The Ringworld Engineers

Chapter 23 — Final Offer

He was in a great echoing glass bottle, in near darkness. Twilight-shrouded, half-dismantled spacecraft showed through the transparent walls. The probe had been returned to clamps on the back wall of the cargo hold, eight feet off the gray-painted floor. And Louis nestled in the probe, in the gap where the deuterium filter had been, like an egg in an egg cup.

Louis swung out, hung by his hands, and dropped. He was tired to the bone. One last complication, now, and then he could rest. Safety was just the other side of an impenetrable wall. He could see the sleeping plates…

“Good.” The Hindmost’s voice spoke from somewhere near the ceiling. “Is that the reading screen? I expected nothing so bulky. Did you have to chop it in half?”

“Yah.” He had also dropped the components eight feet to the floor. Fortunately puppeteers were good with tools… ”I hope you’ve got a set of stepping discs in here.”

“I anticipated emergencies. Glance toward the forward left… Louis!”

A moan of unearthly terror rose behind him. Louis spun around.

Harkabeeparolyn was nestled in the probe, where Louis had been a moment ago. Her hands strangled the stock of a projectile weapon. Her lips were skinned back from her teeth. Her eyes could not find rest. They flicked up, down, left, right, and found no comfort anywhere.

The Hindmost spoke in a monotone. “Louis, who is this that invades my spacecraft? Is it dangerous?”

“No, relax. It’s just a confused librarian. Harkabeeparolyn, go back.”

Her keening rose in pitch. Suddenly she wailed, “I know this place, I’ve seen it in the map room! It’s the starship haven, outside the world! Luweewu, what are you?”

Louis pointed the flashlight-laser at her. “Go back.”

“No! You’ve wrecked the stolen library property. But if — if the world is threatened, I want to help!”

“Help how, you crazy woman? Look: you go back to the Library. Find out where the immortality drug came from before the Fall of the Cities. That’s the place we’re looking for. If there’s any way to move the world without the big motors, that’s where we’ll find the controls.”

She shook her head. “I don’t… How can you know that?”

“It’s their home base. The pro — the Ringworld engineers had to have certain plants growing somewhere close… Tanj… I’m guessing. I’m only guessing. Tanj dammit!” Louis held his head. It was throbbing like a big drum. “I didn’t ask for any of this. I was kidnapped!”

Harkabeeparolyn swung herself out from the probe and dropped. Her coarse blue robe was damp with sweat. She looked a good deal like Halrloprillalar. “I can help. I can read to you.”

“We’ve got a machine for that.”

She came closer. The weapon drooped as if forgotten. “We did it to ourselves, didn’t we? My people took the world’s steering motors for our starships. Can I help set that right?”

The Hindmost said, “Louis, the woman cannot return. The stepping disc in the first probe is still a transmitter. Is that a weapon in her hands?”

“Harkabeeparolyn, give me that.”

She did. Louis held the projectile weapon awkwardly. It looked to be of Machine People make.

The Hindmost told him, “Carry it to the forward left corner of the cargo bay. The transmitter is there.”

“I don’t see it.”

“I painted it over. Set the weapon in the corner and step back. Woman, hold your place!”

Louis obeyed. The gun disappeared. Louis almost missed a flick of motion beyond the hull as the weapon dropped onto the spaceport ledge. The Hindmost had set a stepping-disc receiver on the outside of the hull.

Louis marveled. There were elements of Renaissance Italy in the puppeteer’s paranoia.

“Good. Next — Louis! Another!”

A brown-fuzzed scalp poked out of the probe. It was the boy from the map room, stark naked and dripping wet and on the verge of toppling out as he stretched to look about him. His eyes were big with wonder. He was just the right age for confrontation with magic.

Louis bellowed, “Hindmost! Turn off those stepping discs now!”

“I have. I should have earlier. Who is this?”

“A librarian child. He’s got a six-syllable name and I can’t remember it.”

“Kawaresksenjajok,” the boy shouted, smiling. “Where are we, Luweewu? What are we doing here?”

“Finagle only knows.”

“Louis! I will not have these aliens on my ship!”

“If you’re thinking of spacing them, forget it. I won’t allow it.”

“Then they must stay in the cargo hold, and so will you. I think you planned this, you and Chmeee. I should never have trusted either of you.”

“You never did.”

“Repeat, please?”

“We’ll starve in here.”

There was a longish pause. Kawaresksenjajok dropped lithely from the probe. He and Harkabeeparolyn engaged in furious whispering.

“You may return to your cell,” the Hindmost said suddenly. “They may stay here. I will leave a stepping-disc link open so that you may feed them. This may work out very well.”

“How?”

“Louis, it is good that some Ringworld natives survive.”

The Ringworlders weren’t close enough to hear Louis’s translator. He said, “You’re not thinking of giving up now, are you? What’s in these tapes could take us straight to the magic transmutation device.”

“Yes, Louis. And the wealth from the Maps of several worlds may be in Chmeee’s hands right now. We may count on distance to protect us for two or three days, no more. We must go soon.”

The natives looked around at Louis’s approach. He said, “Harkabeeparolyn, help me carry the reading machine.”

Ten minutes later the spools and the reading machine and the severed screen were with the Hindmost on the flight deck. Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok awaited further orders.

“You’ll have to stay here for a bit,” Louis told them. “I don’t know just what’s going to happen. I’ll send you food and bedding. Trust me.” He could feel the guilt in his face as he turned quickly and stepped into the corner.

A moment later he was back in his cell — pressure suit, vest, and all.

Louis stripped himself and dialed for a set of informal pajamas. Already he felt better. He was tired, but Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok had to be provided for. The kitchen would not give him blankets. He dialed for four voluminous hooded ponchos and sent them through the stepping discs.

He reached back into his memory. What did Halrloprillalar like to eat? She was an omnivore, but she preferred fresh foods. He chose provisions for them. Through the wall he watched their dubious expressions as they examined it.

He dialed for walnuts and a pedigreed Burgundy for himself. Munching and sipping, he activated the sleeping field, tumbled into it, and stretched out in free fall to think.

Lyar Building would pay for his banditry. Had Harkabeeparolyn left the superconductor cloth behind in the library to help pay for the damage? He didn’t even know that.

What was Valavirgillin doing now? Frightened for her whole species, for her whole world, and with no way to do anything about it, courtesy of Louis Wu. The woman and boy in the cargo hold must be just as frightened… and if Louis Wu died in the next few hours, they would not survive him long.

It was all part of the price. His own life was on the line too.

Step one: Get the flashlight-laser aboard Needle. Done.

Step two: Could the Ringworld be moved back into position? In the next few hours he might prove that it was not possible. It would depend on the magnetic properties of scrith.

If the Ringworld could not be saved, then flee.

If the Ringworld could be saved, then—

Step three: Make a decision. Was it possible for Chmeee and Louis Wu to return alive to known space? If not, then—

Step four: Mutiny.

He should have left that patch of superconductor cloth in Lyar Building itself. He should have reminded the Hindmost to disconnect the probe’s stepping discs. The fact was that Louis Wu had been making some poor decisions lately. It bothered him. His next moves were going to be savagely important.

But for the moment, he would steal a few hours’ sleep… to match his other thefts.

Voices, dimly heard. Louis stirred, and turned in free fall, and looked about him.

Beyond the aft wall, Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok were in animated conversation with the ceiling. To Louis it was gibberish. He didn’t have his translator. But the City Builders were pointing into a rectangular hologram floating outside the hull, blocking part of the spaceport ledge.

Through that “window” Louis could see the sunlit courtyard of a gray stone castle. Rough-hewn stone in big masses; lots of right angles. The only windows were vertical arrow slits. Some kind of ivy was crawling up one of the walls. Luxuriant pale-yellow ivy with scarlet veins.

Louis pushed himself out of the field.

The puppeteer was at his bench on the flight deck. Today his mane was a cloudy phosphorescent glow. He turned one head at Louis’s approach. “Louis, I trust you are rested?”

“Yah, and I needed it, too. Any progress?”

“I was able to repair the reading machine. Needle’s computer doesn’t know enough of the City Builder tongue to read tapes about physics. I hope to pick up a vocabulary by talking to the natives.”

“How much longer? I’ve got some questions about the Ringworld’s general design.” Could the Ringworld floor, the whole six hundred million million square miles of it, be used to manipulate the Ringworld’s position electromagnetically? If he could know for sure!

“Ten to twenty hours, I think. We all need to rest occasionally.”

Too long, Louis thought, with the repair crew coming down their throats. Too bad. “Where’s the picture coming from? The lander?”

“Yes.”

“Can we get a message to Chmeee?”

“No.”

“Why not? He must be carrying his translator.”

“I made the mistake of turning the translator function off by way of coercion. He isn’t carrying it.”

“What happened?” Louis asked. “What’s he doing in a medieval castle?”

The Hindmost said, “It has been twenty hours since Chmeee reached the Map of Kzin. I’ve told you how he made his reconnaissance flight, how he allowed kzinti aircraft to attack him, how he landed on the great ship and waited while they continued their attacks. The attacks lasted some six hours before Chmeee himself broke off and flew elsewhere. I wish I understood what he hoped to gain, Louis.”

“I don’t know either, really. Go on.”

“The aircraft followed him some way, then turned back. Chmeee continued to search. He found a stretch of wilderness with a small, walled stone castle on the highest peak. He landed in the courtyard. He was attacked, of course, but the defenders had nothing but swords and bows and the like. When they were well assembled around the lander, he sprayed them with stun cannon. Then he—”

“Hold it.”

A kzin sprinted out of one of the rounded arches and across the gray flagstones, moving toward the hologram window at a four-legged dead run. It had to be Chmeee; he was wearing impact armor. An arrow protruded from his eye, a long wooden arrow with papery leaves for feathering.

Other kzinti ran behind him,, waving swords and maces. Arrows fell from the slit windows and glanced from his impact armor. As Chmeee reached the lander’s airlock, a thread of light lashed from a window. The laser beam chewed flame from the flagstones, then focused on the lander. Chmeee had disappeared. The beam held… then snuffed out as the slit window exploded in red and white flame.

“Careless,” the Hindmost murmured. “Giving such a weapon to enemies!” His other mouth nibbled at the controls. He switched to an inside camera. Louis watched Chmeee lock the airlock, then stagger toward the autodoc, struggling to take off his impact armor, dropping it as he moved. The kzin’s leg was gashed beneath the armor. He heaved the lid of the autodoc up and more or less fell inside.

“Tanj! He hasn’t turned the monitors on! Hindmost, we’ve got to help him.”

“How, Louis? If you tried to reach him via stepping discs, you would be heated to fusion temperatures. Between your velocity and the lander’s—”

“Yah.” The Great Ocean was thirty-five degrees around the curve of the Ringworld. The kinetic energy difference would be enough to blast a city. There was no way to help.

Chmeee lay bleeding.

Suddenly he cried out. He half turned over. His thick fingers stabbed at the autodoc’s keyboard. He heaved himself on his back, reached up and pulled the cover closed.

“Good enough,” Louis said. The arrow had entered the socket at a sharp outward angle. It might have missed destroying brain tissue… or it might not. “He was careless, all right. Okay, go on.”

“Chmeee used stun cannon to irradiate the entire castle. Then he spent three hours loading unconscious kzinti onto repulser platforms and taking them outside. He barred the gates. He went away, into the castle. For nine hours I saw nothing of him. Why are you grinning?”

“He didn’t take any females outside, did he?”

“No. I think I see.”

“He was tanj lucky to get his armor on fast enough. He got that slash on his leg before he finished.”

“It does seem that Chmeee is no threat to me.”

He’d be in the ‘doc twenty to forty hours, Louis estimated. Now it was Louis Wu’s decision alone. “There’s something we ought to discuss with him, but I guess there’s no help for it. Hindmost, please record the following conversation. Send it to the lander on a looped tape. I want it in Chmeee’s ears when he wakes up.”

The puppeteer reached behind him; he seemed to chew at the control panel. “Done. What is it we are to discuss?”

“Chmeee and I haven’t been able to make ourselves believe that you’ll take us back to known space. Or even that you can.”

The puppeteer peered at him from two directions. His flat heads spread wide, giving him binocular effect, the better to study his dubious ally and possible enemy. He asked, “Why should I not, Louis?”

“First, we know too much. Second, you don’t have any reason to go back to any world in known space. With or without the magic transmuter, the place you want to be is the Fleet of Worlds.”

Muscles in the puppeteer’s hindquarters flexed restlessly. (That was the leg a puppeteer fought with: turn your back on the enemy, zero in with wide-spaced eyes, kick!) He said, “Would that be so bad?”

“It might be better than staying here,” Louis conceded. “What did you have in mind?”

“We can make your lives very comfortable. You know that we have the kzinti longevity drug. We can supply boosterspice, too. There is room in Needle for hominid and kzinti females, and in fact we have a City Builder female aboard. You would travel in stasis, so crowding is not a problem. You and your entourage may settle on one of the four farming worlds of the Fleet. You would virtually own it.”

“What if we got bored with the pastoral life?”

“Nonsense. You would have access to the libraries of the home world. Access to knowledge humanity has wondered about since first we revealed ourselves! The Fleet is moving through space at nearly lightspeed, eventually to reach the Clouds of Magellan. With us you will escape the galactic core explosion. Likely we will need you to explore… interesting territories ahead of our path.”

“You mean dangerous.”

“What else would I mean?”

Louis was more tempted than he would have expected. How would Chmeee take such an offer? Vengeance postponed? A chance to damage the puppeteer home world in some indefinite future? Or simple cowardice?

He asked, “Is this offer contingent on our finding a magic transmuter?”

“No. Your talents are needed regardless. However… any promise I make now would be more easily carried out under an Experimentalist regime. Conservatives might not recognize your value, let alone Chmeee’s.”

That was nicely phrased, Louis conceded. “Speaking of Chmeee—”

“The kzin has defected, but I leave my offer open to him. He has found kzinti females to save. Perhaps you can persuade him.”

“I wonder.”

“And after all, you may see your worlds again. In a thousand years, known space may have forgotten the puppeteers. Mere decades will have passed for you, falling near lightspeed with the Fleet of Worlds.”

“I want time to think it over. I’ll put it to Chmeee when I get the chance.” Louis glanced behind him. The City Builders were watching him. It was a pity he couldn’t consult them, because he was deciding their fate too.

But he had decided. “What I’d like to do next,” he said, “is move on to the Great Ocean. We could come up through Fist-of-God Mountain and go slowly enough—”

“I have no intention of moving the Needle at all. There may be threats other than the meteor defense, and surely it is enough!”

“I’ll bet I can change your mind. Do you remember finding a rig for hoisting the Bussard ramjets on the rim wall? Have a look at that rig now.”

For a moment the puppeteer remained frozen. Then he whirled and was out of sight behind the opaque wall of his quarters.

And that ought to keep him busy long enough.

At his leisure Louis Wu moved to his pile of discarded clothing and equipment. He fished the flashlight-laser out of his vest. Step four: coming up. A pity his autodoc was in the lander, a hundred million miles out of reach. He might need it soon.

There was certainly flare shielding on the outer hall of Needle. Every ship had that, at least on the windows. Under the impact of too much light, flare shielding became a mirror, and maybe saved the pilot’s eyesight.

It stopped solar flares, and it stopped lasers. If the Hindmost had set impervious walls between himself and his captive crew, surely he would have coated the entire flight deck with shielding.

But what about the floor?

Louis knelt. The hyperdrive motor ran the whole length of the ship; it was bronze colored, with some copper and hullmetal. Puppeteer machinery, with all angles rounded, it looked half melted already. Louis angled the flashlight-laser into it and fired through the transparent floor.

Light glared back from the bronze surface. Metal vapor spewed. Liquid metal ran. Louis let the beam chew deep, then played it around, burning or melting anything that looked interesting. A pity he’d never studied hyperdrive system engineering.

The laser grew warm in his hand. He’d been at this for some minutes. He shifted the beam to one of the six mountings that held the motor suspended in its vacuum chamber. It didn’t melt; it softened and settled. He attacked another. The motor’s great mass sagged and twisted.

The narrow beam flickered, strobelike, then faded. Battery dead. Louis tossed the flashlight-laser away from him, remembering that the puppeteer could make it explode in his hand.

He strolled to the forward wall of his cage. The puppeteer wasn’t in sight, but presently Louis heard the sound of a steam calliope dying in agony.

The puppeteer trotted around the opaque green section and stood facing him. Muscles quivered beneath his skin.

“Come,” said Louis Wu, “let us reason together.”

Without haste, the puppeteer tucked both heads beneath his forelegs and let his legs fold under him.

Chapter 24 — Counterproposal

Louis Wu woke clearheaded and hungry. For a few minutes he rested, savoring free fall; then he reached out and killed the field. His watch said he’d slept seven hours.

Needle’s guests were sleeping beneath one of the tremendous clamps that had held the lander in place during flight. The white-haired woman slept restlessly, tangled in her ponchos, with one bare leg sticking out. The brown-haired boy slept like a baby.

There was no way to wake them, and no point. The wall wouldn’t carry sound, and the translator didn’t work. And the stepping-disc link would carry no more than a few pounds. Had the puppeteer really expected some kind of complex conspiracy? Louis smiled. His mutiny had been simplicity itself.

He dialed a toasted-cheese handmeal and ate while he padded to the forward wall of his cell.

In repose the Hindmost was a smooth egg shape, covered in hide, with a cloud of white hair tufting the big end. His legs and his heads were hidden beneath him. He hadn’t moved in seven hours.

Louis had seen Nessus do that. It was a puppeteer’s response to shock: to tuck himself into his navel and make the universe disappear. Well and good, but nine hours seemed excessive. If the puppeteer had been driven into catatonia by Louis’s shock treatment, that could be the end of everything.

The puppeteer’s ears were in his heads. Louis’s words must carry through a thickness of meat and bone. He shouted, “Let me offer you several points to ponder!”

The puppeteer did not respond. Louis raised his voice in soliloquy. “This structure is sliding into its sun. There are things we can do about that, but we can’t do any of them while you contemplate your navel. Nobody but you can control any of Needle’s instruments, sensors, drives, etcetera, and that’s just the way you planned it. So: every minute you spend imitating a footstool, you and I and Chmeee come one minute closer to an opportunity no astrophysicist could resist.”

He finished his handmeal while he waited, Puppeteers were superb linguists, in any number of alien languages. Would a puppeteer respond to a narrative hook?

And in fact the Hindmost exposed one head far enough to ask, “What opportunity?”

“The chance to study sunspots from underneath.”

The head withdrew under the puppeteer’s belly.

Louis bellowed, “The repair team is coming!”

Head and neck reappeared and bellowed in response. “What have you done to us? What have you done to me, to yourself, to two natives who might have fled the fire? Did you have thought for anything besides mere vandalism?”

“I did. You said it once. Some day we must decide who rules this expedition. This is the day,” said Louis Wu. “Let me tell you why you should be taking my orders.”

“I never guessed that a wirehead would lust for mere power.”

“Make that point one. I’m better at guessing than you are.”

“Proceed.”

“We’re not leaving here. Even the Fleet of Worlds is out of reach at slower-than-light speeds. If the Ringworld goes, we all go. We’ve got to put it back in position somehow.

“Third point. The Ringworld engineers have been dead for at least a quarter of a million years,” Louis said carefully. “Chmeee would say a couple of million. The hominids couldn’t have mutated and evolved while the Ringworld engineers were alive. They wouldn’t have allowed it. They were Pak protectors.”

Louis had expected horror or terror or surprise. The puppeteer showed only resignation. “Xenophobes,” he said. “Vicious and hardy and very intelligent.”

He must have suspected.

“My ancestors,” said Louis. “They built the Ringworld, and they built whatever system is supposed to hold it in place. Which of us has a better chance of thinking like a Pak protector? One of us has to try.”

“These arguments would mean nothing if you had left us the chance to run. Louis, I trusted you.”

“I wouldn’t like to think you were that stupid. We didn’t volunteer for this expedition. Kzinti and humans, we make poor slaves.”

“Did you have a fourth argument?”

Louis grimaced. “Chmeee is disappointed in me. He wants to force you to his will. If I can tell him you’re taking my orders, he’ll be impressed. And we need him.”

“We do, yes. He may think more like a Pak protector than you do.”

“Well?”

“Your orders?”

Louis told him.

Harkabeeparolyn had rolled over and was on her feet before she saw Louis stepping out of the corner. Then she gasped, crouched, and disappeared into the ponchos. A lumpy poncho slithered toward a discarded blue robe.

Peculiar behavior. City Builders with a nudity taboo? Should Louis have worn clothing? He did what he considered tactful: he turned his back on her and joined the boy.

The boy was at the wall, looking out at the great dismembered starships. The poncho he wore was too big for him. “Luweewu,” he asked, “were those our ships?”

“Yah.”

The boy smiled. “Did your people build ships that big?”

Louis tried to remember. “The slowboats were almost that size. We needed very big ships before we broke the lightspeed barrier.”

“Is this one of your ships? Can it travel faster than light?”

“It could once. Not any more. I think the number four General Products hulls were even bigger than yours, but we didn’t build those. They were puppeteer ships.”

“That was a puppeteer we were talking to yesterday, wasn’t it? He asked about you. We couldn’t tell him much.”

