Ringworld's Children (19 page)

Though the military 'doc was severed from
Gray Nurse,
somehow they'd got it running.

The joker turned when Roxanny spoke. "You are in violation of several dozen laws enforced by the ARM and related governments."

The joker answered in unknown speech.

Roxanny's translator would pick up the language. Good, and Louis's would catch it too. Immobilized as he was, there was no more he could accomplish here. Louis went to sleep.

Through the greenery Wembleth watched the protector leave the rescue bubble. Roxanny followed. A dozen children followed her. The protector tracked his footprints for a time, then jumped across to the ridge of rock, examined it with her nose to the ground, then came straight toward him. She ran lightly up the trunk. She reached into the tuft and pulled Wembleth out into empty air.

She let him dangle from one hand as she climbed down. He was frozen with fear and cold.

A dozen Children crowded the rescue bubble, and more swarmed outside. Hanuman was clowning for them. They shied back when Louis stirred and woke.

He smiled at a wall of white fur and two dozen eyes. "Hello," he said. A few voices answered. His translator did not.

Most of the pain above his waist--left arm, ribs--had eased off. He wondered how long he was going to be like this. If Roxanny and the joker had taught each other their speech, then the joker hadn't been speaking local dialect, and that meant Louis couldn't even talk to these kids.

But Roxanny and the joker were coming back, and Roxanny was holding Wembleth's hand.

They couldn't get through the crowd to reach the rescue bubble. They didn't try. The joker began to lecture, pointing occasionally at the humans and Wembleth. The kids inside couldn't hear, so they went out. Presently the joker sent Wembleth and Roxanny in, and gestured four remaining kids out, and closed the bubble.

Roxanny glared after the joker, who was hopping away on the struts of the cargo grid. "She won't talk," Roxanny said bitterly.

"Translator won't work?"

"The translator's fine, but it doesn't have anything to say."

Louis asked, "Are you keeping ARM secrets?"

"So's she! Yes,
she,
she told me that much. She said her name was Proserpina."

Wembleth's teeth chattered as he spoke. His translator said, "We're going for another ride."

Louis asked, "Are you up for that?"

The man shivered violently. "I pissed my clothing last time. Thank you for not noticing."

Louis sniffed. The air in the bubble had never ceased to smell clean and fresh. "Protectors build good machines," he said. "We'll be fine." He saw the joker enter the ship's cabin.

Gravity went away. "We'll be fine," he repeated.

The sunfish ship floated away from the cliff, then straight up. Blue sky darkened to black.

Louis said, "I've figured out this ship. Gravity control--"

"Magnetic," Roxanny said crisply. "They must use the grid. Luis, there's a superconductor grid in the Ringworld floor. If this ship is using a magnetic drive, then it can thrust against the Ringworld. It's like leaving your motor at home. I felt my hair stand up. Didn't you?"

"Stet, but I meant the cabin gravity. Powerful, but it flutters. Why wouldn't Vashneesht fix that? I think they're too arrogant to test what they build. They do it all in one shot."

"Got it all figured out, do you, kid?"

Louis flushed. He said, "Stet, it's magnetic. You'd have near infinite range and huge acceleration as long as you stay near the superconductor net. You could use it as a weapon too. Push away missiles and ships. It could even be seen as a message."

"Message?"

" 'I can't invade you. I'm purely defensive.' Like a fort."

"Mmm. Or just 'Keep out.' "

"We're falling again!" Wembleth burst out. "Roxanny, where are we going?"

Roxanny shook her head.

They crossed a wonderfully fractal shoreline, all curliques of bay and beach, and were over the ocean. Ocean and sprinklings of islands. If you thought of them as islands, you didn't see that much speed, but they'd be one-to-one maps of a world.

Near the shore of the Other Ocean the clusters were a bit foreshortened. Otherwise they were all maps of the same world. One sprawling continent with a spine of mountain; four smaller bodies and an archipelago of scattered tiny islands, all to antispin of the mainland; all showed a grainy texture. If you had to tell someone where you were--say, Tunesmith, if you could get hold of any kind of communicator--how would you?

But the shadows were different. Bands and flecks and patches of shadow on only a few of the islands.

