by Larry Niven
The deck was clear. Whatever had spoken must be aboard the cruiser.
Or under it? The space under there was black. Warvia adjusted her stance, a bit farther from the cruiser. Had she imagined …?
“Show yourself!”
“Warvia, I dare not. It’s Whisper.”
Whisper? “Tegger called you a wayspirit. He thought he imagined you.”
The voice said, “I will not speak to Tegger again. Warvia, I hope you will not babble of me to Tegger nor to the Night People. I could be killed and the Arch itself may fall if anyone takes notice of me.”
“Yes, my mate said you were secretive. Whisper? Why tell me?”
“May we talk a little?”
“I’d rather be inside.”
“I know. Warvia, we’re traveling at just under the speed of sound. That’s not very fast at all. When an object strikes the world from outside, it moves three hundred times as fast, with ninety thousand times the energy.”
“Really.” The thought was shattering. But why? Had she thought the speed of sound was instantaneous?
“Light travels much faster than sound. You’ve seen that yourself. Lightning, then thunder,” the voice said.
It didn’t occur to her to doubt a wayspirit. Anyone who could speak such things must really know what she was talking about. She asked, “Why not go faster than sound? Couldn’t we hear each other?”
“It’s the speed of sound in air, Warvia. If we make the air go with us, the sound in the air goes with us, too.”
“Oh.”
“The air sled is doing what the universe says it must. It can go to only one place, and then it will touch softly as a feather.”
Warvia asked again, “Why tell me?”
“When you know what is happening, it can’t frighten you. Of course there are exceptions, but the sky sled isn’t one. It flies in a kind of invisible groove, a pattern of magnetic fields. It cannot lose its way.”
“Pattern of …?”
“I will teach you about magnets and gravity and inertia. Inertia is the force that pulls you against the inside of the spinning ring so that gravity will not pull you into the sun—”
“Is that real, too, what the Night People say? The Arch is a ring?”
“Yes. Gravity is a force you need hardly notice, but it holds the sun together so that it can burn. Magnets allow the sun’s rind to be manipulated, to defend the Arch against things falling from outside. I will teach you more, if you come in daylight.”
“Why?”
“You and Tegger are frightened. If you understand what’s happening here, your fright will go away. If you lose your fright, so will Tegger. You will not go mad.”
“Tegger,” she said, and looked around her. “Tegger must be starving.” She couldn’t find the shrieker she’d dropped. She went back to the shrieker village, holding her eyes to the deck. Nearly the speed of sound: how fast was that in daywalks?
A shrieker came when she tickled a tunnel opening, and she bagged it. She climbed into the payload bay, and no voice stopped her.
Chapter 22
The Net
HOT NEEDLE OF INQUIRY, A.D. 2893
… Coffin!
Louis tried to push the lid away. The lid didn’t want to move that fast. He pulled his knees up to set his feet and thrust upward, then roll-dived out from under the half-raised lid. Hit the floor. Kept rolling and stood up in a crouch.
Not a coffin, he remembered, but he was on an adrenaline high, with good reason to stay in motion. What had been happening while he was in the box?
His ankle stung. He’d kicked something. Ignore it.
The strangest thing about his waking was the way he felt.
In their early twenties, Louis and a dozen friends had run an ancient martial arts teaching program. A few dropped out when the computer had them hitting each other in the face. Louis had stuck with it, play-fighting for ten months. Then it all turned stale, and two hundred years went by, and …
It didn’t feel like waking from steep or surgery. He felt more like a fighter halfway through a yogatsu match he knows he can win. Absolutely charged up, seething with adrenaline and energy.
Great! Bring ‘em on!
Motion! He whirled around. His hands felt naked.
Beyond the forward wall, rocky rolling terrain flashed past on either side, too fast for detail. Needle must be moving like a hypersonic shuttle at ground level. And the view was toward the captain’s cabin—
Only a picture. None of those great rocks was about to mash him into jelly. The black basalt walls to left and right, the lander bay behind him, were all quite motionless.
