Niven, Larry - Ringworld 4 - Ringworld's Children

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Ringworld's Children
Larry Niven
This is for the firemen of California and neighboring states who fought the fires of October 2003, with
particular thanks to those who saved our house and others in Indian Falls, Chatsworth, Los Angeles
County.
PREFACE
The Ringworld is about the same mass as Jupiter. Its shape is that of a ribbon a million miles across and
six hundred million miles long, which makes it a bit larger than the Earth's orbit, and a few miles thick. It
circles a yellow dwarf star. Its spin, at 770 miles/second, is enough to give it about Earth's gravity of
centrifugal force. Walls along both rims, standing a thousand miles high, are enough to hold an
atmosphere for millions of years.
Much else derives from these basic assumptions.
The inner surface is a habitat three million times the area of planet Earth. The topography is literally a
work of art, carved in by whoever built the thing, so that from underneath the Ringworld resembles the
back of a mask.
An inner ring of shadow squares block the sun, giving periods of night; else it would always be noon. A
system of pipes leads from the bottoms of oceans, under the Ringworld floor, up the back of the rim wall
and over the edge, to recycle seabottom ooze (or flup) into spill mountains. Huge attitude jets stand atop
the rim wall, Bussard ramjets using the solar wind of protons for their fuel, to hold the Ringworld against
its inherent instability. There are spaceport ledges outside the walls. Two vast salt oceans serve as
preserves for seagoing life, and as something more: maps of several worlds at one-to-one scale. The
Ringworld floor is of unnaturally strong material, dubbed scrith, with other unusual properties.
The sun itself is involved in the Ringworld's meteor defense. A superconducting network embedded in the
Ringworld floor generates a superthermal laser effect in a solar flare. The drawback: it can't fire through
the Ringworld itself. Thus any meteorite that strikes the Ringworld, such as the one that made Fist-of-God
Mountain, generally rams upward from underneath.
Some details become clues to the nature of the Builders.
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The plethora of harbors and fjords, plus the shallow oceans (most of them), suggest a race that uses only
the top of an ocean.
The nastier life forms--mosquitoes, flies, jackals, sharks, vampire bats--don't exist. Hominids have moved
into some of those ecological slots. The Engineers weren't ecologists, they were gardeners.
The inhabitants are hominids in bewildering variety, some intelligent, some not. They fill ecological
niches which on Earth are held by almost any mammal, but particularly the nastier life forms, jackals and
wolves and vampire bats ... as if mankind's ancestor, Homo habilis, had been protected until they
numbered hundreds of billions, then abandoned to mutate endlessly.
You don't know the Ringworld until you've grasped its size.
After the book came out, a friend was going to build a scale model for an upcoming convention. He had a
marble, a blue immy, to serve as the Earth, for scale. Turns out he'd need a ribbon five feet tall and half a
mile long. The hotel wasn't big enough.
One guy who tried to map the Ringworld told me he ran out of computer space very rapidly. He ran into
too many powers of ten.
David Gerrold speaks of a class of novel called "the Enormous Big Thing." Today you could fill a fair-
sized shelf with them. Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and Bob Shaw's Orbitsville are in that
class, and so is my own Rainbow Mars.
But Ringworld came first, published in 1970.
It might have been laughed at. Too big, too improbable. Any normal structural material would be torn
apart by its spin. I waited for the reviews in some fear.
James Blish wrote that he thought it would win the Hugo Award, but it shouldn't.
The readers gave it a Hugo Award anyway.
The writers gave it a Nebula.
I didn't have a sequel planned. I was not expecting a flood of redesigns.
During one of my speeches, a man pointed out that the Ring-world's mathematics are simple: it's a
suspension bridge with no endpoints.
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An academic in England pointed out that the tensile strength of the Ringworld frame must be
approximately the force that holds an atomic nucleus together. (Hence, scrith.)
A grade school class in Florida spent a semester on the Ringworld. Their conclusion: the worst problem is
that, without tectonic activity, all the topsoil would flow into the oceans in a few thousand years. (Hence,
flup and the spillpipes.)
