Ringworld's Children r-4 Page 14

  "Pipes run under the Ringworld floor. They pump sea-bottom slush up over the rim. Otherwise all the fertile soil would wind up in the sea bottoms and nothing would grow."

  They were dropping toward one of the peaks. Roxanny said, "Those mountains are waste heaps leaning against the rim wall, forty to fifty klicks high. People live on them. Weve seen balloons going between the peaks. But, Luis, I think the ones who attacked us were protectors. Do you know about protectors?"

  "Same thing as Vashneesht? Magicians. Very smart, very fierce, and theyre born in armor. We wondered if they were myths. There are some artifacts."

  "Oh, theyre real. One of those looked different from the rest," Roxanny said. "A primitive protector got as far as Sol system, seven hundred years ago, all the way from the galactic core. Its face looked like that ones."

  "The joker. Thats the one in charge," Louis said.

  "How do you know that?"

  Bram and Anne, both Vampire protectors, had found it easy to enslave spill mountain protectors. Spill mountain people couldnt live on the flats. In every case their entire species was isolated on some single mountain, held hostage with nowhere to flee. A spill mountain protector was born trapped.

  Luis wouldnt know that, so Louis said, "I heard him giving orders."

  They were crawling down the sky toward one of the spill mountains. Louis could hear a thin whining and feel a tremor in the rescue bubble. The sunfish ship had no kind of streamlining. They sank past an icy peak. Green showed much lower down. The sunfish ship moved close and slid sideways along a staircase of ledges, and now Louis could see trees and tiered fields and glimpse snow heaped in regular cones. Miles below was a breathtaking view of an endlessly rolling land, intricately detailed in tiny seas, rivers, ridges of hills.

  There was a thump. Louis drifted against the bubble wall. Then the gravity generator went off and he slumped against the curve of wall in full gravity. Pain lashed up his leg and hip.

  He didnt quite pass out. Roxanny whispered to him, "Things happen in war, Luis. Dont hold it against me," while the protectors moved around on the ice and rock, detaching treasure from Gray Nurse and carrying it away. Several were working on Gray Nurses doc.

  The joker protector opened the rescue balloon. Warm air puffed out; thin cold air blew in. The joker stepped in, sniffed, looked at each of the occupants in turn. Roxanny was wary; Wembleth cringed in terror. Hanumans eyes met the other protectors. They didnt try to speak, but they knew each other for what they were.

  The joker touched Louiss leg and its brace, using great care.

  Wembleth bolted for the opening. The joker swiped at him and missed… or else changed his mind. Wembleth bolted along the ledge, past conical houses, and was out of sight.

  Wembleth was suffocating again. There wasnt enough air. The folk around him didnt seem to be having trouble. A few children watched him curiously.

  Hed snatched up the translator device Roxanny had given him. Learning their language would be easier now… but it would still take hours. Strangers were always well treated, but the Vashneesht was a stranger too. Wembleth knew hed have to hide now, and without help.

  The houses were tall heaps of snow with a single small hole for a door. Hed be found quick in one of those, and only one way out. He considered hiding in a snowdrift, but only for an instant. Hed freeze. He wasnt wearing enough clothing. And he was leaving footprints!

  A ridge of naked rock gave him the chance to backtrack. He followed it to where he could jump across snow onto the angled trunk of a huge elbow tree. His knees betrayed him as he jumped; he landed on the slope, slid, caught himself, and clawed his way up sixty feet of naked trunk. The top was a dense green tuft. Wembleth burrowed into it.

  He could see out, a little.

  Four spill mountain protectors, naked in the cold and their own thick white fur, wedged Gray Nurses doc through the opening into the rescue bubble.

  Louis moaned when they moved him. The protectors were fiercely strong and surprisingly gentle, but it hurt. They lowered him into the Intensive Care Cavity and one reached around behind him. All sensation went away below the small of his back.

  Though the military doc was severed from Gray Nurse, somehow theyd got it running.

  The joker turned when Roxanny spoke. "You are in violation of several dozen laws enforced by the ARM and related governments."

  The joker answered in unknown speech.

  Roxannys translator would pick up the language. Good, and Louiss would catch it too. Immobilized as he was, there was no more he could accomplish here. Louis went to sleep.

