The Ringworld Engineers Part 25

"Did you have a fourth argument?"

Louis grimaced. "Chmeee is disappointed in me. He wants to force you to his will. If I can tell him you're taking my orders, he'll be impressed. And we need him."

"We do, yes. He may think more like a Pak protector than you do."

"Well?"

"Your orders?"

Louis told him.

Harkabeeparolyn had rolled over and was on her feet before she saw Louis stepping out of the corner. Then she gasped, crouched, and disappeared into the ponchos. A lumpy poncho slithered toward a discarded blue robe.

Peculiar behavior. City Builders with a nudity taboo? Should Louis have worn clothing? He did what he considered tactful: he turned his back on her and joined the boy.

The boy was at the wall, looking out at the great dismembered stars.h.i.+ps. The poncho he wore was too big for him. "Luweewu," he asked, "were those our s.h.i.+ps?"

"Yeah."

The boy smiled. "Did your people build s.h.i.+ps that big?"

Louis tried to remember. "The s...o...b..ats were almost that size. We needed very big s.h.i.+ps before we broke the lightspeed barrier."

"Is this one of your s.h.i.+ps? Can it travel faster than light?"

"It could once. Not any more. I think the number four General Products hulls were even bigger than yours, but we didn't build those. They were puppeteer s.h.i.+ps."

"That was a puppeteer we were talking to yesterday, wasn't it? He asked about you. We couldn't tell him much."

Harkabeeparolyn had come to join them. She had recovered her composure with her blue librarian's robe. She asked, "Has our status changed, Luweewu? We were told that you would not be allowed to visit us." It was an effort for her to look him in the face.

"I've taken command," Louis said.

"So easily?"

"I paid a price-"

The boy's voice cut in. "Luweewu? We're moving!"

"It's all right."

"Can you make it darker in here?"

Louis shouted the lights out. Immediately he felt more comfortable. The dark hid his nakedness. Harkabeeparolyn's att.i.tude was contagious.

Hot Needle of Inquiry lifted twelve feet above the s.p.a.ceport ledge. Quickly, almost furtively, with no display of pyrotechnics, the s.h.i.+p drifted to the edge of the world and off.

"Where are we going?" the woman demanded.

"Under the world. We'll end up at the Great Ocean."

There was no sensation of falling, but the s.p.a.ceport ledge was falling silently upward. The Hindmost let them drop several miles before he activated the thrusters: Needle decelerated and began edging beneath the Ringworld.

The edge of blackness slid across to become the sky. Below was a sea of stars, brighter than anything a Ringworld native could have seen through depths of air and scattered Archlight. But the sky was essence of black. The Ringworld's sheath of foamed scrith reflected no starlight.

Louis still felt uncomfortable in his nudity. "I'm going back to my room," he said. "Why don't you join me? There's food and a change of clothing, and better beds if you want them."

Harkabeeparolyn flicked into existence, last in line on the stepping disc, and flinched violently. Louis laughed aloud. She tried to glare at him, but her eyes s.h.i.+ed away. Naked!

Louis dialed for a falling jumper and covered himself. "Better?"

"Yes, better. Do you think I am foolish?"

"No, I think you don't have climate control. You can't go naked most places, so it looks strange to you. I could be wrong."

"You could be right," she said, surprised.

"You slept on a hard deck last night. Try the water bed. It's big enough for both of you and a couple more, and Chmeee isn't using it right now."

Kawaresksenjajok flung himself bodily onto the fur-covered water bed. He bounced, and waves surged outward beneath the fur. "Luweewu, I like it! it's like swimming, but dry!"

Stiff-backed with distrust, Harkabeeparolyn sat down on the uneasy surface. Dubiously she asked, "Chmeee?"

"Eight feet tall and covered with orange fur. He's ... on a mission in the Great Ocean. We're going to get him now. You may talk him into sharing with you."

The boy laughed. The woman said, "Your friend must find another playmate. I do not indulge in rishathra."

