The Ringworld Engineers

Chapter 1 — Under The Wire

Louis Wu was under the wire when two men came to invade his privacy.

He was in full lotus position on the lush yellow indoor-grass carpet. His smile was blissful, dreamy. The apartment was small, just one big room. He could see both doors. But, lost in the joy that only a wirehead knows, he never saw them arrive. Suddenly they were there: two pale youths, both over seven feet tall, studying Louis with contemptuous smiles. One snorted and dropped something weapon-shaped in his pocket. They were stepping forward as Louis stood up.

It wasn’t just the happy smile that fooled them. It was the fist-sized droud that protruded like a black plastic canker from the crown of Louis Wu’s head. They were dealing with a current addict, and they knew what to expect. For years the man must have had no thought but for the wire trickling current into the pleasure center of his brain. He would be near starvation from self-neglect. He was small, a foot and a half shorter than either of the invaders. He—

As they reached for him Louis bent far sideways, for balance, and kicked once, twice, thrice. One of the invaders was down, curled around himself and not breathing, before the other found the wit to back away.

Louis came after him.

What held the youth half paralyzed was the abstracted bliss with which Louis came to kill him. Too late, he reached for the stunner he’d pocketed. Louis kicked it out of his hand. He ducked a massive fist and kicked at kneecap, kneecap (the pale giant stopped moving), groin, heart (the giant bent far forward, with a whistling scream), throat (the scream stopped suddenly).

The other invader was on hands and knees, breathing in sips. Louis chopped at his neck, twice.

The invaders lay still in the lush yellow grass.

Louis Wu went to lock his door. At no time had the blissful smile left his face, and it did not change when he found his door fully locked and alarmed. He checked the door to the balcony: bolted and alarmed.

How in the world had they gotten in?

Bemused, he settled where he was, in lotus position, and did not move again for over an hour.

Presently a timer clicked and switched off the droud.

Current addiction is the youngest of mankind’s sins. At some time in their histories, most of the cultures of human space have seen the habit as a major scourge. It takes users from the labor market and leaves them to die of self-neglect.

Times change. Generations later, these same cultures usually see current addiction as a mixed blessing. Older sins — alcoholism and drug addiction and compulsive gambling — cannot compete. People who can be hooked by drugs are happier with the wire. They take longer to die, and they tend not to have children.

It costs almost nothing. An ecstasy peddler can raise the price of the operation, but for what? The user isn’t a wirehead until the wire has been embedded in the pleasure center of his brain. Then the peddler has no hold over him, for the user gets his kicks from house current.

And the joy comes pure, with no overtones and no hangover.

So that by Louis Wu’s time, those who could be enslaved by the wire or by any lesser means of self-destruction had been breeding themselves out of the human race for eight hundred years.

Today there are even devices that can tickle a victim’s pleasure center from a distance. Tasps are illegal on most worlds, and expensive to make, but they are used. (A dour stranger wanders past, rage or misery written in the sour lines of his face. From behind a tree you make his day. Plink! His face lights up. For a moment he’s got no worries at all… ) They don’t generally rain lives. Most people can take it.

The timer clicked and switched off the droud.

Louis seemed to sag in upon himself. He reached across his smooth scalp to the base of the long black braid, and pulled the droud from its socket beneath the hair. He held it in his hand, considering; then, as always, he dropped it into a drawer and locked it. The drawer disappeared. The desk, which seemed a massive wooden antique, was actually paper-thin hullmetal, with endless room for secret compartments.

It was always a temptation to reset the timer. He’d done it routinely in the early years of his addiction. Neglect had made of him a skeletal rag doll, constantly dirty. Finally he had gathered what remained of his ancient dogged determination, and he had built a timer that took twenty minutes of nitpicking concentration to reset. On its present setting it would give him fifteen hours of current and twelve hours for sleep and for what he called maintenance.

The corpses were still there. Louis had no idea what to do about that. If he’d called the police immediately, it would still have attracted unwanted attention… but what could he tell them now, an hour and a half late? That he’d been knocked unconscious? They’d want to deep-radar his head for fractures!

This he knew: in the black depression that always followed his time under the wire, he simply couldn’t make decisions. He followed his maintenance routine like a robot. Even his dinner was preprogrammed.

He drank a full glass of water. He set the kitchen. He went to the bathroom. He did ten minutes of exercise, pushing himself hard, fighting depression with exhaustion. He avoided looking at the stiffening corpses. Dinner was ready when he finished. He ate without tasting… and remembered that once he had eaten and exercised and made every move with the droud set in his skull, delivering a tenth of normal current to the pleasure center. For a time he had lived with a woman who was also a wirehead. They had made love under the wire… and played war games and held pun contests… until she had lost interest in everything but the current itself. By then Louis had regained enough of his natural caution to flee Earth.

He thought now that it would be easier to flee this world than to dispose of two large, conspicuous corpses. But if he were already being watched?

They didn’t look like ARM agents. Large, soft in the muscle, pale from a sunlight more orange than yellow, they were certainly low-gravity types, probably Canyonites. They hadn’t fought like ARMs… but they had bypassed his alarms. These men could be ARM hirelings, with friends waiting.

Louis Wu disarmed his balcony door and stepped out.

Canyon does not quite follow the usual rules for planets.

The planet is not much bigger than Mars. Until a few hundred years ago its atmosphere was just dense enough to support photosynthesis-using plants. The air held oxygen, but was too thin for human or kzinti life. The native life was as primitive and hardy as lichen. Animal had never developed at all.

But there were magnetic monopoles in the cometary halo around Canyon’s orange-yellow. sun, and radioactives on the planet itself. The Kzinti Empire swallowed the planet and staffed it with the aid of domes and compressors. They called it Warhead, for its proximity to the unconquered Pierin worlds.

A thousand years later the expanding Kzinti Empire met human space.

The Man-Kzin wars were long over when Louis Wu was born. Men won them all. The kzinti have always had a tendency to attack before they are quite ready. Civilization on Canyon is a legacy of the Third Man-Kzin War, when the human world Wunderland developed a taste for esoteric weapons.

The Wunderland Treatymaker was used only once. It was a gigantic version of what is commonly a mining tool: a disintegrator that fires a beam to suppress the charge on the electron. Where a disintegrator beam falls, solid matter is rendered suddenly and violently positive. It tears itself into a fog of monatomic particles.

Wunderland built, and transported into the Warhead system, an enormous disintegrator firing in parallel with a similar beam to suppress the charge on the proton.

The two beams touched down thirty miles apart on Canyon’s surface. Rock and kzinti factories and housing spewed away as dust, and a solid bar of lightning flowed between the two points. The weapon chewed twelve miles deep into the planet, exposing magma throughout a region the size and shape of Baja California on Earth, and running roughly east and west. The kzinti industrial complex vanished. The few domes protected by stasis fields were swallowed by magma, magma that welled higher in the center of the great gash before the rock congealed.

The eventual result was a sea surrounded by sheer cliffs many miles high, surrounding in turn a long, narrow island.

Other human worlds may doubt that the Wunderland Treatymaker ended the war. The Kzinti Patriarchy is not normally terrified by sheer magnitude. Wunderlanders have no such doubts.

Warhead was annexed after the Third Man-Kzin War, and became Canyon. Canyon’s native life suffered, of course, from the gigatons of dust that dropped on its surface, and from the loss of water that precipitated within the canyon itself to form the sea. In the canyon there is comfortable air pressure and a thriving pocket-sized civilization.

Louis Wu’s apartment was twelve stories up the side of the north face of the canyon. Night shadowed the canyon floor as he stepped outside, but the southern face still glowed with daylight. Hanging gardens of native lichen dripped from the rim. Old elevators were silver threads standing miles high against the cut stone. Transfer booths had made these obsolete for travel, but tourists still used them for the view.

The balcony overlooked the belt of parkland that ran down the center of the island. The vegetation had the wild look of a kzinti hunting park, with pink and orange blended into the imported terrestrial biosphere. Kzinti life was common throughout the canyon.

There were as many kzinti as human tourists down there. The kzinti. males looked like fat orange cats walking on their hind legs… almost. But their ears flared like pink Chinese parasols, and their tails were nude and pink, and their straight legs and big hands marked them as toolmakers. They stood eight feet tall, and though they scrupulously avoided bumping human tourists, carefully tended claws slid out above black fingertips if a human passed too close. Reflex. Maybe.

Sometimes Louis wondered what impulse brought them back to a world once theirs. Some might have ancestors here, alive in frozen time in the domes buried beneath this lava island. One day they’d have to be dug up…

There were so many things he hadn’t done on Canyon, because the wire was always calling. Men and kzinti had climbed those sheer cliffs for sport, in the low gravity.

Well, he would have one last chance to try that. It was one of his three routes out. The second was the elevators; the third, a transfer booth to the Lichen Gardens. He’d never seen them.

Then overland in a pressure suit light enough to fold into a large briefcase.

On the surface of Canyon there were mines, and there was a large, indifferently tended preserve for the surviving varieties of Canyon lichen. But most of the world was barren moonscape. A careful man could land a spacecraft undetected, and could hide it where only a deep-radar search would find it. A careful man had. For these past nineteen years Louis Wu’s ship had been waiting, hidden in a cave in the northward-facing cliff of a mountain of low-grade metal ore: a hole hidden within permanent shadow on Canyon’s airless surface.

Transfer booths or elevators or cliff-climbing. Let Louis Wu get to the surface and he was home free. But the ARM could be watching all three exits.

Or he could be playing paranoid games with himself. How could Earth’s police force have found him? He had changed his face, his hair style, his way of life. The things he loved best were just the things he had given up. He used a bed instead of sleeping plates, he avoided cheese as if it were spoiled milk, and his apartment was furnished with mass-produced retractables. The only clothes he owned were of expensive natural fiber, with no optical effects at all.

He had left Earth as an emaciated and dreamy-eyed wirehead. Since then he had forced a rational diet on himself; he had tortured himself with exercise and a weekly course in martial arts (mildly illegal, and the local police would register him if they caught him, but not as Louis Wu!) until today he was an adequate facsimile of glowing health, with the hard muscles a younger Louis Wu had never bothered to attain. How could the ARM recognize him?

And how had they got in? No common burglar could have passed Louis’s alarms.

They lay dead in the grass, and soon the smell would overpower the air conditioning. Now, a bit late, he felt the shame of the man-killer. But they had invaded his territory, and there is no guilt under the wire. Even pain is a spice added to joy, and joy — like the basic human joy of killing a thief in the act — becomes hugely intensified. They had known what he was, and that was both sufficient warning and a direct affront to Louis Wu.

The kzinti and human tourists and natives milling in the street below looked innocent enough, and probably were. If an ARM was watching him now, it would be through binoculars, from a window in one of those black-eyed buildings. None of the tourists were looking up… but Louis Wu’s eyes found a kzin, and locked.

Eight feet tall, three feet broad, thick orange fur turning gray in spots: he was very like the dozens of kzinti about him. What caught Louis’s eye was the way the fur grew. It was tufted, patchy, and whitened over more than half the alien’s body, as if the skin below were extensively scarred. There were black markings around his eyes, and the eyes weren’t looking at scenery. They were searching the faces of passing humans.

Louis wrenched himself free of the urge to gape and stare. He turned and went inside, in no obvious haste. He locked his balcony doors and reset the alarms, and then he dug his droud out of its hiding place in the table. His hands trembled.

It was Speaker-To-Animals he had seen, for the first time in twenty years. Speaker-To-Animals, once an ambassador to human space; Speaker, who with Louis Wu and a Pierson’s puppeteer and a very odd human girl had explored a minuscule section of the enormous structure called the Ringworld; who had earned his full name from the Patriarch of Kzin for the treasure he brought back. You could die, now, for calling him by a profession, but what was his new name? Something that started with a cough, like a German ch, or like the warning cough a lion might give: Chmeee, that was it. But what could he be doing here? With a true name and land and a harem already mostly pregnant, Chmeee had had no intention of leaving Kzin ever again. The idea of his playing tourist on an annexed human world was ridiculous.

Could he possibly know that Louis Wu was in the canyon?

He had to get out, now. Up the canyon wall to his ship.

And that was why Louis Wu was playing with the timer in his droud, squinting as he used tiny instruments on tiny settings. His hands trembled irritatingly… The timing would have to be changed anyway, now that he was leaving Canyon’s twenty-seven-hour day. He knew his target. There was another world in human space whose surface was largely barren moonscape. He could land a ship undetected in the vacuum at the West End of Jinx… and set the timing on the droud now… and take a few hours under the wire now to nerve himself. It all made perfect sense. He gave himself two hours.

Almost two hours passed before the next invader came. Rapt in the joy of the wire, Louis would not have been disturbed in any case. He found the invader something of a relief.

The creature stood solidly braced on a single hind leg and two wide-spaced forelegs. Between the shoulders rose a thick hump: the braincase, covered by a rich golden mane curled into ringlets and glittering with jewels. Two long, sinuous necks rose from either side of the braincase, ending in flat heads. Those loose-lipped mouths had served the puppeteers as hands for all of their history. One mouth clutched a stunner of human make, a long, forked tongue curled around the trigger.

Louis Wu had not seen a Pierson’s puppeteer in twenty-two years. He thought it quite lovely.

And it had appeared from nowhere. This time Louis had seen it blink into existence in the middle of his yellow grass rug. He had worried needlessly; the ARM had not been involved at all. The problem of the Canyonite burglars was solved.

“Stepping discs!” Louis cried joyfully. He launched himself at the alien. This would be easy, puppeteers were cowards—

The stunner glowed orange. Louis Wu spilled onto the carpet, every muscle limp. His heart labored. Black spots formed before his eyes.

The puppeteer stepped delicately around the two dead men. It looked down at him from two directions; and then it reached for him. Two sets of flat-topped teeth clamped on his wrists, not hard enough to hurt. The puppeteer dragged him backward across the rug and set him down.

The apartment vanished.

It could not be said that Louis Wu was worried. He felt no such unpleasant sensation. Dispassionately (for the uniform joy in the wire allows an abstraction of thought normally impossible to mortals) he was readjusting his world picture.

He had seen the system of stepping discs on the Pierson’s puppeteers’ home world. It was an open teleportation system, far superior to the closed transfer booths used on the human worlds.

Apparently a puppeteer had had stepping discs installed in Louis’s apartment; had sent two Canyonites to fetch him; when that failed, had come himself. The puppeteers must want him badly.

That was doubly reassuring. The ARM was not involved at all. And puppeteers had a million years of tradition to back their philosophy of enlightened cowardice. They could hardly want his life; they could have had it more cheaply, with less risk. He should find it easy to cow them.

He was still lying on a patch of yellow grass and binding mat. It must have been sitting on the stepping disc. There was a huge orange fur pillow across the room from him… no, it was a kzin slumped with his eyes open, asleep or paralyzed or dead — and in fact it was Speaker. Louis was glad to see him.

They were in a spacecraft, a General Products hull. Beyond the transparent walls space-bright sunlight glared off sharp-edged lunar rocks. A patch of green-and-violet lichen told him he was still on Canyon.

But he wasn’t worried.

The puppeteer released his wrists. Ornaments glittered in its mane: not natural jewels, but something like black opals. One flat brainless head bent and pulled the droud out of the plug in Louis’s skull. The puppeteer stepped onto a rectangular plate and vanished, with the droud.

Chapter 2 — Press Gang

The kzin’s eyes had been watching him for some time. Now the paralyzed kzin cleared his throat experimentally and rumbled, “Loo-ee Woo.”

“Uh,” said Louis. He had been thinking of killing himself, but there was no way. He could barely wiggle his fingers.

“Louis, urr you wirehead?”

“Ungle,” said Louis, to buy time. It worked. The kzin gave up the effort. And Louis — whose only real concern was for his missing droud — Louis followed an old reflex. He looked around him to learn just how bad his situation was.

The hexagon of indoor grass under him marked the stepping-disc receiver. A black circle beyond would be the transmitter. Otherwise the floor was transparent, as were the portside hull and the aft wall.

The hyperdrive shunt ran nearly the length of the ship, beneath the floor. Louis had to recognize the machinery from first principles. It was not of human manufacture; it had the half-melted look of most puppeteer construction. So: the ship had faster-than-light capability. It seemed he was slated for a long trip.

Through the aft wall Louis could see into a cargo hold with a curved hatch in the side. The hold was nearly filled by a skewed cone thirty feet tall and twice that long. The peak was a turret with ports for weapons and/or sensing instruments. Below the turret, a wraparound window. Lower still, a hatch that would drop to form a ramp.

It was a lander, an exploration vehicle. Human-built, Louis thought, and custom-built. It had none of that half-melted look. Beyond the lander he glimpsed a silver wall, probably a fuel tank.

He had not yet seen a door into his own compartment.

With some effort Louis flopped his head to the other side. Now he was looking forward into the ship’s flight deck. A big section of the ship was opaque green wall, but he could see past it to a curved array of screens, dials with tiny close-set numbers, knobs shaped to a puppeteer’s jaws. The pilot’s control couch was a padded bench with crash webbing and indentations for the hip and shoulders of a Pierson’s puppeteer. There was no door in that wall.

To starboard — well, their cell was at least fairly large. He saw a shower, a pair of sleeping plates, and an expanse of rich fur covering what might be a kzin’s water bed, and between them a bulky structure Louis recognized as a food recycler and dispenser, of Wunderland make. Beyond the beds was more green wall and no airlock, and that took care of that. They were in a box with no openings.

The ship was puppeteer-built: a General Products #3 hull, a cylinder flattened along the belly and rounded at the ends. The puppeteer trading empire had sold millions of such ships. They were advertised as invulnerable to any threat save gravity and visible light. About the time Louis Wu was being born, the puppeteer species had fled known space on a dash for the Clouds of Magellan. Now, two hundred odd years later, you still saw General Products hulls everywhere. Some had had a dozen generations of owners.

Twenty-three years ago, the puppeteer-built spacecraft Liar had crashed into the Ringworld surface at seven hundred and seventy miles per second. A stasis field had protected Louis and the other passengers — and the hull wasn’t even scratched.

“You’re a kzin warrior,” Louis said. His lips were thick and numb. “Can you batter your way through a General Products hull?”

“No,” said Speaker. (Not Speaker. Chmeee!)

“It was worth asking. Chmeee, what are you doing on Canyon?”

“I was sent a message. Louis Wu is in the gash on Warhead, living under the wire. There were holograms for proof. Do you know what you look like under the wire? A marine plant, with fronds stirring at the whim of the current.”

Louis found there were tears dripping down his nose. “Tanj. Tanj for torment. Why did you come?”

“I wanted to tell you what a worthless thing you are.”

“Who sent that message?”

“I didn’t know. It must have been the puppeteer. It wanted us both. Louis, is your brain so ruined that you did not notice that the puppeteer—”

“Isn’t Nessus. Right. But did you see the way it keeps its mane? That ornate hair style must cost it an hour a day, easy. If I’d seen it on the puppeteer world, I’d think its rank was high.”

“Well?”

“No sane puppeteer would risk its life to interstellar travel. The puppeteers took their entire world with them, not to mention four farming worlds; they’re going hundreds of thousands of years at sublight speeds, just because they don’t trust spaceships. Whoever this one is, it’s crazy, just like any puppeteer ever seen by humans. I don’t know what to expect from it,” said Louis Wu. “But it’s back.”

The puppeteer was on the flight deck, on a hexagonal stepping disc, watching them through the wall. It spoke in a woman’s voice, a lovely contralto. “Can you hear me?”

Chmeee lurched away from the wall, held his feet for an instant, then dropped to all fours and charged. He thudded hard against the wall. Any puppeteer should have flinched, but this one didn’t. It said, “Our expedition is almost assembled. We lack only one member of our Crew.”

Louis found he could roll over, and he did. He said, “Back up and start from the beginning. You’ve got us in a box, you don’t have to hide anything. Who are you?”

“You may choose any name for me that pleases you.”

“What are you? What do you need from us?”

The puppeteer hesitated. Then, “I was Hindmost to my world. I was mate to the one you knew as Nessus. Now I am neither. I need you as crew for a return expedition to the Ringworld, to restore my status.”

Chmeee said, “We will not serve you.”

Louis asked, “Is Nessus all right?”

“I thank you for your concern. Nessus is healthy in mind and body The shock he suffered on the Ringworld was just what was needed to restore his sanity. He is at home taking care of our two children.”

What Nessus had suffered, Louis thought, would have shocked anybody. Ringworld natives had cut off one of his heads. If Louis and Teela had not thought of using a tourniquet on the alien’s throat, Nessus would have bled to death. “I take it you transplanted a new head onto him.”

“Of course.”

