Ringworld (13 page)

"We will find help," said Nessus.

"He's probably right," said Louis. "The spaceports are at the rim. If the whole ring went back to the stone age, and civilization started to spread again, it would start with returning ramships. It would have to."

"You speculate wildly," said Speaker.

"Maybe."

"But I agree with you. I might add that if the ring has lost all of its great secrets, we might still find machinery at the spaceport. Working machinery, machinery which can be repaired."

But which rim was closer?

"Teela's right," Louis said suddenly. "Let's get to work. At night we'll be able to see further."

Hours of hard labor followed. They moved machinery, sorted it out, lowered heavy items by wire from the ship's airlock. The sudden shifts of gravity posed problems, but none of the equipment was particularly fragile.

Sometime during those hours, Louis caught Teela in the ship while the aliens were outside. "You've been looking like someone poisoned your favorite orchid-thing. Care to talk about it?"

She shook her head, avoiding his eyes. Her lips, he saw, were perfect for pouting. She was one of those rare, lucky women whom crying does not make ugly.

"Then I'll talk. When you went out the lock without a pressure suit, I dressed you down good. Fifteen minutes later you tried to climb a slope of congealing lava wearing nothing but ship-slippers."

"You wanted me to burn my feet!"

"That's right. Don't look so surprised. We need you. We don't want you killed. I want you to learn to be careful. You never learned before, so you'll have to learn now. You'll remember your sore feet longer than you remember my lectures."

"Need me! That's a laugh. You know why Nessus brought me here. I'm a good luck charm that failed."

"I'll grant you blew that one. As a good luck charm, you're fired. Come on, smile. We need you. We need you to keep me happy, so I don't rape Nessus. We need you to do all the heavy work while we lie about in the sun. We need you to make intelligent suggestions."

She forced a smile. It broke apart and she was crying. She buried her face in his shoulder and sobbed against him, wrackingly, her fingernails digging hard into his back.

It was not exactly the first time a woman had cried on Louis Wu; but Teela probably had more reason than most. Louis held her, rubbing his fingers along the muscles of her back in a half-automatic attempt at a massage, and waited it out.

She talked into the material of his pressure suit. "How was I to know the rock would burn me?"

"Remember the Finagle Laws. The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum. The universe is hos--"

"But it hurt!"

"The rock turned on you. It attacked you. Listen," he pleaded. "You've got to learn to think paranoid. Think like Nessus."

"I can't. I don't know how he thinks. I don't understand him at all." She raised her tear-stained face. "I don't understand you."

"Yeah." He ran his thumbs hard along the edges of her shoulder blades, then down her vertebrae. "Listen," he said presently. "Suppose I said the universe is my enemy. Would you think I was nuts?"

She nodded vigorously, angrily.

"The universe is against me," said Louis Wu. "The universe hates me. The universe makes no provision for a two-hundred-year-old man.

"What is it that shapes a species? Evolution, isn't it? Evolution gives Speaker his night vision and his balance. Evolution gives Nessus the reflex that turns his back on danger. Evolution turns a man's sex off at fifty or sixty. Then evolution quits.

"Because evolution is through with any organism once that organism is too old to breed. You follow me?"

"Sure. You're too old to breed," she mocked him bitterly.

"Right. A few centuries ago some biological engineers carved up the genes of a ragweed and produced boosterspice. As a direct result, I am two hundred years old and still healthy. But not because the universe loves me.

"The universe hates me," said Louis Wit. "It's tried to kill me many times. I wish I could show you the scars. It'll keep trying, too."

"Because you're too old to breed."

"Finagle in hysterics, woman! You're the one who doesn't know how to take care of herself! We're in unknown territory; we don't know the rules, and we don't know what we might meet. If you try to walk on hot lava, you could get more than sore feet next time. Stay alert. You understand me?"

"No," said Teela. "No."

Later, after she had washed her face, they carried the fourth flycycle into the airlock. For half an hour the aliens had left them alone. Had they decided to avoid two humans dealing with strictly human problems? Maybe, maybe.

Between high walls of black lava stretched an infinite strip of ring foundation material as flat as a polished tabletop. In the foreground, a tremendous glass cathode tube lay on its side. Beneath the curving flank of the transparent cylinder, a cluster of machinery and four odd figures looking slightly lost.

"How about water?" Louis was asking. "I couldn't see any lakes. Do we have to haul our own water?"

"No." Nessus opened the aft section of his own flycycle to show them the water tank and the cooler-extractor which would condense water from the air.

