Ringworld's Children (22 page)

"We never approached Earth, Roxanny. We were afraid. We studied the system intensively at long range. The Map of Earth became home to our own breeders. We needed fifty thousand falans to build an ecology into the Ringworld's inner surface, but we started there, with the Map of Earth as a test bed."

"Whales," Louis said. "There are whales in the Great Ocean.
Some
protector must have gone to Earth."

"It may have happened after I was isolated," Proserpina said. "Wembleth, are you keeping up with this?" Proserpina changed languages and spoke rapidly. She switched back: "Later I'll show Wembleth maps of the sky, and diagrams. You two should try to tell him what a Ball World is. Roxanny, these maps of our world are prisons. We knew some of us would break the one law. We built the prisons first, to warn each other. Any felon would be isolated with a world to rule and a population all of her own kind, just as if they'd each conquered the Pak homeworld, but all made hostage to the majority.

"I was one of those."

"Why?"

"Oh, Roxanny." Proserpina's body language suggested impatience and bitter laughter. "We thought we would win! Eleven of us thought we could take the Repair Center. We'd breed our descendants to all of the lines, and cull to keep our traits dominant. In a thousand years we'd be safe, even if the power balance changed, even if an insurgence should kill us. We planned it all in an afternoon, and collected our resources as fast as ever we could. Even so, we were a little slow.

"They confined me on one of the Maps, not this one. They collected a hundred of my line and scattered them in pairs through this land. I must build a land they could live in. I must guide the breeders myself so that ultimately they meet and interbreed, or else inbreeding would destroy them. While I did all that, time passed me by. I was out of the loop. Others of my descendants lived among the Ringworld's expanding population, and their genes were hostage too."

Proserpina fell silent. Louis asked, "How long did it last? What stopped it?"

"A few hundred thousand falans--I'm guessing, Luis. Wembleth, Roxanny, you don't understand? On the Ringworld we built, a breeder population expanded to a trillion. At some point they became a chaos of mutations. Mutations are of no use to a protector; they don't smell right. Luis asks me when the protectors stopped culling their tribes, and why. I witnessed too little. I don't know why. I'm guessing even at when.

"I was a prisoner. I spent long periods in depression, noticing nothing. I never quite starved myself. When I was myself, I made telescopes but not probes. We were barred from intrusive investigations. With telescopes I could see nothing nearby, but I could study what was happening far up the arc. Meteors continued to be intercepted. An eyestorm formed; I guessed at the dynamics; I saw the storm dissipate. It meant that protectors were still doing repairs. Luis, what?"

"Depression. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt--"

"How can I not notice when you want to speak?"

"These bouts of depression, do they make you miss things? I'm wondering about the rim-wall attitude jets, and Fist-of-God Mountain."

"Where is it?"

"Near the far ocean. It was a giant meteoroid impact, from underneath. It didn't leak much because the land was pushed up."

"I would not have acted. This is work for the resident protector."

"There was a
fight
for who would be resident protector."

Roxanny and Proserpina stared at Louis. Then Proserpina moaned. "I've been remiss."

Louis asked, "Did your jailers give you tree-of-life?"

"Yes, but neutered. A virus causes the gene flip that makes a breeder a protector. The virus lives in tree-of-life root. Neutered tree-of-life will still feed me, will feed any protector, but it won't change a breeder. What made you ask that, Luis?"

"Just a thought." Tree-of-life only grew in the Repair Center, as far as Louis knew. Apparently it had died out elsewhere. "Is it easy to get rid of the protector virus?"

"Yes."

"But you got more?"

"How did you know that? Yes, I filtered it from the air when it grew thick enough and scattered far enough, four hundred thousand falans after creation. I cultured the virus and grew it in my plants. I made a few servants then, not enough to be noticed, and sent them on errands. But they revolted, and I had to kill them, Luis, and the next time I tried it, it didn't work. My plants had been neutered again. I know not by what means, and the virus wasn't in the air any more. You ate tree-of-life tonight."

Roxanny gasped. Louis gulped. He said, "Tasted like a yam. I think it probably is a yam, Roxanny. Proserpina, when did it happen?"

"Something more than a million falans after creation. You know what happened, don't you, Luis? Tell me."

