by Larry Niven
"Anyone but puppeteers," Roxanny said. "Theyd never have the nerve."
"But the big, slow one, thats Long Shot"
The rest of the Fringe War had taken notice. Both ships were now surrounded by probes from half a dozen civilizations. Feeds were shown on the common-worn monitors. A Piersons puppeteer was at the helm of the GP#3 ship. Long Shots pilot looked like a man.
"Long Shots ours," Claus said. "This might be our chance to get it back."
The crewfolk watched the feeds. A sudden burst of firepower surrounded Long Shot — threatening an experimental ship of inestimable value — and Roxanny smiled at their cursing. Her smile slipped and the cursing stopped when the crystal sphere simply disappeared.
The voice of Command spoke at last. "Board your ships! All fighter crews board your ships now!"
Gone like a soap bubble, Roxanny thought. How? But she was scurrying along the corridor toward her station, flinching from burly hot shots who thought they could fly in these narrow confines.
Her station was Snail Darter. She crawled through the lock and took her assigned seat. Claus Raschid followed her through. The third crewman — "Wheres Forrestier?" she rapped.
Tec Oliver Forrestier swung in and took his place. The three were back to back, looking into their wall displays. Oliver asked, "Think theyll launch us this time?"
Roxanny Gauthier grinned. She liked this: herself and two males in an environment that couldnt possibly rid the air of all pheromones, in conditions too cramped to do anything beyond flirting. Claus and Oliver already found her intimidating. "Well launch," she said. "Depending on what those ships do, we could see the Ringworld close up. We might even get down to the surface. Gird up thy loins, Legal Entities! We are going in."
The ship jerked, and Louis jerked too, as everything around them shifted. Needle was out of stasis.
Views to the side showed fearsome coronas above a black horizon of blocked-out sun. Aft was only black: the sun, receding.
Louis couldnt see what the Hindmosts cabin displays saw. Good. If he could see graphs and false-color representations, he would feel the hull temperature rising. There was that about Piersons puppeteers: they never ignored danger, never pretended it wasnt there. Never turned their backs on a threat except to kick.
Ahead, arcs of glowing coronal gas streamed past. The stars were hidden in a ruby glare that might actually be Needles invisible hull giving off black body radiation.
The ships of the Fringe War… were not to be seen. The puppeteer had lost their pursuers by aerobraking his ship through the sun.
They were already nearing the ring of huge rectangles that cast shadows of night across the Ringworld. The Hindmost drifted his ship behind a shadow square, then boosted to some ferocious acceleration and ran for it.
Louis wondered idly if Tunesmith had turned off the meteor defense. Once before, the meteor defense had fired on Louis. Lying Bastard in stasis had smashed into the Ringworld floor and plowed a furrow across the land. Theyd survived without a bruise… but this time Tunesmith had futzed the timing on their stasis field.
This time the Ringworlds sun-powered superthermal laser didnt fire, or didnt fire quick enough to catch Needle.
But the Fringe War found them. "Were being followed," Acolyte said.
The Hindmost sang, "Ill lose them. Dont distract me."
The Ringworld came up like a vast fly swatter. Needle dove straight toward a long strip of nightbound land. Louis could see the Other Ocean almost below, a vast diamond dotted with clusters of islands, easing off to the side as Needle came down. The Hindmost aimed at lightning-lit cloud laid out like a flattened hourglass in a pattern several times larger than the Earth.
An eyestorm is the visible sign of a puncture in the Ringworld floor.
Its the Ringworld equivalent of the hurricanes and tornados that form on planets. Air draining through the puncture produces a partial vacuum. Air flowing from spinward slows against its spin velocity; it weighs less; it wants to rise. Air from antispinward speeds up, grows heavier, wants to sink. From overhead the pattern is a sketchy flattened hourglass with a puncture at the throat. From port or starboard the storm takes the appearance of an eye, upper lid and lower lid and a horizontal tornado whorl in the center, and perhaps an eyebrow of high cirrus.
A Ringworld protector, Tunesmith or Bram before him, would have filled in any large puncture by now. Lost air is hard to replace. The meteor crater at the heart of this storm would be a small one, and old: these storms took generations to form.
