Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,38

the solar system. But this star wore a barely visible halo. Louis would remember this, his first sight of the Ringworld. From the edge of the system, the Ringworld was a naked-eye object.

Speaker ran the big fusion motors up to full power. He tilted the flat thruster discs out of the plane of the wing, lining their axes along ship’s aft, and added their thrust to the rockets. The Liar backed into the system blazing like twin suns, decelerating at nearly two hundred gravities.

Teela didn’t know that, because Louis didn’t tell her. He didn’t want to worry her. If the cabin gravity were interrupted for an instant—they’d all be flattened like bugs beneath a heel.

But the cabin gravity worked with unobtrusive perfection. Throughout the lifesystem there was only the gentle pull of the puppeteer world, and the steady, muted tremor of the fusion motors. For the rumble of the drives forced its way through the only available opening, through a wiring conduit no thicker than a man’s thigh; and once inside, it was everywhere.

Even in hyperdrive, Speaker preferred to fly in a transparent ship. He liked a good field of view, and the Blind Spot didn’t seem to affect his mind. The ship was still transparent, except for private cabins, and the resulting view took getting used to.

The lounge and the control cabin, wall and floor and ceiling, all of which curved into one another, were not so much transparent as invisible. In the apparent emptiness were blocks of solidity: Speaker in the control couch, the horseshoe-shaped bank of green and orange dials which surrounded him, the neon-glowing borders of doorways, the cluster of couches around the lounge table, the block of opaque cabins aft; and, of course, the flat triangle of the wing. Beyond and around these were the stars. The universe seemed very close…and somewhat static; for the ringed star was directly aft, bidden behind the cabins, and they could not watch it grow.

The air smelled of ozone and puppeteers.

Nessus, who should have been cowering in terror with the rumble of two hundred gravities in his ears, seemed perfectly comfortable sitting with the others around the lounge table.

“They will not have hyperwave,” he was saying. “The mathematics of the system guarantees it. Hyperwave is a generalization of hyperdrive mathematics, and they cannot have hyperdrive.”

“But they might have discovered hyperwave by accident.”

“No, Teela. We can try the hyperwave bands, since there is nothing else to try while we are decelerating but—”

“More tanj waiting!” Teela stood up suddenly and half-ran from the lounge.

Louis answered the puppeteer’s questioning look with an angry shrug.

Teela was in a foul mood. The week in hyperdrive had bored her stiff, and the prospect of another day-and-a-half of deceleration, of continued inaction, had her ready to climb walls. But what did she expect from Louis? Could he change the laws of physics?

“We must wait,” Speaker agreed. He spoke from the control cabin, and he may have missed the emotional overtones of Teela’s last words. “The hyperwave zaps are clear of signals. I will guarantee that the Ringworld engineers are not trying to speak to us by any known form of hyperwave.”

The subject of communications had become general. Until they could reach the Ringworld engineers, their presence in this inhabited system smacked of banditry. Thus far there had been no sign that their presence had been detected.

“My receivers are open,” said Speaker. “If they attempt to communicate in electromagnetic frequencies, we will know it.”

“Not if they try the obvious,” Louis retorted.

“True. Many species have used the cold hydrogen line to search for other minds circling other stars.”

“Like the kdatlyno. They cleverly found you.”

“And we cleverly enslaved them.”

Interstellar radio is noisy with the sound of the stars. But the twenty-one centimeter band is conveniently silent, swept clean for use by endless cubic light years of cold interstellar hydrogen. It was the line any species would pick to communicate with an alien race. Unfortunately the nova-hot hydrogen in the Liar’s exhaust was making that band useless.

“Remember,” said Nessus, “that our projected freely falling orbit must not cross the ring itself.”

“You have said so too many times, Nessus. My memory is excellent.”

“We must not appear a danger to the inhabitants of the ring. I trust you will not forget.”

“You are a puppeteer. You trust nothing,” said Speaker.

“Cool it,” Louis said wearily. The bickering was an annoyance he didn’t need. He went to his cabin to sleep.

Hours passed. The Liar fell toward the ringed star, slowing, preceded by twin spears of