by Larry Niven
“Let’s hear the questions.”
“Is there a history of repair activity on the Ringworld? If so, did repair machinery approach from any one source? Is repair more frequent in any given locale? Is any section of the Ringworld in better repair than the rest? Locate all references to Pak-like beings. Does the style of armor vary with distance from a central point? What are the magnetic properties of the Ringworld floor and of scrith in general?”
“Good.”
“Did I miss anything?”
“… Yah. We want the most probable source of the immortality drug. It’ll be the Great Ocean, but let’s ask anyway.”
“I will. Why the Great Ocean?”
“Oh, partly because it’s so visible. And partly because we’ve found one surviving sample of the immortality drug, and one only. Halrloprillalar had it. We found her in the vicinity of the Great Ocean.” And partly because we crashed there, Louis thought. The luck of Teela Brown distorts probability. Teela’s luck could have brought us straight to the Repair Center that first time. “Harkabeeparolyn? Can you think of anything we missed?”
Her voice was scratchy. “I don’t understand what you’re doing.”
How to explain? “Our machine remembers everything on your tapes. We tell it to search its memory for answers to given questions.”
“Ask it how to save the Ringworld.”
“We have to be more specific. The machine can remember and correlate and do sums, but it can’t think for itself. It’s not big enough.”
She shook her head.
“What if the answers are wrong?” the Hindmost persisted. “We cannot flee.”
“We try something else.”
“I have thought about this. We must go into polar orbit around the sun, to minimize the risk that a fragment of the disintegrating Ringworld will strike us. I will put Needle in stasis, to wait for rescue. Rescue will not come, but the risk is better than what we face now.”
It could come to that, Louis thought. “Fine. We’ve got a couple of years to try to find better odds.”
“Less than that. If—”
“Shut up.”
***
The exhausted librarian dropped onto the water bed. Imitation kzin fur surged and rippled under her. She held herself rigid for a moment, then cautiously let herself fall back. The fur continued to ripple. Presently the stiffness left her and she let herself roll with the tide. Kawaresksenjajok murmured sleepy protest and turned over.
The librarian looked most appealing. Louis resisted an urge to join her on the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired. Miserable. Will I ever see my home again? If the end comes—when it comes—I’d like to wait for it on the Library roof. But the flowers will be dead by then, won’t they? Scorched and frozen.”
“Yah.” Louis was touched. Certainly he’d never see his own home again. “I’ll try to get you back. Right now you need sleep. And a back massage.”
“No.”
Strange. Wasn’t Harkabeeparolyn one of the City Builders, Halrloprillalar’s people, who had ruled the Ringworld largely through sex appeal? Sometimes it was difficult to remember that the individuals within an alien species could differ as thoroughly as humans did.
He said, “The Library staff seemed more priests than professionals. Do you practice continence?”
“While we work in the Library, we are continent. But I was continent by choice.” She rose on an elbow to look at him. “We learn that all other species lust to do rishathra with the City Builders. Is that the case with you?”
He admitted it.
“I hope you can control it.”
He sighed, “Oh, tanj, yes. I’m a thousand falans old. I’ve learned how to distract myself.”
“How?”
“Ordinarily I’d go looking for another woman.”
The librarian didn’t laugh. “What if another woman is not available?”
“Oh … exercise to exhaustion. Get drunk on ‘fuel.’ Go on sabbatical, off into interstellar space in a one-man ship. Find some other pleasure to indulge myself. Get involved in work.”
“You should not be drunk,” she said, and she was right. “What pleasure might you try?”
The droud! A touch of current and he wouldn’t care if Harkabeeparolyn turned to green slime before his eyes. Why should he care now? He didn’t admire her … well, maybe he did, a little. But she’d done her part. He could save the Ringworld, or lose it, without more help from her.
