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.”
PART TWO
Chapter 13 — Origins
The lander cruised five miles up at just under sonic speed.
Thirteen thousand miles was no great distance for the lander. Louis’s caution irked the kzin. “Two hours and we can be dropping onto the floating city, or rising from underneath! One hour, without serious discomfort!”
“Sure. We’d have to go out of the atmosphere with the fusion drive blazing like a star, but sure. Remember how we reached Halrloprillalar’s floating jail? Upside down in midair, with the motors burned out of our flycycles?”
Chmeee’s tail thumped the back of his chair. He remembered.
“We don’t want to be noticed by any old machinery. The superconductor plague doesn’t seem to have got it all.”
Grassland gave way to patterns of cultivation, then to a watery jungle. Vertical sunlight reflected back at them from between the trunks of flowering trees.
Louis was feeling wonderful. He wouldn’t let himself see the futility of his war on the sunflower patch. It had worked. He had set himself a task; he had accomplished it with intelligence and the tools at hand.
The swamp seemed to go on forever. Once Chmeee pointed out a small city. It was difficult to see, with water half drowning the buildings, and vines and trees trying to pull them down. The architectural style was strange. Every wall and roof and door bulged outward a little, leaving the streets narrow in the center. Not built by Halrloprillalar’s people.
By midday the lander had traveled further than Ginjerofer or the king giant would travel in their lifetimes. Louis had been foolish to question savages. They were as far from the floating city as any two points on Earth.
The Hindmost called.
Today his mane was a swirling rainbow, dyed in streamers of primary colors. Behind him puppeteers flickered along lines of stepping discs, clustered at shop windows, brushed against each other without apology or resentment, all in a murmur of music with flutes and clarinets predominating: puppeteer language. The Hindmost asked, “What have you learned?”
“Little,” said Chmeee. “We have wasted time. There was certainly a great solar flare seventeen falans ago — about three and a half years — but we guessed that much. The shadow squares closed to protect the surface. Their guidance system must operate independently of the Ringworld’s.”
“We could guess that too. No more?”
“Louis’s hypothetical Repair Center is certainly inactive. This swamp below us was not designed. I imagine a major river silted up to block the outflow of a sea. We find a variety of hominids, some intelligent, some not. Of those who built the Ringworld we find no trace, unless they were Halrloprillalar’s ancestors. I am inclined to think they were.”
Louis opened his mouth… and glanced down at a threshold pain in his leg. He found four kzinti claws just resting on his thigh. He shut his mouth. Chmeee continued, “We have not met any of Halrloprillalar’s species. Perhaps they were never a dense population. We hear rumors of another race, the Machine People, who may rise to replace them. We go to seek them.”
“The Repair Center is inactive, yes,” the Hindmost said briskly. “I have learned much. I have put a probe to work—”
“You have two probes,” Chmeee said. “Use both.”
“I hold one in reserve, to refuel
The far right screen showed a probe’s-eye view. It raced along the rim wall; passed something, too quick for detail; slowed, turned, moved back.
“Louis advised me to explore the rim wall. The probe had barely started its deceleration routine when it found this. I thought it worth investigating!”
There was a swelling on the rim wall — a tube hooked over the lip. It was molded, flattened against the rim wall, and was made of the same translucent gray scrith. The probe eased toward it until the camera was looking up into a pipe a quarter-mile across.
“Much of the Ringworld’s design shows a brute-force approach,” the Hindmost was saying. And the probe moved alongside the pipe, over the lip, and down the outer face of the rim wall to where the pipe disappeared into the foamed material that formed a meteor shield for the Ringworld’s underside.
“I see,” Louis said. “And it wasn’t working?”