The thing he’d kicked was a block of stone in the forward-starboard corner of crew quarters. He’d never seen that before. It looked completely inert and harmless: a roughly dressed granite cube as tall as his knee.
He was alone.
Louis understood why Bram had left Acolyte in an induced coma until he could attend to him. Waking alone, a Kzin might set traps and barriers, or force the wardrobe and kitchen systems to produce weapons. But Louis did not understand why Bram had left him to wake alone.
How fast did a protector learn? Bram had observed him for … hmm? Up to three days, if he’d tapped into the webeye camera at Weaver Town. Could Bram already know me well enough to trust me?
Not likely! Bram hadn’t done this. The Hindmost must have reset the ’doc to open when his treatment was finished.
Now, what was the Hindmost trying to show him? Louis wondered. Did the protector know what kind of show the Hindmost had running here?
The hologram view streamed past him. Distant trees flashed past, an extensive forest of what looked like pines. Dead ahead, mountains and cloud patterns seemed infinitely distant.
The Hindmost could hide anything in the captain’s cabin, and his crew would see nothing but this bounding, lurching hologram projection. Maybe that was the point.
The bouncing lower rim was dark wood: the front of an alcohol-burning Machine People cruiser. Under that, a bit of a curved rim of gleaming metal or plastic.
The webeye camera that the Ghouls had mounted on a Machine People cruiser now rode something that flew.
Blocks of rock protruded from fringes of forest. The vehicle flew no more than two hundred feet up. The speed? Subsonic, but not by much.
What kind of hominids could tolerate such speed? Louis wondered. Even Disney Port didn’t run rides this fast. Most Ringworld hominids would die if they merely traveled beyond their local ecologies. A ride like this would stop their hearts.
What was he supposed to do with this?
How much time did he have to play?
Trapped in a bungalow-sized box buried miles deep in cooled lava, he was hardly a free agent. Stepping disks would get him out, but they would only take him to where his masters waited.
Louis knew that he was reacting instead of acting, like a good dog trying to guess the will of his masters. He was seething with new youth, and he couldn’t do anything.
Sit down, he told himself. Relax. Distract yourself. Eat?
The kitchen menu was running. It showed kzinti script and a picture: some kind of sea life. Alien sashimi! Better not. Louis reset it for human metabolism, Sol, Earth, français [francais], pain perdu, added café [cafe] au lait, and called it breakfast. And while he waited … hmmm?
Using the stepping disk would lose him his options.
Examining the stepping disk …
He lifted the rim as he’d seen Bram do.
The racing landscape blinked out, replaced by an abstraction: the diagram of the stepping disk network.
More links had been added. Several networks had merged into one. The restricted flick from crew quarters to the captain’s cabin was still isolated, and so were a few other pairs. Still, the Hindmost had given up some security for greater convenience. Bram must have made him do that.
The diagram measured distance on a logarithmic scale. At and near Needle, detail was fine enough to disc
riminate between crew quarters and the lander bay. There were flick points all through the Repair Center. Louis picked out Weaver Town, hundreds of thousands of miles distant. One point was far to starboard of Needle’s position, almost to the rim wall, half a million miles away or more. The most distant point must be a third of the way around the Ringworld’s arc: hundreds of millions of miles.
Brighter lines would indicate links that were currently open. If he was reading this right … open circuits ran from Needle’s crew quarters to Needle’s lander bay to the far point on the Great Ocean. Bram must be exploring.
Had he taken the Hindmost? Or had the Hindmost returned to his cabin?
Knowing that, Louis thought, would tell him exactly how much trust was between the Hindmost and Bram. In his cabin the Hindmost would be next to invulnerable, with General Products hull material between him and any enemy. Locked off from his grooming aids, he would grow scruffy and uncomfortable—
Ding. French toast with maple syrup. Coffee with foamy steamed milk appeared a moment later. Louis ate rapidly.
