Louis jumped when fingers tugged at his jumper. “Luweewu? I’m hungry.”
“Okay.” He was tired of studying anyway; it wasn’t telling him much that was useful.
Harkabeeparolyn was still asleep. The smell of meat broiling in a flashlight-laser beam woke her. Louis dialed fruits and cooked vegetables for them, and showed them where to dump anything they didn’t like.
He took his own dinner into the cargo hold.
It bothered him to have dependents. Granted that both were Louis Wu’s victims. But he couldn’t even teach them to get their own meals! The settings were marked in Interworld and the Hero’s Tongue.
Was there any way to put them to work?
Tomorrow. He’d think of something.
The computer was beginning to deliver results. The Hindmost was busy. When Louis got the puppeteer’s attention for a moment he asked for the records of Chmeee’s invasion of the castle.
The castle occupied the peak of a rocky hill. Herds of piglike beasts, yellow with an orange stripe, grazed the yellow grass veldt below. The lander circled about the castle, then settled into the courtyard in a cloud of arrows.
Nothing happened for several minutes.
Then orange blurred from several arched doorways at once, too fast to see.
They stopped, flattened like rugs and clutching weapons, against the base of the lander. They were kzinti, but they seemed distorted. There had been divergence over a quarter of a million years.
Harkabeeparolyn spoke at Louis’s shoulder. “Are these your companion’s kind?”
“Close enough. They seem a little shorter and a little darker, and… the lower jaw seems more massive.”
“He abandoned you. Why don’t you leave him?”
Louis laughed. “Why, to get you a bed? We were in battle conditions when I let a vampire seduce me. He was disgusted. As far as Chmeee knows, I abandoned him.”
“No man or woman can resist a vampire.”
“Chmeee is not a man. He couldn’t possibly want rishathra with a vampire, or with any hominid.”
Now more of the great orange cats sprinted to posts beneath the lander. Two carried a rust-stained metal cylinder. The dozen cats crept to the far side of the lander.
The cylinder disappeared in a blast of yellow-white flame. The lander slid a yard or two. The kzinti waited, then crept back to study the results.
Harkabeeparolyn shuddered. “They seem more likely to desire me for a meal.”
Louis was growing irritated. “They might. But I remember a time when Chmeee was starving, and he never touched me. What’s your problem, anyway? Don’t you get carnivores in the city?”
“We do.”
“And the Library?”
He thought she wouldn’t answer. (Furry faces showed at many of the slit windows. The explosion had done no visible damage.) Then, “I was in Panth Building for a time.” She did not meet his eyes.
For a moment he couldn’t remember. Then: Panth Building. Built like an onion floating tip down. Repairs to the water condenser. The ruler wanted to pay the fee in sex. Scent of vampire in the halls.
“You had rishathra with carnivores?”
“With Herders and Grass People and Hanging People and Night People. One remembers.”
Louis withdrew a little. “With Night People?” Ghouls?
“The Night People are very important to us. They bear information for us and for the Machine People. They hold together what is left of civilization, and we do well not to offend them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But it was the — Luweewu, the Night Hunters have a very keen sense of smell. The scent of vampire sends them running. I was told that I must have rishathra with a Night Hunter. Without vampire scent. I asked for transfer to the Library.”
Louis remembered Mar Korssil. “They don’t seem repugnant.”
“But for rishathra? We who have no parents, we must pay society’s debt before we can mate and make a household. I lost my accumulated fund when I transferred. The transfer did not come soon enough.” She looked up into his eyes. “It was not joyful. But other times were as bad. When the vampire scent wears off, the memory does not. One remembers the smells. Blood on the Night Hunter’s breath. Corruption on the Night People’s.”
“You’re well out of that,” Louis said.
Some of the kzinti tried to stand up. Then they all fell asleep. Ten minutes later the hatch descended. Chmeee came down to take command.
It was late when the Hindmost reappeared. He looked rumpled and tired. “It seems your guess was correct,” he said. “Not only will scrith hold a magnetic field, but the Ringworld structure is webbed with superconductor cables.”
“That’s good,” said Louis. A great weight lifted from him. “That’s good! But how would City Builders know that? I can’t see them digging into the scrith to find out.”
“No. They made magnets for compasses. They traced a gridwork of superconductor lines running in hexagonal patterns through the Ringworld foundation, fifty thousand miles across. It helped them make their maps. Centuries passed before the City Builders knew enough physics to guess what they were tracing, but their guess led them to develop their own superconductor.”
“The bacteria you seeded—”
“It will not have touched superconductor buried in scrith. I’m aware that the Ringworld floor is vulnerable to meteorites. We must hope that none ever breached the superconductor grid.”
“It’s good odds.”
The puppeteer pondered. “Louis, are we still searching for the secret of massive transmutation?”
“No.”
“It would solve our problem very nicely,” said the Hindmost. “The device must have operated on a tremendous scale. Converting matter to energy must be far easier than converting matter to other matter. Suppose we simply fired a… call it a transmutation cannon at the underside of the Ringworld at its farthest distance from the sun. Reaction would put the structure back in place very nicely. Of course there would be problems. The shock wave would kill many natives, but many would live, too. The burned-off meteor shielding could be replaced at some later date. Why are you laughing?”
“You’re brilliant. The trouble is, we don’t have any reason to think there was ever a transmutation cannon.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Halrloprillalar was just making up stories. She told us so later. And after all, how would she know anything about the way the Ringworld was built? Her ancestors weren’t much more than monkeys when that happened.” Louis saw the heads dip, and snapped, “Do not curl up on me. We don’t have the time.”
“Aye, aye.”
“What else have you got?”
“Little. Pattern analysis is still incomplete. The fantasies involving the Great Ocean mean nothing to me. You try them.”
“Tomorrow.”
Sounds too low to interpret held him awake. Louis turned over in darkness and free fall.
There was light enough to see. Kawaresksenjajok and Harkabeeparolyn lay in each other’s arms, murmuring in each other’s ears. Louis’s translator wasn’t picking it up. It sounded like love. The sudden stab of envy made him smile at himself. He’d thought the boy was too young; he’d thought the woman had sworn off. But this wasn’t rishathra. They were the same species.
Louis turned his back and closed his eyes. His ears expected a rhythmic wave action; but it never came, and presently he was asleep.
He dreamed that he was on sabbatical.
Falling, falling between the stars. When the world became too rich, too varied, too demanding, then there came a time to leave all worlds behind. Louis had done this before. Alone in a small spacecraft, he had gone into the unexplored gaps beyond known space, to see what there was to see, and to learn if he still loved himself. Now Louis floated between sleeping plates and dreamed happy dream of falling between the stars. No dependents, no promises to keep.