defenses.
He rested more and more frequently. Presently he was crawling. A walking stick sounded really good. Maybe hed find a sapling in the hanging garden. Then, walk home to Proserpinas base. Climb into the ARM doc and finish healing. Figure out what to do next.
He knew that smell.
Hed found the Penultimates tree-of-life supply!
It was a futzy good thing, he thought dizzily, that he hadnt landed the flycycle in the garden. Roxanny would have eaten. She was… maybe past the age, maybe not, given decades of boosterspice. Shed be a protector, or dead. Wembleth might have eaten too, he thought. The natives elegant black-and-white hair could be a sign of age.
Water welled up, pooled on the ramp, and ran into the plants. Louis waded into it on hands and knees. It rose to his belly. He only stopped once, when he realized he was kneeling on bright cloth: on a womans skirt with a hologram running round it. Wild horses ran below Wyoming buttes, around and around.
No telling how long it had been here at the bottom of the pool. Good cloth didnt rot. Teela had owned a skirt like this, bought at a shop in Phoenix. And Louis was crawling again.
He crawled into the garden, dripping, pulling the skirt behind him. There were trees: he could pull himself to his feet. There was more than tree-of-life here. He saw fruit, snap beans, fist-sized ears of corn… He knelt and began to dig.
He pulled up a yellow root, shook off some dirt, and bit into it. It was like chewing wood.
This was twice insane. He was too young. Carlos Wus nanotech doc had made him too young. There was no reason for him to be interested in tree-of-life. It might kill him. He went on eating.
CHAPTER 18
The Ringworld Floor
Hanuman caught the rim of the stepping disk with a hand and a foot. Rocks like rust-colored teeth waited far below him. For millions of falans his kind had known what to do about
Proserpina flicked through. Hanuman caught her belt, but he wasnt needed: she had the rim of the stepping disk. 'Trap,' she said. She pulled herself onto an ochre rock. 'Crude. Aliens?'
Hanuman said, 'Tunesmith is careful. Anything might come through from the Penultimates home. Proserpina, we were told to wait. Hes sent us a service stack.'
'Follow,' said Proserpina. She swung around from the rim and thumped soundly against the stepping disk. Nothing happened. 'Gauthiers changed the link.'
'I know the protocols.' Hanuman popped the controls open, freed a hand, and tapped rapidly. 'Well lose Gauthiers link. Do you care where the detective and the native went?'
'Shell change the settings again. Theyre lost in the network. Go.'
Hanuman swung himself down and was elsewhere.
Under a hemisphere of artificial sky, a sun burned low, red, and flattened. Veldt stretched out around Hanuman, with a lake and a low forest in the distance.
Proserpina flicked in behind him. She gaped at the lowering sun. 'Was there a planet-born protector?'
'Yes. I dont know details,' Hanuman said.
'I am suddenly very hungry.' Proserpina loped toward the trees.
'I surmise,' Hanuman said, 'that protectors lose their hunger when they have too little to protect. Were you idle for a very long time?'
They were running through yellow grain, and Hanuman was falling behind. He recognized the trees ahead.
His memories as a breeder were murky. He was old, slowing down, joints starting to hurt. The troop had fought an intruder. Hanuman, fiercest of the males, got close enough to inhale a scent that sparked a rage of hunger. Hed eaten himself stupid, then estivated, then… woke like this, in a pocket of forest transplanted deep underground, with its own wandering sun. His own forest to keep him sane, and puzzles to train his newly expanded mind.
The trees were fruit trees. Lower plants grew at the edges. Ringworld life was Pak life, and all these were edible crops. Proserpinas hands plunged into the dark soil. She tore a yellow root out of the ground and ate, and gave another to Hanuman.
Presently she asked, 'Wheres Tunesmith?'
'I cant call him.' The pressure suit Proserpina had worked up for him was a quick fix. It didnt fit well, and it didnt have a communication link to Tunesmith. 'Hell find us,' Hanuman said.
'I was trapped on a single map for more than a million falans,' she said. 'When my Pak brethren ceased to supervise the Ringworld landscape, I continued to test for protectors in the Repair Center. The Repair Center has remained active, and I have remained passive. Im the last defense. One day I will be needed. Even now that day may not have come, but we must see. I should explore. Where can you take me?'
'Your interest is in the massing of alien craft near our sun, isnt it?'
'Yes.'
Hanuman rewrote settings. 'Come.'
They were in a vast, dark, ellipsoidal space.
Stars glared unimpeded, light-enhanced, in walls and floor and ceiling. Spacecraft were harder to see. Tunesmith had set blinking circles round the ones hed found; he might have missed others. Thousands of ships. Hundreds of thousands of tiny blinking points: probes.
Only Proserpinas head turned.
Three long swinging booms ended in chairs equipped with lap keyboards. All three were empty. Hanuman asked, 'Would you like — ?'
'Shush,' she said, and continued to take it all in. Stepping disks: one visible. She couldnt see the one she was standing on. Weapons and cameras: she couldnt see those either. The star projections could mask anything.
If Tunesmith attacked, it would be from above, and Hanuman would attack too. She was ready — but that was instinct speaking. Practically speaking, if Tunesmith wanted her life, it was his. She asked, 'Do you know these ships?'
'Some of them.' Hanuman pointed out a few: Puppeteer, Trinoc, Outsider, Kzinti, ARM, Sheathclaws.
'Some are only observers,' Proserpina said. 'Some are arrayed for war. Badly. The ARM would win if they struck there and there…' Her voice wandered off. 'And wreckage from this ship or this one might strike the Ringworld. That tail design confines antimatter fuel, doesnt it? Has Tunesmith considered destroying all of these fleets?'
'Tunesmith considers everything.'
'But I dont know his tools. He must be at work on something! Something besides mere defensive meteor control. I wont know anything until I know what we can fight with. Or run with.'
Hanuman said, 'Run?'
'I speculate.' Proserpina walked around the curve of the glowing wall. Under a glare of light were the bones of an ancient protector, laid out with some of his tools. The joints were swollen into knobs. Vertebrae in the back were fused.
'They had already begun to mutate,' she said. 'Do you know that we kill mutants? Do you still do that?'
'Of course, if they smell wrong, or behave wrong.'
'This one was very good at what he did. Look at the state of the bones, the scarring from mere age. He must have survived tens of thousands of falans. Hanuman, should we have loosed our predators?'
'No.'
'But these who were our own shape have occupied every ecological niche we didnt fill.' She looked hard at