Louis chortled. (The underside of his mind thought: tanj!) "Chmeee's stranger than you think. He's as likely to want rishathra with a weenie plant. You'd be quite safe unless he wants the whole bed, which is possible. Be careful never to shake him awake. Or you can try the sleeping plates."

"Do you use the sleeping plates?"

"Yes." He guessed at the meaning of her expression. "The field can be set to keep two bodies apart." (*Tanj!* Did the boy's presence inhibit her?) She said, "Luweewu, we have inflicted ourselves on you in the middle of your mission. Did you come simply to steal knowledge?"

The correct answer would have been yes. Louis's answer was at least true. "We're here to save the Ringworld."

Thoughtfully she said, "But how can I ...?" And then she was staring past Louis's shoulder.

The Hindmost waited beyond the forward wall, and he was glorious. Now his claws were tipped with silver, and he wore his mane in gold and silver strands. The short, pale hair over the rest of his body had been brushed to a glow. "Harkabeeparolyn, Kawaresksenjajok, be welcome," he sang. "Your aid is urgently needed. We have traveled a vast distance between the stars in hope of saving your peoples and your world from a fiery death."

Louis swallowed laughter. Fortunately his guests had eyes only for the Pierson's puppeteer.

"Where are you from?" the boy demanded of the puppeteer. "What is it like?"

The puppeteer tried to tell them. He spoke of worlds falling through s.p.a.ce at near lightspeed, five worlds arrayed in a pentagon, a Kemplerer rosette. Artificial suns circled four, to grow food for the population of the fifth. The fifth world glowed only by the light of its streets and buildings. Continents blazed yellow-white, oceans dark. Isolated brilliant stars surrounded by mist were factories floating on the sea, their waste heat boiling the water. Waste industrial heat alone kept the world from freezing.

The boy forgot to breathe as he listened. But the librarian spoke softly to herself. "He must come from the stars. He is shaped like no living thing known anywhere."

The puppeteer spoke of crowded streets, tremendous buildings, parks that were the last refuge of a world's native life. He spoke of stepping-disc arrays whereby one could walk around the world in minutes.

Harkabeeparolyn shook her head violently. Her voice rose. "Please, we don't have time. I'm sorry, Kawa! We want to hear more, we need to know more, but-the world, the sun! Louis, I never should have doubted you. What can we do to help?"

The Hindmost said, "Read to me."

Kawaresksenjajok lay on his back, watching the back of the world roll past him.

Needle ran beneath a featureless black roof in which the Hindmost had set two hologram "windows." One wide rectangle showed a light-amplified view; the other examined the Ringworld's underside by infrared light. In infrared the underside of day still glowed brighter than night-shadowed land; and rivers and seas were dark by day and light by night.

"Like the back of a mask, see?" Louis kept his voice down to avoid interrupting Harkabeeparolyn. "That branching river chain: see how it stands out? The seas bulge too. And that line of dents-that's a whole mountain range."

"Are your worlds like that?"

"Oh, no. On one of my worlds all that would be solid underneath, and the surface would be happening by accident. Here the world was sculpted. Look, the seas are all the same depth, and they're s.p.a.ced out so there's enough water everywhere."

"Somebody carved the world like a bas relief?"

"Just like that."

"Luweewu, that's scary. What were they like?"

"They thought big, and they loved their children, and they looked like suits of armor." Louis decided not to say more about the protectors.

The boy pointed. "What's that?"

"I don't know." It was a dimple in the Ringworld's underside ... with fog in it. "I think it's a meteor puncture. There'll be an eye storm above it."

The reading screen was on the flight deck, facing Harkabeeparolyn through the wall. The Hindmost had repaired the damage and added a braided cable that led into the control panel. As Harkabeeparolyn read aloud, the s.h.i.+p's computer was reading the tape and correlating it to her voice and to its own stored knowledge of Halrloprillalar's tongue. That tongue would have changed over the centuries, but not too much, not in a literate society. Hopefully the computer could take over soon.

As for the Hindmost, he had disappeared into the hidden section. The alien had suffered repeated shocks. Louis didn't begrudge him time off for hysterics.

