Ringworld

CHAPTER 13 — Starseed Lure

"They should have been kneeling," Louis complained. "That's what fooled me. And the translation kept saying 'builder' when it should have been saying 'god'."

"God?"

"They've made gods of the Ringworld engineers. I should have noticed the silence. Tanjit, nobody but the priest was making a sound! They all acted like they were listening to some old litany. Except that I kept giving the wrong responses."

"A religion. How weird! But you shouldn't have laughed," Teela's intercom image said seriously. "Nobody laughs in church, not even tourists."

They flew beneath a fading sliver of noon sun. The Ringworld showed above itself in glowing blue stripes, brighter every minute.

"It seemed funny at the time," said Louis. "It's still funny. They've forgotten they're living on a ring. They think it's an arch."

A rushing sound penetrated the sonic fold. For a moment it was a hurricane, then it cut off sharply. They had crossed the speed of sound.

Zignamuclickclick dwindled behind them. The city would never have its vengeance on the demons. Probably it would never see them again.

"It looks like an arch," said Teela.

"Right. I shouldn't have laughed. We're lucky, though. We can leave our mistakes behind us," said Lous. "All we have to do, any time, is get airborne. Nothing can catch us."

"Some mistakes we must carry with us," said Speaker-To-Animals.

"Funny you should say so." Louis scratched absently at his nose, which was as numb as a block of wood. It would be healed before the anaesthetic wore off.

He made up his mind. "Nessus?"

"Yes, Louis."

"I realized something, back there. You've been claiming that you're insane because you demonstrate courage. Right?"

"How tactful you are, Louis. Your delicacy of tongue -"

"Be serious. You and all the other puppeteers have been making the same wrong assumption. A puppeteer instinctively turns to run from danger. Right?"

"Yes, Louis."

"Wrong. A puppeteer instinctively turns away from danger. It's to free his hind leg for action. That hoof makes a deadly weapon, Nessus."

All in one motion, the puppeteer had spun on his forelegs and lashed out with his single hind leg. His heads were turned backward and spread wide, Louis remembered, to triangulate on his target. Nessus had accurately kicked a man's heart out through his splintered spine.

"I could not run," he said. "I would have been leaving my vehicle. That would have been dangerous."

"But you didn't stop to think about it," sad Louis. "It was instinctive. You automatically turn your back on an enemy. Turn, and kick. A sane puppeteer turns to fight, not to run. You're not crazy."

"You are wrong, Louis. Most puppeteers run from danger."

"But -"

"The majority is always sane, Louis."

Herd animal! Louis gave it up. He lifted his eyes to watch the last sliver of sun disappear.

Some mistakes we must carry with us…

But Speaker must have been thinking of something else when he said that. Thinking of what?

At the zenith swarmed a ring of black rectangles. The one that hid the sun was framed in a pearly coronal glow. The blue Ringworld formed a paraboloid arch over it all, framed against a star-dotted sky.

It looked like something done with a Build-A-City set, by a child too young to know what he was doing.

Nessus had been steering when they left Zignamuclickclick. Later he had turned the fleet over to Speaker. They had flown all night. Now, overhead, a brighter glow along one edge of the central shadow square showed that dawn was near.

Sometime during these past hours, Louis had found a way to visualize the scale of the Ringworld.

It involved a Mercator projection of the planet Earth — a common, rectangular, classroom wall map — but with the equator drawn to one-to-one scale. One could relief-sculpt such a map, so that standing near the equator would be exactly like standing on the real Earth. But one could draw forty such maps, edge to edge, across the width of the Ringworld.

Such a map would be greater in area than the Earth. But one could map it into the Ringworld's topography, and look away for a moment, and never be able to find it again.

One could play cuter tricks than that, given the tools that shaped the Ringworld. Those matching salt oceans, one on each side on the ring, had each been larger in area than any world in human space. Continents, after all, were only large islands. One could map the Earth onto such an ocean and still have room left over at the borders.

I shouldn't have laughed, Louis told himself. It took me long enough to grasp the scale of this … artifact. Why should I expect the natives to be more sophisticated?

Nessus had seen it earlier. Night before last, when they had first seen the arch, Nessus had screamed and tried to hide.

