by Larry Niven
Louis shook his head. “What do protectors want? That’s one thing we learned about you. Your motives are hard-wired. You protect your genetic line. When the line dies out, you stop eating and die. Teela didn’t have children on the Ringworld, but there were hominids. Relatives, if you close one eye and squint a little. She had to save them. Why wait? With the Ringworld sliding off balance—”
Bram brushed it away. “She waited for Hot Needle of Inquiry, for puppeteer-derived computer programs. I watched you use them and was glad I had not interfered.”
Oh. “But why not just say so? Tanj dammit, why the fight?” Wait, now—“Bram, did Anne leave just after you killed Cronus?”
“She took several days to prepare.”
“And that was just under seven thousand falans ago?”
“Yes.”
“Around twelve hundred A.D., my calendar. Did she take roots? And does she have to come back for more?”
“Anne took roots and a blooming plant and some thalium [sic—should be “thallium”] oxide. She planted tree-of-life but the crop failed after a time, so she came back near five thousand falans ago. She stayed with me for not long. I haven’t seen her since. Either she grew a better garden or she’s dead.”
“Yeah. Teela had the same idea? Roots, plants, thallium oxide. If there’s a good place to plant all that, then Anne’s garden was in it. Teela would know what it was.”
“Anne would hide it well.”
“You can’t hide plants from sunlight. She couldn’t put it where any passing hominid would sniff it. She’d want it within her reach, on a spill mountain, in a place even hot-air balloons couldn’t invade. A fissure, a steep valley, maybe. And now we have to guess whether Teela saw it.”
“And if she did?”
Louis sighed. “Bram, what have you got on living protectors?”
“Hindmost, show him. I propose to bathe.”
Chapter 25
Default Option
A hundred miles above the spill mountain tops, the probe accelerated. The Ringworld raced toward and past it like a frozen river bigger than worlds, but no longer at 770 miles per second. The probe was catching up.
Louis asked the puppeteer, “Are we in view of that comet installation you didn’t blast?”
“Yes, it’s far enough above the Ringworld plane, but we will have landed before the light reaches the comet.”
Acolyte reclined, huge and silent. Chmeee had sent him to learn, and he had been learning from Bram for these past 2.2 falans. Teaching him wisdom would be a neat trick, Louis thought. Protectors had intelligence coming out of their ears, but wisdom? Could a Kzin see the difference?
“And you’ve blasted everything else that can see us.”
“Yes.”
“Stet. Show us the rim.”
“I can’t really show you protectors, Louis. It’s what Bram asked, but I cannot magnify so greatly.”
“What have you got?”
The Hindmost had months, falans, of observing the rim wall and the spill mountains. Winking heliographs were everywhere, not just on the rim wall. Several times the probe had caught daylit flashes from—one presumed—client species on the flatlands.
A village flashed past, and the Hindmost froze it for their eyes: a thousand houses spreading out from one side of a magnificent waterfall, eight to ten thousand feet high. On the other side of the falls, a dockyard for hot air balloons, marked by a cliff splashed with bright orange paint. Below the dockyard, clustered factories and warehouses ran down the ice and rocks to another orange boulder and a lower landing pad. Come in high or come in low, travelers would find refuge.
The Hindmost jumped the view to another village fifty million miles away. A spread across a shallow green hillside: houses with sloped sod roofs, and a vertical row of industrial works with orange-marked landing pads above and below.
Louis said, “Acolyte, you’ve seen a lot more of this than I have. What am I likely to miss?”
“I can’t guess what you might miss, Louis. They have no more problem with garbage disposal than a school of fish. They—”
Louis laughed widely, white teeth showing. Acolyte waited it out. “Their houses differ but their placement follows a pattern. Balloons and factories are alike everywhere. Bram and I surmise that the Night People mirrors can relay designs, maps, weather alerts, perhaps written music: a trade in ideas.”
“Trade between stars is like that.”
