Ringworld Read online

  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 unnerving. At normal hyperdrive speeds the lines would remain fixed for hours.

  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 puppeteer 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 Louis 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.

  Anchored by his teeth to an exercise rung, Nessus peered over Louis’s shoulder. “I need certain stars for reference. Center that green-white giant and throw it on the scope screen ...”

  The pilot’s cabin was crowded. Louis hunched over the instrument panel, protecting buttons from the puppeteer’s careless hooves.

  “Spectroanalysis ... yes. Now the blue-and-yellow double at two o’clock ...

  “I have my bearings. Swing to 348, 72.”

  “What exactly am I looking for, Nessus? A cluster of fusion flames? No, you’d be using thrusters.”

  “You must use the scope. When you see it, you will know.”

  On the scope screen was a sprinkling of anonymous stars. Louis ran the magnification up until ... “Five dots in a regular pentagon. Right?”

  “That is our destination.”

  “Good. Let me check the distance.—Tanj! That’s wrong, Nessus. They’re too far away.”

  No comment.

  “Well, they couldn’t be ships, even if the distance meter isn’t working. The puppeteer fleet must be moving at just under lightspeed. We’d see the motion.”

  Five dim stars, in a regular pentagon. They were a fifth of a light year distant and quite invisible to the naked eye. At present scope magnification they would have to be full sized planets. In the scope screen one was faintly less blue, faintly dimmer than the others.

  A Kemplerer rosette. How very odd.

  Take three or more equal masses. Set them at the points of an equilateral polygon and give them equal angular velocities about their center of mass.

  Then the figure has stable equilibrium. The orbits of the masses may be circular or elliptical. Another
mass may occupy the center of mass of the figure, or the center of mass may be empty. It doesn’t matter. The figure is stable, like a pair of Trojan points.

  The difficulty is that there are several easy ways in which a mass can be captured by a Trojan point. (Consider the Trojan asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit.) But there is no easy way for five masses to fall accidentally into a Kemplerer rosette.

  “That’s wild,” Louis murmured. “Unique. Nobody’s ever found a Kemplerer rosette ...” He let it trail off.

  Here between the stars, what could be lighting those objects?

  “Oh, no you don’t,” said Louis Wu. “You’ll never make me believe it. What kind of an idiot do you take me for?”

  “What is it that you will not believe?”

  “You know tanj well what I won’t believe!”

  “As you please. That is our destination, Louis. If you will take us within range, a ship will be sent to match our velocity.”

  The rendezvous ship was a #3 hull, a cylinder with rounded ends and a flattened belly, painted shocking pink, and windowless. There were no engine apertures. The engines must be reactionless: thrusters of the human type, or something more advanced.

  On Nessus’s orders Louis had let the other ship do the maneuvering. The Long Shot, on fusion drives alone, would have required months to match velocities with the puppeteer “fleet”. The puppeteer ship had done it in less than an hour, blinking into existence alongside the Long Shot with her access tube already reaching like a glass snake toward the Long Shot’s airlock.

  Disembarking would be a problem. There wasn’t room to release all the crew from stasis at once. More important, this would be Speaker’s last chance to take control of the ship.

  “Do you think he will obey my tasp, Louis?”

  “No. I think he’ll risk one more, shot at stealing the ship. Tell you what we’d better do ...”

  They disconnected the instrument panel from the Long Shot’s fusion motors. It was nothing that the kzin couldn’t fix, given a little time and a touch of the mechanical intuition possessed by any toolmaker. But he would not have the time ...

  Louis watched the puppeteer move through the tube. Nessus was carrying Speaker’s pressure suit. His eyes were tightly closed; which was a pity, because the view was magnificent.

  “Free fall,” said Teela when he opened her crash couch. “I don’t feel so good. Better guide me, Louis. Wbat’s happening? Are we there?”

  Louis told her a few details while he guided her to the airlock. She listened, but Louis guessed she was concentrating on the pit of her stomach. She looked acutely uncomfortable. “There’ll be gravity on the other ship,” he told her.

  Her eyes found the tiny rosette where Louis pointed. It was a naked-eye object now, a pentagon of five white stars. She turned with astounded questions in her eyes. The motion spun her semicircular canals; and Louis saw her expression change in the moment before she bolted into the airlock.

  Kemplerer rosettes were one thing. Free-fall sickness was something else again. Louis watched her recede against the unfamiliar stars.

  As the couch cover opened, Louis said, “Don’t do anything startling. I’m armed.”

  The kzin’s orange face did not change expression. “Have we arrived?”

  “Yeah. I’ve disconnected the fusion drive. You’d never reconnect it in time. We’re in the sights of a pair of big ruby lasers.”

  “Suppose I were to escape in hyperdrive? No, my mistake. We must be within a singularity.”

  “You’re in for a shock. We’re in five singularities.”

  “Five? Really? But you lied about the lasers, Louis. Be ashamed.”

  At any rate, the kzin left his couch peaceably enough. Loins followed with the variable-sword at the ready. In the airlock the kzin stopped, suddenly caught by the sight of an expanding pentagon of stars.

  He could hardly have had a better view.

