by Larry Niven
Not on the Ringworld. The meteor defenses would blow them apart.
They had not received permission to land on the spaceport ledge. And something was wrong there.
Back to one of the abandoned home worlds? In effect they would be starting a new colony world, with thirty-three men and three women.
“They were hidebound prisoners of routine, ill-equipped to make such a decision. They panicked,” said Nessus. “They mutinied. The Pioneer’s pilot managed to lock himself in the control room long enough to land the Pioneer on the spaceport ledge. They murdered him for it, for risking the ship and their lives, says Halrloprillalar. I wonder if they did not in truth murder him for breaking tradition, for landing by rocket and without formal permission.”
Louis felt eyes on him. He looked up.
The spacer-girl was still watching them. And Nessus was looking back at her with one head, the left.
So that one held the tasp. And that was why Nessus had been looking steadily upward. She wouldn’t let Nessus out of her sight, and he dared not let her off the tasp’s lovely hook.
“After the killing of the pilot, they left the ship,” said Nessus. “Then it was that they learned how badly the pilot had hurt them. The cziltang brone was inert, broken.
They were stranded on the wrong side of a wall a thousand miles high.
“I do not know the equivalent of cziltang brone in Interworld or the Hero’s Tongue. I can only tell you what it does. What it does is crucial to us all.”
“Go ahead,” said Louis Wu.
The Ringworld engineers had designed fail-safe. In many ways it seemed that they had anticipated the fall of civilization, had planned for it, as if cycles of culture and barbarism were man’s natural lot. The complex structure that was the Ringworld would not fail for lack of tending. The descendants of the Engineers might forget how to tend airlocks and electromagnetic cannon, how to move worlds and build flying cars; civilization might end, but the Ringworld would not.
The meteor defenses, for instance, were so utterly failsafe that Halrloprillalar—
“Call her Prill,” Louis suggested.
that Prill and her crew never considered that they might not be working.
But what of the spaceport? How fail-safe would it be, if some idiot left both doors of the airlock open?
There weren’t any airlocks! Instead, there was the cziltang brone. This machine projected a field which caused the structure of the Ringworld floor, and hence of the rim wall, to become permeable to matter. There was some resistance. While the cziltang brone was going—
“Osmosis generator,” Louis suggested.
“Perhaps. I suspect that brone is a modifier, possibly obscene.”
air would leak through, but slowly, while the osmosis generator was going. Men could push through in pressure suits, moving as against a steady wind. Machines and large masses could be drawn through by tractors.
“What of pressurized breathing-air?” Speaker asked.
But they made that outside, with the transmutors!
Yes, there was cheap transmutation on the Ringworld. It was cheap only in great quantity, and there were other limits. The machine itself was gigantic. It would make just one element into just one other element. The spaceport’s two transmutors would turn lead into nitrogen and oxygen; lead was easy to store and easy to move through the rim wall.
The osmosis generators were a fail-safe device. When and airlock fails, a veritable hurricane of breathing-air can be lost. But if the cziltang brone broke down, the worst that could happen would be that the airlock would be closed to space—and incidentally to returning spacemen.
“Also to us,” said Speaker.
Louis said, “Not so fast. It sounds like the osmosis generator is just what we need to get home. We wouldn’t have to move the Liar at all. Just point the cziltang brone—“ He pronounced it as if it started with a sneeze—“at the Ring floor under the Liar. The Liar would sink through the Ring floor like quicksand. Down, and out the other side.”
“To be trapped in the foamed plastic meteor buffer,” the kzin retorted. Then, “Correction. The Slaver weapon might serve us there.”
“Quite so. Unfortunately,” said Nessus, “there is no cziltang brone available to us.”
“She’s here. She got through somehow!”
“Yes ...”
The magnetohydrodynamicists virtually had to learn a new profession before they could begin to rebuild the cziltang brone. It took them several years. The machine had failed in action: it was partly twisted and partly melted. They had to make new parts; recalibrate; use elements they knew would fail, but maybe they’d hold long enough ...
There was an accident during that time. An osmosis beam, modified by bad calibration, went through the Pioneer. Two crewmen died waist-deep in a metal floor, and seventeen others suffered permanent brain damage in addition to other injuries when certain permeable membranes became too permeable.
But they got through, the remaining sixteen. They took the idiots with them. They also took the cziltang brone, in case the new Ringworld turned out to be inhospitable.
They found savagery, nothing but savagery.
Years later, some of them tried to go back.
The cziltang brone failed in action, trapping four of them in the rim wall. And that was that. By then they knew that there would be no new parts available anywhere on the Ringworld.
“I don’t understand how barbarism could come so fast,” said Louis. “You said the Pioneer ran a twenty-four year cycle?”
“Twenty-four years in ship’s time, Louis.”
“Oh. That does make a difference.”
