squinted to teary slits. Wembleth scooped up two small children, hugged their faces against his chest, and shouted at the rest. 'Get inside!' He darted into the nearest house. The others would have to follow, or find their own houses.
Windows were mere slits in Mouse Eater houses. Wembleth dropped his load of children into the dark, wiggled past more frightened children and out again.
In the horrid light children and elders were running blind. Elder Mouse Eaters tended to lose their sight anyway; it let them move around in daylight. Through squinted eyes Wembleth could still see. They could not. Adults were bigger than he was. Somehow he wrestled them into doorways.
He couldnt guess how much time passed. The light faded. A hot fierce wind blasted across the plaza, scattering coals from the commonfire, and died. Presently a softer wind was blowing the other way. When he couldnt find anyone, couldnt see anyway, he crawled indoors. Indoors was perfect blackness; his night sight had faded, and the horrid light had faded too. Wembleth lay down and gasped for air.
Something would change. Something always did, when things went bad. You had to watch for the opportunity that would follow.
Presently Wembleth realized that he was suffocating.
The blast Spit Snail Darter, in stasis, into a rocky cliff above a vast forest. When time resumed, the ship had become part of an immense landslide of shattered shale.
Far, far to spinward, a sea of mist ran all across the horizon, hiding everything up to the base of the Arch. Worlds away, the mist domed upward. The near edge of the mist was a shock wave still moving sluggishly toward Snail Darter.
'It looks like the end of the world. Any world. Lots of worlds,' Oliver said.
'See whos around,' Roxanny ordered.
Detective Oliver Forrestier busied himself with various sensors. Right Whale, the big ARM cruiser, had gone up against a nameless Kzinti juggernaut, just before the fireball and blackout. There had been other ships too… but now there was nothing. 'No obvious contrails,' Oliver said. 'The cloud is spitting neutrinos… last traces of antimatter, I guess, and diminishing. No point sources. No big ships.'
'The fireball is collapsing. Like its being sucked down,' Claus said uneasily.
'Well,' Roxanny said, 'lets go look. Weve run out of enemies, right, Tec Forrestier? The blast must have smashed them all. Friends too. So our mission is to collect data. Lift us, Claus.'
Snail Darter lifted. Tec-Two Claus Raschid asked, 'Just go straight on in, Roxanny?'
'Stay low, take our time. Look around. Claus, theres a hole at the center of all this. A hole in the Ringworld is a way home.'
'Roxanny, what has you so cheerful?'
Roxanny Gauthier laughed boisterously. 'Were alive! Isnt that enough? Look at the trail we left! We can follow it right back to the explosion. Claus, Oliver, for all we know about stasis fields, did you really believe it? Does it make sense that you can stop time and restart it? When I saw the light, I knew I was in an antimatter explosion. I thought we were dead!'
'This was a city,' Oliver said. He played his instruments along the grid of streets and buildings. 'Big one. Spread out, like Sydney.'
'Claus, slow us down,' Roxanny said. 'I dont see much in the way of corpses. Where are the dead? '
Oliver guessed. 'Inside, taking cover from the shock wave. Look at your displays, Roxanny. Air pressure is down and dropping. They hid from the shock wave and then—'
'Suffocated? The airs draining out.' Claus wasnt stupid; he was only coming out of denial. 'Weve killed the whole Ringworld. Hey—'
'Well be ten thousand years investigating the structure, learning its secrets,' Roxanny said. 'What are you doing, Claus?'
'Landing. I can see a survivor.'
Underground, Wembleth was suffocating.
He clawed his way into the light, but the air wasnt any better.
The light was no more than broad daylight, but there was a weirdness to spinward as if half the world had been taken away, leaving only fog and chaos. Wembleth made his way to the commons, his chest heaving.
An hour ago theyd been feasting. Now there was nobody. The fires had gone out. Mouse Eaters wouldnt come outside in an emergency, and Wembleth didnt have a better answer than they did.
Something shaped vaguely like a silver vinchs egg was dropping out of the sky.
Wembleth stood up, though he nearly fainted, and waved both arms. When in doubt, ask for help. It was his normal instinct, but his fading intellect backed him up:
Here were folk with the power to fly! Tales told of such power, but these were flying in the winds of a major disaster. Anyone who could do that must know something.
News of this disaster must be carried to other peoples.
Wembleth was on his hands and knees, his vision blacking out, when two men of unknown species descended to him. They wore hard armor, like the mythical Vashneesht. They offered him a bag to crawl into.
Wembleth did.
Air hissed into the bag. He could breath.
He didnt know how to tell the Vashneesht that others needed rescuing. It never occurred to him that Vashneesht — wizards — might be the cause of a world- destroying disaster.
Gravity near a Ball World follows an inverse square law. In contrast, the Ringworld is a plane surface. Gravity does not dwindle as you rise, nor do spin gravity nor magnetic force, until the Ringworld looks less like a plane than a ribbon, from hundreds of thousands of miles high.
The Ringworld engineers embedded a lacework of superconducting cable in the Ringworld floor. The grid allows magnetic manipulation of solar flares to cause a superthermal laser effect, the Ringworld meteor defense; but it also opens the entire Ringworld to magnetic levitation.
Magnetically powered vehicles could rise to any height.
It was night when the skycycles lifted. Sixty miles high, effectively out of the atmosphere, they followed the gouge spinward. Verdant landscape became stormy, in ripples and streams of lightning-lit cloud rather than in whorl patterns. Then it was all unbroken clouds.
The terminator, the shadow of the edge of a shadow square, swept over them. A growing sliver of sun became a noonday glare. How long had it been since Louis saw a sunrise?
They crossed above a tremendous, sagging, faintly glowing tube. Horsetails of mist were flowing over the tubes flaccidities and disappearing into vacuum. Tunesmiths plug wouldnt hold forever.
Soil and rock still clung to the scrith floor. There were pools and ribbons of foamy ice, all ravaged in a radial pattern. They followed it inward toward the puncture.
The rim of the hole glittered. Maybe, maybe Tunesmiths 'reweaving' system was working.
'Spacecraft,' Acolyte said. 'Above the hole.'
There was no exhaust. The ship hovered on thrusters: a cylinder with a flattened belly, a little bigger than the tank it had left behind, but with a bulb of transparent canopy for a nose.
'Thats an ARM design, Kittycatcher Class,' Louis said. 'A fighter. Three crew. Theyll have seen us by now.'
