They had named it Hidden Patriarch and set sail, leaving the Hindmost behind. One Earthly year ago, or half of the puppeteer world’s archaic year, or forty Ringworld rotations… the Hindmost and his alien thralls had found a mile-long sailing ship moored below the Map of Mars.
This year had been a time for torpor, for recuperation and contemplation but such states could change in an instant. Dancing maintained the Hindmost’s skills, his reflexes, his health. The other three-legged dancers, the vast floor and ceiling, were projections from Hot Needle of Inquiry’s computer memory. The Hindmost’s view of Hidden Patriarch was a distraction, a ground-rules hazard, an obstacle within the dance. For millions of years the competition dance, and a wide spectrum of other social vectors, had determined who would mate and who would not.īeyond the illusion of the dance loomed the illusion of a window, distant and huge. In this movement and the next, never glance toward the wall that hides the Brides. The clicking of their hooves was a part of the music, like a hundred thousand castanets.
Tens of thousands of his kind moved in tight patterns that were great mutating curves, heads cocked high and low to keep their orientation. They were dancing as far as the eye could see, beneath a ceiling that was a flat mirror. 2880 - Hot Needle of Inquiry reaches Ringworld 2878 - Hot Needle of Inquiry leaves CanyonĪ.D. 2851 - First contact: Lying Bastard impacts RingworldĪ.D. 1733 - Fall of the Cities (Puppeteer Experimentalist regime introduces superconductor plague to Ringworld)Ī.D.
Niven still ranks near the top of the SF field, but this outing is likely to satisfy determined Ringworld fans more than other readers.Ī.D. Wu’s pursuit of the Protectors displays Niven s deft hand at portraying aliens, but the dialogue that fills in the backstory slows the narrative. The battle against the vampires is the more exciting of the two stories, filled with action, scenes of the Ringworld and explorations of ritualistic interspecies sex. Meanwhile, returning hero Louis Wu is battling what effectively is a plague of Protectors (superbeings common to many Niven novels) whose rivalries threaten Ringworld’s existence. A motley array of hominid inhabitants are seeking to defeat a plague of vampires. This third fictional voyage to the Ringworld (after, 1970, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula for best SF novel of that year, and, 1980) offers two stories crowded into one. Подробная информация для ознакомления по текущему запросу представлена ниже:Īn honored SF writer returns to his best-known creation: the artificial world, built far from Earth by aliens over a half million years ago, in the form of a ring 600 million miles in diameter, hosting an astonishing multitude of inhabitants and cultures.
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