and he rolled across the bed and onto the floor.
Louis had leaped for the shower. He flipped it on full blast, jumped the water bed, put his shoulder into Chmeee’s armpit, and heaved. Chmeee’s flesh was hot beneath the fur.
The kzin stood and followed the pull into the stream of cold water. He moved about, getting water over every part of himself; then he huddled with his face in the stream. Presently he said, “How did you know?”
“You’ll smell it in a minute,” Louis said. “Scorched fur. What happened?”
“Suddenly I was burning. A dozen red lights glowed on the board. I leaped for the stepping disc. The lander is still on autopilot, if it isn’t destroyed.”
“We may have to find out.
The puppeteer was curled up with his heads beneath his belly.
One shock too many. It was easy to see why. A screen on the flight deck showed a half-familiar face.
The same face, enlarged, was looking out of the rectangle that had been a deep-radar projection. A mask of a face, like a human face molded out of old leather, but not quite. It was hairless. The jaws were hard, toothless crescents. From deep under a ridge of brow, the eyes looked speculatively out at Louis Wu.
Chapter 30 — Wheels Within Wheels
“It appears you’ve lost your pilot,” the leathery-faced intruder told them. It floated outside the hull: the distorted head and melon-sized shoulders of a protector, a ghost within the black rock that enclosed them.
Louis could only nod. The shocks had come too fast, from the wrong directions. He was aware that Chmeee stood beside him, dripping water, silently studying a potential enemy. The City Builders were mute. If Louis read their faces right, they were closer to awe or rapture than fear.
The protector said, “That traps you thoroughly. Soon enough you must go into stasis, and we need not discuss what happens after that. I am relieved. I wonder if I could make myself kill you.”
Louis said, “We thought you were all dead.”
“The Pak died off a quarter of a million years ago.” The protector’s fused lips and gums distorted some of the consonants, but it was speaking Interworld. Why Interworld? “A disease took them. You were right to assume that the protectors were all dead. But tree-of-life is alive and well beneath the Map of Mars. Sometimes it is discovered. I speculate that the immortality drug was made here when a protector needed funding for some project.”
“How did you learn Interworld?”
“I grew up with it. Louis, don’t you know me?”
It was like a knife in the gut. “Teela. How?”
Her face was hard as a mask. How could it show expression? She said, “A little knowledge. You know the adage? Seeker was looking for the base of the Arch. I paraded my superior education before him: I told him that the Arch had no base, that the world was a ring. He became badly upset. I told him that if he was looking for the place from which the world could be ruled, he should look for the construction shack.”
“Repair Center,” said Louis. A glance toward the flight deck showed the Hindmost as an elongated white footstool decorated in ruby and lavender gems.
“Of course it would become the Repair Center, and the center of power too,” the protector said. “Seeker remembered tales of the Great Ocean. It seemed a likely choice, protected by the natural barriers of distance, storm, and a dozen predatory ecologies. Astronomers had studied the Great Ocean from vantages far along the Arch, and Seeker remembered enough to make us maps.
“We were sixteen years crossing the Great Ocean. There should be legends made from that voyage. Did you know that the Maps are stocked? The kzinti have colonized the Map of Earth. We could not have continued if we had not captured a kzinti colony ship. There are islands in the Great Ocean that are large life forms, their backs covered in vegetation, who dive when a sailor least expects it—”
“Teela! How? How could you get to be like this?”
“A little knowledge, Louis. I never did reason out the origin of the Ringworld engineers, not until too late.”
“But you were
The protector nodded. “Bred for luck, by Pierson’s puppeteers meddling with Earth’s Fertility Laws to make the Birthright Lotteries. You assumed it worked. It always seemed stupid to me. Louis, do you want to believe that six generations of Birthright Lottery winners produced a lucky human being?”
He didn’t answer.
“Only one?” She seemed to be laughing at him. “Consider the luck of all the descendants of all the winners of the Birthright Lotteries. In twenty thousand years they must be well on their way out of the galaxy, fleeing the explosion of the galactic core. Why not aboard the Ringworld? Three million times the habitable surface area of the Earth, and it can be moved, Louis. The Ringworld is lucky for those unborn descendants of people bred for luck. If I can save the Ringworld, then it is luck for them that we came here twenty-three years ago, and luck for them that Seeker and I found the entrance in Mons Olympus. Their luck. Never mine.”
“Did it happen to him too?”
“Seeker died, of course. We both went mad with the hunger for tree-of-life root, but Seeker was a thousand years too old. It killed him.”
“I should never have left you,” Louis said.
“I gave you no choice. I had none myself — if you believe in luck. I have little choice now. Instincts are very strong in a protector.”
“Do you believe in luck?”
She said, “No. I wish I could.”
Louis flopped his arms — a gesture of helplessness — and turned away. He had always known that he would meet Teela Brown again. But not like this! He waved the sleeping field on and floated.
The Hindmost had the right idea. Crawl into your own navel.
But humans can’t bury their ears. Louis floated half curled up, with his arms over his face. But he heard:
“Speaker-To-Animals, I congratulate you on regaining your youth.”
“My name is Chmeee.”
“I beg your pardon,” the protector said. “Chmeee, how did you come here?”
The kzin said, “I am thrice trapped. Kidnapped by the Hindmost, barred by Louis from escaping the Ringworld, trapped underground by Teela Brown. This is a habit I must break. Will you fight me, Teela?”
“Not unless you can reach me, Chmeee.”
The kzin turned away.
“What do you want from us?” That was Kawaresksenjajok, speaking diffidently in the City Builder tongue, echoed in Interworld by the translator.
“Nothing.” Teela, in City Builder.
“Then what are we doing here?”
“Nothing. I’ve seen to it that you can do nothing.”
“I don’t understand.” The boy was near tears. “Why do you want to bury us underground?”
“Child, I do what I must. I must prevent one point five times ten to the twelfth murders.”
Louis opened his eyes.
Harkabeeparolyn objected heatedly. “But we’re here to prevent deaths! Don’t you know that the world is off center, sliding into the sun?”
“I know of that. I formed the team that has been remounting the Ringworld’s attitude jets, reversing the damage done by your species.”
“Luweewu says that it isn’t enough.”
“It isn’t.”
They had Louis Wu’s complete attention now.
