“I have done that.” The window shifted, and Louis was looking into the cabin that he hadn’t seen in eleven years. A huge coffin occupied what had been his and Chmeee’s exercise space.
Well, futz. The Hindmost was eager. Louis said, “I left Hidden Patriarch a few thousand miles downstream. Didn’t you leave a stepping disk aboard? I can be there in seven or eight falans.”
“
“Oh?” All innocence was Louis Wu, with a smile beginning deep inside. Yes, it all came down to protectors.
“Before she died, Teela said she had left one living Ghoul protector in charge on the rim wall. I can verify that the Repair Crew is still active.”
“Show me,” Louis said.
The window in the cliff panned along a wall a thousand miles high.
The rim wall was a frieze: mountain shapes relief-carved into a continuous wall the color of Earth’s moon. Bands of night swept along its length, their motion barely visible. Spill mountains stood as tiny cones five to seven miles tall along its base. Along the top of this stretch of the rim wall, twenty faint violet flames pointed toward the stars.
The Hindmost said, “These are the rim ramjets as they were when we first saw them. I was testing a webeye camera, the same that the Ghouls now hold. Here, five years later, six years ago—”
The same view, night again, but the ghost flames had gone out. “The Ringworld was back in place by then,” Louis said.
“Oh, yes. But I kept track. Louis, can’t you see the attitude jets?” The view zoomed. Now Louis could make out the dark mouths of spillpipes high above the spill mountains, and ghostly shapes much larger than he’d guessed. Pairs of copper-colored toroids circled the tiny wasp waists of twenty-one double cones of fine wire: huge, skeletal Bussard ramjets.
“
“Six before I noticed. Caught up in the dance, I might have lost track for as much as—” Hesitation. “-a falan?”
Lonely to the point of madness, lost in a dance with ghosts. The poor herdbeast, once all-powerful, now all alone, rejected by his kind.
Louis shook it off. “So someone mounted the twenty-first motor, the one we found on the spaceport ledge.”
“Yes, but copied it first! Here, less than two years ago…” Twenty-three motors, and a twenty-fourth with skewed orientation, not yet mounted. Louis couldn’t see what was moving it; he only saw minute adjustments in position.
“My webeye has no more definition than this. But new motors are being manufactured and set in their cradles on the rim wall. Is this not evidence for a protector?”
“More than one,” Louis said. “Manufacture, transport, placement, supervision.”
Hesitation again. “Louis, some hominids go in herds or tribes, but my records suggest that protectors do not. I believe
“Mmm. And defense?”
“But a second protector is using the Meteor Defense to destroy invading ships!”
“Stet.”
“And what of the unseen creature following the Red Herder?”
“No, I won’t give you that one. A Ghoul spying on other Ghouls. Local politics.”
“Louis, think. We saw him enter the vampire sanctuary! He must be a protector if the vampire scent doesn’t affect him.”
“…Stet. What was he doing in there, do you think?”
“Protecting the Red Herder, it seemed. He may be of that species. Our next sight of him would have been the river, I expect.”
“Yeah. Self-effacing he was, and you can’t do that when you’re covered with vampire scent. But we won’t see him because your camera is lying in the cargo hold of a—”
“Three protectors, Louis. Six to eight, if your guess is right. War among Pak protectors made a radioactive waste of their own world.”
“I see your point,” Louis said placidly.
“Protectors of divergent species would leave fragments of the Ringworld falling to interstellar space. Louis, we cannot have two years! I could escape into stasis for the remaining lifespan of the universe. You can’t even reach Hot Needle of Inquiry!”
“Maybe they’ll cooperate,” Louis said. “Ringworld hominids do get along. Different species don’t use the same resources, and they
“There was war between Red Herders and Grass Giants.”
“Futz, Hindmost, they both wanted the grass!”
“I feel the situation is urgent.”
Louis stretched. His joints creaked, and tendons were protesting even this afternoon’s moderate exercise.
“Tell you what,” he said. “Send your refueling probe to where I left Hidden Patriarch. It’ll make a nice big target for you. I’ll move back downstream and see if our City Builder friends want to join us again. Eight falans, two Earth years, one of yours. Then, if we can come to an agreement, I’ll accept your medical attentions.”
The Hindmost said, “Agreement?”
“I’ll work out a contract.”
“You are in a poor position to bargain.”
“Let me know if you change your mind,” Louis said. He got up and waded back through the river… waiting for the musical scream behind him. It didn’t come.
Louis came awake slowly, groggy from lack of sleep. Sawur felt good, moving against him. He asked, “Do Weavers rish at sunglare?”
“By preference, we do.”
“Stet.” Louis got his arms working and began running his hands through her fur. “Nice.”
“Thank you.” She stretched along his length. Her fingers caressed his scalp, grooming what hair she could find. They moved easily into rishathra.
It was a wonderful lifestyle, in its way.
Presently Sawur pulled back to look at him. “Tired or not, you seem very relaxed.”
“I think I’ve got him.”
Night.
“I have formulated a contract,” the Hindmost said.
“So have I,” Louis Wu said. He held up his translator. “It’s in memory, mostly in notes.”
“I can’t read that. We’ll have to work from here.” The cliff abruptly glowed with lines of print, black on white, and a virtual keyboard taller than Louis himself.
Their audience murmured appreciatively. Most of the villagers were seated around Louis. Louis wondered what they thought they were seeing.
He’d been making notes toward his own contract all afternoon. To work from the Hindmost’s instead of his own would violate a basic principle of negotiation. Louis didn’t intend that.
But another principle said that a negotiator should never admit to being under a deadline. Louis asked in Interspeak, “How do I work it?”
“Point,” the Hindmost said. “Left for cursor, right to type.”
Louis tried it, waving his arms like an ambidextrous orchestra conductor. {Mental patterns may require alteration} — Louis deleted that and wrote, {Mental patterns must not be altered for any purpose.} The section on {PAYMENT} looked reasonable: he was to be charged for work comparable to treatment in hospitals at Sol system, paid off in service not to exceed twelve years.
