“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.
