Ringworld (11 page)

Teela Brown bent over the puppeteer, who was still curled into a ball behind the fragile netting of his crash web. Contrary to Louis's prediction, she had shown not the least sign of panic since the beginning of the laser attack. Now she slid her hands along the bases of the puppeteer's necks, scratching gently, as she had seen Louis do once before.

"You're being a silly coward," she rebuked the frightened puppeteer. "Come on and show your heads. Come on, look at me. You'll miss all the excitement!"

***

Twelve hours later, Nessus was still effectively in catatonia.

"When I try to coax him out, he only curls up tighter," Teela was near tears. They had retired to their room for dinner, but Teela couldn't eat anything. "I'm doing it wrong, Louis. I know it."

"You keep stressing excitement. Nessus isn't after excitement," Louis pointed out. "Forget it. He isn't hurting himself or us. When he's needed he'll uncurl, if only to protect himself. Meanwhile let him hide in his own belly."

Teela paced awkwardly, half-stumbling; she still hadn't completely adjusted to the difference between ship's gravity and Earth's gravity. She started to speak, changed her mind, changed it again, and blurted, "Are you scared?"

"Yeah."

"I thought so," she nodded, and resumed pacing. Presently she asked, "Why isn't Speaker scared?"

For the kzin had been nothing but active since the attack: cataloguing weaponry, doing primitive trig calculations to plot their course, occasionally delivering concise, reasonable orders in a manner to command instant obedience.

"I think Speaker's terrified. Remember how he acted when he saw the puppeteer worlds? He's terrified, but he won't let Nessus know it."

She shook her head. "I don't understand. I don't! Why is everyone frightened but me?"

Love and pity tore at Louis's insides with a pain so old, so nearly forgotten that it was almost now. I'm new here, and everyone knows but me! "Nessus was half right," he tried to explaim "You've never been hurt at all, have you? You're too lucky to be hurt. We're afraid of being hurt, but you don't understand, because it's never happened to you."

"That's crazy. I've never broken a bone or anything -- but that's not a psi power!"

"No. Luck isn't psi. Luck is statistics, and you're a mathematical fluke. Out of forty-three billion hmnan beings in known space, it would have been surprising if Nessus hadn't found someone like you. Don't yon see what he did?

"He took the group of people who were descendants of winners of the Birthright Lotteries. He says there were thousands, but it's a good bet that if he hadn't found what he was after in those thousands, he would have started looking through the larger group of people with one or more ancestors born through the Lotteries. That gives him tens of millions of choices ..."

"What was he after?"

"You. He took his several thousand people and started eliminating the unlucky ones. Here a man broke his finger when he was thirteen. This girl had personality problems. That one had acne. This man gets in fights and loses. That one won a fight, but lost the lawsuit. This guy flew model rockets until he burnt a thumbnail off. This girl loses constantly at roulette ... You see? You're the girl who's always won. The toast never falls on the buttered side."

Teela was looking thougbtful. "It's a probability thing then. But, Louis, I don't always win at roulette."

"But you never lost enough to hurt you."

"No."

"That's what Nessus looked for."

"You're saying I'm some kind of freak."

"No, tanj it! I'm saying you're not. Nessus kept eliminating candidates who were unlucky, until he wound up with you. He thinks found some basic principle. All he's really found is the far end of a normal curve.

"Probability theory says you exist. It also says that the next time you flip a coin, your chances of losing are just as good as mine: fifty-fifty, because Lady Luck has no memory at all."

Teela dropped into a chair. "A fine good luck charm I turned out to be. Poor Nessus. I failed him."

"Serves him right."

The corners of her mouth twitched. "We could check it out."

"What?"

"Dial a piece of toast. Start flipping it."

***

The shadow square was blacker than black, of the expensively achieved, definitive black used in high school black-body experiments. One corner notched an acute angle into the blue broken line of the Ringworid. With that notch as a mark, a brain and eye could sketch in the rest of it, a narrow oblong of space-blackness, suspiciously void of stars. Already it cut off a good chunk of sky; and it was growing.

