Ringworld (8 page)

The General Products hull was transparent to visible light. To all other forms of electromagnetic energy, and to matter in any form, it was impervious. The company's reputation backed that guarantee, and the guarantee had held for hundreds of years and for millions of ships. A General Products hull was the ultimate in safety.

The vehicle before them was based on a General Products #2 hull.

But ... as far as Louis could see, only the life-support system and the hyperdrive shunt were within the hull. Everything else -- a pair of flat thruster units aimed downward, two small fusion motors facing forward, larger fusion motors on the wing's trailing edges, and a pair of tremendous pods on the wingtips -- pods which must contain detection and communications equipment, since Louis could find no such equipment anywhere else -- all this was on the great delta wing!

Half the ship was on the wing, exposed to any danger that could worry a puppeteer. Why not use a #3 hull and put everything inside?

The puppeteer had led them beneath the delta wing, to the tapered stem of the hull section. "Our purpose was to make as few breaks in the hull as possible," said Nessus. "You see?"

Through the glasslike hull Louis saw a conduit as thick as his thigh leading through the hull into the wing section. Things looked complex at that point, until Louis tumbled to the fact that the conduit was designed to slide back into the hull in one section. Then he picked out the motor that did it all, and the metal door that would seal off the opening.

"An ordinary ship," said the puppeteer, "requires many breaks in its hull: for sensors which do not use visible light, for reaction motors if such are used, for apertures leading to fuel tanks. Here we have only two breaks, the conduit and the airlock. One passes passengers and the other passes information. Both can be closed off.

"Our engineers have coated the hull's inner surface with a transparent conductor. When the airlock is closed and the aperture for the wiring conduit is sealed, the interior is an unbroken conducting surface."

"Stasis field," Louis guessed.

"Exactly. If danger threatens, the entire life-support system goes into Slaver-type stasis for a period of several seconds. No time passes in stasis; hence nothing can harm the passengers. We are not so foolish as to trust to the hull alone. Lasers using visible light can penetrate a General Products hull, killing passengers and leaving the ship unharmed. Antimatter can disintegrate a General Products hull entirely."

"I didn't know that."

"It is not widely advertised."

Louis moved back under the delta wing to where Speaker-To-Animals was inspecting the motors. "Why so many motors?"

The kzin snorted. "Surely a human cannot have forgotten the Kzinti Lesson."

"Oh." Naturally any puppeteer who had studied kzinti or human history would know the Kzinti Lesson. A reaction drive is a weapon, powerful in direct ratio to its efficiency. Here were thrusters for peaceful use, and fusion drives for weapons capability.

"Now I know how you learned to handle fusion-drive craft."

"Naturally I have been trained in war, Louis."

"Just in case of another Man-Kzin war."

"Must I demonstrate my skill as a warrior, Louis?"

"You shall," the puppeteer interrupted. "Our engineers intended that this ship be flown by a kzin. Would you care to inspect the controls, Speaker?"

"Shortly. I will also need performance data, test flight records, and so forth. Is the hyperdrive shunt of standard type?"

"Yes. There have been no test flights."

Typical, Louis thought as they walked toward the airlock. They just built the thing and left it here to wait for us. They had to. No puppeteer was willing to test-fly it.

Where was Teela?

He was about to call out when she reappeared on the pentagramic receiver plate. She had been playing with the stepping-discs again, ignoring the ship entirely. She followed them aboard, still looking wistfully back toward the puppeteer city beyond the black water.

Louis waited for her at the inner airlock door. He was ready to blast her for her carelessness. You'd think that after getting lost once she might learn a little caution!

The door opened. Teela was radiant. "Oh, Louis, I'm so glad I came! That city -- it's such fun!" She grasped his hands and squeezed, beaming inarticulately. Her smile was like sunlight.

He couldn't do it. "It's been fun," he said, and kissed her hard. He moved toward the control room with his arm around Teela's slim waist, his thumb tracing the rim of her hip.

He was sure now. Teela Brown had never been hurt; had never learned caution; did not understand fear. Her first pain would come as a horrifying surprise. It might destroy her entirely.

She'd be hurt over Louis Wu's dead body.

The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.

***

A General Products #2 hull is twenty feet wide and three hundred feet long, tapering to points fore and aft.

Most of the ship was outside the hull, on the thin, oversized wing. The lifesystem was roomy enough to include three living-bedrooms, a long, narrow lounge, a control cabin, and a bank of lockers, plus kitchen, autodocs, reclaimers, batteries, etc. The control panel was fitted out according to kzinti custom, and was labeled in kzinti. Louis felt he could fly the ship in an emergency, but it would have taken a big emergency to make him try it.

