Ringworld (18 page)

"Thanks," said Louis. He showed his surprise.

"It's only for the Long Shot," she said. "Besides, you can't do it."

There was time for a meal and for formal exercises: pushups and situps, and for informal exercises: tree climbing.

Presently Speaker returned to the 'cycles. His mouth was not bloody. At his 'cycle he dialed, not for an allergy pill, but for a wet brick-shaped slab of warm liver. The mighty hunter returns, Louis thought, keeping his mouth firmly shut.

The sky had been overcast when they landed. It was still overcast, a uniform leaden gray, as they took off. And Louis resumed his argument by intercom.

"But it was so long ago!"

"A point of honor is not affected by time, Louis, though of course you would not know that. Further, the consequences of the act are very much with us. Why did Nessus select a kzin to travel with him?"

"He told us that."

"Why did he select Teela Brown? The Hindmost must have instructed Nessus to learn if humans have inherited psychic luck. He was also to learn if kzinti have become docile. He chose me because as ambassador to a characteristically arrogant species, I am likely to demonstrate the docility his people seek."

"I'd thought of that too." Louis had carried the idea even further. Had Nessus been instructed to mention starseed lures, in order to gauge Speaker's reactions?

"It matters not. I say that I am not docile."

"Will you stop using that word? It warps your thinking."

"Louis, why do you intercede for the puppeteer? Why do you wish his company?"

Good questions, Louis thought. Certainly the puppeteer deserved to sweat a little. And if what Louis suspected was true, Nessus was in no danger at all.

Was it only that Louis Wu liked aliens?

Or was it more general than that? A puppeteer was different. Difference was important. A man of Louis Wu's age would get bored with life itself, without variety. To Louis the company of aliens was a vital necessity.

The 'cycles rose, following the slope of the mountains.

"Viewpoints," said Louis Wu. "We're in a strange environnient, stranger than any world of men or kzinti. We may need all the insights we can bring to bear, just to figure out what's going on."

Teela applauded without sound. Nicely argued! Louis winked back. A very human conversation; Speaker couldn't possibly read its meaning.

The kzin was saying, "I do not need a puppeteer to explain the, world to me. My own eyes, nose, ears are sufficient."

"That's moot. But you do need the Long Shot. We all need the techniques that ship represents."

"For profit? An unworthy motive."

"Tanjit, that's not fair! The Long Shot is for the entire human race, and the kzinti too!"

"A quibble. Though the profit is not to you alone, still you sell your honor for profit."

"My honor is not in danger," Louis grated.

"I think it is," said Speaker. And he switched off.

"That's a handy little gadget, that switch," Teela observed, with malice. "I knew he'd do that."

"So did I. But, Lord Finagle! He's hard to convince."

***

Beyond the mountains was an endless expanse of fleecy cloud, graying out at the infinity-horizon. The flycycles seemed to float above white cloud, beneath a bright blue sky in which the Arch was an outline at the threshold of visibility.

The mountains fell behind. Louis felt a twinge of regret for the forest pool with the waterfall. They would never see it again.

A wake followed the 'cycles, a roiling wavefront where three sonic booms touched the cloud cover ahead. Only one detail broke the infinity-horizon. Louis decided that it was either a mountain or a storm, very distant, very large. It was the size of a pinhead held at arms length.

Speaker broke the silence. "A rift in the cloud cover, Louis. Ahead and to spinward."

"I see it."

"Do you see how the light shines through? Much light is being reflected from the landscape."

True, the edges of the cloud break glowed brightly. Hmmm ... "Could we be flying over Ringworld foundation material? It would be the biggest break yet in the landscaping."

"I want to look more closely."

"Good," said Louis.

He watched the speck that was Speaker's flycycle curve frantically away to spinward. At Mach 2 Speaker would get no more than a glimpse of the ground.

There was a problem here. Which to watch? The silver fleck that was Speakees flycycle, or the smaU orange cat-face above the dash? One was real, one was detailed. Both offered information, but of different kinds.

In principle, no answer was entirely satisfactory. In practice, Louis naturally watched both.

He saw that Speaker was over the rift ...

The intercom echoed Speakees yowl. The silver fleck had gone suddenly brighter; and Speaker's face was a glue of white light. His eyes were closed tight. His mouth was open, screaming.