Roxanny said, "This is Ocean Two! Do you suppose we're going to one of the maps?"

"Sure. What do you make of the shadows, Roxanny?"

"We're too high to tell."

Louis didn't answer. What should "Luis Tamasan" know about this? But shadows just didn't happen in a place where it was always noon, and Louis Wu found it freaky.

Roxanny said, "Luis, Wembleth, there's two oceans on the Ringworld, you know? There are all those
billions
of little shallow seas with corrugated shorelines to give the locals lots of convenient bays and harbors, and all the trillions of klicks of twisty rivers. But then there are two big counterbalanced oceans, the one with all the inhabited worlds in known space on it--that's yours, Luis--and this, this endlessly repeated map. It's probably one-to-one scale of
something,
but it's no world known to the ARM."

Louis started to laugh.

Roxanny glared at him. She said, "There are thirty-two of these maps, all of the same world! So after we land, we
still
won't know where we are. Is that what has you amused?"

"Yah. Does the ARM have any idea what the Pak homeworld looked like?"

"A permanent war zone. Every Pak protector wants his gene line to rule the world. I'm just repeating the briefings," Roxanny said, "and we got all that from a stray Pak protector via Jack Brennan, and
he
was a Belter turned protector who couldn't be trusted worth tanj. So, no, we don't know the shapes of the Pak continents. Maybe they change. These creatures are
powerful.

"The joker--she looks like Pak breeder skeletons we're still finding in Asia and Africa. So where's the joker from? The Pak homeworld? But maybe it's the Map of Earth. Luis, you said the Map of Earth was originally Pak breeders."

The sunfish ship was descending toward an island cluster near the Other Ocean's antispinward shore... fifty thousand miles near, maybe. Any distortion was lost in detail as the land rose up to meet them. There were crescents and pools of shadow on the land... but how could they be shadows, with the sun just overhead? They looked almost like pictograms, or writing. A lone mountain near the continent's midpoint glittered. Dwellings? With windows?

The grainy look of the land became interlocking dots of all sizes, circular features, as if the land had been battered by meteors. They skimmed a forest, slowing now. Louis recognized chains of elbow trees and other familiar vegetation.

He said, "Most of what's on the Ringworld must have evolved as Pak plants and animals."

"Good, Luis." A verbal pat on the head.

Something about these patterns--

"It's a garden," Roxanny said.

"Roxanny? This
big?"
They were still miles high.

Still, she was right. The landscape wasn't croplands, but it was just as certainly
shaped.
Variety and color: rainbow ripples that must be thousands of square miles of flower beds; varied stands of trees in all the colors of autumn and more, still seeming no larger than hairs in a dandy's beard. A veldt shadowed with black arcs. Ponds, lakes, seas like silver plates with little central dots of island.

Roxanny said, "Formal gardens are all rectangles, unless they're supposed to look like wilderness. What kind of garden is all circles, and no two the same size? This is like... right."

Like the Moon,
Louis thought. "Like a war?" All circles, all craters. The Pak homeworld.

"Vashneesht," Wembleth said positively.

"Yah, the joker is trying to impress us," Roxanny said. Louis laughed.

He glimpsed rectilinear outlines peeping through the wild colors. They dropped. There was a thump. Gravity ceased its flutter.

She brought the mag ship down in the garden, six miles downhill from the Penultimate's mainland habitat. As soon as she'd safed the motors, Proserpina rolled out of the cabin and ran aft. A sense of order might help the aliens adjust, but she'd learn less if she gave them too much time.

Isolated, shorn of her senses, imprisoned in the Isolation Zone for all of these millions of falans--Proserpina had still been able to infer general details of Ringworld history: infighting, dominance games, reshaping of world-sized stretches of topography, shifting alliances, changing genetic patterns...

There was only one Repair Center, set halfway around the Ringworld from this, the Isolation Zone. The Repair Center could be seen as the Ringworld's natural throne room. A Ghoul was in power now, and that was good. He was short of experience, and reckless (not good), and probably male. Males wandered further. Where tree-of-life was scarce, a male would find it first.

