by Larry Niven
"So now we can all describe him, stet? The Hindmost puts Chiron in charge. Chiron leaves not long after Chmeee, and I came back to human space. That brings him here... mmm... at least thirty years ago. He finds Teela. Her infertility shot has worn off. Teela takes up living with one of Chiron's crew. I'm the child."
"What is your name, child?"
"Luis." Acolyte might forget, but he'd still sound right: Looiss, Luis. "Luis Tamasan," the first Oriental name he could think of, to account for the epicanthic folds in his eyes. "Chiron had his records erased. The ARM already knows that puppeteers meddle with their records. There's no Fertility Board record either, because my father... mmm. Horace Tamasan was born to a freemother, an illegal birth. Lots of bastards go to space."
Hanuman said, "A consistent tale. Have we the acting knack to tell it?"
Tunesmith's voice broke in without warning. "Hanuman, you surmise that an ARM fighter has dropped its add-on tank and gone off to battle. I scan an area bigger than worlds, and I find nothing to fight. My neutrino scan shows no power sources. Battery-powered ships would not register, I assume. Must I watch until they fire lasers or antimatter bullets?"
Louis said, "That half hour delay is going to drive us nuts sooner or later."
"Small ships might escape Tunesmith's instruments, but he wouldn't miss a weapons laser or antimatter flash," said Hanuman. "Would they fight while refusing to use such weapons? No. I surmise there is no fight at all, Luis."
Louis mulled that. If the ARMs hadn't been expecting a fight, where had the ARM ship gone? Why had they dropped their tank first?
"The tank might be empty," Hanuman suggested. "They wanted greater range. They won't be back."
Louis said, "All right, let's rethink. Spinward of us, there's a lot of fog to hide in. Ships could be hunting each other. Ah, flup, never mind." Both aliens were looking at him. "If there's nothing to fight, they've gone off to look at the puncture! What else is there? The Ringworld is dying. They need to tell their mother ship what's happening here, and they might want to run away fast, so they dropped their tank."
Hanuman thought it over; nodded. "Don your pressure suits."
Chapter 11 -
The Wounded Land
Most of the Mouse Eaters were dozing underground after a morning meal.
This wasn't Wembleth's custom. Wembleth was a traveler; he adapted his behavior to his hosts. He'd been living with these nocturnal hunters for several turns of the sky, sharing their meals and their women, teaching them how to make and use tools he'd learned of elsewhere.
Most of the villagers were inside their burrow houses. Older children and elders were cleaning up after the feast, with Wembleth's help, while shadow withdrew from the sun. For him it was a good choice; he needed some sunlight to stay healthy. In a minute they'd all go in--
And the day lit up.
Children began screaming.
Mouse Eaters couldn't deal with mere daylight; what would this glare do to them? His own eyes squinted to teary slits. Wembleth scooped up two small children, hugged their faces against his chest, and shouted at the rest. "Get inside!" He darted into the nearest house. The others would have to follow, or find their own houses.
Windows were mere slits in Mouse Eater houses. Wembleth dropped his load of children into the dark, wiggled past more frightened children and out again.
In the horrid light children and elders were running blind. Elder Mouse Eaters tended to lose their sight anyway; it let them move around in daylight. Through squinted eyes Wembleth could still see. They could not. Adults were bigger than he was. Somehow he wrestled them into doorways.
He couldn't guess how much time passed. The light faded. A hot fierce wind blasted across the plaza, scattering coals from the commonfire, and died. Presently a softer wind was blowing the other way. When he couldn't find anyone, couldn't see anyway, he crawled indoors. Indoors was perfect blackness; his night sight had faded, and the horrid light had faded too. Wembleth lay down and gasped for air.
Something would change. Something always did, when things went bad. You had to watch for the opportunity that would follow.
Presently Wembleth realized that he was suffocating.
The blast Spit Snail Darter, in stasis, into a rocky cliff above a vast forest. When time resumed, the ship had become part of an immense landslide of shattered shale.