The flycycles were miracles of compact design. Aside from their highly individualistic saddles, they were built all alike: a pair of four foot spheres joined by the constriction that held the saddle. Half the rear section was luggage space, and there was harness for stringing additional gear. Four flat feet, extended now for landing, would recess against the two spheres during flight.

The puppeteer's flycycle had a reclining saddle, a belly-bed with three grooves for his three legs. Nessus would he immobile on his belly, controlling the vehicle with his mouths.

The 'cycles intended for Louis and Teela held padded contour chairs with neck rests and power controls for attitude. Like Nessus's and Speaker's, these saddles rested in the constriction in the 'cycle's dumbbell shape, and were split to accommodate leg supports. Speaker's saddle was much larger and broader, and without a neck rest. There was rigging for tools on both sides of his saddle. For weapons?

"We must carry anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon," Speaker was saying, as he prowled restlessly among the scattered machinery.

"We brought no weapons," Nessus answered. "Because we wished to show ourselves as peaceful, we brought no weapons at all."

"Then what are these?" Speaker had already assembled a somewhat sparse collection of lightweight artifacts.

"All tools," said Nessus. He pointed. "These are flashlight-lasers with variable beams. At night one can see great distances with these, for one can narrow the beam indefinitely by turning this ring. Indeed, one must be careful not to burn holes in nearby objects or persons, for the beam can be made perfectly parallel and extremely intense.

"These dueling pistols are for settling arguments between ourselves. They fire a ten-second charge. One must be careful not to touch this safety button, because --"

"Because then it fires an hour's charge. That's a Jinxian model, isn't it?"

"Yes, Louis. And this item is a modified digging tool. Perhaps you know of the digging tool found in a Slaver stasis box --"

He meant the Slaver disintegrator, Louis decided. The disintegrator was indeed a digging tool. Where its narrow beam fell, the charge on the electron was temporarily suppressed. Solid matter, rendered suddenly and violently positive, tended to tear itself into a fog of monatomic dust.

"It is worthless as a weapon," the kzin rumbled. "We have studied it. It works too slowly to be used against an enemy."

"Exactly. A harmless toy. This item --" The item held in the puppeteer's mouth looked like a double-barreled shotgun, except that the handle had a characteristic puppeteer-built look, like quicksilver caught in the act of flowing from one shape to another.

"This item is exactly like the Slaver disintegrator digging tool except that one beam suppresses the positive charge on the proton. One should be careful not to use both beams at once, as the beams are parallel and separate."

"I understand," said the kzin. "If the twin beam were allowed to fall next to each other, there would be a current flow."

"Exactly."

"Do you believe thew makeshifts will be adequate? There is no guessing what we shall meet."

"That's not quite true," said Louis Wu. "This isn't a planet, after all. If there was an animal the Ringworlders didn't like, chances are they left it home. We won't meet any tigers. Or mosquitoes."

"Suppose the Ringworlders liked tigers?" Teela wondered.

It was a valid point despite its facetious sound. What did they know of Ringworld physiology? Only that they came from a water world using approximately G2 starlight. On that basis they might look like humans, puppeteers, kzinti, grogs, dolphins, killer whales, or sperm whales; but they probably wouldn't.

"We will fear the Ringworlders more than their pets," Speaker predicted. "We must take all possible weapons. I recommend that I be placed in charge of this expedition until such time as we may leave the Ring."

"I have the tasp."

"I have not forgotten that, Nessus. You may think of the tasp as an absolute veto power. I suggest that you show reluctance to use it. Think, all of you!" The kzin loomed over them, five hundred pounds of teeth and claws and orange fur. "We are all supposed to be sentient. Think of our situation! We have been attacked. Our ship is half destroyed. We must travel an unknown distance across unknown territory. The powers of the Ringworlders were once enormous. Are they still enormous, or do they now use nothing more complex than a spear made from a sharpened bone?

"They might equally well have transmutation, total conversion beams, anything that may have been required to build this --" the kzin looked around him, at the glassy floor and the black lava walls; and perhaps he shuddered. "-- this incredible artifact"

"I have the tasp," said Nessus. "The expedition is mine."

"Are you pleased with its success? I mean no insult, I intend no challenge. You must place me in command. Of the four of us, I alone have had training in war."

"Let's wait," Teela suggested. "We may not find anything to fight."

"Agreed," said Louis. He didn't fancy being led by a kzin.

"Very well. But we must take the weapons."

They began to load the flycycles.

***

There was other equipment besides weaponry. Camping equipment, food testing and food rebuilding kits, phials of dietary additives, lightweight air filters ...