Chmeee said, “You would not be here if you were not insane. Why would your trillion puppeteers elect a damaged mind to rule them?”

“I do not consider myself insane.” The puppeteer’s hind leg flexed restlessly. (Its faces, if they showed any expression at all, showed only loose-lipped idiocy.) “Please do not refer to this again. I served my species well, and four Hindmosts served well before me, before the Conservative faction found power to replace my faction. They are wrong. I will prove it. We will go to the Ringworld and find treasure beyond their puny understanding.”

“To kidnap a kzin,” Chmeee rumbled, “is probably a mistake.” His long claws were extended.

The puppeteer looked at them through the wall. “You would not have come. Louis would not have come. You had your status and your name. Louis had his droud. Our fourth member was a prisoner. My agents inform me that she has been freed and is on her way to us.”

Louis laughed bitterly. All humor was bitter without the droud. “You really don’t have much imagination, do you? It’s just like the first expedition. Me, Chmeee, a puppeteer, and a woman. Who’s the woman? Another Teela Brown?”

“No! Nessus was terrified of Teela Brown — with reason, I believe. I’ve stolen Halrloprillalar from the mouths of the ARM. We will have a Ringworld native guide. As for the character of our expedition, why would I discard a winning strategy? You did escape the Ringworld.”

“All but Teela.”

“Teela stayed of her own choice.”

The kzin said, “We were paid for our efforts. We brought home a spacecraft capable of crossing a light-year in one point two five minutes. That ship bought me my name and my status. What can you offer us now, to compare with that?”

“Many things. Can you move now, Chmeee?”

The kzin stood up. He seemed to have shaken off most of the effects of the stunner. Louis was still dizzy and numb in the extremities.

“Are you in health? Is there dizziness or ache or nausea?”

“Why so anxious, root-eater? You left me in an autodoc for over an hour. I lack coordination and I am hungry, nothing worse.”

“Good. We were able to test the substance only so far. Very well, Chmeee, you have your payment. Boosterspice is the medicine that has kept Louis Wu young and strong for two hundred and twenty-three years. My people have developed an analogue for kzinti. You may take the formula home to the Kzinti Patriarchy when our mission is complete.”

Chmeee seemed nonplussed. “I will grow young? This muck is in me already?”

“Yes.”

“We could have developed such a thing ourselves. We did not want it.”

“I need you young and strong. Chmeee, there is no great danger in our mission! I don’t plan to land on the Ringworld itself, only on the spaceport ledge! You may share any knowledge we find, and so will you, Louis. As for your immediate reward—”

What appeared on the stepping disc was Louis Wu’s droud. The casing had been opened and resealed. Louis’s heart leaped.

“Don’t use it yet,” Chmeee said, and it was an order.

“All right. Hindmost, how long were you watching me?”

“Fifteen years ago I found you in the canyon. My agents were already at work on Earth, trying to free Halrloprillalar. They were having little success. I installed stepping discs in your apartment and waited for the proper time. I go now to enlist our native guide.” The puppeteer mouthed something in the array of controls, walked forward, and was gone.

“Do not use the droud,” Chmeee said.

“Whatever you say.” Louis turned his back. He would know he’d gone crazy when his need for the wire impelled him to attack a kzin. At least one good thing might come out of this… and he clung hard to that thought.

He’d been able to do nothing for Halrloprillalar.

Halrloprillalar had been thousands of years old when she joined Louis and Nessus and Speaker-To-Animals in their search for a way off the Ringworld. The natives who lived beneath her floating police station had been treating her as a sky-living goddess. The whole team had played that game — living as gods to the natives, with Halrloprillalar’s help — while they wended their way back to the wrecked Liar. And she and Louis had been in love.

The Ringworld natives, the three forms that the team had met, had all been related to humanity, but not quite human. Halrloprillalar was nearly bald, and had lips no more everted than a monkey’s. Sometimes the very old seek nothing but variety in their love affairs. Louis had wondered if that was happening to him. He could see character flaws in Prill… but, tanj! He had his own collection.

And he owed Halrloprillalar. They had needed her help, and Nessus had used a puppeteer’s peculiar brand of force on her. Nessus had conditioned her with a tasp. Louis had let him do it.

She had returned with Louis to human space. She had gone with him into the UN offices in Berlin, and had never come out. If the Hindmost could break her loose and return her to her home, it was more than Louis Wu could do for her.

Chmeee said, “I think the puppeteer must be lying. Delusions of grandeur. Why would puppeteers allow one of unsound mind to rule them?”

“They won’t try it themselves. Risk. Uneasy sits the butt that bears the boss. For puppeteers it makes a kind of sense, picking the brightest of a tiny percentage of megalomaniacs… Or look at it from the other side: a line of Hindmost teaching the rest of the population to keep their heads down — don’t try for too much power, it isn’t safe. It could work either way.”

“You think he told the truth?”

“I don’t know enough. What if he is lying? He’s got us.”

“He’s got you,” said the kzin. “He’s got you by the wire. Why aren’t you ashamed?”

Louis was ashamed. He was fighting to keep the shame from crippling his mind, locking him in black despair. He had no way out of this physical box: walls and floor and ceiling were part of a General Products hull. But there were elements…

“If you’re still thinking about breaking out,” he said, “you’d better think about this. You’ll be getting young. He wouldn’t have lied about that; there wouldn’t be any point. What happens when you get young?”

“Bigger appetite. More stamina. A tendency to fight, and you’d better worry about that, Louis.”

Chmeee had gained bulk as he aged. The black “spectacle” marks around his eyes were nearly all gray, and there was some gray elsewhere. Hard muscle showed when he moved; no sensible younger kzin would fight him. But what mattered were the scars. The fur and a good deal of skin had been burned off over more than half of Chmeee’s body the last time Chmeee had seen the Ringworld. Twenty-three years later the fur had grown back, but it grew in ragged tufts above the scar tissue.

“Boosterspice heals scars,” Louis said. “Your fur will grow out smooth. No white in it either.”

“Well, then, I will be prettier.” The tail slashed air. “I must kill the leaf-eater. Scars are like memories. We do not have them removed.”

“How are you going to prove you’re Chmeee?”

The tail froze. Chmeee looked at him.

“He’s got me by the wire.” Louis had reservations regarding that remark, but he could be speaking for a microphone. A puppeteer would not ignore the possibility of mutiny. “He’s got you by the harem, and the land, and the privileges, and the name that belongs to Chmeee the aging hero. The Patriarch may not believe your story, not unless you’ve got kzinti boosterspice and the Hindmost’s word to back you up.”

“Be silent.”

It was all suddenly too much for Louis Wu. He reached for the droud, and the kzin pounced. Chmeee turned the black plastic case in a black-and-orange hand.

“As you like,” Louis said. He flopped on his back. He was short of sleep anyway…

“How did you come to be a wirehead? How?”

“I,” said Louis, and “What you’ve got to understand,” and “Remember the last time we met?”

“Yes. Few humans have been invited to Kzin itself. You deserved the honor, then.”

“Maybe. Maybe I did. Do you remember showing me the House of the Patriarch’s Past?”

“I do. You tried to tell me that we could improve interspecies relationships. All we need do was let a team of human reporters go through the museum with holo cameras.”

Louis smiled, remembering. “So I did.”

“I had my doubts.”

The House of the Patriarch’s Past had been both grand and grandiose: a huge, sprawling building formed from thick slabs of volcanic rock fused at the edges. It was all angles, and there were laser cannon mounted in four tall towers. The rooms went on and on. It had taken Chmeee and Louis two days to go through it.

The Patriarch’s official past went a long way back. Louis had seen ancient sthondat thighbones with grips worked into them, clubs used by primitive kzinti. He’d seen weapons that could have been classed as hand cannons; few humans could have lifted them. He’d seen silver-plated armor as thick as a safe door, and a two-handed ax that might have chopped down a mature redwood. He’d been talking about letting a human reporter tour the place when they came upon Harvey Mossbauer.

Harvey Mossbauer’s family had been killed and eaten during the Fourth Man-Kzin War. Many years after the truce and after a good deal of monomaniacal preparation, Mossbauer had landed alone and armed on Kzin. He had killed four kzinti males and set off a bomb in the harem of the Patriarch before the guards managed to kill him. They were hampered, Chmeee had explained, by their wish to get his hide intact.

“You call that intact?”

“But he fought. How he fought! There are tapes. We know how to honor a brave and powerful enemy, Louis.”

The stuffed skin was so scarred that you had to look twice to tell its species; but it was on a tall pedestal with a hullmetal plaque, and there was nothing around it but floor. Your average human reporter might have misunderstood, but Louis got the point. “I wonder if I can make you understand,” he said, twenty years later, a wirehead kidnapped and robbed of his droud, “how good it felt, then, to know that Harvey Mossbauer was human.”

“It is good to reminisce, but we were talking of current addiction,” Chmeee reminded him.

“Happy people don’t become current addicts. You have to actually go and get the plug implanted. I felt good that day. I felt like a hero. Do you know where Halrloprillalar was at that time?”

“Where was she?”

“The government had her. The ARM. They had lots of questions, and there wasn’t a tanj thing I could do about it. She was under my protection. I took her back to Earth with me—”

“She had you by the glands, Louis. It’s good that kzinti females aren’t sentient. You would have done anything she asked. She asked to see human space.”

“Sure, with me as native guide. It just didn’t happen. Chmeee, we took the Long Shot and Halrloprillalar home, and we turned them over to a Kzin and Earth coalition, and that’s the last we’ve seen of either one. We couldn’t even talk about it to anyone.”

“The second quantum hyperdrive motor became a Patriarch’s Secret.”

“It’s Top Secret to the United Nations, too. I don’t think they even told the other governments of human space, and they made it tanj clear I’d better not talk. And of course the Ringworld was part of the secret, because how could we have got there without the Long Shot? Which makes me wonder,” Louis said, “how the Hindmost expects to reach the Ringworld. Two hundred light-years from Earth — more, from Canyon — at three days to the light-year if he uses this ship. Do you think he’s got another Long Shot hovering somewhere?”

“You will not distract me. Why did you have a wire implanted?” Chmeee crouched, claws extended. Maybe it was a reflex, beyond conscious control — maybe.

“I left Kzin and went home,” Louis said. “I couldn’t get the ARM to let me see Prill. If I could have got a Ringworld expedition together, she would have had to go as native guide, but, tanj! I couldn’t even talk about it except to the government… and you. You weren’t interested.”

“How could I leave? I had land and a name and children coming. Kzinti females are very dependent. They need care and attention.”

“What’s happening to them now?”

“My eldest son will administer my holdings. If I leave him too long he will fight me to keep them. If — Louis! Why did you become a wirehead?”

“Some clown hit me with a tasp!”

“Urrr?”

“I was wandering through a museum in Rio when somebody made my day from behind a pillar.”

“But Nessus took a tasp to the Ringworld, to control his crew. He used it on both of us.”

“Right. How very like a Pierson’s puppeteer, to do us good by way of controlling us! The Hindmost is using the same approach now. Look, he’s got my droud under remote control, and he’s given you eternal youth, and what’s the result? We’ll do anything he tells us to, that’s what.”

“Nessus used the tasp on me, but I am not a wirehead.”

“I didn’t turn wirehead either, then. But I remembered. I was feeling like a louse, thinking about Prill — thinking about taking a sabbatical. I used to do that, take off alone in a ship and head for the edge of known space until I could stand people again. Until I could stand myself again. But it would have been running out on Prill. Then some clown made my day. He didn’t give me much of a jolt, but it reminded me of that tasp Nessus carried, and that was ten times as powerful. I… held off for almost a year, and then I went and got a plug put in my head.”

“I should rip that wire out of your brain.”

“There turn out to be undesirable side effects.”

“How did you come to the gash on Warhead?”

“Oh, that. Maybe I was paranoid, but look: Halrloprillalar vanished into the ARM building and never came out. Here Louis Wu was turning wirehead, and no telling whom the silly flatlander might tell secrets to. I thought I’d better run. Canyon’s easy to land a ship on without being noticed.”

“I expect the Hindmost found it so.”

“Chmeee, give me the droud or let me sleep or kill me. I’m fresh out of motivation.”

“Sleep, then.”

Chapter 3 — Ghost Among The Crew

It was good to wake floating between sleeping plates… until Louis remembered.

Chmeee was tearing at a joint of raw red meat. Wunderland often made these food recyclers to serve more than one species. The kzin stopped eating long enough to say, “Every piece of equipment aboard was built by humans, or could have been built by humans. Even the hull could have been bought on any human world.”

Like a baby in its womb, Louis floated in free fall, his eyes closed and his knees drawn up. But there was no way to forget where he was. He said, “I thought the big lander had a Jinxian look. Made to order, but on Jinx. What about your bed? Kzinti?”

“Artificial fiber. Made to resemble the pelt of a kzin, and sold in secret, no doubt, to humans with an odd sense of humor. I would find pleasure in hunting down the manufacturer.”

Louis reached out and tripped the field control switch. The sleeping field collapsed, lowering him gently to the floor.

It was night outside: sharp white stars overhead and a landscape that was formless velvet black. Even if they could get to spacesuits, the canyon could be halfway around the planet. Or just beyond that black ridge projecting into the starscape; but how would he know?

The recycler kitchen had two keyboards, one with directions in Interworld and one in the Hero’s Tongue. And two toilets on opposite sides. Louis would have preferred a less explicit arrangement. He dialed for a breakfast that would test the kitchen’s repertoire.

The kzin snarled, “Does the situation interest you at all, Louis?”

“Look beneath your feet.”

The kzin knelt. “Urrr… yes. Puppeteers built the hyperdrive shunt. This is the ship in which the Hindmost fled from the Fleet of Worlds.”

“You forgot the stepping discs, too. The puppeteers don’t use them anywhere but on their own world. Now we find the Hindmost sending human agents to get me, on stepping discs.”

“The Hindmost must have stolen them and the ship and little else. His funds may have been owed to General Products and never claimed. Louis, I do not believe the Hindmost has puppeteer support. We should try to reach the puppeteer fleet.”

“Chmeee, there are bound to be microphones in here.”

“Should I watch my speech for this leaf-eater?”

“All right, let’s look at it.” The depression he was feeling came out as bitter sarcasm, and why not? Chmeee had his droud. “A puppeteer has indulged a whim for kidnapping men and kzinti. Naturally the honest puppeteers will be horrified. Are they really going to let us run home and tell the Patriarch? Who has no doubt been doing his best to build more Long Shots, which could reach the puppeteer fleet in just over four hours plus acceleration time to match velocities — say, three months at three gravities—”

“Enough, Louis!”

“Tanj, if you wanted to start a war you had your chance! According to Nessus, the puppeteers meddled in the First Man-Kzin War, in our favor. Now hold it. Do not tell me whether you told anyone else.”

“Drop the subject now.”

“Sure. Only, it just hit me—” and because the conversation might be recorded, Louis spoke partly for the Hindmost’s benefit. “You and I and the Hindmost are the only ones in known space who know what the puppeteers have been doing, besides anyone either of us might have told.”

“If we should be lost on the Ringworld, would the Hindmost mourn forever? I see your point. But the Hindmost might not even know that Nessus was indiscreet.”

He’ll know if he plays this back, Louis thought. My fault. I should watch my speech for a leaf-eater? He attacked his meal with some ferocity.

He had chosen for both simplicity and complexity: half a grapefruit, a chocolate soufflé, broiled moa breast, Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee topped with whipped cream. Most of it was good; only the whipped cream was unconvincing. But what could you say about the moa? A twenty-fourth-century geneticist had recreated the moa, or so he’d claimed, and the recycler kitchen produced an imitation of that. It had a good texture and tasted like rich bird meat.

It was nothing like being under the wire.

He had learned to live with this part-time depression. It existed only by contrast with the wire; Louis believed that it was the normal state of being for humanity. Being imprisoned by a mad alien for peculiar purposes didn’t make it that much worse. What made the black morning so terrible was that Louis Wu was going to have to give up the droud.

Finished, he dumped the dirty dishes into the toilet. He asked, “What will you take for the droud?”

Chmeee snorted. “What do you have for trade?”

“Promises made on my word of honor. And a good set of informal pajamas.”

Chmeee’s tail slashed at the air. “You were a useful companion once. What will you be if I give you the droud? A browsing beast. I will keep the droud.”

Louis began his exercises.

One-hand push-ups were easy in half a gravity. One hundred on each hand were not. The dorsal curve of the hull was too low for some of his routines. Two hundred scissors jumps, touching extended fingers to extended toes—

Chmeee watched curiously. Presently he said, “I wonder why the Hindmost lost his honors.”

Louis didn’t answer. Suspended horizontally with toes under the bottom sleeping-field plate and a platter under his calves, he was doing very slow sit-ups.

“And what he expects to find on the spaceport ledge. What did we find? The deceleration rings are too big to move. Could he want something from a Ringworlder spacecraft?”

Louis dialed for a pair of moa drumsticks. He wiped them of grease and began juggling them: oversized Indian clubs. Sweat formed in big droplets before reluctantly moving down his face and torso.

Chmeee’s tail lashed. His large pink ears folded back, offering no purchase to an enemy. Chmeee was angry. That was his problem.

The puppeteer flicked into existence, one impervious wall away. It had changed the style of its mane, substituting points of light for the opals… and it was alone. It studied the situation for a moment. It said, “Use the droud, Louis.”

“I don’t have that option.” Louis discarded the weights. “Where’s Prill?”

The puppeteer said, “Chmeee, give Louis the droud.”

“Where’s Halrloprillalar?”

A tremendous furry arm enclosed Louis’s throat. Louis kicked backward, putting his whole body into it. The kzin grunted. With curious gentleness he inserted the droud into its socket.

“All right,” Louis said. The kzin let him go and he sat down. He’d guessed already, and so had the kzin, of course. Louis began to realize how much he had wanted to see Prill… to see her free of the ARM… to see her.

“Halrloprillalar is dead. My agents cheated me,” the puppeteer said. “They have known that the Ringworld native was dead for eighteen standard years. I could stay to root them out wherever they have hidden, but it might take another eighteen years. Or eighteen hundred! Human space is too big. Let them keep their stolen money.”

Louis nodded, smiling, knowing that this was going to hurt when he removed the droud. He heard Chmeee ask, “How did she die?”

“She could not tolerate boosterspice. The United Nations now believes that she was not quite human. She aged very rapidly. A year and five months after reaching Earth, she was dead.”

“Already dead,” Louis mused. “When I was on Kzin… ” But there was a puzzle here. “She had her own longevity drug. Better than boosterspice. We brought a cryoflask home with us.”

“It was stolen. I know nothing more.”

Stolen? But Prill had never walked the streets of Earth, to meet common thieves. United Nations scientists might have opened the flask to analyze the stuff, but they wouldn’t need more than a microgram… He might never know. And afterward they had kept her, to take her knowledge before she died.

This was definitely going to hurt. But not yet.

“We need not delay longer.” The puppeteer settled itself in its padded bench. “You will travel in stasis, to conserve resources. I have an auxiliary fuel tank to be dropped before we enter hyperspace. We will arrive fully fueled. Chmeee, would you name our ship?”

Chmeee demanded, “Do you propose to explore blindly, then?”

“Only the spaceport ledge, and no further. Would you name our ship?”

“I name it Hot Needle of Inquiry.”

Louis smiled and wondered if the puppeteer recognized the term. Their ship was now named for a kzinti instrument of torture. The puppeteer mouthed two knobs and brought them together.

Chapter 4 — Off Center

Louis sagged as his weight suddenly doubled. The black Canyonscape was gone. It must be invisible in the starscape now, a changed starscape in which one star, directly underfoot, shone brighter than all the rest. The Hindmost disengaged itself from crash web and pilot’s bench. The puppeteer had changed too. It moved as if tired, and its mane — differently styled now — seemed not to have been set for some time.

Current didn’t deaden the brain. Louis could see the obvious: that he and Chmeee must have spent two years in stasis, while the puppeteer flew Needle alone through hyperspace; that known space, a bubble of explored star systems some forty light-years in radius, must be far behind them; that Hot Needle of Inquiry was built to be flown by a Pierson’s puppeteer, with all other passengers in stasis, and only a puppeteer’s mercy would ever return them. That he had seen a human being for the last time, and Halrloprillalar was dead of Louis Wu’s carelessness, and he was going to feel terribly lonely when the droud came out of his head, which would be soon. None of that mattered while the tiny current still trickled into his brain.

He saw no drive flame. Hot Needle of Inquiry must be moving on reactionless thrusters alone.

