Ringworld r-1

by Larry Niven

  "Sickness and death are always bad luck, Louis. By our assumptions, Teela Brown should live forever."

  "But … right. She's not thinking in those terms. It's her luck, hovering over us all like a puppet master."

  Nessus had been a corpse at room temperature for two months now. He did not decay. The lights on his first aid kit remained alight, and even changed on occasion. It was his only sign of life.

  Louis was gazing at the puppeteer, minutes later, when two thoughts rubbed together. "Puppeteer," he said softly.

  "Louis?"

  "I just wondered if the puppeteers didn't get their name by playing god with the species around them. They've treated humans and kzinti like puppets; there's no denying that."

  "But Teela's luck made a puppet of Nessus."

  "We've all been playing god at various levels." Louis nodded at Prill, who was catching perhaps every third word. "Prill and you and me. How did it feel, Speaker? Were you a good god or a bad one?"

  "I cannot know. The species was not my own, though I have studied human extensively. I stopped a war, you will remember. I pointed out to each side that it must lose. That had been three weeks ago."

  "Yeah. My idea."

  "Of course."

  "Now you'll have to play god again. To kzinti," said Louis.

  "I do not understand."

  "Nessus and the other puppeteers have been playing planned breeding games on humans and kzinti. They deliberately brought about a situation in which natural selection would favor a peaceable kzin. Right?"

  "Yes."

  "What would happen if the Patriarchy learned of this?"

  "War," said the kzin. "A heavily provisioned fleet would attack the puppeteer worlds after a two-year flight. Perhaps humanity would join us. Surely the puppeteers have insulted you as badly."

  "Surely they have. And then?"

  "Then the leaf-eaters would exterminate my species down to the last kitten. Louis, I do not intend to tell anybody anything concerning starseed lures and puppeteer breeding plans. Can I persuade you to keep silence?"

  "Right."

  "Is this what you meant by playing god to my species?"

  "That, and one more thing," said Louis. "The Long Shot. Do you still want to steal it?"

  "Perhaps," said the kzin.

  "You can't do it," said Louis. "But let's assume you could. Then what?"

  "Then the Patriarchy would have the second quantum hyperdrive."

  "And?"

  Prill seemed to be aware that something crucial was happening. She watched them as if ready to stop a fight.

  "Soon we would have warships capable of crossing a light year in one-and-one-quarter minutes. We would dominate known space, enslave every species within our reach."

  "And then?"

  "Then it ends. This is precisely our ambition, Louis."

  "No. You'd keep conquering. With a drive that good, you'd move outward in all directions, spreading thin, taking every world you found. You'd conquer more than you could hold … and in all that expanded space you'd find something really dangerous. The puppeteer fleet. Another Ringworld, but at the height of its power. Another Slaver race just starting its expansion. Bandersnatchi with hands, grogs with feet, kdatlyno with guns."

  "Scare images."

  "You've seen the Ringworld. You've seen the puppeteer worlds. There must be more, in the space you could reach with the puppeteer hyperdrive."

  The kzin was silent.

  "Take your time" said Louis. "Think it through. You can't take the Long shot anyway. You'd kill us all if you tried it."

  The next day the Improbable crossed a long, straight meteoric furrow. They turned to antispinward, directly toward Fist-of-God.

  * * *

  Fist-of-God Mountain had grown large without coming near. Bigger than any asteroid, roughly conical, she had the look of a snow-capped mountain swollen to nightmare size. The nightmare continued, for Fist-of-God continued to swell.

  "I don't understand," said Prill. She was puzzled and upset. "This formation is not known to me. Why was it built? At the rim there are mountains as high, as decorative, and more useful, for they hold back the air."

  "That's what I thought," Louis Wu said. And he would say no more.

  That day they saw a small glass bottle resting at the end of the meteoric gouge they had been following.

  The Liar was as they had left it: on its back on a frictionless surface. Mentally Louis postponed the celebration. They were not home yet.

