by Larry Niven
“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 overhead.
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!”
“Sure. We’d have to go out of the atmosphere with the fusion drive blazing like a star, but sure. Remember how we reached Halrloprillalar’s floating jail? Upside down in midair, with the motors burned out of our flycycles?”
Chmeee’s tail thumped the back of his chair. He remembered.
“We don’t want to be noticed by any old machinery. The superconductor plague doesn’t seem to have got it all.”
Grassland gave way to patterns of cultivation, then to a watery jungle. Vertical sunlight reflected back at them from between the trunks of flowering trees.
Louis was feeling wonderful. He wouldn’t let himself see the futility of his war on the sunflower patch. It had worked. He had set himself a task; he had accomplished it with intelligence and the tools at hand.
The swamp seemed to go on forever. Once Chmeee pointed out a small city. It was difficult to see, with water half drowning the buildings, and vines and trees trying to pull them down. The architectural style was strange. Every wall and roof and door bulged outward a little, leaving the streets narrow in the center. Not built by Halrloprillalar’s people.
By midday the lander had traveled further than Ginjerofer or the king giant would travel in their lifetimes. Louis had been foolish to question savages. They were as far from the floating city as any two points on Earth.
The Hindmost called.
Today his mane was a swirling rainbow, dyed in streamers of primary colors. Behind him puppeteers flickered along lines of stepping discs, clustered at shop windows, brushed against each other without apology or resentment, all in a murmur of music with flutes and clarinets predominating: puppeteer language. The Hindmost asked, “What have you learned?”
“Little,” said Chmeee. “We have wasted time. There was certainly a great solar flare seventeen falans ago—about three and a half years—but we guessed that much. The shadow squares closed to protect the surface. Their guidance system must operate independently of the Ringworld’s.”
“We could guess that too. No more?”
“Louis’s hypothetical Repair Center is certainly inactive. This swamp below us was not designed. I imagine a major river silted up to block the outflow of a sea. We find a variety of hominids, some intelligent, some not. Of those who built the Ringworld we find no trace, unless they were Halrloprillalar’s ancestors. I am inclined to think they were.”
Louis opened his mouth ... and glanced down at a threshold pain in his leg. He found four kzinti claws just resting on his thigh. He shut his mouth. Chmeee continued, “We have not met any of Halrloprillalar’s species. Perhaps they were never a dense population. We hear rumors of another race, the Machine People, who may rise to replace them. We go to seek them.”
“The Repair Center is inactive, yes,” the Hindmost said briskly. “I have learned much. I have put a probe to work—“
“You have two probes,” Chmeee said. “Use both.”
“I hold one in reserve, to refuel Needle. With the other I have learned the secret of the spill mountains. See—“
The far right screen showed a probe’s-eye view. It raced along the rim wall; passed something, too quick for detail; slowed, turned, moved back.
“Louis advised me to explore the rim wall. The probe had barely started its deceleration routine when it found this. I thought it worth investigating!”
There was a swelling on the rim wall—a tube hooked over the lip. It was molded, flattened against the rim wall, and was made of the same translucent gray scrith. The probe eased toward it until the camera was looking up into a pipe a quarter-mile across.
“Much of the Ringworld’s design shows a brute-force approach,” the Hindmost was saying. And the probe moved alongside the pipe, over the lip, and down the outer face of the rim wall to where the pipe disappeared into the foamed material that formed a meteor shield for the Ringworld’s underside.
“I see,” Louis said. “And it wasn’t working?”
“No. I tried to trace the pipe and had some success.”
The scene jumped. Now it showed dark racing motion as the probe cruised a good distance outward from the Ringworld. Inverted landscape passed above, seen by infrared light. The probe slowed, stopped, moved upward.
If a meteor struck the Ringworld, it had to fall first from interstellar space; and it struck with that velocity plus the Ringworld’s own seven hundred and seventy miles per second. A meteor had struck here. The plasma cloud had drawn a savage gouge across hundreds of miles of sea bottom, vaporizing the protective foam. There in the gouge was a length of pipe a few hundred feet in diameter. It led up into the sea bottom.
“A recycling system,” Louis murmured.
The puppeteer said, “Without some counterbalance to erosion, the Ringworld’s topsoil would all be in the sea bottoms in a few thousand years. I expect the pipes ran from the sea bottoms along the underside and up over the rim wall. They deposit sea-bottom sludge on the spill mountains. Much of the water would boil away in the near vacuum at the peak, thirty miles high. The mountain gradually collapses under its own weight. Material moves from the rim walls inward, carried by winds and rivers.”
Chmeee said, “Mere supposition, but plausible. Hindmost, where is your probe now?”
“I intend to bring it out from under the Ringworld and reinsert it into the rim transport system.”
“Do that. Does the probe have deep-radar?”
“Yes, but the range is short.”
“Deep-radar the spill mountains. The spill mountains are ... perhaps twenty to thirty thousand miles apart? Thus we may find on the order of fifty thousand spill mountains along both rim walls. A handful of those would make a fine hiding place for the Repair Center.”
“But why should the Repair Center be hidden?”
Chmeee made a rude noise. “What if the subject races should revolt? What of an invasion? Of course the Repair Center is hidden, and fortified too. Search every spill mountain.”
“Very well. I will scan the starboard rim wall in one Ringworld rotation.”
“Scan the other rim afterward.”
Louis said, “Keep the cameras going too. We’re still looking for attitude jets ... though I’m starting to think they had something else going.”
The Hindmost clicked off. Louis turned to the window. It had been tickling at his attention all along: a pale thread that curved along the edge of the swamp, straighter than a river. Now he pointed out the barely visible pair of dots moving along its length. “I think we need a closer look at that. Why don’t you take us down?”
