by Larry Niven
"Weathers chaotic. It cant be controlled," Louis said.
"What if you had huge air masses to work with? An area of a thousand Earths, and no hurricane patterns to foul you up because youre not on a spinning ball. Air masses wouldnt move fast—"
Louis laughed. "Stet. Maybe."
"We wont actually see other maps," she said, suddenly depressed. "No boats for guests. What do you think, Luis? One whole supercontinent for a garden, and breeders are an integral part of the garden. Defenses on the islands. Telescopes and research facilities. Mines… you dont get mines on the Ringworld, do you?"
"If you could reach the spill mountains," Louis said. "Materials might layer out according to density. Otherwise, no mining rights. You dig for oil, you hit scrith, then vacuum."
"Proserpina can reach the spill mountains."
Louis shrugged. "I cant help you explore. Be cautious. Every culture has fairy tales about someone finding something he shouldnt."
"Even so," Roxanny said, "Id like to get into that building."
Wembleth and Roxanny went out again after breakfast.
Proserpina was back at midday. She asked, "What are stepping disks?"
"Where did you find those?"
"Your own report to the ARM, Louis Wu. You didnt tell enough. What if I had to make stepping disks? Is the Ghoul protector doing that?"
"You first. How are my companions?"
"Exploring. Hanuman went off alone, Wembleth and Roxanny are together. Theyll learn little in this place. The last rebel to die lived here. I took charge of his habitat, but the Penultimates palace is trapped. I leave it alone."
She hoisted a miniature deer nearly her own weight. It dangled, its neck broken. Big insects buzzed it. "I use this animal for food myself. Can you eat it?"
"Maybe—"
"Treat it with heat?"
"Yah. Clean out the body cavity. Shall I — ?"
"You may exercise your upper body, but otherwise rest. Your bones are pinned together, but let them knit. I will cook. I can research this."
Barbecue smells made him hungry. In an hour she was back with a roasted carcass. She stripped off pieces of meat for him. He found it pleasant to be waited on.
" But always at my back I hear Times winged footsteps hurrying near," she said. "No, eat. I need to know how urgent this matter of the Fringe War is. Does Tunesmith have it under control?"
"More or less," he said.
"Eat. Is it more, or less?" She scowled at what she saw in his face. "Less. Hanuman tells me of the blast that tore a hole into space. I saw it from a distance, and knew I must act. Antimatter. Could it have killed all life? Did Tunesmith really prevent that?"
"Yes."
"What did you see?"
"Wembleth and Roxanny would eat some of that," Louis said.
The protector met his eyes for a long heartbeat. "Ill fetch them," she said. She set a great slab of meat in his reach, and departed.
Daylight was fading when they returned. Proserpina and the others cooked dinner outside. Louis smelled wood smoke and roasting meat. What Roxanny brought to Louis included vegetables: green-and-yellow leafy plants, and roasted yams.
Proserpina was becoming a skilled chef. She ate with them, but what she ate was raw meat and raw yams. When they had finished eating, she said, "I want your trust."
The ancient protectors eyes locked with theirs, skipping past Hanuman as if he were a dumb animal. "Wembleth, Roxanny, Luis, youd be demented to trust me knowing no more than you do."
"Tell us a story," Louis said. Proserpina was keeping Hanumans secrets, and Louiss, and perhaps Roxannys too. There was no reason to trust her, and every reason to listen.
"These events all took place near the galactic core. We who held our world were ten to a hundred million protectors of the Pak species," the protector said. "The number varied wildly in the endless war.
"Something more than four million falans ago — Ive lost track of time to some extent — ten thousand of us built a carrier ship and some fighter scouts. Eighty years later, six hundred were left to ride them." Proserpina spoke slowly, reaching far back into her memory. Interworld was a flexible language, but it wasnt built for these concepts.
"This land is a good map of the Pak world. Did you see its shape? Circles everywhere," Proserpina said. "Blast craters, new and ancient, from an endless variety of weapons. These maps were identical when we built them, but theyve changed since. On the Pak world and here, we fought for any advantage for our blood line. Luis, what?"
