Ringworld r-1

by Larry Niven

  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 sidewase, 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 kztn 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 owans 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 doesnot 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 -"
<
br />   "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?"

  Speakees 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 mosqmtoes 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. Teela 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.

  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 f
eet 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?"