Ringworld

"Are you awake, Louis?"

"Morning, Nessus. Have you been flying all this time?"

"Some hours ago I turned that chore over to Speaker. You will notice that we have already traveled seven thousand-odd miles."

"Yeah." But it was only a figure, a tiny fraction of the distance they would have to travel. A lifetime of using the transfer booth network had ruined Louis's sense of distance.

"Look behind us," he said. "See that dust trail? Any idea what it might be?"

"Of course. It must be the vaporized rock from our meteoric landing, recondensed in the atmosphere. It has not had time to settle out of so large a volume."

"I was thinking of dust storms … Tanj forever, look how far we slid!" For the dust trail was at least a couple of thousand miles long, if it was as far away as the ship.

Sky and earth were two flat plates, infinitely wide, pressed together; and men were microbes crawling between the plates …

"Our air pressure has increased."

Louis pulled his eyes away from the vanishing point. "What did you say?"

"Look at your pressure gauge. We must have been at least two miles above our present level when we landed."

Louis dialed a ration brick for breakfast. "Is the air pressure important?"

"We must observe all things in an unfamiliar environment. One never knows what detail might be crucial. For instance, the mountain which we chose as a landmark bulks large behind us. It must be even larger than we thought. Again, what of that silver-shining point ahead of us?"

"There?"

"Almost at the hypothetical horizon line, Louis. Directly ahead."

It was like searching out a single detail in a map seen edge-on. Louis found it anyway: a bright mirror-gleam, just large enough to be more than a point.

"Reflected sunlight. What could it be? A glass city?"

"Improbable."

Louis laughed. "You're too polite. It's as big as a glass city, though. Or an acre of mirrors. Maybe it's a big telescope, reflector type."

"Then it has probably been abandoned."

"How so?"

"We know that this civilization has returned to savagery. Why else would they allow vast regions to return to desert?"

Once Louis had believed that argument. Now … "You may be oversimplifying. The Ringworld's bigger than we realized. I think there's room here for savagery and civilization and anything in between."

"Civilization tends to spread, Louis."

"Yeah."

They'd find out about the bright point, anyway. It was directly in their path.

There wasn't any coffee spigot.

Louis was swallowing the last of his breakfast brick when he noticed two green lights glowing on his dashboard. They puzzled him until he remembered switching Teela and Speaker out of the intercom last night. He switched them back in.

"Good morning," said Speaker. "Did you see the dawn, Louis? It was artistically stimulating."

"I saw it. Morning, Teela."

Teela didn't answer.

Louis looked more closely. Teela was fascinated, rapt, like one who has reached Nirvana.

"Nessus, have you been using your tasp on my woman?"

"No, Louis. Why should I?"

"How long has she been like this?"

"Like what?" Speaker demanded. "She has not been communicative recently, if that is what you mean."

"I mean her expression, tanjit!" Teela's image, poised on his dashboard, looked at infinity through the bulk of Louis's head. She was quietly, thoroughly happy.

"She seems relaxed," said the kzin, "and in no discomfort. The finer nuances of human expression -"

"Never mind that. Land us, will you? She's got Plateau trance."

"I do not understand."

"Just land us."

They fell from a mile up. Louis endured a queasy period of free fall before Speaker gave them thrust again. He watched Teela's image for her reaction, but he saw none. She was serene and undisturbed. The corners of her mouth turned very slightly up.

Louis fumed as they dropped. He knew something about hypnosis: bits and oddments of information such as a man will collect over two hundred years of watching tridee. If only he could remember …

Greens and browns resolved into field and forest and a silver thread of stream. It was lush, wild country below them, the kind of country flatlanders expect to find on a colony world, more's the pity.

"Try to put us in a valley," Louis told Speaker. "I'd like to get her out of sight of the horizon."

"Very well. I suggest that you and Nessus cut yourselves out of autopilot and follow me down on manual. I will land Teela myseff."

The diamond of flycycles broke up and re-formed. Speaker moved port-and-spinward, toward the stream Louis had spotted earlier. The others followed.

They were still dropping as they crossed the stream. Speaker turned spinward to follow its course. By now he was virtually crawling through the air, moving just above the treetops. He watched for a stretch of bank not blocked by trees.

"The plants seem very Earthlike," said Louis. The aliens made noises of agreement.

They rounded a curve of stream.

The natives were in the middle of a broad section of stream. They were working a fishing net. As the line of 'cycles came into view the natives looked up. For a long moment they did nothing more than let go of the net while they stared upward with their mouths open.

Louis, Speaker, and Nessus all reacted in the same way. They took off straight upward. The natives dwindled to points; the stream to a winding silver thread. The lush, wild forest blurred into green-browns.

"Put yourselves on autopilot," Speaker ordered, in an unmistakable tone of command. "I will land us elsewhere."

He must have learned that tone of command — strictly for use in dealing with humans. The duties of an ambassador, Louis mused, were various indeed.

Teela had apparently noticed nothing at all.

Louis said, "Well?"

"They were men," said Nessus.

"They were, weren't they? I thought I might be hallucinating. How would men get here?"

But nobody tried to answer.

CHAPTER 12 — Fist-of-God

They had landed in a pocket of wild country surrounded by low hills. With the hills hiding the mock-horizon, and the glow of the Arch drowned by daylight, it might have been a scene on any human world. The grass was not precisely grass, but it was green, and it made a carpet over places that should have been covered by grass. There were soil and rocks, and bushes which grew green foliage and which were gnarled in almost the right ways.

The vegetation, as Louis had remarked, was eerily Earth-like. There were bushes where one would expect bushes, bare spots where one would expect bare spots. According to instruments in the scooters, the plants were earthly even at the molecular level. As Louis and Speaker were related by some remote viral ancestor, so the trees of this world could claim both as brother.

There was a plant that would have made a nice hedge/fence. It looked like wood; but it grew up at forty-five degrees, sprouted a crown of leaves, dropped back at the same angle, sprouted a cluster of roots, rose again at forty-five degrees … Louis had seen something like it on Gummidgy; but this row of triangles was glossy-green and bark-brown, the colors of Earth life. Louis called it elbow root.

Nessus moved about within the little pocket of forest, collecting plants and insects for testing in the compact laboratory of his scooter. He wore his vacuum suit, a transparent balloon with three boots and two glove / mouthpieces. Nothing of the Ringworld could attack him without piercing that barrier: not a predator, not an insect, not a gram of pollen nor a fungus spore nor a virus molecule.