Ringworld

CHAPTER 15 — Dream-Castle

Louis, musing, was only half aware of two flycycles dropping beside his own. He was jerked from his reverie when Speaker barked, "Louis! You will take the Slaver disintegrator from my 'cycle and use it to dig us a hiding-hole. Teela, come and tend my injuries."

"A hiding-hole?"

"Yes. We must burrow like animals and wait for nightfall."

"Yeah." Louis shook himself. Speaker should not have had to think of that, injured as he was. Obviously they could not risk a break in the clouds. All the sunflowers needed to murder them was a point-source of light. But at night -

Louis avoided looking at Speaker while he searched Speaker's cycle. One look had been enough. The kzin was burnt black across most of his body. Fluids leaked through the oily ash that had been fur. Flesh showed bright red in wide cracks. The smell of burnt hair was strong and terrible.

Louis found the disintegrator: a double-barreled shotgun with a fluid-seeming handle. The weapon next to it made him grin sourly. If Speaker had suggested burning off the sunflowers with flashlight-lasers, Louis probably would have gone along with it, fuddled as he was.

He took the weapon and withdrew quickly, feeling queasy, ashamed of his weakness. He hurt with the pain of Speaker's burns. Teela, who knew nothing of pain, could help Speaker better than Louis could.

Low aimed the gun thirty degrees downward. He was wearing the breathing-helmet from his pressure suit. As he was in no hurry, he flipped only one of the two triggers.

The pit formed fast. Louis couldn't see how fast, for the dust was all around him after the first instant. A hurricane blew at him from where the beam fell. Louis had to lean hard into the wind.

In the cone of the beam the electron became a neutral particle. Soil and rock, torn to atoms by the mutual repulsion of the nuclei, reached him as a fog of monatoinic dust. Louis was glad of the breathing-helmet.

Presently he turned off the disintegrator. The pit looked big enough to fit the three of them and the flycycles too.

So quickly, he thought. And he wondered how fast the tool would dig with both beams on. But then there would be a current flow, he thought, borrowing Speaker's euphemism. At the moment he wasn't looking for that much excitement.

Teela and Speaker had dismounted. Speaker was now hairless over most of his body. A large orange patch still covered him where he sat and a broad orange band crossed his eyes. Elsewhere his nude skin was veined red-violet, showing clusters of deep red cracks. Teela was spraying him with something that foamed white where it touched.

The stench of burnt hair and meat stayed Louis from coming too close. "It's done," he said.

The kzin looked up. "I can see again, Louis."

"Good!" He'd been worried.

"The puppeteer brought military medical supplies, vastly superior to kzinti civilian medicines. He should not have had access to military supplies." The kzin sounded angry. Perhaps he suspected bribery; and perhaps he was right.

"I'm going to call Nessus," Louis said. And he circled the pair. White foam now covered the kzin from head to foot. There was no smell at all.

"I know where you are," he told the puppeteer.

"Marvelous. Where am I, Louis?"

"You're behind us. You circled round behind us as soon as you were out of sight. Teela and Speaker don't know. They can't think like puppeteers."

"Do they expect a puppeteer to break trail for them? Perhaps it is best they continue to think so. What chance is there that they will permit me to rejoin them?"

"Not now. Maybe later. Let me tell you why I called …" And he told the puppeteer about the sunflower field. He was detailinh the extent of Speaker's injuries when Nessus's flat face dropped below the level of the intercom caniera.

Louis waited a few moments for the puppeteer to reappear. Then he switched off. He was sure that Nessus would not remain long in catatonic withdrawal. The puppeteer was too sanely careful of his life.

Ten hours of daylight remained. The team waited it out in the disintegrator-dug trench.

Speaker slept through it. They walked him into the trench, then used a spray from the kzinti medkit to put him to sleep. The white stuff had congealed on him to the consistency of a foam rubber pillow.

"The world's only bouncy kzin," said Teela.

Louis tried to sleep. He dozed for a time. Once he half woke to bright daylight and to the sharp black shadow of the slope failing across him. He stirred and went back to sleep …

And woke later in a cold sweat. Shadows! If he had sat up to look, hed have been burnt crisp!

But the clouds were back, safely blocking the vengeance of the sunflowers.

Finally one horizon dimmed. As the sky darkened, Louis set about waking the others.

They flew beneath the clouds. It was vital that they be able to see the sunflowers. If dawn approached while the fleet was still over sunflowers, they would have to hide out during the next day.

Occasionally Louis dipped his 'cycle for a closer look.

For an hour they flew and then the sunflowers grew sparse. There was a region where sunflowers were scarce, half-grown seedlings growing among the blackened stumps of a recently burned forest. Grass actually seemed to compete with the sunflowers in this area.

Then there were no sunflowers at all.

And Louis could sleep at last.

Louls slept as if drugged. It was still night when he woke. He looked about him and found a glimmer of light ahead and to spinward.

Groggy as he was, he thought it would turn out to be a firefly caught in the some fold, or something equally silly. But it was still there after he rubbed his eyes.

