Ringworld's Children

by Larry Niven

  Tunesmith had seen it in a moment. And in that moment, Louis Wu had gone to rescue his child and get him to safety.

  It followed that the Ringworld's death was likely and immediate. Tunesmith would act.

  And what now? Hanuman's people were tree dwellers! They didn't have minds; they couldn't follow instructions even if he had any to give. How was he to hide them from the sky?

  Wish for a rainstorm?

  Find and fetch Teela Brown's lucky child, bring the creature here, then wish for a rainstorm?

  Hanuman decided.

  He detached a float plate from the depleted service stack. He stayed above the forest, enjoying the scents of thousands of his people below the canopy. Brothers, sisters, N-children. He did not dip down to see them. There wouldn't be time.

  Tunesmith would move immediately. Where a treetop blocked the sun, already Hanuman could see a glitter to the shadow squares. Power was being beamed down.

  He settled his disk on raddled earth. A few Burrowing People emerged. He spoke to them.

  "You must stay underground for two days. For you this is easy. Do not watch the sky. Spread the word as far as you can, but be underground before shadow hides the sun.

  "There will be lights beyond your experience. Do not look at the sky until the light fades. Afterward the sky will be very dark. Go spin-and-port to where you will find Hanging People. Help them. They are mine, and they will have gone mad."

  Chapter 21 -

  In Flight

  Penultimate's Palace. Louis flicked in and rolled off the burnt stack of float plates. Nothing fired on him.

  The flying belt took him out and down. He skimmed above the yellow lawn, wondering at the black markings. One pattern must be the Penultimate's name or portrait... there, traces of a cartoon, very simplified, a style weirdly reminiscent of William Rotsler. The other would be speech.

  He had guesswork for a Rosetta Stone. What would a protector say to an invader? That might be a pictograph pun: a word you could read as "Enter" or "Extinct"; "Greetings" or "Epitaph". Could you extrapolate a language from that?

  Nah.

  Louis flew low, enjoying the skill it took to weave between trees. Maybe they'd conceal him if Proserpina came looking for him on her own turf. (Nah. She had his scent.) Hard turns and high gees and a brief freedom from intellectual problems.

  Proserpina's sunfish ship rested among the trees near Proserpina's base. Lesser trees had grown up through the gridwork. Louis set the flying belt behind a thick trunk, stripped off his falling jumper, and left that too. He made his way forward on foot. See the naked, limping breeder.

  Here was the ARM 'doc from Gray Nurse. Louis wondered what the diagnostic readings would say about him. Mutated? Not human? Dying? He walked past it without a pause. No time!

  He stopped by Snail Darter's library. No time, but protectors didn't always have a choice.

  He'd watched Claus and Roxanny work this device. It wasn't hard to persuade it to summon up a roster for the Fringe War fleet. There were dozens of Wu, and six Harmony: his first daughter had married a Harmony. An ID number sequence would identify his line of descent--

  A grandson and his daughter had joined the Navy decades ago. Wes Carlton Wu was Flight Captain aboard Koala, a lurker ship, with Tanya Wu as Purser. Another quick pass found no other blood relatives, and time was shrinking.

  Louis approached the sunfish ship.

  Think like a Pak. A protector might kill any breeder who smelled wrong, to leave more space for her own breeders. But you're Proserpina. Accommodation has been your survival for a million years. You don't want to hurt a breeder. It might be some powerful enemy's N-child!

  There were no steps up to the cabin. Louis climbed up like a Hanging Person.

  It was roomy inside. There were handgrips everywhere, and footgrips: just how prehensile were Proserpina's toes? And sensors and touchpads and toggles and levers, randomly placed. There was a horseshoe of couch, but only one control chair, and it would not fit Louis. He'd have to change it--but he'd better give some thought to convincing the ship he was Proserpina.

  Louis was disappointed in the Hindmost. He had steered the destiny of a species whose tools and learning beggared mankind's. Why couldn't he move a few kilotons of medical equipment? It would have saved Louis considerable trouble and two or three hours' time.

