The Ringworld Throne

CHAPTER NINETEEN — THE KNOBBY MAN

Hot Needle of Inquiry had been built around a General Products #3 hull, with interior walls to separate the puppeteer captain from his alien crew. Currently the ship was more dwelling than spacecraft. Needle couldn’t exceed lightspeed because Louis Wu had cut the hyperdrive loose from its mountings, eleven years ago, for reasons that seemed good at the time. The ship itself had been embedded in magma during negotiations with the protector who had once been Teela Brown.

During that period and after, the Hindmost had deployed stepping disks through the ship and the Repair Center and elsewhere, too.

Louis expected to appear in the blocked-off crew quarters. The Hindmost hadn’t needed to suggest, maybe hadn’t dared to be overheard suggesting, that Louis come in fast.

The floating plates come down hard. Louis caught the recoil with bent knees, but he was still knocked off balance. He shouted, “Something’s—”

Something’s following me! Hindmost - But there was plenty going on here.

Thousands of Pierson’s puppeteers shifted and swirled and kicked, stage left. It might have been distracting, but it wasn’t. Louis and Chmeee had learned to ignore that part of the ship. That was the Hindmost’s, and the wall wasn’t glass. It was the invulnerable stuff a General Products hull was made of.

But one two-headed, three-legged alien, his mane curled and bejeweled in formal fashion, was between the kitchen wall and a coffin as big as a transfer booth lying on its side.

A knobby old man in a floppy vest was running at the Hindmost, knees and elbows pumping.

A hidden stepping disk led to the Hindmost’s quarters. The Hindmost must be near or on it, Louis thought. He would be invulnerable there.

Instinct must have been too strong. The Hindmost turned his back instead.

It all happened very fast. Louis was still catching his balance. The Hindmost was spinning around, heads splayed wide apart, looking back, binocular vision with a baseline of three feet. Sighting on his target. His hind leg folded forward and shot straight back as the knobby man attacked.

The Hindmost’s kick was good, square on target. Louis heard a clank: the knobby man must have been wearing a chest plate. Armor or no, that kick would have knocked a normal hominid into a coma. The knobby man turned with the impact, feet off the floor, one hand on the Hindmost’s ankle to borrow its momentum as the Hindmost pulled back for another kick. The knobby man stepped past the hoof and slammed a fist down hard on the puppeteer’s bejeweled mane, where the two necks connected to the torso.

That was the Hindmost’s skull.

And Louis was bringing the flash around. Too slow, too clumsy, the stunned puppeteer was in the way. Something whacked his right wrist and sent the flashlight-laser flying. A metal ball? Another knocked the variable-knife spinning.

Louis flinched violently away from the spinning wire blade.

The Hindmost was down, curled into a ball, heads and long necks tucked between his forelegs. The floor was ankle deep in water. The fallen flash was submerged, but it sent a thread of light through Needle’s transparent hull and into the lava beyond.

The wire blade hadn’t cut Louis in two. Blind luck. But his hands and wrists felt shattered, he was way off balance, and the knobby man was coming at him. Protector!

Louis rolled off the stepping disk and into a corner and started to stand up. His right wrist was a sea of pain. The left was only numb.

In the space where he had been, something huge flicked in on all fours. It stood erect, as big as an orange bear, holding a small cannon in one huge hand.

The knobby man spun and ducked and swept Louis’s variable-knife past the big intruder… the Kzin. The Kzin’s weapon flew away with big clawed fingers still attached. The Kzin froze in a crouch, throttling a howl. The knobby man held the flash, too, in a clear threat.

“You don’t move,” it said. “Web Dweller, you don’t move, either. Louis Wu, you don’t move. Does your contract call for you to die?”

The knobby man’s lips had withdrawn from the gums; the gums had hardened almost to bone, and jawbone had grown through in a jagged pattern. His face was hard, almost a beak. He spoke with a breathy speech impediment, but in Interspeak. How would the knobby man have learned Interspeak? Eavesdropping on the Hindmost?

Contract?

Reality came in waves washing past pain. Eleven years since he’d been in this much trouble. Louis said, stalling, “Yes, under conditions subject to my own sole judgment. Do you accept my contract?”

“Yes,” said the knobby man.

Despite what had gone before, that was astonishing.

The Kzin male was bleeding freely from a hand sliced down to one thumb. He was hugging that arm, trying to squeeze arteries shut. His eyes were on Louis. He said, also in Interspeak, “What shall I do?”

“Raise your arm above your head. Keep squeezing the wrist. Squeeze the blood vessels. Don’t try to fight. That’s a protector. Hindmost, set th-Hindmost! Nap time is over. For all of us.”

The puppeteer uncurled. “Speak, Louis.”

The black coffin—”Your autodoc, you said you could set it to treat a Kzin?”

“Yes?”

“Do that. Then you can tell me what happened. I’m on triple time, by the way, because this has the authentic feel of an emergency.”

The Hindmost wasn’t at his best. He said, “Heal an injured strange Kzin?”

“Do it now.”

“But Louis—”

“I’m under contract! This is for our benefit. Can’t you see who this must be?”

The puppeteer knelt before the ‘doc and began mouthing the controls.

The protector still had the flash and variable-knife. Louis couldn’t think of anything to do about that, or the sudden strange Kzin, or the constant flicker of dancing puppeteers in his peripheral vision.

One tanj thing at a time!

The Kzin. “Who are you?”

“Acolyte.”

“Son of Chmeee,” Louis guessed. He’d forgotten how huge a Kzin male became when you stood next to him. This one couldn’t be more than eleven years old, not quite full-grown. “No true name?”

“Not yet. Eldest son of Chmeee. I challenged. We fought. Father won. He told me, learn wisdom. Stalk Louis Wu. Acolyte.”

“Aww… Hindmost, how long to set the ‘doc for Kzin metabolism?”

“Minutes. Give the Kzin a tourniquet.”

Louis moved to the wardrobe dispenser, slowly, hands visible to the protector. His right hand and wrist were hugely swollen. He held that arm raised above his head. His left hand felt numb, but it would work, he thought.

The kitchen wall had menus for kzinti and human cuisine, diet supplements, allergy suppressants, clothing, and more. Louis hadn’t seen pharmacy menus, but he didn’t doubt they were there. The Hindmost had found him as a wirehead. He would not have shown him how to access recreational chemicals.

Louis dialed {Sol / Nordik / formal} and a selection of cravats. Resisting temptation, he chose an orange and yellow pattern that would look good on a Kzin. Not even his eyes moved toward the Slaver digging tool he’d taped under the dispenser port a lifetime ago.

The smell of the Kzin was faint. Acolyte must have washed himself scentless, to stalk him, Louis Wu thought. His orange fur bore three parallel ridges across the belly. Otherwise he wore Halloween markings: both ears tipped with bitter chocolate, nearly black; a broad chocolate stripe down the back, a smaller chocolate comma down his tail and leg. He was shorter than Chmeee, seven feet even, but just as wide: a hybrid. His mother would be of the archaic kzinti from the Map of Kzin.

Acolyte sat down, bringing his arm in reach. Louis bound the thick wrist with his tie, using his left hand and his teeth. The blood slowed to a dribble.

The Kzin rumbled, “Who is my attacker?”

“Tanj if I know, but if I had to guess… Hello, knobby man?”

“Speak.”

“The Hindmost and I, we both guessed that a protector must be in the Repair Center. You’ve been shooting down invading ships. The timing made it obvious you were working from here. The Hindmost left stepping disks all over the place. A protector might reprogram a disk to link with this one as soon as it was turned on…”

“Yes.”

“Then pop through just ahead of me. Finicky timing. You needed me for a distraction, and you counted on puppeteer reflexes. That’s interesting, isn’t it, Hindmost? You had an instant to escape, but you used it to kick?”

“That old argument. Very well, I reflexively turned my back to fight-you win.”

Louis grinned. The pain wasn’t so bad now, but he was drunk on endorphins. He said, “Acolyte. This is a protector. Look him over. They all have that knobby look, and they’re all brilliant and dangerous.”

“Looked like just another hominid.” The Kzin shook his great furry head.

“How long did you watch me?” Louis asked.

“Two days now. I thought, learn from you before I show myself.”

“Wisdom?”

“Father spoke of you. He believes he learned what he has of wisdom from you, and so can I. But one of the scavengers saw me.”

“The boy?”

“Yes. You named him Kazarp.”

“I talked to his father, too.”

“The boy and I, we talked. His father was not far, listening, thinking he hides. I spoke what I knew of you. I don’t know secrets worth hiding. I did not speak of the Hindmost.”

“How does he think we got to the Ringworld, then?”

“You mean Arch? I said you brought a ship. I did not speak to Kazarp of instant transportation. Didn’t believe Father. When you linked the transfer booths—”

“Stepping disks. Transfer booths are what we use in known space and the Patriarchy. They’re a lot less sophisticated.”

“-stepping disks. I jumped. Catch Kazarp and his father by surprise. Leave them gaping. Surprise!” the Kzin whispered, and slumped. His eyes closed.

“Hindmost?”

“Ready. Bring him.”

Louis set his shoulder in Acolyte’s armpit and lifted. Acolyte found the strength to stand, wobbled to the surgery well, and toppled in.

Louis pulled his tourniquet loose and straightened the Kzin a bit. He found the Kzin’s severed hand, and the two useless halves of the heavy metal handgun he’d carried. He picked up the half hand.

The Hindmost took it in his mouth. “Close the lid,” he said, and fed the hand into another aperture. Then he folded his legs and tucked his heads between his forelegs.

Going into shock, Louis thought. The knobby man said, “Suicide?”

One head came up. “I demonstrate helplessness. This is surrender,” the Hindmost said.

“Surrender, good.”

The Kzin would likely be in there for days.

Louis might have fainted for an instant.

Agony snapped him awake. The protector’s knobby hands were moving the bones in Louis’s right wrist. Louis’s other hand closed hard on the protector’s arm. He moaned and whimpered. Reality came in waves of pain.

Not before the protector withdrew did Louis think to look for the protector’s weapons. Just as well. The knobby man’s vest bore an amazing variety of pockets, and he saw the shape of the flash in one of those.

Now, what must he do before he fainted again?

Contract. He fished out his notepad and offered it to the puppeteer. “This is what you’ve agreed to. You should read it aloud, given that our companion has bound himself, too.”

The puppeteer took the pad. His other head turned to the knobby man. “Why did you do that?”

“I need allies who are not protectors. Protectors kill each other,” the knobby man said. “I can hold you to a formal promise made for mutual advantage. Read.”

The Hindmost read.

The knobby man-or woman: he was a bit shorter, a bit more slender than Teela Brown had been after she turned protector. The hairless, leathery skin, the swollen joints, the triangular face and bulging skull, all made it difficult to assign him a gender. Louis thought he could make out traces of male genitalia, but he couldn’t swear to that.

Behind the impenetrable wall, a million hologram puppeteers danced. The Hindmost must have thought he’d be back among them before he missed a step.

“…if in his sole judgment the commission involves undue risk-‘ Sole judgment?”

Louis smiled and shrugged.

“-undue damage-clear violations of ethics-‘ Sole judgment?”

The protector asked, “Hindmost, will you bind yourself similarly?”

The Hindmost whistled indignantly. “You speak of enslavement! How can you possibly compensate me? What I offered Louis Wu was his life! Point taken, I accept.”

Louis could hold back no longer. He asked, “Who are you?”

“I have not needed a name. Choose what you like.”

“What’s your species?”

“Vampire.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

Louis was about to faint.

He’d found Teela Brown’s medkit welded to the top cargo plate, long ago. He had to stand up to reach it. Grinding his teeth against the pain, he pushed his swollen right hand into the diagnosis well.

The pain went away. A readout asked him questions. Yes, he wanted to remain awake. No, he couldn’t replenish supplies of various medicines… an ominously long list.

His whole right arm seemed gone and nothing else really hurt. His mind was lucid, free to toy with the pieces of reality and try to put them back together. He had bound himself to serve a protector… hadn’t he? The protector had bound himself to Louis, to limitations on his power over Louis Wu. And the puppeteer had bound himself, and was himself bound to the protector, by Louis’s contract.

He could hear what the others were saying, but the words slipped through his ears and were gone. “Require most urgently… invaders… beyond the Arch.”

“ARM and Patriarchy ships,” Louis said. “Bet.” Political entities would invade: it was their nature. He had described the Ringworld for United Nations records. Chmeee had spoken to the Patriarch. What other organizations would know of the Ringworld? “Fleet of Worlds, too?”

“So poorly designed, so ill-protected?” The puppeteer fluted, “Those are not ours!”

“Are these political entities dangerous?” the knobby man asked.

The puppeteer thought they were endlessly dangerous, and said so. Louis’s head was bubbling with chemicals; he did not contribute.

“Are they likely to give up their plans?”

“No. I can show you where their interstellar transports hide,” the Hindmost said. “Those won’t participate in an invasion. Even your sun-powered superthermal laser won’t reach the farthest targets. The ships that land will be warships carrying no hyperdrive motors.”

“Show me.”

“From my cabin.”

Louis laughed inside his head.

The unmarked stepping disk flicked only to the Hindmost’s cabin, and it wouldn’t pass aliens. The Hindmost would be behind an invulnerable wall. What chance was there that the knobby man would permit that?

Vampire protector. Louis made his mouth work. “What do you eat?”

“I make a vegetable mash. I have not tasted blood in twenty-eight falans,” the knobby man said. “My hunger is no risk to you.”

“Good,” Louis said, and closed his eyes for a moment.

He heard, “Hindmost, you will only break your contract once. Show me all of the invader ships.”

The Hindmost’s answer was a warbling, whistling music with overtones in subsonic bass. Louis’s eyes popped open to see the dancers disappear, replaced by rotating three-space star maps.

The system looked nearly empty save for the Ringworld and its shadow squares. Color-coded lights blazed far from the Ringworld’s arc, and scores of smaller sparks swarmed much nearer. Louis couldn’t see motion on this scale, but they seemed to be taking positions around the system, as if just becoming aware of each other.

“I must return to defend the Arch,” the knobby man said. “You come.”

The puppeteer shied. “But maps are only available here in Hot Needle of Inquiry!”

“I have seen them now. Come.”

Louis was alone.

And the picture changed as they flicked out. In the captain’s quarters was a three-dimensional circuit diagram of some kind…

Enough. Louis leaned his head against the stacked cargo plates and closed his eyes.

He dozed, leaning against the stack of cargo plates with his arm in the medkit. Loss of balance snapped him awake from time to time.

Behind the aft wall was the lander dock, nearly empty since Teela burned the lander. Louis couldn’t quite remember what else was in there. Lockers for pressure suits and armor, of course, and a stack of stepping disks. He had a vague impression that the Hindmost had made changes, eleven years’ worth of fiddling.

To ship’s port and ship’s starboard the walls were black. Needle was embedded in black basalt: cooled magma.

A network of lines and dots floated beyond the forward wall, like an ant’s nest seen by deep-radar. It teased at his mind.

Dots there and there and there. Those two linked, and those three. Here, a network of ten. Way off in the distance, one of the ten appeared to be two dots superimposed. Sketchy contours in the background might shape a map.

The Hindmost must be trying to show him something.

When bladder pressure was stronger than his fear of pain, Louis pulled his hand free and wobbled to the toilet. Evidently he still had a medical problem. Afterward he drank a quart of water. He ate a civilized Caesar salad for the first time in eleven years, left-handed. No more of eating whatever he could find! That, he would not mind giving up.

He examined his hand with meager satisfaction. The swelling was down; the bones seemed to be in place.

He left the machine twice more. The pattern caught his eye again as he left the recycler.

Stepping disks!

His subconscious must have been at work. That map defined the stepping disks the Hindmost had deployed. Several were scattered through the millions of cubic miles of Repair Center. Four in Hot Needle of Inquiry itself. One just outside. The double-point must be the refueling probe in Weaver Town, with one disk for transport and another for hydrogen.

The Hindmost had left him this. Louis studied it, fixing it in memory, wondering at the puppeteer’s motives…

And it all popped back to dancing puppeteers as the knobby man flicked in.

The protector had something in his hand. He blew into it, watching Louis’s face. Music fluttered in the air, a woodwind sound.

Louis’s reaction must have been unsatisfactory. The protector put the thing away. He examined Louis as a primitive doctor would have, probing here and there to see what hurt. Presently he said, “Not much longer.”

Louis had had a notion. He said, “My kitchen wall can be made to dispense blood.”

“Will you drink first?”

“No, I won’t. I’m not a vampire. Also, the Hindmost will have to rewrite the kitchen program. No, wait, let me try something.”

At the kitchen wall Louis popped up a virtual keyboard for kzinti cuisine, marked in dots-and-commas, Hero’s Tongue. Louis knew a little of that. He scanned through the extensive menu with the knobby man watching. {Wunderland cuisine} — no. {Fafnir cuisine}? Not under that name. Try {sea life}. There, under the planet’s kzinti name, {Shasht}. {Meat}, {drink}, too many items. Try {seek: meat/drink}. Four times. Three were soups, with as an ingredient, and that left {shreem} itself.

{OVERRIDE laws pertaining to Shasht / Fafnir, Earth, Jinx, Belt, Serpent Swarm…}

A bulb popped into the dispenser port, filled with sluggish red fluid.

The knobby man took the bulb. He took Louis’s jaw, faster than he could flinch. His grip was like iron. “You drink now,” he sad.

Louis opened his mouth, obedient. The knobby man ejected a dollop of sticky red fluid into Louis’s mouth. The taste was unfamiliar, but Louis recognized the smell. He swallowed anyway.

The knobby man drank, watching Louis. “You surprise me. Why would you make blood for me?”

For eleven years Louis had been eating what he could catch, or what unknown hominids would offer as food. “I’m not squeamish,” Louis said.

“Yes, you are.”

In truth, what he had smelled and tasted was making him nauseous. He said, “I have kept to our contract, which calls for me to act in your interest. You are in violation. I judge it wrong for me to drink human blood, and I said so.”

The knobby man said, “The medkit is through with you, isn’t it? You put on your pressure suit. Come with me.”

“Pressure suit. Where are we going?”

The protector said nothing.

Louis grinned. He pointed through the transparent wall aft. “Vacuum gear, landing craft, airlock, anything Chmeee and I might need to get out of this ship is in the lander bay. I can’t get there except by stepping disk. The Hindmost was holding us prisoner.”

“Didn’t you have a contract?”

“Not then.”

“I learned how to use stepping disks. Come here.”

The knobby man had lockpicking tools made of hardwood. He knelt by the disk and lifted its edge.

Louis couldn’t see what he was doing. The protector’s fingers worked too fast. He saw the stepping disk diagram appear in the Hindmost’s quarters, and flicker. Then the protector set the disk in place, pushed Louis onto the stepping disk and followed.

With the lander destroyed, the lander bay was mostly empty space. There were suits for men and kzinti and puppeteers. The transparent walls of the airlock opened into a tunnel that led through several cubic miles of magma, undisturbed since the war with Teela Brown.

Louis glanced at the weapons racks but did not approach them. He pulled out a skintight pressure suit already zipped open along the torso, sleeves, and legs. He wouldn’t need the cummerbund. He started to crawl into it, and stopped with a gasp of pain.

Before he could ask for help, the protector was there, easing his half-healed hand and arm into the sleeve and glove, then fashioning a sling from the tie that had been Acolyte’s tourniquet. He zipped up Louis’s suit, screwed a helmet onto the neck ring, and set an air rack on his back. They waited for the suit to contract to Louis’s own shape.

The knobby man worked the controls of the big stepping disk the cargo disk. Louis began his checklist. Helmet camera, airflow, air recycler, CO2 and water vapor content -

The knobby man pulled him through.

CHAPTER TWENTY — BRAM’S TALE

The Map of Mars stood forty miles high above the Great Ocean, a north polar projection at one-to-one scale. From the Ringworld’s underside there was no sign of the Map of Mars, because the entire forty-mile-high pillbox was hollow.

Louis had seen vast spaces inside the Repair Center, but he had never been inside this one. It was huge and dark. Skeletal chairs equipped with lap keyboards rode on long booms. The ellipsoidal wall was a display screen thirty feet high. The only light came from the screen: a wraparound view of the local sky.

There were no planets or asteroids in Ringworld system. The Ringworld engineers must have cleared all of that out, or used it as building material. The Ringworld’s night-shadowed rim showed pale against the black background. Light-amplified stars glared, and four tiny green circles: cursors.

“I found four more,” the Hindmost said. He was at a wall of clumsy, clunky lights and dials and switches. Now Louis recognized where he was. This was the system that twisted the sun’s magnetic field. He had seen this array in a holo projection, eleven years ago, when the Hindmost manipulated the Meteor Defense.

The air here must be soupy with tree-of-life spores.

It was a tidy place, except-hmmm?

Across that great width of floor, a shadow-shape was standing in near darkness. A shape of motionless menace, skewed from the human shape, too thin and too pointy in spots. Bones. Bones mounted in a pose of attack.

In the shadows beyond those standing bones, gear seemed scattered at random.

Later. Louis said, “I should finish my checklist. Do you need me instantly?”

The knobby man said, “No. Hindmost, show me.”

No Belter would have yanked a man into a vacuum before he had checked his pressure suit. That would be murderously rude. Had the protector read the readiness of his suit at a glance? Louis wondered. Was the protector testing his attitude? His equipment? His temper?

The Hindmost was riding one of the cargo plates. He lifted by a yard; his heads dipped among the controls. The skyview zoomed on an orange near-sphere marked in black dots-and-commas. A kzinti ship, probably centuries old and retrofitted with hyperdrive.

The view shrank, and moved, and expanded. This next ship looked big, a long, slowly rotating lever with a bubble at the near end. Louis didn’t recognize the type.

The view shrank and moved and expanded to show a gray and black object like a diseased potato seen through fog. The Hindmost said, “The Ringworld engineers left only the most distant comets. Too many to destroy them all—”

“Air reserve,” the knobby man said. “To replace air lost over the rim walls.”

“…Yes. Now note this…” A blinking green circle marked a crater on the proto-comet. The view expanded, then shifted to deep-radar, with a blurred view of structure in the ice below the pock.

The knobby man asked, “What species built that?”

“I can’t tell,” the Hindmost said. “Mining projects always have that look, like the root system of a plant. But here…” Another rotating lever, a ship of the same make, viewed from the side. Familiar little stubby-winged aerospacecraft were strung all along its length.

“These are United Nations craft made by Louis’s species.”

Louis had finished his checklist. The suit would keep him alive for weeks, maybe months.

“Very good. Allow me,” the knobby man said. He stepped on another cargo plate, and rose. His hands were dexterous where the puppeteer’s mouths had been unsure. A second screen lit with a darkened view of the sun.

Minutes passed. Then a bright plume began to rise, twisting in magnetic fields.

Louis said, “You’re going to kill them, I take it.”

“Such are my directions. They came as invaders,” the Hindmost said.

“So did we.”

“Yes. Are you healthy?”

Louis wiggled his bound hand. “Healing. It’s a waste of time, anyway, if I’m going into your magic ‘doc. What have you been doing?”

“We’ve destroyed six carrier ships and a fleet of thirty-two landers. Those were the ships closest to the sun, the most vulnerable. These last are so distant that we may do no more than enrage them. I’m inclined to ignore the installation in the comet. We would only boil ice. I found an Outsider ship on one of the farthest comets—”

“Tanj! Knobby man? You didn’t shoot down an Outsider, did you?”

“The Hindmost advised against.”

“Good. They’re very fragile, but they’ve got technology we can’t even properly describe. For that matter, they don’t want anything we’ve got, and what they want, they buy. There’d be no point to hurting an Outsider.”

“Do you like them?”

That was a somewhat surprising question. Louis said, “Yes.”

“What would they be doing here?”

Louis shrugged inside his suit. “The sky is full of planets. There’s only one Ringworld. Outsiders are curious.”

The solar plume was still rising. “Observe and criticize,” the knobby man said to the Hindmost. Fingers like strings of walnuts danced over the wall.

The puppeteer watched. He said, “Good.”

It all seemed very leisurely. The plume would take hours to form. The superthermal laser effect would be propagating for minutes before it left the plume. The targets looked to be hours away at lightspeed.

Louis had already discarded the notion of a last minute rescue.

Louis Wu owed nothing at all to the United Nations or the ARM. He wasn’t obliged to protect kzinti ships either. Disarmed and injured, he was no match for a protector of any species. He knew he’d be lucky to keep his life, now that he was back in this dance of powers.

His contract didn’t bind him to rescue the knobby man’s prey. And they had come as invaders.

“I pointed out a monitor station, too. One of mine,” the Hindmost was saying. “The Conservatives will never miss it.”

“Right. Knobby man, I’m tempted to call you ‘Dracula.’ Dracula was the archetype of story vampires.”

“Follow your whim.”

“No. Trite. You’re a protector, a prime mover among vampires. Let’s call you ‘Bram.’ Can you tell me what you want of me?”

“I want what is best for my species. Vampires face three threats, and each threatens all beneath the Arch including yourselves.”

The knobby man watched Louis’s face as he spoke. “First, if vampires become numerous, we deplete our prey. Intelligent hominids might even find a way to exterminate us. I don’t want any species of vampire getting too much attention. You don’t want us spreading.”

“The vampire slayers, were they yours? No, that’s crazy. They’re your own species.”

“No, Louis, they’re not. There must be a hundred separate species of vampire on the Ringworld.”

“Ah. Where do yours live?”

Bram ignored that. “Louis, I did not shape the Shadow Nest Alliance. Their solution was elegant, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Second, these invaders from space threaten the Ringworld structure itself.”

Louis nodded. “An interstellar warship can always use a meteoroid impact for a weapon. Watch for falling comets.”

“The third threat is protectors, for the duels they fight.”

Louis asked, “Just how many protectors have we got already?”

“Three or more involved in repairing the rim wall installations. Each would seem to have its task, but all will bear watching.”

“What species, can you tell?”

“It’s an important question, isn’t it? Those who rule would be vampires. Any others would be servants drafted from local species. Louis, one can argue—”

“How the tanj did the Ringworld come to be infested with vampire protectors?”

“That is an intricate tale, but why should I tell it?”

Louis had carefully not bound himself or the Hindmost to reveal secrets. How could he urge Bram to reveal his? He said, “It’s your call. First decide what you want. Decide if we can give it to you. Then decide how much we need to know to do it right.”

The knobby man’s hand danced over the wall. He said, “You keep secrets. Why should I tell mine? You are bound to obey regardless.”

Try this - “You’ve been shooting down ships. Stet, but suppose you miss one? You’ve no way to judge what they’ll do next. We three, I and Acolyte and the Hindmost, are the only aliens at hand. You expect to watch us and extrapolate what invaders would do. But we don’t react if we don’t know anything.”

The bright plume pulled from the sun had been arcing over, but now it started to straighten, to narrow. Bram said, “Hindmost?”

“The prominence is nearly in place.”

“Will you complete the maneuver?”

“Destroy all four sources?”

“Leave the comet. Louis, how can you react properly if you know you’re being watched?”

“When I’m being watched, I watch back. Take it into account. Bram, who are you? How did a vampire get into the Repair Center?”

“I mapped my way in.”

Louis waited.

“Louis, have you seen how hominids behave when they drink the fuel the Machine People make?”

“I’ve done it myself.”

“I never have. Now you must imagine that you have drunk fuel beginning with your mother’s milk. Tens of falans later you wake sober for the first time, sober and buzzing with energy and ambition.

“I was born… I was shaped 7,200 falans ago. Corpses lay all about me, tens of my kind, days dead, and one strange shape that was all knobs. I was all knobs, too, sexless, and cold and hungry and gashed by fighting, but I was solving the world like a great puzzle. Three others were waking, changed like me.”

Louis asked, “You trapped a protector? Vampires aren’t that intelligent.”

“This one was born trapped, made to be a servant.”

Made by…? “Go on.”

