The Ringworld Engineers

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.