Liar’s designers had mounted the ship’s motors on its great delta wing. Something like a tremendous laser blast had fired on them as they passed above the Ringworld, and the motors had been burned off. The Hindmost would not have repeated that mistake, Louis thought. Needle’s thrusters would be mounted inside the impervious hull.

Chmeee asked, “How long until we can land?”

“We can be ready to dock in five days. I was unable to take advanced drive systems from the Fleet of Worlds. With human-built machinery we can decelerate only at twenty gravities. Do you find the cabin gravity comfortable?”

“A bit light. One Earth gravity?”

“One Ringworld gravity, point nine nine two Earth gravity.”

“Leave it as it is. Hindmost, you gave us no instruments. I would like to study the Ringworld.”

The puppeteer pondered the point. “Your lander vehicle includes a telescope, but it would not point straight down. Wait several moments.” The puppeteer turned to its instrument board. One head turned back and spoke in the hissing-spitting-snarling accents of the Hero’s Tongue.

Chmeee said, “Use Interworld. Let Louis listen, at least.”

The puppeteer did. “It is good to speak again in any language. I was lonely. There, I give you a projection from Needle’s telescope.”

An image appeared below Louis Wu’s feet: a rectangle, with no borderlines, in which the Ringworld sun and the stars around it were suddenly far larger. Louis blocked the sun with his hand and searched. The Ringworld was there: a thread of baby blue forming a half-circle.

Picture fifty feet of baby-blue Christmas ribbon one inch wide. String it in a circle, on edge on the floor, and put a candle in the middle. Now expand the scale:

The Ringworld was a ribbon of unreasonably strong material, a million miles wide and six hundred million miles long, strung in a circle ninety-five million miles in radius with a sun at the center. The ring spun at seven hundred and seventy miles per second, fast enough to produce one gravity of centrifugal force outward. The unknown Ringworld engineers had layered the inner surface with soil and oceans and an atmosphere. They had raised walls a thousand miles high at each rim to hold the air inside. Presumably air leaked over the rim walls anyway, but not quickly. An inner ring of twenty rectangular shadow squares, occupying what would have been the orbit of Mercury in Sol system, gave a thirty-hour day and night cycle to the Ringworld.

The Ringworld was six hundred million million square miles of habitable planet. Three million times the area of the Earth.

Louis and Speaker-To-Animals and Nessus and Teela Brown had traveled across the Ringworld for almost a year: two hundred thousand miles across the width, then back to the point where Liar had crashed. A fifth of the width. It hardly made them experts. Could any thinking being ever have claimed to be an expert on the Ringworld?

But they had examined one of the spaceport ledges on the outside of the rim wall. If the Hindmost spoke the truth, they would need no more. Land on the spaceport ledge, pick up whatever the Hindmost expected to find, and go. Fast! Because—

Because within the rectangular telescope image that the Hindmost had set before them, it was painfully obvious. The baby-blue arc of Ringworld — the color of three million Earthlike worlds, too far away for detail to show, but banded with midnight blue from the shadow squares — was well off center from its sun.

“We didn’t know this,” Chmeee said. “We spent a Kzin year on the structure and did not know this. How could we not?”

The puppeteer said, “The Ringworld could not have been off center when you were here. It was twenty-three years ago.”

Louis nodded. To speak would be distracting. Only the joy of the wire now held away horror for the fate of the Ringworld natives, fear and guilt for himself. The Hindmost continued, “The Ringworld structure is unstable in the plane of its orbit. Surely you knew?”

“No!”

Louis said, “I didn’t know myself till after I was back on Earth. I did some research then.”

Both aliens were looking at him. He hadn’t really wanted that much of their attention. Oh, well. “It’s easy enough to show that the Ringworld is unstable. Stable along the axis, but unstable in the plane. There must have been something to keep the sun on the axis.”

“But it’s off center now!”

“Whatever it was stopped working.”

Chmeee clawed at the invisible floor. “But then they must die! Billions of them, tens of billions — trillions?” He turned to Louis. “I tire of your fatuous smile. Would you talk better without the droud?”

“I can talk fine.”

“Talk, then. Why is the Ringworld unstable? Is it not in orbit?”

“No, of course not. It has to be rigid. That terrific spin would pull it rigid. If you nudge the Ringworld off center it’ll fall further off center. But the equations are pretty hairy. I played around with a computer and I got numbers I’m not sure I believe.”

The Hindmost said, “At one time we thought we might build our own Ringworld. The instability is too great. Even a strong solar flare would exert enough pressure on the structure to throw it off balance. Five years later it would grind against its sun.”

“That’s the same figure I got,” Louis said. “That must be what happened here.”

Chmeee was clawing the floor again. “Attitude jets! The Ringworld engineers would have mounted attitude jets!”

“Maybe. We know they had Bussard ramjets. They used them to drive their starships. Okay, a lot of big Bussard ramjets on the rim walls would be enough to keep the Ringworld centered. The motors would fuse the hydrogen in the solar wind. They’d never ran out of fuel.”

“We saw nothing. Think how huge the motors would have to be!”

Louis chuckled. “What do you call huge? On the Ringworld? We missed them, that’s all.” But he couldn’t like the way Chmeee stood above him with claws extended.

“You accept it all so easily? There may be enough Ringworld natives to crowd the worlds of known space thousands of times over. They are more nearly your kind than mine.”

“You’re a ruthless, merciless carnivore. Try to remember,” Louis told the kzin. “Look: it’ll bother me. It’ll bother me a lot after the Hindmost turns off my droud. But it won’t kill me, because I’ll be a little bit used to it by then. Can you think of anything we can do to help them? Anything?”

The kzin turned away. “Hindmost, how much time do they have left?”

“I will attempt to find out.”

The sun was well off center to the Ringworld. Louis guessed it might be, oh, seventy million miles from the near side, which would put it a hundred and twenty million miles from the far side. The near side would be getting nearly three times as much sunlight as the far side, and the structure rotated in seven and a half thirty-hour days. There would be weather. Plants that couldn’t take the changes would be dying. And animals. And men.

The Hindmost had finished its work at the telescope. Now it worked at the computer, out of sight behind the solid green wall. Louis wondered what else was concealed in that hidden part of the ship.

The puppeteer trotted into view. “One year and five months from now, the Ringworld will graze its sun. I expect it will disintegrate then. Given their rotational velocity, the fragments would all recede into interstellar space.”

“Shadow squares,” Louis murmured.

“What? Yes, the shadow squares would impact before the sun. Still, we should have at least a year. Plenty of time for us,” the Hindmost said briskly. “We will not touch the Ringworld surface at all. Your expedition examined the spaceport ledge, from some tens of thousands of miles away, without being fired on by the Ringworld meteor defenses. I believe the spaceport has been abandoned. We can land in safety.”

Chmeee asked, “What do you expect to find?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t remembered.” The Hindmost turned to its control board. “Louis, you’ve had enough time.”

“Wait—”

The wire in his brain went dead.

Chapter 5 — Withdrawal Symptoms

Louis watched through the wall as the puppeteer worked on his droud. He thought of death in mind-stunning numbers, and death as his own very personal experience, and death for aliens who monitored the current to his brain.

Flat heads poised and shifted and nosed the small black casing as if nibbling at a dubious meal. Long tongues and sensitive lips worked inside the casing. In a few minutes the puppeteer had reset the timer to a thirty-hour day, and cut the current by half.

The next day it was pure joy unfiltered by human sense, and nothing could actually bother him, but… Louis had trouble defining his own feelings. When the current cut off too soon that evening, depression dropped over him like thick saffron smog.

Then Chmeee stooped above Louis Wu, pulled the droud from his scalp, and set it on the stepping disc to be flicked to the flight deck. For resetting. Again.

Louis screamed and leaped. He scrambled up the kzin’s broad back via fur handholds and tried to tear his ears off. The kzin whirled. Louis found himself clinging to a great arm, found the arm slinging him across the room. He fetched up against a wall. Half stunned, with blood streaming down his torn arm, Louis turned to the attack.

He turned in time to see Chmeee leap onto the stepping disc just as the Hindmost mouthed the controls.

Chmeee crouched on the black disc, looking dangerous and foolish.

The Hindmost said, “Nothing so massive may be flicked to these discs. Do you judge me an idiot, to flick a kzin onto my own flight deck?”

Chmeee snarled, “How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?” He flipped the droud to Louis and shambled toward his water bed.

A diversion. Chmeee had snatched the droud from Louis’s scalp just after it switched off, solely to drive Louis Wu into berserker rage, to distract the puppeteer’s attention.

The Hindmost said, “When next I alter your droud I will do it just before you plug in. Does that make you happy?”

“You know tanj well what makes me happy!” Louis held the droud tightly. It was dead, of course — dead until the timer made it live again.

“You are nearly as long-lived as we are. This is so temporary,” the Hindmost wheedled him. “You will be wealthy beyond dreams! The Ringworld spacecraft used a method of cheap, large-scale transmutation, the same that they must have used to build the Ringworld itself!”

Louis looked up, startled.

“I wish we knew the mass and bulk of the machine,” the puppeteer continued. “The Ringworld spacecraft are tremendous things. But we need not transport it. If necessary, a hologram taken by deep-radar, and holograms of the mechanism in action, should be enough to convince my subjects. Then we need only send a General Products #4 craft to pick it up.”

The alien would not expect a man deep in current withdrawal to respond to every little comment. Of course not. But from under his brows Louis watched Chmeee, to see how he would handle it.

The kzin was admirable. For a moment he froze. Then, “How did you come to lose your prerogatives?”

“The tale is complex.”

“We entered Ringworld system with eleven billion miles to fall and a velocity of fifty-two thousand miles per second to be shed. Only a day has passed. We have time.”

“So we do, and no other useful work. You must know, then, that Conservative and Experimentalist factions are old among us. Usually the Conservatives rule. But when our world suffered from heat pollution due to too much use of Industrial power, Experimentalists moved our world outward into the cometary halo. An Experimentalist regime altered and then seeded two farming worlds. A later regime moved two more worlds inward from where they had formed as moons of distant ice giants… ”

And Chmeee had gained time to lose his agitation and think what he would say next. Good! Maybe the kzin had earned the position he once held: Speaker-To-Animals, a junior ambassador to humanity.

“… we do the necessary things, then are deposed. It is the general rule. Experimentalists came into power when our probes learned of the Kzinti Empire. I believe Nessus told you how we handled that.”

“You aided humanity.” Chmeee was peculiarly still. Louis would have expected him to be tearing up the walls. “The four Wars With Men killed four generations of our mightiest fighters so that the more docile among us might reproduce their kind.”

“We hoped you would become able to deal amicably with other species. My faction also established a trading empire in this region. Despite our successes, we were losing our authority. Then it was discovered that the core of our galaxy has exploded. The shock wave will arrive in twenty thousand years. Our faction stayed in power, to arrange the exodus of the Fleet of Worlds.”

“How fortunate for you. Yet they deposed you after all.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The puppeteer didn’t answer for a time. Then: “Some of my decisions were not popular. I meddled with human and kzinti destiny. Somehow you learned our secret, how we had tampered with the Fertility Laws on Earth in an attempt to breed lucky humans, and with the course of the First War With Men, to produce reasonable kzinti. My predecessor established General Products, the interstellar trading empire. It was said that he had made a virtue of madness, since only the mad among us will risk their lives in space. When I arranged your expedition to explore the Ringworld, I was called mad, to risk contact with so advanced a technology. But one does not hide one’s sight from danger!”

“So they deposed you.”

“It may have been… a convenient excuse.” The Hindmost paced restlessly: clopclopclop, clopclopclop. “You know that I agreed to take Nessus as mate if he returned from the Ringworld. He demanded this concession. And he returned, and we mated. Then we did it again, for love. Nessus was mad, and the Hindmost has often been mad, and… they deposed me.”

Louis suddenly asked, “Which of you is male?”

“I wonder why you did not ask that of Nessus. But he would not have told you, would he? Nessus is shy on certain subjects. We have two kinds of male, Louis. My kind implants its sperm in the female’s flesh, and Nessus’s kind implants its egg in the female with a most similar organ.”

Chmeee asked, “You have three sets of genes?”

“No, two only. The female contributes none. In fact, females mate among themselves in another way to make more females. They are not properly of our species, though they have been symbiotic with us for all history.”

Louis winced. The puppeteers bred like digger wasps: their progeny ate the flesh of a helpless host. Nessus had refused to talk about sex. Nessus was right. This was ugly.

“I was right,” said the Hindmost. “I was right to send a mission to the Ringworld, and we will prove it. Five days in, and no more than ten on the spaceport ledges, and five more to reach flat space where we may escape by hyperdrive. We need never board the Ringworld at all. Halrloprillalar told Nessus that the Ringworld ships carried lead, for compactness, and transmuted it into air and water and fuel during the journey. A Conservative government could not deal with the ramifications of such a technology. They will reinstate me.”

Current-withdrawal depression left Louis no urge to laugh. Still, it was all very funny, and funnier still because it was his own fault from the beginning.

The next morning the aliens cut the droud’s current flow in half again, and left it alone thereafter. It shouldn’t have made that much difference. Under the wire he was still content. But for years he had suffered through the depression when the timer stopped, knowing what he would feel when the current resumed. His depressions were worse now, and there was no security. The aliens could cut the current at any time… and even if they didn’t, he would still have to give it up.

What the aliens talked about during those four days he didn’t know. He tried to concentrate on the ecstasy in the wire. Vaguely he remembered them calling up holograms from the computer. There were the faces of Ringworld natives: the small ones completely covered with golden hair (and one, a priest, was shaven); and the tremendous wire sculpture in the sky castle (stub of a nose, bald head, knife-slash lips); and Halrloprillalar (probably of the same race); and Seeker, the wanderer who had taken Teela under his protection (almost human, but muscled like a Jinxian, and beardless). There were cities ruined by time and by floating buildings that had fallen when their power died. There were holograms of Liar’s approach to a shadow square, and of a city nestled in a smoke cloud of fallen shadow-square wire.

The sun grew from a point to a black dot with a bright rim around it, its brightness blocked by flare shielding on Needle’s inner hull. The blue halo around the sun expanded.

In dreams Louis returned to the Ringworld. In a great floating prison he hung head down from his burned-out flycycle, ninety feet above a hard floor strewn with the bones of earlier captives. Nessus’s voice beat in his ears, promising rescue that never came.

When awake he took refuge in routine… until on the evening of the fourth day he looked at his dinner, then dumped it and dialed for bread and a selection of cheeses. Four days to realize that he was forever beyond the reach of the ARM. He could eat cheese again!

What’s good besides the wire? Louis asked himself. Cheese. Sleeping plates. Love (impractical). Wild skin dye jobs. Freedom, security, self-respect. Winning as opposed to losing. Tanj, I’ve almost forgotten how to think like this, and I’ve lost it all. Freedom, security, self-respect. A little patience and I can take the first step. What else is good? Brandy poured in coffee. Movies.

Twenty-three years earlier, Speaker-To-Animals had brought the spacecraft Lying Bastard close to the Ringworld’s edge. Now Chmeee and the Hindmost watched recordings of that event.

Seen from that close, the Ringworld became straight lines meeting at a vanishing point. From out of the point where the checkered blue inner surface dropped to meet the top and bottom edges of the rim wall, the rings of the spacecraft decelerator system seemed to fly straight into the camera, over and over, in infrared and visible and ultraviolet light and deep-radar images. Or they crept past in slow motion, huge electromagnets, all identical.

But Louis Wu watched the entire eight hours of the Changeling Earth fantasy epic while getting soddenly drunk. Brandy in coffee, then brandy and soda, then brandy alone. It was a movie he watched, not a sensual: it used live actors and only two of the human senses. He was at two removes from reality.

At one point he tried to engage Chmeee in a discussion of Saberhagen’s use of impossible visual effects. He retained just enough wit to desist at once. He dared not talk to Chmeee while drunk. The puppeteers have hidden ears, hidden ears—

The Ringworld grew large.

For two days it had been a finely etched blue ring, narrow, flimsy-looking, off center to its sun, growing as the black circle of its sun grew. Gross detail appeared. An inner ring of black rectangles, the shadow squares. A rim wall, a mere thousand miles high, but growing to block their view of the Ringworld’s inner surface. By evening of the fifth day Hot Needle of Inquiry had lost most of its velocity, and the rim wall was a great black wall across the stars.

Louis was not under the wire. Today he’d forced himself to skip it; and then the Hindmost had told him that he would send no current until they had landed safely. Louis had shrugged. Soon, now—

“The sun is flaring,” the Hindmost said.

Louis looked up. Meteor shielding blocked the sun. He saw only the solar corona, a circle of flame enclosing a black disc. “Give us a picture,” he said.

Darkened and expanded in the rectangular “window,” the sun became a huge, patterned disc. This sun was slightly smaller and cooler than Sol. There were no sunspots, no blemishes, except for a patch of glaring brightness at the center. “Our vantage is not good,” the Hindmost said. “We see the flare head on.”

Chmeee said, “Perhaps the sun has become unstable recently. This could explain why the Ringworld is off center.”

“It may be. Lying Bastard’s records show a flare during your approach to the Ringworld, but for most of that year the sun was quiet.” The Hindmost’s heads poised above his instrument board. “Odd. The magnetic patterns—”

The black disc slid behind the black edge of the rim wall.

“The magnetic patterns of that star are most unusual,” the Hindmost continued.

Louis said, “So go back for another look.”

“Our mission does not permit the collection of random data.”

“No curiosity?”

“No.”

From under ten thousand miles away, the black wall seemed straight as a ruled line. Darkness and speed blurred all detail. The Hindmost had the telescope screen set for infrared light, but it did little good… or did it? There were shadows along the bottom of the rim wall, triangles of coolness thirty to forty miles tall, as if something on the inner side of the thousand-mile-high wall was reflecting sunlight away. And here came a darker, cooler line along the bottom, moving left to right.

Chmeee asked politely, “Are we boarding or merely hovering?”

“Hovering, to assess the situation.”

“The treasure is yours. You may leave without it if it pleases you.”

The Hindmost was restless. His legs gripped the pilot’s bench hard. Muscles twitched in his back. Chmeee was relaxed; he seemed pleased with himself. He said, “Nessus had a kzin for his pilot. There were times when he could give way to total fear. You dare not. Can the automatics land Needle for you while you hide in stasis?”

“What if an emergency developed? No. I did not anticipate this.”

“You must land us yourself. Do it, Hindmost.”

Needle turned nose down and accelerated.

It took nearly two hours to accelerate to the Ringworld’s seven hundred and seventy miles per second. By then, hundreds of thousands of miles of the dark line had raced past them. The Hindmost began to ease them closer — slowly, so slowly that Louis wondered if he would back out. He watched without impatience. He wasn’t under the wire, and by his own choice. Nothing else could be that important.

But where was Chmeee’s patience coming from? Was Chmeee feeling his oncoming youth? A human reaching his first century could feel that he had all the time in the world, for anything. Would a kzin react that way? Or… Chmeee was a trained diplomat. Perhaps he could hide his feelings.

Needle balanced on belly thrusters… 992 gravities of thrust warped its path into the Ringworld’s curve; left to itself, the ship would have flung itself outward toward interstellar space. Louis watched the puppeteer’s heads darting and weaving to check the dials and meters and screens around him. Louis couldn’t read them.

The dark line had become a row of rings set well apart, each ring a hundred miles across, drifting past. During the first expedition, an old recording had shown them how ships would position themselves fifty miles from the rim wall and wait for the rings to sweep them up and accelerate them from free fall to Ringworld rotational speed and then dump them at the far end, on the spaceport ledge.

To left and right the black wall converged at vanishing points. It was close now, a few thousand miles away. The Hindmost tilted Needle to coast along the linear accelerator. Hundreds of thousands of miles of rings… but the Ringworlders had lacked gravity generators. Their ships and crews would not tolerate high accelerations.

“The rings are inactive. I find not even sensors for incoming ships,” a puppeteer head turned to tell them, and then turned quickly back to work.

Here came the spaceport ledge.

It was seventy miles across. There were tall cranes built in beautiful curves, and rounded buildings, and low, wide flatbed trucks. There were ships: four flat-nosed cylinders, of which three had been damaged, the curve of the hulls broken.

“I hope you brought lights,” Chmeee said.

“I do not want to be noticed yet.”

“Do you find any sign of awareness? Will you land us without lights?”

“No and no,” said the Hindmost. The spotlight flared from Needle’s nose, tremendously powerful: an auxiliary weapon, of course.

The ships were vast. An open airlock was a mere black speck. Thousands of windows glittered on the cylinders precisely like candy flecks sprinkled on a cake. One ship seemed intact. The others had been torn open and cannibalized in varying degrees, their guts opened to vacuum and prying alien eyes.

