Ringworld

CHAPTER 17 — The Eye of The Storm

The 'cycles were moving to port when they left Heaven, beneath the steel-gray lid that in these regions served as a sky. It had saved their lives above the sunflower fields. By now it was merely depressing.

Louis touched three points on the dash to lock into his present altitude. He had to watch what he was doing, because there was very little feeling in his right hand under the medicines and the spray-skin and the single white blister on each fingertip. He regarded his hand now, thinking how much worse it might have been …

Speaker appeared above the dash. "Louis, do we not wish to rise above the clouds?"

"We might miss something. We can't see the ground from up there."

"We have our maps."

"Would they show us another sunflower field?"

"You are right," Speaker said instantly. He clicked off.

Speaker and Teela, waiting in Heaven's map room while Louis braced a shaven priest far below, had spent the time well. They had sketched contour maps of their route to the rim wall, and had also sketched in the cities that showed as bright yellow patches in the magnifying screen.

Then something had taken exception to their use of a reserved frequency. Reserved by whom, for what purpose, how long ago? Why had it not objected until now? Louis suspected an abandoned machine, like the meteor guard that had shot down the Liar. Perhaps this one worked only intermittently, in spasms.

And Speaker's translator disc had turned red hot and stuck to his palm. It would be days before he could use his hand again, even with the miracle kzinti "military" medicines. The muscles would have to regenerate.

The maps would make a difference. Resurging civilization would almost certainly show first in the great metropoli. The fleet could cross those sites, watching for lights or rising smoke.

Nessus's call button burned on the dash, as it might have burned for a score of hours. Louis answered it.

He saw the puppeteer's straggly brown mane and glovesoft back rising and slowly falling with his breath. For a moment he wondered if the puppeteer were back in catatonic withdrawal. Then the puppeteer lifted a triangular head and sang, "Welcome, Louis! What news?"

"We found a floating building," said Louis. "With a map room." He told the puppeteer of the castle called Heaven, the map room, the screen, the maps and globes, the priest and his tales and his model of the universe. He had been answering questions for some time when he thought of one of his own.

"Hey. Is your translator disc working?"

"No, Louis. A short time ago the instrument turned white hot before me, frightening me badly. Had I dared, I would have gone catatonic; but I knew too little."

"Well, the others are gone too. Teela's burned its case and left a sear on her 'cycle. Speaker and I both got our hands burned. You know something? Were going to have to learn the Ringworld language."

"Yes."

"I wish the old man had remembered something about the fall of the old Ring society. I had an idea …" And he told the puppeteer his theory of a mutating colonic bacterium.

"That is possible," said Nessus. "Once they lost the secret of transmutation, they would never recover."

"Oh? Why not?"

"Look about you, Louis. What do you see?"

Louis did. He saw a lightning-storm developing ahead; he saw hills, valleys, a distant city, twin mountain peaks tipped with the dirty translucency of raw Ring flooring … "Land anywhere on the Ringworld, and dig. What do you find?"

"Dirt," said Louis. "So?"

"And then?"

"More dirt. Bedrock. Ring floor material," said Louis. And as he said these words the landscape seemed to alter. Storm clouds, mountains, the city to spinward and the city dwindling behind, the edge of brilliance far away on the infinity-horizon, that might be a sea or a sunflower invasion … now the landscape showed as the shell it was. The difference between an honest planet and this was the difference between a human face and an empty rubber mask.

"Dig on any world," the puppeteer was saying, "and eventually you will find some kind of metal ore. Here, you will find forty feet of soil, and then the Ring foundation. That material cannot be worked. If it could be pierced, the miner would strike vacuum — a harsh reward for his labor.

"Give the Ring a civilization capable of building the Ring, and it must necessarily have cheap transmutation. Let them lose the technology of trasmutation — no matter how — and what would be left? Surely they would not stockpile raw metals. There are no ores. The metal of the Ring would be all in machines and in tools and in rust. Even interplanetary capability would not help them, for there is nothing to be mined anywhere around this star. Civilization would fall and never rise."

Softly Louis asked, "When did you figure this out?"