"Oh, what the tanj …" It didn't matter. Not when all mistakes could be left behind at twelve hundred miles per hour.

Presently Speaker called and turned control of the fleet over to Lotus. Louis flew while Speaker slept.

And dawn came on at seven hundred miles per second.

The line dividing day from night is called the terminator. On Earth the terminator is visible from the Moon; it is visible from orbit; but it cannot be seen from the Earth's surface.

But the straight lines dividing light from dark on the arch of the Ringworld were all terminators.

From spinward, the terminator line swept toward the flycycle fleet From ground to sky it ran, from infinity-port to infinity-starboard. It came on like destiny made visible, a moving wall too big to go around.

It arrived. The corona brightened overhead, then blazed as the withdrawing shadow square exposed a rim of solar disc. Louis contemplated the night to his left, the day on his right, the terminator shadow receding across an endless plain. A strange dawn, staged for Lotus Wu the tourist.

Far to starboard, beyond where the land turned to haze, the sharp outlines of a mountain peak materialized in the new daylight.

"Fist-of-God," said Louis Wu, tasting the rolling sound of it in his mouth. What a name for a mountain! But especially, what a name for the greatest mountain in the world!

Louis Wit the man ached. If his body didn't begin adjusting soon, his jouints would freeze him in sitting position and he'd never move again. Furthermore, his food bricks were beginning to taste like — bricks. Moreover, his nose was still partly numb. And there still wasn't any coffee spigot.

But Louis Wu the tourist was being royally entertained. Take the puppeteer flight reflex. Nobody had ever suspected that it might also be a fighting reflex. Nobody but Louis Wu.

Take the starseed lure. What a poetic thing to leave lying about! A simple device, invented thousands of years ago, Nessus had said. And no puppeteer had ever thought to mention it, until yesterday.

But puppeteers wen so completely unpoetic.

Did the puppeteers know why Outsider ships followed starseeds? Did they gloat in the knowledge? Or had they learned that secret, then discarded it as irrelevant to the business of living forever?

Nessus was out of the intercom circuit. Asleep, probably. Louis signaled him, so that the puppeteer would see the light on his panel and call him when he woke.

Did he know?

The starseeds: mindless beings who swarmed in the galactic core. Their metabolism was the solar phoenix, their food was the thinly-spread hydrogen of interstellar space. Their motive power was a photon sail, enormous and highly reflective, controlled like a skydiver's parachute. A starseed's egg-laying flight commonly took it from the galactic axis out to the edge of intergalactic space and then back, without the egg. The hatched starseed chick must find its own way home, riding the photon wind, to the warm, hydrogen-rich core.

Where the starseeds went, then went the Outsiders.

Why did Outsiders follow starseeds? Whimsical question, though poetic.

Maybe not so whimsical. Back around the middle of the first Man-Kzin war a starseed had zigged instead of zagging. The Outsider ship following it had cruised past Procyon. Had paused long enough to sell We Made It a hyperdrive shunt.

The ship could as easily have wandered into kzinti instead of human space.

Amd hadn't the Puppeteers been studying the kzinti about that time?

"Tanjit! That's what I get for letting my mind wander. Discipline, that's what I need."

But hadn't they? Sure they had. Nessus had said so. The puppeteers had been researching the kzinti, investigating whether they could be exterminated safely.

Then the Man-Kzin war had solved their problem. An Outsider ship had wandered into human space to sell We Made It a hyperdrive shunt, while the kzinti armada was sweeping inward from the opposite border. Once human warships had the hyperdrive shunt, the kzinti had ceased to be a threat to man and puppeteer alike.

"They wouldn't dare," Louis told himself. He was appalled.

"If Speaker ever -" But that possibility was even worse.

"An experiment in selective breeding," said Louis. "Selective there-ain't-no-justice breeding. But they used us. They used us!"

"Yes," said Speaker-To-Animals.

For an instant Louis was sure he had imagined it. Then he saw Speaker's transparent, miniature image at the top of his dashboard. He had left the intercom open.

"Tanj for torment! You were listening!"

"Not by choice, Louis. I neglected to switch off my intercom."

