Ringworld's Children (25 page)

Louis asked again. "What
is
this?"

"I made Proserpina tell me, but I guessed first, Louis. There's just too much wrong with the way you act. You played me for a fool--"

"No, Roxanny, no. I liked being treated like a kid, being young again. No responsibility! Roxanny--" Louis Wu was fleeing from the ARM. He couldn't tell her that. There were other things she couldn't know and still run loose. He said, "I love you."

She pointed at a mass that was still red hot. "What is that?"

"A service stack. Float plates from... elsewhere on the Ring."

"What about the weapons? Those."

"Don't know." He could guess. Tunesmith must have lost a service stack exploring the Citadel. He'd armed the next one and invaded again, and got this far.

"And that silver cap?"

He couldn't answer.

"That's a puppeteer stepping disk, isn't it? And it's pumping light and bullets and whatever else falls on it into some other space. That means it's still working, and that's
why
it's still working--"

"Dangerous! Roxanny, you have no idea where it leads!"

"All the things you lied about! I am not a child." Roxanny studied him. "I didn't believe her. You didn't make love like an older man. So I tried you out, and you
do."

"How could you--"

"There was a teacher."

"Roxanny--"

"Well, we seem to be a target here. I think I'll just try it." The flycycle lifted, slid sideways.

The pile of ruined lift plates glowed dull red. The plate at the top was dull silver. Roxanny dropped the flycycle onto it and was gone.

She was upside down and falling. Roxanny's breath streamed out in a long silent scream. She fell along smooth, vertical, red rock toward ochre sand a long way down. Past her feet was navy blue sky touched with pink.

Then the flycycle righted itself and began to rise again--but her scream remained. The flycycle had emerged on Mars with the sonic fold off. In a vacuum you scream, or else your lungs rupture.

Mars. Ridiculous. Insane. But she knew this place, she'd trained on Mars. Her spinning senses found the Arch, the Ringworld rising over itself. So she wasn't quite crazy, it was the Map of Mars on the Great Ocean halfway round the Ringworld. Even so, she and Wembleth would be dead in minutes, in an atmosphere that would be poison if it weren't too thin to matter.

The blood that still streamed from her nose was foaming. Wembleth's mouth was open in a long scream; he clutched the flycycle controls as if throttling them.

The flycycle eased up above a single silver plate like the one they'd come through: an inverted stepping disk.

Wembleth reached out, pulling at the umbilicals that attached him to the flycycle's 'doc. He swung a fist at the edge of the stepping disk. The rim popped up on a hardware keyboard. His fist pounded the buttons. He twisted flycycle controls, and the vehicle dropped, twisted, and rose to touch the stepping disk's undersurface.

There was air and baby blue sky.

Roxanny sucked air, gasped, gasped. She said, "Perfect," her throat a raw whisper. She hugged Wembleth. "Perfect. You saved us. That
thing
would have come after us. Proserpina. And Luis. Louis Wu." After a long moment she lifted her head. "You just slammed touch points at random, didn't you? I wonder where we are."

She could see everything there was of it. They were on a tiny island in the midst of a flat, calm sea. Nothing but scrub was growing here. It seemed a safe place to leave a stepping disk and its stack of lift plates.

Roxanny popped the cover and tapped touch points. "There," she said. "Let's see them find us now."

Louis tottered toward the service stack. He'd do better with a walking stick or a crutch. He stopped where the heat was too much. He
had
to follow her... but he couldn't get close. He sat down to think.

Jump to the stepping disk from a higher ramp? Yah, stet.

The service stack wouldn't be red hot forever... but it would take a long time to cool down. A day, two? He'd have to feed himself while he waited.

In a minute he'd start climbing toward the hanging garden.

Sputtering light woke him. He'd dozed, or fainted. He watched without surprise as Proserpina's ship descended. Lasers stuttered from a dozen directions. The sunfish ship flickered. Then all the lasers died in fiery puffballs, and the big sunfish ship hovered above him.

Hanuman, in full pressure gear, emerged from the opening hatch.

"They went through there," Louis called. "I have to catch them, but it's too hot.
Wait!"