“Nothing attacks, nothing warns us,” the puppeteer said. “The temperature of the buildings and machinery is as that of the ledge and the ships, 174° Absolute. This place is long abandoned.”

A pair of massive toroids, copper-colored, ringed the waist of the intact ship. They must have been a third the mass of the ship itself, or more. Louis pointed them out. “Ramscoop generators, maybe. I studied the history of spaceflight once. A Bussard ramjet generates an electromagnetic field to scoop up interstellar hydrogen and guide it into a constriction zone for fusion. Infinite fuel supply. But you need an inboard tank and rocket motor for when you’re moving too slow for the ramscoop. There.” Tanks were visible within two of the rifled ships.

And on all three of the rifled ships, the massive toroids were missing. That puzzled Louis. But Bussard ramjets commonly used magnetic monopoles, and monopoles could be valuable in other contexts.

Something else was bothering the Hindmost.

“Tanks to carry the lead? But why not simply plate it around the ship, where it would serve as shielding before it need be transmuted into fuel?”

Louis was silent. There had been no lead.

“Availability,” Chmeee said. “Perhaps they had to fight battles. Lead could be boiled from the hull, leaving the ship without fuel. Land us, Hindmost, and we will seek answers in the unharmed ship.”

Needle hovered.

“Easy to depart,” Chmeee insinuated. “Ease us off the ledge and turn off the thrusters. We fall to flat space, activate the hyperdrive and rush for safety.”

Needle settled on the spaceport ledge. The Hindmost said, “Take your place on the stepping discs.”

Chmeee did. He was… not chuckling, but purring as he vanished. Louis stepped after him and was elsewhere.

Chapter 6 — “Now Here’s My Plan…”

The room felt familiar. He’d never seen one exactly like it, but it looked like the flight deck on any small interplanetary spacecraft. You always needed cabin gravity, a ship’s computer, thrust controls, attitude jets, a mass detector. The three control chairs were recliners equipped with crash webs, controls in the arms, urinal tubes, and slots for food and drink. One chair was much larger than the others, that was all. Louis felt he could fly the lander blindfolded.

There was a broad strip of wraparound window above a semicircle of screens and dials. Through the window Louis watched a section of Needle’s hull swing out and up. The hanger was open to space.

Chmeee glanced over the larger knobs and switches set before his own chair. “We have weapons,” he said softly.

A screen blinked and showed a foreshortened puppeteer head, which said, “Descend the steps to reach your vacuum equipment.”

The lander’s stairs were broad and shallow, made for a kzin’s tread. Below was a much larger area, living space, with a water bed and sleeping plates and a kitchen the duplicate of the one in their cell. There was an autodoc big enough for a kzin, with an elaborate control console. Louis had been an experimental surgeon once. Perhaps the Hindmost knew it.

Chmeee had found the vacuum equipment behind one of an array of locker doors. He encased himself in what looked like an assortment of transparent balloons. He was edgy with impatience. “Louis! Gear yourself!”

Louis pulled on a flexible one-piece suit, skintight, and attached the fishbowl helmet and backpack. It was standard equipment; the suit would pass sweat, letting the body be its own cooling system. Louis added a loose oversuit lined in silver. It would be cold out there.

The airlock was built for three. Good: Louis could picture times when he wouldn’t want to wait outside while an airlock cycled for someone else. If the Hindmost wasn’t expecting emergencies, he had prepared for them anyway. As air was replaced by vacuum, Louis’s chest expanded. He pulled shut the “girdle,” the wide elastic band around his middle that would help him exhale.

Chmeee strode out of the lander, out of Needle, into the night. Louis picked up a tool kit and followed at an easy jog.

The sense of freedom was heady, dangerous. Louis reminded himself that his suit’s communication link included the Hindmost. Things had to be said, and soon, but not in the puppeteer’s hearing.

Proportions were wrong here. The half-disassembled ships were too big. The horizon was too close and too sharp. An infinite black wall cut the brilliant, half-familiar starscape in half. Seen through vacuum, the shapes of distant objects remained sharp and clear up to hundreds of thousands of miles away.

The nearest Ringworld ship, the intact one, looked to be half a mile distant. It was more like a mile. On the last voyage he had constantly misjudged the scale of things, and twenty-three years hadn’t cured him.

He arrived puffing beneath the huge ship, to find an escalator built into one landing leg. The ancient machinery wasn’t working, of course. He trudged up.

Chmeee was trying to work the controls of a big airlock. He fished a grippy out of the kit Louis carried. “Best not to burn through doors yet,” he said. “There is power.” He pried a cover off and worked at the innards.

The outer door closed. The inner door opened on vacuum and darkness. Chmeee turned on his flashlight-laser.

Louis was a little daunted. This ship would probably carry enough people to fill a small town. Easy to get lost here. “We want inspection tubes,” he said. “I’d like to get the ship pressurized. With that big helmet you couldn’t get into an access tube built for men.”

They turned into a corridor that curved with the curve of the hull. There were doors just taller than Louis’s head. Louis opened some of the doors. He found small living cubicles with bunks and pull-down chairs for humanoids his own size and smaller.

“I’d say Halrloprillalar’s people built these ships.”

Chmeee said, “We knew that. Her people built the Ringworld.”

“That they did not do,” said Louis. “I wondered if they built the ships or took them over from someone else.”

The Hindmost spoke in their helmets. “Louis? Halrloprillalar told you her people built the Ringworld. Do you think she lied?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She’d lied about other things. Louis didn’t say so. He said, “Style. We know they built the cities. All those floating buildings, they’re the kind of thing you put up to show off your wealth and power. Remember the sky castle, the floating building with the map room in it? Nessus took back tapes.”

“I studied them,” said the puppeteer.

“And it had a raised throne and a wire sculpture of someone’s head that was as big as a house! If you could build a Ringworld, would you bother with a sky castle? I don’t believe it. I never believed it.”

“Chmeee?”

The kzin said, “We must accept Louis’s judgment on human matters.”

They turned right into a radial corridor. Here were more sleeping rooms. Louis inspected one in detail. The pressure suit was interesting. It was mounted against a wall like a hunter’s trophy hide: one piece, crisscrossed with zippers, all open. Instantly accessible in case of vacuum.

The kzin waited impatiently while Louis zipped it shut and stepped back to study the effect.

The joints bulged. Knees and shoulders and elbows like cantaloupes, hands like a fistful of walnuts strung together. The face jutted forward; there were power and air-reserve gauges set below the faceplate.

The kzin growled, “Well?”

“Nope, I need more proof. Let’s go.”

“More proof of what?”

“I think I know who built the Ringworld… and why the natives are so much like humans. But why would they build something they couldn’t defend? It doesn’t make sense.”

“If we discussed it—”

“Nope, not yet. Come on.”

At the ship’s axis they found pay dirt. Half a dozen radial corridors converged, and a tube with a ladder led up and down. There were diagrams covering four sections of wall, with labels that were tiny, detailed pictograms.

“How convenient,” said Louis. “It’s almost as if they had us in mind.”

“Languages change,” said the kzin. “These people rode the winds of relativity; their crews might be born a century apart. They would have needed such aids. We held our empire together with similar aids, before the Wars With Men. Louis, I find no weaponry section.”

“There was nothing guarding the spaceport either. Nothing obvious, anyway.” Louis’s finger traced the diagrams. “Galley, hospital, living area — we’re here in the living area. Three control centers; seems excessive.”

“One for the Bussard ramjet and interstellar space. One for fusion drive and maneuvering in an occupied system, and weapons control, if any. One for life support: this one, that shows wind blowing through a corridor.”

The Hindmost spoke. “With transmutation, they would use a total conversion drive.”

“Oh, not necessarily. A blast of radiation that powerful would play merry hell in an inhabited system,” said Louis. “Hah! There are our access tubes, going to… ramscoop generators, fusion motor, fuel feed. We want the life-support controls first. Two flights up and that way.”

The control room was small: a padded bench facing three walls of dials and switches. A touchpoint in the doorjamb caused the walls to glow yellow-white, and set the dials glowing too. They were unreadable, of course. Pictograms segregated the controls into clusters governing entertainment, spin, water, sewage, food, air.

Louis began flipping switches. The ones most often used would be large and easy to reach. He stopped when he heard a whistling sound.

The pressure dial at his chin rose gradually.

There was low pressure at 40 percent oxygen. Humidity was low but not absent. No detectable noxious substances.

Chmeee had deflated his suit and was stripping it off. Louis removed his helmet, dropped the backpack, and peeled his suit away, all in unseemly haste. The air was dry and faintly stale.

Chmeee said, “I think we may start with the access tube to the fuel feed. Shall I lead?”

“Fine.” Louis heard in his voice the tension and eagerness he’d tried to repress. With luck the Hindmost would miss it. Soon, now. He followed the kzin’s orange back.

Out the door, turn right into a radius, follow to the ship’s axis and down a ladder, and a great furry hand engulfed Louis’s upper arm and pulled him into a corridor.

“We must talk,” the kzin rumbled.

“Yah, and about time too! If he can hear us now, we might as well give up. Listen—”

“The Hindmost will not hear us. Louis, we must capture Hot Needle of Inquiry. Have you given thought to this?”

“I have. It can’t be done. You made a nice try, but what the futz were you going to do next? You can’t fly Needle. You saw the controls.”

“I can make the Hindmost fly it.”

Louis shook his head. “Even if you could stand guard over him for two years, I think the life-support system would break down, trying to keep you both alive that long. That’s the way he planned it.”

“You would surrender?”

Louis sighed. “All right, let’s look at it in detail. We can offer the Hindmost a credible bribe or a credible threat, or we can kill him if we think we can fly Needle afterward.”

“Yes.”

“We can’t bribe him with a magic transmutation device. There isn’t any.”

“I dreaded that you would blurt out the truth.”

“No way. Once he knows we aren’t needed, we’re dead. And we don’t have any other bribes.” Louis continued, “We can’t get to the flight deck. There may be stepping discs that would take us there, somewhere aboard Needle, but where are they and how do we get the Hindmost to turn them on? We can’t attack him either. Projectiles won’t go through a GP hull. There’s flare shielding on the hull, and probably more flare shielding between our cell and the flight deck. A puppeteer wouldn’t have ignored that. So we can’t fire a laser at him because the walls would turn mirror-colored and bounce the beam back at us. What’s left? Sonics? He just turns off the microphones. Have I left anything out?”

“Antimatter. You need not remind me that we have none.”

“So we can’t threaten him, we can’t hurt him, and we can’t reach the flight deck anyway.”

The kzin clawed thoughtfully at the ruff around his neck.

“It just occurred to me,” Louis said. “Maybe Needle can’t get back to known space at all.”

“I don’t see what you mean.”

“We know too much. We’re very bad publicity for the puppeteers. Odds are the Hindmost never planned to take us home. Well, why would he go himself? The place he wants to reach is the Fleet of Worlds, which is twenty or thirty light-years from here by now, in the opposite direction. Even if we could fly Needle, we probably don’t have the life support to reach known space.”

“Shall we steal a Ringworld ship, then? This one?”

Louis shook his head. “We can look it over. But even if it’s in good shape, we probably can’t fly it. Halrloprillalar’s people took crews of a thousand, and they never went that far, according to Prill… though the Ringworld engineers probably did.”

The kzin stood peculiarly still, as if afraid to release the energy bottled inside him. Louis began to realize how angry Chmeee was. “Do you counsel me to surrender, then? Is there not even vengeance for us?”

Louis had thought this through, over and over, while under the wire. He tried to remember the optimism he’d felt then, but it was gone. “We stall. We search the spaceport ledges. When we don’t find anything, we search the Ringworld itself. We’re equipped for that. We don’t let the Hindmost give up till we find our own answer. Whatever it might be.”

“This situation is entirely your fault.”

“I know. That’s what makes it so funny.”

“Laugh, then.”

“Give me my droud and I’ll laugh.”

“Your foolish speculations have left us slave to a mad root-eater. Must you always pretend to more knowledge than is yours?”

Louis sat down with his back to a yellow-glowing wall. “It seemed so reasonable. Tanj, it was reasonable, Look: the puppeteers were studying the Ringworld years before we came on the scene. They knew its spin and its size and its mass, which is just more than the mass of Jupiter. And there’s nothing else in the system. Every planet, every moon, every asteroid, gone. It seemed so obvious. The Ringworld engineers took a Jupiter-style planet and made it into building materials, and they used the rest of the planetary garbage, too, and they built it all into a Ringworld. The mass of, say, Sol system would be just about right.”

“It was only speculation.”

“I convinced you both. Remember that. And gas giant planets,” Louis continued doggedly, “are mostly hydrogen. The Ringworld engineers would have had to convert hydrogen into Ringworld floor material — whatever that stuff is; it’s like nothing we ever built. They would have had to transmute material at a rate that would outstrip a supernova. Listen, Chmeee, I’d seen the Ringworld. I was ready to believe anything.”

“And so was Nessus.” The kzin snorted, forgetting that he too had believed. “And Nessus asked Halrloprillalar about transmutation. And she thought our two-headed companion was charmingly gullible. She told him a tale of Ringworld starships carrying lead to transmute into fuel. Lead! Why not iron? Iron would bulk more, but its structural strength would be greater.”

Louis laughed. “She didn’t think of it.”

“Did you ever tell her that transmutation was your hypothesis?”

“What do you think? She’d have laughed herself to death. And it was too late to tell Nessus. By then Nessus was in the autodoc with one head missing.”

“Uurrr.”

Louis rubbed his aching shoulders. “One of us should have known better. I told you I did some math after we got back. Do you know how much energy it takes to spin the mass of the Ringworld up to seven hundred and seventy miles per second?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It takes a lot. Thousands of times the yearly energy output of this kind of sun. Where would the Ringworld engineers get all that energy? What they had to do was disassemble a dozen Jupiters, or a superjovian planet a dozen times Jupiter’s mass. All mostly hydrogen, remember. They’d use some of the hydrogen in fusion for the energy to run that project, and reserve more of it in magnetic bottles. After they made the Ringworld from the solid residues, they’d have fuel for fusion rockets to spin it up to speed.”

“Hindsight is so wonderful.” Chmeee prowled back and forth along the corridor, on his hind legs, like a man, deep in thought. “So we are slaved to a mad alien searching for a magical machine that never was. What do you hope will happen in the year left to us?”

It was difficult to be optimistic without current. “We explore. Transmutation or not, there’s got to be something valuable on the Ringworld. Maybe we’ll find it. Maybe there’s a United Nations ship already here. Maybe well find a thousand-year-old Ringworld spaceship crew. Maybe the Hindmost will get lonely and let us join him on the flight deck.”

The kzin paced, his tail switching back and forth. “Can I trust you? The Hindmost controls the current flow to your brain.”

“I’ll kick the habit.”

The kzin snorted.

“Finagle’s festering testicles! Chmeee, I’m two and a quarter centuries old. I’ve been everything. I’ve been a master chef. I helped build and operate a wheel city above Down. I settled on Home for a while and lived like a colonist. Now I’m a wirehead. Nothing lasts. You can’t do any one thing for two hundred years. A marriage, a career, a hobby — they’re good for twenty years, and maybe you go through a phase more than once. I did some experimental medicine. I wrote a big chunk of that documentary on the Trinoc culture that won a—”

“Current addiction involves the brain directly. It’s different, Louis.”

“Yah. Yah, it’s different.” Louis felt the depression like a wall of black jelly sagging inward, crushing him down. “It’s all black or all white. The wire is sending or it isn’t. There’s no variety. I’m sick of it. I was sick of it before the Hindmost took over my current flow.”

“But you did not give up the droud.”

“I want the Hindmost to think I can’t.”

“You want me to think you can.”

“Yah.”

“What of the Hindmost? Never have I heard of a puppeteer who behaved so strangely.”

“I know. It makes me wonder if all the mad traders were Nessus’s sex. If the… call them sperm-carrying males… are the dominant ones.”

“Urrr—”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. The kind of madness that sends a puppeteer to Earth because he can’t deal with other puppeteers, that’s not the same as the madness that makes a Joseph Stalin. What do you want from me, Chmeee? I don’t know how he’ll act. If we give him some credit for brains, then he’ll use General Products trading techniques. It’s the only way he knows to deal with us.”

The canned air tasted cool and metallic. There was too much metal in these ships, Louis thought. It seemed queer that Halrloprillalar’s people hadn’t used more advanced materials. Making a Bussard ramjet was no task for primitives.

The air smelled funny, and the yellow-white glow in the walls dimmed and brightened irregularly. Best get back to their pressure suits, soon.

Chmeee said, “There is the lander. It would function as a spacecraft.”

“What do you call a spacecraft? It must have interplanetary capability. It’d need that to get around on the Ringworld. I wouldn’t think we could reach another star with it.”

“I was thinking of ramming Needle. If there is no escape, we may take vengeance.”

“That’ll be fun to watch. You ramming a General Products hull.”

The kzin loomed over him. “Do not be too amusing, Louis. What would I be on the Ringworld, with no mate, no land, no name, and a year to live?”

“We’d be buying time. Time to find a way off. In the meantime” — Louis stood up — “officially, we’re still searching for a magic transmutation machine. Let’s make at least a token search.”

Chapter 7 — Decision Point

Louis woke ravenous. He dialed a cheddar cheese soufflé’ and Irish coffee and blood-oranges and ate his way through it all.

Chmeee slept curled protectively around himself. He looked different somehow. Neater — yes, neater, because the scar tissue under his fur had disappeared and the new fur was growing out.

His stamina was impressive. They had searched every one of the four Ringworlder ships, then moved on to a long, narrow building at the very lip of infinity, which proved to be the guidance center for the spacecraft accelerator system. At the last, Louis was moving in a fog of exhaustion. He knew he should have been examining Needle for details of construction, weak points, routes into the flight deck. Instead he had watched Chmeee, with hatred. The kzin never stopped to rest.

The Hindmost appeared from somewhere, from behind or within the green-painted private sector. His mane was combed and fluffy, dressed with crystals that changed their spectral color as he moved. Louis was intrigued. The puppeteer had been scruffy while he was flying Needle alone. Did he dress to impress his alien prisoners with his elegance?

He asked, “Louis, do you want the droud?”

Louis did, but — “Not yet.”

“You slept eleven hours.”

“Maybe I’m adjusting to Ringworld time. Did you get anything done?”

“I took laser spectrograms of the ships’ hulls. They are largely iron alloys. I have deep-radar scans, two views each for the four ships; I moved Needle while you slept. There are two more spaceport ledges one hundred and twenty degrees around the Ringworld. I located eleven more ships by their hull composition. I could not learn detail at this distance.”

Chmeee woke, stretched, and joined Louis at the transparent wall. “We learn only to ask more questions,” he said. “One ship was left intact, three were stripped. Why?”

“Perhaps Halrloprillalar could have told us,” the Hindmost aid. “Let us deal with the only urgent question. Where is the transmutation device?”

“We have no instruments here. Flick us to the lander, Hindmost. We will use the screens on the flight deck.”

Eight screens glowed around the horseshoe curve of the lander’s instrument board. Chmeee and Louis studied ghostly schematics of the Bussard ramjet ships, generated by the computer from the deep-radar scans.

“It looks to me,” Louis said, “like one team did the entire looting job. They had three ships to work with, and they took what they wanted most first. They kept working till something stopped them: they ran out of air or something. The fourth ship came later. Mmm… but why didn’t the fourth crew loot their own ship?”

“Trivialities. We seek only the transmuter. Where is it?”

Chmeee said, “We could not identify it.”

Louis studied the deep-radar ghosts of four ships. “Let’s be methodical. What isn’t a transmutation system?” He traced lines on the image of the one intact ship, using a light-pointer. “Here, these paired toroids circling the hull have to be the ramscoop field generators. Fuel tanks here. Access tubes here, here, here… ” As he pointed them out, the. Hindmost obliged by removing sections of ship from the screen. “Fusion reaction motor, this whole section. Motors for the landing legs. Take out the legs too. Attitude jets here, here, here, all fed by tubes along here carrying plasma from the one small fusion generator, here. Battery. This thing with the snout, pointing out of the middle of the hull — what did Prill call it?”

“Cziltang brone,” Chmeee sneezed. “It softens the Ringworld floor material temporarily, for penetration. They used it instead of airlocks.”

“Right.” Louis continued, with enthusiasm and hidden glee. “Now, they probably wouldn’t keep the magic transmuter in the living quarters, but… sleeping rooms here, control rooms here, here, here, the kitchen—”

“Could that be — ?”

“No, we thought of that. It’s just an automated chemistry lab.”

“Proceed.”

