by Larry Niven
To ship’s port and starboard the glow of dying coals had faded to the black of cold basalt. In space that would have been stars, an infinite universe spread to either side.
Futz, he had stars. One webeye lay on the maglev track, looking down at the universe through the filigree surface. Another starscape, from the webeye Louis had sprayed onto the vacuum, had fuzzed out only hours ago.
In another window the stolen webeye moved into a smooth-bore tunnel, stopped in what was clearly an airlock for several hours, then moved on through several doors, past piles of strange equipment vaguely glimpsed, and stopped again. Louis had never seen what was carrying it, nor heard that voice again.
The flight deck was windows overlaid on windows, a perspective that could cross the eyes and twist them in their sockets. One was a graph like a constantly wiggling mountain range, purpose unknown. Three were replays: High Point Mountain swept past the refueling probe; the probe maneuvered until it was smashed by violet light; a protector died, his suit slashed open to vacuum.
Nothing was happening where the ruined probe lay on the maglev track. The window held Bram like a dark Dali silhouette, say Shades of Night Descending.
Louis closed his eyes and sagged back on the water bed.
Popped them open again. He’d seen blue-white light flash from one of the windows.
The light was out now, but the wrecked probe was glowing cherry-red. Something tiny was coming down the maglev track from far away, running straight into the window.
It came at astronomical speed, a foot above the track: something like a floating sledge. It decelerated savagely. Something manlike dropped off the back and rolled out of view as the vehicle eased to a stop inches from the window.
The Hindmost moved up beside Bram.
The probe cooled to murky red, darker, black.
That wasn’t a sled. It was a shallow box. The bottom was black like wrought iron. The sides were so transparent as to be barely visible, but Louis could pick them out by the knobs embedded for tiedowns. Lines held tools against the sides of the box: a wand with a handle, maybe a line saw; a widemouthed thing, gun or rocket launcher or energy weapon; a pry bar; stacked boxes; skeletal metal stuff.
A window behind it showed starscape and, rising into view, a nearly empty flat surface. Louis glared and looked away. The stolen webeye had left the tunnel and entered some kind of open elevator, at the worst possible time.
Louis heard, “I do not understand war, but I feel Louis might.”
“Even drugged?”
“Ask.”
“Louis, are you awake?”
“Of course I’m awake, Bram!”
“This is a duel among protectors—”
“Medieval Japanese,” Louis said thickly. Despite what he’d said, the drugs had him wanting to doze. “Hide and stab. Win any way you can. They didn’t duel like Europeans.”
“Yes, you understand. Do you see why this second intruder is still alive?”
“No … wait.” The newcomer moved in a crouched and jerky strut, examining the slagged probe. It was the knobby shape of a Ringworld pressure suit, and wide through the torso, like the one Whisper was wearing; but it fit.
The newcomer found marks on the probe where a stepping disk had been attached. Its head snapped up, and in a flash it was gone.
But Louis had glimpsed its face. “Spill mountain protector. Whisper must see that, too. It’s a slave, stet, Bram? There must be a master, the protector in charge of the maglev track. The master sent him.”
A window lurched, then rolled over and over, showing the black underside of the Ringworld, then stars streaming past, Ringworld, stars … The protector’s servant had cleared the maglev rail by rolling the ruined probe into space.
Now the main window was backing up. The spill mountain protector jumped free.
Louis said, “The first one, the one that died, he left a maglev sled on the track. Acolyte sprayed his webeye on the sled. That’s what we’re watching. Somebody has to get the probe and the sled off the track. So here’s a spill mountain protector to dump the probe, and he’s sent the first sled back where it came from, down to the spaceport ledge. Problem solved. Now he’s boarding his own sled … there it goes back up the track to wherever he came from.”
Bram said, “You do understand.”
“Whisper’s started something she can’t stop.”
“She’s guessed that I sent the probe,” Bram said. “She doesn’t want my enemies to study it.”
“She can’t know how many there are.”
