Ringworld

CHAPTER 14 — Interlude, With Sunflowers

Not far ahead, there were mountains.

Louis had flown all night and well into the morning. He wasn't sure how long. The motionless noon sun was a psychological trap; it either compressed or stretched time, and Louis wasn't sure which.

Emotionally, Louis was on sabbatical. He had almost forgotten the other flycycles. Flying alone over unending, endlessly changing terrain was no different from ranging alone in a singleship, beyond the known stars. Louis Wu was alone with the universe, and the universe was a plaything for Louis Wu. The most important question in the universe became: Is Louis Wu still satisfied with himself?

It came as a shock when a furry orange face formed above the dash.

"You must be tiring," said the kzin. "Do you wish me to fly?"

"I'd rather land. I'm getting cramped."

"Land, then. The controls are yours."

"I don't want to force my company on anyone." As he said it, Louis realized that he meant it. The sabbatical mood had been too easily recaptured.

"Do you feel that Teela would avoid you? You may be right. She has not called even me, though I share her shame."

"You're taking it too hard. No, wait, don't switch off."

"I wish to be alone, Louis. The leaf-eater has shamed me terribly."

"But it was so long ago! No, don't switch off; have pity on a lonely old man. Have you been watching the landscape?"

"Yes."

"Did you notice the bare regions?"

"Yes. In places erosion has cut through bedrock to the indestructible ring floor. Something must have badly upset the wind patterns a very long time ago. Such erosion cannot happen overnight, even on the Ringworld."

"Right."

"Louis, how could a civilization of such size and power fall?"

"I don't know. Let's face it: there's no way to guess, not for us. Even the puppeteers never reached the Ringworld's level of technology. How can we tell what might have knocked them back to the fist-ax level?"

"We must learn more about the natives," said Speaker-To-Animals. "Our evidence thus far indicates that they could not possibly move the ruined Liar anywhere. We must find those who can."

It was the opening Louis had hoped for. "I have some ideas on that score — an effective way to contact the natives as often as we like."

"Well?"

"I'd like to land before we talk it over."

"Land, then."

Mountains formed a high, blocky range across the path of the flycycle fleet. Their peaks and the passes between glowed with a pearly sheen Louis recognized. Winds roaring over and between the peaks had polished away the rock, exposing the framework of ring floor material.

Louis dropped the fleet toward gently rounded foothills. If his target was the mouth of a silver stream that poured out of the mountains and disappeared into a forest, itself seemingly endless, that covered the foothills like green fur.

Teela called. "What are you doing?" she demanded.

"I'm landing. I'm tired of flying. But don't hang up. I'd like to apologize."

She switched off.

Best I could hope for, Louis told himself without conviction. But she would be more willing to listen now that she knew an apology was coming.

"I got the idea from all our talk about 'playing god'," said Louis. Unfortunately he was talking only to Speaker. Teela had dismounted her 'cycle, thrown him one smoking glare and stalked off into the woods.

Speaker nodded his shaggy orange head. His ears twitched like small Chinese fans held in nervous fingers.

"We're reasonably safe on this world," Louis told him, "as long as were in the air. There's no question but that we can get where we're going. We could probably reach the rim wall without ever landing, if it came to that; or we could land only where the ring foundation pokes through. No predatory life could survive on that stuff.

"But we can't learn much without landing. We want to get off this oversized toy, and to do that we're going to need native help. It still looks as though someone is going to have to haul the Liar across four hundred thousand miles of landscape."

"Get to the point, Louis. I need exercise."

"By the time we reach the rim wall we'll want to know a lot more about the Ringworld than we do now."

"Unquestionably."

"Why not play god?"

Speaker hesitated. "You speak with literal precision?"

"Right. We're naturals for Ringworld engineers. We don't have the powers they had, but what we do have must look godlike enough to the natives. You can be the god -"

"Thank you."

"- Teela and I the acolytes. Nessus would make a good captive demon."

Speaker's claws came out. He said, "But Nessus is not with us, and will not be."

"That's the hitch. In -"

"This is not open to argument, Louis."

"Too bad. We need him to make this work."

"Then you must forget it."