Needle continued to accelerate. Presently the inverse landscape was speeding past almost too fast for detail. And Harkabeeparolyn's voice was becoming throaty. Time for a lunch break, Louis decided.

A problem emerged. Louis dialed filets mignons and baked potatoes, with Brie and French bread to follow. The boy stared in horror. So did the woman, but at Louis Wu.

"I'm sorry. I forgot. I keep thinking of you as omnivores."

"Omnivores, yes. We eat plants and flesh both," the librarian said. "But not decayed food!"

"Don't get so upset. There's no bacteria involved." Properly aged steak, milk attacked by mold ... Louis dumped their plates into the toilet and dialed again. Fruit, crudit's [crudites] with a separate sour-cream dip which he dumped, and seafood, including sas.h.i.+mi. His guests had never seen salt-water fish before. They liked it, but it made them thirsty.

And watching Louis eat made them unhappy. What was he supposed to do, starve?

They might starve. Where would he get fresh red meat for them? Why, from Chmeee's side of the autokitchen, of course. Broil it with the laser on wide beam, high intensity. He'd have to get the Hindmost to recharge the laser. That might not be easy, considering the last use to which he'd put it.

Another problem: they might be consuming too much salt. Louis didn't know what to do about that. Maybe the Hindmost could reset the autokitchen controls.

After lunch Harkabeeparolyn went back to her reading. By now the Ringworld was streaming past too fast for detail. Kawaresksenjajok flicked restlessly from cell to cargo hold and back again.

Louis, too, was restive. He should be studying: reviewing the records of the first voyage, or of Chmeee's adventures to date on the Map of Kzin. But the Hindmost wasn't available.

Gradually he became aware of another source of discomfort.

He l.u.s.ted after the librarian.

He loved her voice. She'd been talking for hours, yet the lilt was still there. She'd told him that she sometimes read to blind children: children without sight. Louis got queasy just thinking about it. He liked her dignity and her courage. He liked the way the robe outlined her shape; and he'd glimpsed her nakedness.

It had been years since Louis Wu had loved a strictly human woman. Harkabeeparolyn came too close. And she wasn't having any. When the puppeteer finally rejoined them, Louis was glad of the distraction.

They talked quietly in Interworld, below the sound of Harkabeeparolyn reading to the computer.

"Where did they come from, these amateur repairmen?" Louis wondered. "Who on the Ringworld would know enough to remount the att.i.tude jets? Yet they don't seem to know that it's not enough."

"Let them alone," the Hindmost said.

"Maybe they know it's not enough? Maybe the poor bleeders just can't think of anything else to do. And there's the question of where they got their equipment. It could have come from the Repair Center."

"We face enough complications now. Let them alone."

"For once I think you're right. But I can't help wondering. Teela Brown got her schooling in human s.p.a.ce. Big s.p.a.ce-built structures are nothing new to her. She'd know what it meant when the sun started sliding around."

"Could Teela Brown have organized so large an effort?"

"Maybe not. But Seeker would be with her. Was Seeker in your tapes? He was a Ringworld native, and maybe immortal. Teela found him. A little crazy, but he could have done the organizing. He was a king more than once, he said."

"Teela Brown was a failed experiment. We tried to breed a lucky human being, feeling that puppeteer a.s.sociates would share the luck. Teela may or may not have been lucky, but her luck was surely not contagious. We do not want to meet Teela Brown."

Louis s.h.i.+vered. "No."

"Then we must avoid the attention of the repair crew."

"Add a postscript to the tape you're sending to Chmeee," Louis said. "Louis Wu rejects your offer of sanctuary on the Fleet of Worlds. Louis Wu has taken command of Hot Needle of Inquiry and has destroyed the hyperdrive motor. That should shake him up."

"It did that for me. Louis, my sensors will not penetrate scrith. Your message will have to wait."

"How long until we reach him?"

"About forty hours. I have accelerated to a thousand miles per second. At this velocity it takes more than five gravities of acceleration to hold us in our path."

"We can take thirty gravities. You're being overcautious."

"I'm aware of your opinion."

"You don't take orders worth a tanj," Louis said. "Either."

Chapter 25 -.