by Larry Niven
Wembleth scowled.
"No, really. She saw what we all saw. She must have guessed what was under the Map of Mars. Roxanny, its a huge volume, an area to match all the land masses of Earth, and forty miles high. You cant miss it. Its the Repair Center for the whole Ringworld. Teela could see that most of the rim-wall ramjets were missing. Somebody had to get into the Repair Center to try to stabilize the Ringworld before it brushed its sun."
Shed wanted power too, Louis thought. Futz, she was a protector. He said, "She rode the rim-wall maglev system, and then anything that could reach the Map of Mars on the Great Ocean," his mind running ahead of his mouth. "Maybe she went to the Map of Earth first, to see how the archaic Pak were faring, and picked up Hidden Patriarch there. Thats how the ship got to Mars—"
Roxanny said, "Say what?"
"It doesnt matter. What happened next was that Teela tried to murder Bram."
Roxanny said, "Bram?" and Wembleth said, "Murder? My mother?"
Louis said, "There was a protector already inside the Repair Center. Teela didnt know about Bram, but she knew that if there was anyone on site, he wasnt doing his job. He was letting the rim-wall attitude jets be stolen. Hed have to be replaced.
"Wembleth, I talked to Bram. I got his version of what happened. Bram wasnt the brightest of protectors. He never figured out this next part.
"Teela was a protector. She did what she had to do. She took an older man off one of the other maps, probably, and disguised herself. She went with him into the Map of Mars as a pair of breeders. They went exploring through the Repair Center. By the time they found the tree-of-life garden, Teela must have seen enough, or smelled him. Somewhere there was a protector. She let the man eat tree-of-life, and she ate too.
"The man died. Teela pretended to go into a coma. She might have lain motionless for several turns. Bram was supposed to come and examine her to find out what she was, then kill her before she could wake up as a protector. She would have taken him by surprise and killed him.
"But Bram didnt come. He must have decided to let her wake. She had to go to Plan B. She left the Map of Mars without ever letting Bram know she knew about him. She set about repairing the rim-wall jets, and then… she contrived to get herself killed."
"How? Louis, how?" Wembleth demanded. He was still holding the crossbow.
She had attacked Louis and his companions, and contrived to lose the fight. Louis had killed her himself.
He said, "Bram had us at his mercy. We were hostages for as long as Teela was alive. Shed have been his servant, and he was incompetent. She had to die to save the Ringworld, and she did."
"But—"
Louis rode him down. "What matters now is that I would do anything for you. In practice, what I have to do is lose you again. Its indescribably important that the ruling protectors, Tunesmith and Proserpina, be unable to find you."
"What would they do, kill us? Question us?"
"Theyd protect you."
Wembleth set the crossbow down. His hands were shaking. "Vashneesht! Stet. I like these people, but we can move again. Must you know where?"
"I must not," Louis said firmly.
He went outside. Wolf-people youths were clambering over the service stack. Louis shooed them away. He reprogrammed the stepping-disk controls and the float controls too.
Wembleth and Roxanny had followed him out. "Im going to flick through," he told them. "After Im gone, change this setting, then tap the Crosshatch button, here, and flick through. Then go wherever you like."
"Cant we be traced?"
"I fixed that, Roxanny. Youre ghosts as long as you tap the Crosshatch before you flick out. Even so, Tunesmith will solve that pretty quick, so bounce around for no more than… half a day, give me that much… then stop flicking around and get away from the service stack." Louis flicked out.
CHAPTER 20
Telling a Tale
Launch Room. Louis only needed an instant here. He wanted to see the workspace, Long Shot, and the nanotech autodoc.
Carlos Wus rebuilt autodoc was spread around the stepping disk hed flicked onto. Tools lay about. He could guess their intent, most of them. Cables and rainbow threads of laser light led to a score of instrument stacks. This maze would take minutes to disentangle… an hour or more for the Hindmost.
Long Shot loomed, a bubble a mile tall. At first sight it looked partly disassembled. A curved hatch as big as a fairgrounds gaped near the bottom. Equipment was piled about, and there was lightweight packing stuff everywhere.
