Ringworld - Larry Niven Page 0,56

sentient. Think of our situation! We have been attacked. Our ship is half destroyed. We must travel an unknown distance across unknown territory. The powers of the Ringworlders were once enormous. Are they still enormous, or do they now use nothing more complex than a spear made from a sharpened bone?

“They might equally well have transmutation, total conversion beams, anything that may have been required to build this—” the kzin looked around him, at the glassy floor and the black lava walls; and perhaps he shuddered. “—this incredible artifact.”

“I have the tasp,” said Nessus. “The expedition is mine.”

“Are you pleased with its success? I mean no insult, I intend no challenge. You must place me in command. Of the four of us, I alone have had training in war.”

“Let’s wait,” Teela suggested. “We may not find anything to fight.”

“Agreed,” said Louis. He didn’t fancy being led by a kzin.

“Very well. But we must take the weapons.”

They began to load the flycycles.

There was other equipment besides weaponry. Camping equipment, food testing and food rebuilding kits, phials of dietary additives, lightweight air filters…

There were communicator discs designed to be worn on a human or kzinti wrist or a puppeteer neck. They were bulky and not particularly comfortable.

“Why these?” Louis asked. For the puppeteer had already shown them the intercom system built into the flycycles.

“They were originally intended to communicate with the Liar’s autopilot, so that we might summon the ship when necessary.”

“Then why do we need them now?”

“As translators, Louis. Should we run into sentient beings, as seems likely, we will need the autopilot to translate for us.”

“Oh.”

They were finished. Equipment still rested beneath the Liar’s hull, but it was useless stuff: free-fall equipment for deep space, the pressure suits, some replacement parts for machinery vaporized by the Ringworld defense system. They had loaded even the air filters, more because they were no more bulky than handkerchiefs than because they were likely to be needed.

Louis was bone tired. He mounted his flycycle and looked about him, wondering if he had forgotten anything. He saw Teela staring straight upward, and even through the mist of exhaustion he saw that she was horrified.

“There ain’t no justice,” she swore. “It’s still noon!”

“Don’t panic. The—”

“Louis! We’ve been working for a good six hours, I know we have! How could it be still noon?”

“Don’t worry about it. The sun doesn’t set, remember?”

“Doesn’t set?” Her hysteria ended as suddenly as it had begun. “Oh. Of course it doesn’t set.”

“We’ll have to get used to it. Look again; isn’t that the edge of a shadow square against the sun?”

Something had certainly nipped a chord out of the sun’s disc. The sun diminished as they watched.

“We had best take flight,” said Speaker. “When darkness falls we should be aloft.”

C H A P T E R 11

The Arch of Heaven

Four flycycles rose in a diamond cluster through waning daylight. The exposed ring flooring dropped away.

Nessus had shown them how to use the slave circuits. Now each of the other ’cycles was programmed to imitate whatever Louis’s did. Louis was steering for them all. In a contoured seat like a masseur couch without the masseur attachments, he guided his ’cycle with pedals and a joystick.

Four transparent miniature heads hovered like hallucinations above his dashboard. These included a lovely raven-haired siren, a ferocious quasi-tiger with eyes that were too aware, and a pair of silly-looking one-eyed pythons. The intercom hookup was working perfectly, with results comparable to delirium tremens.

As the flycycles rose above the black lava slopes, Louis watched the others for their expressions.

Teela reacted first. Her eyes scanned the middle distance, and rose, and found infinity where they had always before found limits. They went big and round, and Teela’s face lit like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. “Oh, Louis!”

“What an extraordinarily large mountain!” Speaker said.

Nessus said nothing. His heads bobbed and circled nervously.

Darkness fell quickly. A black shadow swept suddenly across the giant mountain. In seconds it was gone. The sun was only a golden sliver now, cut by blackness. And something took shape in the darkening sky.

An enormous arch.

Its outline grew rapidly clear. As the land and sky grow dark, the true glory of the Ringworld sky emerged against the night.

The Ringworld arched over itself in stripes of baby blue swirled with white cloud, in narrower stripes of near-black. At its base the arch was very broad. It narrowed swiftly as it rose. Near the zenith it was no more than a broken line of glowing blue-white. At the zenith