Harkabeeparolyn had come to join them. She had recovered her composure with her blue librarian’s robe. She asked, “Has our status changed, Luweewu? We were told that you would not be allowed to visit us.” It was an effort for her to look him in the face.

“I’ve taken command,” Louis said.

“So easily?”

“I paid a price—”

The boy’s voice cut in. “Luweewu? We’re moving!”

“It’s all right.”

“Can you make it darker in here?”

Louis shouted the lights out. Immediately he felt more comfortable. The dark hid his nakedness. Harkabeeparolyn’s attitude was contagious.

Hot Needle of Inquiry lifted twelve feet above the spaceport ledge. Quickly, almost furtively, with no display of pyrotechnics, the ship drifted to the edge of the world and off.

“Where are we going?” the woman demanded.

“Under the world. We’ll end up at the Great Ocean.”

There was no sensation of falling, but the spaceport ledge was falling silently upward. The Hindmost let them drop several miles before he activated the thrusters: Needle decelerated and began edging beneath the Ringworld.

The edge of blackness slid across to become the sky. Below was a sea of stars, brighter than anything a Ringworld native could have seen through depths of air and scattered Archlight. But the sky was essence of black. The Ringworld’s sheath of foamed scrith reflected no starlight.

Louis still felt uncomfortable in his nudity. “I’m going back to my room,” he said. “Why don’t you join me? There’s food and a change of clothing, and better beds if you want them.”

Harkabeeparolyn flicked into existence, last in line on the stepping disc, and flinched violently. Louis laughed aloud. She tried to glare at him, but her eyes shied away. Naked!

Louis dialed for a falling jumper and covered himself. “Better?”

“Yes, better. Do you think I am foolish?”

“No, I think you don’t have climate control. You can’t go naked most places, so it looks strange to you. I could be wrong.”

“You could be right,” she said, surprised.

“You slept on a hard deck last night. Try the water bed. It’s big enough for both of you and a couple more, and Chmeee isn’t using it right now.”

Kawaresksenjajok flung himself bodily onto the fur-covered water bed. He bounced, and waves surged outward beneath the fur. “Luweewu, I like it! it’s like swimming, but dry!”

Stiff-backed with distrust, Harkabeeparolyn sat down on the uneasy surface. Dubiously she asked, “Chmeee?”

“Eight feet tall and covered with orange fur. He’s… on a mission in the Great Ocean. We’re going to get him now. You may talk him into sharing with you.”

The boy laughed. The woman said, “Your friend must find another playmate. I do not indulge in rishathra.”

Louis chortled. (The underside of his mind thought: tanj!) “Chmeee’s stranger than you think. He’s as likely to want rishathra with a weenie plant. You’d be quite safe unless he wants the whole bed, which is possible. Be careful never to shake him awake. Or you can try the sleeping plates.”

“Do you use the sleeping plates?”

“Yes.” He guessed at the meaning of her expression. “The field can be set to keep two bodies apart.” (Tanj! Did the boy’s presence inhibit her?)

She said, “Luweewu, we have inflicted ourselves on you in the middle of your mission. Did you come simply to steal knowledge?”

The correct answer would have been yes. Louis’s answer was at least true. “We’re here to save the Ringworld.”

Thoughtfully she said, “But how can I… ?” And then she was staring past Louis’s shoulder.

The Hindmost waited beyond the forward wall, and he was glorious. Now his claws were tipped with silver, and he wore his mane in gold and silver strands. The short, pale hair over the rest of his body had been brushed to a glow. “Harkabeeparolyn, Kawaresksenjajok, be welcome,” he sang. “Your aid is urgently needed. We have traveled a vast distance between the stars in hope of saving your peoples and your world from a fiery death.”

Louis swallowed laughter. Fortunately his guests had eyes only for the Pierson’s puppeteer.

“Where are you from?” the boy demanded of the puppeteer. “What is it like?”

The puppeteer tried to tell them. He spoke of worlds falling through space at near lightspeed, five worlds arrayed in a pentagon, a Kemplerer rosette. Artificial suns circled four, to grow food for the population of the fifth. The fifth world glowed only by the light of its streets and buildings. Continents blazed yellow-white, oceans dark. Isolated brilliant stars surrounded by mist were factories floating on the sea, their waste heat boiling the water. Waste industrial heat alone kept the world from freezing.

The boy forgot to breathe as he listened. But the librarian spoke softly to herself. “He must come from the stars. He is shaped like no living thing known anywhere.”

The puppeteer spoke of crowded streets, tremendous buildings, parks that were the last refuge of a world’s native life. He spoke of stepping-disc arrays whereby one could walk around the world in minutes.

Harkabeeparolyn shook her head violently. Her voice rose. “Please, we don’t have time. I’m sorry, Kawa! We want to hear more, we need to know more, but — the world, the sun! Louis, I never should have doubted you. What can we do to help?”

The Hindmost said, “Read to me.”

Kawaresksenjajok lay on his back, watching the back of the world roll past him.

Needle ran beneath a featureless black roof in which the Hindmost had set two hologram “windows.” One wide rectangle showed a light-amplified view; the other examined the Ringworld’s underside by infrared light. In infrared the underside of day still glowed brighter than night-shadowed land; and rivers and seas were dark by day and light by night.

“Like the back of a mask, see?” Louis kept his voice down to avoid interrupting Harkabeeparolyn. “That branching river chain: see how it stands out? The seas bulge too. And that line of dents — that’s a whole mountain range.”

“Are your worlds like that?”

“Oh, no. On one of my worlds all that would be solid underneath, and the surface would be happening by accident. Here the world was sculpted. Look, the seas are all the same depth, and they’re spaced out so there’s enough water everywhere.”

“Somebody carved the world like a bas relief?”

“Just like that.”

“Luweewu, that’s scary. What were they like?”

“They thought big, and they loved their children, and they looked like suits of armor.” Louis decided not to say more about the protectors.

The boy pointed. “What’s that?”

“I don’t know.” It was a dimple in the Ringworld’s underside… with fog in it. “I think it’s a meteor puncture. There’ll be an eye storm above it.”

The reading screen was on the flight deck, facing Harkabeeparolyn through the wall. The Hindmost had repaired the damage and added a braided cable that led into the control panel. As Harkabeeparolyn read aloud, the ship’s computer was reading the tape and correlating it to her voice and to its own stored knowledge of Halrloprillalar’s tongue. That tongue would have changed over the centuries, but not too much, not in a literate society. Hopefully the computer could take over soon.

As for the Hindmost, he had disappeared into the hidden section. The alien had suffered repeated shocks. Louis didn’t begrudge him time off for hysterics.

Needle continued to accelerate. Presently the inverse landscape was speeding past almost too fast for detail. And Harkabeeparolyn’s voice was becoming throaty. Time for a lunch break, Louis decided.

A problem emerged. Louis dialed filets mignons and baked potatoes, with Brie and French bread to follow. The boy stared in horror. So did the woman, but at Louis Wu.

“I’m sorry. I forgot. I keep thinking of you as omnivores.”

“Omnivores, yes. We eat plants and flesh both,” the librarian said. “But not decayed food!”

“Don’t get so upset. There’s no bacteria involved.” Properly aged steak, milk attacked by mold… Louis dumped their plates into the toilet and dialed again. Fruit, crudités with a separate sour-cream dip which he dumped, and seafood, including sashimi. His guests had never seen salt-water fish before. They liked it, but it made them thirsty.

And watching Louis eat made them unhappy. What was he supposed to do, starve?

They might starve. Where would he get fresh red meat for them? Why, from Chmeee’s side of the autokitchen, of course. Broil it with the laser on wide beam, high intensity. He’d have to get the Hindmost to recharge the laser. That might not be easy, considering the last use to which he’d put it.

Another problem: they might be consuming too much salt. Louis didn’t know what to do about that. Maybe the Hindmost could reset the autokitchen controls.

After lunch Harkabeeparolyn went back to her reading. By now the Ringworld was streaming past too fast for detail. Kawaresksenjajok flicked restlessly from cell to cargo hold and back again.

Louis, too, was restive. He should be studying: reviewing the records of the first voyage, or of Chmeee’s adventures to date on the Map of Kzin. But the Hindmost wasn’t available.

Gradually he became aware of another source of discomfort.

He lusted after the librarian.

He loved her voice. She’d been talking for hours, yet the lilt was still there. She’d told him that she sometimes read to blind children: children without sight. Louis got queasy just thinking about it. He liked her dignity and her courage. He liked the way the robe outlined her shape; and he’d glimpsed her nakedness.

It had been years since Louis Wu had loved a strictly human woman. Harkabeeparolyn came too close. And she wasn’t having any. When the puppeteer finally rejoined them, Louis was glad of the distraction.

They talked quietly in Interworld, below the sound of Harkabeeparolyn reading to the computer.

“Where did they come from, these amateur repairmen?” Louis wondered. “Who on the Ringworld would know enough to remount the attitude jets? Yet they don’t seem to know that it’s not enough.”

“Let them alone,” the Hindmost said.

“Maybe they know it’s not enough? Maybe the poor bleeders just can’t think of anything else to do. And there’s the question of where they got their equipment. It could have come from the Repair Center.”

“We face enough complications now. Let them alone.”

“For once I think you’re right. But I can’t help wondering. Teela Brown got her schooling in human space. Big space-built structures are nothing new to her. She’d know what it meant when the sun started sliding around.”

“Could Teela Brown have organized so large an effort?”

“Maybe not. But Seeker would be with her. Was Seeker in your tapes? He was a Ringworld native, and maybe immortal. Teela found him. A little crazy, but he could have done the organizing. He was a king more than once, he said.”

“Teela Brown was a failed experiment. We tried to breed a lucky human being, feeling that puppeteer associates would share the luck. Teela may or may not have been lucky, but her luck was surely not contagious. We do not want to meet Teela Brown.”

Louis shivered. “No.”

“Then we must avoid the attention of the repair crew.”

“Add a postscript to the tape you’re sending to Chmeee,” Louis said. “Louis Wu rejects your offer of sanctuary on the Fleet of Worlds. Louis Wu has taken command of Hot Needle of Inquiry and has destroyed the hyperdrive motor. That should shake him up.”

“It did that for me. Louis, my sensors will not penetrate scrith. Your message will have to wait.”

“How long until we reach him?”

“About forty hours. I have accelerated to a thousand miles per second. At this velocity it takes more than five gravities of acceleration to hold us in our path.”

“We can take thirty gravities. You’re being overcautious.”

“I’m aware of your opinion.”

“You don’t take orders worth a tanj,” Louis said. “Either.”

Chapter 25 — The Seeds Of Empire

Beyond the curved ceiling the Ringworld floor streamed past.

It wasn’t much of a view, not from thirty thousand miles away, passing at a thousand miles per second, and cloaked in foam padding. Presently the boy fell asleep in the orange furs. Louis continued to watch. The alternative was to float here wondering if he’d doomed them all.

And finally the Hindmost told the City Builder woman, “Enough.”

Louis tumbled off the shifting surface.

Harkabeeparolyn massaged her throat. They watched as the Hindmost ran four stolen tapes through the reading machine.

It took only a few minutes. “This now becomes the computer’s problem,” the puppeteer said. “I’ve programmed in the questions. If the answers are in the tapes, we’ll have them in a few hours, maximum. Louis, what if we don’t like the answers?”

“Let’s hear the questions.”

“Is there a history of repair activity on the Ringworld? If so, did repair machinery approach from any one source? Is repair more frequent in any given locale? Is any section of the Ringworld in better repair than the rest? Locate all references to Pak-like beings. Does the style of armor vary with distance from a central point? What are the magnetic properties of the Ringworld floor and of scrith in general?”

“Good.”

“Did I miss anything?”

“… Yah. We want the most probable source of the immortality drug. It’ll be the Great Ocean, but let’s ask anyway.”

“I will. Why the Great Ocean?”

“Oh, partly because it’s so visible. And partly because we’ve found one surviving sample of the immortality drug, and one only. Halrloprillalar had it. We found her in the vicinity of the Great Ocean.” And partly because we crashed there, Louis thought. The luck of Teela Brown distorts probability. Teela’s luck could have brought us straight to the Repair Center that first time. “Harkabeeparolyn? Can you think of anything we missed?”

Her voice was scratchy. “I don’t understand what you’re doing.”

How to explain? “Our machine remembers everything on your tapes. We tell it to search its memory for answers to given questions.”

“Ask it how to save the Ringworld.”

“We have to be more specific. The machine can remember and correlate and do sums, but it can’t think for itself. It’s not big enough.”

She shook her head.

“What if the answers are wrong?” the Hindmost persisted. “We cannot flee.”

“We try something else.”

“I have thought about this. We must go into polar orbit around the sun, to minimize the risk that a fragment of the disintegrating Ringworld will strike us. I will put Needle in stasis, to wait for rescue. Rescue will not come, but the risk is better than what we face now.”

It could come to that, Louis thought. “Fine. We’ve got a couple of years to try to find better odds.”

“Less than that. If—”

“Shut up.”

The exhausted librarian dropped onto the water bed. Imitation kzin fur surged and rippled under her. She held herself rigid for a moment, then cautiously let herself fall back. The fur continued to ripple. Presently the stiffness left her and she let herself roll with the tide. Kawaresksenjajok murmured sleepy protest and turned over.

The librarian looked most appealing. Louis resisted an urge to join her on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired. Miserable. Will I ever see my home again? If the end comes — when it comes — I’d like to wait for it on the Library roof. But the flowers will be dead by then, won’t they? Scorched and frozen.”

“Yah.” Louis was touched. Certainly he’d never see his own home again. “I’ll try to get you back. Right now you need sleep. And a back massage.”

“No.”

Strange. Wasn’t Harkabeeparolyn one of the City Builders, Halrloprillalar’s people, who had ruled the Ringworld largely through sex appeal? Sometimes it was difficult to remember that the individuals within an alien species could differ as thoroughly as humans did.

He said, “The Library staff seemed more priests than professionals. Do you practice continence?”

“While we work in the Library, we are continent. But I was continent by choice.” She rose on an elbow to look at him. “We learn that all other species lust to do rishathra with the City Builders. Is that the case with you?”

He admitted it.

“I hope you can control it.”

He sighed, “Oh, tanj, yes. I’m a thousand falans old. I’ve learned how to distract myself.”

“How?”

“Ordinarily I’d go looking for another woman.”

The librarian didn’t laugh. “What if another woman is not available?”

“Oh… exercise to exhaustion. Get drunk on ‘fuel.’ Go on sabbatical, off into interstellar space in a one-man ship. Find some other pleasure to indulge myself. Get involved in work.”

“You should not be drunk,” she said, and she was right. “What pleasure might you try?”

The droud! A touch of current and he wouldn’t care if Harkabeeparolyn turned to green slime before his eyes. Why should he care now? He didn’t admire her… well, maybe he did, a little. But she’d done her part. He could save the Ringworld, or lose it, without more help from her.

“You’ll have your massage anyway,” he said. He stepped wide around her to touch a control on the water bed. Harkabeeparolyn looked startled, then smiled and relaxed completely as the sonic vibrations in the water enfolded her. In a few minutes she was asleep. He set the unit to switch off in twenty minutes.

Then he brooded.

If he hadn’t spent a year with Halrloprillalar, he’d find Harkabeeparolyn unsightly, with her bald head and knife-edge lips and small flat nose. But he had…

He had hair where no City Builder had hair. Was that it? Or the smell of his food on his breath? Or a social signal he didn’t know?

A man who had hijacked a starship, a man who had bet his life on the chance to rescue trillions of other lives, a man who had beaten the ultimate in drug habits, should not be bothered by so minor a distraction as an itch for a lovely roommate. A touch of the wire would give him the dispassionate clarity to see that.

Yah.

Louis went to the forward wall. “Hindmost!”

The puppeteer trotted into view.

“Run the records of the Pak for me. Interviews and medical reports on Jack Brennan, studies of the alien’s corpse, everything you’ve got.” He’d try work.

Louis Wu hovered in midair, in lotus position, with his loose clothing drifting around him. On a screen that floated motionless outside Needle’s hull, a man long dead was lecturing on the origin of humanity.

“Protectors have precious little free will,” he was saying. “We’re too intelligent not to see the right answers. Besides that, there are instincts. If a Pak protector has no living children, he generally dies. He stops eating. Some protectors can generalize; they can find a way to do something for their whole species, and it keeps them alive. I think that was easier for me than it was for Phssthpok.”

“What did you find? What’s the cause that keeps you eating?”

“Warning you about Pak protectors.”

Louis nodded, remembering the autopsy data on the alien. Phssthpok’s brain was bigger than a man’s, but the swelling did not include the frontal lobes. Jack Brennan’s head looked dented in the middle because of his human frontal development and the upward swelling of the back of the skull.

Brennan’s skin was deeply wrinkled leathery armor. His joints were abnormally swollen. His lips and gums had fused into a hard beak. None of this seemed to bother the drastically altered Belt miner.

“All the symptoms of old age are holdovers from the change from breeder to protector,” he was telling a long-dead ARM inquisitor. “Skin thickens and wrinkles; it’s supposed to get like this, hard enough to turn a knife. You lose your teeth to leave room for the gums to harden. Your heart can weaken because you’re supposed to grow a second heart, two-chambered, in the groin.”

Brennan’s voice was a rasp. “Your joints are supposed to expand, to offer a larger moment arm for the muscles. Increased strength. But none of this works quite right without tree-of-life, and there hasn’t been tree-of-life on Earth for three million—”

Louis jumped when fingers tugged at his jumper. “Luweewu? I’m hungry.”

“Okay.” He was tired of studying anyway; it wasn’t telling him much that was useful.

Harkabeeparolyn was still asleep. The smell of meat broiling in a flashlight-laser beam woke her. Louis dialed fruits and cooked vegetables for them, and showed them where to dump anything they didn’t like.

He took his own dinner into the cargo hold.

It bothered him to have dependents. Granted that both were Louis Wu’s victims. But he couldn’t even teach them to get their own meals! The settings were marked in Interworld and the Hero’s Tongue.

Was there any way to put them to work?

Tomorrow. He’d think of something.

The computer was beginning to deliver results. The Hindmost was busy. When Louis got the puppeteer’s attention for a moment he asked for the records of Chmeee’s invasion of the castle.

The castle occupied the peak of a rocky hill. Herds of piglike beasts, yellow with an orange stripe, grazed the yellow grass veldt below. The lander circled about the castle, then settled into the courtyard in a cloud of arrows.

Nothing happened for several minutes.

Then orange blurred from several arched doorways at once, too fast to see.

They stopped, flattened like rugs and clutching weapons, against the base of the lander. They were kzinti, but they seemed distorted. There had been divergence over a quarter of a million years.

Harkabeeparolyn spoke at Louis’s shoulder. “Are these your companion’s kind?”

“Close enough. They seem a little shorter and a little darker, and… the lower jaw seems more massive.”

“He abandoned you. Why don’t you leave him?”

Louis laughed. “Why, to get you a bed? We were in battle conditions when I let a vampire seduce me. He was disgusted. As far as Chmeee knows, I abandoned him.”

“No man or woman can resist a vampire.”

“Chmeee is not a man. He couldn’t possibly want rishathra with a vampire, or with any hominid.”

Now more of the great orange cats sprinted to posts beneath the lander. Two carried a rust-stained metal cylinder. The dozen cats crept to the far side of the lander.

The cylinder disappeared in a blast of yellow-white flame. The lander slid a yard or two. The kzinti waited, then crept back to study the results.

Harkabeeparolyn shuddered. “They seem more likely to desire me for a meal.”

Louis was growing irritated. “They might. But I remember a time when Chmeee was starving, and he never touched me. What’s your problem, anyway? Don’t you get carnivores in the city?”

“We do.”

“And the Library?”

He thought she wouldn’t answer. (Furry faces showed at many of the slit windows. The explosion had done no visible damage.) Then, “I was in Panth Building for a time.” She did not meet his eyes.

For a moment he couldn’t remember. Then: Panth Building. Built like an onion floating tip down. Repairs to the water condenser. The ruler wanted to pay the fee in sex. Scent of vampire in the halls.

“You had rishathra with carnivores?”

“With Herders and Grass People and Hanging People and Night People. One remembers.”

Louis withdrew a little. “With Night People?” Ghouls?

“The Night People are very important to us. They bear information for us and for the Machine People. They hold together what is left of civilization, and we do well not to offend them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But it was the — Luweewu, the Night Hunters have a very keen sense of smell. The scent of vampire sends them running. I was told that I must have rishathra with a Night Hunter. Without vampire scent. I asked for transfer to the Library.”

Louis remembered Mar Korssil. “They don’t seem repugnant.”

“But for rishathra? We who have no parents, we must pay society’s debt before we can mate and make a household. I lost my accumulated fund when I transferred. The transfer did not come soon enough.” She looked up into his eyes. “It was not joyful. But other times were as bad. When the vampire scent wears off, the memory does not. One remembers the smells. Blood on the Night Hunter’s breath. Corruption on the Night People’s.”

“You’re well out of that,” Louis said.

Some of the kzinti tried to stand up. Then they all fell asleep. Ten minutes later the hatch descended. Chmeee came down to take command.

