by Larry Niven
That shot struck home. “I’ll tell you about current addiction sometime. Not now.”
She studied him over the metal snout of her weapon. Despite that fringe of black beard along her jaw, she looked human enough … but widened. Her face was almost perfectly square. Louis was having trouble reading her face. That was predictable; the human face has evolved as a signaling device, and Vala’s evolution diverged from his.
He asked, “What will you do next?”
“I must report the deaths … and give over the artifacts from the desert city. There is a bounty, but the empire claims City Builder artifacts.”
“I tell you again that they are mine.”
“Drive.”
***
The desert was showing patches of greenery, and a shadow square sliced the sun, when Valavirgillin bade him stop. He was glad to. He was exhausted with the battering of the road and the endless task of keeping the vehicle aimed.
Vala said, “You will– dinner.”
They were used to gaps in the translation. “I missed that word.”
“You contrive to heat food until it can be eaten. Louis, can’t you–?”
“Cook.” She wasn’t likely to have frictionless pans and a microwave oven, was she? Or measuring cups, refined sugar, butter, any spice he could recognize—“No.”
“I will cook. Make me a fire. What do you eat?”
“Meat, some plants, fruit, eggs, fish. Fruit I can eat not cooked.”
“Just like my people, except for fish. Good. Step out and wait.”
She locked him out of the vehicle, then crawled into the back. Louis stretched aching muscles. The sun was a blazing sliver, still dangerous to look at, but the desert was growing dark. A broad band of worldscape blazed to antispinward. There was brownish scrub grass around him now, and a clump of tall, dry trees. One tree was white and dead-looking.
She crawled out into the air. She tossed a heavy thing at Louis’s feet. “Cut wood and build a fire.”
Louis picked it up: a length of wood with a wedge of crude iron fixed to one end. “I hate to sound stupid, but what is it?”
She named it. “You swing the sharp edge against the trunk till the tree falls down. See?”
“Am” Louis remembered the war axes in the museum on Kzin. He looked at the ax, then the dead tree … and suddenly he’d had enough. He said, “It’s getting dark.”
“Do you have trouble seeing at night? Here.” She tossed him the flashlight-laser.
“That dead tree good enough?”
She turned, giving him a nice profile, the gun turning with her. Louis adjusted the light to narrow beam, high intensity. He flipped it on. A bright thread of light licked past her. Louis flicked it across her weapon. The weapon spurted flame and fell apart.
She stood there with her mouth open and the two pieces in her hands.
“I am perfectly willing to take suggestions from a friend and ally,” he told her. “I’m sick of taking orders. I got plenty of that from my furry companion. Let’s be friends.”
She dropped what she was holding and raised her hands.
“You’ve got more bullets and more guns in the back of the vehicle. Arm yourself.” Louis turned away. He sliced his beam down the dead tree in zigzag fashion. A dozen logs fell burning. Louis strolled over and kicked the logs into a tighter pile around the stump. He played the laser into their midst and watched the fire catch.
Something thumped him between the shoulder blades. For an instant the impact suit went stiff. He heard a single crack of thunder.
Louis waited for a bit, but the second shot didn’t come. He turned and walked back to the vehicle and Vala. He said to her, “Don’t you ever, ever, ever do that again.”
She looked pale and frightened. “No. I won’t.”
“Shall I help you carry your cooking things?”
“No, I can … Did I miss you?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
“One of my tools saved me. I brought it a thousand times the distance light travels in a falan, and it’s mine.”
She made a kind of arm-flapping gesture and turned away.
Chapter 16
Strategies of Trade
There was a plant that grew along the ground like so many links of green-and-yellow-striped sausage, with rootlets sprouting between the links. Valavirgillin sliced some of these into a pot. She added water, then some seed pods from a sack in the vehicle. She set the pot on the burning logs.
Tanj, Louis could have done that himself. Dinner was going to be crude.
The sun was entirely gone now. A tight cluster of stars to port must be the floating city. The Arch swooped up the black sky in horizontal bands of glowing blue and white. Louis felt that he was on some tremendous toy.
“I wish I had some meat,” Vala said.
Louis said, “Give me the goggles.”
He turned away from the fire before he put the goggles on. He turned up the light amplification. The pairs of eyes that had been watching from beyond the reach of the firelight resolved. Louis was glad he hadn’t fired at random. Two large shapes and a smaller one were a family of ghouls.
But one bright-eyed shadow was small, and furry. Louis snipped it headless with the long bright thread from his flashlight-laser. The ghouls flinched. They whispered among themselves. The female started toward the dead animal, but stopped to give Louis precedence. Louis picked up the body and watched her back away.
The ghouls seemed diffident enough. But their place in the ecology was very secure. Vala had told him what happened when a people went to the great effort of burying or burning their dead. The ghouls attacked the living. They owned the night. With magic gleaned from scores of local religions, they were said to be able to turn invisible. Even Vala half believed it.
But they weren’t bothering Louis. Why would they? Louis would eat the furry beast, and one day Louis himself would die, and the ghouls would claim their due.
While they watched him, he examined the creature: rabbitlike, but with a long, flat-ended tail and no forepaws at all. Not a hominid. Good.