“The city stood on a vertical cliff and one great stilt. I was born in its shadow. We were always hungry. A ramp wound up the stilt to the smell of prey, but iron lace stung us when we tried to climb the ramp or the mountain face. Transport flew to and fro. The ramp was never used. After we became protectors, we guessed at the reasons our lives ran as they did. I think we were a defense—”

“Moat monsters,” Louis said. “Invaders would have to face vampires before they reach the real guards.”

“Plausible,” the knobby man said. “There came a famine, when no more produce flowed into the city. A lost war, political games, bandits on the roads, who can tell? We vampires knew only that the flow of garbage slowed to a trickle, and water and sewage, too. What ate of the garbage went elsewhere, and we who survived partly on scavengers’ blood began to starve.

“Many days later the iron lace barrier lifted and great boxes rolled down the ramp. We tried to get them open, get to the blood within. Their wheels rolled over us. A fantastic warrior danced about the vehicles and killed all who came, and stayed after the vehicles were gone, killing all who would follow. She would not heed our pleading—”

“Pleading?”

“She was immune to our scent and ignored our body language. That enraged us. We had never seen a protector. We were stupid and angry and hungry. We brought the knobby one down at last, swarmed her and took what blood she hadn’t lost in the fight, and were still hungry enough to drink from our fallen. Then others fell into a sleep like death, and so did I.

“When I woke, I was changed. But I remembered, and that was already a new thing.

“Many of us tasted protector blood that day. Some died in their sleep. Four protectors woke. By her scent, one was my favored mate, and so we knew each other.”

“I wondered. Vampires are monogamous?”

“Say?”

“Mate once.”

“No, Louis. When a hominid doesn’t have the scent, that is prey. I drink her veins empty while I rish. Her scent may mark a woman as my kind and make her safe. But we were starving, Louis. She and I, my mate, what shall I call her…?”

It surprised Louis, the fervor with which Bram told a tale he’d had to be goaded into. Was this the first time he’d ever had listeners? He said, “Anne?”

“Anne and I had the will to keep our mouths shut while we mated. Of course we never mated after we woke changed, but we remembered that we trusted each other.”

The memory took him by surprise, and Louis shuddered. Trust a vampire?

She had seemed an angel in rut, supernaturally desirable, the vampire who attacked Louis Wu twelve years ago. His hands in her ash-blond curls had found too much hair, too little skull capacity. It was not possible for another hominid to judge what a Ringworld vampire really was.

Louis could see the Hindmost listening: one head cocked toward Bram and him, while the other worked at the board. He said, “Stet, go on.”

“We four explored, with ten breeders too young to make the change. My mind made maps as we went. Wedge City was a triangle, the base supported by a mountain face, the point resting on the great stilt, the stilt rising farther to form a tower. We battered down doors and smashed windows, but the only hominids in the city were imprisoned in the tower. When our breeders had been fed and the edge was off our hunger, we followed a scent trail to a better protected place, a place where two protectors had lived above a hidden store of yellow roots. You know of these roots?”

“Tree-of-life.”

“We saw their nature. Anne and I, we saw that the root was our blood now. We would starve without it. We killed the others.”

“That first protector—”

“I studied her body,” Bram said. “She was smaller than me. Her jaw was massive, specialized to chew tough branches that grew locally. Her tools were primitive. She rescued breeders of her own local species, fought to cover their passage out of the city and through the vampires, and sacrificed her life in the act.

“Louis, most life, most animals, most hominids, can only survive in one locale. Imagine that your species is restricted to some one stretch of river, clump of forest, isolated valley or swamp or desert. As a protector, you become more flexible, but everything you cherish is in one place. A protector of a less restricted kind can destroy it all if you don’t obey her commands.”

“Did you see any sign of—”

“Yes, of course, clues were everywhere, they crawled up on our shoulders to bite our necks! Two protectors dwelt in the house of the roots. One served the other. We found bodies, breeders of the servant’s species. The master was of another kind, near eighty thousand falans old, protector of a species that has since changed or become extinct. I knew the smell of him thousands of falans later. The famine drove him from Wedge City. The servant stayed to rescue her species.”

“Her blood made you a protector.”

“Evidently,” Bram agreed.

“The virus. The gene-changing virus in tree-of-life root. It’s in the blood of protectors, too.” Louis found that amusing. Vampires become immortal by drinking an immortal’s blood!

But it did not amuse him to be at the mercy of a vampire protector.

Now the plume from the sun stretched tens of millions of miles into space. The Hindmost rode a cargo plate near the rounded ceiling, one head cocked to hear. Surely he was too far away. Unless… a directional mike?

Louis asked again, “How did you get into the Repair Center?”

Bram said, “Roots to last a hundred falans. We must find the source or die when we run out. Anne and I taught each other to read. Writings in Wedge City guided us to cities with libraries. We chose a cold climate so that we might hide ourselves under clothing. They took us for visitors from afar. We paid taxes, bought land, ultimately gained a citizen’s access to the library of the Delta People.

“There we learned something of the repair facilities beneath the Map of Mars.

“We reached the Great Ocean and crossed it. We had to make inflated cylinders to walk about the surface of the Map of Mars. I prefer your pressure suits. Still, we entered while still alive.”

“And you didn’t kill each other.”

“No. Vampires have no minds, Louis Wu. A vampire protector starts fresh, intelligent from birth, bound by no preconceptions and no old loyalties or promises. If a hominid cannot choose a protector of her own species, a vampire must be her next best choice.”

You’d have killed each other for the last tree-of-life root. Louis didn’t say it. He wasn’t sure it was true. “You found the master protector. How? Why did you fight?”

“We fought for who would best guard the Arch and all beneath.”

“But his record was good, wasn’t it? Whole species must have evolved and died out during his time, but civilizations rose and flourished until—”

“But we won, Anne and I.” Bram turned away. “Hindmost, what progress?”

Louis looked toward a skeleton standing in dimness. He had guessed who that must be. “How did you get to him? He was eighty thousand falans old, you said.” Nearly a million Ringworld rotations. Twenty thousand Earth years. “All that time, and then there was you.”

“He had to come. Hindmost?”

The puppeteer called down. “I have played the Meteor Defense on three targets. We will not see results for two hours. Three before the installation in the comet can observe and react. Any of the others have hours to move, but who can dodge a beam of light?”

“Your opinion?”

“My people prefer to achieve our aims by giving other species what they want,” the Hindmost said.

“Louis Wu, react.”

Louis answered. “You’ve started something you can’t stop. You’ve attacked two war fleets, three if you count the Fleet of Worlds. Political structures get old and die, Bram, but information never gets lost anymore. Storage is too good. Somebody will be testing the Ringworld defenses for as long as there are protons.”

“Then the Arch must have a protector, for as long as there are protons.”

“At least one. Invaders wouldn’t just take over territory. They’d fiddle and test and maybe ruin something, like the City Builders did when they took the attitude jets on the rim wall to make interstellar ships.”

The knobby man waited.

“A vampire might be a mistake.”

“You have a vampire in place. To fight him might be a far more expensive mistake.”

When Louis said nothing-still chewing his thoughts-Bram fished something from his vest. It was carved wood, bigger than the flute he’d played earlier. The windsound was deeper, richer, with a drumbeat that was Bram’s fingertips tapping the barrel of the thing. Soothing, despite Louis’s irritation.

Louis waited for the mournful tootling to stop. He said, “You need a meteor watch in the plane of the Ringworld. I don’t know how to do that. The solar Meteor Defense can’t fire on anything that’s hiding under the Ringworld floor.”

“Come,” Bram said. “Hindmost, come. We’ll return later to see what has escaped us.”

The knobby man’s hand felt like a handful of marbles, and his pull on Louis’s good wrist was irresistible. Louis found himself walking rapidly away. He looked back once at bones in a stance of attack. Then Bram guided or pushed Louis onto the stepping disk.

They flicked through into Needle’s cargo space.

The knobby man helped Louis strip the suit off inside out, careful of his injured arm, careful not to release spores that might have accreted on the surface. Where was the Hindmost?

Bram led Louis onto the other disk, flicked them both through into crew quarters. At no time had Louis considered resisting. Bram was just too futzy strong.

The protector knelt before a blank wall. “The puppeteer worked here to summon images into his own quarters. Let us see how well I observed him.” He produced wooden picklocks and went to work.

A diagram appeared: the map of the stepping disks.

Then a view of Weaver Town.

The Hindmost flicked in: lander bay, then crew cabin. “Forgive the delay,” he said.

“Were you testing my security? Hindmost, wake the Kzin now,” Bram said. “Afterward I want a better view of the rim wall where the protectors are working. Send your refueling probe.”

The Hindmost glanced at readouts in the autodoc lid, touched something, and danced back as the lid lifted.

The Kzin stood in one fluid motion, ready to take on an army.

Now the knobby man was armed with flash and variable-knife, though Louis hadn’t seen him move. Bram waited to see Acolyte relax, then asked, “Acolyte, will you bind yourself to me according to the terms of Louis Wu’s contract?”

The Kzin turned. His scars had disappeared and his hands looked fine. “Louis Wu, shall I do that?”

Louis swallowed his reservations and said, “Yes.”

“I accept your contract.”

“Get out of the ‘doc.”

Acolyte did. Bram led Louis to the big ‘doc and helped him in.

The Hindmost was busy elsewhere. Color-coded dots and rainbow arcs swirled and shifted in the captain’s cabin, responding to the puppeteer’s music. Suddenly he whistled in discord. “The probe!”

“Speak,” Bram said.

“Look! The stepping disk is dismounted from my refueling probe! Wait—” The puppeteer tapped at the wall. The view from the partly submerged probe became a view from the cliffside webeye. “There! Look, there it is!”

The teleport device that had been mounted on the probe’s flank now lay flat on the riverbank beside the Council House.

“Nobody’s trying to hide it,” Louis said. “The little disk in the nose with the deuterium filter, is that still in place?”

The Hindmost looked. “Yes.”

“It’s almost flattering. Someone wants me back.”

“Theft!”

“Yeah, but leave it. What you’d better do is bring the probe here and mount another disk. Acolyte, the Hindmost will read you your contract. Don’t harm either of these people. Wake me up when the ‘doc is through with me. The kitchen wall has settings to feed a Kzin, and Bram here will be using it, too. Will you be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Stet.” With no small trepidation, Louis lay down in the coffin-shaped ‘doc. The lid closed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE — PHYSICS LESSONS

They saw it days ahead: a black line against the vastly more distant starboard rim wall.

Closer, the line became a tremendous and artificial silhouette rising above the desert: a raised platform with bumps clustered near the center.

Closer yet, the Reds could see daylight under parts of the elevation. By then Warvia knew. It was the Night People’s goal, and the Sand People’s cemetery.

They were traveling through a dry land. Sand wasn’t good for the motor. There had been a hungry few days before they ran across the Sand People.

The Sand People went muffled in pastel robes. Small, compact beasts drew their wagons in groups of twelve, and served as meat animals, too. Carnivores! Red Herders and Machine People rejoiced alike.

They made gifts of the cloth they’d taken from the Shadow Nest. The Sand People killed two of their beasts to make a feast. The several species shared lore and stories as best they could. Only Karker spoke the trade language well enough to be understood, and everything had to be translated.

Rishathra didn’t require translation, only gestures. Without their robes, the Sand People were small and compact: as short as Gleaners, with broader torsos and lean arms and legs.

Harpster and Grieving Tube kept to the payload shell.

The cruiser departed at halfdawn.

It made Warvia uneasy to know that the Ghouls below her driving bench were near starving. But their goal was in sight.

They arrived in bright mid-afternoon.

An ancient road half covered with sand rose to the axis of the platform. Three arms splayed out from the center section at 120-degree angles. The arms were wedge-shaped platforms that floated unsupported.

The center section was a forest of mooring posts, metal rails, pulleys, and ropes. The roofed buildings on this structure looked like afterthoughts. They were empty and sandblasted by time: warehouses, a banquet hall, an inn. Running through the axis was a deep well with clean water at the bottom.

On one of the wide paths between buildings, the Sand People had laid out their dead. It looked as if they had been doing that for generations. There were hundreds of skeletons. A double handful at the hub end were more mummy than bone. A few were more recent yet.

“Just as Karker said,” said Sabarokaresh. “Warvia, did Karker tell you…?”

Warvia said, “Karker told me how to find a shrieker village. Sand People don’t eat shriekers, but I told him we could.”

“You were guessing?”

“Well, what choice? Antispin of the funeral place…” Warvia waved to antispin, and then looked again. Not thirty paces paces [sic-should be a single “paces”] away, the smooth plains became a jumble of mounds. It looked like a crumbling city in miniature.

“We won’t wake the Ghouls,” Sabarokaresh decided. “Let them wake and follow their noses.”

So they set their wagon on the cemetery heights, not too close to the array of corpses, and went out to look over the shrieker village.

It was not the strangest thing Warvia had seen, yet it was strange enough.

Here on the flat plain were hundreds of squared-off mounds. It looked like a half-melted city as built by people a foot high. Every mound had a door in it. Every door faced out from the center of the city.

When the vampire killers walked toward the mounds, an army poured out of the holes and took up station.

The shriekers were of a size to make a day’s meal, Warvia thought. Their faces were blunt. They came out on all fours, then stood upright to display outsize claws intended more for digging than fighting, and shrieked. The high pitch hurt Warvia’s ears.

“Sticks,” Forn suggested.

Tegger waved it off. “If we just wade in and start clubbing them, they’ll swarm us. There’s a forest of ropes where we left the wagon. Didn’t I see a net there?”

The guard took station again to defend their city. Barok and Tegger threw the net. It was of strong, coarse weave, intended to lift cargo. Most of the guard crawled out and attacked. The Reds and Machine People ran then, pulling the net behind them, and paused to flip it over, to trap the few remaining guards. The other shriekers stopped, shrieked at the invaders, and returned to their stations.

Four big ones remained caught.

The Reds had eaten, and the Machine People were cooking their catch, before shadow crossed the sun. The Night People emerged, looked about them, and followed their noses. Warvia and Tegger crawled into the payload shell to sleep.

“Mummified, most of them,” Harpster told them at the following halfdawn. “Too far gone even to carry as hardship rations. Most of them died old. Sand People seem to lead a good, healthy life. Never mind, there was a…”

“Herder,” Grieving Tube finished for him. “Killed by his own beasts, I expect. We rarely starve.”

“Good,” Warvia said.

The sliver of sun was already too bright for the Night People. They sat under an awning while the others soaked up sunlight and waited for the morning to warm.

“We asked the Sand People about this place,” Foranayeedli said. “They grow up in its shadow, but they know nothing of it except as a burial place.”

“It’s much more,” Harpster said. “Our need now is to mount the cruiser and moor it tight. We’ll need food for five days for all four of you—”

Sabarokaresh said, “We leave you here.”

Warvia and Tegger had known this was coming. Warvia said, “We thank you for staying so long. We would have looked peculiar, Red Herders driving a Machine People cruiser. Have your plans changed?”

“We return to port at our own pace. We’ll buy our passage with stories and lore. We’ll teach the tribes we pass among to make fuel.” Barok squeezed his daughter’s arm. “When finally we reach Machine People again, we’ll have enough of bounties to make Forn a dowry.”

“For the lessons also, thank you,” Tegger said carefully.

The girl favored him with a lecherous smile. “You were easy to teach!” She glanced at her father. “Oh, there were things we never yet spoke of—”

“Courting,” Barok said.

“Yes. Remember how to court,” Foranayeedli said. “Most hominids have courting rituals. Don’t try to guess what they are. Stick to your own. It keeps you comfortable, keeps them amused. Can you remember courting?”

Warvia said, “A little.”

Tegger said, “We court briefly and negotiate first. I suppose other hominids consider us shy or cold.”

“Hmm, yes—”

Grieving Tube said firmly, “Time runs short. We must mount the wagon. Barok, Forn, you’ll help before you leave?”

“We will. We’ve found livestock, too. What do you intend?”

“The wagon must sit solidly on the vehicle at the end of the starboard platform.”

“Is that a vehicle?”

It was one of three long floating platforms. Tegger might have taken it for a covered dance floor, tournament field, shooting range… The roof was transparent. The floor was flat, and five times as big as the cruiser’s wheelbase. Sturdy aluminum loops as big as his torso were recessed into the floor.

They centered the cruiser on the platform. Harpster and Grieving Tube supervised from under the awning while the rest threaded rope through aluminum loops and over and around the iron payload shell. They used pulleys to put tension on the ropes, until it seemed no force beneath the Arch would cause the wagon to shift.

They were done by midday. Barok and Forn began to gear up for their own journey.

“You’ll need food,” Tegger said. “Shall we smoke some shriekers?”

“Good. And I noticed something,” Barok said. He led them to his find: a shallow tray three manheights long by two wide, with lines trailing from holes at the corners. He lifted it effortlessly.

Warvia grinned. “Brilliant! You can tow it!”

“Yes. But first…”

The shrieker guard emerged to form rank.

First, the nets. They scooped up most of the guard, twisted the net and threw it aside.

Then the four dipped the edge of their tray into the loose sandy dirt and pushed and wiggled and pushed until the tray slid in and under. When they pulled at the ropes, the corners of the tray came up. They had a section of shrieker city on a tray.

The guard had been working their way free. What they saw maddened them. A swarm of them dug straight into the section of city on the tray, frantic lest it escape. The rest formed a crescent and screamed.

Lifting it took all the strength of all four, but they only had to carry it thirty paces. Then ropes and pulleys lifted it to the cemetery heights, and sliding posts on rails took it the rest of the way. They set it down aft of the cruiser, and slid the tray out from under the dirt.

Four shriekers still struggling in the net were pulled loose, killed, cleaned, and smoked over wood Barok pulled from a collapsed building. The Machine People drank as they worked, as much water as their bellies could carry. They left before halfnight.

Warvia and Tegger talked to the Night People while they inspected the work.

“Truly, we thought you, too, would leave us before now,” Harpster said. He was looking to spinward of port, where Foranayeedli and Sabarokaresh were tiny shadows.

The Sand People had mapped a path to other tribes. Traveling by night, the City Builders could bounce from one tent city to another until they were in green lands once again.

And where, Warvia wondered, would two Red Herders be by then?

Warvia explained: “Red Herders travel widely. Twenty daywalks is nothing. Where we settle, rumor and questions will catch us up. We make poor liars, Harpster. We must go farther. Best to do without the questions.”

Tegger said, “In twenty daywalks we’ve had rishathra with Machine People and Dryland Farmers and Sand People.”

Warvia remembered that her own experience was wider yet. Nobody spoke that truth, not even Harpster. He only gunned and said, “But not Weed Gatherers nor Ghouls. Picky!”

Warvia’s eyes dropped. She would rish, but not with a Ghoul, and Tegger wouldn’t either.

“But we acted without the encouragement of vampire musk,” Tegger said. “There is a restlessness in us-or me…?”

“Us,” Warvia said firmly. “Mated we are, but no longer for each other alone. I don’t doubt that we can return to our custom—”

“But we must be far from the rumor of Red Herders who rished with every species along their path! We’ve nearly left the Machine People empire behind. A little farther—”

Warvia said, “Five days, you said. How does this thing move?”

The Ghouls were at work closing the aft end of the great crystal canopy. Warvia began to feel claustrophobic. It bothered her, how little she and Tegger knew of where they were going.

She thought they would not answer; and then Harpster said, “Like this.” He moved a lever that took both arms and a strong back. The platform detached from the dock.

Motion was hard to see, it was so smooth, but the platform was clearly drifting away.

“How far are you going?” Tegger asked.

“Oh, easily farther than the rumors you’re fleeing.” Harpster grinned.

Grieving Tube strode around the bulk of the wagon. “Is this Barok’s work? He did well. Tegger, Warvia, we’re going as far as the rim wall. We can drop you off at the next stop if you like, or you can come along and then leave us coming back.”

Tegger laughed incredulously. “You’ll be dead of old age before you get to the rim wall!”

“Next stop, then,” Harpster said agreeably.

Grieving Tube chitter-whistled angrily. Harpster laughed and chittered back, whistling ribald-sounding comments through his teeth.

“Grieving Tube wants you,” he told the Red Herders. “She thinks we should travel with people who can look daylight in the face.”

“We only need to be outside Machine People turf,” Tegger said.

“Leave us when you like. But think! It’s serious work we’re doing. We’re going up the spill mountains and farther yet. No Red Herder has ever done anything so big. You’ll have so much to tell when you finally settle that you’ll never remember to speak of rishathra.”

The desert slid smoothly past. Warvia asked, “What are we riding?”

“It’s a Builder thing. I’ve only heard about them. None of the Night People would use an air sled unless the need was dire, but we have permission and directions.”

“How fast does it go?” The landscape was moving faster yet. The receding dockyard had become a dot. A sound was rising, as of wind heard through a sturdy stone wall.

“Fast. We’ll be below the spill mountains in five days.”

“No.”

“So I was told. But the first stop is only three days away.”

“I’m frightened.” Watching the world zip past was beginning to hurt Warvia’s eyes.

“Warvia, there are lines under the land. In drawings they took like a honeycomb, and they lift and move Builder things. We can only stop where the lines come together.”

“Three days,” Grieving Tube repeated.

Far across the desert, a caravan of hominids and beasts popped up and was gone so quickly that Warvia couldn’t even identify the species. The air sled was still accelerating.

The payload shell smelled of Ghouls. It hummed. Warvia huddled against Tegger in the dark and didn’t speak of what was happening outside. They mated with an intensity backed by fear, and for that time Warvia entirely forgot where she was. But then the whisper of motion was back, and Tegger’s voice in the darkness to drown it out.

“What was Karker like?”

“Strong. Strange to hold: strangely shaped.”

“Down here…?”

“No, not here. His body was broad, shoulders and belly and hips. I think every man is alike here. And he was very eager to talk, to try his skill at trade language.”

“You only talked?”

Warvia giggled. “We rished. It was his first time. Imagine, Tegger! I was his teacher!”

“Did you tell him—”

“Of course. The only Red Herder woman who ever engaged in rishathra, and all his for the night. He loved it. Who were you with?”

“Hen-no, Hansheerv. I made sure I got her name right. She was the tall one, almost my size?” Warvia laughed at that, and he said, “The old leader’s widow, though she’s about my age. Of course we couldn’t talk. We tried to rish in the dark, but we couldn’t gesture that way, so we went outside and did it by Archlight.”

“I wonder if the Night People were watching.”

“I wondered, too,” Tegger said. And then the whisper of uncanny speed was in their ears and souls.

They dozed. When each knew that the other couldn’t sleep, they mated again. And tried to sleep again. When the outline of the door was a white glow, Warvia asked, “Are you hungry?”

“Yes. Are you going out?

“No.”

The door opened on halfdawn light. The Ghouls shambled in. The door closed. “We’re moving well along,” Harpster said, and Tegger heard relief and fatigue in his voice. “Warvia, Tegger, are you all right?”

“Scared,” Warvia said.

Tegger asked, “Shouldn’t someone be steering?”

Grieving Tube said, “The air sled rides lines buried in the scrith. We can’t get lost.”

Tegger said, “If the air sled went astray, it would kill us so fast that we’d barely know it.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“How do you know?”

Harpster growled. Grieving Tube said, “Let us sleep.”

Since they’d left the vampires behind, the Night People had been sleeping in the payload shell. The smell was rich. Warvia huddled against her mate and tried not to think of the smell of Ghouls, or her hunger, or the vibration in the iron around her.

She uncurled and stood up. “I’m going to hunt up a meal. Shall I bring you back something?”

“Yes.”

They had left the eternal clouds far behind. The day was ablaze. The land streamed past, pulling Warvia’s eyes with it. Warvia dropped from the cruiser and loped over to the piled sand, keeping her gaze always toward her feet.

No shrieker guards came.

Warvia found an entrance hole and tickled it with a stick. A fat shrieker popped out and screamed at her. She snatched it, broke its neck and ate voraciously.

She couldn’t keep from looking. The land had become a vast forest. The tops of huge trees were all far below, all converging and disappearing behind the sky sled. The motion threw her balance off, making her dizzy.

She made herself circle the cargo tray and tickle another opening. When a defender appeared, she snatched it and wrapped it in her skirt.

She was stepping onto the running board when she heard a voice speak her name.

The shrieker fell and scampered free. Warvia jumped straight backward, her spear poised to kill. That wasn’t Tegger, and the Ghouls were fast asleep…

The deck was clear. Whatever had spoken must be aboard the cruiser.

Or under it? The space under there was black. Warvia adjusted her stance, a bit farther from the cruiser. Had she imagined…?

“Show yourself!”

“Warvia, I dare not. It’s Whisper.”

Whisper? “Tegger called you a wayspirit. He thought he imagined you.”

The voice said, “I will not speak to Tegger again. Warvia, I hope you will not babble of me to Tegger nor to the Night People. I could be killed and the Arch itself may fall if anyone takes notice of me.”

“Yes, my mate said you were secretive. Whisper? Why tell me?”

“May we talk a little?”

“I’d rather be inside.”

“I know. Warvia, we’re traveling at just under the speed of sound. That’s not very fast at all. When an object strikes the world from outside, it moves three hundred times as fast, with ninety thousand times the energy.”

“Really.” The thought was shattering. But why? Had she thought the speed of sound was instantaneous?

“Light travels much faster than sound. You’ve seen that yourself Lightning, then thunder,” the voice said.

It didn’t occur to her to doubt a wayspirit. Anyone who could speak such things must really know what she was talking about. She asked, “Why not go faster than sound? Couldn’t we hear each other?”

“It’s the speed of sound in air, Warvia. If we make the air go with us, the sound in the air goes with us, too.”

“Oh.”

“The air sled is doing what the universe says it must. It can go to only one place, and then it will touch softly as a feather.”

Warvia asked again, “Why tell me?”

“When you know what is happening, it can’t frighten you. Of course there are exceptions, but the sky sled isn’t one. It flies in a kind of invisible groove, a pattern of magnetic fields. It cannot lose its way.”

“Pattern of…?”

“I will teach you about magnets and gravity and inertia. Inertia is the force that pulls you against the inside of the spinning ring so that gravity will not pull you into the sun—”

“Is that real, too, what the Night People say? The Arch is a ring?”

“Yes. Gravity is a force you need hardly notice, but it holds the sun together so that it can burn. Magnets allow the sun’s rind to be manipulated, to defend the Arch against things falling from outside. I will teach you more, if you come in daylight.”

“Why?”

“You and Tegger are frightened. If you understand what’s happening here, your fright will go away. If you lose your fright, so will Tegger. You will not go mad.”

“Tegger,” she said, and looked around her. “Tegger must be starving.” She couldn’t find the shrieker she’d dropped. She went back to the shrieker village, holding her eyes to the deck. Nearly the speed of sound: how fast was that in daywalks?

A shrieker came when she tickled a tunnel opening, and she bagged it. She climbed into the payload bay, and no voice stopped her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO — THE NET

…Coffin!

Louis tried to push the lid away. The lid didn’t want to move that fast. He pulled his knees up to set his feet and thrust upward, then roll-dived out from under the half-raised lid. Hit the floor. Kept rolling and stood up in a crouch.

Not a coffin, he remembered, but he was on an adrenaline high, with good reason to stay in motion. What had been happening while he was in the box?

His ankle stung. He’d kicked something. Ignore it.

The strangest thing about his waking was the way he felt.

In their early twenties, Louis and a dozen friends had run an ancient martial arts teaching program. A few dropped out when the computer had them hitting each other in the face. Louis had stuck with it, play-fighting for ten months. Then it all turned stale, and two hundred years went by, and…

It didn’t feel like waking from steep or surgery. He felt more like a fighter halfway through a yogatsu match he knows he can win. Absolutely charged up, seething with adrenaline and energy.

Great! Bring ’em on!

Motion! He whirled around. His hands felt naked.

