Ringworld

CHAPTER 21 — The Girl From Beyond The Edge

Her name was Halrloprillalar Hotrufan. She had been riding the ramship … Pioneer, Nessus called it after slight hesitation … for two hundred years.

The Pioneer ran a twenty-four-year cycle that covered four suns and their systems: five oxygen-atmosphere worlds and the Ringworld. The "year" used was a traditional measurement which had nothing to do with the Ringworld. It may have matched the solar orbit for one of the abandoned worlds.

Two of the Pioneer's five worlds had been thick with humanity before the Ringworld was built. Now they were abandoned like the others, covered with random vegetation and the debris of crumbling cities.

Halrloprillalar had run the cycle eight times. She knew that on these worlds grew plants or animals which had not adapted to the Ringworld because of the lack of a winter-summer cycle. Some plants were spices. Some animals were meat. Otherwise — Halrloprillalar neither knew nor cared.

Her job had nothing to do with cargos.

"Nor was she concerned with propulsion or life support. I was unable to learn just what she did," said Nessus. "The Pioneer carried a crew of thirty-six. Doubtless some were superfluous. Certainly she could have done nothing complex nor crucial to the well-being of ship or crew. She is not very intelligent, Louis."

"Did you think to ask about the ratio of sexes aboard ship? How many of the thirty-six were women?"

"She told me that. Three."

"You might as well forget about her profession."

Two hundred years of travel, security, adventure. Then at the end of Halrloprillalar's eighth run, the Ringworld refused to answer the Pioneer's call.

The electromagnetic cannon didn't work.

As far as telescopes could determine, there was no sign of activity at any spaceport.

The five worlds of the Pioneer's circuit were not equipped with electromagnetic cannons for braking. Therefore the Pioneer carried braking fuel, condensed en route from interstellar hydrogen. The ship could land … but where?

Not on the Ringworld. The meteor defenses would blow them apart.

They had not received permission to land on the spaceport ledge. And something was wrong there.

Back to one of the abandoned home worlds? In effect they would be starting a new colony world, with thirty-three men and three women.

"They were hidebound prisoners of routine, ill-equipped to make such a decision. They panicked," said Nessus. "They mutinied. The Pioneer's pilot managed to lock himself in the control room long enough to land the Pioneer on the spaceport ledge. They murdered him for it, for risking the ship and their lives, says Halrloprillalar. I wonder if they did not in truth murder him for breaking tradition, for landing by rocket and without formal permission."

Louis felt eyes on him. He looked up.

The spacer-girl was still watching them. And Nessus was looking back at her with one head, the left.

So that one held the tasp. And that was why Nessus had been looking steadily upward. She wouldn't let Nessus out of her sight, and he dared not let her off the tasp's lovely hook.

"After the killing of the pilot, they left the ship," said Nessus. "Then it was that they learned how badly the pilot had hurt them. The cziltang brone was inert, broken.

They were stranded on the wrong side of a wall a thousand miles high.

"I do not know the equivalent of cziltang brone in Interworld or the Hero's Tongue. I can only tell you what it does. What it does is crucial to us all."

"Go ahead," said Louis Wu.

The Ringworld engineers had designed fail-safe. In many ways it seemed that they had anticipated the fall of civilization, had planned for it, as if cycles of culture and barbarism were man's natural lot. The complex structure that was the Ringworld would not fail for lack of tending. The descendants of the Engineers might forget how to tend airlocks and electromagnetic cannon, how to move worlds and build flying cars; civilization might end, but the Ringworld would not.

The meteor defenses, for instance, were so utterly failsafe that Halrloprillalar -

"Call her Prill," Louis suggested.

— that Prill and her crew never considered that they might not be working.

But what of the spaceport? How fail-safe would it be, if some idiot left both doors of the airlock open?

There weren't any airlocks! Instead, there was the cziltang brone. This machine projected a field which caused the structure of the Ringworld floor, and hence of the rim wall, to become permeable to matter. There was some resistance. While the cziltang brone was going -

"Osmosis generator," Louis suggested.

"Perhaps. I suspect that brone is a modifier, possibly obscene."

— air would leak through, but slowly, while the osmosis generator was going. Men could push through in pressure suits, moving as against a steady wind. Machines and large masses could be drawn through by tractors.

"What of pressurized breathing-air?" Speaker asked.

But they made that outside, with the transmutors!

Yes, there was cheap transmutation on the Ringworld. It was cheap only in great quantity, and there were other limits. The machine itself was gigantic. It would make just one element into just one other element. The spaceport's two transmutors would turn lead into nitrogen and oxygen; lead was easy to store and easy to move through the rim wall.