“She might extrapolate. Begin with Teela Brown—”
“Yeah. It all begins with Teela.” The pain had gone far away. Louis felt himself floating. Better disconnect himself from the medkit, clear his head.
The webeye window’s motion stopped. Then it, too, began gliding up the track.
Whisper was using it to follow the other sled.
“Teela made protectors to help her mount motors,” Bram said. “A spill mountain protector might be trusted, because Teela could hold his species at ransom. A Ghoul protector might consider that his species already owns all beneath the Arch, and act only to preserve it. A vampire—”
“Starts fresh. A protector born with a blank mind, and Teela right there to teach. You said that.”
“Yes. Shall we call him Dracula?”
“Mary Shelley.”
“Why am I lecturing a drug-stupefied breeder?”
“I think Teela would pick a woman to be a protector. Three women.”
Bram shrugged widely. “Stet. I don’t know the name, but stet. Mary-Shelley made blood-children, protectors of her own vampire species, and hid them from Teela. When Teela returned to the Map of Mars, two protectors followed. Only the Ghoul remained on the rim.
“Mary-Shelley must have known that her brood would kill and replace the Ghoul. She would rule the rim through them. The spill mountain protector may have guessed that Teela planned to bathe the rim in solar flame. He fought to protect his kind. But Teela killed both.
“Now we must ask, how many are Mary-Shelley’s brood?”
The Hindmost said, “Manufacture, acquisition, transport, mounting, supply.”
“Three, I think,” Bram said. “Manufacture would use repair facilities already in place at a spaceport. If a ship comes, manufacture becomes acquisition. As for supply, no protector would allow another to control what he needs. Stet? Three. Lovecraft to build, Collier for transport, King above them all to mount the motors.”
Louis smiled. Bram had remembered who Mary Shelley was!
The Hindmost said, “My kind would be a hundred strong, for the company alone.”
“And my kind,” Bram said, “would each design his own domain to run without his help. There were Spill Mountain People at hand. Let them build and move and mount, while Lovecraft and Collier and King lurk to pounce.”
Louis asked, “You think they were expecting Whisper?”
“Whisper, or each other, or me, or invaders from the stars. Do you think us too stupid to extrapolate planets from what we can see of the universe? Anne perceived protectors in place on the rim, each ready to kill her. Wherever she’s been or whatever she’s done since, she’s reached the rim unnoticed by me or by them. She’s killed Lovecraft already.”
“She makes a pretty good target for Collier, though. Hindmost? Can you read the back of a webeye camera?”
“Louis? I don’t unde—glass, he sprayed it on glass.” A pipe organ cried in pain. “Done, but wait eleven minutes.”
Eleven minutes later the window suddenly faced back along the maglev track, into the bed of the sled.
Louis made out some dim shapes suggestive of tools. Nothing big enough to hide a protector. Where was Whisper?
The picture reversed again—and the first sled was slowing.
The second sled began to slow, too.
Louis heard woodwinds scream, and saw the Hindmost’s heads jump bolt upright. That wasn’t the Hindmost’s song. It was Br
am and his musical sculpture, and he was already setting it aside. He went to the stepping disk and flicked out.
***
Louis said, “Did you see that?”
“He’s gone,” said the Hindmost.
“Where? Why?”
“You tell me. Louis Wu understands duels, stet? Would you take food?” The Hindmost stood beside him, holding a flask.
Louis took it and sipped. Broth. “That’s good.”
Sanity check: the granite block was back in place and the Hindmost was in the crew cabin, still trapped, like Louis himself.
Louis said, “He’s gone where he’ll need a pressure suit. For now he’s nowhere. Hindmost, if you turned off the stepping desk system, where would Bram be?”
“Safeties prevent me.”
“What if we just blast the system with a flashlight-laser? Tanj, no, he’s got the flash and the variable-knife—”
“The system is buried in the hull, Louis.”
“Then shift his flick to Mons Olympus! Where does he think he’s going, anyway? He may be there already. Summon up that map.”
The Hindmost made music.
Nothing happened.
