by Larry Niven
“If it’s any comfort to you, he won’t find anything that can go up against a General Products hull. They can’t even hurt the lander.”
Long pause; then “Perhaps you’re right. The aircraft use hydrogen-burning jets and missiles propelled by chemical explosives. In any case, I must rescue you myself. You must expect the probe at dusk.”
“Then what? There’s still the rim wall. You told me stepping discs won’t send through scrith.”
“I used the second probe to place a pair of stepping discs on the rim wall as a relay.”
“If you say so. I’m in a building shaped like a top, at the port-by-spinward perimeter. Set the probe to hover until we decide what to do with it. I’m not sure I want to leave yet.”
“You must.”
“But all the answers we need could be right here in the Library!”
“Have you made any progress?”
“Bits and pieces. Everything Halrloprillalar’s people knew is somewhere in this building. I want to question the ghouls too. They’re scavengers, and they seem to be everywhere.”
“You only learn to ask more questions. Very well, Louis. You have several hours. I will bring the lander to you at dusk.”
Chapter 22
Grand Theft
The cafeteria was halfway down the building. Louis gave thanks for a bit of luck: the City Builders were omnivores. The meat-and-mushroom stew could have used salt, but it filled the vacuum in his belly.
Nobody used enough salt. And all the seas were fresh water, except for the Great Oceans. He might be the only hominid on the Ringworld who needed salt, and he couldn’t live without it forever.
He ate quickly. Time pressed on the back of his neck. The puppeteer was already skittish. Surprising that he hadn’t already fled, leaving Louis and the renegade Chmeee and the Ringworld to their similar fates. Louis could almost admire the puppeteer for waiting to rescue his press-ganged crewman.
But the puppeteer might change his mind when he saw the repair crew coming at him. Louis intended to be back aboard Needle before the Hindmost turned his telescope in that direction.
He went back to the upper rooms.
The reading screens he tried all gave unreadable script and no pictures and no voice. Finally, at one of a bank of screens, his eye caught a familiar collar.
“Harkabeeparolyn?”
The librarian turned. Small flat nose; lips like a slash; bald scalp and a fine, delicate skull; long, wavy white hair … and a nice flare to her hips, and fine legs. In human terms she’d have been about forty. City Builders might age more slowly than human beings, or faster; Louis didn’t know.
“Yes?”
There was a snap in her voice. Louis jumped. He said, “I need a voice-programmed screen and a tape to tell me the characteristics of scrith.”
She frowned. “I don’t know what you mean. Voice-programmed?”
“I want the tape to read to me out loud.”
Harkabeeparolyn stared, then laughed. She tried to strangle the laugh, and couldn’t; and it was too late anyway. They were the center of attention. “There is no such thing. There never has been,” she tried to whisper, but the giggle bubbled up and made her voice louder than she wanted. “Why, can’t you read?”
Blood and tanj! Louis felt the heat rising in his ears and neck. Literacy was admirable, of course, and everybody learned to read sooner or later, at least in Interworld. But it was no life or death matter. Every world had voice boxes! Why, without a voice box, his translator would have nothing to work with!
“I need more help than I thought. I need someone to read to me.”
“You need more than you paid for. Have your master renegotiate.”
Louis wasn’t prepared to risk bribing this embarrassed and hostile woman. “Will you help me find the tapes I need?”
“You’ve paid for that. You’ve even bought the right to interrupt my own researches. Tell me just what you want,” she said briskly. She tapped at keys, and pages of strange script jumped on her screen. “Characteristics of scrith? Here’s a physics text. There are chapters on the structure and dynamics of the world, including one on scrith. It may be too advanced for you.”
“That, and a basic physics text.”
She looked dubious. “All right.” She tapped more keys. “An old tape for engineering students on the construction of the rim transport system. Historical interest only, but it might tell you something.”
“I want it. Did your people ever go under the world?”
Harkabeeparolyn drew herself up. “I’m sure we must have. We ruled the world and the stars, with machines that would make the Machine People worship us if we had them now.” She played with the keyboard again. “But we have no record of that event. What do you want with all this?”
“I don’t quite know yet. Can you help me trace the origin of the old immortality drug?”
Harkabeeparolyn laughed, softly this time. “I don’t think you can carry that many book spools. Those who made the drug never told their secret. Those who wrote books never found it. I can give you religious spools, police records, confidence games, records of expeditions to various parts of the world. Here’s the tale of an immortal vampire who haunted the Grass Giants for a thousand falans, growing uncomfortably cunning with the years, until—”
“No.”
“His hoard of the drug was never found. No? Let me see … Ktistek Building joined the Ten because the other buildings ran out of the drug before Ktistek did. A fascinating lesson in politics—”
“No, forget it. Do you know anything about the Great Ocean?”
“There are two Great Oceans,” she informed him. “They’re easy to pick out on the Arch at night. Some of the old stories say the immortality drug came from the antispinward Ocean.”
“Uh-huh.”
Harkabeeparolyn smirked. The small mouth could look prissy. “You are naive. One can pick out just two features on the Arch with the naked eye. If anything valuable came from far away and comes no more, somebody will say that it came from one of the Great Oceans. Who can deny it, or offer another origin?”
