N-Space

by Larry Niven

  Shaeffer’s hypothesis: the tnuctipun come not from the Core, but from the rim. Thus all ships will move right into their territory. But where exactly are they? They’ve already come five thousand light-years.

  Ten years and 1200 light years later, comes the attack.

  13

  So it’s war.

  And after the tnuctipun are exterminated, what then? Maybe it can’t be done. If it can, then starts the final war.

  Protector against protector, until only one is left.

  It’ll be quite a war. The stars will fall in flames. And the novel will end just as it is getting started. (Maybe not. I never end a novel as I thought I would.)

  • • •

  • • •

  “It is a star with a ring around it,” said the puppeteer. “A ring of solid matter. An artifact.”

  RINGWORLD, 1970

  From RINGWORLD

  Today it may not be obvious, but when I wrote RINGWORLD it was an act of courage.

  Designing the Ringworld wasn’t the hardest part, though I still found surprises as I traveled. The difficult part was to describe it without losing the reader! This was an environment outside all common experience, yet I planned to give the reader puzzles to be solved as he traveled. [If I don’t have a puzzle, I don’t have a story. It’s not just a quirk. I’m a compulsive teacher.]

  Then there was Teela Brown. Psi powers were common in fiction then, and I was fed up. With Teela I set out to show the ultimate psychic power: Author Control. As soon as it’s obvious what Teela’s power is, she’s moved offstage; but it’s still a lot to ask of a reader, that he continue to suspend his disbelief.

  I used high-school geometry. Mercator maps at one-to-one scale laid across the width [forty] and length [24,000]. The shadows of night subtend the same angle all the way around. From a few miles off the edge, everything looks like straight lines converging. Don Davis did a wonderful painting of this, in the moment of Mount Fist-of-God’s formation.

  I wanted the reader braced, forewarned against the Ringworld. I gave him the puppeteers’ Fleet of Worlds as an intermediate step, to build his imagination. I showed him pictures and gave him scale comparisons and analogies. I stayed with one viewpoint and few characters, to keep it simple where I could. I let the size of the structure, the nature of it [“the mask of a world”], come as a recurring surprise to the characters.

  Today you could fill a long shelf with books about [in David Gerrold’s phrase] “the Enormous Big Thing.” Eighteen years ago, RINGWORLD was the first to be written since the days when all the science was imaginary…since, say, Simak’s The Cosmic Engineers.

  Risky. The publishers must have agreed. RINGWORLD appeared as a paperback. There was no serial. The first hardback version appeared seven years later.

  I didn’t know what the response would be. Would you see what I saw? The artistry of a near-infinite landscape carved to order, the mask of a world stretched over vacuum, the incredible energies, the room for mistakes and the room to leave consequences behind, the hints of God-level civilizations since collapsed…Maybe none of you would understand it at all. Maybe you would laugh at the Ringworld.

  “Playgrounds for the mind,” remember? The Ringworld is the best playground I ever built. People have been reading RINGWORLD and commenting on the assumptions, overt and hidden, and the mathematics and the ecology and the philosophical implications, precisely as if it were a proposed engineering project and they were being paid for their work.

  From Washington, D.C., there came a full proofreading job on the first edition of RINGWORLD, with the title “The Niven-MacArthur Papers, Vol. I.” Robert MacArthur was of enormous help to me. That first edition had some serious mistakes in it.

  A Florida high-school class determined that all of the Ringworld’s topsoil will end up in the oceans in a few thousand years.

  From Cambridge came an estimate for the minimum tensile strength of scrith: of the order of magnitude of the force that holds an atomic nucleus together.

  Freeman Dyson has no trouble believing in the Ringworld, but can’t see why the engineers wouldn’t have built a lot of little ones instead. Safer.

  In Philadelphia a member of the audience pointed out that, mathematically, the Ringworld can be treated as a suspension bridge with no endpoints. Simple in concept; harder to build.

  Neil Jones wrote “Investigation of an Artifact” [Durfed 2] to demonstrate that the Pierson’s puppeteers built the Ringworld. [I disagree.]

