The Ringworld Engineers

by Larry Niven

  They searched Fortaralisplyar, then Louis. They found his flashlight, tested it, gave it back. They puzzled over his translator until Louis said, “That speaks for me.”

  Filistranorlry jumped. “So it does! Will you sell that?” He was speaking to Fortaralisplyar, who answered, “It is not mine.”

  Louis said, “I would be mute without it.” Orlry’s master seemed to accept this.

  The water condenser was a dip in the center of Orlry’s broad roof. The access tubes below were too small for Louis. Even if he took off his armor he wouldn’t fit, and he didn’t intend to do that. “What do you use for repairmen? Mice?”

  “Hanging People,” Filistranorlry said. “We must rent their services. Chilb Building was to have sent them by now. Do you see any other problems?”

  “Yes.” By now the machinery was familiar enough; Louis had repaired three buildings and failed at a fourth. He could see what ought to be a pair of contacts. He looked for the dust below them, and it wasn’t there. “Were there earlier attempts at repair?”

  “I assume so. How would we know, after five thousand falans?”

  “We’ll wait for the repairmen. I hope they can follow orders.” Tanj! Somebody long dead had neatened things up by blowing the telltale dust tracks away. But Louis was sure he could get his arms in there ...

  Filistranorlry asked, “Would you care to see our museum? You’ve bought that right.”

  Louis had never been a weapons buff. He recognized some of the principles, if not the forms, behind the killing tools in the glass cases and behind the glass walls. Most of them used projectiles or explosions or both. Some would throw strings of tiny bullets that exploded like small firecrackers in enemy flesh. The few lasers were massive and cumbersome. Once they must have been mounted on tractors or floating platforms, but those had been scavenged for use elsewhere.

  A City Builder arrived with half a dozen workmen. The Hanging People stood as high as Louis’s floating ribs. Their heads seemed too large for their bodies; their toes were long and dexterous, and their fingers nearly brushed the floor. “This is probably a waste of time,” one said.

  “Do it right and you’ll be paid anyway,” Louis told him. The little man sneered.

  They wore armless gowns covered in pockets, the pockets heavy with tools. When the soldiers wanted to search them, they stripped off the gowns and let the soldiers search those. Perhaps they didn’t like to be touched.

  So small. Louis whispered to Fortaralisplyar, “Does your species do rishathra with those?”

  The City Builder chuckled. “Yes, but carefully.”

  The Hanging People clustered around Louis Wu’s shoulders, peering, as he reached into the access tube. He wore the insulated gloves he’d borrowed from Mar Korssil. “These are what the contacts look like. Fasten the cloth strip thus ... and thus. You should find six pairs of contacts. There may be a worm track of dust below.”

  After they had disappeared around the curve of the access tube, he told the masters of Orlry and Lyar, “We’ll never know it if they make a mistake. I wish we could inspect their work.” But he did not mention his other fear.

  The Hanging People presently emerged. They all trooped up onto the roof: workers, soldiers, masters, and Louis Wu. There they watched as mist formed and condensed and water ran toward the center of the dip.

  And six Hanging People now knew how to repair water condensers with strips of black cloth.

  “I want to buy that black cloth,” Filistranorlry said.

  The Hanging People and their City Builder master were already disappearing down the stairwell. Filistranorlry and ten soldiers blocked Louis and Fortaralisplyar from that escape route.

  “I don’t intend to sell,” Louis said.

  The silver-haired soldier said, “I hope to keep you here until I can persuade you to sell. If pressed, I will insist that you sell the talking box too.”

  Louis had half expected this. “Fortaralisplyar, would Orlry Building keep you here by force?”

  Lyar’s master looked Orlry’s master in the eye as he said, “No, Louis. The complications would be unpleasant. The lesser buildings would join to free me. The Ten would become the Nine rather than face a boycott on guests.”