“Garden area here. Sewage treatment feeds in. Airlocks… ”

When Louis had finished, the ship was gone from the screen. The Hindmost patiently restored it. “What did we overlook? Even if the transmuter was dismounted, removed, there would be space for it.”

This was getting to be fun. “Hey, if they really kept their fuel outside — lead, molded around the hull — then this isn’t really an inboard hydrogen tank, Is it? Maybe they kept the magic transmuter in them. It needed heavy padding or heavy insulation… or cooling by liquid hydrogen.”

Chmeee asked, before the Hindmost could, “How would they remove it?”

“Maybe with the cziltang brone from another ship. Were all the fuel tanks empty?” He looked at the ghosts of the other ships. “Yah. Okay, we’ll find the transmuters on the Ringworld… and they won’t be working. The plague will have got to them.”

“Halrloprillalar’s tale of the bacterium that eats superconductor is in our records,” the Hindmost said.

“Well, she really couldn’t tell us all that much,” said Louis. “Her ship left on a long tour. When it came back, there was no more Ringworld civilization. Everything that used superconductors had stopped.” He had wondered how much to believe of Prill’s tale of the Fall of the Cities. But something had destroyed the Ringworld’s ruling civilization. “Superconductor is almost too wonderful. You end up using it in everything.”

“Then we can repair the transmuters,” said the Hindmost.

“Oh?”

“You will find superconducting wire and fabric stored aboard the lander. It is not the same superconductor the Ringworld used. The bacterium will not touch it. I thought we might need trade goods.”

Louis kept his poker face intact, but the Hindmost had made a startling statement. How did puppeteers come to know so much about a mutant plague that killed Ringworld machines? Suddenly Louis didn’t doubt the bacterium at all.

Chmeee hadn’t caught it. “We want to know what the thieves used for transportation. If the rim-wall transport system failed, then our transmuters may be just the other side of the rim wall, abandoned there because they stopped working.”

Louis nodded. “Failing that, we’ve got a lot of territory to search. I think we should be looking for a Repair Center.”

“Louis?”

“There has to be a control and maintenance center somewhere. The Ringworld can’t run itself forever. There’s meteor defense, meteor repair, the attitude jets… the ecology could go haywire — it all has to be watched. Of course the Repair Center could be anywhere. But it’s got to be big. We shouldn’t have that much trouble finding it. And we’ll probably find that it’s been abandoned, because if anyone had been minding the store, he wouldn’t have let the Ringworld slide off center.”

The Hindmost said, “You have been putting your mind to this.”

“We didn’t do too well the first time we came here. We came to explore, remember? Some kind of laser weapon shot us down, and we spent the rest of our time trying to get off alive. We covered maybe a fifth of the width, and learned just about nothing. It’s the Repair Center we should have been looking for. That’s where the miracles are.”

“I had not expected such ambition from a current addict.”

“We’ll start cautiously.” Cautiously for humans, Louis told himself; not for puppeteers. “Chmeee’s right: the machines could have been dumped as soon as they were through the rim wall, when the bacterium got to them.”

Chmeee said, “We should not try to take the lander through the rim wall. I have no faith in an alien machine a thousand years old. We must go over.”

The Hindmost asked, “How would you avoid the meteor defense?”

“We must try to outguess it. Louis, do you still believe that what fired on us was merely an automated defense against meteors?”

“I thought so at the time. It all happened so tanj fast!” Falling sunward, all a little edgy, daunted by the reality of the Ringworld. All but Teela, of course. A momentary flash of violet-white; then Liar was embedded in tenuous violet-glowing gas. Teela had looked out through the hull. “The wing’s gone,” she’d said.

“It didn’t fire on us till we were on a course to intersect the Ringworld surface. It’s got to be automated. I told you why I think there’s nobody in the Repair Center.”

“Nobody to fire on us deliberately. Very well, Louis. Automatics would not be set to fire on the rim transport system, would they?”

“Chmeee, we don’t know who built the rim transport system. Maybe it wasn’t the Ringworld engineers; maybe it was added later, by Prill’s people—”

“It was,” said the Hindmost.

His crew turned to look at the puppeteer’s image on the screen.

“Did I tell you that I spent some time at the telescope? I have learned that the rim transport system is only partly finished. It runs along 40 percent of this rim wall, and does not include the section we occupy now. On the portward rim wall the system is only 15 percent complete. The Ringworld engineers would not have left so minor a subsystem half built, would they? Their own mode of transport may have been the same spacecraft used to supervise construction.”

“Prill’s people came later,” Louis said. “Maybe a lot later. Maybe the rim transport system got too expensive. Maybe they never actually completed their conquest of the Ringworld… but then why were they building starships? Oh, futz, we may never know. Where does this leave us?”

“It leaves us trying to out-think the meteor defense,” Chmeee said.

“Yah. And you were right. If the meteor defense made a habit of firing on the rim wall, nobody would have built anything there.” Louis chewed it a moment longer. There would be holes in his assumptions… but the alternative was to go through the wall via an ancient cziltang brone of unknown dependability. “Okay. We fly over the rim wall.”

The puppeteer said, “You suggest a fearful risk. I prepared as best I could, but I was forced to use human technology. Suppose the lander should fail? I hesitate to risk any of my resources. You would be stranded. The Ringworld is doomed.”

“I hadn’t forgotten,” Louis said.

“First we must search all of the spaceport ledges. There are eleven more ships on this rim wall, and an unknown number on the portward rim—“

And it would be weeks before the Hindmost satisfied himself that no transmutation system was to be found on those ships. Oh, well—

“We should go now,” Chmeee said. “The secret may be nearly within our grip!”

“We have fuel and supplies. We can afford to wait.”

Chmeee reached out and tapped controls. He must have planned this sequence in detail; he must have studied the lander minutely while Louis was dopey with fatigue. The small conical craft lifted a foot from the floor, spun ninety degrees, and the blast of a fusion motor filled the docking chamber with white fire.

“You are being foolish,” the Hindmost’s liquid contralto reproved them. “I can turn off your drive.”

The lander slid clear of the curved docking hatch and lifted at a brutal four gees. When the Hindmost finished speaking, a fall would already have killed them. Louis cursed himself for not foreseeing this. Chmeee’s blood was bubbling with youth. Half the kzinti never grew up — they died in fights…

And Louis Wu, too engrossed in himself and his current-withdrawal depression, had let his options slip by him.

He asked coolly, “Have you decided to do your own exploring, Hindmost?”

The puppeteer’s heads quivered indecisively above his control board.

“No? Then well do it our way, thank you very much.” Louis turned to Chmeee and said, “Try landing on the rim wall” before he noticed the kzin’s peculiarly rigid attitude, blank eyes, and exposed claws. Rage? Would the kzin actually try to ram Hot Needle of Inquiry?

The kzin howled in the Hero’s Tongue.

The puppeteer answered in the voice of a kzin; changed his mind and repeated in Interworld. “Two fusion rockets, one mounted aft and one beneath. No thrusters. You need never fire the fusion motors on the ground except for defense. You may lift with repulsers, which repel the Ringworld floor material. You may fly as if using a negative gravity generator, but the repulsers are simpler in design, easier to repair and maintain. Do not use them now. They would repel the rim wall and thrust you into space.”

That explained Chmeee’s apparent panic. He was having trouble flying the lander. Not reassuring. But the spaceport ledge was far below, and an unnerving wobble at takeoff had almost disappeared. There was steady four-gee thrust under him… which suddenly cut off. Louis said “Wuff!” as the lander went into free fall.

“We must not rise too far above the rim wall. Search the lockers, Louis. Inventory our equipment.”

“You’ll warn me before you do that again?”

“I will.”

Louis disengaged the crash web and floated down the stairwell.

Here was living space surrounded by lockers and an airlock. Louis began opening doors. The biggest locker held what must have been a square mile of fine, silky black cloth, and hundreds of miles of black thread on twenty-mile spools. Another locker held modified flying belts, with repulsers over the shoulders and a small thruster. Two small and one large. One for Halrloprillalar, of course. Louis found flashlight-lasers and handheld sonic stunners and a heavy two-handed disintegrator. He found boxes the size of Chmeee’s fist, with a shirt clip and a microphone grid, and earplugs (two small and one large) in the same compartment. Those would be translators, with compact computers included. If they worked through the onboard computer they would have been less bulky.

There were large rectangular repulsion plates — for towing cargo through the air? Spools of Sinclair molecule chain, like very thin, very strong thread. Small bars of gold: for trade? Binocular goggles with a light-amplification setting. Impact armor. Louis muttered, “He’s thought of everything.”

“Thank you.” The Hindmost spoke from a screen Louis hadn’t noticed. “I had many years to prepare.”

Louis was getting tired of finding the Hindmost wherever he went. Funny: he could hear the sounds of a cat fight drifting down from the flight deck. The Hindmost must be holding two conversations at once, instructing Chmeee on the lander’s controls. He heard the expression for “attitude jets”—

Chmeee’s voice roared without benefit of microphone. “Louis, take your place!”

Louis glided up the stairwell. He was barely into his chair when Chmeee lit the fusion motors. The lander slowed and hovered just at the edge of the rim wall.

The top of the rim wall was broad enough for the lander, but not much more than that. And how was the Ringworld meteor defense taking all this?

They had been within the arc of the Ringworld, falling toward the inner ring of shadow squares, when violet light bathed the spacecraft Lying Bastard. Liar’s hull had instantly enclosed itself in a bubble of no-time. When time began again, the hull and its occupants had suffered no damage. But Liar’s delta wing, with its thrusters and fusion motors and pods of sensing instruments, had become ionized vapor. And the hull was falling toward the Ringworld.

They had speculated, later, that the violet laser was no more than an automated meteor defense. They had guessed that it might be based on the shadow squares. It was all guesswork, they had never learned anything about the Ringworld weapon.

The rim transport system was a late addition. The Ringworld engineers would not have taken it into account when programming the meteor defense. But Louis had seen old recordings of it in action, in a building abandoned by Halrloprillalar’s species. It had worked; the meteor defense had not fired on the linear accelerator loops or the ships they enclosed. And Louis gripped his chair arms hard, waiting for violet flame, as Chmeee settled the lander on the rim wall.

But it didn’t come.

Chapter 8 — Ringworld

From a thousand miles above the Earth — from, say, a space station in a two-hour orbit — the Earth is a great sphere. The kingdoms of the world revolve below. Details disappear around the horizon’s curve; other, hidden features rotate into view. At night, glowing cities outline the continents.

But from a thousand miles above the Ringworld, the world is flat, and the kingdoms thereof are all there at once.

The rim wall was of the same stuff as the Ringworld floor. Louis had walked on it, in places where eroded landscape let it show through. It had been grayish, translucent, and terribly slippery. Here the surface had been roughened for traction. But the pressure suit and backpack made Chmeee and Louis top-heavy. They moved with care. That first step would be a beauty.

At the bottom of a thousand miles of glassy cliff were broken layers of cloud, and seas: bodies of water from ten thousand to a couple of million square miles in area, spread more or less uniformly across the land, and linked by networks of rivers. As Louis raised his eyes, the seas grew smaller with distance… smaller and a little hazy… too small to see, until sea and fertile land and desert and cloud all blended into a blue knife-edge against black space.

To left and right it was the same, until the eye found a blue band swooping up from the infinity beyond the horizon. The Arch rose and narrowed and curved over and above itself, baby blue checked with midnight blue, to where a narrow ribbon of Arch lost itself behind a shrunken sun.

This part of the Ringworld had just passed its maximum distance from the sun. but a Sol-type star could still burn your eyes out. Louis blinked and shook his head, his eyes and mind dazzled. Those distances could grab your mind and hold it, leave you looking into infinity for hours or days. You could lose your soul to those distances. What was one man when set against an artifact so huge?

He was Louis Wu. There was nothing like him on all the Ringworld. He held to that. Forget the infinities: concentrate on detail.

There, thirty-five degrees up the Arch: a faintly bluer patch.

Louis worked the magnification on his goggles. They locked onto the faceplate, but you had to hold your head very still. The patch was all ocean, an ellipse stretching nearly across the Ringworld, with clusters of islands showing through cloud cover.

He found the other Great Ocean higher up on the other branch of the Arch. It was a ragged four-pointed star, dotted with similar clusters of tiny islands — tiny at this distance, at which the Earth would be a naked-eye object, barely.

It was getting to him again. Deliberately he looked down, studying the near distance.

Almost below, a couple of hundred miles to spinward, a half-cone of mountain leaned drunkenly against the rim wall. It seemed oddly regular. It was layered in half-circles: a bare, dirt-colored peak; far below, a band of white, probably snow and ice; then green spreading down and out into foothills.

The mountain was quite isolated. In the spinward direction the rim wall was a flat vertical cliff out to the limit of the binocular goggles — almost. If that bump at the very limit of vision was another such mountain, it was a futz of a long way away. At the distance you could almost see the Ringworld starting to curve upward.

There was another such bump in the antispinward direction. Louis scowled. File for future study.

Far to port (ahead) and a bit to spinward (right) was a region of glittering white, brighter than land, brighter than sea. A midnight-blue edge of night was sweeping toward it. Salt, was Louis’s first thought. It was big. It had engulfed a couple of dozen Ringworld seas, and those seas varied in size from Lake Huron to the Mediterranean. Brighter points came and went like ripples…

Ah. “Sunflower patch.”

Chmeee looked. “The one that burned me was bigger.”

Slaver sunflowers were as old as the Slaver Empire, which had died more than a billion years ago. The Slavers seemed to have planted sunflowers around their estates, for defense. You still found these plants on some of the worlds of known space. Cleaning them out was a difficult business. You couldn’t just burn them out with laser cannon. The silver blossoms would throw the beam back at you.

What sunflowers were doing on the Ringworld was a mystery. But Speaker-To-Animals had been flying above a Ringworld landscape when a rift in the clouds exposed him to the plants beneath. The scars were almost gone…

Louis raised the magnification on his goggles. A smoothly curved borderline marked off the blue-green-brown of an Earthlike world from the silver sunflower patch. The border curved inward to half enclose one of the larger seas.

“Louis? Look for a short black line, just beyond the sunflowers and a bit to antispinward.”

“I see it.” A black dash on the infinite noonday landscape, perhaps a hundred thousand miles from where they stood. Now, what would that be? A vast tar pit? No, petrochemicals would never form on the Ringworld. A shadow? What could cast a shadow in the Ringworld’s permanent noon?

“Chmeee, I think its a floating city.”

“Yes… At worst it will be a center of civilization. We should consult them.”

They had found floating buildings in some of the old cities. Why not a floating city? They’d be seeing it edge on, of course. “What we should do,” Louis said, “is touch down a fair distance away and ask the natives about them. I’d hate to come on them cold. If they’re good enough to keep that city going, they could be tough. Say we touch down near the edge of the sunflower patch—”

“Why there?”

“The sunflowers would be fouling up the ecology. Maybe the locals could use some help. We’d be surer of our welcome. Hindmost, what do you think?”

There was no answer.

“Hindmost? Calling the Hindmost… Chmeee, I think he can’t hear us. The rim wall’s blocking his signals.”

Chmeee said, “We will not remain free long. I saw a pair of probes mounted in the cargo bay, behind the lander. The puppeteer will use them as relays. Is there anything you would like to say during this temporary freedom?”

“I’d say we covered it all last night.”

“Not quite. Our motives are not quite the same, Louis. I take it that you are eager to save your life. Beyond that you want free access to current. For myself, I want my life and my freedom, but I also want satisfaction. The Hindmost has kidnapped a kzin. He must be made to regret it.”

“I can buy that. He kidnapped me too.”

“What does a wirehead know of thwarted honor? Do not let me find you blocking my path, Louis.”

“I’m just going to diffidently remind you,” Louis said, “that I got you off the Ringworld. Without me you would never have taken the Long Shot home to earn your name.

“You were not a current addict then.”

“I am not a current addict now. And don’t you call me a liar.”

“I am not ac—”

“Hold it.” Louis pointed. The corner of his eye had caught something moving against the stars. A moment later the voice of the Hindmost spoke in their ears.

“Please forgive the hiatus. What have you decided to do?”

“Explore,” Chmeee said curtly. He turned back to the lander.

“Give me details. I am not happy about risking one of my probes merely to maintain communications. The primary purpose of these probes was to refuel Needle.”

“Return your probe to safety,” Chmeee told the puppeteer. “When we return we will report in full.”

The probe settled onto the rim wall on several small jets. It was a lumpy cylinder twenty feet long. The Hindmost said, “You speak frivolously. It is my landing craft you risk. Do you plan to search the base of the rim wall?”

That thrilling contralto, that lovely woman’s voice, was the same that every puppeteer trader had learned from his predecessor. Possibly they learned another to influence women. To men it was a voice that pushed buttons, and Louis resented that. He said, “There are cameras on the lander, aren’t there? Just watch.”

“I have your droud. Explain.”

Neither Louis nor Chmeee bothered to answer.

“Very well. I have locked open the stepping-disc link between the lander and Needle. The probe will function as a relay for this, too. As for your droud, Louis, you may have it when you learn to obey.”

And that, thought Louis, defined his problem nicely.

Chmeee said, “It is good to know that we can flee our mistakes. Are there range limits to stepping discs?”

“Energy limits. The stepping-disc system can absorb only a limited kinetic energy difference. Needle and the lander should have no relative velocity when you flick across. You are advised to stay directly to port of Needle.”

“This fits our plans.”

“But if you abandon the lander, I still control your means of escape from the Ringworld. Do you hear me, Chmeee, Louis? The Ringworld will impact the shadow squares in just more than Earth’s year.”

Chmeee lifted the lander on puppeteer-developed repulsers. A burst from the aft fusion motor edged the craft forward and off the edge.

Flying on Ringworld-floor-material repulsers was not like using antigravity, Louis noted. Repelled by both the rim wall and the landscape, the lander fell in a swooping curve. Chmeee stopped their descent at forty miles.

Louis displayed a telescope view on one of the screens. Floating on repulsers alone, above most of the atmosphere, the lander was very steady and utterly quiet: a good telescope mount.

Rocky soil lapped up in foothills to the base of the rim wall. Louis ran the telescope slowly along that border, at high magnification. Barren brown soil against glassy gray. An anomaly would be easy to spot.

“What do you expect to find?” Chmeee asked.

Louis didn’t mention the watching puppeteer, who thought they were searching for an abandoned transmutation device. “A spacecraft crew would have come through from the spaceport ledge about here. But I don’t see anything big in the way of abandoned machinery. We aren’t really interested in little stuff, are we? They wouldn’t have left anything valuable unless it was just too tanj big to move, and then they’d have left almost everything they had.”

He stopped the telescope. “What do you make of that?”

It stood thirty miles tall against the base of the rim wall: a half-cone, with a weathered look, as if smoothed by a hundred million years of wind. Ice glittered in a broad belt around its lower slope. The ice was thick and showed the flow patterns of glaciers.

“The Ringworld imitates the topography of Earthlike worlds,” said Chmeee. “From what I know of Earthlike worlds, this mountain doesn’t fit the pattern.”

“Yah. It’s inartistic. Mountains come in chains, and they aren’t this regular. But, you know, it’s worse than that. Everything on the Ringworld is contoured in. Remember when we took the Liar underneath? Sea bottoms bulging, dents for mountains and gullies for mountain ranges, riverbeds like veins in a weight lifter’s arm? Even the river deltas are carved into the structure. The Ringworld isn’t thick enough to let the landscape carve itself.”

“There are no tectonic processes to do the carving, for that matter.”

“Then we should have seen that mountain from the back, from the spaceport. I didn’t. Did you?”

“I’ll take us closer.”

That turned out to be difficult. The closer the lander came to the rim wall, the more fusion thrust was needed to hold it there… or to lift the lander if the repulsers were turned off.

They came within fifty miles, and that was close enough to find the city. Great gray rocks protruded through the ice floes, and some of these showed myriad black-shadowed doors and windows. Focus closer and the doorways had balconies and awnings, and hundreds of slender suspension bridges ran up, down, and sideways. Stairways were hacked into the rock; they ran in strange branching curves, half a mile tall and more. One dipped all the way to the foothills, to the tree line.

A fortuitous flat space in the center of the city, half rock and half permafrost, had become a public square; the hordes that thronged it were pale golden flecks just big enough to see. Golden clothing or golden fur? Louis wondered. A great boulder at the back of the square had been carved with the face of a hairy, chubby, jovial baboon.

Louis said, “Don’t try to get closer. We’ll scare them away if we try to land on fusion drive, and there isn’t any other way.”

A vertical city with a population of ten thousand, at a guess. Deep-radar showed that they had not dug deep into the rock. In fact, those rocks riddled with rooms looked like dirty permafrost.

