by Larry Niven
Louis left him there.
In the near-darkness of the prison he found Nessus's 'cycle. His hunger was such that he choked down a food brick intended for a puppeteer gullet, ignoring the peculiar taste. The gloom had begun to bother him, so he turned on the headlamps on the puppeteer's flycycle, then hunted down the other flycycles and turned them on too. By the time he finished the place was pretty bright, and all the shadows were intricate and strange.
What was taking Nessus so long?
There wasn't much entertainment in the ancient floating prison. You could spend just so much time sleeping, and Louis had used his quota. You could spend just so much time wondering what the tanj the puppeteer was doing up there, before you began to wonder if he was selling you out.
After all, Nessus wasn't just an alien. He was a Pierson's puppeteer, with a record a mile long for manipulating humans to his own ends. If he could reach an understanding with a (presumed) Ringworld Engineer, he might abandon Louis and Speaker right now, no hesitation. A puppeteer might have no reason not to.
And there were two good reasons why he should.
Speaker-To-Animals would almost certainly make some last-ditch attempt to take the Long Shot from Louis Wu, to reserve the second quantum hyperdrive for kzinti alone. A puppeteer could get hurt in the resulting battle. Safer to leave Speaker now — and to leave Louis Wu, because he probably wouldn't stand for such a betrayal.
Besides, they knew too much. With Teela dead, only Speaker and Louis knew about the puppeteer experiments in guided evolution. The starseed lure, the Fertility Laws — if Nessus had been ordered to divulge such information, to gauge his crewmates' reactions, probably he had also been ordered to abandon them sometime during the trip.
These were not even new thoughts. Louis had been alert for some such action ever since Nessus had admitted to guiding an Outsider ship to Procyon via starseed lure. His paranoia was justified in a way. But there wasn't a tanj thing he could do about it.
To save his mind, Louis broke into another cell. He cut across suspected locks with his flashlight-laser turned to high and narrow, and on the fourth try the door came up.
A terrible stench came up too. Louis held his breath, stuck his head and his flashlight-laser in long enough to find out why. Someone had died in there, after the ventilation had quit. The corpse was hunched up against the picture window with a heavy pitcher in his hand. The pitcher was broken. The window was intact.
The cell next door proved to be empty. Louis took possession.
He had crossed the pit to get a cell with a starboard view. He could see the rolling hurricane directly before him. Its size was respectable, considering that they had left it twenty-five hundred miles behind. A big, brooding blue eye.
To spinward was a tall, narrow floating building as big as a passenger starship. Briefly Louis daydreamed that it was a starship, hidden here in superb misdirection, and that all they had to do to get off the world was …
It was thin entertainment
Louis schooled himself to memorize the pattern of the city. It might be important. This was the first place they had found with any sign of a still-active civilization.
He was taking a break, maybe an hour later. He was sitting on the duty oval bunk, staring back at the Eye, and … beyond the Eye, well to the side, was a tiny vivid gray-brown triangle,
"Mph," Louis said softly. The triangle was only just big enough to be visible as such. It was set squarely in the gray-white chaos of the infinity horizon. Which meant that it was still day there … although he was looking almost directly to starboard …
Louis went for his binoculars.
The binoculars made every detail as clear and sharp as the craters of the Moon. An irregular triangle, red-brown near the base, bright as dirty snow near the apex … Fist-of-God. Vastly larger than they had thought. To be visible this far away, most of the mountain must project above the atmosphere.
The flycycle fleet had flown around a hundred and fifty thousand miles since the crash. Fist-of-God had to be at least a thousand miles high.
Louis whistled. Again he raised the binoculars.
* * *
Sitting there in the near-darkaess, Louis gradually became aware of noises overhead.
He stuck his head up out of the cell.
Speaker-To-Animals roared, "Welcome, Louis!" He waved at him with the raw, red, half-eaten carcass of something approximately goat-sized. He took a bite the size of a steak, immediately took another, and another. His teeth were for tearing, not for chewing.
He reached out to pick up a bloody-ended hind leg with the hoof and skin still on. "We saved some for you, Louis! It has been hours dead, but no matter. We should hurry. The leaf-eater prefers not to watch us eat. He is sampling the view from my cell."
"Wait'll he sees mine," said Louis. "We were wrong about Fist-of-God. Speaker. It's at least a thousand miles high. The peak isn!t snow-covered, it -"
"Louis! Eat!"
Louis found his mouth watering. "There has to be some way to cook that thing …"
There was. He got Speaker to tear the skin off for him, then wedged the hoof of the beast into a broken stair, stood back and roasted the meat with the flashlight-laser turned to high intensity, wide aperture.
"The meat is not fresh," Speaker said dubiously, "but cremation is not the answer."
"How's Nessus? Is he a prisoner, or is he in control?"
"In partial control, I think. Look up."
The spacer-girl was a tiny doll-figure on the observation platform, her feet trailing in space, her face and scalp showing white as she looked down.
"You see? She will not let him out of her sight."
Louis decided the meat was ready. As he ate, he was aware that Speaker watched him without patience, watched as Louis Wu slowly masticated each small bite. But to Louis it seemed that he ate like a ravening beast. He was hungry.
For the puppeteer's sake they pushed the bones through the broken window, to fall on the city. They reconvened around the puppeteer's flycycle.
"She is partially conditioned," said Nessus. He was having trouble with his breathing … or with the smells of raw and burnt animal. "I have learned a good deal from her."
"Did you learn why she mousetrapped us?"
"Yes, and more. We have been lucky. She is a spacer, a ramship crewman."
"Jackpot!" said Louis Wu.
CHAPTER 21 — The Girl From Beyond The Edge
Her name was Halrloprillalar Hotrufan. She had been riding the ramship … Pioneer, Nessus called it after slight hesitation … for two hundred years.
The Pioneer ran a twenty-four-year cycle that covered four suns and their systems: five oxygen-atmosphere worlds and the Ringworld. The "year" used was a traditional measurement which had nothing to do with the Ringworld. It may have matched the solar orbit for one of the abandoned worlds.
Two of the Pioneer's five worlds had been thick with humanity before the Ringworld was built. Now they were abandoned like the others, covered with random vegetation and the debris of crumbling cities.
Halrloprillalar had run the cycle eight times. She knew that on these worlds grew plants or animals which had not adapted to the Ringworld because of the lack of a winter-summer cycle. Some plants were spices. Some animals were meat. Otherwise — Halrloprillalar neither knew nor cared.
Her job had nothing to do with cargos.
"Nor was she concerned with propulsion or life support. I was unable to learn just what she did," said Nessus. "The Pioneer carried a crew of thirty-six. Doubtless some were superfluous. Certainly she could have done nothing complex nor crucial to the well-being of ship or crew. She is not very intelligent, Louis."
"Did you think to ask about the ratio of sexes aboard ship? How many of the thirty-six were women?"
"She told me that. Three."
"You might as well forget about her profession."
Two hundred years of travel, security, adventure. Then at the end of Halrloprillalar's eighth run,
the Ringworld refused to answer the Pioneer's call.
The electromagnetic cannon didn't work.
As far as telescopes could determine, there was no sign of activity at any spaceport.
The five worlds of the Pioneer's circuit were not equipped with electromagnetic cannons for braking. Therefore the Pioneer carried braking fuel, condensed en route from interstellar hydrogen. The ship could land … but where?
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 Luir 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.