Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven Page A

Tunesmith's hands moved.
     
    There was color and flow. Shapes weren't there, just flow patterns of light and a few tiny dark comma shapes.
    In the Blind Spot, in hyperdrive, Louis had never been able to see anything.
    To go into hyperdrive this close to a sun was insane, but Hanuman's Probe Two had done it anyway. And somehow popped out again. And Tunesmith was about to do that too! They screamed at him but he did it. He went into hyperdrive while too close to a sun.
    Born and raised on the Map of Earth, Acolyte hadn't even guessed the danger. Launch must have been scary enough. In this nightmare of scrambled light and dark darting commas, he was only drawing breath to roar when they were out again.
    Stars. The singularity hadn't eaten them, it had spit them out. Louis looked around, savoring his ability to see. Close behind him was a black half-moon rimmed in fire: the sun chopped in half.
    Hyperdrive gone wrong might, in theory, take them anywhere. Louis had not expected to see a black arc of Ringworld eclipsing half the sun--out of all the quintillions of suns in the universe, he had not thought he would still be next to this one--but it was there.
    Tunesmith said, "Hindmost... no? Louis, then. Will you tell me if that was the Blind Spot your histories speak of?"
    Louis said, "The Blind Spot is what you don't see in hyperspace. If you try to look through a window, you're blind. You can only see what's inside the cabin. It's why most pilots use paint and curtains to cover up a General Products' hull. There are freaks, though, people and other LEs who can at least use a mass detector without going nuts. I can do that. Hindmost?" The puppeteer was in footstool mode. "Acolyte?"
    The Kzin said, "Tunesmith, if you can't see while flying in hyperspace, this will be a fun ride."
    "But that's not the point!" Louis tried to explain the obvious. "Ships just disappear if they drop into hyperspace too near a big mass. The space is too warped. What happened? We should be dead, or somewhere else in the universe, or in some other universe. Why aren't we? We're still in Ringworld system!"
    Tunesmith said, "I found no convincing theory anywhere in the records. I must evolve one. 'Hyperspace' is a false term, Louis. The universe accessed through the Outsider drive corresponds to our own Einstein universe, point-to-point, but there are fixed velocities, quantized.
    "You're aware that you can map any part of a mathematical domain onto the whole domain? For every point in one domain, you can place a unique point in the other. I thought the relationship here might be point-to-point except that space warped by nearby masses isn't represented. A ship that tried what Hanuman tried would go nowhere. Then I thought of an alternate model. We'll have to look at the recordings to know if I'm right, but after all, Hanuman did get in and back out--Excuse me," Tunesmith said, and turned to his controls.
    Hot Needle of Inquiry began to dodge.
    The war wasn't letting them through. Thermonuclear fireworks bloomed outside the ship. The ship surged, and protective blackness washed across the walls.
    Louis's inclination was to beat Tunesmith over the head with something heavy until he talked, but that would not be prudent while he was flying them through a firestorm.
    Tunesmith said, "Notice that we didn't travel far in hyperdrive. Hanuman didn't either. A light year in three days is characteristic of mass-free space. This close to a star's mass, space isn't flat. I'm not sure we even exceeded lightspeed.
    "We launched at point one C. We'll be among the comets in a few hours. We can safely use hyperdrive then. Hindmost, will you take the controls?"
    One head poked above the jeweled mane. "No."
    'Then get into ship's memory and summon up what information we collected."
     
    A mass pointer can't record, because the user's mind is a necessary component. Tunesmith had built something better, something that took pictures in hyperdrive.
    A virtual screen showed the