Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,108

city. They reconvened around the puppeteer’s flycycle.

“She is partially conditioned,” said Nessus. He was having trouble with his breathing…or with the smells of raw and burnt animal. “I have learned a good deal from her.”

“Did you learn why she mousetrapped us?”

“Yes, and more. We have been lucky. She is a spacer, a ramship crewman.”

“Jackpot!” said Louis Wu.

C H A P T E R 21

The Girl From Beyond The Edge

Her name was Halrloprillalar Hotrufan. She had been riding the ramship…Pioneer, Nessus called it after slight hesitation…for two hundred years.

The Pioneer ran a twenty-four-year cycle that covered four suns and their systems: five oxygen-atmosphere worlds and the Ringworld. The “year” used was a traditional measurement which had nothing to do with the Ringworld. It may have matched the solar orbit for one of the abandoned worlds.

Two of the Pioneer’s five worlds had been thick with humanity before the Ringworld was built. Now they were abandoned like the others, covered with random vegetation and the debris of crumbling cities.

Halrloprillalar had run the cycle eight times. She knew that on these worlds grew plants or animals which had not adapted to the Ringworld because of the lack of a winter-summer cycle. Some plants were spices. Some animals were meat. Otherwise—Halrloprillalar neither knew nor cared.

Her job had nothing to do with cargos.

“Nor was she concerned with propulsion or life support. I was unable to learn just what she did,” said Nessus. “The Pioneer carried a crew of thirty-six. Doubtless some were superfluous. Certainly she could have done nothing complex nor crucial to the well-being of ship or crew. She is not very intelligent, Louis.”

“Did you think to ask about the ratio of sexes aboard ship? How many of the thirty-six were women?”

“She told me that. Three.”

“You might as well forget about her profession.”

Two hundred years of travel, security, adventure. Then at the end of Halrloprillalar’s eighth run, the Ringworld refused to answer the Pioneer’s call.

The electromagnetic cannon didn’t work.

As far as telescopes could determine, there was no sign of activity at any spaceport.

The five worlds of the Pioneer’s circuit were not equipped with electromagnetic cannons for braking. Therefore the Pioneer carried braking fuel, condensed en route from interstellar hydrogen. The ship could land…but where?

Not on the Ringworld. The meteor defenses would blow them apart.

They had not received permission to land on the spaceport ledge. And something was wrong there.

Back to one of the abandoned home worlds? In effect they would be starting a new colony world, with thirty-three men and three women.

“They were hidebound prisoners of routine, ill-equipped to make such a decision. They panicked,” said Nessus. “They mutinied. The Pioneer’s pilot managed to lock himself in the control room long enough to land the Pioneer on the spaceport ledge. They murdered him for it, for risking the ship and their lives, says Halrloprillalar. I wonder if they did not in truth murder him for breaking tradition, for landing by rocket and without formal permission.”

Louis felt eyes on him. He looked up.

The spacer-girl was still watching them. And Nessus was looking back at her with one head, the left.

So that one held the tasp. And that was why Nessus had been looking steadily upward. She wouldn’t let Nessus out of her sight, and he dared not let her off the tasp’s lovely hook.

“After the killing of the pilot, they left the ship,” said Nessus. “Then it was that they learned how badly the pilot had hurt them. The cziltang brone was inert, broken. They were stranded on the wrong side of a wall a thousand miles high.

“I do not know the equivalent of cziltang brone in Interworld or the Hero’s Tongue. I can only tell you what it does. What it does is crucial to us all.”

“Go ahead,” said Louis Wu.

The Ringworld engineers had designed fail-safe. In many ways it seemed that they had anticipated the fall of civilization, had planned for it, as if cycles of culture and barbarism were man’s natural lot. The complex structure that was the Ringworld would not fail for lack of tending. The descendants of the Engineers might forget how to tend airlocks and electromagnetic cannon, how to move worlds and build flying cars; civilization might end, but the Ringworld would not.

The meteor defenses, for instance, were so utterly failsafe that Halrloprillalar—

“Call her Prill,” Louis suggested.

—that Prill and her crew never considered that they might not be working.

But what of the spaceport? How fail-safe would it be, if some idiot left both doors of the airlock open?

There weren’t any