The Ringworld Throne

“I solved it. I hope I solved it. Otherwise I am enslaved.”

“Enslaved. But with tens of falans to free yourself.” Kidada sounded tired and bitter.

Louis was becoming aware of how much he wanted to talk to Sawur. He would have stayed to mourn, if he had the time.

Time. The sky had circled twenty-two times… two falans plus. One hundred sixty-five of the Ringworld’s thirty-hour days. They’d left him in that tank for more than half an Earth year!

And he now was playing catch-up. “Kidada, who moved our stepping disk?”

“I know not what you mean. This? It was here the morning you were gone. We’ve left it alone.”

The rim was muddy. Louis could see big fingerprints and scratch marks left by fingernails. Some visiting hominid-not Weavers, who had smaller hands-had been trying to alter the setting.

Ghouls. He might have known. He was glad he’d flicked in during daylight. The Night People wouldn’t even know he’d been here.

Louis donned his pressure suit. “Say hello to the children for me,” he said, and he flicked out.

Darkness.

Louis turned on his helmet lamp, and a half-seen skeleton was watching him.

He was in the Meteor Defense room. The screens were dark. His lamp was the only light.

These bones had been mounted for study. They weren’t attached at the joints: they barely touched. A frame of thin metal rods held them in place.

The skeleton stood ten inches shorter than Louis Wu. All of the bones had a rounded look: weathered. The ribs were improbably narrow, the fingers nearly gone. Time had turned bone structure to dust. Weather in here couldn’t be that erosive! But the knuckles still showed large, and all the joints were massive and greatly swollen. Those eroded projections in the massive jaw weren’t teeth. They were later bone growth.

Protector.

Louis let his fingertips play over the face. The bone was gritty with dust, and smooth. Smoothed by time, as surfaces turned gradually to dust.

This wasn’t an erosive environment. These bones must be a thousand years dead, at least.

The right hip had been shattered, the pieces mounted separately. And the left shoulder and elbow, and the neck: all fractured or shattered.

He might have died in a fall, or been beaten to death in combat.

The Pak had had their origin somewhere in the galactic core. A Pak colony on Earth had failed-the tree-of- life had failed, leaving the colony with no protectors-but Pak breeders had spread over the Earth from landing sites in Africa and Asia. Their bones were in museums under names such as Homo habilis. Their descendants had evolved to intelligence: a classic example of neoteny.

There was a mummified Pak protector in the Smithsonian Institute. It had been dug from under a desert on Mars, centuries ago. Louis had never seen it except as a hologram in a General Biology course.

This creature might be a deformed Pak, he thought. But there was that massive jaw.

Protectors lost their teeth. That was a pity, because teeth could have told him a lot. But the jaw was a bone cracker.

The torso was too long for a standard issue Pak.

It was not quite a Pak, and it was also not quite a Ghoul. Louis could guess when it had died, but when had it been born? The protector in the Smithsonian had spent thirty thousand years and more crossing from the galactic core to Earth. Gearing up for the expedition might have taken him that long again. Protectors could live a long time.

Cronus was the oldest of the Greek gods, killer of his children, until some escaped and killed him instead. Call this one Cronus, then.

A vampire horde had killed a protector who must have been Cronus’s abandoned servant.

Bram and Anne must have stalked the master for years afterward. Years, centuries, millennia? Pak breeders, Man’s ancestors, and the vampires’, too, had been cursorial hunters before ever they left the galactic core.

Old Cronus might not have taken vampire protectors quite seriously. Vampires, after all, were mindless animals with disgusting sexual and dietary habits, and Cronus had been a superintelligent being with no distracting sex urge at all.

And so was Bram. It might give him a blind spot, Louis thought, if he could find it.

The breaks at the right hip, left arm, and shoulder, and a crack along the skull, had been fresh at death. Louis found old, healed breaks elsewhere. Cronus had broken his spine long before his death. Did a protector’s spinal nerves grow back? His right knee, that old injury hadn’t healed: the knee was fused solid.

Something else was strange about the spine… but Louis didn’t understand until he returned to the skull.

The forehead bulged. More: the forehead bone and the crest at the top was smoother, younger than the rest of the skull. The jagged ridge of growth from the jawbone still had an appearance of worn teeth. These things were recent growth. The spine, too, was recent growth: it had gone through a period of regeneration.

If Cronus had won his last battle, he would have healed again.

So think of it as a murder investigation. I know the killer, but to get a conviction in court I need every detail, every nuance. Why did Bram put these bones back together? The enemy was dead, there were none to avenge him -

Or did Bram and Anne fear others like Cronus?

A standing skeleton, and a heap of gear in the shadows beyond. Bram hadn’t let him near this stuff.

It had seemed scattered, dropped at random. It was and it wasn’t. Stuff had been laid out neatly for study; then something had swept through the pattern, like a vampire protector kicking out in rage.

Some of it had simply disintegrated. Some had left clear patterns.

This had been a wonderful fur coat, and a belt to hold it closed. It stank: just a ghost of the stench of old hide, and a Ghoul who hadn’t bathed in thousands of years. On the inner surface, the hide surface, Louis could see the traces of a score of leather pockets in a score of shapes, all empty now.

There were weapons: a knife of old metal turned to black rust, slender and a foot long. Two knives made of horn, each no bigger than a forefinger. There were six throwing knives, nearly identical though shaped from stone, as lethal as the day they were made. A slender pole of some durable metal alloy, the ends sharpened to chisels.

Patterns in the dust might once have been wooden shoes with heavy straps. Here were a fancy crossbow and a dozen bolts, each slightly different. This little box… a firestarter? Louis tried, but he couldn’t get a flame started. A stack of paper or parchment: maps?

There was a telescope… crude, but very finely shaped and polished, and set a little apart. Hello: these next to it were tool-working tools. Pumice, little knives… Bram and/or Anne had set up shop here to duplicate Cronus’s telescope.

A hard black lump the size of his fist. Louis bent low to sniff. Dried meat? A thousand years beyond its date… but jerky always did smell and taste a bit gamy. Maybe a Ghoul would like that.

How long ago had Cronus died?

Ask?

Louis knew he was playing catch-up here. He’d learn more by asking… but he’d learn what Bram chose to teach. And time was constricting around him.

Louis patted Cronus’s shoulder bones. “Trust me,” he said, and flicked out.

He was glare-blind and way off balance.

He convulsed like a sea anemone, reaching between his knees for anything solid, eyes squinted shut against raw sunlight. His gloved fingers brushed something and closed hard.

The badly tilted stepping disk slid under him by a foot or two. He was gripping the rim of the disk itself, he hoped. He held very still.