Ringworld's Children (28 page)

"And never came back?"

"Never did," Wembleth said.

"She found tree-of-life."
Teela's luck,
Louis thought.
Poor Teela. If anything, it was her genes that were lucky.
He said, "I don't know just how it happened, but that tuber grows on every one of these maps of the Pak world, and most maps once held a protector prisoner. A few prisoners must have found some way to infect roots with tree-of-life virus, just as Proserpina did. I think Teela found the Penultimate's garden. It would have got Seeker too if she hadn't been exploring alone. She woke up as a protector. Wembleth, she wouldn't ever leave you unless it was to protect you from some greater danger."

Wembleth scowled.

"No, really. She saw what we all saw. She must have guessed what was under the Map of Mars. Roxanny, it's a huge volume, an area to match all the land masses of Earth, and forty miles high. You can't miss it. It's the Repair Center for the whole Ringworld. Teela could see that most of the rim-wall ramjets were missing. Somebody had to get into the Repair Center to try to stabilize the Ringworld before it brushed its sun."

She'd wanted power too,
Louis thought.
Futz, she was a protector.
He said, "She rode the rim-wall maglev system, and then anything that could reach the Map of Mars on the Great Ocean," his mind running ahead of his mouth. "Maybe she went to the Map of Earth first, to see how the archaic Pak were faring, and picked up
Hidden Patriarch
there. That's how the ship got to Mars--"

Roxanny said, "Say what?"

"It doesn't matter. What happened next was that Teela tried to murder Bram."

Roxanny said, "Bram?" and Wembleth said, "Murder? My mother?"

Louis said, "There was a protector already inside the Repair Center. Teela didn't
know
about Bram, but she knew that
if
there was anyone on site, he wasn't doing his job. He was letting the rim-wall attitude jets be stolen. He'd have to be replaced.

"Wembleth, I talked to Bram. I got his version of what happened. Bram wasn't the brightest of protectors. He never figured out this next part.

"Teela was a protector. She did what she had to do. She took an older man off one of the other maps, probably, and disguised herself. She went with him into the Map of Mars as a pair of breeders. They went exploring through the Repair Center. By the time they found the tree-of-life garden, Teela must have seen enough, or smelled him. Somewhere there was a protector. She let the man eat tree-of-life, and she ate too.

"The man died. Teela pretended to go into a coma. She might have lain motionless for several turns. Bram was supposed to come and examine her to find out what she was, then kill her before she could wake up as a protector. She would have taken him by surprise and killed
him.

"But Bram didn't come. He must have decided to let her wake. She had to go to Plan B. She left the Map of Mars without ever letting Bram know she knew about him. She set about repairing the rim-wall jets, and then... she contrived to get herself killed."

"How? Louis, how?" Wembleth demanded. He was still holding the crossbow.

She had attacked Louis and his companions, and contrived to lose the fight. Louis had killed her himself.

He said, "Bram had us at his mercy. We were hostages for as long as Teela was alive. She'd have been his servant, and he was incompetent. She had to die to save the Ringworld, and she did."

"But--"

Louis rode him down. "What matters now is that I would do anything for you. In practice, what I have to do is lose you again. It's indescribably important that the ruling protectors, Tunesmith and Proserpina, be unable to find you."

"What would they do, kill us? Question us?"

"They'd protect you."

Wembleth set the crossbow down. His hands were shaking. "Vashneesht! Stet. I like these people, but we can move again. Must you know where?"

"I must not," Louis said firmly.

He went outside. Wolf-people youths were clambering over the service stack. Louis shooed them away. He reprogrammed the stepping-disk controls and the float controls too.

Wembleth and Roxanny had followed him out. "I'm going to flick through," he told them. "After I'm gone, change this setting, then
tap the Crosshatch button,
here, and flick through. Then go wherever you like."

"Can't we be traced?"

"I fixed that, Roxanny. You're ghosts as long as you tap the Crosshatch before you flick out. Even so, Tunesmith will solve that pretty quick, so bounce around for no more than... half a day, give me that much... then stop flicking around and get away from the service stack." Louis flicked out.

