Ringworld's Children Page 9

  "Your device deployed. It will hold for days, but it will leak. What are you expecting?"

  "I sent a reweaving system to make more scrith. I based my design on nanotechnology from the 'doc aboard Needle. A complicated matter, this. The system must replace not only the scrith floor but the superconductor grid within."

  Hanuman said, "There are species whose breeders evolved intelligent. Their protectors would be bright enough to help you with such problems."

  "Bright enough to quarrel, too, and to hold the Ringworld hostage for the advantage of their own gene pool. Louis, tell me what you saw of a downed spacecraft."

  "Just a streak," Louis said.

  "Different from other streaks?"

  He spoke too patiently. Louis flushed. "We saw it from a long way away, but--I reached the Ringworld aboard a ship in stasis. Lying Bastard came down with a horizontal velocity of seven hundred and seventy miles per second, like anything that brushes the Ringworld. We left a streak of molten lava and bare scrith. Now I've seen one just like it. I think when one ship exploded, another got knocked down."

  "We'll have to find it."

  "That's easy, but not now," Louis pleaded. "Your orbiting stepping disk won't be in view of the puncture for twelve hours anyway. Let us get some sleep." He was ready to weep, exhausted physically and emotionally.

  "Sleep, then."

  They slept aboard Needle. Louis shared sleeping plates with Hanuman. The little protector just had to try it.

  Chapter 10 -

  A Tale to Tell

  They woke, they breakfasted, they returned to the workstation under Olympus where Tunesmith was waiting.

  Tunesmith had added to their gear. The new gear included two flycycles.

  Nessus and his motley crew had carried four flycycles: flying structures built something like a dumbbell with a seat mounted between the weights. They'd all been ruined on that first voyage. These two must have been modeled on the wreckage; but they were longer, each with two seats and a big luggage rack.

  Louis inspected one of the vehicles. The kitchen converter would store in the luggage rack or swing out. Mounts on the dash carried a flashlight laser and some other tools. Nessus's team had reached the Ringworld with gear similar to this, some of puppeteer make, some purchased off shelves in human space.

  "I reworked the sonic fold too," Tunesmith said. "Orbiting Stepping-Disk Eight will be almost in place, Hanuman. You can take it from here."

  "Stet." To Acolyte and Louis, Hanuman said, "Get into your pressure gear, then stow your baggage. We'll push the flycycles through first."

  "Where's the Hindmost?" Louis asked.

  "He's still in a depressed state," said Tunesmith. "That worries me. He may be suffering a chemical imbalance. I'll put him in the 'doc after you're gone."

  Louis didn't comment. They geared up and went.

  And out into free fall with the Ringworld blazing below. The Kzin, the protector, Louis, and two flycycles drifted apart. Riding lights flashed on the flycycles.

  Orbiting Stepping-Disk Eight had drifted in the night, twenty degrees, thirty-three million miles. Louis was looking almost straight down into a black hole with a glitter at the rim, in a quasi-lunar landscape marked with radial streamlines and glittering threads of frozen riverbed. A torus the size of a mountain range, glowing ruby from within and beginning to sag, was its border. It looked like God had dropped one of his toys. A plane of white cloud surrounded the torus, bigger than worlds.

  To antispin, where cloud cover became patchy, a white scratch ran across the land.

  Louis pointed it out. "A ship dug that gouge. We'll find it at the antispin end, the far end. I don't see it yet, so it'll be small. Hanuman, shall we start decelerating?"

  "Yes. Board a flycycle, I'll take the other, Acolyte rides with whom he will. Acolyte?"

  "With you," Acolyte said.

  "Stet. Keep your altitude until your relative velocity is low, Louis. The sonic fold won't take more than a few times sonic speed. I'll keep you in sight. Guide us down to the ship."

  A grid of superconducting material ran beneath the Ringworld floor. Nessus's flycycles had flown by magnetic levitation. With maglev for lift, thrusters didn't have to be powerful... but these redesigned machines did deliver some serious push. When his velocity relative to the landscape had decreased to something reasonable, Louis eased down into atmosphere until he could hear a thin whine in the sonic fold. He could see a lacework of water vapor around the other flycycle. His own shock waves were barely visible.

