"Niall McAuley" Niall.McAuley@ericsson.moc.invalid wrote:
>I think what he said was that it had to be Pak protectors if >all the Known Space stuff is to be considered, but he didn't >want to get into that in "Ringworld", so he didn't. >
>However, I think the reason Niven didn't want to get into it is >that it makes absolutely no sense for the Pak to have built the >Ringworld. In fact the Pak's alleged relationship to humanity >is even stupider than the physics blooper "The Ringworld Engineers" >was written to fix up, so dragging all of that into the story makes >things worse.
it's fixable. lone tnuctip comes out of stasis not far from earth a few million years ago. feels lonely, adapts local hominids to be its supersmart bodyguards. smell of tnuctip makes protectors obedient. happy tnuctip has them make Ringworld for fun, sticks control room beneath Mars as a joke. tnuctip goes away somewhere, leaving breeding colony of pak near Core, for no clear reason. maybe it was looking for something thataway. wouldn't leave Pak on earth, might contaminate the control group.
later, some childless protectors reconstruct clues in the Library, manage to end up where they came from. thallium oxide tree of life dependence was inserted by tnuctip to prevent such escapes. happy tnuctip, sad pak. humans maybe descended from pak, maybe from original hominids. doesn't matter, virus rewrites genes anyway.
brennan-monster really smart, but Belter miner knows zero biology, doesn't know about tnuctip, gets it all wrong.
Damien