The image dimmed. Speaker had crossed the rift. One arm was thrown across his face. The fur that covered him was smoking black char.

Beneath the diverging silver speck of Speaker's flycycle, a bright spot showed on the cloud cover ... as if a spotlight followed Speaker from below.

"Speaker!" Teela called. "Can you see?"

Speaker heard and uncovered his face. The orange far was unburned in a broad band across his eyes. Elsewhere the fur was ash-black. Speaker opened his eyes, closed them tight, opened them again. "rm blind," he said.

"Yes, but can you see?"

In his worry over Speaker, Louis hardly noticed the strangeness of that question. But something in him noted her tone of voice: the anxiety, and beneath that, the suggestion that Speaker had given a wrong answer and should be given a second chance.

But there wasn't time. Louis called, "Speaker! Slave your 'cycle to mine. We've got to get to cover."

Speaker fumbled at the board. "Done. Louis, what kind of cover?" Pain thickened and distorted his voice.

"Back to the mountains."

"No. We would lose too much time. Louis, I know what attacked me. If I am right, then we are safe as long as we have cloud cover."

"Oh?"

"You will have to investigate."

"You need medical attention."

"I do indeed, but first you must find us a safe place to land. You must descend where the clouds are most dense ..."

***

It was not dark, down here below the clouds. Some light came through, and enough of that was reflected toward Louis Wu. It glared.

The land was an undulating plain. It was not Ring floor material, but soil and vegetation.

Louis dropped lower. squinting against the glare.

... A single species of plant evenly dispersed across the land, from here to the infinity-horizon. Each plant had a single blossom, and each blossom turned to follow Louis Wu as he dropped. A tremendous audience, silent and attentive.

He landed and dismounted beside one of the plants. The plant stood a foot high on a knobbly green stalk. Its single blossom was as big as a large man's face. The back of that blossom was stringy, as if laced with veins or tendons; and the inner surface was a smooth concave mirror. From its center protruded a short stalk ending in a dark green bulb.

All the flowers in sight watched him. He was bathed in the glare. Louis knew they were trying to kill bun, and he looked up somewhat uneasily; but the cloud cover held.

"You were right," he said, speaking into the intercom. "They're Slaver sunflowers. If the cloud cover hadn't come up, we'd have been dead the instant we rose over the mountains."

"Is there cover where we can hide from the sunflowers? A cave, for example?"

"I don't think so. The land's too flat. The sunflowers can't focus the light with any precision, but there's a lot of glare anyway."

Teela broke in. "For pity's sake, what's the matter with you two? Louis, we've got to land! Speaker's in pain!"

"Truly, I am in pain, Louis."

"Then I vote we risk it. Come down, you two. We'll just have to hope the clouds hold."

"Good!" Teela's intercom image went into action.

Louis spent a minute or so searching between the plants. It was as he had surmised. There was no alien survivor anywhere in the domain of the sunflowers. No smaller plant grew between the stalks. Nothing flew. Nothing burrowed beneath the ashy-looking soil. On the plants themselves there were no blights, fungus growths, disease spots. If disease struck one of their own, the sunflowers would destroy it.

The mirror-blossom was a terrible weapon. Its primary purpose was to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node at its center. But it could also focus to destroy a plant-eating animal or insect. The sunflowers burned all enemies. Everything that lives is the enemy of a photosynthesis-using plant; and everything that lived became fertilizer for the sunflowers.

"But how did they come here?" Louis wondered. For sunflowers could not coexist with less exotic plant life. Sunflowers were too powerful. Thus they could not be native to the Ringworlders' original planet.

The engineers must have scouted nearby stars for their useful or decorative plants. Perhaps they had even come as far as Silvereyes, in human space. And they must have decided that the sunflowers were decorative.

"But they would have fenced them in. Any idiot would have that much sense. Give them, say, a plot of ground with a high, broad ring of bare Ring flooring around it. That would keep them in.

"Only it didn't. Somehow a seed got across. No telling how far they've spread by now," said Louis to himself. And he shuddered. This must be the "bright spot" he and Nessus had noticed ahead of them. As far as the eye could see, no living thing challenged the sunflowers.