“Yes. To a ship traveling at one Ringworld gravity of thrust, stars tend to be three to six years apart. The actual distances were large. Prill speaks of an abandoned region two hundred light years closer to the mean galactic plane, where three suns clustered within ten light years of each other.”
“Two hundred light years ... near human space, do you think?”
“Perhaps in human space. Oxygen-atmosphere planets do not in general tend to cluster as closely as they do in the vicinity of Sol. Halrloprillalar speaks of long-term terraforming techniques applied to these worlds, many centuries before the building of the Ringworld. These techniques took too long. They were abandoned halfway by the impatient humans.”
“That would explain a lot. Except ... no, never mind.”
“Primates, Louis? There is evidence enough that your species evolved on Earth. But Earth might have been a convenient base for a terraforming project aimed at worlds in nearby systems. The engineers might have brought pets and servants.”
“Like apes and monkeys and Neanderthals ...” Louis made a chopping gesture. “It’s just speculation. It’s not something we need to know.”
“Granted.” The puppeteer munched a vegetable brick while he talked. “The loop followed by the Pioneer was more than three hundred light years long. There was time for extensive change during a voyage, though such change was rare. Prill’s society was a stable one.”
“Why was she so sure that the whole Ringworld had gone barbarian? How much exploring did they do?”
“Very little, but enough. Prill was right. There will be no repairs for the cziltang brone. The entire Ringworld must be barbarous by now.”
“How?”
“Prill tried to explain to me what happened here, as one of her crew explained it to her. He had oversimplified, of course. It may be that the process started years before the Pioneer departed on its last circuit ...”
There had been ten inhabited worlds. When the Ringworld was finished, all of these had been abandoned, left to go their way without the benefit of man.
Consider such a world:
The land is covered with cities in all stages of development. Perhaps slums were made obsolete, but somewhere there are still slums, if only preserved for history. Across the land one can find all the by-products of living: used containers, broken machines, damaged books or film tapes or scrolls, anything that cannot be reused or reprocessed at a profit, and many things which could be. The was have been used as garbage dumps for a hundred thousand years. Somewhere in that time, they were dumping useless radioactive end products of fission.
How strange is it if the sea life evolves to fit the new conditions?
How strange, if new life evolves capable of living on the garbage?
“That happened on Earth once,” said Louis Wu. “A yeast that could eat polyethyline. It was eating the plastic bags off the supermarket shelves. It’s dead now. We had to give up polyethyline.”
Consider ten such worlds.
Bacteria evolved to eat zinc compounds, plastics, paints, wiring insulation, fresh rubbish, and rubbish thousands of years obsolete. It would not have mattered but for the ramships.
The ramships came routinely to the old worlds, seeking forms of life that had been forgotten or that had not adapted to the Ringworld. They brought back other things: souvenirs, objets d’art which had been forgotten or merely postponed. Many museums were still being transferred, one incredibly valuable piece at a time.
One of the ramships brought back a mold capable of breaking down the structure of a room-temperature superconductor much used in sophisticated machinery.
The mold worked slowly. It was young and primitive and, in the beginning, easily killed. Variations may have been brought to the Ringworld several times by several ships, until one variation finally took hold.
Because it did work slowly, it did not ruin the ramship, until long after the ramship had landed. It did not destroy the spaceport’s cziltang brone until crewmen and spaceport workmen had carried it inside. It did not get into the power beam receivers until the shuttles that traveled through the electromagnetic cannon on the rim wall had carried it everywhere on the Ringworld.
“Power beam receivers?”
“Power is generated on the shadow squares by thermoelectricity, then beamed to the Ringworld. Presumably the beam, too, is fail-safe. We did not detect it coming in. It must have shut itself down when the receivers failed.”
“Surely,” said Speaker, “one could make a different superconductor. We know of two basic molecular structures, each with many variations for different temperature ranges.”
“There are at least four basic structures,” Nessus corrected him. “You are quite right, the Ringworld should have survived the Fall of the Cities. A younger, more vigorous society would have. But consider the difficulties they faced.
“Much of their leadership was dead, killed in falling buildings when the power failed.
“Without power they could do little experimenting to find other superconductors. Stored power was generally confiscated for the personal use of men with political power, or was used to run enclaves of civilization in the hope that someone else was doing something about the emergency. The fusion drives of the ramships were unavailable, as the cziltang brones used superconductors. Men who might have accomplished something could not meet; the computer that ran the electromagnetic cannon was dead, and the cannon itself had no power.”
Louis said, “For want of a nail, the kingdom fell.”
“I know the story. It is not strictly applicable,” said Nessus. “Something could have been done. There was power to condense liquid helium. With the power beams off, the repair of a power receiver would have been useless; but a cziltang brone could have been adapted to a metal superconductor cooled by liquid helium. A cziltang brone would have given access to spaceports. Ships might have flown to the shadow squares, reopened the power beams so that other liquid-helium-cooled superconductors could be adapted to the power beam receivers.