“You’ll have your massage anyway,” he said. He stepped wide around her to touch a control on the water bed. Harkabeeparolyn looked startled, then smiled and relaxed completely as the sonic vibrations in the water enfolded her. In a few minutes she was asleep. He set the unit to switch off in twenty minutes.
Then he brooded.
If he hadn’t spent a year with Halrloprillalar, he’d find Harkabeeparolyn unsightly, with her bald head and knife-edge lips and small flat nose. But he had …
He had hair where no City Builder had hair. Was that it? Or the smell of his food on his breath? Or a social signal he didn’t know?
A man who had hijacked a starship, a man who had bet his life on the chance to rescue trillions of other lives, a man who had beaten the ultimate in drug habits, should not be bothered by so minor a distraction as an itch for a lovely roommate. A touch of the wire would give him the dispassionate clarity to see that.
Yah.
Louis went to the forward wall. “Hindmost!”
The puppeteer trotted into view.
“Run the records of the Pak for me. Interviews and medical reports on Jack Brennan, studies of the alien’s corpse, everything you’ve got.” He’d try work.
***
Louis Wu hovered in midair, in lotus position, with his loose clothing drifting around him. On a screen that floated motionless outside Needle’s hull, a man long dead was lecturing on the origin of humanity.
“Protectors have precious little free will,” he was saying. “We’re too intelligent not to see the right answers. Besides that, there are instincts. If a Pak protector has no living children, he generally dies. He stops eating. Some protectors can generalize; they can find a way to do something for their whole species, and it keeps them alive. I think that was easier for me than it was for Phssthpok.”
“What did you find? What’s the cause that keeps you eating?”
“Warning you about Pak protectors.”
Louis nodded, remembering the autopsy data on the alien. Phssthpok’s brain was bigger than a man’s, but the swelling did not include the frontal lobes. Jack Brennan’s head looked dented in the middle because of his human frontal development and the upward swelling of the back of the skull.
Brennan’s skin was deeply wrinkled leathery armor. His joints were abnormally swollen. His lips and gums had fused into a hard beak. None of this seemed to bother the drastically altered Belt miner.
“All the symptoms of old age are holdovers from the change from breeder to protector,” he was telling a long-dead ARM inquisitor. “Skin thickens and wrinkles; it’s supposed to get like this, hard enough to turn a knife. You lose your teeth to leave room for the gums to harden. Your heart can weaken because you’re supposed to grow a second heart, two-chambered, in the groin.”
Brennan’s voice was a rasp. “Your joints are supposed to expand, to offer a larger moment arm for the muscles. Increased strength. But none of this works quite right without tree-of-life, and there hasn’t been tree-of-life on Earth for three million—”
Louis jumped when fingers tugged at his jumper. “Luweewu? I’m hungry.”
“Okay.” He was tired of studying anyway; it wasn’t telling him much that was useful.
Harkabeeparolyn was still asleep. The smell of meat broiling in a flashlight-laser beam woke her. Louis dialed fruits and cooked vegetables for them, and showed them where to dump anything they didn’t like.
He took his own dinner into the cargo hold.
It bothered him to hav
e dependents. Granted that both were Louis Wu’s victims. But he couldn’t even teach them to get their own meals! The settings were marked in Interworld and the Hero’s Tongue.
Was there any way to put them to work?
Tomorrow. He’d think of something.
***
The computer was beginning to deliver results. The Hindmost was busy. When Louis got the puppeteer’s attention for a moment he asked for the records of Chmeee’s invasion of the castle.
The castle occupied the peak of a rocky hill. Herds of piglike beasts, yellow with an orange stripe, grazed the yellow grass veldt below. The lander circled about the castle, then settled into the courtyard in a cloud of arrows.
Nothing happened for several minutes.
Then orange blurred from several arched doorways at once, too fast to see.
They stopped, flattened like rugs and clutching weapons, against the base of the lander. They were kzinti, but they seemed distorted. There had been divergence over a quarter of a million years.