  Through the greenery Wembleth watched the protector leave the rescue bubble. Roxanny followed. A dozen children followed her. The protector tracked his footprints for a time, then jumped across to the ridge of rock, examined it with her nose to the ground, then came straight toward him. She ran lightly up the trunk. She reached into the tuft and pulled Wembleth out into empty air.

  She let him dangle from one hand as she climbed down. He was frozen with fear and cold.

  A dozen Children crowded the rescue bubble, and more swarmed outside. Hanuman was clowning for them. They shied back when Louis stirred and woke.

  He smiled at a wall of white fur and two dozen eyes. "Hello," he said. A few voices answered. His translator did not.

  Most of the pain above his waist — left arm, ribs — had eased off. He wondered how long he was going to be like this. If Roxanny and the joker had taught each other their speech, then the joker hadnt been speaking local dialect, and that meant Louis couldnt even talk to these kids.

  But Roxanny and the joker were coming back, and Roxanny was holding Wembleths hand.

  They couldnt get through the crowd to reach the rescue bubble. They didnt try. The joker began to lecture, pointing occasionally at the humans and Wembleth. The kids inside couldnt hear, so they went out. Presently the joker sent Wembleth and Roxanny in, and gestured four remaining kids out, and closed the bubble.

  Roxanny glared after the joker, who was hopping away on the struts of the cargo grid. "She wont talk," Roxanny said bitterly.

  "Translator wont work?"

  "The translators fine, but it doesnt have anything to say."

  Louis asked, "Are you keeping ARM secrets?"

  "Sos she! Yes, she, she told me that much. She said her name was Proserpina."

  Wembleths teeth chattered as he spoke. His translator said, "Were going for another ride."

  Louis asked, "Are you up for that?"

  The man shivered violently. "I pissed my clothing last time. Thank you for not noticing."

  Louis sniffed. The air in the bubble had never ceased to smell clean and fresh. "Protectors build good machines," he said. "Well be fine." He saw the joker enter the ships cabin.

  Gravity went away. "Well be fine," he repeated.

  The sunfish ship floated away from the cliff, then straight up. Blue sky darkened to black.

  Louis said, "Ive figured out this ship. Gravity control—"

  "Magnetic," Roxanny said crisply. "They must use the grid. Luis, theres a superconductor grid in the Ringworld floor. If this ship is using a magnetic drive, then it can thrust against the Ringworld. Its like leaving your motor at home. I felt my hair stand up. Didnt you?"

  "Stet, but I meant the cabin gravity. Powerful, but it flutters. Why wouldnt Vashneesht fix that? I think theyre too arrogant to test what they build. They do it all in one shot."

  "Got it all figured out, do you, kid?"

  Louis flushed. He said, "Stet, its magnetic. Youd have near infinite range and huge acceleration as long as you stay near the superconductor net. You could use it as a weapon too. Push away missiles and ships. It could even be seen as a message."

  "Message?"

  " I cant invade you. Im purely defensive. Like a fort."

  "Mmm. Or just Keep out. "

  "Were falling again!" Wembleth burst out. "Roxanny, where are we going?"

  Roxanny shook her head.

  They cro
ssed a wonderfully fractal shoreline, all curliques of bay and beach, and were over the ocean. Ocean and sprinklings of islands. If you thought of them as islands, you didnt see that much speed, but theyd be one-to-one maps of a world.

  Near the shore of the Other Ocean the clusters were a bit foreshortened. Otherwise they were all maps of the same world. One sprawling continent with a spine of mountain; four smaller bodies and an archipelago of scattered tiny islands, all to antispin of the mainland; all showed a grainy texture. If you had to tell someone where you were — say, Tunesmith, if you could get hold of any kind of communicator — how would you?

  But the shadows were different. Bands and flecks and patches of shadow on only a few of the islands.

  Roxanny said, "This is Ocean Two! Do you suppose were going to one of the maps?"

  "Sure. What do you make of the shadows, Roxanny?"

  "Were too high to tell."

  Louis didnt answer. What should "Luis Tamasan" know about this? But shadows just didnt happen in a place where it was always noon, and Louis Wu found it freaky.