  At the 1970 World Science Fiction Convention, students in the halls were chanting, “The Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!” Yeah, it needs attitude jets. Ctein and Dan Alderson, computer wizards working independently, took several years to work out the exact instability. Ctein also worked out data on moving the Ringworld. [Yes, for fun. Isn’t that how you have fun?]

  A stranger redesigned the shadow squares for me, too. There’s too much twilight in my version, too much of partial sunlight. His superior version [in a thick envelope that included sketches] involves five much longer shadow squares moving retrograde…but of course it was too late to redesign that.

  Did you laugh at RINGWORLD? Damn right you did!

  The weekly fan magazine APA-L printed, as back covers, a string of cartoons showing huge structures of peculiar shape, usually with a sun hovering somewhere near the center. There was Wringworld and Wrongworld and Rinkworld and Rungworld [a tremendous stepladder, terraformed landscapes on the steps], and sketches of the Ringworld with lettering along the underside: ONE RING TO RULE THEM ALL and OCCUPANCY BY MORE THAN 3 × 1016 PERSONS IS DANGEROUS AND UNLAWFUL.

  One of the interchangeable Hollander brothers wrote a short story, “Cupworld,” using “half a Dyson sphere, with spaceports along the handle.” There’s a play, “Stringworld,” based on The Wizard of Oz. One Thomas J. Remington agreed: his article demonstrates that I used the plot line from The Wizard of Oz! Harry Harrison borrowed the Ringworld to make a point about population control, in Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers. There’s a song, “The Ringworld Engineers,” and a verse in a filksong:

  “Oh the Ringworld is unstable,

  Oh the Ringworld is unstable!

  Did the best that he was able,

  And it’s good enough for me!”

  Dan Alderson, making proper use of playground equipment, designed a system with four Ringworlds. Three are in contact with each other, spinning orthogonally to each other on frictionless bearings. But the fourth was built by Mesklinites [see Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity.] It’s the size of Jupiter’s orbit [Mesklinites like it cold] and to maintain hundreds of times Earth’s surface gravity, it spins at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed. [I asked Dan if spinning it closer to lightspeed would cause it to contract like a noose. No.]

  Ringworld has won awards: the Hugo and Nebula, and Best Foreign awards from Japan and Australia. There have been paintings. The aliens, the kzinti and puppeteers, have appeared in sketches and sculpture.

  I’ve found some text that allows all of the major characters to demonstrate who and what they are. A quote that fully describes the Ringworld is impossible.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  “You fight with light,” said the man with the tattooed hand. “Surely this is forbidden.”

  “—!” the crowd shouted, and was as suddenly silent.

  “We did not know it,” said Louis. “We apologize.”

  “Did not know it? How could you not know it? Did you not raise the Arch in sign of the Covenant with Man?”

  “What arch is that?”

  The hairy man’s face was hidden, but his astonishment was evident. “The Arch over the world, O Builder!”

  Louis understood then. He started to laugh.

  The hairy man punched him unskillfully in the nose.

  The blow was light, for the hairy man was slight and his hands were fragile. But it hurt.

  Louis was not us
ed to pain. Most people of his century had never felt pain more severe than that of a stubbed toe. Anesthetics were too prevalent, medical help was too easily available. The pain of a skier’s broken leg usually lasted seconds, not minutes, and the memory was often suppressed as an intolerable trauma. Knowledge of the fighting disciplines, karate, judo, ju-jitsu, and boxing, had been illegal since long before Louis Wu was born. Louis Wu was a lousy warrior. He could face death, but not pain.

  The blow hurt. Louis screamed and dropped his flashlight-laser.

  The audience converged. Two hundred infuriated hairy men became a thousand demons; and things weren’t nearly as funny as they had been a minute ago.

  The reed-thin spokesman had wrapped both arms around Louis Wu, pinioning him with hysterical strength. Louis, equally hysterical, broke free with one frantic lunge. He was on his ’cycle, his hand was on the lift lever, when reason prevailed.

  The other ’cycles were slaved to his. If he took off, they would take off, with or without their passengers.