He pushed the Call button for Speaker.

The light grow nearer and clearer. Against the darkness of the Ringworld night landscape it showed bright as a point of reflected sunlight

Not a sunflower. Not at night.

It might be a house, Louis thought; but where would a native got his lighting? Then again, a house would have gone by like that. At flycycle cruising speed, you could cross the North American continent in two-and-half hours.

The light was drifting past them on the right, and still Speaker hadn't answered.

Louis cut his 'cycle out of formation. He was grinning in the dark. Behind him the fleet, now under Speakees guidance (at Speaker's insistence), was only two 'cycles strong. Louis picked Speaker's from memory. He flew toward it.

Shock waves and sonic fold showed faintly outlined by cloud-dimmed Archlight, a network of straight lines converging to a point. Speaker's flycycle, and Speaker's ghost-gray silhouette, seemed caught in a Euclidian spiderweb.

Louis was perilously close when he turned big spotlight on and immediately off. In the dark he saw the ghost come suddenly alert. Louis guided his 'cycle carefully between the kzin and the point of light.

He blinked his spotlight again.

Speaker came on the intercom. "Yes, Louis, I see it now. A lighted something going past us."

"Then let's look it over."

"Very well." Speaker turned toward the light.

They circled it in the dark, like curious minnows nosing a sinking beer bottle. It was a ten-story castle floating a thousand feet high, and it was all lit up like the instrument board on some ancient rocket ship.

A single tremendous picture window, curved so that it formed both wall and ceiling, opened on a cavity the size of an opera house. Within, a labyrinth of dining tables surrounded a raised circle of floor. There was fifty feet of space above the tables, empty but for a free-form sculpture in stressed wire.

Always it came as a fresh surprise, the elbow room on the Ringworld. On Earth it was a felony to fly any vehicle without an autopilot. A falling car would be bound to kill someone, no matter where it fell. Here, thousands of miles of wilderness, buildings suspended over cities, and head room for a guest fifty feet tall.

There was a city beneath the castle. It showed no lights. Speaker skimmed over it like a swooping hawk, scanned it hastily in the blue Archlight. He came up to report that the city looked very like Zignamuclickclick.

"We can explore it after dawn," he said. "I think this stronghold is more important. It may have been untouched since the fall of civilization."

"It must have its own power source," Louis speculated. "I wonder why? None of the buildings in Zignamuclickclick did."

Teela sent her 'cycle skimming directly under the castle. In the intercom her eyes went big with wonder, and she cried, "Louis, Speakerl You've got to see this!"

They dropped after her without thought. Louis was moving up alongside her when he became suddenly, freezingly aware of the mass suspended over his head.

There were windows all over the underside; and the underside was all angles. There was no way to land the castle. Who had built it, and how, with no bottom to it? Concrete and metal asymnietrically designed, and what the tanj was holding it up? Louis's stomach lurched, but he set his jaw and pulled up alongside Teela, underneath a floating mass equivalent to a medium-sized passenger starship.

Teela had found a wonder: a sunken swimming pool, bathtub-shaped and brightly lit. Its glass bottom and glass walls were open to the outer darkness, but for one wall which bordered on a bar, or a living room, or … it was hard to tell, looking through two thicknesses of transparency.

The pool was dry. In the bottom was a single great skeleton resembling that of a bandersnatch.

"They kept large pets," Louis speculated.

"Isn't that a Jinxian bandersnatch? My uncle was a hunter," said Teela. "He had his trophy room built inside a bandersnatch skeleton."

"There are bandersnatchi on a lot of worlds. They were Slaver food animals. I wouldn't be surprised to find them all through the galaxy. The question is, what made the Ringworlders bring them here?"

"Decoration," Teela said promptly.

"Are you kidding?" A bandersnatch looked like a cross between Moby Dick and a caterpillar tractor.

Still, Louis thought, why not? Why wouldn't the engineers have raided a dozen or a hundred stellar systems to populate their artificial world? By hypothesis, they had had ramscoop-fusion drives. By necessity every living thing on the Ringworld had been brought from somewhere else. Sunflowers. Bandersnatchi. What else?

Forget it. Go straight for the rim wall; don't try to explore. Already they had come far enough to circle the Earth half a dozen times. Finagle's law, how much there was to find!

Strange life. (Harmless, so far.)

Sunflowers. (Speaker flaming in a glare of light, yowling into the intercom.)

Floating cities. (Which fell disastrously.)

Bandersnatchi. (Intelligent and dangerous. They would be the same here. Bandersnatchi did not mutate.)

And death? Death was always the same, everywhere.

They circled the castle again, looking for openings. Windows there were, all shapes, rectangles and octagons and bubbles and thick panes in the floor; but all were closed. They found a dock for flying vehicles, with a great door built like a drawbridge to act as a landing ramp; but, like a drawbridge, the door was up and closed. They found a couple of hundred feet of spiral escalator hanging like a bedspring from the lowermost tip of the castle. Its bottom ended in open air. Some force had twisted it away, leaving sheared beam and broken treads. Its top was a locked door.

