by Larry Niven
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 poisoin 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.
They were a dozen yards up the slope when Teela yelled and began dancing. Kicking high, she turned and pelted downslope. She slid like an ice skater when she hit the ring floor. Sliding, gliding, she turned with her hands on her hips and glared upward, baffled and injured and angry.
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.
He turned. "In the other direction …" and he stopped.
"Louis?"
"That's the biggest tanj mountain I ever saw in my life."
"Louis!"
He had spoken too softly. "A mountain!" he bellowed. "Wait'll you see it! The Ringworld engineers must have wanted to put one big mountain in the world, one mountain too big to use. Too big to grow coffee on, or trees, too big even for skiing. It's magnificent!"
It was magnificent. One mountain, roughly conical, all alone, forming no part of a chain. It had the look of a volcano, a mock-volcano, for beneath the Ringworld there was no magma to form volcanos. Its base was lost in mist. Its higher slopes showed clear through what must be thinning air, and its peak had a shiny look of snow: dirty snow, not bright enough to be clean snow. Perhaps permafrost.
There was a crystal clarity to the edges of the peak. Could it thrust clear out of the atmosphere? A real mountain that size would collapse of its own weight; but this mountain would be a mere shell of ring foundation material.
"I'm going to like the Ringworld engineers," said Louis Wu to himself. On a world built to ordered specification, there was no logical reason for such a mountain to exist. Yet every world should have at least one unclimbable mountain.
Beneath the curve of the hull, they waited for him. Their questions boiled down to one. "Did you see any sign of civilization?"
"No."
They made him describe everything he'd seen. They established directions. Spinward was back along the meteoric furrow dug by the Liar's landing. Antispinward was the opposite direction, toward the mountain. Port and starboard were to the left and right of a man facing spinward.
"Could you see any of the rim walls to port or starboard?"
"No. I don't understand why. They should have been there."
"Unfortunate," said Nessus.
"Impossible. You can see for thousands of miles up there."
"Not impossible. Unfortunate."
Again: "Could you see nothing beyond the desert?"
"No. A long way to port, I saw a trace of blue. Might have been ocean. Might have been just distance."
"No buildings?"
"Nothing."
"Contrails in the sky? Straight lines that might have been freeways?"
"Nothing."
"Did you see any sign of civilization?"
"If I had, I'd tell you. For all I know, the whole ten trillion of 'em moved to a real Dyson sphere last month."
"Louis, we must find civilization."
"I know that."
It was too obvious. They had to get off the Ringworld; and they weren't going to move the Liar by themselves. True barbarians would not be help enough, no matter how numerous or how friendly.
"There is one bright aspect to all this," said Louis Wu. "We don't have to repair the ship. If we can just get the Liar off the ring, the ring's rotation will fling it, and us, out of the star's gravity well. Out to where we can use the hyperdrive."
"But first we must find help."
"Or force h
elp," said Speaker.
"But why do you all just stand here talking?" Teela burst out. She had been waiting silent in the circle, letting the others thrash it out. "We've got to get out of here, don't we? Why not get the flycycles out of the ship? Lets get moving! Then talk!"
"I am reluctant to leave the ship," the puppeteer stated.
"Reluctant? Are you expecting help? Is anyone the least bit interested in us? Did anyone answer our radio calls? Louis says we're in the middle of a desert. How long are we going to sit here?"
She could not reafize that Nessus had to work up his courage. And, thought Louis, she had no patience at all.
"Of course we will leave," said the puppeteer. "I merely stated my reluctance. But we must decide where we will go. Else we will not know what to take and what to leave behind."
"We head for the nearest rim wall."
"She's right," said Louis. "If there's civilization anywhere, it'll be at the rim wall. But we doin' know where it is. I should have been able to see it from up there."
"No," said the puppeteer.
"You weren't there, tanjit! You could see forever up there! Thousands of miles without a break! Wait a minute."
"The Ringworld is nearly a million UN miles across."