  In the end Prill had to hover the Improbable so that Louis could cross from the landing ramp. He found controls that would open both doors of the airlock at the same time. But air murmured out around them all the time they were transferring Nessus' body. They could not reduce the cabin pressure without Nessus, and Nessus was, to all appearances, dead.

  But they got him into the autodoc anyway. It was a puppeteer-shaped coffin, form-fitted to Nessus himself, and bulky Puppeteer surgeons and mechanics must have intended that it should handle any conceivable circumstance. But had they thought of decapitation?

  They had. There were two heads in there, and two more with necks attached, and enough organs and body parts to make several complete puppeteers. Grown from Nessus himself, probably; the faces on the heads looked familiar.

  Prill came aboard, and landed on her head. Rarely had Louis seen anyone so startled. He had never thought to tell her about induced gravity. Her face showed nothing as she stood up, but her posture — She was awed to silence.

  In that ghostly silence of homecoming, Louis Wu suddenly screamed like a banshee.

  "Coffeeee!" he yelled. And, "Hot water!" He charged into the stateroom he had shared with Teela Brown. A moment later he put his head out and screamed, "Prill!"

  Prill went.

  * * *

  She hated coffee. She thought Louis must be insane to swallow the bitter stuff, and she told him so.

  The shower was a long lost, badly missed luxury, once Louis explained the controls.

  She went wild over the sleeping plates.

  Speaker was celebrating the homecoming in his own fashion. Louis didn't know everything about the kzin's stateroom. He did know that the kzin was eating his head off.

  "Meat!" Speaker exulted. "I was not happy eating long-dead meat."

  "That stuff you're eating now is reconstituted."

  "Yes, but it tastes freshly killed!"

  That night Prill retired to a couch in the lounge. She appreciated the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. But Louis Wu slept in free fall for the first time in three months.

  He slept ten hours, and woke feeling like a tiger. A half-disc of sun flamed beneath his feet.

  * * *

  Back aboard the Improbable, he used the flashlight laser to free the knobbed end of the shadow square. When he finished, it still had some fused electrosetting plastic attached.

  He did not try to carry it to the Liar. The black thread was far too dangerous, the Ring floor far too slippery. Louis moved on all fours on the frictionless surface, and he pulled the knob behind him.

  He found Speaker silently watching from the airlock.

  Louis entered the airlock via Prill's stepladder, pushed past the kzin and went aft. Speaker continued to watch.

  The farthest point aft in the wreck of the Liar was a channel the size of a man's thigh. It had passed wiring to machinery in the Liar's wing, when the Liar had had a wing. Now it was sealed by a metal hatch. Louis opened the hatch, tossed the knobbed end of the win through and outside.

  He moved forward. At intervals he checked the position of the wire by using it to slice a Jinxian sausage dialed from the Liar's kitchen. Then he marked the spot with bright yellow paint. When he finished, the path of the virtually invisible thread was marked in a line of yellow splotches running through the Lkw.

  When the wire drew taut, it would certainly cut through some internal partitions of the ship. The yellow paint allowed Louis to gauge the path it would take, and to assure himsel
f that the wire would not damage any part of the life-support system. But the paint had another purpose. It would warn them all to keep away from the wire, lest they lose fingers or worse.

  Louis left the airlock, waited for Speaker to follow him out. Then he closed the outer door.

  At this point Speaker asked, "Is this why we came?"

  "Tell you in a minute," said Louis. He walked aft along the General Products hull, picked up the knob in both hands, and tugged gently. The wire hold.

  He put his back into it. He pulled with all his strength. The wire did not budge. The airlock door held it fast.

  "There's just no way to give it a stronger test. I wasn't sure the airlock door would be a close enough fit. I wasn't sure the wire wouldn't abrade a General products hull. I'm still not sure. But yes, this is why we came."

  "What shall we do next?"

  "We open the airlock door." He did it. "We let the thread slide freely through the Liar while we carry the handle back to the Improbable and cement it in place." And they did that

  The thread that had linked the shadow squares turned invisibly away to starboard. It had been dragged for thousands of miles behind the Improbable, because there was no way to get it aboard the flying building. Perhaps it trailed all the way back to the tangle of thread in the City Beneath Heaven; a tangle like a cloud of smoke, that might have held millions of miles of the stuff.