It was late when the Hindmost reappeared. He looked rumpled and tired. “It seems your guess was correct,” he said. “Not only will scrith hold a magnetic field, but the Ringworld structure is webbed with superconductor cables.”

“That’s good,” said Louis. A great weight lifted from him. “That’s good! But how would City Builders know that? I can’t see them digging into the scrith to find out.”

“No. They made magnets for compasses. They traced a gridwork of superconductor lines running in hexagonal patterns through the Ringworld foundation, fifty thousand miles across. It helped them make their maps. Centuries passed before the City Builders knew enough physics to guess what they were tracing, but their guess led them to develop their own superconductor.”

“The bacteria you seeded—”

“It will not have touched superconductor buried in scrith. I’m aware that the Ringworld floor is vulnerable to meteorites. We must hope that none ever breached the superconductor grid.”

“It’s good odds.”

The puppeteer pondered. “Louis, are we still searching for the secret of massive transmutation?”

“No.”

“It would solve our problem very nicely,” said the Hindmost. “The device must have operated on a tremendous scale. Converting matter to energy must be far easier than converting matter to other matter. Suppose we simply fired a… call it a transmutation cannon at the underside of the Ringworld at its farthest distance from the sun. Reaction would put the structure back in place very nicely. Of course there would be problems. The shock wave would kill many natives, but many would live, too. The burned-off meteor shielding could be replaced at some later date. Why are you laughing?”

“You’re brilliant. The trouble is, we don’t have any reason to think there was ever a transmutation cannon.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Halrloprillalar was just making up stories. She told us so later. And after all, how would she know anything about the way the Ringworld was built? Her ancestors weren’t much more than monkeys when that happened.” Louis saw the heads dip, and snapped, “Do not curl up on me. We don’t have the time.”

“Aye, aye.”

“What else have you got?”

“Little. Pattern analysis is still incomplete. The fantasies involving the Great Ocean mean nothing to me. You try them.”

“Tomorrow.”

Sounds too low to interpret held him awake. Louis turned over in darkness and free fall.

There was light enough to see. Kawaresksenjajok and Harkabeeparolyn lay in each other’s arms, murmuring in each other’s ears. Louis’s translator wasn’t picking it up. It sounded like love. The sudden stab of envy made him smile at himself. He’d thought the boy was too young; he’d thought the woman had sworn off. But this wasn’t rishathra. They were the same species.

Louis turned his back and closed his eyes. His ears expected a rhythmic wave action; but it never came, and presently he was asleep.

He dreamed that he was on sabbatical.

Falling, falling between the stars. When the world became too rich, too varied, too demanding, then there came a time to leave all worlds behind. Louis had done this before. Alone in a small spacecraft, he had gone into the unexplored gaps beyond known space, to see what there was to see, and to learn if he still loved himself. Now Louis floated between sleeping plates and dreamed happy dream of falling between the stars. No dependents, no promises to keep.

Then a woman howled in panic, right in his ear. A heel kicked him hard, just below the floating ribs, and Louis doubled up with a breathy cry. Flailing arms battered him, then closed round his neck in a death-grip hug. The wailing continued.

Louis pried at the arms to free his throat. He called, “Sleepfield off!”

Gravity returned. Louis and his attacker settled onto the lower plate. Harkabeeparolyn stopped screaming. She let her arms be pried away.

The boy Kawaresksenjajok knelt beside her, confused and frightened. He spoke urgent questions in the City Builder language. The woman snarled.

The boy spoke again. Harkabeeparolyn answered him at length. The boy nodded reluctantly. Whatever he’d heard, he didn’t like it. He stepped into the corner, with a parting look that Louis couldn’t interpret at all, and vanished into the cargo hold.

Louis reached out for his translator. “Okay, what’s it all about?”

“I was falling!” she sobbed.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” Louis told her. “This is how some of us like to sleep.”

She looked up into his face. “Falling?”

“Yah.”

Her expression was easy to interpret. Mad. Quite mad… and a shrug. Visibly she braced herself. She said, “I have made myself know that my usefulness is over, now that your machines can read faster than I can. I can do one thing only to make our mission easier, and that is to ease the pain of your thwarted lust.”

“That’s a relief,” Louis said. He meant it as sarcasm; would she hear it that way? Louis was tanjed if he’d accept that kind of charity.

“If you bathe, and clean your mouth very thoroughly—”

“Hold it. Your sacrifice of your comfort to higher goals is praiseworthy, but it would be bad manners for me to accept.”

She was bewildered. “Luweewu? Do you not want rishathra with me?”

“Thank you, no. Sleepfield on.” Louis floated away from her. From previous experience he sensed a shouting match coming, and that couldn’t be helped. But if she tried physical force, she’d find herself falling.

She surprised him. She said, “Luweewu, it would be terrible for me to have children now.”

He looked down at her face: not enraged, but very serious. She said, “If I mate now with Kawaresksenjajok, I may bring forth a baby to die in the fire of the sun.”

“Then don’t. He’s too young anyway.”

“No, he’s not.”

“Oh. Well. Don’t you have — No, you wouldn’t be carrying contraceptives. Well, can’t you estimate your fertile period and avoid it?”

“I don’t understand. No, wait, I do understand. Luweewu, our species ruled most of the world because of our command of the nuances and variations of rishathra. Do you know how we learned so much about rishathra?”

“Just lucky, I guess?”

“Luweewu, some species are more fertile than others.”

“Oh.”

“Before history began, we learned that rishathra is the way not to have children. If we mate, four falans later there is a child. Luweewu, can the world be saved? Do you know that the world can be saved?”

Oh, to be on sabbatical. Alone in a singleship, light-years from all responsibility to anyone but Louis Wu. Oh, to be under the wire… ”I can’t guarantee anything at all.”

“Then do rishathra with me, to let me stop thinking of Kawaresksenjajok!”

It was not the most flattering proposal of Louis Wu’s young life. He asked, “How do we ease his mind?”

“There is no way. Poor boy, he must suffer.”

Then you can both suffer, Louis thought. But he couldn’t make himself say it. The woman was serious, and she was hurting, and she was right. This was not a time to bring a baby City Builder into the world.

And he wanted her.

He climbed out of free fall and took her to the water bed. He was glad that Kawaresksenjajok had retired to the cargo hold. What would the boy have to say tomorrow morning?

Chapter 26 — Beneath The Waters

Louis woke under gravity, with a smile on his face, a pleasant ache in every muscle, and a grittiness in his eyes. He had slept very little last night. Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t exaggerated her urgency. He had never known (despite his time with Halrloprillalar) that City Builders went into heat.

He shifted, and the big bed surged beneath him. A body rolled against him: Kawaresksenjajok, on his belly, spread out like a starfish and snoring gently.

Harkabeeparolyn, curled in orange fur at the foot of the bed, stirred and sat up. She said, perhaps in apology at leaving him, “I kept waking up and not knowing where I was, with the bed heaving under me.”

Culture shock, he thought. He remembered that Halrloprillalar had liked the sleeping field, but not for sleeping. “There’s plenty of floor. How do you feel?”

“Much better, for the moment. Thank you.”

“Thank you. Are you hungry?”

“Not yet.”

He exercised. His muscles were still hard, but he was out of practice. The City Builders watched him with puzzled expressions. Afterward he dialed breakfast: melon, soufflés Grand Marnier, muffins, coffee. His guests refused the coffee, predictably, and also the muffins.

When the Hindmost appeared he looked rumpled and tired. “The patterns we sought are not evident in the records of the floating city,” he said. “All species build their armor in the shape of a Pak protector. Armor is not the same everywhere, not quite, but the styling does not vary in any pattern. It may be we can blame the spread of City Builder culture for that. Their empire mixed ideas and inventions until we may never trace their origins.”

“What about the immortality drug?”

“You were right. The Great Ocean is seen as a source of horrors and delights, including immortality. The gift is not always a drug. Sometimes it comes without warning, bestowed by whimsical gods. Louis, the legends make no sense to me, a nonhuman.”

“Set the tape up for us. I’ll get our guests to watch it too. Maybe they can explain what I can’t.”

“Aye, aye.”

“What about repairs?”

“There has been no repair activity on the Ringworld in recorded history.”

“You’re kidding!”

“How large a region is covered by the city records? How long a time? Small, and short. Aside from that, I’ve studied the old interviews with Jack Brennan. I gather that protectors have long lives and very long attention spans. They prefer not to use servomechanisms if they can do a job themselves. There was no autopilot aboard Phssthpok’s spacecraft, for instance.”

“That’s not consistent. The spillpipe system is certainly automatic.”

“A very simple brute-force approach. We don’t know why the protectors died or left the Ringworld. Is it possible that they knew their fate, that they had time to automate the spillpipe system? Louis, we don’t need to know any of this.”

“Oh, yah? The meteor defense is probably automatic too. Wouldn’t you like to know more about the meteor defense?”

“I would.”

“And the attitude jets were automatic. Maybe there were manual overrides for all of that. But a thousand hominid species have evolved since the Pak disappeared, and the automatics are still going. Either the protectors always intended to leave — which I can’t believe—”

“Or they took many years to die,” the Hindmost said. “I have my own ideas on that.” And he would say no more.

Louis found fine entertainment that morning. The tales of the Great Ocean were good stuff, with heroes and royalty and feats of detection and magic and fearsome monsters, and a flavor different from the fairy tales of any human culture. Love was not eternal. The City Builder hero’s (or heroine’s) companions were always of the opposite sex, their loyalty was held by imaginatively described rishathra, and their conveniently strange powers were taken for granted. Magicians were not automatically evil; they were random dangers to be avoided, not fought.

Louis found the common denominators he was looking for. Always there was the vastness of the sea and the terror of the storms and the sea monsters.

Some of those would be sharks, sperm whales, killer whales, Gummidgy destroyers, Wunderland shadowfish, or trapweed jungles. Some were intelligent. There were sea serpents miles long, with steaming nostrils (implying lungs?) and large mouths lined with sharp teeth. There was a land that burned any ship that approached, invariably leaving one survivor. (Fantasy, or sunflowers?) Certain islands were sea beasts of sedentary inclination, such that a whole ecology could establish itself on a beast’s back, until a shipload of sailors disturbed the creature. Then it would dive. Louis might have believed that one if he hadn’t seen the same legend in Earth’s literature.

He did believe the ferocious storms. Over that long a reach, storms could build terribly, even without the Coriolis effect that gives rise to hurricanes on any normal world. On the Map of Kzin he’d seen a ship as big as a city. It might take a ship that size to weather Great Ocean storms.

He did not disbelieve the notion of magicians, not completely. They (in three legends) seemed to be of the City Builder race. But unlike the magicians of Earthly legend, they were mighty fighters. And all three wore armor.

“Kawaresksenjajok? Do magicians always wear armor?”

The boy looked at him strangely. “You mean in stories, don’t you? No. Except, I guess they always do around the Great Ocean. Why?”

“Do magicians fight? Are they great fighters?”

“They don’t have to be.” The questioning was making the boy uneasy.

Harkabeeparolyn broke in. “Luweewu, I may know more of children’s tales than Kawa does. What are you trying to learn?”

“I’m looking for the home of the Ringworld engineers. These armored magicians could be them, except they’re too late in history.”

“Then it isn’t them.”

“But what sparked the legends? Statues? Mummies pulled out of a desert? Racial memories?”

She thought it over. “Magicians usually belong to the species that is telling the story. Descriptions vary: height, weight, what they eat. Yet they have traits in common. They are terrible fighters. They do not take a moral stand. They are not to be defeated, but avoided.”

Like a submarine beneath polar ice, Hot Needle of Inquiry cruised beneath the Great Ocean.

The Hindmost had slowed the ship. They had a good view of the long, intricately curved ribbon of continental shelf falling behind them. Beyond, the floor of the Great Ocean was as active as the land: mountains high enough to rise above the water; undersea canyons showing as ridges five and six miles high.

What was above them now — a pebbled roof, dark even under light amplification, that seemed obtrusively close even though it was three thousand miles above — should be the Map of Kzin. The computer said it was. Kzin must have been tectonically active when the Map was carved. The sea beds bulged strongly; the mountain ranges were deep and sharp of outline.

Louis could identify nothing. Foam-shrouded contours weren’t enough. He needed to see sunlight patterns and yellow-and-orange jungle. “Keep the cameras rolling. Are you getting a signal from the lander?”

From his post at the controls the Hindmost turned one head back. “No, Louis, the scrith blocks it. Do you see the nearly circular bay, there where the big river ends? The great ship is moored across its mouth. Nearly across the Map, the Y-shape where two rivers join — that is the castle where the lander now rests.”

“Okay. Drop a few thousand miles. Give me an overview… or underview.”

Needle sank beneath its carved roof. The Hindmost said, “You made this same tour in the Lying Bastard. Do you expect to find changes now?”

“No. Getting impatient?”

“Of course not, Louis.”

“I know more than I did then. Maybe I’ll pick up details we missed. Like — what’s that, sticking out near the south pole?”

The Hindmost gave them an expanded view. A long, narrow, utterly black triangle with a textured surface, it dropped straight down from the center of the Map of Kzin. “A radiator fin,” the puppeteer said. “The antarctic must be kept refrigerated, of course.”

The Ringworlders were utterly bewildered. “I don’t understand,” Harkabeeparolyn said. “I thought I knew some science, but… what is it?”

“Too complicated. Hindmost—”

“Luweewu, I am not a fool or a child!”

She couldn’t be much over forty, Louis thought. “All right. The whole point is to imitate a planet. A spinning ball, right? Sunlight falls almost level at the poles of a spinning ball, so it’s cold. So this imitation world has to be cooled at the poles. Hindmost, give us more magnification.”

The fin’s textured surface became myriad adjustable horizontal flaps, silver above, black below. Summer and winter, he thought; and he heard himself say, “I can’t believe it.”

“Luweewu?”

He spread his hands helplessly. “Every so often I lose it. I think I’ve accepted it all, and then all of a sudden it’s too big. Too tanj big.”

Tears were brimming in Harkabeeparolyn’s eyes. “I believe it now. My world is an imitation of a real world.”

Louis put his arms around her. “It’s real. Feel this? You’re as real as I am. Stamp your foot. The world is as real as this ship. Just bigger. Way way bigger.”

The Hindmost said, “Louis?”

A bit of telescope work had found him more fins, smaller ones, around the Map’s perimeter. “Naturally the arctic regions must be cooled too.”

“Yah. I’ll be all right in a minute. Take us toward Fist-of-God, but take your time. The computer can find it?”

“Yes. Might we find it plugged? You said that the eye storm has been plugged or repaired.”

“Plugging Fist-of-God wouldn’t be easy. The hole’s bigger than Australia, and clear above the atmosphere.” He rubbed his closed eyes hard.

I can’t let this happen to me, he thought. What happens is real. What’s real, I can manipulate with my brain. Tanj, I should never have used the wire. It’s screwed up my sense of reality. But… cooling fins under the poles?

They were out from under the Map of Kzin. Deep-radar showed nothing of pipes beneath the contoured sea bottoms. Which must mean that the meteor shielding was foamed scrith. The pipes had to be there, or else flup would fill the ocean beds.

Those ridges on the Ringworld’s underside — those long, long undersea canyons. A dredge in each of the deepest canyons, an outlet at one end: you could keep the whole ocean bed clear.

“Veer a little, Hindmost. Take us under the Map of Mars. Then under the Map of Earth. It won’t take us too far out of our way.”

“Nearly two hours.”

“Risk it.”

Two hours. Louis dozed in the sleeping field. He knew that an adventurer snatches sleep when he can. He woke well ahead of time, with sea bottom still gliding past above Needle’s roof. He watched it slow and stop.

The Hindmost said, “Mars is missing.”

Louis shook his head violently. Wake up! “What?”

“Mars is a cold, dry, nearly airless world, isn’t it? The entire Map should be cooled, and desiccated too, somehow, and raised nearly above the atmosphere.”

“Yah. All of that.”

“Then look up. We should be beneath the Map of Mars. Do you see a fin far larger than that beneath the Map of Kzin? Do you see a nearly circular cavity bulging twenty miles inward?”

There was nothing above their heads but the inverted contours of a sea bottom.

“Louis, this is disturbing. If our computer memory is failing us… ” The Hindmost’s legs folded. His heads dipped downward, inward.

“The computer memory is fine,” Louis said. “Relax. The computer’s fine. See if the ocean temperature is higher above us.”

The Hindmost hesitated, half into fetal position. Then, “Aye, aye.” The puppeteer busied himself at the controls.

Harkabeeparolyn asked, “Do I understand you? One of your worlds is missing?”

“One of the smaller ones. Sheer carelessness, my dear.”

“These aren’t balls,” she said thoughtfully.

“No. Peeled like a round fruit, the peel spread flat.”

The Hindmost called, “The temperatures in this vicinity vary. Ignoring the regions around fins, I find temperatures from forty to eighty degrees Fahrenheit.”

“The water should be warmer around the Map of Mars.”

“The Map of Mars is not in evidence, and the water is not warmer.”

“Wha… at? But that’s weird.”

“If I understand you — yes, there is a problem.” The puppeteer’s necks arched out and curved around until he was looking into his own eyes. Louis had seen Nessus do that, and wondered if it was puppeteer laughter. It could be concentration. It was making Harkabeeparolyn queasy, but she couldn’t seem to look away.

Louis paced. Mars had to be refrigerated. Then where?…

The puppeteer whistled an odd harmonic. “The grid?”

Louis stopped in midstride. “The grid. Right. And that would mean… futz! That easy?”

“We make progress of sorts. Our next move?”

They’d learned a good deal, looking at undersides of worlds. So — “Take us on to the Map of Earth, basement level, please.”

“Aye, aye,” said the Hindmost. Needle continued to spinward.

So much ocean, Louis thought. So little land. Why had the Ringworld Engineers wanted so much salt sea in two single bodies? Two for balance, of course, but why so large?

Reservoirs? Partly. Preserves for the sea life of an abandoned Pak world? A conservationist would call that praiseworthy; but these were Pak protectors. Whatever they did was done for the safety of themselves and their blood descendants.

The Maps, Louis thought, were a superb piece of misdirection.

Despite the contoured ocean floor, Earth was easy to recognize. Louis pointed out the flat curves of the continental shelves as they passed beneath Africa, Australia, the Americas, Greenland… fins under Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean… the Ringworlders watched and nodded politely. Why would they care? It wasn’t their home.

Yah, he’d do his best to get Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok home, if there was nothing else he could do for them. Louis Wu was as close to Earth now as he would ever be.

More sea bottom passed above them.

Then shoreline: a flat curve of continental shelf bordering a maze of gulfs and bays and river deltas and peninsulas and island clusters and raggedy detail too fine for the human eye. Needle ran on to port of spinward. They passed beneath hollow mountain ranges and flat seas. A finely ruled line ran straight to spinward, and at its near end, a glint of light—

Fist-of-God.

Something huge had struck the Ringworld long ago. The fireball had pushed the Ringworld floor upward into the shape of a tilted cone, then ripped through. Pointing almost away from that great funnel shape was the track of a much later meteorite: a crippled General Products spacecraft, with its passengers frozen in stasis, had touched down at a horizontal seven hundred and seventy miles per second. Futz, they’d actually bent the scrith!

Hot Needle of Inquiry rose into a spotlight beam: raw sunlight flooding vertically through the crater in Fist-of-God Mountain. Shards of scrith, stretched thin when that old fireball broke through, stood like minor peaks around a volcano cone. The ship lifted above them.

Desert sloped down and away. The impact that made Fist-of-God had cremated all life over a region comfortably larger than the Earth. Far, far away, a hundred thousand miles away, the blue of distance became the blue of sea; and only Needle’s thousand-mile height let them see that far.

“Get us moving,” Louis said. “Then give us a view from the lander’s cameras. Let’s see how Chmeee’s doing.”

“Aye aye.”

Chapter 27 — The Great Ocean

Six rectangular windows floated beyond the hull. Six cameras showed the lander’s flight deck, lower deck, and four outside views.

The flight deck was empty. Louis scanned for emergency lights and found none.

The autodoc was still a great coffin, closed.

Something was wrong with the outside cameras. The view wavered and shifted and streamed with glowing colors. Louis was able to make out the courtyard, the arrow slits, several kzinti standing guard in leather armor. Other kzinti sprinted to and fro on an fours: blurred streaks.

Flames! The defenders had built a bonfire around the lander!

“Hindmost? Can you lift the lander from here? You said you had remote controls.”

“I could take off,” the Hindmost said, “but it would be dangerous. We are… twelve minutes of arc to spinward and a bit to port of the Map of Kzin — a third of a million miles. Would you expect me to fly the lander with a lightspeed delay of three and a half seconds? The life-support system is holding well.”

Four kzinti streaked across the courtyard to throw open massive gates. A wheeled vehicle pulled in and stopped. It was larger than the Machine People vehicle that had brought Louis to the floating city. Projectile weapons were mounted on its four fenders. Kzinti emerged and stood studying the lander.

Had the castle’s lord called on a neighbor for help? Or had a neighbor come to claim rights to an impregnable flying fort?

The vehicles guns swiveled to face the cameras, and spat. Flame bloomed; the cameras shuddered. The great orange cats ducked, then rose to study the results.

No emergency lights showed on the flight deck.