Louis shook his head. "The protectors are gone. That's all we know."

Proserpina said, "I understand now. Species differentiation has been extreme in the past two million falans. I can see how far
your
species has veered, Roxanny, under pressures that favor intelligence, hairlessness, swimming talent, and a two-legged run. My telescopes can observe the spill mountains. I went to visit them when I dared, when I was sure I was the last protector in these lands.

"Their people fission into incompatible species under nearly identical conditions. I've tapped the heliograph communication network formed by the Night People. Eaters of the dead, aren't they? And that intelligent, and as breeders! Some half-intelligent protector ruled the Repair Center for a very long time. I can't guess how many other variations there are."

Roxanny said, "Thousands."

"But on the Map of Earth there isn't room for mutations to settle in and compete and shape each other to strangeness. My servants settled my breeders among the Pak of the Map of Earth. My line may thrive there. Luis,
what are you hiding?"

"I'm sorry."

She loomed over him, small and dangerous. "Talk to me."

Prone in his casket, he said, "I have a friend on the Map of Earth. I want him protected."

"Tunesmith wouldn't let another protector near the Map of Earth.
I
haven't survived by challenging the resident. What are you hiding?"

Roxanny spoke. 'There are Kzinti on the Map of Earth. He said so. His friend Acolyte comes from there."

"Archaic Kzinti," Louis said. "Not the same as the armies of the Fringe War. They sailed across the Great Ocean and formed a colony on the Map of Earth, not that long ago."

"While I was in depression," Proserpina said. "I left too much to the resident. Stet. I'll research Kzinti, archaic and modern. Maybe we can deal. But I must confront the resident.

"Tonight I must go away. Tunesmith must be dealt with one way or another. I may be gone for days. 'Tec Gauthier, you must care for Luis. Luis, shall I give you back your sensation?"

"Try it."

When pain came, Louis wondered if Proserpina was taking revenge on a bearer of bad news. But there was no more than an ache, though it ran from hip to heel.

"Wriggle around if you feel like it, but carefully. Don't detach anything." Proserpina stroked the tree swinger's head. "Little Hanuman, would you like to come with me?"

Hanuman considered, then jumped into her arms. She looked around at them. "I make one proscription. All of what you can reach is open to you, save only the big building to spin and starboard, and the continent nearest to antispinward. I'm sure the big building is trapped. I haven't dared it myself. The little continent is where the Penultimate kept the dangerous species from Pak. Analogues of wolves, tigers, lice, mosquitoes, needle cactus, and poison mushrooms, the plants and creatures we never wanted among our breeders. Most of them were extinct when we left the core stars, but we saved a few. We might have released them, had we known that our breeders would evolve into their ecological slots."

She turned and was gone so quietly and easily that it was as if a ghost had evaporated.

She would let him fly!

Hanuman prepared. The chair was wrong for him; he reshaped it. Proserpina watched.

They stepped into the forest to collect a store of fruit. Sudden as lightning, Proserpina snatched a weasel-like animal out of a bush and broke its neck. She tossed it aboard with the fruit and the water.

She took her place on a horseshoe of couch and improvised a crash web. Hanuman studied the ring of telltales and controls for some seconds before he dared touch them. They had a half-random look: fitted in whenever there was something new to be monitored.

The vehicle was nothing like an airplane.

Relaxed as if poured into her couch, Proserpina watched him lift and swoop and spin and dip almost low enough to shatter a tree and minaret, lift too fast, slow until the wind-induced tremor went away, then rise sedately into the vacuum where he could build up some
speed.

The mag ship was as much a wonder as any of Tunesmith's ships. Its brute strength was startling: it could easily have torn itself into shreds of foil. Its motor was the Ringworld floor itself, powered by sunlight falling on trillions of square miles of shadow squares. Sailing lines of magnetic force, it moved less like an airplane than like an undersea vessel.

These controls weren't all involved with flying. Hanuman was aloft for some time before he tried anything esoteric. Proserpina watched but did not interfere as he manipulated magnetic fields beneath the landscape. Soil lifted and shifted. In his wake, a stream began to change its course.

