Ringworld's Children

communication network formed by the Night People. Eaters of the dead, arent they? And that intelligent, and as breeders! Some half-intelligent protector ruled the Repair Center for a very long time. I cant guess how many other variations there are.'

Roxanny said, 'Thousands.'

'But on the Map of Earth there isnt room for mutations to settle in and compete and shape each other to strangeness. My servants settled my breeders among the Pak of the Map of Earth. My line may thrive there. Luis, what are you hiding?'

'Im sorry.'

She loomed over him, small and dangerous. 'Talk to me.'

Prone in his casket, he said, 'I have a friend on the Map of Earth. I want him protected.'

'Tunesmith wouldnt let another protector near the Map of Earth. I havent survived by challenging the resident. What are you hiding?'

Roxanny spoke. There are Kzinti on the Map of Earth. He said so. His friend Acolyte comes from there.'

'Archaic Kzinti,' Louis said. 'Not the same as the armies of the Fringe War. They sailed across the Great Ocean and formed a colony on the Map of Earth, not that long ago.'

'While I was in depression,' Proserpina said. 'I left too much to the resident. Stet. Ill research Kzinti, archaic and modern. Maybe we can deal. But I must confront the resident.

'Tonight I must go away. Tunesmith must be dealt with one way or another. I may be gone for days. Tec Gauthier, you must care for Luis. Luis, shall I give you back your sensation?'

'Try it.'

When pain came, Louis wondered if Proserpina was taking revenge on a bearer of bad news. But there was no more than an ache, though it ran from hip to heel.

'Wriggle around if you feel like it, but carefully. Dont detach anything.' Proserpina stroked the tree swingers head. 'Little Hanuman, would you like to come with me?'

Hanuman considered, then jumped into her arms. She looked around at them. 'I make one proscription. All of what you can reach is open to you, save only the big building to spin and starboard, and the continent nearest to antispinward. Im sure the big building is trapped. I havent dared it myself. The little continent is where the Penultimate kept the dangerous species from Pak. Analogues of wolves, tigers, lice, mosquitoes, needle cactus, and poison mushrooms, the plants and creatures we never wanted among our breeders. Most of them were extinct when we left the core stars, but we saved a few. We might have released them, had we known that our breeders would evolve into their ecological slots.'

She turned and was gone so quietly and easily that it was as if a ghost had evaporated.

CHAPTER 16 Meeting of Minds

She would let him fly!

Hanuman prepared. The chair was wrong for him; he reshaped it. Proserpina watched.

They stepped into the forest to collect a store of fruit. Sudden as lightning, Proserpina snatched a weasel- like animal out of a bush and broke its neck. She tossed it aboard with the fruit and the water.

She took her place on a horseshoe of couch and improvised a crash web. Hanuman studied the ring of telltales and controls for some seconds before he dared touch them. They had a half-random look: fitted in whenever there was something new to be monitored.

The vehicle was nothing like an airplane.

Relaxed as if poured into her couch, Proserpina watched him lift and swoop and spin and dip almost low enough to shatter a tree and minaret, lift too fast, slow until the wind-induced tremor went away, then rise sedately into the vacuum where he could build up some speed.

The mag ship was as much a wonder as any of Tunesmiths ships. Its brute strength was startling: it could easily have torn itself into shreds of foil. Its motor was the Ringworld floor itself, powered by sunlight falling on trillions of square miles of shadow squares. Sailing lines of magnetic force, it moved less like an airplane than like an undersea vessel.

These controls werent all involved with flying. Hanuman was aloft for some time before he tried anything esoteric. Proserpina watched but did not interfere as he manipulated magnetic fields beneath the landscape. Soil lifted and shifted. In his wake, a stream began to change its course.

Hed seen Tunesmith manipulating such forces in a command post in the Repair Center. This wasnt just a spacecraft. It was an entire Ringworld defense system.

Under guidance from the mag ship, the superconductor cables below the landscape could attract, repel, or shift anything metallic: incoming meteoroids, alien ships and missiles, even the occasional solar storm or lethal surge of cosmic rays. Hanuman might be good enough to orchestrate such a defense. He had watched Tunesmith at work.

The land below Hanuman was only a mask over vacuum. Knowing that in his gut, seeing it in the Ringworlds underside, ridges that were canyons and riverbeds, creases that were mountain ranges, had almost destroyed the newly created protector. Hanuman had never grown used to it. Only now did he begin to feel that he was its master.

Its master, barring the presence of a greater protector. Proserpina was greater than Hanuman. As a breeder, shed evolved closer to intelligence; the tree-of-life virus had done its work on a bigger brain. She had more experience too. But Tunesmith was brighter than she.

It was a bribe, letting him fly. Hanuman understood that well. He understood, too, that he was telling secrets with every move he made. Hanuman is a master pilot, and expendable. What has he flown? How much did she see? How much did she already know? She reclined, and watched.

He circled above land scoured bare and half-hidden beneath tiers of cloud. The hole had closed, but even now the atmosphere had not flowed in to fill the partial vacuum. He told Proserpina, 'This would have spewed all the Ringworlds air to the stars. Tunesmith stopped it.'

'How?'

'I may not tell.'

'Good enough that he has a way. How did you come here? I saw no ship large enough for my sensing devices.'

'I may not tell.'

'Stepping disk. Louis Wu described them for the ARM. We must find one. Show me that wreckage.'

Hanuman skimmed over the vast deflated balloon that had been Tunesmiths meteor plug — shed have found it without his help, of course — then hovered above the ruin of an ARM pressure tent. 'Set down?'

'Yes.'

They donned pressure suits and walked through the wreckage. He saw no reason not to answer her questions. What she asked told him a little of her thoughts and purposes, though Proserpina was learning more than Hanuman was.

They moored the heavy ARM kitchen doc to the cargo grid, and lifted again.

The battlefield had been disturbed. Proserpina walked through it, observing first, then asking questions. Hanuman tried to see what she saw. The sonic hadnt left splashed projectiles or scorch marks. There was the ant-covered splash where Claus had died. Hoof prints: small herdbeasts had run through this place afterward. Prints of big hands and feet: scavengers had come to the smell of blood, and found nothing. The ARM lander had taken Clauss corpse.

The flycycle was upside down, resting on its rack and seat backs. There were more scavenger prints around it and on it. Ghouls had tried to fly it; Tunesmiths locks had held; theyd turned it into a joke.

Hanuman said, 'Tunesmith is smarter than you. Why not let him play? Youve done that for ages.'

'I must still be satisfied as to his fitness. I must speak to him.'