by Larry Niven
Louis was holding his breath. He hoped Chmeee was doing the same. It felt that hot: hot enough to sear the lungs. The floor was tilted four or five degrees. Looking out the window was a mistake: it froze him in disbelief. In the murky dark outside: a questing sand shark? Sea water?
He’d lost two or three seconds. He took the stairs more carefully than Chmeee had, fighting the need to breathe, snorting puffs of breath through his nose to clear the oven-hot air that worked its way in anyway. He smelled char, staleness, smoke, heat.
Chmeee was nursing burnt hands; the fur puffed up hugely around his neck. The handles on the lockers were metal. Louis wrapped the towel around his hands and began opening lockers. Chmeee used his own towel to heave out the contents. Pressure suits. Flying belts. Disintegrator. Superconductor cloth. Louis picked his pressure suit helmet out of that and turned on the air feed, wrapped his towel around his neck for padding and donned the helmet. The wind that blew around his face was merely warm. He pulled in sweet air, his chest heaving.
Chmeee’s suit didn’t have a separate helmet; he had to put it on and seal it up. The rasp of his sudden panting was fearsome in Louis’s earphones.
“We’re underwater,” Louis gasped. “Why is it so futzy hot?”
“Ask me later. Help me carry this.” Chmeee scoop up his flying belt and impact armor, a spool of black wire and a healthy share of the superconductor cloth, and the heavy two-handed disintegrator. He made for the stairs. Louis staggered after him, with Prill’s flying belt and flashlight-laser and two pressure suits and sets of impact armor. The meat of him was beginning to broil.
Chmeee stopped before the flight-deck instruments. Bubbling dark-green water showed through the windows. Small fish wove paths within an extensive seaweed-forest. The kzin puffed, “There, the dials ... record your answer. Teela poured heat at me in ... a blast of microwaves. Life support failed. Scrith repulsers failed. The lander sank. Water stopped ... the microwaves. Lander stayed hot because ... heat pumps burned out first ... insulation too good. We can’t use the lander now.”
“Futz that.” Louis used the stepping disc.
He dropped what he was carrying. Sweat was streaming into his eyes and mouth. He pulled the hot helmet off and sucked cool air. Harkabeeparolyn had her shoulder under his armpit and was half carrying him toward the bed, murmuring soothing City Builder words.
Chmeee hadn’t appeared.
Louis pulled himself loose. He dropped the helmet over his head and staggered back to the stepping disc.
Chmeee was working the controls. He pushed his own gear into Louis’s arms. “Take this. Join you momentarily.”
“Aye, aye.”
Louis was half into his pressure suit when the kzin reappeared in Needle. The kzin stripped off his own suit. “We are in no great hurry, Louis. Hindmost, the lander is useless. I set it to take off on fusion motors and fly to Mons Olympus, purely as a diversion. Teela may waste a few seconds destroying it.”
The microphone answered. “Good. I can report some progress, but I may not show it to you. We know that Teela can tap my communications.”
“Well?”
The Hindmost flicked in from the flight deck. Now he could speak without mechanical aids. “Most of my instruments are useless, of course. I do know our orientation. There is a massive source of neutrino emission, probably a fusion plant, some two hundred miles to port of spinward. Deep-radar shows cavities all around us. Most are merely room-sized. Some are tremendous, and these hold heavy machinery. I believe I have identified the empty cavern that held the repair crew’s scaffolding, from its size and shape and the cradles on the floor. Its exit is a massive curved door in the wall of the Map, hidden by the waterfall. I found storage for what must be patches for major meteor strikes, and another hatch. Small spacecraft, possibly warcraft—I can’t tell—and yet another hatch. There are six hatches in all beneath the waterfall. I managed to—“
“Hindmost, you were to find Teela Brown!”
“Did I hear you counsel Louis Wu to patience?”
“Louis Wu is human; he knows patience. You, you grazing beast, you have far too much.”
“And you propose to murder the human variant of a Pak protector. I hope you are not expecting some kind of duel? Scream and leap, and Teela will fight bare-handed? We must fight Teela with our minds. Patience, kzin. Remember the stakes.”
