Ringworld's Children (14 page)

"It's a three man ship," Forrestier explained.

"What's Wembleth, then?" Louis asked. "Local?"

Wembleth had lagged behind. Rolling a balloon by walking on its bottom didn't seem to bother him, but it was slow going. When he tried to stop, the balloon kept moving; he fell over, and got up without embarrassment.

Could Wembleth hear their communicators? He wasn't speaking.

Forrestier said, "We found him where the air was disappearing. Corpses and smashed burrows all around him. Do you recognize his type?"

"His species?" Louis studied Wembleth.

Wembleth blinked back as if light hurt his eyes, but they met Louis's without a flinch. He was eight inches shorter than Louis, five feet six or a little more. He was dressed in woven cloth, trousers and a loose shirt with patch pockets, all the color of sand. His feet were bare, large, and horny, with toenails like jagged weapons. His skin was darker than Louis's, paler than Roxanny Gauthier's, and his hands and face and neck were wrinkled. Thick hair, black and white, hid most of his face. Blue scrollwork on his brow and cheeks might have been ritual tattooing, or might have been naturally evolved camouflage. He was smiling, interested, where any normal man might have cowered in terror.

"I don't know this exact species." Louis hadn't met any locals within hundreds of millions of miles, but he didn't say that. He hadn't decided how far "Luis Tamasan" had traveled. He said, "There are thousands of hominid species on the Ringworld, maybe tens of thousands, and most of them are sapient. Wembleth is about average size. Dark skin's pretty common too. Teeth--" Wembleth smiled; Louis winced.

Wembleth's teeth were crooked and discolored. Four were missing, leaving black gaps. Louis could
feel
what that must be like. Wouldn't he be constantly chewing up his tongue?

Wembleth still had three canines, though. Louis asked, "Meat eater?"

'Tec Gauthier shrugged. "We gave him a standard dole brick. There's a setting for raw meat, of course, in case we get a Kzinti prisoner. He ate some of that."

"We can feed Wembleth, then. Even if his whole ecology is dead," Louis said.

"Good! Another matter. Tell me anything you can," Oliver Forrestier said, "about
that."
His arm swept a circle.

"The sudden mountain range." Obvious first question, yet Louis hadn't planned an answer. He improvised: "We saw it come down. Things of this scale, Ringworld scale, even my parents never have much to say. Chiron sent us to learn more."

"Chiron?"

"He brought my father to this place. A puppeteer."

"Stet. Come here, Luis." Forrestier walked toward the puncture seventy feet away. Louis followed.

Forrestier stopped. His toes were too near the edge. From this viewpoint it was still a bottomless pit ten or fifteen miles across. Shrinking, it was shrinking. The edge was hard to focus on; it blurred and shimmered when Louis moved his head.

Forrestier asked, "Is this normal?"

"I've never looked into a rip in the floor of the world," Louis said. "It's scary." It was barely a lie. He'd seen Fist-of-God crater... but "Luis" hadn't.

Gauthier said, "Well, it looks like it's repairing itself. Does it always do that? Over the years we've seen some of those hourglass storms die out. We think those are punctures and air leakage."

Louis frowned, projecting
Don't understand.
He remembered a word from far away, used as if it meant
magicians,
but it meant
protector.
"Vashneesht," he said. "There are secrets we never learn."

'Tec-One Gauthier said, "Oliver, get back from there! Luis, Acolyte, shall we set up a tent?"

Roxanny and Oliver lifted a bulky package out of the ship's lock. They set it on the scrith and moored it with stickstrip edges. The tent inflated itself, writhing and trying to bounce, because of course the stickstrip wouldn't hold on scrith. Roxanny left Oliver to deal with that while she went back for the kitchen 'doc.

Oliver saw what she was doing and exploded. "LE Gauthier, are you schitzy? We can't lose that!"

"We can live without for a few hours."

"Why did you try to give away Wembleth? A Ringworld native! He's a wonderful find!"

"Wembleth is a prize, all right. I wish we could take them both, but he's still just a local. He doesn't know enough. I want Luis Tamasan! I'd take the Kzin if I could fit him in the ship, but I can't, so we'll question him first."

"Roxanny, he's still a Kzin!"