“These savages haven’t the means to harm the lander,” the Hindmost said.

Explosive projectiles sprayed the lander again.

“I’ll just take your word for it,” Louis said. “Continue monitoring. Are we close enough that I can get to the lander by stepping discs?”

The puppeteer looked himself in the eyes. He held the pose for several seconds.

Then he spoke. “We are two hundred thousand miles to spinward of the Map of Kzin, and a hundred and twenty thousand miles to port. The portward distance is irrelevant. The spinward distance would be lethal. It gives Needle and the lander a relative velocity of eight-tenths of a mile per second.”

“Too much?”

“Our technology is not miraculous, Louis! Stepping discs can absorb kinetic energies of up to two hundred feet per second, no more.”

The explosions had scattered the bonfire. Armored kzinti guards were building it up again.

Louis bit down on a bad word. “All right. The fastest way to get me there is to run us straight to antispinward until I can use the stepping discs. Then we can take our time running to starboard.”

“Aye, aye. What speed?”

Louis opened his mouth and left it open while he thought. “Now, that is one fascinating question,” he said. “What does the Ringworld meteor defense consider a meteor? Or an invading spacecraft?”

The puppeteer reached behind him, chewed at the control. “I’ve cut our acceleration. We should discuss this. Louis, I don’t understand how the City Builders knew it was safe to build a rim transport system. They were right, but how did they know?”

Louis shook his head. He could see why the Ringworld protectors might program the meteor defense not to fire on the rim walls. A safe corridor for their own ships — or maybe they found that the computer was firing on the attitude jets whenever the attitude jets fired a high-velocity plume of gas. “I’d say the City Builders started with small ships and built up. They tried it and it worked.”

“Stupid. Dangerous.”

“We already know they did things like that.”

“You have my opinion. At your orders, Louis: what speed?”

The high desert sloped gradually down: a baked and lifeless land, an ecology shattered and heated to incandescence thousands of falans ago. What had struck that blow from underneath the Ringworld? A comet wouldn’t normally be that big. There were no asteroids, no planets; they had been cleaned out of the system during the building of the Ringworld.

Needle’s velocity was already respectable. The land ahead was beginning to turn green. There were silver threads of river.

“On the first expedition we flew at Mach 2, using flycycles,” Louis said. “That’d take us… eight days before I can use the stepping discs. Too tanj long. I’m assuming the meteor defense fires on things that move fast relative to the surface. How fast is fast?”

“The easy way to find out is to accelerate until something happens.”

“I do not believe I heard a Pierson’s puppeteer say that.”

“Have faith in puppeteer engineering, Louis. The stasis field will function. No weapon can harm us in stasis. At worst we will return to normal status after we strike the surface, and proceed henceforth at a lower speed. There are hierarchies of risk, Louis. The most dangerous thing we can do during the next two years is hide.”

“I don’t — if it was Chmeee saying — but a Pierson’s… give me a minute.” Louis closed his eyes and tried to think. Then “See how this sounds. First we loft the ruined probe, the one we left in the Library—”

“I moved it.”

“Where?”

“To the nearest high mountain with an exposed scrith crest. The safest place I could think of. The probe is still valuable, though it can no longer manufacture fuel.”

“That’s a good place. Don’t try to fly it. Just turn on every sensor on the probe, and every sensor aboard Needle and the lander. Turn most of them in the direction of the shadow squares. Now, where else would you put a meteor defense? Bear in mind that it can’t seem to fire at anything under the Ringworld floor.”

“I have no ideas.”

“Okay. We aim cameras all over the Arch. Cameras on the shadow squares. Cameras on the sun. Cameras on the Map of Kzin and the Map of Mars.”

“Definitely.”

“We stay at an altitude of a thousand miles. Shall we dismount the probe in the cargo hold? Set it to following us?”

“Our only source of fuel? No.”

“Then start accelerating until something happens. How does it sound?”

“Aye, aye,” said the Hindmost, and he turned to the controls. And Louis, who would have welcomed more discussion, more time to nerve himself up, kept his silence.

The cameras caught it, but none of Needle’s passengers did. Even if they’d been looking up, they wouldn’t have caught it. They would have seen glare-white stars and the checkered blue Arch glowing against black space, and a black circle at the peak of the Arch, where Needle’s flare shielding blocked out the naked sun.

But they weren’t even looking up.

Below the ruin of the hyperdrive motor, the land was green with life. Jungle and swamp and wild land prevailed, with an occasional ragged crazy quilt of cultivated farmland. Of the Ringworld hominids they’d seen so far, not many would make farmers.

There were covies of boats on flat seas. Once they crossed a spider web of roads half an hour wide, seven thousand miles wide. The telescope showed steeds carrying riders or pulling small carts. No powered vehicles. A City Builder culture must have fallen here, and stayed down.

“I feel like a goddess,” Harkabeeparolyn said. “Nobody else could have such a view.”

“I knew a goddess,” Louis said. “At least she thought she was. She was a City Builder too. She was part of a spacecraft crew; she probably saw what you’re seeing now.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

Fist-of-God Mountain shrank slowly. The Earth’s moon could have nestled in that vast shell. One had to see the mountain over such a distance, standing behind a landscape vaster than the habitable surfaces of all the worlds of known space, to appreciate its size. Louis wasn’t feeling godlike. He felt tiny. Vulnerable.

The autodoc lid aboard the lander hadn’t moved. Louis asked, “Hindmost, could Chmeee have had other wounds?”

The puppeteer was out of sight somewhere, but his voice came clear. “Of course.”

“He could be dying in there.”

“No. Louis, I’m busy. Don’t bother me!”

The telescope view had become a blur. The bright land a thousand miles below was visibly moving now; Needle’s velocity had passed five miles per second. Orbital speed for Earth.

Cloud decks shone bright enough to hurt the eyes. Far aft, a checkerboard pattern of cultivation was thinning out. Directly below, the land dipped, then leveled off into hundreds of miles of flat grassland. The flatlands extended to right and left as far as the eye could see. Rivers that fed into the flats became swamps, suddenly green.

You could trace a ragged line of contoured bays, inlets, islands, peninsulas: the mark of Ringworld shoreline, designed for the convenience of boats and shipping. But that was the spinward border. Then several hundred miles of flat, salt-poisoned land. Then the blue line of ocean. Louis felt the hair stir on his neck at this fresh memento of the Fist-of-God impact. Even this far away, the shoreline of the Great Ocean had been lifted; the sea had receded seven or eight hundred miles.

Louis rubbed dazzled eyes. It was too bright down there. Violet highlights—

Then blackness.

Louis closed his eyes tight. When he opened them it was as if he had left them closed: black as the inside of a stomach.

Harkabeeparolyn screamed. Kawaresksenjajok thrashed. His arm struck Louis’s shoulder, and the boy gripped Louis’s arm with both hands and hung on. The woman’s scream cut off abruptly. Then she said, in a voice with teeth in it, “Luweewu, where are we?”

Louis said, “I take a wild guess and say we’re at the bottom of the ocean.”

“You are correct,” said the Hindmost’s contralto. “I have a good view by deep-radar. Shall I turn on a spotlight?”

“Sure.”

The water was murky. Needle wasn’t as deep as it might have been. There were fish nosing about; there was even a seaweed forest anchored nearby.

The boy released Louis and pressed his nose to the wall. Harkabeeparolyn stared too, but she was shivering. She asked, “Luweewu, can you tell me what happened? Can you make it make sense?”

“We’ll find out,” said Louis. “Hindmost, take us up. Back to a thousand miles altitude.”

“Aye, aye.”

“How long were we in stasis?”

“I cannot tell. Needle’s chronometer stopped, of course. I will signal the probe to send data, but the lightspeed delay is sixteen minutes.”

“How fast were we moving?”

“Five point eight one miles per second.”

“Then take us up to five even and hold us there while we see what we’ve got.”

The signals from the lander resumed as Needle approached the surface. Fire still surrounded the lander. The autodoc was still closed. Chmeee should have emerged by now, Louis thought.

Blue light grew around them. Needle broke free of the ocean and surged upward into sunlight. The deck barely quivered as the ocean dropped away at twenty gravities of acceleration.

The view aft was instructive.

Forty or fifty miles behind them, huge combers rolled across the flat beach that had been an undersea continental shelf. A grooved line ran straight back from the shore. Needle had not struck water. The fireball had struck land and kept going.

Farther back, the beach became grassland. Farther yet, forest. It was all burning. Thousands of square miles of firestorm, flame streaming inward from all sides, pouring straight upward in the center, like the steam rushing in over a sunflower patch far, far away. Needle’s impact could not have caused all of that.

“Now we know,” the Hindmost said. “The meteor defense is programmed to fire on inhabited territory. Louis, I am awed. The power expended compares to nothing less than the project that set the Fleet of Worlds in motion. Yet the automatics must do this repeatedly.”

“We know the Pak thought big. How was it done?”

“Don’t bother me for a while. I’ll let you know.” The Hindmost disappeared.

It was annoying. The puppeteer had all the instruments. He could lie his heads off, and how would Louis know? At this point the puppeteer couldn’t even change the arrangement…

Harkabeeparolyn was tugging at his arm. He snapped, “What?”

“Louis, I don’t ask this lightly. My sanity flinches. Forces batter me, and I can’t even describe them. Please, what has happened to us?”

Louis sighed. “I’d have to tell you about stasis fields and the Ringworld meteor defense. Also about Pierson’s puppeteers and General Products hulls and Pak.”

“I am ready.”

And he talked, and she nodded and asked questions, and he talked. He couldn’t be certain how much she understood, and of course he himself knew a lot less than he wanted to. Mostly he was telling her that Louis Wu knew what he was talking about. And when she was sure of that, she became calmer, which was what he was after.

Presently she took him to the water bed — ignoring the presence of Kawaresksenjajok, who grinned at them over his shoulder, once, then went back to watching the Great Ocean move past.

In rishathra there was reassurance. Spurious, perhaps. Who cared?

There sure was a lot of water down there.

From a thousand miles up, one could see a long way before the blanket of air blocked the view. And for most of that distance, there wasn’t a single island! The contours of sea bottom showed, and some of that was shallow enough. But the only islands were far behind, and those had probably been underwater peaks before Fist-of-God distorted the land.

There were storms. One looked in vain for the spiral patterns that meant hurricane and typhoon. But there were cloud patterns that looked like rivers in the air. As you watched them, they moved: even from this height, they moved.

The kzinti who dared that vastness had not been cowards, and those who returned had not been fools. That pattern of islands on the starboard horizon — you had to squint to be sure it was really there — must be the Map of Earth. And it was lost in all that blue.

A cool, precise contralto voice eased into his thoughts. “Louis? I have reduced our maximum velocity to four miles per second.”

“Okay.” Four, five — who cared?

“Louis, where did you say the meteor defense was located?”

Something in the puppeteer’s tone… ”I didn’t say. I don’t know.”

“The shadow squares, you said. You’re on record. It must be the shadow squares if the meteor defense can’t guard the Ringworld’s underside.” No overtones, no emotion showing in that voice.

“Do I gather I was wrong?”

“Now, pay attention, Louis. As we passed four point four miles per second, the sun flared. I have it on visual record. We didn’t see it because of the flare shielding. The sun extruded a jet of plasma some millions of miles long. It is difficult to observe because it came straight at us. It did not arch over in the sun’s magnetic field, as flares commonly do.”

“That was no solar flare that hit us.”

“The flare stretched out several million miles over a period of twenty minutes. Then it lased in violet.”

“Oh my God.”

“A gas laser on a very large scale. The earth still glows where the beam fell. I estimate that it covered a region ten kilometers across: not an especially tight beam, but it would not normally need to be. With even moderate efficiency, a flare that large would power a gas laser beam at three times ten to the twenty-seventh power ergs per second, for on the order of an hour.”

Silence.

“Louis?”

“Give me a minute. Hindmost, that is one impressive weapon.” It hit him, then: the secret of the Ringworld engineers. “That’s why they felt safe. That’s why they could build a Ringworld. They could hold off any kind of invasion. They had a laser weapon bigger than worlds, bigger than the Earth-Moon system, bigger than… Hindmost? I think I’m going to faint.”

“Louis, we don’t have time for that.”

“What caused it? Something caused the sun to jet plasma. Magnetic, it has to be magnetic. Could it be one function of the shadow squares?”

“I wouldn’t think so. Cameras record that the shadow square ring moved aside to allow the beam to pass, and constricted elsewhere, presumably to protect the land from increased insolation. We cannot assume that this same shadow-square ring was manipulating the photosphere magnetically. An intelligent engineer would design two separate systems.”

“You’re right. Absolutely right. Check it anyway, will you? We’ve recorded all possible magnetic effects from three different angles. Find out what made the sun flare.” Allah, Kdapt, Brahma, Finagle, let it be the shadow squares! “Hindmost? Whatever you find, don’t curl up on me.”

There was a peculiar pause. Then “Under the circumstances, that would doom us all. I would not do that unless there was no hope left. What are you thinking?”

“There is never no hope left. Remember.”

The Map of Mars was in view at last. It was farther away than the Map of Earth — a hundred thousand miles straight to starboard — but unlike the Map of Earth, it was one compact mass. From this angle it showed as a black line: twenty miles above the sea, as the Hindmost had predicted.

A red light blinked on the lander’s instrument board. Temperature: a hundred and ten Fahrenheit, just right for a spa. No lights blinked on the big coffin that held Chmeee. The autodoc had its own temperature controls.

The kzinti defenders seemed to have run out of explosives. Their supply of firewood seemed infinite.

Twenty thousand miles to go, at four miles per second.

“Louis?”

Louis eased himself out of the sleeping field. The Hindmost, he thought, looked awful. Mane rumpled, the garnets rubbed off along one side. He staggered as if his knees were made of wood.

“We’ll think of something else,” Louis told him. He was wishing he could reach through the wall, stroke the puppeteer’s mane, give reassurance of some kind. “Maybe there’s some kind of library in that castle. Maybe Chmeee already knows something we don’t. Tanj, maybe the repair crew already knows the answer.”

“We know the same answer. A chance to study sunspots from underneath.” The puppeteer’s voice was wintry-cool, the voice of a computer. “You guessed, didn’t you? Hexagonal patterns of superconductor embedded in the Ringworld floor. The scrith can be magnetized to manipulate plasma jets in the solar photosphere.”

“Yah.”

“It may have been just such an event that pushed the Ringworld off center. A plasma jet formed to fire on a meteoroid, a stray comet, even a fleet from Earth or Kzin. The plasma impacted the Ringworld. There were no attitude jets to push it back into place. Without the plasma jet, the meteor itself might have been sufficient. The repair crew came later: too late.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“The grid is not a backup for the attitude jets.”

“No. Are you all right?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I will follow orders.”

“Good.”

“If I were still Hindmost to this expedition, I would give up now.”

“I believe you.”

“Have you guessed the worst of it? I compute that the sun can probably be moved. The sun can be made to jet plasma, and the plasma can be made to act as a gas laser, forming a photon drive for the sun itself. The Ringworld would be pulled along by the sun’s gravity. But even the maximum thrust would be minuscule, too little to help us. At anything over two times ten to the minus fourth power gravities of acceleration, the Ringworld would be left behind. In any case, radiation from the plasma jet would ruin the ecology. Louis, are you laughing?”

Louis was. “I never thought of moving the sun. I never would have. You actually went ahead and worked out the math?”

Wintry-cool and mechanical, that voice. “I did. It can’t help us. What is left?”

“Follow orders. Hold us at four miles per second antispinward. Let me know when I can flick across to the lander.”

“Aye, aye.” The puppeteer turned away.

“Hindmost?”

A head turned back.

“Sometimes there’s no point in giving up.”

Chapter 28 — The Map Of Kzin

All the lights glowed green. Whatever the medical situation, the autodoc was handling it somehow. Chmeee was alive in there — alive, if not healthy.

But the flight-deck thermometer indicated a temperature of a hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

The Hindmost said, “Louis, are you ready to cross?”

The Map of Mars was a black dash below the line of hologram “windows,” straight to starboard. The Map of Kzin was a good deal harder to see. Ahead of Mars by several degrees of arc, and fifty thousand miles farther away, Louis made out blue-gray dashed lines against a blue-gray sea.

He said, “We’re not exactly opposite yet.”

“No. The Ringworld’s spin will still impose a velocity difference between Needle and the lander. But the vector is vertical. We can compensate for long enough.”

It took Louis a moment to translate those words into a diagram. Then “You’re going to dive at the ocean from a thousand miles altitude?”

“Yes. No risk is insane now, given the position your insanity has put us in.”

Louis burst out laughing (a puppeteer teaching courage to Louis Wu?) and sobered as suddenly. How else could an ex-Hindmost regain any of his authority? He said, “Good enough. Start your dive.”

He dialed and donned a pair of wooden clogs. He stripped off his falling jumper and rolled it around the impact suit and utility vest, but kept the flashlight-laser in his hand. The empty seascape had begun to expand.

“Ready.”

“Go.”

Louis crossed a hundred and twenty thousand miles in one giant step.

Kzin, twenty years ago:

Louis Wu sprawled on a worn stone fooch and thought well of himself.

These oddly shaped stone couches called foochesth were as ubiquitous as park benches throughout the hunting parks of Kzin. They were almost kidney-shaped, built for a male kzin to lie half curled up. The kzinti hunting parks were half wild and stocked with both predators and meat animals: orange-and-yellow jungle, with the foochesth as the only touch of civilization. With a population in the hundreds of millions, the planet was crowded by kzinti standards. The parks were crowded too.

Louis had been touring the jungle since morning. He was tired. Legs dangling, he watched the populace pass before him.

Within the jungle the orange kzinti were almost invisible. One moment, nothing. The next, a quarter-ton of sentient carnivore hot on the trail of something fast and frightened. The male kzin would jerk to a stop and stare — at Louis’s closed-lip smile (because a kzin shows his teeth in challenge) and at the sign of the Patriarch’s protection on his shoulder (Louis had made sure it showed prominently). The kzin would decide it was none of his business, and leave.

Strange, how that much predator could show only as a sense of presence in the frilly yellow foliage. Watching eyes and playful murder, somewhere. Then a huge adult male and a furry, cuddly adolescent half his height were watching the intruder.

Louis had a tyro’s grasp of the Hero’s Tongue. He understood when the kzin kitten looked up at its parent and asked, “Is it good to eat?”

The adult’s eyes met Louis’s eyes. Louis let his smile widen to show the teeth.

The adult said, “No.”

In the confidence of four Man-Kzin wars plus some “incidents” — all centuries in the past, but all won by men — Louis grinned and nodded. You tell him, Daddy! It’s safer to eat white arsenic than human meat!

Ringworld, twenty years later:

The walls bathed him in heat. He started to sweat. It didn’t bother him. He’d used saunas. One hundred and sixty degrees isn’t hot for a sauna.

The Hindmost’s recorded voice snarled and spat in the Hero’s Tongue, offering sanctuary on the Fleet of Worlds. “Cut that broadcast!” Louis commanded, and it was done.

Upward-streaming flames screened the windows. The cannon-carrying vehicle had been moved away. A pair of distorted kzinti sprinted across the courtyard, placed a canister under the lander, sprinted back to a doorway.

These were not quite kzinti: not as civilized as Chmeee. If they got their paws on Louis Wu — but he should be safe enough here.

Louis squinted down through the flames. There were six of the canisters in place around the lander’s base. Bombs, no doubt. They’d be set off any second now, before the flame could explode them individually.

Louis grinned. His hands poised above the control board while he fought temptation. Then: he tapped in instructions, fast. The buttons were uncomfortably hot. He braced his legs and gripped the chair back, with his falling jumper to pad his hands.

The lander rose from the flames. A ring of fireballs billowed below, and then the castle was a dwindling toy. Louis was still grinning. He felt virtuous; he’d resisted temptation. If he’d taken off on the fusion drive instead of the repulsers, the kzinti would have been amazed at the power of their explosives.

Hail clattered on the hull and windows. Louis looked up, startled, as a dozen winged toys curved down toward him. Then the aircraft were dropping away. Louis pursed his lips; he reset the autopilot to halt his rise at five miles. Maybe he’d want to lose those planes. Maybe not.

He got up and turned for the stairs.

Louis snorted when he read the dials. He called the Hindmost. “Chmeee is fully healed and peacefully asleep in the ‘doc. The ‘doc won’t wake him up and let him out because conditions outside are not habitable.”

“Not habitable?”

“It’s too hot. The autodoc isn’t set to let the patient step out into a fire. Things ought to cool off now that we’re out of the flames!” Louis ran his hand across his forehead; water streamed to his elbow. “It Chmeee gets out, will you tell him the situation? I need a cold shower.”

He was in the shower when the floor dropped under him. Louis snatched for a towel and was wrapping it around his waist as he ran up the stairs. He heard hail rapping on the hull.

Slowly and carefully, as if he still hurt, Chmeee turned from his place at the controls. He squinted oddly. Hair had been shaved away around the eye. Mock skin covered a shaved strip running up his thigh to the groin. He said, “Hello, Louis. I see you survived.”

“Yah. What are you doing?”

“I left pregnant females in the fortress.”

“Are they about to be killed this instant? Or can we hover for a few minutes?”

“Have we something to discuss? I trust you know better than to interfere.”

