The Ringworld Throne

“I prefer you here. Louis, Hindmost, Acolyte, I’m trying to paint a picture of a protector in my mind. I have my murky view of Cronus and I knew Anne intimately, but Teela Brown is an alien protector. Soon we must face alien protectors. Hindmost, what have you shown me?”

“These are records on the Lucky Human Project. My administration felt that human allies could do us good. Humans are lucky. We would make them effective by making them luckier. The experiment was local to one planet, Earth. We added a lottery to the formal qualifications that earn a birthright. We kept track of babies born through luck. We financed a social network so that the children might meet and breed.”

“Was she lucky?”

Louis wasn’t listening, definitely wasn’t listening. When he’d fought free of the Ringworld, Teela had stayed behind by her own choice. Louis had had forty years to avoid thinking about Teela Brown.

“She was a sixth-generation lottery winner, but Teela was not lucky for puppeteers, nor for her associates. I cannot think she was lucky for herself. Any creature seeks homeostasis. Teela lost her mate, then her gender identity and shape, then her life. But luck is a thing of dubious interpretation.”

Acolyte spoke. “What if she sought a cause worth dying for?”

Louis gaped. Acolyte added, “Or what if she only wanted to be more intelligent? Like my father. Like me. Luck gave her those things.”

Bram said, “Louis?”

“Maybe. Interesting interpretation.” Forty years, and he’d never seen what was obvious to this eleven- year-old cat!

“Anything further?”

Louis closed his eyes. He could see her, touch her. “A freak accident took her away from us. Luck. When we found her, she’d found Seeker. Big, brawny explorer type, a wonderful guide, and I guess she was in love with him, too—”

“Was she your mate or his?”

“Serial polygamy. Skip it—”

“She left you for him?”

“Not just for Seeker. Bram, she’d found this-this huge toy. It never would have occurred to Teela that it was beyond her, too big to play with. That anything was beyond her.”

“She wanted to play with the Arch? Without destroying it, of course. And only a protector can do that?”

Louis rubbed his eyes.

“So you left her on the Ringworld. And then?”

“Seeker must have led her to the Map of Mars, or told her enough that she could guess the rest. She knew going in that she was entering a strange place, a place of secrets.

“She… let’s see… she wakes as a protector. Seeker’s dead. Teela’s a protector in the Repair Center. She plays around. She finds out how to turn the sun into a superthermal laser. Blasts a few comets?”

“She did that.”

“She learns how to display telescope views with the Meteor Defense setup. She notices that the Ringworld has a wobble to it. She finds attitude jets on the rim wall, but most of them are gone. Any protector could predict the results of that.

“She goes to the rim wall. Bram, did she take roots with her?”

“Roots and a flowering plant and thallium oxide.”

“She finds City Builder ships built around the rim attitude jets. Anne may have replaced some of those… yeah. That’s what your Anne was doing: intercept every City Builder ship as it comes back from the stars, tear out the Bussard ramjets and mount them on the rim. It’s just another thing Halrloprillalar never told me. She and her crew must have been evicted from their ship, sent back through the rim wall by an angry protector.”

Bram waited.

“Poor tanj Prill. That could twist a person’s mind.”

Waited.

“So there’s already a few attitude jets back in place, but all Teela sees is that the ship builders haven’t stolen them all yet. She takes over Anne’s job. It’s urgent. She turns some breeders into protectors. She told me about those: a Spill Mountain People, a vampire, a Ghoul. They all start pulling motors out of returning ships and remounting them.

“They had twenty in place and no more ships in view, and the motors didn’t have enough power by themselves. Teela left the other protectors tending the motors. She came back to the Repair Center. She must have known what she was going to do next. She didn’t see Hot Needle of Inquiry coming at her until she was using the Repair Center telescope again.”

Acolyte said, “She must have had a telescope on the rim, Louis.”

“Sure, and it must have been good enough to see the big City Builder ships coming in. Needle’s much smaller.”

“Would she recognize Needle?”

“A General Products number-three hull? Sure.”

Bram asked, “How could Needle affect her plans?”

“What did I tell you about reading a protector’s mind, Bram?”

“But you must try.”

Louis didn’t want to try. “Here’s what Teela told me. She just couldn’t make herself kill a trillion people even to save thirty trillion. Protector intelligence and Teela Brown empathy: she could feel their deaths. She knew it had to be done, and she knew we’d figure out how, me and Chmeee and the Hindmost, and she couldn’t let us do it, either. She was inviting us to kill her, Bram.”

“I watched her fight. I could have fought better while dead.”

“Yeah. It was the fight of my life, but nobody outfights a protector.”

“If she knew she couldn’t play a plasma jet along the rim wall, why did she return to the Repair Center?” Silly question. Bram didn’t wait for an answer. “What did she really want?”

Louis shook his head. “What do protectors want? That’s one thing we learned about you. Your motives are hard-wired. You protect your genetic line. When the line dies out, you stop eating and die. Teela didn’t have children on the Ringworld, but there were hominids. Relatives, if you close one eye and squint a little. She had to save them. Why wait? With the Ringworld sliding off balance—”

Bram brushed it away. “She waited for Hot Needle of Inquiry, for puppeteer-derived computer programs. I watched you use them and was glad I had not interfered.”

Oh. “But why not just say so? Tanj dammit, why the fight?” Wait, now—”Bram, did Anne leave just after you killed Cronus?”

“She took several days to prepare.”

“And that was just under seven thousand falans ago?”

“Yes.”

“Around twelve hundred A.D., my calendar. Did she take roots? And does she have to come back for more?”

“Anne took roots and a blooming plant and some thalium [sic-should be “thallium”] oxide. She planted tree-of-life but the crop failed after a time, so she came back near five thousand falans ago. She stayed with me for not long. I haven’t seen her since. Either she grew a better garden or she’s dead.”

“Yeah. Teela had the same idea? Roots, plants, thallium oxide. If there’s a good place to plant all that, then Anne’s garden was in it. Teela would know what it was.”

“Anne would hide it well.”

“You can’t hide plants from sunlight. She couldn’t put it where any passing hominid would sniff it. She’d want it within her reach, on a spill mountain, in a place even hot-air balloons couldn’t invade. A fissure, a steep valley, maybe. And now we have to guess whether Teela saw it.”

“And if she did?”

Louis sighed. “Bram, what have you got on living protectors?”

“Hindmost, show him. I propose to bathe.”