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Dwight Bartholomew
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D O W N I N F L A M E S
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OUTLINE FOR AN UNWRITTEN EPIC NOVEL
BY LARRY NIVEN
COPYRIGHT (c) 1977 by Larry Niven
The following requires some explanation. Atleast!
On January 14, 1968, Norman Spinrad and I were at a
party thrown by Tom & Terry Pinckard. We were filling cof-
fee cups when Spinny started this whole thing.
"You ought to drop the known space series," he said.
"You'll get stale." (Quotes are not necessarily dead accu-
rate.)
I explained that I was writing stories outside the
"known space" history, and that I would give up the series
as soon as I ran out of things to say within its framework.
Which would be soon.
"Then why don't you write a novel that tears it to
shreds? Don't just abandon known space. Destroy it!"
"But how?" (I never asked why. Norman and I think
alike in some ways.)
"Start with the premise that the whole thing is a
shuck. There never was a chain reaction of novae in the
galactic core. There aren't any Thrintun. It's all a
gigantic hoax. Write it that way.
"Then," Spinny said, "if the fans write letter
threatening to lynch you, you write back saying, 'It's only
a story...'"
We found a corner. During the next four hours we
worked out the details. Some I rejected. Like, he wanted
to make the Tnuctipun into minions of the Devil. (Yes, the
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Devil.) Like, he wanted me to be inconsistent. I can't do
that, not on purpose.
The incredible thing is that when we finished, we did
indeed have a consistent framework. I wrote it up during
the following week, as a set of assumptions and a plot out-
line. It would have been the longest of my novels up to
that time.
What happened?
About April 1968, I ran into an idea called a Dyson
sphere. It gripped my imagination. I designed a compromise
structure, less roomy, but with some distinct advantages:
the Ringworld is prettier, it's got gravity without the
unlikelihood of gravity generators, and you can see the sky.
So I wrote RINGWORLD, and the PROTECTOR, and then the
three SF-detective novelettes lumped under THE LONG ARM OF
GIL HAMILTON. In 1968 the "known space" history included
about 250,000 words. In 1977 it's more than twice that
large, and some of the assumptions in DOWN IN FLAMES have
gotten lost.
So I was writing RINGWORLD, and I gave the DOWN IN
FLAMES material to Tom Reamy for his fanzine TRUMPET. The
material wasn't all that consistant or well organized; it
was done for my own benefit, and I stopped halfway.
It's nine years later, and I can't resist the impulse
to put the thing into better shape. Those of you who
haven't read any of the "known space" series are going to
find it incredibly cryptic, and what can I do but apologize?
For those of you who have, remember: it's all a hoax.
PRELIMINARY ASSUMPTIONS
1) Beowulf Shaeffer never visited the galactic core.
2) The Long Shot, the alleged Quantum II hyperdrive
ship used in AT THE CORE, was a hoax. For eight months that
"spacecraft" rested somewhere in the West End of Jinx, while
Beowulf Shaeffer was treated to an elaborate movie of a trip
to the galactic core and back. The hyperdrive machinery he
saw through LONG SHOT's transparent hull was hiding other
machinery: 3D movie projectors, artificial gravity, computer
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controls on a fake mass sensor. It wouldn't take much.
3) The core suns are not exploding.
4) The Thrintun or Slaver Species, supposed to exist a
billion and a half years ago (WORLD OF PTAVVS), never
existed.
5) The Tnuctipun (supposed to be a slave race to the
Slavers) are real enough, but they are contemporary with
humanity.
6) The Puppeteers are in their pay.
7) They have accepted employment because they dare not
refuse. The Tnuctipun are vicious and vindictive.
8) Since the Puppeteers are not fleeing the explosion
in the galactic core, what are they fleeing? Why, they're
fleeing the Tnuctipun, of course. And taking some of their
funds from the Tnuctipun.
9) Kzanol (WORLD OF PTAVVS) is neither the last Thrint
(Slaver), nor a robot. He is, now get this, he is a product
of Tnuctipun biological engineering: a tailored species with
only one member. His memories are heavily detailed science
fiction.
