Nine years now, since he’d left Kawaresksenjajok and Harkabeeparolyn; ten since Chmeee departed for the Map of Earth. Eleven years since they’d set sail aboard Hidden Patriarch. Twelve since their return to the Ringworld. Forty-one years since Louis Wu and his motley crew first touched down, cocooned in stasis, at 770 miles per second.
The first hominids they’d found had been small, furry religious fanatics.
These chattering youths were of that or a similar species. They were chin-high to Louis Wu and covered with fluffy blond fur, and wore kilts of muted browns. They threw their wonderfully patterned nets with wonderful skill, in this maze of bare trunks beneath branches spread like the caps of mushrooms.
They were friendly. Every species around the Great Ocean was friendly to strangers. Louis was used to it.
The oldest girl asked, “What shape is the world?”
Quiet fell and heads turned. Was it a test? “I should ask rather than tell, Strill. What shape is the world?”
“A circle, the shape of infinity, the Web Dweller says. I don’t understand, though. I see an arch, like—” Strill pointed. There were small conical roofs below, sprouting among the trees: a sizable village strung along the river’s vastness. Upstream was an arch like the oft-rebuilt St. Louis Arch, broad at the base, narrowing as it rose. “—like the Upstream Gate.”
So that was all right. “The arch is the part of the ring you’re not standing on,” Louis said. Web Dweller?
He was walking with one proprietary hand on the stacked cargo plates as they floated alongside him.
There were millions of these in the Repair Center beneath the Map of Mars. He’d welded some needed items to the topmost floating disk. These included handholds, a seat back, a bin for spare clothing and another for food, and a little attitude thruster, a spare part for the Hindmost’s probes. And … well, he’d found that already in place after the battle eleven years ago. It was Teela Brown’s medkit.
Furry adults and small furry children saw the bird catchers returning early. Most stayed with their tasks, but a man and a woman waited at the arch to greet them.
Strill cried, “He’s a wizard! Kidada-sir, he says it’s a ring!”
The man glanced at the floating plates. He asked, “Do you know this?”
Louis said, “I’ve seen it. I’m Louis Wu of the Ball People.”
It shouldn’t have meant anything to them, but the Elders gaped and the children ooohed.
The woman said, “Louis Wu of the Ball People?” Age had put white in her golden fur, and more of that in the man’s. Their knee-length kilts were elaborate tapestries that would have been valuable in any culture. “I am Sawur and this is Kidada, both of the Council, both of the Weaver Folk. You are from nowhere on the Arch, yes? The Web Dweller has vouched for your power and wisdom.”
“Web Dweller?” How could anyone have known of him here?
Kidada said, “The Web Dweller is certainly of another world. It’s got two heads! And servants like itself in uncountable numbers.”
Aw, tanj. “What else did the Web Dweller have to say?”
“It showed us pictures from far up the Arch, so it says.”
“What did you see? Vampires?”
“Strange humanoids living in darkness, and an alliance of many kinds of people come to attack them. Can you tell us of those?”
“I know something of vampires. The Web Dweller may know more, but I haven’t spoken to him in thirty-six falans.”
“How do your folk manage rishathra?” Sawur asked, and there was suppressed giggling.
Louis grinned. “As best we can. Yours?”
“We Weavers are said to be very good with our hands, and visitors speak well of the touch of our fur. One must ask, shall we wash?”
“Good idea.”
Weavers, they called themselves.
Their village—city–was nowhere crowded, but it seemed to go on and on, spilling up and down both sides of the river, sprouting among the trees of the vast forest. Their houses were wickerwork shells shaped like low mushrooms, not unlike the trees.
Louis was being led toward a vertical cliff of bare pale rock. Kidada said, “See you water running down that cliff face? The baths are below. Sunlight warms the water as it flows, a little.”
The pool was long and narrow. Low tables bore little heaps of embroidered kilts. Sawur and Kidada added theirs to a heap. Three parallel furrows ran through the hair across the old man’s buttocks, old scars rimmed with white fur, leading Louis to wonder about local predators.
Weavers were already bathing themselves. Children and the elderly seemed to gravitate together; postadolescents separated out, but rarely formed pairs. Louis had learned to look for such patterns.
The water was muddy. He didn’t see any towels. He set his clothing—Canyon style camping garb and backpurse, from two hundred light-years away—on a table, and stepped in. When in Rome …
It wasn’t all that warm, either.
Now all the ages mixed as the Weavers gathered around the visiting alien, the teacher. Newly met species always had the same questions.
“My companions and I steered our great ship to the shore of the Great Ocean, forty falans ago. We found desolation. Long before any of you were born, Fist-of-God raised the shore forty manheights along twenty thousand daywalks of shoreline …”
Confusion. Louis’s translator would translate Sol system measurements into the Ringworld’s thirty-hour day, seventy-five days to a falan; but daywalks and manheights varied by species. Louis floated on his back, treading water while they spoke of distance, time, height. No hurry. He’d done this dance before.
“People to spinward remember Fist-of-God in their legends. Something bigger than any mountain struck the floor of the world from underneath at hellish speed, thirty-five hundred falans ago”; A.D. 1200, by Louis’s best guess. “It pushed the land up and then ripped through as a fireball. You can see the mountain it made from here, a hundred thousand miles away, and the deserts all around it. The shore of the Great Ocean moved a thousand miles seaward. All the patterns of life changed …”
The water was armpit-deep, shallower at the end where the children gathered. A kind of dance was going on here: not a courtship game, but the women around Louis were of mating age, and men their age were hanging back. Ring pattern. A rishathra dance?
His eye kept snagging on Strill’s attentive look and wonderful smile. They all had questions. The same questions always. But Louis had seen the glitter of bronze on the bare cliff above his head. The fractal spiderweb was out of a Weaver’s reach, and the water flowing down the rock wasn’t washing it off.
So he spoke for an unseen audience. “We had to stay with the ocean or we’d have had nothing to eat. We spent two falans cruising along the shore, and finally we realized we were in a river mouth. We continued upstream. The fertility has returned to the soil along the Shenthy River valley. We’ve been in this vast river valley for thirty-five falans. My City Builder friends left me at a village downstream, twenty falans ago.”
“Why?”
“They have children now. But I continued upstream. The people are friendly everywhere. They like hearing my tales.”
Sawur asked, “Why does that surprise you, Louis Wu?”
He smiled at the older woman. “When a visitor comes to your village, he probably doesn’t eat what you eat or sleep where you sleep or feel quite comfortable in your house. An alien doesn’t compete with his host. And he might have something to teach. But the Ball People are all one species on all the worlds. A visitor can be bad news.”
A moment’s uncomfortable silence followed. One of the brawny boys settled behind Strill broke it. He called, “Can you do this?” He reached around his back, one arm above, one below, and clasped wrists with himself.