Ringworld's Children (18 page)

"No, not Chiron. Finagle knows where Chiron lives," with a laugh he wished he could suppress. His tongue was curling out of control. "Kzinti don't live in the village, they're from somewhere on the Great Ocean." If they pushed him, he'd reveal another partial truth: that Chmeee lived among Kzinti who had taken over the Map of Earth, natives and all.

'Tec-Major Schmidt said, "A lot of Kzintosh call themselves Chmeee. He was some kind of legendary hero. What do you mean, Map of Earth?"

Louis realized he'd been babbling, thinking out loud.

Schmidt repeated, "Map of Earth?" with steel in his voice.

"Sir. There." Louis pointed into the ceiling, into the Great Ocean, where the continents of Earth were arrayed around its north pole, a hundred thousand miles spinward of the Map of Mars. He knew now that he couldn't keep secrets. Maybe they'd drugged him, maybe it was just painkillers. He'd last as long as he could, and then tell them his name and watch Roxanny explode in his face.

Roxanny said, "Futz. They keep human slaves?"

Luis: "Homo habilis. Pak breeders."

Schmidt: "Unchanged? Like the skeletons in the Olduvai Gorge?"

Luis: "I never saw one. Like to see their noses."

"Maybe they're a little skewed?" Schmidt said, clearly speaking for a recorder. "From what we already know, a trillion Pak breeders had a quarter million years to evolve without protectors to cull the mutants. The Kzinti would have done some selective breeding. Anyway, these animals wouldn't have evolved into actual human beings, right, Luis?"

Louis's words came slowly. "They could have evolved intelligence. We did. Did you want to invade?" He laughed. "Rescue? These archaic Kzinti built the bigges' sea ship in history, and that was a thousand years ago. They're not using jus' spears and clubs."

"We can beat seagoing ships. Now, what kind of tech has the puppeteer got? Anything weird?"

Louis said, as Luis, "How do I know what's weird?"

But he heard himself continue, "Cameras like copper spiderwebs? Out of a spray gun?" his voice lost in a recorded bellow. The ceiling was flashing an unfamiliar distress symbol.
Hull breach*in*aft portside consumables tank. Power*lost in*sections two*and*three.
Schmidt and Roxanny drew weapons and turned away, stooping to get through a small oval doorway. Louis spoke to nobody: "He's got stepping disks too. What was that sound?"

Gray Nurse
shook herself. Gravity went away.

Hanuman said, "Invaders. We'll either be rescued or killed. Expect surprises. No protector would leave us in alien hands."

"Why not?" Louis heard the whine in his voice. "Why the futz can't they jus' leave us alone?"

He didn't hear Hanuman's answer. It had become too noisy. A spacecraft being boarded made a fearful echo chamber.

Roxanny Gauthier ducked back through the oval door and around out of Louis's sight. A moment later Wembleth drifted loose, too drugged to act. Roxanny touched points on Hanuman's cage, and it opened.

She was talking in a hysterical whisper. "I don't know what they are. Not Kzinti. Nightmares." She looked at Louis, immobile in his medical cage, and said, "Sorry."

"Wha's happening?" Louis asked. She touched his lips with a forefinger. She braced herself behind Louis's medical cage. Only her projectile weapon showed, aimed at the doorway.

A voice spoke from somewhere, 'Tec Schmidt's voice sounding much too calm. "All hands, we're fighting from the radiation refuge. I can see invaders on the hull and in four, five, six, and ten. Our motors are burned out, but we're under acceleration anyway. We don't know where it's coming from. We're also facing friendly fire, ARM missiles incoming, sixty and counting, no alien attackers yet. 'Tec-Admiral Wrayne doesn't want us captured, I guess."

"Why didn't we see it coming?" she whispered. "They've got an invisible ship! Shh."

Schmidt's voice--"The missiles are veering away!"--died in a roar of static.

A shadow blinked past the little door. Roxanny fired, and cursed. What came through then looked like a small man filmed fast-forward. It was behind Roxanny before she could turn, and Louis couldn't see the rest.

Three bulkier man-shapes zipped through the door, moving more slowly. They sealed it behind them. They were wearing skintight pressure suits. They deployed a balloon with inflatable tubes around it: a big nonstandard rescue pod. They didn't wait for it to inflate.