When he looked up, there was a faintly glowing violet flame far to port.
Holding his breath, holding himself very still, Louis raised both the light amplification and the magnification. Even his pulse in his temples was blurring the picture now, but he knew what he saw. The magnified flame was eye-hurting violet, and it fanned out like a rocket firing in vacuum. Its bottom was clipped off by a straight black line: the edge of the portward rim wall.
He lifted the goggles. Even after his eyes adjusted, the violet flame was barely visible, but it was still there. Tenuous … and tremendous.
Louis returned to the fire and dropped the beast at Vala’s feet. He walked into the darkness to starboard and donned the goggles again.
The flame to starboard showed much larger, but of course that rim wall was much closer.
Vala skinned the little furry beast and dropped it into the pot without removing the entrails. When she had finished, Louis led her by the arm into the darkness. “Wait a little, then tell me if you see a blue flame far away.”
“Yes, I see it.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“No, but I think my father does. There was something he wouldn’t talk about, the last time he came back from the city. There are more. Turn your eyes to the base of the Arch to spinward.”
A daylit, blue-and-white horizontal stripe was bright enough to make him squint. Louis covered it with the edge of his hand … and now, with the goggles to help, he could make out two small candle flames on the rims of the Arch, and two above them, tinier yet.
Valavirgillin said, “The first appeared seven falans ago, near the base of the spinward Arch. Then more to spinward, and these large flames to port and starboard, then more small ones on the antispinward Arch. Now there are twenty-one. They only show for two days each turn, when the sun is brightest.”
Louis heaved a gusty sigh of relief.
“Louis,
I don’t know what it means when you do that. Are you angry or frightened or relieved?”
“I don’t know either. Let’s say relieved. We’ve got more time than I thought.”
“Time for what?”
Louis laughed. “Haven’t you had enough of my madness yet?”
She bridled. “After all, I can choose whether to believe you or not!”
Louis got mad. He didn’t hate Valavirgillin, but she was a thorny character, and she had already tried to kill him once. “Fine. If this ring-shaped structure you live on is left to itself, it will brush against the shadow squares—the objects that cover the sun when night comes—in five or six falans. That will kill everything. There won’t be anything left alive when you brush against the sun itself—”
She screamed, “And you sigh with relief?”
“Easy, take it easy. The Ringworld is not being left alone. Those flames are motors for moving it. We’re almost at the closest point to the sun, and they’re using braking thrust—they’re firing inward, sunward. Like this.” He sketched the situation for her in the dirt with a pointed stick. “See? They’re holding us back.”
“You say now that we will not die?”
“The motors may not be strong enough for that. But they’ll hold us back. We could have ten or fifteen falans.”
“I do hope you are mad, Louis. You know too much. You know that the world is a ring, and that is secret.” She shrugged as one shifts a heavy weight. “Yes, I have had enough of it. Will you tell me why you have not suggested rishathra?”
He was surprised. “I would have thought you’d had enough of rishathra to last a lifetime.”
“That is not funny. Rishathra is the way to seal a truce!”
“Oh. All right. Back to the fire?”
“Of course, we need light.”
She pulled the pot a little back from the flame, to cook more slowly. “We must discuss terms. Will you agree not to harm me?” She sat down across from him on the ground.
“I agree not to harm you unless I am attacked.”
“I make you the same concession. What else do you want from me?”
She was brisk and matter-of-fact, and Louis fell into the spirit of the thing. “You will transport me as far as you can, subject to your own needs. I expect that’s as far as, ah, River’s Return. You will treat the artifacts as mine. You will not turn them or me over to any authority. You will give me advice, to the best of your knowledge and ability, that will get me into the floating city.”
“What can you offer in return?”
Here now, wasn’t this woman utterly at Louis Wu’s mercy? Well, never mind. “I will attempt to find out if I can save the Ringworld,” he said, and was somewhat astonished to realize that it was what he most desired. “If I can, I will, no matter what the cost. If I decide the Ringworld can’t be saved, I will try to save myself, and you if it’s convenient.”
She stood. “A promise, empty of meaning. You offer me your madness as if it held real value!”
“Vala, haven’t you dealt with madmen before?” Louis was amused.
“I have never dealt with even sane aliens! I am only a student!”
“Calm down. What else can I offer you? Knowledge? I’ll share my knowledge freely, such as it is. I know how the City Builders’ machines failed, and who caused it.” It seemed safe to assume that the City Builders were Halrloprillalar’s species.
“More madness?”
“You’ll have to decide that for yourself. And … I can give you my flying belt and eyepieces when I’m through with them.”
“When is that likely to be?”
“When and if my companion returns.” The lander held another flying belt and set of goggles, intended for Halrloprillalar. “Or let them be yours when I die. And I can give you half my store of cloth now. Strips of it would let you repair some of the City Builders’ old machines.”
Vala thought it over. “I wish I were more skilled. Well, then, I agree to all of your requirements.”
“I agree to yours.”
She began to take off her clothes and jewelry. Slowly, seemingly titillatingly … until Louis saw what she was doing: stripping herself of all possible weapons. He waited until she was quite naked, then imitated her, dropping the flashlight-laser and goggles and the pieces of impact armor some distance from her, adding even his chronometer.
