by Larry Niven
Bram must have noted Louis’s rapt gaze. “What strikes you, Louis?”
What struck Louis was that the Hindmost wasn’t going to be much help to Louis Wu. Bram had had too much time to intimidate the puppeteer. Louis said instead, “I had an insight. The Hindmost’s cabin, what does it look like to you?”
“A womb, perhaps.”
“How about the interior of an animal?”
“Are we playing word games?”
“There’s a difference. It might matter. Female puppeteers don’t have a womb. A … prey animal evolved into a symbiote so long ago that they think of it as the puppeteer female, but it isn’t. Nessus had an ovipositor. Bram, get into the Hindmost’s records and see if he has a file on digger wasps.”
“Digger wasps, stet,” Bram said. “We have some nine hours to play with. You were going to lecture me about protectors.”
Louis asked, “Shall we go look at bones?”
“Lecture,” Bram said.
Louis complied. “Our ancestor was the Pak breeder. The Pak evolved on a planet near the galactic core, say a hundred and thirty thousand falans from here at lightspeed.” Thirty thousand light-years and a bit. “Some of them tried to set a colony on my planet, on Earth, long ago. There wasn’t enough thallium to support the virus that grows in the yellow roots, and that’s what turns a breeder into a protector.
“The protectors died off. They may have cleared off some predators first to give the breeders room to expand. The immature Pak, the breeders, evolved on their own, just like they did here. They spread over Earth from landing sites in Africa and Asia.”
“Speculative?”
“We have bones of Pak breeders from Olduvai Gorge and other sites. There’s a mummified Pak protector in the Smithsonian,” Louis said. “They dug it out from under a desert on Mars. I never saw it myself. Even at my age you can’t do everything. But we studied a hologram of the thing in General Biology.”
“How did you come by that?”
“He came to rescue the old colony. That’s hearsay evidence, Bram, from a Belter who ate the yellow roots, but the Hindmost probably has it in memory. Ship components, Brennan’s tale, the dissected mummy, chemical—”
“Let us not disturb the Hindmost. But you studied this mummy?”
“Yes.”
“Let us look at bones.”
***
The knobby man’s hand felt like a handful of marbles, and his pull on Louis’s wrist was irresistible. Acolyte followed, suitless. Kzinti needn’t fear the smell of tree-of-life. Louis found himself walking rapidly toward a skeleton looming in amplified starlight.
Bram brought them face-to-face, stepped back and said, “React.”
Acolyte circled the skeleton. “It died in combat,” he murmured. He sniffed, then followed his nose to Cronus’s array of tools and clothing.
Louis ran his fingertips over the eroded edges where bone was broken. Would Bram guess that he’d been here before? Louis said, “Well, it looks thousands of falans old.”
“Near seven thousand,” Bram confirmed.
“Beaten to death. You?”
“I and Anne.”
Acolyte turned, his ears up. “Tell us the tale. He challenged you here?”
“No, we hid our existence.”
“How did you find him? How did you lure him?”
“He had to come. We waited.”
The Kzin waited. But Bram didn’t speak again, so Louis said, “This could almost be a deformed Pak protector. Still, the jaw’s a bone cracker. The skull doesn’t have much brow ridge. The torso, I think it’s too long for a standard issue Pak. Bram, I think you have here a carrion eater.”
Back came Acolyte to see what Louis was talking about. Bram asked, “On what basis?”
“Jaw built to crack bones. A predator would have teeth to tear open big arteries or an abdomen. The long torso gives him a gut long enough to deal with a difficult meal. The missing brow ridge—well, he could be going out only at night, or maybe he had bushy eyebrows for eyeshades, but—”
Acolyte asked, “Might he be a Night People protector? Distort the skull, expand the joints—”
Louis shook his head. “I saw a Ghoul child at the Weaver village. I saw adults among the Fearless Vampire Slayers, and more adults in the fungus farm under a floating city once upon a time. I would swear they were all the same species, and this isn’t it.
