by Larry Niven
Nessus faced himself, eye to eye. The kzin sheathed his claws.
“On a more pragmatic level,” said Louis, “We’re all bushed. Tired. Hungry. Who wants to fight on an empty stomach? I’m going to catch an hour under a sleep set. I suggest you do the same.”
Teela was shocked. “You don’t want to watch? Well be seeing the inner side!”
“You watch. Tell me what happens.” He left.
He woke groggy and ravenous. Hunger pulled him from between sleeping plates, then kept him in the cabin long enough to dial a handmeal. Eating one-handed, he strolled out into the lounge.
“What’s happening?”
Teela answered, rather coldly, across the top of a reading screen. “You missed everything. Slaver ships, Mist Demons, space dragons, cannibal starseeds, all attacking at once. Speaker had to fend them off with his bare hands. You’d have loved it.”
“Nessus?”
The puppeteer answered from the control room. “Speaker and I have agreed to move on to the shadow squares. Speaker is asleep. We will be in clear space soon.”
“Anything new?”
“Yes, considerable. Let me show you.”
The puppeteer did things to the scope screen controls. He must have studied Kzinti symbology, somewhere.
The view in the scope screen was like Earth seen from a great height. Mountains, lakes. valleys, rivers, large bare spots that might be desert.
“Desert?”
“So it would seem, Louis. Speaker took temperature and humidity spectra. Evidence accumulates that the Ringworld has reverted to savagery, at least in part. Why else would there be deserts?
“We found another deep salt ocean on the opposite side of the ring, as big as the one on this side. Spectra confirmed the salt. Clearly the engineers found it necessary to balance such tremendous masses of water.”
Louis bit into his handmeal.
“Your suggestion was a good one,” Nessus remarked. “You may be our most skilled diplomat, despite Speaker’s training and mine. It was after we turned the scope on the shadow squares that Speaker agreed to a closer look.”
“Oh? Why?”
“We found a peculiarity. The shadow squares are moving at a speed comfortably greater than orbital velocity.” Louis stopped chewing.
“That is not impossible,” the puppeteer added. “The shadow squares may hold matching stable elliptical orbits. They need not maintain a constant distance from the primary.”
Louis swallowed mightily to clear the way for speech. “That’s crazy. The length of the day would vary!”
Teela said, “We thought it might be to separate summer from winter, by making the nights shorter and then longer. But that doesn’t make sense either.”
“No, it doesn’t. The shadow squares make their circuit in less than a month. Who needs a three-week year?”
“You see the problem,” said Nessus. “The abnormality was too small to detect from our own system. What causes it? Does gravity increase anomalously near the primary, requiring a higher orbital speed? In any case, the shadow objects merit a closer look.”
Passing time was marked by the sharp black edge of a shadow square passing across the sun.
Presently the kzin left his room, exchanged civilities with the humans in the lounge, and replaced Nessus in the control room.
Shortly thereafter he emerged. There was no sound to indicate trouble; but Louis suddenly saw that the puppeteer was backing away from a murderous Kzinti glare. Speaker was ready to kill.
“Okay,” Louis said resignedly. “What’s the trouble?”
“This leaf-eater,” the kzin began, and strangled on his anger. He started over. “Our schizophrenic leader-from-behind has had us in a minimum-fuel orbit since I went to rest. At this rate it will take us four months to reach the belt of shadow squares.” And Speaker began to curse in the Hero’s Tongue.
“You put us in that orbit yourself,” the puppeteer said mildly.
The kzin’s voice rose in volume. “It was my intention to leave the Ringworld slowly, so that we might have a long look at the inner surface. We might then accelerate directly toward the shadow squares, arriving within hours instead of months!”
“There is no need to bellow, Speaker. If we accelerate toward the shadow squares, our projected orbit will intersect the Ringworld. I wish to avoid that.”
“He can aim for the sun,” said Teela.
They all turned to look at her.
“If the Ringworlders are afraid that we’ll hit them,” Teela explained patiently, “then they’re probably projecting our course. If our projected course hits the sun, then we’re not dangerous. See?”
“That would work,” said Speaker.
The puppeteer shuddered. “You are the pilot. Do as you like, but do not forget—“
“I do not intend to fly us through the sun. In due time I will match our course to the shadow squares.” And the kzin stomped back into the control room. It is not easy for a kzin to stomp.
Presently the ship turned parallel to the ring. There was little sense of anything happening; the kzin, following orders, was using thrusters only. Speaker killed the ship’s orbital velocity, so that the ship was falling toward the sun; and then he swung the nose inward and began to increase velocity.
The Ringworld was a broad blue band marked with ripples and clots of blazing white cloud. It was receding visibly now. Speaker was in a hurry.
Louis dialed two bulbs of mocha and handed one to Teela.
He could understand the kzin’s anger. The Ringworld terrified him. He was convinced he would have to land ... and desperate to get it over with before he lost his nerve.
Presently Speaker returned to the lounge. “We will reach the shadow square orbit in fourteen hours. Nessus, we warriors of the Patriarchy are taught patience from childhood, but you leaf-eaters have the patience of a corpse.”