In time, if they were given time, the sunflowers would rule the Ringworld.

But that would take much time. The Ringworld was roomy. Roomy enough for anything.

Louis, musing, was only half aware of two flycycles dropping beside his own. He was jerked from his reverie when Speaker barked, "Louis! You will take the Slaver disintegrator from my 'cycle and use it to dig us a hiding-hole. Teela, come and tend my injuries."

"A hiding-hole?"

"Yes. We must burrow like animals and wait for nightfall."

"Yeah." Louis shook himself. Speaker should not have had to think of that, injured as he was. Obviously they could not risk a break in the clouds. All the sunflowers needed to murder them was a point-source of light. But at night --

Louis avoided looking at Speaker while he searched Speaker's cycle. One look had been enough. The kzin was burnt black across most of his body. Fluids leaked through the oily ash that had been fur. Flesh showed bright red in wide cracks. The smell of burnt hair was strong and terrible.

Louis found the disintegrator: a double-barreled shotgun with a fluid-seeming handle. The weapon next to it made him grin sourly. If Speaker had suggested burning off the sunflowers with flashlight-lasers, Louis probably would have gone along with it, fuddled as he was.

He took the weapon and withdrew quickly, feeling queasy, ashamed of his weakness. He hurt with the pain of Speaker's burns. Teela, who knew nothing of pain, could help Speaker better than Louis could.

Low aimed the gun thirty degrees downward. He was wearing the breathing-helmet from his pressure suit. As he was in no hurry, he flipped only one of the two triggers.

The pit formed fast. Louis couldn't see how fast, for the dust was all around him after the first instant. A hurricane blew at him from where the beam fell. Louis had to lean hard into the wind.

In the cone of the beam the electron became a neutral particle. Soil and rock, torn to atoms by the mutual repulsion of the nuclei, reached him as a fog of monatoinic dust. Louis was glad of the breathing-helmet.

Presently he turned off the disintegrator. The pit looked big enough to fit the three of them and the flycycles too.

So quickly, he thought. And he wondered how fast the tool would dig with both beams on. But then there would be a current flow, he thought, borrowing Speaker's euphemism. At the moment he wasn't looking for that much excitement.

***

Teela and Speaker had dismounted. Speaker was now hairless over most of his body. A large orange patch still covered him where he sat and a broad orange band crossed his eyes. Elsewhere his nude skin was veined red-violet, showing clusters of deep red cracks. Teela was spraying him with something that foamed white where it touched.

The stench of burnt hair and meat stayed Louis from coming too close. "It's done," he said.

The kzin looked up. "I can see again, Louis."

"Good!" He'd been worried.

"The puppeteer brought military medical supplies, vastly superior to kzinti civilian medicines. He should not have had access to military supplies." The kzin sounded angry. Perhaps he suspected bribery; and perhaps he was right.

"I'm going to call Nessus," Louis said. And he circled the pair. White foam now covered the kzin from head to foot. There was no smell at all.

***

"I know where you are," he told the puppeteer.

"Marvelous. Where am I, Louis?"

"You're behind us. You circled round behind us as soon as you were out of sight. Teela and Speaker don't know. They can't think like puppeteers."

"Do they expect a puppeteer to break trail for them? Perhaps it is best they continue to think so. What chance is there that they will permit me to rejoin them?"

"Not now. Maybe later. Let me tell you why I called ..." And he told the puppeteer about the sunflower field. He was detailinh the extent of Speaker's injuries when Nessus's flat face dropped below the level of the intercom caniera.

Louis waited a few moments for the puppeteer to reappear. Then he switched off. He was sure that Nessus would not remain long in catatonic withdrawal. The puppeteer was too sanely careful of his life.

***

Ten hours of daylight remained. The team waited it out in the disintegrator-dug trench.

Speaker slept through it. They walked him into the trench, then used a spray from the kzinti medkit to put him to sleep. The white stuff had congealed on him to the consistency of a foam rubber pillow.

"The world's only bouncy kzin," said Teela.

Louis tried to sleep. He dozed for a time. Once he half woke to bright daylight and to the sharp black shadow of the slope failing across him. He stirred and went back to sleep ...