“I’m locked out,” the Hindmost said. “Bram has learned my programming language. He’s wrested control of the stepping disks from me.” His legs folded under him. His heads tucked under his forelegs.
Louis tried lifting the edge of the stepping disk. It wouldn’t move. Bram had taken full control. Those tanj concerts weren’t entertainment. They were Bram practicing with his handmade instruments until he could duplicate the Hindmost’s musical speech.
Something was happening: the webeye window jittered and shook. Louis shouted, “Hindmost! Turn the picture around! It’s looking the wrong way!”
The puppeteer didn’t move.
The window skewed sideways, hit the side of the track, and bounced away spinning. Whatever had attacked the sled was having its effect.
The puppeteer was unfolding himself.
The maglev sled hit the other wall hard. The picture jittered and slid. When it came to a stop, it was looking at nothing but silver filigree.
The puppeteer whistled and the picture reversed. Now starlight showed them walls of shattered crystal. Bullets had chewed the sled into lace, and the tools in the bed had been showered with glass slivers.
Most of these things had been unrecognizable. Now they were junk, with one exception.
Seeing Acolyte and him flick in and out, Louis thought, would have told Whisper about stepping disks. She must have ripped the stepping disk off the probe and tossed it into the sled, for there it was, unharmed.
Three pressure suits leaped into the sled in the same instant. Two fired sprays of projectiles at anything big, then hurled anything hurlable in a rapid search for a protector hiding in wreckage. But Whisper was nowhere.
Two protectors picked up the stepping disk and held it on edge so that the third could inspect its underside. They turned it to show the upper surface. The vampire must have thought it more dangerous than useful, because he adjusted his weapon and fired a bright, narrow beam at it.
The beam lashed straight up out of the cabin’s main stepping disk and began to char the ceiling.
Though Louis couldn’t remember jumping for cover, he and the Hindmost were now curled intimately behind the recycler wall. The Hindmost didn’t look like he intended to uncurl.
Louis poked his head around.
The vampire protector had picked up the stepping disk and was trying to hurl it over the edge of the track.
The disk was suddenly too heavy, as an intruder’s weight slammed it down.
The intruder—Bram!—lashed out as the other leapt away. The other vampire—Collier?—fell and separated, cut in half by six feet of wire in a stasis field. Both ends of him spewed fog. But Collier’s torso still had arms, and one came around with the bulky light-weapon.
Bram’s variable-knife licked out again. The light-weapon fell.
No telling where Whisper had come from, but she was there. Two spill mountain protectors faced two vampire protectors.
The puppeteer was still in something like a catatonic state. Louis tried to follow what was happening in the webeye window. It wasn’t simple.
The spill mountain protectors hadn’t attacked.
Whisper was wearing one of their suits; she’d be able to talk to them. Louis could hear Bram’s breath huffing with recent exertion, but he wasn’t talking. He wouldn’t have the right kind of suit radio.
He was blinking his helmet lamp at Whisper.
Tanj, that must be the Ghouls’ heliograph language! Louis realized. And now the others were using helmet lamps, too.
It went on and on, and presently an agreement was reached.
The spill mountain protectors picked up the ruined sled with some difficulty. Bram gave his weapon to Whisper and helped them throw the sled over the rim and into space.
They dropped the stepping disk into the undamaged maglev sled. The two vampire protectors got in, then the spill mountain protectors. The sled began to move back down the track. As the sled began to pull away, Bram puffed a webeye onto the track, then another onto the sled.
Then Bram sang the song of an orchestra being gunned down by terrorists.
He stepped on the disk and flicked out, gone, here. As the light through the webeye window showed his going, Bram walked off the stepping disk, lifting his helmet. Something like a fat burl flute was in his hard beak of a mouth.
When a puppeteer is upset, he loses control, not of speech, but of emotional signals. The Hindmost’s song was as pure as wind chimes. “You’ve learned my programming language.”
Bram put the flute away. “Our contract does not preclude such a thing.”
“I am disturbed.”
