by Larry Niven
The scream of breathing-air stopped. It left a ringing in the ears.
“Well,” Teela said awkwardly.
Speaker came out of the control room. “A pity the scope screen is no longer connected to anything. There are so many questions it could answer.”
“Like what?” Louis half-shouted.
“Why are the shadow squares moving at more than orbital velocity? Are they indeed power generators for the engineers? What holds them face-down to the sun? All the questions the leaf-eater asked could be answered, if we had a working scope screen.”
“Are we going to hit the sun?”
“Of course not. I told you that, Louis. We will be behind the shadow square for half an hour. Then, an hour later, we will pass between the next shadow square and the sun. If the cabin becomes too hot we can always activate the stasis field.”
The ringing silence closed in. The shadow square was a featureless field of black, without boundaries. A human eye can draw no data from pure black.
Presently the sun came out. Again the cabin was filled with the howl of the air plant.
Louis searched the sky ahead until he found another shadow square. He was watching its approach when the lightning struck again.
It looked like lightning. It came like lightning, without warning. There was a moment of terrible light, white with a violet tinge. The ship lurched—
Discontinuity.
lurched, and the light was gone. Louis reached under his goggles with two forefingers to rub dazzled eyes.
“What was that?” Teela exclaimed.
Louis’s vision cleared slowly. He saw that Nessus had exposed a goggled head; that Speaker was at work in one of the lockers; that Teela was staring at him. No, at something behind him. He turned.
The sun was a wide black disc, smaller than it had been, outlined in yellow-white flame. It had shrunk considerably during the moment in stasis. The moment must have lasted hours. The scream of the air plant had faded to an irritating whine.
Something else burned out there.
It was a looping thread of black, very narrow, outlined in violet-white. There seemed to be no endpoints. One end faded into the black patch that hid the sun. The other diminished ahead of the Liar, until it was too small to see.
The thread was writhing like an injured earthworm.
“We seem to have hit something,” Nessus said calmly. It was as if he had never been away. “Speaker, you must go outside to investigate. Please don your suit.”
“We are in a state of war,” the kzin answered. “I command.”
“Excellent. What will you do now?”
The kzin had sense enough to remain silent. He had nearly finished donning the multiple balloon and heavy backpack which served him as a pressure suit. Obviously he intended to go out for a look.
He went out on one of the flycycles: a dumbbell-shaped thruster-powered vehicle with an armchair seat in the constriction.
They watched him maneuver alongside the writhing thread of black. It had cooled considerably; for the fringe of brightness around the goggle-induced black had dimmed from violet-white through white-white to orange-white. They watched Speaker’s dark bulk leave the flycycle and move about near the heated, writhing wire.
They could hear him breathing. Once they heard a startled snarling sound. But he never said a word into the suit phone. He was out there a fall half-hour, while the heated thing darkened to near-invisibility.
Presently he returned to the Liar. When he entered the lounge, he had their complete and respectful attention.
“It was no thicker than thread,” said the kzin. “You will notice that I hold half a grippy.”
He held up the ruined tool for them to see. The grippy had been cut cleanly along a plane surface, and the cut surface polished to mirror brightness.
“When I was close enough to see how thin the thread was, I swung the grippy at it. The thread cut cleanly through the steel. I felt only the slightest of togs.”
Louis said, “A variable-sword would do that.”
“But a variable-sword blade is a metal wire enclosed in a Slaver stasis field. It cannot bend. This—thread was in constant motion, as you saw.”
“Something new, then.” Something that cut like a variable-sword. Light, thin, strong, beyond human skill. Something that stayed solid at temperatures where a natural substance would become a plasma. “Something really new. But what was it doing in our way?”
“Consider. We were passing between shadow squares when we hit something unidentified. Subsequently we found a seemingly infinite length of thread, at a temperature comparable to the interior of a hot star. Obviously we hit the thread. It retained the heat of impact. I surmise that it was strung between the shadow squares.”
“Probably was. But why?”
“We can only speculate. Consider,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “The Ringworld engineers used the shadow squares to provide intervals of night. To fulfill their purpose, the rectangles must occlude. sunlight They would fail if they drifted edge-on to the sun.
“The Ringworld engineers used their strange thread to join the rectangles together in a chain. They spun the chain at faster than orbital speed in order to put tension on the threads. The threads are taut, the rectangles are held flat to the ring.”
It made an odd picture. Twenty shadow squares in a Maypole dance, their edges joined by threads cut to lengths of five million miles ... “We need that thread,” said Louis. “There’s no limit to what we could do with it.”
“I had no way to bring it aboard. Or to cut a length of it, for that matter.”
The Puppeteer interposed. “Our course may have been changed by the collision. Is there any way to determine if we will miss the Ringworld?”
Nobody could think of one.
“We may miss the ring, yet the collision may have taken too much of our momentum. We may fall forever in an elliptical orbit,” lamented the puppeteer. “Teela, your luck has played us false.”