Spill mountain people come in a variety of species, but they all look more or less alike: burly bodies and short thick arms and legs, large lung capacity, thick fur for insulation, hairless faces. These three had been spill mountain people. Now they weren't. They wore pressure suits and big globular helmets, but their faces gave them away: mouths hard and toothless, like flattened beaks; big Roman noses; hairless skin wrinkled into leather armor. A mummified look, and an uncanny grace. They'd eaten tree-of-life. They were protectors.

The fourth came around into view towing an unconscious Roxanny. It was a protector, but not of the spill mountain people. Smaller, more slender. A dead-looking face with no more nose than an ape. Louis didn't recognize the species, but it wasn't a Hanging Person. Louis had thought Tunesmith was involved in this. He was less sure now.

They pushed Wembleth into the rescue pod, then Roxanny. Hanuman crawled in without a struggle. Then the protectors turned to Louis.

"I'm injured," he said. No reaction.

They studied the machinery around him, talking tersely in a language Louis's translator didn't have. Then they switched things off. When one reached behind Louis's back, pain came as if he'd been hit by a truck.

He fought to keep from fainting, holding his attention on his breathing. Later he remembered a good deal. The feel of their hands, large, with blunt fingers and knobby knuckles. Brown eyes with epicanthic folds. The slender odd-man-out protector gave orders in monosyllables. The others detached Louis from the ICC, pushed him into the rescue pod, and sealed it. A framework still held his leg and hip immobile. Two studied the machinery that had held him while another cut a wide hole in the hull.

Air puffed the rescue pod into space.

Gray Nurse
was an ARM warcraft, built more like a spear than a ship, with a few smaller ships along its length. An intruder had attached itself like a remora near the fore end. It was lighter than
Gray Nurse,
built like the skeleton of a sunfish: a cabin, then an extensive grid of crosshatching girders like those found on a Belt mining ship meant to carry rocks and ore. Louis couldn't immediately see anything like a motor.

The protectors followed the rescue bubble into space. Others, all spill mountain protectors, emerged from further aft in
Gray Nurse.
Some towed the rescue bubble to the sunfish ship and moored it to the grid. Then they spurted away on rocket plumes, leaving their prisoners exposed to open space.

Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was his body's defenses: the pain had gone out like a tide. Louis looked around him at the universe.

A dusting of light motes, motionless a moment ago, were swept away in an eyeblink. Spy probes dismissed as by a sweep of God's hand, but how?

Roxanny was stirring, trying to wake up. Hanuman was just watching. Wembleth was very jittery. He spoke; saw that he was not understood; switched languages. His translator said, "I don't understand."

Louis said, "Talk to me, Wembleth."

"Where am I, Looeess?"

"Under the Ringworld."

Wembleth looked up at the black wall that blocked half the sky. "We are falling."

"There's nothing to hit. You get used to this--"

The protectors were back. Two were pushing a fair-sized mass: the medical cage. They moored it to the cargo grid next to the rescue bubble. There was other cargo to be attached. Then they swarmed away to the cabin, leaving one still on the grid.

Gray Nurse
was whipped away.

Louis felt no acceleration beyond a kind of flutter, but he felt his hair writhe about him. They must be doing hundreds of gravities.
Gray Nurse
was just
gone.
He'd seen nothing like a rocket motor, nor even a thruster.

Wembleth had his arms over his face.

The sunfish ship followed the thread of a spillpipe beneath the Ringworld's black underside. A slow hour later, by the watch face in the back of Louis's hand, the spillpipe led them around the rim and up into a glare of sunlight.

Louis looked down along the inside of the rim wall, a thousand miles down toward a few tiny cones along its base. Beyond was a wide shore--twenty to thirty thousand miles of shore, it must be, given how high they were--and then an infinity of blue water seen from high enough to show the texture of sea bottom, and a few sparse clusters of big flat islands.

The clustered islands were peculiar. They all looked alike, and there was something else too. Louis had never seen anything like it, and that alone meant that he was looking at the Other Ocean.

They were dropping toward the rim wall. They'd been in flight for less than an hour.

"Wembleth?"

"Roxanny! Can you talk?"

