Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,39

nova light and nova heat.

Speaker found no sign of coherent light impinging on the ship. Either the Ringworlders hadn’t noticed the Liar yet, or they didn’t have com lasers.

During the week in hyperspace, Speaker had shared hours of leisure with the humans. Louis and Teela had developed a taste for the kzin’s cabin: for the slightly higher gravity and the holoscapes of orange-yellow jungle and ancient alien fortress, for the sharp and changing smells of an alien world. Their own cabin was unimaginatively decorated, with cityscapes and with farming seas half-covered with genetically tailored seaweeds. The kzin liked their cabin better than they did.

They had even tried sharing a meal in the kzin’s cabin. But the kzin ate like a starved wolf, and he complained that the man’s-food smelled like burnt garbage, and that was that.

Now Teela and Speaker talked in low tones at one end of the lounge table. Louis listened to the silence and the distant thunder of the fusion drives.

He was used to depending for his life on a cabin gravity system. His own yacht would do thirty gee. But his own yacht used thrusters, and thrusters were silent.

“Nessus,” he said into the drone of suns burning.

“Yes, Louis?”

“What do you know about the Blind Spot that we don’t?”

“I do not understand the question.”

“Hyperspace terrifies you. This—this backing through space on a pillar of fire—doesn’t. Your species built the Long Shot, they must know something about hyperspace that we don’t.”

“Perhaps so. Perhaps we do know something.”

“What? Unless it’s one of your precious secrets.”

Speaker and Teela were listening now. Speaker’s ears, which, folded, could vanish into depressions in his fur, were spread like translucent pink parasols.

“We know that we have no undying part,” said Nessus. “I will not speak for your race. I have not the right. My species has no immortal part. Our scientists have proved this. We are afraid to die, for we know that death is permanent.”

“And?”

“Ships disappear in the Blind Spot. No puppeteer would go too near a singularity in hyperdrive; yet still they disappeared, in the days when our ships carried pilots. I trust the engineers who built the Liar. Hence I trust the cabin gravity. It will not fail us. But even the engineers fear the Blind Spot.”

There was a ship’s night, during which Louis slept poorly and dreamed spectacularly, and a ships day, during which Teela and Louis found each other impossible to live with. She was not frightened. Louis suspected he would never see her frightened. She was merely bored stiff.

That evening, in the space of half an hour, the ringed star came out from behind the sternward block of living-sleeping cabins. The star was small and white, a shade less intense than Sol, and it nestled in a shallow pencil-line of arc blue.

They stood looking over Speaker’s shoulder as Speaker activated the scope screen. He found the arc-blue line of the Ringworld’s inner surface, touched the expansion button—

One question answered itself almost immediately.

“Something at the edge,” said Louis.

“Keep the scope centered on the rim,” Nessus ordered.

The rim of the ring expanded in their view. It was a wall, rising inward toward the star. They could see its black, space-exposed outer side silhouetted against the sunlit blue landscape. A low rim wall, but low only in comparison to the ring itself.

“If the ring is a million miles across,” Louis estimated, “The rim wall must be at least a thousand miles high. Well, now we know. That’s what holds the air in.”

“Would it work?”

“It should. The ring’s spinning for about a gravity. A little air might leak over the edges over the thousands of years, but they could replace it. To build the ring at all, they must have had cheap transmutation—a few tenth-stars per kiloton—not to mention a dozen other impossibilities.”

“I wonder what it looks like from the inside.”

Speaker heard, and he touched a control point, and the view slid. The magnification was not yet great enough to pick up details. Bright blue and brighter white slid across the scope screen, and the blurred straight edge of a navy blue shadow…

The further rim slid into view. Here the rim wall was tilted outward.

Nessus, standing in the doorway with his heads poised above Speaker’s shoulders, ordered, “Give us what magnification you can.”

The view expanded.

“Mountains,” said Teela. “How lovely.” For the rim wall was irregular, sculptured like eroded rock, and was the color of the Moon. “Mountains a thousand miles high.”

“I can expand the view no further. For greater detail we must approach