Ringworld

CHAPTER 9 — Shadow Squares

Blazing, the G2 sun dawned beyond the straight black rim of the ring. It was uncomfortably bright until Speaker touched a polarizer; and then Louis could look at the disc, and he found an edge of shadow cutting its arc. Shadow square.

"We must be careful," Nessus warned. "If we were to match velocities with the ring and hover above the inner surface, we would surely be attacked."

Speaker's answer came in a slurred rumble. The kzin must be tiring after so many hours behind the horseshoe of controls. "By what weapon would we be attacked? We have shown that the Ringworld engineers do not have so much as a working radio station."

"We cannot guess at the nature of their communications. Telepathy, perhaps, or resonant vibrations in the ring floor, or electrical impulses in metal wires. Similarly, we know nothing of their weaponry. Hovering over their surface, we would be a serious threat. They would use what weapons they have."

Louis nodded his agreement. He was not naturally cautious, and the Ringworld held him by the curiosity bump; but the puppeteer was right.

Hovering over the surface, the Liar would be a potential meteor. A big one. Moving at merely orbital speed, such a mass was a hellish danger; for one touch of atmosphere would send it shrieking down at several hundred miles per second. Moving at faster than orbital speed, holding a curved path with the drives, the ship would be a lesser but a surer threat; for if the drive were to fail, "centrifugal force" would hurl the ship outward/down at populated lands. The Ringworlders would not take meteors lightly. Not when a single puncture in the ring floor would drain all the world's breathing-air and spew it at the stars.

Speaker turned from the control board. It put him eye to eye with the puppeteer's flat heads. "Your orders, then."

"First you must slow the ship to orbital speed."

"Then?"

"Accelerate toward the sun. We can inspect the ring's habitable surface to some extent as it diminishes below us. Our major target shall be the shadow squares."

"Such caution is unnecessary and humiliating. We have no slightest interest in the shadow squares."

Tanj! Louis thought. Tired and hungry as he was, would he now be called on to play peacemaker for the aliens? It had been too long since any of them had eaten or slept. If Louis was tired, the kzin must be exhausted, spoiling for a fight.

The puppeteer was saying, "We have a definite interest in the shadow squares. Their area intercepts more sunlight than does the Ringworld itself. They would make ideal thermoelectric generators for the Ringworld's power supply."

The kzin snarled something venomous in the Hero's Tongue. His reply in Interworld seemed ludicrously mild. "You are unreasonable. We surely have no interest in the source of the Ringworld's power. Let us land, find a native, and ask him about his power sources."

"I refuse to consider landing."

"Do you question my skill at the controls?"

"Do you question my decisions as leader?"

"Since you broach the subject -"

"I still carry the tasp, Speaker. My word governs the disposal of the Long Shot and the second quantum hyperdrive, and I am still Hindmost aboard this ship. You will bear in mind -"

"Stop," said Louis. They looked at him.

"Your arguments are premature," said Louis. "Why not turn our telescopes on the shadow squares? That way you'll both have more facts to shout at each other. It's more fun that way."

Nessus faced himself, eye to eye. The kzin sheathed his claws.

"On a more pragmatic level," said Louis, "We're all bushed. Tired. Hungry. Who wants to fight on an empty stomach? I'm going to catch an hour under a sleep set. I suggest you do the same."

Teela was shocked. "You don't want to watch? Well be seeing the inner side!"

"You watch. Tell me what happens." He left.

He woke groggy and ravenous. Hunger pulled him from between sleeping plates, then kept him in the cabin long enough to dial a handmeal. Eating one-handed, he strolled out into the lounge.

"What's happening?"

Teela answered, rather coldly, across the top of a reading screen. "You missed everything. Slaver ships, Mist Demons, space dragons, cannibal starseeds, all attacking at once. Speaker had to fend them off with his bare hands. You'd have loved it."

"Nessus?"

The puppeteer answered from the control room. "Speaker and I have agreed to move on to the shadow squares. Speaker is alseep. We will be in clear space soon."

"Anything new?"

"Yes, considerable. Let me show you."

The puppeteer did things to the scope screen controls. He must have studied kzinti symbology, somewhere.