He'd seen Tunesmith manipulating such forces in a command post in the Repair Center. This wasn't just a spacecraft. It was an entire Ringworld defense system.

Under guidance from the mag ship, the superconductor cables below the landscape could attract, repel, or shift anything metallic: incoming meteoroids, alien ships and missiles, even the occasional solar storm or lethal surge of cosmic rays. Hanuman might be good enough to orchestrate such a defense. He had watched Tunesmith at work.

The land below Hanuman was only a mask over vacuum. Knowing that in his gut,
seeing
it in the Ringworld's underside, ridges that were canyons and riverbeds, creases that were mountain ranges, had almost destroyed the newly created protector. Hanuman had never grown used to it. Only now did he begin to feel that he was its master.

Its master, barring the presence of a greater protector. Proserpina was greater than Hanuman. As a breeder, she'd evolved closer to intelligence; the tree-of-life virus had done its work on a bigger brain. She had more experience too. But Tunesmith was brighter than she.

It was a bribe, letting him fly. Hanuman understood that well. He understood, too, that he was telling secrets with every move he made.
Hanuman is a master pilot, and expendable. What has he flown?
How much did she see? How much did she already know? She reclined, and watched.

He circled above land scoured bare and half-hidden beneath tiers of cloud. The hole had closed, but even now the atmosphere had not flowed in to fill the partial vacuum. He told Proserpina, "This would have spewed all the Ringworld's air to the stars. Tunesmith stopped it."

"How?"

"I may not tell."

"Good enough that he has a way. How did you come here? I saw no ship large enough for my sensing devices."

"I may not tell."

"Stepping disk. Louis Wu described them for the ARM. We must find one. Show me that wreckage."

Hanuman skimmed over the vast deflated balloon that had been Tunesmith's meteor plug--she'd have found it without his help, of course--then hovered above the ruin of an ARM pressure tent. "Set down?"

"Yes."

They donned pressure suits and walked through the wreckage. He saw no reason not to answer her questions. What she asked told him a little of her thoughts and purposes, though Proserpina was learning more than Hanuman was.

They moored the heavy ARM kitchen 'doc to the cargo grid, and lifted again.

The battlefield had been disturbed. Proserpina walked through it, observing first, then asking questions. Hanuman tried to see what she saw. The sonic hadn't left splashed projectiles or scorch marks. There was the ant-covered splash where Claus had died. Hoof prints: small herdbeasts had run through this place afterward. Prints of big hands and feet: scavengers had come to the smell of blood, and found nothing. The ARM lander had taken Claus's corpse.

The flycycle was upside down, resting on its rack and seat backs. There were more scavenger prints around it and on it. Ghouls had tried to fly it; Tunesmith's locks had held; they'd turned it into a joke.

Hanuman said, "Tunesmith is smarter than you. Why not let him play? You've done that for ages."

"I must still be satisfied as to his fitness. I must speak to him."

The flycycle was too heavy for the strength of two protectors. Hanuman crawled under it. The vehicle lifted and righted itself. He turned the holoscreen on. Louis must have turned reception off and left the sender going. Now, how to hide the lightspeed delay, to conceal Tunesmith's location?

Hanuman saw no way. He said openly, "Now you may speak to Tunesmith. He cannot see us yet. Expect a delay of half an hour."

"He's on the far side of the Arch? Conversation will be painful. Stet, I'll begin. Tunesmith!" and she howled what Hanuman had given as his true name. "You have been meddling with the basic design of the Ringworld. You must have surmised my existence. Call me--" followed by a decidedly unmusical sound. "I reside in the Isolation Zone. Louis Wu and your pilot are both safe. Louis Wu is injured and healing. We hold 'Tec Roxanny Gauthier, an ARM, of the Ball People. The Kzin Acolyte is missing. I presume he's with you.

"I want to trade secrets and promises with you. What I have to offer is some knowledge of the Ringworld's construction and history plus whatever I can get from Roxanny Gauthier. We all want to protect the structure from what Louis calls the Fringe War. Haste seems called for. I beg you to reassure me that you can plug a hole if another antimatter explosion happens. Reassure me that you can outfly these intruders. Hanuman seems skilled and apt, but he is no better than his vehicles. Also my direct lineal descent--"