  Filistranorlry laughed. “The lesser buildings would grow thirsty ...” and his smile vanished as Fortaralisplyar’s grew. Lyar Building now had water to give away.

  “You could not hold me. Guests would be pushed from the ramps. The dramas in Chkar and the facilities in Panth would be closed to you—“

  “Go, then.”

  “I take Louis.”

  “You do not.”

  Louis said, “Take the money and go. It’ll make things easier for all concerned.” His hand was in his pocket, on the flashlight-laser.

  Filistranorlry held out a small bag. Fortaralisplyar took it, counted the contents. He walked through the soldiers and descended the stairway. When he was out of sight, Louis pulled the hood of the impact suit over his head.

  “I offer a high price. Twelve -----“ something untranslated. “You would not be cheated,” Filistranorlry was saying. But Louis backed toward the edge of the roof. He saw Filistranorlry signal to the soldiers, and he ran.

  The edge of the roof was a chest-high fence: zigzag iron spokes, carved to resemble elbow root. The shadow farm was far below. Louis ran along the fence toward the walkway. The soldiers were close, but Filistranorlry was standing back and firing his pistol. The roar was disconcerting, even terrifying. A slug slammed into Louis’s ankle; the suit went rigid, and he rolled like a tumbled statue, picked himself up, and ran again. As two soldiers threw themselves at him, he swung over the fence and dropped.

  Fortaralisplyar was on the walkway. He turned, startled.

  Louis landed flat on his face, in an impact suit gone rigid as steel. The form-fitting coffin supported him, but he was still stunned. Hands helped him to his feet before he really wanted to get up. Fortaralisplyar put his shoulder under Louis’s armpit and began walking them away.

  “Get away. They might shoot,” Louis gasped.

  “They would not dare. Are you hurt? Your nose is bleeding.”

  “It was worth it.”

  Chapter 21 -

  The Library

  They entered the Library via a small vestibule in the bottom of the cone, the tip.

  Behind a wide, massive desk, two librarians worked at reading screens: bulky machines, styled like a cluster of boxes, that used book tapes rolling through a reader. The librarians looked like a priest and priestess in identical blue robes with jaggedly cut collars. It was some minutes before the woman looked up.

  Her hair was pure, clean white. Perhaps she’d been born with white hair, because she wasn’t old. A woman of Earth would have been about to take her first shot of boosterspice. She was straight and slender, and pretty, Louis thought. Flat-chested, of course, but nicely built. Halrloprillalar had taught Louis to find a bald head and a well-shaped skull sexy. If she would smile ... but even to Fortaralisplyar she was rude and imperious. “Yes?”

  “I am Fortaralisplyar. Have you my contract?”

  She tapped at the keyboard of the reading machine. “Yes. Is this the one?”

  “He is.”

  Now she looked at Louis. “Luweewu, can you understand me?”

  “I can, with the aid of this.”

  When the translator spoke, her calm cracked, but only for a moment. She said, “I am Harkabeeparolyn. Your master has purchased your right to unlimited research for three days, with an option to purchase an additional three days. You may roam the Library at will, barring the residential sections, the doors marked in gold. You may use any machine unless it is marked thus.” She showed him: an orange tic-tac-toe gri
d. “To use these, you need help. Come to me or to anyone whose collar is cut like mine. You may use the dining room. For sleep or a bath you must return to Lyar Building.”

  “Good.”

  The librarian looked puzzled. Louis was a little startled himself. Why had he said that with such force? It struck him that Lyar Building felt more like home to him than the apartment on Canyon ever had.

  Fortaralisplyar paid out silver coins, bowed to Louis, and departed. The librarian turned back to her reading screen. (Harkabeeparolyn. He was tired of six-syllable names, but he’d better memorize it.) Harkabeeparolyn glanced around when Louis said, “There’s a place I’d like to find.”

  “In the Library?”