"You're afraid? He's a kid. They're both teen children. Both their parents were on the Ringworld before the Fleet, and the kids must have been hearing about it all their lives."

Oliver considered. "What would their parents do to get them back?"

"Maybe we'll find that out too, after we know everything they do." She grinned. "Ollie, did you see the look on Luis's face? Like--"

Oliver had, and his voice showed his resentment. "Like he never saw a woman before. All right, Roxanny, have it your way. We'll crawl into the tent with a Kzin, and by Finagle he's the first that gets fed! But we've got way more data than we were sent for, and the trick now is to get home with it!"

The ARMs were involved with erecting the tent. Nobody was looking at Louis when Tunesmith's miniature bust popped up on his dash.

The protector said, "I urgently need to know whether my reweaving system is working. Is the hole getting smaller? How drastically must I act to save
something?
I need hardly warn you not to fall into the puncture."

Was
Snail Darter
or its mother ship eavesdropping? Even if this line were private, little glowing hologram heads would be seen. Louis said quickly, "The hole is closing.
It's closing.
We have company." He turned the holoscreen off.

Now Tunesmith could do no more than listen.

The tent had inflated into a tube with a big airlock, an alcove for vacuum gear, a living space, and silver walls that must hide a toilet. Gauthier inside, and Forrestier outside, assisted the rest to enter.

Acolyte carried Hanuman, but left him in his pressure suit. "The suit takes care of sanitary matters," Acolyte said. Hanuman ooked.

Gauthier had thrown back her helmet, though she didn't move to strip off her suit. Oliver had done the same. The ARMs didn't seem to be excessively distrustful. Louis and Acolyte opened their own helmets. The varying species settled themselves around a small kitchen box.

Wembleth spoke syllables Louis had never heard. A translator voice spoke from one of his pockets: "Good, this is much more room." The hairy man zipped his rescue pod open and wriggled out with a sigh of contentment.

"Wembleth makes number four in a three man ship," Forrestier explained. "We found him surrounded by the dead of some larger, hairier species, gasping like a beached fish, but on his feet and pulling himself toward us by any ruined wall the storm hadn't flung away. We had to stuff him in Mission and Weapons and shut it all off. We've questioned him--he knows things we need--but we can't fly like that, LE Luis. We need to defend ourselves."

"We'll take him someplace he can live," Louis said.

"We'll find a way to moor his rescue pod to your flying thing. We don't have a suit that'll fit him."

'Tec Gauthier was handing out dole bricks from the little kitchen. She made adjustments to give Acolyte a brick of drippy red, then something fruity for Hanuman. "It's the only kitchen we've got, and it's the 'doc too. In flight, in peacetime, this tent buds out from the hull. If we can't deploy it, we barely have room to wiggle. War is hell," she said lightly. "Can I give you something to drink?"

"Surprise me," Louis said. "Tea? Juice?"

"Beer?"

"Better not. And Acolyte's too young."

Acolyte growled.

Roxanny laughed. "So're you, Luis!"

She thought he was a child! He said, "Yes, LE."

She passed out squeezebulbs: something cranberry-flavored for Louis, boullion for Acolyte and Wembleth. "You both grew up on the Ringworld. Did your fathers tell you about planets?"

"We learned physics that way," Acolyte said. "Father--Chmeee--tried to show me what a Coriolis storm is, a hurricane. I'm not sure I understand."

"I'd love to see Earth," Louis said. A working spacecraft! His first chance to defect since the abominable Bram had found him... no, since before that. Since he'd sliced up
Needle's
hyperdrive motor!

There had to be a way to speak to Roxanny Gauthier alone.

Her suit wasn't quite a skintight: it only hinted at a shape that made his heart turn over. A strong woman, an athlete. Her face was severe, with a square chin and a straight-edged nose. She'd be in her fifties, Louis judged, based on body language and the way Forrestier deferred to her... unless she ranked him. Her hair was a sparse black puffball; she must depilate or shave her scalp periodically.

It took Louis by surprise, after all the hominids he'd met, how much he longed for the sight of a woman.

But she was asking something. "Do you know anything about a big transparent ship?"

Louis shook his head. Acolyte was less cautious. "Like a General Products ship? What would we see, a glass bubble?"

