Louis found fine entertainment that morning. The tales of the Great Ocean were good stuff, with heroes and royalty and feats of detection and magic and fearsome monsters, and a flavor different from the fairy tales of any human culture. Love was not eternal. The City Builder hero’s (or heroine’s) companions were always of the opposite sex, their loyalty was held by imaginatively described rishathra, and their conveniently strange powers were taken for granted. Magicians were not automatically evil; they were random dangers to be avoided, not fought.
Louis found the common denominators he was looking for. Always there was the vastness of the sea and the terror of the storms and the sea monsters.
Some of those would be sharks, sperm whales, killer whales, Gummidgy destroyers, Wunderland shadowfish, or trapweed jungles. Some were intelligent. There were sea serpents miles long, with steaming nostrils (implying lungs?) and large mouths lined with sharp teeth. There was a land that burned any ship that approached, invariably leaving one survivor. (Fantasy, or sunflowers?) Certain islands were sea beasts of sedentary inclination, such that a whole ecology could establish itself on a beast’s back, until a shipload of sailors disturbed the creature. Then it would dive. Louis might have believed that one if he hadn’t seen the same legend in Earth’s literature.
He did believe the ferocious storms. Over that long a reach, storms could build terribly, even without the Coriolis effect that gives rise to hurricanes on any normal world. On the Map of Kzin he’d seen a ship as big as a city. It might take a ship that size to weather Great Ocean storms.
He did not disbelieve the notion of magicians, not completely. They (in three legends) seemed to be of the City Builder race. But unlike the magicians of Earthly legend, they were mighty fighters. And all three wore armor.
“Kawaresksenjajok? Do magicians always wear armor?”
The boy looked at him strangely. “You mean in stories, don’t you? No. Except, I guess they always do around the Great Ocean. Why?”
“Do magicians fight? Are they great fighters?”
“They don’t have to be.” The questioning was making the boy uneasy.
Harkabeeparolyn broke in. “Luweewu, I may know more of children’s tales than Kawa does. What are you trying to learn?”
“I’m looking for the home of the Ringworld engineers. These armored magicians could be them, except they’re too late in history.”
“Then it isn’t them.”
“But what sparked the legends? Statues? Mummies pulled out of a desert? Racial memories?”
She thought it over. “Magicians usually belong to the species that is telling the story. Descriptions vary: height, weight, what they eat. Yet they have traits in common. They are terrible fighters. They do not take a moral stand. They are not to be defeated, but avoided.”
Like a submarine beneath polar ice, Hot Needle of Inquiry cruised beneath the Great Ocean.
The Hindmost had slowed the ship. They had a good view of the long, intricately curved ribbon of continental shelf falling behind them. Beyond, the floor of the Great Ocean was as active as the land: mountains high enough to rise above the water; undersea canyons showing as ridges five and six miles high.
What was above them now — a pebbled roof, dark even under light amplification, that seemed obtrusively close even though it was three thousand miles above — should be the Map of Kzin. The computer said it was. Kzin must have been tectonically active when the Map was carved. The sea beds bulged strongly; the mountain ranges were deep and sharp of outline.
Louis could identify nothing. Foam-shrouded contours weren’t enough. He needed to see sunlight patterns and yellow-and-orange jungle. “Keep the cameras rolling. Are you getting a signal from the lander?”
From his post at the controls the Hindmost turned one head back. “No, Louis, the scrith blocks it. Do you see the nearly circular bay, there where the big river ends? The great ship is moored across its mouth. Nearly across the Map, the Y-shape where two rivers join — that is the castle where the lander now rests.”
“Okay. Drop a few thousand miles. Give me an overview… or underview.”
Needle sank beneath its carved roof. The Hindmost said, “You made this same tour in the Lying Bastard. Do you expect to find changes now?”
“No. Getting impatient?”
“Of course not, Louis.”
“I know more than I did then. Maybe I’ll pick up details we missed. Like — what’s that, sticking out near the south pole?”
The Hindmost gave them an expanded view. A long, narrow, utterly black triangle with a textured surface, it dropped straight down from the center of the Map of Kzin. “A radiator fin,” the puppeteer said. “The antarctic must be kept refrigerated, of course.”
The Ringworlders were utterly bewildered. “I don’t understand,” Harkabeeparolyn said. “I thought I knew some science, but… what is it?”
“Too complicated. Hindmost—”
“Luweewu, I am not a fool or a child!”
She couldn’t be much over forty, Louis thought. “All right. The whole point is to imitate a planet. A spinning ball, right? Sunlight falls almost level at the poles of a spinning ball, so it’s cold. So this imitation world has to be cooled at the poles. Hindmost, give us more magnification.”
The fin’s textured surface became myriad adjustable horizontal flaps, silver above, black below. Summer and winter, he thought; and he heard himself say, “I can’t believe it.”
“Luweewu?”
He spread his hands helplessly. “Every so often I lose it. I think I’ve accepted it all, and then all of a sudden it’s too big. Too tanj big.”
Tears were brimming in Harkabeeparolyn’s eyes. “I believe it now. My world is an imitation of a real world.”
Louis put his arms around her. “It’s real. Feel this? You’re as real as I am. Stamp your foot. The world is as real as this ship. Just bigger. Way way bigger.”
The Hindmost said, “Louis?”
A bit of telescope work had found him more fins, smaller ones, around the Map’s perimeter. “Naturally the arctic regions must be cooled too.”
“Yah. I’ll be all right in a minute. Take us toward Fist-of-God, but take your time. The computer can find it?”
“Yes. Might we find it plugged? You said that the eye storm has been plugged or repaired.”
“Plugging Fist-of-God wouldn’t be easy. The hole’s bigger than Australia, and clear above the atmosphere.” He rubbed his closed eyes hard.
I can’t let this happen to me, he thought. What happens is real. What’s real, I can manipulate with my brain. Tanj, I should never have used the wire. It’s screwed up my sense of reality. But… cooling fins under the poles?
They were out from under the Map of Kzin. Deep-radar showed nothing of pipes beneath the contoured sea bottoms. Which must mean that the meteor shielding was foamed scrith. The pipes had to be there, or else flup would fill the ocean beds.
Those ridges on the Ringworld’s underside — those long, long undersea canyons. A dredge in each of the deepest canyons, an outlet at one end: you could keep the whole ocean bed clear.
“Veer a little, Hindmost. Take us under the Map of Mars. Then under the Map of Earth. It won’t take us too far out of our way.”
“Nearly two hours.”
“Risk it.”
Two hours. Louis dozed in the sleeping field. He knew that an adventurer snatches sleep when he can. He woke well ahead of time, with sea bottom still gliding past above Needle’s roof. He watched it slow and stop.
The Hindmost said, “Mars is missing.”