“Look, the Ghouls at the fungus farm were my height and a bit. He’s four inches shorter. No teeth, of course, but look at the hands. Ghoul hands are bigger, thicker, they can tear anything apart. More to the point, Acolyte, the current species is identical across two hundred million miles of distance.”
Acolyte watched, saying nothing. It was rare to see a Kzin so still.
“But it’s obvious,” Bram said patiently. “This is the old one, the species that became the People of the Night.”
Louis said, “Cronus?”
“Precursor god of the Greeks?”
Louis was startled, and showed it. “You’ve been studying.” Tanj, that’s where he learned the music!
“They’re meddlesome, aren’t they, these puppeteers? The Hindmost has a hundred generations of human literature, kzinti oral history, kdatlyno touch-sculpture sequences, even some trinoc vengeance tales. From your nineteenth and twentieth centuries I’ve viewed entertainments based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, including Fred Saberhagen’s and Anne Rice’s work. But why not reserve the name ‘Cronus’? This individual can’t have been the first, Louis. Shall I make blurry word-pictures for you?
“Eighty thousand falans ago there was a dead Pak protector. He might have been hundreds of falans old already. For all we know, he might have helped build the Arch. Call him Cronus. Archaic Night People came and ate his flesh. If the meat of a protector didn’t bring on the change, then they found yellow roots the protector carried. They became protectors. If there were many, soon there was one.”
Louis slapped the dead protector’s clavicle. Dust puffed. “Bram, this is the oldest protector we’ll ever know anything about. Maybe there were gods before Cronus, that the Greeks didn’t know about—”
Bram nodded. “As you will. Cronus.”
“Stet. Cronus’s species might have been eating carrion for thousands of years after something like the Fist-of-God impact—”
“Must you speak every trivial truth aloud? Ah, you have a student. Acolyte, do you see Louis’s point?”
“In truth, I see something,” Acolyte said. “The numbers are ridiculous unless something was guiding Ghouls in one direction across large, very large distances. One empire. Ghouls must be the same along the entire two hundred million miles. Perhaps everywhere on the ring.”
“Yes! It was Cronus tending his species like a herder. Bram? Doesn’t a protector try to preserve his own genetic pattern?”
The Kzin jumped on it. “Yes! How could Cronus guide his own descendants? Even a good change smells wrong. Wait, what if he chose other, similar carrion eaters? No, they would rule his own breed!”
Acolyte was learning how to solve puzzles.
Bram said, “He was a Ghoul. A carrion eater’s sense of smell is altered by evolution. What to approach, what to touch, what to put in his mouth, each is a conscious choice. A Ghoul may be more free than other protectors. He may guide his kind toward what he sees as perfection.”
They looked at the old skeleton. He had to come, Bram had said. Near seven thousand falans, he’d said. One thousand seven hundred years? And if Louis’s dawning suspicion had any basis in fact, he’d best not ask directly.
Try something indirect. “Your mate, is she still in here?”
“Anne may be dead. When we became aware that the Arch is unstable in its plane, that there must have been motors on the rim, Anne went to fix it. I was able to track her for a time. These others now at work on the rim wall may have killed her.”
“Bram, she would have had to make those other protectors.”
“Anne felt no suc
h urgency when she left me. She would have worked alone. These late-blooming protectors might be the work of the recent one, the Ball People protector—”
“Teela.”
“Teela Brown. Your mate,” Bram said. “The Hindmost has records of her, too.”
“Were you here when Teela came?”
“Yes. It was more difficult to hide from her than from the Hindmost. I watched her learn to use the Meteor Defense. I was sure she intended what a protector must: she would save the Arch from impacting the sun. What was her true intent, Louis?”
“Teela was a protector. I can’t read a protector’s mind.”
Bram asked, “If not hers, then whose?”
“You saw the records. Teela was strange.”
“Two came into the Repair Center,” Bram said. “They ate of the root. One died. The other fell into the coma that leads to the protector state. I had time to hide my presence and set up means to observe her.