The osmosis generators were a fail-safe device. When and airlock fails, a veritable hurricane of breathing-air can be lost. But if the cziltang brone broke down, the worst that could happen would be that the airlock would be closed to space — and incidentally to returning spacemen.

"Also to us," said Speaker.

Louis said, "Not so fast. It sounds like the osmosis generator is just what we need to get home. We wouldn't have to move the Luir at all. Just point the cziltang brone -" He pronounced it as if it started with a sneeze — "at the Ring floor under the Liar. The Liar would sink through the Ring floor like quicksand. Down, and out the other side."

"To be trapped in the foamed plastic meteor buffer," the kzin retorted. Then, "Correction. The Slaver weapon might serve us there."

"Quite so. Unfortunately," said Nessus, "there is no cziltang brone available to us."

"She's here. She got through somehow!"

"Yes …"

The magnetohydrodynamicists virtually had to learn a new profession before they could begin to rebuild the cziltang brone. It took them several years. The machine had failed in action: it was partly twisted and partly melted. They had to make new parts; recalibrate; use elements they knew would fail, but maybe they'd hold long enough …

There was an accident during that time. An osmosis beam, modified by bad calibration, went through the Pioneer. Two crewmen died waist-deep in a metal floor, and seventeen others suffered permanent brain damage in addition to other injuries when certain permeable membranes became too permeable.

But they got through, the remaining sixteen. They took the idiots with them. They also took the cziltang brone, in case the new Ringworld turned out to be inhospitable.

They found savagery, nothing but savagery.

Years later, some of them tried to go back.

The cziltang brone failed in action, trapping four of them in the rim wall. And that was that. By then they knew that there would be no new parts available anywhere on the Ringworld.

"I don't understand how barbarism could come so fast," said Louis. "You said the Pioneer ran a twenty-four year cycle?"

"Twenty-four years in ship's time, Louis."

"Oh. That does make a difference."

"Yes. To a ship traveling at one Ringworld gravity of thrust, stars tend to be three to six years apart. The actual distances were large. Prill speaks of an abandoned region two hundred light years closer to the mean galactic plane, where three suns clustered within ten light years of each other."

"Two hundred light years … near human space, do you think?"

"Perhaps in human space. Oxygen-atmosphere planets do not in general tend to cluster as closely as they do in the vicinity of Sol. Halrloprillalar speaks of long-term terraforming techniques applied to these worlds, many centuries before the building of the Ringworld. These techniques took too long. They were abandoned halfway by the impatient humans."

"That would explain a lot. Except … no, never mind."

"Primates, Louis? There is evidence enough that your species evolved on Earth. But Earth might have been a convenient base for a terraforming project aimed at worlds in nearby systems. The engineers might have brought pets and servants."

"Like apes and monkeys and Neanderthals …" Louis made a chopping gesture. "It's just speculation. It's not something we need to know."

"Granted." The puppeteer munched a vegetable brick while he talked. "The loop followed by the Pioneer was more than three hundred light years long. There was time for extensive change during a voyage, though such change was rare. Prill's society was a stable one."

"Why was she so sure that the whole Ringworld had gone barbarian? How much exploring did they do?"

"Very little, but enough. Prill was right. There will be no repairs for the cziltang brone. The entire Ringworld must be barbarous by now."

"How?"

"Prill tried to explain to me what happened here, as one of her crew explained it to her. He had oversimplified, of course. It may be that the process started years before the Pioneer departed on its last circuit …"

There had been ten inhabited worlds. When the Ringworld was finished, all of these had been abandoned, left to go their way without the benefit of man.

Consider such a world:

The land is covered with cities in all stages of development. Perhaps slums were made obsolete, but somewhere there are still slums, if only preserved for history. Across the land one can find all the by-products of living: used containers, broken machines, damaged books or film tapes or scrolls, anything that cannot be reused or reprocessed at a profit, and many things which could be. The was have been used as garbage dumps for a hundred thousand years. Somewhere in that time, they were dumping useless radioactive end products of fission.

How strange is it if the sea life evolves to fit the new conditions?

How strange, if new life evolves capable of living on the garbage?

"That happened on Earth once," said Louis Wu. "A yeast that could eat polyethyline. It was eating the plastic bags off the supermarket shelves. It's dead now. We had to give up polyethyline."

Consider ten such worlds.

Bacteria evolved to eat zinc compounds, plastics, paints, wiring insulation, fresh rubbish, and rubbish thousands of years obsolete. It would not have mattered but for the ramships.

