The Ringworld Engineers Read online

  This time the natives would not suffer because Louis Wu had arrived. He was in current-addiction withdrawal; he didn’t need guilt too. His first act on this visit was to start a stampede. He was going to fix that.

  It was hard physical work.

  He took a break at one point and went up on the flight deck. He was worried about the kzin. Even a human being—a flatlander of five hundred years ago, say, a successful man in middle age—might have been disconcerted to find himself suddenly eighteen years old, his smooth progression toward death interrupted, his blood flowing with powerful and unfamiliar juices, his very identity in question: hair thickening and changing color, scars disappearing ...

  Well, where was Chmeee?

  The grass was strange. Here in the vicinity of the camp, it was waist-high. To spinward was a vast area cropped almost to the ground. Louis could see the herd moving along the edge, guided by small red humanoids, leaving a swath that was almost dirt-colored.

  Give ‘em this: the little green elephants were efficient. The red men must have to shift camp fairly frequently.

  Louis saw motion in the grass nearby. He watched patiently until it moved again ... and suddenly it was an orange streak. Louis never saw Chmeee’s prey. There were no humanoids around, and that was good enough. He went back to work.

  The herdsmen returned to find a feast.

  They came in a band, chattering among themselves. They paused to examine the lander without coming too close. Some of them surrounded one of the green elephants. (Lunch?) It may have been coincidence that the spearmen led the rest as they entered the circle of huts.

  They stopped in surprise, confronting Louis, and Chmeee with a different girl on his shoulder, and half a ton of dressed meat laid on clean leather.

  Shivith introduced the aliens, with a short and fairly accurate account of their claims. Louis was prepared to be called a liar, but it never happened. He met the chief: a woman four feet and a few inches tall, Ginjerofer by name, who bowed and smiled with disconcertingly sharp teeth. Louis tried to bow in the same fashion.

  “Shivith told us you like variety in meat,” Louis said, and gestured toward what he had taken from the lander’s kitchen. Three of the natives turned the green elephant around, aimed it at where the rest of the herd was grazing, and prodded its butt with spear hafts to get it going. The tribe converged on lunch. Others came to join them, out of huts Louis had assumed were empty: a dozen very old men and women. Louis had thought Shivith was old. He was not used to seeing people with wrinkled skin and arthritic joints and old scars. He wondered why they had hidden, and surmised that arrows had been aimed at him and Chmeee while they talked with Shivith and the children.

  In a few minutes the natives reduced the meal to bones. They did no talking; they seemed to have no order of precedence. They ate, in fact, like kzinti. Chmeee accepted a gestured offer to join them. He ate most of the moa, which the natives ignored; they preferred red meat.

  Louis had carried it in several loads on one of the big repulsion plates. His muscles ached from the strain of moving it. He watched the natives tearing into the feast. He felt good. There was no droud in his head, but he felt good.

  Most of the natives left then, to tend the herd. Shivith and Ginjerofer and some of the older ones stayed. Chmeee asked Louis, “Is this moa an artifact or a bird? The Patriarch might want such birds for his hunting parks.”

  “There’s a real bird,” Louis said. “Ginjerofer, this should make us even for the stampede.”

  “We thank you,” she said. There was blood on her lips and chin. Her lips were full, and redder than her skin. “Forget the stampede. Life is more than not being hungry. We love to meet people who are different. Are your worlds really so much smaller than ours? And round?”

  “Round like balls. If mine were far up the Arch, you would see only a white point.”

  “Will you go back to these small places to tell of us?”

  The translators must be feeding to recorders aboard Needle. Louis said, “One day.”

  “You will have questions.”

  “Yeah. Do the sunflowers ruin your grazing ground?”

  He had to point before she understood. “The brightness to spinward? We know nothing of it.”

  “Did you ever wonder? Ever send scouts?”

  She frowned. “This is the way of it. My fathers and mothers tell that we have been moving to antispinward since they were little. They remember that they had to go around a great sea, but they did not come too close, because the beasts would not eat the plants that grow around the shore. There was a brightness to spinward then, but it is stronger now. As for scouts—a party of the young went to see for themselves. They met giants. The giants killed their beasts. They had to return quickly then. They had no meat.”

  “It sounds like the sunflowers are moving faster than you are.”

  “Okay. We can move faster than we do.”

  “What do you know about the floating city?”

  Ginjerofer had seen it all her life. It was a landmark, like the Arch itself. Sometimes when the night was cloud-covered, one could still find the yellow glow of the city, but that was all she knew. The city was too far even for rumor.

  “But we hear tales from large distances, if they are worth telling. They may be garbled. We hear of the people of the spill mountains, who live between the cold white level and the foothills, where air is too dense. They fly between the spill mountains. They use sky sleds when they can get them, but there are no new sky sleds, so that for hundreds of years they must use balloons. Will your seeing-things see that far?”

  Louis put the binocular goggles on her and showed her the enlargement dial. “Why did you call them spill mountains? Is that the same word you use when you spill water?”

  “Yes. I don’t know why we call them that. Your eyepiece only shows me larger mountains ...” She turned to spinward. The goggles almost covered her small face. “I can see the shore, and a glare across.”

