Ringworld's Children (13 page)

"What is your name, child?"

"Luis." Acolyte might forget, but he'd still sound right:
Looiss, Luis.
"Luis Tamasan," the first Oriental name he could think of, to account for the epicanthic folds in his eyes. "Chiron had his records erased. The ARM already knows that puppeteers meddle with their records. There's no Fertility Board record either, because my father... mmm.
Horace
Tamasan was born to a freemother, an illegal birth. Lots of bastards go to space."

Hanuman said, "A consistent tale. Have we the acting knack to tell it?"

Tunesmith's voice broke in without warning. "Hanuman, you surmise that an ARM fighter has dropped its add-on tank and gone off to battle. I scan an area bigger than worlds, and I find nothing to fight. My neutrino scan shows no power sources. Battery-powered ships would not register, I assume. Must I watch until they fire lasers or antimatter bullets?"

Louis said, "That half hour delay is going to drive us nuts sooner or later."

"Small ships might escape Tunesmith's instruments, but he wouldn't miss a weapons laser or antimatter flash," said Hanuman. "Would they fight while refusing to use such weapons? No. I surmise there is no fight at all, Luis."

Louis mulled that. If the ARMs hadn't been expecting a fight, where had the ARM ship gone? Why had they dropped their tank first?

"The tank might be empty," Hanuman suggested. "They wanted greater range. They won't be back."

Louis said, "All right, let's rethink. Spinward of us, there's a lot of fog to hide in. Ships could be hunting each other. Ah, flup, never mind." Both aliens were looking at him. "If there's nothing to fight, they've gone off to look at the puncture! What else is there? The Ringworld is dying. They need to tell their mother ship what's happening here, and they might want to run away fast, so they dropped their tank."

Hanuman thought it over; nodded. "Don your pressure suits."

Most of the
Mouse Eaters were dozing underground after a morning meal.

Most of the villagers were inside their burrow houses. Older children and elders were cleaning up after the feast, with Wembleth's help, while shadow withdrew from the sun. For him it was a good choice; he needed some sunlight to stay healthy. In a minute they'd all go in
--

The blast Spit Snail Darter,
in stasis, into a rocky cliff above a vast forest. When time resumed, the ship had become part of an immense landslide of shattered shale.

Far, far to spinward, a sea of mist ran all across the horizon, hiding everything up to the base of the Arch. Worlds away, the mist domed upward. The near edge of the mist was a shock wave still moving sluggishly toward
Snail Darter.

Detective Oliver Forrestier busied himself with various sensors.
Right Whale,
the big ARM cruiser, had gone up against a nameless Kzinti juggernaut, just before the fireball and blackout. There had been other ships too... but now there was nothing. "No obvious contrails," Oliver said. "The cloud is spitting neutrinos... last traces of antimatter, I guess, and diminishing. No point sources. No big ships."

"The fireball is collapsing. Like it's being
sucked
down," Claus said uneasily.

Snail Darter
lifted. 'Tec-Two Claus Raschid asked, "Just go straight on in, Roxanny?"

"Stay low, take our time. Look around. Claus, there's a
hole
at the center of all this. A hole in the Ringworld is a way home."

Roxanny Gauthier laughed boisterously. "We're alive! Isn't that enough?
Look
at the trail we left! We can follow it right back to the explosion. Claus, Oliver, for all we know about stasis fields, did you really believe it? Does it make sense that you can stop time and restart it? When I saw the light, I knew I was in an antimatter explosion. I thought we were dead!"

Oliver guessed. "Inside, taking cover from the shock wave. Look at your displays, Roxanny. Air pressure is down and dropping. They hid from the shock wave and then
--"

"Suffocated? The air's draining out." Claus wasn't stupid; he was only coming out of denial. "We've killed the whole Ringworld. Hey
--"

Underground, Wembleth was
suffocating.

Here were folk with the power to fly! Tales told of such power, but these were flying in the winds of a major disaster. Anyone who could do that must know
something.

He didn't know how to tell the Vashneesht that others needed rescuing. It never occurred to him that Vashneesht
--
wizards
--
might be the cause of a world-destroying disaster.

Gravity near a Ball World follows an inverse square law. In contrast, the Ringworld is a plane surface. Gravity does not dwindle as you rise, nor do spin gravity nor magnetic force, until the Ringworld looks less like a plane than a ribbon, from hundreds of thousands of miles high.

The Ringworld engineers embedded a lacework of superconducting cable in the Ringworld floor. The grid allows magnetic manipulation of solar flares to cause a superthermal laser effect, the Ringworld meteor defense; but it also opens the entire Ringworld to magnetic levitation.