Beyond the forward wall, rocky rolling terrain flashed past on either side, too fast for detail. Needle must be moving like a hypersonic shuttle at ground level. And the view was toward the captain’s cabin-

Only a picture. None of those great rocks was about to mash him into jelly. The black basalt walls to left and right, the lander bay behind him, were all quite motionless.

The thing he’d kicked was a block of stone in the forward-starboard corner of crew quarters. He’d never seen that before. It looked completely inert and harmless: a roughly dressed granite cube as tall as his knee.

He was alone.

Louis understood why Bram had left Acolyte in an induced coma until he could attend to him. Waking alone, a Kzin might set traps and barriers, or force the wardrobe and kitchen systems to produce weapons. But Louis did not understand why Bram had left him to wake alone.

How fast did a protector learn? Bram had observed him for… hmm? Up to three days, if he’d tapped into the webeye camera at Weaver Town. Could Bram already know me well enough to trust me?

Not likely! Bram hadn’t done this. The Hindmost must have reset the ‘doc to open when his treatment was finished.

Now, what was the Hindmost trying to show him? Louis wondered. Did the protector know what kind of show the Hindmost had running here?

The hologram view streamed past him. Distant trees flashed past, an extensive forest of what looked like pines. Dead ahead, mountains and cloud patterns seemed infinitely distant.

The Hindmost could hide anything in the captain’s cabin, and his crew would see nothing but this bounding, lurching hologram projection. Maybe that was the point.

The bouncing lower rim was dark wood: the front of an alcohol-burning Machine People cruiser. Under that, a bit of a curved rim of gleaming metal or plastic.

The webeye camera that the Ghouls had mounted on a Machine People cruiser now rode something that flew.

Blocks of rock protruded from fringes of forest. The vehicle flew no more than two hundred feet up. The speed? Subsonic, but not by much.

What kind of hominids could tolerate such speed? Louis wondered. Even Disney Port didn’t run rides this fast. Most Ringworld hominids would die if they merely traveled beyond their local ecologies. A ride like this would stop their hearts.

What was he supposed to do with this?

How much time did he have to play?

Trapped in a bungalow-sized box buried miles deep in cooled lava, he was hardly a free agent. Stepping disks would get him out, but they would only take him to where his masters waited.

Louis knew that he was reacting instead of acting, like a good dog trying to guess the will of his masters. He was seething with new youth, and he couldn’t do anything.

Sit down, he told himself. Relax. Distract yourself. Eat?

The kitchen menu was running. It showed kzinti script and a picture: some kind of sea life. Alien sashimi! Better not. Louis reset it for human metabolism, Sol, Earth, fran‡ais [francais], pain perdu, added caf’ [cafe] au lait, and called it breakfast. And while he waited… hmmm?

Using the stepping disk would lose him his options.

Examining the stepping disk…

He lifted the rim as he’d seen Bram do.

The racing landscape blinked out, replaced by an abstraction: the diagram of the stepping disk network.

More links had been added. Several networks had merged into one. The restricted flick from crew quarters to the captain’s cabin was still isolated, and so were a few other pairs. Still, the Hindmost had given up some security for greater convenience. Bram must have made him do that.

The diagram measured distance on a logarithmic scale. At and near Needle, detail was fine enough to discriminate between crew quarters and the lander bay. There were flick points all through the Repair Center. Louis picked out Weaver Town, hundreds of thousands of miles distant. One point was far to starboard of Needle’s position, almost to the rim wall, half a million miles away or more. The most distant point must be a third of the way around the Ringworld’s arc: hundreds of millions of miles.

Brighter lines would indicate links that were currently open. If he was reading this right… open circuits ran from Needle’s crew quarters to Needle’s lander bay to the far point on the Great Ocean. Bram must be exploring.

Had he taken the Hindmost? Or had the Hindmost returned to his cabin?

Knowing that, Louis thought, would tell him exactly how much trust was between the Hindmost and Bram. In his cabin the Hindmost would be next to invulnerable, with General Products hull material between him and any enemy. Locked off from his grooming aids, he would grow scruffy and uncomfortable-

Ding. French toast with maple syrup. Coffee with foamy steamed milk appeared a moment later. Louis ate rapidly.

Then he tried using the fork on the stepping disk controls.

The tines bent and broke.

Humming, Louis dialed {Earth, Japan, assorted sashimi}.

The hashi felt like wood. They even had a grain. He cracked one along the grain to get a point. He began moving whatever would move in the stepping disk controls.

Bright lines faded, others brightened, as links opened and closed.

A slide turned everything off. Moving the slide back the way it had come got him a blinking half brightness: the system wanted instructions.

He kept playing. Presently he had a bent ring of seven bright lines, and a virtual clock, and weird music playing in the background. He couldn’t understand the musical puppeteer language, and he couldn’t read a Fleet of Worlds timepiece, but he saw how to set it for fast.

If he’d read this right, the circuit would take him to the lander bay; then to Weaver Town, to see what had changed. Pick up a pressure suit in the lock, or else he’d be sniffing tree-of-life when he flicked to the Meteor Defense room! Keep the suit on when he flicked to the surface of the Map of Mars, and thence to the farthest point on the diagram, which seemed to be on the rim wall. On to the mystery point at the far shore of the Great Ocean, and back to Needle.

Second thoughts? This shouldn’t take him more than a few minutes, unless he found something interesting.

He set the sashimi plate on the stepping disk.

Nothing happened.

Of course not: the rim of the stepping disk was still lifted, exposing the controls. Louis pushed it down. The sashimi plate flicked out.

The network blinked out, too. Louis had to shy from sudden motion. The racing landscape was back, and mountains beyond, spill mountains with the rim wall as backdrop. They were nearby, by Ringworld measure, a few tens of thousands of miles away.

Louis thought of matters he would like to study, if he could access the ship’s computer. He’d have to ask the Hindmost later. He must review what was known of protectors. Where was that sashimi plate?

Running through a yoga set allowed him to curb his impatience. How fast was fast?

Forty-five minutes later the plate hadn’t come back.

His companions might be at one of these points-probably were-and Acolyte might have snatched the sashimi. Still: rethink.

The far point in the diagram had drifted a little.

Drifted a little, yeah. Louis’s windpipe closed up; he was wheezing. Two hundred million miles up the Arch as measured on a logarithmic scale, and drifting? That point had to be moving like an interstellar slowboat, at hundreds of miles per second.

It was the refueling probe, of course. They must have mounted a new stepping disk on its flank and set it orbiting along the rim wall. As for the sashimi plate, it must have burned as a meteor.

Louis pulled the disk up to expose the controls. He began to reset them, swearing and talking himself through it, trying to ignore the orchestra. “Now this should reset that link… tanj. Why not? Oh. Stet, dark means off, now try this…”

He dialed up a loaf of bread and set it on the stepping disk. Flick.

An hour and ten since he had cut his associates off from Needle. He’d cut them off from the entire Repair Center, come to that. It would be open war when they discovered that, and breach of contract, too.

Then again, what could they do about it?

The chuckle never reached his throat. Louis knew puppeteers. The Hindmost would have had auxiliary controls implanted surgically. Louis knew he should be wondering when to reset the stepping disks. The Hindmost might tolerate his fiddling, but Louis didn’t want to face Bram’s wrath.

The bread was back.

The cruiser was flying over water. The mountains were to its left now, drifting minutely to spinward. The platform must have turned… turned by sixty degrees. Louis let a slow grin form.

It was following the superconductor grid!

Superconducting cable lay as a substrate beneath the Ringworld floor, forming hexagons fifty thousand miles across. It guided the magnetic fields by which solar prominences could be manipulated. Evidently the cruiser was riding a magnetic levitation vehicle, possibly something worked up by City Builders, more likely something as old as the Ringworld itself.

Did the Hindmost know?

Reacting, he was still reacting. And the bread was back.

Worth the risk?

Louis stepped on the disk.

Pressure suits were missing from the lander bay: one for the Hindmost, Chmeee’s spare, and a set meant for Louis. It need not mean that Bram’s crew were in vacuum. The protector might be showing caution, using the suits for armor.

Louis stepped off to tuck a pressure suit under his arm, then a cummerbund, helmet, and air pack. Then on to Weaver Town.

Louis flicked in off balance. He stumbled and dropped everything he was carrying. Embarrassed, he looked warily about him.

Full daylight. The stepping disk sat on the mud bank of the Weavers’ bathing stream, canted at an angle. Nobody was using the pool. Louis listened for children’s voices, but he heard nothing.

He’d stooped to examine the disk when a waspish voice spoke close behind him. The fallen helmet said, “Greeting! What species are you?”

Louis stood up. “I am of the Ball People,” he said. “Kidada?”

“Yes. Louis Wu’s people?” The old Weaver peered at Louis uncertainly.

“Yes. Kidada, how long since Louis Wu left?”

“You’re Louis Wu made young!”

“Yes.” Kidada’s gape and stare made Louis uncomfortable. He said, “Kidada, I have been in a long sleep. Are the Weavers well?”

“We thrive. We trade. Visitors come and go. Sawur took ill and died many days ago. The sky has circled twenty-two times since—”

“Sawur?”

“Since the night you vanished with some hairy creature of legend just on your tail, and only a Ghoul child for witness. Yes, Sawur is dead. I nearly died, too, and two children died. Sometimes visitors bring a sickness that kills others but not themselves.”

“I hoped to talk to her.”

A gaunt smile. “But will she answer?”

“She advised me well.” Don’t wait until you’re desperate!

“Sawur told me of your problem, after you vanished.”

“I solved it. I hope I solved it. Otherwise I am enslaved.”

“Enslaved. But with tens of falans to free yourself.” Kidada sounded tired and bitter.

Louis was becoming aware of how much he wanted to talk to Sawur. He would have stayed to mourn, if he had the time.

Time. The sky had circled twenty-two times… two falans plus. One hundred sixty-five of the Ringworld’s thirty-hour days. They’d left him in that tank for more than half an Earth year!

And he now was playing catch-up. “Kidada, who moved our stepping disk?”

“I know not what you mean. This? It was here the morning you were gone. We’ve left it alone.”

The rim was muddy. Louis could see big fingerprints and scratch marks left by fingernails. Some visiting hominid-not Weavers, who had smaller hands-had been trying to alter the setting.

Ghouls. He might have known. He was glad he’d flicked in during daylight. The Night People wouldn’t even know he’d been here.

Louis donned his pressure suit. “Say hello to the children for me,” he said, and he flicked out.

Darkness.

Louis turned on his helmet lamp, and a half-seen skeleton was watching him.

He was in the Meteor Defense room. The screens were dark. His lamp was the only light.

These bones had been mounted for study. They weren’t attached at the joints: they barely touched. A frame of thin metal rods held them in place.

The skeleton stood ten inches shorter than Louis Wu. All of the bones had a rounded look: weathered. The ribs were improbably narrow, the fingers nearly gone. Time had turned bone structure to dust. Weather in here couldn’t be that erosive! But the knuckles still showed large, and all the joints were massive and greatly swollen. Those eroded projections in the massive jaw weren’t teeth. They were later bone growth.

Protector.

Louis let his fingertips play over the face. The bone was gritty with dust, and smooth. Smoothed by time, as surfaces turned gradually to dust.

This wasn’t an erosive environment. These bones must be a thousand years dead, at least.

The right hip had been shattered, the pieces mounted separately. And the left shoulder and elbow, and the neck: all fractured or shattered.

He might have died in a fall, or been beaten to death in combat.

The Pak had had their origin somewhere in the galactic core. A Pak colony on Earth had failed-the tree-of-life had failed, leaving the colony with no protectors-but Pak breeders had spread over the Earth from landing sites in Africa and Asia. Their bones were in museums under names such as Homo habilis. Their descendants had evolved to intelligence: a classic example of neoteny.

There was a mummified Pak protector in the Smithsonian Institute. It had been dug from under a desert on Mars, centuries ago. Louis had never seen it except as a hologram in a General Biology course.

This creature might be a deformed Pak, he thought. But there was that massive jaw.

Protectors lost their teeth. That was a pity, because teeth could have told him a lot. But the jaw was a bone cracker.

The torso was too long for a standard issue Pak.

It was not quite a Pak, and it was also not quite a Ghoul. Louis could guess when it had died, but when had it been born? The protector in the Smithsonian had spent thirty thousand years and more crossing from the galactic core to Earth. Gearing up for the expedition might have taken him that long again. Protectors could live a long time.

Cronus was the oldest of the Greek gods, killer of his children, until some escaped and killed him instead. Call this one Cronus, then.

A vampire horde had killed a protector who must have been Cronus’s abandoned servant.

Bram and Anne must have stalked the master for years afterward. Years, centuries, millennia? Pak breeders, Man’s ancestors, and the vampires’, too, had been cursorial hunters before ever they left the galactic core.

Old Cronus might not have taken vampire protectors quite seriously. Vampires, after all, were mindless animals with disgusting sexual and dietary habits, and Cronus had been a superintelligent being with no distracting sex urge at all.

And so was Bram. It might give him a blind spot, Louis thought, if he could find it.

The breaks at the right hip, left arm, and shoulder, and a crack along the skull, had been fresh at death. Louis found old, healed breaks elsewhere. Cronus had broken his spine long before his death. Did a protector’s spinal nerves grow back? His right knee, that old injury hadn’t healed: the knee was fused solid.

Something else was strange about the spine… but Louis didn’t understand until he returned to the skull.

The forehead bulged. More: the forehead bone and the crest at the top was smoother, younger than the rest of the skull. The jagged ridge of growth from the jawbone still had an appearance of worn teeth. These things were recent growth. The spine, too, was recent growth: it had gone through a period of regeneration.

If Cronus had won his last battle, he would have healed again.

So think of it as a murder investigation. I know the killer, but to get a conviction in court I need every detail, every nuance. Why did Bram put these bones back together? The enemy was dead, there were none to avenge him -

Or did Bram and Anne fear others like Cronus?

A standing skeleton, and a heap of gear in the shadows beyond. Bram hadn’t let him near this stuff.

It had seemed scattered, dropped at random. It was and it wasn’t. Stuff had been laid out neatly for study; then something had swept through the pattern, like a vampire protector kicking out in rage.

Some of it had simply disintegrated. Some had left clear patterns.

This had been a wonderful fur coat, and a belt to hold it closed. It stank: just a ghost of the stench of old hide, and a Ghoul who hadn’t bathed in thousands of years. On the inner surface, the hide surface, Louis could see the traces of a score of leather pockets in a score of shapes, all empty now.

There were weapons: a knife of old metal turned to black rust, slender and a foot long. Two knives made of horn, each no bigger than a forefinger. There were six throwing knives, nearly identical though shaped from stone, as lethal as the day they were made. A slender pole of some durable metal alloy, the ends sharpened to chisels.

Patterns in the dust might once have been wooden shoes with heavy straps. Here were a fancy crossbow and a dozen bolts, each slightly different. This little box… a firestarter? Louis tried, but he couldn’t get a flame started. A stack of paper or parchment: maps?

There was a telescope… crude, but very finely shaped and polished, and set a little apart. Hello: these next to it were tool-working tools. Pumice, little knives… Bram and/or Anne had set up shop here to duplicate Cronus’s telescope.

A hard black lump the size of his fist. Louis bent low to sniff. Dried meat? A thousand years beyond its date… but jerky always did smell and taste a bit gamy. Maybe a Ghoul would like that.

How long ago had Cronus died?

Ask?

Louis knew he was playing catch-up here. He’d learn more by asking… but he’d learn what Bram chose to teach. And time was constricting around him.

Louis patted Cronus’s shoulder bones. “Trust me,” he said, and flicked out.

He was glare-blind and way off balance.

He convulsed like a sea anemone, reaching between his knees for anything solid, eyes squinted shut against raw sunlight. His gloved fingers brushed something and closed hard.

The badly tilted stepping disk slid under him by a foot or two. He was gripping the rim of the disk itself, he hoped. He held very still.

His photosensitive faceplate turned smoky gray. Still crouched, gripping the edge of the stepping disk, he looked about him.

The Map of Mars wasn’t a very good map.

He could see a hundred shades of red without moving, but the sky was the dark blue of high-altitude Earth. The sun was too bright for Mars. Nothing could be done about the gravity either.

Maybe it didn’t matter to Martians. They lived safe from sunlight beneath sand fine enough to behave like a viscous fluid. Perhaps the sand would even buoy them against Ringworld gravity.

He’d expected to be at Mons Olympus, and it seemed he was. He was a long way up. The stepping disk rested near the top of a smooth forty-five-degree slope of piled dust, and it was starting to slide again.

What had the Hindmost been thinking of, to put it here?

Yeah, right. Martians. They’d set a trap.

Sliding faster now, losing all stability. It was a long way down. Miles! Dust must have piled here over millenia [sic-should be “millennia”] in a prevailing wind… a Great Ocean stratospheric wind, in a weather pattern huger than worlds. Another flaw in the accuracy of the Map of Mars.

Louis squatted, flattened himself against the stepping disk as it became a sled.

It picked up speed. The disk was trying to bounce him off. His hands had a death-grip and he tried to grip with his boot toes, too. An arcology-sized rock stood in his path. He leaned left, trying to steer. Nope. It was going to swat him hard.

Then he was elsewhere.

And his death-grip became something more, because he was falling into a black void.

He chopped off part of a shrill scream. But I fixed it! I fixed it! I fixed it!

He was clinging to a stepping disk welded to a gracefully curved cigar shape: the puppeteer’s refueling probe. Around him was black sky and a glare of stars.

The stepping disk, the probe’s hull, everything glowed. There must be light behind him. Without losing anything of his toe-and-finger grip, Louis twisted to look over his shoulder.

The Ringworld was adrift behind and below him. He could see fine detail: rivers like twisted snakes, undersea landscapes, a straight black thread that might be a Machine People highway.

The naked sun was trying to broil him. No problem: the suit was one he could sweat through. Night would be a greater threat. He hadn’t thought he would need an oversuit.

He was level with the top of the rim wall, looking down at half-conical spill mountains and the rivers that ran from their bases. A thousand miles up. Far ahead of him he could make out lacy lines sketching a long double cone.

An attitude jet. He could see the twin toroids that he’d thought made up a Bussard ramjet; but they were tiny, forming the wasp waist of something far larger. The Ringworld attitude jet was made of wire so thin that it kept fading in and out of sight. A cage to guide the flow of the solar wind.

This one wasn’t mounted yet: it wasn’t pointed right.

Louis hadn’t felt fear like this in two hundred years.

But I got the bread back!

The probe was coasting… was motionless, while the Ringworld rotated below at 770 miles per second.

The system must have reset. I took this one disk out of the link, but it must have reset. I don’t understand the Hindmost’s programming language. What else have I fouled up?

The sashimi? That was easy. The plate must have drifted too far from the disk. The bread hadn’t: it was still in range when the disks cycled.

He hung on, hung on…

And the disk bumped against his faceplate.

He clung with his eyes closed. He was in no shape to confront anyone, any creature. In a few seconds he’d be safe and alone aboard Hot Needle of Inquiry.

A great clawed hand took him by the shoulder and rolled him over.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE — THE RUNNING LESSON

The Kzin pulled him to his feet. Louis was gasping, shivering. Acolyte couldn’t talk to him while his helmet was closed, and Louis was glad of that.

He was aboard Hidden Patriarch, near the stern.

Just another goddamn stunning surprise. He had left the mile-long sailing ship on the Shenthy River. What was it doing here?

Acolyte was trying to ask him something. The Kzin was holding-tanj dammit! Louis wrenched his helmet open.

Acolyte said, “I was prowling around the stern when this popped up on the stepping disk. Your visiting-gift, Louis? Preserved fish?”

Louis took the sashimi plate. The sliced fish was puffy and crisp to the touch.

“It’s been in vacuum,” he said. “Did a loaf of bread come by?”

“I let it pass. Louis, you stink of terror.”

What am I doing here?

In a moment he could be safe aboard Hot Needle of Inquiry, floating between sleeping plates while he got through his shivering, got his mind back, and tried to digest what he had and hadn’t learned.

Acolyte had seen him. If the Kzin could be persuaded to shut up, then-Yeah, right. The protector must have been observing Acolyte’s body language for half an Earth year. The Kzin couldn’t hide anything from him.

Louis said instead, “The dead could smell my terror.” He dropped his helmet and air pack and began opening zippers. “I thought I had the stepping disk controls figured out. Wrong! Oh, and the Martians set us a death trap. That almost got me, too.”

An adolescent’s half-bald head popped into view above a hatch. City Builder. The boy’s eyes widened in surprise, and he dropped from view.

The Kzin asked, “Martians?”

Louis began stripping off his suit. “Skip it. I’ve got to burn some energy. Can you run?”

The Kzin bristled. “I outran my father after we fought.”

“I’ll race you to the bow.”

Acolyte yowled and bounded away.

Louis’s pressure suit was pooled around his ankles. At the Kzin’s howl, his every muscle locked and he fell over.

That was a wonderful battle cry! Hissing ancient curses, Louis pulled the suit off, rolled to his feet and ran.

Acolyte was still in sight, moving considerably faster than he was. Then the ship structure jogged and he was gone.

Louis had lived aboard this ship for nearly two years. He wasn’t likely to get lost. He ran hard, competing only with himself. He had a full mile to cover.

“Loueee!”

The voice was faint and strange, coming from high overhead… from a Pierson’s puppeteer perched in the aft crow’s nest.

Louis bellowed, “Hellooo!”

“Wait!” the voice called.

“Can’t!” He felt good.

A squarish shadow descended. Louis ran on. It came alongside, pacing him: a Repair Center cargo plate with rails welded around it. Louis called, “Stay clear. I’m in a race.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not-an intelligence test.”

“How do you feel?”

“Wonderful. Disoriented. Alive! Hindmost-don’t use-the Olympus stepping disk.”

“Why?”

“Martians-they’re alive-set a trap.” Louis drew a deep breath and blew it out. Salt air on his taste buds: wonderful! His breath was holding, his legs were holding. He pumped harder. “They’ll set another.”

“Two can play that game. What if I dropped a disk in the sea and began flicking water to Mons Olympus?”

“You ask me? Don’t exterminate-anything. You might need it-later. It’s the reason-you didn’t kill off-the kzinti!”

“More or less,” the puppeteer acknowledged. A one-eyed head dipped toward a puff of orange glimpsed far ahead along the top mid-deck. Acolyte.

“Louis, your advent is opportune. We have much to catch up on.”

“Where’s Bram?”

“Cooking our dinner.”

His heads were arced around to look into his own eyes.

Was the Hindmost joking? Maybe that was puppeteer laughter and maybe it wasn’t.

“Bram has a sensitive nose,” the Hindmost added.

Louis asked, “How goes the dance?”

“The dance! It proceeds without me. I’m tanj sick of using your recycler, Louis! I haven’t even had time to redesign it.”

“Thank you for that.” Keep it casual. But if Bram didn’t trust the Hindmost enough to let him take normal exercise or use a toilet and shower designed for puppeteers…

Then the Hindmost might be ready to take back his life.

The top mid-deck ended. Louis clambered through ladders and corridors. Kzinti ladders were heavily tilted and the rungs were too far apart, but Louis went up and down like an ape on steroids. He kept expecting to pass Acolyte. Worse, he expected Acolyte to leap out at him from some alcove. He stayed to the heights.

In his mind he tried to map his way around the garden. It would take too long. At the end of a corridor he ran up a flight of hardwood steps to the top of a wall, along the wall to avoid a thicket of big yellow puffballs with impressive thorns, and dropped ten feet into dirt.

It had been a kzinti hunting park. For two years Louis and the City Builders had tended these plants. They had been growing wild when he arrived. Once they must have fed herds for kzinti sailors. The herds were gone, and he didn’t expect to find animals now, unless Acolyte was about to leap out from some citrus thicket.

But he never saw the Kzin.

There were eight tremendous main masts and uncountable sails, and the winches that moved them could only be worked by a Kzin. Or a protector? This mast was the foremast, with the fore crow’s nest at the top. Louis was blowing hard. His legs felt like overcooked noodles.

Someone was waiting in the bow.

Louis cursed in his mind. He didn’t have breath to spare. A moment later he recognized the protector shape.

Louis slowed. Bram waited like a statue. Louis couldn’t tell if he was breathing at all.

“I think you win,” Louis gasped.

“Were we racing?”

Bram wouldn’t have known of an intruder until the City Builder boy found him in the kitchen, or until he heard feet pounding across the deck overhead. He must have run. Louis said, “Whatever. I needed exercise.”

Before him was a mountain range… an un-Earthly mountain range. Conical mountains, spaced wide apart and varying in size, ran left and right. Without a horizon, he had no real grasp of their size. Most were tall enough to have ice-white peaks, but below the ice they were all green patchwork.

Then his eye/mind perceived what loomed above them.

They were tiny.

Wait now, the rim was a thousand miles high. Of the twenty or thirty mountains he could pick out, five or six were mere foothills leaning against the rim wall, but two or three might match Everest.

The Hindmost drifted toward the bow. Behind him, a puff of orange pulled itself into view.

The Kzin plodded up. He was done, winded. Louis said, “Thank you, Acolyte. I really, really needed that. I was carrying enough adrenaline to run a war.”

The Kzin panted, “Father. Let me win. Didn’t want to. Kill me.”

“Ah.”

“How. Did you pass me?”

“Must have. Maybe in the garden.”

“How?”

“Bram, you must know about cursorial hunters?”

“I don’t know the term,” the protector said.

“Stet. Acolyte, most hunting creatures miss their jump eight times out of nine. If the prey runs away, they pick something slower. Only a few kinds of meat eaters pick their prey and follow it until they run it down. Wolves do that. So do humans.

“Big cats aren’t cursorial hunters, and kzinti aren’t, either. Your ancestors learned that they’d better track down an enemy or he’ll turn up later, but that’s your brain talking. Your evolution hasn’t caught up—”

“You knew you would win.”

“Yeah.”

The Kzin blinked at him. “If we had run only as far as the garden?”

“You would have won.”

“Thank you for the lesson.”

“Thank you.” That was nicely phrased, Louis thought. Who had taught him that?

Bram said, “Louis. Look around you. React.”

React? “Impressive. All that green! From the foothills to the frost line, all green. I shouldn’t be surprised. Those mountains are all seabottom muck, all fertilizer.”

“More?”

“Some of the pipes have stopped delivering flup. That would account for the lowest mountains. What’s left of them must be fairly hard rock by now. The highest ones must have a lot of water ice in them, at least at the peak. I can see rivers running from the foothills. Those mountains will get the Ringworld’s only regular earthquakes.”

“A difficult environment?”

“I suppose. Bram, we saw all this fifty falans ago. Have you seen signs of life in the mountains?”

“Once around your world would mark the distance to those mountains, but yes, we have. Louis, I have a meal to tend. Hindmost, Acolyte, take him to the dining hall. Show him.”

The Hindmost had sprayed webeyes on all four walls of the dining hall.

One was not in use: a mere bronze spiderweb.

A window shaped like a pool of spilled water looked out upon a row of dark green cones capped in white.

Another showed the edge of the rim wall drifting slowly past: a view from the refueling probe.

And one showed a score of muscular, hairy men using ropes to guide a square plate big enough to be the floor plan of a six-room bungalow. The plate floated above them. It might have been a big cargo plate, or part of a floating building. The men were pulling it toward Louis… toward the Machine People cruiser and its stolen webeye.

“I left you a record taken six days ago,” the Hindmost said, “to watch when you woke. But this is in present time.”

“What are they doing?”

The Kzin answered. “They’re approaching the rim wall any way they can.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know that yet. Bram might,” the Kzin said. “While you were in treatment, Bram found your City Builder friends and set them aboard Hidden Patriarch. They obey Bram as my father’s slaves obeyed their lord. They had the ship moving to starboard within a day. Bram is studying the rim wall.”

Louis asked again, “Why?”

“We were not told,” Acolyte said.

The Hindmost said, “I have never seen Bram show fear, yet I think he fears protectors.”

