by Larry Niven
He took up a stance behind the kzin.
Control panels surrounded the screen. All the knobs were large and massive, made of silver, and each was carved to represent the head of some animal. The boards were contoured in swirls and curves. Prettified, Louis thought. Decadent?
The screen was alight, but unmagnified. Looking into it was like looking down on the Ringworld from the vicinity of the shadow squares. Louis felt a touch of deja vu.
“I had it focused earlier,” said the kzin. “If I remember rightly ...” He touched a knob, and the view expanded so fast that Louis’s hand clutched for a throttle. “I want to show you the rim wall. Rrrr, a bit off ...” He touched another fierce-visaged knob, and the view slid. They were looking over the edge of the Ringworld.
Somewhere were telescopes to give them this view. Where? Mounted on the shadow squares?
They were looking down on thousand mile-high mountains. Still the view expanded as Speaker found ever-finer controls. Louis marveled at how abruptly the mountains, appearing very natural but for their size, were cut by the knife-edged shadow of space.
Then he saw what ran along the peaks of the mountains.
Though it was only a line of silver dots, he knew what it would be. “A linear accelerator.”
“Yes,” said Speaker. “Without transfer booths, it is the only feasible way to travel Ringworld distances. It must have been the major transport system.”
“But it’s a thousand miles high. Elevators?”
“I found elevator shafts an along the rim wall. There, for instance.” By now the silver thread was a line of tiny loops, widely spaced, each hidden from the land below by a mountain peak. A tube so slender as to be barely visible led from one of the loops, down the slop of a mountain, into a layer of clouds at the bottom of the Ringworld atmosphere.
Speaker said, “The electromagnetic loops cluster thickly around the elevator shafts. Elsewhere they are up to a million miles apart. I surmise that they are not needed except for starting and stopping and guidance. A car could be accelerated to free fall, coast around the rim at a relative 770 miles per second, to be stopped near an elevator tube by another cluster of loops.”
“It’d take up to ten days to get a man where he wants to go. Not counting accelerations.”
“Trivial. It takes you sixty days to reach Silvereyes, the human world farthest from Earth. You would need four times that long to cross known space from edge to edge.”
True. And the living area on the Ringworld was greater than that of all known space. They built for room when they built this thing. Louis asked, “Did you see any sign of activity? Is anyone still using the linear accelerator?”
“The question is meaningless. Let me show you.” The view converged, slid sidewise, expanded slowly. It was night. Dark clouds diverged over dark land, and then ...
“City lights. Well.” Louis swallowed. It had come too suddenly. “So it’s not all dead. We can get help.”
“I do not think so. This may be difficult to find ... ah.”
“Finagle’s black mind!”
The castle, obviously their own castle, floated serenely above a field of light. Windows, neon, streams of floating light motes which must be vehicles ... oddly shaped floating buildings ... lovely.
“Tapes. Tanjit! We’re watching old tapes. I thought they must be live transmissions.” For one glorious moment it had seemed that their search was over—lighted, bustling cities, pinpointed on a map for them ... but these pictures must be ages old, civilizations old.
“I thought so also, for many hours last night. I did not suspect the truth until I failed to find the thousands of miles of meteor crater slashed by the Liar’s landing.”
Louis, speechless, thwacked the kzin on his nude pink- and-lavender shoulder. It was as high as he could reach.
The kzin ignored the liberty. “After I had located the castle, things proceeded quickly. Observe.” He caused the view to slide rapidly to port. The dark land blurred, lost all detail. Then they were over black ocean.
The camera seemed to back up ...
“You see? A bay of one of the major salt oceans falls across our path to the rim wall. The ocean itself is several times as large as any on Kzin or Earth. The bay is as large as our largest ocean.”
“More delay! Can’t we go over it?”
“Perhaps we can. But we face greater delay than that.” The kzin reached for a knob.
“Hold it. I want a closer look at those groups of islands!”
“Why, Louis? That we might stop for provisions?”
“No ... Do you see how they tend to form clusters, with wide stretches of deep water between? Take that grouping there.” Louis’s forefinger circled images on the screen. “Now look up at that map.”
“I do not understand.”
“And that grouping in what you called a bay, and that map behind you. The continents in the conic projections are a little distorted ... See it now? Ten worlds, ten clusters of islands. They aren’t one-to-one scale; but I’ll bet that island is as big as Australia, and the original continent does not look any bigger than Eurasia on the globe.”
“What a macabre jest. Louis, does this represent a typically human sense of humor?”
“No, no, no. Sentiment! Unless—“
“Yes?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. The first generation—they had to throw away their own worlds, but they wanted to keep something of what they were losing. Three generations later it would be funny. It’s always that way.”
When the kzin was sure Louis had finished, he asked somewhat diffidently, “Do you humans feel that you understand Kzinti?”
Louis smiled—and shook his head.
“Good,” said the kzin, and changed the subject. “I spent some time last night examining the nearest spaceport.”