Louis was still in doubt about those claws. Were they or were they not under voluntary control? In any case, they were still showing. Had he been speaking over intercom Speaker would certainly have switched off by now.

Which was why Louis had insisted on landing.

"Look at the sheer intellectual beauty of it. You'd make a great god. From a human viewpoint you're impressive as all hell — though I suppose you'd have to take my word for that."

"Why would we need Nessus?"

"For the tasp, for reward and punishment. As a god, you tear a doubter to shreds and gobbets, then eat the gobbets. That's punishment. For reward, you use the puppeteer's tasp."

"Can we not do without the tasp?"

"But it's such a great way to reward the faithful! A blast of pure pleasure, straight to the brain. No side effects. No hangover. A tasp is supposed to be better than sex!"

"I do not like the ethics. Though the natives are only human, I would not like to addict them to a tasp. It would be more merciful to kill them" said Speaker. "In any case, the puppeteer's tasp works apinst kzinti, not human."

"I think you're wrong."

"Louis, we know that the tasp was designed for use against a kzinti brain structure. I felt it. In this you are right: it was a religious experience, a diabolical experience."

"But we don't know the tasp doesn't work on a human being. I think it does. I know Nessus. Either his tasp works on both of us, or he's carrying two tasps. I wouldn't be here unless he had a way to control humans."

"You speculate wildly."

"Shall we call him and ask him?"

"No."

"What's the harm in asking him?"

"There would be no purpose in it."

"I forgot. No curiosity," said Louis. Monkey curiosity was not powerful in most sentient species.

"Were you playing on my curiosity? I see. You tried to commit me to a course of action. Louis, the puppeteer may find his own way to the rim wall. Until then, he travels alone."

And before Louis could answer, the kzin turned and bounded into a thicket of elbow root. It ended the discussion as effectively as if he had switched off an intercom.

The world had caved in on Teela Brown. She sobbed miserably, wrackingly, in an orgy of self-pity.

She had found a wonderful place for her mourning.

Dark green was the motif. The vegetation was lush overhead, too thick to permit the direct passage of sunlight. But it thinned out near the ground, to make walking easy. It was a somber paradise for nature lovers.

Flat, vertical rock walls, kept constantly wet by a waterfall, surrounded a deep, clear pool. Teela was in the pool. The falling water nearly drowned out her sobbing, but the rock walls amplified the sound like a shower stall. It was as if Nature wept with her.

She had not noticed Louis Wu.

Stranded on an alien world, even Teela Brown would not have gone far without her first aid kit. It was a small, flat box on her belt, and it had a finding circuit built into it. Louis had followed its signal to Teelas clothes, which were piled on a natural granite tabletop at the poors edge.

Dark green illumination, the roar of a waterfall, and the echoed sound of sobbing. Teela was almost under the falling water. She must be sitting on something, for her arms and shoulders were out of the pool. Her head was bent, and her dark hair streamed forward to cover her face.

There was no point in waiting for her to come to him. Louis took off his clothes, piled them beside Teela's. He frowned at the chill in the air, shrugged, and dove in.

He saw his mistake instantly.

On sabbatical, Louis did not commonly ran across Earthlike worlds. Those he did land on were generally as civilized as Earth itself. Louis was not stupid. If it had occurred to him to wonder about the temperature of the water …

But it didn't.

The water was runoff water from snow-capped mountains. Louis tried to scream with the cold, but his head was already underwater. He did have sense enough not to inhale.

His head broke water. He splashed and gasped with the cold and the need for air.

Then he began to enjoy it.

He knew how to tread water; though he had learned in warmer waters than these! He stayed afloat, kicking rhythmically, feeling the currents from the plunging waterfall eddy over his skin.

Teela had seen him. She sat beneath the waterfall, waiting. He swam to her.

He would have had to scream into her face to tell her anything. Apologies and words of love would have been misplaced. But he could touch her.

She did not flinch away. But she bent her head, and her hair hid her again. Her rejection was almost telepathically intense.

Louis respected it.

He swam about, stretching muscles cramped by eighteen hours in a flycycle seat. The water felt wonderful. But at some point the numbness of the cold became an ache, and Louis decided he was courting pneumonia.

