Meteor defense: Ringworld systems can cause a solar flare, and a superthermal laser effect within the flare. Energy output is awesome, but the effect is slow.
N-child: Lineal descendant.
Outsider hyperdrive or Hyperdrive: A means of faster- than-light travel common in known space.
Patriarchy: The Kzinti interstellar empire.
Port: To the left as one looks spinward.
Quantum II hyperdrive: An advanced experimental faster-than-light system, puppeteer designed, first seen in 'At the Core.' One Ringworld day under QII hyperdrive = 1440 light years.
Repair Center: The ancient center of Ringworld repair, maintenance, and control, housed beneath the Map of Mars on the Great Ocean.
Rishathra (reshtra, etc.): Sexual practice outside ones own species but within the intelligent hominids.
Scrith: Ringworld structural material. Scrith underlies all the terraformed and contoured inner surface of the Ringworld. The rim walls are also of scrith. Very dense, with a tensile strength on the order of the force that holds an atomic nucleus together.
Sheathclaws: A world held by humans and Kzinti together.
Spill mountains: Mountains standing against the rim wall, the outflow of the rim spillpipes. One stage in the circulation of flup.
Spin or Spinward: In the direction of rotation of the Ringworld. (Against the rotation of the sky.)
Starboard: To the right as one looks spinward.
Stasis field: Human technology. An induced state in which time passes very slowly. Ratios can be as high as a billion years of real time to a few seconds in stasis. An object in stasis is very nearly invulnerable.
Stepping disks: Puppeteer technology, an advanced form of teleportation.
Stet: Leave it alone; accept as written; make no change; restore.
Tanj: An expletive, once shorthand for 'There aint no justice.'
Thruster: Reactionless drive. In human space, thrusters have generally replaced fusion rockets on all spacecraft save warcraft.
Vishnishtee (Vashneesht, Vasnesht, Vasneesit, etc.): Wizard or protector.
Webeye: Puppeteer technology, a multisensory transmitter.
Weenie plant: Ubiquitous Ringworld plant. Edible.
2893 A.D.
Louis Wu woke aflame with new life, under a coffin lid.
Displays glowed above his eyes. Bone composition, blood parameters, deep reflexes, urea and potassium and zinc balance: he could identify most of these. The damage listed wasnt great. Punctures and gouges; fatigue; torn ligaments and extensive bruises; two ribs cracked; all relics of the battle with the Vampire protector, Bram. All healed now. The doc would have rebuilt him cell by cell. Hed felt dead and cooling when he climbed into the Intensive Care Cavity.
Eighty-four days ago, the display said.
Sixty-seven Ringworld days. Almost a falan; a falan was ten Ringworld rotations, seventy-five thirty-hour days. Twenty or thirty days should have healed him! But hed known he was injured. What with all the general bruising from the battle with Bram, he hadnt even noticed puncture wounds in his back.
Hed been under repair for twice that long the first time he lay in this box. Then, his internal plumbing systems had been leaking into each other, and hed been eleven years without the longevity complex called boosterspice. Hed been dying, and old.
Testosterone was high, adrenalin high and rising.
Louis pushed steadily up against the lid of the doc. The lid wouldnt move faster, but his body craved action. He slid out and dropped to a stone floor, cold beneath his bare feet. Stone?
He was naked. He stood in a vast cavern. Where was Needle?
The interstellar spacecraft Hot Needle of Inquiry had been embedded in cooled magma when last he looked, and Carlos Wus experimental nanotech repair system had been in the crew quarters. Now its components sat within a nest of instruments and cables on a floor of cooled lava. The doc had been partly pulled apart. Everything was still running.
Hubristic, massive, awesome: this was a protectors work. Tunesmith, the Ghoul protector, must have been studying the doc while it healed Louis.
Nearby, Hot Needle of Inquiry had been fileted like a finless fish. A slice of hull running almost nose to tail had been cut away, exposing housing, cargo space, docking for a Lander now destroyed, thruster plates, and the hyperdrive motor housing. More than half of the ships volume was tanks, and of course theyd been drained. The rim of the cut had been lined with copper or bronze, and cables in the metal led to instruments and a generator.
The cut section had been pulled aside by massive machinery. The cut surface was rimmed in bronze laced with cables.
The hyperdrive motor had run the length of the ship. Now it was laid out on the lava, in a nest of instruments. Tunesmith again?
Louis wandered over to look.
It had been repaired.
Louis had stranded the Hindmost in Ringworld space by chopping the hyperdrive in half, twelve or thirteen years ago. Dismounted, it looked otherwise ready to take Needle between the stars at Quantum I speeds, three days to the light year.
I could go home, Louis thought, tasting the notion.
Where is everybody? Louis looked around him, feeling the adrenalin surge. He was starting to shiver with cold.
Hed be almost two hundred and forty years old by now, wouldnt he? Easy to lose track here. But the nano machines in Carlos Wus experimental doc had read his DNA and repaired everything down through the cell nuclei. Louis had done this dance before. His body thought it was just past puberty.
Keep it cool, boy. Nobodys challenged you yet.
The spacecraft, the hull section, the doc, machines to move and repair these masses, and crude-looking instruments arrayed to study them, all formed a tight cluster within vaster spaces. The cavern was tremendous and nearly empty. Louis saw float plates like stacks of poker chips, and beyond those a tilted tower of tremendous toroids that ran through a gap in the floor right up to the roof. Cylinders lay near the gap, caged within more of Tunesmiths machinery. They were bigger than Needle, each a little different from the others.
Hed passed through this place once before. Louis looked up, knowing what to expect.
Five or six miles up, he thought. The Map of Mars stood forty miles high. This level would be near the roof. Louis could make out its contours. Think of it as the back of a mask… the mask of a shield volcano the size of Ceres.
Needle had smashed down through the crater in Mons Olympus, into the repair center that underlay the one-to-one scale Map of Mars. Teela Brown had trapped them there after she turned