Control was what this was all about. In earlier ages she had seen conspiracy after conspiracy, and had always found a way to stay neutral without being destroyed. There was always a master of creation, and--after one awful early experiment--it was never Proserpina.

She hop-stepped over the struts of the cargo grid and slid into the rescue bubble.

The woman spoke. "We need to talk."

Proserpina perceived 'Tec-First Gauthier's impatience and was amused. The woman was young, though not young for a breeder. Her stance suggested a different gravity; her speech was a bit altered from what Proserpina had heard while eavesdropping on the Ghoul's retinue. Gauthier was one of the invaders. She'd have much to tell, once she stopped refusing to tell it.

Proserpina's silence made the woman uneasy. "We need to talk to make the translators work," she added.

Proserpina didn't smile. She couldn't. They'd talked while they hunted Wembleth in the spill mountain village, but they'd said nothing. Nouns, verbs: not enough to cue 'Tec Gauthier's speaking device. Gauthier was keeping secrets.

So was Proserpina. When she needed to talk, she would.

The brachiator watched her and did nothing. She'd been expecting subservience. The little protector must serve another, perhaps the Ghoul.

One of the males made a soft-voiced request. Proserpina didn't know his speech. She'd work it out presently. He stood like a local, a little stooped, but at home with Ringworld spin gravity. He wouldn't have much to tell. What he wanted was clear: he was hungry.

The other male was injured and immobilized, naked and helpless. He watched. Proserpina was struck by his patience. Though no protector, he was an elder, of the same species as the woman. This would be the Ghoul's breeder servant, Louis Wu of the Ball Worlds.

"You're all hungry," Proserpina said in Interworld. The men were unsurprised, but Gauthier jumped. "You can all tolerate fruit. We'll work out details of your diet presently. We're all omnivores, I think, except you," looking at the little one. "How are you called?"

The woman recovered her aplomb. She gestured: "Luis Tamasan. Wembleth. Roxanny Gauthier. Proserpina? How did you learn our language?"

"I've hacked into a library," Proserpina said. She saw the woman bristle:
Gray Nurse's computer! Stolen!
"I chose my name from your literature," speaking now to Luis/Louis. Wu and the little protector were keeping secrets too.

She clapped her hands. "Let's feed you. There's fruit outside, and a stream."

"I'll have to feed Luis," Roxanny said.

"You must learn what's edible. Come. Luis, we'll be back soon. Your device is giving you nutrient, but it's best if your digestive systems are exercised."

"Thank you," he said.

Roxanny looked dubious, but she went.

Roxanny followed the protector. Wembleth followed Roxanny, holding Hanuman's hand. The ape scrambled along faster than his little legs were up to.

From the back the joker looked like a small, scrawny, bald woman. She stood a meter and a half tall. All of her joints were swollen; her back was a column of pebbles. Roxanny knew that she should be afraid of the creature, but she couldn't
feel
intimidated.

Proserpina was talking to Wembleth in Interspeak. Wembleth chattered in his own language, and Roxanny listened to his translator with half her attention.

"Mother abandoned us. I never asked Father about it; he was touchy there, but I listened. They both used to go exploring. One day she was just gone. Some species do that, turn vicious and solitary, like the Swamp Folk. Friendly and curious when they're young,
great
rishathra, then something triggers, and they bulk up and change attitude and go off into the swamp. I was afraid I'd do the same. Interbreeding is rare, and you don't know what you'll get."

"Have you rished with Swamp People?"

"With a Swamp Girl until she mated, and afterward we were friends. Then she got pregnant, and she went off alone to raise the children."

There were low buildings in the forest. Trees masked them. Trees grew from the roofs, or up the side of a minaret. A huge tree grew through the hollow core of a ring two stories high.

Shadows ticked at the corners of her vision. Tree shadows wouldn't move in this weird place where it was always noon or night. Roxanny became sure that there were animals in the forest, watching them.

Proserpina was fast, darting among the trees, plucking and gathering plants in varied colors and shapes. "Try this," she said to Luis's long-armed pet, setting a purple blob in his hands. It resembled an eggplant, but it sprayed red juice when Hanuman bit into it. Hanuman buried his face in it.