He touched Teela on the arm and pointed toward shore. This time she nodded and followed.

They lay beside the pool, shivering, wrapped in each other's arms, with the thermocontrolled coveralls open and spread around them like blankets. Gradually their chilled bodies soaked up the heat.

"I'm sorry I laughed," Louis said.

She nodded, accepting the fact of his apology, without forgiveness.

"It was funny, you know. The puppeteers, the cowards of the universe, having the gall to breed humans and kzinti like two strains of cattle! They must have known what a chance they were taking." He knew he was talking too much, but he had to explain, to justify himself. "And then look what they did with it! Breeding for a reasonable kzin, that wasn't a bad idea. I know a little about the Man-Kzin wars; I know the kzinti used to be pretty fierce. Speaker's ancestors would have blasted Zignamuclickclick down to the Ring floor. Speaker stopped.

"But breeding humans for luck -"

"You think they made a mistake, making me what I am."

"Tanjit, do you think I'm trying to insult you? I'm trying to say that it's a funny idea. For puppeteers to do it is even funnier. So I laughed."

"Do you expect me to giggle?"

"That'd be going too far."

"All right."

She didn't hate him for laughing. She wanted comfort, not revenge. There was comfort in the heat of the coveralls, and comfort in the heat of two bodies pressed together.

Louis began to stroke Teeld's back. It made her relax.

"I'd like to get the expedition back together again," he said presently. He felt her stiffen. "You don't like that idea."

"No."

"Nessus?"

"I hate him. I hate him! He bred my ancestors likelike beasts!" She relaxed minutely. "But Speaker would blast him out of the sky if he tried to come back. So it's all right."

"Suppose I could talk Speaker into letting Nessus rejoin us?"

"How could you do that?"

"Suppose I could?"

"But why?"

"Nessus still owns the Long Shot. The Long Shot is the only way to get the human race to the Clouds of Magellan in less than centuries. We lose the Long Shot if we leave the Ringworld without Nessus."

"How, how crass, Louis!"

"Look. You claimed that if the puppeteers hadn't done what they did to the kzinti we'd all be kzinti slaves. True. But if the puppeteers hadn't interfered with the Fertility Laws, you wouldn't even have been born!"

She was rigid against him. Her mind showed in her face, and her face was like her eyes: tightly closed.

He kept trying. "What the puppeteers did, they did a long time ago Can't you forgive and forget?"

"No!" She rolled away from him, out from under the heated coveralls and into the icy water. Louis hesitated, then followed her. A cold, wet shock … he surfaced … Teela was back at her place beneath the waterfall.

Smiling in invitation. How could her moods change so suddenly?

He swam to her.

"That's a charming way to tell a man to shut up!" he laughed. She couln't possibly have heard him. He couldn't hear himself, with the water pounding down around him. But Teela laughed back, equally soundlessly, and reached for him.

"They were stupid arguments anyway!" he screamed.

The water was cold, cold. Teela was the only warmth. They knelt clasping each other, supported by rough, shallow underwater rock.

Love was a delicious blend of warm and cold. There was comfort in making love. It solved no problems: but one could ran away from problems.

They walked back toward the 'cycles, shivering a little within their heated cocoons. Louis didn't speak. He had realized a thing about Teela Brown.

She had never learned how to resist. She could not say no and make it stick. She could not deliver reproofs of calculated intensity, humorous or jabbing or deadly vicious, as other women could. Teela Brown had not been hurt socially, not often enough to learn these things.

Louis could browbeat her until doomsday, and she would never know how to stop him. But she could hate him for it. And so he remained silent, for that reason and for another.

He didn't want to hurt her.

They walked in silence, holding hands, making loveplay with their fingers.

"All right." she said suddenly. "If you can talk Speaker into it, you can bring Nessus back."

"Thanks," said Louis. He showed his surprise.

"It's only for the Long Shot," she said. "Besides, you can't do it."

There was time for a meal and for formal exercises: pushups and situps, and for informal exercises: tree climbing.

