The Ringworld Throne

It didn’t occur to her to doubt a wayspirit. Anyone who could speak such things must really know what she was talking about. She asked, “Why not go faster than sound? Couldn’t we hear each other?”

“It’s the speed of sound in air, Warvia. If we make the air go with us, the sound in the air goes with us, too.”

“Oh.”

“The air sled is doing what the universe says it must. It can go to only one place, and then it will touch softly as a feather.”

Warvia asked again, “Why tell me?”

“When you know what is happening, it can’t frighten you. Of course there are exceptions, but the sky sled isn’t one. It flies in a kind of invisible groove, a pattern of magnetic fields. It cannot lose its way.”

“Pattern of…?”

“I will teach you about magnets and gravity and inertia. Inertia is the force that pulls you against the inside of the spinning ring so that gravity will not pull you into the sun—”

“Is that real, too, what the Night People say? The Arch is a ring?”

“Yes. Gravity is a force you need hardly notice, but it holds the sun together so that it can burn. Magnets allow the sun’s rind to be manipulated, to defend the Arch against things falling from outside. I will teach you more, if you come in daylight.”

“Why?”

“You and Tegger are frightened. If you understand what’s happening here, your fright will go away. If you lose your fright, so will Tegger. You will not go mad.”

“Tegger,” she said, and looked around her. “Tegger must be starving.” She couldn’t find the shrieker she’d dropped. She went back to the shrieker village, holding her eyes to the deck. Nearly the speed of sound: how fast was that in daywalks?

A shrieker came when she tickled a tunnel opening, and she bagged it. She climbed into the payload bay, and no voice stopped her.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO — THE NET

HOT NEEDLE OF INQUIRY, A.D. 2893

…Coffin!

Louis tried to push the lid away. The lid didn’t want to move that fast. He pulled his knees up to set his feet and thrust upward, then roll-dived out from under the half-raised lid. Hit the floor. Kept rolling and stood up in a crouch.

Not a coffin, he remembered, but he was on an adrenaline high, with good reason to stay in motion. What had been happening while he was in the box?

His ankle stung. He’d kicked something. Ignore it.

The strangest thing about his waking was the way he felt.

In their early twenties, Louis and a dozen friends had run an ancient martial arts teaching program. A few dropped out when the computer had them hitting each other in the face. Louis had stuck with it, play-fighting for ten months. Then it all turned stale, and two hundred years went by, and…

It didn’t feel like waking from steep or surgery. He felt more like a fighter halfway through a yogatsu match he knows he can win. Absolutely charged up, seething with adrenaline and energy.

Great! Bring ’em on!

Motion! He whirled around. His hands felt naked.

Beyond the forward wall, rocky rolling terrain flashed past on either side, too fast for detail. Needle must be moving like a hypersonic shuttle at ground level. And the view was toward the captain’s cabin-

Only a picture. None of those great rocks was about to mash him into jelly. The black basalt walls to left and right, the lander bay behind him, were all quite motionless.

The thing he’d kicked was a block of stone in the forward-starboard corner of crew quarters. He’d never seen that before. It looked completely inert and harmless: a roughly dressed granite cube as tall as his knee.

He was alone.

Louis understood why Bram had left Acolyte in an induced coma until he could attend to him. Waking alone, a Kzin might set traps and barriers, or force the wardrobe and kitchen systems to produce weapons. But Louis did not understand why Bram had left him to wake alone.

How fast did a protector learn? Bram had observed him for… hmm? Up to three days, if he’d tapped into the webeye camera at Weaver Town. Could Bram already know me well enough to trust me?

Not likely! Bram hadn’t done this. The Hindmost must have reset the ‘doc to open when his treatment was finished.

Now, what was the Hindmost trying to show him? Louis wondered. Did the protector know what kind of show the Hindmost had running here?

The hologram view streamed past him. Distant trees flashed past, an extensive forest of what looked like pines. Dead ahead, mountains and cloud patterns seemed infinitely distant.

The Hindmost could hide anything in the captain’s cabin, and his crew would see nothing but this bounding, lurching hologram projection. Maybe that was the point.

The bouncing lower rim was dark wood: the front of an alcohol-burning Machine People cruiser. Under that, a bit of a curved rim of gleaming metal or plastic.

The webeye camera that the Ghouls had mounted on a Machine People cruiser now rode something that flew.

Blocks of rock protruded from fringes of forest. The vehicle flew no more than two hundred feet up. The speed? Subsonic, but not by much.

What kind of hominids could tolerate such speed? Louis wondered. Even Disney Port didn’t run rides this fast. Most Ringworld hominids would die if they merely traveled beyond their local ecologies. A ride like this would stop their hearts.

What was he supposed to do with this?

How much time did he have to play?

Trapped in a bungalow-sized box buried miles deep in cooled lava, he was hardly a free agent. Stepping disks would get him out, but they would only take him to where his masters waited.

Louis knew that he was reacting instead of acting, like a good dog trying to guess the will of his masters. He was seething with new youth, and he couldn’t do anything.

Sit down, he told himself. Relax. Distract yourself. Eat?

The kitchen menu was running. It showed kzinti script and a picture: some kind of sea life. Alien sashimi! Better not. Louis reset it for human metabolism, Sol, Earth, fran‡ais [francais], pain perdu, added caf’ [cafe] au lait, and called it breakfast. And while he waited… hmmm?

Using the stepping disk would lose him his options.

Examining the stepping disk…

He lifted the rim as he’d seen Bram do.

The racing landscape blinked out, replaced by an abstraction: the diagram of the stepping disk network.

More links had been added. Several networks had merged into one. The restricted flick from crew quarters to the captain’s cabin was still isolated, and so were a few other pairs. Still, the Hindmost had given up some security for greater convenience. Bram must have made him do that.

The diagram measured distance on a logarithmic scale. At and near Needle, detail was fine enough to discriminate between crew quarters and the lander bay. There were flick points all through the Repair Center. Louis picked out Weaver Town, hundreds of thousands of miles distant. One point was far to starboard of Needle’s position, almost to the rim wall, half a million miles away or more. The most distant point must be a third of the