"I was just about to realize that," said Louis Wu. "Scale. It keeps fouling me up. I just can't visualize anything this big!"
"It will come to you," the puppeteer reassured him.
"I wonder. Maybe my brain isn't big enough to hold it. I keep remembering how narrow the ring looked from deep space. Like a thread of blue ribbon. Blue ribbon," Louis repeated, and shivered.
If each rim wall were a thousand miles high, then how far away would it need to be before Louis Wu couldn't see it at all?
Assume that Louis Wu can see through a thousand miles of dust-laden, water-vapor-laden, somewhat terrestrial air. If such air gave way to effective vacuum at forty miles …
Then the nearest rim wall must be at least twenty-five thousand miles away.
If you flew that far on Earth, you would have returned to your starting point. But the nearest rim wall might be much further than that.
"We cannot drag the Liar behind our skycycles," Speaker was saying. "Were we attacked, we would have to cut the ship loose. Better to leave it here, near a prominent landmark."
"Who said anything about dragging the ship?"
"A good warrior thin of everything. We may end by dragging the ship in any case, if we cannot find help at the rim."
"We will find help," said Nessus.
"He's probably right," said Louis. "The spaceports are at the rim. If the whole ring went back to the stone age, and civilization started to spread again, it would start with returning ramships. It would have to."
"You speculate wildly," said Speaker.
"Maybe."
"But I agree with you. I might add that if the ring has lost all of its great secrets, we might still find machinery at the spaceport. Working machinery, machinery which can be repaired."
But which rim was closer?
"Teela's right," Louis said suddenly. "Let's get to work. At night we'll be able to see further."
Hours of hard labor followed. They moved machinery, sorted it out, lowered heavy items by wire from the ship's airlock. The sudden shifts of gravity posed problems, but none of the equipment was particularly fragile.
Sometime during those hours, Louis caught Teela in the ship while the aliens were outside. "You've been looking like someone poisoned your favorite orchid-thing. Care to talk about it?"
She shook her head, avoiding his eyes. Her lips, he saw, were perfect for pouting. She was one of those rare, lucky women whom crying does not make ugly.
"Then I'll talk. When you went out the lock without a pressure suit, I dressed you down good. Fifteen minutes later you tried to climb a slope of congealing lava wearing nothing but ship-slippers."
"You wanted me to burn my feet!"
"That's right. Don't look so surprised. We need you. We don't want you killed. I want you to learn to be careful. You never learned before, so you'll have to learn now. You'll remember your sore feet longer than you remember my lectures."
"Need me! That's a laugh. You know why Nessus brought me here. I'm a good luck charm that failed."
"I'll grant you blew that one. As a good luck charm, you're fired. Come on, smile. We need you. We need you to keep me happy, so I don't rape Nessus. We need you to do all the heavy work while we lie about in the sun. We need you to make intelligent suggestions."
She forced a smile. It broke apart and she was crying. She buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed against him, wrackingly, her fingernails digging hard into his back.
It was not exactly the first time a woman had cried on Louis Wu; but Teela probably had more reason than most. Louis held her, rubbing his fingers along the muscles of her back in a half-automatic attempt at a massage, and waited it out.
She talked into the material of his pressure suit. "How was I to know the rock would burn me?"
"Remember the Finagle Laws. The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum. The universe is hos-"
"But it hurt!"
"The rock turned on you. It attacked you. Listen," he pleaded. "You've got to learn to think paranoid. Think like Nessus."
"I can't. I don't know how he thinks. I don't understand him at all." She raised her tear-stained face. "I don't understand you."
"Yeah." He ran his thumbs hard along the edges of her shoulder blades, then down her vertebrae. "Listen," he said presently. "Suppose I said the universe is my enemy. Would you think I was nuts?"
She nodded vigorously, angrily.
"The universe is against me," said Louis Wu. "The universe hates me. The universe makes no provision for a two-hundred-year-old man.