Far, far to spinward, a sea of mist ran all across the horizon, hiding everything up to the base of the Arch. Worlds away, the mist domed upward. The near edge of the mist was a shock wave still moving sluggishly toward Snail Darter.
"It looks like the end of the world. Any world. Lots of worlds," Oliver said.
"See who's around," Roxanny ordered.
Detective Oliver Forrestier busied himself with various sensors. Right Whale, the big ARM cruiser, had gone up against a nameless Kzinti juggernaut, just before the fireball and blackout. There had been other ships too... but now there was nothing. "No obvious contrails," Oliver said. "The cloud is spitting neutrinos... last traces of antimatter, I guess, and diminishing. No point sources. No big ships."
"The fireball is collapsing. Like it's being sucked down," Claus said uneasily.
"Well," Roxanny said, "let's go look. We've run out of enemies, right, 'Tec Forrestier? The blast must have smashed them all. Friends too. So our mission is to collect data. Lift us, Claus."
Snail Darter lifted. 'Tec-Two Claus Raschid asked, "Just go straight on in, Roxanny?"
"Stay low, take our time. Look around. Claus, there's a hole at the center of all this. A hole in the Ringworld is a way home."
"Roxanny, what has you so cheerful?"
Roxanny Gauthier laughed boisterously. "We're alive! Isn't that enough? Look at the trail we left! We can follow it right back to the explosion. Claus, Oliver, for all we know about stasis fields, did you really believe it? Does it make sense that you can stop time and restart it? When I saw the light, I knew I was in an antimatter explosion. I thought we were dead!"
"This was a city," Oliver said. He played his instruments along the grid of streets and buildings. "Big one. Spread out, like Sydney."
"Claus, slow us down," Roxanny said. "I don't see much in the way of corpses. Where are the dead? "
Oliver guessed. "Inside, taking cover from the shock wave. Look at your displays, Roxanny. Air pressure is down and dropping. They hid from the shock wave and then--"
"Suffocated? The air's draining out." Claus wasn't stupid; he was only coming out of denial. "We've killed the whole Ringworld. Hey--"
"We'll be ten thousand years investigating the structure, learning its secrets," Roxanny said. "What are you doing, Claus?"
"Landing. I can see a survivor."
Underground, Wembleth was suffocating.
He clawed his way into the light, but the air wasn't any better.
The light was no more than broad daylight, but there was a weirdness to spinward as if half the world had been taken away, leaving only fog and chaos. Wembleth made his way to the commons, his chest heaving.
An hour ago they'd been feasting. Now there was nobody. The fires had gone out. Mouse Eaters wouldn't come outside in an emergency, and Wembleth didn't have a better answer than they did.
Something shaped vaguely like a silver vinch's egg was dropping out of the sky.
Wembleth stood up, though he nearly fainted, and waved both arms. When in doubt, ask for help. It was his normal instinct, but his fading intellect backed him up:
Here were folk with the power to fly! Tales told of such power, but these were flying in the winds of a major disaster. Anyone who could do that must know something.
News of this disaster must be carried to other peoples.
Wembleth was on h
is hands and knees, his vision blacking out, when two men of unknown species descended to him. They wore hard armor, like the mythical Vashneesht. They offered him a bag to crawl into.
Wembleth did.
Air hissed into the bag. He could breath.
He didn't know how to tell the Vashneesht that others needed rescuing. It never occurred to him that Vashneesht--wizards--might be the cause of a world-destroying disaster.
Gravity near a Ball World follows an inverse square law. In contrast, the Ringworld is a plane surface. Gravity does not dwindle as you rise, nor do spin gravity nor magnetic force, until the Ringworld looks less like a plane than a ribbon, from hundreds of thousands of miles high.
The Ringworld engineers embedded a lacework of superconducting cable in the Ringworld floor. The grid allows magnetic manipulation of solar flares to cause a superthermal laser effect, the Ringworld meteor defense; but it also opens the entire Ringworld to magnetic levitation.
Magnetically powered vehicles could rise to any height.
It was night when the skycycles lifted. Sixty miles high, effectively out of the atmosphere, they followed the gouge spinward. Verdant landscape became stormy, in ripples and streams of lightning-lit cloud rather than in whorl patterns. Then it was all unbroken clouds.