"Oh." Too late, Louis remembered Speaker grinning at him, supposedly out of hearing range, after Nessus had finished describing a starseed lure. Remembered that kzinti ears were made to serve a hunting carnivore. Remembered that the kzinti smile reflex is intended to free the teeth for battle.

"You mentioned selective breeding," said Speaker.

"I was just -" Louis floundered.

"The puppeteers pitted our species against each other in order to restrict kzinti expansion. They had a starseed lure, Louis. They used it to guide an Outsider ship into your space, to ensure a human victory. An experiment in selective breeding, you called it."

"Listen, times a very chancy chain of assumptions. If you'll just calm down -"

"But we both followed that chain."

"Um."

"I was in doubt as to whether to broach the subject to Nessus, or whether to wait until we had accomplished our major objective, which is to leave the Ringworld. Now that you know the situation, I have no choice."

"But -" Louis closed his mouth. The siren would have drowned him out anyway. Speaker had signaled emergency.

The siren was a maniac mechanical scream, a subsonic and supersonic and jarringly painful sound. Nessus appeared above the dash, crying, "Yes? Yes?"

Speaker roared his answer. "You have meddled in a war in the enemy's favor! Your action is tantamount to a declaration of war against the Patriarchy!"

Teela had cut in in time to hear the last part. Louis caught her eye, shook his head. Dont mix in.

The puppeteer's heads reared like snakes to show his astonishment. His voice was without inflection, as usual. "What are you talking about?"

"The First War with Men. Starseed lures. The Outsider hyperdrive shunt."

A triangular head dipped out of sight. Louis watched a silver flycycle drop out of formation, and knew it was Nessus.

He was not terribly worried. The other two flycycles looked like silver midges, so far away were they, and so far apart. If the fight had taken place on the ground, someone could have been seriously hurt. Up here, what could happen? The puppeteer's flycycle had to be faster than Speaker's. Nessus would have seen to that. He would have made certain he could outrun a kzin when necessary.

Except that the puppeteer wasn't fleeing. He was looping around at Speaker's 'cycle.

"I do not wish to kill you," said Speaker-To-Animals. "If you intend to attack from the air, you should remember that the range of your tasp may be less than the range of the Slaver digging beam. SNARL!"

The kzinti killing yell was blood-freezing. Louis's muscles locked in position, as with tetanus. He was only dimly aware of the silver dot that looped away from Speaker's cycle.

But he did notice Teela's look of open-mouthed admiration.

"I do not intend to kill you," Speaker-To-Animal add more calmly. "But I will have answers, Nessus. We know that your race can guide starseeds."

"Yes," said Nessus. His 'cycle was receding to port at improbable speed. The feral calm of the aliens was an illusion. It existed only because Louis Wu could not read expression in an alien face, and because the aliens could not put human expression into the Interworld language.

Nessus was fleeing for his life, but the kzin had not left his place in formation. He said, "I will have answers, Nessus."

"You have guessed correctly," said the puppeteer. "Our investigation of safe methods to exterminate the vicious, carnivorous kzinti showed that your species has a high potential, that you could conceivably be of use to us. We took steps to evolve you to the point where you could deal peaceably with races alien to you. Our methods were indirect, and very safe."

"Very. Nessus, I am not happy."

"Neither am I," said Louis Wu.

He had not missed the fact that both aliens were still speaking Interworld. They could have had privacy by using the Hero's Tongue. They had preferred to include the humans — and quite rightly, for it was Louis Wu's quarrel, too.

"You used us," he said. "You used us just as thoroughly as you used the kzinti."

"But to our detriment," Speaker objected.

"A number of men were killed in the Man-Kzin Wars."

"Louis, get off his back!" Teela Brown entered the lists of battle. "Tanjit, if it hadn't been for the puppeteers, we'd all be kzinti slaves! They kept the kzinti from destroying civilization!"

Speaker smiled and said, "We had a civilization, too."

The puppeteer was a silent, ghostly image, a one-eyed python poised to strike. Presumably the other mouth was steering his 'cycle, which by now was a good distance away.

"The puppeteers used us," said Louis Wu. "They used us as a tool, a tool to evolve the kzinti."

"But it worked!" Teela insisted.