  Roxanny said, "Luis, Wembleth, theres two oceans on the Ringworld, you know? There are all those billions of little shallow seas with corrugated shorelines to give the locals lots of convenient bays and harbors, and all the trillions of klicks of twisty rivers. But then there are two big counterbalanced oceans, the one with all the inhabited worlds in known space on it — thats yours, Luis — and this, this endlessly repeated map. Its probably one-to-one scale of something, but its no world known to the ARM."

  Louis started to laugh.

  Roxanny glared at him. She said, "There are thirty-two of these maps, all of the same world! So after we land, we still wont know where we are. Is that what has you amused?"

  "Yah. Does the ARM have any idea what the Pak homeworld looked like?"

  "A permanent war zone. Every Pak protector wants his gene line to rule the world. Im just repeating the briefings," Roxanny said, "and we got all that from a stray Pak protector via Jack Brennan, and he was a Belter turned protector who couldnt be trusted worth tanj. So, no, we dont know the shapes of the Pak continents. Maybe they change. These creatures are powerful.

  "The joker — she looks like Pak breeder skeletons were still finding in Asia and Africa. So wheres the joker from? The Pak homeworld? But maybe its the Map of Earth. Luis, you said the Map of Earth was originally Pak breeders."

  The sunfish ship was descending toward an island cluster near the Other Oceans antispinward shore… fifty thousand miles near, maybe. Any distortion was lost in detail as the land rose up to meet them. There were crescents and pools of shadow on the land… but how could they be shadows, with the sun just overhead? They looked almost like pictograms, or writing. A lone mountain near the continents midpoint glittered. Dwellings? With windows?

  The grainy look of the land became interlocking dots of all sizes, circular features, as if the land had been battered by meteors. They skimmed a forest, slowing now. Louis recognized chains of elbow trees and other familiar vegetation.

  He said, "Most of whats on the Ringworld must have evolved as Pak plants and animals."

  "Good, Luis." A verbal pat on the head.

  Something about these patterns -

  "Its a garden," Roxanny said.

  "Roxanny? This big?" They were still miles high.

  Still, she was right. The landscape wasnt croplands, but it was just as certainly shaped. Variety and color: rainbow ripples that must be thousands of square miles of flower beds; varied stands of trees in all the colors of autumn and more, still seeming no larger than hairs in a dandys beard. A veldt shadowed with black arcs. Ponds, lakes, seas like silver plates with little central dots of island.

  Roxanny said, "Formal gardens are all rectangles, unless theyre supposed to look like wilderness. What kind of garden is all circles, and no two the same size? This is like… right."

  Like the Moon, Louis thought. "Like a war?" All circles, all craters. The Pak homeworld.

  "Vashneesht," Wembleth said positively.

  "Yah, the joker is trying to impress us," Roxanny said. Louis laughed.

  He glimpsed rectilinear outlines peeping through the wild colors. They dropped. There was a thump. Gravity ceased its flutter.

  CHAPTER 15

  Proserpina

  She brought the mag ship down in the garden, six miles downhill from the Penultimates mainland habitat. As soon as shed safed the motors, Proserpina rolled out of the cabin and ran aft. A sense of order might help the aliens adjust, but shed learn less if she gave them too much time.

  Isolated, shorn of her senses, imprisoned in the Isolation Zone for all of these millions of falans — Proserpina had still been able to infer general details of Ringworld history: infighting, dominance games, reshaping of world-sized stretches of topography, shifting alliances, changing genetic patterns…

  There was only one Repair Center, set halfway around the Ringworld from this, the Isolation Zone. The Repair Center could be seen as the Ringworlds natural throne room. A Ghoul was in power now, and that was good. He was short of experience, and reckless (not good), and probably male. Males wandered further. Where tree-of-life was scarce, a male would find it first.

  Control was what this was all about. In earlier ages she had seen conspiracy after conspiracy, and had always found a way to stay neutral without being destroyed. There was always a master of creation, and — after one awful early experiment — it was never Proserpina.

  She hop-stepped over the struts of the cargo grid and slid into the rescue bubble.

  The woman spoke. "We need to talk."