  Maybe the Experimentalist faction on the Fleet of Worlds was more like New Orleans' traditional Fool King. Set them going, but watch them. Turn them off when they do something excessively expensive or dangerous. Sometimes they'll do something worthwhile--

  He was getting distracted.

  Thou shalt have no Proserpinas before me. She'd have set defenses to prevent a protector from manipulating the ship. Unless--would Proserpina really set a death trap for someone like Tunesmith, acknowledged as brighter and more dangerous than Proserpina herself? Retaliation could be terminal.

  And what about protector slaves? This chair looked like it had been altered to fit a Hanging Person, then adjusted for Proserpina again. Hey, she must have let Hanuman fly it!

  Futz! The ship wasn't defended. She was the defense. Who would dare steal Proserpina's ship?--and that was the point: risk for Louis Wu was do nothing. He adjusted the chair and sat down, strapped himself in, and lifted.

  Trees had grown into the ship's metal lacework. They tore loose. Louis lofted the ship above the atmosphere, then turned toward the rim wall.

  Was the sun starting to roil? He'd burn his eyes out if he looked hard. There must be a way to dim the glass, right? And Tunesmith would have the meteor defense going. Louis zigzagged his path a bit, and studied the controls. Here?

  It didn't just darken the view; it was light-amplification too. He turned it very dark, and looked up.

  A solar prominence was reaching out and out.

  Louis jogged the ship at high gees. The ground flared below him. He could see the beam tracking and avoid it, even guide it a little to miss a populated spill mountain, and then he was off the Ringworld and dropping, easing back and under the Ringworld floor.

  He had to follow the arc halfway around, three hundred million miles. Now the nontrivial danger was alien ships. Louis zigged along the magnet grid, accelerating hard, hearing a toc, toc of multimolecule-sized cameras hitting the skin of the ship. The Fringe War would be after him soon enough.

  Something flashed on the Ringworld's underside. Louis zagged almost into another flash. Maybe he'd started a war himself.

  Tunesmith's Meteor Reweaving System had closed Fist-of-God. Louis came up around the rim instead. He made for the Map of Mars, a little over half a million miles away. The sun was roiling again.

  A spark struck upward: a launch from Mons Olympus. Louis slid the sunfish ship beneath the path of the meteor package, just for a moment. Tunesmith wouldn't have set the meteor defense to fire on those! He slowed, descended through the crater, and set the ship to hover.

  He crawled halfway out of the cabin and shouted down. "Hindmost! Close it!"

  The crater's lid began to close.

  Louis began to play with the sunfish ship's controls. The 'doc's Intensive Care Cavity rose, twirled in the air, and settled a bit jerkily into the bay in Long Shot. Then the Service Wall, trailing loose cables. Then other, smaller components. Then the lifeboat.

  Then a tank Louis had identified earlier.

  The puppeteer was shouting something. "--tied down?"

  Louis settled the tank in with the rest of the 'doc. He brought the sunfish ship down and got out.

  The Hindmost came trotting up. He asked, "How will you tie these components against shock of takeoff?"

  "Tunesmith was using a tank of foam plastic. Let's set it going and close the ship up, then bo
ard."

  The tank was spraying foam plastic as Louis closed the lid on it. He'd taken the pilot's seat without comment. Hey, it was built for humans. The Hindmost asked, "Shouldn't we open the crater again?"

  "Hindmost, let's try something else." He activated the hyperdrive. The cavern disappeared. The Q2 ship launched itself straight down into a boil of colors.

  Map of Earth. Shortly after nightfall Acolyte begged audience with Chmeee.

  One of the guards said, "Play elsewhere, child. Your father is busy." And grinned.

  "I bear a message from Tunesmith."

  "An odd name."

  "Chmeee will know it. Tunesmith who lives under the Map of Mars."

  The guard was bored, and he toyed with Acolyte a bit longer. Then he went into the tent. When he came out, he asked, "How did it come, this message?"

  "There were flashes of light from the mountains to starboard."

  Acolyte was allowed entrance. He groveled before his father, who asked, "Is this the Tunesmith who wants to give me the Map of Earth? I've heard nothing since you delivered his message."

