Ringworld's Children (9 page)

"Tell
me about it."

Hot Needle of Inquiry
had picked up considerable velocity and was still accelerating as it passed the rim wall. As it did, ships lifted from the Ringworld's black underside. Then
Needle
was inside the Ringworld's arc in a glare of sunlight and a halo of thousands of tiny probes.

Louis heard a howl to melt bones and a rhythmic thudding sound, but he didn't walk around the kitchen wall to see. It was just Acolyte attacking a wall, getting some exercise.

The ship was jigging and jogging across the sky, but only the jittery starscape showed that.
Needle
had tremendous acceleration, but its cabin gravity was up to the challenge. Then again, so were the probes. Nothing was attacking
Needle,
but every species wanted to look.

What would they see? A #3 General Products hull, puppeteer made, and a puppeteer in the command section.
Needle
should be safe. Most LEs wanted to avoid frightening a puppeteer.

The black spot that hid the sun was growing larger.

It was going to be a hell of a ride.

A sudden glare blinked white-black. Acolyte asked, sarcastically, "Missiles don't carry antimatter?"

"Maybe it's a ship hit by an antimatter bullet. The light looked right. I'm guessing, of course. Hindmost, keep dodging."

The puppeteer's voice sang, "As opposed to
what?
Distract yourself. What if they kill Tunesmith? Will you choose another protector? Or choose none?"

"How's he doing?"

The Hindmost popped up a virtual window.

Shoals of missiles and ships were converging in a shell around the mile-wide crystal sphere. Lasers and bombs sparkled among them. Against all sense, a ship had fired on
Long Shot,
and now others were firing too. The sphere turned, bright-dark-bright in laser light, its four archaic rocket motors flaring.

Then
Long Shot
was gone.

"Dodged into hyperspace," Louis said. "Crazy bastard. He'll lose them if he didn't get himself eaten."

"What will you do if Tunesmith is dead?" the Hindmost persisted.

"There's too much tree-of-life around. I have to do something," Louis said. "Otherwise the protectors on the rim wall will take over everything.
That's
no good. They're evolved too far out of the mainstream of hominid development, and they don't know enough. Hindmost, a Ghoul is still the best choice. They live a jackal lifestyle. Whatever lives is theirs eventually. They do best for their own kind by making life better and safer for everyone. Aside from that, their heliograph system is wonderful. We need it."

The Hindmost said, "Tunesmith is arrogant and manipulative."

The black blotch covering the sun expanded and swallowed them.

--
discontinuity
--

For two days
Gray Nurse
had been accelerating, then merely falling toward the sun and the Ringworld. The carrier would whip past the rim wall in a few hours. In that moment there would be an option. A linear motor ran the length of
Gray Nurse's
hull. Fighter-lurker ships could be backfired into range of the Ringworld itself.

Whatever had gone on in that Kzinti-held patch of comets and vacuum, it took place far above
Gray Nurse,
half-hidden in a fog of ice crystals. Fighter crews could speculate, of course. Explorer probes were on their way to do forensic work. Meanwhile the attackers were in view and running.

"But the big, slow one, that's
Long Shot"

The rest of the Fringe War had taken notice. Both ships were now surrounded by probes from half a dozen civilizations. Feeds were shown on the common-worn monitors. A Pierson's puppeteer was at the helm of the GP#3 ship.
Long Shot's
pilot looked like a man.

"Long Shot's
ours," Claus said. "This might be our chance to get it back."

The crewfolk watched the feeds. A sudden burst of firepower surrounded
Long Shot--
threatening an experimental ship of inestimable value
--
and Roxanny smiled at their cursing. Her smile slipped and the cursing stopped when the crystal sphere simply disappeared.

Gone like a soap bubble,
Roxanny thought.
How?
But she was scurrying along the corridor toward her station, flinching from burly hot shots who thought they could fly in these narrow confines.

Her station was
Snail Darter.
She crawled through the lock and took her assigned seat. Claus Raschid followed her through. The third crewman
--
"Where's Forrestier?" she rapped.

The ship jerked, and Louis jerked too, as everything around them shifted.
Needle
was out of stasis.

Views to the side showed fearsome coronas above a black horizon of blocked-out sun. Aft was only black: the sun, receding.

Louis couldn't see what the Hindmost's cabin displays saw.
Good.
If he could see graphs and false-color representations, he would
feel
the hull temperature rising. There was that about Pierson's puppeteers: they never ignored danger, never pretended it wasn't there. Never turned their backs on a threat except to kick.

Ahead, arcs of glowing coronal gas streamed past. The stars were hidden in a ruby glare that might actually be
Needle's
invisible hull giving off black body radiation.

The ships of the Fringe War... were not to be seen. The puppeteer had lost their pursuers by aerobraking his ship through the sun.

They were already nearing the ring of huge rectangles that cast shadows of night across the Ringworld. The Hindmost drifted his ship behind a shadow square, then boosted to some ferocious acceleration and ran for it.

Louis wondered idly if Tunesmith had turned off the meteor defense. Once before, the meteor defense had fired on Louis.
Lying Bastard
in stasis had smashed into the Ringworld floor and plowed a furrow across the land. They'd survived without a bruise... but this time Tunesmith had futzed the timing on their stasis field.

This time the Ringworld's sun-powered superthermal laser didn't fire, or didn't fire quick enough to catch
Needle.

But the Fringe War found them. "We're being followed," Acolyte said.

The Hindmost sang, "I'll lose them. Don't distract me."