The sound was almost a snore, a low and ominous snarl. By now nobody could have mistaken Speaker's expression for a smile.

"It did work!" Teela flared. "You're a peaceful race now, Speaker. You can get along with -"

"Be silent, man!"

"With your equals," she finished generously. "You haven't attacked another species in -"

The kzin produced the modified Slaver digging tool and held it before the intercom so that Teela could see it. She stopped talking suddenly.

"It could have been us," said Louis.

He had their attention. "It could have been us," he repeated. "If the puppeteers had wanted to breed humans for some trait …" He stopped. "Oh," he said. "Teela. Sure."

The puppeteer did not react.

Teela shifted under Louis's stare. "What's the matter, Louis? Louis!"

"Sorry. Something just occurred to me … Nessus, speak to us. Speak to us of the Fertility Laws."

"Louis, have you gone crazy?"

"Uurrr," said Speaker-to-Animals. "I would have thought of that myself, given time. Nessus?"

"Yes," said Nessus.

The puppeteees 'cycle was a silver mote, still dwindling to port. It was almost lost against a larger, vaguer bright point ahead, somewhat more distant from the fleet than any two points can be on Earth. The puppeteees intercom image wore the unchanging, unreadable silly face produced by a flat triangular skull and loose, prehensile lips. He could not look dangerous, this one.

"You meddled with the Fertility Laws of Earth."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"We like humans. We trust humans. We have dealt profitably with humans. It is to our advantage to encourage humans, since they will certainly reach the Lesser Cloud before we do."

"Wonderful. You like us. So?"

"We sought to improve you genetically. But what should we improve? Not your intelligence. Intelligence is not your great strength. Nor is your sense of self-preservation, nor your durability, nor your fighting talents."

"So you decided to make us lucky," said Louis. And he began to laugh.

Teela got it then. Her eyes went round and horrified. She tried to say something, but it came out as a squeak.

"Of course," said Nessus. "Please stop laughing, Louis. The decision was sensible. Your species has been incredibly lucky. Your history reads like a series of hair-breath escapes, from intraspecies atomic war, from pollution of your planet with industrial wastes, from ecological upsets, from dangerously massive asteroids, from the vagaries of your mildly variable sun, and even from the Core explosion, which you discovered only by the merost accident. Louis, why are you still laughing?"

Louis was still laughing because he was looking at Teela. Teela was blushing furiously. Her eyes shifted as if seeking a place to hide. It is not pleasant to realize that one is part of a genetics experiment.

"And so we changed the Fertility Laws of Earth. It was surprisingly easy. Our withdrawal from known space caused a stock market crash. Economic manipulation ruined several members of the Fertility Board. We bribed some of these, blackmailed others with the threat of debtor's prison, then used corruption in the Fertility Board as publicity to force a change. It was a hideously expensive undertaking, but quite safe, and partially successful. We were able to introduce the Birthright Lotteries. We hoped to produce a strain of unusually lucky humans."

"Monster!" Teela shouted. "Monster!"

Speaker had sheathed his Slaver digging tool. He said, "Teela, you did not complain when you learned that the puppeteers had manipulated the heredity of my race. They sought to produce a docde kzin To that end they bred us as a biologist breeds stheets, killing the defectives, keeping others. You gloated that this crime was to the benefit of your species. Now you complain. Why?"

Teela, weeping with rage, cut herself out of the intercom.

"A docile kzin," Speaker repeated. "You sought to produce a docile kzin, Nessus. If you think you have produced a docile kzin, come and rejoin us."

The puppeteer did not answer. Somewhere far ahead of the fleet, the silver point of his 'cycle had become too small to see.

"You do not wish to rejoin our fleet? But how can I protect you from this unknown land unless you rejoin the fleet? But I do not blame you. You do well to be wary," said the kzin. His claws were showing, needle-sharp and slightly curved. "Your attempt to produce a lucky human was also a failure."

"No," said Nessus via intercom. "We produced lucky humans. I could not contact them for this ill-fated expedition. They were too lucky."

"You have played god with both our species. Do not attempt to rejoin us."

"I will remain in intercom contact."

Speaker's image disappeared.

"Louis, Speaker has cut me off," said Nessus. "If I have something to tell him, I must pass it through you."

