The Murder of Larry Niven
With the fate of a world at stake, a marginally famous 70s sci-fi author is killed
A knock on the door.
He rose halfway from his desk. Why, he’d just had the grandest idea for a story.
The knock came again, more urgently. He set aside his pen before he could complete the thought and rose to answer it. Who was knocking on his door, at a time like this?
It was a bald man, without even any eyebrows, of indeterminable age.
“Laurence Niven?” The man asked him.
He nodded, “Yes, who’s asking?”
The bald man pulled a small device about the size of a tv remote out of his pocket and pointed it at the middle of Larry’s chest. Larry looked down curiously. What was that? He had the moment to think before his insides detonated, his skin unspooling and plastering the walls, door, and ceiling with his liquified remains.
A wave of gore blasted the bald man, splattering him head to toe in blood. A ream of small intestine ended up wrapped around him, fragments of bone were in his clothes, but he made no effort to remove any of it.
He aimed the device at his own heart and cried, “Life eternal to the ringlady!” And then he too erupted into a puddle of distended guts and organs.
—-
The year was 3563 PB (post-Babylon) and the forces of the Five Worlds Alliance, recently united with the Primacy of Proxima Centauri, were close. Centuries ago these vessels launched, hypersleeping soldier crews frozen in anticipation for the day they would cross black to the ringworld’s star and rain death upon her curves. It was a regrettable situation. The ringworld’s present ringlady was not responsible for the budding conflict. That fell squarely upon an ancestor of hers, whose indelicate embargo three hundred rotations prior incited war.
With passing rotations the vessels grew closer and a solution ever more distant. Eventually, she realized she alone did not have the skills to respond to this crisis and an emergency council was called. This was a great sign of weakness for the ringlady, for the ringworld’s monarchs were held accountable to no one but themselves. Even so, the finest minds in the realm were brought to her, men and women and others who were consequently also the richest. Whether this overlap was a circumstance of fate or merely a tool by which the wealthy and powerful presented themselves was difficult to say.
The table was oak. They had all manner of trees on the ringworld, which indulged in post-scarcity splendor and wanted for nothing. One hundred million kilometers long and twelve thousand kilometers wide, grasslands, oceans, mountains, lakes, deserts, tundra, steppe, covering the ringworld in bands. Here in her tower she could almost see it all, both where it spread beneath her, but then wrapped around up, up, up to disappear behind the star. It was beautiful.
They stood standing until she sat and then they assumed their seats with quiet decorum. A machine humming overhead was the only sound.
Expectant eyes were aimed at her, eagerly waiting to hang onto every word spoken. They loved her; they did not know her and they loved her still. Such dogged worship would have exhausted her, if she knew anything else.
An intake of breath broke the silence of the room, “Assembled friends,” she began, “I thank you for heeding my call.”
There began an effusive outpouring of honor and praise. She held up her hand before it could sweep her away. “You all know of our dire circumstances. Those dogs of the Five Worlds Alliance have turned all beyond the ring against us.”
A young military officer suddenly stood up and pounded the table with a fist, “Damn them! Damn them all to hell! May they and their mothers and their fathers roast alive in fire, screaming for the end!”
Everyone at the table stared with vacant expressions, including the ringlady, who had been interrupted. Wordlessly, the officer sat back down.
“Yes, well,” she continued, “it will only be one rotation before our enemies make ringfall. Time carries herself against us. I know in the era of my sire and of course his sire and then her sire, and her sire before her, and all those who preceded them, this would have been a decision solely for my station.”
“It is your right to flout tradition, ringlady,” the old sage said. “Nay, your duty.”
“All is as you will, ringlady!”
“Yes, yes,” she broke in before anyone else could speak up, “but, well, I believe that may be my meaning. All is not as I will. I would like input–your input–this is, of course, why I have assembled you here.”
A bent-backed general bobbed their head, “Say what you wish of us, ringlady, and you will hear it.”
“My life from the ringworld!” That same military officer from early cried, standing up again, and this time people joined the chant.
“My life for the ringworld!”
“All for the ringworld!”
The sage began to proselytize, “May the ringworld spin forever, bless it and its many curves–”
“Silence!” The ringlady thundered, rising to her feet. At once the room became quiet, her councilors staring at with wide, vacant eyes, like cowed children. “It seems I am misunderstood. I do not seek my own opinion through your mouths, you useless, prying sycophants.”
“We apologize for our failure, ringlady,” the same general from earlier quickly said. Everyone else was finally too terrified to speak.
She sat back down in failure. The nature of autocracy was self-defeating. Every part of the state was an extension of her. In theory, the power was limitless. But, in truth, bound by her own personal limits. They could only produce what she herself was capable of.
“What if we were to hit the vessels with projectiles?” The ringlady suggested.
For a moment, no one spoke. Then her general leaned forwards so that they would be visible out of the sea of heads. “The vessels have planetoid keels, lady, satellites removed from orbit. Nothing that we could launch is capable of damaging them or altering their course. Additionally, they have been accelerating towards the speed of light for several hundred rotations. We possess nothing that may hit a target moving so fast, nor anything that could slow it down, save a collision with our ringworld.”
“And if we were to move the ringworld? Alter its position around the star so that the vessel would miss?” This was possible due to jets on the ringworld’s exterior that stabilized its orbit.
“The vessels would undoubtedly alter their own course to match,” her scientist put in.
“And to fight them on the ground is impossible?” The ringlady confirmed.
“The impact of the vessels with our ringworld will cause us to break up,” her engineer said. “The pieces would then drift into the star.”
“The vessels will then tow our remnants out of the star and colonize what remains,” her foreign minister added. “However, all life will have been completely annihilated.”