"Some time ago. It did not seem important to our survival."

"So you just didn't mention it. Right," said Louis. The hours he'd spent worrying that problem! And it all seemed so vividly obvious now. What a trap, what a terrible trap for thinking beings.

Louis looked ahead of him (and was marginally aware that Nessus's image was gone). The storm was nearer now, and it was wide. Doubtless the sonic folds could handle it, but still …

Better to fly over it. Louis pulled on a handle, and the flycycles rose toward the world's gray lid, toward the clouds that had covered them since they reached the tower called Heaven.

Louis's mind ran in idle …

Learning a new language would take time. Learning a new language every time they set down would be impossible. The question was becoming crucial. How long had the Ring natives been barbarian? How long since they had all spoken the same language? How far had the local languages diverged from the original?

The universe blurred, then went entirely gray. They were in the clouds. Tendrils of mist streamed around the bubble of Louis's sonic fold. Then the 'cycles broke through into the sunlight.

From the Ringworld's indefinite horizon, a vast blue eye looked at Louis Wu across a flat infinity of cloud.

If God's head had been the size of the Earth's Moon, that eye would have been about the right size.

It took Louis a moment to grasp what he was seeing. For another moment his brain flatly refused to believe it. Then the whole picture tried to fade like a badly illuminated holo.

Through the humming in his ears he heard / felt someone screaming.

Am I dead? he wondered.

And, Is that Nessus screaming? But he'd cut that circuit.

It was Teela. Teela, who had never been afraid of anything in her life. Teela covered her face with her hands, hiding from that vast blue stare.

The eye lay dead ahead, dead to port. It seemed to be drawing them toward itself.

Am I dead? Is the Creator come to judge me? Which Creator?

It was finally time for Louis Wu to decide which Creator he believed in, if any.

The eye was blue and white, with a white eyebrow and a dark pupil. White of cloud, blue of distance. As if it were part of the sky itself.

"Louis!" Teela screamed. "Do something!"

It isn't happening, Louis told himself. His throat was a column of solid ice. His mind ran about in his skull like something trapped. It's a big universe, but some things really are impossible.

"Louis!"

Louis found his voice. "Speaker. Hey, Speaker. What do you see?"

The kzin took his time answering. His voice was curiously flat. "I see a great human eye ahead of us."

"Human?"

"Yes. Do you see it too?"

The word Louis would never have used made all the difference. Human. A human eye. If the eye were a supernatural manifestation, then a kzin should see a kzinti eye, or nothing at all.

"Then it's natural," Louis told himself. "It has to be."

Teela looked at him hopefully.

But how was it drawing them toward itself?

"Oh," said Louis Wu. He moved the steering handle hard right. The 'cycles curved away to spinward.

"This is not our route," Speaker said instantly. "Louis, bring us back. Or put the fleet under my command."

"You aren't thinking of going through that thing, are you?"

"It is too large to go around."

"Speaker, it's no bigger than Plato crater. We can circle it in an hour. Why take chances?"

"If you are afraid, drop out of formation, Louis. Circle the eye and meet me on the other side. Teela, you may do the same. I will go through."

"Why?" Louis's voice sounded ragged even to him. "Do you think that — accidental cloud formation is a challenge to your manhood?"

"My what? Louis, my ability to procreate is not at issue. My courage is."

"Why?"

The 'cycles fell across the sky at cruising velocity, twelve hundred miles per hour.

"Why is your courage at issue? You owe me an answer. You're risking our lives."

"No. You may go around the Eye."

"And how do we find you afterward?"

The kzin considered. "I concede the point. Have you heard of the Kdapt-Preacher heresy?"

"No."

"In the dark days that followed the Fourth Truce with Man, Mad Kdapt-Preacher headed a new religion. He was executed by the Patriarch himself in single combat, since he bore a partial name, but his heretical religion survives in secret to this day. Kdapt-Preacher believed that God the Creator made man in his own image."

"Man? But — Kdapt-Preacher was a kzin?"