“The way things stand now, your females will be dead in two years.”

“They may ride home in stasis aboard Hot Needle of Inquiry. I still hope to persuade the Hindmost—”

“Persuade me. I have taken command of Needle.”

Chmeee’s hands moved. The floor surged savagely. Louis grabbed at a chair back and rode it out. A glance at the board told him that Needle’s descent had stopped. The rain of projectiles had stopped too, though a dozen aircraft still circled beyond the windows. The fortress was half a mile below.

Chmeee asked, “How did you arrange that?”

“I made slag out of the hyperdrive motor.”

The kzin moved incredibly fast. Before Louis could do more than flinch, he was wrapped in orange fur. The kzin was pulling Louis against his chest with one arm while the other held four claws against Louis’s eyebrows.

“Shrewd,” said Louis. “Very shrewd. Where do your plans carry you from here?”

The kzin didn’t move. Blood trickled past Louis’s eyes. He felt that his back was breaking. Louis said, “It seems I’ve had to rescue you again.”

The kzin released him and stepped back carefully, as if afraid to move on impulse. He asked, “Have you doomed us all? Or do you have some notion of moving the entire Ringworld back into position?”

“The latter.”

“How?”

“A couple of hours ago I could have told you. Now we’ll have to find another answer.”

“Why did you do it?”

“I wanted to save the Ringworld. There was just one way to get the Hindmost’s cooperation. His life’s at stake now. How do I go about getting your cooperation?”

“You fool. I fully intend to learn how to move the Ringworld, if only to save my children. Your problem is to persuade me that I need you.”

“The Pak who built the Ringworld were my ancestors. We’re trying to think like them, aren’t we? What did they build in that would do the job? Aside from that, I’ve got two City Builder librarians with a good knowledge of Ringworld history. They wouldn’t cooperate with you. They already see you as monstrous, and you haven’t even killed me yet.”

Chmeee thought it over. “If they fear me they will obey. Their world is at stake. Their ancestors were Pak too.”

The lander’s temperature had become uncomfortably cool for a naked man, but Louis was sweating again. “I’ve already located the Repair Center.”

“Where?”

Louis considered withholding that information, briefly. “The Map of Mars.”

Chmeee sat down. “Now, that is most impressive. These displaced kzinti learned a good deal about the Map of Mars during their age of exploration, but they never learned that.”

“I’ll bet some ships disappeared around the Map of Mars.”

“The aircraft pilot told me that many ships disappeared, and nothing of value was ever taken from the Map of Mars. The explorers brought home wealth from a Map further to spinward, but they never brought as much wealth as they put into making the ships. Do you need the autodoc?”

Louis wiped blood from his face with his falling Jumper. “Not just yet. That Map to spinward sounds like Earth. So it wasn’t defended after all.”

“It seems not. But there is a Map to port, and ships that went there never returned. Could the Repair Center be there?”

“No, that’s the Map of Down. They met Grogs.” Louis swabbed at his face again. The claws hadn’t cut deep, he thought, but a facial cut bleeds a long time. “Let’s do something about your pregnant females. How many?”

“I don’t know. Six were in their mating period.”

“Well, we don’t have room for them. They’ll have to stay in the castle. Unless you think the local lord will kill them?”

“No, but he may very well kill my male children. Another danger… Well, I can deal with that.” Chmeee turned to the controls. “The most powerful civilization is built around one of the old exploration ships, the Behemoth. If they track me here, there might be war against the fortress.”

The aircraft burned like torches as they fell. Chmeee tested the sky with radar, deep-radar, and infrared. Empty. “Louis, were there more? Did any land?”

“I don’t think so. If they did, they ran out of fuel, and there aren’t any runways… Roads? Scan the roads. You can’t let them radio the big ship.” Radio would be line of sight, and the Ringworld atmosphere probably had a Heaviside layer.

There was one road, and tanj few straight patches on it. There were flat fields… It was some minutes before Chmeee was satisfied. The aircraft were dead, all of them.

“Next step,” said Louis. “You can’t just wipe out everyone in the fortress. I gather kzinti females can’t take care of themselves.”

“No… Louis, it’s odd. The females of the castle are much more intelligent than those of the Patriarchy.”

“As intelligent as you?”

“No! But they even have a small vocabulary.”

“Is it possible that your own people have been breeding your females for docility? Refusing to mate with the intelligent ones for hundreds of thousands of years? After all, you cull the slave species.”

Chmeee shifted restlessly. “It may be. The males here are different too. I tried to deal with the rulers of the exploration ship. I showed my power, then waited for them to attempt to negotiate. They attempted no such thing. They behaved as if there was nothing to do but fight until they or I were destroyed. I had to mock Chjarrl, to insult his pride in his ancestry, before he would tell me anything.”

But puppeteers never bred these kzinti for docility, Louis thought. “Well, if you can’t take the females out of the fortress and you can’t kill off the males, then you’ll tanj well have to deal with them. God Gambit?”

“Perhaps. Let us do it this way… ”

Well above arrow range, just above the range of the cannon on the intruder’s vehicle, the lander hovered. Its shadow covered the ashes of the fire in the courtyard. Louis listened to the voices from Chmeee’s translator, and waited for Chmeee’s signal.

Chmeee inviting archers to fire at him. Chmeee threatening, promising, threatening. Staccato thunder from a laser beam cutting rock, followed by a crash. Hissing, snarling, spitting.

No mention of Chmeee’s really dangerous master.

Four hours he was down there. Then Chmeee stepped from one of the narrow windows and floated upward. Louis waited till he was aboard, then lifted.

Presently Chmeee appeared behind him, minus flying belt and impact armor. Louis said, “You never signaled for the God Gambit.”

“Are you offended?”

“No, of course not.”

“It would have gone badly. And… I could not have done it. This is my own species. I could not threaten them with a man.”

“Okay.”

“Kathakt will raise my children as heroes. He will teach them arms, and arm them well, and when they are old enough he will turn them loose to conquer their own lands. They will be no threat to his own domains, you see, and they will stand a good chance to survive if I do not return. I left Kathakt my flashlight-laser.”

“Good enough.”

“I hope so.”

“Are we through with the Map of Kzin?”

Chmeee pondered. “I captured an aircraft pilot. They are all nobility, with names and comprehensive educations. Chjarrl told me much about the age of exploration after I mocked the accomplishments of his ancestors. We may assume that there is an extensive historical library within the Behemoth. Shall we capture it?”

“Tell me what Chjarrl told you. How far did they get on Mars?”

“They found a wall of falling water. Later generations invented pressure suits and high-altitude aircraft. They explored the edges of the Map, and one team reached the center, where there was ice.”

“I think we’ll just skip the Behemoth’s library, then. They never got inside. Hindmost, are you there?”

A microphone said, “Yes, Louis.”

“We’re heading for the Map of Mars. You do the same, but stay to port of us in case we have to flick across.”

“Aye, aye. Have you anything to report?”

“Chmeee picked up some information. Kzinti explored the surface of the Map of Mars, and they didn’t find anything un-Marslike. So we still don’t know where to look for an opening.”

“Perhaps from beneath.”

“Yah, could be. That’d be annoying. How are our guests holding out?”

“You should rejoin them soon.”

“Soon as I can, then. You see if there’s data on Mars in Needle’s computer. And on martians. Louis out.” He turned. “Chmeee, do you want to fly this thing? Don’t exceed four miles per second.”

The lander surged up and forward in obedience to the kzin’s touch. A gray wall of cloud broke to let them through; then there was only blue sky, darkening as they rose. The Map of Kzin streamed below them. Then behind them.

Chmeee said, “The puppeteer seems docile enough.”

“Yah.”

“You seem very sure of the Map of Mars.”

“Yah.” Louis grinned. “It’s a very nice piece of misdirection, but it couldn’t be perfect, could it? They had too much to hide, by volume. We went under the Great Ocean on the way here. Guess what we found when we went under the Map of Mars?”

“Don’t play games.”

“Nothing. Nothing but sea bottom. Not even radiator fins. Most of the other Maps have radiator fins to cool the poles. Passive cooling systems. There has to be a system to cool the Map of Mars. Where’s the heat going? I thought it might be going into the sea water, but it wasn’t. We think the heat is pumped directly into the superconductor grid in the Ringworld floor.”

“Superconductor grid?”

“Big mesh, but it controls magnetic effects in the Ringworld foundation. It’s used to control effects in the sun. If the Map of Mars plugs into the grid, it has to be the Ringworld control center.”

Chmeee thought it over. He said, “They could not pump heat into the sea water. The warm, wet air would rise. Cloud patterns would stream inward and outward from great distances. From space the Map of Mars would appear as a great target. Can you imagine Pak protectors making such a mistake?”

“No.” Though Louis would have.

“I remember too little about Mars. The planet was never very important to your people, was it? It was no more than a source of legends. I do know that the Map is twenty miles high, to mimic the very rarefied air of the planet.”

“Twenty miles high, and fifty-six million square miles in area. That’s one billion, one hundred and twenty million cubic miles of hiding place.”

“Urrr,” said Chmeee. “You must be right. The Map of Mars is the Repair Center, and the Pak did their best to hide it. Chjarrl told me of the monsters and the storms and the distances of the Great Ocean. They would have made good passive guardians. A fleet of invaders might never have guessed the secret.”

Louis rubbed absently at four itching spots across his eyebrows. “One point twelve times ten to the ninth cubic miles. I have to admit it, that number leaves me numb. What were they keeping in there? Patches big enough to plug Fist-of-God Mountain? Machinery big enough to carry those patches, and plant them, and weld them tight? That winching equipment we saw on the rim wall, for the attitude jets? Spare attitude jets? Tanj, I’d love to find spare attitude jets. But they’d still have room to spare.”

“War fleets.”

“Yah. We already know about their big weapon, but — war fleets, of course, and ships to carry refugees, too. Maybe the whole Map is one big refugee ship. It must have been big enough to evacuate the Ringworld before the population started filling every niche in the ecology.”

“A spacecraft? Perhaps a spacecraft big enough to tow the Ringworld back into place? I have trouble thinking on this scale, Louis.”

“Me too. I don’t think it’d be big enough.”

“Then what did you have in mind when you destroyed our hyperdrive motor?” Suddenly the kzin was snarling.

Louis chose not to flinch. “I thought the Ringworld might be set up to act on the sun magnetically. I was almost right. The trouble—”

The Hindmost’s voice blared from a speaker. “Louis! Chmeee! Set the lander on autopilot and flick across to me now!”

Chapter 29 — The Map Of Mars

Chmeee reached the disc ahead of Louis, in one monstrous bound. The kzin could take orders too, Louis thought. He forbore to remark on the fact.

The City Builders were looking out through the hull, not at the passing seascape — which was nothing but blue sea and cloud-striped blue sky merging at the infinity-horizon — but at a movie-screen-sized hologram. As Chmeee appeared on the receiver disc they turned and flinched and then tried to hide it.

Louis said, “Chmeee, meet Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok, librarians from the floating city. They’ve been of great help in gaining us information.”

The kzin said, “Good. Hindmost, what is the problem?”

Louis tugged at the kzin’s fur and pointed.

“Yes,” said the puppeteer. “The sun.”

The sun showed dimmed and magnified in the hologram rectangle. A brilliant patch near the center was shifting, twisting, changing shape as they watched.

Chmeee said, “Wasn’t the sun doing that shortly before we boarded the spaceport ledge?”

“Right. You’re looking at the Ringworld meteor defense. Hindmost, what do we do now? We can slow down, but I don’t see any way to save the lander.”

“My first thought was to save your valuable selves,” the puppeteer said.

The sea threw back a highlight from directly below the fleeing Needle. Now it seemed to be growing brighter, with a violet tinge. Suddenly, momentarily, it was unbearably bright. Then it was a black spot on the hull beneath their feet.

And a thread of jet-black, outlined in violet-white, stood upon the spinward horizon. A vertical pillar, reaching from ground to sky. Above the atmosphere it was invisible.

The kzin spoke words in the Hero’s Tongue.

“All very well,” said the Hindmost in Interworld, “but what is it firing on? I assumed we were the target.”

Louis asked, “Isn’t the Map of Earth in that direction?”

“Yes. Also a good deal of water and considerable Ringworld landscape.”

Where the beam touched down, the horizon glowed white. Chmeee whispered in the Hero’s Tongue, but Louis caught the sense. “With such a weapon I could boil the Earth to vapor.”

“Shut up.”

“It was a natural thought, Louis.”

“Yah.”

The beam cut off abruptly. Then it touched down again, a few degrees to port.

“Tanj dammit! All right, Hindmost, take us up. Take us high enough to use the telescope.”

There was a glowing yellow-white point on the Map of Earth. It had the look of a major asteroid strike.

There was a similar glow farther away, at the far shore of the Great Ocean.

The solar flare had dimmed and was losing coherence.

Chmeee asked, “Were there aircraft or spacecraft in those directions? Fast-moving objects?”

“The instruments may have recorded something,” the Hindmost said.

“Find out. And take us down to one mile altitude. I think we want to approach the Map of Mars from below the surface.”

“Louis?”

“Do it.”

Chmeee asked, “Have you knowledge of how that laser beam was produced?”

“Louis can tell you,” the puppeteer said. “I will be busy.”

Needle and the lander converged on the Map of Mars from two directions. The Hindmost held the two vehicles parallel so that it was possible to cross between them.

Louis and Chmeee flicked across to the lander for lunch. Chmeee was hungry. He consumed several pounds of red meat, a salmon, a gallon of water. Louis’s own appetite suffered. He was pleased that his guests weren’t watching.

“I don’t understand why you picked up these passengers,” Chmeee said, “unless it was to mate with the woman. But why the boy?”

“They’re City Builders,” Louis said. “Their species ruled most of the Ringworld. And I plucked these two out of a library. Get to know them, Chmeee. Ask them questions.”

“They fear me.”

“You’re a soft-spoken diplomat, remember? I’m going to invite the boy to see the lander. Tell him stories. Tell him about Kzin and hunting parks and the House of the Patriarch’s Past. Tell him how kzinti mate.”

Louis flicked across to Needle, spoke to Kawaresksenjajok, and was back in the lander with him before Harkabeeparolyn quite realized what was happening.

Chmeee showed him how to fly. The lander swooped and did somersaults and darted skyward at his command. The boy was entranced. Chmeee showed him the magic of binocular goggles, and superconductor cloth, and impact armor.

The boy asked about kzinti mating practices.

Chmeee had mated with a female who could talk! It had opened new vistas for him. He told Kawaresksenjajok what he wanted to know — which Louis thought was pretty dull stuff — and then got the boy talking about mating and rishathra.

Kawaresksenjajok had no practice but a lot of theory. “We make records if a species will let us. We have archives of tapes. Some species have things they can do instead of rishathra, or they may like to watch or to talk about it. Some mate in only one position, others only in season, and this carries over. All of this influences trade relationships. There are aids of various kinds. Did Luweewu tell you about vampire perfume?”

They hardly noticed when Louis left to return to Needle alone.

Harkabeeparolyn was upset. “Luweewu, he might hurt Kawa!”

“They’re doing fine,” Louis told her. “Chmeee’s my crewmate, and he likes children of all species. He’s perfectly safe. If you want to be his friend too, scratch him behind the ears.”

“How did you hurt your forehead?”

“I was careless. Look, I know how to calm you down.”

They made love — well, rishathra — on the water bed, with the massage unit going. The woman might have hated Panth Building, but she had learned a good deal. Two hours later, when Louis was sure he would never move again, Harkabeeparolyn stroked his cheek and said, “My time of mating should end tomorrow. Then you may recover.”

“I have mixed feelings about that.” He chuckled.

“Luweewu, I would feel better if you would rejoin Chmeee and Kawa.”

“Okay. Behold as I stagger to my feet. See me at the stepping disc? There I go: poof, gone.”

“Luweewu—”

“Oh, all right.”

The Map of Mars was a dark line, growing, becoming a wall across their path. As Chmeee slowed, microphones on the lander’s hull picked up a steady whispering, louder than the wind of their passage.

They came to a wall of falling water.

From a mile distant it appeared perfectly straight and infinitely long. The top of the waterfall was twenty miles above their heads. The base was hidden in fog. Water thundered in their ears until Chmeee had to turn off the microphones, and then they could hear it through the hull.

“It’s like the water condensers in the city,” the boy said. “This must be where my people learned how to make water condensers. Chmeee, did I tell you about water condensers?”

“Yes. If the City Builders came this far, one wonders if they found the way inside. Do your tales tell anything of a hollow land?”

“No.”

Louis said, “Their magicians are all built like Pak protectors.”

The boy asked, “Luweewu, this great waterfall — why is there so much of it?”

“It must run all the way round the top of the Map. It takes out the water vapor. The top of the Map has to be kept dry,” Louis said. “Hindmost, are you listening?”

“Yes. Your orders?”

“We’ll circle with the lander, using deep-radar and the other instruments. Maybe we’ll find a door under the waterfall. We’ll use Needle to explore the top. How’s our fuel supply?”

“Adequate, given that we won’t be going home.”

“Good. We’ll dismount the probe and set it following Needle at… ten miles and ground-hugging altitude, I think. Keep the stepping-disc links and the microphones open. Chmeee, do you want to fly the lander?”

The kzin said, “Aye, aye.”

“Okay. Come on, Kawa.”

“I’d like to stay here,” the boy said.

“Harkabeeparolyn would kill me. Come on.”

Needle rose twenty miles, and red Mars stretched before them.

Kawaresksenjajok said, “It looks awful.”

Louis ignored that. “At least we know we’re looking for something big. Picture a blowout patch big enough to plug Fist-of-God Mountain. We want a hatch big enough for that patch plus the vehicle to lift it. Where would you put it on the Map of Mars? Hindmost?”

“Under the waterfall,” the Hindmost said. “Who would see? The ocean is empty. The failing water would hide all.”

“Yah. Makes sense. But Chmeee’s searching that. Where else?”

“I must hide the lines of a gigantic hatch in a martian landscape? Perhaps an irregular shape, with hinges in a long, straight canyon. Perhaps I would put it beneath the ice, melting and refreezing the north pole to conceal my comings and goings.”

“Is there a canyon like that?”

“Yes. I did my homework. Louis, the poles are the best gamble. Martians never went near the poles. Water killed them.”

The Map was a polar projection; the south pole was spread out around the rim. “Okay. Take us to the north pole. If we don’t find anything, we’ll spiral out from there. Stay high and keep all instruments going. We don’t care too much if something fires on Needle. Chmeee, are you listening?”

“I hear.”

“Tell us everything. Chances are you’ll find what were after. Don’t try to do anything about it.” Would he obey? “We don’t invade in the lander. We’re burglars. We’d rather be shot at in a General Products hull.”

Deep-radar stopped at the scrith floor. Above the scrith the mountains and valleys showed translucent. There were seas of marsdust fine enough to flow like oil. Under the dust were cities of a sort: stone buildings denser than the dust, with carved walls and rounded corners and a good many openings. The City Builders stared, and so did Louis Wu. Martians had been extinct in human space for hundreds of years.

The air was clear as vacuum. Off to starboard, well beyond the horizon, was a mountain taller than any on Earth. Mons Olympus, of course. And a splinter of white floated above the crater.

Needle fell, and pulled out of the fall just above the crescent dunes. The structure was still visible, floating fifty to sixty yards above the peak; and Needle must have been quite visible to its occupants.

“Chmeee?”

“Listening.”

Louis fought a tendency to whisper. “We’ve found a floating skyscraper. Maybe thirty stories tall, with bay windows and a landing ledge for cars. Built like a double cone. It looks very much like the building we took over on our first trip, the good ship Improbable.”

“Identical?”

“Not quite, but close. And it’s floating above the highest mountain on Mars, just like a god-tanjed signpost.”

“It does sound like a signal meant for us. Shall I flick through?”

“Not yet. Have you found anything?”

“I believe I’ve traced the lines of a tremendous hatch inside the waterfall. It would pass a war fleet or a patch to cover the crater in Fist-of-God. There may be signals to open it. I haven’t tried.”

“Don’t. Stand by. Hindmost?”

“I have radiation and deep-radar scans. The building is radiating little energy. Magnetic levitation does not require large amounts of power.”

“What’s inside?”

“Here.” The Hindmost gave them a view. By deep radar the structure showed translucent gray. It appeared to be a floating building modified for travel, with fuel tanks and an air-breathing motor built into the fifteenth floor. The puppeteer said, “Solid construction: walls of concrete or something equally dense. No vehicles in the carport. Those are telescopes or other sensor devices in the tower and the basement. I cannot tell if the structure is occupied.”

“That’s the problem, all right. I want to outline a strategy. You tell me how it sounds. One: we go as fast as possible to just above the peak.”

“Making perfect targets of ourselves.”

“We’re targets now.”

“Not from weapons inside Mons Olympus.”

“What the futz, we’re wearing a General Products hull. If nothing fires on us, we go to step two: we deep-radar the crater. If we find anything but a solid scrith floor we go to step three: vaporize that building. Can we do that? Fast?”

“Yes. We don’t have power storage to do it twice. What is step four?”