10) Many of the stasis boxes are relics of the Tnuc-
tipun occupation of known space. So are the genetically
tailored species, the sunflowers and stage trees and Ban-
dersnatchi, found throughout known space.
The Tnuctipun were all through here. They evauated our
region of space not too long ago, certainly less than a mil-
lion years ago. They were forced to leave a lot of gene-
tailored lfe and a number of lost stasis boxes; though they
could count on most of the relics of the empire disintegrat-
ing with age.
But they had time to leave other evidence, in stasis
boxes, to contribute to the hoax. Later they created Kzanol
and left him in stasis on the continental shelf off Brazil.
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The major hoax is the Slaver War, supposed to have
occured a billion and a half years ago. The Tnuctipun could
not conceal their presence in known space, but they could
hide the fact that they are contemporary.
11) The truth is that the Tnuctipun are all through
known space. It will be seen how this is possible.
12) Clearly the Bandersnatchi were not designed to spy
on the Slavers for the Tnuctipun. Tnuctipun get a kick out
of eating meat that was sentient when alive. So, they
designed the Bandersnatchi sentient.
13) When the Tnuctipun cleared out, some of their
number got left behind. That group went to savagery, then
built its civilization again, and began carving out an
interstellar empire. We call them the Kzinti. The Kzinti
know nothing of the Tnuctipun, but there are Tnuctipun hid-
den among the Kzinti.
14) There's proof fo sorts: a psychological point.
Female Kzinti are dumb animals, no more. The Kzinti may be
thought of as asexual. So it is with the Tnuctipun, too. A
Kzin will understand the kick they get from eating intelli-
gent beings. There has to be something to replace the kick
of mating with someone of your own intelligence.
15) And a second point of proof. The Grog's psi power
is very like the Slaver's. The Grog might well be a degen-
erate Slaver, except that with the Grog the female is dom-
inant and intelligent. How could that be?
Obvious. The Thrint (Kzanol) was copied from the Grog
and modified. But the Tnuctipun got it garbled; they could
not believe in a sentient female.
16) The core of the hoax is the Core explosion: the lie
that our galaxy is a Seyfert galaxy, that in twenty thousand
years the wave of radiation will make all of known space
uninhabitable, and most of the galaxy too. The hoax may
extend much further than known space. Refugees will be
passing through from nearer the Core. Dozens of species
will be mothballing whole planets, expecting eventually to
return. They will sheath and eggs of useful life-forms in
lead or stasis fields, and make every effort to preserve
their artifacts for thousands of years.
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Now look at it from the viewpoint of Tnuctipun return-
ing to known space. They'll find all the worlds of known
space deserted, with their most valuable artifacts
preserved. They'll find trillions of beings in spacecraft
moving at Quantum II hyperdrive. ALl flavors, these beings.
All moving at the single velocity, three days to the light
year. Match direction and you match course for boarding.
In many cases, no weapons; too many species would concen-
trate soley on the tremendous task of moving billions of
individuals clear out of the galaxy.
Obviously this would have been the last of the known
space stories (If only Blish had stopped with his second
Okie novel! He ended the universe, then had to back up!)
I've given the assumptions I have to make in order to get a
coherent picture. The framework does answer some questions
left open in the "known space" series and raises others.
1) The Quantum II hyperdrive was advertised for sale by
the Puppeteers. Why didn't someone buy it? (Those who
tried got the runaround. The QII ship never existed.)
2) If the Grogs are degenerate Slavers, how did the sex
get changed? (We figured it backward. The Tnuctipun
reversed the sexes through male chauvinist piggery.)
3) The "soft weapon" (see the NEUTRON STAR collection)
has to be a real abandoned Tnuctip artifact.
It's too powerful to have been allowed to fall into
human hands deliberately; even if it didn't remain there.
Why didn't the handle fit a Kzinti (i.e., Tnuctip) hand?
Probably because the Tnuctipun have their own slave races.
4) Even if the Ringworld is edge on to the Core, it
isn't thick enough to shield itself (and Teela Brown!) from
the gamma rays. But Teela's "luck" requires that she be
safe there. She is, if there's no Core explosion.
5) What of the Outsiders?
With their Helium II metabolism, they are not "meat" to
a Tnuctip. If they maintain their neutrality, nobody should
harm them. And they must have known of the Tnuctip plot for
some time.