The rim wall was a continuous sheet of scrith, of Ringworld floor material as strong as the force that held an atomic nucleus together. Even that force wasn’t as strong as a meteoroid moving at Ringworld speed, and Louis noted a punch hole high up on the rim wall, a few million miles antispin from the other Great Ocean. Otherwise the great empty mountings stood three million miles apart along a featureless rim, and a slender thread ran along the top for a third of its length. They’d seen that eleven years ago: a maglev track, never finished.
Twenty-three of the mounts now held motors. At highest magnification, the tiny pairs of toroids were just visible.
“Here is what they look like firing.” The puppeteer jumped the view, fast-forward.
The change was not great. Hydrogen fusion radiates mostly X rays. A fusion motor radiates visible light because it is hot, or because working mass has been added to increase thrust. When a rim wall motor was firing, the wire outline glowed white-hot, and flexed against the plasma’s magnetic fields. The toroids were the wasp-waist constriction in an hourglass of white-hot wire, and an indigo ghost flame ran down the axis. Twenty-two of those in a row.
The Hindmost displayed successive views of work around the twenty-third motor. There were cranes and cables big enough to see, and flatbed things that might be used for magnetic levitation, but not a hope of seeing anything man-sized.
And all Louis could think of was his need to talk where Bram couldn’t hear.
The protector was using the bath setup in the crew cabin. No doubt that equipment had kept Chmeee and Louis sane, and Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok, too. Still, it was cramped and complicated and primitive. They could hear the whisper of spray through the wall.
Louis said, testing, “Given he bathes at all, I’m surprised he didn’t use your cabin.”
“Louis, I wish now that I could show you my cabin. The dedicated stepping disk is hardwired. It cannot move an alien.”
The Kzin rumbled, “You value your privacy greatly.”
“You know better. I want company,” the Hindmost said. “Louis or even you, if I cannot surround myself with my kind. We follow our fears. I followed my fear when I shaped this ship.”
“You persuaded Bram of that?”
“I hope so. It’s true.”
The probe was an hour short of matching the Ringworld’s spin. Louis said, “We’re going to have to use pressure suits. Let’s do something about them.”
“I keep my own well-maintained,” the puppeteer said.
“Stet. Send me and Acolyte to the lander bay.”
“I should come,” the Hindmost said. “There’s other equipment I should see to.”
They flicked out.
***
“We cannot be heard here,” the Hindmost assured them.
Acolyte snorted. Louis said, “Suppose a protector-level intelligence really wanted to hear us?”
“No, Louis. I intended to spy on you and Chmeee and—” Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t made the cut. “I made this my listening post. No entity could add a spy device in the lander bay without signaling me.”
Maybe. “Hindmost, aren’t you safe when you’re in your own cabin?”
“Bram has a way to attack me there.”
“Can you block it?”
“I haven’t worked out what he has.”
“A good bluff? Bram’s had a long time to work on you. He has you terrified.”
The Hindmost’s gaze converged on Louis: binocular vision with a baseline of three feet. “You have never understood us. The hidden protector fri
ghtened me from the first. I remain frightened. However you plan to circumvent Bram, I may accept the risk or reject it, but only on the odds. I do not turn my mind from danger.”
“I don’t expect to break my contract.”
“Excellent.”
There were pressure suits and air racks designed for humans. He and Bram would need two of everything. Louis checked pressure zips on the suits and the racks. He emptied waste recycler reservoirs and filled nutrient reservoirs, flushed the interiors of the suits and the air and water tanks, topped off the air, charged the batteries.
Acolyte was tending his own suit. The Hindmost was inspecting a stack of stepping disks.
Louis said, “I know why Teela Brown died.”
The Hindmost said, “Protectors die fairly easily, when they no longer feel needed—”
Louis shook his head. “She found something. Maybe it was Anne’s garden, maybe just fingerprints on the rim wall motors. Whatever, she knew there was a protector in the Repair Center. She had to get Needle into the Map of Mars, but when she did that, she made us hostages. The only way to make us safe was to die. But—”
“Louis, we don’t have time. What do you want of us?”