  Tunesmith spoke suddenly in his earphones. "Your mission is to seek out a crashed ship. Louis, guide them. Report to me at every step. Watch for more than one ship down. The crash grooves they carve would be close together and parallel.

  "I want to know the species and what to expect of them. Don't throw your life away to find out. Don't kill any LE if you can avoid it, but if you must, leave no sign. If possible, negotiate. I'll make any guests glad they met me.

  "I worry for what I might forget to tell you.

  "Louis, remember that information storage is easy. All of human knowledge is probably stored aboard every ARM spacecraft, with blocks to restrict secrets. The right officer will know the right passwords. Acolyte, if you find a Patriarchy ship instead, give up. The knowledge may be there, but no hero will give it to you--"

  Louis said, "A telepath might," but Tunesmith's monologue droned on.

  I worry for what I might forget to tell you... that it's a three hundred million mile walk home, and the stepping disk is orbiting beyond your reach, and the Hindmost will be in the 'doc. So you can't count on him for an ally, and you can't use the 'doc to rejuvenate, Louis. In the fullness of time, I'll make you a protector.... Not likely that Tunesmith would say any of that. Louis concentrated on flying.

  Far behind them was the low wall of fog. The ship they were tracking had skipped across a sea, a river, another river. A ridge showed a glittering notch of bare scrith where the ship must have bounced aloft. The arrow-straight canyon resumed further on, scrith rimmed with splashed lava. Following it was easy. It ran across forest, a white sand beach, a long, long stretch of veldt... there...

  So small a thing to have wrought so much damage.

  Against another ridge lay an elegantly contoured half-cylinder, flat along one side, no cabins, no windows, no breaks in the reflective surface, except near one end. Louis zoomed his faceplate.

  "Is that an ARM ship?" Acolyte asked. "Or Patriarchy? Smooth as it is, it might be puppeteer. But they'd use a General Products' hull, wouldn't they?"

  Closing now at several mach. The protrusion at one end looked like a bee's stinger.

  "It's a drop tank," Louis said.

  "Explain," Hanuman rapped.

  "It's not a spacecraft. It's part of a spacecraft, the part that carries extra fuel, the part you can throw away." He was furious with himself, and then, suddenly, elated. "The ship whapped down in stasis. After the stasis field collapsed, they still had a working spacecraft."

  Working spacecraft!

  Keep talking. Somehow he held his voice steady. "They drop the tank when they want agility or longer range. I'd say they were getting ready for a dogfight."

  But a working spacecraft!

  Hanuman said, "Flup. We have to find that ship. Were you expecting this?"

  "No. Lying Bastard was a different design. After we hit, we were grounded. Now what?"

  "Possibilities suggest themselves," Hanuman said. "First, I'm linked to Tunesmith. Tunesmith, you have Louis's assessment. Shall we wait for the ship to return for its fuel? Is it ARM or Kzinti or something else? Must we negotiate or challenge?"

  Louis said, "ARM." Kzinti would have marked their property. Pierin or Kdat
or Trinocs wouldn't challenge Kzinti or men; Kzinti had owned them. Puppeteers wouldn't directly challenge anything. Outsiders wouldn't get this close to a star. "Might be some other human branch, or Kzinti bandits, or Trinocs... but call it ARM.

  "That's a little tank, so we're looking for a little ship. A fighter won't carry antimatter fuel. Energy stored in a battery. Water for reaction mass because it's easy to store and pump. They might have antimatter weapons. It's surprising that a little ship would have a stasis field. Maybe the UN is getting better at building them."

  Any part of a warcraft would have dot-sized cameras all over it. "If they're not watching us, they might still record us," Louis said. "So what shall we be?"

  The little hologram heads of his companions looked blank.

  Louis explained. "We're operatives working for a superintelligent protector who used to be an eater of the dead. That's too scary. Any military LE who heard that might shoot us out of hand. An ARM ship will have records of what a protector is. That'll scare them too.

  "So, what do we want to be? We're a Kzin and a man and a Hanging People protector. We don't want to be Patriarchy. They're scary too. We can't show ARM identification--"

  "Ah," Hanuman said. "You want to lie."