And woke later in a cold sweat. Shadows! If he had sat up to look, hed have been burnt crisp!

But the clouds were back, safely blocking the vengeance of the sunflowers.

Finally one horizon dimmed. As the sky darkened, Louis set about waking the others.

They flew beneath the clouds. It was vital that they be able to see the sunflowers. If dawn approached while the fleet was still over sunflowers, they would have to hide out during the next day.

Occasionally Louis dipped his 'cycle for a closer look.

For an hour they flew and then the sunflowers grew sparse. There was a region where sunflowers were scarce, half-grown seedlings growing among the blackened stumps of a recently burned forest. Grass actually seemed to compete with the sunflowers in this area.

Then there were no sunflowers at all.

And Louis could sleep at last.

***

Louls slept as if drugged. It was still night when he woke. He looked about him and found a glimmer of light ahead and to spinward.

Groggy as he was, he thought it would turn out to be a firefly caught in the some fold, or something equally silly. But it was still there after he rubbed his eyes.

He pushed the Call button for Speaker.

The light grow nearer and clearer. Against the darkness of the Ringworld night landscape it showed bright as a point of reflected sunlight

Not a sunflower. Not at night.

It might be a house, Louis thought; but where would a native got his lighting? Then again, a house would have gone by like that. At flycycle cruising speed, you could cross the North American continent in two-and-half hours.

The light was drifting past them on the right, and still Speaker hadn't answered.

Louis cut his 'cycle out of formation. He was grinning in the dark. Behind him the fleet, now under Speakees guidance (at Speaker's insistence), was only two 'cycles strong. Louis picked Speaker's from memory. He flew toward it.

Shock waves and sonic fold showed faintly outlined by cloud-dimmed Archlight, a network of straight lines converging to a point. Speaker's flycycle, and Speaker's ghost-gray silhouette, seemed caught in a Euclidian spiderweb.

Louis was perilously close when he turned big spotlight on and immediately off. In the dark he saw the ghost come suddenly alert. Louis guided his 'cycle carefully between the kzin and the point of light.

He blinked his spotlight again.

Speaker came on the intercom. "Yes, Louis, I see it now. A lighted something going past us."

"Then let's look it over."

"Very well." Speaker turned toward the light.

***

They circled it in the dark, like curious minnows nosing a sinking beer bottle. It was a ten-story castle floating a thousand feet high, and it was all lit up like the instrument board on some ancient rocket ship.

A single tremendous picture window, curved so that it formed both wall and ceiling, opened on a cavity the size of an opera house. Within, a labyrinth of dining tables surrounded a raised circle of floor. There was fifty feet of space above the tables, empty but for a free-form sculpture in stressed wire.

Always it came as a fresh surprise, the elbow room on the Ringworld. On Earth it was a felony to fly any vehicle without an autopilot. A falling car would be bound to kill someone, no matter where it fell. Here, thousands of miles of wilderness, buildings suspended over cities, and head room for a guest fifty feet tall.

There was a city beneath the castle. It showed no lights. Speaker skimmed over it like a swooping hawk, scanned it hastily in the blue Archlight. He came up to report that the city looked very like Zignamuclickclick.

"We can explore it after dawn," he said. "I think this stronghold is more important. It may have been untouched since the fall of civilization."

"It must have its own power source," Louis speculated. "I wonder why? None of the buildings in Zignamuclickclick did."

Teela sent her 'cycle skimming directly under the castle. In the intercom her eyes went big with wonder, and she cried, "Louis, Speakerl You've got to see this!"

They dropped after her without thought. Louis was moving up alongside her when he became suddenly, freezingly aware of the mass suspended over his head.

There were windows all over the underside; and the underside was all angles. There was no way to land the castle. Who had built it, and how, with no bottom to it? Concrete and metal asymnietrically designed, and what the tanj was holding it up? Louis's stomach lurched, but he set his jaw and pulled up alongside Teela, underneath a floating mass equivalent to a medium-sized passenger starship.

Teela had found a wonder: a sunken swimming pool, bathtub-shaped and brightly lit. Its glass bottom and glass walls were open to the outer darkness, but for one wall which bordered on a bar, or a living room, or ... it was hard to tell, looking through two thicknesses of transparency.