She blinked. "Luis? They took you too. Where are we? Who are these--?"

"Spill mountain people," Louis said. "There are lots of species. Do you ARMs know about--?"

"Down there below us,
those
are spill mountains," she said. "They're bigger than they look. Do you know what they are?"

"They're just the mountains," Louis said, secretly amused.

The spill mountains had grown larger. Each of the little cones had a few silver threads of river running from its base.

"Pipes run under the Ringworld floor. They pump sea-bottom slush up over the rim. Otherwise all the fertile soil would wind up in the sea bottoms and nothing would grow."

They were dropping toward one of the peaks. Roxanny said, "Those mountains are waste heaps leaning against the rim wall, forty to fifty klicks high. People live on them. We've seen balloons going between the peaks. But, Luis, I think the ones who attacked us were protectors. Do you know about protectors?"

"Same thing as Vashneesht? Magicians. Very smart, very fierce, and they're born in armor. We wondered if they were myths. There are some artifacts."

"Oh, they're real. One of those looked different from the rest," Roxanny said. "A primitive protector got as far as Sol system, seven hundred years ago, all the way from the galactic core. Its face looked like that one's."

"The joker. That's the one in charge," Louis said.

"How do you know that?"

Bram and Anne, both Vampire protectors, had found it easy to enslave spill mountain protectors. Spill mountain people couldn't live on the flats. In every case their entire species was isolated on some single mountain, held hostage with nowhere to flee. A spill mountain protector was born trapped.

Luis wouldn't know that, so Louis said, "I heard him giving orders."

They were crawling down the sky toward one of the spill mountains. Louis could hear a thin whining and feel a tremor in the rescue bubble. The sunfish ship had no kind of streamlining. They sank past an icy peak. Green showed much lower down. The sunfish ship moved close and slid sideways along a staircase of ledges, and now Louis could see trees and tiered fields and glimpse snow heaped in regular cones. Miles below was a breathtaking view of an endlessly rolling land, intricately detailed in tiny seas, rivers, ridges of hills.

There was a thump. Louis drifted against the bubble wall. Then the gravity generator went off and he slumped against the curve of wall in full gravity. Pain lashed up his leg and hip.

He didn't quite pass out. Roxanny whispered to him, "Things happen in war, Luis. Don't hold it against me," while the protectors moved around on the ice and rock, detaching treasure from
Gray Nurse
and carrying it away. Several were working on
Gray Nurse's
'doc.

The joker protector opened the rescue balloon. Warm air puffed out; thin cold air blew in. The joker stepped in, sniffed, looked at each of the occupants in turn. Roxanny was wary; Wembleth cringed in terror. Hanuman's eyes met the other protector's. They didn't try to speak, but they knew each other for what they were.

The joker touched Louis's leg and its brace, using great care.

Wembleth bolted for the opening. The joker swiped at him and missed... or else changed his mind. Wembleth bolted along the ledge, past conical houses, and was out of sight.

Wembleth was suffocating again. There wasn't enough air. The folk around him didn't seem to be having trouble. A few children watched him curiously.

He'd snatched up the translator device Roxanny had given him. Learning their language would be easier now... but it would still take hours. Strangers were always well treated, but the Vashneesht was a stranger too. Wembleth knew he'd have to hide
now,
and without help.

The houses were tall heaps of snow with a single small hole for a door. He'd be found quick in one of those, and only one way out. He considered hiding in a snowdrift, but only for an instant. He'd freeze. He wasn't wearing enough clothing. And he was leaving footprints!

A ridge of naked rock gave him the chance to backtrack. He followed it to where he could jump across snow onto the angled trunk of a huge elbow tree. His knees betrayed him as he jumped; he landed on the slope, slid, caught himself, and clawed his way up sixty feet of naked trunk. The top was a dense green tuft. Wembleth burrowed into it.

He could see out, a little.

Four spill mountain protectors, naked in the cold and their own thick white fur, wedged
Gray Nurse's
'doc through the opening into the rescue bubble.

Louis moaned when they moved him. The protectors were fiercely strong and surprisingly gentle, but it hurt. They lowered him into the Intensive Care Cavity and one reached around behind him. All sensation went away below the small of his back.