The view in the scope screen was like Earth seen from a great height. Mountains, lakes. valleys, rivers, large bare spots that might be desert.

"Desert?"

"So it would seem, Louis. Speaker took temperature and humidity spectra. Evidence accumulates that the Ringworld has reverted to savagery, at least in part. Why else would there be deserts?

"We found another deep salt ocean on the opposite side of the ring, as big as the one on this side. Spectra confirmed the salt. Clearly the engineers found it necessary to balance such tremendous masses of water."

Louis bit into his handmeal.

"Your suggestion was a good one," Nessus remarked. "You may be our most skilled diplomat, despite Speaker's training and mine. It was after we turned the scope on the shadow squares that Speaker agreed to a closer look."

"Oh? Why?"

"We found a peculiarity. The shadow squares are moving at a speed comfortably greater than orbital velocity." Louis stopped chewing.

"That is not impossible," the puppeteer added. "The shadow squares may hold matching stable elliptical orbits. They need not maintam a constant distance from the primary."

Louis swallowed mightily to clear the way for speech. "That's crazy. The length of the day would vary!"

Teela said, "We thought it might be to separate summer from winter, by making the nights shorter and then longer. But that doesn't make sense either."

"No, it doesn't. The shadow squares make their circuit in less than a month. Who needs a three-week year?"

"You see the problem," said Nessus. "The abnormality was too small to detect from our own system. What causes it? Does gravity increase anomalously near the primary, requiring a higher orbital speed? In any case, the shadow objects merit a closer look."

Passing time was marked by the sharp black edge of a shadow square passing across the sun.

Presently the kzin left his room, exchanged civilities with the humans in the lounge, and replaced Nessus in the control room.

Shortly thereafter he emerged. There was no sound to indicate trouble; but Louis suddenly saw that the puppeteer was backing away from a murderous kzinti glare. Speaker was ready to kill.

"Okay," Louis said resignedly. "What's the trouble?"

"This leaf-eater," the kzin began, and strangled on his anger. He started over. "Our schizophrenic leader-from-behind has had us in a minimum-fuel orbit since I went to rest. At this rate it will take us four months to reach the belt of shadow squarts." And Speaker began to curse in the Hero's Tongue.

"You put us in that orbit yourself," the puppeteer said mildly.

The kzin's voice rose in volume. "It was my intention to leave the Ringworld slowly, so that we might have a long look at the inner surface. We might then accelerate directly toward the shadow squares, arriving within hours instead of months!"

"There is no need to bellow, Speaker. If we accelerate toward the shadow squares, our projected orbit will intersect the Ringworld. I wish to avoid that."

"He can aim for the sun," said Teela.

They all turned to look at her.

"If the Ringworlders are afraid that we'll hit them," Teela explained patiently, "then they're probably projecting our course. If our projected course hits the sun, then we're not dangerous. See?"

"That would work," said Speaker.

The puppeteer shuddered. "You are the pilot. Do as you like, but do not forget -"

"I do not intend to fly us through the sun. In due time I will match our course to the shadow squares." And the kzin stomped back into the control room. It is not easy for a kzin to stomp.

Presently the ship turned parallel to the ring. There was little sense of anything happening; the kzin, following orders, was using thrusters only. Speaker killed the ship's orbital velocity, so that the ship was falling toward the sun; and then he swung the nose inward and began to increase velocity.

The Ringworld was a broad blue band marked with ripples and clots of blazing white cloud. It was receding visibly now. Speaker was in a hurry.

Louis dialed two bulbs of mocha and handed one to Teela.

He could understand the kzin's anger. The Ringworld terrified him. He was convinced he would have to land … and desperate to get it over with before he lost his nerve.

Presently Speaker returned to the lounge. "We will reach the shadow square orbit in fourteen hours. Nessus, we warriors of the Patriarchy are taught patience from childhood, but you leaf-eaters have the patience of a corpse."

"We're moving," said Louis, and half rose. For the ship's nose was swinging aside from the sun.

Nessus screamed and leapt the length of the lounge. He was in the air when the Liar lit up like the interior of a flashbulb. The ship lurched -

Discontinuity.

