Ringworld's Children (10 page)

"Hindmost, was the Ringworld built by Pak?"

"I don't know, Louis."

"I thought you might, by now. I wondered if there might be real Pak, somewhere among all these variant hominids. We've never seen anything of Pak but old bones."

The puppeteer said, "We can deduce a good deal about Pak breeders. They slept or hid during the day and night. They hunted and did their business at twilight. They lived above a shoreline."

Louis was startled. "How can you know all that?"

"Your partial baldness suggests that your ancestors swam regularly, and I've watched you in the water, too. As for twilight, this Ringworld gets far more twilight than a planet would, and it's wholly unnecessary. Let me show you."

The Hindmost boarded a chair, clumsily. His questing mouth found controls. The wall display jumped, became a featureless blue. The Hindmost began to draw in white lines. A blob of white: the sun. A circle: the Ringworld. A much smaller ring, concentric: thirty-odd shadow squares moving a little faster than orbit, held in a net of cables. "This is the way the Ringworld was designed," the Hindmost said. "A thirty hour day with ten hours blacked out, and more than an hour of a sun partly blocked. Instead--"

He sketched in five long shadow squares sliding retrograde, against the Ringworld's spin. "This model would avoid the long, long twilight period and give equal day and night. The builders didn't want that. Whoever built the Ringworld must have wanted endless summers and long twilights. We surmise they were Pak protectors, and we surmise that the Pak world was like that."

Louis studied the picture.
Or else,
he thought,
they built an advanced model somewhere else.

The Hindmost said, "I'm hungry. Will you keep watch?"

"Hungry," the Kzin agreed. "Hurry."

Time had slid by unnoticed. Louis realized he was half starved.

A puppeteer must eat more often than a carnivore. The Hindmost was gone for most of an hour. He returned with jewels sparkling in a newly coifed mane. A float plate heaped with fodder followed him.

"We'll regret the time we're wasting," he said. "Our last hours free from Tunesmith, but what can we do with them? My plans didn't reach far enough. Look, more warships."

Three Kzinti, then an unfamiliar larger craft, then three more ARM ships danced around the inner ring of shadow squares, not firing yet.

Louis said, "Acolyte, go feed yourself." Who wants to be around a hungry Kzin?

Louis and the Hindmost watched the warships at play. "They won't all have stasis fields," Louis speculated. "Stasis fields are expensive and not too dependable, and of course they take a ship out of the action. So they'll be leery of the Ringworld's meteor defense, but Tunesmith turned that off, and they're starting to realize that. So," as three Kzinti ships began a long dive toward the Ringworld surface, "here come Kzinti to stop the first ARM ships, and more ARMs to stop
them
--tanj dammit!" A brilliant streak inside the atmosphere ended in a flash against desert.

"That was an antimatter bullet," said the puppeteer.

"And now it's a little eyestorm. Tanj, this isn't even the main event! What they want is
Long Shot. Needle
is nothing."

"A
Needle
in a haystack? What you describe is mostly your imagination," said the Hindmost. "Much of a war goes unseen. That larger ship, I have identified it. Lure of Far Lands Limited, the Kdatlyno and Jinx business alliance. They won't fight, they will only observe. Here is Acolyte. Louis, go eat. Bathe."

Louis jerked awake. Something had disturbed him... a flash of light from the screen?

Acolyte and the Hindmost were asleep, sprawled far apart on the hard floor beneath the Meteor Defense Room walls. It was good to be clean; he'd eaten like an army; sleeping plates would be good too. But anyone who slept aboard
Needle
would miss something.

Louis sat up. Nothing hurt! He grinned, remembering what an older woman had told him at his two hundredth birthday party. "Dearest, if you can wake in the morning with no pain in your joints and muscles, it's a sure sign that you have died in the night."

The Hindmost had reset the wraparound screen. It showed a skyscape with windows in it, views of an eyestorm and the Other Ocean. Around the windows stars moved uneasily: ships of the Fringe War. All views were quiet now.