Yes. You kept winning, Louis. For three centuries and four wars you had been winning. Kdapt's disciples ware masks of human skin when they prayed. They hoped to confuse the Creator long enough to win a war."

"And when you saw that eye peering over the horizon at us -"

"Yes."

"Oh, boy."

"I put it to you, Louis, that my own theory is more likely than yours. An accidental cloud formation. Really, Louis!"

Louis's brain was working again. "Strike accidental. Maybe the Ring engineers set up the Eye formation for their own amusement, or as a pointer to something."

"To what?"

"Who knows? Something big. An amusement park, a major church. The headquarters of the Optometrist's Union. With the techniques they had, and the room, it might be anything!"

"A prison for Peeping Toms," said Teela, suddenly getting into the spirit of the thing. "A university for private detectives! A test pattern on a giant tridee set! I was as scared as you were, Speaker." Teela sounded normal again. "I thought it was — I don't know what I thought. But I'm with you. We'll go through together."

"Very well, Teela."

"If he blinks, we'll both be killed."

"'The majority is always sane,'" Louis quoted. "I'm going to call Nessus."

"Finagle, yes! He must have gone through it already, or around it!"

Louis laughed harder than he ordinarily would have. He had been very frightened. "You don't think Nessus is breaking trail for us, do you?"

"Huh?"

"He's a puppeteer. He circled around behind us, then he probably slaved his 'cycle to Speaker's. That way Speaker can't catch him, and any danger he's likely to meet, we'll meet first."

Speaker said, "You have a remarkable ability to think like a coward, Louis."

"Don't knock it. We're on an alien world. We need alien insights."

"Very well, call him since you and he seem to think so much alike. I intend to face the Eye, and learn what lies behind it, or within it."

Louis called Nessus.

In the intercom image, only the puppeteer's back was visible. His mane stirred slowly with his breathing.

"Nessus," Louis called. Then, louder, "Nessus!"

The puppeteer twitched. A triangular head rose in enquiry.

"I was afraid I'd have to use the siren."

"Is there an emergency?" Both heads came up, quiveringly alert.

Louis was finding it impossible to return the vast blue stare ahead of him. His eyes kept sliding away. He said, "A kind of emergency. My crazy team are about to wreck themselves. I don't think we can afford to lose them."

"Explain, please."

"Look ahead of you and tell me if you can see a cloud formation in the shape of a human eye."

"I see it," said the puppeteer.

"Any idea what's causing it?"

"Obviously it is a storm of some kind. You will already have reasoned that there will be no spiral hurricane formations on the Ringworld."

"Oh!" Louis hadn't even wondered about that.

"The spiral form of a hurricane derives from coriolis force, from the difference in the velocities of two air masses at different latitudes. A planet is a rotating spheroid. If two masses of air move toward each other to fill a partial vacuum, one moving north and the other south, their residual velocities will carry them past each other. Thus a whirlpool of air is formed."

"I know what causes hurricanes."

"Then you must realize that on the Ringworld, all contiguous masses of air have virtually the same velocity. There will be no whirlpool effect."

Louis looked ahead of him toward the eye-shaped storm. "But what kind of a storm would you get? None at all, I'd think. You wouldn't get any circulation of air at all."

"Untrue, Louis. Hot air would rise, cold air would sink. But these effects could not produce such a storm as that ahead of us."

"Too right."

"What is Speaker threatening to do?"

"Fly through the center of that Finagle-sired thing, with Teela loyally following after him."

The puppeteer whistled a tone as pure and beautiful as ruby laser light "That seems dangerous. The sonic folds would protect them against the ravages of any ordinary storm. But this looks to be no ordinary storm."

"I was thinking that it might be artificial."

"Yes … The Ringworlders would have set up their own Ring-girdling circulation system. But that system would have stopped working when the Ring power supply failed. I don't see … ah. I have it, Louis."

"What is it?"

"We must postulate an air-sink, a region where air disappears near the middle of the storm. All the rest follows.

"Consider. The air sink creates a partial vacuum. Air masses flow in from spinward and antispinward -"

"And port and starboard."

