Ringworld's Children

climb. Its even somewhat safe, once I found some rope. We got a wonderful view. Its all flat, the horizon never curves out of sight, and I had these.' Mag specs. 'Luis, did you notice one big central mountain, coming in?'

'Yah, inland.'

'Its windows top to bottom, but there are only a few picture windows. The rest looks like a spray of glitter everywhere. Id call that structure an arcology, but big, and built by military, or maybe paranoid crazies. Straight highways with towers at the end, wonderful fields of fire. Big helipads. I didnt see any guns; I just saw where they should be mounted.

'Theres only that one huge palace. Over the rest of the island — I keep saying island, just because I can see so much of it, even though most of it dwindles into what looks like fog. Continent. The buildings nearby are all very basic, and theres nothing big further out. Wembleth thinks its all housing for breeders, Homo habilis. We didnt see any, they could all have died off, but Luis, if this was a protectors home, thered be defenses and research labs and libraries, wouldnt there?'

'Well, theres the arcology,' Louis said.

She grinned at him. 'Do you even know what arcology means?'

'Big building.'

'Well… yah. I dont think shes using it. It was left by the previous tenant. I think Proserpina has a base, maybe on the little continents, maybe on another Map. She wouldnt have turned us loose where she works. This place is… remember I said garden? Suppose you had to turn the whole Earth into a garden? Earth is a closed ecology, but it changes. It drifts.' She looked deep into his eyes, seeking understanding. 'Gardeners dont like weeds. Theyd do something about deserts… wouldnt have to worry about tundra because theres no winter… but a gardener might have to control the weather.'

'Weathers chaotic. It cant be controlled,' Louis said.

'What if you had huge air masses to work with? An area of a thousand Earths, and no hurricane patterns to foul you up because youre not on a spinning ball. Air masses wouldnt move fast—'

Louis laughed. 'Stet. Maybe.'

'We wont actually see other maps,' she said, suddenly depressed. 'No boats for guests. What do you think, Luis? One whole supercontinent for a garden, and breeders are an integral part of the garden. Defenses on the islands. Telescopes and research facilities. Mines… you dont get mines on the Ringworld, do you?'

'If you could reach the spill mountains,' Louis said. 'Materials might layer out according to density. Otherwise, no mining rights. You dig for oil, you hit scrith, then vacuum.'

'Proserpina can reach the spill mountains.'

Louis shrugged. 'I cant help you explore. Be cautious. Every culture has fairy tales about someone finding something he shouldnt.'

'Even so,' Roxanny said, 'Id like to get into that building.'

Wembleth and Roxanny went out again after breakfast.

Proserpina was back at midday. She asked, 'What are stepping disks?'

'Where did you find those?'

'Your own report to the ARM, Louis Wu. You didnt tell enough. What if I had to make stepping disks? Is the Ghoul protector doing that?'

'You first. How are my companions?'

'Exploring. Hanuman went off alone, Wembleth and Roxanny are together. Theyll learn little in this place. The last rebel to die lived here. I took charge of his habitat, but the Penultimates palace is trapped. I leave it alone.'

She hoisted a miniature deer nearly her own weight. It dangled, its neck broken. Big insects buzzed it. 'I use this animal for food myself. Can you eat it?'

'Maybe—'

'Treat it with heat?'

'Yah. Clean out the body cavity. Shall I — ?'

'You may exercise your upper body, but otherwise rest. Your bones are pinned together, but let them knit. I will cook. I can research this.'

Barbecue smells made him hungry. In an hour she was back with a roasted carcass. She stripped off pieces of meat for him. He found it pleasant to be waited on.

' But always at my back I hear Times winged footsteps hurrying near,' she said. 'No, eat. I need to know how urgent this matter of the Fringe War is. Does Tunesmith have it under control?'

'More or less,' he said.

'Eat. Is it more, or less?' She scowled at what she saw in his face. 'Less. Hanuman tells me of the blast that tore a hole into space. I saw it from a distance, and knew I must act. Antimatter. Could it have killed all life? Did Tunesmith really prevent that?'

'Yes.'

'What did you see?'

'Wembleth and Roxanny would eat some of that,' Louis said.

The protector met his eyes for a long heartbeat. 'Ill fetch them,' she said. She set a great slab of meat in his reach, and departed.

Daylight was fading when they returned. Proserpina and the others cooked dinner outside. Louis smelled wood smoke and roasting meat. What Roxanny brought to Louis included vegetables: green-and-yellow leafy plants, and roasted yams.

Proserpina was becoming a skilled chef. She ate with them, but what she ate was raw meat and raw yams. When they had finished eating, she said, 'I want your trust.'

The ancient protectors eyes locked with theirs, skipping past Hanuman as if he were a dumb animal. 'Wembleth, Roxanny, Luis, youd be demented to trust me knowing no more than you do.'

'Tell us a story,' Louis said. Proserpina was keeping Hanumans secrets, and Louiss, and perhaps Roxannys too. There was no reason to trust her, and every reason to listen.

'These events all took place near the galactic core. We who held our world were ten to a hundred million protectors of the Pak species,' the protector said. 'The number varied wildly in the endless war.

'Something more than four million falans ago — Ive lost track of time to some extent — ten thousand of us built a carrier ship and some fighter scouts. Eighty years later, six hundred were left to ride them.' Proserpina spoke slowly, reaching far back into her memory. Interworld was a flexible language, but it wasnt built for these concepts.

'This land is a good map of the Pak world. Did you see its shape? Circles everywhere,' Proserpina said. 'Blast craters, new and ancient, from an endless variety of weapons. These maps were identical when we built them, but theyve changed since. On the Pak world and here, we fought for any advantage for our blood line. Luis, what?'

'Well, its strange,' Louis Wu said. 'One world, over and over? The Pak world was in the galactic core. Suns are packed close together there. You came here, thirty thousand light years in one leap. Why didnt you use worlds closer in?'

'Yes, our worlds were much closer together than yours. Endless room, endlessly coveted. We saw no way to reach them in a spacecraft carrying breeders, because we would fight for advantage of the breeders. If we solved that, wed face another problem. Any world would require reshaping for periods of thousands of years. Before the work was complete, each would be snatched away by armies of other protectors. We could see that this had happened. Worlds near Pak were shaped to a Pak ideal, then blasted back to barren waste long before I was born. We saw no way to take other worlds unless we could change the circumstances that shaped us.

'This is what we did, we six hundred. First, we gave up nearby worlds. If another ship could reach us, that world was too close. We found records of a voyage into the galactic arms, a route already tested by an earlier colony ship. The colony failed, but we knew no intervening danger had stopped it from reaching its target world.

'Second, we segregated ourselves from our breeders. We housed them in a cylinder topographed like a