“But all this would have required stored power. The power was used to light street lamps, or to support the remaining floating buildings, or to cook meals and freeze foods! And so the Ringworld fell.”
“And so did we,” said Louis Wu.
“Yes. We were lucky to run across Halrloprillalar. She has saved us a needless journey. There is no longer any need to continue toward the rim wall.”
Louis’s head throbbed once, hard. He was going to have a headache.
“Lucky,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “Indeed. If this is luck, why am I not joyful? We have lost our goal, our last meager hope of escape. Our vehicles are ruined. One of our party is missing in this maze of city.”
“Dead,” said Louis. When they looked at him without comprehension, he pointed into the dusk. Teela’s flycycle was obvious enough, marked by one of four sets of headlamps.
He said, “We’ll have to make our own luck from now on.”
“Yes. You will remember, Louis, that Teela’s luck is sporadic. It had to be. Else she would not have been aboard the Liar. Else we would not have crashed.” The puppeteer paused, then added, “My sympathies, Louis.”
“She will be missed,” Speaker rumbled.
Louis nodded. It seemed he should be feeling more. But the incident in the Eye storm had somehow altered his feelings for Teela. She had seemed, for that time, less human than Speaker or Nessus. She was myth. The aliens were real.
“We must find a new goal,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “We need a way to take the Liar back to space. I confess I have no ideas at all.”
“I do,” Louis said.
Speaker seemed startled. “Already?”
“I want to think about it some more. I’m not sure it’s even sane, let alone workable. In any case, we’re going to need a vehicle. Let’s think about that.”
“A sled, perhaps. We can use the remaining flycycle to tow it. A big sled, perhaps the wall of a building.”
“We can better that. I am convinced that I can persuade Halrloprillalar to guide me through the machinery that lifts this building. We may find that the building itself can become our vehicle.”
“Try that,” said Louis.
“And you?”
“Give me time.”
The core of the building was all machinery. Some was lifting machinery; some ran the air conditioning and the water condensers and the water-taps; and one insulated section was part of the electromagnetic trap generators. Nessus worked. Louis and Prill stood by, awkwardly ignoring one another.
Speaker was still in prison. Prill had refused to let him up.
“She is afraid of you,” Nessus had said. “We could press the point, no doubt. We could put you aboard one of the flycycles. If I refused to board until you were on the platform, she would have to lift you.”
“She might lift me halfway to the ceiling, then drop me. No.”
But she had taken Louis.
He studied her while pretending to ignore her. Her mouth was narrow, virtually lipless. Her nose was small and straight and narrow. She had no eyebrows.
Small wonder if she seemed to have no expression. Her face seemed little more than markings on a wigmaker’s dummy.
After two hours of work, Nessus pulled his heads out of an access panel. “I cannot give us motive power. The lift fields will do no more than lift us. But I have freed a correcting mechanism designed to keep us over one spot. The building is now at the mercy of the winds.”
Louis grinned. “Or a tow. Tie a line to your flycycle and pull the building behind you.”
“There is no need. The flycycle uses a reactionless thruster. We can keep it within the building.”
“You thought of it first, hmm? But that thruster’s awfully powerful. If the ‘cycle tore itself loose in here—“
“Yesss—“ The puppeteer turned to Prill and spoke slowly and at length in the language of the Ringworld gods. Presently he said to Louis, “There is a supply of electrosetting plastic. We can embed the flycycle in plastic, leaving only the controls exposed.”
“Isn’t that a little drastic?”
“Louis, if the flycycle tore itself loose, I could be hurt.”
“Well ... maybe. Can you land the building when you need to?”
“Yes, I have altitude control.”
“Then we don’t need a scout vehicle. Okay, we’ll do it.”
Louis was resting, not sleeping. He lay on his back on the big oval bed. His eyes were open, staring through the bubble window in the ceiling.
A glow of solar corona showed over the edge of the shadow square. Dawn was not far off ; but still the Arch was blue and bright in a black sky.
“I must be out of my mind,” said Louis Wu.
And, “What else can we do?”
The bedroom had probably been part of the governor’s suite. Now it was a control room. He and Nessus had mounted the flycycle in the walk-in closet, poured plastic over and around it, then—with Prill’s help—run a current through the plastic. The closet had been just the right size.
The bed smelled of age. It crinkled when he moved.
“Fist-of-God,” Louis Wu said into the dark. “I saw it. A thousand miles high. It doesn’t make sense they’d build a mountain that high, not when ...” He let it trail off.
And suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, shouting, “Shadow square wire!”
A shadow entered the bedroom.
Louis froze. The entrance was dark. Yet, by its fluid motion and by the distribution of subtle shadings of curvature, a naked woman was walking toward him.
Hallucination? The ghost of Teela Brown? She had reached him before he could decide. Totally self-confident, she sat beside him on the bed. She reached out and touched his face and ran her fingertips down his cheek.