Launch Room. Louis only needed an instant here. He wanted to see the workspace,
Long Shot,
and the nanotech autodoc.

Carlos Wu's rebuilt autodoc was spread around the stepping disk he'd flicked onto. Tools lay about. He could guess their intent, most of them. Cables and rainbow threads of laser light led to a score of instrument stacks. This maze would take minutes to disentangle... an hour or more for the Hindmost.

Long Shot
loomed, a bubble a mile tall. At first sight it looked partly disassembled. A curved hatch as big as a fairgrounds gaped near the bottom. Equipment was piled about, and there was lightweight packing stuff everywhere.

Look again: that stuff wasn't intrinsic to any likely hyperdrive system. Here was a General Products #2 ship, a lifeboat. Those were tanks. Those, inflatable habitats for ground and orbit, and a deuterium refinery fitted to suck up seawater. Some of it was mere misdirection. Distorted hull fittings turned out to be a holoprojector left running.

Tunesmith had cleaned out cargo and packaging to get at the works, done his investigations, and rebuilt the ship. Close that hatch and--Louis couldn't instantly see how it would exit the cavern. Hmm?

The linear cannon roared like the end of a world. Lightning ran through the hole in the floor, up and out through Mons Olympus. In the silence that followed, Louis heard Proserpina's shout.

"They'll notice!" In Ghoulish.

They were over by the hole, looking down along the linear cannon: Proserpina, Tunesmith, and two little protectors either of whom might be Hanuman. Tunesmith bellowed, "They know I'm here. They'll guess I'm active. The ones with brains must have deduced what's under the Map of Mars by now. Some may even rest easier because I'm closing holes in the Ringworld floor."

"...Risk?"

"The missiles most of these factions have been using, one antimatter explosion wouldn't tear up much of the Repair Center. An enemy couldn't
know
he'd hurt me, and he'd anger me, and I might find him. I admit there's risk. I'm stalling. I don't want the ARM and the rest of them wondering what the Mars protector is up to. So this is what I'm up to, closing holes. Keeps me out of mischief."

They wouldn't scent him: Louis was in a pressure suit. Louis couldn't smell anything either, so he kept looking around. He saw a few Hanging People protectors. They weren't near him. He saw a webeye camera sprayed on the 'doc's Intensive Care Cavity. He waved at it,
Hi, Hindmost!
and wondered if Tunesmith was linked into the same cameras.

"...need the holes?"

"I'm through with them. We're almost..." Their voices dropped as their hearing came back. Louis wasn't going to learn more this way.

He saw them cover their ears, so Louis covered his. As lightning roared up the linear cannon, Louis picked up a grippy and flung it at Proserpina's head, sixty meters away.

Proserpina caught it and sent it whizzing back at him... almost: it would hit the service wall, shatter, and shower him with slivers, Louis danced around the service wall, caught the grippy as it struck, and flung it slantwise at the floor, to ricochet at Proserpina, who caught and returned it. Suddenly other objects were in motion, tools and a random chunk of concrete and a long dead animal as big as Louis. The animal disintegrated in his hand. Louis caught the rest and returned them. He turned a spigot on a tank and was behind the service wall again, popped
up
and returned the grippy and a block of lava tuff, then threw himself behind the puff of featherweight packing plastic that had emerged from the tank. He kicked it upward and was behind the tank while they looked for him there. The grippy burst through the foam plastic, shattering it--

But there were too many things moving now, and elements in his torso and hip were trying to tear themselves apart. He caught what missiles he could, juggled them, and presently set them down. He limped toward the protectors.

Proserpina said, "Funny man--"

"What makes you feel so safe?" Tunesmith demanded.

"You left me a chair. You fiddled with my metabolism."

Tunesmith said, "Louis, everything has happened out of sequence. You ate early and finished your change late. An ARM ship exploded early. We could have taken our sweet time extrapolating the behavior of all these factions in the Fringe War. Now--talk to me. What will they do?"

"A sanity check first?"

"Whose?"

"Have you solved how
Long Shot
works?"