There were communicator discs designed to be worn on a human or kzinti wrist or a puppeteer neck. They were bulky and not particularly comfortable.

"Why these?" Low asked. For the puppeteer had already shown them the intercom system built into the flycycles.

"They were originally intended to communicate with the Liar's autopilot, so that we might summon the ship when necessary."

"Then why do we need them now?"

"As translators, Louis. Should we run into sentient beings, as seems likely, we will need the autopilot to translate for us."

"Oh."

They were finished. Equipment still rested beneath the Liar's hull, but it was useless stuff: free-fall equipment for deep space, the pressure suits, some replacement parts for machinery vaporized by the Ringworld defense system. They had loaded even the air flIters, more because they were no more bulky than handkerchiefs than because they were likely to be needed.

Louis was bone tired. He mounted his flycycle and looked about him, wondering if he had forgotten anything. He saw Teela staring straight upward, and even through the mist of exhaustion he saw that she was horrified.

"There ain't no justice," she swore. "It's still noon!"

"Don't panic. The --"

"Louis! We've been working for a good six hours, I know we have! How could it be still noon?"

"Don't worry about it. The sun doesn't set, remember?"

"Doesn't set?" Her hysteria ended as suddenly as it had begun. "Oh. Of course it doesn't set."

"We'll have to get used to it. Look again; isn't that the edge of a shadow square against the sun?"

Something had certainly nipped a chord out of the sun's disc. The sun diminished as they watched.

"We had best take flight," said Speaker. "When darkness falls we should be aloft."

Four flycycles rose in a diamond cluster through waning daylight. The exposed ring flooring dropped away.

Nessus had shown them how to use the slave circuits. Now each of the other 'cycles was programmed to imitate whatever Louis's did. Louis was steering for them all. In a contoured seat like a masseur couch without the masseur attachments, he guided his 'cycle with pedals and a joystick.

Four transparent miniature heads hovered like hallucinations above his dashboard. These included a lovely raven-haired siren, a ferocious quasi-tiger with eyes that were too aware, and a pair of silly-looking one-eyed pythons. The intercom hookup was working perfectly, with results comparable to delirium tremens.

As the flycycles rose above the black lava slopes, Louis watched the others for their expressions.

Teela reacted first. Her eyes scainned the middle distance, and rose, and found infinity where they had always before found limits. They went big and round, and Teela's face lit like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. "Oh, Louis!"

"What an extraordinarily large mountain!" Speaker said.

Nessus said nothing. His heads bobbed and circled nervously.

Darkness fell quickly. A black shadow swept suddenly across the giant mountain. In seconds it was gone. The sun was only a golden sliver now, cut by blackness. And something took shape in the darkening sky.

An enormous arch.

Its outline grew rapidly clear. As the land and sky grow dark, the true glory of the Ringworld sky emerged against the night.

The Ringworld arched over itself in stripes of baby blue swirled with white cloud, in narrower stripes of near-black. At its base the arch was very broad. It narrowed swiftly as it rose. Near the zenith it was no more than a broken line of glowing blue-white. At the zenith itself the arch was cut by the otherwise invisible ring of shadow squares.

The skycycles rose quickly, but in silence. The sonic fold was a most effective insulator. Louis heard no windsong from outside. He was all the more startled when his private bubble of space was violated by a scream of orchestral music.

It sounded as though a steam organ had exploded.

The sound was painfully loud. Louis slapped his hands over his ears. Stunned, he did not at once realize what was happening. Then he flicked the intercom control, and Nessus's image went like a ghost at dawn. The scream (a church choir being burnt alive?) diminished considerably. He could still hear it keening at second hand (a gutshot stereo set?) through Speaker's and Teela's intercom.

"Why did he do that?" Teela exclaimed in astonishment.

"Terrified. It'll take him awhile to get used to it."

"Used to what?"

"I take command," Speaker-To-Animals boomed. "The herbivore is incapable to make decisions. I declare this mission to be of military nature, and I take command."

For a moment Louis considered the only alternative: claiming the leader's place for himself. But who wanted to fight a kzin? In any case, the kzin would probably make a better leader.

By now the flycycles were half a mile up. Sky and land were mostly black; but on the black land were blacker shadows, giving form if not color to the map; and the sky was sprinkled with stars, and mastered by that ego-smashing arch.

Oddly, Louis found himself thinking of Dante's Divine Comedy. Dante's universe had been a complex artifact, with the souls of men and angels shown as precisely machined parts of the vast structure. The Ringworld was obtrusively an artifact, a made thing. You couldn't forget it, not for an instant; for the handle rose overhead, huge and blue and checkered, from beyond the edge of infinity.