The lockers held an ominous plethora of exploration gear. There was nothing Louis could have pointed to, saying, "That's a weapon." But there were things which could be used as weapons. There were also four flycycles, four flying backpacks (lift belt plus catalytic ramjet), food testers, phials of dietary additives, medkits, air sensors and filters. Someone was sure as tanj convinced that this ship would be landing somewhere.

Well, why not? A species as powerful as the Ringworlders, and as sealed in by their presumed lack of hyperdrive craft, might invite them to land. Perhaps this was what the puppeteers were expecting.

There was nothing aboard that Nessus could not point to and say, "That is not a weapon. That we took aboard for such-and-such a purpose."

There were three species aboard; four, if one thought of male and female human as of different species, which was something a kzin or a puppeteer might well do. (Suppose Nessus and the Hindmost were of the same sex? Why shouldn't it take two males and a nonsentient female to produce a baby?) Then the presumed Ringworlders could see at a glance that many kinds of sentient life could deal amicably with each other.

Yet too many of these items -- the flashlight-lasers, the dueling stunners -- could be used as weapons.

They took off on reactionless thrusters, to avoid damaging the island. Half an hour later they had left the feeble gravity wells of the puppeteer rosette. It occurred to Louis then that aside from Nessus, whom they had brought with them, and aside from the projected image of the puppeteer Chiron, they had seen not a single puppeteer on the puppeteer world.

***

After they had entered hyperdrive, Lotus spent an hour-and-a-half inspecting every item in the lockers. Better safe than surprised, he told himself. But the weaponry and the other equipment left a bitter aftertaste, a foreboding.

Too many weapons, and not one weapon that could not be used for something else. Flashlight-lasers. Fusion reaction motors. When they held a christening ceremony on the first day in hyperdrive, Louis suggested that the ship be called Lying Bastard. For their own reasons, Teela and Speaker agreed. For his own reason, Nessus did not object.

They were in hyperdrive for a week, covering a little more than two light years. When they dropped back into Einsteinian space they were within the system of the ringed G2 star; and the foreboding was still with Louis Wu.

Someone was sure as tanj convinced that they would land on the Ringworld.

The puppeteer worlds had been moving at nearly lightspeed along galactic north. Speaker had circled in hyperspace to galactic south of the G2 sun, with the result that the Liar, as it fell out of the Blind Spot, was already driving straight into the Ringworld system at high velocity.

The G2 star was a blazing white point. Louis, returning from other stars, had seen Sol looking very like this from the edge of the solar system. But this star wore a barely visible halo. Louis would remember this, his first sight of the Ringworld. From the edge of the system, the Ringworld was a naked-eye object.

Speaker ran the big fusion motors up to full power. He tilted the flat thruster discs out of the plane of the wing, lining their axes along ship's aft, and added their thrust to the rockets. The Liar backed into the system blazing like twin suns, decelerating at nearly two hundred gravities.

Teela didn't know that, because Louis didn't tell her. He didn't want to worry her. If the cabin gravity were interrupted for an instant -- they'd all be flattened like bugs beneath a heel.

But the cabin gravity worked with unobtrusive perfection. Throughout the lifesystem there was only the gentle pull of the puppeteer world, and the steady, muted tremor of the fusion motors. For the rumble of the drives forced its way through the only available opening, through a wiring conduit no thicker than a man's thigh; and once inside, it was everywhere.

Even in hyperdrive, Speaker preferred to fly in a transparent ship. He liked a good field of view, and the Blind Spot didn't seem to affect his mind. The ship was still transparent, except for private cabins, and the resulting view took getting used to.

The lounge and the control cabin, wall and floor and ceiling, all of which curved into one another, were not so much transparent as invisible. In the apparent emptiness were blocks of solidity: Speaker in the control couch, the horseshoe-shaped bank of green and orange dials which surrounded him, the neon-glowing borders of doorways, the cluster of couches around the lounge table, the block of opaque cabins aft; and, of course, the flat triangle of the wing. Beyond and around these were the stars. The universe seemed very close ... and somewhat static; for the ringed star was directly aft, bidden behind the cabins, and they could not watch it grow.

The air smelled of ozone and puppeteers.

Nessus, who should have been cowering in terror with the rumble of two hundred gravities in his ears, seemed perfectly comfortable sitting with the others around the lounge table.

"They will not have hyperwave," he was saying. "The mathematics of the system guarantees it. Hyperwave is a generalization of hyperdrive mathematics, and they cannot have hyperdrive."

"But they might have discovered hyperwave by accident."

"No, Teela. We can try the hyperwave bands, since there is nothing else to try while we are decelerating but --"

"More tanj waiting!" Teela stood up suddenly and half-ran from the lounge.

Louis answered the puppeteer's questioning look with an angry shrug.