"Well, its strange," Louis Wu said. "One world, over and over? The Pak world was in the galactic core. Suns are packed close together there. You came here, thirty thousand light years in one leap. Why didnt you use worlds closer in?"
"Yes, our worlds were much closer together than yours. Endless room, endlessly coveted. We saw no way to reach them in a spacecraft carrying breeders, because we would fight for advantage of the breeders. If we solved that, wed face another problem. Any world would require reshaping for periods of thousands of years. Before the work was complete, each would be snatched away by armies of other protectors. We could see that this had happened. Worlds near Pak were shaped to a Pak ideal, then blasted back to barren waste long before I was born. We saw no way to take other worlds unless we could change the circumstances that shaped us.
"This is what we did, we six hundred. First, we gave up nearby worlds. If another ship could reach us, that world was too close. We found records of a voyage into the galactic arms, a route already tested by an earlier colony ship. The colony failed, but we knew no intervening danger had stopped it from reaching its target world.
"Second, we segregated ourselves from our breeders. We housed them in a cylinder topographed like a rolled-up landscape. Their food would grow there too, water and air and wastes recycled, a locked ecology. No pheromones from breeder housing would reach the flight control complex. The breeders were not to love us; they would not be aware of us at all. Any protector violating the ban must die.
"Of course there was natural selection at work. Many breeders would die, did die without the company of protectors." Proserpinas eyes sought theirs. "Even now, four million falans evolved, dont you Ball Worlders sometimes need the companionship of something greater than yourselves?"
Roxanny said, "No."
"I find records of scores of religions."
"Weve outgrown them," Roxanny said.
After a moments pause, Proserpina said, "Stet. Many breeders died for lack of our company, but less every generation. Again, many protectors found we must smell or touch our own kind. Many found ways to enter breeder housing, and died when they were caught. Others stopped eating. In the first thousand years we lost half our number. Replacing them from breeder stock was a chancy thing. Natural selection took its toll.
"What emerged at the end of three hundred and fifty thousand falans of travel, was a race that can live without the smell of our own blood line constantly in our nostrils.
"We veered away from the target world. A colony there had failed, but we could not know how badly. We might find protectors already in place, and our ship was a fragile bubble. We believed — Yes, Roxanny?"
"Earth?"
"Yes, your world, Earth. We could have had Earth. Your tree-of-life plants werent growing right. Your protectors died. Their descendants were mutating in many directions. We didnt know that. I learned too little of the Earth colony before your evolved breeders began blasting radio waves at the stars. By then—"
Proserpina blinked at them; started over. "We arrived in the local neighborhood. We found worlds we might take, but our ambitions were greater than that. We chose a system with a gas giant planet huddled close up against its star. We surmise it formed far out in the disk that became the planets. Then it was drawn in over the billions of years, eating lesser worlds as it came. Thus we found a planetary system already cleared out for our convenience, and most of the mass gathered in a single body, a mass of almost twenty Jupiters, Roxanny.
"Stars that can generate extensive planetary systems form in clusters. There were stars with planets around us where we stopped, and some were Pak-like or close to it. We identified those that might evolve dangerous enemies. We collected local ecologies and settled them on maps of their worlds.
"We never approached Earth, Roxanny. We were afraid. We studied the system intensively at long range. The Map of Earth became home to our own breeders. We needed fifty thousand falans to build an ecology into the Ringworlds inner surface, but we started there, with the Map of Earth as a test bed."
"Whales," Louis said. "There are whales in the Great Ocean. Some protector must have gone to Earth."
"It may have happened after I was isolated," Proserpina said. "Wembleth, are you keeping up with this?" Proserpina changed languages and spoke rapidly. She switched back: "Later Ill show Wembleth maps of the sky, and diagrams. You two should try to tell him what a Ball World is. Roxanny, these maps of our world are prisons. We knew some of us would break the one law. We built the prisons first, to warn each other. Any felon would be isolated with a world to rule and a population all of her own kind, just as if theyd each conquered the Pak homeworld, but all made hostage to the majority.
