by Larry Niven
For all that, the music was beautiful.
Teela could not hear that beauty. The music of her experience had come from recordings and tridee sets, always by way of a microphone system. Such music could be amplified, rectified, the voices multiplied or augmented, the bad takes thrown away. Teela Brown had never heard live music.
Louis Wu had. He slowed his ‘cycle to give his nerve ends time to adapt to the rhythms of it. He remembered the great public sings on the cliffs above Crashlanding City, throngs which had boasted twice this number, sings which had sounded different for that and another reason; for Louis Wu had been singing too. Now, as he let the music vibrate in him, his ears began to adjust to the slightly sharp or flat notes, to the blurring of voices, to the repetition, to the slow majesty of the hymn.
He caught himself as he was about to join in the singing. That’s not a good idea, he thought, and let his cycle settle toward the square.
The pedestal in the center of the square had once held a statue. Louis identified the humanlike footprints, each four feet long, that marked where the statue had stood. Now the pedestal housed a kind of triangular altar, and a man stood with his back to the altar waving his arms as the people sang.
Flash of pink above gray robe ... Louis assumed that the man was wearing a headpiece, perhaps of pink silk.
He chose to land on the pedestal itself. He was just touching down when the conductor turned to face him. As a result he almost wrecked the ‘cycle.
It was pink scalp Louis had seen. Unique in this crowd of heads like golden flowers, faces of blond hair with eyes peeping through, this man’s face was as naked as Louis Wu’s own.
With a straight-armed gesture, palms down, the man held the last note of the singing ... held it for seconds ... then cut it. A fragment of a second later the tail of it drifted in from the edges of the square. The—priest? -- faced Louis Wu in a sudden silence.
He was as tall as Louis Wu, tall for a native. The skin of his face and scalp were so pale as to be nearly translucent, like a We Made It albino. He must have shaved many hours ago with a razor that was not sharp enough, and now the stubble was emerging, adding its touch of gray everywhere but for the two circles around his eyes.
He spoke with a note of reproof, or so it seemed. The translator disc instantly said, “So you have come at last.”
“We didn’t know we were expected,” Louis said truthfully. He was not confident enough to try a God Gambit based on himself. In a long lifetime he had learned that telling a consistent set of lies could get hellishly complicated.
“You grow hair on your head,” said the priest. “One presumes that your blood is less than pure, O Engineer.”
So that was it! The race of the Engineers must have been totally bald; so that this priest must imitate them by using a blunt razor on his tender skin. Or ... had the Engineers used depil cream or something just as easy, for no reason more pressing than fashion? The priest looked very like the wire-portrait in the banquet hall.
“My blood is of no concern to you,” Louis said, shelving the problem. “We are on our way to the rim of the world. What can you tell us about our route?”
The priest was transparently puzzled. “You ask information from me? You, an Engineer?”
“I’m not an Engineer.” Louis held his hand ready to activate the sonic fold.
But the priest only looked more bewildered. “Then why are you half-hairless? How do you fly? Have you stolen secrets from Heaven? What do you want here? Have you come to steal my congregation?”
The last question seemed the important one. “We’re on our way to the rim. All we need here is information.”
“Surely your answers are in Heaven.”
“Don’t be flippant with me,” Louis said evenly.
“But you came directly from Heaven! I saw you!”
“Oh, the castle! We’ve gone through the castle, but it didn’t tell us much. For instance, were the Engineers really hairless?”
“I have sometimes thought that they only shave, as I do. Yet your own chin seems naturally hairless.”
“I depilate.” Louis looked about him, at the sea of reverent golden flower-faces. “What do they believe? They don’t seem to share your doubts.”
“They see us talking as equals, in the language of the Engineers. I would have this continue, if it please you.” Now the priest’s manner seemed conspiratorial rather than hostile.
“Would that improve your standing with them? I suppose it would,” said Louis. The priest really had feared to lose his congregation—as any priest might, if his god came to life and tried to take over. “Can’t they understand us?”
“Perhaps one word in ten.”
At this point Louis had cause to regret the efficiency of his translator disc. He could not tell if the priest was speaking the language of Zignamuclickclick. Knowing that, knowing how far the two languages had diverged since the breakdown in communications, he might have been able to date the fall of civilization.
“What was this castle called Heaven?” he asked. “Do you know?”
“The legends speak of Zrillir,” said the priest, “and of how he ruled all the lands under Heaven. On this pedestal stood Zrillir’s statue, which was life-sized. The lands supplied Heaven with delicacies which I could name if you like, as we learn their names by rote; but in these days they do not grow. Shall I?”
“No thanks. What happened?”
A singsong quality had crept into the man’s voice. He must have heard this tale many times, and told it many times . . .
“Heaven was made when the Engineers made the world and the Arch. He who rules Heaven rules the land from edge to edge. So Zrillir ruled, for many lifetimes, throwing sunfire from Heaven when he was displeased. Then it was suspected that Zrillir could no longer throw sunfire.