  “What else do you hear from travelers?”

  “When we meet we talk most of dangers. There are brainless meat-eaters to antispinward that kill people. They look something like us, but smaller, and they are black and hunt at night. And there are ...” She frowned. “We don’t know the truth of this. There are mindless things that urge one to do rishathra with them. One does not live through the act.”

  “But you can’t do rishathra. They can’t be dangerous to you.”

  “Even to us, we are told.”

  “What about diseases? Parasites?”

  None of the natives knew what he meant! Fleas, hookworm, mosquitoes, measles, gangrene: there was nothing like that on the Ringworld. Of course he should have guessed that. The Ringworld engineers just hadn’t brought them. He was startled nonetheless. He wondered if he might have brought disease to the Ringworld for the first time ... and decided that he had not. The autodoc would have cured him of anything dangerous.

  But the natives were that much like civilized humans. They grew old, but not sick.

  Chapter 10 -

  The God Gambit

  Hours before nightfall, Louis was exhausted.

  Ginjerofer offered them the use of a hut, but Chmeee and Louis elected to sleep in the lander. Louis fell between the sleeping plates while Chmeee was still setting up defenses.

  He woke in the dead of night.

  Chmeee had activated the image amplifier before he went to sleep. The landscape glowed bright as a rainy day. The daylit rectangles of the Arch were like ceiling light panels: too bright to do more than glance at. But most of the nearer Great Ocean was in shadow.

  The Great Oceans lured him. They were flamboyant. They should not have been. If Louis was right about the Ringworld engineers, flamboyance was not
their style. They built with simplicity and efficiency, and they planned in very long time spans, and they fought wars.

  But the Ringworld was flamboyant in its own way, and impossible to defend. Why hadn’t they built a lot of little Ringworlds instead? And why the Great Oceans? They didn’t fit either.

  He could be wrong from the start. That had happened before! Yet the evidence—

  Was there something moving in the grass?

  Louis activated the infrared scanner.

  They glowed by their own heat. They were bigger than dogs, like a blend of human and jackal: horrid supernatural things in this unnatural light. Louis spent a moment locating the sonic stun cannon in the lander’s turret and another swinging it toward the interlopers. Four of them, moving on all fours through the grass.

  They stopped not far from the huts. They were there for some minutes. Then they moved off, and now they were hunched half erect. Louis turned off the infrared scanner.

  In augmented Archlight it was clear: they were carrying the day’s garbage, the remains of the feast. Ghouls. The meat probably wasn’t ripe enough for them yet.

  Yellow eyes in his peripheral vision: Chmeee was wide-awake. Louis said, “The Ringworld’s old. A hundred thousand years at least.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The Ringworld engineers wouldn’t have brought jackals. There’s been time enough for some branch of the hominids to fit that niche in the ecology.”

  “A hundred thousand years wouldn’t be enough,” said Chmeee.

  “It might. I wonder what else the engineers didn’t bring. They didn’t bring mosquitoes.”

  “You are facetious. But they would not have brought bloodsuckers of any kind.”

  “No. Or sharks, or cougars.” Louis laughed. “Or skunks. What else? Venomous snakes? Mammals couldn’t live like snakes. I don’t think any mammals secrete poison in their mouths.”

  “Louis, it would take millions of years for hominids to evolve in so many directions. We must consider whether they evolved on the Ringworld at all!”

  “They did, unless I’m completely wrong. As for how long it took, there’s a small matter of mathematics. If we assume they started evolving a hundred thousand years ago, from a base popu...” Louis let the sentence trail off.

  A good distance away—moving at fair speed, considering their burdens—the jackal-hominids suddenly stopped, turned back, seemed to pose for a moment, then dropped into the grass and vanished. A touch of the infrared sensor showed four glowing spots fanning out and away.

  “Company to spinward,” Chmeee said quietly.

  The newcomers were big. They were Chmeee’s size, and they weren’t trying to hide. Forty bearded giants marched through the night as if they owned it. They were armed and armored. They moved in a wedge formation, with bowmen on the forward arms of the triangle and swordsmen inside, and the one fully armored man at the point. Others had plates of thick leather to guard arms and torsos, but that one, the biggest of the giants, wore metal: a gleaming shell that bulged at elbows, knuckles, shoulders, knees, hips. The forward-jutting mask was open, with a pale beard and wide nose showing inside.

  “I was right. I was right all along. But why a Ringworld? Why did they build a Ringworld? How in Finagle’s Name did they expect to defend it?”

  Chmeee finished swinging the stun cannon around. “Louis, what are you talking about?”

  “The armor. Look at the armor. Haven’t you ever been in the Smithsonian Institute? And you saw the pressure suits in the Ringworlder spaceship.”

  “Uurrr ... yes. We have a more immediate problem.”

  “Don’t shoot yet. I want to see ... Yeah, I was right. They’re going past the village.”

  “Would you say that the little red ones are our allies? It was only coincidence that we met them first.”

  “I’d say they are. Tentatively.”

