Ringworld's Children (12 page)

Tunesmith spoke suddenly in his earphones. "Your mission is to seek out a crashed ship. Louis, guide them. Report to me at every step. Watch for more than one ship down. The crash grooves they carve would be close together and parallel.

"I want to know the species and what to expect of them. Don't throw your life away to find out. Don't kill any LE if you can avoid it, but if you must, leave no sign. If possible, negotiate. I'll make any guests glad they met me.

"I worry for what I might forget to tell you.

"Louis, remember that information storage is easy. All of human knowledge is probably stored aboard every ARM spacecraft, with blocks to restrict secrets. The right officer will know the right passwords. Acolyte, if you find a Patriarchy ship instead, give up. The knowledge may be there, but no hero will give it to you--"

Louis said, "A telepath might," but Tunesmith's monologue droned on.

I worry for what I might forget to tell you... that it's a three hundred million mile walk home, and the stepping disk is orbiting beyond your reach, and the Hindmost will be in the 'doc. So you can't count on him for an ally, and you can't use the 'doc to rejuvenate, Louis. In the fullness of time, I'll make you a protector....
Not likely that Tunesmith would say any of that. Louis concentrated on flying.

Far behind them was the low wall of fog. The ship they were tracking had skipped across a sea, a river, another river. A ridge showed a glittering notch of bare scrith where the ship must have bounced aloft. The arrow-straight canyon resumed further on, scrith rimmed with splashed lava. Following it was easy. It ran across forest, a white sand beach, a long, long stretch of veldt... there...

So small a thing to have wrought so much damage.

Against another ridge lay an elegantly contoured half-cylinder, flat along one side, no cabins, no windows, no breaks in the reflective surface, except near one end. Louis zoomed his faceplate.

"Is that an ARM ship?" Acolyte asked. "Or Patriarchy? Smooth as it is, it might be puppeteer. But they'd use a General Products' hull, wouldn't they?"

Closing now at several mach. The protrusion at one end looked like a bee's stinger.

"It's a drop tank," Louis said.

"Explain," Hanuman rapped.

"It's not a spacecraft. It's part of a spacecraft, the part that carries extra fuel, the part you can throw away." He was furious with himself, and then, suddenly, elated. "The ship whapped down in stasis. After the stasis field collapsed, they still had a working spacecraft."

Keep talking.
Somehow he held his voice steady. "They drop the tank when they want agility or longer range. I'd say they were getting ready for a dogfight."

Hanuman said, "Flup. We have to find that ship. Were you expecting this?"

"No.
Lying Bastard
was a different design. After we hit, we were grounded. Now what?"

"Possibilities suggest themselves," Hanuman said. "First, I'm linked to Tunesmith. Tunesmith, you have Louis's assessment. Shall we wait for the ship to return for its fuel? Is it ARM or Kzinti or something else? Must we negotiate or challenge?"

Louis said, "ARM." Kzinti would have marked their property. Pierin or Kdat or Trinocs wouldn't challenge Kzinti or men; Kzinti had owned them. Puppeteers wouldn't directly challenge anything. Outsiders wouldn't get this close to a star. "Might be some other human branch, or Kzinti bandits, or Trinocs... but call it ARM.

"That's a little tank, so we're looking for a little ship. A fighter won't carry antimatter fuel. Energy stored in a battery. Water for reaction mass because it's easy to store and pump. They might have antimatter weapons. It's surprising that a little ship would have a stasis field. Maybe the UN is getting better at building them."

Any part of a warcraft would have dot-sized cameras all over it. "If they're not watching us, they might still record us," Louis said. "So what shall we be?"

The little hologram heads of his companions looked blank.

Louis explained. "We're operatives working for a superintelligent protector who used to be an eater of the dead. That's too scary. Any military LE who heard
that
might shoot us out of hand. An ARM ship will have records of what a protector is. That'll scare them too.

"So, what do we want to be? We're a Kzin and a man and a Hanging People protector. We don't want to be Patriarchy. They're scary too. We can't show ARM identification--"

"Ah," Hanuman said. "You want to lie."

