The Ringworld Throne (35 page)

What am I doing here?

In a moment he could be safe aboard Hot Needle of Inquiry, floating between sleeping plates while he got through his shivering, got his mind back, and tried to digest what he had and hadn’t learned.

Acolyte had seen him. If the Kzin could be persuaded to shut up, then --
Yeah, right.
The protector must have been observing Acolyte’s body language for half an Earth year. The Kzin couldn’t hide anything from him.

Louis said instead, “The
dead
could smell my terror.” He dropped his helmet and air pack and began opening zippers. “I thought I had the stepping disk controls figured out. Wrong! Oh, and the Martians set us a death trap. That almost got me, too.”

An adolescent’s half-bald head popped into view above a hatch. City Builder. The boy’s eyes widened in surprise, and he dropped from view.

The Kzin asked, “Martians?”

Louis began stripping off his suit. “Skip it. I’ve
got
to burn some energy. Can you run?”

The Kzin bristled. “I outran my father after we fought.”

“I’ll race you to the bow.”

Acolyte yowled and bounded away.

Louis’s pressure suit was pooled around his ankles. At the Kzin’s howl, his every muscle locked and he fell over.

That was a
wonderful
battle cry! Hissing ancient curses, Louis pulled the suit off, rolled to his feet and ran.

Acolyte was still in sight, moving considerably faster than he was. Then the ship structure jogged and he was gone.

Louis had lived aboard this ship for nearly two years. He wasn’t likely to get lost. He ran hard, competing only with himself. He had a full mile to cover.

“Loueee!”

The voice was faint and strange, coming from high overhead ... from a Pierson’s puppeteer perched in the aft crow’s nest.

Louis bellowed, “Hellooo!”

“Wait!” the voice called.

“Can’t!” He felt
good
.

A squarish shadow descended. Louis ran on. It came alongside, pacing him: a Repair Center cargo plate with rails welded around it. Louis called, “Stay clear. I’m in a race.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not—an intelligence test.”

“How do you feel?”

“Wonderful. Disoriented. Alive! Hindmost—don’t use—the Olympus stepping disk.”

“Why?”

“Martians—they’re alive—set a trap.” Louis drew a deep breath and blew it out. Salt air on his taste buds: wonderful! His breath was holding, his legs were holding. He pumped harder. “They’ll set another.”

“Two can play that game. What if I dropped a disk in the sea and began flicking water to Mons Olympus?”

“You ask me? Don’t exterminate—anything. You might need it—later. It’s the reason—you didn’t kill off—the kzinti!”

“More or less,” the puppeteer acknowledged. A one-eyed head dipped toward a puff of orange glimpsed far ahead along the top mid-deck. Acolyte.

“Louis, your advent is opportune. We have much to catch up on.”

“Where’s Bram?”

“Cooking our dinner.”

His heads were arced around to look into his own eyes.

Was the Hindmost joking? Maybe that was puppeteer laughter and maybe it wasn’t.

“Bram has a sensitive nose,” the Hindmost added.

Louis asked, “How goes the dance?”

“The dance! It proceeds without me. I’m tanj sick of using your recycler, Louis! I haven’t even had time to redesign it.”

“Thank you for that.”
Keep it casual.
But if Bram didn’t trust the Hindmost enough to let him take normal exercise or use a toilet and shower designed for puppeteers ...

Then the Hindmost might be ready to take back his life.

The top mid-deck ended. Louis clambered through ladders and corridors. Kzinti ladders were heavily tilted and the rungs were too far apart, but Louis went up and down like an ape on steroids. He kept expecting to pass Acolyte. Worse, he expected Acolyte to leap out at him from some alcove. He stayed to the heights.

In his mind he tried to map his way around the garden. It would take too long. At the end of a corridor he ran up a flight of hardwood steps to the top of a wall, along the wall to avoid a thicket of big yellow puffballs with impressive thorns, and dropped ten feet into dirt.

It had been a kzinti hunting park. For two years Louis and the City Builders had tended these plants. They had been growing wild when he arrived. Once they must have fed herds for kzinti sailors. The herds were gone, and he didn’t expect to find animals now, unless Acolyte was about to leap out from some citrus thicket.

But he never saw the Kzin.

There were eight tremendous main masts and uncountable sails, and the winches that moved them could only be worked by a Kzin. Or a protector? This mast was the foremast, with the fore crow’s nest at the top. Louis was blowing hard. His legs felt like overcooked noodles.

Someone was waiting in the bow.

Louis cursed in his mind. He didn’t have breath to spare. A moment later he recognized the protector shape.

Louis slowed. Bram waited like a statue. Louis couldn’t tell if he was breathing at all.

“I think you win,” Louis gasped.

“Were we racing?”

Bram wouldn’t have known of an intruder until the City Builder boy found him in the kitchen, or until he heard feet pounding across the deck overhead. He
must
have run. Louis said, “Whatever. I needed exercise.”

Before him was a mountain range ... an un-Earthly mountain range. Conical mountains, spaced wide apart and varying in size, ran left and right. Without a horizon, he had no real grasp of their size. Most were tall enough to have ice-white peaks, but below the ice they were all green patchwork.

Then his eye/mind perceived what loomed above them.

They were
tiny
.

Wait now, the rim was a thousand miles high. Of the twenty or thirty mountains he could pick out, five or six were mere foothills leaning against the rim wall, but two or three might match Everest.

The Hindmost drifted toward the bow. Behind him, a puff of orange pulled itself into view.

The Kzin plodded up. He was done, winded. Louis said, “Thank you, Acolyte. I really, really needed that. I was carrying enough adrenaline to run a war.”

The Kzin panted, “Father. Let me win. Didn’t want to. Kill me.”