— The ship lurched despite the cabin gravity. Louis snatched at the back of a chair and caught it; Teela fell with incredible accuracy into her own crash couch; the puppeteer was folded into a ball as he struck a wall. All in an intense violet glare. The darkness lasted only an instant, to be replaced by glowing light the color of a UV tube.

It was coming from outside, from all around the hull.

Speaker must have finished aiming the Liar and turned it over to the autopilot. And then, thought Louis, the autopilot must have reviewed Speaker's course, decided that the sun was a meteoroid large enough to be dangerous, and taken steps to avoid it.

The cabin gravity was back to normal. Louis picked himself off the floor. He was unhurt. So, apparently, was Teela. She was standing along the wall, peering steraward through the violet light.

"Half my instrument board is dead," Speaker announced.

"So are half your instruments," said Teela. "The wing's gone."

"Excuse me?"

"The wing's gone."

So it was. So was everything that had been attached to the wing: thrusters, fusion plants, communication equipment pods, landing gear. The hull had been polished clean. Nothing was left of the Liar save what had been protected by the General Products hull.

"We have been fired upon," said Speaker. "We are still being fired upon, probably by X-ray lasers. This ship is now in a state of war. Accordingly I take command."

Nessus was not arguing. He was still curled in a ball. Louis knelt beside him and probed with his hands.

"Finagle knows I'm no doctor for aliens. I can't see that he's been hurt."

"He is merely frightened. He attempts to hide in his own belly. You and Teela will strap him down and leave him."

Louis was not surprised to find himself obeying orders. He was badly shaken. A moment ago this had been a spacecraft. Now it was little more than a glass needle falling toward the sun.

They lifted the puppeteer into the crash couch, his own, and tied him down with the crash web.

"We face no peaceful culture," said the kzin. "An X-ray laser is invariably a weapon of war. Were it not for our invulnerable hull we would be dead."

Louis said, "The Slaver stasis field must have gone on too. No telling how long we were in stasis."

"A few seconds," Teela corrected him. "That violet light has to be the fog of metal from our wing, fluorescing."

"Excited by the laser. Right. It's dissipating, I think." True enough, the glow was already less intense.

"Unfortunate that our automatics are so single-mindedly defensive. Trust a puppeteer to know nothing of attack weapons!" said Speaker. "Even our fusion motors were on the wing. And still the enemy fire on us! But they will learn what it means to attack a kzin."

"You're going to chase them down?"

Speaker did not recognize sarcasm. "I am."

"With what?" Louis exploded. "You know what they left us? A hyperdrive and a lifesystem, that's what they left us! We haven't got so much as a pair of attitude jets. You've got delusions of grandeur if you think we can fight a war in this!"

"So the enemy believes! Little do they know -"

"What enemy?"

"- that in challenging a kzin -"

"Automatics, you dolt! An enemy would have started shooting the moment we came in range!"

"I too have wondered at their unusual strategy."

"Automatics! X-ray lasers for blasting meteors. Programmed to shoot down anything that might hit the ring. The moment our projected freely falling orbit intercepted the ring, pow! Lasers."

"That … is possible." The kzin began closing panels over dead portions of the control board. "But I hope you are wrong."

"Sure. It'd help if you had someone to blame, wouldn't it?"

"It would help if our course did not intercept the ring." The kzin had closed off half the board. He continued to close panels as he talked. "Our velocity is high. It will take us out of the system, beyond the local discontinuity, to where we can use the hyperdrive to return to the puppeteer fleet. But first we must miss the ring."

Louis hadn't thought that far ahead. "You had to be in a hurry, didn't you?" he said bitterly.

"At least we will miss the sun. The automatics will not have fired until our projected course circled the sun."

"The lasers are still on," Teela reported. "I can see stars through the glow, but the glow is still there. That means were still aimed at the ring surface, doesn't it?"

"It does if the lasers are automatic."

"If we hit the ring, will we be killed?"

"Ask Nessus. His race built the Liar. See if you can get him to unroll."

The kzin snorted in disgust. By now he had closed off most of the control board. Only a pitiful few lights still glowed to show that part of the Liar lived on.

Teela Brown bent over the puppeteer, who was still curled into a ball behind the fragile netting of his crash web. Contrary to Louis's prediction, she had shown not the least sign of panic since the beginning of the laser attack. Now she slid her hands along the bases of the puppeteer's necks, scratching gently, as she had seen Louis do once before.