She shrugged. “I never told you I was a good luck charm.”
“It was the Hindmost who so misinformed me. Were he here now, I would have rude words for my arrogant fiancé’.”
Dinner that night became a ritual. The crew of the Liar took a last supper in the lounge. Teela Brown was hurtingly beautiful across the table, in a flowing, floating black-and-tangerine garment that couldn’t have weighed as much as an ounce.
Behind her shoulder, the Ringworld was slowly swelling. Occasionally Teela turned to watch it. They all did. But where Louis had to guess at the feelings of the aliens, in Teela he saw only eagerness. She felt it, as he did: they would not miss the Ringworld.
In his lovemaking that night there was a ferocity that startled, then delighted her. “So that’s what fear does to you! I’ll have to remember.”
He could not smile back. “I keep thinking that this could be the last time.” With anyone, he added, to himself.
“Oh, Louis. Were in a General Products hull!”
“Suppose the stasis field doesn’t go on? The hull might survive the impact, but we’d be jelly.”
“For Finagle’s sake, stop worrying!” She ran her fingernails across his back, reaching around from both sides. He pulled her close, so that she couldn’t see his face ...
When she was deeply asleep, floating like a lovely dream between the sleeping plates, he left her. Exhausted, satiated, he lolled in a hot bathtub with a bulb of cold bourbon balanced on the rim.
There had been pleasures to sample one more time.
Baby blue with white streaks, navy blue with no details, the Ringworld spread across the sky. At first only the cloud cover showed detail: storms, parallel streamers, woolly fleece, all diminu
tive. Growing. Then outlines of seas ... the Ringworld was approximately half water ...
Nessus was in his couch, strapped down, curled protectively around himself. Speaker and Teela and Louis Wu, strapped down and watching.
“Better watch this,” Louis advised the puppeteer. “Topography could be important later.”
Nessus obliged: one flat python head emerged to watch the impending landscape.
Oceans, bent lightning-forks of river, a string of mountains.
No sign of life below. You’d have to be less than a thousand miles up to see signs of civilization. The Ringworld went past, snatching detail away almost before it could be recognized. Detail wasn’t going to matter, it was being pulled from beneath them. They would strike unknown, unseen territory.
Estimated intrinsic velocity of ship: two hundred miles per second. Easily enough to carry them safely out of the system, had not the Ringworld intervened.
The land rose up and sidewise, 770 miles per second sidewise. Slantwise, a salamander-shaped sea came at them, growing, underneath, gone. Suddenly the landscape blazed violet!
Discontinuity.
Chapter 10 -
The Ring Floor
An instant of light, violet-white, flashbulb-bright. A hundred miles of atmosphere, compressed in an instant to a star-hot cone of plasma, slapped the Liar hard across the nose. Louis blinked.
L4Duis blinked, and they were down.
He heard Teela’s frustrated complaint: “Tanj! We missed it all!”
And the puppeteer’s answer: “To witness titanic events is always dangerous, usually painful, and often fatal. Be grateful for the Slaver stasis field, if not for your undependable luck.”
Louis heard these things and ignored them. He was horribly dizzy as eyes tried to find a level ...
The sudden transition, from terrible fall to stable ground, would have been dizzying enough without the Liar’s attitude to make it worse. The Liar was forty-five degrees short of being exactly upside down. With her cabin gravity still working perfectly, she wore the landscape like a tilted hat.
The sky was a high-noon sky from Earth’s temperate zone. The landscape was puzzling: shiny-flat and translucent, with distant reddish-brown ridges. One would have to go outside to see it properly.
Louis released his crash web and stood up.
His balance was precarious; for his eyes and his inner ear disagreed on the direction of down. He took it slowly. Easy. No hurry. The emergency was over.
He turned, and Teela was in the airlock. She was not wearing a pressure suit. The inner door was just closing. He bellowed, “Teela, you silly leucoto, come out of there!”
Too late. She couldn’t possibly have heard him through the closed hermetic seal. Louis sprang to the lockers.
The air samplers on the Liar’s wing had been vaporized with the rest of the Liar’s external sensors. He would have to go out in a pressure suit and use the chest sensors to find out if the Ringworld’s air could be breathed safely.
Unless Teela collapsed and died before he could get out. Then he would know.
The outer door was opening.
Automatically the internal gravity went off in the airlock. Teela Brown dropped headfirst through the open door, clutched frantically for a door jamb, had it for just long enough to change her angle of fall. She landed on her tail instead of her skull.
Lows climbed into his pressure suit, zipped up the chest, donned the helmet and closed the clamps. Outside and overhead, Teela was on her feet, rubbing herself where she had landed. She hadn’t stopped breathing, thank Finagle for his forebearance.
Louis entered the lock. No point in checking his suit’s air. He’d only be in the suit long enough for the instruments to tell him if he could breath outside air.