Small wonder Nessus had been unable to face it. He was too afraid -- and too realistic. Perhaps he saw the beauty; perhaps not. Certainly he saw that they were marooned on an artificial structure bigger in area than all the worlds of the former puppeteer empire.

"I believe I can see the rim walls," said Speaker.

Louis tore his eyes away from the archmg sky. He looked to "port" and "starboard" and his heart sank.

To the left (they were facing back along the gouge of the Liar's landing, so that left was port), the edge of the rim wall was a barely visible line, blue-black on blue-black. Louis could not guess its height. Its base was not even hinted. Only the top edge showed; and when he stared at it it disappeared. That line was about where the horizon might have been; so that it might as easily have been the base as the top of something.

To right and starboard, the other rim wall was virtually identical. The same height, the same picture, the same tendency of the line to fade away beneath a steady stare.

Apparently the Liar had smashed down very close to the median line of the ring. The rim walls seemed equally distant ... which put them nearly half a million miles away.

Louis cleared his throat. "Speaker, what do you think?"

"To me the port wall seems fractionally higher."

"Okay." Louis turned left. The other 'cycles followed, still on slave circuits.

Louis activated the intercom for a look at Nessus. The puppeteer was hugging his saddle with all three legs; his heads were tucked between his body and the saddle. He was flying blind.

Teela said, "Speaker, are you sure?"

"Of course," the kzin answered. "The portside rim wall is visibly larger."

Louis smiled to uniself. He had never had war training, but he knew something of war. He'd been caught on the ground during a revolution on Wunderland, and had fought as a guerilla for three months before he could get to a ship.

One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happened to be right, so much the better ...

***

They flew to port over black land. The Ring glowed far brighter than moonlight, but moonlight does little to light a landscape from the air. The meteor gully, the rip the Liar had torn across the Ringworld's surface, was a silver thread behind them. Eventually it faded into the dark.

The skycycles accelerated steadily and in silence. At a little below the speed of sound, a rushing sound penetrated the sonic fold. It reached a peak at sonic speed, then cut off sharply. The sonic fold found a new shape, and again there was silence

Shortly thereafter the 'cycles reached cruising speed. Louis relaxed within the 'cycle seat. He estimated that he would be spending more than a month in that seat, and he might as well get used to it.

Presently (because he was the only one flying, and it would not do to fall asleep) he began testing his 'cycle.

The rest facilities were simple, comfortable, and easy to use. But undignified!

He tried pushing his hand into the sonic fold. The fold was a force field, a network of force vectors intended to guide air currents around the space occupied by the flycycle. It was not intended to behave like a glass wall. To Louis's hand it felt like a hard wind, a wind that pushed straight toward him from every direction. He was in a protected bubble of moving wind.

The sonic fold seemed idiot-proof.

He tested that by pulling a facial tissue from a slot and dropping it. The tissue fluttered underneath the 'cycle, and then it rested on the air, vibrating madly. Louis was willing to believe that if he fell out of his seat, which would not be easy, he would be caught by the sonic fold and would be able to climb back up again.

It figured. Puppeteers ...

The water tube gave him distilled water. The food slot gave him flat reddish-brown bricks. Six times he dialed a brick, took a bite, and dropped the brick into the intake hopper. Each brick tasted different, and they all tasted good.

At least he would not get bored with eating. Not soon, anyway.

But if they could not find plants and water to shovel into the intake hopper, the food slot would eventually stop delivering bricks.

He dialed a seventh brick and ate it.

Unnerving, to think how far they were from help. Earth was two hundred light years away, the puppeteer fleet two light years distant, was receding at nearly lightspeed; and even the half-vaporized Liar had been invisible from the beginning of the flight. Now the meteoric gouge had faded from sight. How easy would it be to lose the ship entirely?

Tanj near impossible, Louis decided. To antispinward was the largest mountain men had ever seen. There couldn't be many such supervolcanos on the Ringworld. To find the Liar one would aim for the mountain, then troll spinward for a linear gouge several thousand miles Iong.

... But the arch of the Ringworld blazed overhead: three million times the surface area of the Earth. There was room to get quite thoroughly lost on the Ringworld.

Nessus was beginning to stir. First one head, then the other emerged from beneath the puppeteer's torso. The puppeteer tongued switches, then spoke.

"Louis, may we have privacy?"

The transparent images of Speaker and Teela appeared to be dozing. Louis switched them out of the intercom circuit. "Go ahead."