Then he tried using the fork on the stepping disk controls.
The tines bent and broke.
Humming, Louis dialed {Earth, Japan, assorted sashimi}.
The hashi felt like wood. They even had a grain. He cracked one along the grain to get a point. He began moving whatever would move in the stepping disk controls.
Bright lines faded, others brightened, as links opened and closed.
A slide turned everything off. Moving the slide back the way it had come got him a blinking half brightness: the system wanted instructions.
He kept playing. Presently he had a bent ring of seven bright lines, and a virtual clock, and weird music playing in the background. He couldn’t understand the musical puppeteer language, and he couldn’t read a Fleet of Worlds timepiece, but he saw how to set it for fast.
If he’d read this right, the circuit would take him to the lander bay; then to Weaver Town, to see what had changed. Pick up a pressure suit in the lock, or else he’d be sniffing tree-of-life when he flicked to the Meteor Defense room! Keep the suit on when he flicked to the surface of the Map of Mars, and thence to the farthest point on the diagram, which seemed to be on the rim wall. On to the mystery point at the far shore of the Great Ocean, and back to Needle.
Second thoughts? This shouldn’t take him more than a few minutes, unless he found something interesting.
He set the sashimi plate on the stepping disk.
Nothing happened.
Of course not: the rim of the stepping disk was still lifted, exposing the controls. Louis pushed it down. The sashimi plate flicked out.
The network blinked out, too. Louis had to shy from sudden motion. The racing landscape was back, and mountains beyond, spill mountains with the rim wall as backdrop. They were nearby, by Ringworld measure, a few tens of thousands of miles away.
Louis thought of matters he would like to study, if he could access the ship’s computer. He’d have to ask the Hindmost later. He must review what was known of protectors. Where was that sashimi plate?
Running through a yoga set allowed him to curb his impatience. How fast was fast?
Forty-five minutes later the plate hadn’t come back.
His companions might be at one of these points—probably were—and Acolyte might have snatched the sashimi. Still: rethink.
The far point in the diagram had drifted a little.
Drifted a little, yeah. Louis’s windpipe closed up; he was wheezing. Two hundred million miles up the Arch as measured on a logarithmic scale, and drifting? That point had to be moving like an interstellar slowboat, at hundreds of miles per second.
It was the refueling probe, of course. They must have mounted a new stepping disk on its flank and set it orbiting along the rim wall. As for the sashimi plate, it must have burned as a meteor.
Louis pulled the disk up to expose the controls. He began to reset them, swearing and talking himself through it, trying to ignore the orchestra. “Now this should reset that link … tanj. Why not? Oh. Stet, dark means off, now try this …”
He dialed up a loaf of bread and set it on the stepping disk. Flick.
An hour and ten since he had cut his associates off from Needle. He’d cut them off from the entire Repair Center, come to that. It would be open war when they discovered that, and breach of contract, too.
Then again, what could they do about it?
The chuckle never reached his throat. Louis knew puppeteers. The Hindmost would have had auxiliary controls implanted surgically. Louis knew he should be wondering when to reset the stepping disks. The Hindmost might tolerate his fiddling, but Louis didn’t want to face Bram’s wrath.
The bread was back.
The cruiser was flying over water. The mountains were to its left now, drifting minutely to spinward. The platform must have turned … turned by sixty degrees. Louis let a slow grin form.
It was following the superconductor grid!
Superconducting cable lay as a substrate beneath the Ringworld floor, forming hexagons fifty thousand miles across. It guided the magnetic fields by which solar prominences could be manipulated. Evidently the cruiser was riding a magnetic levitation vehicle, possibly something worked up by City Builders, more likely something as old as the Ringworld itself.
Did the Hindmost know?
Reacting, he was still reacting. And the bread was back.
Worth the risk?
Louis stepped on the disk.
***
Pressure suits were missing from the lander bay: one for the Hindmost, Chmeee’s spare, and a set meant for Louis. It need not mean that Bram’s crew were in vacuum. The protector might be showing caution, using the suits for armor.