“Anything to get us inside quick. Chmeee stands by to rescue us any way he can. Now tell me whether you’re going to freeze up halfway through this procedure.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“Wait a bit.” It came to Louis that their native guests were scared spitless. To Harkabeeparolyn he said, “If there is a place in the world where the world can be saved, that place is below us. We think we’ve found the door. Someone else has found it too. We don’t know anything about him, or them. Understand?”

The woman said, “I’m frightened.”

“So am I. Can you keep the boy calm?”

“Can you keep me calm?” She laughed raggedly. “I’ll try.”

“Hindmost. Go.”

Needle leapt into the sky at twenty gravities, and rolled, and stopped upside down, almost alongside the floating building. Louis’s belly rolled too. Both City Builders shrieked. Kawaresksenjajok had a death grip on his arm.

Eyesight showed the crater plugged by old lava. Louis watched the deep-radar image.

It was there! A hole in the scrith, an inverted funnel leading up (down!) through the crater in Mons Olympus. It was far too small to pass Ringworld repair equipment. This was a mere escape hatch, but it was roomy enough for Needle.

“Fire,” Louis said.

The Hindmost had last used this beam as a spotlight. At close range it was devastating. The floating building became a streamer of incandescence with a cometlike head of boiling concrete. Then it was only dust cloud.

Louis said, “Dive.”

“Louis?”

“We’re a target here. We don’t have time. Dive. Twenty gravities. We’ll make our own door.”

The ocher landscape was a roof over their heads. Deep-radar showed a hole in the scrith, dropping to engulf them. But every other sense showed the solid lava crater in Mons Olympus descending at terrible speed to smash them.

Kawaresksenjajok’s nails in Louis’s arm were drawing blood. Harkabeeparolyn seemed frozen. Louis braced for the impact.

Darkness.

There was formless, milky light from the deep-radar screen. Something else was glowing somewhere: green and red and orange stars. Those were dials on the flight deck.

“Hindmost!”

No answer.

“Hindmost, give us some light! Use the spotlight! Let us see what’s threatening us!”

“What happened?” Harkabeeparolyn asked plaintively. Louis’s eyes were adjusting; he could see her sitting on the floor, hugging her knees.

Cabin lights came on. The Hindmost turned from the controls. He looked shrunken: half curled up already. “I can’t do this any more, Louis.”

“We can’t use the controls. You know that. Give us a spotlight so we can see out.”

The puppeteer touched controls. A white diffused light bathed the hull in front of the flight deck.

“We are embedded in something.” One head glanced down; the other said, “Lava. The outer hull is at seven hundred degrees. Lava was poured over us while we were in stasis and is now cooled.”

“Sounds like someone was ready for us. Are we still upside down?”

“Yes.”

“So we can’t accelerate up. Just down.”

“Yes.”

“Want to try it?”

“What are you asking? I want to start over from just before you burned out the hyperdrive motor—”

“Come on, now.”

“—or from just before I decided to kidnap a man and a kzin. That was probably a mistake.”

“We’re wasting time.”

“There is no place to radiate Needle’s excess heat. Using the thrusters would bring us an hour or two closer to the moment when we must go into stasis and await developments.”

“Hold off for a while, then. What are you getting from deep-radar?”

“Igneous rock in all directions, cracked with cooling. Let me expand the field… Louis? Scrith floor some six miles below us, below Needle’s roof. A much thinner scrith ceiling fourteen miles above.”

Louis was beginning to panic. “Chmeee, are you getting all this?”

He was answered in unexpected fashion.

He heard a howl of inhuman pain and rage as Chmeee burst from the stepping disc, running full out with his arms across his eyes. Harkabeeparolyn dove out of his path. The water bed caught the kzin across the knees and he rolled across the bed and onto the floor.

Louis had leaped for the shower. He flipped it on full blast, jumped the water bed, put his shoulder into Chmeee’s armpit, and heaved. Chmeee’s flesh was hot beneath the fur.

The kzin stood and followed the pull into the stream of cold water. He moved about, getting water over every part of himself; then he huddled with his face in the stream. Presently he said, “How did you know?”

“You’ll smell it in a minute,” Louis said. “Scorched fur. What happened?”

“Suddenly I was burning. A dozen red lights glowed on the board. I leaped for the stepping disc. The lander is still on autopilot, if it isn’t destroyed.”

“We may have to find out. Needle’s embedded in lava. Hindmost?” Louis turned toward the flight deck.

The puppeteer was curled up with his heads beneath his belly.

One shock too many. It was easy to see why. A screen on the flight deck showed a half-familiar face.

The same face, enlarged, was looking out of the rectangle that had been a deep-radar projection. A mask of a face, like a human face molded out of old leather, but not quite. It was hairless. The jaws were hard, toothless crescents. From deep under a ridge of brow, the eyes looked speculatively out at Louis Wu.

Chapter 30 — Wheels Within Wheels

“It appears you’ve lost your pilot,” the leathery-faced intruder told them. It floated outside the hull: the distorted head and melon-sized shoulders of a protector, a ghost within the black rock that enclosed them.

Louis could only nod. The shocks had come too fast, from the wrong directions. He was aware that Chmeee stood beside him, dripping water, silently studying a potential enemy. The City Builders were mute. If Louis read their faces right, they were closer to awe or rapture than fear.

The protector said, “That traps you thoroughly. Soon enough you must go into stasis, and we need not discuss what happens after that. I am relieved. I wonder if I could make myself kill you.”

Louis said, “We thought you were all dead.”

“The Pak died off a quarter of a million years ago.” The protector’s fused lips and gums distorted some of the consonants, but it was speaking Interworld. Why Interworld? “A disease took them. You were right to assume that the protectors were all dead. But tree-of-life is alive and well beneath the Map of Mars. Sometimes it is discovered. I speculate that the immortality drug was made here when a protector needed funding for some project.”

“How did you learn Interworld?”

“I grew up with it. Louis, don’t you know me?”

It was like a knife in the gut. “Teela. How?”

Her face was hard as a mask. How could it show expression? She said, “A little knowledge. You know the adage? Seeker was looking for the base of the Arch. I paraded my superior education before him: I told him that the Arch had no base, that the world was a ring. He became badly upset. I told him that if he was looking for the place from which the world could be ruled, he should look for the construction shack.”

“Repair Center,” said Louis. A glance toward the flight deck showed the Hindmost as an elongated white footstool decorated in ruby and lavender gems.

“Of course it would become the Repair Center, and the center of power too,” the protector said. “Seeker remembered tales of the Great Ocean. It seemed a likely choice, protected by the natural barriers of distance, storm, and a dozen predatory ecologies. Astronomers had studied the Great Ocean from vantages far along the Arch, and Seeker remembered enough to make us maps.

“We were sixteen years crossing the Great Ocean. There should be legends made from that voyage. Did you know that the Maps are stocked? The kzinti have colonized the Map of Earth. We could not have continued if we had not captured a kzinti colony ship. There are islands in the Great Ocean that are large life forms, their backs covered in vegetation, who dive when a sailor least expects it—”

“Teela! How? How could you get to be like this?”

“A little knowledge, Louis. I never did reason out the origin of the Ringworld engineers, not until too late.”

“But you were lucky!”

The protector nodded. “Bred for luck, by Pierson’s puppeteers meddling with Earth’s Fertility Laws to make the Birthright Lotteries. You assumed it worked. It always seemed stupid to me. Louis, do you want to believe that six generations of Birthright Lottery winners produced a lucky human being?”

He didn’t answer.

“Only one?” She seemed to be laughing at him. “Consider the luck of all the descendants of all the winners of the Birthright Lotteries. In twenty thousand years they must be well on their way out of the galaxy, fleeing the explosion of the galactic core. Why not aboard the Ringworld? Three million times the habitable surface area of the Earth, and it can be moved, Louis. The Ringworld is lucky for those unborn descendants of people bred for luck. If I can save the Ringworld, then it is luck for them that we came here twenty-three years ago, and luck for them that Seeker and I found the entrance in Mons Olympus. Their luck. Never mine.”

“Did it happen to him too?”

“Seeker died, of course. We both went mad with the hunger for tree-of-life root, but Seeker was a thousand years too old. It killed him.”

“I should never have left you,” Louis said.

“I gave you no choice. I had none myself — if you believe in luck. I have little choice now. Instincts are very strong in a protector.”

“Do you believe in luck?”

She said, “No. I wish I could.”

Louis flopped his arms — a gesture of helplessness — and turned away. He had always known that he would meet Teela Brown again. But not like this! He waved the sleeping field on and floated.

The Hindmost had the right idea. Crawl into your own navel.

But humans can’t bury their ears. Louis floated half curled up, with his arms over his face. But he heard:

“Speaker-To-Animals, I congratulate you on regaining your youth.”

“My name is Chmeee.”

“I beg your pardon,” the protector said. “Chmeee, how did you come here?”

The kzin said, “I am thrice trapped. Kidnapped by the Hindmost, barred by Louis from escaping the Ringworld, trapped underground by Teela Brown. This is a habit I must break. Will you fight me, Teela?”

“Not unless you can reach me, Chmeee.”

The kzin turned away.

“What do you want from us?” That was Kawaresksenjajok, speaking diffidently in the City Builder tongue, echoed in Interworld by the translator.

“Nothing.” Teela, in City Builder.

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Nothing. I’ve seen to it that you can do nothing.”

“I don’t understand.” The boy was near tears. “Why do you want to bury us underground?”

“Child, I do what I must. I must prevent one point five times ten to the twelfth murders.”

Louis opened his eyes.

Harkabeeparolyn objected heatedly. “But we’re here to prevent deaths! Don’t you know that the world is off center, sliding into the sun?”

“I know of that. I formed the team that has been remounting the Ringworld’s attitude jets, reversing the damage done by your species.”

“Luweewu says that it isn’t enough.”

“It isn’t.”

They had Louis Wu’s complete attention now.

The librarian shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“With the attitude jets in action we extend the life span of the Ringworld by as much as a year. An extra year for three times ten to the thirteenth intelligent beings is equivalent to giving everyone on Earth an extra thousand years of life span. A worthy accomplishment. My collaborators agreed, even those who are not protectors.”

Louis could trace the lines of Teela Brown’s face in the protector’s leather mask. Bulges at the hinges of the jaw, a skull swollen to accommodate more brain tissue… but it was Teela, and it hurt terribly. Why doesn’t she go away?

Habits die hard, and Louis had an analytic mind. He thought, Why doesn’t she go away? A dying protector in a doomed artificial world! She doesn’t have a minute to spare talking to a collection of trapped breeders. What does she think she’s doing?

He turned to face her. “You formed the repair crew, did you? Who are they?”

“My appearance helped. Most hominids will at least listen to me. I gathered a team of several hundred thousand from various species. I brought three here to become protectors: from the Spill Mountain People and the Night People and the Vampires. I hoped that they would see a solution hidden to me. Their viewpoints would differ. The vampire, for instance, was non-sentient before the change.

“They failed me,” said Teela. She certainly behaved as if she had time. Time to entertain trapped aliens and breeders until the Ringworld brushed the shadow squares! “They saw no better solution. And so we mounted the remaining Bussard ramjets on the rim wall. We have now mounted all but the last. Under the direction of the remaining protector, my team will gear the remaining Ringworld spacecraft to carry them to safety around some nearby star. Some Ringworlders will survive.”

“We’re back to the original question,” Louis said. “Your crew is hard at work. What are you doing here?” I’m right! She’s trying to tell us something!

“I came to prevent the murder of fifteen hundred thousand million intelligent hominids. I recognized the neutrino exhaust from thrusters built in human space, and I came to the only feasible scene of the crime. I waited. Here you are.”

“Here we are,” Louis agreed. “But you know tanj well that we didn’t come to commit any murders whatever.”

“You would have.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Yet she showed no inclination to end the conversation. It was a strange game Teela was playing. They would have to guess at the rules. Louis asked, “Suppose you could save the Ringworld by killing one and a half trillion inhabitants out of thirty trillion. A protector would do that, wouldn’t she? Five percent to save 95 percent. It seems so… efficient.”

“Can you empathize with that many thinking beings, Louis? Or can you only imagine one death a time, with yourself in the starring role?”

He didn’t answer.

“Thirty billion people inhabit human space. Picture all of them dead. Picture fifty times that population dying of, let us say, radiation poisoning. Do you sense their pain, their regrets, their thoughts for each other? From that many? The numbers are too large. Your brain won’t handle it. But mine will.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t make it happen. I can’t let it happen. I knew I must stop you.”

“Teela. Picture a shadow square sweeping down the width of the Ringworld at around seven hundred miles per second. Picture a thousand times the population of human space dying as the Ringworld disintegrates.”

“I do.”

Louis nodded. Pieces of a puzzle. Teela would give them as many pieces as she could. She couldn’t make herself hand them a finished picture. So keep fishing for pieces. “Did you say the remaining protector? There were four, and now there’s one plus you? What happened to the others?”

“Two protectors left the repair crew at the same time I did. They must have left separately. Perhaps they found the clues that announced your arrival. I felt it necessary to track them down and stop them.”

“Really? If they were protectors, they could no more kill a trillion and a half thinking hominids than you could.”

“They might arrange for it to happen, somehow.”

“Somehow.” Careful with the wording, now. He was glad that nobody was trying to interrupt. Not even Chmeee, the soft-spoken diplomat. “Somehow, let breeders reach the only place on the Ringworld where the crime can be committed. Would that have been their strategy, if you hadn’t stopped them?”

“Perhaps.”

“Let these carefully chosen breeders be protected from smelling tree-of-life, somehow.” Pressure suits! That was why Teela had been looking for an interstellar spacecraft. “Let them become aware of the situation, somehow. And somehow a protector has to double-think his way out of killing them before they see the solution and use it, killing astronomical numbers of breeders to save even more. Is that what you think you prevented?”

“Yes.”

“And this is the right place?”

“Why else would I be waiting here?”

“There’s one protector left. Will he come after you?”

“No. The Night People protector knows that she alone is left to supervise the evacuation. If she tries to kill me and I kill her, breeders alone might die en route.”

“You do seem to kill very easily,” Louis said bitterly.

“No. I can’t kill 5 percent of the Ringworld populace, and I don’t know that I can kill you, Louis. You are a breeder of my species. On the Ringworld you are alone in that regard.”

“I thought of ways to save the Ringworld,” said Louis Wu. “If you know of a large-scale transmutation device, we know how to use it.”

“Certainly the Pak had none. That was not your cleverest deduction, Louis.”

“If we could punch a hole under one of the Great Oceans, then control the outflow, we could use the reaction to put the Ringworld back in place.”

“Clever. But you can’t make the hole and you can’t plug it. Furthermore, there is a solution that does less damage, yet it is too much damage, and I cannot permit it.”

“How would you save the Ringworld?”

The protector said, “I can’t.”

“Where are we? What went on in this part of the Repair Center?”

A long moment passed. The protector said, “I may not tell you more than you know. I don’t see how you can escape, but I must consider the possibility.”

“I quit,” said Louis Wu. “I concede. Tanj on your silly game.”

“All right, Louis. At least you will never die.”

Louis closed his eyes and curled up in free fall. Pious bitch.

“I will keep you company until you must go into stasis,” Teela said. “I can do little else for your comfort. You, what are your names and where are you from? You are of the species that conquered the Ringworld and the stars.”

Chattering. Why weren’t people born with flaps over their ears? Was there a hominid with that trait?

Kawaresksenjajok asked. “What is a magician’s position regarding rishathra?”

“That is important when you meet a new species, isn’t it, child? My position is that rishathra is for breeders. But we do love.”

The boy was enjoying himself immensely. His sense of wonder was stretched nowhere near its limits. Teela told of her great journey. Her band of explorers had been trapped by Grogs on the Map of Down, then freed by the odd inhabitants. On Kzin there were hominid animals imported long ago from the Map of Earth, bred for special traits until they differed as thoroughly as dogs do in human space. Teela’s crew had hidden among them. They had stolen a kzinti colony ship. They had killed one of the krill-eating island-beasts for food, freezing the meat in an empty liquid hydrogen tank. It had fed them for months.

Finally he heard her say, “I must eat now, but I will return soon.” And then there was quiet.

The few minutes of silence ended as blunt teeth closed gently on Louis’s wrist. “Louis, wake. We have no time to indulge you.”

Louis turned over; he killed the sleeping field. He took a moment to savor the interesting sight of a puppeteer standing next to a kzin in the prime of health. “I thought you were out of it.”

“A valuable illusion that came too near reality. I was tempted to let events take their own course,” said the puppeteer. “Teela Brown spoke the truth when she said we will not die. Most of the Ringworld will break up and fly free, beyond the cometary halo. We might even be found someday.”

“I’m starting to feel the same way. Ready to give up.”

“The protectors must have been dead for a quarter of a million years. Who told me that?”

“If you had any sense you’d quit listening to me.”

“Not quite yet, if you please. I have the impression the protector was trying to tell us something. Pak were your ancestors, and Teela is of your own culture. Advise us.”

“She wants us to do her dirty work for her,” Louis said. “It’s doublethink all the way. Futz, you studied the interviews with Brennan after he turned protector. Protectors have very strong instincts and superhuman intelligence. There’s bound to be conflict between the two.”

“I don’t grasp the nature of the dirty work.”

“She knows how to save the Ringworld. They all did. Kill 5 percent, save 95 — but they can’t do it themselves. They can’t even let someone else do it, but they have to make someone else do it. Doublethink.”

“Specifics?”

Something about those numbers ticked at Louis’s hindbrain. Why?… Tanj on it. “Teela picked that building because it looked like Halrloprillalar’s floating jail, the one we commandeered on the first expedition. She picked it to get our attention. She left it where she wanted us. I don’t know what this part of the Repair Center does, but it’s the right spot, in a billion-cubic-mile box. We’re supposed to figure out the rest.”

“What then? Is she certain we’re trapped?”

“Whatever we try, she’ll try to stop us. We’ll have to kill her. That’s what she was telling us. We only have one advantage. She’s fighting to lose.”

“I don’t follow you,” said the puppeteer.

“She wants the Ringworld to live. She wants us to kill her. She told us as much as she could. But even if we figure it all out, can we kill that many intelligent beings?”

Chmeee said, “I pity Teela.”

“Yah.”

“How can we kill her? If you are right, then she must have planned something for us.”

“I doubt it. I’d guess she’s done her best not to think of anything we can do. She’d have to block it. We’re on our own. And she’ll kill aliens by instinct. With me she might hesitate that crucial half-second.”

“Very well,” said the kzin. “The big weapons are all on the lander. We are embedded in rock. Is the stepping-disc link to the lander still open?”

The Hindmost returned to the flight deck to find out.

He reported, “The link is open. The Map of Mars is scrith, but only centimeters thick. It does not have to stand the terrible stresses of the Ringworld floor. My instruments penetrate it, and so do the stepping discs. Our only good fortune to date.”

“Good. Louis, will you join me?”

“Sure. What’s the temperature aboard the lander?”

“Some of the sensors have burned out. I can’t tell,” said the Hindmost. “If the lander can be used, well and good. Otherwise gather your equipment and return in haste. If conditions are intolerable, return instantly. We need to know what we have to work with.”

“The obvious next step,” Chmeee agreed. “What if the lander is inoperable?”

“We’d still have a way out,” said Louis, “but we’ve got to have pressure suits. Hindmost, don’t wait for us. Find out where we are, and find Teela. She’ll be in an open space, something suitable for growing crops.”

“Aye, aye. I expect we are some distance beneath Mons Olympus.”

“Don’t count on it. She could have put a heavy laser beam on us to keep Needle in stasis, then towed us to where she had molten rock ready to pour. And that place will turn out to be the murder site.”

“Louis, do you have any idea what she expects of us?”

“Barely an idea. Skip it for now.” Louis dialed himself a couple of bath towels and passed one to Chmeee. He added a set of wooden clogs. “Are we ready?”

Chmeee bounded onto the stepping disc. Louis followed.

Chapter 31 — The Repair Center

It was like flicking into an oven. Louis had his clogs, but the only thing protecting Chmeee’s feet was the carpeting. The kzin disappeared down the stairs, snarling once when he brushed metal.

Louis was holding his breath. He hoped Chmeee was doing the same. It felt that hot: hot enough to sear the lungs. The floor was tilted four or five degrees. Looking out the window was a mistake: it froze him in disbelief. In the murky dark outside: a questing sand shark? Sea water?

He’d lost two or three seconds. He took the stairs more carefully than Chmeee had, fighting the need to breathe, snorting puffs of breath through his nose to clear the oven-hot air that worked its way in anyway. He smelled char, staleness, smoke, heat.

Chmeee was nursing burnt hands; the fur puffed up hugely around his neck. The handles on the lockers were metal. Louis wrapped the towel around his hands and began opening lockers. Chmeee used his own towel to heave out the contents. Pressure suits. Flying belts. Disintegrator. Superconductor cloth. Louis picked his pressure suit helmet out of that and turned on the air feed, wrapped his towel around his neck for padding and donned the helmet. The wind that blew around his face was merely warm. He pulled in sweet air, his chest heaving.

Chmeee’s suit didn’t have a separate helmet; he had to put it on and seal it up. The rasp of his sudden panting was fearsome in Louis’s earphones.

“We’re underwater,” Louis gasped. “Why is it so futzy hot?”

