The Ringworld Engineers

to be under the wire… ”I can’t guarantee anything at all.”

“Then do rishathra with me, to let me stop thinking of Kawaresksenjajok!”

It was not the most flattering proposal of Louis Wu’s young life. He asked, “How do we ease his mind?”

“There is no way. Poor boy, he must suffer.”

Then you can both suffer, Louis thought. But he couldn’t make himself say it. The woman was serious, and she was hurting, and she was right. This was not a time to bring a baby City Builder into the world.

And he wanted her.

He climbed out of free fall and took her to the water bed. He was glad that Kawaresksenjajok had retired to the cargo hold. What would the boy have to say tomorrow morning?

Chapter 26 — Beneath The Waters

Louis woke under gravity, with a smile on his face, a pleasant ache in every muscle, and a grittiness in his eyes. He had slept very little last night. Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t exaggerated her urgency. He had never known (despite his time with Halrloprillalar) that City Builders went into heat.

He shifted, and the big bed surged beneath him. A body rolled against him: Kawaresksenjajok, on his belly, spread out like a starfish and snoring gently.

Harkabeeparolyn, curled in orange fur at the foot of the bed, stirred and sat up. She said, perhaps in apology at leaving him, “I kept waking up and not knowing where I was, with the bed heaving under me.”

Culture shock, he thought. He remembered that Halrloprillalar had liked the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. “There’s plenty of floor. How do you feel?”

“Much better, for the moment. Thank you.”

“Thank you. Are you hungry?”

“Not yet.”

He exercised. His muscles were still hard, but he was out of practice. The City Builders watched him with puzzled expressions. Afterward he dialed breakfast: melon, souffles Grand Marnier, muffins, coffee. His guests refused the coffee, predictably, and also the muffins.

When the Hindmost appeared he looked rumpled and tired. “The patterns we sought are not evident in the records of the floating city,” he said. “All species build their armor in the shape of a Pak protector. Armor is not the same everywhere, not quite, but the styling does not vary in any pattern. It may be we can blame the spread of City Builder culture for that. Their empire mixed ideas and inventions until we may never trace their origins.”

“What about the immortality drug?”

“You were right. The Great Ocean is seen as a source of horrors and delights, including immortality. The gift is not always a drug. Sometimes it comes without warning, bestowed by whimsical gods. Louis, the legends make no sense to me, a nonhuman.”

“Set the tape up for us. I’ll get our guests to watch it too. Maybe they can explain what I can’t.”

“Aye, aye.”

“What about repairs?”

“There has been no repair activity on the Ringworld in recorded history.”

“You’re kidding!”

“How large a region is covered by the city records? How long a time? Small, and short. Aside from that, I’ve studied the old interviews with Jack Brennan. I gather that protectors have long lives and very long attention spans. They prefer not to use servomechanisms if they can do a job themselves. There was no autopilot aboard Phssthpok’s spacecraft, for instance.”

“That’s not consistent. The spillpipe system is certainly automatic.”

“A very simple brute-force approach. We don’t know why the protectors died or left the Ringworld. Is it possible that they knew their fate, that they had time to automate the spillpipe system? Louis, we don’t need to know any of this.”

“Oh, yah? The meteor defense is probably automatic too. Wouldn’t you like to know more about the meteor defense?”

“I would.”

“And the attitude jets were automatic. Maybe there were manual overrides for all of that. But a thousand hominid species have evolved since the Pak disappeared, and the automatics are still going. Either the protectors always intended to leave — which I can’t believe—”

“Or they took many years to die,” the Hindmost said. “I have my own ideas on that.” And he would say no more.

Louis found fine entertainment that morning. The tales of the Great Ocean were good stuff, with heroes and royalty and feats of detection and magic and fearsome monsters, and a flavor different from the fairy tales of any human culture. Love was not eternal. The City Builder hero’s (or heroine’s) companions were always of the opposite sex, their loyalty was held by imaginatively described rishathra, and their conveniently strange powers were taken for granted. Magicians were not automatically evil; they were random dangers to be avoided, not fought.

Louis found the common denominators he was looking for. Always there was the vastness of the sea and the terror of the storms and the sea monsters.

Some of those would be sharks, sperm whales, killer whales, Gummidgy destroyers, Wunderland shadowfish, or trapweed jungles. Some were intelligent. There were sea serpents miles long, with steaming nostrils (implying lungs?) and large mouths lined with sharp teeth. There was a land that burned any ship that approached, invariably leaving one survivor. (Fantasy, or sunflowers?) Certain islands were sea beasts of sedentary inclination, such that a whole ecology could establish itself on a beast’s back, until a shipload of sailors disturbed the creature. Then it would dive. Louis might have believed that one if he hadn’t seen the same legend in Earth’s literature.

He did believe the ferocious storms. Over that long a reach, storms could build terribly, even without the Coriolis effect that gives rise to hurricanes on any normal world. On the Map of Kzin he’d seen a ship as big as a city. It might take a ship that size to weather Great Ocean storms.

He did not disbelieve the notion of magicians, not completely. They (in three legends) seemed to be of the City Builder race. But unlike the magicians of Earthly legend, they were mighty fighters. And all three wore armor.

“Kawaresksenjajok? Do magicians always wear armor?”

The boy looked at him strangely. “You mean in stories, don’t you? No. Except, I guess they always do around the Great Ocean. Why?”

“Do magicians fight? Are they great fighters?”

“They don’t have to be.” The questioning was making the boy uneasy.

Harkabeeparolyn broke in. “Luweewu, I may know more of children’s tales than Kawa does. What are you trying to learn?”

“I’m looking for the home of the Ringworld engineers. These armored magicians could be them, except they’re too late in history.”

“Then it isn’t them.”

“But what sparked the legends? Statues? Mummies pulled out of a desert? Racial memories?”

She thought it over. “Magicians usually belong to the species that is telling the story. Descriptions vary: height, weight, what they eat. Yet they have traits in common. They are terrible fighters. They do not take a moral stand. They are not to be defeated, but avoided.”

Like a submarine beneath polar ice, Hot Needle of Inquiry cruised beneath the Great Ocean.

The Hindmost had slowed the ship. They had a good view of the long, intricately curved ribbon of continental shelf falling behind them. Beyond, the floor of the Great Ocean was as active as the land: mountains