Ringworld's Children

Ocean, one of which was a one-to-one scale map of Earth. These were more thickly clustered, and they seemed all identical.

'Hindmost, was the Ringworld built by Pak?'

'I dont know, Louis.'

'I thought you might, by now. I wondered if there might be real Pak, somewhere among all these variant hominids. Weve never seen anything of Pak but old bones.'

The puppeteer said, 'We can deduce a good deal about Pak breeders. They slept or hid during the day and night. They hunted and did their business at twilight. They lived above a shoreline.'

Louis was startled. 'How can you know all that?'

'Your partial baldness suggests that your ancestors swam regularly, and Ive watched you in the water, too. As for twilight, this Ringworld gets far more twilight than a planet would, and its wholly unnecessary. Let me show you.'

The Hindmost boarded a chair, clumsily. His questing mouth found controls. The wall display jumped, became a featureless blue. The Hindmost began to draw in white lines. A blob of white: the sun. A circle: the Ringworld. A much smaller ring, concentric: thirty-odd shadow squares moving a little faster than orbit, held in a net of cables. 'This is the way the Ringworld was designed,' the Hindmost said. 'A thirty hour day with ten hours blacked out, and more than an hour of a sun partly blocked. Instead—'

He sketched in five long shadow squares sliding retrograde, against the Ringworlds spin. 'This model would avoid the long, long twilight period and give equal day and night. The builders didnt want that. Whoever built the Ringworld must have wanted endless summers and long twilights. We surmise they were Pak protectors, and we surmise that the Pak world was like that.'

Louis studied the picture. Or else, he thought, they built an advanced model somewhere else.

The Hindmost said, 'Im hungry. Will you keep watch?'

'Hungry,' the Kzin agreed. 'Hurry.'

Time had slid by unnoticed. Louis realized he was half starved.

A puppeteer must eat more often than a carnivore. The Hindmost was gone for most of an hour. He returned with jewels sparkling in a newly coifed mane. A float plate heaped with fodder followed him.

'Well regret the time were wasting,' he said. 'Our last hours free from Tunesmith, but what can we do with them? My plans didnt reach far enough. Look, more warships.'

Three Kzinti, then an unfamiliar larger craft, then three more ARM ships danced around the inner ring of shadow squares, not firing yet.

Louis said, 'Acolyte, go feed yourself.' Who wants to be around a hungry Kzin?

Louis and the Hindmost watched the warships at play. 'They wont all have stasis fields,' Louis speculated. 'Stasis fields are expensive and not too dependable, and of course they take a ship out of the action. So theyll be leery of the Ringworlds meteor defense, but Tunesmith turned that off, and theyre starting to realize that. So,' as three Kzinti ships began a long dive toward the Ringworld surface, 'here come Kzinti to stop the first ARM ships, and more ARMs to stop them — tanj dammit!' A brilliant streak inside the atmosphere ended in a flash against desert.

'That was an antimatter bullet,' said the puppeteer.

'And now its a little eyestorm. Tanj, this isnt even the main event! What they want is Long Shot. Needle is nothing.'

'A Needle in a haystack? What you describe is mostly your imagination,' said the Hindmost. 'Much of a war goes unseen. That larger ship, I have identified it. Lure of Far Lands Limited, the Kdatlyno and Jinx business alliance. They wont fight, they will only observe. Here is Acolyte. Louis, go eat. Bathe.'

Louis jerked awake. Something had disturbed him… a flash of light from the screen?

Acolyte and the Hindmost were asleep, sprawled far apart on the hard floor beneath the Meteor Defense Room walls. It was good to be clean; hed eaten like an army; sleeping plates would be good too. But anyone who slept aboard Needle would miss something.

Louis sat up. Nothing hurt! He grinned, remembering what an older woman had told him at his two hundredth birthday party. 'Dearest, if you can wake in the morning with no pain in your joints and muscles, its a sure sign that you have died in the night.'

The Hindmost had reset the wraparound screen. It showed a skyscape with windows in it, views of an eyestorm and the Other Ocean. Around the windows stars moved uneasily: ships of the Fringe War. All views were quiet now.

It did bother him, that he couldnt think of anything to do except watch. He was trying to outthink a protector. What chance would he have later if he couldnt find an angle now, while Tunesmith was being hunted across the system?

On the Ringworld were millions of seas. Louis couldnt guess where the Hindmost had put Hot Needle of Inquiry. He could get there by a stepping-disk setting. The first pair of ARM ships hadnt found it, and now they were too busy maneuvering. The war above the eyestorm had been quiet for hours, but ships continued to shift position.

Sudden light splashed around the Farland ship: antimatter bullets intercepted in transit. The Farland ship was accelerating away from the action. Its new course would miss the Ringworld. A ruby laser lit it brilliantly, but diffused, its attacker already deep in atmosphere. Ships tens of millions of miles apart had some chance to defend themselves.

But the war above the eyestorm was getting too tight.

Fire burst into the clouds where two ARM ships were hiding. Louis cried, 'Wake up! Wake up! Youre missing action!'

The others stirred.

Tunesmiths deep-radar window showed one ARM ship diving through the puncture hole — leaving hard-won turf abandoned, but safeguarding data from its explorations, unless some ambush waited beneath the Ringworld floor. The other accelerated hard, running down the storms axis in a channel of clear air, the pupil of the eye.

Kzinti had deep-radar too. Two lens ships were diving. Fire followed them down.

The eyestorm flashed to a blue-white glare.

The Hindmost killed the zoom window before it could blind them. On a less expanded view — Tunesmith must have a camera on one of the shadow squares — a star glared near the Other Ocean, as big as… too big… far too big.

The puppeteer said, 'I believe one of the ARM ships exploded. Antimatter. Well have a hole the size of…' The Hindmost thought it through, then folded into himself and was silent.

The eyestorm was gone, blasted apart. Cloud patterns showed an expanding ring of shock wave crossing seas and gray-green land. A hemisphere of cloud enveloped a dimming fireball.

'What has happened here?'

Tunesmith and the little chimp-protector were on the stepping disk: a sorcerer confronting wayward apprentices, demanding explanations. Louiss throat closed on him. It felt like he should have stopped this. It felt like Tunesmith would, should blame him.

'Antimatter explosion,' Acolyte said.

'Is there a hole under that cloud?'

The question was already silly: the dome of cloud was dimpled in the center. It was being sucked into interstellar space. When Acolyte didnt answer, Louis said, 'There was already a hole—'

'Of course. We have to move fast,' Tunesmith said. 'Come.' He had the lip of the stepping disk up and was redirecting it.

Louis found his voice. 'Sure, nows a good time to move fast. Youve brought the war home! And now the airs draining out of the Ringworld!'

What had been a fireball was nearly gone. The Ringworld floor was naked scrith within a slowly expanding ring of cloud. Clouds streamed toward the hole.

And Tunesmith had Louis by the forearm. He walked them to a stepping disk.