At the 1970 World Science Fiction Convention there were MIT students in the halls chanting, "The
Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!" (Did the best that I was able... hence, attitude jets.)
Somebody decided that the shadow squares shed too much twilight. What's needed is five long shadow
squares orbiting retrograde.
Ultimately there was too much opportunity for redesign. I had to write The Ringworld Engineers.
All of these readers had found something worth knowing. The Ringworld is a great, gaudy, intellectual
toy, a playground with the gates left wide open.
Some readers just read a book and stop.
Others play with the characters, or the assumptions, or the environment. They make up their own
homework. We readers have been doing that for unguessable thousands of years: demanding more data on
Atlantis from Plato, inventing Purgatory to put between Hell and Heaven, redesigning Dante's Inferno,
writing new Odysseys. An amazing subculture has sprung up around Star Trek.
The Internet opens a whole new metaplayground for such people. A number of Web sites have sprung up
(well, at least two) whose topic is Larry Niven's fiction.
In September 1999, tipped off by my lovely agent, Eleanor Wood, I logged onto larryniven-
1@bucknell.edu. They were arguing about whether you can clone a protector, and whether Seeker and
Teela Brown might have left a child behind. If they'd been right I wouldn't have seen a story, but they
were off on the wrong foot, and I could fix it. After a few months of following these discussions, rarely
interrupting, I had enough material for Ringworld's Children.
This is a playground for the mind. It's a puzzle too, a maze. Question every turn or you'll get lost. When
you've finished the book, remember not to lock the gate.
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"All this was indispensably necessary," replied the one-eyed doctor, "for private misfortunes are public
benefits, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the greater is the general good."
--Pangloss, in Candide, by Voltaire
RINGWORLD PARAMETERS
30 hours = one Ringworld day
1 Ringworld rotation = 7½ days
75 days = 10 turns = 1 falan
Mass = 2 x l0exp30 grams
Radius = .95 x l0exp8 miles
Circumference = 6 x l0exp8 miles
Width = .997 x l0exp6 miles
Surface area = 6 x l0exp14 square miles = 3 million times the surface area of the Earth
Surface gravity = .992 G (spin)
Spin velocity = 770 miles/second
Rim walls rise inward, 1000 miles.
Star: G3 verging on G2, barely smaller and cooler than Sol
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Recent arrivals
Louis Wu: Earth born. First and second Ringworld expeditions.
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Teela Brown: Earth born, of a line bred for luck by Pierson's puppeteer manipulation. Turned protector in
The Ringworld Engineers, and now deceased. First Ringworld expedition.
Nessus: Pierson's puppeteer, the Hindmost's partner and mate. Led the first Ringworld expedition.
The Hindmost: Pierson's puppeteer, once Chief-in-Command of his species. Led the second Ringworld
expedition.
Chmeee, once Speaker-to-Animals: Kzin. First and second Ringworld expeditions.
Roxanny Gauthier: Earth born, Detective-One in the ARM. Served aboard Snail Darter and Gray Nurse.
Oliver Forrestier: Wunderland born, Detective, ARM. Served aboard Snail Darter and Gray Nurse.
Claus Raschid: Earth born, Detective-Two, ARM. Served aboard Snail Darter and Gray Nurse.
Detective-Major Schmidt: Earth born. Served aboard Gray Nurse.
Wes Carlton Wu: Earth born, Flight Captain aboard Koala.
Tanya Haynes Wu, Earth born, Purser aboard Koala.
Ringworld's children
Seeker: species unknown, last seen with Teela Brown.
Acolyte: Kzin, Chmeee's exiled son.
Bram: Vampire turned protector, ruler of the Repair Center for countless aeons until killed by Tunesmith
with Louis Wu's help.
Wembleth: species unknown, Ringworld-born traveler.
Tunesmith: Night Person (Ghoul) turned protector.
Kazarp: Night Person, Tunesmith's son.
Hanuman: Hanging Person turned protector.
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Valavirgillin: Machine People, represents Farsight Trading.
Proserpina: surviving Pak protector.
The Penultimate: Pak protector, long dead.
