The Ringworld Throne

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE — DEFAULT OPTION

A hundred miles above the spill mountain tops, the probe accelerated. The Ringworld raced toward and past it like a frozen river bigger than worlds, but no longer at 770 miles per second. The probe was catching up.

Louis asked the puppeteer, “Are we in view of that comet installation you didn’t blast?”

“Yes, it’s far enough above the Ringworld plane, but we will have landed before the light reaches the comet.”

Acolyte reclined, huge and silent. Chmeee had sent him to learn, and he had been learning from Bram for these past 2.2 falans. Teaching him wisdom would be a neat trick, Louis thought. Protectors had intelligence coming out of their ears, but wisdom? Could a Kzin see the difference?

“And you’ve blasted everything else that can see us.”

“Yes.”

“Stet. Show us the rim.”

“I can’t really show you protectors, Louis. It’s what Bram asked, but I cannot magnify so greatly.”

“What have you got?”

The Hindmost had months, falans, of observing the rim wall and the spill mountains. Winking heliographs were everywhere, not just on the rim wall. Several times the probe had caught daylit flashes from-one presumed-client species on the flatlands.

A village flashed past, and the Hindmost froze it for their eyes: a thousand houses spreading out from one side of a magnificent waterfall, eight to ten thousand feet high. On the other side of the falls, a dockyard for hot air balloons, marked by a cliff splashed with bright orange paint. Below the dockyard, clustered factories and warehouses ran down the ice and rocks to another orange boulder and a lower landing pad. Come in high or come in low, travelers would find refuge.

The Hindmost jumped the view to another village fifty million miles away. A spread across a shallow green hillside: houses with sloped sod roofs, and a vertical row of industrial works with orange-marked landing pads above and below.

Louis said, “Acolyte, you’ve seen a lot more of this than I have. What am I likely to miss?”

“I can’t guess what you might miss, Louis. They have no more problem with garbage disposal than a school of fish. They—”

Louis laughed widely, white teeth showing. Acolyte waited it out. “Their houses differ but their placement follows a pattern. Balloons and factories are alike everywhere. Bram and I surmise that the Night People mirrors can relay designs, maps, weather alerts, perhaps written music: a trade in ideas.”

“Trade between stars is like that.”

The rim wall was a continuous sheet of scrith, of Ringworld floor material as strong as the force that held an atomic nucleus together. Even that force wasn’t as strong as a meteoroid moving at Ringworld speed, and Louis noted a punch hole high up on the rim wall, a few million miles antispin from the other Great Ocean. Otherwise the great empty mountings stood three million miles apart along a featureless rim, and a slender thread ran along the top for a third of its length. They’d seen that eleven years ago: a maglev track, never finished.

Twenty-three of the mounts now held motors. At highest magnification, the tiny pairs of toroids were just visible.

“Here is what they look like firing.” The puppeteer jumped the view, fast-forward.

The change was not great. Hydrogen fusion radiates mostly X rays. A fusion motor radiates visible light because it is hot, or because working mass has been added to increase thrust. When a rim wall motor was firing, the wire outline glowed white-hot, and flexed against the plasma’s magnetic fields. The toroids were the wasp- waist constriction in an hourglass of white-hot wire, and an indigo ghost flame ran down the axis. Twenty-two of those in a row.

The Hindmost displayed successive views of work around the twenty-third motor. There were cranes and cables big enough to see, and flatbed things that might be used for magnetic levitation, but not a hope of seeing anything man-sized.

And all Louis could think of was his need to talk where Bram couldn’t hear.

The protector was using the bath setup in the crew cabin. No doubt that equipment had kept Chmeee and Louis sane, and Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok, too. Still, it was cramped and complicated and primitive. They could hear the whisper of spray through the wall.

Louis said, testing, “Given he bathes at all, I’m surprised he didn’t use your cabin.”

“Louis, I wish now that I could show you my cabin. The dedicated stepping disk is hardwired. It cannot move an alien.”

The Kzin rumbled, “You value your privacy greatly.”

“You know better. I want company,” the Hindmost said. “Louis or even you, if I cannot surround myself with my kind. We follow our fears. I followed my fear when I shaped this ship.”

“You persuaded Bram of that?”

“I hope so. It’s true.”

The probe was an hour short of matching the Ringworld’s spin. Louis said, “We’re going to have to use pressure suits. Let’s do something about them.”

“I keep my own well-maintained,” the puppeteer said.

“Stet. Send me and Acolyte to the lander bay.”

“I should come,” the Hindmost said. “There’s other equipment I should see to.”

They flicked out.

“We cannot be heard here,” the Hindmost assured them.

Acolyte snorted. Louis said, “Suppose a protector-level intelligence really wanted to hear us?”

“No, Louis. I intended to spy on you and Chmeee and—” Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t made the cut. “I made this my listening post. No entity could add a spy device in the lander bay without signaling me.”

Maybe. “Hindmost, aren’t you safe when you’re in your own cabin?”

“Bram has a way to attack me there.”

“Can you block it?”

“I haven’t worked out what he has.”

“A good bluff? Bram’s had a long time to work on you. He has you terrified.”

The Hindmost’s gaze converged on Louis: binocular vision with a baseline of three feet. “You have never understood us. The hidden protector frightened me from the first. I remain frightened. However you plan to circumvent Bram, I may accept the risk or reject it, but only on the odds. I do not turn my mind from danger.”

“I don’t expect to break my contract.”

“Excellent.”

There were pressure suits and air racks designed for humans. He and Bram would need two of everything. Louis checked pressure zips on the suits and the racks. He emptied waste recycler reservoirs and filled nutrient reservoirs, flushed the interiors of the suits and the air and water tanks, topped off the air, charged the batteries.

Acolyte was tending his own suit. The Hindmost was inspecting a stack of stepping disks.

Louis said, “I know why Teela Brown died.”

The Hindmost said, “Protectors die fairly easily, when they no longer feel needed—”

Louis shook his head. “She found something. Maybe it was Anne’s garden, maybe just fingerprints on the rim wall motors. Whatever, she knew there was a protector in the Repair Center. She had to get Needle into the Map of Mars, but when she did that, she made us hostages. The only way to make us safe was to die. But—”

“Louis, we don’t have time. What do you want of us?”

“I want to change the stepping disk pattern without Bram knowing. Then I may want to change it back. I’m not sure I’m right yet. I need a default option.”