"It's good odds."

The puppeteer pondered. "Louis, are we still searching for the secret of ma.s.sive trans.m.u.tation?"

"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 trans.m.u.tation 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 trans.m.u.tation 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 s.p.a.cecraft, he had gone into the unexplored gaps beyond known s.p.a.ce, 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.

Then a woman howled in panic, right in his ear. A heel kicked him hard, just below the floating ribs, and Louis doubled up with a breathy cry. Flailing arms battered him, then closed round his neck in a death-grip hug. The wailing continued.

Louis pried at the arms to free his throat. He called, "Sleepfield off!"

Gravity returned. Louis and his attacker settled onto the lower plate. Harkabeeparolyn stopped screaming. She let her arms be pried away.

The boy Kawaresksenjajok knelt beside her, confused and frightened. He spoke urgent questions in the City Builder language. The woman snarled.

The boy spoke again. Harkabeeparolyn answered him at length. The boy nodded reluctantly. Whatever he'd heard, he didn't like it. He stepped into the corner, with a parting look that Louis couldn't interpret at all, and vanished into the cargo hold.

Louis reached out for his translator. "Okay, what's it all about?"

"I was falling!" she sobbed.

"It's nothing to be afraid of," Louis told her. "This is how some of us like to sleep."

She looked up into his face. "Falling?"

"Yeah."

Her expression was easy to interpret. Mad. Quite mad ... and a shrug. Visibly she braced herself. She said, "I have made myself know that my usefulness is over, now that your machines can read faster than I can. I can do one thing only to make our mission easier, and that is to ease the pain of your thwarted l.u.s.t."

"That's a relief," Louis said. He meant it as sarcasm; would she hear it that way? Louis was tanjed if he'd accept that kind of charity.

"If you bathe, and clean your mouth very thoroughly-"

"Hold it. Your sacrifice of your comfort to higher goals is praiseworthy, but it would be bad manners for me to accept."

She was bewildered. "Luweewu? Do you not want rishathra with me?"

"Thank you, no. Sleepfield on." Louis floated away from her. From previous experience he sensed a shouting match coming, and that couldn't be helped. But if she tried physical force, she'd find herself falling.

She surprised him. She said, "Luweewu, it would be terrible for me to have children now."

He looked down at her face: not enraged, but very serious. She said, "If I mate now with Kawaresksenjajok, I may bring forth a baby to die in the fire of the sun."

"Then don't. He's too young anyway."

"No, he's not."

"Oh. Well. Don't you have-No, you wouldn't be carrying contraceptives. Well, can't you estimate your fertile period and avoid it?"

"I don't understand. No, wait, I do understand. Luweewu, our species ruled most of the world because of our command of the nuances and variations of rishathra. Do you know how we learned so much about rishathra?"

"Just lucky, I guess?"

"Luweewu, some species are more fertile than others."

"Oh."

"Before history began, we learned that rishathra is the way not to have children. If we mate, four falans later there is a child. Luweewu, can the world be saved? Do you know that the world can be saved?"

Oh, to be on sabbatical. Alone in a singleship, light-years from all responsibility to anyone but Louis Wu. Oh, to be under the wire ... "I can't guarantee anything at all."

"Then do rishathra with me, to let me stop thinking of Kawaresksenjajok!"

It was not the most flattering proposal of Louis Wu's young life. He asked, "How do we ease his mind?"

"There is no way. Poor boy, he must suffer."

Then you can both suffer, Louis thought. But he couldn't make himself say it. The woman was serious, and she was hurting, and she was right. This was not a time to bring a baby City Builder into the world.

And he wanted her.

He climbed out of free fall and took her to the water bed. He was glad that Kawaresksenjajok had retired to the cargo hold. What would the boy have to say tomorrow morning?

Chapter 26 -.

Beneath the Waters Louis woke under gravity, with a smile on his face, a pleasant ache in every muscle, and a grittiness in his eyes. He had slept very little last night. Harkabeeparolyn hadn't exaggerated her urgency. He had never known (despite his time with Halrloprillalar) that City Builders went into heat.

He shifted, and the big bed surged beneath him. A body rolled against him: Kawaresksenjajok, on his belly, spread out like a starfish and snoring gently.

Harkabeeparolyn, curled in orange fur at the foot of the bed, stirred and sat up. She said, perhaps in apology at leaving him, "I kept waking up and not knowing where I was, with the bed heaving under me."

Culture shock, he thought. He remembered that Halrloprillalar had liked the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. "There's plenty of floor. How do you feel?"

"Much better, for the moment. Thank you."

"Thank you. Are you hungry?"

"Not yet."

He exercised. His muscles were still hard, but he was out of practice. The City Builders watched him with puzzled expressions. Afterward he dialed breakfast: melon, souffl's [souffles] Grand Marnier, m.u.f.fins, coffee. His guests refused the coffee, predictably, and also the m.u.f.fins.

When the Hindmost appeared he looked rumpled and tired. "The patterns we sought are not evident in the records of the floating city," he said. "All species build their armor in the shape of a Pak protector. Armor is not the same everywhere, not quite, but the styling does not vary in any pattern. It may be we can blame the spread of City Builder culture for that. Their empire mixed ideas and inventions until we may never trace their origins."

"What about the immortality drug?"

"You were right. The Great Ocean is seen as a source of horrors and delights, including immortality. The gift is not always a drug. Sometimes it comes without warning, bestowed by whimsical G.o.ds. Louis, the legends make no sense to me, a nonhuman."

"Set the tape up for us. I'll get our guests to watch it too. Maybe they can explain what I can't."

"Aye, aye."

"What about repairs?"

"There has been no repair activity on the Ringworld in recorded history."

"You're kidding!"

"How large a region is covered by the city records? How long a time? Small, and short. Aside from that, I've studied the old interviews with Jack Brennan. I gather that protectors have long lives and very long attention spans. They prefer not to use servomechanisms if they can do a job themselves. There was no autopilot aboard Phssthpok's s.p.a.cecraft, for instance."

"That's not consistent. The spillpipe system is certainly automatic."

"A very simple brute-force approach. We don't know why the protectors died or left the Ringworld. Is it possible that they knew their fate, that they had time to automate the spillpipe system? Louis, we don't need to know any of this."

"Oh, yeah? The meteor defense is probably automatic too. Wouldn't you like to know more about the meteor defense?"

"I would."

"And the att.i.tude jets were automatic. Maybe there were manual overrides for all of that. But a thousand hominid species have evolved since the Pak disappeared, and the automatics are still going. Either the protectors always intended to leave-which I can't believe-"

"Or they took many years to die," the Hindmost said. "I have my own ideas on that." And he would say no more.

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 s.e.x, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d. 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?"