Szeblinda: Hinsh. Giraffe People
Kawaresksenjajok: City Builder
Fortaralisplyar: City Builder
GLOSSARY
Aerobrake: To shed velocity by passing through a planetary atmosphere.
Antispin: Direction opposite the Ringworld's direction of spin.
Arch: The Ringworld as seen from anywhere on its surface.
ARM: Once the Amalgamation of Regional Militia; for several hundred years, the United Nations armed
forces. Jurisdiction was originally limited to Earth-Moon system.
Autodoc: Any system built to perform automated medical operations.
Belter: Citizen of the asteroid belt, Sol system.
Canyon: A world of human space, once Patriarchy property.
Carlos Wu's autodoc: An experimental medical system first seen in "Procrustes".
Droud: A small device that plugs into the skull of a current addict. Its purpose: to meter a current flow to
the pleasure center of the user's brain.
Elbow root: A ubiquitous Ringworld plant. Grows as a kind of natural fence.
Experimentalist: A Pierson's puppeteer political faction now out of power.
Eyestorm: The pattern of winds that forms above a puncture in the Ringworld floor. A tornado on its side.
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(Hurricanes and tornadoes are impossible on the Ringworld's flat surface.)
Fleet of Worlds: The homeworld of the Pierson's puppeteer species, and four more worlds sequestered for
farming, all occupy a Kemplerer rosette moving at near lightspeed.
Flup: Seabottom ooze.
Flycycle: A one- or two-LE flying device.
Fringe War: All the spacegoing species of known space seem to have sent ships to Ringworld system.
Bram, when he was in command of the Repair Center, shot them down if they approached too close.
Tunesmith hasn't done that, and the Fringe War is currently in a cold state.
General Products: A company owned by Pierson's puppeteers that sold mostly spacecraft hulls. Dissolved
two hundred years ago.
The Great Ocean: One of two salt seas on the Ringworld, measuring six hundred times the surface area of
the Earth.
Grippy: An all purpose hand tool.
Home: A world of human space, unusually Earthlike.
Hot Needle of Inquiry: Second ship (of Experimentalist design) to reach the Ringworld.
Human space: The region of stars explored by humanity.
Known space: The region of the universe known to explorers who communicate with humanity.
LE (Legal Entity): Any entity (human or not, organic or not) legally entitled to civil rights.
Long Shot: Prototype Quantum II hyperdrive spacecraft, first ship to visit the galactic core.
Lying Bastard: First ship (of Experimentalist design) to reach the Ringworld.
Map of Earth (or Mars, Kzin, Kdatlyno, etc.): The Great Ocean is scattered with maps of nearby inhabited
worlds at one-to-one scale, complete with local ecologies as of the time the Ringworld was built.
Meteor defense: Ringworld systems can cause a solar flare, and a superthermal laser effect within the
flare. Energy output is awesome, but the effect is slow.
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N-child: Lineal descendant.
Outsider hyperdrive or Hyperdrive: A means of faster-than-light travel common in known space.
Patriarchy: The Kzinti interstellar empire.
Port: To the left as one looks spinward.
Quantum II hyperdrive: An advanced experimental faster-than-light system, puppeteer designed, first
seen in "At the Core." One Ringworld day under QII hyperdrive = 1440 light years.
Repair Center: The ancient center of Ringworld repair, maintenance, and control, housed beneath the
Map of Mars on the Great Ocean.
Rishathra (reshtra, etc.): Sexual practice outside one's own species but within the intelligent hominids.
Scrith: Ringworld structural material. Scrith underlies all the terraformed and contoured inner surface of
the Ringworld. The rim walls are also of scrith. Very dense, with a tensile strength on the order of the
force that holds an atomic nucleus together.
Sheathclaws: A world held by humans and Kzinti together.
Spill mountains: Mountains standing against the rim wall, the outflow of the rim spillpipes. One stage in
the circulation of flup.
Spin or Spinward: In the direction of rotation of the Ringworld. (Against the rotation of the sky.)
Starboard: To the right as one looks spinward.