"What has been happening?"

"Couldn't you hear?"

"My ears are in my heads. My hearing was blocked."

"How are you feeling now?"

"Perhaps I will return to catatonia. I feel very lost, Louis."

"Me too. Well, we've come twenty-two hundred miles in the last three hours. We'd have done better with transfer booths, or even stepping discs."

"Our engineers were unable to arrange stepping discs." The puppeteer's heads glanced at each other, eye to eye. A moment only they held the position; but Louis had seen that gesture before.

Now, tentatively, he tagged it as puppeteer's laughter. Would a mad puppeteer develop a sense of humor?

He continued speaking. "We're moving to port. Speaker decided that the portside rim wall was closer. I think we could have flipped a coin for it and got better accuracy. But Speaker's the boss. He took over when you went catatonic."

"That is unfortunate. Speaker's flycycle is beyond range of my tasp. I must --"

"Hold it a second. Why not leave him in command?"

"But, but, but --"

"Think about it," Louis urged. "You can always veto him with the tasp. If you don't put him in charge, he'll take over anyway, every time you relax. We need an undisputed leader."

"I suppose it cannot hurt," the puppeteer fluted. "My leadership will not materially improve our chances."

"That's the spirit. Call Speaker and tell him he's the Hindmost."

Louis hooked himself into Speaker's intercom to hear the exchange. If he was expecting fireworks he was disappointed. The kzin and the puppeteer spoke a few hissing, spitting phrases in the Hero's Tongue. Then the kzin cut himself out of the circuit.

"I must apologize," said Nessus. "My stupidity has brought disaster on us."

"Don't worry about it," Louis consoled him. "You're just in the depressive leg of your cycle."

"I am a sentient being, and I can face facts. I was terribly wrong about Teela Brown."

"True enough, but that wasn't your fault."

"It was indeed my fault, Louis Wu. I should have realized why I was having trouble finding candidates other than Teela Brown."

"Huh?"

"They were too lucky."

Louis whistled tunelessly through his teeth. The puppeteer had evolved a brand new theory.

"Specifically," said Nessus, "They were too lucky to become involved in such a dangerous project as ours. The Birthright Lotteries have indeed produced psychic, hereditary luck. Yet that luck was not available to me. When I tried to contact the Lottery Families, I found only Teela Brown."

"Listen --"

"I was unable to contact others because they were too lucky. I was able to contact Teela Brown, to involve her in this ill-fated expedition, because she did not inherit the gene. Louis, I apologize."

"Oh, go to sleep."

"I must apologize to Teela too."

"No. That's my fault. I could have stopped her."

"Could you?"

"I don't know. I honestly don't. Go to sleep."

"I cannot."

"Then you fly. I'll go to sleep."

And so it was. But before Louis dropped off he was surprised to realize how smoothly the flycycle was riding. The puppeteer was an excellent pilot.

***

Louis woke at first light.

He was not used to sleeping under gravity. Never in his life had he spent a night in sitting position. When he yawned and tried to stretch, muscles seemed to crack and crumble under the strain. Groaning, he rubbed sticky eyes and looked about him.

The shadows were funny; the light was funny. Louis looked up and found a white sliver of noonday sun. Stupid, he told himself as he waited for the tears to stop. His reflexes were faster than his brain.

To his left all was darkness, deepening with distance. The missing horizon was a blackness born of night and chaos, beneath a navy sky in which outlines of the Ringworld arch glowed faintly.

To the right, to spinward, was full day.

Dawn was different on the Ringworld.

The desert was coming to an end. Its weaving border, clear and sharp, curved away to right and left. Behind the 'cycles was desert, yellow-white and bright and barren. The big mountain still blocked an impressive chunk of sky. Ahead, rivers and lakes showed in diminishing perspective, separated by patches of green-brown.

The 'cycles had maintained their positions, widely separated in a diamond pattern. At this distance they seemed silver bugs, all alike. Louis was in the lead. His memory told him that Speaker had the spinward position; Nessus was to antispinward, and Teela brought up the rear.

To spinward of the mountain was a hanging thread of dust, like the trail left by a ground-effect jeep crossing a desert, but larger. It had to be larger, though it was only a thread at this distance ...

"Are you awake, Louis?"

"Morning, Nessus. Have you been flying all this time?"

"Some hours ago I turned that chore over to Speaker. You will notice that we have already traveled seven thousand-odd miles."

"Yeah." But it was only a figure, a tiny fraction of the distance they would have to travel. A lifetime of using the transfer booth network had ruined Louis's sense of distance.