It did bother him, that he couldn't think of anything to do except watch. He was trying to outthink a protector. What chance would he have later if he couldn't find an angle now, while Tunesmith was being hunted across the system?

On the Ringworld were millions of seas. Louis couldn't guess where the Hindmost had put
Hot Needle of Inquiry.
He could get there by a stepping-disk setting. The first pair of ARM ships hadn't found it, and now they were too busy maneuvering. The war above the eyestorm had been quiet for hours, but ships continued to shift position.

Sudden light splashed around the Farland ship: antimatter bullets intercepted in transit. The Farland ship was accelerating away from the action. Its new course would miss the Ringworld. A ruby laser lit it brilliantly, but diffused, its attacker already deep in atmosphere. Ships tens of millions of miles apart had some chance to defend themselves.

But the war above the eyestorm was getting too tight.

Fire burst into the clouds where two ARM ships were hiding. Louis cried, "Wake up! Wake up! You're missing action!"

The others stirred.

Tunesmith's deep-radar window showed one ARM ship diving through the puncture hole--leaving hard-won turf abandoned, but safeguarding data from its explorations, unless some ambush waited beneath the Ringworld floor. The other accelerated hard, running down the storm's axis in a channel of clear air, the pupil of the eye.

Kzinti had deep-radar too. Two lens ships were diving. Fire followed them down.

The eyestorm flashed to a blue-white glare.

The Hindmost killed the zoom window before it could blind them. On a less expanded view--Tunesmith must have a camera on one of the shadow squares--a star glared near the Other Ocean, as big as... too big... far too big.

The puppeteer said, "I believe one of the ARM ships exploded. Antimatter. We'll have a hole the size of..." The Hindmost thought it through, then folded into himself and was silent.

The eyestorm was gone, blasted apart. Cloud patterns showed an expanding ring of shock wave crossing seas and gray-green land. A hemisphere of cloud enveloped a dimming fireball.

"What has happened here?"

Tunesmith and the little chimp-protector were on the stepping disk: a sorcerer confronting wayward apprentices, demanding explanations. Louis's throat closed on him. It felt like he should have stopped this. It felt like Tunesmith would,
should
blame him.

"Antimatter explosion," Acolyte said.

"Is there a hole under that cloud?"

The question was already silly: the dome of cloud was dimpled in the center. It was being sucked into interstellar space. When Acolyte didn't answer, Louis said, "There was already a hole--"

"Of course. We have to move fast," Tunesmith said. "Come." He had the lip of the stepping disk up and was redirecting it.

Louis found his voice. "Sure,
now's
a good time to move fast. You've brought the war home! And now the air's draining out of the Ringworld!"

What had been a fireball was nearly gone. The Ringworld floor was naked scrith within a slowly expanding ring of cloud. Clouds streamed toward the hole.

And Tunesmith had Louis by the forearm. He walked them to a stepping disk.

Hanuman's eyes took
it all in in one sweep:

The aliens saw it too. The most alien was the eldest, the most experienced, perhaps the wisest, and that one had shut down his mind. The hominid had lost hope. The youngest, the nothing-like-a-big-cat, was
--
like Hanuman
--
waiting for someone to solve it.

Machinery on a Brobdingnagian scale had been moved into the workstation under Mons Olympus.

Tunesmith dropped Louis's arm and moved among his instruments at a sprint. The little protector, Hanuman, scampered after.

Acolyte popped up next to Louis. "Louis, what's happening?"

"The air's draining out of the Ringworld."

"That would be... the end of everything?"

"Yah. Starting on the far side. We might have days, but only because the Ringworld is so endlessly
big.
I have no idea what Tunesmith thinks he's doing."

"What is that massive structure? I've seen it--"

Hanuman rejoined them. "That is a meteor plug, largest version. Of course it was never tested."