Louis saw the connection. “The attitude jets need replacing. Otherwise the Ringworld slides off center. Any protector who sees that will be found mounting attitude jets on the rim wall. Right?”

“If the theory holds.”

“Why isn’t Bram there?”

The puppeteer made a short, sharp sound, as if a clarinet had sneezed. “If protectors knew that three off-world species have mounted invasions and a fourth is in wide orbit to study the effects, they would swarm the Map of Mars instead.”

“Give them decent telescopes? No, they’d still-Ah.”

“Ah?”

“Bram has to be on the rim wall, too. He’s preparing. The other protectors will kill him if they can.”

The puppeteer’s eyes met. He said, “In any case, we have Hidden Patriarch’s view of the local rim wall. My refueling probe has been in solar orbit for more than a falan now, skimming along the rim walls, recording. We’ve learned a great deal, Louis.” The Hindmost whistled a brief trill.

All three views began a slow zoom.

From Hidden Patriarch’s fore crow’s nest: The spill mountains expanded until only one was in sight. Pale green and dark green, grass and forest, reached up to ice-white. At the very peak a black thread dipped into a compact knot of black fog. Seabottom muck fell steadily from a spillpipe a thousand miles overhead.

From the probe: The rim wall blurred past. Louis tried to keep his eyes off it.

From the stolen webeye - Louis began to laugh.

Now the Machine People cruiser was bobbing gently, twenty feet up. Beyond the edge of the floating plate was rolling landscape, hummocks like a thousand sleeping behemoths.

Ropes were pulling the cargo plate. Thirty-odd men of a species unfamiliar to Louis were pulling the ropes. The men wore light packs, but nothing else. Straight black hair covered their heads and their backs to below their buttocks. Perhaps hair was all they needed for warmth.

They were running uphill toward a ridge, and toward thirty hairy women waiting below the ridge. The women were waving, yelling encouragement. Among them was a small red woman, a Red Herder, attempting to guide them with wide motions of her arms.

The way grew steeper; the men weren’t running anymore. As they neared the crest, the women ran alongside them. They were as hairy as the men. More or less smoothly, they added themselves to the ropes. There was general laughter and brief conversations held in gasps.

The women pulled. Some were running backward. They had strong legs, Louis noted, as strong as the men’s. They were over the crest now and starting downhill. The runners were behind the window now, trying to slow the craft.

The Red Herder ran to snatch a rope and climb it.

The viewpoint moved faster and faster over the rounded land. By now all the runners must have let go. The hummocks grew larger ahead; grew mountainous. Streams ran among them and converged ahead. Louis realized that he was looking at the foot of a spill mountain.

The swaying of the plate was making Louis motion-sick. “They’re going to get themselves wrecked,” he said.

Acolyte yowled: kzinti ridicule.

“I don’t consider them sane myself,” the Hindmost said.

The view from Hidden Patriarch’s bow was expanding, too. Now the peak of the spill mountain was lost overhead. A third of the way up the slopes, Louis began to see colored dots and blinking lights.

Blinking lights? “Heliographs.”

“Very astute, Louis.”

“A Ghoul child told me about this. He thought he was being cryptic. Their whole empire must be linked by heliographs in the spill mountains. How do you suppose they do it? Ghouls can’t stand daylight.”

“At night they see flashing mirrors from daylit mountains. Easy enough, but how do they send? Louis, they must buy message services from locals.”

“Somehow. And bargain with the Spill Mountain People, too, somehow. I bet they don’t use rishathra.”

“They don’t need many. We only see the glitter from a handful of spill mountains. A few thousands of message stations on the surface would be enough to knit their empire together.”

“What about the-what are those, balloons?”

The Hindmost trilled again. The zoom stopped; the mountains began to drift sideways. A score of colored dots were adrift against the ice, a mile to a mile and a half up. Louis saw more of them in the wide spaces between mountains.

“Hot gas balloons, Louis. We see them flowing between the spill mountains everywhere we look.”

“How much variation—”

Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok entered bearing platters, and stopped in their tracks.

The Hindmost whistled. The hurtling rim wall and the bouncing foothills faded into bronze spiderwebs. It was a wonder the City Builders hadn’t dropped everything and run screaming, Louis thought. But Harkabeeparolyn was still staring, and Kawaresksenjajok was watching her and grinning.

Me. Louis said, “It’s still me. I’ve had some medical work done.”

Harkabeeparolyn turned to her mate and spoke. Louis’s translator said, “You knew!”

“Zelz told me.”

“I’ll get you for this, you little zilth!” But Harkee was laughing, and so was Kawa.

They set their platters down: a heap of brown and yellow roots and a bowl of pink fluid. Harkabeeparolyn settled into Louis’s lap and studied his face from an inch away. “We’ve been lonely,” she said.

It felt natural, as if they’d been doing this forever. It felt as if he had come home.

He said, “You weren’t lonely where I left you.”

“We were told to come.” She nodded at the kitchen.

They had obeyed a protector. That, too, must have seemed very natural. Louis asked, “What were you told?”

“’Sail to starboard.’” She shrugged. “From time to time he comes and looks about and alters our course, or tells us of wind and water currents, or ways to catch and cook fish or warm-bloods or tend the garden. He says we don’t eat enough red meat.”

“That might be his ancestry speaking.”

“Louis, you look as young as Kawa. Can you…?”

The puppeteer answered. “Only for Ball People and the Ball Kzinti. To heal local hominids or local kzinti or any other species, a thousand of my kind would need a lifetime of study and testing.”

Harkabeeparolyn scowled.

Kawaresksenjajok and Bram entered with more platters. Here were six big, surpassingly ugly deep-sea fish. Two were still twitching. The others had been broiled with strange looking plants… kzinti vegetables. The bowl of raw vegetables was also from the kzinti hunting park.

Louis looked at the other bowl and asked, “Fish blood?”

Bram said, “Whale blood and a vegetable puree. It would not feed me long. Your kitchen was a wonderful find.”

They sat. Kawaresksenjajok went, and returned with a two- or three-year-old child. She had a full head of orange-blond hair. Louis wouldn’t have taken her for a City Builder. The older boy was not in evidence.

Bram’s cooking was good. A little strange. Bram must have been cooking for City Builder tastes using plants from the hunting park. There would be crucial diet components missing or in short supply.

Louis asked, “How long would this keep me alive?”

Bram said, “A falan before your behavior would begin to deteriorate.” He sipped decorously.

Acolyte had already disposed of the raw fish. Louis asked him, “Are you still hungry?”

“It’s enough. One who satisfies his hunger grows fat and torpid.”

The little girl was crawling toward the edge of the table. Louis pointed; Harkee turned; the child reached the edge, slipped, and clung by her fingers. She had a grip like a monkey or a Hanging Person.

“Thought she’d fall? Hah!” The City Builder woman was laughing at him. “Wrong species.” Abruptly she asked the protector, “May we keep Louis for a time?”

In the instant before he replied, Bram’s glance touched all their faces, judging, deciding. He said, “You may have each other until midday tomorrow. Louis, we should return to Needle soon. We can learn no more until we take the probe over the rim. Hindmost, is that why you let Louis wake?”

“Of course. I’ve had little chance to brief him.”

Again Bram’s eyes took them all in. He said, “I must know the spill mountains and the rim. The protectors on the rim wall must not learn of me. The central question is of protectors. I must know where they are, how many, what species, their intentions and methods and goals.

“I have learned what I can without acting, and avoided attention when I could. The pilfered webeye moves ever closer to the rim wall. The Ghouls must intend to show us something. Kawaresksenjajok, Harkabeeparolyn, you have shown me spill mountain activity far from the working site. You of the Ball People have brought me recordings made at one of the spaceports. I know more of the rim wall now than I guessed was there to learn. Soon I must show myself. Advise me.”

Acolyte spoke. “If others see the probe, they will guess at interstellar invaders. You should prepare to defend the Repair Center—”

“Yes, but the probe implies the puppeteer, not me. I have prepared. Hindmost?”

Louis was thinking: He chopped Acolyte off pretty hard. Why is the kit taking it?

The Hindmost didn’t speak.

Chmeee’s son come to me as my student. Bram has had too long to impress him. Maybe I’ve lost a student. If I’d known I wanted the kit’s respect…

I’d have raced him and beat him. Hah! What’s my next step?

Bram asked, “Harkabeeparolyn, what do you know of protectors?”

She had been a teacher in the floating city’s library, where Kawaresksenjajok had been a student. She said, “I remember pictures of armor collected from tens of thousands of daywalks around us. They all looked very different, fitted for different species, but all had the crested helm and oversized joints. Fanciful old tales tell of saviors and destroyers fearsome to see, with faces like armor, big shoulders, knobby knees and elbows. Neither men nor women can fight them or tempt them. Bram, do you want to hear old stories?”

“When I know what I must hear, I can learn it,” Bram said. “When I ask, ‘What have I forgotten?’ I can only hope for a useful answer. Louis?”

Louis shrugged. “I’m still two falans behind the rest of you.”

Bram looked at them. His hard face permitted little expression. The Hindmost and City Builders watched him anxiously. Acolyte seemed relaxed, perhaps bored.

Bram picked up a chair and moved it to… a skeletal structure in an unused corner. Tubes and metal domes and wires had been fixed to a wooden spine in a manner that seemed not quite useful, not quite random. There had been too many distractions, but now that he came to look at it, Louis would have placed it as representing some brief ancient fad in sculpture. It had that kind of esthetic unity.

But Bram was moving it into place between his knees, plucking the strings…

The Hindmost asked, “Did you finish the Mozart Requiem?”

“We shall see. Record.”

The puppeteer whistled chords of programming music, speaking to the fourth webeye. Louis shrugged his eyebrows at Harkabeeparolyn sitting in his lap. This nonsense was burning up time they might spend together… but the City Builder woman whispered, “Listen.”

The protector’s fingers were suddenly everywhere, and the air exploded with music.

Acolyte strolled out the door and was gone.

The music was strange and rich and precise. The puppeteer was singing accompaniment, but Bram held the structure of it. Louis couldn’t remember where he’d heard anything like it.

It was human music, paced for human nerves. No sound shaped by aliens could have done this to his central nervous system. He felt a roaring optimism… a godlike calm… wistful longing… the power to conquer worlds, or move them.

The music he knew was shaped in computers, not made by toenails softly kicking or stroking stretched surfaces or a bronze plate, fingernails strumming wires, a lipless mouth blowing into pipes with holes in them.

It was making him horny as tanj, and Harkabeeparolyn was half melted in his lap. He thought, You were right, but he wouldn’t interrupt even to whisper that in her ear. Instead he settled back and let the vibrations flood through him.

And when the sound had finally died away, he sat stunned.

“I think we have it,” Bram decided. He set the orchestral sculpture aside. “Hindmost, thank you. Louis, can you describe the effects?”

“Stunning. I, ah… no, I’m sorry, Bram, it’s nonverbal.”

“Might it be used as a tool of diplomacy?”

Louis shook his head. “Tanj if I know. Bram, had you thought of mounting a webeye in Fist-of-God Crater?”

“Why? Ah, to point it down.”

“Yeah, down, out, for a view in the plane of the Arch. Fist-of-God is a hollow cone the size of a moon-well, big, with a hole in the peak. You could mount a sizable fortress in there if you could anchor it in the Ringworld floor material—”

“The scrith.”

“Scrith, yeah. A volume a tenth the size of the Repair Center and at least as well hidden.”

“Defend the plane of the Arch from inside Fist-of-God?”

Louis hesitated. “I’m sure you can do your spying from there. Defend? Any enemy is bound to think of hiding in the shadow of the Ringworld. I’m not sure you can defend that. If you fight from the rim wall, it’s the same problem. The Meteor Defense can’t fire through the scrith, can it?”

“We cannot split our defense. I must command the rim wall, and its protectors, too,” Bram decided. “We’ll put the refueling probe in place tomorrow. Louis, when did this notion come to you?”

“Just popped into my head. Maybe the music distracted me and my brain went on without me.”

“Did your brain pop up anything else?”

“I don’t know enough about protectors,” Louis said. “There was a skeleton in the Meteor Defense room. You didn’t let me get close, but that was a protector, wasn’t it?”

“I will show you. Tomorrow, after we place the probe.”

The Machine People cruiser was an uncontrolled toboggan now, running up the side of a green hill, veering away. Hell of a ride. The plate’s bobbing rim gave him glimpses up the higher, more distant spill mountain. Louis saw blinking brilliance above the snow line. The empire of the Night People was here, too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR — THESE BONES

They flicked from cloudy daylight to the pinkish artificial light of Needle’s lander bay; thence to the crew cabin and a webeye view of the rim wall zipping past in vacuum-harsh sunlight.

Bram arrived last. He set down his orchestral sculpture where Louis had dropped his pressure suit components, and went straight to the kitchen dispenser. “Get us an update on the probe, Hindmost. How long until we can dock?”

The Hindmost spoke orchestral chords. Equations wrote themselves across the air in Interspeak symbols. “We could begin to decelerate now at two gee and dock in fifteen and a half hours.”

“You’ve told me the probe can take ten gee.”

“I prefer a margin of error.”

“Hindmost, the probe’s drive is a powerful, conspicuous X-ray source. We’ll give an enemy minimal time to track it down. Wait, then decelerate at ten gee.”

“At high thrust a fusion drive becomes brighter, more conspicuous.”

Bram said nothing.

“Wait, aye aye. Decelerate at ten gee beginning in six hours. Dock in just more than nine hours. May I return to my cabin to eat and bathe and dance and sleep?”

The protector sipped from a squeezebulb. The Kzin’s nose wrinkled, though Louis couldn’t smell anything. Bram said, “You can do all of that here.”

“Bram, I must enter my cabin when the time comes to decelerate the probe. Let me go now.”

“Show me your cabin.”

The Hindmost whistle-chirped. The rim wall faded out, and they looked into the Hindmost’s cabin.

The light was yellow shading toward orange, but the decor was the infinite greens of a cold weather forest. There were no corners, no edges. Floor and wall, table space and storage space, it was all curves.

Bram instructed, “Leave it thus. Bathe and sleep. If you dance, dance alone—”

The Hindmost snorted like an angry horn section.

“If I see a hologram where I should see the Hindmost, I must act. You want me to feel safe, don’t you?” Bram stooped with bent knees above the granite block. He lifted, swung around, and set it down.

Oh.

The Hindmost stepped where the granite had been, and was on the far side of the bulkhead.

The contours of the cabin shifted as he moved. A bowl formed from the floor and took on shades of peach. The puppeteer stepped daintily into it. It grew like a flower until it had almost closed above: a high-sided bathtub much like those used in lunar cities.

Bram must have noted Louis’s rapt gaze. “What strikes you, Louis?”

What struck Louis was that the Hindmost wasn’t going to be much help to Louis Wu. Bram had had too much time to intimidate the puppeteer. Louis said instead, “I had an insight. The Hindmost’s cabin, what does it look like to you?”

“A womb, perhaps.”

“How about the interior of an animal?”

“Are we playing word games?”

“There’s a difference. It might matter. Female puppeteers don’t have a womb. A… prey animal evolved into a symbiote so long ago that they think of it as the puppeteer female, but it isn’t. Nessus had an ovipositor. Bram, get into the Hindmost’s records and see if he has a file on digger wasps.”

“Digger wasps, stet,” Bram said. “We have some nine hours to play with. You were going to lecture me about protectors.”

Louis asked, “Shall we go look at bones?”

“Lecture,” Bram said.

Louis complied. “Our ancestor was the Pak breeder. The Pak evolved on a planet near the galactic core, say a hundred and thirty thousand falans from here at lightspeed.” Thirty thousand light-years and a bit. “Some of them tried to set a colony on my planet, on Earth, long ago. There wasn’t enough thallium to support the virus that grows in the yellow roots, and that’s what turns a breeder into a protector.

“The protectors died off. They may have cleared off some predators first to give the breeders room to expand. The immature Pak, the breeders, evolved on their own, just like they did here. They spread over Earth from landing sites in Africa and Asia.”

“Speculative?”

“We have bones of Pak breeders from Olduvai Gorge and other sites. There’s a mummified Pak protector in the Smithsonian,” Louis said. “They dug it out from under a desert on Mars. I never saw it myself. Even at my age you can’t do everything. But we studied a hologram of the thing in General Biology.”

“How did you come by that?”

“He came to rescue the old colony. That’s hearsay evidence, Bram, from a Belter who ate the yellow roots, but the Hindmost probably has it in memory. Ship components, Brennan’s tale, the dissected mummy, chemical—”

“Let us not disturb the Hindmost. But you studied this mummy?”

“Yes.”

“Let us look at bones.”

The knobby man’s hand felt like a handful of marbles, and his pull on Louis’s wrist was irresistible. Acolyte followed, suitless. Kzinti needn’t fear the smell of tree-of-life. Louis found himself walking rapidly toward a skeleton looming in amplified starlight.

Bram brought them face-to-face, stepped back and said, “React.”

Acolyte circled the skeleton. “It died in combat,” he murmured. He sniffed, then followed his nose to Cronus’s array of tools and clothing.

Louis ran his fingertips over the eroded edges where bone was broken. Would Bram guess that he’d been here before? Louis said, “Well, it looks thousands of falans old.”

“Near seven thousand,” Bram confirmed.

“Beaten to death. You?”

“I and Anne.”

Acolyte turned, his ears up. “Tell us the tale. He challenged you here?”

“No, we hid our existence.”

“How did you find him? How did you lure him?”

“He had to come. We waited.”

The Kzin waited. But Bram didn’t speak again, so Louis said, “This could almost be a deformed Pak protector. Still, the jaw’s a bone cracker. The skull doesn’t have much brow ridge. The torso, I think it’s too long for a standard issue Pak. Bram, I think you have here a carrion eater.”

Back came Acolyte to see what Louis was talking about. Bram asked, “On what basis?”

“Jaw built to crack bones. A predator would have teeth to tear open big arteries or an abdomen. The long torso gives him a gut long enough to deal with a difficult meal. The missing brow ridge-well, he could be going out only at night, or maybe he had bushy eyebrows for eyeshades, but—”

Acolyte asked, “Might he be a Night People protector? Distort the skull, expand the joints—”

Louis shook his head. “I saw a Ghoul child at the Weaver village. I saw adults among the Fearless Vampire Slayers, and more adults in the fungus farm under a floating city once upon a time. I would swear they were all the same species, and this isn’t it.

“Look, the Ghouls at the fungus farm were my height and a bit. He’s four inches shorter. No teeth, of course, but look at the hands. Ghoul hands are bigger, thicker, they can tear anything apart. More to the point, Acolyte, the current species is identical across two hundred million miles of distance.”

Acolyte watched, saying nothing. It was rare to see a Kzin so still.

“But it’s obvious,” Bram said patiently. “This is the old one, the species that became the People of the Night.”

Louis said, “Cronus?”

“Precursor god of the Greeks?”

Louis was startled, and showed it. “You’ve been studying.” Tanj, that’s where he learned the music!

“They’re meddlesome, aren’t they, these puppeteers? The Hindmost has a hundred generations of human literature, kzinti oral history, kdatlyno touch-sculpture sequences, even some trinoc vengeance tales. From your nineteenth and twentieth centuries I’ve viewed entertainments based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, including Fred Saberhagen’s and Anne Rice’s work. But why not reserve the name ‘Cronus’? This individual can’t have been the first, Louis. Shall I make blurry word-pictures for you?

“Eighty thousand falans ago there was a dead Pak protector. He might have been hundreds of falans old already. For all we know, he might have helped build the Arch. Call him Cronus. Archaic Night People came and ate his flesh. If the meat of a protector didn’t bring on the change, then they found yellow roots the protector carried. They became protectors. If there were many, soon there was one.”

Louis slapped the dead protector’s clavicle. Dust puffed. “Bram, this is the oldest protector we’ll ever know anything about. Maybe there were gods before Cronus, that the Greeks didn’t know about—”

Bram nodded. “As you will. Cronus.”

“Stet. Cronus’s species might have been eating carrion for thousands of years after something like the Fist-of-God impact—”

“Must you speak every trivial truth aloud? Ah, you have a student. Acolyte, do you see Louis’s point?”

“In truth, I see something,” Acolyte said. “The numbers are ridiculous unless something was guiding Ghouls in one direction across large, very large distances. One empire. Ghouls must be the same along the entire two hundred million miles. Perhaps everywhere on the ring.”

“Yes! It was Cronus tending his species like a herder. Bram? Doesn’t a protector try to preserve his own genetic pattern?”

The Kzin jumped on it. “Yes! How could Cronus guide his own descendants? Even a good change smells wrong. Wait, what if he chose other, similar carrion eaters? No, they would rule his own breed!”

Acolyte was learning how to solve puzzles.

Bram said, “He was a Ghoul. A carrion eater’s sense of smell is altered by evolution. What to approach, what to touch, what to put in his mouth, each is a conscious choice. A Ghoul may be more free than other protectors. He may guide his kind toward what he sees as perfection.”

They looked at the old skeleton. He had to come, Bram had said. Near seven thousand falans, he’d said. One thousand seven hundred years? And if Louis’s dawning suspicion had any basis in fact, he’d best not ask directly.

Try something indirect. “Your mate, is she still in here?”

“Anne may be dead. When we became aware that the Arch is unstable in its plane, that there must have been motors on the rim, Anne went to fix it. I was able to track her for a time. These others now at work on the rim wall may have killed her.”

“Bram, she would have had to make those other protectors.”

“Anne felt no such urgency when she left me. She would have worked alone. These late-blooming protectors might be the work of the recent one, the Ball People protector—”

“Teela.”

“Teela Brown. Your mate,” Bram said. “The Hindmost has records of her, too.”

“Were you here when Teela came?”

“Yes. It was more difficult to hide from her than from the Hindmost. I watched her learn to use the Meteor Defense. I was sure she intended what a protector must: she would save the Arch from impacting the sun. What was her true intent, Louis?”

“Teela was a protector. I can’t read a protector’s mind.”

Bram asked, “If not hers, then whose?”

“You saw the records. Teela was strange.”

“Two came into the Repair Center,” Bram said. “They ate of the root. One died. The other fell into the coma that leads to the protector state. I had time to hide my presence and set up means to observe her.

“Your Teela wandered the Repair Center. It was a pleasure to watch her. She discovered things I hadn’t noticed, and ultimately came here. She played with the Meteor Defense and the telescope display.

“Then she left. I was able to track her a little as she moved to the rim wall. She used a magnetic transport system on the rim wall, much faster than the system we used, but she had an advanced pressure suit.”

“Timing?”

“Some extrasolar object impacted the sun twenty-two falans past. Storms of subatomic particles threw the Arch off balance. Louis, Teela was in a great hurry.”

Twenty-two falans ago: the Ringworld began sliding off balance about five years before Hot Needle of Inquiry’s return. “She was educated on Earth,” Louis said. “With a protector’s brain and basic physics classes, she must have seen the situation quick enough. She went to fix the attitude jet system. What would she find? Anne?”

“Anne would hide,” Bram said. “She would watch Teela. At the first sign of incompetence, she would kill Teela.”

“Mmm.”

“You knew her—”

“As a woman. Bram, nobody knew Teela. She was a statistical fluke, a woman who was lucky every time luck was called for, up until Nessus drafted her for the Ringworld expedition. Any kind of normal life must have been just out of her reach.”

Acolyte said, “My father speaks of Teela sometimes. He never knew what to make of her. To the puppeteers, she was part of a breeding program, breeding for luck. Chmeee believed they succeeded.”

“No,” Bram said.

Louis said, “She’s dead, Bram. She’s no threat to you.”

“But what might a protector leave behind to shape a future she desired? We plan far ahead. Louis, have you seen what you needed to see?”

“Yeah.”

Bram flicked in, calling, “Hindmost, wake!”

But the Hindmost was awake and dancing in his cabin… dancing with three ghosts, three puppeteers too translucent to hide him. “Bram, I thought of something cute. I made a brief burn an hour ago to put the probe below the rim, out of sight of invading ships.”

“Numbers?”

The Hindmost whistled. Equations wrote rainbow lines.

Bram studied them. It was the first time Louis had seen him freeze up like that, but the equations looked complex, far beyond his own abilities. Then Bram said, “Good. Begin deceleration now.”

The Hindmost chirped. The racing rim wall opened behind him—”Stet?”

“Yes, stet, if it doesn’t hide you from me.”

— rim wall moving at a blur, its edge far above, the tops of the spill mountains far below. The probe must be about three hundred miles up, Louis thought.

The Hindmost chirped. Louis looked for results, but he couldn’t see-wait, now. Night-shadowed, the passing rim wall had picked up a blue highlight: the reflection of a small fusion drive. Floating equations told it better: some of the numbers were reeling down.

Three ghosts still danced with the Hindmost, and Louis knew them. Their hairstyles differed, but they were all Nessus.

Acolyte was gnawing on something that dripped red. It was not an appetizing sight, but Louis was suddenly starved. He tapped at the kitchen wall with one eye for the holograms.

Bram asked, “Hindmost, what do you know of Teela Brown?”

The Hindmost sang like a bronze bell. A third hologram opened behind the Hindmost: a table of contents, as best Louis could tell. The cabin was crowded with images.

Bram flared in anger. “Come here. Come here now!”

The Hindmost didn’t hesitate. He stepped and was beside them. “I intended no harm.”

“I prefer you here. Louis, Hindmost, Acolyte, I’m trying to paint a picture of a protector in my mind. I have my murky view of Cronus and I knew Anne intimately, but Teela Brown is an alien protector. Soon we must face alien protectors. Hindmost, what have you shown me?”

“These are records on the Lucky Human Project. My administration felt that human allies could do us good. Humans are lucky. We would make them effective by making them luckier. The experiment was local to one planet, Earth. We added a lottery to the formal qualifications that earn a birthright. We kept track of babies born through luck. We financed a social network so that the children might meet and breed.”

“Was she lucky?”

Louis wasn’t listening, definitely wasn’t listening. When he’d fought free of the Ringworld, Teela had stayed behind by her own choice. Louis had had forty years to avoid thinking about Teela Brown.

“She was a sixth-generation lottery winner, but Teela was not lucky for puppeteers, nor for her associates. I cannot think she was lucky for herself. Any creature seeks homeostasis. Teela lost her mate, then her gender identity and shape, then her life. But luck is a thing of dubious interpretation.”

Acolyte spoke. “What if she sought a cause worth dying for?”

Louis gaped. Acolyte added, “Or what if she only wanted to be more intelligent? Like my father. Like me. Luck gave her those things.”

Bram said, “Louis?”

“Maybe. Interesting interpretation.” Forty years, and he’d never seen what was obvious to this eleven-year-old cat!

“Anything further?”

Louis closed his eyes. He could see her, touch her. “A freak accident took her away from us. Luck. When we found her, she’d found Seeker. Big, brawny explorer type, a wonderful guide, and I guess she was in love with him, too—”

“Was she your mate or his?”

“Serial polygamy. Skip it—”

“She left you for him?”

“Not just for Seeker. Bram, she’d found this-this huge toy. It never would have occurred to Teela that it was beyond her, too big to play with. That anything was beyond her.”

“She wanted to play with the Arch? Without destroying it, of course. And only a protector can do that?”

Louis rubbed his eyes.

“So you left her on the Ringworld. And then?”

“Seeker must have led her to the Map of Mars, or told her enough that she could guess the rest. She knew going in that she was entering a strange place, a place of secrets.

“She… let’s see… she wakes as a protector. Seeker’s dead. Teela’s a protector in the Repair Center. She plays around. She finds out how to turn the sun into a superthermal laser. Blasts a few comets?”

“She did that.”

“She learns how to display telescope views with the Meteor Defense setup. She notices that the Ringworld has a wobble to it. She finds attitude jets on the rim wall, but most of them are gone. Any protector could predict the results of that.

“She goes to the rim wall. Bram, did she take roots with her?”

