Ringworld (19 page)

The sculpted head of an entirely hairless man.

Was he a native, from a community whose members shaved their faces and scalps? Or had he been a member of another race from far around the curve of the Ring?

They might never know. But the face was decidedly human: handsome, angular, the face of one used to command.

Louis looked up at the ceiling and remembered that face. Command had worn hues into that face, around the eyes and mouth, and the artist had somehow managed to include those lines into the wire framework.

This castle had been a seat of government. Everything pointed to it: the throne, the banquet hall, the unique windows, the floating castle itself with its independent power source. But for Louis Wu the clincher was that face.

Afterward they had wandered through the castle. They had found lavishly decorated, beautifully designed staircases everywhere. But they didn't move. There were no escalators, no elevators, no slidewalks, no dropshafts. Perhaps the stairs themselves had moved once.

So the party had wandered downward, because it was easier than climbing up. In the bottom of the castle they had found the bedroom.

Endless days of sleeping in flycycle seats, of making love wherever the fleet had happened to touch down, had made that bed irresistible to Teela and Louis Wu. They had left Speaker to continue his explorations alone.

By now there was no telling what he had found.

Louis raised himself on one elbow. The dead hand was coming back to life. He was careful not to jar it. Never happens with sleeping plates, he reflected, but what the tanj ... a least it's a bed ...

One glassy wall of the bedroom opened on a dry pool. Framed by glass walls and a glass floor, the white skeleton of a Frumious bandersnatch looked back at him with empty eyes set in a spoon-shaped skull.

The opposite wall, equally transparent, opened a thousand feet over the city.

Louis rolled over three times and dropped off the edge of the bed. The floor was soft, covered with a fur rug whose texture and color distintingly resembled a native's beard. Louis padded to the window and looked out.

(Something was interfering with his vision, like a minor flicker in a tridee screen. Consciously he had not even noticed it. Nonetheless it was annoying.)

Beneath a white and featureless sky, the city was all the colors of gray. Most of the buildings were tall, but a bare handful were tall enough to dwarf the rest; taller, a few of them, than the bottom of this floating castle. There had been other floating buildings. Lotus could see the scars, broad gaps in the cityscape, where thousands of tons of masonry had smashed down.

But this one dream-castle had had its own independent power supply. And a bedroom big enough to fit any decent-sized orgy. With a tremendous window-wall from which a sultan might contemplate his domain, might see his subjects as the ants they were.

"This place must have been conducive to hubris," said Louis Wu.

Something caught his eye. Something fluttering outside the window.

Thread. A length of it had hung up on a cornice; but more of it was still drifting down from the sky. Coarse thread. He could see the two strands trailing from the cornice down over the city. It must have been falling for as long as he had been looking out the window. Interfering with his vision.

Not knowing its origin, Louis accepted it for what it was. Something pretty. He lay nude on his back on the hairy wall-to-wall rug, and he watched the thread drifting past his window. He felt safe and rested, perhaps for the first time since an X-ray-laser had touched the Liar.

The thread drifted endlessly down, loop after loop of black line curving out of a gray-white sky. It was fine enough to flicker in and out of visibility. How to know the length of it? How to count the snowflakes in a blizzard?

Suddenly Louis recognized it.

"Welcome back," he said. But he was jolted.

Shadow square wire. It had followed them here.

***

Louis climbed five flights of stairs to find his breakfast. Naturally he didn't expect the kitchen to be operating.

He was looking for the banquet hall; but he found the kitchen instead.

It confirmed ideas he had had earlier. It takes servants to make an autocrat; and there had been servants here. The kitchen was tremendous. It must have required a score of chefs, with their own servants to carry the finished product out to the banquet hall, return the dirty dishes, clean up, run errands ...

There were bins that had held fresh fruit and vegetables, and now held dust and fruit-pits and dried skins and mold. There was a cold room where carcasses had hung. It was empty and warm. There was a freezer, still working. Some of the food on the freezer shelves might have been edible; but Louis would not have risked it.

There were no cans.

The water spigots were dry.

Aside from the freezer, there was not a machine more complex than a door hinge. There were no temperature indicators or timers on the stoves. There was nothing equivalent to a toaster. There were threads hanging over the stove, with nodules of crud on them. Raw spices? No spice bottles?

Louis looked once around him before he left. Otherwise he might have missed the truth.

This room had not originally been a kitchen.