Presently Speaker returned to the 'cycles. His mouth was not bloody. At his 'cycle he dialed, not for an allergy pill, but for a wet brick-shaped slab of warm liver. The mighty hunter returns, Louis thought, keeping his mouth firmly shut.

The sky had been overcast when they landed. It was still overcast, a uniform leaden gray, as they took off. And Louis resumed his argument by intercom.

"But it was so long ago!"

"A point of honor is not affected by time, Louis, though of course you would not know that. Further, the consequences of the act are very much with us. Why did Nessus select a kzin to travel with him?"

"He told us that."

"Why did he select Teela Brown? The Hindmost must have instructed Nessus to learn if humans have inherited psychic luck. He was also to learn if kzinti have become docile. He chose me because as ambassador to a characteristically arrogant species, I am likely to demonstrate the docility his people seek."

"I'd thought of that too." Louis had carried the idea even further. Had Nessus been instructed to mention starseed lures, in order to gauge Speaker's reactions?

"It matters not. I say that I am not docile."

"Will you stop using that word? It warps your thinking."

"Louis, why do you intercede for the puppeteer? Why do you wish his company?"

Good questions, Louis thought. Certainly the puppeteer deserved to sweat a little. And if what Louis suspected was true, Nessus was in no danger at all.

Was it only that Louis Wu liked aliens?

Or was it more general than that? A puppeteer was different. Difference was important. A man of Louis Wu's age would get bored with life itself, without variety. To Louis the company of aliens was a vital necessity.

The 'cycles rose, following the slope of the mountains.

"Viewpoints," said Louis Wu. "We're in a strange environnient, stranger than any world of men or kzinti. We may need all the insights we can bring to bear, just to figure out what's going on."

Teela applauded without sound. Nicely argued! Louis winked back. A very human conversation; Speaker couldn't possibly read its meaning.

The kzin was saying, "I do not need a puppeteer to explain the, world to me. My own eyes, nose, ears are sufficient."

"That's moot. But you do need the Long Shot. We all need the techniques that ship represents."

"For profit? An unworthy motive."

"Tanjit, that's not fair! The Long Shot is for the entire human race, and the kzinti too!"

"A quibble. Though the profit is not to you alone, still you sell your honor for profit."

"My honor is not in danger," Louis grated.

"I think it is," said Speaker. And he switched off.

"That's a handy little gadget, that switch," Teela observed, with malice. "I knew he'd do that."

"So did I. But, Lord Finagle! He's hard to convince."

Beyond the mountains was an endless expanse of fleecy cloud, graying out at the infinity-horizon. The flycycles seemed to float above white cloud, beneath a bright blue sky in which the Arch was an outline at the threshold of visibility.

The mountains fell behind. Louis felt a twinge of regret for the forest pool with the waterfall. They would never see it again.

A wake followed the 'cycles, a roiling wavefront where three sonic booms touched the cloud cover ahead. Only one detail broke the infinity-horizon. Louis decided that it was either a mountain or a storm, very distant, very large. It was the size of a pinhead held at arms length.

Speaker broke the silence. "A rift in the cloud cover, Louis. Ahead and to spinward."

"I see it."

"Do you see how the light shines through? Much light is being reflected from the landscape."

True, the edges of the cloud break glowed brightly. Hmmm … "Could we be flying over Ringworld foundation material? It would be the biggest break yet in the landscaping."

"I want to look more closely."

"Good," said Louis.

He watched the speck that was Speaker's flycycle curve frantically away to spinward. At Mach 2 Speaker would get no more than a glimpse of the ground.

There was a problem here. Which to watch? The silver fleck that was Speakees flycycle, or the smaU orange cat-face above the dash? One was real, one was detailed. Both offered information, but of different kinds.

In principle, no answer was entirely satisfactory. In practice, Louis naturally watched both.

He saw that Speaker was over the rift …

The intercom echoed Speakees yowl. The silver fleck had gone suddenly brighter; and Speaker's face was a glue of white light. His eyes were closed tight. His mouth was open, screaming.

The image dimmed. Speaker had crossed the rift. One arm was thrown across his face. The fur that covered him was smoking black char.