  The Long Shot, edging close in hyperdrive, had stopped half a light-hour ahead of the puppeteer “fleet”: something less than the average distance between Earth and Jupiter. But the “fleet” was moving at terrible speed, falling just behind its own light, so that the light which reached the Long Shot came from much further away. When the Long Shot stopped the rosette had been too small to see. It had been barely visible when Teela left the lock. Now it was impressively large, and growing at enormous speed.

  Five pale blue dots in a pentagon, spreading across the sky, growing, spreading ...

  For a flashing instant there were five worlds around the Long Shot. Then they were gone, not fading but gone, their receding light reddened to invisibility. And Speaker-To-Animals held the variable-sword.

  “Finagle’s eyes!” Louis exploded. “Don’t you have any curiosity at all?”

  The kzin considered. “I have curiosity, but my pride is much stronger.” He retracted the wire blade and handed the variable-sword back to Louis. “A threat is a challenge. Shall we go?”

  The puppeteer ship was a robot. Beyond the airlock the lifesystem was all one big room. Four crash couches, as varied in design as their intended occupants, faced each other in a circle around a refreshment console.

  There were no windows.

  There was gravity, to Louis’s relief. But it was not quite Earth’s gravity; nor was the air quite Earth’s air. The pressure was a touch too high. There were smells, not unpleasant but odd. Louis smelled ozone, hydrocarbons, puppeteer—dozens of puppeteers—and other smells he never expected to identify.

  There were no corners. The curved wall merged into floor and ceiling; the couches and the refreshment console all looked half melted. In the puppeteer world there would be nothing hard or sharp, nothing that could draw blood or raise a bruise.

  Nessus sprawled bonelessly in his couch. He looked ridiculously, ludicrously comfortable.

  “He won’t talk,” Teela laughed.

  “Of course not,” said the puppeteer. “I would only have had to start over when you arrived. Doubtless you have been wondering about—“

  “Flying worlds,” the kzin interrupted.

  “And Kemplerer rosettes,” said Louis. A barely audible hum told him that the ship was moving. He and Speaker stowed their luggage and joined the others in the couches. Teela handed Louis a red, fruity drink in a squeezebulb.

  “How much time have we got?” he asked the puppeteer.

  “An hour until we land. Then you will be briefed on our final destination.”

  “That should be long enough. Okay, speak to us. Why flying worlds? Somehow it doesn’t seem safe to throw habitable worlds about with such gay abandon.”

  “Oh, but it is, Louis!” The puppeteer was terribly earnest. “Much safer than this craft, for instance; and this craft is very safe compared to most human-designed craft. We have had much practice in the moving of worlds.”

  “Practice! How did that happen?”

  “To explain this, I must speak of heat ... and of population control. You will not be embarrassed or offended?”

  They signified negative. Louis had the grace not to laugh; Teela laughed.

  “What you must know is that population control is very difficult for us. There are only two ways for one of us to avoid becoming a parent. One is major surgery. The other is total abstinence from sexual congress.”

  Teela was shocked. “But that’s terrible!”

  “It is a handicap. Do not misunderstand me. Surgery is not a substitute for abstinence; it is to enforce abstinence. Today such surgery can be reversed; in the past it was impossible. Few of my species will willingly undergo such surgery.”

  Louis whistled. “I should think so. So your population control depends on will power?”

  “Yes. Abstinen
ce has unpleasant side effects, with us as with most species. The result has traditionally been overpopulation. Half a million years ago we were half a trillion in human numbering. In Kzinti numbering—“

  “My mathematics is good,” said the kzin. “But these problems do not seem to relate to the unusual nature of your fleet.” He was not complaining, merely commenting. From the refreshment console Speaker had procured a double-handed flagon of Kzinti design and half a gallon’s capacity.

  “But it does relate, Speaker. Half a trillion civilized beings produce a good deal of heat as a byproduct of their civilization.”

  “Were you civilized so long ago?”

  “Certainly. What barbarian culture would support so large a population? We had long since run out of farming land, and had been forced to terraform two worlds of our system for agriculture. For this it was necessary to move them closer to our sun. You understand?”

  “Your first experience in moving worlds. You used robot ships, of course.”

  “Of course ... After that, food was not a problem. Living space was not a problem. We built high even then, and we like each other’s company.”

  “Herd instinct, I’ll bet. Is that why this ship smells like a herd of puppeteers?”

  “Yes, Louis. It is reassuring to us to smell the presence of our own kind. Our sole and only problem, at the time of which I speak, was heat.”

  “Heat?”

  “Heat is produced as a waste product of civilization.”

  “I fail to understand,” said Speaker-To-Animals.

  Louis, who as a flatlander understood perfectly, forebore to comment. (Earth was far more crowded than Kzin.)

  “An example. You would wish a light source at night, would you not, Speaker? Without a light source you must sleep, whether or not you have better things to do.”

  “This is elementary.”

  “Assume that your light source is perfect, that is, it gives off radiation only in the spectra visible to Kzinti. Nonetheless, all light which does not escape through the window will be absorbed by walls and furniture. It will become randomized heat.