"These we can ignore," the puppeteer said crisply. "But air moving in from spinward win become fractionally lighter than the surrounding air. It will rise. Air moving in from the opposite direction, from antispinward, will become fractionally heavier — -"

Louis was groping with an improperly visualized picture. "Why?"

"From antispinward it comes, Louis. Its rotational velocity is increased fractionally with respect to the Ring. Centrifugal force causes it to sink slightly.

"It forms the lower eyelid of the eye. The air from spinward, rising, forms the upper eyelid. There is a whirlpool effect, surely, but the axis of the whirlpool is horizontal, where on a planet it would be vertical."

"But it's such a small effect!"

"But it is the only effect, Louis. There is nothing to interfere with its action, or to stop it. It might go on for millenia, building to what you see now."

"Maybe. Maybe." The eye seemed less frightening now. As the puppeteer had said, it must be some kind of storm. It was all the colors of a storm, of black clouds and upper sunlit white clouds and the dark "eye" of the storm acting as the iris of the Eye.

"The problem is the air sink, of course. Why does air disappear near the center of the storm?"

"Maybe a pump is still working in there."

"I doubt that, Louis. If that were so, the air disturbances in this vicinity would be planned."

"Well?"

"Have you noticed the places where the ring foundation material pokes through the soil and the bedrock? Surely such erosion must be unplanned. Have you noticed how such places appeared more frequently as we neared this place? The Eye storm must have upset weather patterns for tens of thousands of miles around, over an area greater than your world or mine."

This time it was Louis who whistled. "Tanj for torment! But then — oh, now I see. There must be a meteor puncture in the center of the Eye storm."

"Yes. You see the importance of this. The ring floor can be penetrated."

"But not by anything we're armed with."

"True. Still, we must know if the puncture is there."

Already Louis's superstitious panic seemed a remembered dream. The puppeteer's analytical calm was contagious and steadying. Louis Wu looked fearlessly into the eye and said, "We'll have to go in and look. You think it'll be safe, flying through the iris?"

"It should be no more than clear, still air in a partial vacuum."

"Okay. I'll relay the good news. Well all fly through the eye storm."

The sky was darkening as they approached the iris. Was night falling overhead? Impossible to tell. The thickening, blackening clouds made darkness enough.

The eye was at least a hundred miles long from corner to corner, and something like forty miles tall. Its outline seemed to blur as they approached. Layers and streamers became visible. The true shape of the eye began to show: a tunnel of churning winds, reasonably uniform, whose cross-section was a picture of a human eye.

But it still looked like an eye as they hurtled toward the iris.

It was like falling into the eye of God. The visual effect was horrifying, terrifying, almost comically overdone. Louis was ready to laugh or scream. Or back out. It would only take one observer to find out whether there was a hole in the Ringworld floor. Louis could go around …

They were in.

They flew down a black corridor lit by lightning. Lightning flashed almost continuously, ahead and behind and on all sides. For a uniform distance around them the air was clear. Beyond the iris region, opaque black clouds swirled around them, moving at greater than hurricane velocities.

"The leaf-eater was right," Speaker roared. "It is nothing but a storm."

"Funny thing. He was the only one of the four of us who didn't panic when he saw that eye. I guess puppeteers aren't superstitious," screamed Louis Wu.

Teela called, "I see something ahead of us!"

It was a dip in the floor of the tunnel. Louis grinned with tension and rested his hands lightly on the controls. There might be a tanj of a downdraft over that dip.

He was less wary now, less tense, than he had been when they entered the Eye. What could happen where even a puppeteer found safety?

Clouds and lightning whirled around them as they neared the dip.

They braked and hovered over the dip, their flycycle motors fighting the downdraft. Through the muffling action of the sonic folds, the storm screamed in their ears.

It was like looking into a funnel. Obviously there was air disappearing down there; but was it being pumped away at high speed, or was it being spewed at the stars through the black bottom of the Ringworld? They couldn't actually see much …

Louis did not notice when Teela dropped her 'cycle. She was too far away, the flickering light was too strange, and he was looking down. He saw a tiny speck dwindling into the funnel, but he thought nothing of it.

