where he wants to go. Not counting accelerations.”
“Trivial. It takes you sixty days to reach Silvereyes, the human world farthest from Earth. You would need four times that long to cross known space from edge to edge.”
True. And the living area on the Ringworld was greater than that of all known space. They built for room when they built this thing. Louis asked, “Did you see any sign of activity? Is anyone still using the linear accelerator?”
“The question is meaningless. Let me show you.” The view converged, slid sidewise, expanded slowly. It was night. Dark clouds diverged over dark land, and then…
“City lights. Well.” Louis swallowed. It had come too suddenly. “So it’s not all dead. We can get help.”
“I do not think so. This may be difficult to find…ah.”
“Finagle’s black mind!”
The castle, obviously their own castle, floated serenely above a field of light. Windows, neon, streams of floating light motes which must be vehicles…oddly shaped floating buildings…lovely.
“Tapes. Tanjit! We’re watching old tapes. I thought they must be live transmissions.” For one glorious moment it had seemed that their search was over. Lighted, bustling cities, pinpointed on a map for them…but these pictures must be ages old, civilizations old.
“I thought so also, for many hours last night. I did not suspect the truth until I failed to find the thousands of miles of meteor crater slashed by the Liar’s landing.”
Louis, speechless, thwacked the kzin on his nude pink-and-lavender shoulder. It was as high as he could reach.
The kzin ignored the liberty. “After I had located the castle, things proceeded quickly. Observe.” He caused the view to slide rapidly to port. The dark land blurred, lost all detail. Then they were over black ocean.
The camera seemed to back up…
“You see? A bay of one of the major salt oceans falls across our path to the rim wall. The ocean itself is several times as large as any on Kzin or Earth. The bay is as large as our largest ocean.”
“More delay! Can’t we go over it?”
“Perhaps we can. But we face greater delay than that.” The kzin reached for a knob.
“Hold it. I want a closer look at those groups of islands!”
“Why, Louis? That we might stop for provisions?”
“No…Do you see how they tend to form clusters, with wide stretches of deep water between? Take that grouping there.” Louis’s forefinger circled images on the screen. “Now look up at that map.”
“I do not understand.”
“And that grouping in what you called a bay, and that map behind you. The continents in the conic projections are a little distorted…See it now? Ten worlds, ten clusters of islands. They aren’t one-to-one scale; but I’ll bet that island is as big as Australia, and the original continent doesn’t look any bigger than Eurasia on the globe.”
“What a macabre jest. Louis, does this represent a typically human sense of humor?”
“No, no, no. Sentiment! Unless—”
“Yes?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. The first generation—they had to throw away their own worlds, but they wanted to keep something of what they were losing. Three generations later it would be funny. It’s always that way.”
When the kzin was sure Louis had finished, he asked somewhat diffidently, “Do you humans feel that you understand kzinti?”
Louis smiled—and shook his head.
“Good,” said the kzin, and changed the subject. “I spent some time last night examining the nearest spaceport.”
They stood at the hub of the miniature Ringworld, looking through a rectangular window into the past.
The past they saw was one of magnificent achievement. Speaker had focused the screen on the spaceport, a wide projecting ledge on the spaceward side of the rim wall. They watched as an enormous blunt-ended cylinder, alight with a thousand windows, was landed in electromagnetic cradling fields. The fields glowed in pastel shades, probably so that the operators could manipulate them visually.
“The tape is looped,” said Speaker. “I watched it for some time last night. The passengers seem to walk directly into the rim wall, as if a kind of osmosis process were being used.”
“Yah.” Louis was badly depressed. The spaceport ledge was far to spinward of them—a distance to dwarf the distance they had already traveled.
“I watched a ship take off. They did not use the linear accelerator. They use it only for landings, to match the velocity of the ship to that of the spaceport. For takeoffs they simply tumble the ship off into space.
“It was as the leaf-eater guessed, Louis. Remember the trap door arrangement? The Ringworld spins easily fast enough for a ramscoop field to operate. Louis,