The ramships came routinely to the old worlds, seeking forms of life that had been forgotten or that had not adapted to the Ringworld. They brought back other things: souvenirs, objets d'art which had been forgotten or merely postponed. Many museums were still being transferred, one incredibly valuable piece at a time.

One of the ramships brought back a mold capable of breaking down the structure of a room-temperature superconductor much used in sophisticated machinery.

The mold worked slowly. It was young and primitive and, in the beginning, easily killed. Variations may have been brought to the Ringworld several times by several ships, until one variation finally took hold.

Because it did work slowly, it did not ruin the ramship, until long after the ramship had landed. It did not destroy the spaceport's cziltang brone until crewmen and spaceport workmen had carried it inside. It did not get into the power beam receivers until the shuttles that traveled through the electromagnetic cannon on the rim wall had carried it everywhere on the Ringworld.

"Power beam receivers?"

"Power is generated on the shadow squares by thermoelectricity, then beamed to the Ringworld. Presumably the beam, too, is fail-safe. We did not detect it coming in. It must have shut itself down when the receivers failed."

"Surely," said Speaker, "one could make a different superconductor. We know of two basic molecular structures, each with many variations for different temperature ranges."

"There are at least four basic structures," Nessus corrected him. "You are quite right, the Ringworld should have survived the Fall of the Cities. A younger, more vigorous society would have. But consider the difficulties they faced.

"Much of their leadership was dead, killed in falling buildings when the power failed.

"Without power they could do little experimenting to find other superconductors. Stored power was generally confiscated for the personal use of men with political power, or was used to run enclaves of civilization in the hope that someone else was doing something about the emergency. The fusion drives of the ramships were unavailable, as the cziltang brones used superconductors. Men who might have accomplished something could not meet; the computer that ran the electromagnetic cannon was dead, and the cannon itself had no power."

Louis said, "For want of a nail, the kingdom fell."

"I know the story. It is not strictly applicable," said Nessus. "Something could have been done. There was power to condense liquid helium. With the power beams off, the repair of a power receiver would have been useless; but a cziltang brone could have been adapted to a metal superconductor cooled by liquid helium. A cziltang brone would have given access to spaceports. Ships might have flown to the shadow squares, reopened the power beams so that other liquid-helium-cooled superconductors could be adapted to the power beam receivers.

"But all this would have required stored power. The power was used to light street lamps, or to support the remaining floating buildings, or to cook meals and freeze foods! And so the Ringworld fell."

"And so did we," said Louis Wu.

"Yes. We were lucky to run across Halrloprillalar. She has saved us a needless journey. There is no longer any need to continue toward the rim wall."

Louis's head throbbed once, hard. He was going to have a headache.

"Lucky," said Speaker-To-Animals. "Indeed. If this is luck, why am I not joyful? We have lost our goal, our last meager hope of escape. Our vehicles are ruined. One of our party is missing in this maze of city."

"Dead," said Louis. When they looked at him without comprehension, he pointed into the dusk. Teela's flycycle was obvious enough, marked by one of four sets of headlamps.

He said, "We'll have to make our own luck from now on."

"Yes. You will remember, Louis, that Teela's luck is sporadic. It had to be. Else she would not have been aboard the Liar. Else we would not have crashed." The puppeteer paused, then added, "My sympathies, Louis."

"She will be missed," Speaker rumbled.

Louis nodded. It seemed he should be feeling more. But the incident in the Eye storm had somehow altered his feelings for Teela. She had seemed, for that time, less human than Speaker or Nessus. She was myth. The aliens were real.

"We must find a new goal," said Speaker-To-Animals. "We need a way to take the Liar back to space. I confess I have no ideas at all."

"I do," Louis said.

Speaker seemed startled. "Already?"

"I want to think about it some more. I'm not sure it's even sane, let alone workable. In any case, we're going to need a vehicle. Let's think about that."

"A sled, perhaps. We can use the remaining flycycle to tow it. A big sled, perhaps the wall of a building."

"We can better that. I am convinced that I can persuade Halrloprillalar to guide me through the machinery that lifts this building. We may find that the building itself can become our vehicle."

"Try that," said Louis.

"And you?"

"Give me time."

The core of the building was all machinery. Some was lifting machinery; some ran the air conditioning and the water condensers and the water-taps; and one insulated section was part of the electromagnetic trap generators. Nessus worked. Louis and Prill stood by, awkwardly ignoring one another.

Speaker was still in prison. Prill had refused to let him up.