The pool was dry. In the bottom was a single great skeleton resembling that of a bandersnatch.

"They kept large pets," Louis speculated.

"Isn't that a Jinxian bandersnatch? My uncle was a hunter," said Teela. "He had his trophy room built inside a bandersnatch skeleton."

"There are bandersnatchi on a lot of worlds. They were Slaver food animals. I wouldn't be surprised to find them all through the galaxy. The question is, what made the Ringworlders bring them here?"

"Decoration," Teela said promptly.

"Are you kidding?" A bandersnatch looked like a cross between Moby Dick and a caterpillar tractor.

Still, Louis thought, why not? Why wouldn't the engineers have raided a dozen or a hundred stellar systems to populate their artificial world? By hypothesis, they had had ramscoop-fusion drives. By necessity every living thing on the Ringworld had been brought from somewhere else. Sunflowers. Bandersnatchi. What else?

Forget it. Go straight for the rim wall; don't try to explore. Already they had come far enough to circle the Earth half a dozen times. Finagle's law, how much there was to find!

Strange life. (Harmless, so far.)

Sunflowers. (Speaker flaming in a glare of light, yowling into the intercom.)

Floating cities. (Which fell disastrously.)

Bandersnatchi. (Intelligent and dangerous. They would be the same here. Bandersnatchi did not mutate.)

And death? Death was always the same, everywhere.

They circled the castle again, looking for openings. Windows there were, all shapes, rectangles and octagons and bubbles and thick panes in the floor; but all were closed. They found a dock for flying vehicles, with a great door built like a drawbridge to act as a landing ramp; but, like a drawbridge, the door was up and closed. They found a couple of hundred feet of spiral escalator hanging like a bedspring from the lowermost tip of the castle. Its bottom ended in open air. Some force had twisted it away, leaving sheared beam and broken treads. Its top was a locked door.

"To Finagle with this! I'm going to ram a window," said Teela.

"Stop!" Louis commanded. He believed she would do it. "Speaker, use the disintegrator. Get us in."

In the light streaming from the great picture window, Speaker unslung the Slaver digging tool.

Louis knew about the disintegrator. Objects within its variable width beam acquired, suddenly, a positive charge powerful enough to tear them apart. The puppeteers had added a second, parallel beam to suppress the charge on the proton. Louis had not used it to dig in the sunflower field, and he knew it would not be needed for this job.

He might have guessed that Speaker would use it anyway.

Two points a few inches apart on the great octagonal window acquired opposite charges, with a potential difference between.

The flash was blinding. Louis clenched his eyes over tears and pain. The crack of thunder was simultaneous, and deafening even through the sonic fold. In the stunned calm that followed, Louis felt gritty particles settled thickly over his neck and shoulders and the backs of his hands. He kept his eyes closed.

"You had to test it," he said.

"It works very well. It will serve us."

"Happy birthday. Don't point it at Daddy, because Daddy will be very angry."

"Do not be flippant, Louis."

His eyes had recovered. Louis found millions of glass slivers all over him and the 'cycle. Flying glass! The sonic fold must have stopped the particles, then released them to drift down over every horizontal surface.

Teela was already floating into the ballroom-sized cavity. They followed.

***

Louis woke gradually, feeling wonderful. He was lying on his arm, on a soft surface. His arm was asleep.

He rolled over and opened his eyes.

He was in a bed, looking up at a high white ceiling. An obstruction under his ribs turned out to be Teela's foot.

Right. Thhey had found the bed last night, a bed as big as a miniature golf course, in an enormous bedroom in what would have been the basement of a less unusual castle.

By then they had already found marvels.

The castle was a castle kideed, and not merely a posh hotel. A banquet hall with a picture window fifty feet tall was startling enough. But the tables circled a central, ring-shaped table on a raised dais. The ring surrounded a contoured, high-backed chair the size of a throne. Teela, experimenting, had found how to make the chair rise halfway to the ceiling, and how to activate a pickup to amplify the voice of the occupant into a thunder of commmd. The chair would turn; and when it turned, the sculpture above it turned too.

The sculpture was in stressed wire, very light, mostly empty space it had seemed an abstraction until Teela started it turning. Then it was obviously a portrait.