“I want to change the stepping disk pattern without Bram knowing. Then I may want to change it back. I’m not sure I’m right yet. I need a default option.”
The Kzin asked, “Default option?”
The Hindmost answered, “Decide in advance what you will do if you don’t have time to decide.”
“Like the first move you learn in fighting with a Kzin dagger, a wtsai,” Louis said. “If you’re attacked too fast to think, there’s your training.”
“The disembowel.”
“Whatever. I just knew there must be one. Epees and handguns and hand-to-hand and yogatsu, it doesn’t matter: you train the moves into your reflex arcs so you don’t have to make up something while you’re being attacked. Likewise, you instruct a computer on what to do if you don’t tell it what to do.”
“Clever notion,” said the Kzin.
“Hindmost, I don’t quite understand your stepping disk network …”
They discussed it. The system wanted to know that you really meant the change you’d whistled or typed in. Push the edge of the disk down.
“Stet. Now I can do this and you cannot notice. We have deniability. Acolyte, I’ll need a distraction.”
“See if you can describe it,” Acolyte said.
“I haven’t the faintest bloody idea. I only need it for about two breaths.”
***
As they flicked through to the cabin, the Hindmost was saying, “Louis, are you aware that you were dying?”
Louis smiled faintly. “Tradition says that everyone is dying. Exceptions may be made for puppeteers and protectors. Hello, Bram. Any change?”
Bram was in a rage. “Hindmost, amplify the light and zoom. The village!”
The probe was moving through shadow; but much closer than the distant oncoming band of daylight was a glimpse of pattern crusting the dim snow-colors of a passing spill mountain.
The Hindmost sang flute and strings. The pattern brightened and began to expand.
The spill mountain village looked like a great blotchy cross seen from almost overhead. Houses were white of a different shade from the snowfields: sloped roofs under a snow blanket, strung out along ledges on a background of naked rock and snow laced with dark paths, sparsely patterned along twenty miles and more. Factories and warehouses crossed that band vertically, much more closely clustered, running from six to ten thousand feet high. At top and bottom were angular blobs of bright orange and bits of other colors, too.
Bram’s temper was under tight control. “You were needed. I feared the probe would pass before you returned. Can you see why that might be a concern?”
“Not … yes.”
Then Louis saw, too. Three bright silver squares: three of the oversized cargo plates. One was bare; one was loaded with cargo, hard to see for what it was. The third, a brown square with a bright rim: the Machine People cruiser still riding its cargo plate. It was tethered at the upper dock next to a naked rock cliff painted bright orange, and two patches of yellow and orange and cobalt blue: deflated balloons.
“That was a quick ride,” Louis said.
Daylight swept upon them at 770 miles per second. The view flashed bright, then dimmed to truer colors.
Acolyte reminded them: “They have their own webeye.”
The Hindmost popped up a window next to the probe’s—four now. They were now seeing through the bow of the cruiser.
Here were Red Herders muffled in lovely furs striped gray and white. Louis only glimpsed red hands in long loose sleeves, flat noses and dark eyes deep within hoods, but who else could they be? The Fearless Vampire Slayers. Several larger furry shapes must be Spill Mountain People. Their hands were broad, with thick, stubby fingers. Glimpses of faces inside hoods were silver-gray, like the hands.
They panted out puffs of frost as they worked. Red hands and brown hands gripped the fuzzy edges of the window, and the view wobbled.
The Hindmost said, “The probe will be well past before we can slow. Shall I bring it back for another view?”
Bram said, “Why? We have our view. Hindmost, we’re closing on the near end of the rim wall transport rail, and possible witnesses. Take the probe over the rim when you can.”
“Aye aye. Twelve minutes.”
The probe was in full daylight now, leaving the village far aft. The dismounted webeye was in jerky motion, carried along footholds and handholds chopped in stone. Windows overlaid on windows.