"She is afraid of you," Nessus had said. "We could press the point, no doubt. We could put you aboard one of the flycycles. If I refused to board until you were on the platform, she would have to lift you."

"She might lift me halfway to the ceiling, then drop me. No."

But she had taken Louis.

He studied her while pretending to ignore her. Her mouth was narrow, virtually lipless. Her nose was small and straight and narrow. She had no eyebrows.

Small wonder if she seemed to have no expression. Her face seemed little more than markings on a wigmaker's dummy.

After two hours of work, Nessus pulled his heads out of an access panel. "I cannot give us motive power. The lift fields will do no more than lift us. But I have freed a correcting mechanism designed to keep us over one spot. The building is now at the mercy of the winds."

Louis grinned. "Or a tow. Tie a line to your flycycle and pull the building behind you."

"There is no need. The flycycle uses a reactionless thruster. We can keep it within the building."

"You thought of it first, hmm? But that thruster's awfully powerful. If the 'cycle tore itself loose in here -"

"Yesss -" The puppeteer turned to Prill and spoke slowly and at length in the language of the Ringworld gods. Presently he said to Louis, "There is a supply of electrosetting plastic. We can embed the flycycle in plastic, leaving only the controls exposed."

"Isn't that a little drastic?"

"Louis, if the flycycle tore itself loose, I could be hurt."

"Well … maybe. Can you land the building when you need to?"

"Yes, I have altitude control."

"Then we don't need a scout vehicle. Okay, we'll do it."

Louis was resting, not sleeping. He lay on his back on the big oval bed. His eyes were open, staring through the bubble window in the ceiling.

A glow of solar corona showed over the edge of the shadow square. Dawn was not far off ; but still the Arch was blue and bright in a black sky.

"I must be out of my mind," said Louis Wu.

And, "What else can we do?"

The bedroom had probably been part of the governor's suite. Now it was a control room. He and Nessus had mounted the flycycle in the walk-in closet, poured plastic over and around it, then — with Prill's help — run a current through the plastic. The closet had been just the right size.

The bed smelled of age. It crinkled when he moved.

"Fist-of-God," Louis Wu said into the dark. "I saw it. A thousand miles high. It doesn't make sense they'd build a mountain that high, not when …" He let it trail off.

And suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, shouting, "Shadow square wire!"

A shadow entered the bedroom.

Louis froze. The entrance was dark. Yet, by its fluid motion and by the distribution of subtle shadings of curvature, a naked woman was walking toward him.

Hallucination? The ghost of Teela Brown? She had reached him before he could decide. Totally self-confident, she sat beside him on the bed. She reached out and touched his face and ran her fingertips down his cheek.

She was nearly bald. Though her hair was dark and long and full-bodied, so that it bobbed as she walked, it was only an inch-wide fringe growing from the base of her skull. In the dark the features of her face virtually disappeared. But her body was lovely. He was seeing the shape of her for the first time. She was slim, muscled with wire like a professional dancer. Her breasts were high and heavy.

If her face had matched her figure …

"Go away," Louis said, not roughly. He took her wrist, interrupted what her fingertips were doing to his face. It had felt like a barber's facial massage, definitely relaxing. He stood up, pulled her gently to her feet, took her by the shoulders. If he simply turned her around and patted her on the rump-?

She ran her fingertips along the side of his neck. Now she was using both hands. She touched him on the chest, and here, and there, and suddenly Louis Wu was blind with lust. His hands closed like clamps on her shoulders.

She dropped her hands. She waited without trying to help as he peeled out of his falling jumper. But as he exposed more skin, she stroked him here, and there, not always where nerves clustered. Each time it was as if she had touched him in the pleasure center of his brain.

He was on fire. If she pushed him away now, he would use force; he must have her -

— But some cool part of him knew that she could chill him as quickly as she had aroused him. He felt like a young satyr, yet he dimly sensed that he was also a puppet.

For the moment he couldn't have cared less.

And still Prill's face showed no expression.

She took him to the verge of orgasm, then held him there, held him there … so that when the moment came it was like being struck by lightning. But the lightning went on and on, a flaming discharge of ecstacy.

When it ended he was barely aware that she was leaving. She must know how thoroughly she had used him up. He was asleep before she reached the door.

And he woke thinking: Why did she do that?

Too tanj analytical, he answered himself. She's lonely. She must have been here a long time. She's mastered a skill, and she hasn't had a chance to practice that skill …

Skill. She must know more anatomy than most professors. A doctorate in Prostitution? There was more to the oldest profession than met the eye. Louis Wu could recognize expertise in any field. This woman had it.