  "Hanuman? A new concept?"

  Acolyte rumbled in dissatisfaction. Hanuman said, "My species' breeders aren't sapient. I've been able to think and speak for less than a falan. Who would I lie to? Tunesmith?"

  A dog will try to lie to its human master, Louis thought, but getting away with it--"Stet, but we do not want to confront them with a protector. Hanuman, do you remember how you behaved as a breeder? Can you do it again?"

  "You would make me a pet monkey?"

  "Yah."

  "Stet. If I can't talk, I can't be caught in a lie. Acolyte's pet, I assume. What of you?"

  Louis said, "I think Tunesmith saw this coming. Our gear is pretty close to what Nessus brought aboard Lying Bastard. Let's be the Hindmost's new crew. With the puppeteer leading from wayyy behind, as usual. It would explain flycycles. Hanuman, any thoughts?"

  "We're telling a story. Better if they do not learn that Louis Wu made a protector and set him in charge of the Ringworld. You would seem too powerful and too undefended. Best if we do not mention an experimental medical system using nanotechnology, either. That was stolen from the United Nations, even if eight hundred falans ago. They'd want it back."

  "I hadn't even thought of that. Stet, let's keep working on this. Acolyte--"

  "I am proud of what I am! And I was not taught to lie. We serve a powerful master. Why not simply demand what we want?"

  "Maybe this is why Chmeee sent you to me. Acolyte, it's only a fighter, but their mother ship would carry antimatter fuel. Hanuman, how many double-X-large plugs does Tunesmith have?"

  "One partly completed."

  Worse than he'd thought. The Ringworld couldn't afford another antimatter explosion! "Acolyte, you're Chmeee's son. Stick with the truth, as much as you can. Just don't talk about the RepairCenter or Tunesmith or Carlos Wu's nanotech autodoc. Your father, Chmeee, rules a chunk of the Map of Earth. The Hindmost made you an offer, and you went off with him rather than fight your father again. You're his hostage, but you don't know it."

  "And how did I meet Louis Wu?" the Kzin demanded.

  "I... hadn't got that far."

  "Land," ordered Hanuman. "We'll fill our kitchen slots while we wait for the ship's return. Louis, how long does a dogfight take?"

  "Not long. Hours."

  They landed among trees like redwood-sized dandelions. Louis had seen these elsewhere.

  Light and noise would alert them if a ship returned. Meanwhile they dismounted, stretched, removed their pressure suits. As soon as Acolyte sniffed the air, he bounded away with a howl, hot in pursuit of something the others never saw.

  Louis swung his kitchen converter out on its boom. He loaded grass and small plants into the hopper. Hanuman was doing the same. If the kitchen box was based on what they'd used thirty-odd years ago, it would process local vegetation or animal flesh, make handmeal bricks he could eat, and discard the dross. He'd have to catch something meaty, soon.

  It extruded a brick.

  "Wrong setting," Hanuman said. "Here." He turned a dial on Louis's kitchen. "That was for me. Fruit eater."

  Louis broke a chunk off the protector's brick and tasted it. "Good, though. We eat fruit too."

  It hit him without warning, a rush of nostalgia. He'd been here before, on unknown landscape in all this Ringworld hugeness, sharing a handmeal brick with Teela. He turned away from Hanuman as his eyes filled with tears.

  He remembered Teela Brown.

  She was tall and slender and walked with the confidence of a centenarian, though she was only in her thirties. He'd first seen her wearing silver net on blue skin; hair scarlet and orange and black, like bonfire flames and smoke, streaming upward. Later she'd put aside flatlander style. Nordik-pale skin, oval face, big brown eyes, and a small, serious mouth; dark and wavy hair cut short to fit into a pressure suit helmet.

  She had never stumbled, never had a bad love affair, never been sick or hurt, never been caught in scandal or a public gaffe, until she attended Louis Wu's birthday party. Louis still believed that was a statistical fluke. Among a population in the tens of billions, someone like Teela Brown could surely be found.