"To Finagle with this! I'm going to ram a window," said Teela.

"Stop!" Louis commanded. He believed she would do it. "Speaker, use the disintegrator. Get us in."

In the light streaming from the great picture window, Speaker unslung the Slaver digging tool.

Louis knew about the disintegrator. Objects within its variable width beam acquired, suddenly, a positive charge powerful enough to tear them apart. The puppeteers had added a second, parallel beam to suppress the charge on the proton. Louis had not used it to dig in the sunflower field, and he knew it would not be needed for this job.

He might have guessed that Speaker would use it anyway.

Two points a few inches apart on the great octagonal window acquired opposite charges, with a potential difference between.

The flash was blinding. Louis clenched his eyes over tears and pain. The crack of thunder was simultaneous, and deafening even through the sonic fold. In the stunned calm that followed, Louis felt gritty particles settled thickly over his neck and shoulders and the backs of his hands. He kept his eyes closed.

"You had to test it," he said.

"It works very well. It will serve us."

"Happy birthday. Don't point it at Daddy, because Daddy will be very angry."

"Do not be flippant, Louis."

His eyes had recovered. Louis found millions of glass slivers all over him and the 'cycle. Flying glass! The sonic fold must have stopped the particles, then released them to drift down over every horizontal surface.

Teela was already floating into the ballroom-sized cavity. They followed.

Louis woke gradually, feeling wonderful. He was lying on his arm, on a soft surface. His arm was asleep.

He rolled over and opened his eyes.

He was in a bed, looking up at a high white ceiling. An obstruction under his ribs turned out to be Teela's foot.

Right. Thhey had found the bed last night, a bed as big as a miniature golf course, in an enormous bedroom in what would have been the basement of a less unusual castle.

By then they had already found marvels.

The castle was a castle kideed, and not merely a posh hotel. A banquet hall with a picture window fifty feet tall was startling enough. But the tables circled a central, ring-shaped table on a raised dais. The ring surrounded a contoured, high-backed chair the size of a throne. Teela, experimenting, had found how to make the chair rise halfway to the ceiling, and how to activate a pickup to amplify the voice of the occupant into a thunder of commmd. The chair would turn; and when it turned, the sculpture above it turned too.

The sculpture was in stressed wire, very light, mostly empty space it had seemed an abstraction until Teela started it turning. Then it was obviously a portrait.

The sculpted head of an entirely hairless man.

Was he a native, from a community whose members shaved their faces and scalps? Or had he been a member of another race from far around the curve of the Ring?

They might never know. But the face was decidedly human: handsome, angular, the face of one used to command.

Louis looked up at the ceiling and remembered that face. Command had worn hues into that face, around the eyes and mouth, and the artist had somehow managed to include those lines into the wire framework.

This castle had been a seat of government. Everything pointed to it: the throne, the banquet hall, the unique windows, the floating castle itself with its independent power source. But for Louis Wu the clincher was that face.

Afterward they had wandered through the castle. They had found lavishly decorated, beautifully designed staircases everywhere. But they didn't move. There were no escalators, no elevators, no slidewalks, no dropshafts. Perhaps the stairs themselves had moved once.

So the party had wandered downward, because it was easier than climbing up. In the bottom of the castle they had found the bedroom.

Endless days of sleeping in flycycle seats, of making love wherever the fleet had happened to touch down, had made that bed irresistible to Teela and Louis Wu. They had left Speaker to continue his explorations alone.

By now there was no telling what he had found.

Louis raised himself on one elbow. The dead hand was coming back to life. He was careful not to jar it. Never happens with sleeping plates, he reflected, but what the tanj … a least it's a bed …

One glassy wall of the bedroom opened on a dry pool. Framed by glass walls and a glass floor, the white skeleton of a Frumious bandersnatch looked back at him with empty eyes set in a spoon-shaped skull.

The opposite wall, equally transparent, opened a thousand feet over the city.

Louis rolled over three times and dropped off the edge of the bed. The floor was soft, covered with a fur rug whose texture and color distintingly resembled a native's beard. Louis padded to the window and looked out.

(Something was interfering with his vision, like a minor flicker in a tridee screen. Consciously he had not even noticed it. Nonetheless it was annoying.)

Beneath a white and featureless sky, the city was all the colors of gray. Most of the buildings were tall, but a bare handful were tall enough to dwarf the rest; taller, a few of them, than the bottom of this floating castle. There had been other floating buildings. Lotus could see the scars, broad gaps in the cityscape, where thousands of tons of masonry had smashed down.

But this one dream-castle had had its own independent power supply. And a bedroom big enough to fit any decent-sized orgy. With a tremendous window-wall from which a sultan might contemplate his domain, might see his subjects as the ants they were.

"This place must have been conducive to hubris," said Louis Wu.

Something caught his eye. Something fluttering outside the window.

Thread. A length of it had hung up on a cornice; but more of it was still drifting down from the sky. Coarse thread. He could see the two strands trailing from the cornice down over the city. It must have been falling for as long as he had been looking out the window. Interfering with his vision.

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."