“Roots and a flowering plant and thallium oxide.”

“She finds City Builder ships built around the rim attitude jets. Anne may have replaced some of those… yeah. That’s what your Anne was doing: intercept every City Builder ship as it comes back from the stars, tear out the Bussard ramjets and mount them on the rim. It’s just another thing Halrloprillalar never told me. She and her crew must have been evicted from their ship, sent back through the rim wall by an angry protector.”

Bram waited.

“Poor tanj Prill. That could twist a person’s mind.”

Waited.

“So there’s already a few attitude jets back in place, but all Teela sees is that the ship builders haven’t stolen them all yet. She takes over Anne’s job. It’s urgent. She turns some breeders into protectors. She told me about those: a Spill Mountain People, a vampire, a Ghoul. They all start pulling motors out of returning ships and remounting them.

“They had twenty in place and no more ships in view, and the motors didn’t have enough power by themselves. Teela left the other protectors tending the motors. She came back to the Repair Center. She must have known what she was going to do next. She didn’t see Hot Needle of Inquiry coming at her until she was using the Repair Center telescope again.”

Acolyte said, “She must have had a telescope on the rim, Louis.”

“Sure, and it must have been good enough to see the big City Builder ships coming in. Needle’s much smaller.”

“Would she recognize Needle?”

“A General Products number-three hull? Sure.”

Bram asked, “How could Needle affect her plans?”

“What did I tell you about reading a protector’s mind, Bram?”

“But you must try.”

Louis didn’t want to try. “Here’s what Teela told me. She just couldn’t make herself kill a trillion people even to save thirty trillion. Protector intelligence and Teela Brown empathy: she could feel their deaths. She knew it had to be done, and she knew we’d figure out how, me and Chmeee and the Hindmost, and she couldn’t let us do it, either. She was inviting us to kill her, Bram.”

“I watched her fight. I could have fought better while dead.”

“Yeah. It was the fight of my life, but nobody outfights a protector.”

“If she knew she couldn’t play a plasma jet along the rim wall, why did she return to the Repair Center?” Silly question. Bram didn’t wait for an answer. “What did she really want?”

Louis shook his head. “What do protectors want? That’s one thing we learned about you. Your motives are hard-wired. You protect your genetic line. When the line dies out, you stop eating and die. Teela didn’t have children on the Ringworld, but there were hominids. Relatives, if you close one eye and squint a little. She had to save them. Why wait? With the Ringworld sliding off balance—”

Bram brushed it away. “She waited for Hot Needle of Inquiry, for puppeteer-derived computer programs. I watched you use them and was glad I had not interfered.”

Oh. “But why not just say so? Tanj dammit, why the fight?” Wait, now—”Bram, did Anne leave just after you killed Cronus?”

“She took several days to prepare.”

“And that was just under seven thousand falans ago?”

“Yes.”

“Around twelve hundred A.D., my calendar. Did she take roots? And does she have to come back for more?”

“Anne took roots and a blooming plant and some thalium [sic-should be “thallium”] oxide. She planted tree-of-life but the crop failed after a time, so she came back near five thousand falans ago. She stayed with me for not long. I haven’t seen her since. Either she grew a better garden or she’s dead.”

“Yeah. Teela had the same idea? Roots, plants, thallium oxide. If there’s a good place to plant all that, then Anne’s garden was in it. Teela would know what it was.”

“Anne would hide it well.”

“You can’t hide plants from sunlight. She couldn’t put it where any passing hominid would sniff it. She’d want it within her reach, on a spill mountain, in a place even hot-air balloons couldn’t invade. A fissure, a steep valley, maybe. And now we have to guess whether Teela saw it.”

“And if she did?”

Louis sighed. “Bram, what have you got on living protectors?”

“Hindmost, show him. I propose to bathe.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE — DEFAULT OPTION

A hundred miles above the spill mountain tops, the probe accelerated. The Ringworld raced toward and past it like a frozen river bigger than worlds, but no longer at 770 miles per second. The probe was catching up.

Louis asked the puppeteer, “Are we in view of that comet installation you didn’t blast?”

“Yes, it’s far enough above the Ringworld plane, but we will have landed before the light reaches the comet.”

Acolyte reclined, huge and silent. Chmeee had sent him to learn, and he had been learning from Bram for these past 2.2 falans. Teaching him wisdom would be a neat trick, Louis thought. Protectors had intelligence coming out of their ears, but wisdom? Could a Kzin see the difference?

“And you’ve blasted everything else that can see us.”

“Yes.”

“Stet. Show us the rim.”

“I can’t really show you protectors, Louis. It’s what Bram asked, but I cannot magnify so greatly.”

“What have you got?”

The Hindmost had months, falans, of observing the rim wall and the spill mountains. Winking heliographs were everywhere, not just on the rim wall. Several times the probe had caught daylit flashes from-one presumed-client species on the flatlands.

A village flashed past, and the Hindmost froze it for their eyes: a thousand houses spreading out from one side of a magnificent waterfall, eight to ten thousand feet high. On the other side of the falls, a dockyard for hot air balloons, marked by a cliff splashed with bright orange paint. Below the dockyard, clustered factories and warehouses ran down the ice and rocks to another orange boulder and a lower landing pad. Come in high or come in low, travelers would find refuge.

The Hindmost jumped the view to another village fifty million miles away. A spread across a shallow green hillside: houses with sloped sod roofs, and a vertical row of industrial works with orange-marked landing pads above and below.

Louis said, “Acolyte, you’ve seen a lot more of this than I have. What am I likely to miss?”

“I can’t guess what you might miss, Louis. They have no more problem with garbage disposal than a school of fish. They—”

Louis laughed widely, white teeth showing. Acolyte waited it out. “Their houses differ but their placement follows a pattern. Balloons and factories are alike everywhere. Bram and I surmise that the Night People mirrors can relay designs, maps, weather alerts, perhaps written music: a trade in ideas.”

“Trade between stars is like that.”

The rim wall was a continuous sheet of scrith, of Ringworld floor material as strong as the force that held an atomic nucleus together. Even that force wasn’t as strong as a meteoroid moving at Ringworld speed, and Louis noted a punch hole high up on the rim wall, a few million miles antispin from the other Great Ocean. Otherwise the great empty mountings stood three million miles apart along a featureless rim, and a slender thread ran along the top for a third of its length. They’d seen that eleven years ago: a maglev track, never finished.

Twenty-three of the mounts now held motors. At highest magnification, the tiny pairs of toroids were just visible.

“Here is what they look like firing.” The puppeteer jumped the view, fast-forward.

The change was not great. Hydrogen fusion radiates mostly X rays. A fusion motor radiates visible light because it is hot, or because working mass has been added to increase thrust. When a rim wall motor was firing, the wire outline glowed white-hot, and flexed against the plasma’s magnetic fields. The toroids were the wasp-waist constriction in an hourglass of white-hot wire, and an indigo ghost flame ran down the axis. Twenty-two of those in a row.

The Hindmost displayed successive views of work around the twenty-third motor. There were cranes and cables big enough to see, and flatbed things that might be used for magnetic levitation, but not a hope of seeing anything man-sized.

And all Louis could think of was his need to talk where Bram couldn’t hear.

The protector was using the bath setup in the crew cabin. No doubt that equipment had kept Chmeee and Louis sane, and Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok, too. Still, it was cramped and complicated and primitive. They could hear the whisper of spray through the wall.

Louis said, testing, “Given he bathes at all, I’m surprised he didn’t use your cabin.”

“Louis, I wish now that I could show you my cabin. The dedicated stepping disk is hardwired. It cannot move an alien.”

The Kzin rumbled, “You value your privacy greatly.”

“You know better. I want company,” the Hindmost said. “Louis or even you, if I cannot surround myself with my kind. We follow our fears. I followed my fear when I shaped this ship.”

“You persuaded Bram of that?”

“I hope so. It’s true.”

The probe was an hour short of matching the Ringworld’s spin. Louis said, “We’re going to have to use pressure suits. Let’s do something about them.”

“I keep my own well-maintained,” the puppeteer said.

“Stet. Send me and Acolyte to the lander bay.”

“I should come,” the Hindmost said. “There’s other equipment I should see to.”

They flicked out.

“We cannot be heard here,” the Hindmost assured them.

Acolyte snorted. Louis said, “Suppose a protector-level intelligence really wanted to hear us?”

“No, Louis. I intended to spy on you and Chmeee and—” Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t made the cut. “I made this my listening post. No entity could add a spy device in the lander bay without signaling me.”

Maybe. “Hindmost, aren’t you safe when you’re in your own cabin?”

“Bram has a way to attack me there.”

“Can you block it?”

“I haven’t worked out what he has.”

“A good bluff? Bram’s had a long time to work on you. He has you terrified.”

The Hindmost’s gaze converged on Louis: binocular vision with a baseline of three feet. “You have never understood us. The hidden protector frightened me from the first. I remain frightened. However you plan to circumvent Bram, I may accept the risk or reject it, but only on the odds. I do not turn my mind from danger.”

“I don’t expect to break my contract.”

“Excellent.”

There were pressure suits and air racks designed for humans. He and Bram would need two of everything. Louis checked pressure zips on the suits and the racks. He emptied waste recycler reservoirs and filled nutrient reservoirs, flushed the interiors of the suits and the air and water tanks, topped off the air, charged the batteries.

Acolyte was tending his own suit. The Hindmost was inspecting a stack of stepping disks.

Louis said, “I know why Teela Brown died.”

The Hindmost said, “Protectors die fairly easily, when they no longer feel needed—”

Louis shook his head. “She found something. Maybe it was Anne’s garden, maybe just fingerprints on the rim wall motors. Whatever, she knew there was a protector in the Repair Center. She had to get Needle into the Map of Mars, but when she did that, she made us hostages. The only way to make us safe was to die. But—”

“Louis, we don’t have time. What do you want of us?”

“I want to change the stepping disk pattern without Bram knowing. Then I may want to change it back. I’m not sure I’m right yet. I need a default option.”

The Kzin asked, “Default option?”

The Hindmost answered, “Decide in advance what you will do if you don’t have time to decide.”

“Like the first move you learn in fighting with a Kzin dagger, a wtsai,” Louis said. “If you’re attacked too fast to think, there’s your training.”

“The disembowel.”

“Whatever. I just knew there must be one. Epees and handguns and hand-to-hand and yogatsu, it doesn’t matter: you train the moves into your reflex arcs so you don’t have to make up something while you’re being attacked. Likewise, you instruct a computer on what to do if you don’t tell it what to do.”

“Clever notion, said the Kzin.

“Hindmost, I don’t quite understand your stepping disk network…”

They discussed it. The system wanted to know that you really meant the change you’d whistled or typed in. Push the edge of the disk down.

“Stet. Now I can do this and you cannot notice. We have deniability. Acolyte, I’ll need a distraction.”

“See if you can describe it,” Acolyte said.

“I haven’t the faintest bloody idea. I only need it for about two breaths.”

As they flicked through to the cabin, the Hindmost was saying, “Louis, are you aware that you were dying?”

Louis smiled faintly. “Tradition says that everyone is dying. Exceptions may be made for puppeteers and protectors. Hello, Bram. Any change?”

Bram was in a rage. “Hindmost, amplify the light and zoom. The village!”

The probe was moving through shadow; but much closer than the distant oncoming band of daylight was a glimpse of pattern crusting the dim snow-colors of a passing spill mountain.

The Hindmost sang flute and strings. The pattern brightened and began to expand.

The spill mountain village looked like a great blotchy cross seen from almost overhead. Houses were white of a different shade from the snowfields: sloped roofs under a snow blanket, strung out along ledges on a background of naked rock and snow laced with dark paths, sparsely patterned along twenty miles and more. Factories and warehouses crossed that band vertically, much more closely clustered, running from six to ten thousand feet high. At top and bottom were angular blobs of bright orange and bits of other colors, too.

Bram’s temper was under tight control. “You were needed. I feared the probe would pass before you returned. Can you see why that might be a concern?”

“Not… yes.”

Then Louis saw, too. Three bright silver squares: three of the oversized cargo plates. One was bare; one was loaded with cargo, hard to see for what it was. The third, a brown square with a bright rim: the Machine People cruiser still riding its cargo plate. It was tethered at the upper dock next to a naked rock cliff painted bright orange, and two patches of yellow and orange and cobalt blue: deflated balloons.

“That was a quick ride,” Louis said.

Daylight swept upon them at 770 miles per second. The view flashed bright, then dimmed to truer colors.

Acolyte reminded them: “They have their own webeye.”

The Hindmost popped up a window next to the probe’s-four now. They were now seeing through the bow of the cruiser.

Here were Red Herders muffled in lovely furs striped gray and white. Louis only glimpsed red hands in long loose sleeves, flat noses and dark eyes deep within hoods, but who else could they be? The Fearless Vampire Slayers. Several larger furry shapes must be Spill Mountain People. Their hands were broad, with thick, stubby fingers. Glimpses of faces inside hoods were silver-gray, like the hands.

They panted out puffs of frost as they worked. Red hands and brown hands gripped the fuzzy edges of the window, and the view wobbled.

The Hindmost said, “The probe will be well past before we can slow. Shall I bring it back for another view?”

Bram said, “Why? We have our view. Hindmost, we’re closing on the near end of the rim wall transport rail, and possible witnesses. Take the probe over the rim when you can.”

“Aye aye. Twelve minutes.”

The probe was in full daylight now, leaving the village far aft. The dismounted webeye was in jerky motion, carried along footholds and handholds chopped in stone. Windows overlaid on windows.

Bram asked, “Where have you been?”

Louis answered. “The time to check a pressure suit—”

“Yes. Report.”

“—is before you’re breathing vacuum—”

“You used a checklist. I use my mind.”

“And your first mistake will be memorable.”

“Report.”

“I can’t speak for a puppeteer’s suit. Ours will keep us alive for two falans. We refilled and recharged everything fillable and chargeable. The Hindmost still has six stepping disks not in use, and we can recycle some of what we’re using now. We can put webeyes anywhere. There aren’t any weapons in the lander bay. I assume you’ve stored them somewhere. You decide what you want us to be carrying. We couldn’t think of anything else to check.”

Bram said nothing.

Hidden Patriarch’s crow’s nest showed no change, and the Hindmost whistle-bonged that window off. The refueling probe ran along a rim wall touched with violet. The next window over rolled wobbling along a path that had become more than a rock climb, downhill toward rectangular patches of snow.

The Hindmost said, “You were dying.”

“Did you see… never mind,” Louis said. “Show me that medical report.”

The puppeteer chimed. Louis Wu’s medical record partly blocked both windows. “There, it’s in Interspeak.”

Chemical… major restructure… diverticulosis… tanj. “You can get used to what age does to you, Hindmost. Old people used to say, ‘If you can wake up in the morning with nothing hurting anywhere, it’s a sign that you have died in the night.’”

“Not funny.”

“But even an idiot might guess something’s wrong when he starts pissing gas with his urine.”

“I would have thought it rude to observe you at such a time.”

“I am much relieved. Even so, would you have noticed?” Louis read further. “Diverticulosis, that’s little blowout patches on your colon-my colon. Diverticuli [sic-should be “Diverticula”] can hurt you lots of ways. Mine seems to have extended far enough to attach itself to my bladder. Then it got infected and blew through. That left a tube connecting my colon and my bladder. A fistula.”

“What did you think?”

“I had the medkit. It was giving me antibiotics. For a couple of days I hoped… well, bacteria can get into a human bladder and make gas, but antibiotics would have cleared that up. So I knew I needed a plumber.”

Acolyte didn’t usually stare directly into anyone’s eyes, but he did now. His ears were folded out of sight. “You were dying? Dying when you refused the Hindmost’s offers?”

“Yes. Hindmost, if you’d known, would you have accepted my contract?”

“Not a serious question. Louis, I’m expressing admiration. You are a scary negotiator.”

“Thank you.”

Bram said, “Please restore our view from the probe… Thank you. In six minutes we’ll move up the rim wall and cross to the outside. I trust we won’t lose the signal, Hindmost?”

“Scrith stops a percentage of neutrinos. Implied is some kind of nuclear reaction ongoing in the Ringworld floor, but the signal will dwindle predictably and I can compensate.”

Bram said, “Good. Is my suit in order?”

“It’s my spare, after all,” Louis said. “Take whichever suit feels lucky to you. I’ll take the other.”

The probe was slowing, slowing.

“Now?”

“Now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX — THE DOCKYARD

The cruiser and its cargo plate rose through the night. Warvia and Tegger clung to each other in the payload shell. Fear of heights was a terrible thing. They both shrieked when they felt the bump, then laughed because they were still alive.

Leaving the protection of the payload shell was an ordeal. They gasped and shivered in the thin, cold air. The sun was just peeping around a shadow square.

The Ghouls blinked in the growing daylight and crawled into the payload shell to sleep.

Harpster had brought them down at the higher of two orange-splashed cliffs, alongside another floating plate and three baskets attached to collapsed balloons.

The village was stirring. Downslope and to the sides, furred shapes moved out from snow-roofed houses to forage in the tilted lands beyond.

Even to a nomad like Tegger, this wasn’t a large village. Then again, it was nearly invisible. The roofs were rectangles of snow on a snowfield; you picked them out by their shadows.

Five locals were trudging uphill to meet the visitors from below. A raptor-beaked bird circled about them. The Red Herders watched them come, but they couldn’t see anything inside their furs. They carried water bags and more furs.

The water was heated. It tasted wonderful. Warvia and Tegger struggled into furs in frantic haste, pulling them closed until only their noses showed. That and their gasping seemed to amuse the Spill Mountain People.

“Na, na, it’s lovely day!” Saron sang in a nearly impenetrable accent. “You walk in blizzard. Teach you respect mountain!”

They walked around the wood and iron cruiser, paying no attention to the floating plate it rode on.

The five Spill Mountain People looked like barrels sheathed in layers of white- and-gray-striped fur. Saron’s fur was different: striped white and greenish-brown, with a hood that had been some ferocious creature’s head. Her rank must be distinctive, Tegger thought, and decided that Saron was a woman. She was the smallest of the five. Her voice gave no clue and her furs hid all details.

Saron was studying the bronze spinnerweb and its stone backing. She asked, “Is this the eye?”

Warvia said, “Yes. Saron, we don’t know what to do next.”

“We were told Night People would come. Where are they?”

“Sleeping. It isn’t night yet.”

Saron laughed. “My mother told me it was only a way of speaking. They come out at night?”

The Reds nodded.

The bird hovered above them, riding the wind, then suddenly dropped far downslope. It struck talons first, and rose with something struggling in its beak.

Deb asked, “What must the eye see?”

Tegger and Warvia had no idea. This must have been obvious, and Deb answered herself. “The mirror and the passage. Take the eye with us. Does it talk?”

“No.”

“How do you know it sees?”

“Ask Harpster and Grieving Tube.”

Warvia said, “I’m going to cover them. They could freeze to death up here.”

“Good,” Jennawil said, and they carried furs into the payload shell.

Harreed and Barraye were at work dismounting the bronze web and its backing. Tegger had decided they were men. Though they peered out of their hoods in frank astonishment at the Red Herders, they were silent. It seemed the women did all the talking.

Tegger tried to help them. As he scuttled sideways carrying one edge of the stone-backed web, he found himself gasping, suffocating. Deb and Jennawil moved in to help. Tegger got out of their way, fighting for breath.

“You’re feeble,” Saron decided.

Tegger tried to quiet his gasping. “We can walk.”

“Your lungs don’t find enough air. You will be stronger tomorrow. Today you must rest.”

The four picked up the web and began to climb, angling downhill, toward the snow-roofed houses. Saron walked ahead to point out footholds to Warvia and Tegger, ready to steady them if they slipped.

The bird dropped onto the leather pad that crossed Deb’s shoulders. Deb staggered and swore at it in some alien language, and it rose again.

Spill Mountain People seemed incredibly surefooted.

Tegger and Warvia walked with their arms around each other, trying to stay upright. They’d been in motion too long. The mountain seemed to sway beneath them. The wind searched out every tiniest gap in their furs. Tegger peeped out of his hood through slitted eyes, blinking away tears.

He had some of his breath back. He asked Deb, “That was your own tongue, yes? How did you learn the trade speech?”

Deb’s vowels and consonants were distorted. He had to catch the sense above the shrilling of the wind. “Night People say, tell you everything. But you, you tell the flatland vishnishtee nothing. Keep our secrets. Yes?”

Tegger didn’t know the word, but Warvia caught it. She told him, “Vashnesht,” enunciating it properly, and told the others, “Yes.”

Vashnesht: protectors. Keep secrets from the protectors from below the spill mountains. “Yes,” said Tegger.

Deb said, “Teela came from below, from the flats. A strange person, all knobs, could not resh. You understand, reshtra? Could not. Nothing there. She let us look.

“She taught us to speak. We knew the speech of the mirrors, but we spoke it wrong. Teela taught us, then told us teach the people who ride the balloons.

“Then she went through the passage. Came back seventy falans later, no change in her. We thought she was a vishnishtee, but now we knew.”

They were passing houses now: rectilinear houses made of wood that must have been imported from the forest below. They’d picked up an entourage of curious children: eyes peeking out from fur hoods, and chattering that came in puffs of fog. Warvia was trying to answer them.

Tegger asked, “May we speak to this Teela?”

“Teela went below again, since forty falans or more,” Deb said.

“More,” Saron said flatly.

Jennawil asked, “What do you know of reshtra?”

Tegger looked at Warvia. Warvia temporized. “How can you know of rishathra? Do you have other visitors from below?”

The locals laughed, even the men. Deb said, “Not from below, but from sideways! Folk visit from nearby mountains—”

“But they’re all Spill Mountain People, aren’t they?”

“Wairbeea, the people of the mountains are not all one kind. We are High Point. Saron—”

Here, a door. Tegger eased Warvia in ahead of him. The bird settled on Deb’s shoulder as she entered.

This narrow space was not the house proper, only a tiny anteroom supported by wooden beams and lines with hooks for furs. Doors at the far end opened opposite each other.

Now the furs started to come off. The two species stared at one another, fiercely curious.

High Point People were broad through the torso, broad across the face, with wide mouths and deep-set eyes. Their hair and-on the men-beards were curly and dark. Beneath their furs was cloth enclosing their torsos to the elbows and knees, and below the cuffs, a good deal of curly hair.

Deb was a strong woman in middle age. The bird, Skreepu, belonged to Deb. So did the identical-looking young men, Harreed and Barraye: they were her sons. Jennawil was a young woman mated to Barraye.

And Saron was a woman, deep of voice, old and deeply wrinkled. Something about her jaw, her hands: Warvia asked, “Are you of High Point?”

“No, from Two Peaks. A balloon carried us to High Point, far past Short One, where we wanted to visit. The wind blows wrong here. We could not return. The rest flew on, exploring, but I found my man Makray persuasive. He cannot have more children, I have had mine, why not?”

While Deb removed her fur and hung it, Skreepu clung to the leather patch. When Saron led the rest into the main house, the great bird lifted and followed them.

The ceiling was high. Furniture was minimal. There was a high perch for the bird, two low tables, no chairs. This was half of the visitors’ house, divided from the other half by the long anteroom. Tegger wondered if he would meet whatever visitors were living on the other side.

The men propped the bronze web against the wall. Then the High Pointers settled cross-legged in a circle that left space for their visitors.

“This is your place, the visitors’ house,” Saron said. “It is warm enough for most who come, but you may want to sleep in fur.”

Jennawil waved about her. “We are High Point. Next spinward call themselves Eagle Folk. Noses like beaks. They’re smaller than we are and not as strong, but their balloons are best we have seen, and they sell balloons to other folk. We can get children with them, but so rarely that we resh with little risk.

“To antispin are Ice People. They live higher and the cold hurts them less. Mazarestch got a boy by an Ice People man. The way she tells it, their exertion moved mountain. The boy Jarth can forage higher than any of his peers.

“Visitors come from far spin and antispin. We welcome them all and resh with them, too, but we get no children together. They tell us it is the same for them. Reshtra is for different kinds, mating is between two of a kind. Folk of near mountains can mate, those from too far cannot. Teela told us that our foreparents must have traveled from mountain to mountain, changing as we went.

“And you?”

Warvia was laughing too hard to speak, less amused than embarrassed, Tegger thought. He tried to put an answer together. “On the flat land travel is easy. We have all species mixed. We see every possible way of rishathra. We Red Herders travel with the animals we tend, for all of our lives. We cannot rish. We only mate once.”

He could not tell how they were reacting to that: their faces were too unfamiliar. He said, “But some kinds rish for pleasure, some for trade contracts or to end a war or to postpone a child. We hear of Weed Gatherers, near mindless, who rish very nicely, convenient for ones who won’t take the time to-to court. Water People will rish with anyone who can hold his or her breath for long enough, but few there are—”

“Water People?”

“Live under liquid water, Barraye. I guess you don’t have many of those.”

Laughter. Jennawil asked Warvia, “You don’t rish, but only you listen?”

“What else is there for my kind when visitors come? But you’ll want to speak to the Night People when they wake.”

Tegger saw Jennawil trying to keep a straight face.

“Please understand,” Saron said, “we have only resh with species from near mountains. Spill mountain species, all of us, all very like each other even if we cannot get children. You…” She searched for words and found none.

A bit strange? Very queer? Demons from below? Before the silence could grow yet less comfortable, Warvia said, “We hear that protectors can pierce any secret. How can you hope to hide anything?”

“From flatland vishnishtee,” Deb said.

Saron explained. “Vishnishtee are a danger. Teela told us so, the Night People tell us, and the legends tell us, too. But the passage belongs to High Point. The passage is of interest to vishnishtee. The passage pierces the rim wall. They can go out of the world through the passage if they wear their balloon suits and helms with windows. The Night People don’t like to draw attention from vishnishtee.”

“You have protectors here?”

It seemed clear that Saron was speaking for the bronze web as well as Tegger and Warvia. “Three flatland vishnishtee rule the passage. More: they have taken some of us away, older ones, and some of those come back to us as vishnishtee.

“When the Death Light shone, the flatland vishnishtee showed us how to hide. Sod or rock is enough to stop the light that shines through fur and flesh, but better was to hide in the passage itself. Makray was hunting when the Death Light shone,” Saron said. “Half a day from shelter, and no vishnishtee to tell him he wanted it.”

Deb said, “Many of us went to hunt, or were caught out. One of every three died. Odd and feeble children were born after. All the mountains about tell the same tale, and only we and the mountains nearby had vishnishtee to give warning. Flatland vishnishtee are not wholly evil.”

Tegger asked, “Death Light?”

But none of the High Pointers chose to hear, and Tegger didn’t ask again. Saron said, “High Point vishnishtee serve the flatland vishnishtee to keep us safe. But they will not tell the flatland vishnishtee where we have the mirror, and those will not learn of themselves. They are good at knowing secrets, but the mountains are not theirs.”

Warvia sighed. “The Night People will be very glad of your answers. We’ve traveled vastly to find them. No doubt they’ll have better questions.”

“And Louis Wu,” Deb said. “Or is he only a tale?”

“Where did you hear it?”

“From message mirrors and from Teela.”

Tegger said, “Louis Wu boiled an ocean. The City Builder Halrloprillalar traded and rished with him. Louis Wu is real, but is he on the other side of that spinnerweb? Deb, I need sleep.”

Warvia said, “Yes!”

Jennawil expressed the others’ surprise. “It is the middle of the day.”

“We worked through the night. Breathing is labor,” Warvia said.

“Let them sleep now,” Saron ordered. “We go. Teegr, Wairbeea, will you wake when the Night People do?”

Tegger could hardly keep his thoughts together or his eyes apart. “We may hope.”

“Food behind that door. Flup, we forgot! What do you eat?”

“Freshly killed meat,” Warvia said.

“Behind those little doors-no, never mind. Skreepu will find you something. Sleep well.” The High Point People filed out.

