Ringworld's Children Read online

  He had watched Tunesmith at work on the Meteor Reweaving System.

  Tunesmith talked while he worked. Hanuman almost felt he understood it. Inside a Ringworld puncture, vast numbers of minimally tiny components would weave strands of scrith out of lesser matter, pulling the vast structure back together, closing the holes. Something else would be going on while the nanomachines worked. Similarly tiny components would weave magnetic cables thinner than the hair on Hanuman's body, following superconducting cables already in place inside the torn floor of the Ringworld.

  A protector's nature was to act. It was all Hanuman could do, to stand away from the Meteor Reweaving System, to keep his hands off machines that could save the Ringworld and every species on it, including Hanuman's own. He dared not touch what he didn't understand.

  For fifteen hundred turns of the sky, Hanuman had lived in trees with others of his kind. He had loved; had sired children; had grown old. Then a knotted creature sheathed in leather armor had given Hanuman a root to eat.

  Hanuman had only been intelligent for a falan or so. He knew this much: Tunesmith was a superior intellect. Hanuman's touch on Tunesmith's machines could only ruin them unless he were explicitly directed and guided.

  But he could work on Probe Two. This was the machine that might kill him. He was hoping to understand it better. Tunesmith--as much Hanuman's superior as he was superior to his species' breeders--didn't quite understand it either.

  Hanuman heard a puff of air and turned around. Tunesmith had arrived, with visitors.

  They were in the cavern beneath Mons Olympus. Tunesmith strode toward an individual half his height. He said, "Hanuman, these are friends. Folk, this is Hanuman, pilot for Probe Two."

  The stranger's voice was high-pitched but not childish. "Acolyte, Louis Wu, Hindmost. Hello."

  Louis said, "A pleasure. Hanuman?" Still trying to decide what he was seeing. The stranger wouldn't weigh more than fifty pounds. Three feet tall, with two feet of tail, swollen joints and swollen skull and skin like cured leather pleated in folds. "You'd be a Hanging People protector?"

  "Yes. Tunesmith made me and named me. 'Hanuman' is a literary reference from the library in Hot Needle of Inquiry." Hanuman switched to another language: Ghoulish, spoken far too fast. As he and Tunesmith chattered, Louis's translator caught a word here and there.

  "--haste--"

  "--lower that into place."

  "A single theory to be tested. If your vehicle survives--"

  A cylinder waited beside the linear accelerator. It looked too small for a passenger, but the nose was fully transparent, and the magnet coils behind it--the linear accelerator--were more than a mile across.

  Machines had already mounted the rebuilt hyperdrive motor in Needle's belly. Now Needle's missing hull section crawled forward to rejoin Needle.

  Needle's sliced-off wall had been breeched. A drum-shaped cylinder ran into and through it. The outer, hull side of the intrusion was opaque, painted with more of that bronze stuff. As the hull section moved to join Hot Needle of Inquiry, the intrusion eased into what had once been the garage for Needle's lander.

  The intrusion was an airlock, Louis saw. A big one, big enough to transfer a dozen humans at a time.

  The bronze edges matched. Then the bronze edging oozed away, coiling on the lava like a snake. The bronze splotch on the airlock remained in place.

  Louis said, "I can't stand it. What is that bronze stuff?"

  Hanuman said, "Glue."

  Louis waited.

  Tunesmith spoke with a touch of reluctance. "It's more complex than that. Do you know about General Products' hulls? Each variation is a molecule with its interatomic bonding artificially enhanced. It's very strong, but if the molecule is cut, it comes apart. I've engineered a substance to replace the interatomic bonds. It does more than allow me to slice up a hull. I can bond one General Products ship's hull to another. Hanuman, are you ready?"

  "Yes."

  "Only fulfill your mission, then save yourself if you can. Go."

  Hanuman scampered across the stone floor, climbed into the tiny missile, and closed the transparent nose. His ship dropped below floor level.

  Hanuman spared a moment to wonder about Tunesmith's companions. One was a breeder, species unknown, but all three showed their alien state. Starborn, alien to the Ringworld. Hanuman knew a little about them from Needle and its computer files.

  Where did they stand with regard to Hanuman?

  "Glue," Hanuman had said, to see if Louis Wu would extrapolate the rest. He didn't. Not that bright.