Louis wore bulbous goggles of a material that developed black spots under the impact of too much vertically impinging light. Polarization in the hull was no longer enough. Speaker, who was in the control room controlling whatever was left to control, also wore a pair. They had found two separate leases, each on a short strap, and managed to force them on Nessus.

To Louis's goggled eyes, the sun, twelve million miles distant, was a blurred rim of flame around a wide, solid black disc. Everything was hot to the touch. The breathing-air plant was a howling wind.

Teela opened her cabin door and hastily shut it again. Presently she reappeared wearing goggles. She joined Louis at the lounge table.

The shadow square was a looming absence. It was as if a wet cloth had swept across a blackboard, erasing a swath of chalk-mark stars.

The howl of the air plant made speech impossible.

How would it dump the heat, out here where the sun was a looming furnace? It couldn't, Louis decided. It must be storing the heat. Somewhere in the breathing-air circuit was a point as hot as a star, growing hotter by the second.

One more thing to worry about.

The black oblong continued to swell.

It was the size that made it seem to approach so slowly. The shadow square was as broad as the sun, nearly a million miles across, and much longer: two-and-a-half mdlion miles long. Almost suddenly, it became tremendous. Its edge slid across the sun, and there was darkness.

The shadow square covered half the universe. Its borders were indeftite, black-on-black, terrible to see.

Part of the ship glowed white behind the block of cabins. The air plant was radiating waste heat while it had the chance. Louis shrugged and turned back to watch the shadow square.

The scream of breathing-air stopped. It left a ringing in the ears.

"Well," Teela said awkwardly.

Speaker came out of the control room. "A pity the scope screen is no longer connected to anything. There are so many questions it could answer."

"Like what?" Louis half-shouted.

"Why are the shadow squares moving at more than orbital velocity? Are they indeed power generators for the engineers? What holds them face-down to the sun? All the questions the leaf-eater asked could be answered, if we had a working scope screen."

"Are we going to hit the sun?"

"Of course not. I told you that, Louis. We will be behind the shadow square for half an hour. Then, an hour later, we will pass between the next shadow square and the sun. If the cabin becomes too hot we can always activate the stasis field."

The ringing silence closed in. The shadow square was a featureless field of black, without boundaries. A human eye can draw no data from pure black.

Presently the sun came out. Again the cabin was filled with the howl of the air plant.

Louis searched the sky ahead until he found another shadow square. He was watching its approach when the lightning struck again.

It looked like lightning. It came like lightning, without warning. There was a moment of terrible light, white with a violet tinge. The ship lurched --

Discontinuity.

-- lurched, and the light was gone. Louis reached under his goggles with two forefingers to rub dazzled eyes.

"What was that?" Teela exclaimed.

Louis's vision cleared slowly. He saw that Nessus had exposed a goggled head; that Speaker was at work in one of the lockers; that Teela was staring at him. No, at something behind him. He turned.

The sun was a wide black disc, smaller than it had been, outlined in yellow-white flame. It had shrun considerably during the moment in stasis. The moment must have lasted hours. The scream of the air plant had faded to an irritating whine.

Something else burned out there.

It was a looping thread of black, very narrow, outlined in violet-white. There seemed to be no endpoints. One end faded into the black patch that hid the sun. The other diminished ahead of the Liar, until it was too small to see.

The thread was writhing like an injured earthworm.

"We seem to have hit something," Nessus said calmly. It was as if he had never been away. "Speaker, you must go outside to investigate. Please don your suit."

"We are in a state of war," the kzin answered. "I command."

"Excellent. What will you do now?"

The kzin had sense enough to remain silent. He had nearly finished donning the multiple balloon and heavy backpack which served him as a pressure suit. Obviously he intended to go out for a look.

***

He went out on one of the flycycles: a dumbbell-shaped thruster-powered vehicle with an armchair seat in the constriction.

They watched him maneuver alongside the writhing thread of black. It had cooled considerably; for the fringe of brightness around the goggle-induced black had dimmed from violet-white through white-white to orange-white. They watched Speaker's dark bulk leave the flycycle and move about near the heated, writhing wire.