"I was one of those."
"Why?"
"Oh, Roxanny." Proserpinas body language suggested impatience and bitter laughter. "We thought we would win! Eleven of us thought we could take the Repair Center. Wed breed our descendants to all of the lines, and cull to keep our traits dominant. In a thousand years wed be safe, even if the power balance changed, even if an insurgence should kill us. We planned it all in an afternoon, and collected our resources as fast as ever we could. Even so, we were a little slow.
"They confined me on one of the Maps, not this one. They collected a hundred of my line and scattered them in pairs through this land. I must build a land they could live in. I must guide the breeders myself so that ultimately they meet and interbreed, or else inbreeding would destroy them. While I did all that, time passed me by. I was out of the loop. Others of my descendants lived among the Ringworlds expanding population, and their genes were hostage too."
Proserpina fell silent. Louis asked, "How long did it last? What stopped it?"
"A few hundred thousand falans — Im guessing, Luis. Wembleth, Roxanny, you dont understand? On the Ringworld we built, a breeder population expanded to a trillion. At some point they became a chaos of mutations. Mutations are of no use to a protector; they dont smell right. Luis asks me when the protectors stopped culling their tribes, and why. I witnessed too little. I dont know why. Im guessing even at when.
"I was a prisoner. I spent long periods in depression, noticing nothing. I never quite starved myself. When I was myself, I made telescopes but not probes. We were barred from intrusive investigations. With telescopes I could see nothing nearby, but I could study what was happening far up the arc. Meteors continued to be intercepted. An eyestorm formed; I guessed at the dynamics; I saw the storm dissipate. It meant that protectors were still doing repairs. Luis, what?"
"Depression. Sorry, I dont mean to interrupt—"
"How can I not notice when you want to speak?"
"These bouts of depression, do they make you miss things? Im wondering about the rim-wall attitude jets, and Fist-of-God Mountain."
"Where is it?"
"Near the far ocean. It was a giant meteoroid impact, from underneath. It didnt leak much because the land was pushed up."
"I would not have acted. This is work for the resident protector."
"There was a fight for who would be resident protector."
Roxanny and Proserpina stared at Louis. Then Proserpina moaned. "Ive been remiss."
Louis asked, "Did your jailers give you tree-of-life?"
"Yes, but neutered. A virus causes the gene flip that makes a breeder a protector. The virus lives in tree-of-life root. Neutered tree-of-life will still feed me, will feed any protector, but it wont change a breeder. What made you ask that, Luis?"
"Just a thought." Tree-of-life only grew in the Repair Center, as far as Louis knew. Apparently it had died out elsewhere. "Is it easy to get rid of the protector virus?"
"Yes."
"But you got more?"
"How did you know that? Yes, I filtered it from the air when it grew thick enough and scattered far enough, four hundred thousand falans after creation. I cultured the virus and grew it in my plants. I made a few servants then, not enough to be noticed, and sent them on errands. But they revolted, and I had to kill them, Luis, and the next time I tried it, it didnt work. My plants had been neutered again. I know not by what means, and the virus wasnt in the air any more. You ate tree-of-life tonight."
Roxanny gasped. Louis gulped. He said, "Tasted like a yam. I think it probably is a yam, Roxanny. Proserpina, when did it happen?"
"Something more than a million falans after creation. You know what happened, dont you, Luis? Tell me."
Louis shook his head. "The protectors are gone. Thats all we know."
Proserpina said, "I understand now. Species differentiation has been extreme in the past two million falans. I can see how far your species has veered, Roxanny, under pressures that favor intelligence, hairlessness, swimming talent, and a two-legged run. My telescopes can observe the spill mountains. I went to visit them when I dared, when I was sure I was the last protector in these lands.
"Their people fission into incompatible species under nearly identical conditions. Ive tapped the heliograph communication network formed by the Night People. Eaters of the dead, arent they? And that intelligent, and as breeders! Some half-intelligent protector ruled the Repair Center for a very long time. I cant guess how many other variations there are."