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Now we know why the Outsiders charged such a tremendous
price for the answer to a simple question. What are they
going to do, now that the galaxy is becoming uninhabitable?
Answer: it isn't!
Can we use the Outsiders? How well can wo balance pro-
fit against their fear of the Tnuctipun?
6) What happens to a ship that goes too deep into a
gravity well while using Outsider hyperdrive?
Snatched by the Tnuctipun! There is no relevant physi-
cal law, no mysterious singularity in hyperspace. The need
to enter a system at sublight speeds will restrict the
spread of humanity and keep us from regions where the fraud
is apparent.
So much for background. What of the story itself?
Obviously I'm setting up Armageddon. Exposure of the
Tnuctip fraud will result in a cataclysm to shake the stars.
Fire and death, and the Tnuctipun may win.
They will have no allies. The Kzinti have been
changed, by four Man-Kzin Wars in which the most serious
war-mongers, and the ones with the least self-control, were
the ones who died. The Kzinti population has been consider-
ably reduced. Those left are not peaceful, but they can
think first before they jump. Telepaths are their own
development. And they have reason to hate the Tnuctipun who
abandoned their ancestors. The Kzinti will fight on our
side, though we must watch for planted Tnuctip spies.
No allies...but Tnuctip technology must be enormous.
Slaver stasis boxes were largely planted. What we found in
them was technology the Tnuctipun threw away! What more are
they hiding?
I know some of the characters I'll need. Oddly, the
most necessary are the most familiar. And known space isn't
that defenseless.
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I need either Kzanol or Larry Greenberg: the only two
characters capable of recongnizing a Tnuctip. Kzanol is out
of the question, as you will see. We've got to rescue
Greenberg from where we left him last: aboard a slowboat,
one of the Lazy Eight series, which lost its drive systems
while moving at near lightspeed. By Louis Wu's time it will
be several hundred light-years from known space.
(Louis is out of it. So are Teela Brown and the entire
Ringworld. The Tnuctipun dare not attack the Ringworld.
For reasons, see THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS is a couple of
years).
I need Beowulf Shaeffer, who was at the heart of the
Core explosion hoax. If I set DOWN IN FLAMES after
RINGWORLD, Shaeffer is 200-odd years old: middle-aged
despite boosterspice.
I need an expert on Slaver relics.
I need money and brains to work this. That's easy.
I'll use the Truesdale-monster (see PROTECTOR).
Three more: a mountaineer woman with Plateau eyes (Matt
Keller's talent; see A GIFT FROM EARTH), and a Kzin for a
central character, and a Grog for her mind-reading ability.
Ready?
DOWN IN FLAMES
SOON TO BE A MINOR MOTION PICTURE
I
Old Beowulf Shaeffer is relaxing somewhere when the
Truesdale-monster taps him on the shoulder. "I need you,"
he says, and produces whatever credentials it takes. ARM,
Belt Speaker, King, Secretary-General, he's got 'em.
Shaeffer's interest is captured. Truesdale leads him away,
talking a blue streak.
- 8 -
We last saw the Truesdale-monster taking a fleet of
ships to confront an oncoming fleet of Pak refugee ships.
Whatever they found out there (evidence of existence of the
Kzinti Empire? Maybe.) it caused them to send one of their
number home to watch over human space. They sent the only
flatlander: Truesdale.
At sublight speeds he arrived only recently. Things
seem calm enough in known space. Against all expectation,
the Kzinti seem harmless. But there is a mystery to be
tracked down, and the Core explosions needs some attention
too.
II
They are attacked at the spaceport. The weapons are of
the Soft Weapon type: "soft" in the sense used by Salidor
Dali, in that the weapon changes shape. The species attack-
ing is an unfamiliar one, agile as a Pak, without much
brain, and with hands to fit their weapons.
Truesdale takes them in a mad run for his ship. He
loses a leg, cauterizes it with his own laser, and off they
go, Truesdale hopping. The alien weapons do ferocious dam-
age; they include a total-conversion setting, but
Truesdale's ship is largely stasis fields.