Bram asked, “Where have you been?”
Louis answered. “The time to check a pressure suit—”
“Yes. Report.”
“—is before you’re breathing vacuum—”
“You used a checklist. I use my mind.”
“And your first mistake will be memorable.”
“Report.”
“I can’t speak for a puppeteer’s suit. Ours will keep us alive for two falans. We refilled and recharged everything fillable and chargeable. The Hindmost still has six stepping disks not in use, and we can recycle some of what we’re using now. We can put webeyes anywhere. There aren’t any weapons in the lander bay. I assume you’ve stored them somewhere. You decide what you want us to be carrying. We couldn’t think of anything else to check.”
Bram said nothing.
Hidden Patriarch’s crow’s nest showed no change, and the Hindmost whistle-bonged that window off. The refueling probe ran along a rim wall touched with violet. The next window over rolled wobbling along a path that had become more than a rock climb, downhill toward rectangular patches of snow.
The Hindmost said, “You were dying.”
“Did you see … never mind,” Louis said. “Show me that medical report.”
The puppeteer chimed. Louis Wu’s medical record partly blocked both windows. “There, it’s in Interspeak.”
Chemical … major restructure … diverticulosis … tanj. “You can get used to what age does to you, Hindmost. Old people used to say, ‘If you can wake up in the morning with nothing hurting anywhere, it’s a sign that you have died in the night.’ ”
“Not funny.”
“But even an idiot might guess something’s wrong when he starts pissing gas with his urine.”
“I would have thought it rude to observe you at such a time.”
“I am much relieved. Even so, would you have noticed?” Louis read further. “Diverticulosis, that’s little blowout patches on your colon—my colon. Diverticuli [sic—should be “Diverticula”] can hurt you lots of ways. Mine seems to have extended far enough to attach itself to my bladder. Then it got infected and blew through. That left a tube connecting my colon and my bladder. A fistula.”
“What did you think?”
“I had the medkit. It was giving me antibiotics. For a couple of days I hoped … well, bacteria can get into a human bladder a
nd make gas, but antibiotics would have cleared that up. So I knew I needed a plumber.”
Acolyte didn’t usually stare directly into anyone’s eyes, but he did now. His ears were folded out of sight. “You were dying? Dying when you refused the Hindmost’s offers?”
“Yes. Hindmost, if you’d known, would you have accepted my contract?”
“Not a serious question. Louis, I’m expressing admiration. You are a scary negotiator.”
“Thank you.”
Bram said, “Please restore our view from the probe … Thank you. In six minutes we’ll move up the rim wall and cross to the outside. I trust we won’t lose the signal, Hindmost?”
“Scrith stops a percentage of neutrinos. Implied is some kind of nuclear reaction ongoing in the Ringworld floor, but the signal will dwindle predictably and I can compensate.”
Bram said, “Good. Is my suit in order?”
“It’s my spare, after all,” Louis said. “Take whichever suit feels lucky to you. I’ll take the other.”
The probe was slowing, slowing.
“Now?”
“Now.”
Chapter 26
The Dockyard
HIGH POINT, A.D. 2893
The cruiser and its cargo plate rose through the night. Warvia and Tegger clung to each other in the payload shell. Fear of heights was a terrible thing. They both shrieked when they felt the bump, then laughed because they were still alive.
Leaving the protection of the payload shell was an ordeal. They gasped and shivered in the thin, cold air. The sun was just peeping around a shadow square.
The Ghouls blinked in the growing daylight and crawled into the payload shell to sleep.
Harpster had brought them down at the higher of two orange-splashed cliffs, alongside another floating plate and three baskets attached to collapsed balloons.
The village was stirring. Downslope and to the sides, furred shapes moved out from snow-roofed houses to forage in the tilted lands beyond.
Even to a nomad like Tegger, this wasn’t a large village. Then again, it was nearly invisible. The roofs were rectangles of snow on a snowfield; you picked them out by their shadows.