It was a road. From a hundred feet up it was rough-surfaced, stony stuff: white stone poured in a stream. Louis said, “The Machine People, I presume. Shall we track those vehicles?”
“Let us wait until we are closer to the floating city.”
Giving up a present opportunity seemed silly, but Louis was afraid to object. The kzin’s tension was thick enough to smell.
The road avoided the low, wet areas. It seemed in good repair. Chmeee followed it at low speed, a hundred feet up.
Once they passed a handful of buildings, the biggest of which seemed to be a chemical plant. Several times they watched boxy vehicles pass below them. They were seen only once. A box stopped suddenly, and humanoid shapes spilled out, ran in circles, then produced sticks which they pointed at the lander. A moment later they were out of sight.
There were great pale shapes in the wet jungle. They couldn’t be glacier-scoured boulders; not here. Louis wondered if they might be tremendous fungi. He stopped wondering when he saw one move. He tried to point it out to Chmeee. The kzin ignored him.
The road curved away to antispinward as it approached a range of craggy mountains; it jogged through a notch in the range, rather than carving its own path, then jogged right to run alongside the swamp again.
But Chmeee swerved left and accelerated. The lander streaked along the portward side of the range, trailing a plume of fire. Abruptly the kzin spun the lander around, braked, and set down at the foot of a granite cliff.
He said, “Let us step outside.”
The scrith shell of the mountain would block the Hindmost’s microphones, but they’d feel still safer outside the lander. Louis followed the kzin.
The day was bright and sunny—too bright, as this arc of the Ringworld approached its nearest point to the sun. A stiff warm wind was blowing. The kzin asked, “Louis, were you about to tell the Hindmost of the Ringworld engineers?”
“Probably. Why not?”
“I assume we’ve come to the same conclusion.”
“Doubtful. What would a kzin know of Pak protectors?”
“I know everything in the records of the Smithsonian Institute, what little there is. I have studied the testimony of the asteroid belt miner, Jack Brennan, and holos of the mummified remains of the alien Phssthpok and of the cargo pod from his ship.”
“Chmeee, how did you get hold of that stuff?”
“Does it matter? I was a diplomat. The existence of the Pak has been a Patriarch’s Secret for generations, but any kzin who must deal with humans is required to study the records. We learn to know our enemy. I may know more of your ancestry than you do. And I surmise that the Ringworld was built by Pak.”
Six hundred years before Louis Wu’s birth, a Pak protector arrived in Sol system on a mission of mercy. It was through this Phssthpok, via the Belter Jack Brennan, that historians learned the rest of the story.
The Pak were native to a world in the galactic core. They lived their lives in three stages: child, breeder, protector. The adults or breeders were just intelligent enough to swing a club or throw a stone.
In middle age, if they lived long enough, Pak breeders developed a compulsion to gorge on the plant called tree-of-life. A symbiotic virus in the plant triggered the change. The breeder lost its gonads and teeth. Its skull and brain expanded. Lips and gums fused into a hard, blunt beak. Its skin wrinkled and thickened and hardened. Its joints became enlarged, offering a larger moment arm to the muscles, increasing their strength. A two-chambered heart developed in the groin.
Phssthpok came tracking a Pak colony ship that had reached Earth more than two million years earlier.
The Pak were in a constant state of war. Previous colonies to nearby worlds in the galactic core had always been overrun by subsequent waves of ships. Perhaps that was the reason this ship had come so far.
The colony was large and well-equipped, and guided by beings tougher and smarter than humans. It had failed nonetheless. Tree-of-life grew in Earth’s soil, but the virus didn’t. The protectors had died out, leaving a lost population of Pak breeders to fend for themselves ... and leaving records of a cry for help that had crossed thirty thousand light-years to the Pak home world.
Phssthpok found those records in an ancient Pak library. And Phssthpok cr
ossed thirty thousand light-years, all alone in a slower-than-light craft, seeking Sol system. The resources that built that craft, in knowledge and minds and materials, were resources Phssthpok had conquered and held by war. His cargo pod was jammed with tree-of-life roots and seeds, and bags of thallium oxide. His own research had discovered the need for that unusual soil additive.
It might have occurred to him that the breeders would mutate.
Among the Pak a mutant stood no chance. If the children smelled wrong to their protector forefathers, they were killed. On Earth—perhaps Phssthpok counted on a lower mutation rate, this far from the savage cosmic-ray density among the core suns. Perhaps he took his chances.
The breeders had mutated. By Phssthpok’s time they showed little resemblance to the Pak breeder—barring certain changes at middle age, when the production of eggs stopped in females, and when both sexes showed wrinkling of skin, lost teeth, swelling of joints, and a restlessness and dissatisfaction that was all that remained of the hunger for tree-of-life. Later in life, heart attacks would result from the lack of the second heart.
Phssthpok learned none of this. The rescuer died almost painlessly, with no more than a suspicion that those he intended to rescue had become monsters, and had no need of him at all.
Such was the tale that Jack Brennan told to United Nations representatives before his disappearance. But Phssthpok was dead by then, and Jack Brennan’s testimony was doubtful. He had eaten tree-of-life. He had become a monster; his braincase in particular was expanded and distorted. Perhaps he had become mad too.
It was as if a load of spinach noodles had been spilled all over this rocky area. Strips of greenery, fuzzy to the touch, hugged the ground in places where dirt had packed itself between the boulders. Clouds of insects buzzed around their ankles, staying within inches of the ground.
“Pak protectors,” said Louis. “That’s what I thought, but I’ve been having trouble making myself believe it.”