“Ask me later. Help me carry this.” Chmeee scoop up his flying belt and impact armor, a spool of black wire and a healthy share of the superconductor cloth, and the heavy two-handed disintegrator. He made for the stairs. Louis staggered after him, with Prill’s flying belt and flashlight-laser and two pressure suits and sets of impact armor. The meat of him was beginning to broil.

Chmeee stopped before the flight-deck instruments. Bubbling dark-green water showed through the windows. Small fish wove paths within an extensive seaweed-forest. The kzin puffed, “There, the dials… record your answer. Teela poured heat at me in… a blast of microwaves. Life support failed. Scrith repulsers failed. The lander sank. Water stopped… the microwaves. Lander stayed hot because… heat pumps burned out first… insulation too good. We can’t use the lander now.”

“Futz that.” Louis used the stepping disc.

He dropped what he was carrying. Sweat was streaming into his eyes and mouth. He pulled the hot helmet off and sucked cool air. Harkabeeparolyn had her shoulder under his armpit and was half carrying him toward the bed, murmuring soothing City Builder words.

Chmeee hadn’t appeared.

Louis pulled himself loose. He dropped the helmet over his head and staggered back to the stepping disc.

Chmeee was working the controls. He pushed his own gear into Louis’s arms. “Take this. Join you momentarily.”

“Aye, aye.”

Louis was half into his pressure suit when the kzin reappeared in Needle. The kzin stripped off his own suit. “We are in no great hurry, Louis. Hindmost, the lander is useless. I set it to take off on fusion motors and fly to Mons Olympus, purely as a diversion. Teela may waste a few seconds destroying it.”

The microphone answered. “Good. I can report some progress, but I may not show it to you. We know that Teela can tap my communications.”

“Well?”

The Hindmost flicked in from the flight deck. Now he could speak without mechanical aids. “Most of my instruments are useless, of course. I do know our orientation. There is a massive source of neutrino emission, probably a fusion plant, some two hundred miles to port of spinward. Deep-radar shows cavities all around us. Most are merely room-sized. Some are tremendous, and these hold heavy machinery. I believe I have identified the empty cavern that held the repair crew’s scaffolding, from its size and shape and the cradles on the floor. Its exit is a massive curved door in the wall of the Map, hidden by the waterfall. I found storage for what must be patches for major meteor strikes, and another hatch. Small spacecraft, possibly warcraft — I can’t tell — and yet another hatch. There are six hatches in all beneath the waterfall. I managed to—”

“Hindmost, you were to find Teela Brown!”

“Did I hear you counsel Louis Wu to patience?”

“Louis Wu is human; he knows patience. You, you grazing beast, you have far too much.”

“And you propose to murder the human variant of a Pak protector. I hope you are not expecting some kind of duel? Scream and leap, and Teela will fight bare-handed? We must fight Teela with our minds. Patience, kzin. Remember the stakes.”

“Proceed.”

“I managed to locate the mapping of Mons Olympus, eight hundred miles to antispinward of port of us. I surmise that Teela kept a heavy laser firing on Needle, or some such similar artifice, to keep us in stasis while she towed us eight hundred miles. I cannot guess why.”

Louis said, “She towed us to where she had molten rock ready to pour. That place will turn out to be the site of her hypothetical multiple murder. We still have to figure out how. Tanj, maybe she’s overestimated our intelligence!”

“Speak for yourself, Louis. Likely it is below us.” One puppeteer head arced upward. “Nearly above us, by ship’s orientation, is a complex of rooms in which a good deal of electrical activity can be sensed, not to mention enough pulsed neutrino emission to indicate half a dozen deep-radar sets.

“I also found a hemisphere thirty-eight point eight miles in diameter, with another neutrino source partly up the wall. A moving source. Output is random, as with a fusion plant. It hasn’t moved far during the few minutes you’ve been gone, but it might traverse the full one hundred and eighty degrees of dome in fifteen hours plus or minus three. Meat-eater, warrior, does that suggest anything to you?”

“An artificial sun. Agriculture. Where?”

“Twenty five hundred miles toward the starboard edge of the Map. But since you will be invading through Mons Olympus, you must search twelve degrees to antispinward of starboard. There may be walls to penetrate. Did you bring the hand disintegrator?”

“Not being totally nonsentient, I did. Hindmost, if the lander should reach Mons Olympus, then we may exit through the stepping discs and straight out the lander’s cargo door. But Teela will shoot it down first.”

“Why should she? We are not aboard yet. She has deep-radar; she will know that.”

“Uurrr. Then she will track the lander, wait until we appear, and destroy us then. Is this the sapience that aids your people to sneak up on a leaf?”

“Yes. You will enter Mons Olympus hours before the lander arrives. I set the probe to follow us. There is a stepping-disc receiver in the probe. Of course you will have no way to return to Needle.”

“Uurrr. It sounds workable.”

“What equipment will you use?”

“Pressure suits, flying belts, flashlight-lasers, and the disintegrator. I also brought this.” Chmeee indicated the superconductor cloth. “Teela doesn’t know of it. That may help us. We can sew it into garments to cover our pressure suits. You, Harkabeeparolyn, can you sew?”

“No.”

Louis said, “I can.”

“So can I,” said the boy. “You have to show me what you want.”

“I will. It need not be elegant. We must hope that Teela will use lasers rather than projectiles or a war ax. Our impact armor will not fit over pressure suits.”

“Not quite true,” Louis said. “For instance, Chmeee, your impact armor would fit over my pressure suit.”

“Swaddled like that, you could not move fast enough.”

“Maybe not. Harkabeeparolyn, how are you holding up?”

“I’m confused, Louis. Are you battling with or against the protector?”

“She’s fighting us, but she’s hoping to lose,” Louis said gently. “She can’t say so. The rules she plays by are built into her brain and glands. Can you believe any of that?”

Harkabeeparolyn hesitated. Then “The protector acted like — like somebody it feared was supervising everything it said and did. It was like that in Panth Building when I was being trained.”

“That’s the way it is. The supervisor is Teela herself. Can you fight a protector, knowing that the whole world could die if you lose?”

“I think so. At worst I may distract the protector.”

“Okay. We’re taking you with us. We’ve got equipment that was meant for another City Builder woman. I’ll teach you as much as I can about what you’ll be wearing. Chmeee, she’ll have your impact suit between her pressure suit and the superconductor cloth.”

“She may have Halrloprillalar’s flashlight-laser. I lost mine through carelessness. I will carry the disintegrator. I also know how to rig spare batteries to release their power in a millisecond.”

“These batteries are my people’s. We designed them for safety,” the Hindmost said dubiously.

“Let me see them anyway. Next you must close off all avenues of communication. We must expect Teela to eat and return before we finish here. I wish we had more time. Louis, show Kawaresksenjajok how to sew our covering garments. Use superconductor for thread.”

“Yah, I thought of that. Tanj, I wish we had more time.”

They bounced toward the stepping disc, swaddled in gear.

Harkabeeparolyn was shapeless in layers of cloth. Her face within the helmet was tense with concentration. Pressure suit, flying belt, laser — she’d be lucky to remember how to work what she was wearing, let alone fight. From a distance it might be Louis Wu under all that cloth. Teela might hesitate. Anything might count.

She was gone. Louis followed, switching on his flying belt.

Chmeee, Harkabeeparolyn, Louis Wu: they floated like balls of black tissue paper above the rust-colored slope of Mons Olympus. The probe wasn’t floating. It must have hovered until it ran out of fuel, then dropped and rolled. It was badly battered. The stepping disc had survived.

The dials below Louis’s chin told him that the air was very thin, very dry, rich in carbon dioxide. A good imitation of Mars, but this was nearly Earth’s gravity. How had the martians survived? They must have adapted, buoyed by the sea of dust they lived in. Stronger than their extinct cousins… Stick to business!

The crater rim was forty miles upslope. It took them fifteen minutes. Harkabeeparolyn trailed. Her flying was jerky; she must have been constantly fiddling with the controls.

The hatch at the bottom of the crater was rock-and-rust-colored and rough-surfaced. It had exploded inward, downward.

They dropped into darkness.

Their flying belts held them. That shouldn’t have worked. The repulser units were repelling flat scrith plates overhead and underneath. But the scrith ceiling was not load-bearing. It was much thinner than the Ringworld floor below them.

Louis switched to infrared (hoping Harkabeeparolyn would remember; otherwise she’d be blind). Heat radiated from below — a small, bright circle. Their surroundings were vast, indistinct. Columns of discs, and slender ladders alongside, along three walls. And rising up the middle of the great room, a tilted tower of toroids. They fell past it, ring by ring. A linear accelerator, aimed up through Mons Olympus? Then those discs could be one-protector fighting platforms waiting to be launched into the sky.

A hole had been punched downward through the floor. They dropped through. Harkabeeparolyn was still with them. The warm spot was still below, growing large.

Twelve floors, close together, each with a hole punched through. Needle had cut quite a swath. Even the last of the ruptures was a big one… and infrared light glared through it. The chamber below was just short of red-hot. Chmeee dropped into it well ahead of Louis. A moment later he floated back up, then settled on the floor above.

They were maintaining radio silence. Louis imitated Chmeee: he dropped through the last hole and found himself in a blaze of infrared. Enormous heat had been released here. And the tunnel leading away glowed more brightly still.

Louis rose to join Chmeee. He waved at Harkabeeparolyn, and she settled beside him with a thump.

Yah. Needle had been towed away through that tunnel, with enough heat played on the ship to trigger the stasis field. Easy to follow… except that they’d broil. Now what?

Now follow Chmeee, who was floating away at speed. What did he have in mind? If only they could talk!

They were moving through residential space. It was confining for people trying to fly at speed. Cubicles with no doors, or else doors like the doors on a safe; never a curtain for mere privacy. How did Pak protectors live? Glimpses into cubicles showed spartan simplicity. On the floor of a cubicle, a skeleton with swollen joints and a crested skull. One great room was full of what must have been exercise equipment, including a jungle gym that looked a mile high.

They flew for hours. Sometimes there were miles of straight corridor. They could take these at high speed. At other times they had to pick their way.

Doors blocked them. Chmeee dealt with that: the doors sprayed away from the disintegrator beam in a cloud of monatomic dust.

Dust puffed from one big door, and then the dust stopped coming and the door was still there. A blank rectangle. It must be scrith, Louis thought.

Chmeee took them left, around whatever that door guarded. Louis dropped behind Harkabeeparolyn and flew backward, watching for Teela Brown to emerge. The big door remained closed. If it hid Teela Brown, she couldn’t detect them through scrith. Even protectors had limits.

They could have been following the tunnel to Needle, moving above it, but they weren’t. With Needle’s position to establish their orientation, Chmeee was leading them about twelve degrees to antispinward of starboard… toward a great hemispherical cavity with a moving neutrino source halfway up one wall. Good enough.

They veered right when they could. They passed another scrith door, but it wasn’t blocking their path. Whatever they had circled, it was big. An emergency control room? They might want to find it again.

Fourteen hours had passed, and almost a thousand miles, before they stopped to rest. They slept in a land of waist-high metal doughnut centered in a vast expanse of floor. Purpose unknown — but nothing could sneak up on them. Louis was getting hungry for something besides nutrient syrup. He wondered: had Teela eaten and gone about her business and had time to grow hungry again?

They flew on. They were out of the residential section now, though there were still cubicles here and there, with empty food storage bins and plumbing and nice flat floors for catnaps. But these were tucked away in huge chambers that might hold anything or nothing.

They flew around the perimeter of what must have been a tremendous pump, judging from the racket that pounded their eardrums until they had left it behind. Chmeee led them left, and blasted through a wall, and took them into a map room so large that Louis shrank within himself. When Chmeee blasted the far wall the huge hologram blazed and died, and they moved on.

Close now. They slept on top of a fusion generator that wasn’t running. Four hours; then they moved on.

A corridor, and light beyond, and wind blowing them onward.

They emerged into the light.

The sun was just past zenith in a nearly cloudless sky. An endless sunlit landscape stretched before them: ponds, groves of trees, fields of grain, and rows of dark green vegetables. Louis felt like a target. A coil of black wire was taped to his shoulder. Now he pulled it free and flung it away. One end was still attached to his suit. It would radiate heat if she fired now.

Where was Teela Brown?

Not here, it seemed.

Chmeee led them across a range of small hills. He arced down beside a stagnant pond. Louis followed, with Harkabeeparolyn behind him. The kzin was opening his spacesuit. As Louis touched down, Chmeee held both palms outward, then mimed holding his suit tightly shut.

Don’t open your suit. He meant it for Harkabeeparolyn. She’d been warned, but Louis watched her till he was sure she wouldn’t.

Now what?

The land was too flat. Hiding places looked scarce — groves of trees, a handful of soft-edged hills behind them: too obvious. Hide underwater? Maybe. Louis began reeling in the superconductor wire he’d thrown away. They probably had hours to prepare, but when Teela came, she’d come like lightning.

Chmeee had stripped himself naked. Now he put the suit of superconductor cloth back on. He went to Harkabeeparolyn and helped her remove his own impact armor, and donned it. Leaving her that much more helpless. Louis did not interfere.

Hide behind the sun? The small, fusion-powered, neutrino-emitting sun — at least it was no obvious hiding place. Could it be done? With superconductor wire trailing into a pond, he’d only be at the boiling point of water. Tanj, that was clever! It would even have worked, nearer the martian surface, where water would boil at some reasonable temperature. But they were too near the Ringworld floor; air pressure was nearly at sea level.

They might wait for days. The water in the suits would hold out, and the sugar syrup, and Louis Wu’s patience, probably. Chmeee was already out of his suit. There might even be prey for him.

But what of Harkabeeparolyn? If she opened her suit she’d be sniffing tree-of-life.

Chmeee had reinflated his pressure suit. Now he pulled his flying belt over it. He set a rock on each toe, then fiddled with the flying belt until it was straining upward. Now, that was clever. Kick the rocks away and flip the thruster on, and an empty suit would fly to the attack.

Louis hadn’t thought of anything comparable.

Maybe Teela came here only every couple of weeks. Maybe she stored tree-of-life roots elsewhere.

What did tree-of-life look like, anyway? These glossy clumps of dark-green leaves? Louis pulled one up. There were fat roots underneath, vaguely like yams or sweet potatoes. He didn’t recognize the plant, but he didn’t recognize anything that lived here. Most of what lived on the Ringworld, and everything here, must have been imported from the galactic core.

Teela laughed in Louis’s ear.

Chapter 32 — Protector

Louis didn’t just jump; he screamed inside his helmet.

There was laughter in Teela’s voice, and a slurring of consonants that she couldn’t help: lips and gums fused into a hard beak. “I never want to fight a Pierson’s puppeteer again! Chmeee, do you think you’re dangerous? That puppeteer almost got me.”

Somehow she was activating their dead earphones. Could she track them by the same means? Then they were dead. So assume she couldn’t.

“There were no signals from your ship. Communications dead. I had to know what was happening inside. So I rigged something to hook into the stepping discs. I can tell you that wasn’t easy. First I had to guess that a puppeteer might bring stepping discs from his home planet, then I had to deduce how they worked, and build it… and when I hooked in and flicked over, the puppeteer was reaching for the stasis field switch! I had to guess where the transmitter disc was, and tanj fast! But I got out, and your ship must be in stasis, and nobody’s coming to help you. I’m coming for you now,” said Teela, and Louis heard the regret in her voice.

Nothing to do but wait now. The Hindmost was out of the picture, with all of the equipment aboard Needle. Nothing left but what was in their hands.

It sounded like she’d be a while, though — if she wasn’t lying. Louis lifted on his flying belt.

A mile, two miles, and the roof was still far above. Ponds, streams, gentle hills: a thousand square miles of garden turned to wilderness. Lacy-leaved, bell-shaped trees formed a spreading jungle to port. Hundreds of square miles of yellow bushes to spinward and starboard still retained traces of the rows in which they’d been planted.

He found one big entrance to spinward, and at least three smaller ones, including the tunnel to antispinward, the one that had brought them here.

Louis dropped to near the surface. They’d have to defend from four directions. If he could find some kind of bowl shape… there, off center, a stream with low hills around it. Why not the middle of a stream? He studied it from above, with the feeling that he was missing some crucial point.

Yah.

Louis streaked back to where Chmeee had taken cover. He shook Chmeee’s arm and pointed.

Chmeee nodded. He ran toward the corridor they’d entered by, towing his pressure suit like a balloon. Louis lifted via his flying belt and waved Harkabeeparolyn to follow.

A notched ridge of low hills, with a pond behind. Might make a nice ambush. Louis settled on the crest. He stretched out flat, where he could watch the entrance. He turned for a moment to hurl his coil of superconductor wire toward the pond, and watched to be sure it reached the water.

There was only one way out of Needle. The only stepping disc Teela could have reached led to a probe on the slope of Mons Olympus. Teela’s route was the route they’d followed, and it led here.

Several swallows of sugar syrup; several swallows of water. Try to relax. Louis couldn’t see Chmeee; he hadn’t any idea where the kzin had gone. Harkabeeparolyn was looking at him. Louis pointed at the corridor, then waved her away. She got it. She slid around the curve of a hill. Louis was alone.

These hills were too tanj flat. The thigh-high clumps of dark, glossy green leaves would hide a motionless man, but would impede movement.

Time passed. Louis used the sanitary facilities in his suit, feeling helpless and hurried. Back to his post. Stay ready. With her knowledge of the Repair Center’s interior transport systems, she’d come fast. Hours from now, or now…

Now! Teela came like a guided missile, just under the corridor’s roof. Louis glimpsed her as he rolled to fire. She was standing upright on a disc six feet across, hanging on to an upright post with handles and controls on it.

Louis fired. Chmeee fired from wherever he hid. Two threads of ruby light touched the same target. Teela was squatting by then, hidden by the disc. She’d seen all she wanted, placed their positions to the inch.

But the flying disc flared ruby flame, and it was falling. Louis had a last glimpse of Teela before she dropped behind the strange, lacy trees.

She had spread a tiny paraglider.

So assume she’s alive and unhurt, and move away fast. Economically, Louis went over the crest of the hill and watched from the other side. It could work, and his tail of superconductor thread was still in the pond.

Where was she?

Something leaped from the crest of the next hill over. Green light speared it in midair, and held while the thing flamed and died. So much for Chmeee’s spacesuit. But a flight of hand-sized missiles flew toward the base of the green laser beam. Half a dozen white flashes from behind the rise, and the snap! of lightning striking close, showed that Chmeee had succeeded in turning puppeteer-made batteries into bombs.

Teela was close, and she was using a laser. And if she was circling the pond, just beyond the crest… Louis adjusted his position.

Chmeee’s burnt suit had fallen too slowly. A protector would know it was empty. Cthulhu and Allah! How could anyone fight a lucky protector?

Teela popped up, lower down the hillside than Louis had expected, speared Louis on a lance of green light, and was gone before Louis’s thumb could move. Louis blinked. The flare shielding in his helmet had saved his eyes. But, instincts or no, Teela was trying to kill Louis Wu.

She popped up again elsewhere. Green light died on black cloth. This time Louis fired back. She was gone; he didn’t know whether he’d hit her. He’d glimpsed pliant leather armor a little loose on her, and joints swollen hugely: knuckles and finger joints like walnuts, knees and elbows like cantaloupes. She wore no armor except her own skin.

Louis rolled sideways and down the hill. He started crawling, fast. Crawling was hard work. Where would she be next? He’d never played this game. In two hundred years of life, he’d never been a soldier.

Two puffs of steam drifted above the pond.

To his left, Harkabeeparolyn suddenly stood and fired. Where was Teela? Her laser didn’t answer. Harkabeeparolyn stood like a black-robed target; then she ducked and ran down the hill. Flattened out and started to crawl left and upward.

The rock came from her left, and how could Teela have been there that fast? It smacked Harkabeeparolyn’s arm hard enough to smash bone and to rip the sleeve open. The City Builder woman stood howling, and Louis waited to see her cut down. Futzfutzfutz! but track the beam—

No beam came. And he shouldn’t be watching; he should be acting. He’d seen where the rock came from. There was a cleft between two hills, and he crawled as fast as he dared, to put hillside between himself and Teela. Then around… Tanj, where was Chmeee now? Louis risked a glance over the crest.

Harkabeeparolyn had stopped screaming. She sniffed. She dropped her flying belt and tore the black cloth away, one-handed. Her other arm flapped loose, broken. She began trying to take off her suit.

Teela had been there. Where would she move? She was ignoring Harkabeeparolyn.

Harkabeeparolyn’s helmet wouldn’t come loose. She reeled down the hill, straining to rip the fabric one-handed, then smashing at the faceplate with a rock.

Too much time was passing. Teela could be anywhere by now. Louis moved again, to a notch carved by a brook now dry. If he tried a hilltop, she’d be watching it.

Could she actually guess his every move? Protector! Where was she now?

Behind me? Louis felt spiders on the back of his neck. He spun around, for no good reason, and fired at Teela as a small metal tool slashed along his ribs. The missile ripped his suit and flesh, and jarred his aim. He clasped his left arm across the torn fabric while playing the ruby beam where Teela had last been. Then she popped up and was gone before the beam could reach her, and a dense metal ball sprayed chips from his helmet.

He rolled downhill, holding his suit shut with his left arm. Through the starred helmet he saw Teela coming at him like a great black bat, and he held the ruby beam on her faster than she could dodge.