“We’re moving,” said Louis, and half rose. For the ship’s nose was swinging aside from the sun.
Nessus screamed and leapt the length of the lounge. He was in the air when the Liar lit up like the interior of a flashbulb. The ship lurched—
Discontinuity.
The ship lurched despite the cabin gravity. Louis snatched at the back of a chair and caught it; Teela fell with incredible accuracy into her own crash couch; the puppeteer was folded into a ball as he struck a wall. All in an intense violet glare. The darkness lasted only an instant, to be replaced by glowing light the color of a UV tube.
It was coming from outside, from all around the hull.
Speaker must have finished aiming the Liar and turned it over to the autopilot. And then, thought Louis, the autopilot must have reviewed Speaker’s course, decided that the sun was a meteoroid large enough to be dangerous, and taken steps to avoid it.
The cabin gravity was back to normal. Louis picked himself off the floor. He was unhurt. So, apparently, was Teela. She was standing along the wall, peering sternward through the violet light.
“Half my instrument board is dead,” Speaker announced.
“So are half your instruments,” said Teela. “The wing’s gone.”
“Excuse me?”
“The wing’s gone.”
So it was. So was everything that had been attached to the wing: thrusters, fusion plants, communication equipment pods, landing gear. The hull had been polished clean. Nothing was left of the Liar save what had been protected by the General Products hull.
“We have been fired upon,” said Speaker. “We are still being fired upon, probably by X-ray lasers. This ship is now in a state of war. Accordingly I take command.”
Nessus was not arguing. He was still curled in a ball. Louis
knelt beside him and probed with his hands.
“Finagle knows I’m no doctor for aliens. I can’t see that he’s been hurt.”
“He is merely frightened. He attempts to hide in his own belly. You and Teela will strap him down and leave him.”
Louis was not surprised to find himself obeying orders. He was badly shaken. A moment ago this had been a spacecraft. Now it was little more than a glass needle falling toward the sun.
They lifted the puppeteer into the crash couch, his own, and tied him down with the crash web.
“We face no peaceful culture,” said the kzin. “An X-ray laser is invariably a weapon of war. Were it not for our invulnerable hull we would be dead.”
Louis said, “The Slaver stasis field must have gone on too. No telling how long we were in stasis.”
“A few seconds,” Teela corrected him. “That violet light has to be the fog of metal from our wing, fluorescing.”
“Excited by the laser. Right. It’s dissipating, I think.” True enough, the glow was already less intense.
“Unfortunate that our automatics are so single-mindedly defensive. Trust a puppeteer to know nothing of attack weapons!” said Speaker. “Even our fusion motors were on the wing. And still the enemy fire on us! But they will learn what it means to attack a kzin.”
“You’re going to chase them down?”
Speaker did not recognize sarcasm. “I am.”
“With what?” Louis exploded. “You know what they left us? A hyperdrive and a lifesystem, that’s what they left us! We haven’t got so much as a pair of attitude jets. You’ve got delusions of grandeur if you think we can fight a war in this!”
“So the enemy believes! Little do they know—“
“What enemy?”
“—that in challenging a kzin—“
“Automatics, you dolt! An enemy would have started shooting the moment we came in range!”
“I too have wondered at their unusual strategy.”
“Automatics! X-ray lasers for blasting meteors. Programmed to shoot down anything that might hit the ring. The moment our projected freely falling orbit intercepted the ring, pow! Lasers.”
“That ... is possible.” The kzin began closing panels over dead portions of the control board. “But I hope you are wrong.”
“Sure. It’d help if you had someone to blame, wouldn’t it?”
“It would help if our course did not intercept the ring.” The kzin had closed off half the board. He continued to close panels as he talked. “Our velocity is high. It will take us out of the system, beyond the local discontinuity, to where we can use the hyperdrive to return to the puppeteer fleet. But first we must miss the ring.”
Louis hadn’t thought that far ahead. “You had to be in a hurry, didn’t you?” he said bitterly.
“At least we will miss the sun. The automatics will not have fired until our projected course circled the sun.”
“The lasers are still on,” Teela reported. “I can see stars through the glow, but the glow is still there. That means were still aimed at the ring surface, doesn’t it?”
“It does if the lasers are automatic.”
“If we hit the ring, will we be killed?”
“Ask Nessus. His race built the Liar. See if you can get him to unroll.”
The kzin snorted in disgust. By now he had closed off most of the control board. Only a pitiful few lights still glowed to show that part of the Liar lived on.
Teela Brown bent over the puppeteer, who was still curled into a ball behind the fragile netting of his crash web. Contrary to Louis’s prediction, she had shown not the least sign of panic since the beginning of the laser attack. Now she slid her hands along the bases of the puppeteer’s necks, scratching gently, as she had seen Louis do once before.
“You’re being a silly coward,” she rebuked the frightened puppeteer. “Come on and show your heads. Come on, look at me. You’ll miss all the excitement!”
Twelve hours later, Nessus was still effectively in catatonia.
