Ringworld (20 page)

"I wondered about that," said Speaker. "How long has it been falling?"

"Since I woke up, at least. It's like a rain, or a new kind of snow. Wire from the shadow squares, mile after mile of it. Why do you suppose it fell here?"

Louis thought of six million miles of distance between each shadow square ... of an entire six-million-mile strand torn loose by its impact with the Liar ... falling with the Liar toward the Ringworld landscape, on nearly the same course. It was hardly surprising that they had come across part of that enormous strand.

He was not in a long-winded mood. "Coincidence," he said.

"Anyway, it's draped all over us, and it's been falling since last night, probably. The natives must have worshipped the castle already, because it floats."

"Consider," the kzin said slowly. "If Ringworld engineers were to appear today, floating down from this floating castle, it would be taken as more appropriate than surprising. Louis, shall we try the God Gambit?"

Louis turned to answer-and couldn't. He could only try to keep a straight face. He might have made it, but Speaker was explaining to Teela:

"It was Louis's suggestion that we might succeed better with the natives by posing as Ringworld engineers. You and Louis were to be acolytes. Nessus was to be a captive demon; but we can hope to do without him. I was to be more god than engineer, a kind of war god --"

Then Teela started to laugh, and Louis broke up.

Eight feet tall, inhumanly broad across the shoulders and hips, the kzin was too big and too toothy to be other than fearsome, even when burnt bald. His ratlike tail had always been his least impressive feature. Now his skin was the same color: baby pink crisscrossed with lavender capillaries. Without the fur to bulk out his head, his ears became ungainly pink parasols. Orange fur made a domino mask across his eyes, and he seemed to have grown his own fluffy orange pillow to sit on.

The danger of laughing at a kzin only made it funnier. Doubled over, with his arms around his middle, laughing silently now because he could not inhale, Louis backed toward what he hoped was a chair.

An inhumanly large hand closed on his shoulder and lifted him high. Still convulsed with mirth, Louis faced the kzin at eye level. He heard, "Truly, Louis, you must explain this behavior."

Louis made an enormous effort. "A k-k-kind of war god," he said, and was off again. Teela was making hiccupping sounds.

The kzin set him down and waited for the fit to pass.

"You simply aren't impressive enough to play god," Louis said some minutes later. "Not until the hair grows back."

"But if I tore some humans to pieces with my hands, perhaps they would respect me then."

"They'd respect you from a distance, and from hiding. That wouldn't do us any good. No, we'll just have to wait for the hair. Even then, we ought to have Nessus's tasp."

"The puppeteer is unavailable."

"But --"

"I say he is unavailable. How shall we contact the natives?"

"You'll have to stay here. See what you can learn from the map room. Teela and I," said Louis, and suddenly remembered. "Teela, you haven't seen the map room."

"What's it like?"

"You stay here and get Speaker to show you. I'll go down alone. You two can monitor me by communicator disc, and come for me if there's trouble. Speaker, I want your flashlight-laser."

The kzin grumbled, but he did relinquish the flashlight-laser. It still left him with the modified Slaver disintegrator.

***

From a thousand feet over their heads, he heard their reverent silence become a murmur of astonishment; and he knew that they had seen him, a bright speck separating from the castle window. He sank toward them.

The murmur did not die. It was suppressed. He could hear the difference.

Then the singing began.

"It drags," Teela had said, and, "They don't keep in step," and, "It all sounds flat." Louis's imagination had gone on from there. As a result the singing took him by surprise. It was much better than he had expected.

He guessed they were singing a twelve-tone scale. The "octave" scale of most of the human worlds was also a twelve-tone scale, but with differences. Small wonder it had sounded flat to Teela.

Yes, it dragged. It was church music, slow and solemn and repetitive, without harmony. But it had grandeur.

The square was immense. A thousand people were a vast throng after the weeks of loneliness; but the square could have held ten times that number. Loudspeakers could have kept them singing in step, but there were no loudspeakers. A lone man waved his arms from a pedestal in the center of the square. But they would not look at him. They were all looking up at Louis Wu.

