The Ringworld Throne

in.”

The puppeteer whistled up a window. “Louis, the nanotech devices are still repairing damage to his spinal cord. He should be free in a few hours.”

“Tanj!”

“Leave him?”

“Yes!” Louis curled up on the water bed. “I’m going to sleep.”

CHAPTER THIRTY — KING

Louis uncurled slowly. Pain is a great teacher. Still, he moved more easily than he had these last four days.

The medkit had been giving him diet supplements, but he’d turned off the pain drip. Louis disengaged himself and went to the fore wall.

Here: in Hidden Patriarch’s dining hall, Bram was speaking to the City Builders. The webeye windows in the walls were active, and one was the same as this second window-

Here: the vast width of the spaceport ledge. The nearly finished rim wall motor was gone, completed and moved somewhere. Here passed a huge floating sledge with skeletal towers and alien waldos at the corners. A tower with a spiral decor… more than decor: it was bending over like a silver tentacle, and its tip was an infinite bifurcation. It englobed the picked-over hull of a City Builder starship and lifted.

Beyond the edge of the ledge was a line of vertical rings: the deceleration track for incoming ships.

Here: a blur of maglev track with stars showing faintly through. Whisper must have set her sled moving, Louis decided. Built up considerable speed, too, while he slept. It had to be Whisper; who else would have sprayed a webeye?

Here: a sluggishly drifting starscape seen through a filigree maglev track, and a tiny green blinking cursor. “I found a spacecraft,” the Hindmost said.

“Show me.”

The puppeteer sang and the view zoomed hugely, to a blurred view of something more crowbar than ship. Little winged spacecraft ran its length like aphids on a twig. At the near end, a big drive cone and/or plasma cannon drifted past.

“Another ARM ship,” Louis said. “Good catch.”

Bram had left the dining hall.

The Hindmost noticed motion along the maglev track. He chimed. The window reversed to show the other side of Whisper’s webeye.

That wasn’t the sled Whisper had been using. It was a vast dark plane. Cable rose in loops of varying thickness and varying curvatures, branching like arteries, reaching around and up and out of sight. A slender pillar rose out of the center.

Whisper’s handhold was on the narrowest of these loops. She was floating in close foreground, with one hand on a cable as thick as her fist.

It seemed a fantasy, like some ancient book cover. The only item Louis could recognize was welded just behind Whisper: the stepping disk off the refueling probe.

Louis realized that his mind wasn’t tracking. What he needed was breakfast.

Muscles in his back, groin, right hamstring, and some transverse muscles under his ribs protested when he moved to the kitchen wall. Lifting a Kzin, even a Kzin not quite grown… “Remember, I’m a trained professional,” he muttered. “Don’t try this stunt in Earth gravity.” He dialed up a pastiche omelet, papaya, grapefruit, bread.

“Louis?”

“Nothing. Is Acolyte ready to come out?”

The Hindmost looked. “Yes—”

“Wait.” Louis tapped an order. “Let’s pacify him with haunch of mammal.”

Acolyte sat up fast and found himself looking at a rack of beef ribs. He took it and found the Hindmost behind it. He said, “Your munificence as host must be legendary,” and began to tear ribs apart.

The Hindmost said, “Your father came to us as an ambassador. He’s taught you well.”

Acolyte waggled his ears and kept eating.

The puppeteer dialed up a big bowl of grassy stuff, but it only stopped one mouth at a time. For Acolyte’s benefit, he described the deaths on the maglev track, singing up visual displays, with Louis filling in a word here and there. The puppeteer didn’t grasp strategy. One thing Acolyte wasn’t hearing was that Bram had begun treating his alien serfs as prisoners.

Acolyte dropped a big white imitation bone into the recycler. “Louis, are you healthy?”

“I’m not ready to race you again, not just yet.”

“You did well. What it cost you… you did well. I think my main nerve trunk was broken. Shall I put you in the ‘doc?”

“No no no, it’s all coming to a head! Look—” Louis waved through the webeye window, at Whisper floating motionless above an infinite field of superconductor. His mind had had time to digest a little of that weird picture, and he spoke for the puppeteer as well as the adolescent Kzin. “Whisper’s in free fall. That means we’re looking at a vehicle moving at seven hundred seventy miles per second, antispinward. It’s a vehicle even if it has to stretch the full width of the maglev track. Two hundred feet wide and maybe longer than that.

“Those loops-Acolyte, you were in the ‘doc when Bram was hinting around. You’re looking at the barest fringes of a rim wall ramjet. Lovecraft’s team had one all ready to go. Whisper’s holding it hostage.”

Whisper was looking back, watching the webeye. Bram must have told her what it was.

Bram flicked in. He was wearing Louis’s pressure suit with the helmet back. He looked at his allies; glanced into the windows; then turned to the kitchen. “Louis, Acolyte, Hindmost. What news?”

“As you see,” the Hindmost said. “An ARM carrier vessel orbits a hundred million miles out from the Ringworld’s underside. How will you deal with it?”

“Not yet.” Bram turned back to the windows. Now Whisper was clinging like a frightened monkey to the loop of superconductor.

“She’s begun deceleration. Acolyte, do you understand? We hope that King will consider a rim ramjet and the large sled too valuable to destroy.”

“Louis explained.”

Bram said, “Whisper expects me. What do you need of me before I go?”

The puppeteer bleated, “Give me access to the stepping disks!”

“Not quite yet, Hindmost.”

Louis asked, “What kind of opposition…”

“King has a long supply line. He’ll have a few spill mountain protectors. He will rotate them frequently unless he prefers to watch them die. They must scent their own kind, to know whom they protect, or else protect all beneath the Arch. King reserves that for himself.”

“Not many, then.”

“None, it may be. King’s own hands may serve him. The rim wall ramjet motors cannot be moved by muscle. In any case, I don’t fear the High Point protectors. If they see a clear victory, they will finish the loser. The victor holds their people ransom.”

Louis said, “Give us a hint. If you and Whisper are killed, what do we do?”

“Your contract. Protect all beneath the Arch.” Bram lowered his faceplate and fixed it in place. He was gone, a virtual particle in motion, and the port and starboard walls were glowing bright orange with the heat of the momentum exchange.

Tiny bottles popped into the kitchen well. The Hindmost inserted them one by one into the little medkit on the cargo plate stack. “Antibiotics,” he said.

“Thanks, Hindmost. I must have been clean out.”

More bottles. “Pain blockers.”

Whisper wasn’t in sight on the barge. She’d been conspicuous enough until now. She’d shown herself to