“Surely we want to question them regarding their peculiar mountain?”

“I’d love to talk to them,” Louis said, and he meant it. “But look at the spectrograph and deep-radar. They don’t use metals or plastics, let alone single-crystal stuff. I hate to think what those bridges are made of. They’re primitives. They’ll think they’re living on a mountain.”

“I agree. Too much trouble to reach them. Where next? The floating city?”

“Yah, by way of the sunflower patch.”

A shadow square was sliding across the sun’s disc.

Chmeee lit the aft motor again and ran their speed to ten thousand miles per hour, then coasted. Not too fast for detail, but fast enough to get them where they were going in about ten hours. Louis studied the racing landscape.

In principle the Ringworld should have been an endless garden. It was not a randomly evolved world, after all, but a made thing.

What they had seen on their first visit could not be considered typical. They had spent most of their time between two big meteoroid punctures: between the eye storm, which was spewing air through a puncture in the Ringworld floor, and the stretched and raised landscape around Fist-of-God Mountain. Of course the ecology was damaged. The engineers’ carefully planned wind patterns must have been ruined.

But here? Louis looked in vain for the pattern of an eye storm, a hurricane turned on its side and flattened. There were no meteoroid punctures here. Yet there were patches of desert, Sahara-size and larger. On the ridges of mountain ranges he found the pearly gleam of naked Ringworld foundation. Winds had stripped away the covering rock.

Had the weather patterns grown this bad, this fast? Or did the Ringworld engineers like deserts? It struck Louis that the Repair Center must have been deserted for a very long time. Halrloprillalar’s people might never have found it at all, after the Ringworld engineers vanished. As they had to have vanished, if Louis’s guess was right.

“I want three hours’ sleep,” Chmeee said. “Can you fly the lander if something happens?”

Louis shrugged. “Sure, but what could happen? We’re too low for the meteor defense. Even if it’s based on the rim wall, it’d be firing on settled land. We’ll just cruise awhile.”

“Yes. Wake me in three hours.” Chmeee reclined his chair and slept.

Louis turned to the fore and aft telescopes for amusement and instruction. Night had covered the sunflower region. He ran the view up along the Arch to the nearest of the Great Oceans.

There, to spinward of the ocean and almost on the Ringworld median line: that tilted mock volcano was Fist-of-God Mountain, in a patch of Mars-colored desert much bigger than Mars. Farther to port, a reaching bay of the Great Ocean, itself bigger than worlds.

They had reached the shore of that bay and turned back, last time.

The islands were scattered in clusters across the blue ellipse. One was a small island, disc-shaped, desert colored. One was a disc with a channel cut through it. Strange. But the others were islands in a vast sea… there, he had found the map of Earth: America, Greenland, Eurasiafrica, Australia, Antarctica, all splayed out from the glare-white North Pole, just as he had seen it in the sky castle long ago.

Were they all maps of real worlds? Prill wouldn’t have known. The maps must have been made long before her species came on the scene.

He had left Teela and Seeker somewhere in there. They must still be in the area. Given Ringworld distance and native technology, they could not have gone far in twenty-three years. They were thirty-five degrees up the curve of the Arch — fifty-eight million miles away.

Louis really didn’t want to meet Teela again.

Three hours had passed. Louis reached out and shook Chmeee’s shoulder, gently.

A great arm lashed out. Louis threw himself backward, not far enough.

Chmeee blinked at him. “Louis, never wake me like that. Do you want the autodoc?”

There were two deep gashes just behind his shoulder. He could feel blood seeping into his shirt. “In a minute. Look.” He pointed at the map of Earth, tiny islands well separated from the other clusters.

Chmeee looked. “Kzin.”

“What?”

“A map of Kzin. There. Louis, I think we were wrong when we assumed that these were miniature maps. They are full size, one-to-one scale.”

Half a million miles from the map of Earth was another cluster. As with the Earth map, the oceans were distorted by the polar projection, but the continents were not “That is Kzin,” Louis said. “Why didn’t I notice? And that disc with a channel cut through it — that’s Jinx. The smaller red-orange blob must be Mars.” Louis blinked away dizziness. His shirt was wet with blood. “We can take this up later. Help me down to the autodoc.”

Chapter 9 — The Herdsmen

He slept in the autodoc.

Four hours later — with a trace of tightness behind and below his shoulder to remind him never to touch a sleeping kzin — Louis took his seat.

It was still night outside. Chmeee had the Great Ocean on the screen. He asked, “How are you?”

“Restored to health, thanks be to modern medicine.”

“You were not distracted by your wounds. Yet there must have been pain and shock.”

“Oh, I suppose Louis Wu at fifty would have gone into hysterics, but futz, I knew the autodoc was right there. Why?”

“It seemed to me at first that you must have the courage of a kzin. Then I wondered if current addiction has left you unable to respond to any lesser stimulus.”

“We’ll just assume it’s courage, okay? How are you making out?”

“Well enough.” The kzin pointed. “Earth. Kzin. Jinx; the two peaks rise right out of the atmosphere, as do the East and West Poles of Jinx. So does the Map of Mars. This is Kdat, the slave planet—”

“Not anymore.”

“The kdatlyno were our slaves. So were the pierin, and this is their world, I think. Here, you would know: is this the home world of the Trinocs?”

“Yah, and they’d settled this one next to it, I think. We can ask the Hindmost if he’s got maps.”

“We can be sure enough.”

“Granted. Okay, what is it? It’s not a roster of Earth-like worlds. And there are half a dozen I can’t identify at all.”

Chmeee snorted. “Obvious to the meanest intelligence, Louis. It is a roster of potential enemies, intelligent or near-intelligent beings who may one day threaten the Ringworld. Pierin, kzinti, martians, human, Trinoc.”

“But where does Jinx fit in? Oh. Chmeee, they couldn’t have thought the bandersnatchi might come at them with warships. They’re big as dinosaurs, and handless. And Down has intelligent natives, too. So where is it?”

“There.”

“Yah. That’s kind of impressive. The Grogs aren’t all that obvious a menace. They spend their whole lives sitting on one rock.”

“The Ringworld engineers found all of these species, and left the Maps as a message for their descendants. Are we agreed? But they did not find the puppeteer world.”

“Oh?”

“And we know they landed on Jinx. We found a bandersnatch skeleton during the first expedition.”

“So we did. They may have visited all these worlds.”

The quality of the light changed, and Louis saw the shadow of night receding to antispinward. He said, “Nearly time to land.”

“Where do you suggest?”

The sunflower field ahead was brightening with sunlight. “Turn us left. Follow the terminator line. Keep going till you see real dirt. We want to be down before dawn.”

Chmeee bent their path in a great curve. Louis pointed. “Do you see where the border dips toward us, where the sunflowers are spreading around both sides of a sea? I think the sunflowers must have trouble crossing water. Land us on the far shore.”

The lander dipped into atmosphere. Flame built up before and around the lander, throwing a white glaze over the view. Chmeee held the lander high, shedding their velocity slowly, dipping lower when he could. The sea fled beneath them. Like all Ringworld seas, it was built for convenience, with a highly convoluted shoreline, forming bays and beaches, and a gentle offshore slope to a uniform depth. There were seaweed forests and numerous islands and beaches of clean white sand. A vast grassy plain ran to antispinward.

The sunflower plague reached two arms around to engulf the sea. A river meandered in S-curves through the sunflowers to the delta where it entered the sea. To port the sunflowers were edging up against a swampy outflow river. Louis could sense the frozen motion, slow as the march of glaciers.

The sunflowers noticed the lander.

Light exploded from below. The window darkened instantly, leaving Chmeee and Louis dazzled.

“Fear not,” Chmeee said. “We can’t hit anything at this height.”

“The stupid plants probably took us for a bird. Can you see yet?”

“I can see the instruments.”

“Drop us to five miles. Put them behind us.”

The window cleared a few minutes later. Behind them the horizon blazed; the sunflowers were still trying. Ahead… yah. “Village.”

Chmeee dropped for a closer look. The village was a closed double ring of huts. “Land in the center?”

“I wouldn’t. Land at the edge, and I wish I knew what they consider crops.”

“I won’t burn anything.”

A mile above the village, Chmeee braked the lander with the fusion drive. He settled on the tall grassy stuff that covered the plain. At the last moment Louis saw the grass move — saw three things like green dwarf elephants stand up, raise short, flattened trunks to bleat warning, and begin running.

“The natives must be herders,” Louis said. “We’ve started a stampede.” More green beasts were joining the exodus. “Well, good flight, Captain.”

The instruments showed Earthlike atmosphere. Hardly surprising. Louis and Chmeee donned impact armor: leathery stuff, not unpleasantly stiff, which would go rigid as steel under impact from spear, arrow, or bullet. They added sonic stunners, translators, binocular goggles. The ramp carried them down into waist-high grass.

The huts were close together and joined by fences. The sun was right overhead… of course. It was dawn, and the natives ought to be just stirring. No windows on the outsides of the huts — except for one twice the height of the others, and that one had a balcony. Perhaps they’d been seen already.

As Chmeee and Louis came near, the natives stirred.

They came over the fence in a bounding swarm, screaming at each other in falsetto. They were small and red and human-shaped, and they ran like demons. They carried nets and spears. Louis saw Chmeee draw his stunner, and drew his own. The red humanoids darted past Louis and Chmeee and kept going.

Chmeee asked, “Have we been insulted?”

“No, they’re off to turn the stampede, of course. I can’t even fault their sense of proportion. Let’s go. Maybe somebody’s home.”

Somebody was. A couple of dozen red-skinned children watched them from behind the fences as they approached. They were thin; even the babies were lean as greyhound puppies. Louis stopped at the fence and smiled at them. They paid him scant attention. Most of them clustered around Chmeee.

The compound within the circle of huts was bare earth. A border of rocks marked a burnt-out campfire. A one-legged red man came out of one building and approached, using a crutch, moving at a pace Louis would have considered jogging. He wore a kilt of cured hide marked with decorative lacing. His ears were large and stood out from his head, and one had been torn, long ago. His teeth were filed… were they? The children were all smiling and laughing, and their teeth were filed, even those of the babies. Nope. They must grow that way.

The old man stopped at the fence. He smiled and asked a question.

“I don’t speak your language yet,” Louis said.

The old man nodded. He gestured with an upward sweep of his arm: invitation?

One of the older children found the courage to leap. He (she; the children wore no kilts) landed on Chmeee’s shoulder, settled herself comfortably in the fur, and began to explore. Chmeee stood very still. He asked, “What should I do now?”

“She isn’t armed. Don’t tell her how dangerous you are.” Louis climbed over the fence. The old man stood back for him. Chmeee followed, carefully, with the girl still on his shoulder, clinging to the thick fur around his neck.

They settled near the fireplace, Louis and Chmeee and the one-legged red man, surrounded by children. They began to teach the native language to the translating widgets. For Louis it was routine. Oddly, it also seemed routine to the old man; even the voices of the translators didn’t surprise him.

His name was Shivith hooki-Furlaree something. His voice was high and piping. His first intelligible question was “What do you eat? You don’t have to say.”

“I eat plants and sea life and meat treated with fire. Chmeee eats meat without fire,” Louis said, and that seemed sufficient.

“We eat meat without fire too. Chmeee, you are an unusual visitor.” Shivith hesitated. “I have to tell you this. We do not do rishathra. Don’t be angry.” At the word rishathra the translator only beeped.

Chmeee asked, “What is rishathra?”

The old man was surprised. “We thought that the word was the same everywhere.” He began to explain. Chmeee was oddly silent as they delved into the subject, working around the unknown words:

Rishathra was sex outside of one’s own species.

Everyone knew the word. Many species practiced it. For some, it could be a means of mutual birth control; for others, the first move in a trade agreement. For some it was taboo. The People didn’t need a taboo. They just couldn’t do it. The sexual signals were wrong; it might be a matter of distinct pheromones. “You must come from far away, not to know this,” the old man said.

Louis spoke of himself, how he had come from the stars beyond the Arch. No, neither he nor Chmeee had ever practiced rishathra, though there was great variety among his species. (He remembered a Wunderland girl a foot taller and fifteen pounds lighter than himself, a feather in his arms.) He spoke of the variety of worlds and of intelligent life, but he skirted the subject of wars and weaponry.

The tribes of the People herded many kinds of animals. They liked variety, but they didn’t like starving, and it was not usually possible to keep herds of different animals at the same time. Tribes of the People kept track of each other, to trade feasts. Sometimes they traded herds. It was like trading entire life styles: you could spend half a falan in mutual instruction before parting. (A falan was ten turns, ten Ringworld rotations, seventy-five days of thirty hours each.)

Would the herders worry that there were strangers in the village? Shivith said they wouldn’t. Two strangers were no threat.

When would they return? At midday, Shivith said. They had had to hurry; there had been a stampede. Otherwise they would have stopped to talk.

Louis asked, “Do you need to eat meat right after it’s been killed?”

Shivith smiled. “No. Half a day is okay. A day and a night is too long.”

“Do you ever—”

Chmeee stood up suddenly. He set the girl down gently and turned off his translator. “Louis, I need exercise and solitude. This time of confinement has threatened my sanity! Do you need me?”

“No. Hey—”

Chmeee was already over the fence. He turned.

“Don’t take off your clothes. At a distance there’s no way to tell you’re intelligent. Don’t kill any of the green elephants.”

Chmeee waved and bounded off into the green grass.

“Your friend is fast,” said Shivith.

“I should go too. I have a project in mind.”’

Survival and escape had been their concerns during their first visit to the Ringworld. Only later, in the safe and familiar surroundings of Resht on Earth, had Louis Wu’s conscience become active. Then he remembered destroying a city.

The shadow squares formed a ring concentric to the Ringworld. There were twenty of them held face-on to the sun by invisibly thin wire. The wire stayed taut because the shadow squares rotated at greater than orbital speed.

Liar, falling free with its drive motors burned away, had struck one of the shadow square wires and torn it loose. The wire, a single strand tens of thousands of miles long, had settled like a smoke cloud over an occupied city.

Louis had needed it to tow the grounded Liar.

They had found an endpoint and moored it to their makeshift vehicle — Halrloprillalar’s floating jail — and towed it behind them. Louis couldn’t know exactly what had happened to the city, but he could guess. The stuff was as fine as gossamer and strong enough to cut hullmetal. It must have cut the buildings into gravel as its loops contracted.

This time the natives would not suffer because Louis Wu had arrived. He was in current-addiction withdrawal; he didn’t need guilt too. His first act on this visit was to start a stampede. He was going to fix that.

It was hard physical work.

He took a break at one point and went up on the flight deck. He was worried about the kzin. Even a human being — a flatlander of five hundred years ago, say, a successful man in middle age — might have been disconcerted to find himself suddenly eighteen years old, his smooth progression toward death interrupted, his blood flowing with powerful and unfamiliar juices, his very identity in question: hair thickening and changing color, scars disappearing…

Well, where was Chmeee?

The grass was strange. Here in the vicinity of the camp, it was waist-high. To spinward was a vast area cropped almost to the ground. Louis could see the herd moving along the edge, guided by small red humanoids, leaving a swath that was almost dirt-colored.

Give ‘em this: the little green elephants were efficient. The red men must have to shift camp fairly frequently.

Louis saw motion in the grass nearby. He watched patiently until it moved again… and suddenly it was an orange streak. Louis never saw Chmeee’s prey. There were no humanoids around, and that was good enough. He went back to work.

The herdsmen returned to find a feast.

They came in a band, chattering among themselves. They paused to examine the lander without coming too close. Some of them surrounded one of the green elephants. (Lunch?) It may have been coincidence that the spearmen led the rest as they entered the circle of huts.

They stopped in surprise, confronting Louis, and Chmeee with a different girl on his shoulder, and half a ton of dressed meat laid on clean leather.

Shivith introduced the aliens, with a short and fairly accurate account of their claims. Louis was prepared to be called a liar, but it never happened. He met the chief: a woman four feet and a few inches tall, Ginjerofer by name, who bowed and smiled with disconcertingly sharp teeth. Louis tried to bow in the same fashion.

“Shivith told us you like variety in meat,” Louis said, and gestured toward what he had taken from the lander’s kitchen. Three of the natives turned the green elephant around, aimed it at where the rest of the herd was grazing, and prodded its butt with spear hafts to get it going. The tribe converged on lunch. Others came to join them, out of huts Louis had assumed were empty: a dozen very old men and women. Louis had thought Shivith was old. He was not used to seeing people with wrinkled skin and arthritic joints and old scars. He wondered why they had hidden, and surmised that arrows had been aimed at him and Chmeee while they talked with Shivith and the children.

In a few minutes the natives reduced the meal to bones. They did no talking; they seemed to have no order of precedence. They ate, in fact, like kzinti. Chmeee accepted a gestured offer to join them. He ate most of the moa, which the natives ignored; they preferred red meat.

Louis had carried it in several loads on one of the big repulsion plates. His muscles ached from the strain of moving it. He watched the natives tearing into the feast. He felt good. There was no droud in his head, but he felt good.

Most of the natives left then, to tend the herd. Shivith and Ginjerofer and some of the older ones stayed. Chmeee asked Louis, “Is this moa an artifact or a bird? The Patriarch might want such birds for his hunting parks.”

“There’s a real bird,” Louis said. “Ginjerofer, this should make us even for the stampede.”

“We thank you,” she said. There was blood on her lips and chin. Her lips were full, and redder than her skin. “Forget the stampede. Life is more than not being hungry. We love to meet people who are different. Are your worlds really so much smaller than ours? And round?”

“Round like balls. If mine were far up the Arch, you would see only a white point.”

“Will you go back to these small places to tell of us?”

The translators must be feeding to recorders aboard Needle. Louis said, “One day.”

“You will have questions.”

“Yah. Do the sunflowers ruin your grazing ground?”

He had to point before she understood. “The brightness to spinward? We know nothing of it.”

“Did you ever wonder? Ever send scouts?”

She frowned. “This is the way of it. My fathers and mothers tell that we have been moving to antispinward since they were little. They remember that they had to go around a great sea, but they did not come too close, because the beasts would not eat the plants that grow around the shore. There was a brightness to spinward then, but it is stronger now. As for scouts — a party of the young went to see for themselves. They met giants. The giants killed their beasts. They had to return quickly then. They had no meat.”

“It sounds like the sunflowers are moving faster than you are.”

“Okay. We can move faster than we do.”

“What do you know about the floating city?”

Ginjerofer had seen it all her life. It was a landmark, like the Arch itself. Sometimes when the night was cloud-covered, one could still find the yellow glow of the city, but that was all she knew. The city was too far even for rumor.

“But we hear tales from large distances, if they are worth telling. They may be garbled. We hear of the people of the spill mountains, who live between the cold white level and the foothills, where air is too dense. They fly between the spill mountains. They use sky sleds when they can get them, but there are no new sky sleds, so that for hundreds of years they must use balloons. Will your seeing-things see that far?”

Louis put the binocular goggles on her and showed her the enlargement dial. “Why did you call them spill mountains? Is that the same word you use when you spill water?”

“Yes. I don’t know why we call them that. Your eyepiece only shows me larger mountains… ” She turned to spinward. The goggles almost covered her small face. “I can see the shore, and a glare across.”

“What else do you hear from travelers?”

“When we meet we talk most of dangers. There are brainless meat-eaters to antispinward that kill people. They look something like us, but smaller, and they are black and hunt at night. And there are… ” She frowned. “We don’t know the truth of this. There are mindless things that urge one to do rishathra with them. One does not live through the act.”

“But you can’t do rishathra. They can’t be dangerous to you.”

“Even to us, we are told.”

“What about diseases? Parasites?”

None of the natives knew what he meant! Fleas, hookworm, mosquitoes, measles, gangrene: there was nothing like that on the Ringworld. Of course he should have guessed that. The Ringworld engineers just hadn’t brought them. He was startled nonetheless. He wondered if he might have brought disease to the Ringworld for the first time… and decided that he had not. The autodoc would have cured him of anything dangerous.

But the natives were that much like civilized humans. They grew old, but not sick.

Chapter 10 — The God Gambit

Hours before nightfall, Louis was exhausted.

Ginjerofer offered them the use of a hut, but Chmeee and Louis elected to sleep in the lander. Louis fell between the sleeping plates while Chmeee was still setting up defenses.

He woke in the dead of night.

Chmeee had activated the image amplifier before he went to sleep. The landscape glowed bright as a rainy day. The daylit rectangles of the Arch were like ceiling light panels: too bright to do more than glance at. But most of the nearer Great Ocean was in shadow.