  Hanuman was brighter than a Hanging People, but he couldn't see what Tunesmith saw: the right answer, every time. Louis Wu had chosen Tunesmith. Did that make him bright enough to trust? The big hairy alien was a youth; he'd have little to say. The two-headed one was as old as seas and mountains....

  Probe Two was ready to launch, and Hanuman had his instructions. But if he survived, he must come to know who to trust.

  Hydrogen fuel flooded into Needle's tanks.

  Tunesmith waved at the tower of rings. "Bram built this to launch meteor defense and repair systems. I've altered it. It will give us higher initial velocity than our fuel and thrusters would buy. Board Needle now, don pressure suits, strap down. Hindmost, up front with me. We should launch behind Probe Two."

  Now Hot Needle of Inquiry was sliding across the lava. Louis wondered if they'd have to run after the ship, but Tunesmith led them to a stepping disk that flicked them aboard. The Hindmost and Tunesmith moved to the control room; Acolyte and Louis stayed in crew quarters.

  While Louis was getting into his suit, Probe Two launched in a flare of lightning and was gone into the sky. The launch system was inefficient, Louis thought. Bad for the environment. Tunesmith must have power to throw away.

  Needle sank toward the base of the launcher.

  Tunesmith was suited up much faster than the others. "Eat before you close your helmets!" he shouted. "There's time." He raced through some diagnostic programs, then began using stepping disks to flick through the ship, stopping to observe, to fiddle. In two or three minutes he was back.

  Needle's control cabin had been given place for a copilot. Tunesmith's bolted-in seat was a layer of plates that moved to accommodate him. He glanced around at his crew--in place, webbed down, the Hindmost beside him--and launched.

  Chapter 6 -

  The Blind Spot

  "Another one!" Forrestier shouted.

  'Tec Roxanny Gauthier looked. In the wall display, what was rising past the edge of the Ringworld was no more than a blurred point. Gray Nurse was on patrol among the inner comets, far, far away from any Ringworld action.

  Roxanny asked, "Did you see where it came from?"

  "Same as the other. One of the big salt oceans, an island cluster."

  The fighter-recon crews didn't actually know anything. They were watching a wall display relayed from Control. The officers in Control could feed them any data they liked. That didn't stop crewfolk from speculating.

  Roxanny said, "The first one was too small. So's this one. They're not ships, they're just probes."

  "Fast, though. 'Tec Gauthier, what's that?"

  That, rising from the same GreatOceanisland, was a larger dot, elongated, moving with the same amazing speed as the probe.

  "That's a ship," Roxanny said. Headquarters would have to respond to that! Gray Nurse herself would not fight. She was a carrier. She was long and slender, built for spin gravity in emergencies, and she carried twenty fighter-recon ships. Roxanny belonged to the crew of the fighter Snail Darter.

  Crewfolk numbered about two men for every woman, all between forty and eighty years old. Younger than forty, Command wouldn't trust your reflexes. Olde
r than eighty, why hadn't you been promoted? In Sol system they'd been the best. Here, in this strange place, some were startled to find themselves average.

  Roxanny Gauthier was fifty-one, and still one of the best. Lack of action didn't bother her. For two years she'd enjoyed Gray Nurse's modest rec facilities, kept herself in shape, competed ferociously in war simulations, and worked on her education. She enjoyed dominance games. Some of the fighter crew found her intimidating.

  The Fringe War couldn't last forever. The forces involved controlled energies that were too powerful. If the Ringworld itself was getting involved, nothing would last much longer.

  Gray Nurse came under power. Her nose swung around. The voice of Command--placid, not quite soothing--said, "All fighter-recon crews, we will be passing through the inner system in fifty to sixty hours. You're on down time until then. Eat, sleep, wash. After you launch, you'll wish you had."

  One or two crewfolk blew raspberries. Gray Nurse hadn't launched a fighter since their arrival ten months ago.

  Launch was ferocious. Louis heard a whine from the cabin gravity generators, and a planet's mass settled on him and squeezed out all the air. That wasn't supposed to happen! Then--

  --discontinuity--

  --the view jumped, navy blue masked by flame colors around a black disk. The flames died, leaving the sun a deeper black disk on black sky.