  Now it entered the Liar's double airlock, circled through the Liar's fuselage, out the wiring channel, and back to a blob of electrosetting plastic on the underside of the flying building.

  "So far so good," said Louis. "Now I'll need Prill. No, tanj it! I forgot. Prill doesn't have a pressure suit."

  "A pressure suit?"

  "We're taking the Improbable up Fist-of-God Mountain. The building isn't airtight. Well need pressure suits, and Prill doesn't have one. We'll have to leave her here."

  "Up Fist-of-God Mountain," Speaker repeated. "Louis: one flycycle has not the power to drag the Liar up that slope. You propose to burden the motor with the additional mass of a floating building."

  "No, no, no. I don't want to drag the Liar. All I want to do is pull the shadow square wire behind us. It should slide freely through the Liar, unless I give Prill the word to close the airlock door."

  Speaker thought about it. "That should work, Louis. If the puppeteer's flycycle has not the power we need, we can cut away chunks of the building to make it lighter. But why? What do you expect to find at the top?"

  "I could tell you in one word; and then you'd laugh in my face. Speaker, if I'm wrong, I swear you'll never know," said Louis Wu.

  And he thought: I'll have to tell Prill what to do. And plug the Liar's wiring channel with plastic. It won't stop the thread from sliding, but it should make the Liar nearly airtight.

  The Improbable was not a spaceship. Her lifting power was electromagnetic, thrusting against the Ring foundation itself. And the Ring floor sloped up toward Fist-of-God; for Fist-Of-God was hollow. Naturally the Improbable tended to tilt, to slide back down against the push of the puppeteer's flycycle.

  To that problem, Speaker had already found the answer.

  They were living in pressure suits, before the journey had properly began. Louis sucked pap through a tube, and thought yearningly of steak broiled with a flashlight-laser. Speaker sucked reconstituted blood, and thought his own thoughts.

  They certainly didn't need the kitchen. They cut that part of the building loose, and improved the tilt of the building to boot.

  They cut away air conditioning and police equipment. The generators that had ruined their flycycles went only after they had been positively identified as separate from the lifting motors. Walls went. Some walls were needed for their shade; for heating became a problem in the direct sunlight.

  Day by day they neared the crater at the top of Fist-of-God, a crater that would have swallowed most asteroids. The lip of the crater looked like no impact crater Louis had ever seen. Shards like obsidian spearheads formed a jagged ring. Spearheads the size of mountains themselves. There was a gap between two such peaks … they could enter there …

  "I take it," said Speaker, "that you wish to enter the crater itself."

  "That's right."

  "Then it is good that you noticed the pass. The slope above is too steep for our drive. We should reach the pass very soon."

  Speaker was steering the Improbable by modifying the flycycle thrust. That had been necessary since they cut away the stabilizing mechanism in a final attempt to reduce the building's weight. Louis had grown used to the bizarre appearance of the kzin: the five transparent concentric balloons of his pressure suit, the fishbowl helmet with its maze of tongue controls half hiding the kzin's face, the tremendous backpack.

  "Calling Prill," Louis said into the intercom. "Calling Halrloprillalar. Are you there, Prill?"

  "I am."

  "Stay there. We'll be through in twenty minutes."

  "Good. You've been long enough at it."

  The Arch seemed to blaze above them. A thousand miles above the Ringworld, they could see how the Arch merged into the rim walls and the flat landscape. Like the first man in space, a thousand years ago, looking down on an Earth that, by Jahweh and his mighty hammer, really was round.

  "We couldn't have known," said Louis Wu, not loudly. But Speaker looked up from his work.

  Louis didn't notice the kzin's odd look. "It would have saved us so much trouble. We could have turned back after we found the shadow square wire. Tanj, we could have dragged the Liar straight up Fist-of-God Mountain behind our flycycles! But then Teela wouldn't have met Seeker."

  "The luck of Teela Brown again?"

  "Sure." Louis shook himself. "Have I been talking to myself?"

