The Ringworld Engineers

Harkabeeparolyn laughed, softly this time. “I don’t think you can carry that many book spools. Those who made the drug never told their secret. Those who wrote books never found it. I can give you religious spools, police records, confidence games, records of expeditions to various parts of the world. Here’s the tale of an immortal vampire who haunted the Grass Giants for a thousand falans, growing uncomfortably cunning with the years, until—”

“No.”

“His hoard of the drug was never found. No? Let me see… Ktistek Building joined the Ten because the other buildings ran out of the drug before Ktistek did. A fascinating lesson in politics—”

“No, forget it. Do you know anything about the Great Ocean?”

“There are two Great Oceans,” she informed him. “They’re easy to pick out on the Arch at night. Some of the old stories say the immortality drug came from the antispinward Ocean.”

“Uh-huh.”

Harkabeeparolyn smirked. The small mouth could look prissy. “You are naive. One can pick out just two features on the Arch with the naked eye. If anything valuable came from far away and comes no more, somebody will say that it came from one of the Great Oceans. Who can deny it, or offer another origin?”

Louis sighed. “You’re probably right.”

“Luweewu, how can these questions possibly be connected?”

“Maybe they can’t.”

She got the spools he’d requested, and another: a book for children, tales of the Great Ocean. “I can’t think what you’ll do with these. You won’t steal them. You’ll be searched when you leave, and you can’t carry a reading machine with you.”

“Thank you for your help.”

He needed someone to read to him.

He didn’t have the nerve to ask random strangers. Perhaps a nonrandom stranger? There had been a ghoul in one of these rooms. If ghouls in the shadow farm knew of Louis Wu, perhaps this one did too.

But the ghoul was gone, leaving only her scent.

Louis dropped into a chair in front of a reading screen and closed his eyes. The useless spools bulged in two of his vest pockets. I’m not licked yet, he thought. Maybe I can find the boy again. Maybe I can get Fortaralisplyar to read to me, or to send someone. It’ll cost more, of course. Everything always costs more. And takes longer.

The reading machine was a big, clumsy thing, moored to the wall by a thick cable. The manufacturer certainly hadn’t had superconducting wire. Louis threaded a spool into it and glared at the meaningless script. The screen’s definition was poor, and there was no place for a speaker grid. Harkabeeparolyn had told the truth.

I don’t have time for this.

Louis stood up. He had no choices left.

The roof of the Library was an extensive garden. Walks spiraled out from the center, from the top of the spiral stairs. Giant nectar-producing flowers grew in the rich black soil between the walks. There were small dark-green cornucopias with tiny blue flowers in the mouths, and a patch of weenie plant in which most of the “sausages” had split to give birth to golden blossoms, and trees that dropped festoons of greenish-yellow spaghetti.

The couples on the scattered benches gave Louis his privacy. He saw a good many blue-robed librarians, and a tall male librarian escorting a noisy group of Hanging People tourists. Nobody had the look of a guard. No ramps led away from the Library roof: there was nothing to guard, unless a thief could fly.

Louis intended a poor return for the hospitality he’d been given. True, he’d bought that hospitality… but it bothered him.

The water condenser rose from the roof’s edge like a sculptured triangular sail. It drained into a crescent- shaped pond. The pond seethed with City Builder children. Louis heard his name, “Luweewu!” and turned in time to catch an inflated ball against his chest.

The brown-haired boy he’d met in the map room clapped and shouted for the ball’s return.

Louis dithered. Warn him to leave the roof? The roof would soon be a dangerous place. But the kid was bright. He might be bright enough to see the implications and call for guards.

Louis threw the wet ball back at him, and waved, and moved away.

If only he could think of a way to clear the roof entirely!

There were no guardrails at the edge of the roof. Louis walked with care. Presently he circled a clump of small trees whose trunks seemed to have been wrung like washcloths, and found himself in a place of reasonable privacy. There he used his translator.

“Hindmost?”

“Speaking. Chmeee is still under attack. He has retaliated once, by melting one of the great ship’s large swiveling projectile launchers. I cannot guess at his motives.”

“He’s probably letting them see how good his defenses are. Then he’ll deal.”

“What will he deal for?”

“Even he doesn’t know that yet. I doubt they can do much for him except introduce him to a female or three. Hindmost, there’s no way I can do any research here. I can’t read the screens. I’ve got too much material anyway. It’d take me a week.”

“What might Chmeee accomplish in a week? I dare not stay to find out.”

“Yah. What I’ve got is some reading spools. They’ll tell us most of what we want to know, if we can read them. Can you do anything with them?”

“I think it unlikely. Can you furnish me with one of their reading machines? With that I could play the tapes on the screen and photograph them for Needle’s computer.”

“They’re heavy. They’ve got thick cables that—”

“Cut the cables.”

Louis sighed. “Okay. Then what?”

“Already I can see the floating city through the probe camera. I will guide the probe to you. You must remove the deuterium filter to expose the stepping disc. Have you a grippy?”

“I don’t have any tools at all. What I’ve got is a flashlight-laser. You tell me where to slice.”

“I hope this is worth losing half my fuel source. Very well. If you can secure a reading machine, and if it will pass through the opening to the stepping disc, well and good. Otherwise, bring the tapes. Perhaps there is something I can do.”

Louis stood at the rim of the Library roof and looked down past his toes, into the textured dusk of the shadow farm. At the shadows edge was noonday light. Rectangle-patterned farmland ran away from him. The Serpent River curled away to port and disappeared among low mountains. Beyond the mountains were seas, flatlands, a tiny mountain range, tinier seas, all bluing with distance… and finally the Arch rising up and up. Half hypnotized, Louis waited beneath the bright sky. There was nothing else to be done. He was barely aware of time passing.

The probe came out of the sky on a breath of blue flame. Where the nearly invisible fire touched the rooftop, the plants and soil became an orange inferno. Small Hanging People and blue-robed librarians and wet children ran screaming for the stairwell.

The probe settled into the flame and toppled on its side, slowed by attitude jets. There were tiny jets all around the upper rim, and the big jet underneath. It was twenty feet long and ten feet thick, a cylinder made lumpy by cameras and other instruments.

Louis waited until the fires had mostly gone out. Then he waded through coals to the probe. The roof was empty, as far as he could tell — empty even of bodies. No dead. Good.

The voice of his translator guided him as he cut away the thick molecular sieve in the top of the probe. Presently he had exposed a stepping disc. He asked, “Now what?”

“I’ve reversed the action of the stepping disc in the other probe and removed the filter. Can you get a reading machine?”

“I’ll try. I don’t like any of this.”

“In two years it won’t matter. I give you thirty minutes. Then come, bringing whatever you have.”