What, then? A storage room? A tridee room? Probably the latter. One wall was very blank, with a uniform paint job that looked younger than the rest; and there were scars on the floor where chairs and couches might have been removed.

All right, then. The room had been an entertainment room. Then, maybe the wall set had broken down, and nobody remembered how to fix it. Later the autokitchen had gone the same route.

So the big tridee room had been turned into a manually operated kitchen. Such kitchens must have been common by then, if nobody remembered how to fix an autokitchen. Raw foods had been brought up by flying truck.

And when the flying trucks broke down, one by one ...?

Louis left.

He found the banquet hall at last, and the only dependable source of food in the castle. There he breakfasted on a brick from the kitchen slot in his 'cycle.

He was finishing up when Speaker entered.

The kzin must have been starving. He went straight to his 'cycle, dialed three wet dark-red bricks, and gulped them down in nine swallows. Only then did he turn to look at Louis.

He was no longer ghost-white. Sometime during the night, the foam had finished healing him and had sloughed away. His skin showed glossy and pink and healthy, if pink was the color of healthy kzinti skin, with a few ridges of grey scar tissue and an extensive network of violet veins.

"Come with me," the kzin commanded. "I have found a map room."

The map room was at the very top of the castle, as befitted its importance. Louis was blowing hard from the climb. He had had a time keeping up. The kzin did not run, but he walked faster than a man could walk.

Louis reached the landing as Speaker pushed through a double door ahead of him.

Through that gap Louis saw a horizontal band of jet black, eight inches broad and three feet off the ground. He looked beyond it, looked for a similar strip of baby blue chocked with midnight blue rectangles; and he found it.

Jackpot.

Louis stood in the doorway, taking in details. The miniature Ringworld was almost as large as the room, which was circular and perhaps a hundred and twenty feet across. At the hub of the circular map was a rectangular screen, heavily mounted, facing away from the doorway but built to turn.

High on the walls were ten turning globes. They varied in size, and they turned at different rates; but each was the characteristic color, rich blue with swirled white frosting, of an Earthlike world. There was a conic-section map below each globe.

"I spent the night here, working," said Speaker. He was standing behind the screen. "I have many things to show you. Come here."

Louis almost ducked under the Ring. A thought stopped him. The hawk-featured man who ruled the banquet hall would never have stooped so, not even to enter this holy of holies. Louis walked at the Ring, and through it, and found it was a holo projection.

He took up a stance behind the kzin.

Control panels surrounded the screen. All the knobs were large and massive, made of silver, and each was carved to represent the head of some animal. The boards were contoured in swirls and curves. Prettified, Louis thought. Decadent?

The screen was alight, but unmagnified. Looking into it was like looking down on the Ringworld from the vicinity of the shadow squares. Louis felt a touch of deja vu.

"I had it focused earlier," said the kzin. "If I remember rightly ..." He touched a knob, and the view expanded so fast that Louis's hand clutched for a throttle. "I want to show you the rim wall. Rrrr, a bit off ..." He touched another fierce-visaged knob, and the view slid. They were looking over the edge of the Ringworld.

Somewhere were telescopes to give them this view. Where? Mounted on the shadow squares?

They were looking down on thousand mile-high mountains. Still the view expanded as Speaker found ever-finer controls. Louis marveled at how abruptly the mountains, appearing very natural but for their size, were cut by the knife-edged shadow of space.

Then he saw what ran along the peaks of the mountains.

Though it was only a line of silver dots, he knew what it would be. "A linear accelerator."

"Yes," said Speaker. "Without transfer booths, it is the only feasible way to travel Ringworld distances. It must have been the major transport system."

"But it's a thousand miles high. Elevators?"

"I found elevator shafts an along the rim wall. There, for instance." By now the silver thread was a line of tiny loops, widely spaced, each hidden from the land below by a mountain peak. A tube so slender as to be barely visible led from one of the loops, down the slop of a mountain, into a layer of clouds at the bottom of the Ringworld atmosphere.

Speaker said, "The electromagnetic loops cluster thickly around the elevator shafts. Elsewhere they are up to a million miles apart. I surmise that they are not needed except for starting and stopping and guidance. A car could be accelerated to free fall, coast around the rim at a relative 770 miles per second, to be stopped near an elevator tube by another cluster of loops."

"It'd take up to ten days to get a man where he wants to go. Not counting accelerations."