“When I try to coax him out, he only curls up tighter,” Teela was near tears. They had retired to their room for dinner, but Teela couldn’t eat anything. “I’m doing it wrong, Louis. I know it.”
“You keep stressing excitement. Nessus isn’t after excitement,” Louis pointed out. “Forget it. He isn’t hurting himself or us. When he’s needed he’ll uncurl, if only to protect himself. Meanwhile let him hide in his own belly.”
Teela paced awkwardly, half-stumbling; she still hadn’t completely adjusted to the difference between ship’s gravity and Earth’s gravity. She started to speak, changed her mind, changed it again, and blurted, “Are you scared?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought so,” she nodded, and resumed pacing. Presently she asked, “Why isn’t Speaker scared?”
For the kzin had been nothing but active since the attack: cataloguing weaponry, doing primitive trig calculations to plot their course, occasionally delivering concise, reasonable orders in a manner to command instant obedience.
“I think Speaker’s terrified. Remember how he acted when he saw the puppeteer worlds? He’s terrified, but he won’t let Nessus know it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I don’t! Why is everyone frightened but me?”
Love and pity tore at Louis’s insides with a pain so old, so nearly forgotten that it was almost now. I’m new here, and everyone knows but me! “Nessus was half right,” he tried to explain “You’ve never been hurt at all, have you? You’re too lucky to be hurt. We’re afraid of being hurt, but you don’t understand, because it’s never happened to you.”
“That’s crazy. I’ve never broken a bone or anything—but that’s not a psi power!”
“No. Luck isn’t psi. Luck is statistics, and you’re a mathematical fluke. Out of forty-three billion human beings in known space, it would have been surprising if Nessus hadn’t found someone like you. Don’t yon see what he did?
“He took the group of people who were descendants of winners of the Birthright Lotteries. He says there were thousands, but it’s a good bet that if he hadn’t found what he was after in those thousands, he would have started looking through the larger group of people with one or more ancestors born through the Lotteries. That gives him tens of millions of choices ...”
“What was he after?”
“You. He took his several thousand people and started eliminating the unlucky ones. Here a man broke his finger when he was thirteen. This girl had personality problems. That one had acne. This man gets in fights and loses. That one won a fight, but lost the lawsuit. This guy flew model rockets until he burnt a thumbnail off. This girl loses constantly at roulette ... You see? You’re the girl who’s always won. The toast never falls on the buttered side.”
Teela was looking thoughtful. “It’s a probability thing then. But, Louis, I don’t always win at roulette.”
“But you never lost enough to hurt you.”
“No.”
“That’s what Nessus looked for.”
“You’re saying I’m some kind of freak.”
“No, tanj it! I’m saying you’re not. Nessus kept eliminating candidates who were unlucky, until he wound up with you. He thinks found some basic principle. All he’s really found is the far end of a normal curve.
“Probability theory says you exist. It also says that the next time you flip a coin, your chances of losing are just as good as mine: fifty-fifty, because Lady Luck has no memory at all.”
Teela dropped into a chair. “A fine good luck charm I turned out to be. Poor Nessus. I failed him.”
“Serves him right.”
The corners of her mouth twitched. “We could
check it out.”
“What?”
“Dial a piece of toast. Start flipping it.”
The shadow square was blacker than black, of the expensively achieved, definitive black used in high school black-body experiments. One corner notched an acute angle into the blue broken line of the Ringworld. With that notch as a mark, a brain and eye could sketch in the rest of it, a narrow oblong of space-blackness, suspiciously void of stars. Already it cut off a good chunk of sky; and it was growing.
Louis wore bulbous goggles of a material that developed black spots under the impact of too much vertically impinging light. Polarization in the hull was no longer enough. Speaker, who was in the control room controlling whatever was left to control, also wore a pair. They had found two separate leases, each on a short strap, and managed to force them on Nessus.
To Louis’s goggled eyes, the sun, twelve million miles distant, was a blurred rim of flame around a wide, solid black disc. Everything was hot to the touch. The breathing-air plant was a howling wind.
Teela opened her cabin door and hastily shut it again. Presently she reappeared wearing goggles. She joined Louis at the lounge table.
The shadow square was a looming absence. It was as if a wet cloth had swept across a blackboard, erasing a swath of chalk-mark stars.
The howl of the air plant made speech impossible.
How would it dump the heat, out here where the sun was a looming furnace? It couldn’t, Louis decided. It must be storing the heat. Somewhere in the breathing-air circuit was a point as hot as a star, growing hotter by the second.
One more thing to worry about.
The black oblong continued to swell.
It was the size that made it seem to approach so slowly. The shadow square was as broad as the sun, nearly a million miles across, and much longer: two-and-a-half million miles long. Almost suddenly, it became tremendous. Its edge slid across the sun, and there was darkness.
The shadow square covered half the universe. Its borders were indefinite, black-on-black, terrible to see.
Part of the ship glowed white behind the block of cabins. The air plant was radiating waste heat while it had the chance. Louis shrugged and turned back to watch the shadow square.