Ringworld

CHAPTER 11 — The Arch of Heaven

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.

"Look behind us," he said. "See that dust trail? Any idea what it might be?"

"Of course. It must be the vaporized rock from our meteoric landing, recondensed in the atmosphere. It has not had time to settle out of so large a volume."

"I was thinking of dust storms … Tanj forever, look how far we slid!" For the dust trail was at least a couple of thousand miles long, if it was as far away as the ship.

Sky and earth were two flat plates, infinitely wide, pressed together; and men were microbes crawling between the plates …

"Our air pressure has increased."

Louis pulled his eyes away from the vanishing point. "What did you say?"

"Look at your pressure gauge. We must have been at least two miles above our present level when we landed."

Louis dialed a ration brick for breakfast. "Is the air pressure important?"

"We must observe all things in an unfamiliar environment. One never knows what detail might be crucial. For instance, the mountain which we chose as a landmark bulks large behind us. It must be even larger than we thought. Again, what of that silver-shining point ahead of us?"

"There?"

"Almost at the hypothetical horizon line, Louis. Directly ahead."

It was like searching out a single detail in a map seen edge-on. Louis found it anyway: a bright mirror-gleam, just large enough to be more than a point.

"Reflected sunlight. What could it be? A glass city?"

"Improbable."

Louis laughed. "You're too polite. It's as big as a glass city, though. Or an acre of mirrors. Maybe it's a big telescope, reflector type."

"Then it has probably been abandoned."

"How so?"

"We know that this civilization has returned to savagery. Why else would they allow vast regions to return to desert?"

Once Louis had believed that argument. Now … "You may be oversimplifying. The Ringworld's bigger than we realized. I think there's room here for savagery and civilization and anything in between."

"Civilization tends to spread, Louis."

"Yeah."

They'd find out about the bright point, anyway. It was directly in their path.

There wasn't any coffee spigot.

Louis was swallowing the last of his breakfast brick when he noticed two green lights glowing on his dashboard. They puzzled him until he remembered switching Teela and Speaker out of the intercom last night. He switched them back in.

"Good morning," said Speaker. "Did you see the dawn, Louis? It was artistically stimulating."

"I saw it. Morning, Teela."

Teela didn't answer.

Louis looked more closely. Teela was fascinated, rapt, like one who has reached Nirvana.

"Nessus, have you been using your tasp on my woman?"

"No, Louis. Why should I?"

"How long has she been like this?"

"Like what?" Speaker demanded. "She has not been communicative recently, if that is what you mean."

"I mean her expression, tanjit!" Teela's image, poised on his dashboard, looked at infinity through the bulk of Louis's head. She was quietly, thoroughly happy.

"She seems relaxed," said the kzin, "and in no discomfort. The finer nuances of human expression -"

"Never mind that. Land us, will you? She's got Plateau trance."

"I do not understand."

"Just land us."

They fell from a mile up. Louis endured a queasy period of free fall before Speaker gave them thrust again. He watched Teela's image for her reaction, but he saw none. She was serene and undisturbed. The corners of her mouth turned very slightly up.

Louis fumed as they dropped. He knew something about hypnosis: bits and oddments of information such as a man will collect over two hundred years of watching tridee. If only he could remember …

Greens and browns resolved into field and forest and a silver thread of stream. It was lush, wild country below them, the kind of country flatlanders expect to find on a colony world, more's the pity.

"Try to put us in a valley," Louis told Speaker. "I'd like to get her out of sight of the horizon."

"Very well. I suggest that you and Nessus cut yourselves out of autopilot and follow me down on manual. I will land Teela myseff."

The diamond of flycycles broke up and re-formed. Speaker moved port-and-spinward, toward the stream Louis had spotted earlier. The others followed.

They were still dropping as they crossed the stream. Speaker turned spinward to follow its course. By now he was virtually crawling through the air, moving just above the treetops. He watched for a stretch of bank not blocked by trees.

"The plants seem very Earthlike," said Louis. The aliens made noises of agreement.

They rounded a curve of stream.

The natives were in the middle of a broad section of stream. They were working a fishing net. As the line of 'cycles came into view the natives looked up. For a long moment they did nothing more than let go of the net while they stared upward with their mouths open.

Louis, Speaker, and Nessus all reacted in the same way. They took off straight upward. The natives dwindled to points; the stream to a winding silver thread. The lush, wild forest blurred into green-browns.

"Put yourselves on autopilot," Speaker ordered, in an unmistakable tone of command. "I will land us elsewhere."

He must have learned that tone of command — strictly for use in dealing with humans. The duties of an ambassador, Louis mused, were various indeed.

Teela had apparently noticed nothing at all.

Louis said, "Well?"

"They were men," said Nessus.

"They were, weren't they? I thought I might be hallucinating. How would men get here?"

But nobody tried to answer.