  Louis looked about him.

  Teela Brown was already in the air. From overhead she watched the fight, her eyebrows puckered in concern. She had not thought of trying to help.

  Speaker was in furious motion. He’d already felled half a dozen enemies. As Louis watched, the kzin swung his flashlight-laser and smashed a man’s skull.

  The hairy men milled about him in an indecisive circle.

  Long-fingered hands were trying to pull Louis from his seat. They were winning, though Louis gripped the saddle with hands and knees. Belatedly he thought to switch on the sonic fold.

  The natives shrieked as they were snatched away.

  Someone was still on Louis’s back. Louis pulled him away, let him drop, flipped the sonic fold off and then on again to eject him. He scanned the ex-parking lot for Nessus.

  Nessus was trying to reach his ’cycle. The natives seemed to fear his alien shape. Only one blocked his way; but that one was armed with a metal rod from some old machine.

  As Louis located them, the man swung the rod at the puppeteer’s head.

  Nessus snatched his head back. He spun on his forelegs, putting his back to danger, but facing away from his flycycle.

  The puppeteer’s own flight reflex had killed him—unless Speaker or Louis could help him in time. Louis opened his mouth to shout, and the puppeteer completed his motion.

  Louis closed his mouth.

  The puppeteer turned to his ’cycle. Nobody tried to stop him. His hind hoof left bloody footprints across the hard-packed dirt.

  Speaker’s circle of admirers were still out of his reach. The kzin spat at their feet—not a kzinti gesture but a human one—turned and mounted his ’cycle. His flashlight-laser was gory up to the elbow of his left hand.

  The native who had tried to stop Nessus lay where he had fallen. Blood pooled lavishly about him.

  The others were in the air. Louis took off after them. From afar he saw what Speaker was doing, and he called, “Hold it! That’s not necessary.”

  Speaker had drawn the modified digging tool. He said, “Does it have to be necessary?”

  But he had stayed his hand. “Don’t do it,” Louis implored him. “It’d be murder. How can they hurt us now? Throw rocks at us?”

  “They may use your flashlight-laser against us.”

  “They can’t use it at all. There’s a taboo.”

  “So said the spokesman. Do you believe him?”

  “Yah.”

  Speaker put his weapon away. (Louis sighed in relief; he’d expected the kzin to level the city.) “How would such a taboo evolve? A war of energy weapons?”

  “Or a bandit armed with the Ringworld’s last laser cannon. Too bad there’s nobody to ask.”

  “Your nose is bleeding.”

  Now that he came to think about it, Louis’s nose stung painfully. He slaved his ’cycle to Speaker’s and set about making medical repairs. Below, a churning, baffled lynch mob swarmed at the outskirts of Zignamuclickclick.

  • • •

  “They should have been kneeling,” Louis complained. “That’s what fooled me. And the translation kept saying ‘builder’ when it should have been saying ‘god.’”

  “God?”

  “They’ve made gods of the Ringworld engineers. I should have noticed the silence. Tanjit, nobody but the priest was making a sound! They all acted like they were listening to some old litany. Except that I kept giving the wrong responses.”

  “A religion. How weird! But you shouldn’t have laughed,” Teela’s intercom image said seriously. “Nobody laughs in church, not even tourists.”

  They flew beneath a fading silver of noon sun. The Ringworld showed above itself in glowing blue stripes, brighter every minute.

  “It seemed funny at the time,” said Louis. “It’s still funny. They’ve forgotten they’re living on a ring. They think it’s an arch.”

  A rushing sound penetrated the sonic fold. For a moment it was a hurricane, then it cut off sharply. They had crossed the speed of sound.

  Zignamuclickclick dwindled behind them. The city would never have its vengeance on the demons. Probably it would never see them again.

  “It looks like an arch,” said Teela.

  “Right. I shouldn’t have laughed. We’re lucky, though. We can leave our mistakes behind us,” said Louis. “All we have to do, any time, is get airborne. Nothing can catch us.”

  “Some mistakes we must carry with us,” said Speaker-To-Animals.

