The Ringworld Engineers

you?”

He admitted it.

“I hope you can control it.”

He sighed, “Oh, tanj, yes. I’m a thousand falans old. I’ve learned how to distract myself.”

“How?”

“Ordinarily I’d go looking for another woman.”

The librarian didn’t laugh. “What if another woman is not available?”

“Oh… exercise to exhaustion. Get drunk on ‘fuel.’ Go on sabbatical, off into interstellar space in a one-man ship. Find some other pleasure to indulge myself. Get involved in work.”

“You should not be drunk,” she said, and she was right. “What pleasure might you try?”

The droud! A touch of current and he wouldn’t care if Harkabeeparolyn turned to green slime before his eyes. Why should he care now? He didn’t admire her… well, maybe he did, a little. But she’d done her part. He could save the Ringworld, or lose it, without more help from her.

“You’ll have your massage anyway,” he said. He stepped wide around her to touch a control on the water bed. Harkabeeparolyn looked startled, then smiled and relaxed completely as the sonic vibrations in the water enfolded her. In a few minutes she was asleep. He set the unit to switch off in twenty minutes.

Then he brooded.

If he hadn’t spent a year with Halrloprillalar, he’d find Harkabeeparolyn unsightly, with her bald head and knife-edge lips and small flat nose. But he had…

He had hair where no City Builder had hair. Was that it? Or the smell of his food on his breath? Or a social signal he didn’t know?

A man who had hijacked a starship, a man who had bet his life on the chance to rescue trillions of other lives, a man who had beaten the ultimate in drug habits, should not be bothered by so minor a distraction as an itch for a lovely roommate. A touch of the wire would give him the dispassionate clarity to see that.

Yah.

Louis went to the forward wall. “Hindmost!”

The puppeteer trotted into view.

“Run the records of the Pak for me. Interviews and medical reports on Jack Brennan, studies of the alien’s corpse, everything you’ve got.” He’d try work.

Louis Wu hovered in midair, in lotus position, with his loose clothing drifting around him. On a screen that floated motionless outside Needle’s hull, a man long dead was lecturing on the origin of humanity.

“Protectors have precious little free will,” he was saying. “We’re too intelligent not to see the right answers. Besides that, there are instincts. If a Pak protector has no living children, he generally dies. He stops eating. Some protectors can generalize; they can find a way to do something for their whole species, and it keeps them alive. I think that was easier for me than it was for Phssthpok.”

“What did you find? What’s the cause that keeps you eating?”

“Warning you about Pak protectors.”

Louis nodded, remembering the autopsy data on the alien. Phssthpok’s brain was bigger than a man’s, but the swelling did not include the frontal lobes. Jack Brennan’s head looked dented in the middle because of his human frontal development and the upward swelling of the back of the skull.

Brennan’s skin was deeply wrinkled leathery armor. His joints were abnormally swollen. His lips and gums had fused into a hard beak. None of this seemed to bother the drastically altered Belt miner.

“All the symptoms of old age are holdovers from the change from breeder to protector,” he was telling a long-dead ARM inquisitor. “Skin thickens and wrinkles; it’s supposed to get like this, hard enough to turn a knife. You lose your teeth to leave room for the gums to harden. Your heart can weaken because you’re supposed to grow a second heart, two-chambered, in the groin.”

Brennan’s voice was a rasp. “Your joints are supposed to expand, to offer a larger moment arm for the muscles. Increased strength. But none of this works quite right without tree-of-life, and there hasn’t been tree-of- life on Earth for three million—”

Louis jumped when fingers tugged at his jumper. “Luweewu? I’m hungry.”

“Okay.” He was tired of studying anyway; it wasn’t telling him much that was useful.

Harkabeeparolyn was still asleep. The smell of meat broiling in a flashlight-laser beam woke her. Louis dialed fruits and cooked vegetables for them, and showed them where to dump anything they didn’t like.

He took his own dinner into the cargo hold.

It bothered him to have dependents. Granted that both were Louis Wu’s victims. But he couldn’t even teach them to get their own meals! The settings were marked in Interworld and the Hero’s Tongue.

Was there any way to put them to work?

Tomorrow. He’d think of something.

The computer was beginning to deliver results. The Hindmost was busy. When Louis got the puppeteer’s attention for a moment he asked for the records of Chmeee’s invasion of the castle.

The castle occupied the peak of a rocky hill. Herds of piglike beasts, yellow with an orange stripe, grazed the yellow grass veldt below. The lander circled about the castle, then settled into the courtyard in a cloud of arrows.

Nothing happened for several minutes.

Then orange blurred from several arched doorways at once, too fast to see.

They stopped, flattened like rugs and clutching weapons, against the base of the lander. They were kzinti, but they seemed distorted. There had been divergence over a quarter of a million years.

Harkabeeparolyn spoke at Louis’s shoulder. “Are these your companion’s kind?”

“Close enough. They seem a little shorter and a little darker, and… the lower jaw seems more massive.”

“He abandoned you. Why don’t you leave him?”

Louis laughed. “Why, to get you a bed? We were in battle conditions when I let a vampire seduce me. He was disgusted. As far as Chmeee knows, I abandoned him.”

“No man or woman can resist a vampire.”

“Chmeee is not a man. He couldn’t possibly want rishathra with a vampire, or with any hominid.”

Now more of the great orange cats sprinted to posts beneath the lander. Two carried a rust-stained metal cylinder. The dozen cats crept to the far side of the lander.

The cylinder disappeared in a blast of yellow-white flame. The lander slid a yard or two. The kzinti waited, then crept back to study the results.

Harkabeeparolyn shuddered. “They seem more likely to desire me for a meal.”

Louis was growing irritated. “They might. But I remember a time when Chmeee was starving, and he never touched me. What’s your problem, anyway? Don’t you get carnivores in the city?”

“We do.”

“And the Library?”

He thought she wouldn’t answer. (Furry faces showed at many of the slit windows. The explosion had done no visible damage.) Then, “I was in Panth Building for a time.” She did not meet his eyes.

For a moment he couldn’t remember. Then: Panth Building. Built like an onion floating tip down. Repairs to the water condenser. The ruler wanted to pay the fee in sex. Scent of vampire in the halls.

“You had rishathra with carnivores?”

“With Herders and Grass People and Hanging People and Night People. One remembers.”

Louis withdrew a little. “With Night People?” Ghouls?

“The Night People are very important to us. They bear information for us and for the Machine People. They hold together what is left of civilization, and we do well not to offend them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But it was the — Luweewu, the Night Hunters have a very keen sense of smell. The scent of vampire sends them running. I was told that I must have rishathra with a Night Hunter. Without vampire scent. I asked for