Tanj dammit, she wasn’t dodging! And why should she? Harkabeeparolyn’s suit of black superconductor cloth was now worn by Teela Brown. He held the beam on her with both hands. She’d get warmer than she liked before she killed him. The armored demon bounded toward him with black cloth shredding around her like wet tissue.

Shredding. Why? And what was that smell?

She veered and threw the laser like a missile, sideways, at Chmeee. Disintegrator and flashlight-laser spun away from Chmeee’s hand. They crashed together.

The smell of tree-of-life was in Louis’s nose and in his brain. It was not like the wire. Current was sufficient unto itself an experience that demanded nothing further to make it perfect. The smell of tree-of-life was ecstasy, but it sparked a raging hunger. Louis knew what tree-of-life was now. It had glossy dark-green leaves and roots like a sweet potato, and it was all around him, and the taste — something in his brain remembered the taste of Paradise.

It was all around him, and he couldn’t eat. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t eat because of his helmet, and he tore his hands away from the clamps that would release his helmet, because he couldn’t eat while the human variant of a Pak protector was killing Chmeee.

He steadied the laser with both hands, as if it might recoil. The kzin and the protector were inextricably tangled and rolling downhill, leaving shreds of black cloth. He followed them down with a thread of ruby light. First fire, then aim. You’re not really hungry. It would kill you, you’re too old to make the change to protector, it would kill you.

Tanj, the smell! His brain reeled with it. The strain of resisting it was horrible. It was every bit as bad as not resetting his droud every evening of his life for these past eighteen years. Intolerable! Louis held the beam steady and waited.

Teela missed a disemboweling kick. For an instant her leg stuck straight out. The red thread touched it, and Teela’s shin flashed eye-searing red.

He saw another clear shot that disappeared as he fired. Part of Chmeee’s nude pink tail flared and fell away, writhing like an injured worm. Chmeee didn’t seem to notice. But Teela knew where the beam was. She tried to throw Chmeee into it. Louis moved the wand of red light clear and waited.

Chmeee had been slashed; he was bleeding in several places; but he was on top of the protector, using his mass. Louis noticed a sharp-edged rock nearby, like a carefully flaked fist ax, that would crush Chmeee’s skull. He released the trigger and aimed at the rock. Teela’s hand flashed out for it and burst into flame.

Surprise, Teela!

Tanj, the smell! I’ll kill you for the smell of tree-of-life!

A hand gone and a lower leg: Teela should be handicapped by that, but how badly had she damaged Chmeee? They must have been tiring, because Louis caught a clear glimpse of Teela’s hard beak in Chmeee’s thick neck. Chmeee twisted, and for an instant there was nothing behind Teela’s misshapen skull but blue sky. Louis waved the light into her brain.

It took Louis and Chmeee pulling together to open Teela’s jaws where they were locked in Chmeee’s throat. “She let her instincts fight for her,” Chmeee gasped. “Not her mind. You were right, she fought to lose. Kdapt help me if she had fought to win.”

And then it was over, except for the blood leaking into Chmeee’s fur; except for Louis’s bruised and possibly broken ribs, and the pain that twisted him sideways; except for the smell, the smell of tree-of-life, and that went on and on. Except for Harkabeeparolyn, now standing in pond water up to bar knees, mad-eyed and frothing at the mouth as she fought to pound her helmet open.

They took her arms and led her away. She fought. Louis fought too: he fought to keep walking away from the rows and rows of tree-of-life.

Chmeee stopped in the corridor. He undogged Louis’s helmet and pulled it away. “Breathe, Louis. The wind blows toward the farm.”

Louis sniffed. The smell was gone. They took Harkabeeparolyn’s helmet off to let the smell out of her suit. It didn’t seem to matter. Her eyes were mad, staring. Louis wiped foam from her mouth.

The kzin asked, “Can you resist? Can you hold her from returning? And yourself?”

“Yah. Nobody but a reformed wirehead could have done it.”

“Urrr?”

“You’ll never know.”

“I never will. Give me your flying belt.”

The straps were tight. They must have hurt, cutting across Chmeee’s wounds. Chmeee was gone only a few minutes. He came back with Harkabeeparolyn’s flying belt, his own disintegrator, and two flashlight-lasers.

Harkabeeparolyn was calmer, probably through exhaustion. Louis was fighting a terrible depression. He barely heard Chmeee say, “We seem to have won the battle and lost the war. What shall we do next? Your woman and I both need treatment. It may be we can reach the lander.”

“We’ll go through Needle. What do you mean, lost the war?”

“You heard Teela. Needle is in stasis, and we are left with nothing but our hands. How can we learn what any of this machinery does without Needle’s instruments?”

“We won.” Louis felt awful enough without the kzin’s pessimism. “Teela isn’t infallible. She’s dead, isn’t she? How would she know if the Hindmost was reaching for the stasis switch? Why should he?”

“With a protector in his ship, just a wall away?”

“Didn’t he have a kzin trapped in that same room? That wall is General Products hull. I’d say the Hindmost reached to turn off the stepping discs. He was a little slow.”

Chmeee thought it over. “We have the disintegrator.”

“And only two flying belts. Let’s see, how far are we from Needle? Around two thousand miles, almost back the way we came. Futz.”

“What does a human do for a broken arm?”

“Splint.” Louis got up. It was not easy to keep moving. He found a length of aluminum bar and had to be reminded what he wanted it for. They had nothing for bindings but superconductor cloth. Harkabeeparolyn’s arm was swelling ominously. Louis bound her arm. He used the black thread to sew stitches where Chmeee had been most deeply gashed.

They could both die without treatment, and there wasn’t any treatment. And Louis might sit down and die, the way he was feeling. Keep moving. Futz, it won’t hurt any less if you stop moving. You’ve got to get over this sometime. Why not now?

“Got to rig a sling between the flying belts. What can we use? Superconductor isn’t strong enough.”

“We must find something. Louis, I am too badly wounded to scout.”

“We don’t need to. Help me get this suit off Harkabeeparolyn.”

He used the laser. He cut away the front of the pressure suit. He sliced the loose fabric into strips. He punched holes around the edges of what was left of the suit, and threaded strips of the rubberized fabric through it. The other ends he tied to the straps of his flying belt.

The suit had become a Harkabeeparolyn-shaped sling. They put her back into it. She was docile now, but she wouldn’t speak.

Chmeee said, “Clever.”

“Thank you. Can you fly?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try it. If you have to drop out and you feel better later, you’ll still have a flying belt. Maybe we’ll find a landmark big enough that I can come back for you and find you again.”

They set off down the corridor that had brought them here. Chmeee’s gashes were bleeding again, and Louis knew he was hurting. Three minutes into their journey they came to a disc six feet across, floating a foot in the air and piled with gear. They settled beside it.

“We might have known. Teela’s cargo disc, by another of those interesting coincidences,” Louis said.

“Another part of her game?”

“Yah. If we lived, we’d find it.” Everything on the disc was strange to the eye, alien, except a heavy box whose bolts had been melted off. “Do you remember this? It’s the medical kit off Teela’s flycycle.

“It won’t help a kzin. And the medicines are twenty-three Earth years old.”

“Better than nothing, for her. You, you’ve got allergy pills, and there’s nothing here to infect you. We’re not close enough to the Map of Kzin to get kzinti bacteria.”

The kzin looked bad. He shouldn’t have been standing up. He asked, “Can you learn these controls? I don’t trust myself to try them.”

Louis shook his head. “Why bother? You and Harkabeeparolyn get on the disc. It’s already floating. I’ll tow it. You sleep.”

“Good.”

“Get her attached to the pocket ‘doc first. And tie yourselves to the control post, both of you.”

Chapter 33 — 1.5 x 10¹²

Both of them slept through the next thirty hours while Louis towed the disc. His ribs on the right side were one great red-and-purple bruise.

He stopped when he saw that Harkabeeparolyn was awake.

She babbled of the terrible compulsion that had gripped her, of the horror and delight of the insidious evil that was tree-of-life. Louis had been trying not to think about it. She waxed poetic as hell, and she wouldn’t shut up, and Louis wouldn’t tell her to. She needed to talk.

She wanted the comfort of Louis’s arms around her, and he could give her that too.

He also hooked Teela’s old ‘doc to his own arm for an hour. When the agony in his ribs had receded a little, and when he felt a little less woozy, he gave it back. There was still enough pain to distract him from a smell that was still with him. His flying belt might have brushed against tree-of-life. Or else… perhaps it was in his head. Forever.

Chmeee had grown delirious. Louis made Harkabeeparolyn wear Chmeee’s impact armor. Teela had torn it open in the fight, but it was better than skin for a woman who planned to lie next to a delirious kzin.

The armor probably saved her life at least once, when Chmeee slashed at her because she looked too much like Teela. She tended the kzin as best she could, feeding him water and nutrient from her pressure-suit helmet. By the fourth day Chmeee was rational, but still weak… and ravenous. The syrup in a human’s pressure suit wasn’t enough.

It took them four days in all to reach the approximate position of Needle, and another day cutting through walls until they found a solid block of fused basalt.

A week after it had solidified, the rock was still warm. Louis left his floating disc and passengers far down the tunnel down which Teela had towed Needle. He had his pressure-suit helmet on, with clean air blowing into it, when he held the disintegrator two-handed and pressed the trigger.

A hurricane of dust blew back at him. A tunnel formed ahead of him, and he walked into it.

There was nothing to see, and no sound but the howl of basalt disintegrating and blowing past him, and lightning somewhere behind him where the electron charges were reasserting their prerogatives. Just how much lava had Teela poured? It seemed he’d been at this for hours.

He bumped into something.

Yah. He was looking through a window into a strange place. A living room, with couches and a floating coffee table. But everything looked soft, somehow; there wasn’t a sharp edge or a hard surface anywhere — nothing that any living thing could bump a knee against. Through a further window he could see huge buildings, and a glimpse of black sky between. Pierson’s puppeteers swarmed in the streets. Everything was upside down.

That which he had taken for one of the couches wasn’t. Louis used his flashlight-laser at low intensity. He flicked it on and off. For a good minute nothing happened. Then a flattish white head and neck, emerging to drink from a shallow bowl, jerked in amazement and darted back under its belly.

Louis waited.

The puppeteer stood up. He led Louis around the hull — slowly, because Louis had to make his path with the disintegrator — to where he had placed a stepping-disc transmitter on the outside of the hull. Louis nodded. He went back for his companions.

Ten minutes later he was inside. Eleven minutes later, he and Harkabeeparolyn were eating like kzinti. Chmeee’s hunger was beyond description. Kawaresksenjajok watched him in awe. Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t even noticed.

Ship’s morning, for a spacecraft buried in congealed lava, tens of miles beneath the sunlight.

“Our medical facilities are crippled,” the Hindmost said. “Chmeee and Harkabeeparolyn must heal as best they can.”

He was on the flight deck, speaking via the intercom system; and that might or might-not have been significant. Teela was gone, and the Ringworld might survive. The puppeteer suddenly had a long, long life span to protect. Rubbing shoulders with aliens was contraindicated.

“I have lost contact with both the lander and the probe,” the puppeteer said. “The meteor defense flared at about the time the lander stopped sending, for whatever significance that may have. Signals from the damaged probe stopped just after Teela Brown tried to invade Needle.”

Chmeee had slept (on the water bed, quite alone) and eaten. His restored pelt would bear interesting scars once again, but the wounds were healing. He said, “Teela must have destroyed the probe as soon as she saw it. She could not force herself to leave a dangerous enemy behind her.”

“Behind her? Who?”

“Hindmost, she called you more dangerous than a kzin. A tactical ploy, to insult us both, no doubt.”

“Did she indeed.” Two flat heads looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. “Well. Our resources have dwindled to Needle itself and a single probe. We left that probe on a peak near the floating city. It still has working sensors, and I have signaled it to return, in case we think of a use for it. We should have it available in six local days.

“Meanwhile we seem to have our original problem back, with additional clues and additional complications. How to restore the Ringworld’s stability? We believe that we are in the right place to begin,” the Hindmost said. “Don’t we? Teela’s behavior, inconsistent for a being of acknowledged intelligence… ”

Louis Wu made no comment. Louis was quiet this morning.

Kawaresksenjajok and Harkabeeparolyn sat cross-legged against a wall, close enough that their arms were touching. Harkabeeparolyn’s arm was padded and in a sling. From time to time the boy glanced at her. She puzzled and worried him. She was running on painkillers, of course, but that wasn’t enough to account for her torpor. Louis knew he ought to talk to the boy… if he knew what to say.

The City Builders had slept in the cargo hold. Fear of falling would have kept Harkabeeparolyn out of the sleeping field in any case. She had offered rishathra, without urgency, when Louis joined them for breakfast. “But be careful of my arm, Luweewu.”

Refusing sex took tact in Louis’s culture. He had told her that he was afraid of jarring her arm, which he was. It was equally true that he couldn’t seem to work up an interest. He wondered if tree-of-life had affected him so. But he sensed no lust in himself for yellow roots, nor even for a wire trickling electric current.

This morning he seemed to have no strong urges at all.

Fifteen hundred billion people…

The Hindmost said, “Let us accept Louis’s judgment regarding Teela Brown. Teela brought us here. Her intent matched our own. She gave us as many clues as she could. But what clues? She was fighting both sides of a battle. Was it important for her to create three more protectors, then kill two of them? Louis?”

Louis, lost in thought, felt four sharp points prick his skin above the carotid artery. He said, “Sorry?”

The Hindmost started to repeat himself. Louis shook his head violently. “She killed them with the meteor defense. She fired the meteor defense, twice, at targets other than our vitally necessary selves. We were allowed to watch it without being in stasis at the time. Just another message.”

Chmeee asked, “Do you assume that she could have chosen other weapons?”

“Weapons, times, circumstances, number of operating protectors — she had considerable choice.”

“Are you playing games with us now, Louis? If you know something, why not tell us?”

Louis’s guilty glance at the City Builders showed Harkabeeparolyn trying to stay awake, Kawaresksenjajok listening intently. A pair of self-elected heroes waiting their chance to help save the world. Tanj. He said, “One point five trillion people.”

“To save twenty-eight point five trillion, and ourselves.”

“You didn’t get to know them, Chmeee. Not as many, anyway. I was hoping one of you would think of this. I’ve been thrashing around in my head trying to see some—”

“Know them? Know who?”

“Valavirgillin. Ginjerofer. The king giant. Mar Korssil. Laliskareerlyar and Fortaralisplyar. Herders, Grass Giants, Amphibians, Hanging People, Night People, Night Hunters… We’re supposed to kill 5 percent to save 95 percent. Don’t those numbers sound familiar to you?”

It was the puppeteer who answered. “The Ringworld’s attitude jet system is 5 percent functional. Teela’s repair crew remounted them over 5 percent of the arc of the Ringworld. Are these the people who must die, Louis? The people on that arc?”

Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok stared in disbelief. Louis spread his arms, helpless. “I’m sorry.”

The boy cried, “Luweewu! Why?”

“I promised,” said Louis. “If I hadn’t promised maybe I’d have a decision to make. I told Valavirgillin I’d save the Ringworld no matter what it took. I promised I’d save her, too, if I could, but I can’t. We don’t have time to find her. The longer we wait, the bigger the force pushing the Ringworld off center. So she’s on the arc. So’s the floating city, and the Machine People empire, and the little red carnivores and the Grass Giants. So they die.”

Harkabeeparolyn beat the heels of her hands together. “But this is everyone we know in the world, even by reputation!”

“Me too.”

“But this leaves nothing worth saving! Why must they die? How?”

“Dead is dead,” said Louis. Then, “Radiation poisoning. Fifteen hundred billion people of twenty or thirty species. But only if we do everything exactly right. First we have to find out where we are.”

The Puppeteer asked reasonably, “Where do we need to be?”

“Two places. Places that control the meteor defense. We have to be able to guide the plasma jets, the solar flares. And we have to disconnect the subsystem that causes the plasma jet to lase.”

“I have already found these places,” the Hindmost said. “While you were gone, the meteor defense fired, possibly to destroy the lander. Magnetic effects scrambled half my sensor equipment. Nonetheless I traced the origin of the impulse. The massive currents in the Ringworld floor that make and manipulate solar flares derive from a point beneath the north pole of the Map of Mars.”

Chmeee said, “Perhaps the equipment must be cooled—”

“Futz that! What about the laser effect?”

“Activity there came hours later: smaller electrical effects, patterned. I told you of this source. It is just over our heads, by ship’s orientation.”

“I take it we must disconnect this system,” Chmeee said.

Louis snorted. “It’s easy. I could do it with a flashlight-laser or a bomb or the disintegrator. Learning how to make solar flares will be the hard part. The controls probably weren’t designed for idiots, and we don’t have too much time.”

“And afterward?”

“Then we put a blowtorch against inhabited land.”

“Louis! Details!”

He would be speaking a death sentence for a score of species.

Kawaresksenjajok wouldn’t show his face. Harkabeeparolyn’s face was set like stone. She said, “Do what you must.”

He did. “The attitude jet system is only 5 percent operational.”

Chmeee waited.

“Operating fuel is hot protons streaming from the sun. The solar wind.”

The puppeteer said, “Ah. We flare the sun to multiply the fuel intake by a factor of twenty. Life forms beneath the flare die or mutate drastically. Thrust increases by the same factor. The attitude jets either take us to safety or explode.”

“We don’t really have time to redesign them, Hindmost.”

Chmeee said, “Irrelevant unless Louis is totally wrong. Teela inspected those motors while mounting them.”

“Yah. If they weren’t strong enough, she talked herself into adding an overdesign safety factor. Guarding against the mischance of a large solar flare. She knew that was possible. Doublethink!”

“To guide the flare is not necessary to us, merely convenient,” the kzin continued. “Let the laser-generating subsystem be disconnected. Then, if need be, Needle may be placed where we want the flare to fall, then used as a target: accelerated until the meteor defense fires. Needle is invulnerable.”

Louis nodded. “We’d like something a little more accurate. We’d do the job faster and kill less people. But… yah. We can do it all. We can do it.”

The Hindmost came with them to inspect the components of the meteor defense. Nobody talked him into that. The sensor devices they dismounted from Needle had to be operated by a puppeteer’s lips and tongue. When he suggested teaching Louis how to manipulate the controls using a pick and tweezers, Louis laughed at him.

The Hindmost spent some hours in the blocked section of Needle. Then he followed them out through the tunnel. His mane was dyed in streaks of a hundred glowing colors, and beautifully groomed. Louis thought, Everyone wants to look good at his own funeral, and wondered if that was it.

It wasn’t necessary to use a bomb on the laser subsystem. Finding the off switch took the Hindmost a full day and a disc-load of the dismounted instruments, but it was there.

The web of superconductor cables had its nexus in the scrith twenty miles beneath the north pole of the Map of Mars. They found a central pillar twenty miles tall, a sheath of scrith enclosing the cooling pumps for the Map of Mars. The complex at the bottom must be the control center, they decided. They found a maze of huge airlocks, and each had to be passed by solving some kind of design puzzle. The Hindmost handled that.

They passed through the last door. Beyond was a brightly lighted dome, and dry-looking soil with a podium in the center, and a smell that sent Louis spinning around, running for his life, towing a bewildered Kawaresksenjajok by his thin wrist. The airlock was closed before the boy started to fight. Louis batted him across the head and kept going. They had passed through three airlocks before he let them stop.

Presently Chmeee joined them. “The path led across a patch of soil beneath artificial sunlights. The automated gardening equipment has failed, and few plants still grow, but I recognized them.”

“So did I,” said Louis.

“I knew the smell. Mildly unpleasant.”

The boy was crying. “I didn’t smell anything! Why did you throw me around like that? Why did you hit me?”

“Flup,” said Louis. It had finally occurred to him that Kawaresksenjajok was too young; the smell of tree-of-life wouldn’t mean anything to him.

So the City Builder boy stayed with the aliens. But Louis Wu didn’t see what went on in the control room. He returned to Needle alone.

The probe was still far around the Ringworld, light-minutes distant. A hologram window, glowing within the black basalt outside Needle’s wall, looked out through the probe’s camera: a dimmed telescopic view of a sun somewhat less active than Sol. The Hindmost must have set that up before he left.

The bone in Harkabeeparolyn’s arm was healing slightly crooked; Teela’s old portable ‘doc couldn’t set it. But it was healing. Louis worried more about her emotional state.

With nothing of her own world around her, and flame about to take everything she remembered — call it culture shock. He found her on the water bed watching the magnified sun. She nodded when he greeted her. Hours later she hadn’t moved.

Louis tried to get her talking. It wasn’t good. She was trying to forget her past, all of it.

He found a better approach when he tried to explain the physical situation. She knew some physics. He didn’t have access to Needle’s computer and hologram facilities, so he drew diagrams on the walls. He waved his arms a lot. She seemed to understand.

On the second night after his return, he woke to see her cross-legged on the water bed, watching him thoughtfully, holding the flashlight-laser in her lap. He met its glassy stare, then swung his arm in circles to turn himself over and went back to sleep. He woke up next morning, so what the tanj.

That afternoon he and Harkabeeparolyn watched a flame rise from the sun, licking out and out and out. They said very little.