"You're being a silly coward," she rebuked the frightened puppeteer. "Come on and show your heads. Come on, look at me. You'll miss all the excitement!"

Twelve hours later, Nessus was still effectively in catatonia.

"When I try to coax him out, he only curls up tighter," Teela was near tears. They had retired to their room for dinner, but Teela couldn't eat anything. "I'm doing it wrong, Louis. I know it."

"You keep stressing excitement. Nessus isn't after excitement," Louis pointed out. "Forget it. He isn't hurting himself or us. When he's needed he'll uncurl, if only to protect himself. Meanwhile let him hide in his own belly."

Teela paced awkwardly, half-stumbling; she still hadn't completely adjusted to the difference between ship's gravity and Earth's gravity. She started to speak, changed her mind, changed it again, and blurted, "Are you scared?"

"Yeah."

"I thought so," she nodded, and resumed pacing. Presently she asked, "Why isn't Speaker scared?"

For the kzin had been nothing but active since the attack: cataloguing weaponry, doing primitive trig calculations to plot their course, occasionally delivering concise, reasonable orders in a manner to command instant obedience.

"I think Speaker's terrified. Remember how he acted when he saw the puppeteer worlds? He's terrified, but he won't let Nessus know it."

She shook her head. "I don't understand. I don't! Why is everyone frightened but me?"

Love and pity tore at Louis's insides with a pain so old, so nearly forgotten that it was almost now. I'm new here, and everyone knows but me! "Nessus was half right," he tried to explaim "You've never been hurt at all, have you? You're too lucky to be hurt. We're afraid of being hurt, but you don't understand, because it's never happened to you."

"That's crazy. I've never broken a bone or anything — but that's not a psi power!"

"No. Luck isn't psi. Luck is statistics, and you're a mathematical fluke. Out of forty-three billion hmnan beings in known space, it would have been surprising if Nessus hadn't found someone like you. Don't yon see what he did?

"He took the group of people who were descendants of winners of the Birthright Lotteries. He says there were thousands, but it's a good bet that if he hadn't found what he was after in those thousands, he would have started looking through the larger group of people with one or more ancestors born through the Lotteries. That gives him tens of millions of choices …"

"What was he after?"

"You. He took his several thousand people and started eliminating the unlucky ones. Here a man broke his finger when he was thirteen. This girl had personality problems. That one had acne. This man gets in fights and loses. That one won a fight, but lost the lawsuit. This guy flew model rockets until he burnt a thumbnail off. This girl loses constantly at roulette … You see? You're the girl who's always won. The toast never falls on the buttered side."

Teela was looking thougbtful. "It's a probability thing then. But, Louis, I don't always win at roulette."

"But you never lost enough to hurt you."

"No."

"That's what Nessus looked for."

"You're saying I'm some kind of freak."

"No, tanj it! I'm saying you're not. Nessus kept eliminating candidates who were unlucky, until he wound up with you. He thinks found some basic principle. All he's really found is the far end of a normal curve.

"Probability theory says you exist. It also says that the next time you flip a coin, your chances of losing are just as good as mine: fifty-fifty, because Lady Luck has no memory at all."

Teela dropped into a chair. "A fine good luck charm I turned out to be. Poor Nessus. I failed him."

"Serves him right."

The corners of her mouth twitched. "We could check it out."

"What?"

"Dial a piece of toast. Start flipping it."

The shadow square was blacker than black, of the expensively achieved, definitive black used in high school black-body experiments. One corner notched an acute angle into the blue broken line of the Ringworid. With that notch as a mark, a brain and eye could sketch in the rest of it, a narrow oblong of space-blackness, suspiciously void of stars. Already it cut off a good chunk of sky; and it was growing.

Louis wore bulbous goggles of a material that developed black spots under the impact of too much vertically impinging light. Polarization in the hull was no longer enough. Speaker, who was in the control room controlling whatever was left to control, also wore a pair. They had found two separate leases, each on a short strap, and managed to force them on Nessus.

To Louis's goggled eyes, the sun, twelve million miles distant, was a blurred rim of flame around a wide, solid black disc. Everything was hot to the touch. The breathing-air plant was a howling wind.