  "He says you may take the Map yourself, after the other prides have gone mad."

  It had gone quiet: Chmeee's courtiers were paying attention.

  Chmeee asked, "Mad?" and studied his son, whose subservience seemed laid over a whiplash eagerness. "Lecture me, then."

  "Tunesmith instructs us to hide ourselves from the sky for two full days. We must be under a roof or tent, all of us, even females and kits. We should sleep if we can. We must all be under cover, or blindfolded, before shadow reveals the sun."

  "So soon? How shall I manage that?"

  Acolyte dared to grin. "What would Louis Wu say?"

  " 'That's why I get the big money.' What is to happen to the sky?"

  "That was not told. You have seen ships leaving tracks of light across the sky. You have heard talk of the Fringe War. I watched it in Tunesmith's Meteor Defense Room. It is told that Tunesmith will end the war."

  Chmeee nodded. "Are you ready to run? It is well." His voice rose to a bellow. "All in my hearing, you are each an emissary to my far provinces! Divide the contents of my kitchen to feed yourselves. Go where I send you. Carry a blindfold ready to use. You will know when to use it. Fools will go blind or mad.

  "You are each more valuable than those you will speak to, and you will be under cover before the shadow square passes. Two days hidden, or answer to me. The rest of us may conquer the Map of Earth if we so choose."

  The boy Kazarp was gazing open-mouthed at the sky. Shadow had covered the sun, but the shadow squares were glittering in a way he'd never seen. Presently he raised his instrument and began to play.

  Over the music he heard a stealthy shift in posture, too close for any stranger, and he said, "I knew you were there."

  "Don't turn around. I am become Vashneesht."

  His father had disappeared falans ago, and now this: a thing out of fantasy, awesome and terrible. Kazarp didn't turn. "Father? Does mother know?"

  "You must tell her. Tell her gently. Then tell her she must hide from the sky for two days, and you too, for fear of going mad. Spread the word. A burrow would be better than a roof. Afterward there is a world of mad folk to care for, and far more feasting than our folk will ever want."

  "Will you stay?"

  "Not now. I will visit when I can."

  Long Shot's cabin was at the bottom of the sphere, between four fusion-drive nostrils. In hyperdrive Long Shot flew ass-backward into the unknown. Louis launched straight down, into and through the Ringworld floor--feeling a touch of drag from the superdense scrith--and out into space.

  He was moving away from the sun and straight into the thickest gathering of Fringe War ships. Not that that mattered. Those ships were all in Einstein space, this close to a large mass. Louis was flying blind, of course, through hyperspace. What he hoped was that this faster ship would outrun the eaters.

  The puppeteer was wound into a tight knot. He wouldn't be of much help.

  How fast would Long Shot move near this great a mass? He'd wondered if it would even exceed lightspeed. Tunesmith might have worked out the QII system's behavior, but Louis didn't have enough clues. He'd learn soon enough. When the crystal sphere that was the mass detector began working, he'd be outside the "singularity."

  Eleven hours later, Louis knew that even protectors could grow tired. He could ignore that, and hunger and thirst, and pain in guts and joints, headache and sinus ache, that properly belong only to an aging savage. It didn't matter. He'd got clear of the Ringworld. Of thirty trillion Ringworld hominids, a fat percentage would survive. Wembleth and Roxanny and their child were lost in noise. If Tunesmith worked out what they truly were, he wouldn't even search. With luck, though, he'd think Louis had taken Wembleth to the stars.

  Winning could compensate for a lot of pain.

  The window was the floor, and it would darken, light-amplify, record and display recordings, or zoom. Louis watched flow patterns of colored light, and a dark comma zipping past.

  He saw the view change. The window wasn't there: his eyes slid around it.

  Louis looked at the mass detector. There should have been lines of light crawling toward him. Nothing showed. It was just doped crystal.

  Louis hit the cutoff.

  He saw showers of stars. The universe was wide and beautiful below his feet. He was in Einstein space.