Magnetically powered vehicles could rise to any height.

It was night when the skycycles lifted. Sixty miles high, effectively out of the atmosphere, they followed the gouge spinward. Verdant landscape became stormy, in ripples and streams of lightning-lit cloud rather than in whorl patterns. Then it was all unbroken clouds.

The terminator, the shadow of the edge of a shadow square, swept over them. A growing sliver of sun became a noonday glare. How long had it been since Louis saw a sunrise?

They crossed above a tremendous, sagging, faintly glowing tube. Horsetails of mist were flowing over the tube's flaccidities and disappearing into vacuum. Tunesmith's plug wouldn't hold forever.

Soil and rock still clung to the scrith floor. There were pools and ribbons of foamy ice, all ravaged in a radial pattern. They followed it inward toward the puncture.

The rim of the hole glittered. Maybe, maybe Tunesmith's "reweaving" system was working.

"Spacecraft," Acolyte said. "Above the hole."

There was no exhaust. The ship hovered on thrusters: a cylinder with a flattened belly, a little bigger than the tank it had left behind, but with a bulb of transparent canopy for a nose.

"That's an ARM design, Kittycatcher Class," Louis said. "A fighter. Three crew. They'll have seen us by now."

"Will they fire on us?"

"We must look harmless enough." Louis was trying to persuade himself.

Hologram miniatures of his two allies blurred, then became two views of a dark-skinned woman in ARM uniform. A contralto voice blared from his speaker. "Intruders, answer at once or be destroyed! You have entered a war zone!"

"I'm Luis Tamasan," Louis Wu answered. "Can you hear me?"

"We hear you, Luis Tamasan. Please approach
Snail Darter."

"What are your intentions?"

"We are observers for the United Nations," the woman said. "What do you know of events in this region?"

"We came to observe a puncture in the Ringworld floor."

"Your associate is a Kzin."

Louis laughed. "Acolyte is local, a Ringworld native. I'm local too."

She peered at his hologram. "You look human."

"I'm human. Born here. Acolyte was too, and he's Kzin."

"There are Kzinti here?"

"Archaic Kzinti, in the Great Ocean." That should rouse their curiosity.

The ARM woman sounded peevish. "We tried every reasonable frequency. Why are you communicating in a mode used by the Fleet of Worlds?"

"Puppeteers found the Ringworld and puppeteers explored it first," Louis said with a trace of chill in his voice. "My parents and Acolyte's father came here with Pierson's puppeteers."

"Land there at the edge."

"We came to examine the puncture. May we circle above it?"

"Land
now,
Ringworld's children."

Louis said, "Down, Acolyte." He let his flycycle sink.

The ARM asked, "Acolyte, do you speak Interworld?"

"Madam LE, I do," the Kzin rumbled.

"While I serve the United Nations you may address me by my rank, as Copilot or 'Tec, not as Legal Entity. How may I call you?"

"Acolyte, until I earn a more worthy name."

"What is your connection to the Patriarchy?"

"I hear of them from my father. We see the lights of the Fringe War."

The skycycles settled on bare scrith.

Snail Darter
descended with evident caution, and touched down. An airlock opened below its rounded tip. A human shape emerged, then a second pulling a bulb of some kind through a door that was too narrow. It got through anyway.

One ARM flew to meet the flycycles while the other lowered the bulb to the desiccated turf. The bulb was a rescue pod, an inflated balloon with a few opaque bulges of life-support gear. The shadow of a walking man showed in the bulb as it rolled toward the flycycles.

'Tec-First Gauthier--easily recognized through her fishbowl helmet--must have had a clear view of Hanuman riding alert in Acolyte's lap. Acolyte attached a line to Hanuman's pressure suit, as if the Hanging Person might scamper away and have to be caught. The pair debarked and joined Louis. Gauthier settled before them.

"I feel small," Acolyte said uneasily.

This close to the puncture, the floor was polished by the antimatter blast: featureless scrith, translucent and smooth, artificial and infinite. Louis and his companions were tiny. Louis hadn't felt it until the Kzin spoke.

"LE Acolyte, LE Luis," said Gauthier--courtesy, because Acolyte couldn't ever have been registered as a Legal Entity, nor could Luis Tamasan. "--meet 'Tec Oliver Forrestier and LE Wembleth. I'm 'Tec Roxanny Gauthier." Her manner had softened.

'Tec Forrestier, the second flyer, was large and pale, perhaps a Belter raised in low G. Like Gauthier's his rust-colored curly hair was cut close to his scalp. He smiled and touched gloves with the man, then the Kzin. "We're glad to find you," he said, Gauthier asked, "Can you take Wembleth for us? We don't have room for him."