“It sounds like the sunflowers are moving faster than you are.”
“Okay. We can move faster than we do.”
“What do you know about the floating city?”
Ginjerofer had seen it all her life. It was a landmark, like the Arch itself. Sometimes when the night was cloud-covered, one could still find the yellow glow of the city, but that was all she knew. The city was too far even for rumor.
“But we hear tales from large distances, if they are worth telling. They may be garbled. We hear of the people of the spill mountains, who live between the cold white level and the foothills, where air is too dense. They fly between the spill mountains. They use sky sleds when they can get them, but there are no new sky sleds, so that for hundreds of years they must use balloons. Will your seeing-things see that far?”
Louis put the binocular goggles on her and showed her the enlargement dial. “Why did you call them spill mountains? Is that the same word you use when you spill water?”
“Yes. I don’t know why we call them that. Your eyepiece only shows me larger mountains… ” She turned to spinward. The goggles almost covered her small face. “I can see the shore, and a glare across.”
“What else do you hear from travelers?”
“When we meet we talk most of dangers. There are brainless meat-eaters to antispinward that kill people. They look something like us, but smaller, and they are black and hunt at night. And there are… ” She frowned. “We don’t know the truth of this. There are mindless things that urge one to do rishathra with them. One does not live through the act.”
“But you can’t do rishathra. They can’t be dangerous to you.”
“Even to us, we are told.”
“What about diseases? Parasites?”
None of the natives knew what he meant! Fleas, hookworm, mosquitoes, measles, gangrene: there was nothing like that on the Ringworld. Of course he should have guessed that. The Ringworld engineers just hadn’t brought them. He was startled nonetheless. He wondered if he might have brought disease to the Ringworld for the first time… and decided that he had not. The autodoc would have cured him of anything dangerous.
But the natives were that much like civilized humans. They grew old, but not sick.
Chapter 10 — The God Gambit
Hours before nightfall, Louis was exhausted.
Ginjerofer offered them the use of a hut, but Chmeee and Louis elected to sleep in the lander. Louis fell between the sleeping plates while Chmeee was still setting up defenses.
He woke in the dead of night.
Chmeee had activated the image amplifier before he went to sleep. The landscape glowed bright as a rainy day. The daylit rectangles of the Arch were like ceiling light panels: too bright to do more than glance at. But most of the nearer Great Ocean was in shadow.
The Great Oceans lured him. They were flamboyant. They should not have been. If Louis was right about the Ringworld engineers, flamboyance was not their style. They built with simplicity and efficiency, and they planned in very long time spans, and they fought wars.
But the Ringworld was flamboyant in its own way, and impossible to defend. Why hadn’t they built a lot of little Ringworlds instead? And why the Great Oceans? They didn’t fit either.
He could be wrong from the start. That had happened before! Yet the evidence—
Was there something moving in the grass?
Louis activated the infrared scanner.
They glowed by their own heat. They were bigger than dogs, like a blend of human and jackaclass="underline" horrid supernatural things in this unnatural light. Louis spent a moment locating the sonic stun cannon in the lander’s turret and another swinging it toward the interlopers. Four of them, moving on all fours through the grass.
They stopped not far from the huts. They were there for some minutes. Then they moved off, and now they were hunched half erect. Louis turned off the infrared scanner.
In augmented Archlight it was clear: they were carrying the day’s garbage, the remains of the feast. Ghouls. The meat probably wasn’t ripe enough for them yet.
Yellow eyes in his peripheral vision: Chmeee was wide-awake. Louis said, “The Ringworld’s old. A hundred thousand years at least.”
“What makes you say that?”
“The Ringworld engineers wouldn’t have brought jackals. There’s been time enough for some branch of the hominids to fit that niche in the ecology.”
“A hundred thousand years wouldn’t be enough,” said Chmeee.
“It might. I wonder what else the engineers didn’t bring. They didn’t bring mosquitoes.”
“You are facetious. But they would not have brought bloodsuckers of any kind.”
“No. Or sharks, or cougars.” Louis laughed. “Or skunks. What else? Venomous snakes? Mammals couldn’t live like snakes. I don’t think any mammals secrete poison in their mouths.”
“Louis, it would take millions of years for hominids to evolve in so many directions. We must consider whether they evolved on the Ringworld at all!”
“They did, unless I’m completely wrong. As for how long it took, there’s a small matter of mathematics. If we assume they started evolving a hundred thousand years ago, from a base popu… ” Louis let the sentence trail off.
A good distance away — moving at fair speed, considering their burdens — the jackal-hominids suddenly stopped, turned back, seemed to pose for a moment, then dropped into the grass and vanished. A touch of the infrared sensor showed four glowing spots fanning out and away.
“Company to spinward,” Chmeee said quietly.
The newcomers were big. They were Chmeee’s size, and they weren’t trying to hide. Forty bearded giants marched through the night as if they owned it. They were armed and armored. They moved in a wedge formation, with bowmen on the forward arms of the triangle and swordsmen inside, and the one fully armored man at the point. Others had plates of thick leather to guard arms and torsos, but that one, the biggest of the giants, wore metaclass="underline" a gleaming shell that bulged at elbows, knuckles, shoulders, knees, hips. The forward-jutting mask was open, with a pale beard and wide nose showing inside.
“I was right. I was right all along. But why a Ringworld? Why did they build a Ringworld? How in Finagle’s Name did they expect to defend it?”
Chmeee finished swinging the stun cannon around. “Louis, what are you talking about?”
“The armor. Look at the armor. Haven’t you ever been in the Smithsonian Institute? And you saw the pressure suits in the Ringworlder spaceship.”
“Uurrr… yes. We have a more immediate problem.”
“Don’t shoot yet. I want to see… Yah, I was right. They’re going past the village.”
“Would you say that the little red ones are our allies? It was only coincidence that we met them first.”
“I’d say they are. Tentatively.”
The microphone picked up a high-pitched scream, interrupted by a bellow. The archers drew arrows simultaneously, fitted them to bows. Two small red sentries were bounding toward the huts at impressive speed. They were ignored.
“Fire,” Louis said softly.
The arrows went wild. The giants crumpled. Two or three green elephants bellowed and tried to get to their feet, paused, then settled back. One had a couple of arrows in its flank.
“They were after the herd,” Chmeee said.
“Yah. We don’t really want them slaughtered, do we? Tell you what, you stay here with the stun cannon and I’ll go out and negotiate.”