“Ah.”

“How. Did you pass me?”

“Must have. Maybe in the garden.”

“*How*?”

“Bram,
you
must know about cursorial hunters?”

“I don’t know the term,” the protector said.

“Stet. Acolyte, most hunting creatures miss their jump eight times out of nine. If the prey runs away, they pick something slower. Only a few kinds of meat eaters pick their prey and follow it until they run it down. Wolves do that. So do humans.

“Big cats aren’t cursorial hunters, and kzinti aren’t, either. Your ancestors learned that they’d better track down an enemy or he’ll turn up later, but that’s your brain talking. Your evolution hasn’t caught up—“

“You knew you would win.”

“Yeah.”

The Kzin blinked at him. “If we had run only as far as the garden?”

“You would have won.”

“Thank you for the lesson.”

“Thank
you
.” That was nicely phrased, Louis thought. Who had taught him that?

Bram said, “Louis. Look around you. React.”

React? “Impressive. All that green! From the foothills to the frost line, all green. I shouldn’t be surprised. Those mountains are all seabottom muck, all fertilizer.”

“More?”

“Some of the pipes have stopped delivering flup. That would account for the lowest mountains. What’s left of them must be fairly hard rock by now. The highest ones must have a lot of water ice in them, at least at the peak. I can see rivers running from the foothills. Those mountains will get the Ringworld’s only regular earthquakes.”

“A difficult environment?”

“I suppose. Bram, we saw all this fifty falans ago. Have you seen signs of life in the mountains?”

“Once around your world would mark the distance to those mountains, but yes, we have. Louis, I have a meal to tend. Hindmost, Acolyte, take him to the dining hall. Show him.”

The Hindmost had sprayed webeyes on all four walls of the dining hall.

One was not in use: a mere bronze spiderweb.

A window shaped like a pool of spilled water looked out upon a row of dark green cones capped in white.

Another showed the edge of the rim wall drifting slowly past: a view from the refueling probe.

And one showed a score of muscular, hairy men using ropes to guide a square plate big enough to be the floor plan of a six-room bungalow. The plate floated above them. It might have been a big cargo plate, or part of a floating building. The men were pulling it toward Louis ... toward the Machine People cruiser and its stolen webeye.

“I left you a record taken six days ago,” the Hindmost said, “to watch when you woke. But this is in present time.”

“What are they doing?”

The Kzin answered. “They’re approaching the rim wall any way they can.”

“*Why*?”

“I don’t know that yet. Bram might,” the Kzin said. “While you were in treatment, Bram found your City Builder friends and set them aboard Hidden Patriarch. They obey Bram as my father’s slaves obeyed their lord. They had the ship moving to starboard within a day. Bram is studying the rim wall.”

Louis asked again, “Why?”

“We were not told,” Acolyte said.

The Hindmost said, “I have never seen Bram show fear, yet I think he fears protectors.”

Louis saw the connection. “The attitude jets need replacing. Otherwise the Ringworld slides off center. Any protector who sees
that
will be found mounting attitude jets on the rim wall. Right?”

“If the theory holds.”

“Why isn’t Bram there?”

The puppeteer made a short, sharp sound, as if a clarinet had sneezed. “If protectors knew that three off-world species have mounted invasions and a fourth is in wide orbit to study the effects, they would swarm the Map of Mars instead.”

“Give them decent telescopes? No, they’d still—Ah.”

“Ah?”

“Bram has to be on the rim wall, too. He’s preparing. The other protectors will kill him if they can.”

The puppeteer’s eyes met. He said, “In any case, we have Hidden Patriarch’s view of the local rim wall. My refueling probe has been in solar orbit for more than a falan now, skimming along the rim walls, recording. We’ve learned a great deal, Louis.” The Hindmost whistled a brief trill.

All three views began a slow zoom.

From Hidden Patriarch’s fore crow’s nest:
The spill mountains expanded until only one was in sight. Pale green and dark green, grass and forest, reached up to ice-white. At the very peak a black thread dipped into a compact knot of black fog. Seabottom muck fell steadily from a spillpipe a thousand miles overhead.

From the probe:
The rim wall blurred past. Louis tried to keep his eyes off it.

From the stolen webeye --
Louis began to laugh.

Now the Machine People cruiser was bobbing gently, twenty feet up. Beyond the edge of the floating plate was rolling landscape, hummocks like a thousand sleeping behemoths.

Ropes were pulling the cargo plate. Thirty-odd men of a species unfamiliar to Louis were pulling the ropes. The men wore light packs, but nothing else. Straight black hair covered their heads and their backs to below their buttocks. Perhaps hair was all they needed for warmth.

They were running uphill toward a ridge, and toward thirty hairy women waiting below the ridge. The women were waving, yelling encouragement. Among them was a small red woman, a Red Herder, attempting to guide them with wide motions of her arms.

The way grew steeper; the men weren’t running anymore. As they neared the crest, the women ran alongside them. They were as hairy as the men. More or less smoothly, they added themselves to the ropes. There was general laughter and brief conversations held in gasps.

The women pulled. Some were running backward. They had strong legs, Louis noted, as strong as the men’s. They were over the crest now and starting downhill. The runners were behind the window now, trying to slow the craft.

The Red Herder ran to snatch a rope and climb it.

The viewpoint moved faster and faster over the rounded land. By now all the runners must have let go. The hummocks grew larger ahead; grew mountainous. Streams ran among them and converged ahead. Louis realized that he was looking at the foot of a spill mountain.

The swaying of the plate was making Louis motion-sick. “They’re going to get themselves wrecked,” he said.

Acolyte yowled: kzinti ridicule.

“I don’t consider them sane myself,” the Hindmost said.