Beneath the diverging silver speck of Speaker's flycycle, a bright spot showed on the cloud cover … as if a spotlight followed Speaker from below.

"Speaker!" Teela called. "Can you see?"

Speaker heard and uncovered his face. The orange far was unburned in a broad band across his eyes. Elsewhere the fur was ash-black. Speaker opened his eyes, closed them tight, opened them again. "rm blind," he said.

"Yes, but can you see?"

In his worry over Speaker, Louis hardly noticed the strangeness of that question. But something in him noted her tone of voice: the anxiety, and beneath that, the suggestion that Speaker had given a wrong answer and should be given a second chance.

But there wasn't time. Louis called, "Speaker! Slave your 'cycle to mine. We've got to get to cover."

Speaker fumbled at the board. "Done. Louis, what kind of cover?" Pain thickened and distorted his voice.

"Back to the mountains."

"No. We would lose too much time. Louis, I know what attacked me. If I am right, then we are safe as long as we have cloud cover."

"Oh?"

"You will have to investigate."

"You need medical attention."

"I do indeed, but first you must find us a safe place to land. You must descend where the clouds are most dense …"

It was not dark, down here below the clouds. Some light came through, and enough of that was reflected toward Louis Wu. It glared.

The land was an undulating plain. It was not Ring floor material, but soil and vegetation.

Louis dropped lower. squinting against the glare.

… A single species of plant evenly dispersed across the land, from here to the infinity-horizon. Each plant had a single blossom, and each blossom turned to follow Louis Wu as he dropped. A tremendous audience, silent and attentive.

He landed and dismounted beside one of the plants. The plant stood a foot high on a knobbly green stalk. Its single blossom was as big as a large man's face. The back of that blossom was stringy, as if laced with veins or tendons; and the inner surface was a smooth concave mirror. From its center protruded a short stalk ending in a dark green bulb.

All the flowers in sight watched him. He was bathed in the glare. Louis knew they were trying to kill bun, and he looked up somewhat uneasily; but the cloud cover held.

"You were right," he said, speaking into the intercom. "They're Slaver sunflowers. If the cloud cover hadn't come up, we'd have been dead the instant we rose over the mountains."

"Is there cover where we can hide from the sunflowers? A cave, for example?"

"I don't think so. The land's too flat. The sunflowers can't focus the light with any precision, but there's a lot of glare anyway."

Teela broke in. "For pity's sake, what's the matter with you two? Louis, we've got to land! Speaker's in pain!"

"Truly, I am in pain, Louis."

"Then I vote we risk it. Come down, you two. We'll just have to hope the clouds hold."

"Good!" Teela's intercom image went into action.

Louis spent a minute or so searching between the plants. It was as he had surmised. There was no alien survivor anywhere in the domain of the sunflowers. No smaller plant grew between the stalks. Nothing flew. Nothing burrowed beneath the ashy-looking soil. On the plants themselves there were no blights, fungus growths, disease spots. If disease struck one of their own, the sunflowers would destroy it.

The mirror-blossom was a terrible weapon. Its primary purpose was to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node at its center. But it could also focus to destroy a plant-eating animal or insect. The sunflowers burned all enemies. Everything that lives is the enemy of a photosynthesis-using plant; and everything that lived became fertilizer for the sunflowers.

"But how did they come here?" Louis wondered. For sunflowers could not coexist with less exotic plant life. Sunflowers were too powerful. Thus they could not be native to the Ringworlders' original planet.

The engineers must have scouted nearby stars for their useful or decorative plants. Perhaps they had even come as far as Silvereyes, in human space. And they must have decided that the sunflowers were decorative.

"But they would have fenced them in. Any idiot would have that much sense. Give them, say, a plot of ground with a high, broad ring of bare Ring flooring around it. That would keep them in.

"Only it didn't. Somehow a seed got across. No telling how far they've spread by now," said Louis to himself. And he shuddered. This must be the "bright spot" he and Nessus had noticed ahead of them. As far as the eye could see, no living thing challenged the sunflowers.

In time, if they were given time, the sunflowers would rule the Ringworld.

But that would take much time. The Ringworld was roomy. Roomy enough for anything.