For all that, the music was beautiful.

Teela could not hear that beauty. The music of her experience had come from recordings and tridee sets, always by way of a microphone system. Such music could be amplified, rectified, the voices multiplied or augmented, the bad takes thrown away. Teela Brown had never heard live music.

Louis Wu had. He slowed his 'cycle to give his nerve ends time to adapt to the rhythms of it. He remembered the great public sings on the cliffs above Crashlanding City, throngs which had boasted twice this number, sings which had sounded different for that and another reason; for Louis Wu had been singing too. Now, as he let the music vibrate in him, his ears began to adjust to the slightly sharp or flat notes, to the blurring of voices, to the repetition, to the slow majesty of the hymn.

He caught himself as he was about to join in the singing. That's not a good idea, he thought, and let his cycle settle toward the square.

The pedestal in the center of the square had once held a statue. Louis identified the humanlike footprints, each four feet long, that marked where the statue had stood. Now the pedestal housed a kind of triangular altar, and a man stood with his back to the altar waving his arms as the people sang.

Flash of pink above gray robe ... Louis assumed that the man was wearing a headpiece, perhaps of pink silk.

He chose to land on the pedestal itself. He was just touching down when the conductor turned to face him. As a result he almost wrecked the 'cycle.

It was pink scalp Louis had seen. Unique in this crowd of heads like golden flowers, faces of blond hair with eyes peeping through, this man's face was as naked as Louis Wu's own.

With a straight-armed gesture, palms down, the man held the last note of the singing ... held it for seconds ... then cut it. A fragment of a second later the tail of it drifted in from the edges of the square. The -- priest? -- faced Louis Wu in a sudden silence.

He was as tall as Louis Wu, tall for a native. The skin of his face and scalp were so pale as to be nearly translucent, like a We Made It albino. He must have shaved many hours ago with a razor that was not sharp enough, and now the stubble was emerging, adding its touch of gray everywhere but for the two circles around his eyes.

He spoke with a note of reproof, or so it seemed. The translator disc instantly said, "So you have come at last."

"We didn't know we were expected," Louis said truthfully. He was not confident enough to try a God Gambit based on himself. In a long lifetime he had learned that telling a consistent set of lies could get hellishly complicated.

"You grow hair on your head," said the priest. "One presumes that your blood is less than pure, O Engineer."

So that was it! The race of the Engineers must have been totally bald; so that this priest must imitate them by using a blunt razor on his tender skin. Or ... had the Engineers used depil cream or something just as easy, for no reason more pressing than fashion? The priest looked very like the wire-portrait in the banquet hall.

"My blood is of no concern to you," Louis said, shelving the problem. "We are on our way to the rim of the world. What can you tell us about our route?"

The priest was transparently puzzled. "You ask information from me? You, an Engineer?"

"I'm not an Engineer." Louis held his hand ready to activate the sonic fold.

But the priest only looked more bewildered. "Then why are you half-hairless? How do you fly? Have you stolen secrets from Heaven? What do you want here? Have you come to steal my congregation?"

The last question seemed the important one. "We're on our way to the rim. All we need here is information."

"Surely your answers are in Heaven."

"Don't be flippant with me," Louis said evenly.

"But you came directly from Heaven! I saw you!"

"Oh, the castle! We've gone through the castle, but it didn't tell us much. For instance, were the Engineers really hairless?"

"I have sometimes thought that they only shave, as I do. Yet your own chin seems naturally hairless."

"I depilate." Louis looked about him, at the sea of reverent golden flower-faces. "What do they believe? They don't seem to share your doubts."

"They see us talking as equals, in the language of the Engineers. I would have this continue, if it please you." Now the priest's manner seemed conspiratorial rather than hostile.

"Would that improve your standing with them? I suppose it would," said Louis. The priest really had feared to lose his congregation -- as any priest might, if his god came to life and tried to take over. "Can't they understand us?"

"Perhaps one word in ten."

At this point Louis had cause to regret the efficiency of his translator disc. He could not tell if the priest was speaking the language of Zignamuclickclick. Knowing that, knowing how far the two languages had diverged since the breakdown in communications, he might have been able to date the fall of civilization.

