the stars.”
Louis hadn’t thought of that aspect. “Never mind. The point about Dyson spheres is that any sentient, industrial race is eventually going to need one. Technological civilizations tend to use more and more power as time goes on. The ring is a compromise between a normal planet and a Dyson sphere. With the ring you get only a fraction of the available room, and you block only a fraction of the available sunlight; but you can see the stars, and you don’t have to worry about gravity generators.”
From the control room Speaker-to-Animal snarled something complicated, a sound powerful enough to curse the very air of the cabin. Teela giggled.
“If the puppeteers have been thinking along the same lines as Dyson,” Louis continued, “they might very well expect to find the Clouds of Magellan riddled with Ringworlds, edge to edge.”
“And that’s why we were called in.”
“I’d hate to bet on a puppeteer’s thoughts. But if I had to, that’s the way I’d bet.”
“No wonder you’ve been spending all your time in the library.”
“Infuriating!” screamed the kzin. “Insulting! They deliberately ignore us! They pointedly turn their backs to invite attack!”
“Improbable,” said Nessus. “If you cannot find radio transmissions, then they do not use radio. Even if they were routinely using radio lasers, we would detect some leakage.”
“They do not use lasers, they do not use radio, they do not use hyperwave. What are they using for communication? Telepathy? Written messages? Big mirrors?”
“Parrots,” Louis suggested. He got up to join them at the door to the control room. “Huge parrots, specially bred for their oversized lungs. They’re too big to fly. They just sit on hilltops and scream at each other.”
Speaker turned to look Louis in the eye. “For four hours I have tried to contact the Ringworld. For four hours the inhabitants have ignored me. Their contempt has been absolute. Not a word have they vouchsafed me. My muscles are trembling for lack of exercise, my fur is matted, my eyes refuse to focus, my sthondat-begotten room is too small, my microwave heater heats all meat to the same temperature, and it is the wrong temperature, and I cannot get it fixed. Were it not for your help and your suggestions, Louis, I would despair.”
“Can they have lost their civilization?” Nessus mused. “It would be silly of them, considering.”
“Perhaps they are dead,” Speaker said viciously. “That too would be silly. Not to contact us has been silly. Let us land and find out.”
Nessus whistled in panic. “Land on a world which may have killed its indigenous species? Are you mad?”
“How else can we learn?”
“Of course,” Teela chimed in. “We didn’t come all this way just to fly in circles!”
“I forbid it. Speaker, continue your attempts to contact the Ringworld.”
“I have ended such attempts.”
“Repeat them.”
“I will not.”
In stepped Louis Wu, volunteer diplomat. “Cool it, furry buddy. Nessus, he’s right. The Ringworlders don’t have anything to say to us. Otherwise we’d know it by now.”
“But what can we do other than keep trying?”
“Go on about our business. Give the Ringworlders time to make up their minds about us.”
Reluctantly the puppeteer agreed.
They drifted toward the Ringworld.
Speaker had aimed the Liar to pass outside the Ringworld’s edge: a concession to Nessus. The puppeteer feared that hypothetical Ringworlders would take it as a threat if the ship’s course should intersect the ring itself. He also claimed that fusion drives of the Liar’s power had the look of weapons; and so the Liar moved on thrusters alone.
To the eye there was no way of judging scale. Over the hours the ring shifted position. Too slowly. With cabin gravity to compensate for from zero to thirty gee of thrust, the inner ear could not sense motion. Time passed in a vacuum, and Louis, for the first time since leaving Earth, was ready to gnaw his fingernails.
Finally the ring was edge-on to the Liar. Speaker used the thrusters, braking the ship into a circular orbit around the rim; and then he sent them drifting in toward the rim.
Now there was motion.
The rim of the Ringworld grew from a dim line occluding a few stars, to a black wall. A wall a thousand miles high, featureless, though any features would have been blurred by speed. Half a thousand miles away, blocking ninety degrees of sky, the wall sped past at a hellish 770 miles per second. Its edges converged to vanishing points, to points at infinity at either end of the universe; and from each point at infinity, a narrow