“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.
Louis had needed it to tow the grounded
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.