  It would have pleased him to sell Long Shot to some band of freebooters in human space. Or form his own! Now that looked unlikely. Louis set the window to zoom, then darkened it a little against the zodiacal glare. The Ringworld eclipsed the sun except for a tiny sliver of light.

  Six light-hours from Ringworld system--he measured it--the sun wouldn't light up Long Shot very much, but putting the ship in the Ringworld's shadow would leave it black as space. He hadn't used fusion motors at all: nobody would find him via neutrino flux. The rest of the electromagnetic spectrum might reveal him to the Fringe War if they happened to look. Louis thought they'd be too busy for that. They'd hunt for Proserpina's sunfish ship until something more interesting happened... real soon now.

  The rec room above was as tiny as the cabin below, but there was a game-room wall, food dispenser, and a shower bag. He noticed also the hatch in the ceiling. That was new. It led into a maze of man-wide access tubes he could see through the wall. They were hard to follow, a neat puzzle, but one led to the storage room where he had stowed the lifeboat and autodoc. Good.

  He took time for a shower. Hey, if he missed the event, Long Shot would catch the light wave further out.

  Nothing had changed when he'd dried himself. He sank his fingers in the Hindmost's mane and dodged a hind leg kick--almost. "Wake," he said.

  "Did I hurt you?"

  "Doesn't matter."

  "Why are we at rest?"

  "I want to watch something. Also, I can't use the mass detector."

  "Eee!" the Hindmost whistled.

  "It's a psionics device. You'll have to fly the ship yourself. But we're loose, everyone I love is safe, the Fringe War won't be looking for us, and the way lies clear to Canyon."

  "To Canyon?"

  "Well, or the Fleet of Worlds, if you like. I just assumed you'd brought your mate and children with you when you left the Fleet."

  "Of course."

  "If we can work out details, there's something I need."

  "You're bluffing, Louis, as you did once before. You're dying, aren't you?"

  "Yah. I was too twisted up when tree-of-life started to change me. I'm dying, stet, but not bluffing. Everything's worked out fine. But I'd be pleased if we could get Carlos Wu's autodoc running again."

  "That
would take... mmm."

  "Considerable trouble. Hard physical labor. What can I offer you?"

  "Long Shot moves too fast. Collision with some star is nearly certain. I don't have the nerve to fly us to Home."

  "NotCanyon?"

  "Home," said the puppeteer. "I didn't think I could hide us on Canyon. Too small. Home is very like Earth, Louis, and has a wonderful history."

  "Home it is," Louis said agreeably. "Hey." The magnified sun glared, etching the control room with sharp-edged shadows.

  The puppeteer turned one head, then both. The pupils irised nearly shut. His voice was a monotone: the Hindmost was upset. "Where is the Ringworld?"

  "Yah."

  "Yah?"

  "Yah. Tunesmith used nanotechnology to change the entire superconductor grid to the configuration he found in Long Shot. He's off like a bunny under Quantum II hyperdrive, and he took the Ringworld with him."

  "How far?"

  "What?" But this was the only ship that could catch it. A little more than two thirty-hour days at Quantum II hyperdrive... a light year in 5/4 minutes... "Three thousand light years before Tunesmith runs out of power. That's way out of human space. Telescopes won't see anything for a hundred generations. You might catch that much mass shifting around with a gravity-wave detector. What were you going to do, chase it down?"

  "The wealth," mourned the Hindmost. "All gone. I lost my place as Hindmost chasing the Ringworld's wealth of knowledge. And those you spoke of, those you love, Louis, what of them?"

  "I'll never find them. Hindmost, that's the point. Now let's fix that autodoc before something intimate tears loose inside me."

  "I think we can ignore the tidal effect," Tunesmith said. "Don't you?"

  Proserpina's fingers danced. The wall display--which showed nothing, a kind of curdled gray everywhere--went black. White hieroglyphs danced across it in a Pak mathematical system millions of falans old. "The sun's gravity pulled up and a bit inward along a very narrow angle, when the Ringworld had a sun. With the sun gone," she said, "all the seas will tend to flow toward the rim walls. We're in flight for two days? Stet, that's negligible. What I'm worried about," hieroglyphs danced again, "is the approach."