by Larry Niven
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 millennia [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.
<
br /> 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 23
The Running Lesson
HIDDEN PATRIARCH, A.D. 2893
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. Lo
uis 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.