  “Funny you should say so.” Louis scratched absently at his nose, which was as numb as a block of wood. It would be healed before the anaesthetic wore off.

  He made up his mind. “Nessus?”

  “Yes, Louis.”

  “I realized something, back there. You’ve been claiming that you’re insane because you demonstrate courage. Right?”

  “How tactful you are, Louis. Your delicacy of tongue—”

  “Be serious. You and all the other puppeteers have been making the same wrong assumption. A puppeteer instinctively turns to run from danger. Right?”

  “Yes, Louis.”

  “Wrong. A puppeteer instinctively turns away from danger. It’s to free his hind leg for action. That hoof makes a deadly weapon, Nessus.”

  All in one motion, the puppeteer had spun on his forelegs and lashed out with his single hind leg. His heads were turned backwards and spread wide, Louis remembered, to triangulate on his target. Nessus had accurately kicked a man’s heart out through his splintered spine.

  “I could not run,” he said. “I would have been leaving my vehicle. That would have been dangerous.”

  “But you didn’t stop to think about it,” said Louis. “It was instinctive. You automatically turn your back on an enemy. Turn, and kick. A sane puppeteer turns to fight, not to run. You’re not crazy.”

  “You are wrong, Louis. Most puppeteers run from danger.”

  “But—”

  “The majority is always sane, Louis.”

  Herd animal! Louis gave it up. He lifted his eyes to watch the last sliver of sun disappear.

  Some mistakes we must carry with us…

  But Speaker must have been thinking of something else when he said that. Thinking of what?

  At the zenith swarmed a ring of black rectangles. The one that hid the sun was framed in a pearly coronal glow. The blue Ringworld formed a paraboloid arch over it all, framed against a star-dotted sky.

  It looked like something done with a Build-A-City set, by a child too young to know what he was doing.

  Nessus had been steering when they left Zignamuclickclick. Later he had turned the fleet over to Speaker. They had flown all night. Now, overhead, a brighter glow along one edge of the central shadow square showed that dawn was near.

  Sometime during these past hours, Louis had found a way to visualize the scale of the Ringworld.

  It involved a Mercator projection of the planet Earth—a common, rectangular, classroom wall map—but with the equa
tor drawn to one-to-one scale. One could relief-sculpt such a map, so that standing near the equator would be exactly like standing on the real Earth. But one could draw forty such maps, edge to edge, across the width of the Ringworld.

  Such a map would be greater in area than the Earth. But one could map it into the Ringworld’s topography, and look away for a moment, and never be able to find it again.

  One could play cuter tricks than that, given the tools that shaped the Ringworld. Those matching salt oceans, one on each side on the ring, had each been larger in area than any world in human space. Continents, after all, were only large islands. One could map the Earth on to such an ocean and still have room left over at the borders.

  “I shouldn’t have laughed,” Louis told himself. It took me long enough to grasp the scale of this…artifact. Why should I expect the natives to be more sophisticated?

  Nessus had seen it earlier. Night before last, when they had first seen the arch, Nessus had screamed and tried to hide.

  “Oh, what the tanj…” It didn’t matter. Not when all mistakes could be left behind at twelve hundred miles per hour.

  • • •

  • • •

  Speaker-to-Animals said one thing more before he turned back to his table. “Louis Wu, I found your challenge verbose. In challenging a kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.”

  RINGWORLD, 1970

  THE FOURTH PROFESSION

  The doorbell rang around noon on Wednesday.

  I sat up in bed and—it was the oddest of hangovers. My head didn’t spin. My sense of balance was quiveringly alert. At the same time my mind was clogged with the things I knew: facts that wouldn’t relate, churning in my head.

  It was like walking the high wire while simultaneously trying to solve an Agatha Christie mystery. Yet I was doing neither. I was just sitting up in bed, blinking.

  I remembered the Monk, and the pills. How many pills?

  The bell rang again.

  Walking to the door was an eerie sensation. Most people pay no attention to their somesthetic senses. Mine were clamoring for attention, begging to be tested—by a backflip, for instance. I resisted. I don’t have the muscles for doing backflips.