  He could breathe again.

  The ship's wall protected them from unfiltered sunlight by imposing a black patch on the sun. As Louis's eyes adjusted, he could make out stars, and here and there a spear of fusion light. A sudden starship zipped past, an advanced ARM design, too close.

  Tunesmith said, "Sorry. I reworked the stasis field generator. The stasis effect was holding for too long. It would have left us vulnerable, but now it doesn't become active fast enough. I'll fix it. Is everyone all right?"

  "We could have been crushed!" the Hindmost whimpered.

  "Where is Hanuman?" Acolyte asked.

  A virtual window appeared, and zoomed. "There, ahead of us."

  The Fringe War was starting to notice Hanuman's tiny ship and the larger craft following four minutes behind. Tunesmith jigged and jogged to avoid dangers unseen. Ahead of them, Hanuman's Probe Two was jittering all over the sky. The black patch that covered the sun was expanding.

  Tunesmith used the thrusters for a sustained surge; veered in the midst of the burn. The forward view went black, then cleared.

  Probe Two was gone.

  Louis had never had a chance to know the little protector. He asked, "Now, what did that accomplish, Tunesmith?"

  Pyrotechnics sought them out, Fringe War weapons following Needle's jittery path. Tunesmith ignored all that. "What you've seen buys us nothing yet--"

  Probe Two was back. It had moved, pulled ahead by a crazy quarter of a million miles. Tanj dammit, what has Hanuman done?

  Tunesmith said, "We are constantly testing each other, aren't we, Louis? Let me show you what I have learned."

  The puppeteer's orchestral scream drowned out Louis's, "Wait!" 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 streaming colors Louis remembered, and a deep violet dot expanding into a tadpole shape. Tunesmith said, "This explains why we didn't travel far. Too close to the sun's mass--"

  "Inside the singularity," Louis said.

  "Louis, I don't think there's a mathematical singularity here at all. I found reference to a mass pointer in the Hindmost's library. Have you used a mass pointer?"

  "There's one in front of you. It only works in hyperdrive."

  "This?" A crystal sphere, inert now. "What do you think you see with it?"

  "Stars."

  "Starlight?"

  "...No. A mass pointer is a psionics device. You perceive, but it's not with your usual senses. Stars look bigger than they should, as if you're seeing a whole solar system."

  "You've been perceiv
ing this." Tunesmith waved into a recorded view of neon paint streaming through oil. "Dark matter. The missing mass. Instruments in Einstein space can't find it, but it huddles close around suns in this other domain you've been calling hyperspace. Dark matter makes galaxies more massive, changes their spin--"

  "We rammed through that?"

  "Wrong picture, Louis. My instruments didn't record any resistance. We'll test that later. It might have been different if this had reached us." A deep violet comma-shaped shadow. "We find life everywhere we look in this universe. Would it be surprising if an ecology has grown up within dark matter? And predators?"

  Maybe Tunesmith was mad. Louis asked, "Are you suggesting that ships that use hyperdrive near a star are eaten?"

  Tunesmith said, "Yes."

  Crazy. But... the Hindmost continued his work with the recordings and Needle's instruments. He hadn't flinched at the notion of predators eating spacecraft.

  The puppeteer already knew.

  "I only held us in hyperdrive for a moment," Tunesmith said, "but these hypothetical predators only have one speed, Louis, and it's fast. 'Singularity' is a mathematical term. Certainly there are mathematics involved, but they may be more complex than just places where an equation gives infinities. Inside this morass of dark matter, the characteristic speed may be drastically lowered. The proof is that we live."

  "We are being observed," the Hindmost said. "I sense ranging beams from ARM and Patriarchy telescopes and neutrino detectors. Ships begin to accelerate inward. The ship from Sheathclaws houses telepaths of both species, though they can't reach us yet. I've found the comet cluster that hides the Kzinti flagship Diplomat. It's across the solar system, seven light-hours away and receding behind us. Tunesmith, do you have a plan?"

  The Ghoul protector said, "I have the simple part. We will observe the Fringe War as we coast outward. Let our velocity carry us beyond the danger zone, the dark matter zone where predators lurk. Then swing around the system in hyperdrive. Approach Diplomat from the other side of the system. Await developments."