Teela was in a foul mood. The week in hyperdrive had bored her stiff, and the prospect of another day-and-a-half of deceleration, of continued inaction, had her ready to climb walls. But what did she expect from Louis? Could he change the laws of physics?

"We must wait," Speaker agreed. He spoke from the control cabin, and he may have missed the emotional overtones of Teela's last words. "The hyperwave zaps are clear of signals. I will guarantee that the Ringworld engineers are not trying to speak to us by any known form of hyperwave."

The subject of communications had become general. Until they could reach the Ringworld engineers, their presence in this inhabited system smacked of banditry. Thus far there had been no sign that their presence had been detected.

"My receivers are open," said Speaker. "If they attempt to communicate in electromagnetic frequencies, we will know it."

"Not if they try the obvious," Louis retorted.

"True. Many species have used the cold hydrogen line to search for other minds circling other stars."

"Like the kdatlyno. They cleverly found you."

"And we cleverly enslaved them."

Interstellar radio is noisy with the sound of the stars. But the twenty-one centimeter band is conveniently silent, swept clean for use by endless cubic light years of cold interstellar hydrogen. It was the line any species would pick to communicate with an alien race. Unfortunately the nova-hot hydrogen in the Liar's exhaust was making that band useless.

"Remember," said Nessus, "that our projected freely falling orbit must not cross the ring itself."

"You have said so too many times, Nessus. My memory is excellent."

"We must not appear a danger to the inhabitants of the ring. I trust you will not forget."

"You are a puppeteer. You trust nothing," said Speaker.

"Cool it," Louis said wearily. The bickering was an annoyance he didn't need. He went to his cabin to sleep.

Hours passed. The Liar fell toward the ringed star, slowing, preceded by twin spears of nova light and nova heat.

Speaker found no sign of coherent light impinging on the ship. Either the Ringworlders hadn't noticed the Liar yet, or they didn't have com lasers.

During the week in hyperspace, Speaker had shared hours of leisure with the humans. Louis and Teela had developed a taste for the kzin's cabin: for the slightly higher gravity and the holoscapes of orange-yellow jungle and ancient alien fortress, for the sharp and changing smells of an alien world. Their own cabin was unimagmatively decorated, with cityscapes and with farming seas half-covered with genetically tailored seaweeds. The kzin liked their cabin better than they did.

They had even tried sharing a meal in the kzin's cabin. But the kzin ate like a starved wolf, and he complained that the man's-food smelled like burnt garbage, and that was that.

Now Teela and Speaker talked in low tones at one end of the lounge table. Louis listened to the silence and the distant thunder of the fusion drives.

He was used to depending for his life on a cabin gravity system. His own yacht would do thirty gee. But his own yacht used thrusters, and thrusters were silent.

"Nessus," he said into the drone of suns burning.

"Yes, Louis?"

"What do you know about the Blind Spot that we don't?"

"I do not understand the question."

"Hyperspace terrifies you. This -- this backing through space on a pillar of fire -- doesn't. Your species built the Long Shot, they must know something about hyperspace that we don't."

"Perhaps so. Perhaps we do know something."

"What? Unless it's one of your precious secrets."

Speaker and Teela were listening now. Speaker's ears, which, folded, could vanish into depressions in his fur, were spread like translucent pink parasols.

"We know that we have no undying part," said Nessus. "I will not speak for your race. I have not the right. My species has no immortal part. Our scientists have proved this. We are afraid to die, for we know that death is permanent."

"And?"

"Ships disappear in the Blind Spot. No puppeteer would go too near a singularity in hyperdrive; yet still they disappeared, in the days when our ships carried pilots. I trust the engineers who built the Liar. Hence I trust the cabin gravity. It will not fail us. But even the engineers fear the Blind Spot."

There was a ship's night, during which Louis slept poorly and dreamed spectacularly, and a ships day, during which Teela and Louis found each other impossible to live with. She was not frightened. Louis suspected he would never see her frightened. She was merely bored stiff.

That evening, in the space of half an hour, the ringed star came out from behind the sternward block of living-sleeping cabins. The star was small and white, a shade less intense than Sol, and it nestled in a shallow pencil-line of arc blue.

They stood looking over Speaker's shoulder as Speaker activated the scope screen. He found the arc-blue line of the Ringworld's inner surface, touched the expansion button. One question answered itself amost immediately.

"Something at the edge," said Louis.

"Keep the scope centered on the rim," Nessus ordered.

The rim of the ring expanded in their view. It was a wall, rising inward toward the star. They could see its black, space-exposed outer side silhouetted against the sunlit blue landscape. A low rim wall, but low only in comparison to the ring itself.

"If the ring is a million miles across," Louis estimated, "The rim wall must be at least a thousand miles high. Well, now we know. That's what holds the air in."

"Would it work?"