Louis sighed. “You’re probably right.”
“Luweewu, how can these questions possibly be connected?”
“Maybe they can’t.”
She got the spools he’d requested, and another: a book for children, tales of the Great Ocean. “I can’t think what you’ll do with these. You won’t steal them. You’ll be searched when you leave, and you can’t carry a reading machine with you.”
“Thank you for your help.”
***
He needed someone to read to him.
He didn’t have the nerve to ask random strangers. Perhaps a nonrandom stranger? There had been a ghoul in one of these rooms. If ghouls in the shadow farm knew of Louis Wu, perhaps this one did too.
But the ghoul was gone, leaving only her scent.
Louis dropped into a chair in front of a reading screen and closed his eyes. The useless spools bulged in two of his vest pockets. I’m not licked yet, he thought. Maybe I can find the boy again. Maybe I can get Fortaralisplyar to read to me, or to send someone. It’ll cost more, of course. Everything always costs more. And takes longer.
The reading machine was a big, clumsy thing, moored to the wall by a thick cable. The manufacturer certainly hadn’t had superconducting wire. Louis threaded a spool into it and glared at the meaningless script. The screen’s definition was poor, and there was no place for a speaker grid. Harkabeeparolyn had told the truth.
I don’t have time for this.
Louis stood up. He had no choices left.
***
The roof of the Library was an extensive garden. Walks spiraled out from the center, from the top of the spiral stairs. Giant nectar-producing flowers grew in the rich black soil between the walks. There were small dark-green cornucopias with tiny blue flowers in the mouths, and a patch of weenie plant in which most of the “sausages” had split to give birth to golden blossoms, and t
rees that dropped festoons of greenish-yellow spaghetti.
The couples on the scattered benches gave Louis his privacy. He saw a good many blue-robed librarians, and a tall male librarian escorting a noisy group of Hanging People tourists. Nobody had the look of a guard. No ramps led away from the Library roof: there was nothing to guard, unless a thief could fly.
Louis intended a poor return for the hospitality he’d been given. True, he’d bought that hospitality … but it bothered him.
The water condenser rose from the roof’s edge like a sculptured triangular sail. It drained into a crescent-shaped pond. The pond seethed with City Builder children. Louis heard his name, “Luweewu!” and turned in time to catch an inflated ball against his chest.
The brown-haired boy he’d met in the map room clapped and shouted for the ball’s return.
Louis dithered. Warn him to leave the roof? The roof would soon be a dangerous place. But the kid was bright. He might be bright enough to see the implications and call for guards.
Louis threw the wet ball back at him, and waved, and moved away.
If only he could think of a way to clear the roof entirely!
There were no guardrails at the edge of the roof. Louis walked with care. Presently he circled a clump of small trees whose trunks seemed to have been wrung like washcloths, and found himself in a place of reasonable privacy. There he used his translator.
“Hindmost?”
“Speaking. Chmeee is still under attack. He has retaliated once, by melting one of the great ship’s large swiveling projectile launchers. I cannot guess at his motives.”
“He’s probably letting them see how good his defenses are. Then he’ll deal.”
“What will he deal for?”
“Even he doesn’t know that yet. I doubt they can do much for him except introduce him to a female or three. Hindmost, there’s no way I can do any research here. I can’t read the screens. I’ve got too much material anyway. It’d take me a week.”
“What might Chmeee accomplish in a week? I dare not stay to find out.”
“Yah. What I’ve got is some reading spools. They’ll tell us most of what we want to know, if we can read them. Can you do anything with them?”
“I think it unlikely. Can you furnish me with one of their reading machines? With that I could play the tapes on the screen and photograph them for Needle’s computer.”
“They’re heavy. They’ve got thick cables that—”
“Cut the cables.”
Louis sighed. “Okay. Then what?”
“Already I can see the floating city through the probe camera. I will guide the probe to you. You must remove the deuterium filter to expose the stepping disc. Have you a grippy?”
“I don’t have any tools at all. What I’ve got is a flashlight-laser. You tell me where to slice.”
“I hope this is worth losing half my fuel source. Very well. If you can secure a reading machine, and if it will pass through the opening to the stepping disc, well and good. Otherwise, bring the tapes. Perhaps there is something I can do.”
***
Louis stood at the rim of the Library roof and looked down past his toes, into the textured dusk of the shadow farm. At the shadows edge was noonday light. Rectangle-patterned farmland ran away from him. The Serpent River curled away to port and disappeared among low mountains. Beyond the mountains were seas, flatlands, a tiny mountain range, tinier seas, all bluing with distance … and finally the Arch rising up and up. Half hypnotized, Louis waited beneath the bright sky. There was nothing else to be done. He was barely aware of time passing.
The probe came out of the sky on a breath of blue flame. Where the nearly invisible fire touched the rooftop, the plants and soil became an orange inferno. Small Hanging People and blue-robed librarians and wet children ran screaming for the stairwell.
