Ringworld's Children (4 page)

Good point. Louis said, "And what if he waits that long before he puts
Needle
back together?"

The puppeteer spoke in mournful music. "Then I am lost. Severed from my family, my home. Slave to a creature shaped by his evolution to hold nothing of worth beyond his own bloodline. Louis, you face the same. You are not of Tunesmith's species."

"On the Ringworld I'm not of any species."

"Yes, Louis,
yes,"
in crescendo, "don't you see the implication? He will feed you tree-of-life. You will be a protector. He will not give you power over
him.
You are to be only a prisoner and advisor, a talking head, the protector who has no descendants to guard. You will be the Voice that speaks for the safety of the Ringworld itself!"

"Yes," Louis said patiently, "but not for twenty-five years. I've been rebuilt young. I don't react to the smell of the root. I'm not old enough to make the change."

"But do you want that?"

"No. Nonono. What can you do for me? I've been studying your placement of stepping disks. I made a few changes."

The Hindmost whistled up the Map Room display, the Ringworld and stepping disks, and vectors and all. He turned a complete circle, heads held wide apart for extreme binocular vision. "Good."

"I expect you could reset everything. Understand though, Hindmost, if a service stack isn't where I expect to find it, that could kill me. You should give me access codes."

"Yes."

"By now Tunesmith must know everything about the 'doc. What don't I know?"

"You would not have the mental capacity."

Louis was silent.

"Carlos Wu built an experimental nanotech-based medical system more than two hundred years ago. The United Nations considered him a proprietary genius. They claimed his work too. He took the 'doc when he disappeared. Carlos Wu was never found. The 'doc reappeared six years later on Shasht-Fafnir. My agent, Nessus, was able to buy it. My research team modified it to accommodate Kzinti and Pierson's puppeteer physiology and to make it more versatile and dependable.

"Now Tunesmith has rebuilt the machine. I expect it will accommodate Night People too. He's mastered this form of nanotechnology and is using nanomachines to make more stepping disks. What else must you know? The 'doc is set to rebuild certain life forms from their genetic codes."

"Let's talk about
Needle.
Has he added weapons?"

"Yes, and mastered mine, and boosted my thrusters beyond sane safety limits--"

"What's he doing now?"

In the pop-up window, the black silhouette of Tunesmith wasn't doing anything. All the action was in deep space, where a point was moving away from the Ringworld at high speed. The ships of the Fringe War hadn't found it yet.

"A very agile ship with a miniature cabin. A small Hanging People protector is the pilot," the Hindmost said. "Little fuel, large thruster and reaction motors, weapons not from my library. As you saw, launched via linear accelerator. Onboard fuel is used only to dodge and decelerate. Tunesmith names it
Probe One."

Probe One
was hard to see when its motor was off, but the motor was sputtering now as it dodged plasma weapons and missiles and, somehow, even lasers. Tunesmith's instruments followed it out toward interstellar space.

The Ringworld system retained its outer comets. All the near masses--planets, moons, asteroids--had been stripped from Ringworld system long ago, but comets must have been judged no threat to the Ringworld. After all, there were no big masses to change their orbits and hurl them inward.

Ships of half a dozen species had been hiding among the comets ever since Chmeee and Louis revealed the Ringworld's existence nearly forty years ago.

Now ARM ships--human-built, the police and military branch of the United Nations--streaked in from offscreen. They looked more like tethers than ships, some with smaller ships attached.
Probe One
lit like a flashbulb--
guessed wrong about a laser!
--and vanished.

Tunesmith's screen swung wide, following nothing obvious.

Louis hadn't seen any debris.

"Hanging People" was a generic designation for hominids who lived a monkey lifestyle. Some weren't sapient. A Hanging People protector would still gain human intelligence or better. Hastily trained for spaceflight, it might outguess ARM defenses, but Tunesmith would still outthink it, would still keep control. Being a protector was all about control.