“The people no longer obeyed him. They did not send food. They pulled down the statue. When Zrillir’s angels dropped rocks from the heights, the people dodged and laughed.
“There came a day when the people tried to take Heaven by way of the rising stairway. But Zrillir caused the stairway to fall. Then his angels left Heaven in flying cars.
“Later it was regretted that we had lost Zrillir. The sky was always overcast; crops grew stunted. We have prayed for Zrillir’s return.”
“How accurate is all this, do you think?”
“I would have denied it all until this morning, when you came flying down from Heaven. You make me terribly uneasy, O Engineer. Perhaps Zrillir does indeed intend to return, and sends his bastard ahead to clear the way of false priests.”
“I could shave my scalp. Would that help?”
“No. Never mind; ask your questions.”
“What can you tell me about the fall of Ringworld civilization?”
The priest looked still more uneasy. “Is civilization about to fall?”
Louis sighed and—for the first time—turned to consider the altar.
The altar occupied the center of the pedestal on which they stood. It was of dark wood. Its flat rectangular surface had been carved into a relief map, with hills and rivers and a single lake, and two upward-turning edges. The other pair of edges, the short edges, were the bases of a golden paraboloid arch.
The gold of that arch was tarnished. But from the curve of its apex a small golden ball hung by a thread; and that gold was highly polished.
“Is civilization in danger? So much has happened. The sunwire, your own coming—is it sunwire? Is the sun falling on us?”
“I strongly doubt it. You mean the wire that’s been falling all morning?”
“Yes. In our religious training we were taught that the sun hangs from the Arch by a very strong thread. This thread is strong. We know,”
said the priest. “A girl tried to pick it up and undo a tangle, and it cut through her fingers.”
Louis nodded. “Nothing’s falling,” he said. Privately he thought: Not even the shadow squares. Even it you cut all the wires, the squares wouldn’t hit the Ringworld. The Engineers would have given them an orbital aphelion inside the Ring.
He asked, without much hope, “What do you know about the transport system at the rim?” And in that instant he knew something was wrong. He’d caught something, some evidence of disaster; but what?
The priest said, “Would you mind repeating that?”
Louis did.
The priest answered, “Your thing that talks said something else the first time. Something about a restricted something.”
“Funny,” said Louis. And this time he heard it. The translator spoke in a different tone of voice, and it spoke at length.
“’You are using a restricted wavelength in violation—‘ I do not remember the rest,” said the priest. “We had best end this interview. You have reawakened something ancient, something evil—“ The priest stopped to listen, for Louis' translator was speaking again in the priest’s language. “—‘in violation of edict twelve, interfering with maintenance.’ Can your powers hold back—“
Whatever else the priest said was not translated.
For the disc suddenly turned red hot in Louis’s hand. He instantly threw it as hard as he could. It was white hot and brightly glowing when it hit the pavement—without hurting anyone, as far as he could see. Then the pain backlashed him and he was half-blinded by tears.
He was able to see the priest nod to him, very formal and regal.
He nodded back, his face equally expressionless. He had never dismounted his ‘cycle; now he touched the control and rose toward Heaven.
When his face could not be seen he let it snarl with the pain, and he used a word he had heard once on Wunderland, from a man who had dropped a piece of Steuben crystal a thousand years old.
Chapter 17 -
The Eye of the Storm
The ‘cycles were moving to port when they left Heaven, beneath the steel-gray lid that in these regions served as a sky. It had saved their lives above the sunflower fields. By now it was merely depressing.
Louis touched three points on the dash to lock into his present altitude. He had to watch what he was doing, because there was very little feeling in his right hand under the medicines and the spray-skin and the single white blister on each fingertip. He regarded his hand now, thinking how much worse it might have been ...
Speaker appeared above the dash. “Louis, do we not wish to rise above the clouds?”
“We might miss something. We can’t see the ground from up there.”
“We have our maps.”
“Would they show us another sunflower field?”
“You are right,” Speaker said instantly. He clicked off.
Speaker and Teela, waiting in Heaven’s map room while Louis braced a shaven priest far below, had spent the time well. They had sketched contour maps of their route to the rim wall, and had also sketched in the cities that showed as bright yellow patches in the magnifying screen.
Then something had taken exception to their use of a reserved frequency. Reserved by whom, for what purpose, how long ago? Why had it not objected until now? Louis suspected an abandoned machine, like the meteor guard that had shot down the Liar. Perhaps this one worked only intermittently, in spasms.
And Speaker’s translator disc had turned red hot and stuck to his palm. It would be days before he could use his hand again, even with the miracle Kzinti “military” medicines. The muscles would have to regenerate.
The maps would make a difference. Resurging civilization would almost certainly show first in the great metropoli. The fleet could cross those sites, watching for lights or rising smoke.