Louis stepped off to tuck a pressure suit under his arm, then a cummerbund, helmet, and air pack. Then on to Weaver Town.
***
Louis flicked in off balance. He stumbled and dropped everything he was carrying. Embarrassed, he looked warily about him.
Full daylight. The stepping disk sat on the mud bank of the Weavers’ bathing stream, canted at an angle. Nobody was using the pool. Louis listened for children’s voices, but he heard nothing.
He’d stooped to examine the disk when a waspish voice spoke close behind him. The fallen helmet said, “Greeting! What species are you?”
Louis stood up. “I am of the Ball People,” he said. “Kidada?”
“Yes. Louis Wu’s people?” The old Weaver peered at Louis uncertainly.
“Yes. Kidada, how long since Louis Wu left?”
“You’re Louis Wu made young!”
“Yes.” Kidada’s gape and stare made Louis uncomfortable. He said, “Kidada, I have been in a long sleep. Are the Weavers well?”
“We thrive. We trade. Visitors come and go. Sawur took ill and died many days ago. The sky has circled twenty-two times since—”
“Sawur?”
“Since the night you vanished with some hairy creature of legend just on your tail, and only a Ghoul child for witness. Yes, Sawur is dead. I nearly died, too, and two children died. Sometimes visitors bring a sickness that kills others but not themselves.”
“I hoped to talk to her.”
A gaunt smile. “But will she answer?”
“She advised me well.” Don’t wait until you’re desperate!
“Sawur told me of your problem, after you vanished.”
“I solved it. I hope I solved it. Otherwise I am enslaved.”
“Enslaved. But with tens of falans to free yourself.” Kidada sounded tired and bitter.
Louis was becoming aware of how much he wanted to talk to Sawur. He would have stayed to mourn, if he had the time.
Time. The sky had circled twenty-two times … two falans plus. One hundred sixty-five of the Ringworld’s thirty-hour days. They’d left him in that tank for more than half an Earth year!
And he now was playing catch-up. “Kidada, who moved our stepping disk?”
“I
know not what you mean. This? It was here the morning you were gone. We’ve left it alone.”
The rim was muddy. Louis could see big fingerprints and scratch marks left by fingernails. Some visiting hominid—not Weavers, who had smaller hands—had been trying to alter the setting.
Ghouls. He might have known. He was glad he’d flicked in during daylight. The Night People wouldn’t even know he’d been here.
Louis donned his pressure suit. “Say hello to the children for me,” he said, and he flicked out.
***
Darkness.
Louis turned on his helmet lamp, and a half-seen skeleton was watching him.
He was in the Meteor Defense room. The screens were dark. His lamp was the only light.
These bones had been mounted for study. They weren’t attached at the joints: they barely touched. A frame of thin metal rods held them in place.
The skeleton stood ten inches shorter than Louis Wu. All of the bones had a rounded look: weathered. The ribs were improbably narrow, the fingers nearly gone. Time had turned bone structure to dust. Weather in here couldn’t be that erosive! But the knuckles still showed large, and all the joints were massive and greatly swollen. Those eroded projections in the massive jaw weren’t teeth. They were later bone growth.
Protector.
Louis let his fingertips play over the face. The bone was gritty with dust, and smooth. Smoothed by time, as surfaces turned gradually to dust.
This wasn’t an erosive environment. These bones must be a thousand years dead, at least.
The right hip had been shattered, the pieces mounted separately. And the left shoulder and elbow, and the neck: all fractured or shattered.
He might have died in a fall, or been beaten to death in combat.
***
The Pak had had their origin somewhere in the galactic core. A Pak colony on Earth had failed—the tree-of-life had failed, leaving the colony with no protectors—but Pak breeders had spread over the Earth from landing sites in Africa and Asia. Their bones were in museums under names such as Homo habilis. Their descendants had evolved to intelligence: a classic example of neoteny.
