Louis shook his head violently. Wake up! “What?”
“Mars is a cold, dry, nearly airless world, isn’t it? The entire Map should be cooled, and desiccated too, somehow, and raised nearly above the atmosphere.”
“Yah. All of that.”
“Then look up. We should be beneath the Map of Mars. Do you see a fin far larger than that beneath the Map of Kzin? Do you see a nearly circular cavity bulging twenty miles inward?”
There was nothing above their heads but the inverted contours of a sea bottom.
“Louis, this is disturbing. If our computer memory is failing us… ” The Hindmost’s legs folded. His heads dipped downward, inward.
“The computer memory is fine,” Louis said. “Relax. The computer’s fine. See if the ocean temperature is higher above us.”
The Hindmost hesitated, half into fetal position. Then, “Aye, aye.” The puppeteer busied himself at the controls.
Harkabeeparolyn asked, “Do I understand you? One of your worlds is missing?”
“One of the smaller ones. Sheer carelessness, my dear.”
“These aren’t balls,” she said thoughtfully.
“No. Peeled like a round fruit, the peel spread flat.”
The Hindmost called, “The temperatures in this vicinity vary. Ignoring the regions around fins, I find temperatures from forty to eighty degrees Fahrenheit.”
“The water should be warmer around the Map of Mars.”
“The Map of Mars is not in evidence, and the water is not warmer.”
“Wha… at? But that’s weird.”
“If I understand you — yes, there is a problem.” The puppeteer’s necks arched out and curved around until he was looking into his own eyes. Louis had seen Nessus do that, and wondered if it was puppeteer laughter. It could be concentration. It was making Harkabeeparolyn queasy, but she couldn’t seem to look away.
Louis paced. Mars had to be refrigerated. Then where?…
The puppeteer whistled an odd harmonic. “The grid?”
Louis stopped in midstride. “The grid. Right. And that would mean… futz! That easy?”
“We make progress of sorts. Our next move?”
They’d learned a good deal, looking at undersides of worlds. So — “Take us on to the Map of Earth, basement level, please.”
“Aye, aye,” said the Hindmost. Needle continued to spinward.
So much ocean, Louis thought. So little land. Why had the Ringworld Engineers wanted so much salt sea in two single bodies? Two for balance, of course, but why so large?
Reservoirs? Partly. Preserves for the sea life of an abandoned Pak world? A conservationist would call that praiseworthy; but these were Pak protectors. Whatever they did was done for the safety of themselves and their blood descendants.
The Maps, Louis thought, were a superb piece of misdirection.
Despite the contoured ocean floor, Earth was easy to recognize. Louis pointed out the flat curves of the continental shelves as they passed beneath Africa, Australia, the Americas, Greenland… fins under Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean… the Ringworlders watched and nodded politely. Why would they care? It wasn’t their home.
Yah, he’d do his best to get Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok home, if there was nothing else he could do for them. Louis Wu was as close to Earth now as he would ever be.
More sea bottom passed above them.
Then shoreline: a flat curve of continental shelf bordering a maze of gulfs and bays and river deltas and peninsulas and island clusters and raggedy detail too fine for the human eye. Needle ran on to port of spinward. They passed beneath hollow mountain ranges and flat seas. A finely ruled line ran straight to spinward, and at its near end, a glint of light—
Fist-of-God.
Something huge had struck the Ringworld long ago. The fireball had pushed the Ringworld floor upward into the shape of a tilted cone, then ripped through. Pointing almost away from that great funnel shape was the track of a much later meteorite: a crippled General Products spacecraft, with its passengers frozen in stasis, had touched down at a horizontal seven hundred and seventy miles per second. Futz, they’d actually bent the scrith!
Hot Needle of Inquiry rose into a spotlight beam: raw sunlight flooding vertically through the crater in Fist-of-God Mountain. Shards of scrith, stretched thin when that old fireball broke through, stood like minor peaks around a volcano cone. The ship lifted above them.
Desert sloped down and away. The impact that made Fist-of-God had cremated all life over a region comfortably larger than the Earth. Far, far away, a hundred thousand miles away, the blue of distance became the blue of sea; and only Needle’s thousand-mile height let them see that far.
“Get us moving,” Louis said. “Then give us a view from the lander’s cameras. Let’s see how Chmeee’s doing.”
“Aye aye.”
Chapter 27 — The Great Ocean
Six rectangular windows floated beyond the hull. Six cameras showed the lander’s flight deck, lower deck, and four outside views.
The flight deck was empty. Louis scanned for emergency lights and found none.
The autodoc was still a great coffin, closed.
Something was wrong with the outside cameras. The view wavered and shifted and streamed with glowing colors. Louis was able to make out the courtyard, the arrow slits, several kzinti standing guard in leather armor. Other kzinti sprinted to and fro on an fours: blurred streaks.
Flames! The defenders had built a bonfire around the lander!
“Hindmost? Can you lift the lander from here? You said you had remote controls.”
“I could take off,” the Hindmost said, “but it would be dangerous. We are… twelve minutes of arc to spinward and a bit to port of the Map of Kzin — a third of a million miles. Would you expect me to fly the lander with a lightspeed delay of three and a half seconds? The life-support system is holding well.”
Four kzinti streaked across the courtyard to throw open massive gates. A wheeled vehicle pulled in and stopped. It was larger than the Machine People vehicle that had brought Louis to the floating city. Projectile weapons were mounted on its four fenders. Kzinti emerged and stood studying the lander.
Had the castle’s lord called on a neighbor for help? Or had a neighbor come to claim rights to an impregnable flying fort?
The vehicles guns swiveled to face the cameras, and spat. Flame bloomed; the cameras shuddered. The great orange cats ducked, then rose to study the results.
No emergency lights showed on the flight deck.
“These savages haven’t the means to harm the lander,” the Hindmost said.
Explosive projectiles sprayed the lander again.
“I’ll just take your word for it,” Louis said. “Continue monitoring. Are we close enough that I can get to the lander by stepping discs?”
The puppeteer looked himself in the eyes. He held the pose for several seconds.
Then he spoke. “We are two hundred thousand miles to spinward of the Map of Kzin, and a hundred and twenty thousand miles to port. The portward distance is irrelevant. The spinward distance would be lethal. It gives Needle and the lander a relative velocity of eight-tenths of a mile per second.”
“Too much?”
“Our technology is not miraculous, Louis! Stepping discs can absorb kinetic energies of up to two hundred feet per second, no more.”
The explosions had scattered the bonfire. Armored kzinti guards were building it up again.
Louis bit down on a bad word. “All right. The fastest way to get me there is to run us straight to antispinward until I can use the stepping discs. Then we can take our time running to starboard.”