“Did you follow what you saw? No? Of Mary-Shelley’s blood-children, we’ve killed Lovecraft and Collier. Collier’s servants tell us that Lovecraft’s servants are ready to load cargo. We expect that they will aid us. Now only King remains. When King is dead, Whisper will control the rim and I the Repair Center, and then we may accomplish something.”
The kitchen delivered a flask, and Bram drank deeply. Louis noticed he was carrying the big light-weapon. That thing would probably kill everyone in the cabin if it was fired.
Bram looked at him. “Louis Wu, what would you do now?”
“Well, she’s got to kill King. Too late for anything else. Me? My suit would keep me alive for two falans, so I don’t have to board a sled and rev it up to seven hundred seventy miles per second and then let King shoot at me. I might come back to this side of the rim, then climb up the wall from here.”
“You would lose all surprise.”
“He still—”
Bram waved it away. “Anne’s suit won’t last that long.”
“Mph.” Cargo, Bram had said. “Well, if I had something King wanted, I could put it on the sled with me. Of course he’d have to know I had it. What does King want?”
“Never mind, Louis. I thought it worth seeking a different viewpoint.” Bram whistled at the stepping disk system, then flicked out.
“Now where’s he gone? Hindmost, are you still locked out?”
“I can’t use stepping disks. I can find him.”
“Do it.”
Two windows showed moiré patterns: webeyes destroyed in the battle. The Hindmost sang them out, then popped one up in their place. It began flicking past other views. Weaver Town. Hidden Patriarch: the foremast crow’s nest.
The Hindmost sang flutes and percussion. He said, “I’ve begun a search program. If invaders come using familiar craft, we’ll know it in minutes.”
“Good.” Louis pointed at the window half obscured by that one. “I hope you were recording that.”
“Yes.”
The stolen webeye had reached the spaceport ledge. Tiny starlit pressure suits walked through vacuum toward a structure too huge to show its shape. It took them forever to round the curve of it.
<
br /> Bigger yet: a pair of golden toroids mounted on tall gantries. It took Louis a moment to see the rest of it.
Cables were growing out of the toroids, spreading like a growing plant, narrowing at the ends to invisibly fine wire.
“Stet. They’re actually making new motors.”
The Hindmost said, “I’ve wondered if the wire frames are an innovation. My records show no more than the toroids.”
“Interesting notion, but maybe the City Builders took just the toroids. That wire frame could be awkward if you wanted to land a ship.”
The shifting window showed Hidden Patriarch’s aft crow’s nest; then the kitchen and two adult City Builders and three children. Where had the older children been hiding, Louis wondered, that he hadn’t met them? But they were all moving out the door. And now they came chattering back with Bram between them.
Bram had stripped off his suit. He stretched out on a bench. Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok began a massage.
Bones and swollen joints and no fat anywhere. “He looks like a tanj skeleton now,” Louis said.
Bram seemed asleep.
“If Bram thinks there’s time for that, he’s likely right. Hindmost, let’s get Acolyte out of that box and me in.”
The puppeteer whistled up a window. “Louis, the nanotech devices are still repairing damage to his spinal cord. He should be free in a few hours.”
“Tanj!”
“Leave him?”
“Yes!” Louis curled up on the water bed. “I’m going to sleep.”
Chapter 30
King
Louis uncurled slowly. Pain is a great teacher. Still, he moved more easily than he had these last four days.
The medkit had been giving him diet supplements, but he’d turned off the pain drip. Louis disengaged himself and went to the fore wall.
Here: in Hidden Patriarch’s dining hall, Bram was speaking to the City Builders. The webeye windows in the walls were active, and one was the same as this second window—
Here: the vast width of the spaceport ledge. The nearly finished rim wall motor was gone, completed and moved somewhere. Here passed a huge floating sledge with skeletal towers and alien waldos at the corners. A tower with a spiral decor … more than decor: it was bending over like a silver tentacle, and its tip was an infinite bifurcation. It englobed the picked-over hull of a City Builder starship and lifted.