They stood at the hub of the miniature Ringworld, looking through a rectangular window into the past.
The past they saw was one of magnificent achievement. Speaker had focused the screen on the spaceport, a wide projecting ledge on the spaceward side of the rim wall. They watched as an enormous blunt-ended cylinder, alight with a thousand windows, was landed in electromagnetic cradling fields. The fields glowed in pastel shades, probably so that the operators could manipulate them visually.
“The tape is looped,” said Speaker. “I watched it for some time last night. The passengers seem to walk directly into the rim wall, as if a kind of osmosis process were being used.”
“Yeah.” Louis was badly depressed. The spaceport ledge was far to spinward of them—a distance to dwarf the distance they had already traveled.
“I watched a ship take off. They did not use the linear accelerator. They use it only for landings, to match the velocity of the ship to that of the spaceport. For takeoffs they simply tumble the ship off into space.
“It was as the leaf-eater guessed, Louis. Remember the trap door arrangement? The Ringworld spins easily fast enough for a ramscoop field to operate. Louis, are you listening?”
Louis shook himself. “Sorry. All I can think about is that this adds about seven hundred thousand miles to our trip.”
“It may be possible to use the main transport system, the small linear accelerator at the top of the rim wall.”
“Not a chance. It’s probably wrecked. Civilization tends to spread, if there’s a transport system to spread it. And even if we can got it working, we aren’t moving toward an elevator shaft.”
“That is true,” said the kzin. “I looked for one.”
In the rectangular screen, the ship was down. Floating trucks ran a jointed tube to the ship’s main lock. Passengers spilled into the tube.
“Shall we change our goal?�
�
“We can’t. The spaceport is still our best chance.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, tanjit! Big as it is, the Ringworld is a colony world. Civilization always centers around the spaceport on a colony world.”
“Because craft come from the home world, carrying news of technological innovations. We surmise that the Ringworlders have abandoned their home world.”
“But the ships can still come in,” Louis said doggedly. “From the abandoned worlds! From centuries ago! Ramships are subject to relativity, to time dilation.”
“You hope to find old spacemen trying to teach the old skills to savages who have forgotten them. And you may be right,” said Speaker. “But I weary of this structure, and the spaceport is very far. What else can I show you on the map screen?”
Suddenly Louis asked, “How far have we come since we left the Liar?”
“I told you I could not find our impact crater. Your guess is as accurate as mine. But I know how far we must go. From the castle to the rim is approximately two hundred thousand miles.”
“A long way ... But you must have found the mountain.”
“No.”
“The big one. Fist-of-God. We crashed practically on its slope.”
“No.”
“I don’t like that. Speaker, is there any way we could have gotten off course? You should have found Fist-of-God just by backtracking starboard from the castle.”
“But I did not,” Speaker said with finality. “Do you wish to see anything more? For example, there are blank areas. Probably they are due only to worn tape, but I wondered if they might not conceal places on the Ringworld whose nature is secret.”
“But we’d have to go there ourselves to find out.”
Speaker suddenly turned to face the double doors, his ears spread like fans. Silently he dropped to all fours, and leapt.
Louis blinked. What could have caused that? And then he heard it ...
Considering its age, the castle machinery had been remarkably silent. Now there came a low-pitched hum from outside the double doors.
Speaker was out of sight. Louis drew his flashlight-laser and followed cautiously.
He found the kzin at the head of the stairs. He put the weapon away; and together they watched Teela ride up.
“They only go up,” Teela told them. “Not down. The one between the sixth and seventh floors won’t go at all.”
Louis asked the obvious question. “How do you make them move?”
“You just grip the banister and push forward. That way it won’t go unless you’re hanging on. Safer. I only found out by accident.”
“You would. I climbed ten flights of stairs this morning. How many did you climb before you found out?”
“None. I was going up for breakfast, and I tripped on the first step and grabbed for the banister.”
“Right. it figures.”
Teela looked hurt. “It’s not my fault if you—“
“Sorry. Did you get your breakfast?”
“No. I’ve been watching people move around below us. Did you know there’s a public square just under the building?”
Speaker's ears opened wide. “Is there? And it is not deserted?”
“No. They’ve been filing in from all directions, all morning. By now there must be hundreds of them.” She smiled like dawn breaking. “And they’re singing.”
There were wide spots along all the corridors of the castle. Each such alcove was furnished with rugs and couches and tables, apparently so that any group of strollers could take a meal whenever he fancied, wherever he might be. In one such dining-nook, near the “basement level” of the castle, was a long window bent at right angles to form half a wall, half a floor.
Louis was panting a little from having descended ten flights of stairs. He found himself fascinated by the dining table. Its top seemed—sculpted; but the contours were shaped and placed to suggest soup plates, salad or butter or dinner plates, or coasters for the bottom of a mug. Decades or centuries of use had stained the hard white material.
“You wouldn’t use plates,” Louis speculated. “You’d dish the food into the depressions, and hose the table off afterward.”