“Proceed.”
“I managed to locate the mapping of Mons Olympus, eight hundred miles to antispinward of port of us. I surmise that Teela kept a heavy laser firing on Needle, or some such similar artifice, to keep us in stasis while she towed us eight hundred miles. I cannot guess why.”
Louis said, “She towed us to where she had molten rock ready to pour. That place will turn out to be the site of her hypothetical multiple murder. We still have to figure out how. Tanj, maybe she’s overestimated our intelligence!”
“Speak for yourself, Louis. Likely it is below us.” One puppeteer head arced upward. “Nearly above us, by ship’s orientation, is a complex of rooms in which a good deal of electrical activity can be sensed, not to mention enough pulsed neutrino emission to indicate half a dozen deep-radar sets.
“I also found a hemisphere thirty-eight point eight miles in diameter, with another neutrino source partly up the wall. A moving source. Output is random, as with a fusion plant. It hasn’t moved far during the few minutes you’ve been gone, but it might traverse the full one hundred and eighty degrees of dome in fifteen hours plus or minus three. Meat-eater, warrior, does that suggest anything to you?”
“An artificial sun. Agriculture. Where?”
“Twenty five hundred miles toward the starboard edge of the Map. But since you will be invading through Mons Olympus, you must search twelve degrees to antispinward of starboard. There may be walls to penetrate. Did you bring the hand disintegrator?”
“Not being totally nonsentient, I did. Hindmost, if the lander should reach Mons Olympus, then we may exit through the stepping discs and straight out the lander’s cargo door. But Teela will shoot it down first.”
“Why should she? We are not aboard yet. She has deep-radar; she will know that.”
“Uurrr. Then she will track the lander, wait until we appear, and destroy us then. Is this the sapience that aids your people to sneak up on a leaf?”
“Yes. You will enter Mons Olympus hours before the lander arrives. I set the probe to follow us. There is a stepping-disc receiver in the probe. Of course you will have no way to return to Needle.”
“Uurrr. It sounds workable.”
“What equipment will you use?”
“Pressure suits, flying belts, flashlight-lasers, and the disintegrator. I also brought this.” Chmeee indicated the superconductor cloth. “Teela doesn’t know of it. That may help us. We can sew it into garments to cover our pressure suits. You, Harkabeeparolyn, can you sew?”
“No.”
Louis said, “I can.”
“So can I,” said the boy. “You have to show me what you want.”
“I will. It need not be elegant. We must hope that Teela will use lasers rather than projectiles or a war ax. Our impact armor will not fit over pressure suits.”
“Not quite true,” Louis said. “For instance, Chmeee, your impact armor would fit over my pressure suit.”
“Swaddled like that, you could not move fast enough.”
“Maybe not. Harkabeeparolyn, how are you holding up?”
“I’m confused, Louis. Are you battling with or against the protector?”
“She’s fighting us, but she’s hoping to lose,” Louis said gently. “She can’t say so. The rules she plays by are built into her brain and glands. Can you believe any of that?”
Harkabeeparolyn hesitated. Then
“The protector acted like—like somebody it feared was supervising everything it said and did. It was like that in Panth Building when I was being trained.”
“That’s the way it is. The supervisor is Teela herself. Can you fight a protector, knowing that the whole world could die if you lose?”
“I think so. At worst I may distract the protector.”
“Okay. We’re taking you with us. We’ve got equipment that was meant for another City Builder woman. I’ll teach you as much as I can about what you’ll be wearing. Chmeee, she’ll have your impact suit between her pressure suit and the superconductor cloth.”
“She may have Halrloprillalar’s flashlight-laser. I lost mine through carelessness. I will carry the disintegrator. I also know how to rig spare batteries to release their power in a millisecond.”
“These batteries are my people’s. We designed them for safety,” the Hindmost said dubiously.
“Let me see them anyway. Next you must close off all avenues of communication. We must expect Teela to eat and return before we finish here. I wish we had more time. Louis, show Kawaresksenjajok how to sew our covering garments. Use superconductor for thread.”