Tunesmith's telescope swung half around the sky, a hundred and eighty degrees, or nearly that. Tunesmith's viewpoint focused on a fuzzy object... a comet, loosely packed ice drifting apart. Then on a spacecraft emerging from within the cloud.

It was lens shaped, painted black with vivid orange markings in the dots-and-commas of Kzinti script.

"Markings name this ship
Diplomat,"
the Hindmost told Louis. "We've observed.
Diplomat
seems well armed, but it never comes close to the Ringworld star. Always it lurks among the comets. Always it can flee in hyperdrive."

"That doesn't sound like Kzinti."

"They learn. I deem
Diplomat
the command ship for the Patriarchy fleet."

Probe One
was back. It had circled halfway around Ringworld's sun through hyperspace in less than thirty minutes. Its huge intrinsic velocity had pointed away from the sun; now it carried the ship inward, straight toward
Diplomat.

Word from the other side of the sky would not have reached
Diplomat
yet. Minutes passed before the ship's Kzinti crew reacted to the intruder. Then threads of interplanetary dust glowed a bit in
Diplomat's
laser fire, and a handful of small ships zipped out of the ice cloud.

Probe One
began dodging. A laser:
Probe One
flared brilliantly. Louis squinted against the glare. Tunesmith's screen wasn't built to protect viewers from blindness.
Probe One
dodged out of the beam and into a scintillation of impacts and was still going.

Louis asked, "General Products' hull?"

"That, under a layer of Ringworld floor material."

Another ship popped out nearby, just long enough for Louis to get a good view. It was much larger than
Diplomat,
a transparent sphere with complex machinery packed tightly inside the hull... gone now, like the soap bubble it resembled.

"Long Shot,"
Louis said, anger rising.

"I saw it," the Hindmost said.

"They ran. Kzinti don't do that."

"Long Shot
is being used for courier service. It's too valuable to risk, and the Patriarchy will not have found room for armaments."

"ARM and Patriarchy were supposed to
share
that ship. Chmeee and I gave it to them with that understanding."

Probe One
was too near the lens ship, accelerating sideways to get around it while fighting energy displays and lesser ships. Suddenly there was actinic light. Louis blinked hard. When he could see again,
Probe One
was gone.

"What the futz was that?" he demanded.

"Antimatter bullet. The newer ARM ships are all powered by antimatter, but we had not seen it used by the Patriarchy. They must manufacture their own in a particle accelerator somewhere. The ARM has a source, an antimatter solar system."

"Antimatter. Hindmost, that makes the Fringe War a
lot
more dangerous. The Ringworld is too fragile for this."

"Agreed."

"What's he doing now?"

The shadow of a protector leapt from its chair, arced like a ballet superstar across the view of comets and warships, touched down at one focus of the elliptical room, and was gone.

A hand like a sackful of ball bearings closed on Louis's forearm. He spasmed like a man electrocuted. "Louis! Good, you're awake," Tunesmith said briskly. "Without you this would have been difficult. Hindmost, come out of there. Danger does not await our convenience. Louis, are you all right? Your heartbeat sounds funny."

Tunesmith was a
young
protector.

A Night People male of middle age had been lured into a cavern that grew tree-of-life. Tunesmith had emerged from his cocoon state a hundred and ten days ago: a tremendous mind demanding to be trained, in a hominid body hardened for endless war.

At first he must have satisfied himself with the Librarians' incomplete knowledge, and Acolyte's, and with what came in niggardly driblets from the Hindmost.

Tunesmith would not have begun his intrusions in any tentative fashion, Louis thought. The Hindmost might block that. Tunesmith must have built this heavy equipment and programmed it at his leisure, then set it moving all at once, after he'd picked the Hindmost's locks.

Fait accompli:
suddenly he's standing over the puppeteer in his own living quarters. Suddenly he's filleted the Hindmost's spacecraft and is removing components as a fisher guts a trout.

Protectors of any species would be manipulative. Intelligence
was
manipulative, wasn't it? A superior intelligence would want to
control
his teachers. Knock them off balance from time to time. The differences between ally, servant, slave, and sled dog blur when the difference in intelligence is great enough.