The Hindmost dove toward the whirling throat of the hourglass, slowing hard, with one large and two smaller ships still in his wake. Then Needle plunged into the black whirlwind as if in suicidal frenzy, and out. Out through the meteor crater into black interstellar space, looping hard around and up. The Hindmost fired a laser at the Ringworlds black underside. A ruby glare lit an array of spillpipes broken by another ancient meteor.
Have to tell Tunesmith, Louis thought. The Ringworld is wearing out. Its losing air and water. Everything needs repairs, underside, rim walls, landscape. Yah, in our copious free time.
They were driving through a plume of ice crystals now. A block of frozen seawater was being boiled away. Acolyte suddenly demanded, "Louis, stop saying that!"
"Sorry."
"I know what Its a ride means. Billions of your kind pay a sum for the privilege of being scared out of their wits under conditions of assured safety. A hero must risk real danger!"
"You did that when we fought Bram. Here we go," as Needle surged upward. Its not a death trap. Its a ride.
The foamy black sea ice was nearly boiled away. Needle rammed up through a smashed drainhole, through a last barrier of ice, and into the sea above.
Hot Needle of Inquiry settled through black water and came to rest.
"And here the ship may stay," the Hindmost said. He popped up the lip of a stepping disk and went to work on its controls.
Louis asked, "How much of this were you expecting?"
"Contingencies," the Hindmost said. "If Tunesmith ever gave me a chance to move Needle, Id need a place to hide it. Here, Louis, this link leads to the Repair Center. The stepping disk network is open to us."
Acolytes ears were up. He watched them like a tennis match.
Louis thought it through. The ocean around them would drain until an ice plug formed. Tunesmith could find them by the plume of water vapor, if he had the leisure. But Long Shot was slow in normal space, and if hyperdrive near a star was no longer sure death, it was still tanj dangerous. Tunesmith and Long Shot would be hunted across the sky for days yet.
So Hot Needle of Inquiry was… "Hindmost, you cant hide the ship."
"I have."
"We need access to Needle for food, beds, showers, pressure suits. We need a stepping-disk link, and thats all Tunesmith needs too."
"I can hide its location, Louis."
The Hindmost was searching for the illusion of control. It seemed futile, but hey, Louis was doing the same. "Think now," Louis said. "While Tunesmith is watching Hot Needle of Inquiry, why dont we steal Long Shot?"
"How?"
"I have no idea. But Im tired of being run around like a marionette by him or you, Hindmost. There has to be some way out of this box!"
"While Tunesmith is occupied, we might yet have a day or two to accomplish something."
They flicked to the Meteor Defense Room.
Daylight had swept across the eyestorm. Louis was looking across a hundred and ninety million miles, past the rim of the sun and the black edges of shadow squares.
Silver knots and threads still marked rivers, lakes, seas; but time and a puncture wound had desiccated this land. Three ships dodged and weaved in and out of a flattened hourglass made of storm. These must be the ships that had followed Needle down. The big ship was Kzinti, and the smallest was an ARM fighter, and the third was ARM too. Theyd be able to detect each other through cloud, as anyone could given deep-radar.
Lightning flickered
sporadically in the constriction, but a sudden sputter was too bright to be lightning.
"The trouble with an antimatter bullet," Louis surmised, "is that the crew will use any excuse to get it off the ship."
Both ARM ships were chasing the Kzin ship. The Kzin dove back into cloud. Louis could track its deep-radar shadow through the axis of the eyestorm, one ARM ship in its wake, one darting ahead through open air. Then the Kzin ship was gone, down through the drainhole and out.
Two ARM ships now commanded perhaps a trillion square miles of Ringworld. They spent the next several hours quartering the area, returning every so often to the eyestorm.
"Guarding the puncture against entry," the Hindmost suggested. "You and Chmeee blurted that secret to all of known space, didnt you, Louis? Enter and leave the Ringworld through any meteor puncture. Otherwise face a solar-pumped superthermal laser meteor defense."
"If they find Needle," Louis said, "theyll have access to the stepping-disk network. Hindmost, is that technology easy to copy? The United Nations never had the chance. Its a lot more advanced than transfer booths."
