Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,49

ring engineers? What holds them face-down to the sun? All the questions the leaf-eater asked could be answered, if we had a working scope screen.”

“Are we going to hit the sun?”

“Of course not. I told you that, Louis. We will be behind the shadow square for half an hour. Then, an hour later, we will pass between the next shadow square and the sun. If the cabin becomes too hot we can always activate the stasis field.”

The ringing silence closed in. The shadow square was a featureless field of black, without boundaries. A human eye can draw no data from pure black.

Presently the sun came out. Again the cabin was filled with the howl of the air plant.

Louis searched the sky ahead until he found another shadow square. He was watching its approach when the lightning struck again.

It looked like lightning. It came like lightning, without warning. There was a moment of terrible light, white with a violet tinge. The ship lurched—

Discontinuity.

—lurched, and the light was gone. Louis reached under his goggles with two forefingers to rub dazzled eyes.

“What was that?” Teela exclaimed.

Louis’s vision cleared slowly. He saw that Nessus had exposed a goggled head; that Speaker was at work in one of the lockers; that Teela was staring at him. No, at something behind him. He turned.

The sun was a wide black disc, smaller than it had been, outlined in yellow-white flame. It had shrunk considerably during the moment in stasis. The “moment” must have lasted hours. The scream of the air plant had faded to an irritating whine.

Something else burned out there.

It was a looping thread of black, very narrow, outlined in violet-white. There seemed to be no endpoints. One end faded into the black patch that hid the sun. The other diminished ahead of the Liar, until it was too small to see.

The thread was writhing like an injured earthworm.

“We seem to have hit something,” Nessus said calmly. It was as if he had never been away. “Speaker, you must go outside to investigate. Please don your suit.”

“We are in a state of war,” the kzin answered. “I command.”

“Excellent. What will you do now?”

The kzin had sense enough to remain silent. He had nearly finished donning the multiple balloon and heavy backpack which served him as a pressure suit. Obviously he intended to go out for a look.

He went out on one of the flycycles: a dumbbell-shaped thruster-powered vehicle with an armchair seat in the constriction.

They watched him maneuver alongside the writhing thread of black. It had cooled considerably; for the fringe of brightness around the goggle-induced black had dimmed from violet-white through white-white to orange-white. They watched Speaker’s dark bulk leave the flycycle and move about near the heated, writhing wire.

They could hear him breathing. Once they heard a startled snarling sound. But he never said a word into the suit phone. He was out there a full half-hour, while the heated thing darkened to near-invisibility.

Presently he returned to the Liar. When he entered the lounge, he had their complete and respectful attention.

“It was no thicker than thread,” said the kzin. “You will notice that I hold half a grippy.”

He held up the ruined tool for them to see. The grippy had been cut cleanly along a plane surface, and the cut surface polished to mirror brightness.

“When I was close enough to see how thin the thread was, I swung the grippy at it. The thread cut cleanly through the steel. I felt only the slightest of tugs.”

Louis said, “A variable-sword would do that.”

“But a variable-sword blade is a metal wire enclosed in a Slaver stasis field. It cannot bend. This—thread was in constant motion, as you saw.”

“Something new, then.” Something that cut like a variable-sword. Light, thin, strong, beyond human skill. Something that stayed solid at temperatures where a natural substance would become a plasma. “Something really new. But what was it doing in our way?”

“Consider. We were passing between shadow squares when we hit something unidentified. Subsequently we found a seemingly infinite length of thread, at a temperature comparable to the interior of a hot star. Obviously we hit the thread. It retained the heat of impact. I surmise that it was strung between the shadow squares.”

“Probably was. But why?”

“We can only speculate. Consider,” said Speaker-To-Animals. “The Ringworld engineers used the shadow squares to provide intervals of night. To fulfill their purpose, the rectangles must occlude sunlight. They would fail if they drifted edge-on to the sun.

“The Ringworld engineers used their strange thread to