He remembered the tilt of the ship in time to grab at the jamb as the airlock opened. As the cabin gravity went off Louis swung around, hung by his hands for an instant, and dropped.
His feet shot out from under him the moment they touched ground. He landed hard on his gluteus maximi.
The flat, grayish, translucent material beneath the ship was terribly slippery. Louis tried once to stand, then gave it up. Sitting, he examined the dials on his chest.
His helmet spoke to him in Speaker’s furry voice.
“Louis.”
“Yeah.”
“Is the air breathable?”
“Yeah. Thin, though. Say a mile above sea level, Earth standard.”
“Shall we come out?”
“Sure, but bring a line into the lock and tie it to something. Otherwise we’ll never get back up. Watch out when you get down. The surface is almost frictionless.”
Teela was having no trouble with the slippery surface. She stood awkwardly, with her arms folded, waiting for Louis to quit fooling around and take off his helmet.
He did. “I have something to tell you,” he said. And he spoke rudely to her.
He spoke of the uncertainties in spectroanalysis of an atmosphere from two light years away. He spoke of subtle poisoning metal compounds, and strange dusts, organic wastes and catalysts, which can poison an otherwise breathable atmosphere, and which can only be detected from on actual air sample. He spoke of criminal carelessness and culpable stupidity; he spoke of the unwisdom in volunteering one’s services as a guinea pig. He said it all before the aliens could leave the airlock.
Speaker came down hand over hand, landed on his feet and moved a few steps away, cat-careful, balanced like a dancer. Neesus came down gripping the rope with alternate sets of teeth. He landed in tripod position.
If either of them noticed that Teela was upset, they gave no sign. They stood below the tilted hull of the Liar, looking about them.
They were in an enormous, shallow gully. Its floor was translucent gray and perfectly flat and smooth, like a vast glass tabletop. Its borders, a hundred yards from the ship in either direction, were gentle slopes of black lava. The lava seemed to ripple and flow before Louis’s eyes. It must be still hot, he decided, from the impact of the Liar’s landing. The shallow lava walls stretched away behind the ship, away and away, perfectly straight, until they dwindled to a vanishing point.
Louis tried to stand up. Of the four of them he was the only one having trouble with his balance. He reached his foot, then stood precariously balanced, unable to move.
Speaker-To-Animals unsheathed his flashlight-laser and fired at a point near his feet. They watched the point of green light ... in silence. There was no crackle of solid material exploding into vapor. No steam or smoke formed where the beam struck. When Speaker released the trigger button, the light was gone instantly; the spot was not glowing, nor was it marked in any way.
Speaker delivered the verdict. “We are in a furrow plowed by our own landing. The ring foundation material must have ultimately stopped our fall. Nessus, what can you tell us about it?”
“This is something new,” the puppeteer answered. “It seems to retain no heat. Yet it is not a variant on the General Products hall, nor on the Slaver stasis field.”
“We’ll need protection to climb the walls,” said Louis. He wasn’t particularly interested in the ring foundation material. Not then. “You’d better stay here, all of you, while I climb up.”
After all, he was the only one wearing a heat-insulated pressure suit.
“I’ll come along,” said Teela. Moving without effort, she came up under his arm. He leaned heavily on her, stumbling but not falling, as they moved toward the black lava slope.
The lava was good footing, though steep. “Thanks,” he said, and he started up. A moment later he realized that Teela was following him. He said nothing. The faster she learned to look before she leapt, the longer she’d live.
It could have been worse, Louis told himself. She could have slipped and fallen and burned her bare hands—and he’d still have been right. He continued to climb, repressing ugly pangs of guilt.
The bank of lava was approximately forty feet high. At the top it gave way to clean white sand.
They had landed in a desert. Searching the near distance with his eyes, Louis could find no sign of vegetation-green or water-blue. That was a piece of luck. The Liar could as easily have plowed through a city.
Or through several cities! The Liar had plowed quite a furrow ...
It stretched long miles across the white sand. In the distance, beyond where that gouge ended, another began. The ship had bounced, not once, but many times. The gouge of the Liar’s landing went on and on, narrowing to no more than a dotted line, a trace ... Louis let his eyes follow that trace, and he found himself looking into infinity.
The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky. Rather, earth and sky seemed to merge in a region where details the size of continents would have been mere points, where all colors blended gradually into the blue of sky. The vanishing point held his eyes fixed. When he blinked, as he finally did, it was with deliberate effort.
Like the void mist of Mount Lookitthat, seen decades ago and light-centuries away ... like the undistorted deeps of space, as seen by a Belt miner in a singleship ... the Ringworld’s horizon could grip the eye and the mind of a man before he was aware of the danger.
Louis turned to face into the gully. He shouted, “The world is flat!”
They looked up at him.
“We ripped quite a line coming down. I can’t see that there’s anything living around here, so we were lucky. Where we hit, the earth splashed; I can see a scattering of small craters, secondary meteorites, back along the way we came.