The terminator, the shadow of the edge of a shadow square, swept over them. A growing sliver of sun became a noonday glare. How long had it been since Louis saw a sunrise?
They crossed above a tremendous, sagging, faintly glowing tube. Horsetails of mist were flowing over the tube's flaccidities and disappearing into vacuum. Tunesmith's plug wouldn't hold forever.
Soil and rock still clung to the scrith floor. There were pools and ribbons of foamy ice, all ravaged in a radial pattern. They followed it inward toward the puncture.
The rim of the hole glittered. Maybe, maybe Tunesmith's "reweaving" system was working.
"Spacecraft," Acolyte said. "Above the hole."
There was no exhaust. The ship hovered on thrusters: a cylinder with a flattened belly, a little bigger than the tank it had left behind, but with a bulb of transparent canopy for a nose.
"That's an ARM design, Kittycatcher Class," Louis said. "A fighter. Three crew. They'll have seen us by now."
"Will they fire on us?"
"We must look harmless enough." Louis was trying to persuade himself.
Hologram miniatures of his two allies blurred, then became two views of a dark-skinned woman in ARM uniform. A contralto voice blared from his speaker. "Intruders, answer at once or be destroyed! You have entered a war zone!"
"I'm Luis Tamasan," Louis Wu answered. "Can you hear me?"
"We hear you, Luis Tamasan. Please approach Snail Darter."
"What are your intentions?"
"We are observers for the United Nations," the woman said. "What do you know of events in this region?"
"We came to observe a puncture in the Ringworld floor."
"Your associate is a Kzin."
Louis laughed. "Acolyte is local, a Ringworld native. I'm local too."
She peered at his hologram. "You look human."
"I'm human. Born here. Acolyte was too, and he's Kzin."
"There are Kzinti here?"
"Archaic Kzinti, in the GreatOcean." That should rouse their curiosity.
The ARM woman sounded peevish. "We tried every reasonable frequency. Why are you communicating in a mode used by the Fleet of Worlds?"
"Puppeteers found the Ringworld and puppeteers explored it first," Louis said with a trace of chill in his voice. "My parents and Acolyte's father came here with Pierson's puppeteers."
"Land there at the edge."
"We came to examine the puncture. May we circle above it?"
"Land now, Ringworld's children."
Louis said, "Down, Acolyte." He let his flycycle sink.
The ARM asked, "Acolyte, do you speak Interworld?"
"Madam LE, I do," the Kzin rumbled.
"While I serve the United Nations you may address me by my rank, as Copilot or 'Tec, not as Legal Entity. How may I call you?"
"Acolyte, until I earn a more worthy name."
"What is your connection to the Patriarchy?"
"I hear of them from my father. We see the lights of the Fringe War."
The skycycles settled on bare scrith.
Snail Darter descended with evident caution, and touched down. An airlock opened below its rounded tip. A human shape emerged, then a second pulling a bulb of some kind through a door that was too narrow. It got through anyway.
One ARM flew to meet the flycycles while the other lowered the bulb to the desiccated turf. The bulb was a rescue pod, an inflated balloon with a few opaque bulges of life-support gear. The shadow of a walking man showed in the bulb as it rolled toward the flycycles.
'Tec-First Gauthier--easily recognized through her fishbowl helmet--must have had a clear view of Hanuman riding alert in Acolyte's lap. Acolyte attached a line to Hanuman's pressure suit, as if the Hanging Person might scamper away and have to be caught. The pair debarked and joined Louis. Gauthier settled before them.
"I feel small," Acolyte said uneasily.
This close to the puncture, the floor was polished by the antimatter blast: featureless scrith, translucent and smooth, artificial and infinite. Louis and his companions were tiny. Louis hadn't felt it until the Kzin spoke.
"LE Acolyte, LE Luis," said Gauthier--courtesy, because Acolyte couldn't ever have been registered as a Legal Entity, nor could Luis Tamasan. "--meet 'Tec Oliver Forrestier and LE Wembleth. I'm 'Tec Roxanny Gauthier." Her manner had softened.