Diplomacy was also impossible. They were many rotations too late to signal a surrender. Indeed, even if they canceled the embargo, it would take many hundreds of rotations for goods to once again begin reaching their enemies. As a matter of fact, the Five Worlds Alliance would only have felt the embargo’s effects fairly recently, with the last goods sent during the age of her foolish ancestor reaching them well after the enemy’s vessels launched–between two points in a vacuum, the fastest something could travel was lightspeed. In the age of interstellar travel, the consequences of gunboat diplomacy well eclipsed a human lifespan.
There was not even religion for the ringlady to turn to. She could not tell them, and her people, to prepare their souls because the transhumanism of thirty-sixth century post-Babylonia did not deal in metaphysics. Their material world was too full of wonder for them to believe the interior world had anything to offer.
“The solution is not military, it is not scientific, it is not an engineering problem, diplomatic concessions are no longer possible. What is left open to us?” She asked.
There was an awkward silence as her councilors looked among themselves. These landowners, who owned swaths of acreage exceeding the surface area of Earth, who were so pumped full of stimulants and steroids that they could mentally perform differential calculus and crack steel bare-handed, knew only how to exceed problems. If an issue outpaced them, if it was beyond what they could brute force with their intellect and ability, then it was not something to be overcome. It was a fact, nay a rule, nay a law of the world and reality. Those vessels, with orphaned moons mounted to their bows, would crash into the ringworld, destroying all life, and they would shrug their shoulders and say that nothing could be done. Discounting that it had been their ancestors who smilingly encountered her ancestor to enter into the present situation.
“If I might, ringlady?” Her minister of culture raised his hand above the rest. She nodded her assent and he stood.
“My ministry has spent many rotations debating and considering this issue and we believe we have come to a unique solution.”
All listened with open ears, intrigued. Had the cultural minister offered his opinion first, he would have been discounted before the more technical and practical professionals. Here at the end, absent a better idea, everyone listened.
“As you know, time travel was discounted early on due to the nature of the grandfather paradox. We would be unable to affect a solution in the past without removing the need for that solution in the present.”
“Yes, yes,” the scientist impatiently motioned for him to continue. They were retreading old ground and each minute spent here was a minute where they were not fucking their roboslaves before the world ended. The ringworld indulged in post-scarcity, but there were still those who needed to feel powerful and despotic and important. It was these individuals, who pretended at wealth and genius, that made up the ringlady’s council. So cloistered was she, that she imagined her aristocracy of fakers and leeches to be the real thing. Were they not all super-genetically engineered to transcend beyond their humanity, she would have seen through them long ago. It was a lucky thing, then, there was at least one person present who had read a book.
“However, I bring to your attention the origin of the ringworld. Not our ringworld, but the ringworld as a concept.” He pushed out a thought and an image appeared in the room before them.
The engineer shrieked, “What is that hideous thing?”
“This is a human male, only some two thousand five hundred years post-Babylon on the planet Earth. His name is Laurence ‘Larry’ Niven, composer of a physical text that is called Ringworld.”
The ringlady leaned forwards in her seat now, hooked. Unlike her council, she was not juiced on thirty-sixth century steroids and psychedelics, but instead had a fairly unaltered biology. Without excess chemicals rushing around her brain and nervous system she was better able to pay attention. “What do you propose?”
“If one were to remove Larry Niven from the timeline, before he had composed Ringworld, I believe the invasion would be rendered harmless.”
“Does that not bring us to the same problem?” The ringlady asked. “How might our ringworld exist, if the one who originally invented it did not?”
“Because, ringlady, your ancestor, the founder of the ringworld, came to the idea entirely independently and had never heard of Larry Niven. It was a complete accident of fate. Naturally, overtime, the two ideas informed each other, but it does not necessitate that one needs the other to survive. To eliminate Larry Niven removes the concept of a ‘ringworld’ from the collective consciousness of anyone not from our ringworld.”
“It does not remove the issue of conflict in the first place,” the foreign minister pointed out. “The Five Worlds Alliance knows the location of our ringworld and the vessels will still be dispatched. Because of the paradoxes inherent in time travel, that cannot be changed, yes?”
They looked to the scientist for confirmation, who mutely nodded.
“Can you provide an answer to this, minister?” The ringlady asked him.
“I cannot, ringlady,” the cultural minister said. “Only that I beg you try all the solutions presented here today, rather than none of them, and my solution last of all.”
And so the ringlady did as the minister requested. She bombarded the vessels with salvos of atomic missiles, but this did nothing, so she turned the ringworld perpendicular to its original orbit, and as predicted the vessels altered their course to turn with it. Without a better solution, she deployed her armies into the bands of the ringworld, gleaming rows of knights and soldiers, cyborg limbs and handheld atomics glittering in the light of the sky star, ranks upon ranks that could have conquered any civilization a million times over. But when they saw those approaching vessels, visible now with the naked eye, descending upon the world like falling moons, they knew that no weapon would be sufficient. The world was at an end.
And so finally the ringlady sent one man into the past to remove Larry Niven, to cut his thread from the weave of existence, and when she looked through her great mirror into time, and could see that indeed he had been erased from memory, she went to stand atop her tower. The vessels never slowed in their approach.
They came upon the ringworld, the likes of which their pilots had never seen or heard of, and concluded that it was an accretion disk gathering around the star. They flew past it at the speed of light into the star itself, navigation systems searching for their promised enemy, and were vaporized instantly.
All rejoiced and the armies were dispersed. Mad celebrations were held in the streets. A threat that had literally hung over the ringworld’s head for generations was finally vanquished. When the revelry finished, the ringlady summoned her cultural minister to meet in her chambers.
“Did you know it would work?” She asked him, as he knelt before her and was laden with honors.
“Not at all!” The cultural minister said. “I just really fucking hate Larry Niven.”