"Fine," said Louis, and cut him off. Almost instantly a tiny light burned where the puppeteer's ghost-head had been. The puppeteer wanted to talk.

Tanj upon him.

Later that day they crossed a sea the size of the Mediterranean. Lows dipped to investigate, and found that the other 'cycles followed him down. The Beet, then, was still under his guidance, despite the fact that nobody would speak to him.

The shoreline was a single city, and the city was a ruin. Aside from the docks, it did not differ in kind from Zignamuclickclick. Louis did not land. There was nothing to be learned here.

Afterward the land sloped gradually upward, always upward, until ears popped and pressure sensors dropped. The green land became brown scrub, then high desert tundra, then miles and miles of bare rock, then -

Along half a thousand miles' of ridgeback mountain peak, the winds had scraped away scrub and sod and rock. Nothing was left but an exposed backbone of ring foundation material, translucent gray and hideous.

Sloppy upkeep. No Ringworld engineer would have permitted such a thing. The Ringworld civilization, then, must have begun to die long ago. The process would have started here, with bare spots poking through the facade in the places where nobody went …

Far ahead of the fleet, in the direction Nessus had gone, was an extensive shiny spot in the landscape. At a guess, it was thirty to fifty thousand miles away. A great shiny spot as big as Australia.

More exposed ring floor? Vast, shiny areas of ring foundation poking through once-fertile soil, soil that dies and dries and blows away when the river systems break down. The fall of Zignamuclickclick, the universal power failure, must have been the last stage of the breakdown.

How long had it taken? Ten thousand years?

Longer?

"Tanjit! I wish I could talk it over with someone. It might be important." Louis scowled at the landscape.

Time was different when the sun was always straight overhead. Morning and afternoon were identical. Decisions seemed less than permanent. Reality seemed less than real. It was, Louis thought, like the instant of time spent traveling between transfer booths.

That was it. They were between transfer booths, one at the Liar, one at the rim wall. They only dreamed that they flew above flat gray land in a triangle pattern of flycycles.

They flew to port through frozen time.

How long had it been since anyone had spoken to anyone? It had been hours since Louis had signaled Teela that he wanted to talk to her. Not much later he had signaled Speaker. Lights had burned above their dashboards, ignored, as Louis ignored the light above his own.

"Enough of that," Louis said suddenly. He opened the intercom.

He caught an incredible burst of orchestral music before the puppeteer noticed him. Then -

"We must see to it that the expedition is reunited without bloodshed," said Nessus. "Have you any suggestions, Louis?"

"Yes. It's not polite to start a conversation in the middle."

"I apologize, Louis. Thank you for returning my call. How have you been?"

"Lonely and irritated, and it's all your fault. Nobody wants to talk to me."

"Can I help?"

"Maybe. Did you have anything to do with changing the Fertility Laws?"

"I headed the project."

Louis snorted. "That's the wrong answer. May you be the first victim of retroactive birth control! Teela won't ever speak to me again."

"You should not have laughed at her."

"I know. You know what scares me the most about this whole thing? Not your there-ain't no-justice arrogance," said Louis. "It's the fact that you can make decicions of that magnitude, then do something as downright stupid as, as -"

"Can Teela Brown hear us?"

"No, of course not. Tanj you, Nessus! Do you know what you've done to her?"

"If you knew her ego would be so wounded, why did you speak?"

Louis moaned. He had solved a thought-problem and immediately revealed the solution. It had not occurred to him, it would never have occurred to him, that the solution was better hidden. He didn't think that way.

The puppeteer asked, "Have you thought of a way to reunite the expedition?"

"Yes," said Louis, and he switched off.

Let the puppeteer sweat over that one.

The land sloped down and became green again.

They passed another sea, and a great triangular river delta. But the riverbed was dry, and so was the delta. Alterations in the wind currents must have dried up the source.

As Louis dipped low, it became clear that all of the haphazard, meandering channels that made up the delta had been carved permanently into the land. The Ringworld artists had not been content to let the river dig its own channels. And they had been right; the soil wasn't deep enough on the Ringworld. Artifice was necessary.

But the empty channels were ugly. Louis pursed his lips in disapproval, and flew on.