It seemed unsanitary, but --? “They wouldn’t bring flies or mosquitoes or wolves. Why should they bring bacteria?
“Colonic bacteria,” he answered himself. “For digestion. And if one bacterium mutated, turned vicious—“ By then there would be no immunity to anything. Was that how the Ringworld civilization had died? Any civilization requires a minimum number to maintain it.
Teela and Speaker were paying him no attention. They knelt in the bend of the window, looking down. Louis went to join them.
“They’re still at it,” said Teela. And they were. Louis guessed that a thousand people were looking up at him. They were not chanting now.
“They can’t know were here,” he said.
Speaker suggested, “Perhaps they worship the building.”
“Even so, they can’t do this every day. We’re too far from the edge of town. They couldn’t reach the fields.”
“Perhaps we happened by on a special day, the holy day.”
Teela said, “Maybe something happened last night. Something special, like us, if someone spotted us after all. Or like that.” She pointed.
“I wondered about that,” said Speaker. “How long has it been falling?”
“Since I woke up, at least. It’s like a rain, or a new kind of snow. Wire from the shadow squares, mile after mile of it. Why do you suppose it fell here?”
Louis thought of six million miles of distance between each shadow square ... of an entire six-million-mile strand torn loose by its impact with the Liar ... falling with the Liar toward the Ringworld landscape, on nearly the same course. It was hardly surprising that they had come across part of that enormous strand.
He was not in a long-winded mood. “Coincidence,” he said.
“Anyway, it’s draped all over us, and it’s been falling since last night, probably. The natives must have worshipped the castle already, because it floats.”
“Consider,” the kzin said slowly. “If Ringworld engineers were to appear today, floating down from this floating castle, it would be taken as more appropriate than surprising. Louis, shall we try the God Gambit?”
Louis turned to answer-and couldn’t. He could only try to keep a straight face. He might have made it, but Speaker was explaining to Teela:
“It was Louis’s suggestion that we might succeed better with the natives by posing as Ringworld engineers. You and Louis were to be acolytes. Nessus was to be a captive demon; but we can hope to do without him. I was to be more god than engineer, a kind of war god—“
Then Teela started to laugh, and Louis broke up.
Eight feet tall, inhumanly broad across the shoulders and hips, the kzin was too big and too toothy to be other than fearsome, even when burnt bald. His ratlike tail had always been his least impressive feature. Now his skin was the same color: baby pink crisscrossed with lavender capillaries. Without the fur to bulk out his head, his ears became ungainly pink parasols. Orange fur made a domino mask across his eyes, and he seemed to have grown his own fluffy orange pillow to sit on.
The danger of laughing at a kzin only made it funnier. Doubled over, with his arms around his middle, laughing silently now because he could not inhale, Louis backed toward what he hoped was a chair.
An inhumanly large hand closed on his shoulder and lifted him high. Still convulsed with mirth, Louis faced the kzin at eye level. He heard, “Truly, Louis, you must explain this behavior.”
Louis made an enormous effort. “A k-k-kind of war god,” he said, and was off again. Tee
la was making hiccupping sounds.
The kzin set him down and waited for the fit to pass.
“You simply aren’t impressive enough to play god,” Louis said some minutes later. “Not until the hair grows back.”
“But if I tore some humans to pieces with my hands, perhaps they would respect me then.”
“They’d respect you from a distance, and from hiding. That wouldn’t do us any good. No, we’ll just have to wait for the hair. Even then, we ought to have Nessus’s tasp.”
“The puppeteer is unavailable.”
“But—“
“I say he is unavailable. How shall we contact the natives?”
“You’ll have to stay here. See what you can learn from the map room. Teela and I,” said Louis, and suddenly remembered. “Teela, you haven’t seen the map room.”
“What’s it like?”
“You stay here and get Speaker to show you. I’ll go down alone. You two can monitor me by communicator disc, and come for me if there’s trouble. Speaker, I want your flashlight-laser.”
The kzin grumbled, but he did relinquish the flashlight-laser. It still left him with the modified Slaver disintegrator.
From a thousand feet over their heads, he heard their reverent silence become a murmur of astonishment; and he knew that they had seen him, a bright speck separating from the castle window. He sank toward them.
The murmur did not die. It was suppressed. He could hear the difference.
Then the singing began.
“It drags,” Teela had said, and, “They don’t keep in step,” and, “It all sounds flat.” Louis’s imagination had gone on from there. As a result the singing took him by surprise. It was much better than he had expected.
He guessed they were singing a twelve-tone scale. The “octave” scale of most of the human worlds was also a twelve-tone scale, but with differences. Small wonder it had sounded flat to Teela.
Yes, it dragged. It was church music, slow and solemn and repetitive, without harmony. But it had grandeur.
The square was immense. A thousand people were a vast throng after the weeks of loneliness; but the square could have held ten times that number. Loudspeakers could have kept them singing in step, but there were no loudspeakers. A lone man waved his arms from a pedestal in the center of the square. But they would not look at him. They were all looking up at Louis Wu.