"Trivial. It takes you sixty days to reach Silvereyes, the human world farthest from Earth. You would need four times that long to cross known space from edge to edge."

True. And the living area on the Ringworld was greater than that of all known space. They built for room when they built this thing. Louis asked, "Did you see any sign of activity? Is anyone still using the linear accelerator?"

"The question is meaningless. Let me show you." The view converged, slid sidewase, expanded slowly. It was night. Dark clouds diverged over dark land, and then ...

"City lights. Well." Louis swallowed. It had come too suddenly. "So it's not all dead. We can get help."

"I do not think so. This may be difficult to find ... ah."

"Finagle's black mind!"

The castle, obviously their own castle, floated serenely above a field of light. Windows, neon, streams of floating light motes which must be vehicles ... oddly shaped floating buildings ... lovely.

"Tapes. Tanjit! We're watching old tapes. I thought they must be live transmissions." For one glorious moment it had seemed that their search was over -- lighted, bustling cities, pinpointed on a map for them ... but these pictures must be ages old, civilizations old.

"I thought so also, for many hours last night. I did not suspect the truth until I failed to find the thousands of miles of meteor crater slashed by the Liar's landing."

Louis, speechless, thwacked the kzin on his nude pink- and-lavender shoulder. It was as high as he could reach.

The kztn ignored the liberty. "After I had located the castle, things proceeded quickly. Observe." He caused the view to slide rapidly to port. The dark land blurred, lost all detail. Then they were over black ocean.

The camera seemed to back up ...

"You see? A bay of one of the major salt owans falls across our path to the rim wall. The ocean itself is several times as large as any on Kzin or Earth. The bay is as large as our largest ocean."

"More delay! Can't we go over it?"

"Perhaps we can. But we face greater delay than that." The kzin reached for a knob.

"Hold it. I want a closer look at those groups of islands!"

"Why, Louis? That we might stop for provisions?"

"No ... Do you see how they tend to form clusters, with wide stretches of deep water between? Take that grouping there." Louis's forefinger circled images on the screen. "Now look up at that map."

"I do not understand."

"And that grouping in what you called a bay, and that map behind you. The continents in the conic projections are a little distorted ... See it now? Ten worlds, ten clusters of islands. They aren't one-to-one scale; but I'll bet that island is as big as Australia, and the original continent doesnot look any bigger than Eurasia on the globe."

"What a macabre jest. Louis, does this represent a typically human sense of humor?"

"No, no, no. Sentiment! Unless --"

"Yes?"

"I hadn't thought of that. The first generation -- they had to throw away their own worlds, but they wanted to keep something of what they were losing. Three generations later it would be funny. It's always that way."

When the kzin was sure Louis had finished, he asked somewhat diffidently, "Do you humans feel that you understand kzinti?"

Louis smiled -- and shook his head.

"Good," said the kzin, and changed the subject. "I spent some time last night examining the nearest spaceport."

***

They stood at the hub of the miniature Ringworld, looking through a rectangular window into the past.

The past they saw was one of magnificent achievement. Speaker had focused the screen on the spaceport, a wide projecting ledge on the spaceward side of the rim wall. They watched as an enormous blunt-ended cylinder, alight with a thousand windows, was landed in electromagnetic cradling fields. The fields glowed in pastel shades, probably so that the operators could manipulate them visually.

"The tape is looped," said Speaker. "I watched it for some time last night. The passengers seem to walk directly into the rim wall, as if a kind of osmosis process were being used."

"Yeah." Louis was badly depressed. The spaceport ledge was far to spinward of them -- a distance to dwarf the distance they had already traveled.

"I watched a ship take off. They did not use the linear accelerator. They use it only for landings, to match the velocity of the ship to that of the spaceport. For takeoffs they simply tumble the ship off into space.

"It was as the leaf-eater guessed, Louis. Remember the trap door arrangement? The Ringworld spins easily fast enough for a ramscoop field to operate. Louis, are you listening?"

Louis shook himself. "Sorry. All I can think about is that this adds about seven hundred thousand miles to our trip."

"It may be possible to use the main transport system, the small linear accelerator at the top of the rim wall."

"Not a chance. It's probably wrecked. Civilization tends to spread, if there's a transport system to spread it. And even if we can got it working, we aren't moving toward an elevator shaft."

"That is true," said the kzin. "I looked for one."