  "I have been listening."

  "We should have known," said Louis. The gap between the sharp peaks was very near. He felt the urge to babble. "The Engineers would never have built a mountain this high here. They've got over a billion miles of thousand-mile-high mountains, if you count both rim walls."

  "But Fist-of-God is real, Louis."

  "No, no, no. It's just a shell. Look down; what do you see?"

  "Ringworld foundation material."

  "We thought it was dirty ice when we first saw it. Dirty ice, in hard vacuum! But forget that aspect. Remember the night you explored a giant map of the Ringworld? You couldn't find Fist-of-God. Why not?"

  The kzin didn't answer.

  "It wasn't there, that's why not. It wasn't there when the map was made. Prill, are you there?"

  "I am here. Why would I leave you?"

  "Good. Close the airlock doors. Repeat, close the airlock doors now. Don't cut yourself on the thread."

  "My people invented this thread, Louis." Prill's voice was garbled with static. She was off for a minute, then: "Both doors are closed."

  The Improbable was passing between the standing shards of mountain. Tense as Louis was, he would have been still more tense; but subconsciously he was expecting a kind of canyon or pass between those peaks.

  "Louis, just what do you expect to find in Fist-of-God crater?"

  "Stars," said Louis Wa.

  The kzin was tense too. "Do not mock me! In all honor -"

  — And they were through. There wasn't any pass. There was only a broken eggshell of Ringworld foundation material, stretched by terrific stresses to a few feet of thickness; and beyond that, the crater in Fist-of-God Mountain.

  They were falling. And the crater was full of stars.

  * * *

  Louis Wu had an excellent imagination. In his mind's eye the event was perfectly clear.

  He saw the, system of the Ringworld, sterile, tidily clean, empty of ramships, empty but for a G2 star and a daisy chain of shadow squares and the Ringworld.

  He saw a foreign body passing near, too near. He watched its hyperbolic fall from interstellar space, and he saw its path interrupted — by the underside of the Ringworld.

  In his vision the foreign body
was about the size of the Earth's Moon.

  It must have been ionized plasma in the first seconds. A meteorite can be cooled by ablation, by the boiling away of its own skin. But here the vaporized gas could not expand; it had forced its way into a deforming pocket of the Ringworld floor. The landscape had deformed upward, its carefully planned ecology and rainfall patterns shot to hell over a region greater than the surface of the Earth. All that desert … and Fist-of-God itself, raised a full thousand miles upward before the incredibly tough Ring floor ripped to let the fireball through.

  Fist-Of-God? Tanj, yes! Watching from a Ringworld prison cell, Louis Wu had seen it clear in his mind's eye. It must have been visible clear to both rims: a ball of hellfire the size of the Earth's Moon ripping up through the floor of the Ringworld like a strong man's fist through a cardboard box.

  The natives could be thankful that the Ring floor had deformed as much as it did. The hole was easily big enough to let all the air out of the Ringworld; but it was a thousand miles too high …

  * * *

  The crater was fall of stars.

  And there wasnt any gravity; there wasn't anything for the lifting motors to push against. Louis hadn't really thought this far ahead.

  "Grab something," he bellowed, "and hang on! If you fall through the bay window, there'll be no rescue."

  "Naturally not," said Speaker. He was wrapped around a naked metal beam. Louis had found another.

  "Was I right? Stars!"

  "Yes, Louis, but how did you know?"

  There was gravity, a steady, heavy pull on the Improbable. The skeleton of a buildiag turned on its side, and the bay window was up.

  "It's holding," Louis said fiercely. He wriggled to get right side up on the beam. "It better! I hope Prill strapped down; she'll have a bouncy ride, up the side of Fist-of-God Mountain, riding at the end of ten thousand miles of shadow square wire. Up and over the lip, then -"

  They looked up at the underside of the Ringworld. An infinity of sculptured surface. In the middle, a tremendous conical meteor puncture, shiny at the bottom. As the Improbable swung like a plumb bob beneath the Ringworld, the sun flashed suddenly in the bottom of the crater.