The Hindmost didnt answer, of course.
Louis found himself staring at the display of the Other Ocean. The vast expanse of water and land looked like tapestry on a castle wall. Clusters of islands… continents; theyd be that big, as big as the maps in the Great Ocean, one of which was a one-to-one scale map of Earth. These were more thickly clustered, and they seemed all identical.
"Hindmost, was the Ringworld built by Pak?"
"I dont know, Louis."
"I thought you might, by now. I wondered if there might be real Pak, somewhere among all these variant hominids. Weve never seen anything of Pak but old bones."
The puppeteer said, "We can deduce a good deal about Pak breeders. They slept or hid during the day and night. They hunted and did their business at twilight. They lived above a shoreline."
Louis was startled. "How can you know all that?"
"Your partial baldness suggests that your ancestors swam regularly, and Ive watched you in the water, too. As for twilight, this Ringworld gets far more twilight than a planet would, and its wholly unnecessary. Let me show you."
The Hindmost boarded a chair, clumsily. His questing mouth found controls. The wall display jumped, became a featureless blue. The Hindmost began to draw in white lines. A blob of white: the sun. A circle: the Ringworld. A much smaller ring, concentric: thirty-odd shadow squares moving a little faster than orbit, held in a net of cables. "This is the way the Ringworld was designed," the Hindmost said. "A thirty hour day with ten hours blacked out, and more than an hour of a sun partly blocked. Instead—"
He sketched in five long shadow squares sliding retrograde, against the Ringworlds spin. "This model would avoid the long, long twilight period and give equal day and night. The builders didnt want that. Whoever built the Ringworld must have wanted endless summers and long twilights. We surmise they were Pak protectors, and we surmise that the Pak world was like that."
Louis studied the picture. Or else, he thought, they built an advanced model somewhere else.
The Hindmost said, "Im hungry. Will you keep watch?"
"Hungry," the Kzin agreed. "Hurry."
Time had slid by unnoticed. Louis realized he was half starved.
A puppeteer must eat more often than a carnivore. The Hindmost was gone for most of an hour. He returned with jewels sparkling in a newly coifed mane. A float plate heaped with fodder followed him.
"Well regret the time were wasting," he said. "Our last hours free from Tunesmith, but what can we do with them? My plans didnt reach far enough. Look, more warships."
Three Kzinti, then an unfamiliar larger craft, then three more ARM ships danced around the inner ring of shadow squares, not firing yet.
Louis said, "Acolyte, go feed yourself." Who wants to be around a hungry Kzin?
Louis and the Hindmost watched the warships at play. "They wont all have stasis fields," Louis speculated. "Stasis fields are expensive and not too dependable, and of course they take a ship out of the action. So theyll be leery of the Ringworlds meteor defense, but Tunesmith turned that off, and theyre starting to realize that. So," as three Kzinti ships began a long dive toward the Ringworld surface, "here come Kzinti to stop the first ARM ships, and more ARMs to stop them — tanj dammit!" A brilliant streak inside the atmosphere ended in a flash against desert.
"That was an antimatter bullet," said the puppeteer.
"And now its a little eyestorm. Tanj, this isnt even the main event! What they want is Long Shot. Needle is nothing."
"A Needle in a haystack? What you describe is mostly your imagination," said the Hindmost. "Much of a war goes unseen. That larger ship, I have identified it. Lure of Far Lands Limited, the Kdatlyno and Jinx business alliance. They wont fight, they will only observe. Here is Acolyte. Louis, go eat. Bathe."
Louis jerked awake. Something had disturbed him… a flash of light from the screen?
Acolyte and the Hindmost were asleep, sprawled far apart on the hard floor beneath the Meteor Defense Room walls. It was good to be clean; hed eaten like an army; sleeping plates would be good too. But anyone who slept aboard Needle would miss something.
Louis sat up. Nothing hurt! He grinned, remembering what an older woman had told him at his two hundredth birthday party. "Dearest, if you can wake in the morning with no pain in your joints and muscles, its a sure sign that you have died in the night."