A moment ago Louis had been spying on a protector. Suddenly the protector was beside him, gripping his wrist.

Louis said, "I'm fine. Much too young to have a heart attack."

The puppeteer's heads and legs were buried under him.

"Work on him," Tunesmith said. "I'm going to be busy."

"Two questions," Louis said, but the protector was gone.

The Hindmost eased a head into the open. No part of the neck showed, only eye and mouth.

Tunesmith could be seen sprinting about outside
Hot Needle of Inquiry,
working controls, then shouting into thin air. Heavy machinery began to move. The rebuilt hyperdrive motor was in motion. Unequal halves of the ship's hull began to close. The top of the linear accelerator began to track across the underside of Mons Olympus.

The Hindmost whistled. "I was right! He's--" The head ducked back under him. Tunesmith was back.

He stooped to work controls on the hidden stepping disk. Then he picked up the curled-up puppeteer, evading the hind leg as it lashed out. They weighed about the same, Louis guessed. "Louis, follow," he barked, and stepped forward and was gone.

Just for an instant, Louis Wu rebelled.

It was a test, of course. Would Louis Wu follow him without question? This was all just too familiar.

An alien mastermind bursts into Louis Wu's life, assembles a crew, and hares off on a mission known only to the master. First Nessus, then the Hindmost, then the protector Teela Brown, then Bram, now Tunesmith, each chooses Louis Wu for reasons of convenience, drops him into the middle of a situation he doesn't understand, and runs him like a marionette. By the time Louis finishes playing catch-up, he's committed to something on the far side of sanity.

Pierson's puppeteers were control freaks. A true coward never turns his back on danger.

Being a protector was all about control.

Where would he be, what would Louis Wu have done, by the time he knew anything?

The instant passed. If he didn't follow, he'd be out of the action entirely. Louis stepped forward, onto a stepping disk that looked like the rest of the floor, and flicked out.

A flood of sunlight made him squint.

He stood on a high peak, on a stack of six float plates and a stepping disk. Tunesmith and the Hindmost stood below him on a translucent gray surface. Louis looked first for the Arch, to orient himself.

The Arch--the far side of the Ringworld--arced from horizon to horizon, broad above the haze at the spinward and antispin horizons, narrowing toward noon where it passed behind the sun. Louis hadn't seen the Arch in some time.

Fist-of-God Mountain loomed to port like a lost moon, poking far out of the atmosphere. Around its foot the land was more moonscape than desert, hundreds of millions of square miles of lifeless pitted rock. Fist-of-God was an inverted crater. A meteoroid had punched up through the Ringworld floor from underneath, hundreds of years ago. The blast had flayed soil from the high places, even this far away. Naked scrith was dramatically slippery.

Closer were silver threads of river and silver patches of sea, and the dark green tint of life gradually encroaching. The land below the hill was a broad jungle, and cutting through it, a river miles across.

"Watch your footing," Tunesmith said. Louis lowered himself carefully onto naked scrith.

It was worth remembering: beneath this shell of landscape was nothing but stars and vacuum. There would be no springs hereabouts, no groundwater, nothing to support life. No busybody to wander by, to fiddle with the controls on an abandoned service stack. Exposed as it was, this was an excellent hiding place for high-tech tools such as these.

Louis asked, "Are you going to explain what's going on?"

Tunesmith said, "Briefly. As a breeder I knew little but remembered a great deal. Coming out of my transition from breeder to protector, the first thing I was sure of was that the Ringworld is terribly fragile. I knew that I was reborn to protect the Ringworld and all its species.

"That has come in steps. I whiffed Bram, of course, and knew I had to kill him. I spent some time learning from the Hindmost and his library, and watching the Fringe War develop. Then for a time it seemed best to work alone or with a few Hanging People protectors. Now I must assemble a team."

"To do what?"

Tunesmith touched controls. The service stack lifted. Four float plates detached from the bottom and eased apart. Tunesmith boarded a stack of two, leaving one each for the puppeteer and the man.