Teela opened her cabin door and hastily shut it again. Presently she reappeared wearing goggles. She joined Louis at the lounge table.

The shadow square was a looming absence. It was as if a wet cloth had swept across a blackboard, erasing a swath of chalk-mark stars.

The howl of the air plant made speech impossible.

How would it dump the heat, out here where the sun was a looming furnace? It couldn't, Louis decided. It must be storing the heat. Somewhere in the breathing-air circuit was a point as hot as a star, growing hotter by the second.

One more thing to worry about.

The black oblong continued to swell.

It was the size that made it seem to approach so slowly. The shadow square was as broad as the sun, nearly a million miles across, and much longer: two-and-a-half mdlion miles long. Almost suddenly, it became tremendous. Its edge slid across the sun, and there was darkness.

The shadow square covered half the universe. Its borders were indeftite, black-on-black, terrible to see.

Part of the ship glowed white behind the block of cabins. The air plant was radiating waste heat while it had the chance. Louis shrugged and turned back to watch the shadow square.

The scream of breathing-air stopped. It left a ringing in the ears.

"Well," Teela said awkwardly.

Speaker came out of the control room. "A pity the scope screen is no longer connected to anything. There are so many questions it could answer."

"Like what?" Louis half-shouted.

"Why are the shadow squares moving at more than orbital velocity? Are they indeed power generators for the engineers? What holds them face-down to the sun? All the questions the leaf-eater asked could be answered, if we had a working scope screen."

"Are we going to hit the sun?"

"Of course not. I told you that, Louis. We will be behind the shadow square for half an hour. Then, an hour later, we will pass between the next shadow square and the sun. If the cabin becomes too hot we can always activate the stasis field."

The ringing silence closed in. The shadow square was a featureless field of black, without boundaries. A human eye can draw no data from pure black.

Presently the sun came out. Again the cabin was filled with the howl of the air plant.

Louis searched the sky ahead until he found another shadow square. He was watching its approach when the lightning struck again.

It looked like lightning. It came like lightning, without warning. There was a moment of terrible light, white with a violet tinge. The ship lurched -

Discontinuity.

— lurched, and the light was gone. Louis reached under his goggles with two forefingers to rub dazzled eyes.

"What was that?" Teela exclaimed.

Louis's vision cleared slowly. He saw that Nessus had exposed a goggled head; that Speaker was at work in one of the lockers; that Teela was staring at him. No, at something behind him. He turned.

The sun was a wide black disc, smaller than it had been, outlined in yellow-white flame. It had shrun considerably during the moment in stasis. The moment must have lasted hours. The scream of the air plant had faded to an irritating whine.

Something else burned out there.

It was a looping thread of black, very narrow, outlined in violet-white. There seemed to be no endpoints. One end faded into the black patch that hid the sun. The other diminished ahead of the Liar, until it was too small to see.

The thread was writhing like an injured earthworm.

"We seem to have hit something," Nessus said calmly. It was as if he had never been away. "Speaker, you must go outside to investigate. Please don your suit."

"We are in a state of war," the kzin answered. "I command."

"Excellent. What will you do now?"

The kzin had sense enough to remain silent. He had nearly finished donning the multiple balloon and heavy backpack which served him as a pressure suit. Obviously he intended to go out for a look.

He went out on one of the flycycles: a dumbbell-shaped thruster-powered vehicle with an armchair seat in the constriction.

They watched him maneuver alongside the writhing thread of black. It had cooled considerably; for the fringe of brightness around the goggle-induced black had dimmed from violet-white through white-white to orange-white. They watched Speaker's dark bulk leave the flycycle and move about near the heated, writhing wire.

They could hear him breathing. Once they heard a startled snarling sound. But he never said a word into the suit phone. He was out there a fall half-hour, while the heated thing darkened to near-invisibility.

Presently he returned to the Liar. When he entered the lounge, he had their complete and respectful attention.

"It was no thicker than thread," said the kzin. "You will notice that I hold half a grippy."

He held up the ruined tool for them to see. The grippy had been cut cleanly along a plane surface, and the cut surface polished to mirror brightness.

"When I was close enough to see how thin the thread was, I swung the grippy at it. The thread cut cleanly through the steel. I felt only the slightest of togs."