  But the Experimentalist Party among Pierson's puppeteers believed that they had been breeding the human race for luck. Teela was the descendant of six generations of Birthright Lottery winners. Whatever happened to Teela could be interpreted as lucky:

  Falling in love with Louis Wu. Following him here.

  Losing her way, in a domain three million times the surface area of the Earth. Finding Seeker, the brawny explorer who could show her so much of the Ringworld's secrets.

  Finding the RepairCenter beneath the Map of Mars. Finding a cache of tree-of-life root. Falling into a coma while her joints and brain case expanded, gender disappeared, gums and lips fused to horseshoes of sharp bone, skin thickened and wrinkled into armor... while she became a protector.

  Nessus led us, and I led Teela, to the biggest, gaudiest toy in the universe. How could she not want to make it her own? But only a protector's intelligence could hold the Ringworld safe. And when the Ringworld was endangered, Teela Brown the protector saw that she must die.

  Death isn't bad luck to a protector. It's just another tool.

  Acolyte returned with his mouth bloody. "Good hunting here. My father is missing another fine adventure."

  Hanuman asked, "Louis, can you pass for crew on an ARM ship?"

  "There's a notion." Louis thought about it. Did he really remember enough...? "What I can't pass for is a local. I'm Homo sapiens, Earth origin. Why do I want to be a crewman, Hanuman? Crew of what?"

  Hanuman said, "We must not be servants of a protector. So, I must be a tree-dwelling animal, and you must be a wanderer unless you serve some greater force. If you serve, it must be some aspect of the Fringe War--"

  "The ARM, of course. But I don't know ARM protocol, and I'm not in their records."

  "Isn't there a way you could have been missed?"

  "...No. Let's try something else."

  He munched on a handmeal while he thought. Drop the previous story; start over. Tell something simple. Something Louis Wu can keep straight, and Acolyte also.

  He said, "Let's try to guess what a random ARM fighter has in its computer records.

  "They know that we came home--that Chmeee and Louis Wu came home with Nessus injured and no Teela Brown. Suppose Teela lived? She never finds the RepairCenter and tree-of-life.

  "They might know that the Hindmost landed on Canyon twenty-three years lat
er, and Louis Wu disappeared then. They might have tracked Chmeee too, from one of the Kzin worlds up to where the Hindmost collected him.

  "So the Hindmost brings us both back to the Ringworld as crew. That's the way it happened, but let's say he planned to rendezvous with Teela. She and Louis Wu have been living together ever since." It could have been that way. Should have been! Even though the Ringworld would have been torn apart a year later. Still daydreaming, Louis said, "They had a child after her implant wore off, and that's me."

  Hanuman said, "Hypothesis diverges from ARM records."

  Tanj! "How?"

  "When would these events take place? Louis Wu returned here thirteen years ago. Does the ARM know that?"

  "...Yes, they do. ARM found me on Canyon just before the Hindmost collected me." Louis had killed two agents. "Tanj! That would make Louis Wu's son twelve years old at best."

  "Can you pass for twelve?" Hanuman asked.

  "Hah hah."

  "Could you, Louis Eldest, have left Teela with a child? The child would be aged a hundred and sixty falans."

  "Almost forty years old. Couldn't happen. Teela must have had her five-year infertility shots. They'd have had to wear off. We never had the time."

  Acolyte asked, "Can you be a child of Teela and Seeker?"

  "Hah! No. Different species."

  Hanuman and Acolyte waited.

  Start over. "At the end of the first expedition, thirty-eight years ago, Chmeee and I came back to known space and the Patriarchy. We turned over Long Shot and some information about the Ringworld. We were debriefed by a joint commission, then the ARM asked me a lot more questions. They didn't learn much, because we didn't explore much. Our second expedition was twenty-three years later. What if there was an expedition in between?"

  Hanuman asked, "Who sent it?"

  "The Hindmost sent it. Expedition number one-and-a-half. I can fake that. I met a puppeteer named Chiron on the Fleet of Worlds. He was pure white, perfectly coiffed with a wonderful array of classic gems, and a little smaller than Nessus--" His companions had never met Nessus. "Thirty pounds lighter than the Hindmost. He sounded just like the Hindmost; I suppose they all had the same training.