The Hindmost had reset the wraparound screen. It showed a skyscape with windows in it, views of an eyestorm and the Other Ocean. Around the windows stars moved uneasily: ships of the Fringe War. All views were quiet now.
It did bother him, that he couldnt think of anything to do except watch. He was trying to outthink a protector. What chance would he have later if he couldnt find an angle now, while Tunesmith was being hunted across the system?
On the Ringworld were millions of seas. Louis couldnt guess where the Hindmost had put Hot Needle of Inquiry. He could get there by a stepping-disk setting. The first pair of ARM ships hadnt found it, and now they were too busy maneuvering. The war above the eyestorm had been quiet for hours, but ships continued to shift position.
Sudden light splashed around the Farland ship: antimatter bullets intercepted in transit. The Farland ship was accelerating away from the action. Its new course would miss the Ringworld. A ruby laser lit it brilliantly, but diffused, its attacker already deep in atmosphere. Ships tens of millions of miles apart had some chance to defend themselves.
But the war above the eyestorm was getting too tight.
Fire burst into the clouds where two ARM ships were hiding. Louis cried, "Wake up! Wake up! Youre missing action!"
The others stirred.
Tunesmiths deep-radar window showed one ARM ship diving through the puncture hole — leaving hard-won turf abandoned, but safeguarding data from its explorations, unless some ambush waited beneath the Ringworld floor. The other accelerated hard, running down the storms axis in a channel of clear air, the pupil of the eye.
Kzinti had deep-radar too. Two lens ships were diving. Fire followed them down.
The eyestorm flashed to a blue-white glare.
The Hindmost killed the zoom window before it could blind them. On a less expanded view — Tunesmith must have a camera on one of the shadow squares — a star glared near the Other Ocean, as big as… too big… far too big.
The puppeteer said, "I believe one of the ARM ships exploded. Antimatter. Well have a hole the size of…" The Hindmost thought it through, then folded into himself and was silent.
The eyestorm was gone, blasted apart. Cloud patterns showed an expanding ring of shock wave crossing seas and gray-green land. A hemisphere of cloud enveloped a dimming fireball.
"What has happened here?"
Tunesmith and the little chimp-protector were on the stepping disk: a sorcerer confronting wayward apprentices, demanding explanations. Louiss throat closed on him. It felt like he should hav
e stopped this. It felt like Tunesmith would, should blame him.
"Antimatter explosion," Acolyte said.
"Is there a hole under that cloud?"
The question was already silly: the dome of cloud was dimpled in the center. It was being sucked into interstellar space. When Acolyte didnt answer, Louis said, "There was already a hole—"
"Of course. We have to move fast," Tunesmith said. "Come." He had the lip of the stepping disk up and was redirecting it.
Louis found his voice. "Sure, nows a good time to move fast. Youve brought the war home! And now the airs draining out of the Ringworld!"
What had been a fireball was nearly gone. The Ringworld floor was naked scrith within a slowly expanding ring of cloud. Clouds streamed toward the hole.
And Tunesmith had Louis by the forearm. He walked them to a stepping disk.
Hanumans eyes took it all in in one sweep:
Hed bent the laws that governed this universe and a hypothetical other. His mission was a total success. And none of it mattered. The Ringworld held everything worth saving, and the Ringworld floor was ripped open.
The puncture was on the far side of the arch. That was both good and ill. Death would be a long time marching around the curve to reach them here; but Tunesmiths countermeasures would have to cross that same gap.
The aliens saw it too. The most alien was the eldest, the most experienced, perhaps the wisest, and that one had shut down his mind. The hominid had lost hope. The youngest, the nothing-like-a-big-cat, was — like Hanuman — waiting for someone to solve it.
Tunesmith?
Tunesmith was in motion while Hanuman was still catching up. The Ghoul protector showed no doubts. When Tunesmith and Louis Wu vanished, the little protector followed. Tunesmith would fix it.
Machinery on a Brobdingnagian scale had been moved into the workstation under Mons Olympus.
Tunesmith dropped Louiss arm and moved among his instruments at a sprint. The little protector, Hanuman, scampered after.
Acolyte popped up next to Louis. "Louis, whats happening?"