Louis said, "A variable-sword would do that."

"But a variable-sword blade is a metal wire enclosed in a Slaver stasis field. It cannot bend. This- thread was in constant motion, as you saw."

"Something new, then." Something that cut like a variable-sword. Light, thin, strong, beyond human skill. Something that stayed solid at temperatures where a natural substance would become a plasma. "Something really new. But what was it doing in our way?"

"Consider. We were passing between shadow squares when we hit something unidentified. Subsequently we found a seemingly infinite length of thread, at a temperature comparable to the interior of a hot star. Obviously we hit the thread. It retained the heat of impact. I surmise that it was strung between the shadow squares."

"Probably was. But why?"

"We can only speculate. Consoder," said Speaker-To-Animals. "The Ringworld engineers used the shadow squares to provide intervals of night. To fulfill their purpose, the rectangles must occlude. sunlight They would fail if they drifted edge-on to the sun.

"The Ringworld engineers used their strange thread to join the rectangles together in a chain. They spun the chain at faster than orbital speed in order to put tension on the threads. The threads are taut, the rectangles are held flat to the ring."

It made an odd picture. Twenty shadow squares in a Maypole dance, their edges joined by threads cut to lengths of five million miles … "We need that thread," said Louis. "There's no limit to what we could do with it."

"I had no way to bring it aboard. Or to cut a length of it, for that matter."

The Puppeteer interposed. "Our course may have been changed by the collision. Is there any way to determine if we will miss the Ringworld?"

Nobody could think of one.

"We may miss the ring, yet the collision may have taken too much of our momentum. We may fall forever in an elliptical orbit," lamented the puppeteer. "Teela, your luck has played us false."

She shrugged. "I never told you I was a good luck charm."

"It was the Hindmost who so misinformed me. Were he here now, I would have rude words for my arrogant fianc®"

Dinner that night became a ritual. The crew of the Liar took a last supper in the lounge. Teela Brown was hurtingly beautiful across the table, in a flowing, floating black-and-tangerine garment that couldn't have weighed as much as an ounce.

Behind her shoulder, the Ringworld was slowly swelling. Occasionally Teela turned to watch it. They all did. But where Louis had to guess at the feelings of the aliens, in Teela he saw only eagerness. She felt it, as he did: they would not miss the Ringworld.

In his lovemaking that night there was a ferocity that startled, then delighted her. "So that's what fear does to you! I'll have to remember."

He could not smile back. "I keep thinking that this could be the last time." With anyone, he added, to himself.

"Oh, Louis. Were in a General Products hull!"

"Suppose the stasis field doesn't go on? The hull might survive the impact, but we'd be jelly."

"For Finagle's sake, stop worrying!" She ran her fingernails across his back, reaching around from both sides. He pulled her close, so that she couldn't see his face …

When she was deeply asleep, floating like a lovely dream between the sleeping plates, he left her. Exhausted, satiated, he lolled in a hot bathtub with a bulb of cold bourbon balanced on the rim.

There had been pleasures to sample one more time.

Baby blue with white streaks, navy blue with no details, the Ringworld spread across the sky. At first only the cloud cover showed detail: storms, parallel streamers, woolly fleece, all diminutive. Growing. Then outlines of seas … the Ringworld was approximately half water …

Nessus was in his couch, strapped down, curled protectively around himself. Speaker and Teela and Louis Wu, strapped down and watching.

"Better watch this," Louis advised the puppeteer. "Topography could be important later."

Nessus obliged: one flat python head emerged to watch the impending landscape.

Oceans, bent lightning-forks of river, a string of mountains.

No sign of life below. You'd have to be less than a thousand miles up to see signs of civilization. The Ringworld went past, snatching detail away almost before it could be recognized. Detail wasn't going to matter, it was being pulled from beneath them. They would strike unknown, unseen territory.

Estimated intrinsic velocity of ship: two hundred miles per second. Easily enough to carry them safely out of the system, had not the Ringworld intervened.

The land rose up and sidewise, 770 miles per second sidewise. Slantwise, a salamander-shaped sea came at them, growing, underneath, gone. Suddenly the landscape blazed violet!

Discontinuity.