“Aye, aye. What speed?”
Louis opened his mouth and left it open while he thought. “Now, that is one fascinating question,” he said. “What does the Ringworld meteor defense consider a meteor? Or an invading spacecraft?”
The puppeteer reached behind him, chewed at the control. “I’ve cut our acceleration. We should discuss this. Louis, I don’t understand how the City Builders knew it was safe to build a rim transport system. They were right, but how did they know?”
Louis shook his head. He could see why the Ringworld protectors might program the meteor defense not to fire on the rim walls. A safe corridor for their own ships — or maybe they found that the computer was firing on the attitude jets whenever the attitude jets fired a high-velocity plume of gas. “I’d say the City Builders started with small ships and built up. They tried it and it worked.”
“Stupid. Dangerous.”
“We already know they did things like that.”
“You have my opinion. At your orders, Louis: what speed?”
The high desert sloped gradually down: a baked and lifeless land, an ecology shattered and heated to incandescence thousands of falans ago. What had struck that blow from underneath the Ringworld? A comet wouldn’t normally be that big. There were no asteroids, no planets; they had been cleaned out of the system during the building of the Ringworld.
Needle’s velocity was already respectable. The land ahead was beginning to turn green. There were silver threads of river.
“On the first expedition we flew at Mach 2, using flycycles,” Louis said. “That’d take us… eight days before I can use the stepping discs. Too tanj long. I’m assuming the meteor defense fires on things that move fast relative to the surface. How fast is fast?”
“The easy way to find out is to accelerate until something happens.”
“I do not believe I heard a Pierson’s puppeteer say that.”
“Have faith in puppeteer engineering, Louis. The stasis field will function. No weapon can harm us in stasis. At worst we will return to normal status after we strike the surface, and proceed henceforth at a lower speed. There are hierarchies of risk, Louis. The most dangerous thing we can do during the next two years is hide.”
“I don’t — if it was Chmeee saying — but a Pierson’s… give me a minute.” Louis closed his eyes and tried to think. Then “See how this sounds. First we loft the ruined probe, the one we left in the Library—”
“I moved it.”
“Where?”
“To the nearest high mountain with an exposed scrith crest. The safest place I could think of. The probe is still valuable, though it can no longer manufacture fuel.”
“That’s a good place. Don’t try to fly it. Just turn on every sensor on the probe, and every sensor aboard Needle and the lander. Turn most of them in the direction of the shadow squares. Now, where else would you put a meteor defense? Bear in mind that it can’t seem to fire at anything under the Ringworld floor.”
“I have no ideas.”
“Okay. We aim cameras all over the Arch. Cameras on the shadow squares. Cameras on the sun. Cameras on the Map of Kzin and the Map of Mars.”
“Definitely.”
“We stay at an altitude of a thousand miles. Shall we dismount the probe in the cargo hold? Set it to following us?”
“Our only source of fuel? No.”
“Then start accelerating until something happens. How does it sound?”
“Aye, aye,” said the Hindmost, and he turned to the controls. And Louis, who would have welcomed more discussion, more time to nerve himself up, kept his silence.
The cameras caught it, but none of Needle’s passengers did. Even if they’d been looking up, they wouldn’t have caught it. They would have seen glare-white stars and the checkered blue Arch glowing against black space, and a black circle at the peak of the Arch, where Needle’s flare shielding blocked out the naked sun.
But they weren’t even looking up.
Below the ruin of the hyperdrive motor, the land was green with life. Jungle and swamp and wild land prevailed, with an occasional ragged crazy quilt of cultivated farmland. Of the Ringworld hominids they’d seen so far, not many would make farmers.
There were covies of boats on flat seas. Once they crossed a spider web of roads half an hour wide, seven thousand miles wide. The telescope showed steeds carrying riders or pulling small carts. No powered vehicles. A City Builder culture must have fallen here, and stayed down.
“I feel like a goddess,” Harkabeeparolyn said. “Nobody else could have such a view.”
“I knew a goddess,” Louis said. “At least she thought she was. She was a City Builder too. She was part of a spacecraft crew; she probably saw what you’re seeing now.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
Fist-of-God Mountain shrank slowly. The Earth’s moon could have nestled in that vast shell. One had to see the mountain over such a distance, standing behind a landscape vaster than the habitable surfaces of all the worlds of known space, to appreciate its size. Louis wasn’t feeling godlike. He felt tiny. Vulnerable.
The autodoc lid aboard the lander hadn’t moved. Louis asked, “Hindmost, could Chmeee have had other wounds?”
The puppeteer was out of sight somewhere, but his voice came clear. “Of course.”
“He could be dying in there.”
“No. Louis, I’m busy. Don’t bother me!”
The telescope view had become a blur. The bright land a thousand miles below was visibly moving now; Needle’s velocity had passed five miles per second. Orbital speed for Earth.
Cloud decks shone bright enough to hurt the eyes. Far aft, a checkerboard pattern of cultivation was thinning out. Directly below, the land dipped, then leveled off into hundreds of miles of flat grassland. The flatlands extended to right and left as far as the eye could see. Rivers that fed into the flats became swamps, suddenly green.
You could trace a ragged line of contoured bays, inlets, islands, peninsulas: the mark of Ringworld shoreline, designed for the convenience of boats and shipping. But that was the spinward border. Then several hundred miles of flat, salt-poisoned land. Then the blue line of ocean. Louis felt the hair stir on his neck at this fresh memento of the Fist-of-God impact. Even this far away, the shoreline of the Great Ocean had been lifted; the sea had receded seven or eight hundred miles.
Louis rubbed dazzled eyes. It was too bright down there. Violet highlights—
Then blackness.
Louis closed his eyes tight. When he opened them it was as if he had left them closed: black as the inside of a stomach.
Harkabeeparolyn screamed. Kawaresksenjajok thrashed. His arm struck Louis’s shoulder, and the boy gripped Louis’s arm with both hands and hung on. The woman’s scream cut off abruptly. Then she said, in a voice with teeth in it, “Luweewu, where are we?”
Louis said, “I take a wild guess and say we’re at the bottom of the ocean.”
“You are correct,” said the Hindmost’s contralto. “I have a good view by deep-radar. Shall I turn on a spotlight?”
“Sure.”
The water was murky. Needle wasn’t as deep as it might have been. There were fish nosing about; there was even a seaweed forest anchored nearby.
The boy released Louis and pressed his nose to the wall. Harkabeeparolyn stared too, but she was shivering. She asked, “Luweewu, can you tell me what happened? Can you make it make sense?”
“We’ll find out,” said Louis. “Hindmost, take us up. Back to a thousand miles altitude.”