by Larry Niven
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.
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 24
These Bones
They flicked from cloudy daylight to the pinkish artificial light of Needle’s lander bay; thence to the cre
w 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.