'Tec Forrestier, the second flyer, was large and pale, perhaps a Belter raised in low G. Like Gauthier's his rust-colored curly hair was cut close to his scalp. He smiled and touched gloves with the man, then the Kzin. "We're glad to find you," he said, Gauthier asked, "Can you take Wembleth for us? We don't have room for him."
"It's a three man ship," Forrestier explained.
"What's Wembleth, then?" Louis asked. "Local?"
Wembleth had lagged behind. Rolling a balloon by walking on its bottom didn't seem to bother him, but it was slow going. When he tried to stop, the balloon kept moving; he fell over, and got up without embarrassment.
Could Wembleth hear their communicators? He wasn't speaking.
Forrestier said, "We found him where the air was disappearing. Corpses and smashed burrows all around him. Do you recognize his type?"
"His species?" Louis studied Wembleth.
Wembleth blinked back as if light hurt his eyes, but they met Louis's without a flinch. He was eight inches shorter than Louis, five feet six or a little more. He was dressed in woven cloth, trousers and a loose shirt with patch pockets, all the color of sand. His feet were bare, large, and horny, with toenails like jagged weapons. His skin was darker than Louis's, paler than Roxanny Gauthier's, and his hands and face and neck were wrinkled. Thick hair, black and white, hid most of his face. Blue scrollwork on his brow and cheeks might have been ritual tattooing, or might have been naturally evolved camouflage. He was smiling, interested, where any normal man might have cowered in terror.
"I don't know this exact species." Louis hadn't met any locals within hundreds of millions of miles, but he didn't say that. He hadn't decided how far "Luis Tamasan" had traveled. He said, "There are thousands of hominid species on the Ringworld, maybe tens of thousands, and most of them are sapient. Wembleth is about average size. Dark skin's pretty common too. Teeth--" Wembleth smiled; Louis winced.
Wembleth's teeth were crooked and discolored. Four were missing, leaving black gaps. Louis could feel what that must be like. Wouldn't he be constantly chewing up his tongue?
Wembleth still had three canines, though. Louis asked, "Meat eater?"
'Tec Gauthier shrugged. "We gave him a standard dole brick. There's a setting for raw meat, of course, in case we get a Kzinti prisoner. He ate some of that."
"We can feed Wembleth, then. Even if his whole ecology is dead," Louis said.
"Good! Another matter. Tell me anything you can," Oliver Forrestier said, "about that." His arm swept a circle.
"The sudden mountain range." Obvious first question, yet Louis hadn't planned an answer. He improvised: "We saw it come down. Things of this scale, Ringworld scale, even my parents never have much to say. Chiron sent us to learn more."
"Chiron?"
"He brought my father to this place. A puppeteer."
"Stet. Come here, Luis." Forrestier walked toward the puncture seventy feet away. Louis followed.
Forrestier stopped. His toes were too near the edge. From this viewpoint it was still a bottomless pit ten or fifteen miles across. Shrinking, it was shrinking. The edge was hard to focus on; it blurred and shimmered when Louis moved his head.
Forrestier asked, "Is this normal?"
"I've never looked into a rip in the floor of the world," Louis said. "It's scary." It was barely a lie. He'd seen Fist-of-God crater... but "Luis" hadn't.
Gauthier said, "Well, it looks like it's repairing itself. Does it always do that? Over the years we've seen some of those hourglass storms die out. We think those are punctures and air leakage."
Louis frowned, projecting Don't understand. He remembered a word from far away, used as if it meant magicians, but it meant protector. "Vashneesht," he said. "There are secrets we never learn."
'Tec-One Gauthier said, "Oliver, get back from there! Luis, Acolyte, shall we set up a tent?"
Roxanny and Oliver lifted a bulky package out of the ship's lock. They set it on the scrith and moored it with stickstrip edges. The tent inflated itself, writhing and trying to bounce, because of course the stickstrip wouldn't hold on scrith. Roxanny left Oliver to deal with that while she went back for the kitchen 'doc.