"Hanuman? A new concept?"

Acolyte rumbled in dissatisfaction. Hanuman said, "My species' breeders aren't sapient. I've been able to think and speak for less than a falan. Who would I lie to? Tunesmith?"

A dog will try to lie to its human master,
Louis thought,
but getting away with it
--"Stet, but we
do not
want to confront them with a protector. Hanuman, do you remember how you behaved as a breeder? Can you do it again?"

"You would make me a
pet monkey?"

"Yah."

"Stet. If I can't talk, I can't be caught in a lie. Acolyte's pet, I assume. What of you?"

Louis said, "I think Tunesmith saw this coming. Our gear is pretty close to what Nessus brought aboard
Lying Bastard.
Let's be the Hindmost's new crew. With the puppeteer leading from wayyy behind, as usual. It would explain flycycles. Hanuman, any thoughts?"

"We're telling a story. Better if they do not learn that Louis Wu made a protector and set him in charge of the Ringworld. You would seem too powerful and too undefended. Best if we do not mention an experimental medical system using nanotechnology, either. That was stolen from the United Nations, even if eight hundred falans ago. They'd want it back."

"I hadn't even
thought
of that. Stet, let's keep working on this. Acolyte--"

"I am proud of what I am! And I was not taught to lie. We serve a powerful master. Why not simply demand what we want?"

"Maybe this is why Chmeee sent you to me. Acolyte, it's only a fighter, but their mother ship would carry
antimatter fuel.
Hanuman, how many double-X-large plugs does Tunesmith have?"

"One partly completed."

Worse than he'd thought. The Ringworld couldn't afford another antimatter explosion! "Acolyte, you're Chmeee's son. Stick with the truth, as much as you can. Just don't talk about the Repair Center or Tunesmith or Carlos Wu's nanotech autodoc. Your father, Chmeee, rules a chunk of the Map of Earth. The Hindmost made you an offer, and you went off with him rather than fight your father again. You're his hostage, but you don't know it."

"And how did I meet Louis Wu?" the Kzin demanded.

"I... hadn't got that far."

"Land," ordered Hanuman. "We'll fill our kitchen slots while we wait for the ship's return. Louis, how long does a dogfight take?"

"Not long. Hours."

They landed among trees like redwood-sized dandelions. Louis had seen these elsewhere.

Light and noise would alert them if a ship returned. Meanwhile they dismounted, stretched, removed their pressure suits. As soon as Acolyte sniffed the air, he bounded away with a howl, hot in pursuit of something the others never saw.

Louis swung his kitchen converter out on its boom. He loaded grass and small plants into the hopper. Hanuman was doing the same. If the kitchen box was based on what they'd used thirty-odd years ago, it would process local vegetation or animal flesh, make handmeal bricks he could eat, and discard the dross. He'd have to catch something meaty, soon.

It extruded a brick.

"Wrong setting," Hanuman said. "Here." He turned a dial on Louis's kitchen. "That was for me. Fruit eater."

Louis broke a chunk off the protector's brick and tasted it. "Good, though. We eat fruit too."

It hit him without warning, a rush of nostalgia. He'd been here before, on unknown landscape in all this Ringworld
hugeness,
sharing a handmeal brick with Teela. He turned away from Hanuman as his eyes filled with tears.

He remembered Teela Brown.

She was tall and slender and walked with the confidence of a centenarian, though she was only in her thirties. He'd first seen her wearing silver net on blue skin; hair scarlet and orange and black, like bonfire flames and smoke, streaming upward. Later she'd put aside flatlander style. Nordik-pale skin, oval face, big brown eyes, and a small, serious mouth; dark and wavy hair cut short to fit into a pressure suit helmet.

She had never stumbled, never had a bad love affair, never been sick or hurt, never been caught in scandal or a public gaffe, until she attended Louis Wu's birthday party. Louis still believed that was a statistical fluke. Among a population in the tens of billions, someone like Teela Brown could surely be found.