  The microphone picked up a high-pitched scream, interrupted by a bellow. The archers drew arrows simultaneously, fitted them to bows. Two small red sentries were bounding toward the huts at impressive speed. They were ignored.

  “Fire,” Louis said softly.

  The arrows went wild. The giants crumpled. Two or three green elephants bellowed and tried to get to their feet, paused, then settled back. One had a couple of arrows in its flank.

  “They were after the herd,” Chmeee said.

  “Yeah. We don’t really want them slaughtered, do we? Tell you what, you stay here with the stun cannon and I’ll go out and negotiate.”

  “I don’t take your orders, Louis.”

  “Do you have other suggestions?”

  “No. Save at least one giant to answer questions.”

  This one had fallen on his back. He was not just bearded, he was maned: only his eyes and nose showed in a mass of golden hair that spilled over face and head and shoulders. Ginjerofer squatted and forced his mouth open with two small hands. The warrior’s jaw was massive. His teeth were flat-topped molars, well worn down. All of them.

  “See,” Ginjerofer said, “a plant-eater. They wanted to kill the herd, to take their grass.”

  Louis shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought the competition would be so fierce.”

  “We didn’t know. But they come from spinward, where our herds have cropped the grass close. Thank you for killing them, Louis. We must have a great feast.”

  Louis’s stomach lurched. “They’re only sleeping. And they’ve got minds, like you, like me.”

  She looked at him curiously. “Their minds were turned to our destruction.”

  “We shot them. We ask you to let them live.”

  “How? What would they do to us if we let them wake up?”

  It was a problem. Louis temporized. “If I solve that, will you let them live? Remember, it was our sleepgun.” And that should suggest to Ginjerofer that Chmeee could use the gun again.

  “We will confer,” said Ginjerofer.

  Louis waited, and thought. No way would forty giant herbivores fit in the lander. They could be disarmed, of course ... Louis grinned suddenly at the sword in the giant’s big, broad-fingered hand. The long, curved blade would work as a scythe.

  Ginjerofer came back. “They may live if we never see their tribe again. Can you promise that?”

  “You’re a bright woman. Yeah, they could have relatives with a vengeance tradition. And yeah, I can promise you’ll never see this tribe again.”

  Chmeee spoke in his ear. “Louis? You may have to exterminate them!”

  “No. It could cost us some time, but tanj, look at them! Peasants. They can’t fight us. At worst I’ll make them build a big raft and we’ll tow it with the lander. The sunflowers haven’t crossed the downstream river yet. We’ll let them off a good way away, where there’s grass.”

  “For what? A delay of weeks!”

  “For information.” Louis turned back to Ginjerofer. “I want the one in the armor, and I want all their weapons. Leave them not so much as a knife. Keep what you want, but I want most of it piled in the lander.”

  She looked dubiously at the armored giant. “How shall we move him?”

  “I’ll get a repulser plate. You tie the rest up after we’re gone. Let them loose in pairs. Tell them the situation. Send them to spinward in daylight. If they come back to attack you with no weapons, they’re yours. But they won’t. They’ll cross that plain damn fast, with no weapons and no grass over an inch tall.”

  She considered. “It seems safe enough. It will be done.”

  “We’ll be at their camp, wherever it is, long before they arrive. We’ll wait for them, Ginjerofer.”

  “They will not be hurt. My promise is for the People,” she sa
id coldly.

  The armored giant woke shortly after dawn.

  His eyes opened, blinked, and focused on a looming orange wall of fur, and yellow eyes, and long claws. He held quite still while his eyes roved ... seeing the weapons of thirty comrades piled around him ... seeing the airlock, with both doors open. Seeing horizon slide past; feeling the wind of the lander’s speed.

  He tried to roll over.

  Louis grinned. He was watching via a scanner in the rec-room ceiling while he steered the lander. The giant’s armor was soldered to the deck at knees, heels, wrists, and shoulders. A little heat would free him, but rolling around wouldn’t.

  The giant made demands and threats. He did not plead. Louis paid scant attention. When the computer’s translating program started getting sense out of that, he’d notice. At the moment he was more concerned with his view of the giants’ camp.

  He was a mile up, and fifty miles from the red carnivores’ huts. He slowed. The grass hereabouts had had time to grow back, but the giants had left another great bare region behind them, toward the sea and the sunflower gleam beyond. They were out in the grass: thousands of them scattered widely across the veldt. Louis caught points of light glittering from scythe-swords.

  No giants were near the camp itself. There were wagons parked near the center of camp, and no sign of draft beasts. The giants must pull the wagons themselves. Or they might have motors left from the event Halrloprillalar had called the Fall of the Cities, a thousand years ago.

  The one thing Louis couldn’t see was the central building. He saw only a black spot on his window, a black rectangle overloaded by too much light. Louis grinned. The giants had enlisted the enemy.

  A screen lighted. A seductive contralto said, “Louis.”

  “Here.”

  “I return your droud,” the puppeteer said.

  Louis turned. The small black thing was sitting on the stepping disc. Louis turned away as one turns one’s back on an enemy, remembering that the enemy is still there.