Hanuman jumped. He landed on the stepping disk and was gone.

What had turned it on, anyway? Plasma heat? A random bullet? Must have been something like that. Why would Tunesmith send a service stack in here with the stepping disk running? Louis saw Proserpina in the hatch, wearing a pressure suit. He called, "Watch out, it's still going!"

She dropped onto the stepping disk and was gone.

The sunfish ship turned, questing blindly. It lifted toward the hole in the wall, outside and gone.

Louis wondered how much trouble he was in.

Everyone had left him. He hadn't felt this alone since... he couldn't remember. Roxanny had left him. How would he ever explain... or did she understand too well?

He'd thought of her as his woman, decreed by fate, the only Homo sapiens woman in a vastness of three million worlds.

She'd taken the flycycle. Proserpina had programmed the sunfish ship to take itself home. Louis was on foot. That was good news and bad. It was a futz of a long way to a food source, but it was all downhill. Hunger wouldn't kill him. The Penultimate's defenses wouldn't kill him, if he believed Roxanny's analysis: he would be seen as a wandering Homo habilis. He was nearly naked already.

But he had to find water sooner than that.

There'd be water to feed that vast green veldt. Even so, there was water closer: not far above his head. His eye could follow ramps around and up and over to the hanging gardens.

Louis began to walk. Nothing shot at him. Maybe Proserpina had shut down the rest of the Penultimate's defenses.

He rested more and more frequently. Presently he was crawling. A walking stick sounded really good. Maybe he'd find a sapling in the hanging garden. Then, walk home to Proserpina's base. Climb into the ARM 'doc and finish healing. Figure out what to do next.

He knew that smell.

He'd found the Penultimate's tree-of-life supply!

It was a futzy good thing, he thought dizzily, that he hadn't landed the flycycle in the garden. Roxanny would have eaten. She was... maybe past the age, maybe not, given decades of boosterspice. She'd be a protector, or dead. Wembleth might have eaten too, he thought. The native's elegant black-and-white hair could be a sign of age.

Water welled up, pooled on the ramp, and ran into the plants. Louis waded into it on hands and knees. It rose to his belly. He only stopped once, when he realized he was kneeling on bright cloth: on a woman's skirt with a hologram running round it. Wild horses ran below Wyoming buttes, around and around.

No telling how long it had been here at the bottom of the pool. Good cloth didn't rot. Teela had owned a skirt like this, bought at a shop in Phoenix. And Louis was crawling again.

He crawled into the garden, dripping, pulling the skirt behind him. There were trees: he could pull himself to his feet. There was more than tree-of-life here. He saw fruit, snap beans, fist-sized ears of corn.... He knelt and began to dig.

He pulled up a yellow root, shook off some dirt, and bit into it. It was like chewing wood.

This was twice insane. He was too young. Carlos Wu's nanotech 'doc had made him too young. There was no reason for him to be interested in tree-of-life. It might kill him. He went on eating.

Hanuman caught the rim of the stepping disk with a hand and a foot. Rocks like rust-colored teeth waited far below him. For millions of falans his kind had known what to do about
falling.

Proserpina flicked through. Hanuman caught her belt, but he wasn't needed: she had the rim of the stepping disk. "Trap," she said. She pulled herself onto an ochre rock. "Crude. Aliens?"

Hanuman said, "Tunesmith is careful. Anything might come through from the Penultimate's home. Proserpina, we were told to wait. He's sent us a service stack."

"Follow," said Proserpina. She swung around from the rim and thumped soundly against the stepping disk. Nothing happened. "Gauthier's changed the link."

"I know the protocols." Hanuman popped the controls open, freed a hand, and tapped rapidly. "We'll lose Gauthier's link. Do you care where the detective and the native went?"

"She'll change the settings again. They're lost in the network. Go."

Hanuman swung himself down and was elsewhere.

Under a hemisphere of artificial sky, a sun burned low, red, and flattened. Veldt stretched out around Hanuman, with a lake and a low forest in the distance.

Proserpina flicked in behind him. She gaped at the lowering sun. "Was there a planet-born protector?"

"Yes. I don't know details," Hanuman said.