"Yah, a big glass bubble. What do you know about General Products hulls?"

"Luis's father came here in a Number Two," Acolyte said. He was giving too much detail. He'd be caught in inconsistencies, Louis feared... but Chmeee must have described
Liar,
which had been a Number Two, when he told his son of the first expedition.

And Acolyte was enjoying himself.

"A huge glass bubble filled with gear. Massive machines inside," Gauthier said.

Forrestier said, "Or four flames moving across the sky. It's got four fusion motors. It was stolen, maybe by your Chiron."

Louis said, "Chiron doesn't tell us everything. Or anything."

Roxanny said, "Actually it was stolen twice, first by the Kzinti, then from the Kzinti. We didn't see it reach the Ringworld, but we think it's here. We want it back."

"Tell us about the Chiron expedition," Oliver ordered.

Louis improvised. "Dad says it took two years, and it was way cramped." Stick to what you know where possible--"My mother came on the first expedition. She says
Lying Bastard
started as a Number Two and just grew out of all proportion, bigger every time a puppeteer thought of another safety feature. In the end
Lying Bastard
was a big flying wing with the General Products cylinder stuck into it. The stasis field enclosed the cylinder, but they lost everything that was on the wing." All of that would be in ARM records, including Louis Wu's own speculations. They'd find Louis's description of Chiron there too.

"So when Chiron built
his
ship, he wedged everything inside the hull. I've been in it, but not since I was
this
high, and it was already cramped--"

"We would like to talk to Chiron," Oliver said. "Where may we find him?"

Acolyte said, "Chiron has told us most explicitly that we must not tell anyone how to find him."

To Roxanny Oliver said,
"Long Shot
was in the hands of Kzinti. Puppeteers might find that distressing, don't you think? A puppeteer might act to get it back." He asked Louis, "Did Chiron's ship have a name?"

"Paranoia,"
Louis said without cracking a smile.

"How is it armed?"

"Paranoia
has no armaments at all," Louis said, "barring tools which may be turned to that end. We're not to speak of those."

"Where on the Ringworld did your
Paranoia
land? Was it near the Great Ocean, where the first expedition left Teela Brown?"

Louis hadn't decided that either. "Can't say."

"Boy, you don't seem to have anything at all to trade," Roxanny Gauthier said. "What would you like to know from us? Did Chiron tell you what questions to ask?"

"He wants to know if the Ringworld is going to heal. I can see that the rupture's sealing itself. Even so, what can you tell us about the Fringe War? Is it about to go away?"

"I doubt it," Roxanny said.

"Or is it going to get so big and violent that it shatters everything?"

"That doesn't have to happen," she said firmly.

Oliver laughed. Roxanny looked around in annoyance, and Oliver said, "Just a passing thought. How old are you, Luis?"

Louis had planned to be in his thirties, but both ARMs seemed to think he was just past puberty. For some reason this delighted him. Tanj, why not? He said, "Eighty falans and a bit."

"And a falan would be?"

"Ten rotations of the sky."

"About seventy-five days? Thirty-hour Ringworld days?" Oliver was whispering to a pocket computer, bigger than a civilian version. "You're about twenty years old, Earth time. I'm forty-six. Roxanny?"

"I'm fifty-one," she said without hesitation.

"We take boosterspice, of course. It keeps us from getting old. What crossed my mind," Oliver Forrestier said, "is that this is the first human woman you've ever seen other than your mother, Luis."

Roxanny was smiling, a reluctant smile. And Louis was flushing, suddenly aware that his eyes had lingered too long on Roxanny Gauthier; that he'd edged closer to her than the cramped quarters demanded; that he couldn't look at her and talk coherently. The close air must be alive with pheromones... Roxanny's and Oliver's too. And as Oliver was the first human male he'd seen or sniffed in twenty-odd years--and no room for a shower aboard
Snail Darter
--it wasn't surprising if Louis felt both horny and threatened.

"Sorry," he said, and eased back by an inch.

It crossed his mind that intimidation could take many forms. They wanted something from Luis: information Louis Wu would have to make up, but still--

Roxanny laughed lightly. "Never mind. Luis, would you like to see
Snail Darter?
Acolyte, we can't take you aboard. It's too cramped. Luis can tell you about it afterward."