III
Truesdale takes them to Camelot: his refugee in the
cometary halo. Camelot is similar to Kobold (see PROTECTOR)
in that Truesdale has been using gravity generators as a art
form. On the way, Truesdale gives his own background, and
gets Shaeffer to go over his tale of the trip to the Core
(AT THE CORE).
IV
At Camelot Truesdale takes Shaeffer once more through
the Core trip, under drugs. He still hasn't said what he's
after. He doesn't get it. But they were attacked, and that
must be important.
He examines the corpse of their attacker. It would
have been no brighter than a chimpanzee. Something else is
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training these.
They talk endlessly. Shaeffer mentions the trip to
Swoosh (FLATLANDER). Truesdale knows a good deal about the
Outsiders, and shows it. Shaeffer wonders about some of the
questions he asked the Outsiders during that single meeting.
When he mentions one question ("What will you do now that
you know the Core is exploding?") Truesdale hops up yelling,
"That's it!"
The attack starts in that instant.
V
It catches them on the surface. In the first moments
Camelot's gravity field goes and the air starts to expand
into space. Truesdale is vaporized in the middle of a leap
across a gap between the segments of Camelot.
Shaeffer dives for a door. Any door: the nearest
despite warning signs. There's air. Shaeffer inhales once
in relief, once in glorious disbelief, once to find out
where the incredibly delicious smeel is coming from. Then
his mind turns off, and he's tracking the tree-of-life root
down through the corridors of Camelot's heart.
VI
Shaeffer wakes as a protector stage human, very like
Truesdale: knobby joints, no obvious sex, expanded brain-
case, skin thickened to leather armor, etc.
Escape is his first problem. There's no ship; there's
not much left of Camelot. If the aliens were searching
Camelot with a device to detect thinking minds, then
Shaeffer's dormancy saved him. But they may still be
around.
There are gravity generators. Shaeffer repairs them,
then lines them up to accelerate rocks at near-lightspeed..
Now he's got a reaction drive. He heads for the sun.
The enemy attacks as his makeshift ship drops toward
the solar system. Shaeffer's gravity generators throw rocks
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at them. He follows with a sphere of neutronium in stasis.
The Pluto Watch picks him up. Shortly he sets himself
to locating and using Truesdale's organization on
Earth...and solving an urgent problem: the Grogs.
VII
Why didn't Truesdale exterminate the Grogs? Why wasn't
it his second act? His first, of course, was to review the
Kzinti problem and pronouce them harmless. The Grogs look
dangerous. They're sesile, granted. They talk a good
surrender. But they're hypnotic telepaths, and they bid
fair to be descendants of the terrible Slavers! Except
they're the wrong sex. How in hell did that happen?
Right, this must have been that Truesdale was investi-
gating. Shaeffer will retrace his steps.
VIII
Passing himself as Truesdale is trivial; who'd look
beyond the fasade of a man-parody done in coconuts and wal-
nuts? To command Truesdale's organization he need only
locate it, and he does. Truesdale ruled them with money;
he's got a nice little commercial empire going.
Data on Grogs tells him nothing he didn't know. Even-
tually he'll have to go to Down. Meanwhile, he investigates
Slavers.
IX
His major step is to steal the Sea Statue (see WORLD OF
PTAVVS) fromthe Smithsonian. Kzanol, the only known Thrint,
is in there. Shaeffer kidnaps an expert on Slaver
artifacts. He sets up some safeguards, hopefully adequate,
and opens the suit.
The safeguards include a Grog tourist: a hairy cone,
bald on top, split halfway down by her wide smile, eyeless,
earless ... and her rock, and the tractor treads it's
mounted on. It turns out she's not needed yet. Kzanol is
inthe suit when Shaeffer breaks the stasis field aroung it.
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But there's a butcher knife in Kzanol. As any fool might
have guessed, Jack Brennan (see PROTECTOR) would never have
left Kzanol alive in there, and odd sense of humor (a
butcher knife?) pretty well identifies his work.
But the corpse is enough. There are enough relics of
Tnuctip biological engineering around: sunflowers, stage
trees, Bandersnatchi. Schultz-Mann, the expert on Slavers
(for economy we'll make her a woman with Plateau eyes; that
trait may come in handy), says that Kzanol is of Tnuctip
manufacture. So, when Shaeffer produces it, is the corpse
of an alien attacker.