Look again: that stuff wasnt intrinsic to any likely hyperdrive system. Here was a General Products #2 ship, a lifeboat. Those were tanks. Those, inflatable habitats for ground and orbit, and a deuterium refinery fitted to suck up seawater. Some of it was mere misdirection. Distorted hull fittings turned out to be a holoprojector left running.
Tunesmith had cleaned out cargo and packaging to get at the works, done his investigations, and rebuilt the ship. Close that hatch and — Louis couldnt instantly see how it would exit the cavern. Hmm?
The linear cannon roared like the end of a world. Lightning ran through the hole in the floor, up and out through Mons Olympus. In the silence that followed, Louis heard Proserpinas shout.
"Theyll notice!" In Ghoulish.
They were over by the hole, looking down along the linear cannon: Proserpina, Tunesmith, and two little protectors either of whom might be Hanuman. Tunesmith bellowed, "They know Im here. Theyll guess Im active. The ones with brains must have deduced whats under the Map of Mars by now. Some may even rest easier because Im closing holes in the Ringworld floor."
"…Risk?"
"The missiles most of these factions have been using, one antimatter explosion wouldnt tear up much of the Repair Center. An enemy couldnt know hed hurt me, and hed anger me, and I might find him. I admit theres risk. Im stalling. I dont want the ARM and the rest of them wondering what the Mars protector is up to. So this is what Im up to, closing holes. Keeps me out of mischief."
They wouldnt scent him: Louis was in a pressure suit. Louis couldnt smell anything either, so he kept looking around. He saw a few Hanging People protectors. They werent near him. He saw a webeye camera sprayed on the docs Intensive Care Cavity. He waved at it, Hi, Hindmost! and wondered if Tunesmith was linked into the same cameras.
"…need the holes?"
"Im through with them. Were almost…" Their voices dropped as their hearing came back. Louis wasnt going to learn more this way.
He saw them cover their ears, so Louis covered his. As lightning roared up the linear cannon, Louis picked up a grippy and flung it at Proserpinas head, sixty meters away.
Proserpina caught it and sent it whizzing back at him… almost: it would hit the service wall, shatter, and shower him with slivers, Louis danced around the service wall, caught the grippy as it struck, and flung it slantwise at the floor, to ricochet at Proserpina, who caught and returned it. Suddenly other objects were in motion, tools and a random chunk of concrete and a long dead animal as big as Louis. The animal disintegrated in his hand. Louis caught the rest and returned them. He turned a spigot on a tank and was behind the service wall again, popped up and returned the grippy and a block of lava tuff, then threw himself behind the puff of featherweight packing plastic that had emerged from the tank. He kicked it upward and was behind the tank while they looked for him there. The grippy burst through the foam plastic, shattering it -
But there were too many things moving now, and elements in his torso and hip were trying to tear themselves apart. He caught what missiles he could, juggled them, and presently set them down. He limped toward the protectors.
Proserpina said, "Funny man—"
"What makes you feel so safe?" Tunesmith demanded.
"You left me a chair. You fiddled with my metabolism."
Tunesmith said, "Louis, everything has happened out of sequence. You ate early and finished your change late. An ARM ship exploded early. We could have taken our sweet time extrapolating t
he behavior of all these factions in the Fringe War. Now — talk to me. What will they do?"
"A sanity check first?"
"Whose?"
"Have you solved how Long Shot works?"
"Yes."
"And embedded the principle in a quintillion nanotech devices? Made from a much-altered experimental autodoc?"
"The numbers—"
"And run nanodust into the superconducting network under the Ringworld, so that its structure can be altered?"
"Yes, with help from Proserpina and our associates."
"Proserpina, are you with this?"
"Yes, Louis. There werent enough holes in the landscape, so we had to drill in spots—"
"Is it working?"
Tunesmith said, "I think so."
"Stet, Im sane and so are you, or else were all crazy. Is the system ready to go?"
