Ringworld

Not knowing its origin, Louis accepted it for what it was. Something pretty. He lay nude on his back on the hairy wall-to-wall rug, and he watched the thread drifting past his window. He felt safe and rested, perhaps for the first time since an X-ray-laser had touched the Liar.

The thread drifted endlessly down, loop after loop of black line curving out of a gray-white sky. It was fine enough to flicker in and out of visibility. How to know the length of it? How to count the snowflakes in a blizzard?

Suddenly Louis recognized it.

"Welcome back," he said. But he was jolted.

Shadow square wire. It had followed them here.

Louis climbed five flights of stairs to find his breakfast. Naturally he didn't expect the kitchen to be operating.

He was looking for the banquet hall; but he found the kitchen instead.

It confirmed ideas he had had earlier. It takes servants to make an autocrat; and there had been servants here. The kitchen was tremendous. It must have required a score of chefs, with their own servants to carry the finished product out to the banquet hall, return the dirty dishes, clean up, run errands …

There were bins that had held fresh fruit and vegetables, and now held dust and fruit-pits and dried skins and mold. There was a cold room where carcasses had hung. It was empty and warm. There was a freezer, still working. Some of the food on the freezer shelves might have been edible; but Louis would not have risked it.

There were no cans.

The water spigots were dry.

Aside from the freezer, there was not a machine more complex than a door hinge. There were no temperature indicators or timers on the stoves. There was nothing equivalent to a toaster. There were threads hanging over the stove, with nodules of crud on them. Raw spices? No spice bottles?

Louis looked once around him before he left. Otherwise he might have missed the truth.

This room had not originally been a kitchen.

What, then? A storage room? A tridee room? Probably the latter. One wall was very blank, with a uniform paint job that looked younger than the rest; and there were scars on the floor where chairs and couches might have been removed.

All right, then. The room had been an entertainment room. Then, maybe the wall set had broken down, and nobody remembered how to fix it. Later the autokitchen had gone the same route.

So the big tridee room had been turned into a manually operated kitchen. Such kitchens must have been common by then, if nobody remembered how to fix an autokitchen. Raw foods had been brought up by flying truck.

And when the flying trucks broke down, one by one …?

Louis left.

He found the banquet hall at last, and the only dependable source of food in the castle. There he breakfasted on a brick from the kitchen slot in his 'cycle.

He was finishing up when Speaker entered.

The kzin must have been starving. He went straight to his 'cycle, dialed three wet dark-red bricks, and gulped them down in nine swallows. Only then did he turn to look at Louis.

He was no longer ghost-white. Sometime during the night, the foam had finished healing him and had sloughed away. His skin showed glossy and pink and healthy, if pink was the color of healthy kzinti skin, with a few ridges of grey scar tissue and an extensive network of violet veins.

"Come with me," the kzin commanded. "I have found a map room."

CHAPTER 16 — The Map Room

The map room was at the very top of the castle, as befitted its importance. Louis was blowing hard from the climb. He had had a time keeping up. The kzin did not run, but he walked faster than a man could walk.

Louis reached the landing as Speaker pushed through a double door ahead of him.

Through that gap Louis saw a horizontal band of jet black, eight inches broad and three feet off the ground. He looked beyond it, looked for a similar strip of baby blue chocked with midnight blue rectangles; and he found it.

Jackpot.

Louis stood in the doorway, taking in details. The miniature Ringworld was almost as large as the room, which was circular and perhaps a hundred and twenty feet across. At the hub of the circular map was a rectangular screen, heavily mounted, facing away from the doorway but built to turn.

High on the walls were ten turning globes. They varied in size, and they turned at different rates; but each was the characteristic color, rich blue with swirled white frosting, of an Earthlike world. There was a conic-section map below each globe.

"I spent the night here, working," said Speaker. He was standing behind the screen. "I have many things to show you. Come here."

Louis almost ducked under the Ring. A thought stopped him. The hawk-featured man who ruled the banquet hall would never have stooped so, not even to enter this holy of holies. Louis walked at the Ring, and through it, and found it was a holo projection.

He took up a stance behind the kzin.

Control panels surrounded the screen. All the knobs were large and massive, made of silver, and each was carved to represent the head of some animal. The boards were contoured in swirls and curves. Prettified, Louis thought. Decadent?

The screen was alight, but unmagnified. Looking into it was like looking down on the Ringworld from the vicinity of the shadow squares. Louis felt a touch of deja vu.

"I had it focused earlier," said the kzin. "If I remember rightly …" He touched a knob, and the view expanded so fast that Louis's hand clutched for a throttle. "I want to show you the rim wall. Rrrr, a bit off …" He touched another fierce-visaged knob, and the view slid. They were looking over the edge of the Ringworld.

Somewhere were telescopes to give them this view. Where? Mounted on the shadow squares?

They were looking down on thousand mile-high mountains. Still the view expanded as Speaker found ever-finer controls. Louis marveled at how abruptly the mountains, appearing very natural but for their size, were cut by the knife-edged shadow of space.

Then he saw what ran along the peaks of the mountains.

Though it was only a line of silver dots, he knew what it would be. "A linear accelerator."

"Yes," said Speaker. "Without transfer booths, it is the only feasible way to travel Ringworld distances. It must have been the major transport system."

"But it's a thousand miles high. Elevators?"

"I found elevator shafts an along the rim wall. There, for instance." By now the silver thread was a line of tiny loops, widely spaced, each hidden from the land below by a mountain peak. A tube so slender as to be barely visible led from one of the loops, down the slop of a mountain, into a layer of clouds at the bottom of the Ringworld atmosphere.

Speaker said, "The electromagnetic loops cluster thickly around the elevator shafts. Elsewhere they are up to a million miles apart. I surmise that they are not needed except for starting and stopping and guidance. A car could be accelerated to free fall, coast around the rim at a relative 770 miles per second, to be stopped near an elevator tube by another cluster of loops."

"It'd take up to ten days to get a man 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 sidewase, expanded slowly. It was night. Dark clouds diverged over dark land, and then …