the flying belt, then stooped and picked it up, without jerky motions. Thunder cracked. A stone six inches from Louis Wu’s foot jumped wildly away. He dropped the harness and stepped back.

  Tanj, she wasn’t talking! She’d decided he couldn’t speak her language, and that was that. How would the translator learn anything?

  With his hands in the air, he watched her fiddle one-handed with the flying belt while she kept the gun more or less on him. If she touched the wrong controls, he’d lose the belt and the cloth too. But she set the belt down, studied Louis’s face a moment, then stepped back and gestured.

  Louis picked up the flying belt. When she gestured toward her vehicle, he shook his head. He went to where Chmeee had left an acre or so of superconductor cloth, weighted down by a boulder far too heavy to move.

  The gun never left him as he strapped the harness around the rock and activated the flying belt. He wrapped his arms around the rock—and the harness, for fear it would slip—and lifted. The rock came up. He turned full around and let go. It settled slowly to the ground.

  Was that respect in her eyes? Was it for his technology or his strength? He turned off the belt, picked up it and the superconductor cloth, and moved ahead of her to her vehicle. She opened double doors in its side. He set his burden down and looked around.

  Couches around three sides; a tiny stove in the center, and a hatch in the roof for a smoke hole. Stacks of baggage behind the rear seat. Another couch in front, facing forward.

  He backed out. He turned back toward the tower, took one step forward, and looked at her. She got the idea. She dithered, then gestured him on.

  The dead were beginning to smell. He wondered if she would bury or burn them. But she walked among the bodies without stopping. It was Louis who s
topped, to probe with his fingers in a woman’s silver hair.

  There was too much hair, too little skull. Beautiful she was, but her brain was smaller than a human brain. He sighed and went on.

  The woman followed him through the shell of the lower building, into the tower’s spiral staircase, and down. A dead man of her species lay broken in the crushed basement, and the flashlight-laser was next to him. When he glanced back at the woman, he saw tears in her eyes.

  He reached for the flashlight-laser and she fired past him. The ricochet thumped him on the hip, and he shied violently inside the suddenly rigid shell. He backed against the shattered wall while she picked up the device.

  She found the switch, and light jumped around them in a wide beam. She found the focus; the beam narrowed. She nodded and dropped the device in her pocket.

  On their walk back to the vehicle Louis casually pulled the impact-suit hood over his face, as if the sunlight were too bright. She might have all she wanted from Louis Wu, or she might be short of water, or she might not want his company.

  She didn’t shoot him. She climbed into the car and locked the doors, with a key. For an instant Louis saw himself marooned with no water and no tools. But she gestured him close to the right-hand window, where the driving controls were. She began to show him how to drive.

  It was the breakthrough Louis had hoped for. He repeated the words she called through the window, and added his own words. “Steering ring. Turn. Activator. Key. Throttle. Retrothrottle.” She was pretty good with gestures. A hand zipping through air plus a finger tracing a needle’s path were “airspeed gauge.”

  It startled her when the translator began talking back to her. She let the language lesson continue for a bit. Then she unlocked the door, backed across the seat with the gun ready, and said, “Get in. Drive.”

  The machine was noisy and balky. It translated every little bump directly to the driver’s couch until Louis learned to steer around cracks in the road, rubble, or drifts of sand. The woman watched him silently. Did she have no curiosity? It occurred to him that she had lost a dozen companions to the vampires. Under the circumstances she was functioning well enough.