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."
CHAPTER 16 — The Map Room
The map room was at the very top of the castle, as befitted its importance. Louis was blowing hard from the climb. He had had a time keeping up. The kzin did not run, but he walked faster than a man could walk.
Louis reached the landing as Speaker pushed through a double door ahead of him.
Through that gap Louis saw a horizontal band of jet black, eight inches broad and three feet off the ground. He looked beyond it, looked for a similar strip of baby blue chocked with midnight blue rectangles; and he found it.
Jackpot.
Louis stood in the doorway, taking in details. The miniature Ringworld was almost as large as the room, which was circular and perhaps a hundred and twenty feet across. At the hub of the circular map was a rectangular screen, heavily mounted, facing away from the doorway but built to turn.
High on the walls were ten turning globes. They varied in size, and they turned at different rates; but each was the characteristic color, rich blue with swirled white frosting, of an Earthlike world. There was a conic-section map below each globe.
"I spent the night here, working," said Speaker. He was standing behind the screen. "I have many things to show you. Come here."
Louis almost ducked under the Ring. A thought stopped him. The hawk-featured man who ruled the banquet hall would never have stooped so, not even to enter this holy of holies. Louis walked at the Ring, and through it, and found it was a holo projection.
He took up a stance behind the kzin.
Control panels surrounded the screen. All the knobs were large and massive, made of silver, and each was carved to represent the head of some animal. The boards were contoured in swirls and curves. Prettified, Louis thought. Decadent?
The screen was alight, but unmagnified. Looking into it was like looking down on the Ringworld from the vicinity of the shadow squares. Louis felt a touch of deja vu.
"I had it focused earlier," said the kzin. "If I remember rightly …" He touched a knob, and the view expanded so fast that Louis's hand clutched for a throttle. "I want to show you the rim wall. Rrrr, a bit off …" He touched another fierce-visaged knob, and the view slid. They were looking over the edge of the Ringworld.
Somewhere were telescopes to give them this view. Where? Mounted on the shadow squares?
They were looking down on thousand mile-high mountains. Still the view expanded as Speaker found ever-finer controls. Louis marveled at how abruptly the mountains, appearing very natural but for their size, were cut by the knife-edged shadow of space.
Then he saw what ran along the peaks of the mountains.
Though it was only a line of silver dots, he knew what it would be. "A linear accelerator."
"Yes," said Speaker. "Without transfer booths, it is the only feasible way to travel Ringworld distances. It must have been the major transport system."
"But it's a thousand miles high. Elevators?"
"I found elevator shafts an along the rim wall. There, for instance." By now the silver thread was a line of tiny loops, widely spaced, each hidden from the land below by a mountain peak. A tube so slender as to be barely visible led from one of the loops, down the slop of a mountain, into a layer of clouds at the bottom of the Ringworld atmosphere.
Speaker said, "The electromagnetic loops cluster thickly around the elevator shafts. Elsewhere they are up to a million miles apart. I surmise that they are not needed except for starting and stopping and guidance. A car could be accelerated to free fall, coast around the rim at a relative 770 miles per second, to be stopped near an elevator tube by another cluster of loops."
"It'd take up to ten days to get a man where he wants to go. Not counting accelerations."
"Trivial. It takes you sixty days to reach Silvereyes, the human world farthest from Earth. You would need four times that long to cross known space from edge to edge."
True. And the living area on the Ringworld was greater than that of all known space. They built for room when they built this thing. Louis asked, "Did you see any sign of activity? Is anyone still using the linear accelerator?"
"The question is meaningless. Let me show you." The view converged, slid sidewase, expanded slowly. It was night. Dark clouds diverged over dark land, and then …
"City lights. Well." Louis swallowed. It had come too suddenly. "So it's not all dead. We can get help."
"I do not think so. This may be difficult to find … ah."
"Finagle's black mind!"
The castle, obviously their own castle, floated serenely above a field of light. Windows, neon, streams of floating light motes which must be vehicles … oddly shaped floating buildings … lovely.
"Tapes. Tanjit! We're watching old tapes. I thought they must be live transmissions." For one glorious moment it had seemed that their search was over — lighted, bustling cities, pinpointed on a map for them … but these pictures must be ages old, civilizations old.
"I thought so also, for many hours last night. I did not suspect the truth until I failed to find the thousands of miles of meteor crater slashed by the Liar's landing."
Louis, speechless, thwacked the kzin on his nude pink- and-lavender shoulder. It was as high as he could reach.
The kztn ignored the liberty. "After I had located the castle, things proceeded quickly. Observe." He caused the view to slide rapidly to port. The dark land blurred, lost all detail. Then they were over black ocean.
The camera seemed to back up …
"You see? A bay of one of the major salt owans falls across our path to the rim wall. The ocean itself is several times as large as any on Kzin or Earth. The bay is as large as our largest ocean."
"More delay! Can't we go over it?"
"Perhaps we can. But we face greater delay than that." The kzin reached for a knob.
"Hold it. I want a closer look at those groups of islands!"
"Why, Louis? That we might stop for provisions?"
"No … Do you see how they tend to form clusters, with wide stretches of deep water between? Take that grouping there." Louis's forefinger circled images on the screen. "Now look up at that map."
"I do not understand."
"And that grouping in what you called a bay, and that map behind you. The continents in the conic projections are a little distorted … See it now? Ten worlds, ten clusters of islands. They aren't one-to-one scale; but I'll bet that island is as big as Australia, and the original continent doesnot look any bigger than Eurasia on the globe."