They had to look behind the little doors, and that let half the heat out of the house. Opening the little doors revealed food-visitor food, plants and old meat, not Red Herder food-and snowscape seen through wooden slats. Bars to keep away predators, and the great outside to keep food cold.

Warvia and Tegger curled together, fur beneath them, fur above. They’d set their clothes aside to air. They were warm enough, but Tegger could feel the cold at his nose. He could hear knocking behind the wall as the High Pointers donned their furs.

He was near sleep when Warvia said, “Whisper would have better questions.”

He said, “Whisper was only my madness.”

“Mine, too. Whisper taught me things—”

“What?”

Warvia whispered in his ear. “She was with us on the air sled, beneath the cruiser. She taught me about speed so that our speed would not drive me mad. She keeps herself a secret, Tegger. I don’t want the web to hear us.”

They’d propped the web upright against a wall. Tegger looked at the web, propped against a wall with a view of the whole room, and laughed. “If the web is no more than a slice of stone—”

“We will all seem great fools.”

“What does Whisper look like?”

“I never saw. Perhaps a wayspirit with no body at all.”

“What did she teach? No, don’t tell me now. We should sleep.”

“Why did you say we cannot rish? Was it the way they look?”

“No. They’re no stranger than Sand People. My mind saw me in Jennawil’s arms, gasping like a beached fish—”

Warvia laughed deliciously against his ear.

“Then I remembered that they talk with-talk for-the Ghoul empire. We would be famous. Did you want to settle somewhere, someday, where no Red Herder has heard of Red Herders who rish with every species under the Arch?”

“We never did that!”

“Tales grow in the telling. They are mighty tellers, the Ghoul empire, and these Spill Mountain People speak their words for them, and you and I destroyed the biggest nest of vampires beneath the Arch.”

“Yes.”

“You were thinking—”

“They are new to this. They have only rished with peoples very like them. Love, would you like to teach rishathra, if only once?”

They slept.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN — LOVECRAFT

The probe tilted over and rose at ten gravities straight up, closing on the rim wall. The blue highlight converged, then went out. The probe coasted, rising.

The Ringworld’s edge was narrow. The probe rose a few hundred feet higher, and arced over. A puff of fusion flame hatted its fall and set it drifting toward the shadowed back of a black wall that seemed to reach to the heavens.

It slowed. Hovered. The probe spat.

A window popped up to overlay the others. It showed the probe hovering on indigo flame; then the probe dropped away and it showed only starlight.

The Hindmost said, “I give you a webeye window beyond the rim wall.”

“We need a view from the underside. Get us that,” Bram commanded.

“Aye aye.” But the Hindmost was doing nothing.

“Hindmost!”

“The probe already has my instructions. Motors off. Rotate. I want a view.”

The probe was turning as it fell. The view turned: black rim wall, sunglare, starscape… a silver thread was shining against the star-spattered black below the falling probe.

“That!” Louis said. “See it? You need a burn or we’ll hit it.”

“Burn, aye aye.” A burst of woodwinds, then, “What is it?”

“Not a spaceport ledge, it’s too narrow.”

They waited through the lightspeed delay. The silver thread was growing larger, clearer. Now it seemed banded, like a silver earthworm. Eleven minutes…

The probe’s spin stopped. Window displays tremored: the probe was thrusting, flaring in X-ray light.

Nova light blasted through the hologram window.

Louis, with his arms thrown over his eyes, heard music from hell, then a voice that had lost all human traits. “My fuel source is destroyed!”

Bram’s voice was cool. “My concern is for the enemy that fired on us.”

“We are challenged! Arm me and send me through!” A bestial bellow, all madness. Acolyte’s idea of a distraction? Or are we locked in with a mad Kzin?

“Let me through to my cabin,” the Hindmost pleaded. “I must see what is still working.”

“What could be working? Your probe is destroyed and we are attacked, we are known. Could an invader react so quickly, or was that a protector?”

“The stepping disk at least should be safe.”

Louis opened his eyes. “Why?”

“I’m not a fool!” the Hindmost bleated. “I opened a stepping disk link as we crossed the rim. A plasma blast, kinetic weapons, any threat should go straight through.”

“Straight through to what?” Louis blinked. He was still seeing spots.

“I linked it to the stepping disk at the map of Mons Olympus.”

Louis laughed. It was probably too much to hope for, that a thousand Martians were setting a new trap when the stepping disk sprayed star-hot plasma over them, but heyyy…

Big claws closed on his shoulders; warm red meat breathed in his face. “We are at war, Louis Wu! This is not a time for distractions!”

Distractions. Stet. “Acolyte, go suit up. Get my suit, and a webeye sprayer, too, and my cargo disk stack, wherever Bram-Bram?”

“Dining hall aboard Hidden Patriarch,” Bram said.

“Hindmost, route him there first. Bram, get him some weapons. If we have a working stepping disk on the probe, we should use it.”

Bram said, “Go.”

The Hindmost rattled / chimed / bonged. Acolyte stepped and flicked out. The Hindmost stepped where the granite block had been and was gone, was in his cabin, his tongues licking out at what looked like an alien chess set but must be a virtual keyboard. One head rose to say, “We have a link. The stepping disk still operates.”

“Try the webeye sprayer,” Bram ordered.

“Spray what?”

“Vacuum.”

Eleven minutes later the blacked-out window lit again: a revolving starscape with a slow ripple to it. Louis could picture a webeye falling free through vacuum, spinning a little-was the probe spinning too? — drifting gradually away from the probe. And while the protector was worrying about the Kzin and trying to watch the puppeteer and all four hologram windows, Louis knelt above the stepping disk and lifted the edge.

A tiny hologram of glowing sticks rose just above the disk itself-the map of the stepping disk system. A larger display would have given him away, but the Hindmost had fixed that. Louis tapped his changes in quickly and pushed the rim down.

“Do you see?”

“Hindmost, explain to see me how we could have missed that until now!”

Bram and the Hindmost sure as tanj weren’t watching him. Louis turned.

As viewed through the free-falling webeye, the silver thread had become a silver ribbon with raised edges, a shallow trough not unlike a miniature of the Ringworld itself. Slender toroids arced over it.

Unmistakably, it was the transport system: the magnetic levitation track that ran along the top of the rim wall for a third of its length. Teela’s repair crew must have led it over the rim wall and down the outside.

Louis said, “Well, I haven’t been watching the rim wall for a good half year.”

“We should have looked closer,” the Hindmost said.

The silver rail swept past. Now there was only starscape. The fluttering webeye was below the Ringworld floor, falling into the universe.

Louis said, “I might have guessed. You, too, Bram. What else would Teela’s crew use to move their reclaimed ramjets?”

“The terminus is far to spinward, perhaps on a spaceport ledge. We’re in the wrong place to be looking for a factory.”

Stacked cargo plates flicked in, with pressure gear and a webeye sprayer added to Louis’s clutter. Louis shouldered the floating mass aside to leave room for Acolyte.

The Kzin flicked in wearing full pressure gear: concentric clear balloons and a fishbowl helmet. He tipped back the helmet and asked, “Are we ready?”

Louis gestured at a rippling starscape. “You don’t want to flick into that.”

Unexpectedly, the Hindmost said, “The link is still open and has stopped moving.”

Louis said, “What…”

Bram snapped, “Sprayed with plasma flame, dropped for a thousand miles, and it still works? Improbable!”

Louis took the webeye sprayer off the stacked cargo plates. “Try it.”

Heads turned. They didn’t get it. Louis said, “Hindmost, I want to spray a webeye through the stepping disk link. Set me up. We’ll just see what it hits.”

The Hindmost whistled. “Try,” he said.

Louis sprayed a bronze net at the stepping disk and saw it vanish.

They waited. Acolyte used the time to take a shower. Thirty-five degrees of Ringworld arc: five and a half minutes in transit, and the same again before they’d see it arrive. Transfer booths didn’t work faster than lightspeed, and neither, it seemed, did stepping disks.

“Signal,” the Hindmost said as his other tongue licked out. A fifth window popped up.

They looked up at stars crossed by the rim wall. A fuzzy bulk at the edge might be the probe. A lousy view-but the probe wasn’t falling. It had landed on a tiny target, the maglev track.

Bram said, “Acolyte, take the sprayer. Go through. Spray us a camera where we might see something interesting. Return instantly and report. Don’t wait for danger. We know it’s there.”

Too fast. Louis was just beginning to pull his suit on. Acolyte would be gone before he was ready. He said, “Hold it. Bram, he’s got to be armed!”

“Against protectors already on site? I prefer Acolyte to be conspicuously unarmed. Acolyte, go.”

The Kzin flicked out.

Louis finished getting into his suit. They’d have eleven minutes to wait.

Did Chmeee really think an old man like him, Louis wondered, could restrain and protect an eleven-year-old Kzin male?

It had been four minutes, and something was in view.

They watched a dark blur moving around the blurred edges of the window, inspecting the probe at its leisure. Then suddenly it was clear and close, an elegant alien pressure suit with a bubble helmet, and a near-triangular face with a mouth that seemed to be all bone. A single fingertip came closer yet, and traced curves Louis couldn’t see. It had found the webeye.

It snapped around quicksilver-fast, and still wasn’t quick enough. Something fast and black brushed across it and leapt away, out of range, gone.

The elegant intruder’s suit was slashed wide along the left side. It lifted a weapon like an old-fashioned chemical rocket motor. Violet-white flame lashed after the attacker. It must have missed. The elegant one bounded after, holding its suit almost closed with one hand, firing with the other. A ghost-trail of ice crystals followed it.

Bram said, “That was Anne.”

“Which?”

“Anne was the killer, Louis. They’re both vampire protectors, but I remember how Anne moves.”

“How do we warn Acolyte?”

“We cannot.”

Louis caught himself grinding his teeth. Acolyte was nowhere: a signal, a point, an energy quantum moving at lightspeed toward where one protector had killed another and was ready for more.

“Your Teela was too trusting,” Bram said. “She made a vampire into a protector, and that one must have changed others of his species before Teela killed him. But Anne and I are of another species than theirs.”

“Signal,” the Hindmost said as his other tongue licked out. Now they had two windows placed on the maglev transport track.

Acolyte had arrived; had sprayed a webeye on… Louis couldn’t tell. On something above his head. There was no sign of another intruder. The Kzin posed with the probe just behind him. It looked half melted and somewhat battered, and it was blocking the track.

Any protector would have to remove that blockage.

Acolyte, get out!

The track receded into infinity. It looked to be around two hundred feet across, and geometrically straight.

Acolyte was turning slowly, taking it all in. He sprayed another webeye, then stepped back to the probe and was gone.

The Hindmost said, “He flicked out.”

“Well, where is he?”

“Do you assume I want fusion plasma spraying through my cabin?”

“Where’s the link? Where did you flick him?” The Hindmost didn’t answer, and Louis knew. “Mons Olympus, you freemother?”

He lunged toward the stepping disk, stopped himself, and scrambled onto the stack of cargo plates instead. He led a line through the handholds, then around his tool belt: a poor man’s crash web. “Chmeee will have my ears and guts!” He set the cargo plates aloft and eased them onto the stepping disk.

Flick, and the sky was half stars, half black. Silver fractal filigree under his feet and stars showing through that.

Marvelous.

He looked up and down the maglev track. It was peaceful as hell. Nothing moved at all.

Silver lace. Where had he seen this kind of fractal pattern? He’d expected the maglev track to be a solid trough, but you could see stars through the mesh.

Hah! It was the Pinwheel, the old orbital tether they still used to transfer bulk cargos between Earth and the moon and Belt. The fractal distributed the stresses better. But never mind that-

“Bram, Hindmost, the maglev track is lacework. Can you see it? If I had the sprayer, I’d put a webeye on it right now. Look through the lace and see whatever tries to hide in the Ringworld’s shadow.”

They’d hear that in five and a half minutes. Hot Needle of Inquiry was that far away at lightspeed.

An ink blot pulled itself over the edge and walked toward Louis… a bulk like a sack of potatoes painted black, with a flared bell held negligently in one hand.

Louis touched the lift throttle.

The cargo plates didn’t move. There was a maglev track under him, but it wasn’t giving him enough lift.

“I’m looking at an ARM weapon,” Louis said. They’d hear him and know the rest: ARMs must have landed on a spaceport ledge and found protectors there.

How do you activate stepping disks when you can’t step off first? I’ll be dead when they hear all this. Should have brought an orchestra-or a recording of the command.

The protector-killer examined Louis Wu with a proprietary air. It-Anne-She was a slender shape in an inflated suit designed for something a little taller-recessed eyes peeped over the chin readouts-and much wider-

Flick, he was upside down and falling through red light.

It was red rock all around him and below his head, and hundreds of feet of smooth lava running down, down. The cargo plates surged upward, and Louis hung head-down over red rocks. He could feel the ropes slipping, in the moment before the plates’ inherent stability turned him upright.

Louis’s brain and belly and inner ears were whirling. Moments passed before his eyes could focus.

No Martians were there to watch.

He was hovering alongside a glassy-smooth stretch of lava that dropped almost straight for… futz… a thousand feet before it eased toward horizontal like a ski jump. Louis could see a splash of orange at the bottom: Acolyte in his translucent suit. He might even have survived such a fall… or not.

Louis decided he needn’t fear Martians.

This time the Martians had mounted their stepping disk upside down at the top of the highest cliff they could find. Then the flame that destroyed the Hindmost’s refueling probe had flooded through the stepping disk. Any Martians watching the trap must have been crisped. The cliff side had melted and flowed, forming a slide.

Louis landed the cargo plates, loosed the lines, and jumped down.

Acolyte by at an angle on hot red rock.

Louis got a shoulder under the Kzin. Not enough, and he pulled to roll the Kzin over him. Acolyte was an inert mass. Louis could feel broken ribs shifting.

He could have used Martian gravity about now.

He tightened his abdominal muscles, knees and back, grunt and lift. Lift! A nearly grown male Kzin, pressure suit and all, rose just high enough to roll onto the cargo plate.

Louis crawled aboard. Tied the Kzin down. Took the cargo plates up. He used the little thruster to put him just under the stepping disk. Lifted until his shoulders touched.

Flick, they were upside down in Needle with the cargo plates on top of them.

Bram did the rest: rolled the cargo plates off, opened all the sealstrips that held the Kzin’s suit together, and pulled him out. The Kzin’s eyes blinked, focused, found Louis. Otherwise he seemed unable to move.

Bram eased Louis out of his suit, stretched him out next to Acolyte, and examined him. That hurt. “You’ve torn some muscles and tendons,” he said. “You need the ‘doc, but the Kzin needs it more.”

“He goes first,” Louis said. If Acolyte died, what would he say to Chmeee?

Bram lifted the Kzin with no apparent effort, rolled him into the ‘doc and closed it. An odd notion: had Bram been waiting for permission?

Not so odd. Louis was starting to hurt in earnest now, and it wouldn’t do to let Bram know. Louis was a hominid and Acolyte wasn’t, and a protector might need a breeder’s permission to heal an alien first.

Bram picked him up and set him on the cargo plates in one smooth motion. Pain flashed through him, blocking his breath, turning his scream to a squeak. Bram hooked up leads and tubes from Teela’s portable ‘doc. He said, “Many of the reservoirs here need filling, Hindmost. Can your larger ‘doc make medicines?”

“The kitchen has a pharmacy menu.”

The port and starboard walls glowed with orange heat.

In another window he saw a black, baggy shape roll over the rim of the maglev rail. Then nothing, only a silver path receding to infinity.

The pain was receding. Louis knew he wouldn’t be lucid much longer.

He felt lean and knobby arms around him. Hard fingertips probed him here and there. A rib felt distant pain, then eased. His back cracked, and again lower down, and a hip joint, and his right knee.

Bram spoke near his ear, but not to Louis. “The Night People went to some effort to show us a spill mountain village, one out of tens of thousands. Why?”

The Hindmost replied, “Didn’t you see the way…” and Louis was asleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT — THE PASSAGE

“Feel that?”

“Yes,” said Warvia.

The room was trembling, a tiny vibration in all the walls and the rock below.

Riding weird vehicles had left them dizzy and disoriented, but they’d had hours to sleep that off. This was something else. Tegger hadn’t noticed at first. Now Warvia’s breathing and the endless tremor were the only sensations in the dark room.

“Any idea—”

“Seabottom mulch. It’s pounding on the peak, and we feel it all the way down here.”

Tegger stared at her in the dark.

“Pipes pump it up the back of the rim wall. It falls fifty daywalks from the edge of the rim,” Warvia said. “It falls on all the spill mountains. It’s what makes the spill mountains. Without the pumps, all the soil beneath the Arch would end up in the seas. Whisper told me all about it.”

“You got more out of Whisper than I ever did.”

“I wonder where she is now.”

“She?”

Fingers caressed his jaw. “I’m guessing. I asked, but she wouldn’t say. Do you know what that seabottom muck is called?”

“What?”

“Flup.”

Tegger belly-laughed. “What? You mean all this time-Flup, everyone I know thinks he knows what flup means. Seabottom?”

“This mountain is made of it. Pressure turns it into rock—”

White light flooded them. A voice said, “Hello.”

They leapt to their feet, wrapping fur around them. The High Point People had left them a fur like Saron’s, relic of a green-spotted sloth with a damaged head. On Warvia it looked quite lovely.

Warvia had other concerns. She whispered, “That was no High Point accent—”

“Hello? You hear the voice of Louis Wu. May we talk?”

Tegger blinked against the painful light. Details weren’t there, but he could pick out a man’s shape and something stranger.

“You have invaded our privacy,” he said.

“You were not sleeping. Ours is the spy device you carried for so long. Will you speak or shall we come another time?”

Something rapped on the wood beside the skin door. A woman’s voice called, “Teegr? Wairbeea?”

“Flup! Come in,” Tegger ordered.

Through the skins came Jennawil and Barraye and a smell of blood. “We hear voices,” the young woman said, “else we would have left this in the anteroom. It’s a gwill. Skreepu killed it for you.”

The gwill was a big lizard. Its tail still twitched.

“Your timing is good,” Tegger said. He hefted the gwill. Its skin felt armored. It would have to be skinned. To the glare in the web and the monsters within, he said, “You speak to Jennawil and Barraye of the High Point People. They know what we only guess. Jennawil, Barraye, we meet Louis Wu at last.”

Dozing with his chin on the portable ‘doc, Louis heard himself speaking. “You hear the voice of Louis Wu. You see my associates, Bram and the Web Dweller. We have kept silence because we have enemies.”

“We are Warvia and Tegger,” a high-pitched alien voice said. Louis’s eyes were open now, and he recognized the red-skinned vampire slayers. “Why do you break silence now?”

“We must ask questions.” That was the voice of Louis Wu, all right, but it was coming from the Hindmost.

A High Point man said, “We are to show you the hidden mirror and the passage through the rim and anything else you desire.”

“Thank you. Are you prepared to go through the passage?”

Jennawil jumped in shock. “No! There are vishnishtee—” Louis’s translator hesitated an instant. “-protectors moving constantly through the passage.”

Louis decided not to speak. He was feeling mellow and foolish, and pain lurked if he wanted to feel it. He wouldn’t make sense, and what would they make of two “voices of Louis Wu”?

The Hindmost said, “Tell us what you know about protectors.”

“Of two kinds they are. Protectors of our own kind would keep us safe, but they obey flatland protectors—”

“May we speak to a High Point protector?”

“I think not Keeping secrets from flatland protectors is near impossible, and protectors are conspicuous. I can ask.”

The puppeteer asked, “Will Whisper speak to us?”

Huh?

The Red Herders looked at each other. The woman said firmly, “Whisper will not.”

“What can you tell us of Whisper?”

“Nothing.”

“What ties beyond the passage?”

Barraye said, “Poison, we think.”

Jennawil explained: “Protectors wear suits that cover every part of them when they go through the passage. They carry a great bulk of tools back and forth. Rumors say they are building something out there, something monstrous.”

The red woman said, “Louis Wu, it was the massed might of the Night People that moved the eye here. Come night, you may speak to them.”

“How long until night?”

Jennawil said, “Two tenths.”

The voice of Louis Wu said, “We wait,” and sang like a bass string quartet.

Bram asked, “Did you hear, Louis?”

“Some of it. Good act, Hindmost, but you need better makeup.”

“Louis Wu is vashnesht. Wizard. He remains out of sight,” the Hindmost said, “while his weird servitors speak for him.”

“Stet. Who’s Whisper?”

“Anne is Whisper,” Bram said. “I’ve seen your tapes of Whisper guiding the red man. She used the cruiser’s mission for concealment.”

“’Whisper’ fits her,” Louis said.

The Hindmost turned from the window. “Louis, what do you think? Where is Whisper? Will she interfere?”

Louis was watching the people in the window. There wasn’t quite enough anesthetic in him to knock him out. “Bram, you’re the only one who might guess what she wants.”

“Yes.”

“I’m too groggy to think. I think I want my voice back.”

“As you will,” said the Hindmost.

Warvia stripped the gwill with a knife. Tegger said, “Red Herders have to eat meat freshly killed. Watching may distress you.”

Warvia tore the gwill apart and gave part to Tegger. They ate. The High Point couple seemed fascinated and appalled. Tegger wondered why they were still here, now that the window was only a bronze web again.

Bones only. Tegger looked the question; Barraye pointed to a receptacle.

Jennawil said, “Tegger, Wairbeea, we noted that you did not speak of reshtra until you saw what was under our furs.”

Ah.

“Our people mate once, for life,” Warvia said, and looked at her mate. Something passed between them, and she added, “A thing happened to us, to change us. But we don’t need rishathra. What changed was only that we have a choice.”

Tegger had thought it through. “Barraye, Jennawil, there are no tales of Red Herders who rish. What if your talking mirrors spread that tale all across the flatlands? Where could we live? Who would mate to our children?”

The High Pointers looked at each other.

“You saw the Night People, Jennawil,” Warvia said. “What if it is told that you rished with red-skinned visitors from below? What will the Night People expect?”

Barraye nodded. “They would think to resh with us. How curious are we, my mate?”

She was whacking his massive shoulder, lightly and open-handed, and laughing. Tegger suspected that was a no. “Not their shape alone. Their smell!”

Barraye patted her rump reassuringly. “Well, then, must keep yet another secret.”

Fun stuff. Louis watched in passive prurience. A show like this would be a success, he thought, on pay channels on every world in known space. And of course it was being recorded… for that matter, how many senses did the webeyes record? Not just sight and sound. Smell? Radar for a kinesthetic sense?

Somewhere in there he fell asleep.

Hours later, it seemed, he woke and stared in astonishment at himself looming above him.

No: at his pressure suit, angular like fractured bones where a human would be smooth. Bram tipped the helmet back and asked, “Are you well?”

“I’m pretty sore.” The medkit was dripping stuff into him, but he could feel where the pain was waiting.

“Two ribs were out of place. I set them. No bones are broken. You’ve abused muscles, torn ligaments and mesenteries, slipped a spinal disk that I reset. You would heal with no more than your own defenses and the portable medkit.”

“Why are you wearing my suit?”

“Reasons of strategy.”

“Too complex for my tiny mind? All right, Bram. You’ll notice that we have more visitors. If you’ll disconnect me, the voice of Louis Wu can show a face.”

The Hindmost and Bram waited to either side of Louis and a little behind. On the other side of the webeye window, the Reds huddled under a fur, letting the Ghouls take center stage.

The Ghouls were shivering. The lanky woman said, “It’s cold out there! Well, I am Grieving Tube, this is Harpster. Is your box making sense of my voice?”

“Yes, it’s fine. How did you know about my translator?”

“Your companion Tunesmith seems to have departed, but his son Kazarp spoke of your visit to Weaver Town.”

“My regards to Kazarp. Grieving Tube, why did you move two manweight of poured stone over such a distance if you could have spoken to me through Tunesmith?”

The Ghouls laughed, showing way too much teeth. “Spoken, yes, but what would we say? The rim wall is in the wrong hands? We don’t know that. You, are you a vashnesht?” Protector, the translator said.

Bram said, “Yes.”

Tegger started to get up; Warvia held him back. The Ghouls, too, had flinched, but Harpster made himself speak to the protector. “We know enough to know our helplessness. These are vampire protectors. They take the High Point Folk as meat from a herd. Some return as protectors. Many simply disappear.”

Bram said, “They are repairing the Arch.”

“Do they do more good than harm?”

“Yes. There are too many, and they’ll fight when the repairs are done. We hope we can improve the balance.”

“How do you expect to help?”

“We must know more. Tell us what you can.”

Harpster shrugged hugely. “You know what we know. High Point will show us more, come dawn.”

The Hindmost fluted. The window shrank to background size.

“We wait,” he said. “Louis, we recorded earlier conversation. They know much of protectors and something of Teela Brown. Or shall we serenade you?”

Bram was reaching for the instrument package he’d brought from Hidden Patriarch.

“A little dinner music would go nicely,” Louis said politely. “And I’m starved.”

Louis was trying to do some stretching. Lifting Acolyte had pulled some serious muscles and tendons. Bram’s attentions had helped, but he had to move carefully.

Many hours had passed. Now the window at High Point was rotating bumpily across night-darkened mountainscape. A mixed bag of hominids were rolling the stolen webeye like a wheel over the worn paths of the village. When they left the village and began moving uphill over rock, the motion began to jar his stomach.

Louis turned his back on the display, trusting the others to alert him when the webeye got somewhere interesting. What was taking the Kzin so long? Anyplace in known space, he could at least have used a ‘doc! The medkit wouldn’t do anything for him except inject chemicals, and he’d need it again in a few minutes.

Four High Point People carried the web and its backing. They climbed uphill in the charcoal night. Saron moved ahead of the Red Herders and Night People to point out footholds for them.

The Ghouls had tried to help carry, but they were doing well just to catch their breath.

“Sunlight soon,” Warvia said to the Ghoul woman. “What will you do then?”

“I was told we would come to the passage. Shelter.”

There were no roads here. What paths there were, were only scuff marks on hard dirt and rock. The High Village People moved up and up across a tilted land, on and on, miles above the infinite flatland.

To spin was the oncoming terminator line, and daylight.

Close up against the spill mountains the land below was a relief map, like the map the Ghouls had made for them outside the Grass Giants’ hall. A view like this may have given them that notion. Farther away, all detail was lost. A thread of silver linked by puddles might have been the Homeflow, or any other body of water, or something else entirely.

Warvia may have been thinking similar thoughts. “The lands the Red Herders move through, are they even big enough to see? How will we ever find Red Herders again?”

Harpster said, “That’s not the problem at all—”

Grieving Tube said, “Our people know the routes of the Red Herders. They’ll map-Forgive me.” She had to stop for breath. “They’ll map a path for us-by mirror-speech. You’ll find a new home-as quickly as you came here.”

“Oh. Good.” Then Warvia laughed. “Your solution was extreme! We didn’t need to travel quite so far.”

Tegger wouldn’t show weakness with Warvia watching. With dying strength he followed Saron. The old woman moved more slowly now. He could hear the other High Point People gasping as they carried the web’s weight along the hill.

Day swept toward them from spinward. As the first edge of sun peeped around the shadow of night, Harpster pulled from his pack two rolled-up hats with gigantic brims. Now only the Night People walked in shadow.

“We should be on the fringes of Red Herder turf,” Warvia said, “as far as possible from stories that must have started already.”

Harpster said, “No. Warvia, Red Herders aren’t all the same species.”

“Why, of course we are!”

Tegger said, “We woo our mates from other tribes at the feasts, when the herds cross. We’ve done it since before anyone can remember.”

Harpster said, “Good idea—”

“But you don’t always,” said Grieving Tube. “You and Warvia, you have the same accent—”

“Yes, we both were born into Ginjerofer’s tribe, but others mate across the lines.”

“Some tribes have given it up. Some just don’t push it, like Ginjerofer’s people. Tegger, the farther you go from Ginjerofer’s tribe, the less likely your children will find mates who can give them children. It wouldn’t matter so much if you didn’t mate for life.”