Touch these nerves in the correct order, and the subject will react thus-and-so. The right knowledge can turn a man into a puppet …

… puppet to Teela's luck …

He almost had it then. He came close enough that the answer, when it finally came, was no surprise.

Nessus and Halrloprillalar came backward out of the freezer room. They were followed by the dressed carcass of a flightless bird bigger than a man. Nessus had used a cloth for padding, so that his mouth need not touch the dead meat of the ankle.

Louis took the puppeteer's burden. He and Prill pulled in tandem. He found that he needed both hands, as did she. He answered her nod of greeting and asked, "How old is she?"

Nessus did not show surprise at the question. "I do not know."

"She came to my room last night." That would not do; it would mean nothing to an alien. "You know that the thing we do to reproduce, we also do for recreation?"

"I knew that."

"We did that. She's good at it. She's so good at it that she must have had about a thousand years of practice," said Louis Wu.

"It is not impossible. Prill's civilization had a compound superior to boosterspice in its ability to sustain life. Today the compound is worth whatever the owner cares to ask. One charge is equivalent to some fifty years of youth."

"Do you happen to know how many charges she's taken?"

"No, Louis. But I know that she walked here."

They had reached the stairway leading down to the conical cell block. The bird trailed behind them, bouncing.

"Walked here from where?"

"From the rim wall."

"Two hundred thousand miles?"

"Nearly that."

"Tell me all of it. What happened to them after they reached the right side of the rim wall?"

"I will ask. I do not know it all." And the puppeteer began to question Prill. In bits and pieces the story emerged:

They were taken for gods by the first group of savages they met, and by everyone thereafter, with one general exception.

Godhood solved one problem neatly. The crewmen whose brains had been damaged by backlash from the half-repaired cziltang brone were left to the care of various villages. As resident gods they would be well treated; and as idiots they would be relatively harmless as gods.

The remainder of the Pioneer's crew split up. Nine, including Prill, went to antispinward. Prill's home city was in that direction. Both groups planned to travel along the rim wall, looking for civilization. Both parties swore to send help if they found any.

They were taken for gods by all but the other gods. The Fall of the Cities had left a few survivors. Some were mad. All took the life-extending compound if they could get it. All were looking for enclaves of civilization. None had thought to build his own.

As the Pioneer's crew moved to antispinward, other survivors joined them. They became a respectable pantheon.

In every city they found the shattered towers. These towers had been set floating after the settling of the Ringworld, but thousands of years before the perfection of the youth drug. The youth drug had made later generations cautious. For the most part those who could afford it simply stayed away from the floaters, unless they were elected officials. Then they would install safety devices, or power generators.

A few of the floaters still floated. But most had smashed down into the centers of cities, all in the same instant, when the last power receiver flared and died.

Once the traveling pantheon found a partially recivilized city, inhabited only on the outskirts. The God Gambit would not serve them here. They traded a fortune in the youth drug for a working, self-powered bus.

It did not happen again until much later. By then they had come too far. The spirit had gone out of them, and the bus had broken down. In a half-smashed city, among other survivors of the Fall of the Cities, most of the pantheon simply stopped moving.

But Prill had a map. The city of her birth was directly to starboard. She persuaded a man to join her, and they started walking.

They traded on their godhoods. Eventually they tired of one another, and Prill went on alone. Where her godhood was not enough, she traded small quantities of the youth drug, if she had to. Otherwise -

"There was another way in which she could maintain power over people. She has tried to explain it to me, but I do not understand."

"I think I do," said Louis. "She could get away with it, too. She's got her own equivalent of a tasp."

She must have been quite mad by the time she reached her home city. She took up residence in the grounded police station. She spent hundreds of hours learning how to work the machinery. One of the first things she accomplished was to get it airborne; for the self-powered tower had been landed as a safety precaution after the Fall of the Cities. Subsequently she must have come close enough to dropping the tower and killing herself.

"There was a system for trapping drivers who broke the traffic laws," Nessus finished. "She turned it on. She hopes to capture someone like herself, a survivor from the Fall of the Cities. She reasons that if he is flying a car, he must be civilized."

"Then why does she want him trapped and helpless in that sea of rusted metal?"

"Just in case, Louis. It is a mark of her returning sanity."

Louis frowned into the cell block below. They had lowered the bird's carcass on a ruined metal car, and Speaker had taken possession. "We can lighten this building," said Louis. "We can cut the weight almost in half."

"How?"

"Cut away the basement. But we'll have to get Speaker out of there. Can you persuade Prill?"

"I can try."