“Your Teela wandered the Repair Center. It was a pleasure to watch her. She discovered things I hadn’t noticed, and ultimately came here. She played with the Meteor Defense and the telescope display.
“Then she left. I was able to track her a little as she moved to the rim wall. She used a magnetic transport system on the rim wall, much faster than the system we used, but she had an advanced pressure suit.”
“Timing?”
“Some extrasolar object impacted the sun twenty-two falans past. Storms of subatomic particles threw the Arch off balance. Louis, Teela was in a great hurry.”
Twenty-two falans ago: the Ringworld began sliding off balance about five years before Hot Needle of Inquiry’s return. “She was educated on Earth,” Louis said. “With a protector’s brain and basic physics classes, she must have seen the situation quick enough. She went to fix the attitude jet system. What would she find? Anne?”
“Anne would hide,” Bram said. “She would watch Teela. At the first sign of incompetence, she would kill Teela.”
“Mmm.”
“You knew her—”
“As a woman. Bram, nobody knew Teela. She was a statistical fluke, a woman who was lucky every time luck was called for, up until Nessus drafted her for the Ringworld expedition. Any kind of normal life must have been just out of her reach.”
Acolyte said, “My father speaks of Teela sometimes. He never knew what to make of her. To the puppeteers, she was part of a breeding program, breeding for luck. Chmeee believed they succeeded.”
“No,” Bram said.
Louis said, “She’s dead, Bram. She’s no threat to you.”
“But what might a protector leave behind to shape a future she desired? We plan far ahead. Louis, have you seen what you needed to see?”
“Yeah.”
***
Bram flicked in, calling, “Hindmost, wake!”
But the Hindmost was awake and dancing in his cabin … dancing with three ghosts, three puppeteers too translucent to hide him. “Bram, I thought of something cute. I made a brief burn an hour ago to put the probe below the rim, out of sight of invading ships.”
“Numbers?”
The Hindmost whistled. Equations wrote rainbow lines.
Bram studied them. It was the first time Louis had seen him freeze up like that, but the equations looked complex, far beyond his own abilities. Then Bram said, “Good. Begin deceleration now.”
The Hindmost chirped. The racing rim wall opened behind him—“Stet?”
“Yes, stet, if it doesn’t hide you from me.”
–rim wall moving at a blur, its edge far above, the tops of the spill mountains far below. The probe must be about three hundred miles up, Louis thought.
The Hindmost chirped. Louis looked for results, but he couldn’t see—wait, now. Night-shadowed, the passing rim wall had picked up a blue highlight: the reflection of a small fusion drive. Floating equations told it better: some of the numbers were reeling down.
Three ghosts still danced with the Hindmost, and Louis knew them. Their hairstyles differed, but they were all Nessus.
Acolyte was gnawing on something that dripped red. It was not an appetizing sight, but Louis was suddenly starved. He tapped at the kitchen wall with one eye for the holograms.
Bram asked, “Hindmost, what do you know of Teela Brown?”
The Hindmost sang like a bronze bell. A third hologram opened behind the Hindmost: a table of contents, as best Louis could tell. The cabin was crowded with images.
Bram flared in anger. “Come here. Come here now!”
The Hindmost didn’t hesitate. He stepped and was beside them. “I intended no harm.”
“I prefer you here. Louis, Hindmost, Acolyte, I’m trying to paint a picture of a protector in my mind. I have my murky view of Cronus and I knew Anne intimately, but Teela Brown is an alien protector. Soon we must face alien protectors. Hindmost, what have you shown me?”
“These are records on the Lucky Human Project. My administration felt that human allies could do us good. Humans are lucky. We would make them effective by making them luckier. The experiment was local to one planet, Earth. We added a lottery to the formal qualifications that earn a birthright. We kept track of babies born through luck. We financed a social network so that the children might meet and breed.”
“Was she lucky?”
Louis wasn’t listening, definitely wasn’t listening. When he’d fought free of the Ringworld, Teela had stayed behind by her own choice. Louis had had forty years to avoid thinking about Teela Brown.