"It may be, if my power storage holds. I cant include the shadow squares or the sun. At best I can only run for a little more than two days. But, Louis, Im not sure the nanosystems have finished infecting the entire grid. I need to know how much time weve got. What will the Fringe War do?"
Louiss mind was dancing down a new path. "You can build a new day-and-night system. Tunesmith, why not build a real Dyson sphere? Ten million miles diameter with a sun at the center and the Ringworld around it. Make it thin like a solar sail so light pressure will inflate it. Give it windows to let daylight through to the Ringworld. The rest of the material is a photoelectric transformer. Youll be collecting most of the power of a sun."
Proserpina said, "Youre fresh, Louis." In Ghoulish speech that implied meat not ready to eat: unacceptable immaturity. "Protectors can be scatterbrains. You must solve one problem at a time. Were still looking at the Fringe War fleet. When will they strike?"
"Theres another matter—"
Tunesmith bellowed, "No! Already some faction has destroyed one of my attitude jets. Who? What motive? Was it a deliberate provocation?"
"Show me the event. Meteor Defense Room."
They flicked out.
He absolutely couldnt signal the Hindmost. The puppeteer would have to move now.
Meteor Defense. Proserpina and Tunesmith took their chairs in a jump. Twisted Louis had to climb to reach the third chair. He looked for where stepping disks ought to be. The one hed come through was clearly marked. A Hanging People protector, Hanuman, flicked through an unmarked site and awaited orders. Others might be concealed there or there. Bet on three or four, no more. Why were the chairs on these booms so massive?
The wall displayed the Ringworld system as if viewed from the sun. The Ringworld was a mere outline, white threads against starscape. "I need a pointer," Louis said, and found touchpoints on a knob. "Stet. These are Outsider ships, right? Two. Do you see more?"
"No."
"Were not really of interest to anything that different. These," he highlighted lenses and spheres, "are Kzinti, and these are ARM," long levers studded with lesser ships. "I dont see the Sheathclaws ship."
"It went away."
"Probably ordered off, or they might have run from Kzinti. Kzinti use telepaths as slaves. What are you wondering about?"
"Interactions," Proserpina said.
He needed a way to use up some time, then send the protectors off on some sort of distraction. Louis drew a net of lines linking various ships, and added vector arrows. "See? Distance and velocity and gravity, you need to take it all into consideration, so its complicated—"
Proserpina snapped, "It is not! Its only different. We did this all the way from the galactic core to the Ringworld site! Theyve arranged a standoff, but its unstable here—"
"Yah. And this balance wont hold if — if some dissident faction, say the One Race contingent, is actually running this ship or—"
"I dont see how it held this long. I dont see how it could hold much longer," Tunesmith said. "But you know them all, Louis."
"It wont hold. Youre missing the effect of the Outsiders. Theyre more powerful than the other factions and everybody knows it. Just being here, theyve made it all more stable until now. Everybodys been wondering what the Outsiders will do. What the Outsiders will do is nothing, and the whole Fringe War is gradually coming to know that."
He was seeing it now, the disintegrating patterns, strength built up here, bluff here. Two bar-shaped ARM ships poised to destroy one great Kzin lens. Thirty-one ships edged up around one Outsider ship in hope of protection that would vanish like dawn frost on the Moon. Futz, the balance just wasnt there.
"Tunesmith, this whole house of cards could come down at any second. Dont wait. How fast can you get us moving?"
"Half a day, with luck."
Louis turned, shocked. "Why so long?"
"I need to run all the power in the shadow square system into the superconductor grid. If I did that too early, it would leak—"
"Cant you get magnetohydrodynamic power from the rim ramjets?"
"What a good idea. It would have required a certain amount of redesigning, say twenty to thirty days and a thousand spill mountain protectors. I need half a day, then go, and no more Fringe War."
"Start now," Louis said.
Patiently Tunesmith said, "Youve only just arrived. We dont even know, you dont even know who attacked us twenty-eight days ago. Wheres the danger coming from? Can I just kill it? The superconductor net has been rewiring itself for only two falans, crystallizing into its new configuration. Even if the change is complete, I need to test it."