"I am suddenly very hungry." Proserpina loped toward the trees.

"I surmise," Hanuman said, "that protectors lose their hunger when they have too little to protect. Were you idle for a very long time?"

They were running through yellow grain, and Hanuman was falling behind. He recognized the trees ahead.

His memories as a breeder were murky. He was old, slowing down, joints starting to hurt. The troop had fought an intruder. Hanuman, fiercest of the males, got close enough to inhale a scent that sparked a rage of hunger. He'd eaten himself stupid, then estivated, then... woke like this, in a pocket of forest transplanted deep underground, with its own wandering sun. His own forest to keep him sane, and puzzles to train his newly expanded mind.

The trees were fruit trees. Lower plants grew at the edges. Ringworld life was Pak life, and all these were edible crops. Proserpina's hands plunged into the dark soil. She tore a yellow root out of the ground and ate, and gave another to Hanuman.

Presently she asked, "Where's Tunesmith?"

"I can't call him." The pressure suit Proserpina had worked up for him was a quick fix. It didn't fit well, and it didn't have a communication link to Tunesmith. "He'll find us," Hanuman said.

"I was trapped on a single map for more than a million falans," she said. "When my Pak brethren ceased to supervise the Ringworld landscape, I continued to test for protectors in the Repair Center. The Repair Center has remained active, and I have remained passive. I'm the last defense. One day I will be needed. Even now that day may not have come, but we must see. I should explore. Where can you take me?"

"Your interest is in the massing of alien craft near our sun, isn't it?"

"Yes."

Hanuman rewrote settings. "Come."

They were in a vast, dark, ellipsoidal space.

Stars glared unimpeded, light-enhanced, in walls and floor and ceiling. Spacecraft were harder to see. Tunesmith had set blinking circles round the ones he'd found; he might have missed others. Thousands of ships. Hundreds of thousands of tiny blinking points: probes.

Only Proserpina's head turned.

Three long swinging booms ended in chairs equipped with lap keyboards. All three were empty. Hanuman asked, "Would you like--?"

"Shush," she said, and continued to take it all in. Stepping disks: one visible. She couldn't see the one she was standing on. Weapons and cameras: she couldn't see those either. The star projections could mask anything.

If Tunesmith attacked, it would be from above, and Hanuman would attack too. She was ready--but that was instinct speaking. Practically speaking, if Tunesmith wanted her life, it was his. She asked, "Do you know these ships?"

"Some of them." Hanuman pointed out a few: Puppeteer, Trinoc, Outsider, Kzinti, ARM, Sheathclaws.

"Some are only observers," Proserpina said. "Some are arrayed for war. Badly. The ARM would win if they struck there and there..." Her voice wandered off. "And wreckage from this ship or this one might strike the Ringworld. That tail design confines antimatter fuel, doesn't it? Has Tunesmith considered destroying all of these fleets?"

"Tunesmith considers everything."

"But I don't know his tools. He must be at work on something! Something besides mere defensive meteor control. I won't know anything until I know what we can fight with. Or run with."

Hanuman said, "Run?"

"I speculate." Proserpina walked around the curve of the glowing wall. Under a glare of light were the bones of an ancient protector, laid out with some of his tools. The joints were swollen into knobs. Vertebrae in the back were fused.

"They had already begun to mutate," she said. "Do you know that we kill mutants? Do you still do that?"

"Of course, if they smell wrong, or behave wrong."

"This one was very good at what he did. Look at the state of the bones, the scarring from mere age. He must have survived tens of thousands of falans. Hanuman, should we have loosed our predators?"

"No."

"But these who were our own shape have occupied every ecological niche we didn't fill." She looked hard at Hanuman. She'd almost managed to ignore his mutant smell. "I see your point. Not just scavengers like this one, but brachiators like you. Mutations and evolution are good, if only you can stop it
now,
always
now,
so that your own kind need not change."

Hanuman didn't answer. She was only stating the obvious.

But Tunesmith spoke. "Your kind, your original Pak,
did not
survive. That's what mutations and evolution are for, Proserpina. Something almost of your shape has multiplied into the tens of trillions. You don't like some of us? When did you ever like all of your neighbors?"