"What was this castle called Heaven?" he asked. "Do you know?"

"The legends speak of Zrillir," said the priest, "and of how he ruled all the lands under Heaven. On this pedestal stood Zrillir's statue, which was life-sized. The lands supplied Heaven with delicacies which I could name if you like, as we learn their names by rote; but in these days they do not grow. Shall I?"

"No thanks. What happened?"

A singsong quality had crept into the man's voice. He must have heard this tale many times, and told it many times . . .

"Heaven was made when the Engineers made the world and the Arch. He who rules Heaven rules the land from edge to edge. So Zrillir ruled, for many lifetimes, throwing sunfire from Heaven when he was displeased. Then it was suspected that Zrillir could no longer throw sunfire.

"The people no longer obeyed him. They did not send food. They pulled down the statue. When Zrillir's angels dropped rocks from the heights, the people dodged and laughed.

"There came a day when the people tried to take Heaven by way of the rising stairway. But Zrillir caused the stairway to fall. Then his angels left Heaven in flying cars.

"Later it was regretted that we had lost Zrillir. The sky was always overcast; crops grew stunted. We have prayed for Zrillir's return."

"How accurate is all this, do you think?"

"I would have denied it all until this morning, when you came flying down from Heaven. You make me terribly uneasy, O Engineer. Perhaps Zrillir does indeed intend to return, and sends his bastard ahead to clear the way of false priests."

"I could shave my scalp. Would that help?"

"No. Never mind; ask your questions."

"What can you tell me about the fall of Ringworld civilization?"

The priest looked still more uneasy. "Is civilization about to fall?"

Louis sighed and -- for the first time -- turned to consider the altar.

The altar occupied the center of the pedestal on which they stood. It was of dark wood. Its flat rectangular surface had been carved into a relief map, with hills and rivers and a single lake, and two upward-turning edges. The other pair of edges, the short edges, were the bases of a golden paraboloid arch.

The gold of that arch was tarnished. But from the curve of its apex a small golden ball hung by a thread; and that gold was highly polished.

"Is civilization in danger? So much has happened. The sunwire, your own coming -- is it sunwire? Is the sun falling on us?"

"I strongly doubt it. You mean the wire that's been falling all morning?"

"Yes. In our religious training we were taught that the sun hangs from the Arch by a very strong thread. This thread is strong. We know," said the priest. "A girl tried to pick it up and undo a tangle, and it cut through her fingers."

Louis nodded. "Nothing's falling," he said. Privately he thought: Not even the shadow squares. Even it you cut all the wires, the squares wouldn't hit the Ringworld. The Engineers would have given them an orbital aphelion inside the Ring.

He asked, without much hope, "What do you know about the transport system at the rim?" And in that instant he knew something was wrong. He'd caught something, some evidence of disaster; but what?

The priest said, "Would you mind repeating that?"

Louis did.

The priest answered, "Your thing that talks said something else the first time. Something about a restricted something."

"Funny," said Louis. And this time he heard it. The translator spoke in a different tone of voice, and it spoke at length.

"'You are using a restricted wavelength in violation --' I do not remember the rest," said the priest. "We had best end this interview. You have reawakened something ancient, something evil --" The priest stopped to listen, for Lou&s translator was speaking again in the priest's language. "-- 'in violation of edict twelve, interfering with maintenance.' Can your powers hold back --"

Whatever else the priest said was not translated.

For the disc suddenly turned red hot in Louis's hand. He instantly threw it as hard as he could. It was white hot and brightly glowing when it hit the pavement -- without hurting anyone, as far as he could see. Then the pain backlashed him and he was half-blinded by tears.

He was able to see the priest nod to him, very formal and regal.

He nodded back, his face equally expressionless. He had never dismounted his 'cycle; now he touched the control and rose toward Heaven.

When his face could not be seen he let it snarl with the pain, and he used a word he had heard once on Wunderland, from a man who had dropped a piece of Steuben crystal a thousand years old.