It was the shape of an aspirin tablet and roughly the size of the Twin Peaks arcology or a small mountain, still small compared to the puncture in the Ringworld. Louis said, "I remember. It was in one of the caverns. He set it moving here on big stacks of float plates."

They watched it slide into the hole in the floor and fall, guided by magnetic fields toward the base of the linear launcher. Tunesmith was at the edge, watching. Louis and Acolyte went to join him.

Forty miles from the roof to the floor of the Repair Center ran the loops of the linear launcher. It was way overbuilt for something as small as
Hot Needle of Inquiry.
It would better accommodate something like this half-mile-wide package of Tunesmith's. The launcher's bottom sat on an array of float plates, and that was moving to adjust its aim.

The package was near the bottom now, still falling, but slowing.

Tunesmith saw them watching. Immediately he hustled them away from the hole in the floor.

Lightning roared at their backs. Louis turned to see something tremendous flash past, out through the crater in Mons Olympus and gone.

Acolyte's ears were curled into tight knots. Hanuman lifted his hands from his ears and said something inaudible. Louis couldn't hear anything. His ears still held the roar and agony of that lightning blast.

Louis didn't lose his deafness for some time. Acolyte recovered much faster. Louis could see the Kzin discussing... whatever... with Tunesmith and Hanuman while they all followed the action in a wall display of the Meteor Defense Room. The Hindmost remained in footstool mode.

Louis could only watch.

Tunesmith's meteor-plug package drifted toward the sun.
Needle
had been launched at a tenth of lightspeed; the launch system was capable of that. But over such a distance the package's fall seemed sluggish.

In a zoom window the puncture showed as a black dot on landscape that looked lunar: clear and sharp and barren of water's silver or the dark gray-green of life. Louis guessed the puncture was sixty to seventy miles across. A ring of fog surrounded it, bigger than the Earth and still growing.

The Ringworld was not yet aware of its death. Air and water would flow into the hole and out into vacuum, but first it all had to move... from up to three hundred million miles around each arc before the shock could reach the Ringworld's far side, the Great Ocean,
here.
Not much would be lost in a hundred and sixty minutes, while Tunesmith's package crossed the Ringworld's diameter. Even the Other Ocean wouldn't have begun to boil yet.

Hanuman wandered over. He said--loudly, spitting his consonants; it was fun to watch his lips--"I have been in this state for less than a falan. I still cannot grasp the scale of things. I did not grow up in a universe fifty billion falans old, on a ring spinning around one fleck of light among ten-to-the-twentieth of flecks. There were not that many of anything! My world was small, cozy, easily grasped."

"You get used to it," Louis said. He could barely hear himself. "Hanuman, what is that? What can it do? We're losing our atmosphere!"

"I know little."

"Share it with me," Louis demanded.

"Two bright minds with similar goals will solve problems in similar ways. The Vampire protector Bram saw a need to plug meteor holes. His first meteor plugs were small, but his mass driver under Mons Olympus is hundreds of falans old and hugely overbuilt. The Fist-of-God meteoroid impact must have frightened Bram witless.

"Tunesmith builds bigger yet. That package is his biggest effort." Hanuman was constantly in motion, bouncing around Louis as he spoke, arms swinging. "We shall see it in action. Tunesmith wants us to observe on site. If there is partial failure, then we must see what must be redesigned."

"This double-X-large meteor patch, how does it work?"

"I would be guessing."

"It's never been tested?"

"Tested when? You were stored in the 'doc for less than a falan. Tunesmith made and trained four Hanging People protectors, built a nanotech factory to make bigger meteor plugs, monitored the Fringe War, designed several probe ships, built a stepping-disk factory, redesigned your
Hot Needle of
--"

"He's been busy?"

"He's been crazy as a stingbug hive city! And if the plug doesn't work, it's all for nothing."

"Do you have children?"

"Yes, and they have children. Since Tunesmith made me, I've not had the chance to count them, nor even to sniff them. Of course they are all forfeit to Tunesmith's schemes and the Fringe War."