Louis spoke of himself, how he had come from the stars beyond the Arch. No, neither he nor Chmeee had ever practiced rishathra, though there was great variety among his species. (He remembered a Wunderland girl a foot taller and fifteen pounds lighter than himself, a feather in his arms.) He spoke of the variety of worlds and of intelligent life, but he skirted the subject of wars and weaponry.
The tribes of the People herded many kinds of animals. They liked variety, but they didn’t like starving, and it was not usually possible to keep herds of different animals at the same time. Tribes of the People kept track of each other, to trade feasts. Sometimes they traded herds. It was like trading entire life styles: you could spend half a falan in mutual instruction before parting. (A falan was ten turns, ten Ringworld rotations, seventy-five days of thirty hours each.)
Would the herders worry that there were strangers in the village? Shivith said they wouldn’t. Two strangers were no threat.
When would they return? At midday, Shivith said. They had had to hurry; there had been a stampede. Otherwise they would have stopped to talk.
Louis asked, “Do you need to eat meat right after it’s been killed?”
Shivith smiled. “No. Half a day is okay. A day and a night is too long.”
“Do you ever—”
Chmeee stood up suddenly. He set the girl down gently and turned off his translator. “Louis, I need exercise and solitude. This time of confinement has threatened my sanity! Do you need me?”
“No. Hey—”
Chmeee was already over the fence. He turned.
“Don’t take off your clothes. At a distance there’s no way to tell you’re intelligent. Don’t kill any of the green elephants.”
Chmeee waved and bounded off into the green grass.
“Your friend is fast,” said Shivith.
“I should go too. I have a project in mind.”’
Survival and escape had been their concerns during their first visit to the Ringworld. Only later, in the safe and familiar surroundings of Resht on Earth, had Louis Wu’s conscience become active. Then he remembered destroying a city.
The shadow squares formed a ring concentric to the Ringworld. There were twenty of them held face-on to the sun by invisibly thin wire. The wire stayed taut because the shadow squares rotated at greater than orbital speed.
Liar, falling free with its drive motors burned away, had struck one of the shadow square wires and torn it loose. The wire, a single strand tens of thousands of miles long, had settled like a smoke cloud over an occupied city.
Louis had needed it to tow the grounded Liar.
They had found an endpoint and moored it to their makeshift vehicle — Halrloprillalar’s floating jail — and towed it behind them. Louis couldn’t know exactly what had happened to the city, but he could guess. The stuff was as fine as gossamer and strong enough to cut hullmetal. It must have cut the buildings into gravel as its loops contracted.
This time the natives would not suffer because Louis Wu had arrived. He was in current-addiction withdrawal; he didn’t need guilt too. His first act on this visit was to start a stampede. He was going to fix that.
It was hard physical work.
He took a break at one point and went up on the flight deck. He was worried about the kzin. Even a human being — a flatlander of five hundred years ago, say, a successful man in middle age — might have been disconcerted to find himself suddenly eighteen years old, his smooth progression toward death interrupted, his blood flowing with powerful and unfamiliar juices, his very identity in question: hair thickening and changing color, scars disappearing…
Well, where was Chmeee?
The grass was strange. Here in the vicinity of the camp, it was waist-high. To spinward was a vast area cropped almost to the ground. Louis could see the herd moving along the edge, guided by small red humanoids, leaving a swath that was almost dirt-colored.
Give ‘em this: the little green elephants were efficient. The red men must have to shift camp fairly frequently.
Louis saw motion in the grass nearby. He watched patiently until it moved again… and suddenly it was an orange streak. Louis never saw Chmeee’s prey. There were no humanoids around, and that was good enough. He went back to work.
The herdsmen returned to find a feast.
They came in a band, chattering among themselves. They paused to examine the lander without coming too close. Some of them surrounded one of the green elephants. (Lunch?) It may have been coincidence that the spearmen led the rest as they entered the circle of huts.
They stopped in surprise, confronting Louis, and Chmeee with a different girl on his shoulder, and half a ton of dressed meat laid on clean leather.
Shivith introduced the aliens, with a short and fairly accurate account of their claims. Louis was prepared to be called a liar, but it never happened. He met the chief: a woman four feet and a few inches tall, Ginjerofer by name, who bowed and smiled with disconcertingly sharp teeth. Louis tried to bow in the same fashion.
“Shivith told us you like variety in meat,” Louis said, and gestured toward what he had taken from the lander’s kitchen. Three of the natives turned the green elephant around, aimed it at where the rest of the herd was grazing, and prodded its butt with spear hafts to get it going. The tribe converged on lunch. Others came to join them, out of huts Louis had assumed were empty: a dozen very old men and women. Louis had thought Shivith was old. He was not used to seeing people with wrinkled skin and arthritic joints and old scars. He wondered why they had hidden, and surmised that arrows had been aimed at him and Chmeee while they talked with Shivith and the children.
In a few minutes the natives reduced the meal to bones. They did no talking; they seemed to have no order of precedence. They ate, in fact, like kzinti. Chmeee accepted a gestured offer to join them. He ate most of the moa, which the natives ignored; they preferred red meat.
Louis had carried it in several loads on one of the big repulsion plates. His muscles ached from the strain of moving it. He watched the natives tearing into the feast. He felt good. There was no droud in his head, but he felt good.
Most of the natives left then, to tend the herd. Shivith and Ginjerofer and some of the older ones stayed. Chmeee asked Louis, “Is this moa an artifact or a bird? The Patriarch might want such birds for his hunting parks.”
“There’s a real bird,” Louis said. “Ginjerofer, this should make us even for the stampede.”
“We thank you,” she said. There was blood on her lips and chin. Her lips were full, and redder than her skin. “Forget the stampede. Life is more than not being hungry. We love to meet people who are different. Are your worlds really so much smaller than ours? And round?”
“Round like balls. If mine were far up the Arch, you would see only a white point.”
“Will you go back to these small places to tell of us?”
The translators must be feeding to recorders aboard Needle. Louis said, “One day.”
“You will have questions.”
“Yah. Do the sunflowers ruin your grazing ground?”
He had to point before she understood. “The brightness to spinward? We know nothing of it.”
“Did you ever wonder? Ever send scouts?”
She frowned. “This is the way of it. My fathers and mothers tell that we have been moving to antispinward since they were little. They remember that they had to go around a great sea, but they did not come too close, because the beasts would not eat the plants that grow around the shore. There was a brightness to spinward then, but it is stronger now. As for scouts — a party of the young went to see for themselves. They met giants. The giants killed their beasts. They had to return quickly then. They had no meat.”