Sometimes you just have to gamble, Louis thought. But Tunesmith wouldnt act fast enough without more pressure. "Show me how it happened," he said.
The sky changed: ships moved, stars didnt. The Ringworld went solid. A frame zoomed on one of the attitude jets, a gauzy glittering net molded magnetically into a hyperboloid of rotation with a line of white fire running down the axis. Suddenly it was bright, bright, dimming — the motor was gone, and a piece was bitten out of the rim wall. Along its foot, spill mountains were burning.
"Is this all youve got?"
"Various frequencies."
Replay, hydrogen alpha light. Louis waved it off. "Its too overt for puppeteers, too restrained for Kzinti. Maybe a Kzinti dissident. There are ARM dissidents too; we could ask Roxanny. Or anyone whod like to see both sides reduced a little. Ive never been sure about Trinocs, or puppeteers."
"Not much help," Tunesmith agreed.
"Tell me what you know about Teela Brown."
Proserpina asked, "Who?"
"An insane puppeteer scheme," Tunesmith said. "She was a victim. General Products, the merchant arm of Piersons puppeteers in human space, set up a birthright lottery on Earth. The attempt was to breed for lucky humans. In practice what they got was a few statistical flukes, like Teela Brown. She… Louis! Did you have a child with Teela Brown?"
Louis said nothing.
"Where is your child?"
Louis said nothing. Among protectors, a poker face is easy; body language is hard.
He waited until he saw motion. Proserpina left her chair in a long jump. Tunesmith jumped in a different direction. Hanuman looked uncertain; he remained at the visible stepping disk, the far one. As soon as the protectors were committed, Louis jumped toward Tunesmiths chair.
One of these chairs had to be a stepping disk. It was a natural hiding place. Two would be redundant, though all three had been made too thick and too wide — and Tunesmith would have claimed the right one. But other stepping disks in this room had to be guarded. If Louis was right — and he was, because Hanuman instantly launched himself toward the same chair.
Hanuman got there first. The chair started to swing aside, but Louis was there. Hanuman caught Louis with a powerful kick, but Louis had the mass. He slammed Hanuman into the stepping disk and reached around the dazed hominid to pop the rim and turn the disk on. They both flicked out.
Heel of the hand, a blow to Hanumans head. Hanuman went limp. Louis pushed, sent him flying. Grinding pain in his hip: Hanumans kick had br
oken something.
They were underground, somewhere beneath Mars. He popped the disks rim and tapped controls, fast.
Louis flicked in, popped the rim. If Tunesmith tracked him to this sandy, barren island — or Hanuman signaled him a minute or two from now — hed find Louiss footprints, hours old. He might even find scent traces of Wembleth and Roxanny.
And if Teelas genes were lucky, Wembleth and Roxanny and their child would be well out of Tunesmiths reach by now. But every surviving gene pattern is insanely lucky, and Teelas luck didnt matter a tanj to Tunesmith. What mattered was this:
Louis Wu could never give a dispassionate, trustworthy answer to Tunesmiths questions while he could shade his answers to favor his bloodline.
One more move. Louis tapped controls, then hit #, and flicked out.
In the crew quarters aboard Hot Needle of Inquiry, Louis rapidly typed up a bleu cheese and mushroom omelet and a salad. He stripped off his pressure suit, then his clothes. He dialed up a falling jumper and put it on. He turned on the shower just long enough to wet the bag. He half-expected to hear the Puppeteers Voice, but it didnt come.
He flicked into the cargo bay. A flycycle would have been too big, but he typed up a flying belt modified for magnetic lift. He ate most of his salad and omelet while he waited, a hairy four minutes, for the flying belt to be built. Put it on, flicked back to crew quarters.
Now, where would a puppeteer hide a stepping disk? An escape hatch had to be here: the Hindmost might find himself trapped in crew quarters by a man and a Kzin. The toilet seat? Too small. The shower?