Ringworld

CHAPTER 5 — Rosette

There are singularities in the mathematics of hyperspace. One such singularity surrounds every sufficiently large mass in the Einsteinian universe. Outside of these singularities, ships can travel faster than light. Inside, they disappear if they try it.

Now the Long Shot, some eight light-hours from Sol, was beyond Sol's local singularity.

And Louis Wu was in free fall.

There was tension in his gonads and discomfort in his diaphragm, and his stomach thought he wanted to belch. These sensations would pass. There was a paradoxical urge to fly …

He had flown many times in free fall, in the huge transparent bubble of the Outbound Hotel, which circled Earth's Moon. Here, he would smash something vital if he so much as flapped his arms.

He had chosen to accelerate outward under two gravities. For something like five days he had worked and eaten and slept in the pilot's crash couch. Despite the excellent facilities of the couch, he was dirty and unkempt; despite fifty hours of sleep, he was exhausted.

Louis felt his future foreshadowed. For him, the keynote of the expedition would be discomfort.

The sky of deep space looked not much different from the lunar night sky. In the solar system the planets add little to a naked-eye view. One remarkably bright star glared in the galactic south; and that star was Sol.

Louis used flywheel controls. The Long Shot rotated, and stars went by beneath his feet.

Twenty-seven, three hundred and twelve, one thousand even — Nessus had given him these coordinates just before Louis closed the crash couch on him. They were the location of the puppeteer migration. And now Louis realized that this was not in the direction of either of the Clouds of Magellan. The puppeteer had lied to him.

But, Louis thought, it was about two hundred light years away. And it was along the galactic axis. Perhaps the puppeteers had chosen to move out of the galaxy along the shortest direction, then travel above the plane of the galaxy to reach the Lesser Cloud. Thus they would avoid interstellar debris: suns, dust clouds, hydrogen concentrations …

It didn't particularly matter. Louis's hands, like a pianist's about to begin a concert, hovered over the instrument panel.

Descended.

The Long Shot vanished.

Louis kept his eyes away from the transparent floor. He had already stopped wondering why there were no covers for all that window space. The sight of the Blind Spot had driven good men mad; but there were those who could take it. The Long Shot's pilot must have been such a man.

He looked instead at the mass pointer: a transparent sphere above the instrument panel, with a number of blue lines radiating from its center. This one was oversized, despite limitations on cabin space. Louis settled back and watched the lines.

They changed visibly. Louis could fix his eye on a line and watch it sweep slowly across the curvature of the sphere. It was unusual and u

Louis flew with his left hand on the panic switch.

The kitchen slot to his right fed him odd-tasting coffee and, later, a handmeal that came apart in his hands, into separate strata of meat and cheese and bread and some kind of leaf. The autokitchen must be hundreds of years overdue for reprogramming. Radial lines in the mass indicator grew large, and swept upward like the second hand on a watch, and shrank to nothing. A fuzzy blue line at the bottom of the sphere grew long, and longer … Louis pulled the panic switch.

An unfamiliar red giant glared beneath his feet.

"Too fast," Louis snarled. "Too tanj fast!" In any normal ship you only had to check the mass indicator every six hours or so. On the Long Shot you hardly dared blink!

Louis let his eyes drop to the bright, fuzzy red disc and its starry background.

"Tanj! I'm already out of known space!"

He wheeled the ship to see the stars. A foreign sky streamed beneath him. "They're mine, all mine!" Louis chortled, rubbing his hands together. On sabbaticals Louis Wu was his own entertainment.

The red star returned to view, and Louis let it swing another ninety degrees. He'd let his ship get too close to the star, and now he'd have to circle around it.

He was then an hour and a half on his way.

He was three hours on his way when he dropped out again.

The foreign stars didn't bother him. City lights drowned the starlight over most of the Earth; and Louis Wu had been raised a flatlander. He had not seen a star until he was twenty-six. He checked to be sure he was in clear space, he closed covers on instrument panels, and then, finally, he stretched.

"Wow. My eyes feel like boiled onions."

Releasing himself from the crash web, he floated, flexing his left hand. For three hours he had flown with that hand closed on the hyperdrive switch. From elbow to fingertips it felt like a single cramp.

Under the ceiling were rungs for isometric exercises. Louis used them. The kinks left his muscles, but he was still tired.

Mmmm. Wake Teela? It would be nice to talk to her now. Lovely idea there. Next time I go on sabbatical I'll take a woman in stasis. Get the best of both worlds. But he looked and felt like something washed from a flooded graveyard. Unfit for polite company. Oh, well.

He should not have let her board the Long Shot.

Not for his own sake! He was glad enough that she had stayed over those two days. It had been like the story of Louis Wu and Paula Cherenkov, rewritten for a happy ending. Perhaps it had been better.

Yet there was something shallow about Teela. It wasn't only her age. Louis's friends were of all ages, and some of the youngest were very deep indeed. Certainly they suffered most. As if hurting were part of the learning process. Which it probably was.

No, there was a lack of empathy in Teela, a lack of the ability to feel someone else's pain … Yet she could sense another's pleasure, and respond to pleasure, and create pleasure. She was a marvelous lover: painfully beautiful, almost new to the art, sensuous as a cat and startlingly uninhibited …

Now of which would qualify her as an explorer.

Teela's life had been happy and dull. Twice she had fallen in love, and twice she had been first to tire of the affair. She had never been in a bad stress situation, never been really hurt. When the time came, when Teela found her first genuine emergency, she would probably panic.

"But I picked her as a lover," said Louis to himself. "Damn Nessus!" If Teela had ever been found in a stress situation, Nessus would have rejected her as unlucky!

It had been a mistake to bring her. She would be a liability. He would spend too much of his time protecting her when he should be protecting himself.

What kinds of stress situations might they face? The puppeteers were good businessmen. They did not overpay. The Long Shot was a fee of unheard-of value. Louis had the chilly suspicion that they would earn it.

"Sufficient unto the day," Louis said to himself.

And he returned to his crash couch and slept for an hour under the sleep headset. Waking, he swung the ship, into line and dropped back into the Blind Spot.

Five-and-a-half hours from Sol he dropped out again.

The puppetwes coordinates defined a small rectangular section of the sky as seen from Sol plus a radial distance in that direction. At that distance, those coordinates defined a cube half a light year on a side. Somewhere in that volume, presumably, was a fleet of ships. Also in that volume, unless instruments had fouled him up, were Lous Wu and the Long Shot.

Somewhere far behind him was a bubble of stars some seventy light years in diameter. Known space was small and very far away.

No point in searching for the fleet. Louis wouldn't know what to look for. He went to wake Nessus.