Then, thinned by the howl of the storm, he heard Teela's scream.

Teela's face was clear in the intercom image. She was looking down, and she was terrified.

"What is it?" he bellowed.

He could barely hear her answer. "It's got me!"

He looked down.

The funnel was clear between its whirling conical sides. It was oddly and steadily lit, not by lightning per se, but by cathode-ray effects caused by current differences in a nearly complete vacuum. There was a speck of … something down there, something that might conceivably have been a flycycle, if anyone were stupid enough to dive a flycycle into a maelstrom merely to get a closer look at a puncture hole into outer space.

Louis felt sick. There was nothing to be done, nothing at all. He wrenched his eyes away -

Only to see Teela's eyes above the dashboard. She was looking down into something dreadful -

And blood was running from her nose.

He saw the terror drain out of her face, to leave a white corpselike calm. She was about to faint. Anoxia? The sonic fold would hold air against vacuum, but it had to be set first.

Half-conscious, she looked up at Louis Wu. Do something, she begged. Do something.

Her head fell forward against the dash.

Louis's teeth were in his lower lip. He could taste the blood. He looked down into the funnel of streaming neon-lit cloud, and it was sickeningly like the whirlpool over a bathtub drain. He found the tiny speck that must be Teela's cycle — and saw it lunge straight forward and into the sloping, whirling wall of the funnel.

Seconds later he saw the vapor trail appear ahead of him, far down the eye of the horizontal hurricane. A thread of white, sharply pointed. Somehow it never occurred to him to doubt that it was Teela's 'cycle.

"What happened?" Speaker called.

Louis shook his head, declining to answer. He felt numb. Reason was short-circuited; his thoughts traced a circle, round and round.

Teela's intercom image was face down, showing mostly hair. She was unconscious, in an uncontrolled flycycle moving far faster than twice sonic speed. Somebody really ought to do something about that …

"But she was about to die, Louis. Could Nessus have activated a control we don't know about?"

"No. I'd rather believe that than … no."

"I think that must be what happened," said Speaker.

"You saw what happened! She fainted, her head hit the control board, and her 'cycle shot out of that drain like hell wouldn't have it! She punched the right controls with her forehead!"

"Nonsense."

"Yeah." Louis wanted to sleep, to stop thinking …

"Consider the probabilities, Louis!" The kzin got it then, and he left his mouth open while he thought about it. His verdict was, "No. Impossible."

"Yeah."

"She would not have been chosen to join us. If her luck were even partially dependable, Nessus would never have found her. She would have stayed on Earth."

Lightning sparkled, illuminating the long, long tunnel of churning storm cloud. A straight, narrow line pointed dead ahead: the vapor trail from Teela's flycycle. But the 'cycle itself was beyond visibility.

"Louis, we would never have crashed on the Ringworld!"

"I'm still wondering about that."

"Perhaps you had better wonder how to save her life."

Louis nodded. With no real sense of urgency, he pushed the call button for Nessus — a thing Speaker could not do.

The puppeteer answered instantly, as if he had been waiting for the signal. Louis was surprised to see that Speaker remained on the line. Rapidly he outlined what had happened.

"It appears that we were both wrong about Teela," said Nessus.

"Yeah."

"She is moving under emergency power. Her forehead would not be enough to activate the proper controls. First she must manipulate the override slot. It is difficult to see how she could do that by accident."

"Where is it?" And when the puppeteer had shown him, Louis said, "She might have stuck her finger in it, just out of curiosity."

"Really?"

Speaker interrupted Louis's answer. "But what can we do?"

"When she wakes up, have her signal me," Nessus said crisply. "I can show her how to go back on normal thrust, and how to find us afterward."

"Meanwhile, we can do nothing?"

"That is correct. There is the danger that elements may burn out in the propulsion system. However, her vehicle will avoid obstacles; she will not crash. She is receding from us at approximately Mach four. The worst danger she faces is anoxia, which can lead to brain damage. I suspect she is safe from that."

"Why? Anoxia is dangerous."

"She is too lucky," said Nessus.