Ringworld's Children (3 page)

Past the edge of the pop-up window, under a glare of light, knobby bones had been laid out for study. This was the oldest protector Louis knew of, and Louis had named him Cronus. In the far shadows stood pillars with large plates on top, mechanical mushrooms. Louis pointed into the window. "What are those?"

"Service stacks," the Hindmost's Voice said, "each made from several float plates topped by a stepping disk."

Louis nodded. The Ringworld engineers had left float plates all through the Repair Center. If you stacked them, they'd lift more. Adding a stepping disk seemed an obvious refinement... if you had them to spare.

Louis saw a boom swing across the starscape. It ended in a knobby, angular shadow.

All protectors look something like medieval armor.

The protector was watching a spray of stars. His cameras would be mounted on the Ringworld itself, maybe on the outside of the rim wall, looking away from the sun. He didn't seem aware that he was being spied on.

Louis knew better than to expect asteroids or worlds. Unknown engineers had cleared all that out of the Ringworld system. This drift of moving lights would be spacecraft held by several species. Now the view focused on a gauzy, fragile Outsider ship; now on a glass needle, a General Products' #2 hull, tenant unknown; now a crowbar-shaped ARM warship.

Tunesmith's concentration seemed total. He zoomed on starscape occluded by a foggy lump, a proto-comet. Tiny angular machines drifted around it, marked by blinking cursor circles. A lance of light glared much brighter: some warship's fusion drive. Here came another, zipping across the screen. No weapon fired.

The Fringe War is still cold,
Louis thought. He'd wondered how long that could last. A formal truce could not hold among so many different minds.

The protector's arms jittered above the keyboard.

In the corner of Louis's eye, sunlight glared down. Louis spun around.

Above
Needle
the crater in Mons Olympus was sliding open, flooding the cavern with unfiltered light.

The linear accelerator roared; an arc of lightning ran bottom to top.

The crater began to close.

Louis turned back to the display. Looking over Tunesmith's shoulder, he watched fusion light flare from offscreen and dwindle to a bright point. Whatever Tunesmith had launched was already too far to see.

Tunesmith had joined the Fringe War!

A protector could not be expected to do nothing, even if the alternative was to bring war down on their heads. Louis scowled. Bram the protector had been crazy, even if supremely intelligent. Louis must eventually decide if Tunesmith was crazy too, and what to do about it.

Meanwhile this latest maneuver should keep the protector busy. Now, how much freedom had Louis been allotted? Louis said, "Hindmost's Voice, show me the locations of all stepping disks."

The Hindmost's Voice popped up three hundred and sixty degrees of Map Room. The Ringworld surrounded Louis, a ring six hundred million miles around and a million miles wide, banded in blue for day and black for night and broad fuzzy edges for dusk and dawn. Winking orange cursor lights were displayed across its face. Some were shaped like arrowheads.

This pattern had changed greatly since Louis had last seen it. "How many?"

"Ninety-five stepping disks are now in use. Two failed. Three were dropped into deep space and probes launched through them. The fleets shot them down. Ten are held in reserve."

The Hindmost had stocked stepping disks aboard
Hot Needle of Inquiry,
but not a hundred and ten! "Is the Hindmost building more stepping disks?"

"With his help Tunesmith has built a stepping-disk factory. Work proceeds slowly."

The blinking orange lights that marked stepping disks were thick along the near side of the Ringworld, the Great Ocean arc. The far side looked sparse. Two blinking orange arrowheads had nearly reached the edge of the Other Ocean. Others were moving in that direction.

The Other Ocean was a diamond shape sprawling across most of the width of the Ringworld, one hundred eighty degrees around from the Great Ocean. Two such masses of water must counterbalance each other. The Hindmost's crew had not explored the Other Ocean.
High time,
Louis thought.

Most of the stepping disks were clustered around the Great Ocean, and of those, most were in a tight cluster that must be the Map of Mars. Louis pointed at one offshore from Mars. "What is that?"

"That is
Hot Needle of Inquiry's
lander."

Teela the protector had blasted the lander during their last duel. "It's functional?"

"The stepping-disk link is functional."

"What about the lander?"

"Life support is marginal. Drive systems and weaponry have failed."

"Can some of these service stacks be locked out of the system?"

"That has been done." Lines spread across the map to link the blinking lights. Some had crossed-circle
verboten
marks on them:
closed.
The maze was complicated, and Louis didn't try to understand it. "My Master has override codes," the Voice said.

"May I have those?"

"No."

"Number these stepping-disk sites for me. Then print out a map."

As the Ringworld was vast, the scale was extreme. His naked eye would never get any detail out of it. When the map extruded, he folded it and stuffed it in a pocket anyway.

He broke for lunch and came back.

He set two service stacks moving and changed a number of links. The Hindmost's Voice printed another map with his changes added. He pocketed that too. Better keep both. Now, with luck, he'd have avenues of travel unknown to Tunesmith.

Or it might be wasted effort. The Hindmost, when he woke, could change it all back in a moment.

The Voice refused to make weapons. Of course the kitchen in
Needle's
crew quarters hadn't done that either.

Tunesmith was still at the end of a boom, still tracking whatever he'd launched.

"Where are the rest of us?" Louis asked the Voice.

"Who do you seek?"

"Acolyte."

"I do not have that name--"

"The Kzin we shared this ship with. Chmeee's child."

"I list that LE as--" blood-curdling howl. Louis had to pry his fingers loose from a table edge. "Rename him Acolyte?"

"Please."