The Great Oceans lured him. They were flamboyant. They should not have been. If Louis was right about the Ringworld engineers, flamboyance was not their style. They built with simplicity and efficiency, and they planned in very long time spans, and they fought wars.

But the Ringworld was flamboyant in its own way, and impossible to defend. Why hadn’t they built a lot of little Ringworlds instead? And why the Great Oceans? They didn’t fit either.

He could be wrong from the start. That had happened before! Yet the evidence—

Was there something moving in the grass?

Louis activated the infrared scanner.

They glowed by their own heat. They were bigger than dogs, like a blend of human and jackal: horrid supernatural things in this unnatural light. Louis spent a moment locating the sonic stun cannon in the lander’s turret and another swinging it toward the interlopers. Four of them, moving on all fours through the grass.

They stopped not far from the huts. They were there for some minutes. Then they moved off, and now they were hunched half erect. Louis turned off the infrared scanner.

In augmented Archlight it was clear: they were carrying the day’s garbage, the remains of the feast. Ghouls. The meat probably wasn’t ripe enough for them yet.

Yellow eyes in his peripheral vision: Chmeee was wide-awake. Louis said, “The Ringworld’s old. A hundred thousand years at least.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The Ringworld engineers wouldn’t have brought jackals. There’s been time enough for some branch of the hominids to fit that niche in the ecology.”

“A hundred thousand years wouldn’t be enough,” said Chmeee.

“It might. I wonder what else the engineers didn’t bring. They didn’t bring mosquitoes.”

“You are facetious. But they would not have brought bloodsuckers of any kind.”

“No. Or sharks, or cougars.” Louis laughed. “Or skunks. What else? Venomous snakes? Mammals couldn’t live like snakes. I don’t think any mammals secrete poison in their mouths.”

“Louis, it would take millions of years for hominids to evolve in so many directions. We must consider whether they evolved on the Ringworld at all!”

“They did, unless I’m completely wrong. As for how long it took, there’s a small matter of mathematics. If we assume they started evolving a hundred thousand years ago, from a base popu… ” Louis let the sentence trail off.

A good distance away — moving at fair speed, considering their burdens — the jackal-hominids suddenly stopped, turned back, seemed to pose for a moment, then dropped into the grass and vanished. A touch of the infrared sensor showed four glowing spots fanning out and away.

“Company to spinward,” Chmeee said quietly.

The newcomers were big. They were Chmeee’s size, and they weren’t trying to hide. Forty bearded giants marched through the night as if they owned it. They were armed and armored. They moved in a wedge formation, with bowmen on the forward arms of the triangle and swordsmen inside, and the one fully armored man at the point. Others had plates of thick leather to guard arms and torsos, but that one, the biggest of the giants, wore metal: a gleaming shell that bulged at elbows, knuckles, shoulders, knees, hips. The forward-jutting mask was open, with a pale beard and wide nose showing inside.

“I was right. I was right all along. But why a Ringworld? Why did they build a Ringworld? How in Finagle’s Name did they expect to defend it?”

Chmeee finished swinging the stun cannon around. “Louis, what are you talking about?”

“The armor. Look at the armor. Haven’t you ever been in the Smithsonian Institute? And you saw the pressure suits in the Ringworlder spaceship.”

“Uurrr… yes. We have a more immediate problem.”

“Don’t shoot yet. I want to see… Yah, I was right. They’re going past the village.”

“Would you say that the little red ones are our allies? It was only coincidence that we met them first.”

“I’d say they are. Tentatively.”

The microphone picked up a high-pitched scream, interrupted by a bellow. The archers drew arrows simultaneously, fitted them to bows. Two small red sentries were bounding toward the huts at impressive speed. They were ignored.

“Fire,” Louis said softly.

The arrows went wild. The giants crumpled. Two or three green elephants bellowed and tried to get to their feet, paused, then settled back. One had a couple of arrows in its flank.

“They were after the herd,” Chmeee said.

“Yah. We don’t really want them slaughtered, do we? Tell you what, you stay here with the stun cannon and I’ll go out and negotiate.”

“I don’t take your orders, Louis.”

“Do you have other suggestions?”

“No. Save at least one giant to answer questions.”

This one had fallen on his back. He was not just bearded, he was maned: only his eyes and nose showed in a mass of golden hair that spilled over face and head and shoulders. Ginjerofer squatted and forced his mouth open with two small hands. The warrior’s jaw was massive. His teeth were flat-topped molars, well worn down. All of them.

“See,” Ginjerofer said, “a plant-eater. They wanted to kill the herd, to take their grass.”

Louis shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought the competition would be so fierce.”

“We didn’t know. But they come from spinward, where our herds have cropped the grass close. Thank you for killing them, Louis. We must have a great feast.”

Louis’s stomach lurched. “They’re only sleeping. And they’ve got minds, like you, like me.”

She looked at him curiously. “Their minds were turned to our destruction.”

“We shot them. We ask you to let them live.”

“How? What would they do to us if we let them wake up?”

It was a problem. Louis temporized. “If I solve that, will you let them live? Remember, it was our sleepgun.” And that should suggest to Ginjerofer that Chmeee could use the gun again.

“We will confer,” said Ginjerofer.

Louis waited, and thought. No way would forty giant herbivores fit in the lander. They could be disarmed, of course… Louis grinned suddenly at the sword in the giant’s big, broad-fingered hand. The long, curved blade would work as a scythe.

Ginjerofer came back. “They may live if we never see their tribe again. Can you promise that?”

“You’re a bright woman. Yah, they could have relatives with a vengeance tradition. And yah, I can promise you’ll never see this tribe again.”

Chmeee spoke in his ear. “Louis? You may have to exterminate them!”

“No. It could cost us some time, but tanj, look at them! Peasants. They can’t fight us. At worst I’ll make them build a big raft and we’ll tow it with the lander. The sunflowers haven’t crossed the downstream river yet. We’ll let them off a good way away, where there’s grass.”

“For what? A delay of weeks!”

“For information.” Louis turned back to Ginjerofer. “I want the one in the armor, and I want all their weapons. Leave them not so much as a knife. Keep what you want, but I want most of it piled in the lander.”

She looked dubiously at the armored giant. “How shall we move him?”

“I’ll get a repulser plate. You tie the rest up after we’re gone. Let them loose in pairs. Tell them the situation. Send them to spinward in daylight. If they come back to attack you with no weapons, they’re yours. But they won’t. They’ll cross that plain damn fast, with no weapons and no grass over an inch tall.”

She considered. “It seems safe enough. It will be done.”

“We’ll be at their camp, wherever it is, long before they arrive. We’ll wait for them, Ginjerofer.”

“They will not be hurt. My promise is for the People,” she said coldly.

The armored giant woke shortly after dawn.

His eyes opened, blinked, and focused on a looming orange wall of fur, and yellow eyes, and long claws. He held quite still while his eyes roved… seeing the weapons of thirty comrades piled around him… seeing the airlock, with both doors open. Seeing horizon slide past; feeling the wind of the lander’s speed.

He tried to roll over.

Louis grinned. He was watching via a scanner in the rec-room ceiling while he steered the lander. The giant’s armor was soldered to the deck at knees, heels, wrists, and shoulders. A little heat would free him, but rolling around wouldn’t.

The giant made demands and threats. He did not plead. Louis paid scant attention. When the computer’s translating program started getting sense out of that, he’d notice. At the moment he was more concerned with his view of the giants’ camp.

He was a mile up, and fifty miles from the red carnivores’ huts. He slowed. The grass hereabouts had had time to grow back, but the giants had left another great bare region behind them, toward the sea and the sunflower gleam beyond. They were out in the grass: thousands of them scattered widely across the veldt. Louis caught points of light glittering from scythe-swords.

No giants were near the camp itself. There were wagons parked near the center of camp, and no sign of draft beasts. The giants must pull the wagons themselves. Or they might have motors left from the event Halrloprillalar had called the Fall of the Cities, a thousand years ago.

The one thing Louis couldn’t see was the central building. He saw only a black spot on his window, a black rectangle overloaded by too much light. Louis grinned. The giants had enlisted the enemy.

A screen lighted. A seductive contralto said, “Louis.”

“Here.”

“I return your droud,” the puppeteer said.

Louis turned. The small black thing was sitting on the stepping disc. Louis turned away as one turns one’s back on an enemy, remembering that the enemy is still there.

He said, “There’s something I want you to investigate. There are mountains along the base of the rim wall. The natives—”

“For the risks of exploring I selected you and Chmeee.”

“Can you understand that I might want to minimize those risks?”

“Certainly.”

“Then hear me out. I think we’ll want to investigate the spill mountains. Before we do, there are just a lot of things we need to know about the rim wall. All you have to—”

“Louis, why did you call them spill mountains?”

“The natives call them that. I don’t know why, and neither do they. Suggestive, eh? And they don’t show from the back. Why not? Most of the Ringworld is like the mask of a world, with seas and mountains molded into it. But there’s volume to the spill mountains.”

“Suggestive, yes. You must learn the answers yourselves. I am called Hindmost, as any leader may be called Hindmost,” the puppeteer said, “because he directs his people from safety, because safety is his prerogative and his duty, because his death or injury would be disaster for all. Louis, you’ve dealt with my kind before!”

“Tanj, I’m only asking you to risk a probe, not your valuable hide! All we need is a running hologram taken along the rim wall. Put the probe in the rim transport loops and decelerate it to solar orbital speed. You’ll be using the system just as it’s meant to be used. The meteor defense won’t fire on the rim wall—”

“Louis, you are trying to outguess a weapon programmed hundreds of thousands of years ago by your reckoning. What if something has blocked the rim transport system? What if the laser targeting system has become faulty?”

“Even at worst, what have you lost?”

“Half my refueling capability,” said the puppeteer. “I planted stepping-disc transmitters in the probes, behind a filter that will pass only deuterium. The receiver is in the fuel tank. To refuel I need only drop a probe in a Ringworld sea. But if I lose my probes, how will I leave the Ringworld? And why should I take that risk?”

Louis held tight to his temper. “The volume, Hindmost! What’s inside the spill mountains? There must be hundreds of thousands of those half-cones thirty to forty miles tall, and the backs are flat! One could be the control and maintenance center, or a whole string of them. I don’t think they are, but I want to know before I go anywhere near them. Aside from that, there must be attitude jets for the Ringworld, and the best place for them is the rim wall. Where are they, and why aren’t they working?”

“Are you quite sure they must be rocket motors? There are other solutions. Gravity generators would serve for attitude control.”

“I don’t believe it. The Ringworld engineers wouldn’t need to spin the Ringworld if they had gravity generators. It’d make for a much simpler engineering problem.”

“Control of magnetic effects, then, in the sun and the Ringworld floor.”

“Mmm… maybe. Tanj, I’m not sure. I want you to find out!”

“How can you dare to bargain with me?” The puppeteer seemed more puzzled than angry. “At my whim you remain until the Ringworld grinds against the shadow squares. At my whim you will never taste current again.”

The translator was finally speaking. “Butt out,” Louis said. He’d been given no volume control for the Hindmost’s voice, but the Hindmost stopped talking.

The translator said, “Docile? Because I eat plants, must I be docile? Take me out of my armor and I will fight you naked, you ball of orange hair. My space in the longhouse needs a fine new rug.”

“And what,” Chmeee asked, “of these?” He showed polished black claws.

“Give me one tiny dagger against your eight. Or give me none, I will fight without.”

Louis was chortling. He used the intercom. “Chmeee, haven’t you ever seen a bullfight? And this one must be the Patriarch of the herd, the king giant!”

The giant asked, “Who or what was that?”

“That was Louis.” Chmeee’s voice dropped. “There is danger for you. I urge you to be respectful. Louis is… fearsome.”

Louis was a little startled. What was this? A reverse God Gambit, with the Voice of Louis Wu as guest star? It could work, if Chmeee the ferocious kzin was clearly afraid of an unseen voice… Louis said, “King of Plant Eaters, tell me why you attacked my worshippers.”

“Their beasts ate our forage,” said the giant.

“Was there forage elsewhere, that you could avoid risking my anger?”

Among the males of a herd of cattle or buffalo, one either dominates or submits. There is no middle ground. The giant’s eyes rolled, seeking escape, but there was none. If he couldn’t dominate Chmeee, how could he cow an unseen voice?

“We had no choice,” he said. “To spinward are the fire plants. To port are the Machine People. To starboard is a high ridge of exposed scrith. Nothing will grow on scrith, and it is too slippery to climb. To antispinward is grass, and nothing to stop us but small savages, until you came! What is your power, Louis? Are my men alive?”

“I let your men live. In” — fifty miles, running naked and hungry — “…in two days they will be with you. But I can kill you all with a motion of my finger.”

The giant’s eyes searched the ceiling, pleading. “If you can kill the fire plants, we will worship you.”

Louis settled back to think. Suddenly it was no longer fun.

He heard the giant begging Chmeee for information on Louis; he heard Chmeee lying outrageously. They’d played such games before. The God Gambit had kept them alive during their long return to the Liar; Speaker-To-Animals’s reputation as a war god, and the natives’ offerings, had kept them from starvation. Louis hadn’t realized that Speaker / Chmeee enjoyed it.

Sure, Chmeee was having fun. But the giant was pleading for help, and what could Louis do against sunflowers? Actually, it was hardly a problem. The giants had offended him, hadn’t they? Gods in general were not noted for forgiveness. So Louis opened his mouth, and closed it again, and thought some more, and said, “For your life and the lives of your people, tell me the truth. Can you eat the fire plants if they do not burn you first?”

The giant answered eagerly. “Yes, Louis. We forage along the border at night, when we grow hungry enough. But we must be far away by dawn! The plants can find us miles away, and they burn anything that moves! They all turn at once, they turn the glare of the sun on us, and we burn!”

“But you can eat them when the sun isn’t shining.”

“Yes.”

“How do the winds blow in this region?”

“Winds?… In these parts they blow to spinward. For great distances around, they blow only into the realm of fire plants.”

“Because the plants heat the air?”

“Am I a god, to know that?”

After all, the sunflowers only got a certain amount of sunlight. The way they worked, they’d heat the air around and above them, but the sunlight would never pass the silver blossoms to reach the roots. Dew would condense on the cool soil. The plants would get their moisture that way. And rising hot air would bring a steady wind from the borders of the sunflower patch.

And the plants burned anything that moved, to turn plant-eating beasts and birds into fertilizer.

He could do it. He could.

“You will do most of the work yourself,” Louis said. “The tribe is yours and you will save them. Afterward, you and they will turn toward the dying fire plants. Eat them, or plow them under and plant whatever you like to eat.” Louis grinned at Chmeee’s bewilderment, and continued, “You will never disturb my worshippers, the red people.”

The armored giant was gloriously happy. “All of this is most welcome news. Our worship is yours. We must seal the covenant by rishathra.”

“You’re kidding.”

“What? No, I spoke of this earlier, but Chmeee did not understand. Bargains must be sealed by rishathra, even between men and gods. Chmeee, this is no problem. You are even of proper size for my women.”

“I am stranger than you think,” Chmeee said.

From Louis’s ceiling viewpoint it looked like Chmeee was exposing himself to the giant. Certainly something had caused the giant’s startled expression. Louis couldn’t have cared less. Tanj dammit! he thought. I actually thought of an answer! And now this. What do I have to do to—

Yah. “I will make for you a servant,” Louis said. “Because I am hurried, he will be dwarf, and mute in your language. Call him Wu. Chmeee, we must confer.”

Chapter 11 — The Grass Giants

The lander touched down in a malevolent glare of white light. The glare from the longhouse persisted for a minute after the lander stopped moving, then died. Presently the ramp descended. The king giant, fully armored, let it carry him to the ground. He raised his head and bellowed. The sound must have carried for many miles.

Giants began jogging toward the lander.

Chmeee descended, then Wu. Wu was small, partly hairless, and harmless-looking. He smiled a lot; he looked about him with charming enthusiasm, as if seeing the world for the first time…

The longhouse was a fair distance away. It was mud and grass, reinforced with vertical members. The row of sunflowers planted on the roof shifted restlessly, now turning their concave mirror faces and green photosynthetic nodes to the sun, now flashing at the giants converging from all directions.

Chmeee was asking, “What if an enemy attacked in the daytime? How can you reach the longhouse? Or do you store your weapons elsewhere?”

The giant considered before giving away secrets of defense. But Chmeee served Louis, and it was well not to offend him… ”See you the pile of brush to antispinward of the longhouse? If danger threatens, a man must approach from behind that pile and wave a sheet. The sunflowers fire the damp wood. Under cover of smoke we may then enter and take weapons.” He glanced at the lander and added, “An enemy fast enough to reach us before we can reach weapons is too strong for us anyway. Perhaps the sunflowers would surprise him.”

“May Wu choose his own mate?”

“Does he have that much volition? I had thought to lend him my wife Reeth, who has practiced Rishathra before. She is small, and the Machine People are not so different from Wu.”

“Acceptable,” Chmeee said without a glance at Wu.

A hundred of the giants surrounded them now. No more seemed to be coming. The kzin asked, “Are these all?”

“These and my warriors are all of my tribe. There are twenty-six tribes on the veldt. We stay together when we can, but none speaks for all,” the king giant said.

Of the hundred or so, eight were males, and all of the eight were markedly scarred; three were actual cripples. None but the king giant showed the wrinkles and whitening hair of age.

The rest were females… rather, they were women. They stood six and a half to seven feet tall, small next to their men: brown-skinned, dignified, naked. Their hair was golden and spilled in wealth down their backs; it was generally a mass of tangles. None bore any kind of decoration. Their legs were thick, their feet large and hard. A few of the women were white-haired. Their heavy breasts gave a good indication of their relative ages. They examined their guests with pleasure and wonder while the armored giant told what he knew of them.

And Chmeee, with his translator off, spoke low. “If you prefer one or another female, I must say so now.”

“No, they’re all about equally… attractive.”

“We can still end this situation. You must be mad to make such a promise!”

“I can do it. Hey, don’t you want revenge for your burnt pelt?”

“Revenge on a plant? You are mad. Our time is precious, and in just over a year they will all be dead — sunflowers, giants, little red carnivores, and all!”

“Yah… ”

“Your help is no help at all, if they knew it. How long will your project take? A day? A month? You hurt our own project.”

“Maybe I am mad. Chmeee, I have to carry this through. In all the time since I left the Ringworld I haven’t had reason to be proud of myself. I have to prove—”

The king giant was saying, “Louis himself will tell you that the threat of the fire plants is over for us. He will tell us our part—”

Wu, self-effacing, as was his nature, stepped behind the great kzin; and none of the giants particularly noticed that he was talking to his hand. Half a minute later the time-delayed Voice of Louis boomed from the lander, saying, “Hear me, for your day has come to make the places of the fire plants clean for all the breeds of men. My work will go before you as a cloud. You must gather the seeds of what you wish to grow where fire plants grow now… ”

In the first light of dawn, when the sun shone overhead as a mere splinter of light at the edge of a shadow square, the giants were up and moving.

They liked to sleep touching each other. The king giant was the center of a circle of women, with Wu at its edge, his small, half-bald head pillowed on a woman’s shoulder, his legs hooked over a man’s long bony legs. The dirt floor was covered in flesh and hair.

Waking, they moved in order, those nearest the door untangling themselves and picking up bags and sickle-swords and moving out, then those farther in. Wu moved out with them.

Outside the distant lander, a one-armed giant with a marred face said a quick farewell to Chmeee and came jogging toward the longhouse. Last night’s guards would be sleeping inside during the day, and some older women had stayed too.

The giants turned and stared openly when Wu began climbing the wall.

The grass and mud surface was crumbly, but the roof was only twelve feet high. Louis pulled himself up between two sunflowers.

The plants stood a foot tall on knobbly green stalks. Each had a single oval blossom, mirror-surfaced, nine to twelve inches across. A short stalk poked from the mirror’s center and ended in a dark-green bulb. The back of the blossom was stringy, laced with some vegetable analogue of muscle fibers. And all of the blossoms were throwing sunlight at Louis Wu; but there wasn’t enough sunlight to hurt him yet.

Louis wrapped his hands around a thick sunflower stalk and rocked it gently. There was no give; the roots were dug deep into the roof. He took off his shirt and held it between the blossom and the sun. The mirror-blossom wavered and rippled in indecision, then folded forward to enclose the green bulb.

Mindful of his audience, Wu climbed down with some attention to style. A white glare followed him as he went to join Chmeee.

The kzin said, “I spent part of this night talking to a guard.”

“Learn anything?”

“He has the utmost confidence in you, Louis. They’re gullible.”

“So were the carnivores. I wondered if it was just good manners.”

