“There are no tectonic processes to do the carving, for that matter.”
“Then we should have seen that mountain from the back, from the spaceport. I didn’t. Did you?”
“I’ll take us closer.”
That turned out to be difficult. The closer the lander came to the rim wall, the more fusion thrust was needed to hold it there… or to lift the lander if the repulsers were turned off.
They came within fifty miles, and that was close enough to find the city. Great gray rocks protruded through the ice floes, and some of these showed myriad black-shadowed doors and windows. Focus closer and the doorways had balconies and awnings, and hundreds of slender suspension bridges ran up, down, and sideways. Stairways were hacked into the rock; they ran in strange branching curves, half a mile tall and more. One dipped all the way to the foothills, to the tree line.
A fortuitous flat space in the center of the city, half rock and half permafrost, had become a public square; the hordes that thronged it were pale golden flecks just big enough to see. Golden clothing or golden fur? Louis wondered. A great boulder at the back of the square had been carved with the face of a hairy, chubby, jovial baboon.
Louis said, “Don’t try to get closer. We’ll scare them away if we try to land on fusion drive, and there isn’t any other way.”
A vertical city with a population of ten thousand, at a guess. Deep-radar showed that they had not dug deep into the rock. In fact, those rocks riddled with rooms looked like dirty permafrost.
“Surely we want to question them regarding their peculiar mountain?”
“I’d love to talk to them,” Louis said, and he meant it. “But look at the spectrograph and deep-radar. They don’t use metals or plastics, let alone single-crystal stuff. I hate to think what those bridges are made of. They’re primitives. They’ll think they’re living on a mountain.”
“I agree. Too much trouble to reach them. Where next? The floating city?”
“Yah, by way of the sunflower patch.”
A shadow square was sliding across the sun’s disc.
Chmeee lit the aft motor again and ran their speed to ten thousand miles per hour, then coasted. Not too fast for detail, but fast enough to get them where they were going in about ten hours. Louis studied the racing landscape.
In principle the Ringworld should have been an endless garden. It was not a randomly evolved world, after all, but a made thing.
What they had seen on their first visit could not be considered typical. They had spent most of their time between two big meteoroid punctures: between the eye storm, which was spewing air through a puncture in the Ringworld floor, and the stretched and raised landscape around Fist-of-God Mountain. Of course the ecology was damaged. The engineers’ carefully planned wind patterns must have been ruined.
But here? Louis looked in vain for the pattern of an eye storm, a hurricane turned on its side and flattened. There were no meteoroid punctures here. Yet there were patches of desert, Sahara-size and larger. On the ridges of mountain ranges he found the pearly gleam of naked Ringworld foundation. Winds had stripped away the covering rock.
Had the weather patterns grown this bad, this fast? Or did the Ringworld engineers like deserts? It struck Louis that the Repair Center must have been deserted for a very long time. Halrloprillalar’s people might never have found it at all, after the Ringworld engineers vanished. As they had to have vanished, if Louis’s guess was right.
“I want three hours’ sleep,” Chmeee said. “Can you fly the lander if something happens?”
Louis shrugged. “Sure, but what could happen? We’re too low for the meteor defense. Even if it’s based on the rim wall, it’d be firing on settled land. We’ll just cruise awhile.”
“Yes. Wake me in three hours.” Chmeee reclined his chair and slept.
Louis turned to the fore and aft telescopes for amusement and instruction. Night had covered the sunflower region. He ran the view up along the Arch to the nearest of the Great Oceans.
There, to spinward of the ocean and almost on the Ringworld median line: that tilted mock volcano was Fist-of-God Mountain, in a patch of Mars-colored desert much bigger than Mars. Farther to port, a reaching bay of the Great Ocean, itself bigger than worlds.
They had reached the shore of that bay and turned back, last time.
The islands were scattered in clusters across the blue ellipse. One was a small island, disc-shaped, desert colored. One was a disc with a channel cut through it. Strange. But the others were islands in a vast sea… there, he had found the map of Earth: America, Greenland, Eurasiafrica, Australia, Antarctica, all splayed out from the glare-white North Pole, just as he had seen it in the sky castle long ago.
Were they all maps of real worlds? Prill wouldn’t have known. The maps must have been made long before her species came on the scene.
He had left Teela and Seeker somewhere in there. They must still be in the area. Given Ringworld distance and native technology, they could not have gone far in twenty-three years. They were thirty-five degrees up the curve of the Arch — fifty-eight million miles away.
Louis really didn’t want to meet Teela again.
Three hours had passed. Louis reached out and shook Chmeee’s shoulder, gently.
A great arm lashed out. Louis threw himself backward, not far enough.
Chmeee blinked at him. “Louis, never wake me like that. Do you want the autodoc?”
There were two deep gashes just behind his shoulder. He could feel blood seeping into his shirt. “In a minute. Look.” He pointed at the map of Earth, tiny islands well separated from the other clusters.
Chmeee looked. “Kzin.”
“What?”
“A map of Kzin. There. Louis, I think we were wrong when we assumed that these were miniature maps. They are full size, one-to-one scale.”
Half a million miles from the map of Earth was another cluster. As with the Earth map, the oceans were distorted by the polar projection, but the continents were not “That is Kzin,” Louis said. “Why didn’t I notice? And that disc with a channel cut through it — that’s Jinx. The smaller red-orange blob must be Mars.” Louis blinked away dizziness. His shirt was wet with blood. “We can take this up later. Help me down to the autodoc.”
Chapter 9 — The Herdsmen
He slept in the autodoc.
Four hours later — with a trace of tightness behind and below his shoulder to remind him never to touch a sleeping kzin — Louis took his seat.
It was still night outside. Chmeee had the Great Ocean on the screen. He asked, “How are you?”
“Restored to health, thanks be to modern medicine.”
“You were not distracted by your wounds. Yet there must have been pain and shock.”
“Oh, I suppose Louis Wu at fifty would have gone into hysterics, but futz, I knew the autodoc was right there. Why?”
“It seemed to me at first that you must have the courage of a kzin. Then I wondered if current addiction has left you unable to respond to any lesser stimulus.”
“We’ll just assume it’s courage, okay? How are you making out?”
“Well enough.” The kzin pointed. “Earth. Kzin. Jinx; the two peaks rise right out of the atmosphere, as do the East and West Poles of Jinx. So does the Map of Mars. This is Kdat, the slave planet—”
“Not anymore.”
“The kdatlyno were our slaves. So were the pierin, and this is their world, I think. Here, you would know: is this the home world of the Trinocs?”