“Flup,” Tegger whispered.

Something flashed at them as they rounded a barrier of crumbling rock.

Tegger had tried to imagine what a mirror might look like. Now he couldn’t see it. What he saw was himself, Warvia, the Ghouls and High Point People, the sky and the rim wall. A mirror was a flat window that showed what was behind the viewer. It stood as high as a Red Herder man, and three men wide.

They set the web and its backing carefully in place, flat onto the mirror. Saron and the men went to the ends of the mirror, and the Night People went with them.

Harpster began to talk, spitting his consonants, as if he were addressing a crowd.

The men began to tilt the mirror up and down. It was mounted on hinges. Jennawil stood behind Tegger and pointed along the rim.

Toward the next spill mountain.

A highlight played on the mountain’s flank, falling and rising as the men tilted the mirror.

Tegger asked, “How does it work?”

Jennawil laughed. “Ah, the Night People haven’t told you everything! Sun mirrors flash a code known to us and Night People. They carry news between mountains, but also news of flatlands to mountains and back to flatlands.”

That explained much. The Ghouls had always known too much about the weather, the Shadow Nest, the bronze spinnerweb itself.

The four took up the eye of Louis Wu again. “Around this jut of rock,” Saron said, “and up.”

“We’ve been discussing your problem, Grieving Tube and I. We think we have an answer,” Harpster said.

Tegger had been thinking, too. “It’s like being crushed between two bulls. If we go too far, we doom our children. If we settle too close to Ginjerofer’s route, we’ll hear tales about ourselves.”

“We’re too conspicuous,” Warvia said, “too easy to recognize. When visitors tell of the vampire slayers who learned rishathra, that will be us.”

Harpster was grinning with all his spade teeth. “Suppose there was an old story,” Harpster said. “Once upon a time all hominids were monogamous. No man looked at a woman who was not his mate, and she would not look aside from him. War happened when hominids met.

“Then came two heroes who saw that hominids could live otherwise. They invented rishathra and ended a war. They spread it like a ministry—”

Warvia cried, “Harpster, was there really such a tale?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh.”

“The Night People are selective about whom we speak to, but you must not think we’re silent. You’ve seen the sun mirrors. Those are our voice. You know that every priest must know how to dispose of his dead. Priests must talk to us.”

The route had become steeper, and they were all huffing now. “We can spread the tale from several directions,” Grieving Tube said. “Only the old women remember the legend, or the old men. The tale tells of heroes of their own species who invented rishathra and ended war, and it tells that their own species has practiced rishathra ever since. Details are different among different species. When a variation appears in which the heroes were Red Herders who ended a war to gain allies against vampires—”

“It’s just a story.” Tegger laughed. He was starting to believe it would work. “Only a story. Warvia?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. It’s worth a try. We can lie, love, as long as we don’t have to lie to each other.”

A rock as big as the tallest city building had split vertically, and the High Point People were leading them through the split. Ribbons of color ran through the rock. “Ice did this,” Deb said. “Water soaks into rock. Freezes. Melts and freezes again.”

The wind shrilled through, icy, tearing at any bit of exposed skin. Tearing at eyes. Tegger walked blind, feeling his way, following Warvia, though her eyes were closed, too.

A big hand on his chest stopped him. He opened his eyes into slits.

Finally, here it was, a place to hide from the wind: a rock tunnel into the mountain. But they’d stopped within the cleft, with the tunnel’s mouth barely in view. From the cleft a slope of shattered rock ran up to a rough rock entrance.

Barraye spoke for the first time. “Teegr, that is not shelter.”

He asked, “Why not? Monsters inside?”

“Yes. Vishnishtee.”

They set the web on its rim and propped it to face the opening. Barraye had gone silent again. Saron said, “Louis Wu, can you see?”

The bronze web spoke. “Yeah, barely. How deep is that thing?”

“We think that this is passage through the high mountain. None of us have gone that far.”

“You’ve been inside?”

Deb spoke. “Most of High Point and near a hundred of airborne visitors hid in the passage when the Death Light shone. We could only hunt at night. After the Death Light faded, we were cast out and forbidden to return.”

A breathy voice said, “Describe the vishnishtee.”

Tegger’s eyes met Warvia’s. That voice from the web must be the vashnesht, Bram, but it sounded very like Whisper.

“The vishnishtee cared for us,” Deb said, “but none of us ever saw one.”

“What, never?”

“But sometimes one of us would disappear. There was a limit to how far we could go down the passage. We knew there was death in the passage, but there was death outside, too.”

“Couldn’t you make your own shelters? Rock would stop radiation… stop the Death Light.”

“We knew that. Hide in caves, the vishnishtee said. Make houses of rock? The mountain would shake rock down on our heads!”

The voice of Louis Wu said, “My companions are showing me a picture taken from tens of daywalks above you. It’s amazing how much detail you can see when you’re far enough away, Deb. The mountain you live on is kind of a flat cone, but around that tunnel, it’s like a sand castle piled against a wall with a pipe poking out of it.”

They waited for Louis Wu to make better sense.

“Yeah. What I mean is, the passage is older than the mountain and a lot stronger. Made of scrith, I bet. The mountain gradually settles under its own weight, but the passage stays right where it is, and vishnishtee have to keep digging the entrance again. Can you take me through?”

“No!” said Barraye and Saron and Jennawil.

Deb said, “We were cast out! If we’re seen, we will die!”

Saron said, “We have stayed on broken rock. We left no footprints and no scent. If a vishnishtee learns that we have come bearing this, we will die.”

It was Harpster who protested. “The eye of Louis Wu has come far to see so little.”

“That is as it is. Harreed, stay behind. If you find sign of us, conceal it. Harpster, are you strong enough to take Harreed’s place?”

And a voice said, “Leave the web.”

Nine hominids froze. Tegger could see no tenth. And that was not the voice of Whisper, nor the protector Bram, either, but it had the same breathy speech impediment.

The High Point People were quietly moving back through the cleft in the rock and downslope. Tegger and Warvia followed, leading the Ghouls, who by now were nearly blind in the black shadows of their hats. They left the bronze spinnerweb propped in the cleft and didn’t look back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE — COLLIER

They were four in Hot Needle of Inquiry’s crew cabin: Bram and the Hindmost and Louis Wu, and Acolyte, in a great black coffin where their exercise space used to be. They all used the same shower and the same kitchen wall.

Sleeping arrangements weren’t a problem. The Hindmost wanted the sleeping plates, but that was all right. They’d moved the cargo plates beside the water bed. Louis used that.

He was sitting cross-legged on the bouncing surface, eating something crunchy and nutrition-free. Boredom had him eating too much. He might be getting too much painkiller, too.

Bram didn’t want him exercising alone in the lander bay. Louis had healed enough to want that. He had offered to take Bram along, teach him yoga or even some fighting techniques. Bram refused. He intended to be right here when…

What the futz was Bram expecting? Louis wondered. For most of two days he’d watched the wreckage of the refueling probe. It lay smashed on the maglev track in a window that overlaid six others-five, now-and Bram stood before it, watching.

Louis was getting cabin fever.

To ship’s port and starboard the glow of dying coals had faded to the black of cold basalt. In space that would have been stars, an infinite universe spread to either side.

Futz, he had stars. One webeye lay on the maglev track, looking down at the universe through the filigree surface. Another starscape, from the webeye Louis had sprayed onto the vacuum, had fuzzed out only hours ago.

In another window the stolen webeye moved into a smooth-bore tunnel, stopped in what was clearly an airlock for several hours, then moved on through several doors, past piles of strange equipment vaguely glimpsed, and stopped again. Louis had never seen what was carrying it, nor heard that voice again.

The flight deck was windows overlaid on windows, a perspective that could cross the eyes and twist them in their sockets. One was a graph like a constantly wiggling mountain range, purpose unknown. Three were replays: High Point Mountain swept past the refueling probe; the probe maneuvered until it was smashed by violet light; a protector died, his suit slashed open to vacuum.

Nothing was happening where the ruined probe lay on the maglev track. The window held Bram like a dark Dali silhouette, say Shades of Night Descending.

Louis closed his eyes and sagged back on the water bed.

Popped them open again. He’d seen blue-white light flash from one of the windows.

The light was out now, but the wrecked probe was glowing cherry-red. Something tiny was coming down the maglev track from far away, running straight into the window.

It came at astronomical speed, a foot above the track: something like a floating sledge. It decelerated savagely. Something manlike dropped off the back and rolled out of view as the vehicle eased to a stop inches from the window.

The Hindmost moved up beside Bram.

The probe cooled to murky red, darker, black.

That wasn’t a sled. It was a shallow box. The bottom was black like wrought iron. The sides were so transparent as to be barely visible, but Louis could pick them out by the knobs embedded for tiedowns. Lines held tools against the sides of the box: a wand with a handle, maybe a line saw; a widemouthed thing, gun or rocket launcher or energy weapon; a pry bar; stacked boxes; skeletal metal stuff.

A window behind it showed starscape and, rising into view, a nearly empty flat surface. Louis glared and looked away. The stolen webeye had left the tunnel and entered some kind of open elevator, at the worst possible time.

Louis heard, “I do not understand war, but I feel Louis might.”

“Even drugged?”

“Ask.”

“Louis, are you awake?”

“Of course I’m awake, Bram!”

“This is a duel among protectors—”

“Medieval Japanese,” Louis said thickly. Despite what he’d said, the drugs had him wanting to doze. “Hide and stab. Win any way you can. They didn’t duel like Europeans.”

“Yes, you understand. Do you see why this second intruder is still alive?”

“No… wait.” The newcomer moved in a crouched and jerky strut, examining the slagged probe. It was the knobby shape of a Ringworld pressure suit, and wide through the torso, like the one Whisper was wearing; but it fit.

The newcomer found marks on the probe where a stepping disk had been attached. Its head snapped up, and in a flash it was gone.

But Louis had glimpsed its face. “Spill mountain protector. Whisper must see that, too. It’s a slave, stet, Bram? There must be a master, the protector in charge of the maglev track. The master sent him.”

A window lurched, then rolled over and over, showing the black underside of the Ringworld, then stars streaming past, Ringworld, stars… The protector’s servant had cleared the maglev rail by rolling the ruined probe into space.

Now the main window was backing up. The spill mountain protector jumped free.

Louis said, “The first one, the one that died, he left a maglev sled on the track. Acolyte sprayed his webeye on the sled. That’s what we’re watching. Somebody has to get the probe and the sled off the track. So here’s a spill mountain protector to dump the probe, and he’s sent the first sled back where it came from, down to the spaceport ledge. Problem solved. Now he’s boarding his own sled… there it goes back up the track to wherever he came from.”

Bram said, “You do understand.”

“Whisper’s started something she can’t stop.”

“She’s guessed that I sent the probe,” Bram said. “She doesn’t want my enemies to study it.”

“She can’t know how many there are.”

“She might extrapolate. Begin with Teela Brown—”

“Yeah. It all begins with Teela.” The pain had gone far away. Louis felt himself floating. Better disconnect himself from the medkit, clear his head.

The webeye window’s motion stopped. Then it, too, began gliding up the track.

Whisper was using it to follow the other sled.

“Teela made protectors to help her mount motors,” Bram said. “A spill mountain protector might be trusted, because Teela could hold his species at ransom. A Ghoul protector might consider that his species already owns all beneath the Arch, and act only to preserve it. A vampire—”

“Starts fresh. A protector born with a blank mind, and Teela right there to teach. You said that.”

“Yes. Shall we call him Dracula?”

“Mary Shelley.”

“Why am I lecturing a drug-stupefied breeder?”

“I think Teela would pick a woman to be a protector. Three women.”

Bram shrugged widely. “Stet. I don’t know the name, but stet. Mary-Shelley made blood-children, protectors of her own vampire species, and hid them from Teela. When Teela returned to the Map of Mars, two protectors followed. Only the Ghoul remained on the rim.

“Mary-Shelley must have known that her brood would kill and replace the Ghoul. She would rule the rim through them. The spill mountain protector may have guessed that Teela planned to bathe the rim in solar flame. He fought to protect his kind. But Teela killed both.

“Now we must ask, how many are Mary-Shelley’s brood?”

The Hindmost said, “Manufacture, acquisition, transport, mounting, supply.”

“Three, I think,” Bram said. “Manufacture would use repair facilities already in place at a spaceport. If a ship comes, manufacture becomes acquisition. As for supply, no protector would allow another to control what he needs. Stet? Three. Lovecraft to build, Collier for transport, King above them all to mount the motors.”

Louis smiled. Bram had remembered who Mary Shelley was!

The Hindmost said, “My kind would be a hundred strong, for the company alone.”

“And my kind,” Bram said, “would each design his own domain to run without his help. There were Spill Mountain People at hand. Let them build and move and mount, while Lovecraft and Collier and King lurk to pounce.”

Louis asked, “You think they were expecting Whisper?”

“Whisper, or each other, or me, or invaders from the stars. Do you think us too stupid to extrapolate planets from what we can see of the universe? Anne perceived protectors in place on the rim, each ready to kill her. Wherever she’s been or whatever she’s done since, she’s reached the rim unnoticed by me or by them. She’s killed Lovecraft already.”

“She makes a pretty good target for Collier, though. Hindmost? Can you read the back of a webeye camera?”

“Louis? I don’t unde-glass, he sprayed it on glass.” A pipe organ cried in pain. “Done, but wait eleven minutes.”

Eleven minutes later the window suddenly faced back along the maglev track, into the bed of the sled.

Louis made out some dim shapes suggestive of tools. Nothing big enough to hide a protector. Where was Whisper?

The picture reversed again-and the first sled was slowing.

The second sled began to slow, too.

Louis heard woodwinds scream, and saw the Hindmost’s heads jump bolt upright. That wasn’t the Hindmost’s song. It was Bram and his musical sculpture, and he was already setting it aside. He went to the stepping disk and flicked out.

Louis said, “Did you see that?”

“He’s gone,” said the Hindmost.

“Where? Why?”

“You tell me. Louis Wu understands duels, stet? Would you take food?” The Hindmost stood beside him, holding a flask.

Louis took it and sipped. Broth. “That’s good.”

Sanity check: the granite block was back in place and the Hindmost was in the crew cabin, still trapped, like Louis himself.

Louis said, “He’s gone where he’ll need a pressure suit. For now he’s nowhere. Hindmost, if you turned off the stepping desk system, where would Bram be?”

“Safeties prevent me.”

“What if we just blast the system with a flashlight-laser? Tanj, no, he’s got the flash and the variable-knife—”

“The system is buried in the hull, Louis.”

“Then shift his flick to Mons Olympus! Where does he think he’s going, anyway? He may be there already. Summon up that map.”

The Hindmost made music.

Nothing happened.

“I’m locked out,” the Hindmost said. “Bram has learned my programming language. He’s wrested control of the stepping disks from me.” His legs folded under him. His heads tucked under his forelegs.

Louis tried lifting the edge of the stepping disk. It wouldn’t move. Bram had taken full control. Those tanj concerts weren’t entertainment. They were Bram practicing with his handmade instruments until he could duplicate the Hindmost’s musical speech.

Something was happening: the webeye window jittered and shook. Louis shouted, “Hindmost! Turn the picture around! It’s looking the wrong way!”

The puppeteer didn’t move.

The window skewed sideways, hit the side of the track, and bounced away spinning. Whatever had attacked the sled was having its effect.

The puppeteer was unfolding himself.

The maglev sled hit the other wall hard. The picture juttered and slid. When it came to a stop, it was looking at nothing but silver filigree.

The puppeteer whistled and the picture reversed. Now starlight showed them walls of shattered crystal. Bullets had chewed the sled into lace, and the tools in the bed had been showered with glass slivers.

Most of these things had been unrecognizable. Now they were junk, with one exception.

Seeing Acolyte and him flick in and out, Louis thought, would have told Whisper about stepping disks. She must have ripped the stepping disk off the probe and tossed it into the sled, for there it was, unharmed.

Three pressure suits leaped into the sled in the same instant. Two fired sprays of projectiles at anything big, then hurled anything hurlable in a rapid search for a protector hiding in wreckage. But Whisper was nowhere.

Two protectors picked up the stepping disk and held it on edge so that the third could inspect its underside. They turned it to show the upper surface. The vampire must have thought it more dangerous than useful, because he adjusted his weapon and fired a bright, narrow beam at it.

The beam lashed straight up out of the cabin’s main stepping disk and began to char the ceiling.

Though Louis couldn’t remember jumping for cover, he and the Hindmost were now curled intimately behind the recycler wall. The Hindmost didn’t look like he intended to uncurl.

Louis poked his head around.

The vampire protector had picked up the stepping disk and was trying to hurl it over the edge of the track.

The disk was suddenly too heavy, as an intruder’s weight slammed it down.

The intruder-Bram! — lashed out as the other leapt away. The other vampire-Collier? — fell and separated, cut in half by six feet of wire in a stasis field. Both ends of him spewed fog. But Collier’s torso still had arms, and one came around with the bulky light-weapon.

Bram’s variable-knife licked out again. The light-weapon fell.

No telling where Whisper had come from, but she was there. Two spill mountain protectors faced two vampire protectors.

The puppeteer was still in something like a catatonic state. Louis tried to follow what was happening in the webeye window. It wasn’t simple.

The spill mountain protectors hadn’t attacked.

Whisper was wearing one of their suits; she’d be able to talk to them. Louis could hear Bram’s breath huffing with recent exertion, but he wasn’t talking. He wouldn’t have the right kind of suit radio.

He was blinking his helmet lamp at Whisper.

Tanj, that must be the Ghouls’ heliograph language! Louis realized. And now the others were using helmet lamps, too.

It went on and on, and presently an agreement was reached.

The spill mountain protectors picked up the ruined sled with some difficulty. Bram gave his weapon to Whisper and helped them throw the sled over the rim and into space.

They dropped the stepping disk into the undamaged maglev sled. The two vampire protectors got in, then the spill mountain protectors. The sled began to move back down the track. As the sled began to pull away, Bram puffed a webeye onto the track, then another onto the sled.

Then Bram sang the song of an orchestra being gunned down by terrorists.

He stepped on the disk and flicked out, gone, here. As the light through the webeye window showed his going, Bram walked off the stepping disk, lifting his helmet. Something like a fat burl flute was in his hard beak of a mouth.

When a puppeteer is upset, he loses control, not of speech, but of emotional signals. The Hindmost’s song was as pure as wind chimes. “You’ve learned my programming language.”

Bram put the flute away. “Our contract does not preclude such a thing.”

“I am disturbed.”

“Did you follow what you saw? No? Of Mary-Shelley’s blood-children, we’ve killed Lovecraft and Collier. Collier’s servants tell us that Lovecraft’s servants are ready to load cargo. We expect that they will aid us. Now only King remains. When King is dead, Whisper will control the rim and I the Repair Center, and then we may accomplish something.”

The kitchen delivered a flask, and Bram drank deeply. Louis noticed he was carrying the big light-weapon. That thing would probably kill everyone in the cabin if it was fired.

Bram looked at him. “Louis Wu, what would you do now?”

“Well, she’s got to kill King. Too late for anything else. Me? My suit would keep me alive for two falans, so I don’t have to board a sled and rev it up to seven hundred seventy miles per second and then let King shoot at me. I might come back to this side of the rim, then climb up the wall from here.”

“You would lose all surprise.”

“He still—”

Bram waved it away. “Anne’s suit won’t last that long.”

“Mph.” Cargo, Bram had said. “Well, if I had something King wanted, I could put it on the sled with me. Of course he’d have to know I had it. What does King want?”

“Never mind, Louis. I thought it worth seeking a different viewpoint.” Bram whistled at the stepping disk system, then flicked out.

“Now where’s he gone? Hindmost, are you still locked out?”

“I can’t use stepping disks. I can find him.”

“Do it.”

Two windows showed moire patterns: webeyes destroyed in the battle. The Hindmost sang them out, then popped one up in their place. It began flicking past other views. Weaver Town. Hidden Patriarch: the foremast crow’s nest.

The Hindmost sang flutes and percussion. He said, “I’ve begun a search program. If invaders come using familiar craft, we’ll know it in minutes.”

“Good.” Louis pointed at the window half obscured by that one. “I hope you were recording that.”

“Yes.”

The stolen webeye had reached the spaceport ledge. Tiny starlit pressure suits walked through vacuum toward a structure too huge to show its shape. It took them forever to round the curve of it.

Bigger yet: a pair of golden toroids mounted on tall gantries. It took Louis a moment to see the rest of it.

Cables were growing out of the toroids, spreading like a growing plant, narrowing at the ends to invisibly fine wire.

“Stet. They’re actually making new motors.”

The Hindmost said, “I’ve wondered if the wire frames are an innovation. My records show no more than the toroids.”

“Interesting notion, but maybe the City Builders took just the toroids. That wire frame could be awkward if you wanted to land a ship.”

The shifting window showed Hidden Patriarch’s aft crow’s nest; then the kitchen and two adult City Builders and three children. Where had the older children been hiding, Louis wondered, that he hadn’t met them? But they were all moving out the door. And now they came chattering back with Bram between them.

Bram had stripped off his suit. He stretched out on a bench. Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok began a massage.

Bones and swollen joints and no fat anywhere. “He looks like a tanj skeleton now,” Louis said.

Bram seemed asleep.

“If Bram thinks there’s time for that, he’s likely right. Hindmost, let’s get Acolyte out of that box and me in.”

The puppeteer whistled up a window. “Louis, the nanotech devices are still repairing damage to his spinal cord. He should be free in a few hours.”

“Tanj!”

“Leave him?”

“Yes!” Louis curled up on the water bed. “I’m going to sleep.”

CHAPTER THIRTY — KING

Louis uncurled slowly. Pain is a great teacher. Still, he moved more easily than he had these last four days.

The medkit had been giving him diet supplements, but he’d turned off the pain drip. Louis disengaged himself and went to the fore wall.

Here: in Hidden Patriarch’s dining hall, Bram was speaking to the City Builders. The webeye windows in the walls were active, and one was the same as this second window-

Here: the vast width of the spaceport ledge. The nearly finished rim wall motor was gone, completed and moved somewhere. Here passed a huge floating sledge with skeletal towers and alien waldos at the corners. A tower with a spiral decor… more than decor: it was bending over like a silver tentacle, and its tip was an infinite bifurcation. It englobed the picked-over hull of a City Builder starship and lifted.

Beyond the edge of the ledge was a line of vertical rings: the deceleration track for incoming ships.

Here: a blur of maglev track with stars showing faintly through. Whisper must have set her sled moving, Louis decided. Built up considerable speed, too, while he slept. It had to be Whisper; who else would have sprayed a webeye?

Here: a sluggishly drifting starscape seen through a filigree maglev track, and a tiny green blinking cursor. “I found a spacecraft,” the Hindmost said.

“Show me.”

The puppeteer sang and the view zoomed hugely, to a blurred view of something more crowbar than ship. Little winged spacecraft ran its length like aphids on a twig. At the near end, a big drive cone and/or plasma cannon drifted past.

“Another ARM ship,” Louis said. “Good catch.”

Bram had left the dining hall.

The Hindmost noticed motion along the maglev track. He chimed. The window reversed to show the other side of Whisper’s webeye.

That wasn’t the sled Whisper had been using. It was a vast dark plane. Cable rose in loops of varying thickness and varying curvatures, branching like arteries, reaching around and up and out of sight. A slender pillar rose out of the center.

Whisper’s handhold was on the narrowest of these loops. She was floating in close foreground, with one hand on a cable as thick as her fist.

It seemed a fantasy, like some ancient book cover. The only item Louis could recognize was welded just behind Whisper: the stepping disk off the refueling probe.

Louis realized that his mind wasn’t tracking. What he needed was breakfast.

Muscles in his back, groin, right hamstring, and some transverse muscles under his ribs protested when he moved to the kitchen wall. Lifting a Kzin, even a Kzin not quite grown… “Remember, I’m a trained professional,” he muttered. “Don’t try this stunt in Earth gravity.” He dialed up a pastiche omelet, papaya, grapefruit, bread.

“Louis?”

“Nothing. Is Acolyte ready to come out?”

The Hindmost looked. “Yes—”

“Wait.” Louis tapped an order. “Let’s pacify him with haunch of mammal.”

Acolyte sat up fast and found himself looking at a rack of beef ribs. He took it and found the Hindmost behind it. He said, “Your munificence as host must be legendary,” and began to tear ribs apart.

The Hindmost said, “Your father came to us as an ambassador. He’s taught you well.”

Acolyte waggled his ears and kept eating.

The puppeteer dialed up a big bowl of grassy stuff, but it only stopped one mouth at a time. For Acolyte’s benefit, he described the deaths on the maglev track, singing up visual displays, with Louis filling in a word here and there. The puppeteer didn’t grasp strategy. One thing Acolyte wasn’t hearing was that Bram had begun treating his alien serfs as prisoners.

Acolyte dropped a big white imitation bone into the recycler. “Louis, are you healthy?”

“I’m not ready to race you again, not just yet.”

“You did well. What it cost you… you did well. I think my main nerve trunk was broken. Shall I put you in the ‘doc?”

“No no no, it’s all coming to a head! Look—” Louis waved through the webeye window, at Whisper floating motionless above an infinite field of superconductor. His mind had had time to digest a little of that weird picture, and he spoke for the puppeteer as well as the adolescent Kzin. “Whisper’s in free fall. That means we’re looking at a vehicle moving at seven hundred seventy miles per second, antispinward. It’s a vehicle even if it has to stretch the full width of the maglev track. Two hundred feet wide and maybe longer than that.

“Those loops-Acolyte, you were in the ‘doc when Bram was hinting around. You’re looking at the barest fringes of a rim wall ramjet. Lovecraft’s team had one all ready to go. Whisper’s holding it hostage.”

Whisper was looking back, watching the webeye. Bram must have told her what it was.

Bram flicked in. He was wearing Louis’s pressure suit with the helmet back. He looked at his allies; glanced into the windows; then turned to the kitchen. “Louis, Acolyte, Hindmost. What news?”

“As you see,” the Hindmost said. “An ARM carrier vessel orbits a hundred million miles out from the Ringworld’s underside. How will you deal with it?”

“Not yet.” Bram turned back to the windows. Now Whisper was clinging like a frightened monkey to the loop of superconductor.

“She’s begun deceleration. Acolyte, do you understand? We hope that King will consider a rim ramjet and the large sled too valuable to destroy.”

“Louis explained.”

Bram said, “Whisper expects me. What do you need of me before I go?”

The puppeteer bleated, “Give me access to the stepping disks!”

“Not quite yet, Hindmost.”

Louis asked, “What kind of opposition…”

“King has a long supply line. He’ll have a few spill mountain protectors. He will rotate them frequently unless he prefers to watch them die. They must scent their own kind, to know whom they protect, or else protect all beneath the Arch. King reserves that for himself.”

“Not many, then.”

“None, it may be. King’s own hands may serve him. The rim wall ramjet motors cannot be moved by muscle. In any case, I don’t fear the High Point protectors. If they see a clear victory, they will finish the loser. The victor holds their people ransom.”

Louis said, “Give us a hint. If you and Whisper are killed, what do we do?”

“Your contract. Protect all beneath the Arch.” Bram lowered his faceplate and fixed it in place. He was gone, a virtual particle in motion, and the port and starboard walls were glowing bright orange with the heat of the momentum exchange.

Tiny bottles popped into the kitchen well. The Hindmost inserted them one by one into the little medkit on the cargo plate stack. “Antibiotics,” he said.

“Thanks, Hindmost. I must have been clean out.”

More bottles. “Pain blockers.”

Whisper wasn’t in sight on the barge. She’d been conspicuous enough until now. She’d shown herself to King’s telescopes, with King’s treasure displayed vastly behind her. What was she playing at now?

Was she high in that cone of superconducting cable? How well did vampires climb?

Under the maglev barge?