They made love, then, but it wasn’t love. The madness of last night was gone with the vampires. She asked his preferred technique, then insisted, and he chose the missionary position. It was too much a formality. Perhaps it was meant to be. Afterward, when she went to stir the cooking pot, he was careful that she didn’t get between him and his weapons. It felt like that kind of situation.
She came back to him, and he explained that his kind could make love more than once.
He sat cross-legged with Vala in his lap, her legs closed tight around his hips. They stroked each other, aroused each other, learned each other. She liked having her back scratched. Her back was muscular, her torso wider than his own. A strip of her hair ran all the way down her spine. She had fine control of the muscles of her vagina. The fringe of beard was very soft, very fine.
And Louis Wu had a plastic disc under the hair at the crown of his head.
They lay in each other’s arms, and she waited.
“Even if you don’t have electricity, you must know about it,” Louis said. “The City Builders used it to run their machines!”
“Yes. We can make electricity from the flow of a river. Tales tell that endless electricity came from the sky before the fall of the City Builders.”
Which was accurate enough. There were solar power generators on the shadow squares, and they beamed the power to collectors on the Ringworld. Naturally the collectors used superconducting cables, and naturally they had failed.
“Well, then. If I let a very fine wire down into my brain in the right place—which I did—then a very little bit of electric power will tickle the nerves that register pleasure.”
“What is it like?”
“Like getting drunk without the hangover or the dizziness. Like rishathra, or real mating, without needing to love anyone but yourself and without needing to stop. But I stopped.”
“Why?”
“An alien had my electric source. He wanted to give me orders. But I was ashamed before that.”
“The City Builders never had wires in their skulls. We would have found them when we searched the ruined cities. Where is this custom practiced?” she asked. Then she rolled away from him and stared at him in horror.
It was the sin he regretted most often: not keeping his mouth shut. He said, “I’m sorry.”
“You said strips of that cloth would—What is that cloth?”
“It conducts electric current and magnetic fields with no loss. Superconductor, we call it.”
“Yes, that was what failed the City Builders. The … superconductor rotted. Your cloth will rot too, will it not? How long?”
“No. It’s a different kind.”
She screamed it at him. “How do you know that, Louis Wu?”
“The Hindmost told me. The Hindmost is an alien who brought us here against our will. He left us with no way home.”
“This Hindmost, he took you as slaves?”
“He tried to. Humans and kzinti, we make poor slaves.”
“Is his word good?”
Louis grimaced. “No. And he took the superconductor cloth and wire when he fled his world. He didn’t have time to make it. He must have known where it was, in storage. Like the other things he brought, the stepping discs: it must have been readily available.” And he knew instantly that something was wrong, but it took him a moment to know what it was.
The translator had stopped speaking too soon.
Then it spoke with a very different voice. “Louis, is it wise to, tell her these things?”
“She guessed part of it,” Louis said. “She was about to blame me for the Fall of the Cities. Giv
e me back my translator.”
“Can I allow you this ugly suspicion? Why would my people perform so malicious an act?”
“Suspicion? You son of a bitch.” Vala knelt watching him with big eyes, listening to him talk to himself in gibberish. She couldn’t hear the Hindmost’s voice in his earphones. Louis said, “They kicked you out as Hindmost and you ran. You grabbed what you could and ran. Stepping discs and superconductor cloth and wire and a ship. Discs were easy. You must make them by the million. But where would you find superconductor cloth just waiting for you? And you knew it wouldn’t rot on the Ringworld!”
“Louis, why would we do such a thing?”
“Trade advantage. Give me back my translator!”
Valavirgillin got up. She pulled the pot a little out from the fire, stirred it, tasted. She disappeared toward the vehicle and returned with two wooden bowls, which she filled with a dipper.
Louis waited uneasily. The Hindmost could leave him stranded, with no translator. Louis wasn’t good with languages …
“All right, Louis. It wasn’t planned this way, and it happened before my time. We were searching for a way to expand our territory with minimal risk. The Outsiders sold us the location of the Ringworld.”
The Outsiders were cold, fragile beings who roamed throughout the galaxy in slower-than-light craft. They traded in knowledge. They might well have known of the Ringworld, and sold the information to puppeteers, but … “Wait a minute. Puppeteers are afraid of spaceflight.”
“I overcame that fear. If the Ringworld had proved suitable, then one spaceflight in an individual’s lifetime is no great risk. We would have flown in stasis, of course. From what the Outsiders told us, and from what we learned via telescopes and automatic probes, the Ringworld seemed ideal. We had to investigate.”
“An Experimentalist faction?”
“Of course. Still, we hesitated to contact so powerful a civilization. But we analyzed Ringworld superconductors through laser spectroscopy. We made a bacterium that could feed on it. Probes seeded the superconductor plague across the Ringworld. You guessed as much?”
“That much, yah.”
“We were to follow with trading ships. Our traders would come opportunely to the rescue. They would learn all we needed to know, and gain allies too.” Clear and musical, the puppeteer’s voice held no trace of guilt, nor even embarrassment.