The probe settled into the flame and toppled on its side, slowed by attitude jets. There were tiny jets all around the upper rim, and the big jet underneath. It was twenty feet long and ten feet thick, a cylinder made lumpy by cameras and other instruments.
Louis waited until the fires had mostly gone out. Then he waded through coals to the probe. The roof was empty, as far as he could tell—empty even of bodies. No dead. Good.
The voice of his translator guided him as he cut away the thick molecular sieve in the top of the probe. Presently he had exposed a stepping disc. He asked, “Now what?”
“I’ve reversed the action of the stepping disc in the other probe and removed the filter. Can you get a reading machine?”
“I’ll try. I don’t like any of this.”
“In two years it won’t matter. I give you thirty minutes. Then come, bringing whatever you have.”
***
A score of blue-robed librarians had almost decided to come after him when Louis appeared in the stairwell. His hood was pulled over his face. The bits of heavy metal they fired at him bounced from his impact armor, and he came on in a jerky step-stop-step walk.
The fusillade slowed and stopped. They retreated before him.
When they had gone far enough, Louis sliced through the top of the stairway below him. The spiral staircase had been moored only at top and bottom. Now it compressed like a spring, ripping side ramps from doorsills. Librarians hung on for dear life. Louis had the top two floors to himself.
And when he turned to the nearest reading room, Harkabeeparolyn was blocking his path with an ax in her hands.
“Once again I need your help,” Louis said.
She swung. Louis caught the ax as it rebounded from the join of his neck and shoulder. She thrashed, trying to wrench it from his grip.
“Watch,” he said. He waved the laser beam through the cable that fed a reading machine. The cable spurted flame and fell apart, sparking.
Harkabeeparolyn screamed, “Lyar Building will pay dearly for this!”
“That can’t be helped. I want you to help me carry a reading machine up to the roof. I thought I was going to have to cut through a wall. This is better.”
“I won’t!”
Louis waved the light through a reading machine. It burned after falling apart. The smell was horrible. “Say when.”
“Vampire lover!”
The machine was heavy, and Louis wasn’t about to let go of the laser. He backed up the stairs; most of the weight was in Harkabeeparolyn’s arms. He told her, “If we drop it we’ll have to go back for another one.”
“Idiot! … You’ve already … ruined the cable!”
He didn’t answer.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m trying to save the world from brushing against its sun.”
She almost dropped it then. “But—but the motors! They’re all back in place!”
“So you already knew that much! It’s too little too late. Most of your spaceships never came back. There aren’t enough motors. Keep moving.”
As they reached the roof, the probe lifted and settled beside them on attitude jets. They set the machine down. It wasn’t going to fit. Louis gritted his teeth and sliced the screen free of the rest of the machine. Now it would fit.
Harkabeeparolyn just looked at him. She was too exhausted to comment.
The screen went into the gap where the molecular filter had been, and vanished. What remained, the guts of the machine, was much heavier. Louis managed to heave one end into the gap. He lay down on his back and used his legs to push it inward until it too vanished.
“Lyar Building had nothing to do with this,” he told the librarian. “They didn’t know what I had in mind. Here.” He dropped a swatch of dull black cloth beside her. “Lyar Building can tell you how to fix water condensers and other old machines with this. You can make the whole city independent of the Machine People.”
She watched him with eyes full of horror. It was hard to tell if she heard.
He eased himself feet first into the probe.
And out head first into Needle’s cargo hold.
Par
t Three
Chapter 23
Final Offer
He was in a great echoing glass bottle, in near darkness. Twilight-shrouded, half-dismantled spacecraft showed through the transparent walls. The probe had been returned to clamps on the back wall of the cargo hold, eight feet off the gray-painted floor. And Louis nestled in the probe, in the gap where the deuterium filter had been, like an egg in an egg cup.
Louis swung out, hung by his hands, and dropped. He was tired to the bone. One last complication, now, and then he could rest. Safety was just the other side of an impenetrable wall. He could see the sleeping plates …
“Good.” The Hindmost’s voice spoke from somewhere near the ceiling. “Is that the reading screen? I expected nothing so bulky. Did you have to chop it in half?”
“Yah.” He had also dropped the components eight feet to the floor. Fortunately puppeteers were good with tools … “I hope you’ve got a set of stepping discs in here.”
“I anticipated emergencies. Glance toward the forward left … Louis!”
A moan of unearthly terror rose behind him. Louis spun around.
Harkabeeparolyn was nestled in the probe, where Louis had been a moment ago. Her hands strangled the stock of a projectile weapon. Her lips were skinned back from her teeth. Her eyes could not find rest. They flicked up, down, left, right, and found no comfort anywhere.
The Hindmost spoke in a monotone. “Louis, who is this that invades my spacecraft? Is it dangerous?”
“No, relax. It’s just a confused librarian. Harkabeeparolyn, go back.”
Her keening rose in pitch. Suddenly she wailed, “I know this place, I’ve seen it in the map room! It’s the starship haven, outside the world! Luweewu, what are you?”
Louis pointed the flashlight-laser at her. “Go back.”
“No! You’ve wrecked the stolen library property. But if—if the world is threatened, I want to help!”