Roxanny said, "Thousands."
"But on the Map of Earth there isnt room for mutations to settle in and compete and shape each other to strangeness. My servants settled my breeders among the Pak of the Map of Earth. My line may thrive there. Luis, what are you hiding?"
"Im sorry."
She loomed over him, small and dangerous. "Talk to me."
Prone in his casket, he said, "I have a friend on the Map of Earth. I want him protected."
"Tunesmith wouldnt let another protector near the Map of Earth. I havent survived by challenging the resident. What are you hiding?"
Roxanny spoke. There are Kzinti on the Map of Earth. He said so. His friend Acolyte comes from there."
"Archaic Kzinti," Louis said. "Not the same as the armies of the Fringe War. They sailed across the Great Ocean and formed a colony on the Map of Earth, not that long ago."
"While I was in depression," Proserpina said. "I left too much to the resident. Stet. Ill research Kzinti, archaic and modern. Maybe we can deal. But I must confront the resident.
"Tonight I must go away. Tunesmith must be dealt with one way or another. I may be gone for days. Tec Gauthier, you must care for Luis. Luis, shall I give you back your sensation?"
"Try it."
When pain came, Louis wondered if Proserpina was taking revenge on a bearer of bad news. But there was no more than an ache, though it ran from hip to heel.
"Wriggle around if you feel like it, but carefully. Dont detach anything." Proserpina stroked the tree swingers head. "Little Hanuman, would you like to come with me?"
Hanuman considered, then jumped into her arms. She looked around at them. "I make one proscription. All of what you can reach is open to you, save only the big building to spin and starboard, and the continent nearest to antispinward. Im sure the big building is trapped. I havent dared it myself. The little continent is where the Penultimate kept the dangerous species from Pak. Analogues of wolves, tigers, lice, mosquitoes, needle cactus, and poison mushrooms, the plants and creatures we never wanted among our breeders. Most of them we
re extinct when we left the core stars, but we saved a few. We might have released them, had we known that our breeders would evolve into their ecological slots."
She turned and was gone so quietly and easily that it was as if a ghost had evaporated.
CHAPTER 16
Meeting of Minds
She would let him fly!
Hanuman prepared. The chair was wrong for him; he reshaped it. Proserpina watched.
They stepped into the forest to collect a store of fruit. Sudden as lightning, Proserpina snatched a weasel-like animal out of a bush and broke its neck. She tossed it aboard with the fruit and the water.
She took her place on a horseshoe of couch and improvised a crash web. Hanuman studied the ring of telltales and controls for some seconds before he dared touch them. They had a half-random look: fitted in whenever there was something new to be monitored.
The vehicle was nothing like an airplane.
Relaxed as if poured into her couch, Proserpina watched him lift and swoop and spin and dip almost low enough to shatter a tree and minaret, lift too fast, slow until the wind-induced tremor went away, then rise sedately into the vacuum where he could build up some speed.
The mag ship was as much a wonder as any of Tunesmiths ships. Its brute strength was startling: it could easily have torn itself into shreds of foil. Its motor was the Ringworld floor itself, powered by sunlight falling on trillions of square miles of shadow squares. Sailing lines of magnetic force, it moved less like an airplane than like an undersea vessel.
These controls werent all involved with flying. Hanuman was aloft for some time before he tried anything esoteric. Proserpina watched but did not interfere as he manipulated magnetic fields beneath the landscape. Soil lifted and shifted. In his wake, a stream began to change its course.
Hed seen Tunesmith manipulating such forces in a command post in the Repair Center. This wasnt just a spacecraft. It was an entire Ringworld defense system.
Under guidance from the mag ship, the superconductor cables below the landscape could attract, repel, or shift anything metallic: incoming meteoroids, alien ships and missiles, even the occasional solar storm or lethal surge of cosmic rays. Hanuman might be good enough to orchestrate such a defense. He had watched Tunesmith at work.