Harkabeeparolyn spoke at Louis’s shoulder. “Are these your companion’s kind?”
“Close enough. They seem a little shorter and a little darker, and … the lower jaw seems more massive.”
“He abandoned you. Why don’t you leave him?”
Louis laughed. “Why, to get you a bed? We were in battle conditions when I let a vampire seduce me. He was disgusted. As far as Chmeee knows, I abandoned him.”
“No man or woman can resist a vampire.”
“Chmeee is not a man. He couldn’t possibly want rishathra with a vampire, or with any hominid.”
Now more of the great orange cats sprinted to posts beneath the lander. Two carried a rust-stained metal cylinder. The dozen cats crept to the far side of the lander.
The cylinder disappeared in a blast of yellow-white flame. The lander slid a yard or two. The kzinti waited, then crept back to study the results.
Harkabeeparolyn shuddered. “They seem more likely to desire me for a meal.”
Louis was growing irritated. “They might. But I remember a time when Chmeee was starving, and he never touched me. What’s your problem, anyway? Don’t you get carnivores in the city?”
“We do.”
“And the Library?”
He thought she wouldn’t answer. (Furry faces showed at many of the slit windows. The explosion had done no visible damage.) Then, “I was in Panth Building for a time.” She did not meet his eyes.
For a moment he couldn’t remember. Then: Panth Building. Built like an onion floating tip down. Repairs to the water condenser. The ruler wanted to pay the fee in sex. Scent of vampire in the halls.
“You had rishathra with carnivores?”
“With Herders and Grass People and Hanging People and Night People. One remembers.”
Louis withdrew a little. “With Night People?” Ghouls?
“The Night People are very important to us. They bear information for us and for the Machine People. They hold together what is left of civilization, and we do well not to offend them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But it was the—Luweewu, the Night Hunters have a very keen sense of smell. The scent of vampire sends them running. I was told that I must have rishathra with a Night Hunter. Without vampire scent. I asked for transfer to the Library.”
Louis remembered Mar Korssil. “They don’t seem repugnant.”
“But for rishathra? We who have no parents, we must pay society’s debt before we can mate and make a household. I lost my accumulated fund when I transferred. The transfer did not come soon enough.” She looked up into his eyes. “It was not joyful. But other times were as bad. When the vampire scent wears off, the memory does not. One remembers the smells. Blood on the Night Hunter’s breath. Corruption on the Night People’s.”
“You’re well out of that,” Louis said.
Some of the kzinti tried to stand up. Then they all fell asleep. Ten minutes later the hatch descended. Chmeee came down to take command.
***
It was late when the Hindmost reappeared. He looked rumpled and tired. “It seems your guess was correct,” he said. “Not only will scrith hold a magnetic field, but the Ringworld structure is webbed with superconductor cables.”
“That’s good,” said Louis. A great weight lifted from him. “That’s good! But how would City Builders know that? I can’t see them digging into the scrith to find out.”
“No. They made magnets for compasses. They traced a gridwork of superconductor lines running in hexagonal patterns through the Ringworld foundation, fifty thousand miles across. It helped them make their maps. Centuries passed before the City Builders knew enough physics to guess what they were tracing, but their guess led them to develop their own superconductor.”
“The bacteria you seeded—”
“it will not have touched superconductor buried in scrith. I’m aware that the Ringworld floor is vulnerable to meteorites. We must hope that none ever breached the superconductor grid.”
“It’s good odds.”
The puppeteer pondered. “Louis, are we still searching for the secret of massive transmutation?”
“No.”
“It would solve our problem very nicely,” said the Hindmost. “The device must have operated on a tremendous scale. Converting matter to energy must be far easier than converting matter to other matter. Suppose we simply fired a … call it a transmutation cannon at the underside of the Ringworld at its farthest distance from the sun. Reaction would put the structure back in place very nicely. Of course there would be problems. The shock wave would kill many natives, but many would live, too. The burned-off meteor shielding could be replaced at some later date. Why are you laughing?”