“I think not. The carnivores and the herbivores expect anything at all to walk in from the horizon at any moment. They know that there are people with strange shapes and godlike powers. They made me wonder what we may meet next. Uurrr, and the sentry knew that we are not of the race that built the Ringworld. Is this significant?”

“Maybe. What else?”

“There will be no problem with the other tribes. Cattle they may be, but with minds. Those who stay on the veldt will collect seeds for those who choose to invade sunflower territory. They will give women to the young adult men if they go. Perhaps a third of them will leave when you have worked your magic. The rest will have enough grass. They will not need to move toward the red people.”

“Okay.”

“I asked about long-term weather.”

“Good! Well?”

“The guard is an old man,” Chmeee said. “When he was young and had both legs — before something marred him; the translator said ‘ogre’ — the sun was always the same brightness and the days were always the same length. Now the sun seems sometimes brighter and sometimes dimmer, and when the sun is bright, the days seem too short, and vice versa. Louis, he remembers how it started. Twelve falans ago, which would be one hundred and twenty rotations of the constellations, there was a time of dark. Dawn never came for what would have been two or three days. They saw the stars, and a ghost-flame spreading overhead. Then all was as it should be for some falans. When the uneven days came, it was long before they noticed; they don’t have clocks.”

“Seems predictable enough. Except—”

“But the long night, Louis. What does that sound like?”

Louis nodded. “The sun flared up. The shadow square ring closed somehow. Maybe the wire that holds it together can be reeled in by automatics.”

“Then the flare jet pushed the Ringworld off center. Now the days grow more uneven. It frightens all of the races the giants trade with.”

“And well it should.”

“I wish there were something we could do.” The kzin’s tail lashed once. “But we battle sunflowers instead. Did you enjoy yourself this night?”

“Yah.”

“Then you should be smiling.”

“If you really wanted to know, you could have watched. Everyone else did. There aren’t any walls in that big building; they all crowd in together. Anyway, they like watching.”

“I can’t tolerate the smell.”

Louis laughed. “It’s strong. Not bad, just strong. And I had to stand on a stool. And the women were… docile.”

“Females should be docile.”

“Not human females! They’re not even stupid. I couldn’t talk, of course, but I listened.” Louis’s forefinger tapped the knob in his ear. “I listened to Reeth organizing the clean-up squad. She’s good. Hey, you were right, they’re organized just like a herd of cattle! The females are all wives of the king giant. None of the other males ever gets laid, except that sometimes the king giant declares a holiday and then goes away so he won’t have to watch. Fun’s over when he comes back, and officially nothing happened. Everyone’s a little miffed because we brought him back from the raid two days early.”

“What are human females supposed to be like?”

“Oh… orgasm. The males of all the mammals have orgasms. The females generally don’t. But human women do. But the giant women, they just accept. They don’t, ah, participate.”

“You didn’t enjoy it?”

“Of course I enjoyed it. It’s sex, isn’t it? But it takes a little getting used to, that I couldn’t make Reeth enjoy it like I did, that she can’t.”

“My sympathy is all that it should be,” Chmeee said, “considering that my nearest wife is two hundred light-years away. What must we do next?”

“Wait for the king giant. He may be a little groggy. He spent a lot of last night getting reacquainted with his wives. In fact, the only way he had to tell me how was by demonstration. He’s awesome,” Louis said. “He… serviced? He serviced a dozen women, and I tried like tanj to keep up with him, but it didn’t help my ego that… Skip it.” Now Louis was grinning.

“Louis?”

“My reproductive set isn’t built to the same scale.”

“The guard said that the females of other species stand in awe of the giant males. The males practice rishathra whenever they can. They enjoy peace conferences immensely. The guard was annoyed that Louis did not make you female.”

“Louis was in a hurry,” Wu said, and he went in.

Last night the gatherers’ big bags had disgorged a great heap of cut grass some distance from the longhouse. Guards and the king giant had eaten most of the pile; the gatherers must have been eating as they worked. Now Louis watched as the king giant, loping toward the lander, stopped to finish the pile off.

Herbivores spent too much of their lives eating, Louis mused. How had the humanoids kept their intelligence? Chmeee was right — you didn’t need intelligence to sneak up on a blade of grass. Maybe it took intelligence to avoid being eaten. Or… it took considerable cunning to sneak up on a sunflower.

Louis felt himself being watched.

He turned. Nothing.

It would be embarrassing at best if the king giant learned he’d been duped. Yet Louis was all alone on the flight deck, if you ignored the Hindmost’s spy-eyes. Why this tingling at the back of his neck? He turned again, and who was he kidding? It was the droud. The black plastic case was staring at him from the stepping disc.

A touch of the wire would really make him feel like a god. It would really louse up his act, too! He remembered that Chmeee had seen him under the wire. “Like a mindless marine plant… ” He turned away.

The king giant came without armor today. As he and Chmeee entered the rec room the kzin raised his hands to the ceiling, palms together, and intoned, “Louis.” The giant imitated him.

“Find me one of the repulser plates,” Louis said without preamble. “Set it out on the floor. Good. Now get some of the superconductor cloth. It’s three doors down, the big locker. Good. Wrap the cloth around the repulser plate. Cover it completely, but leave a fold so you can reach the settings. Chmeee, how strong is that cloth?”

“A moment, Louis… See, it cuts with a knife. I don’t think I could rip it.”

“Good. Now get me twenty miles of the superconducting wire. Wrap one end around the repulser plate. Tie it well; use a lot of loops. Be lavish. Good enough. Now coil the rest of the wire so it won’t tangle when you let it out. I need the other end. Chmeee, you do that. King of the Grass Eaters, I need the biggest rock you can carry. You know this territory. Find it and bring it.”

The king giant stared… and dropped his eyes and went. Chmeee said, “It sours my stomach to take your orders so meekly.”

“But you thought of it, and besides that, you’re dying to find out what I’m planning. But—”

“I could make you tell.”

“I can make you a better offer than that. Come up here, please.”

Chmeee bounded up through the hatch. Louis asked, “What do you see on the stepping disc?”

Chmeee picked up the droud.

Louis’s voice was jagged in his throat. “Break it.”

The kzin instantly stiff-armed the small instrument into a wall. It didn’t dent. He pried at the casing, got it open, and jabbed at the inside with the hullmetal blade of the knife he’d been using. At last he said, “It’s beyond repair.”

“Good.”

“I will wait below.”

“No, I’ll come with you. I want to check your work. And I want breakfast.” He was feeling twitchy. He wasn’t sure how he felt. Rishathra hadn’t quite lived up to his expectations, and the pure joy of the wire was over forever. But… cheese fondue? Right. And freedom, and pride. In a couple of hours he was going to wipe out a sunflower invasion and shock tanj out of Chmeee. Louis Wu, ex-wirehead, whose brain hopefully had not turned to oatmeal after all.

The king giant came back hugging a boulder and moving very slowly. Chmeee started to take it from him, hesitated an instant as he saw its size, and finished the motion. He turned with it in his arms and, with strain just showing in his voice, said, “What must I do with it, Louis?”

It was tempting. Oh, there are so many possibilities… Give me a minute to think it over… But gods don’t dither, and he couldn’t let Chmeee drop it with the giant watching.

“Set it on superconductor cloth and wrap it up. Tie it with superconductor wire. Take a lot of turns around the rock, and be lavish with the knots, too. Okay, now I want some stronger wire that’ll stand up to heat.”

“We have Sinclair molecule chain.”

“Less than twenty miles of that. I want it shorter than the superconductor wire.” Louis was glad he’d made the inspection. He had overlooked the chance that the superconductor wire wouldn’t be strong enough to hold the cloth-wrapped repulser plate, once the plate reached altitude. But Sinclair chain was fantastic stuff. It ought to hold.

Chapter 12 — Sunflowers

Louis flew high and fast to spinward. The veldt showed too much brown: grass cropped first by green elephants and then by giants was having trouble growing back. Ahead, the white line of sunflowers glared across the sea.

The king giant watched through the transparent airlock doors. “It may be I should have brought armor,” he said.

Chmeee snorted. “To fight sunflowers? Metal grows hot.”

“Where,” Louis asked, “did you get the armor?”

“We made a road for the Machine People. They made us free of the grasslands the road was to go through, and afterward they made armor for the kings of the tribes. We kept moving. We didn’t like their air.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It tastes wrong and smells wrong, Louis. It smells like what they drink sometimes. They pour the same stuff in their machines, but without mixing it with anything.”

Chmeee asked, “I wondered about the shape of your armor. It is not quite your own shape. I wondered why.”

“The shape is meant to awe and frighten. Did you not find it so?”

“No,” said Chmeee. “Is it the shape of those who built the Ringworld?”

“Who knows?”

“I do,” Louis said. The giant’s eyes flicked nervously upward.

The grass, grown tall again, abruptly gave way to forest. The sunflowers had grown bright. Louis dropped the lander to a hundred feet and slowed drastically.

The forest ended in a long white beach. Louis slowed further and eased the lander down, down, until he was almost skimming the water. The sunflowers lost interest.

He flew on toward the diminished glare. The sea was calm, rippled by a breeze from astern. The sky was blue and cloudless. Islands went by, small and medium-sized, with beaches and convoluted shores and peaks charred black. Two had been commandeered by sunflowers.

Fifty miles offshore, the sunflowers were taking an interest again. Louis brought the lander to a halt. “They can’t hope to use us for fertilizer,” he said. “We’re too far away and flying too low.”

“Brainless plants.” Chmeee coughed contempt.

The king giant said, “They are clever. They start brush fires. When only ashen ground is left, the fire plants spread their seed.”

But they were over water!… Skip it. “King of the Grass Giants, this is your hour. Drop the rock overboard. Don’t snag the wire.” Louis opened the airlock and lowered the ramp. The king giant went forth into the ominous glare. The boulder fell twenty feet into the water, trailing black and silver wires.

Spotlights seemed to wink at them from the far shore as clusters of the plants tried to burn the lander, then lost interest. They sought motion, but they wouldn’t fire on running water, would they? On a waterfall, say? The plants did best on half-arid worlds… ”Chmeee. Take the repulser plate outside. Set it for, oh, eighteen miles. See that the wires don’t foul.”

The black rectangle rose. Wire trailed, black and silver. The thread of Sinclair chain should have been invisibly thin, but it glowed silver, and a bright nimbus glowed around the dwindling repulser plate. The plate was a black dot now, harder to see than the bright halo around it. At that altitude it was a target for hordes of sunflower blossoms.

A superconductor will pass an electric current with no resistance whatever. It is this property that makes it so valuable to industry. But superconductors have another property. A superconductor is always the same temperature throughout.

Air and dust particles, and Sinclair wire, glowed by sunflower light. But the superconductor cloth and wire remained black. Good. Louis blinked away the dazzle and looked down at the water. “King of the Grass People,” he said, “come inside before you’re hurt.”

Where the two wires entered the water, the water boiled. A streamer of steam blew into the white glare to spinward. Louis set the lander drifting to starboard. Already a fair patch of water was steaming.

The Ringworld engineers had built only two deep oceans, the Great Oceans, counterbalanced opposite each other. The rest of the Ringworld’s seas were twenty-five feet deep throughout. Like humans, they apparently used only the top of a sea. That was to Louis’s advantage. It was making it easier to boil a sea.

The steam cloud reached for shore.

Gods don’t gloat. That was a pity. “We will watch until you are satisfied,” he told the king giant.

“Uurrr,” said Chmeee.

“I begin to see,” the king giant said, “but… ”

“Speak.”

“The fire plants burn away clouds.”

Louis swallowed uneasiness. “We will watch. Chmeee, you may offer our guest lettuce. It may be that you will want to eat with a door between you.”

They were fifty miles to starboard of the anchored wire, on the port side of a tall, bare island. The island blocked half the glare of those sunflowers still interested in cremating the lander… but most of the sunflowers were distracted anyway. Some of the glare focused on the hovering black rectangle; some, on the steam cloud.

For the water was steaming for a couple of square miles around the wire and submerged boulder. The steam ran in a spreading cloud across the sea, fifty miles to shore, and there it caught fire. Five miles inland it ran, burning like a firestorm, and then it was gone.

Louis focused the telescope on the patch of steam. He could see water boiling. Plants would be starting to die. A five-mile strip of plants was getting no sunlight; plants around them were wasting their light on a steam cloud instead of making sugar with it. But a five-mile strip was nothing, nothing. The patch was half the size of a world.

He saw something else that made him swing the view straight upward.

The silver wire was falling, drifting to spinward in the wind. The sunflowers had burned through Sinclair molecule chain. Louis softly spoke a one-syllable word meaning impotence. But the thread of superconductor was still black.

It would hold. Sure it would.

It would be no hotter than boiling water, and everywhere the same temperature. More light from the plants wouldn’t change that; it would only boil the water faster. And this was a big sea. And water vapor doesn’t just vanish. Heat it and it rises.

“God eats well,” the king giant said. He was munching on a head of Boston butter lettuce: his twentieth or maybe thirtieth. He stood beside Chmeee, watching, and like Chmeee he did not speculate on what was happening outside.

Sea water boiled merrily. The sunflowers were sure as tanj determined to knock down that bit of potential fertilizer, that possible sunflower-eating bird. They couldn’t judge altitude or distance. Evolution wouldn’t let them keep that up until they starved. Time off for each blossom to focus on the green photosynthetic node, while others took turns.

Quietly Chmeee said, “Louis. The island.”

Something large and black stood waist-deep in the water offshore. It was not human and not otter, but a little of both. It waited patiently, watching the lander with large brown eyes.

Louis spoke calmly, but with effort. “Is this sea peopled?”

“We did not know it,” said the king giant.

Louis slid the lander toward the beach. The humanoid waited without fear. He was covered with short, oily black fur, and nicely streamlined: thick neck, drastically sloping shoulders, a broad nose flattened against his chinless face.

Louis activated the microphones. “Do you use the speech of the Grass Giants?”

“I can use it. Talk slowly. What are you doing there?”

Louis sighed. “Heating the sea.”

The creature’s self-possession was remarkable. The idea of heating a sea didn’t faze him. He asked the mobile building, “How hot?”

“Very hot at this end. How many are you?”

“Thirty-four of us now,” said the amphibian. “We were eighteen when we came here fifty-one falans past. Will the starboard part of the sea grow hot?”

Louis sagged with relief. He’d had visions of hundreds of thousands of people cooked because Louis Wu had played god. He croaked, “You tell me. The river inlet’s at that end. How much warmth can you stand?”

“Some. We will eat better; fish like warmth. It is polite to ask before you destroy even part of a home. Why are you doing this?”

“To kill off the fire plants.”

The amphibian considered. “Good. If the fire plants die, we can send a messenger upstream to Fuboobish’s Son’s Sea. They must think us long dead.” He added, “I forget my manners. Rishathra is acceptable to us if you will state your sex, and if you can function underwater.”

Louis needed a moment to regain his voice. “None of us mate in water.”

“Few do,” said the amphibian, with no obvious disappointment.

“How did you come here?”

“We were exploring downstream. Rapids carried us into the realm of the fire plants. We could not go ashore, to walk. We must let the river carry us to this place, which I named Tuppugop’s Sea, for myself. It is a good place, though one must be wary of the fire plants. Can you really kill them with fog?”

“I think so.”

“I must move my people,” the amphibian said. He disappeared without a splash.

“I thought you would kill him,” Chmeee told the ceiling, “for his impudence.”

“It’s his home,” said Louis. He turned off the intercom. He was weary of the game. I’m boiling someone’s home, he thought, and I don’t even know it’ll work! He wanted the droud. Nothing else could help, nothing but the vegetable happiness of current running in his brain; nothing else would stop the black rage that had him pounding the arms of his chair and making animal noises with his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

That, and time. Time passed, and the spell passed, and he opened his eyes.

Now he could see neither the black wire nor the boiling of the water. It was all a vast fog bank drifting to spinward, catching fire as it reached shore, ten miles inward and gone. Then only the flare of sunflowers… and a pair of parallel lines at the horizon.

White line above, black below, across fifty degrees of horizon.

Water vapor doesn’t just disappear. Heated, it had gone up, and recondensed in the stratosphere. White edge of cloud, blazing under sunflower attack; black shadow across a tremendous patch of sunflowers. It must be five hundred to a thousand miles away, to be seen so near to its own shadow, and hundreds of miles across. And it was spreading — excruciatingly slowly, but it was spreading.

In the stratosphere the air would be forced outward from the center of the sunflower patch. Some of the cloud would rain out, but some water vapor would meet the steam from the boiling sea and flow inward, recirculating.

His arms hurt. Louis realized that he had a death grip on the chair arms. He let go. He turned on the intercom.

“Louis has kept his promise,” the king giant was saying, “but the dying plants may be out of our reach. I don’t know—”

“We’ll spend the night here,” Louis told them. “In the morning we’ll know better.”

He set the lander on the antispinward side of the island. Seaweed had washed ashore in great heaps. Chmeee and the king giant spent an hour stuffing seaweed into a hatch in the lander’s hull, feeding the converter-kitchen with raw material. Louis took the opportunity to call Hot Needle of Inquiry.

The Hindmost was not on the flight deck. He must be in the hidden part of Needle. “You have broken your droud,” he said.

“I know it. Have you done anything—”

“I have a replacement.”

“I don’t care if you’ve got a dozen. I quit. Do you still want the Ringworld engineers’ transmuter?”

“Of course.”

“Then let’s cooperate a little. The Ringworld control center has to be somewhere. If it’s been built into one of the spill mountains, then the transmuters that came off the ships on the spaceport ledge have to be there. I want to know everything about the situation before I go into it.”

The Hindmost thought it through.

Behind his flat weaving hands, massive buildings glowed with light. A wide street, with stepping discs at intersections, dwindled to a vanishing point. The street swarmed with puppeteers. Their coiffeured manes glowed in glorious variety; they seemed always to move in groups. In a sliver of sky between buildings, two farming worlds hovered, each surrounded by orbiting points of light. There was a background sound like alien music, or like a million puppeteers holding conversations too far away to be heard clearly.

The Hindmost had a piece of his lost civilization here: tapes and a holo wall and, probably, the smell of his own kind constantly in the air. His furniture was all soft curves, with no sharp corners to bump a knee on. An oddly shaped indentation in the floor was probably a bed.

“The back of the rim wall is quite flat,” the Hindmost said abruptly. “My deep-radar won’t penetrate it. I can afford to risk one of my probes. It will still serve as a relay between Needle and the lander; in fact, it will serve better as it rises higher. Accordingly I will place a probe in the rim wall transport system.”

“Good enough.”

“Do you really think the repair center is—”

“No, not really, but we’ll find enough surprises to keep us entertained. It should be checked out.”

“One day we must decide who rules this expedition,” the puppeteer said. He disappeared from the screen.

There were no stars that night.

Morning was a brightening of chaos. From the flight deck nothing showed but a formless pearly glow: no sky, no sea, no beach. Louis was tempted to re-create Wu, just to step out and see if the world was still there.

Instead he took the lander up. There was sunlight at three hundred feet. Below was nothing but white cloud, growing brighter at the spinward horizon. The fog had spread a long way inland.

The repulser plate was still in place, a black dot just overhead.

Two hours after dawn, a wind swept the fog away. Louis dropped the lander to sea level before the edge reached shore. Minutes later a bright nimbus formed around the repulser plate.

The king giant had been at the airlock doors all morning, watching, absently stuffing his face with lettuce. Chmeee too had been almost silent. They turned toward the ceiling when Louis spoke.

“It will work,” he said, and finally he believed it. “Soon you will find an alley of dead sunflowers leading to a much bigger patch of them under a permanent cloud deck. Sow your seeds. If you’d rather eat live fire plants, forage at night on both sides of the streamer of fog. You may want a base on some island in this sea. You’ll want boats.”

“We can make our own plans now,” the king giant said. “It will help to have Sea People near, even so few. They trade service for metal tools. They can build our boats. Will grass grow in all this rain?”

“I don’t know. You’d better seed the burned-off islands too.”

“Good… For our special heroes we carve their likeness on a rock, with a few words. We are migratory; we can’t carry large statues with us. Is this adequate?”

“Certainly.”

“What is your likeness?”

“I’m a little bigger than Chmeee, with more hair around the shoulders, and the hair is your own color. Carnivore teeth, with fangs. No external ears. Don’t go to too much trouble. Where shall we take you now?”

“To our camp. Then I think I must take a few women and scout the edges of the sea.”

“We can do that now.”

The king giant laughed. “Our thanks, Louis, but my warriors will be in an ugly mood when they return. Naked, hungry, defeated. It may go better for them when they learn that I am gone for a few days. I am no god. A hero must have warriors happy with his rule. He cannot be fighting every waking hour.”