Here the jungle was scrawny. The yellow-brown of barren soil showed through in a pattern that wasn’t city-shaped at all. It looked like a melted archery target. At a guess, it was a very large and very old strip mine.
Half a million years ago, or more, a sampling of kzinti had been dropped here. Louis didn’t expect to find mining towns. They’d be lucky to have anything left to mine. For half a million years they had been confined to one world, a world whose surface ended a few hundred feet down. But it seemed the kzinti had kept their civilization.
They had brains, these near-cats. They had ruled a respectable interstellar civilization. Tanj, it was kzinti who had taught humans to use gravity generators! And Chmeee must have reached the Map of Kzin hours ago, in his search for allies against the Hindmost.
Louis had followed the river to the sea. Now he skimmed his god’s-eye view “south” along the shoreline of the Map’s largest continent. He expected ports, though the kzinti didn’t use ships much. They didn’t like the sea. Their seaports were industrial cities; nobody lived there for pleasure.
But that was in the Kzinti Empire, where gravity generators had been used for millennia. Louis found himself looking down on a seaport that would have rivalled New York harbor. It crawled with the wakes of ships barely large enough to see. The harbor had the nearly circular look of a meteor crater.
Louis lowered the magnification, backing his viewpoint into the sky, to get an overview.
He blinked. Had his miserable sense of scale betrayed him again? Or had he mishandled the controls?
There was a ship moored across the harbor. It made the harbor look bathtub-sized.
The wakes of tinier ships were still there. It was real, then. He was looking at a ship as big as a town. It nearly closed off the arc of the natural harbor.
They wouldn’t move it often, Louis thought. The motors would chew up the sea bed something fierce. With the ship gone, the harbor’s wave patterns would change. And how would the kzinti fuel something so big? How had they fueled it the first time? Where did they find the metals?
Why?
Louis had never seriously wondered if Chmeee would find what he sought on the Map of Kzin. Not until now.
He spun the magnification dial. His viewpoint receded into space until the Map of Kzin was a cluster of specks on a vast blue sea. Other Maps showed near the edges of the screen.
The nearest Map to the Map of Kzin was a round pink dot. Mars… and it was as far from Kzin as the Moon was from Earth.
How could such distances be conquered? Even a telescope wouldn’t penetrate more than two hundred thousand miles of atmosphere. The idea of crossing that distance in a seagoing ship — even a ship the size of a small city — tanj!
“Calling the Hindmost. Louis Wu calling the Hindmost.” Time was running out for Louis Wu as repairmen moved in on Needle and Chmeee culled the Map of Kzin for warriors. Louis didn’t intend to mention any of this to the Hindmost. It would only upset the puppeteer.
What was the Hindmost doing that he couldn’t answer a call?
Could a human even guess at the answer?
Continue the survey, then.
Louis ran the scale down until he could see both rim walls. He looked for Fist-of-God Mountain near the Ringworld’s median line, to port of the Great Ocean. Not there. He expanded the scale. A patch of desert bigger than the Earth was still small against the Ringworld, but there it was, reddish and barren, and the pale dot near the center was… Fist-of-God, a thousand miles tall, capped with naked scrith.
He skimmed to port, tracing the path they had taken following Liar’s crash. Long before he was ready, he had reached water, a wide-flung arm of the Great Ocean. They had stopped within sight of that bay. Louis drifted back, looking for what would be an oblong of permanent cloud, seen from above.
But the eye storm wasn’t there.
“Calling the Hindmost! In the names of Kdapt and Finagle and Allah I summon thee, God tanj it! Calling—”
“I am here, Louis.”
“Okay! I’m in a library in the floating city. They’ve got a map room. Look up Nessus’s records of the map room we—”
“I remember,” the puppeteer said coolly.
“Well, that map room showed old tapes. This one is running on present time!”
“Are you safe?”
“Safe? Oh, safe enough. I’ve been using superconductor cloth to make friends and influence people. But I’m trapped here. Even if I could bribe my way out of the city, I’d still have to get past the Machine People station on Sky Hill. I’d rather not shoot my way out.”
“Wise.”
“What’s new at your end?”
“Two data. First, I have holograms of both of the other spaceports. All of the eleven ships have been rifled.”
“The Bussard ramjets gone? All of them?”
“Yes, all.”
“What else?”
“You cannot expect rescue from Chmeee. The lander has set down on the Map of Kzin in the Great Ocean,” the puppeteer reported. “I should have guessed. The kzin has defected, taking the lander with him!”
Louis cursed silently. He should have recognized that cool, emotionless tone. The puppeteer was badly upset; he was losing control of the finer nuances of human speech. “Where is he? What’s he doing?”
“I watched through the lander’s cameras as he circled the Map of Kzin. He found a capacious seagoing ship—”
“I found it too.”
“Your conclusions?”
“They tried to explore or colonize the other Maps.”
“Yes. In known space the kzinti eventually conquered other stellar systems. On the Map of Kzin they must have looked across the ocean. They were not likely to develop space travel, of course.”
“No.” The first step in learning space travel is to put something in orbit. On Kzin, low orbital velocity was around six miles per second. On the Map of Kzin, the equivalent was seven hundred and seventy miles per second. “They couldn’t have built too many of these ships either. Where would they get the metals? And the voyages would take decades, at least. I wonder how they even knew there were other Maps.”
“We may guess that they launched telescopic camera equipment aboard rockets. The instruments would have to perform quickly. A missile could not go into orbit. It would rise and fall back.”
“I wonder if they reached the Map of Earth? It’s another hundred thousand miles past Mars… and Mars wouldn’t make a good staging area.” What would kzinti have found on the Map of Earth? Homo habilis alone, or Pak protectors too? “There’s the Map of Down to starboard, and I don’t know the world to antispinward.”
“We know it. The natives are communal intelligences. We expect that they will never develop space travel. Their ships would need to support an entire hive.”
“Hospitable?”
“No, they would have fought the kzinti. And the kzinti have clearly given up the conquest of the Great Ocean. They seem to be using the great ship to block off a harbor.”
“Yah. I’d guess it’s a seat of government too. You were telling me about Chmeee.”
“After learning what he could by circling above the Map of Kzin, he hovered above the great ship. Aircraft rose and attacked him with explosive missiles. Chmeee allowed this, and the missiles did no harm. Then Chmeee destroyed four aircraft. The rest continued the attack until weapons and fuel were exhausted. When they returned to the ship, Chmeee followed them down. The lander presently rests on a landing platform on the great ship’s conning tower. The attack continues. Louis, is he seeking allies against me?”
“If it’s any comfort to you, he won’t find anything that can go up against a General Products hull. They can’t even hurt the lander.”