"It should. The ring's spinning for about a gravity. A little air might leak over the edges over the thousands of years, but they could replace it. To build the ring at all, they must have had cheap transmutation -- a few tenth-stars per kiloton -- not to mention a dozen other impossibilities."

"I wonder what it looks like from the inside."

Speaker heard, and he touched a control point, and the view slid. The magnification was not yet great enough to pick up details. Bright blue and brighter white slid across the scope screen, and the blurred straight edge of a navy blue shadow ...

The further rim slid into view. Here the rim wall was tilted outward.

Nessus, standing in the doorway with his heads poised above Speaker's shoulders, ordered, "Give us what magnification you can."

The view expanded.

"Mountains," said Teela. "How lovely." For the rim wall was irregular, sculptured like eroded rock, and was the color of the Moon. "Mountains a thousand miles high."

"I can expand the view no further. For greater detail we must approach closer."

"Let us first attempt to contact them," said the puppeteer. "Are we at rest?"

Speaker consulted the ship's brain. "We are approaching the primary at perhaps thirty miles per second. Is that slow enough?"

"Yes. Begin transmissions."

No laser light was falling on the Liar.

Testing for electromagnetic radiation was more difficult. Radio, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays -- the whole spectrum had to be investigated, from the room-temperature heat given off by the dark side of the Ringworld, up to light quanta energetic enough to split into matter-antimatter pairs. The twenty-one centimeter band was empty; and so were its easy multiples and divisors, which might have been used merely because the hydrogen absorption band was so obvious. Beyond that point Speaker-To-Animals was playing blind man's bluff with his receivers.

The great pods of communications equipment on the Liar's wing had opened. The Liar was sending radio messages on the hydrogen absorption frequency and others, bathing successive portions of the ring's inner surface with laser light of ten different frequencies, and sending Interworld-Morse in alternate blasts of the fusion motors.

"Our autopilot would eventually translate any possible message," said Nessus. "We must assume that their ground-based computers are at least as capable.

Speakees reply was venomous. "Can your leucotomized computers translate total silence?"

"Concentrate your sendings at the rim. If they have spaceports, the spaceports must be at the rim. To land a spacecraft anywhere else would be horribly dangerous."

In the Hero's Tongue Speaker-To-Animals snarled something horribly insulting. Effectively it ended the conversation; but Nessus stayed where he had been for hours now, with his heads poised alertly above the kzin's shoulders.

The Ringworld waited beyond the hull, a checkered blue ribbon trailing across the sky.

"You tried to tell me about Dyson spheres," said Teela.

"And you told me to go pick lice out of my hair." Louis had found a description of Dyson spheres in the ship's library. Excited by the idea, he had made the mistake of interrupting Teela's game of solitaire to tell her about it.

"Tell me now," she coaxed.

"Go pick lice out of your hair."

She waited.

"You win," said Louis. For the past hour he had been staring broodingly out at the ring. He was as bored as she was.

"I tried to tell you that the Ringworld is a compromise, an engineering compromise between a Dyson sphere and a normal planet.

"Dyson was one of the ancient natural philosophers, pre-Belt, almost pre-atomic. He pointed out that a civilization is limited by the energy available to it. The way for the human race to use all the energy within its reach, he said, is to build a spherical shell around the sun and trap every ray of sunlight.

"Now if you'll quit giggling for just a minute, you'll see the idea. The Earth traps only about half a billionth of the sun's output. If we could use all that energy ...

"Well, it wasn't crazy then. There wasn't even a theoretical basis for faster-than-light travel. We never did invent hyperdrive, if you'll recall. We'd never have discovered it by accident, either, because we'd never have thought to do our experiments out beyond the singularity.

"Suppose an Outsider ship hadn't stumbled across a United Nations ramrobot? Suppose the Fertility Laws hadn't worked out? With a trillion human beings standing on each other's shoulders, and the ramships the fastest thing around, how long could we get along on fusion power? We'd use up all the hydrogen in Earth's oceans in a hundred years.

"But there's more to a Dyson sphere than collecting solar power.

"Say you make the sphere one astronomical unit in radius. You've got to clear out the solar system anyway, so you use all the solar planets in the construction. That gives you a shell of, say, chrome steel a few yards thick. Now you put gravity generators all over the shell. You'd have a surface area a billion times as big as the Earth's surface. A trillion people could wander all their lives without ever meeting one another."

Teela finlly got a full sentence in edgewise. "You're using the gravity generators to hold everything down?"

"Yeah, against the inside. We cover the inside with soil."

"What if one of the gravity generators broke down?"

"Picky, picky, picky. Well ... you'd get a billion people drifting up into the sun. All the air swarming up after them. A tornado big enough to swallow the Earth. Not a prayer of getting a repair crew in, not through that kind of a storm ..."