Ringworld

"No. They've been filing in from all directions, all morning. By now there must be hundreds of them." She smiled like dawn breaking. "And they're singing."

There were wide spots along all the corridors of the castle. Each such alcove was furnished with rugs and couches and tables, apparently so that any group of strollers could take a meal whenever he fancied, wherever he might be. In one such dining-nook, near the "basement level" of the castle, was a long window bent at right angles to form half a wall, half a floor.

Louis was panting a little from having descended ten flights of stairs. He found himself fascinated by the dining table. Its top seemed — sculpted; but the contours were shaped and placed to suggest soup plates, salad or butter or di

"You wouldn't use plates," Louis speculated. "You'd dish the food into the depressions, and hose the table off afterward."

It seemed unsanitary, but -? "They wouldn't bring flies or mosqmtoes or wolves. Why should they bring bacteria?

"Colonic bacteria," he answered himself. "For digestion. And if one bacterium mutated, turned vicious -" By then there would be no immunity to anything. Was that how the Ringworld civilization had died? Any civilization requires a minimum number to maintain it.

Teela and Speaker were paying him no attention. They knelt in the bend of the window, looking down. Louis went to join them.

"They're still at it," said Teela. And they were. Louis guessed that a thousand people were looking up at him. They were not chanting now.

"They can't know were here," he said.

Speaker suggested, "Perhaps they worship the building."

"Even so, they can't do this every day. We're too far from the edge of town. They couldn't reach the fields."

"Perhaps we happened by on a special day, the holy day."

Teela said, "Maybe something happened last night. Something special, like us, if someone spotted us after all. Or like that." She pointed.

"I wondered about that," said Speaker. "How long has it been falling?"

"Since I woke up, at least. It's like a rain, or a new kind of snow. Wire from the shadow squares, mile after mile of it. Why do you suppose it fell here?"

Louis thought of six million miles of distance between each shadow square … of an entire six-million-mile strand torn loose by its impact with the Liar … falling with the Liar toward the Ringworld landscape, on nearly the same course. It was hardly surprising that they had come across part of that enormous strand.

He was not in a long-winded mood. "Coincidence," he said.

"Anyway, it's draped all over us, and it's been falling since last night, probably. The natives must have worshipped the castle already, because it floats."

"Consider," the kzin said slowly. "If Ringworld engineers were to appear today, floating down from this floating castle, it would be taken as more appropriate than surprising. Louis, shall we try the God Gambit?"

Louis turned to answer-and couldn't. He could only try to keep a straight face. He might have made it, but Speaker was explaining to Teela:

"It was Louis's suggestion that we might succeed better with the natives by posing as Ringworld engineers. You and Louis were to be acolytes. Nessus was to be a captive demon; but we can hope to do without him. I was to be more god than engineer, a kind of war god -"

Then Teela started to laugh, and Louis broke up.

Eight feet tall, inhumanly broad across the shoulders and hips, the kzin was too big and too toothy to be other than fearsome, even when burnt bald. His ratlike tail had always been his least impressive feature. Now his skin was the same color: baby pink crisscrossed with lavender capillaries. Without the fur to bulk out his head, his ears became ungainly pink parasols. Orange fur made a domino mask across his eyes, and he seemed to have grown his own fluffy orange pillow to sit on.

The danger of laughing at a kzin only made it fu

An inhumanly large hand closed on his shoulder and lifted him high. Still convulsed with mirth, Louis faced the kzin at eye level. He heard, "Truly, Louis, you must explain this behavior."

Louis made an enormous effort. "A k-k-kind of war god," he said, and was off again. Teela was making hiccupping sounds.

The kzin set him down and waited for the fit to pass.

"You simply aren't impressive enough to play god," Louis said some minutes later. "Not until the hair grows back."

"But if I tore some humans to pieces with my hands, perhaps they would respect me then."

"They'd respect you from a distance, and from hiding. That wouldn't do us any good. No, we'll just have to wait for the hair. Even then, we ought to have Nessus's tasp."

"The puppeteer is unavailable."

"But -"

"I say he is unavailable. How shall we contact the natives?"

"You'll have to stay here. See what you can learn from the map room. Teela and I," said Louis, and suddenly remembered. "Teela, you haven't seen the map room."

"What's it like?"

"You stay here and get Speaker to show you. I'll go down alone. You two can monitor me by communicator disc, and come for me if there's trouble. Speaker, I want your flashlight-laser."

The kzin grumbled, but he did relinquish the flashlight-laser. It still left him with the modified Slaver disintegrator.

From a thousand feet over their heads, he heard their reverent silence become a murmur of astonishment; and he knew that they had seen him, a bright speck separating from the castle window. He sank toward them.

The murmur did not die. It was suppressed. He could hear the difference.

Then the singing began.

"It drags," Teela had said, and, "They don't keep in step," and, "It all sounds flat." Louis's imagination had gone on from there. As a result the singing took him by surprise. It was much better than he had expected.

He guessed they were singing a twelve-tone scale. The "octave" scale of most of the human worlds was also a twelve-tone scale, but with differences. Small wonder it had sounded flat to Teela.

Yes, it dragged. It was church music, slow and solemn and repetitive, without harmony. But it had grandeur.

The square was immense. A thousand people were a vast throng after the weeks of loneliness; but the square could have held ten times that number. Loudspeakers could have kept them singing in step, but there were no loudspeakers. A lone man waved his arms from a pedestal in the center of the square. But they would not look at him. They were all looking up at Louis Wu.

For all that, the music was beautiful.

Teela could not hear that beauty. The music of her experience had come from recordings and tridee sets, always by way of a microphone system. Such music could be amplified, rectified, the voices multiplied or augmented, the bad takes thrown away. Teela Brown had never heard live music.

Louis Wu had. He slowed his 'cycle to give his nerve ends time to adapt to the rhythms of it. He remembered the great public sings on the cliffs above Crashlanding City, throngs which had boasted twice this number, sings which had sounded different for that and another reason; for Louis Wu had been singing too. Now, as he let the music vibrate in him, his ears began to adjust to the slightly sharp or flat notes, to the blurring of voices, to the repetition, to the slow majesty of the hymn.

He caught himself as he was about to join in the singing. That's not a good idea, he thought, and let his cycle settle toward the square.