The Ringworld Throne r-3

by Larry Niven

  Hold it–“Boosterspice and standard tech?”

  “By no means.”

  “What then, puppeteer experiments?”

  “I’ve tried to describe what I have available, a modified ARM X-program.”

  “You can’t compute the cost of this thing against fees payable at a Sol hospital! Your system would give me another thirty years of life, roughly speaking, wouldn’t it? I’ll give you seven years of service following my emergence from the ’doc.”

  “Twelve! Louis, this system will rewrite you to the age of twenty! You’d get another fifty years with no further medical treatment at all!”

  “The risks you’ll put me through, I’ll be lucky to get fifty good days, and you know it. That’s why I went on sabbatical in the first place. Seven.”

  “Stet.”

  Louis pointed with his left forefinger, the cursor. {Time expended shall be computed only for discrete actions taken at the direction of the Hindmost.} “Now what is this flup? What about consultation time? Travel time? Actions done without consulting you because there’s no time? Subconscious problem-solving during sleep?”

  “Write it in.”

  “Your motives are questionable. No honest entity would have tried that.”

  “This is how negotiation works, Louis.”

  “You’re going to teach me how to negotiate? Stet.” Louis erased the offending sentence, then typed one-fingered on the air. {Service period shall terminate seven years after acceptance of this contract.} He ignored the squawk of distress. “Now I need a clause to protect me from being altered into a better servant. I don’t see anything in here that will do that.”

  Text added itself. Louis watched for a bit, then said, “No.”

  “Write, then.”

  “No. Can you think of any way to get yourself a copy of my contract?”

  “No.”

  “It’ll have to wait for me to reach Hidden Patriarch, then. I’ll start tomorrow.”

  “Wait! Louis, I can easily find you here.”

  “Hindmost, I think I’ll have to insist on your accepting my contract, not yours. If you can’t read it, how can you suggest changes?”

  “You must read it to me aloud.”

  “Tomorrow. Now, something else has been bothering me. How long does it take you to shape a plume from the sun and then set off the superthermal laser effect?”

  “Two hours, sometimes three. Conditions vary.”

  “Three ships came through Fist-of-God, near here, and someone blasted them. One landed on the far side of the Ringworld and something blasted it. Did that take longer? What with all the fast-forward action, I just couldn’t tell.”

  “I will look.”

  ***

  Louis woke late. Sawur and the children were gone. Nothing edible remained from last night. Louis worked near the empty firepit.

  {No entity or process shall alter Louis Wu’s patterns of thought by medical or chemical means nor by any means save persuasion worked while Louis Wu is fully conscious and in his right mind. No agreements made while he is not fully conscious and in his right mind shall be binding.}

  {The period of servitude}—Louis crossed out “servitude.” —{mutual dependence shall end no more than seven years after acceptance of this contract. Wu shall be entitled to sleep, meals, and periods of healing as required. Emergencies interrupting these free times shall shorten the period of mutual dependence at triple time. Penalties for violations … vacation periods mutually agreed upon shall extend the period of mutual dependence … Louis Wu may refuse any command if in his sole judgment the commission involves undue risk, undue damage to local hominids or their culture or their environment, global damage to the Ringworld, or clear ethical violations.} A few talking points wouldn’t hurt.

  He’d become ferociously hungry. He knew where to find more roots. Louis rode the cargo stack straight up to seek out a path, and saw children milling in the upland woods across the Shenthy River.

  Sawur had found two big mushrooms of different species, and the children had killed a land-going crustacean as big as a rabbit. They watched with interest as Louis wrapped them in leaves and then wet clay. He dug his flash out of the lockbox on his cargo stack. With the flash on microwave, wide aperture, medium intensity, he heated the mound of clay until it puffed steam. Then he carefully locked the flash away. A dangerous thing to leave loose.

  “Strill, Parald, keep the rest away from the clay. It’ll burn you. Sawur? I want to make you a parting gift.”

  “Louis, are we to part?”

  “The Web Dweller sent his refueling probe to spray the cliff. It must be nearby. I expect he could have it here in a few hours.” He hopped off the plates. “Let me show you this now. I’m wondering if it should go to you or to the whole village.”

  The cargo plate controls were depressions on the rims, and they took some strength to move. Protector strength. Louis jabbed with a slender piece of rod held in both hands. The bottommost plate dropped from his stack and floated an inch above the grass.

  Sawur asked, “Will you present it tonight? Give it to the village in charge of me and Kidada. I will be as surprised as any. Show him and me how to work it, but none other, and no visitors.”