The map was back, and a blinking point next to Fist-of-God... a hundred thousand miles port-and-antispin from Fist-of-God--four times the circumference of the Earth--and twice that far to spinward of the Map of Mars. The hugeness of the Ringworld had to be learned over and over. The Voice said, "Here we set Acolyte, with a service stack, thirty-one days ago. He has since moved by eleven hundred miles." The point jumped minutely. "Tunesmith has altered the setting for the stepping disk. It sends to an observation point on the Map of Earth."

Home to Acolyte's father. "Has he used it?"

"No."

"Where are the City Builders?"

"Do you mean the librarians? Kawaresksenjajok and Fortaralisplyar and three children were returned to their origin--"

"Good!" He'd meant to do that himself.

"To the library in the floating city. I note your approval. Who else shall I track?"

Who else had been his companions? Two protectors. Bram the Vampire protector was dead. Tunesmith was... still busy, it seemed. In the Meteor Defense Room the protector's telescope screen was following a receding point, the vehicle he'd launched earlier. Its drive was off... flared brilliantly and blinked off again.

That was a warship. Reaction motors were still needed for war; modern thrusters couldn't switch on and off as fast.

Louis asked, "Have you kept track of Valavirgillin?"

The map jumped. "Here, near the floating city and a local center of Machine People culture."

Good, and she was well away from vampires. They had not met in twelve years.
"Why
did you track her, Hindmost's Voice?"

"Orders."

Carefully, "Who do you take orders from?"

"From you and Tunesmith and--" a blast of orchestral chaos, piercingly sweet. Louis recognized the Hindmost's true name. "But all such may be countermanded by--" the Hindmost's name again.

"Is Tunesmith restricted from any interesting levels of this ship?"

"Not currently."

The Hindmost was still in wrapped-around-himself catatonia. "How long since he's eaten?" Louis asked.

"Two local days. He wakes to eat."

"Wake him up."

"How shall I wake him without trauma?"

"I saw him in a dance once. Turn that on. Prepare food for him."

The Hindmost dreamed
of perfect safety.

And then the dance began
--

The illusion was marvelous.

Louis stood in a vast hall. The floor was all broad, shallow steps. A thousand aliens moved around him; two thousand throats uttered orchestral music that was also conversation, unbearably complex. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would have gone crazy. The Beatles... started out crazy, but futz, so did Mozart.

Kick, slide, left heads brush fingerlips; hind leg kicks, partner shies.
The Hindmost kicked. A flat one-eyed head emerged from beneath his torso.
Spin, kick;
the Hindmost lurched to his forefeet and tried to turn. Was this a dance or a martial art?

The Hindmost whistled. The dance dissipated. "Louis," the puppeteer said.

"How long were you out?"

"I sleep much. Where is Tunesmith?"

"Fighting a war, I think."

A head turned to the display of the Meteor Defense Room. "I watched him build that vehicle. The Fringe War grows ever hotter. Have they invaded the Ringworld?"

"I have no idea. Hindmost, how did
Needle
come to be in this state?"

"Recall that Tunesmith accepted me as his teacher, on your advice."

Tunesmith, the Ghoul musician, had been newborn as a protector and thirsty for learning. "He needed training, and fast," Louis said. "I thought that the more he learned from us, the more we could guess what he'd do. Did you try to keep secrets?"

"Yes."

"And you barred him from the flight deck, of course."

"I did," the puppeteer acknowledged. "I taught using your displays in crew quarters. I taught well, but he learned faster, always faster. He demanded access to my tools. I refused. Six days after you entered the 'doc, I woke to find him standing over me
here
where I thought he could not reach. I gave him everything."

"When did he chop up your ship?"

"Some time afterward. I was in fear-coma for eleven days. I woke and found this. Little has changed since. Louis, he has repaired the hyperdrive!"

"A fat lot of good--"

"He will reassemble the ship. When he does, I flee. Be aboard."

"When?"

The puppeteer's eyes looked at each other.

That meant confusion, or amusement, or any form of internal conflict. Louis asked, "What's he been doing? Building a warship--"

"Yes, and tracking the Fringe War, delving the secrets of my machinery--he wouldn't trust me to teach him--and ridding himself of my allies and yours. The Machine People are sent home. Acolyte is sent to spy on nothing at all. You, he kept safely asleep in the Intensive Care Cavity, and did extensive experiments there too. Louis, I must instruct you. You shall know everything you might need."

Louis asked, "Why?"

"We are allies!"

"Why?" The droud was gone from its place, a bulge in Louis's pocket. Would the Hindmost mention it?

"Tunesmith has us enslaved! Can't you see what he plans for you?"

"I think so. He'll make me a protector."

Protector was the adult form of the human species.

Child, breeder, protector. At middle age--younger for some species of hominid, older for a few, around forty-five for humans--a breeder can become a protector. His/her skin thickens and wrinkles to armor. The brain case expands. A second two-chamber heart grows where the femoral arteries run into the legs. Joints grow bulky, giving a greater momentum for greater leverage in muscles and tendons.

There are psychological changes too. A protector loses the attributes of gender. A protector will protect his/her progeny, identifying them by scent. Mutations are left to die. A protector with no surviving children usually stops eating and dies... but some may choose to protect and nurture their entire species. That can work, if there is a perceived threat.

But none of it happens without the virus that lives in tree-of-life to trigger the change.

Tree-of-life did not grow properly on Earth. On the Ringworld it had been found only in chambers beneath the Map of Mars. The hominids of Earth, and of the Ringworld too, had evolved as breeders, an unfinished form, like axolotls.

Too young a hominid does not react to the smell of tree-of-life root. The root will poison an elderly hominid. Louis Wu had been too old until Carlos Wu's autodoc changed him, and now he was too young.

"I'm safe for at least a quarter century," he said.

The puppeteer said, "Longer than that, if you use Carlos Wu's autodoc in time. The 'doc rejuvenates you. Tunesmith will stop you from doing that."