Ringworld

After they had entered hyperdrive, Lotus spent an hour-and-a-half inspecting every item in the lockers. Better safe than surprised, he told himself. But the weaponry and the other equipment left a bitter aftertaste, a foreboding.

Too many weapons, and not one weapon that could not be used for something else. Flashlight-lasers. Fusion reaction motors. When they held a christening ceremony on the first day in hyperdrive, Louis suggested that the ship be called Lying Bastard. For their own reasons, Teela and Speaker agreed. For his own reason, Nessus did not object.

They were in hyperdrive for a week, covering a little more than two light years. When they dropped back into Einsteinian space they were within the system of the ringed G2 star; and the foreboding was still with Louis Wu.

Someone was sure as tanj convinced that they would land on the Ringworld.

CHAPTER 8 — Ringworld

The puppeteer worlds had been moving at nearly lightspeed along galactic north. Speaker had circled in hyperspace to galactic south of the G2 sun, with the result that the Liar, as it fell out of the Blind Spot, was already driving straight into the Ringworld system at high velocity.

The G2 star was a blazing white point. Louis, returning from other stars, had seen Sol looking very like this from the edge of the solar system. But this star wore a barely visible halo. Louis would remember this, his first sight of the Ringworld. From the edge of the system, the Ringworld was a naked-eye object.

Speaker ran the big fusion motors up to full power. He tilted the flat thruster discs out of the plane of the wing, lining their axes along ship's aft, and added their thrust to the rockets. The Liar backed into the system blazing like twin suns, decelerating at nearly two hundred gravities.

Teela didn't know that, because Louis didn't tell her. He didn't want to worry her. If the cabin gravity were interrupted for an instant — they'd all be flattened like bugs beneath a heel.

But the cabin gravity worked with unobtrusive perfection. Throughout the lifesystem there was only the gentle pull of the puppeteer world, and the steady, muted tremor of the fusion motors. For the rumble of the drives forced its way through the only available opening, through a wiring conduit no thicker than a man's thigh; and once inside, it was everywhere.

Even in hyperdrive, Speaker preferred to fly in a transparent ship. He liked a good field of view, and the Blind Spot didn't seem to affect his mind. The ship was still transparent, except for private cabins, and the resulting view took getting used to.

The lounge and the control cabin, wall and floor and ceiling, all of which curved into one another, were not so much transparent as invisible. In the apparent emptiness were blocks of solidity: Speaker in the control couch, the horseshoe-shaped bank of green and orange dials which surrounded him, the neon-glowing borders of doorways, the cluster of couches around the lounge table, the block of opaque cabins aft; and, of course, the flat triangle of the wing. Beyond and around these were the stars. The universe seemed very close … and somewhat static; for the ringed star was directly aft, bidden behind the cabins, and they could not watch it grow.

The air smelled of ozone and puppeteers.

Nessus, who should have been cowering in terror with the rumble of two hundred gravities in his ears, seemed perfectly comfortable sitting with the others around the lounge table.

"They will not have hyperwave," he was saying. "The mathematics of the system guarantees it. Hyperwave is a generalization of hyperdrive mathematics, and they ca

"But they might have discovered hyperwave by accident."

"No, Teela. We can try the hyperwave bands, since there is nothing else to try while we are decelerating but -"

"More tanj waiting!" Teela stood up suddenly and half-ran from the lounge.

Louis answered the puppeteer's questioning look with an angry shrug.

Teela was in a foul mood. The week in hyperdrive had bored her stiff, and the prospect of another day-and-a-half of deceleration, of continued inaction, had her ready to climb walls. But what did she expect from Louis? Could he change the laws of physics?

"We must wait," Speaker agreed. He spoke from the control cabin, and he may have missed the emotional overtones of Teela's last words. "The hyperwave zaps are clear of signals. I will guarantee that the Ringworld engineers are not trying to speak to us by any known form of hyperwave."

The subject of communications had become general. Until they could reach the Ringworld engineers, their presence in this inhabited system smacked of banditry. Thus far there had been no sign that their presence had been detected.

"My receivers are open," said Speaker. "If they attempt to communicate in electromagnetic frequencies, we will know it."

"Not if they try the obvious," Louis retorted.

"True. Many species have used the cold hydrogen line to search for other minds circling other stars."

"Like the kdatlyno. They cleverly found you."

"And we cleverly enslaved them."

Interstellar radio is noisy with the sound of the stars. But the twenty-one centimeter band is conveniently silent, swept clean for use by endless cubic light years of cold interstellar hydrogen. It was the line any species would pick to communicate with an alien race. Unfortunately the nova-hot hydrogen in the Liar's exhaust was making that band useless.

"Remember," said Nessus, "that our projected freely falling orbit must not cross the ring itself."

"You have said so too many times, Nessus. My memory is excellent."

"We must not appear a danger to the inhabitants of the ring. I trust you will not forget."

"You are a puppeteer. You trust nothing," said Speaker.

"Cool it," Louis said wearily. The bickering was an a

Hours passed. The Liar fell toward the ringed star, slowing, preceded by twin spears of nova light and nova heat.

Speaker found no sign of coherent light impinging on the ship. Either the Ringworlders hadn't noticed the Liar yet, or they didn't have com lasers.

During the week in hyperspace, Speaker had shared hours of leisure with the humans. Louis and Teela had developed a taste for the kzin's cabin: for the slightly higher gravity and the holoscapes of orange-yellow jungle and ancient alien fortress, for the sharp and changing smells of an alien world. Their own cabin was unimagmatively decorated, with cityscapes and with farming seas half-covered with genetically tailored seaweeds. The kzin liked their cabin better than they did.

They had even tried sharing a meal in the kzin's cabin. But the kzin ate like a starved wolf, and he complained that the man's-food smelled like burnt garbage, and that was that.

Now Teela and Speaker talked in low tones at one end of the lounge table. Louis listened to the silence and the distant thunder of the fusion drives.

He was used to depending for his life on a cabin gravity system. His own yacht would do thirty gee. But his own yacht used thrusters, and thrusters were silent.

"Nessus," he said into the drone of suns burning.

"Yes, Louis?"

"What do you know about the Blind Spot that we don't?"

"I do not understand the question."

"Hyperspace terrifies you. This — this backing through space on a pillar of fire — doesn't. Your species built the Long Shot, they must know something about hyperspace that we don't."

"Perhaps so. Perhaps we do know something."

"What? Unless it's one of your precious secrets."

Speaker and Teela were listening now. Speaker's ears, which, folded, could vanish into depressions in his fur, were spread like translucent pink parasols.