Chains of hypothesis lead Shaeffer to part of the
truth. There was no Slaver race and no Slaver War. It's
all Tnuctipun, and they're still around.
What do they look like? (We know only the attacking
alien.)
Why the deception?
What are they planning?
How did Beowulf Shaeffer get into it at all?
X
Shaeffer takes some time to ready Earth's and the
Belt's defenses against a return of the attackers. As a
protector Shaeffer isn't bothered by plans that take years
to reach fruition. When he's convinced that human space is
safe, he moves on to the Kzinti empire, taking with him the
Grog, and Schultz-Mann, and a loose Kzinti tourist with a
full name. With his aid, drop the word: something dangerous
is going on, be ready.
Then, a four hundred light year trip in hyperdrive,
taking four years. Shaeffer took a big ship and stocked it
with tools and raw materials. He's got time to build grav-
ity generators. With these he can match velocities with the
lost slowboat, board, and retrieve the entire crew. There
are some problems here with culture shock; these humans date
fromthe time of Gil the ARM and Lucas Garner.
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Larry Greenberg solves one problem fast. He points at
the Kzin and says, "That's a Tnuctip!"
The Grog says, "No, he isn't."
Deduction comes last for the Shaeffer monster. If
Kzinti and Tnuctip are related species, then there are Tnuc-
tip spies among the Kzinti. By now they will have a Fifth
Man-Kzin War going, probably.
XI
Third piece of the problem comes by straight extrapola-
tion. The Tnuctipun didn't interfere with Shaeffer's life,
throughtout 250 years or more, because he could testify to
the Core explosion. But Truesdale might have seen through
the hoax. So the Tnuctipun sent assasins.
Shaeffer turns back toward known space. On the way he
turns all of the slowboat's crew of fifty or so, except for
those too old, into protector stage humans. (He didn't need
tree-of-life, he needs only a culture of the virus, and
that's in his own body. A little biochemical work does it.)
He does not expect the expect the Tnuctipun to attack
in hyperdrive! But then they aren't expecting fifty protec-
tor playing games with gravity generators. Humans would
expect use of a gravity generator in hyperspace to detroy
the ship at once; but that hoax is obvious as soon as the
attacking ships appear.
XII
Eight years after leaving known space, Shaeffer's band
returns. There's no Fifth Man-Kzin War going. The Tnuc-
tipun tried that and failed. Now they're attacking
throughout known space with half a dozen slave races. The
Kzinti Empire (second most powerful among the Good Guys) is
paralyzed by Tnuctipun among them, and distrusted by their
allies because some Tnuctipun corpes have been recovered
from attacking ships. Shaeffer leaves a team to clear that
up, with the Grog to point out the ringers. He goes to war.
XIII
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Before it's over, we'll need billions of human protec-
tors. It's a Flash Gordon/E. E. Smith war, with superior
Tnuctip technology battling tools and weapons worked up on
the spot by a billions Dr Zarkovs. To Outsiders those same
new inventions are money; will they sell us the location of
the Tnuctipun?
If they don't it can be deduced. The Tnuctipun are
among the stars of the galactic rim. The Core explosion
hoax was to drive millions of refugee ships right to their
tables. Of course, the Puppeteers avoided that; they drove
their fleet up along the galactic axis, and none but the
suicidal ever boarded a spacecraft at all.
So we come to the final phase, as Shaeffer's legions
bring the war to the enemy.
I'm not strongly tempted to write this story. the
scale of things near the end gets bigger than I like. There
are too few human characters involved. And there's one
assumption I don't like.
The Logn Shot spacecraft was used in RINGWORLD and it
worked.
What do we have to assum? Either that RINGWORLD was
never written in this universe, or that the Puppeteers
modelled their hoax on something they were only then
developing, and they later finished the job.
Hey, that could be interesting after all. After the
Tnuctipun are finally exterminated, after things settle down
in known space, someone finally takes a Quantum II hyper-
drive ship toward the hub of the galaxy. And he finds that
the galactic core is exploding.
END