  “Stet.”

  “This is a magnificent gift, Louis.”

  “Sawur, you’ve given me my life. I think. Maybe.”

  “Do you still doubt?”

  “Give me a moment.” Louis knocked the clay off one end of his mound. The mushrooms looked and smelled done.

  They tasted wonderful. He broke open the rest of the mound and found the crawler done, too. Most of the meat was in the spinnerets, and the children shared those around. The tail made one bite each for him and Sawur.

  “That’s better. I’m not rational when I’m that hungry. Now look.” Louis drew a ring in the dirt. “Light takes thirty-two minutes to cross the Ringworld and come back.” He heard the translator converting times and distances.

  “Really?”

  “Trust me. Eight minutes for a beam from the sun to touch the Arch. Sixteen minutes across, thirty-two to cross and come back. If three starships pop up through a hole here, near the Great Ocean, and two and a half hours later they’re destroyed, and a ship lands here and is destroyed two hours later, where is the attacker?”

  Sawur studied the sketch, then pointed. “Here, across the Arch. The first ships, he needed half an hour just to see them.”

  “But what if it is attacked three hours later?”

  Sawur said, “That would put the attacker here where you drew the Great Ocean.”

  “Yeah.”

  ***

  When shadow touched the sun, Louis had written a contract that ought to protect him, if a puppeteer would honor a contract.

  He presented the cargo plate to Weaver Town while dinner was broiling. They acclaimed him as a mighty magician, a vashnesht. Then children wanted to ride the plate while parents were urging caution. Louis showed Kidada the setting that would hold the disk two feet high, low enough to be safe.

  He watched Kidada swooping among the houses with Strill whooping in his arms, and hoped that they wouldn’t burn the thing out joyriding. One day they’d need it to lift something heavy.

  The light was disappearing. Hunters had killed a predator; the meat tasted too much of cat. Weavers took slices and settled to watch the cliff as it came alight. Perched on his stack of cargo plates like a proper wizard, Louis nibbled cooked reeds and a root he’d microwaved in clay.

  Puppeteers were dancing in a swirling rainbow. Louis watched with the others, then asked in Interspeak, “Are the pyrotechnics supposed to throw you off?”

  “They are for loveliness. Louis, you must come to me.”

  “How is it with the fearless vampire slayers?”

  “I hear only voices. The cruisers have separated. Cruiser Two is gone to starboard with my webeye in the cargo shell. The Red Herders speak of an entity the male calls ‘Whisper.’ Tegger thinks Whisper has left them. War
via thinks he dreamed. I think Whisper is our phantom protector. Louis, will you come?”

  “We’ll have to reach terms—”

  “I accept your contract—”

  “You haven’t seen it!”

  “I accept it provided you make no changes from this moment. As you’ve had no extortionate advantage, you will have written it fairly. My probe will arrive within twelve minutes.”

  Louis looked at the sky. Nothing was visible yet. “Where will I pop out?”

  “In your suite aboard Needle.”

  Suite? It was one compartment, locked, that he had shared with a Kzin! “Contract pays me triple time during emergencies. Shall I arm myself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sawur, get the children out of the water. Hindmost, land in the stream. Now, I remember crawling through the disk you mounted for refueling. It was pretty cramped.”

  “I do learn, Louis! I’ve mounted a full-sized stepping disk on the side of the probe, big enough for you and your cargo plates, too.”

  Louis thought, Fortunately I always keep my feathers numbered for just such emergencies. It wouldn’t have meant anything to a puppeteer. From his safe box he withdrew the flashlight-laser and a variable-knife, two powerful weapons. He set the flash for narrow, short range, high intensity. He extended the blade by two feet, then brought it back to a foot and a half.

  Lose your hold on a variable-knife, the wire blade would cut whatever was close.

  A violet-white light peeked above the cliff.

  The refueling probe settled on fusion flame. The cavity in its nose, that was the refueling system: a filter to pass hydrogen ions, and a one-way stepping disk no wider than Louis’s hips. A much larger stepping disk had been mounted on its flank, a circular plate like an afterthought of a wing.

  Weavers oohed and ahhed, then shied back from a wave of steam. The flame went out. As Louis glided above the probe, it splashed down on its flared motor, then rolled and toppled into the water.

  The water dimpled above the stepping disk.

  So: it was on. Louis cut the lift and dropped straight in. His peripheral vision caught a shadow leaping after him.

  Chapter 19

  The Knobby Man

  HOT NEEDLE OF INQUIRY, A.D. 2892

  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.