Stasis field: Human technology. An induced state in which time passes very slowly. Ratios can be as high
as a billion years of real time to a few seconds in stasis. An object in stasis is very nearly invulnerable.
Stepping disks: Puppeteer technology, an advanced form of teleportation.
Stet: Leave it alone; accept as written; make no change; restore.
Tanj: An expletive, once shorthand for "There ain't no justice."
Thruster: Reactionless drive. In human space, thrusters have generally replaced fusion rockets on all
spacecraft save warcraft.
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Vishnishtee (Vashneesht, Vasnesht, Vasneesit, etc.): Wizard or protector.
Webeye: Puppeteer technology, a multisensory transmitter.
Weenie plant: Ubiquitous Ringworld plant. Edible.
2893 A.D.
CHAPTER 1
Louis Wu
Louis Wu woke aflame with new life, under a coffin lid.
Displays glowed above his eyes. Bone composition, blood parameters, deep reflexes, urea and potassium
and zinc balance: he could identify most of these. The damage listed wasn't great. Punctures and gouges;
fatigue; torn ligaments and extensive bruises; two ribs cracked; all relics of the battle with the Vampire
protector, Bram. All healed now. The 'doc would have rebuilt him cell by cell. He'd felt dead and cooling
when he climbed into the Intensive Care Cavity.
Eighty-four days ago, the display said.
Sixty-seven Ringworld days. Almost a falan; a falan was ten Ringworld rotations, seventy-five thirty-hour
days. Twenty or thirty days should have healed him! But he'd known he was injured. What with all the
general bruising from the battle with Bram, he hadn't even noticed puncture wounds in his back.
He'd been under repair for twice that long the first time he lay in this box. Then, his internal plumbing
systems had been leaking into each other, and he'd been eleven years without the longevity complex
called boosterspice. He'd been dying, and old.
Testosterone was high, adrenalin high and rising.
Louis pushed steadily up against the lid of the 'doc. The lid wouldn't move faster, but his body craved
action. He slid out and dropped to a stone floor, cold beneath his bare feet. Stone?
He was naked. He stood in a vast cavern. Where was Needle?
The interstellar spacecraft Hot Needle of Inquiry had been embedded in cooled magma when last he
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looked, and Carlos Wu's experimental nanotech repair system had been in the crew quarters. Now its
components sat within a nest of instruments and cables on a floor of cooled lava. The 'doc had been partly
pulled apart. Everything was still running.
Hubristic, massive, awesome: this was a protector's work. Tunesmith, the Ghoul protector, must have
been studying the 'doc while it healed Louis.
Nearby, Hot Needle of Inquiry had been fileted like a finless fish. A slice of hull running almost nose to
tail had been cut away, exposing housing, cargo space, docking for a Lander now destroyed, thruster
plates, and the hyperdrive motor housing. More than half of the ship's volume was tanks, and of course
they'd been drained. The rim of the cut had been lined with copper or bronze, and cables in the metal led
to instruments and a generator.
The cut section had been pulled aside by massive machinery. The cut surface was rimmed in bronze laced
with cables.
The hyperdrive motor had run the length of the ship. Now it was laid out on the lava, in a nest of
instruments. Tunesmith again?
Louis wandered over to look.
It had been repaired.
Louis had stranded the Hindmost in Ringworld space by chopping the hyperdrive in half, twelve or
thirteen years ago. Dismounted, it looked otherwise ready to take Needle between the stars at Quantum I
speeds, three days to the light year.
I could go home, Louis thought, tasting the notion.
Where is everybody? Louis looked around him, feeling the adrenalin surge. He was starting to shiver with
cold.
He'd be almost two hundred and forty years old by now, wouldn't he? Easy to lose track here. But the
nano machines in Carlos Wu's experimental 'doc had read his DNA and repaired everything down through
the cell nuclei. Louis had done this dance before. His body thought it was just past puberty.
Keep it cool, boy. Nobody's challenged you yet.
The spacecraft, the hull section, the 'doc, machines to move and repair these masses, and crude-looking
instruments arrayed to study them, all formed a tight cluster within vaster spaces. The cavern was
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