“You’re brilliant. The trouble is, we don’t have any reason to think there was ever a transmutation cannon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Halrloprillalar was just making up stories. She told us so later. And after all, how would she know anything about the way the Ringworld was built? Her ancestors weren’t much more than monkeys when that happened.” Louis saw the heads dip, and snapped, “Do not curl up on me. We don’t have the time.”
“Aye, aye.”
“What else have you got?”
“Little. Pattern analysis is still incomplete. The fantasies involving the Great Ocean mean nothing to me. You try them.”
“Tomorrow.”
***
Sounds too low to interpret held him awake. Louis turned over in darkness and free fall.
There was light enough to see. Kawaresksenjajok and Harkabeeparolyn lay in each other’s arms, murmuring in each other’s ears. Louis’s translator wasn’t picking it up. It sounded like love. The sudden stab of envy made him smile at himself. He’d thought the boy was too young; he’d thought the woman had sworn off. But this wasn’t rishathra. They were the same species.
Louis turned his back and closed his eyes. His ears expected a rhythmic wave action; but it never came, and presently he was asleep.
He dreamed that he was on sabbatical.
Falling, falling between the stars. When the world became too rich, too varied, too demanding, then there came a time to leave all worlds behind. Louis had done this before. Alone in a small spacecraft, he had gone into the unexplored gaps beyond known space, to see what there was to see, and to learn if he still loved himself. Now Louis floated between sleeping plates and dreamed happy dream of falling between the stars. No dependents, no promises to keep.
Then a woman howled in panic, right in his ear. A heel kicked him hard, just below the floating ribs, and Louis doubled up with a breathy cry. Flailing arms battered him, then closed round his neck in a death-grip hug. The wailing continued.
Louis pried at the arms to free his throat. He called, “Sleepfield off!”
Gravity returned. Louis and his attacker settled onto the lower plate. Harkabeeparolyn stopped screaming. She let her arms be pried away.
The boy Kawaresksenjajok
knelt beside her, confused and frightened. He spoke urgent questions in the City Builder language. The woman snarled.
The boy spoke again. Harkabeeparolyn answered him at length. The boy nodded reluctantly. Whatever he’d heard, he didn’t like it. He stepped into the corner, with a parting look that Louis couldn’t interpret at all, and vanished into the cargo hold.
Louis reached out for his translator. “Okay, what’s it all about?”
“I was falling!” she sobbed.
“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Louis told her. “This is how some of us like to sleep.”
She looked up into his face. “Falling?”
“Yah.”
Her expression was easy to interpret. Mad.Quite mad … and a shrug. Visibly she braced herself. She said, “I have made myself know that my usefulness is over, now that your machines can read faster than I can. I can do one thing only to make our mission easier, and that is to ease the pain of your thwarted lust.”
“That’s a relief,” Louis said. He meant it as sarcasm; would she hear it that way? Louis was tanjed if he’d accept that kind of charity.
“If you bathe, and clean your mouth very thoroughly—”
“Hold it. Your sacrifice of your comfort to higher goals is praiseworthy, but it would be bad manners for me to accept.”
She was bewildered. “Luweewu? Do you not want rishathra with me?”
“Thank you, no. Sleepfield on.” Louis floated away from her. From previous experience he sensed a shouting match coming, and that couldn’t be helped. But if she tried physical force, she’d find herself falling.
She surprised him. She said, “Luweewu, it would be terrible for me to have children now.”
He looked down at her face: not enraged, but very serious. She said, “If I mate now with Kawaresksenjajok, I may bring forth a baby to die in the fire of the sun.”
“Then don’t. He’s too young anyway.”
“No, he’s not.”
“Oh. Well. Don’t you have—No, you wouldn’t be carrying contraceptives. Well, can’t you estimate your fertile period and avoid it?”