“She was a sixth-generation lottery winner, but Teela was not lucky for puppeteers, nor for her associates. I cannot think she was lucky for herself. Any creature seeks homeostasis. Teela lost her mate, then her gender identity and shape, then her life. But luck is a thing of dubious interpretation.”
Acolyte spoke. “What if she sought a cause worth dying for?”
Louis gaped. Acolyte added, “Or what if she only wanted to be more intelligent? Like my father. Like me. Luck gave her those things.”
Bram said, “Louis?”
“Maybe. Interesting interpretation.” Forty years, and he’d never seen what was obvious to this eleven-year-old cat!
“Anything further?”
Louis closed his eyes. He could see her, touch her. “A freak accident took her away from us. Luck. When we found her, she’d found Seeker. Big, brawny explorer type, a wonderful guide, and I guess she was in love with him, too—”
“Was she your mate or his?”
“Serial polygamy. Skip it—”
“She left you for him?”
“Not just for Seeker. Bram, she’d found this—this huge toy. It never would have occurred to Teela that it was beyond her, too big to play with. That anything was beyond her.”
“She wanted to play with the Arch? Without destroying it, of course. And only a protector can do that?”
Louis rubbed his eyes.
“So you left her on the Ringworld. And then?”
“Seeker must have led her to the Map of Mars, or told her enough that she could guess the rest. She knew going in that she was entering a strange place, a place of secrets.
“She … let’s see … she wakes as a protector. Seeker’s dead. Teela’s a protector in the Repair Center. She plays around. She finds out how to turn the sun into a superthermal laser. Blasts a few comets?”
“She did that.”
“She learns how to display telescope views with the Meteor Defense setup. She notices that the Ringworld has a wobble to it. She finds attitude jets on the rim wall, but most of them are gone. Any protector could predict the results of that.
“She goes to the rim wall. Bram, did she take roots with her?”
“Roots and a flowering plant and thallium oxide.”
“She finds City Builder ships built around the rim attitude jets. Anne may have replaced some of those … yeah. That’s what your Anne was doing: intercept every City Builder ship as it comes back from the stars, tear out the Bussard ramjets and mount
them on the rim. It’s just another thing Halrloprillalar never told me. She and her crew must have been evicted from their ship, sent back through the rim wall by an angry protector.”
Bram waited.
“Poor tanj Prill. That could twist a person’s mind.”
Waited.
“So there’s already a few attitude jets back in place, but all Teela sees is that the ship builders haven’t stolen them all yet. She takes over Anne’s job. It’s urgent. She turns some breeders into protectors. She told me about those: a Spill Mountain People, a vampire, a Ghoul. They all start pulling motors out of returning ships and remounting them.
“They had twenty in place and no more ships in view, and the motors didn’t have enough power by themselves. Teela left the other protectors tending the motors. She came back to the Repair Center. She must have known what she was going to do next. She didn’t see Hot Needle of Inquiry coming at her until she was using the Repair Center telescope again.”
Acolyte said, “She must have had a telescope on the rim, Louis.”
“Sure, and it must have been good enough to see the big City Builder ships coming in. Needle’s much smaller.”
“Would she recognize Needle?”
“A General Products number-three hull? Sure.”
Bram asked, “How could Needle affect her plans?”
“What did I tell you about reading a protector’s mind, Bram?”
“But you must try.”
Louis didn’t want to try. “Here’s what Teela told me. She just couldn’t make herself kill a trillion people even to save thirty trillion. Protector intelligence and Teela Brown empathy: she could feel their deaths. She knew it had to be done, and she knew we’d figure out how, me and Chmeee and the Hindmost, and she couldn’t let us do it, either. She was inviting us to kill her, Bram.”
“I watched her fight. I could have fought better while dead.”
“Yeah. It was the fight of my life, but nobody outfights a protector.”
“If she knew she couldn’t play a plasma jet along the rim wall, why did she return to the Repair Center?” Silly question. Bram didn’t wait for an answer. “What did she really want?”