“Yeah, I thought of that. Tanj, I wish we had more time.”
They bounced toward the stepping disc, swaddled in gear.
Harkabeeparolyn was shapeless in layers of cloth. Her face within the helmet was tense with concentration. Pressure suit, flying belt, laser—she’d be lucky to remember how to work what she was wearing, let alone fight. From a distance it might be Louis Wu under all that cloth. Teela might hesitate. Anything might count.
She was gone. Louis followed, switching on his flying belt.
Chmeee, Harkabeeparolyn, Louis Wu: they floated like balls of black tissue paper above the rust-colored slope of Mons Olympus. The probe wasn’t floating. It must have hovered until it ran out of fuel, then dropped and rolled. It was badly battered. The stepping disc had survived.
The dials below Louis’s chin told him that the air was very thin, very dry, rich in carbon dioxide. A good imitation of Mars, but this was nearly Earth’s gravity. How had the martians survived? They must have adapted, buoyed by the sea of dust they lived in. Stronger than their extinct cousins ... Stick to business!
The crater rim was forty miles upslope. It took them fifteen minutes. Harkabeeparolyn trailed. Her flying was jerky; she must have been constantly fiddling with the controls.
The hatch at the bottom of the crater was rock-and-rust-colored and rough-surfaced. It had exploded inward, downward.
They dropped into darkness.
Their flying belts held them. That shouldn’t have worked. The repulser units were repelling flat scrith plates overhead and underneath. But the scrith ceiling was not load-bearing. It was much thinner than the Ringworld floor below them.
Louis switched to infrared (hoping Harkabeeparolyn would remember; otherwise she’d be blind). Heat radiated from below—a small, bright circle. Their surroundings were vast, indistinct. Columns of discs, and slender ladders alongside, along three walls. And rising up the middle of the great room, a tilted tower of toroids. They fell past it, ring by ring. A linear accelerator, aimed up through Mons Olympus? Then those discs could be one-protector fighting platforms waiting to be launched into the sky.
A hole had been punched downward through the floor. They dropped through. Harkabeeparolyn was still with them. The warm spot was still below, growing large.
Twelve floors, close together, each with a hole punched through. Needle had cut quite a swath. Even the last of the ruptures was a big one ... and infrared light glared through it. The chamber below was just short of red-hot. Chmeee dropped into it well ahead of Louis. A moment later he floated back up, then settled on the floor above.
They were maintaining radio silence. Louis imitated Chmeee: he dropped through the last hole and found himself in a blaze of infrared. Enormous heat had been released here. And the tunnel leading away glowed more brightly still.
Louis rose to join Chmeee. He waved at Harkabeeparolyn, and she settled beside him with a thump.
Yeah. Needle had been towed away through that tunnel, with enough heat played on the ship to trigger the stasis field. Easy to follow ... except that they’d broil. Now what?
Now follow Chmeee, who was floating away at speed. What did he have in mind? If only they could talk!
They were moving through residential space. It was confining for people trying to fly at speed. Cubicles with no doors, or else doors like the doors on a safe; never a curtain for mere privacy. How did Pak protectors live? Glimpses into cubicles showed spartan simplicity. On the floor of a cubicle, a skeleton with swollen joints and a crested skull. One great room was full of what must have been exercise equipment, including a jungle gym that looked a mile high.
They flew for hours. Sometimes there were miles of straight corridor. They could take these at high speed. At other times they had to pick their way.
Doors blocked them. Chmeee dealt with that: the doors sprayed away from the disintegrator beam in a cloud of monatomic dust.
Dust puffed from one big door, and then the dust stopped coming and the door was still there. A blank rectangle. It must be scrith, Louis thought.
Chmeee took them left, around whatever that door guarded. Louis dropped behind Harkabeeparolyn and flew backward, watching for Teela Brown to emerge. The big door remained closed. If it hid Teela Brown, she couldn’t detect them through scrith. Even protectors had limits.