But the Experimentalist Party among Pierson's puppeteers believed that they had been breeding the human race for luck. Teela was the descendant of six generations of Birthright Lottery winners. Whatever happened to Teela could be interpreted as lucky:

Falling in love with Louis Wu. Following him here.

Losing her way, in a domain three million times the surface area of the Earth. Finding Seeker, the brawny explorer who could show her so much of the Ringworld's secrets.

Finding the Repair Center beneath the Map of Mars. Finding a cache of tree-of-life root. Falling into a coma while her joints and brain case expanded, gender disappeared, gums and lips fused to horseshoes of sharp bone, skin thickened and wrinkled into armor... while she became a protector.

Acolyte returned with his mouth bloody. "Good hunting here. My father is missing another fine adventure."

Hanuman asked, "Louis, can you pass for crew on an ARM ship?"

"There's
a notion." Louis thought about it. Did he really remember enough...? "What I can't pass for is a local. I'm Homo sapiens, Earth origin. Why do I want to be a crewman, Hanuman? Crew of what?"

Hanuman said, "We must not be servants of a protector. So, I must be a tree-dwelling animal, and you must be a wanderer unless you serve some greater force. If you serve, it must be some aspect of the Fringe War--"

"The ARM, of course. But I don't know ARM protocol, and I'm not in their records."

"Isn't there a way you could have been missed?"

"...No. Let's try something else."

He munched on a handmeal while he thought. Drop the previous story; start over. Tell something simple. Something Louis Wu can keep straight, and Acolyte also.

He said, "Let's try to guess what a random ARM fighter has in its computer records.

"They know that we came home--that Chmeee and Louis Wu came home with Nessus injured and no Teela Brown. Suppose Teela lived? She never finds the Repair Center and tree-of-life.

"They might know that the Hindmost landed on Canyon twenty-three years later, and Louis Wu disappeared then. They might have tracked Chmeee too, from one of the Kzin worlds up to where the Hindmost collected
him.

"So the Hindmost brings us both back to the Ringworld as crew. That's the way it happened, but let's say he planned to rendezvous with Teela. She and Louis Wu have been living together ever since." It could have been that way. Should have been! Even though the Ringworld would have been torn apart a year later. Still daydreaming, Louis said, "They had a child after her implant wore off, and that's me."

Hanuman said, "Hypothesis diverges from ARM records."

Tanj! "How?"

"When would these events take place? Louis Wu returned here thirteen years ago. Does the ARM know that?"

"...Yes, they do. ARM found me on Canyon just before the Hindmost collected me." Louis had killed two agents. "Tanj! That would make Louis Wu's son twelve years old at best."

"Can you pass for twelve?" Hanuman asked.

"Hah hah."

"Could you, Louis Eldest, have left Teela with a child? The child would be aged a hundred and sixty falans."

"Almost forty years old. Couldn't happen. Teela must have had her five-year infertility shots. They'd have had to wear off. We never had the time."

Acolyte asked, "Can you be a child of Teela and Seeker?"

"Hah! No. Different species."

Hanuman and Acolyte waited.

Start over. "At the end of the first expedition, thirty-eight years ago, Chmeee and I came back to known space and the Patriarchy. We turned over
Long Shot
and some information about the Ringworld. We were debriefed by a joint commission, then the ARM asked me a lot more questions. They didn't learn much, because we didn't explore much. Our second expedition was twenty-three years later. What if there was an expedition in between?"

Hanuman asked, "Who sent it?"

"The Hindmost sent it. Expedition number one-and-a-half. I can fake that. I met a puppeteer named Chiron on the Fleet of Worlds. He was pure white, perfectly coiffed with a wonderful array of classic gems, and a little smaller than Nessus--" His companions had never met Nessus. "Thirty pounds lighter than the Hindmost. He sounded just like the Hindmost; I suppose they all had the same training.

"So now we can all describe him, stet? The Hindmost puts Chiron in charge. Chiron leaves not long after Chmeee, and I came back to human space. That brings him here... mmm... at least thirty years ago. He finds Teela. Her infertility shot has worn off. Teela takes up living with one of Chiron's crew. I'm the child."