The view ahead hadn’t changed. The track ran on and on. The barge and its unwieldy cargo might be decelerating, but even at high gee it would take awhile. Louis wondered if Whisper was planning to ram the terminus. King might be wondering the same thing.

Nah. In ten hours at 770 miles/second, she’d covered around twenty-four million miles. But the track ran for two hundred million miles, and where in that length was her target? She couldn’t give King that much time to shoot at her.

Where, for that matter, was King? The vampire protector could be anywhere, if he’d trained High Point protectors to mount the ramjets for him. What was that?

Maglev sled, the small variety, almost lost on the vast track. Coming straight toward the window. Now veering from side to side, and slowing… matching speed with the barge… contact, and five matching pressure suits were past the webeye before Louis could blink. The Hindmost whistle-chimed, the view reversed, and… gone. They had already disappeared into the maze of coils.

Five matching pressure suits would be five spill mountain protectors, stet? They’d guard the ramjet, protect it from stray effects of a battle, serving both sides. For King, they would also serve as a distraction.

And anyone who had ever watched a magic act might guess that one of the five was King himself, his suit bulked out with additional weapons or armor.

Where were they?

Action far aft. Louis couldn’t make it out. This was going to be frustrating, he thought. He glanced at the Kzin: would Acolyte freak out? But he was watching with the patience of a cat at a mouse hole.

Traces of motion, distant flashes of light… and two maglev sleds were weaving through the coils! Sporadic flashes of light followed them. They dipped below view, then rose. One struck a coil and rebounded into an actinic blast, crashed into another coil and was out, over the edge of the track, gone. The other…

“Clever,” Louis whispered, and lowered his gaze to the bed of the barge. But there was nothing to be seen.

The Hindmost said, “Louis?”

“Whisper had the little sleds following the barge, right aft where King couldn’t see them. I only saw two, but maybe there were more, all slaved to the one she was in, and which one is that? Now she’s dipped them and rolled clear and sent them up again for King to shoot at. Even if King’s figured it out by now, it puts her in two places, and Whisper knows where he is. And I could be completely wrong.”

“The barge will stop soon. Then the dueling field expands, stet, Louis?”

“Ye gods, you’re right. If—”

Bram flicked in.

Light slashed where he had been, but Bram was among the superconductor loops and firing back with Louis’s flash. Light flared among the loops, a storm of energy beams. Bram stood up, holding his suit together with one hand.

The first beam hadn’t missed. It was hellishly intense, having gotten through the laser shielding on Louis’s suit.

Now two tiny man-shapes were firing among the loops, leaping, firing, chewing up the ramjet.

Louis said, “I just—” and stopped.

“Share it,” Acolyte spat.

“Light doesn’t hurt a superconductor. They’re all three using light-weapons. If King had known…”

Bram would be dead if he didn’t get to safety soon. He’d taken cover behind a thick loop of ramjet and was watching, just watching. Likely Bram had no better idea than he did, Louis thought, as to which man-shape was Whisper, which was King. He’d done what he could.

One combatant flared like a sun and dissolved.

The other flared brighter and was gone faster. Four shapes leaped like fleas, a pincer closing on Bram.

Louis started to laugh.

Bram ran for the stepping disk. He blazed like a sun and then he was gone, here, off the stepping disk, throwing back his helmet, pulling in air in great gasps. His pressure suit glowed dull red in spots. He stripped it away, keeping the gloves on until he was clear of the rest, hurled the suit into the shower and turned it on.

Louis was still laughing.

And Acolyte seemed to be smiling widely, but on a kzinti that was no smile. He said, “One of you will tell me what happened.”

“Whisper is dead and I am alone,” Bram said. “Is there more to know? King’s protector servants were to guard the ramjet and the barge while we fought. But we three came to fight war on a superconducting field, under superconducting coils. We all chose energy weapons. Stet, Acolyte? The Arch lives by the rim ramjets! We are protectors!”

Acolyte said, “Stet.”

“Four protector servants saw that none of us could harm the transport or the ramjet. Whisper and I thought they would kill the losers. But they saw two dying and one unwary, and they struck to free themselves from us entirely! I must have seemed easy meat,” Bram said. “Witless ones. If they saw me flick in, couldn’t they guess I’d flick out?”

Bram looked at the webeye windows glowing in the Hindmost’s cabin. Four protectors in High Point pressure suits gathered around the stepping disk. Their helmet lights blinked heliograph patterns. One looked up into the window. Then all four eased around out of view.

The window went to moire patterns.

“That won’t save them,” Bram said, and turned. “Hindmost, why was a link made between Weaver Town and the Meteor Defense room?”

The puppeteer said, “Ask Louis Wu.”

“Louis?”

One does not reproach a Pierson’s puppeteer for cowardice. Louis barely glanced at the Hindmost. “It’s the morals clause, Bram. I’ve judged you unfit to rule the Ringworld.”

Bram’s hand was a vise on Louis’s left shoulder, lifting. Louis could see the Kzin bristling, trying to decide whether to interfere. The protector said, “By what unjustifiable arrogance could a breeder-It’s Teela, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“She forced you to kill her. She forced you to kill hundreds of millions of Spill Mountain Folk in order to push the Arch back into place. Of course she had to die to save the hostages she had given me. Of course the Arch would have impacted the sun without plasma to feed the rim ramjets. But why did she impose these tasks on you?”

“All right. Why?”

Bram had set Louis on his feet, but his grip hadn’t relaxed. “I’ve read your record from the ship’s computer. You open problems, then abandon them—”

Louis believed he was prepared to die, but this was turning weird. “What problems, Bram?”

“You found a dangerous alien species in interstellar space. You opened negotiations, you showed their way to your world, then left professional ambassadors to try to deal with them. Teela Brown you carried to the Ringworld, then left to another’s care—”

“Tanj dammit, Bram, she made her own choice!”

“Halrloprillalar you brought to Earth, then allowed the ARM to take her. She died.”

Louis was silent.

“Despite Teela, still you have ignored your responsibility for forty-three falans. Only the fear of death brought you back here. But you understood her message, didn’t you, Louis?”

“That is completely—”

“You must judge the Ringworld’s safety. She trusted your wisdom, Louis, and not her own. She was half right, half bright.”

The Hindmost spoke from safety behind the kitchen wall. “Teela wasn’t wise. Protectors are not wise. Their motives don’t come from the forebrain, Louis. She may have been just wise enough.”

“Hindmost, that’s ridiculous,” Louis said. “Bram, I’m naturally arrogant. You’re being too clever. Bright people do a lot of that.”

“What shall I do about the protectors who killed my mate?”

“We’ll ask the High Point People if we can please talk to a protector. We’ll tell them they’re in charge of the rim. Bram, spill mountain protectors have every interest in protecting the Ringworld from any danger. Anything that happens hurts the rim wall first, and who should know that better than they do?”

Bram blinked. He said, “Yes. Next. I have ruled in the Repair Center for more than seven thousand falans. How do you judge me—”

“I know what you did. The dates, Bram, the dates. You didn’t even try to hide them!”

“You talk to too many kinds. You’ve traveled too far. How could I lie? You might have learned.”

“I am,” Acolyte said, “bewildered.”

Louis had nearly forgotten the Kzin. He said, “He and Whisper searched for the mysterious master protector for-how long, Bram? Hundreds of falans? But it wasn’t enough, even using the telescope display in the Repair Center. The Ringworld is too big. But if you know where a protector will be, you can be there first. A disaster lures protectors. Like Bram. You’ll have to do something about that ARM carrier ship, won’t you, Bram?”

“Yes.”

“Whisper and Bram found a large mass falling toward the Ringworld. That was all they needed. Cronus would have to do something about that. He’d come to the Repair Center. Whisper and Bram would be ready. Stet, Bram?”

Silence.

“Maybe Cronus knew how to stop the impact. Bram and Whisper would have waited, right? See if he could do it. But Bram knew something was wrong—”

“Louis, we think it was his habit. His first move was to set up defenses. We— We couldn’t. Couldn’t.”

Bram’s fingers were sinking into Louis’s shoulder, drawing blood.

Louis said, “You killed him before he could finish.”

“We moved almost too late! He and we stalked each other. He and we had mapped these vast spaces and set traps.” Bram was speaking to Acolyte now, telling of a duel to one who loved such tales. “Anne was crippled for a lifetime. I still don’t know how he shattered my leg and hip in the dark. We killed him.”

Louis said, “And then?”

“He didn’t know, either. Louis, we searched his tools, he brought nothing.”

“Whatever he had, he never got to use it. You and Whisper, you had no ideas at all.”

Bram said, “Acolyte—”

“You let Fist-of-God hit the Ringworld!”

“Acolyte! An enemy waits for me in the Meteor Defense room. Here is your wtsai. Go and kill my enemy.”

“Yes,” Acolyte said.

Bram whistle-trilled into his eccentric flute. The Kzin stepped forward and flicked out. Louis tried to follow, but Bram’s fingers were sunk deep in his shoulder.

Louis said, “You bloodsucking freemother.”

“You know where I must be, but I decide the rest. Come.” Bram and Louis were on the stepping disk and gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE — THE RINGWORLD THRONE

They flicked into the gloom of the Meteor Defense, and Louis was flying, hurled away.

He tried to land rolling. He glimpsed Bram flicking out in a burst of mad flute-oboe music. Something monstrous and shadowy was leaping at Louis, and something much faster scuttled toward them both.

Louis landed on his right shoulder, where a vampire protector had sunk dirty claws deep into the sinew and muscle. Louis cried out and kept rolling, and the first attacker landed almost on top of him. The second fended off a reflexive kick from an orange-furred leg and was at the stepping disk. He played a snatch of flute-oboe music and was gone.

The first attacker swept him up and rolled them another ten feet into shadow. “Louis?”

Louis’s shoulder was screaming. He pulled in great lungfuls of air. His nose was full of the smell of Kzin. “Acolyte,” he said.

“I intend to kill Bram,” the Kzin said.

“He may be dead already.” Smell of Kzin and something else. What? “Did that other one try to kill you? You were supposed to die to distract him. So was I, I think.”

“I didn’t scent him until he leapt. He must have judged me harmless.”

“Are you offended?”

“Louis, where is Bram?”

“Anywhere. Bram controls the stepping disks. There must be twenty or so scattered through the Repair Center.”

“Yes, he whistles them up, but that other got through before Bram could change the flick, don’t you think?”

“What I’m thinking,” Louis said, “is that Bram went through and then changed the flick to Mons Olympus, or the rim, or Hell. Then the other one copied Bram’s command and changed it back.”

“Then we’re missing a fine battle.”

What was he smelling? Flowers, something flowery, pulled at Louis’s attention and made it hard to think. The Kzin’s smell was far stronger… and his fur had hard lumps. Wait, now, that was a throwing knife, and that was a long metal pole with chisel-sharpened ends.

Louis said, “You probably can’t kill Bram. For that matter, wasn’t he teaching you?”

“Louis, shouldn’t I kill my teacher?”

Oh? “I’ll keep that in mind.” Louis sat up.

“No, not you, Louis! I came to you for wisdom, but Bram made me his servant. I learned from Bram by listening until I was ready to learn by freeing myself. See, I have these.”

Cronus’s weapons.

Louis said, “Most appropriate, but Bram—”

Bram fell from the ceiling. It was thirty feet to the floor, and he landed hard, rolled, and came up with two feet of blade. He tried to balance it on end as another man-shape dropped toward him.

The other’s arms swung forward. Bram leapt away as sharp objects rattled across the floor. Shuriken? The blade fell over. Bram’s enemy slammed down, rolled and bounced to his feet. He seemed made of knobs, bigger than Bram, with one arm clutched against his chest and sharp metal in the other.

Louis’s mind was still trying to catch up.

Bram must have turned a second stepping disk upside down and fixed it to the ceiling. Copying the Martians? Now the vampire protector had nearly reached the first stepping disk, with his larger attacker a long jump behind, as Acolyte surged from cover. Acolyte jabbed the iron pole at Bram’s ribs.

Bram didn’t turn. He braked for an instant. The pole went past his navel and Bram had the end. He pulled and twisted, the pole bent, and the other end cracked Acolyte across the forehead.

It slowed Bram just enough. The other was on him. He chopped at Bram’s wrist, at the foot that came at his face, elbow, the other foot, the other arm.

Bram went down flopping, with bones or tendons cut in all four limbs.

His attacker had vanished. He spoke in the trade language as spoken around Weaver Town, distorted by a protector’s usual breathy speech impediment, and Louis’s translator was only a moment behind.

“Furry People, you must stay back for now. You shall be satisfied, but this seems a good time to talk.”

Acolyte was sitting up, dazed. “Louis?”

If the other protector was still afraid of Bram, so was Louis. He couldn’t see any way to drag Acolyte to cover. His own cover wasn’t good, but he stayed where he lay. He called, “Stay back, Acolyte. I brought him here.”

“Yes,” said Bram’s attacker. The walls reflected his voice, masking its origin. “Louis Wu, why have you done that?”

Bram sat in a spreading pool of blood. He could have been trying to tie tourniquets, but he wasn’t. He’d left his weapons lying. It came to Louis that whatever was done for him, Bram would stop eating now and would be dead shortly thereafter. Protectors do that when they lose their reason to live.

Louis called into the dark. “You’d be Tunesmith?”

“And you’d be Louis Wu who boiled an ocean, but why have you made Tunesmith into this?”

Bram broke in. “My time runs short. May I borrow yours? Come, I swear you’re safe. Louis, Tunesmith has asked my question. Why did you open a stepping disk for a Ghoul whom you have never seen?”

“Forgive me,” Louis Wu said. He was having trouble concentrating. That flowery smell! He remained where he was, on his side, nursing his ruined shoulder.

He said, “Bram, you know why I judged you and Anne unfit to hold the Repair Center. I haven’t heard you say I was wrong. We could argue before Tunesmith and let him judge. Bram?”

Silence.

“Tunesmith, did you examine the skeleton?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been calling him Cronus. Cronus was your ancestor. I think even Bram saw the implication. Cronus had eighty thousand falans to breed his genetic line toward the traits he wanted. He shaped an empire with communications that reach all the way around the Arch—”

“Ring. It’s a ring,” said Tunesmith.

“Cronus extended his breeding program through an area almost too vast to describe. The Night People must number tens of billions. They’re all one species, as the vampires are not. He shaped you to be ideal protectors.”

Tunesmith said, “I see possible improvements.”

“So? Bram here is a vampire protector. We have recordings of Bram in better health, and you’ll see them. You’re his clear superior. Bigger brain. More versatile. Less reflex, more choices. Bram?”

Bram said, “He beat me. Bigger brain? He was intelligent as a breeder, of course it’s bigger now. Louis, he knows nothing. Invaders threaten. You are obliged to train him!”

“I know, Bram—”

“Contract violation or no, you must teach him. Tunesmith, trust his intent, question his judgment. Learn from the Web Dweller but do not trust until he gives you a contract.”

Louis asked, “My turn?”

“Speak.”

“Tunesmith, protectors do immense damage when they fight. Bram and his mate fixed a problem, and the protectors in charge of the rim wall right now are a local spill mountain species. We need them there. I’ll show you why when we get—” The smell. “-get back to the ship.” It was tree-of-life. “Get me out of here, Tunesmith. I can’t stay here!”

“Louis Wu, you’re much too young to respond to the smell of the roots. It’s faint here, too.”

“I’m too old! The root would kill me!” Louis rolled to his knees. He couldn’t use his right arm—”Last time I smelled this I barely got away.” With Acolyte’s help he was on his feet, and he lurched toward the stepping disk.

He had beaten current addiction once. The tree-of-life smell had turned off his mind in a moment, but he had beaten that, too. It had been much stronger eleven years ago. Only a reformed current addict could have walked away from it.

A hand like a fistful of walnuts had his wrist. “Louis Wu, I heard him use three chords and I followed him through each time. One leads to traps and a weapons cache, one to a fall from the ceiling, and the last flicks us to where we fought. Whole fields of tree-of-life grow there, where an artificial sun-

Louis began to laugh. The smell of tree-of-life was in his brain, and the way out led to where he had fought Teela Brown!

Tunesmith watched him. He said, “Too old, but something was done to you.”

Bram was trying to laugh. It sounded awful. “I saw records. Nanotechnology. Experiment stolen from Earth, stolen again, bought by General Products from a thief on Fafnir. It’s the puppeteer’s autodoc, Louis!” His voice wasn’t built for it and his lungs were collapsing, but he laughed. “Eighty falans, Louis. Ninety. No more. Remember me!”

Tunesmith and Acolyte were both looking at Louis Wu.

The scent was in his nose, but it wasn’t pulling him. His mind was his own. But that meant…

He told them, “I was very sick. The autodoc must have healed me very thoroughly. Changed everything. Every cell.” Bram was right. Twenty years, twenty-five tops.

“You could become a protector,” Tunesmith said.

“It’s only a choice.”

Bram was dead. Maybe a protector could will his heart to stop. His last words were suspiciously apt.

“It’s an option,” Louis repeated. The strength was draining out of him.

“You’re ill,” Tunesmith said.

The Kzin helped him lie down. Tunesmith’s knobby hands probed him. The portable medkit hadn’t magically healed anything. Tendons, mesentery, a hamstring. His shoulder was badly swollen around five deep puncture wounds. Tunesmith’s arm was worse, puffed out and immobile in a sling, but the protector ignored it.

“I don’t know your kind. I don’t think you can walk, and you may have a fever soon. Louis, what would you normally do for medicine?”

“Back to the ship. Into the ‘doc. Heals everything.”

Tunesmith went away, taking the Kzin with him. They were back quickly. They lifted Louis and set him down again. He rose into the air, lying flat.

“This will carry you. Signal the magic door.”

The Ghoul protector had invented the stretcher? No, they’d gone for a cargo plate and rope to pull it. Louis said, “I can’t sing the Hindmost’s programming language.”

“We’re trapped?”

“Not quite.”

They set him down. Tunesmith said, “Louis, what shall I do to find my son?”

“Oh… tanj. I totally forgot Kazarp in all this. Would he hang around the Weavers? Does he have relatives in the area?”

“There were Night People with us when I flicked in. They can return him to his mother. My fear is that he may have followed me.”

“Aw, futz! No, wait, you’d smell him. Knowing your own gene line is built into your brain. Tunesmith, he’ll know me. Better send me. Don’t go yourself.”

“I would terrify him. Louis, shall I play random chords?”

“And test them how? Bram set traps. Tunesmith, we don’t need the stepping disks. I led us back to Needle once before, on foot, without the Hindmost’s help. Dug a tunnel. That’s still in place.”

“How long?”

“A few days. You’ll have to tow me. We’ll need water and food.”

“There’s water at the tree-of-life farm,” Tunesmith said. “Food—” He and Acolyte moved toward Bram’s body, and stopped. Tunesmith said, “I was taught that others should not see me eat.”

“He’s not yet carrion,” Acolyte said.

“My teacher’s friend, few there are who will discuss cuisine with the Night People, but I see you have an interest. We can eat the freshly dead. We often prefer it, but some are too tough at first, and this was a protector. I could put him on a second cargo plate and pull him along with a longer rope—”

“I’m hungry now, Tunesmith. I would not offend you by eating in your presence.”

“Take what you need.”

Louis turned his back on what happened next, but he couldn’t help grinning. The sounds told the story. A kzinti kitten must have to fight for his food. Now Acolyte was trying to wrench his hard-won portion from Bram’s body. Now he used his wtsai, thuk! and retreated with whatever that got him.

Tunesmith approached and settled cross-legged. “A child’s habits aren’t easily broken. Will Acolyte listen to me after this?”

“It’s a good start.”

“There is food for you, too, Louis Wu. I see no risk in your eating boiled tree-of-life root.”

The thought made him flinch, but, “Yams and sweet potatoes are nearly the same species. We roast them.”

“It means?”

“Build a fire. Put the roots in the coals where it’s not too hot.”

“We’ll find something to burn in the tree-of-life farm.” Tunesmith called toward sounds of grinding teeth and yowling rage. The Kzin was still trying to chew nourishment from the corpse of a protector. “Acolyte, there is prey in the tree-of-life farm. Little animals, and quick. I don’t think anyone but a Night People protector will ever eat Bram, and then not today.”

“Well, let me hunt, then!”

“You’ll need me to get back.” Tunesmith fluted, and they flicked away.

Tunesmith come back with an armful of yellow roots. “Acolyte hunts alone. I whistled in the return flick to use when he wants it.” He set the roots in the fire. “How do you like your water?”

“Clean. Any temperature, really.”

“Cold, too?”

“Sure.”

Tunesmith flicked out, and back again with a slab of ice. “Easier than choosing an appropriate container.”

“Where did you get that?”

“Miles above us, where air is thin and cold.” He soaked a swatch of cloth in dripping ice water and draped it around Louis’s neck. “How long do you cook tree-of-life?”

“An hour,” Louis said, and he showed Tunesmith the timepiece in the skin of his hand. “This tells tides, too. Not much use here. This makes it a calculator. This is a game, you move the numbers around like-tanj, you’re fast.”

Acolyte flicked in, his mouth bloody, something dripping from his hand. He set to work with the wtsai. “I looked for anything from the Map of Earth. Nothing quite fit, but this is much like a rabbit, don’t you think?” He cleaned the beast and skinned and splayed it butterfly fashion, and perched it above the coals to roast.

Louis said, “Some fun, huh?”

Acolyte thought it over. “Yes. But I’m not wounded.”

Acolyte’s forehead was swollen and the yellow fur was soaked with blood. Louis said, “We’re all wounded. Victors don’t have to pay attention to that. Acolyte, tell us a story.”

“You first. You fought the lucky protector, Teela Brown.”

“I’m not quite proud of that. Let me tell you how I boiled a sea.”

He did. Then Acolyte told his father’s tale: his arrival at the Map of Earth with a kzinti assault boat and puppeteer tools. The war. Friends and enemies, the deaths, the matings arranged to bind allies. Learning to talk to females.

Chmeee had sired three children in his few weeks on the Map of Kzin. A local lord had contracted to raise them. When he could, Chmeee had retrieved his eldest son from Kathakt-amicably-and brought him to the Map of Earth. Acolyte had seen his first human being at twelve falans.

The eldest son of a lord trained hard. Enemies and friends, whom to watch, whom to almost trust, how to talk to possible mates. Don’t talk to female diplomats, they’ll have your hide-

“This grows boring,” Tunesmith said.

Acolyte said, “Yes, it grew boring until I wanted to scream. One day I screamed challenge and fought my father. He let me go. I’ve been injured and I’ve starved and I was slaved to a vampire protector, but that diplomatic flup is out of my life. Tell us a tale, Tunesmith.”

“I’ll sing it. Then we should sleep, and after, Louis can lead us to safety.”

Tunesmith sang of a thing of fiery magic abandoned by Louis Wu, who boiled a sea. Five Night People, greatly daring, had dismounted a magical door. They didn’t know where it led and they couldn’t make it work.

One night Chime was gone.

The rest promised to hold his son from following, and Tunesmith went through the door alone. A scent pulled him toward what he could only perceive as the promise of Paradise.

He woke in the garden of tree-of-life. The woman who had gone through ahead lay dead beside him. Chime had been too old.

He explored. He found the Meteor Defense and the telescope. He created a physics to explain what he was seeing. He and Louis discussed that, with Acolyte listening. Tunesmith had deduced not just worlds, but black holes, too. He had guessed at the existence and nature of other protectors.

“What did you eat? Dead rabbits?”

“Well, Chime, of course, but I haven’t been awake long enough to get very hungry.”

Louis tried to talk about what a protector needed to know immediately. Invader ships: it was time to take some prisoners, see what their policy actually was. Hidden Patriarch and its crew: there must be City Builders everywhere, easily found. The children would need mates in not many years. The Web Dweller-

“A contract is an unambiguous promise, stet, Louis? But why should the Web Dweller offer me such a thing?”

Acolyte said, “Through fear, but he often reacts badly to fear.”

“Better if you have something he wants,” said Louis. “Tunesmith, what if you offered him the four hundred and first rim wall ramjet?”

His own dinner was ready by now. He explained while he ate. Bussard ramjet, attitude jet, hydrogen fusion. Tunesmith already understood the law of reaction and the Ringworld’s instability.

“There are only four hundred mountings. When you build the four hundred and first motor, we’ll mount Hot Needle of Inquiry at the axis. It’s a General Products hull; radiation can’t touch it. At sublight speed it’ll take the Hindmost a thousand years or so to match with the Fleet of Worlds…”

Acolyte stalked away from the smell of politics.

Louis said, “I don’t expect that’ll bother him. The Conservatives are in power in the Fleet of Worlds. Nothing will change. They may even want him back. Anyway, we can offer.”

“He likes power games, does he?”

“Stet.”

“Let him play. If he gains more power, we’ll offer him the two hundredth ramjet. It’s clear we don’t need them all. Acolyte! Do you wonder how you lived?”

Acolyte stalked back. Tunesmith sang of finding the skeleton and weapons of Cronus. Clues there told him that he was challenged. He chose his lurking spot and waked.

A monstrous shape of orange hair flicked in and surged away. Tunesmith stalked it, but he sensed no harm in it. “It may be my kind hasn’t grown up frightened of your kind’s smell.”

Acolyte thought that over. Tunesmith said, “But now I knew my enemy would use others for bait. When two hominids appeared and one threw the other flying—”

The Hindmost flicked in.

He squeaked like a smashed piano and was instantly gone, but Tunesmith was faster than that. He went through with the Kzin on his heels and Louis screaming, “Wait! What if it’s Mons Olympus?”

He’d reached his feet, but they were gone. Louis said, “Idiots,” and limped to the stepping disk and flicked through anyway.

Tunesmith was in some kind of weird weaving defense pose. Acolyte was not quite a safe distance away, trying to talk him down. Tunesmith ignored the Kzin. “I want to talk to your leader,” he said firmly.

Thousands of three-legged, two-headed creatures were watching them through the forward wall.

“We say ‘Hindmost,’” one of them said. “I’m the Hindmost. Speak your desire.”

“Teach me.”

The granite block had been set aside.

Louis limped past Kzin and protector. The pain in his shoulder was a part of his anger. He asked the Hindmost, “Now how did you do that?”

“I braced my forequarters against the wall and pushed with my hind leg. Bram felt the strength in my leg. He should have known.”

“Lucky for us—”

“Where is Bram?”

“Dead at our hands. Tunesmith, the teaching aids are all here aboard Hot Needle of Inquiry. Those pictures especially. They’re made by bronze webs like the one on the cliff at Weaver Town.”

Tunesmith said, “I follow Bram’s advice. Web Dweller, teach me. I am not to trust you until we have a contract.”

“I’ll print out my people’s standard contract for service.”

“Only for my amusement, I hope. Louis, my son needs…” Tunesmith looked again. “You, into the ‘doc, now. Is that it?”

Acolyte was lifting him.

He was in the big box and Tunesmith was examining the readouts doubtfully. “How long?” the Ghoul protector asked.

The puppeteer said, “Three days, maybe less.”

Louis talked in haste. “Don’t anyone sign anything. Hindmost, I don’t know how to feed a Night Person. Try aged beef. Try cheese. Tunesmith, I hope you won’t destroy that last ARM spacecraft unless they do something dreadful—”

“Nearest possible mates in this universe?”

“Well… that, too. Now, the High Point protectors hold the rim wall, and at this point they may be scared out of their minds. Talk to them through that window, with the black sky and the big strange shapes? Ghouls stole that web from a vampire nest, carried it maybe two hundred thousand miles plus two miles straight up—”

“The sunlight network told us about it.”

“Tell the spill mountain protectors they’re in charge of the rim. Mean it.”

Acolyte was closing the lid on the big box. Louis laughed suddenly. “Hey. Remind you of anything?”

He heard the voice of Louis Wu telling a hairless face with red skin, “We’d like to talk to a protector, please. We want to propose a contract.”

And the lid closed and he could rest.