The Ringworld came up like a vast fly swatter.
Needle
dove straight toward a long strip of nightbound land. Louis could see the Other Ocean almost below, a vast diamond dotted with clusters of islands, easing off to the side as
Needle
came down. The Hindmost aimed at lightning-lit cloud laid out like a flattened hourglass in a pattern several times larger than the Earth.

An eyestorm is the visible sign of a puncture in the Ringworld floor.

It's the Ringworld equivalent of the hurricanes and tornados that form on planets. Air draining through the puncture produces a partial vacuum. Air flowing from spinward slows against its spin velocity; it weighs less; it wants to rise. Air from antispinward speeds up, grows heavier, wants to sink. From overhead the pattern is a sketchy flattened hourglass with a puncture at the throat. From port or starboard the storm takes the appearance of an eye, upper lid and lower lid and a horizontal tornado whorl in the center, and perhaps an eyebrow of high cirrus.

A Ringworld protector, Tunesmith or Bram before him, would have filled in any large puncture by now. Lost air is hard to replace. The meteor crater at the heart of this storm would be a small one, and old: these storms took generations to form.

The Hindmost dove toward the whirling throat of the hourglass, slowing hard, with one large and two smaller ships still in his wake. Then
Needle
plunged into the black whirlwind as if in suicidal frenzy, and out. Out through the meteor crater into black interstellar space, looping hard around and up. The Hindmost fired a laser at the Ringworld's black underside. A ruby glare lit an array of spillpipes broken by another ancient meteor.

Have to tell Tunesmith,
Louis thought.
The Ringworld is wearing out. It's losing air and water. Everything needs repairs, underside, rim walls, landscape. Yah, in our copious free time.

They were driving through a plume of ice crystals now. A block of frozen seawater was being boiled away. Acolyte suddenly demanded, "Louis, stop saying that!"

"Sorry."

"I know what 'It's a ride' means. Billions of your kind pay a sum for the privilege of being scared out of their wits under conditions of assured safety. A hero must risk real danger!"

"You did that when we fought Bram.
Here
we go," as
Needle
surged upward.
It's not a death trap. It's a ride.

The foamy black sea ice was nearly boiled away.
Needle
rammed up through a smashed drainhole, through a last barrier of ice, and into the sea above.

Hot Needle of Inquiry
settled through black water and came to rest.

"And here the ship may stay," the Hindmost said. He popped up the lip of a stepping disk and went to work on its controls.

Louis asked, "How much of this were you expecting?"

"Contingencies," the Hindmost said. "If Tunesmith ever gave me a chance to move
Needle,
I'd need a place to hide it. Here, Louis, this link leads to the Repair Center. The stepping disk network is open to us."

Acolyte's ears were up. He watched them like a tennis match.

Louis thought it through. The ocean around them would drain until an ice plug formed. Tunesmith could find them by the plume of water vapor, if he had the leisure. But
Long Shot
was slow in normal space, and if hyperdrive near a star was no longer sure death, it was still tanj dangerous. Tunesmith and
Long Shot
would be hunted across the sky for days yet.

So
Hot Needle of Inquiry
was... "Hindmost, you can't
hide
the ship."

"I have."

"We need access to
Needle
for food, beds, showers, pressure suits. We need a stepping-disk link, and that's all Tunesmith needs too."

"I can hide its location, Louis."

The Hindmost was searching for the illusion of control. It seemed futile, but hey, Louis was doing the same. "Think now," Louis said. "While Tunesmith is watching
Hot Needle of Inquiry,
why don't we steal
Long Shot?"

"How?"

"I have no idea. But I'm tired of being run around like a marionette
by him or you,
Hindmost. There has to be some way out of this box!"

"While Tunesmith is occupied, we might yet have a day or two to accomplish something."

They flicked to the Meteor Defense Room.

Daylight had swept across the eyestorm. Louis was looking across a hundred and ninety million miles, past the rim of the sun and the black edges of shadow squares.

Silver knots and threads still marked rivers, lakes, seas; but time and a puncture wound had desiccated this land. Three ships dodged and weaved in and out of a flattened hourglass made of storm. These must be the ships that had followed
Needle
down. The big ship was Kzinti, and the smallest was an ARM fighter, and the third was ARM too. They'd be able to detect each other through cloud, as anyone could given deep-radar.

Lightning flickered sporadically in the constriction, but a sudden sputter was too bright to be lightning.

"The trouble with an antimatter bullet," Louis surmised, "is that the crew will use any excuse to get it off the ship."

Both ARM ships were chasing the Kzin ship. The Kzin dove back into cloud. Louis could track its deep-radar shadow through the axis of the eyestorm, one ARM ship in its wake, one darting ahead through open air. Then the Kzin ship was gone, down through the drainhole and out.

Two ARM ships now commanded perhaps a trillion square miles of Ringworld. They spent the next several hours quartering the area, returning every so often to the eyestorm.

"Guarding the puncture against entry," the Hindmost suggested. "You and Chmeee blurted that secret to all of known space, didn't you, Louis? Enter and leave the Ringworld through any meteor puncture. Otherwise face a solar-pumped superthermal laser meteor defense."

"If they find
Needle,"
Louis said, "they'll have access to the stepping-disk network. Hindmost, is that technology easy to copy? The United Nations never had the chance. It's a lot more advanced than transfer booths."

The Hindmost didn't answer, of course.

Louis found himself staring at the display of the Other Ocean. The vast expanse of water and land looked like tapestry on a castle wall. Clusters of islands... continents; they'd be that big, as big as the maps in the Great Ocean, one of which was a one-to-one scale map of Earth. These were more thickly clustered, and they seemed all identical.