  “I hope so. I saw a place like it long ago. You stood at the center of a circle, and the circle was the world. The screen at the center turned, and you could make any part of the world show big—“

  “We have a map room. Climb the stairs all the way up.” She turned away.

  A tight spiral of metal stairs wound up the Library’s axis. Anchored only at the top and bottom, it was springy under his weight as he climbed. He passed doors marked in gold, all closed. Higher up, arched openings led to banks of reading screens with chairs. Louis counted forty-six City Builders using reading screens, and two elderly Machine People, and a compact, very hairy male you-name-it, and a ghoul woman all alone in one room.

  The top floor was the map room. He knew when he had reached it.

  They had found the first map room in an abandoned floating palace. Its wall was a ring of blue mottled with white. There had been globes of ten oxygen-atmosphere worlds, and a screen that would show a magnified view. But the scenes it showed were thousands of years old. They showed a bustling Ringworld civilization: glowing cities; craft zipping through rectangular loops along the rim wall; aircraft as big as this library: spacecraft much bigger.

  They had not been looking for a Repair Center then. They’d been looking for a way off the Ringworld. Clearly the old tapes had been almost useless.

  They’d been in too much of a hurry. So: twenty-three years later, in another kind of desperation, we try again ...

  Louis Wu emerged from the stairwell with the Ringworld glowing around him. Where the sun would have been, there was Louis Wu’s head. The map was two feet tall and almost four hundred feet in diameter. The shadow squares were the same height, but much closer in, hovering over a thousand square feet of jet black floor flecked with thousands of stars. The ceiling, too, was black spattered with stars.

  Louis walked toward one of the shadow squares, and through it. Holograms, right, as with that earlier map room. But this time there were no globes of Earthlike worlds.

  He turned to inspect the back of a shadow square. No detail showed: nothing but a dead-black rectangle, slightly curved.

  The magnification screen was in use.

  A three-foot-by-two-foot rectangular screen, with controls below, was mounted on a circular track that ran between the shadow squares and the Ringworld. The boy had an expanded view of one of the mounted Bussard ramjets. It showed as a glare of bluish light. The boy was trying to squint past it.

  He must have just reached adolescence. Very fine brown hair covered his entire scalp, thickening at the back. He wore a librarian’s blue robes. His collar was wide and square, almost a cape, with a single notch cut into it.

  Louis asked, “May I look over your shoulder?”

  The boy turned. His features were small and nearly unreadable, as with any City Builder. It made him look older. “Are you allowed such knowledge?”

  “Lyar Building has purchased full privileges for me.”

  “Oh.” The boy turned back. “We can’t see anything anyway. In two days they’ll turn off the flames.”

  “What are you watching?”

  “The repair crew.”

  Louis squinted into the glare. A storm of blue-white light filled the screen, with darkness at its core. The attitude jet was a dim pinkish dot at the center of the darkness.

  Electromagnetic lines of force gathered the hot hydrogen of the solar wind, guided and compressed it to fusion temperatures, and fired it back at the sun. Machinery strove with single-minded futility to hold the Ringworld against the gravity of its star. But this was all that showed: blue-white light and a pinkish dot on the line of the rim wall.

  “They’re almost finished,” the boy said. “We thought they’d call us for help, but they never came.” He sounded wistful.

  “Maybe you don’t have the tools to hear them calling.” Louis tried to keep his voice calm. Repair crew! “They must be finished anyway. There aren’t any more motors.”

  “No. Look.” The boy set the view zipping along the rim wall. The view stopped, jarringly, well beyond the blue glare. Louis saw bits of metal falling along the rim wall.

  He studied them until he was certain. Bars of metal, a great spool-shaped cylinder—those were the dismantled components of what he had seen through Needle’s telescope. That was the scaffolding for remounting the Ringworld’s attitude jets.

  The repair crew must have decelerated this equipment to solar orbital speed by using a segment of the rim transport system. But how did they plan to reverse the procedure? The machinery would have to be accelerated to Ringworld rotational speed at its destination.