"What is it that shapes a species? Evolution, isn't it? Evolution gives Speaker his night vision and his balance. Evolution gives Nessus the reflex that turns his back on danger. Evolution turns a man's sex off at fifty or sixty. Then evolution quits.
"Because evolution is through with any organism once that organism is too old to breed. You follow me?"
"Sure. You're too old to breed," she mocked him bitterly.
"Right. A few centuries ago some biological engineers carved up the genes of a ragweed and produced boosterspice. As a direct result, I am two hundred years old and still healthy. But not because the universe loves me.
"The universe hates me," said Louis Wit. "It's tried to kill me many times. I wish I could show you the scars. It'll keep trying, too."
"Because you're too old to breed."
"Finagle in hysterics, woman! You're the one who doesn't know how to take care of herself! We're in unknown territory; we don't know the rules, and we don't know what we might meet. If you try to walk on hot lava, you could get more than sore feet next time. Stay alert. You understand me?"
"No," said Teela. "No."
Later, after she had washed her face, they carried the fourth flycycle into the airlock. For half an hour the aliens had left them alone. Had they decided to avoid two humans dealing with strictly human problems? Maybe, maybe.
Between high walls of black lava stretched an infinite strip of ring foundation material as flat as a polished tabletop. In the foreground, a tremendous glass cathode tube lay on its side. Beneath the curving flank of the transparent cylinder, a cluster of machinery and four odd figures looking slightly lost.
"How about water?" Louis was asking. "I couldn't see any lakes. Do we have to haul our own water?"
"No." Nessus opened the aft section of his own flycycle to show them the water tank and the cooler-extractor which would condense water from the air.
The flycycles were miracles of compact design. Aside from their highly individualistic saddles, they were built all alike: a pair of four foot spheres joined by the constriction that held the saddle. Half the rear section was luggage space, and there was harness for stringing additional gear. Four flat feet, extended now for lan
ding, would recess against the two spheres during flight.
The puppeteer's flycycle had a reclining saddle, a belly-bed with three grooves for his three legs. Nessus would he immobile on his belly, controlling the vehicle with his mouths.
The 'cycles intended for Louis and Teela held padded contour chairs with neck rests and power controls for attitude. Like Nessus's and Speaker's, these saddles rested in the constriction in the 'cycle's dumbbell shape, and were split to accommodate leg supports. Speaker's saddle was much larger and broader, and without a neck rest. There was rigging for tools on both sides of his saddle. For weapons?
"We must carry anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon," Speaker was saying, as he prowled restlessly among the scattered machinery.
"We brought no weapons," Nessus answered. "Because we wished to show ourselves as peaceful, we brought no weapons at all."
"Then what are these?" Speaker had already assembled a somewhat sparse collection of lightweight artifacts.
"All tools," said Nessus. He pointed. "These are flashlight-lasers with variable beams. At night one can see great distances with these, for one can narrow the beam indefinitely by turning this ring. Indeed, one must be careful not to burn holes in nearby objects or persons, for the beam can be made perfectly parallel and extremely intense.
"These dueling pistols are for settling arguments between ourselves. They fire a ten-second charge. One must be careful not to touch this safety button, because -"
"Because then it fires an hour's charge. That's a Jinxian model, isn't it?"
"Yes, Louis. And this item is a modified digging tool. Perhaps you know of the digging tool found in a Slaver stasis box -"
He meant the Slaver disintegrator, Louis decided. The disintegrator was indeed a digging tool. Where its narrow beam fell, the charge on the electron was temporarily suppressed. Solid matter, rendered suddenly and violently positive, tended to tear itself into a fog of monatomic dust.
"It is worthless as a weapon," the kzin rumbled. "We have studied it. It works too slowly to be used against an enemy."
"Exactly. A harmless toy. This item -" The item held in the puppeteer's mouth looked like a double-barreled shotgun, except that the handle had a characteristic puppeteer-built look, like quicksilver caught in the act of flowing from one shape to another.