In the rectangular screen, the ship was down. Floating trucks ran a jointed tube to the ship's main lock. Passengers spilled into the tube.

"Shall we change our goal?"

"We can't. The spaceport is still our best chance."

"Is it?"

"Yes, tanjit! Big as it is, the Ringworld is a colony world. Civilization always centers around the spaceport on a colony world."

"Because craft come from the home world, carrying news of technological innovations. We surmise that the Ringworlders have abandoned their home world."

"But the ships can still come in," Louis said doggedly. "From the abandoned worlds! From centuries ago! Ramships are subject to relativity, to time dilation."

"You hope to find old spacemen trying to teach the old skills to savages who have forgotten them. And you may be right," said Speaker. "But I weary of this structure, and the spaceport is very far. What else can I show you on the map screen?"

Suddenly Louis asked, "How far have we come since we left the Liar?"

"I told you I could not find our impact crater. Your guess is as accurate as mine. But I know how far we must go. From the castle to the rim is approximately two hundred thousand miles."

"A long way ... But you must have found the mountain."

"No."

"The big one. Fist-of-God. We crashed practically on its slope."

"No."

"I don't like that. Speaker, is there any way we could have gotten off course? You should have found Fist-of-God just by backtracking starboard from the castle."

"But I did not," Speaker said with finality. "Do you wish to see anything more? For example, there are blank areas. Probably they are due only to worn tape, but I wondered if they might not conceal places on the Ringworld whose nature is secret."

"But we'd have to go there ourselves to find out."

Speaker suddenly turned to face the double doors, his ears spread like fans. Silently he dropped to all fours, and leapt.

Louis blinked. What could have caused that? And then he heard it ...

Considering its age, the castle machinery had been remarkably silent. Now there came a low-pitched hum from outside the double doors.

Speaker was out of sight. Louis drew his flashlight-laser and followed cautiously.

He found the kzin at the head of the stairs. He put the weapon away; and together they watched Teela ride up.

"They only go up," Teela told them. "Not down. The one between the sixth and seventh floors won't go at all."

Louis asked the obvious question. "How do you make them move?"

"You just grip the banister and push forward. That way it won't go unless you're hanging on. Safer. I only found out by accident."

"You would. I climbed ten flights of stairs this morning. How many did you climb before you found out?"

"None. I was going up for breakfast, and I tripped on the first step and grabbed for the banister."

"Right. it figures."

Teela looked hurt. "It's not my fault if you --"

"Sorry. Did you get your breakfast?"

"No. I've been watching people move around below us. Did you know there's a public square just under the building?"

Speakees ears opened wide. "Is there? And it is not deserted?"

"No. They've been filing in from all directions, all morning. By now there must be hundreds of them." She smiled like dawn breaking. "And they're singing."

***

There were wide spots along all the corridors of the castle. Each such alcove was furnished with rugs and couches and tables, apparently so that any group of strollers could take a meal whenever he fancied, wherever he might be. In one such dining-nook, near the "basement level" of the castle, was a long window bent at right angles to form half a wall, half a floor.

Louis was panting a little from having descended ten flights of stairs. He found himself fascinated by the dining table. Its top seemed -- sculpted; but the contours were shaped and placed to suggest soup plates, salad or butter or dinner plates, or coasters for the bottom of a mug. Decades or centuries of use had stained the hard white material.

"You wouldn't use plates," Louis speculated. "You'd dish the food into the depressions, and hose the table off afterward."

It seemed unsanitary, but --? "They wouldn't bring flies or mosqmtoes or wolves. Why should they bring bacteria?

"Colonic bacteria," he answered himself. "For digestion. And if one bacterium mutated, turned vicious --" By then there would be no immunity to anything. Was that how the Ringworld civilization had died? Any civilization requires a minimum number to maintain it.

Teela and Speaker were paying him no attention. They knelt in the bend of the window, looking down. Louis went to join them.

"They're still at it," said Teela. And they were. Louis guessed that a thousand people were looking up at him. They were not chanting now.

"They can't know were here," he said.

Speaker suggested, "Perhaps they worship the building."

"Even so, they can't do this every day. We're too far from the edge of town. They couldn't reach the fields."

"Perhaps we happened by on a special day, the holy day."

Teela said, "Maybe something happened last night. Something special, like us, if someone spotted us after all. Or like that." She pointed.