  By friction with the atmosphere? Those materials could be as durable as scrith. If so, heating would not be a problem.

  “And here.” The view skidded again, spinward along the rim wall to the spaceport ledge. The four great City Builder ships showed clear. Hot Needle of Inquiry was a speck. Louis would have missed it if he hadn’t known just where to look: a mile from the only ship that still sported a Bussard ramjet around its waist.

  “There, you see?” The boy pointed to the pair of copper-colored toroids. “There’s only one motor left. When the repair crew mounts that, they’ll be finished.”

  Megatons of construction equipment were falling down the rim wall, no doubt accompanied by hordes of construction men of unknown species, all aimed at Needle’s parking space. The Hindmost would not be pleased.

  “Finished, yes,” Louis said. “It won’t be enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “Never mind. How long have they been working, this repair team? Where did they come from?”

  “Nobody wants to tell me anything,” the boy said. “Flup. Odorous flup. What’s everybody so excited about? Why am I asking you? You don’t know either.”

  Louis let that pass. “Who are they? How did they find out about the danger?”

  “Nobody knows. We didn’t know anything about them till they started putting up the machines.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Eight falans.”

  Fast work, Louis thought. Just over a year and a half, plus whatever time it took them to get ready. Who were they? Intelligent, quick, decisive, not overwhelmed by large projects and large numbers—they might almost be ... but the protectors were long gone. They had to be.

  “Have they done other repairs?”

  “Teacher Wilp thinks they’ve been unblocking the spillpipes. We’ve seen fog around some of the spill mountains. Wouldn’t that be a big thing, unblocking a spillpipe?”

  Louis thought about it. “Big, all right. If you could get the sea-bottom dredges going again ... you’d still have to heat the pipes. They run under the world. The sea-bottom ooze in a blocked pipe would freeze, I think.”

  “Flup,” said the boy.

  “What?”

  “The brown stuff that comes out of a spillpipe is called flup.”

  “Oh.”

  “Where are you from?”

  Louis grinned. “I came from the stars, in this.�
� He reached past the boy’s shoulder to point out the speck that was Hot Needle of Inquiry. The boy’s eyes grew big.

  More clumsily than the boy had, Louis ran the view along the path the lander had taken since leaving the rim wall. He found a continent-sized expanse of white cloud where the sunflower patch had been. Farther to port was a wide green swamp, then a river that had cut itself a new bed, leaving the old as a twisting brown track through the yellow-brown desert. He followed the dry riverbed. He showed the boy the city of vampires; the boy nodded.

  The boy wanted to believe. Men from the stars, come to help us! Yet he was afraid to look gullible. Louis grinned at him and continued.

  The land turned green again. The Machine People road was easy to follow; in most places the land was clearly different to either side. Here the river curved back to join its old bed. He ran the scale up again and was looking down on the floating city. “Us,” he said.

  “I’ve seen that. Tell me about the vampires.”

  Louis hesitated. But after all, the boy’s species were this world’s experts at interspecies sex. “They can make you want to do rishathra with them. When you do, you get bitten on the neck.” He showed the boy the healed wound in his throat. “Chmeee killed the vampire that, uh, attacked me.”

  “Why didn’t the vampires get him?”

  “Chmeee’s like nothing in the world. He’s as likely to be seduced by a sausage plant.”

  “We make perfume from vampires,” the boy said.

  “What?” Something wrong with the translator?

  The boy smiled too wisely. “One day you’ll see. I’ve got to go. Will you be here later?”

  Louis nodded.

  “What’s your name? Mine’s Kawaresksenjajok.”

  “Luweewu.”

  The boy left by the stairwell. Louis stood frowning at the screen.

  Perfume? The smell of vampires in Panth Building ... and now Louis remembered the night Halrloprillalar came to his bed, twenty-three years ago. She’d been trying to control him. She’d said so. Had she used vampire scent on him?