They could have been following the tunnel to Needle, moving above it, but they weren’t. With Needle’s position to establish their orientation, Chmeee was leading them about twelve degrees to antispinward of starboard ... toward a great hemispherical cavity with a moving neutrino source halfway up one wall. Good enough.
They veered right when they could. They passed another scrith door, but it wasn’t blocking their path. Whatever they had circled, it was big. An emergency control room? They might want to find it again.
Fourteen hours had passed, and almost a thousand miles, before they stopped to rest. They slept in a land of waist-high metal doughnut centered in a vast expanse of floor. Purpose unknown—but nothing could sneak up on them. Louis was getting hungry for something besides nutrient syrup. He wondered: had Teela eaten and gone about her business and had time to grow hungry again?
They flew on. They were out of the residential section now, though there were still cubicles here and there, with empty food storage bins and plumbing and nice flat floors for catnaps. But these were tucked away in huge chambers that might hold anything or nothing.
They flew around the perimeter of what must have been a tremendous pump, judging from the racket that pounded their eardrums until they had left it behind. Chmeee led them left, and blasted through a wall, and took them into a map room so large that Louis shrank within himself. When Chmeee blasted the far wall the huge hologram blazed and died, and they moved on.
Close now. They slept on top of a fusion generator that wasn’t running. Four hours; then they moved on.
A corridor, and light beyond, and wind blowing them onward.
They emerged into the light.
The sun was just past zenith in a nearly cloudless sky. An endless sunlit landscape stretched before them: ponds, groves of trees, fields of grain, and rows of dark green vegetables. Louis felt like a target. A coil of black wire was taped to his shoulder. Now he pulled it free and flung it away. One end was still attached to his suit. It would radiate heat if she fired now.
Where was Teela Brown?
Not here, it seemed.
Chmeee led them across a range of small hills. He arced down beside a stagnant pond. Louis followed, with Harkabeeparolyn behind him. The kzin was opening his spacesuit. As Louis touched down, Chmeee
held both palms outward, then mimed holding his suit tightly shut.
Don’t open your suit. He meant it for Harkabeeparolyn. She’d been warned, but Louis watched her till he was sure she wouldn’t.
Now what?
The land was too flat. Hiding places looked scarce—groves of trees, a handful of soft-edged hills behind them: too obvious. Hide underwater? Maybe. Louis began reeling in the superconductor wire he’d thrown away. They probably had hours to prepare, but when Teela came, she’d come like lightning.
Chmeee had stripped himself naked. Now he put the suit of superconductor cloth back on. He went to Harkabeeparolyn and helped her remove his own impact armor, and donned it. Leaving her that much more helpless. Louis did not interfere.
Hide behind the sun? The small, fusion-powered, neutrino-emitting sun—at least it was no obvious hiding place. Could it be done? With superconductor wire trailing into a pond, he’d only be at the boiling point of water. Tanj, that was clever! It would even have worked, nearer the martian surface, where water would boil at some reasonable temperature. But they were too near the Ringworld floor; air pressure was nearly at sea level.
They might wait for days. The water in the suits would hold out, and the sugar syrup, and Louis Wu’s patience, probably. Chmeee was already out of his suit. There might even be prey for him.
But what of Harkabeeparolyn? If she opened her suit she’d be sniffing tree-of-life.
Chmeee had reinflated his pressure suit. Now he pulled his flying belt over it. He set a rock on each toe, then fiddled with the flying belt until it was straining upward. Now, that was clever. Kick the rocks away and flip the thruster on, and an empty suit would fly to the attack.
Louis hadn’t thought of anything comparable.
Maybe Teela came here only every couple of weeks. Maybe she stored tree-of-life roots elsewhere.
What did tree-of-life look like, anyway? These glossy clumps of dark-green leaves? Louis pulled one up. There were fat roots underneath, vaguely like yams or sweet potatoes. He didn’t recognize the plant, but he didn’t recognize anything that lived here. Most of what lived on the Ringworld, and everything here, must have been imported from the galactic core.