They could hear him breathing. Once they heard a startled snarling sound. But he never said a word into the suit phone. He was out there a fall half-hour, while the heated thing darkened to near-invisibility.

Presently he returned to the Liar. When he entered the lounge, he had their complete and respectful attention.

"It was no thicker than thread," said the kzin. "You will notice that I hold half a grippy."

He held up the ruined tool for them to see. The grippy had been cut cleanly along a plane surface, and the cut surface polished to mirror brightness.

"When I was close enough to see how thin the thread was, I swung the grippy at it. The thread cut cleanly through the steel. I felt only the slightest of togs."

Louis said, "A variable-sword would do that."

"But a variable-sword blade is a metal wire enclosed in a Slaver stasis field. It cannot bend. This-- thread was in constant motion, as you saw."

"Something new, then." Something that cut like a variable-sword. Light, thin, strong, beyond human skill. Something that stayed solid at temperatures where a natural substance would become a plasma. "Something really new. But what was it doing in our way?"

"Consider. We were passing between shadow squares when we hit something unidentified. Subsequently we found a seemingly infinite length of thread, at a temperature comparable to the interior of a hot star. Obviously we hit the thread. It retained the heat of impact. I surmise that it was strung between the shadow squares."

"Probably was. But why?"

"We can only speculate. Consoder," said Speaker-To-Animals. "The Ringworld engineers used the shadow squares to provide intervals of night. To fulfill their purpose, the rectangles must occlude. sunlight They would fail if they drifted edge-on to the sun.

"The Ringworld engineers used their strange thread to join the rectangles together in a chain. They spun the chain at faster than orbital speed in order to put tension on the threads. The threads are taut, the rectangles are held flat to the ring."

It made an odd picture. Twenty shadow squares in a Maypole dance, their edges joined by threads cut to lengths of five million miles ... "We need that thread," said Louis. "There's no limit to what we could do with it."

"I had no way to bring it aboard. Or to cut a length of it, for that matter."

The Puppeteer interposed. "Our course may have been changed by the collision. Is there any way to determine if we will miss the Ringworld?"

Nobody could think of one.

"We may miss the ring, yet the collision may have taken too much of our momentum. We may fall forever in an elliptical orbit," lamented the puppeteer. "Teela, your luck has played us false."

She shrugged. "I never told you I was a good luck charm."

"It was the Hindmost who so misinformed me. Were he here now, I would have rude words for my arrogant fianc‚."

***

Dinner that night became a ritual. The crew of the Liar took a last supper in the lounge. Teela Brown was hurtingly beautiful across the table, in a flowing, floating black-and-tangerine garment that couldn't have weighed as much as an ounce.

Behind her shoulder, the Ringworld was slowly swelling. Occasionally Teela turned to watch it. They all did. But where Louis had to guess at the feelings of the aliens, in Teela he saw only eagerness. She felt it, as he did: they would not miss the Ringworld.

In his lovemaking that night there was a ferocity that startled, then delighted her. "So that's what fear does to you! I'll have to remember."

He could not smile back. "I keep thinking that this could be the last time." With anyone, he added, to himself.

"Oh, Louis. Were in a General Products hull!"

"Suppose the stasis field doesn't go on? The hull might survive the impact, but we'd be jelly."

"For Finagle's sake, stop worrying!" She ran her fingernails across his back, reaching around from both sides. He pulled her close, so that she couldn't see his face ...

When she was deeply asleep, floating like a lovely dream between the sleeping plates, he left her. Exhausted, satiated, he lolled in a hot bathtub with a bulb of cold bourbon balanced on the rim.

There had been pleasures to sample one more time.

***

Baby blue with white streaks, navy blue with no details, the Ringworld spread across the sky. At first only the cloud cover showed detail: storms, parallel streamers, woolly fleece, all diminutive. Growing. Then outlines of seas ... the Ringworld was approximately half water ...

Nessus was in his couch, strapped down, curled protectively around himself. Speaker and Teela and Louis Wu, strapped down and watching.