D O W N I N F L A M E S OUTLINE FOR AN UNWRITTEN EPIC NOVEL BY LARRY NIVEN (c) 1977 by Larry Niven The following requires some explanation. At least! On January 14, 1968, Norman Spinrad and I were at a party thrown by Tom & Terry Pinckard. We were filling coffee 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 accurate.) 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 letters 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 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 outline. 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 then 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 consistent 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 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 Tnuctipun occupation of known space. So are the genetically tailored species, the sunflowers and stage trees and Bandersnatchi, found throughout known space. The Tnuctipun were all through here. They evacuated our region of space not long ago, certainly less than a million years ago. They were forced to leave a lot of gene-tailored life and a number of lost stasis boxes; though they could count on most of the relics of the empire disintegrating 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. The major hoax is the Slaver War, supposed to have occurred 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 hidden among the Kzinti. 14) There's proof of 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 intelligent 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 degenerate Slaver, except that with the Grog the female is dominant 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 seeds and eggs of useful life-forms in lead or stasis fields, and make every effort to preserve their artifacts for thousands of years. Now look at it from the viewpoint of Tnuctipun returning 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 I hyperdrive. All flavors, these beings. All moving at that 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 concentrate solely 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. 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 we balance profit 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 physical law, no mysterious singularity in hyperspace. The need to enter a system at sublight speeds will restrict the spread of humanity and keep us fro...
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