  Proserpina perceived Tec-First Gauthiers impatience and was amused. The woman was young, though not young for a breeder. Her stance suggested a different gravity; her speech was a bit altered from what Proserpina had heard while eavesdropping on the Ghouls retinue. Gauthier was one of the invaders. Shed have much to tell, once she stopped refusing to tell it.

  Proserpinas silence made the woman uneasy. "We need to talk to make the translators work," she added.

  Proserpina didnt smile. She couldnt. Theyd talked while they hunted Wembleth in the spill mountain village, but theyd said nothing. Nouns, verbs: not enough to cue Tec Gauthiers speaking device. Gauthier was keeping secrets.

  So was Proserpina. When she needed to talk, she would.

  The brachiator watched her and did nothing. Shed been expecting subservience. The little protector must serve another, perhaps the Ghoul.

  One of the males made a soft-voiced request. Proserpina didnt know his speech. Shed work it out presently. He stood like a local, a little stooped, but at home with Ringworld spin gravity. He wouldnt have much to tell. What he wanted was clear: he was hungry.

  The other male was injured and immobilized, naked and helpless. He watched. Proserpina was struck by his patience. Though no protector, he was an elder, of the same species as the woman. This would be the Ghouls breeder servant, Louis Wu of the Ball Worlds.

  "Youre all hungry," Proserpina said in Interworld. The men were unsurprised, but Gauthier jumped. "You can all tolerate fruit. Well work out details of your diet presently. Were all omnivores, I think, except you," looking at the little one. "How are you called?"

  The woman recovered her aplomb. She gestured: "Luis Tamasan. Wembleth. Roxanny Gauthier. Proserpina? How did you learn our language?"

  "Ive hacked into a library," Proserpina said. She saw the woman bristle: Gray Nurses computer! Stolen! "I chose my name from your literature," speaking now to Luis/Louis. Wu and the little protector were keeping secrets too.

  She clapped her hands. "Lets feed you. Theres fruit outside, and a stream."

  "Ill have to feed Luis," Roxanny said.

  "You must learn whats edible. Come. Luis, well be back soon. Your device is giving you nutrient, but its best if your digestive systems are exercised."

  "Thank you," he said.

  Roxanny looked dubious, but she went.

  Roxanny followed the protector. We
mbleth followed Roxanny, holding Hanumans hand. The ape scrambled along faster than his little legs were up to.

  From the back the joker looked like a small, scrawny, bald woman. She stood a meter and a half tall. All of her joints were swollen; her back was a column of pebbles. Roxanny knew that she should be afraid of the creature, but she couldnt feel intimidated.

  Proserpina was talking to Wembleth in Interspeak. Wembleth chattered in his own language, and Roxanny listened to his translator with half her attention.

  "Mother abandoned us. I never asked Father about it; he was touchy there, but I listened. They both used to go exploring. One day she was just gone. Some species do that, turn vicious and solitary, like the Swamp Folk. Friendly and curious when theyre young, great rishathra, then something triggers, and they bulk up and change attitude and go off into the swamp. I was afraid Id do the same. Interbreeding is rare, and you dont know what youll get."

  "Have you rished with Swamp People?"

  "With a Swamp Girl until she mated, and afterward we were friends. Then she got pregnant, and she went off alone to raise the children."

  There were low buildings in the forest. Trees masked them. Trees grew from the roofs, or up the side of a minaret. A huge tree grew through the hollow core of a ring two stories high.

  Shadows ticked at the corners of her vision. Tree shadows wouldnt move in this weird place where it was always noon or night. Roxanny became sure that there were animals in the forest, watching them.

  Proserpina was fast, darting among the trees, plucking and gathering plants in varied colors and shapes. "Try this," she said to Luiss long-armed pet, setting a purple blob in his hands. It resembled an eggplant, but it sprayed red juice when Hanuman bit into it. Hanuman buried his face in it.

  "Here. Here." Proserpina distributed other fruits, and watched for reactions. Roxannys yellow globe was bitter. She dropped it. A handful of green cherries was edible, but sour around the seeds. Wembleth liked the inner rim of a mottled yellow ring — he had to fit his head inside it — and Hanumans purple blob.