Nessus’s call button burned on the dash, as it might have burned for a score of hours. Louis answered it.
He saw the puppeteer’s straggly brown mane and glovesoft back rising and slowly falling with his breath. For a moment he wondered if the puppeteer were back in catatonic withdrawal. Then the puppeteer lifted a triangular head and sang, “Welcome, Louis! What news?”
“We found a floating building,” said Louis. “With a map room.” He told the puppeteer of the castle called Heaven, the map room, the screen, the maps and globes, the priest and his tales and his model of the universe. He had been answering questions for some time when he thought of one of his own.
“Hey. Is your translator disc working?”
“No, Louis. A short time ago the instrument turned white hot before me, frightening me badly. Had I dared, I would have gone catatonic; but I knew too little.”
“Well, the others are gone too. Teela’s burned its case and left a sear on her ‘cycle. Speaker and I both got our hands burned. You know something? Were going to have to learn the Ringworld language.”
“Yes.”
“I wish the old man had remembered something about the fall of the old Ring society. I had an idea ...” And he told the puppeteer his theory of a mutating colonic bacterium.
“That is possible,” said Nessus. “Once they lost the secret of transmutation, they would never recover.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Look about you, Louis. What do you see?”
Louis did. He saw a lightning-storm developing ahead; he saw hills, valleys, a distant city, twin mountain peaks tipped with the dirty translucency of raw Ring flooring ... “Land anywhere on the Ringworld, and dig. What do you find?”
“Dirt,” said Louis. “So?”
“And then?”
“More dirt. Bedrock. Ring floor material,” said Louis. And as he said these words the landscape seemed to alter. Storm clouds, mountains, the city to spinward and the city dwindling behind, the edge of brilliance far away on the infinity-horizon, that might be a sea or a sunflower invasion ... now the landscape showed as the shell it was. The difference between an honest planet and this was the difference between a human face and an empty rubber mask.
“Dig on any world,” the puppeteer was saying, “and eventually you will find some kind of metal ore. Here, you will find forty feet of soil, and then the Ring foundation. That material cannot be worked. If it could be pierced, the miner would strike vacuum—a harsh reward for his labor.
“Give the Ring a civilization capable of building the Ring, and it must necessarily have cheap transmutation. Let them lose the technology of transmutation—no matter how—and what would be left? Surely they would not stockpile raw metals. There are no ores. The metal of the Ring would be all in machines and in tools and in rust. Even interplanetary capability would not help them, for there is nothing to be mined anywhere around this star. Civilization would fall and never rise.”
Softly Louis asked, “When did you figure this out?”
“Some time ago. It did not seem important to our survival.”
“So you just didn’t mention it. Right,” said Louis. The hours he’d spent worrying that problem! And it all seemed so vividly obvious now. What a trap, what a terrible trap for thinking beings.
Louis looked ahead of him (and was marginally aware that Nessus’s image was gone). The storm was nearer now, and it was wide. Doubtless the sonic folds could handle it, but still ...
Better to fly over it. Louis pulled on a handle, and the flycycles rose toward the world’s gray lid, toward the clouds that had covered them since they reached the tower called Heaven.
Louis’s mind ran in idle ...
Learning a new language would take time. Learning a new language every time they set down would be impossible. The question was becoming crucial. How long had the Ring natives been barbarian? How long sinc
e they had all spoken the same language? How far had the local languages diverged from the original?
The universe blurred, then went entirely gray. They were in the clouds. Tendrils of mist streamed around the bubble of Louis’s sonic fold. Then the ‘cycles broke through into the sunlight.
From the Ringworld’s indefinite horizon, a vast blue eye looked at Louis Wu across a flat infinity of cloud.
If God’s head had been the size of the Earth’s Moon, that eye would have been about the right size.
It took Louis a moment to grasp what he was seeing. For another moment his brain flatly refused to believe it. Then the whole picture tried to fade like a badly illuminated holo.
Through the humming in his ears he heard / felt someone screaming.
Am I dead? he wondered.
And, Is that Nessus screaming? But he’d cut that circuit.
It was Teela. Teela, who had never been afraid of anything in her life. Teela covered her face with her hands, hiding from that vast blue stare.
The eye lay dead ahead, dead to port. It seemed to be drawing them toward itself.
Am I dead? Is the Creator come to judge me? Which Creator?
It was finally time for Louis Wu to decide which Creator he believed in, if any.
The eye was blue and white, with a white eyebrow and a dark pupil. White of cloud, blue of distance. As if it were part of the sky itself.
“Louis!” Teela screamed. “Do something!”
It isn’t happening, Louis told himself. His throat was a column of solid ice. His mind ran about in his skull like something trapped. It’s a big universe, but some things really are impossible.
“Louis!”
Louis found his voice. “Speaker. Hey, Speaker. What do you see?”