"Yes."

"And embedded the principle in a quintillion nanotech devices? Made from a much-altered experimental autodoc?"

"The numbers--"

"And run nanodust into the superconducting network under the Ringworld, so that its structure can be altered?"

"Yes, with help from Proserpina and our associates."

"Proserpina, are you with this?"

"Yes, Louis. There weren't enough holes in the landscape, so we had to drill in spots--"

"Is it
working?"

Tunesmith said, "I think so."

"Stet, I'm sane and so are you, or else we're all crazy. Is the system ready to go?"

"It may be, if my power storage holds. I can't include the shadow squares or the sun. At best I can only run for a little more than two days. But, Louis, I'm not sure the nanosystems have finished infecting the entire grid. I need to know how much time we've got. What will the Fringe War do?"

Louis's mind was dancing down a new path. "You can build a new day-and-night system. Tunesmith, why not build a real Dyson sphere? Ten million miles diameter with a sun at the center and the Ringworld around it. Make it thin like a solar sail so light pressure will inflate it. Give it windows to let daylight through to the Ringworld. The rest of the material is a photoelectric transformer. You'll be collecting most of the power of a sun."

Proserpina said, "You're fresh, Louis." In Ghoulish speech that implied meat not ready to eat: unacceptable immaturity. "Protectors can be scatterbrains. You must solve one problem at a time. We're still looking at the Fringe War fleet. When will they strike?"

"There's another matter--"

Tunesmith bellowed, "No! Already some faction has destroyed one of my attitude jets. Who? What motive? Was it a deliberate provocation?"

"Show me the event. Meteor Defense Room."

They flicked out.

He absolutely couldn't signal the Hindmost. The puppeteer would have to move
now.

Meteor Defense. Proserpina and Tunesmith took their chairs in a jump. Twisted Louis had to climb to reach the third chair. He looked for where stepping disks ought to be. The one he'd come through was clearly marked. A Hanging People protector, Hanuman, flicked through an unmarked site and awaited orders. Others might be concealed
there
or
there.
Bet on three or four, no more. Why were the chairs on these booms so massive?

The wall displayed the Ringworld system as if viewed from the sun. The Ringworld was a mere outline, white threads against starscape. "I need a pointer," Louis said, and found touchpoints on a knob. "Stet. These are Outsider ships, right? Two. Do you see more?"

"No."

"We're not really of interest to anything that different. These," he highlighted lenses and spheres, "are Kzinti, and these are ARM," long levers studded with lesser ships. "I don't see the Sheathclaws' ship."

"It went away."

"Probably ordered off, or they might have run from Kzinti. Kzinti use telepaths as slaves. What are you wondering about?"

"Interactions," Proserpina said.

He needed a way to use up some time, then send the protectors off on some sort of distraction. Louis drew a net of lines linking various ships, and added vector arrows. "See? Distance and velocity and gravity, you need to take it all into consideration, so it's complicated--"

Proserpina snapped, "It is not! It's only different. We did this all the way from the galactic core to the Ringworld site! They've arranged a standoff, but it's unstable
here
--"

"Yah. And this balance won't hold if--if some dissident faction, say the One Race contingent, is actually running
this
ship or--"

"I don't see how it held this long. I don't see how it could hold much longer," Tunesmith said. "But you know them all, Louis."

"It won't hold. You're missing the effect of the Outsiders. They're more powerful than the other factions and everybody knows it. Just being here, they've made it all more stable until now. Everybody's been wondering what the Outsiders will do. What the Outsiders will do is nothing, and the whole Fringe War is gradually coming to know that."

He was seeing it now, the disintegrating patterns, strength built up here, bluff here. Two bar-shaped ARM ships poised to destroy one great Kzin lens. Thirty-one ships edged up around one Outsider ship in hope of protection that would vanish like dawn frost on the Moon. Futz, the balance just wasn't there.

"Tunesmith, this whole house of cards could come down at any second. Don't wait. How fast can you get us moving?"

"Half a day, with luck."

Louis turned, shocked. "Why so long?"