Ringworld's Children

Have to tell Tunesmith, Louis thought. The Ringworld is wearing out. Its losing air and water. Everything needs repairs, underside, rim walls, landscape. Yah, in our copious free time.

They were driving through a plume of ice crystals now. A block of frozen seawater was being boiled away. Acolyte suddenly demanded, "Louis, stop saying that!"

"Sorry."

"I know what Its a ride means. Billions of your kind pay a sum for the privilege of being scared out of their wits under conditions of assured safety. A hero must risk real danger!"

"You did that when we fought Bram. Here we go," as Needle surged upward. Its not a death trap. Its a ride.

The foamy black sea ice was nearly boiled away. Needle rammed up through a smashed drainhole, through a last barrier of ice, and into the sea above.

Hot Needle of Inquiry settled through black water and came to rest.

"And here the ship may stay," the Hindmost said. He popped up the lip of a stepping disk and went to work on its controls.

Louis asked, "How much of this were you expecting?"

"Contingencies," the Hindmost said. "If Tunesmith ever gave me a chance to move Needle, Id need a place to hide it. Here, Louis, this link leads to the Repair Center. The stepping disk network is open to us."

Acolytes ears were up. He watched them like a te

Louis thought it through. The ocean around them would drain until an ice plug formed. Tunesmith could find them by the plume of water vapor, if he had the leisure. But Long Shot was slow in normal space, and if hyperdrive near a star was no longer sure death, it was still tanj dangerous. Tunesmith and Long Shot would be hunted across the sky for days yet.

So Hot Needle of Inquiry was… "Hindmost, you cant hide the ship."

"I have."

"We need access to Needle for food, beds, showers, pressure suits. We need a stepping-disk link, and thats all Tunesmith needs too."

"I can hide its location, Louis."

The Hindmost was searching for the illusion of control. It seemed futile, but hey, Louis was doing the same. "Think now," Louis said. "While Tunesmith is watching Hot Needle of Inquiry, why dont we steal Long Shot?"

"How?"

"I have no idea. But Im tired of being run around like a marionette by him or you, Hindmost. There has to be some way out of this box!"

"While Tunesmith is occupied, we might yet have a day or two to accomplish something."

They flicked to the Meteor Defense Room.

Daylight had swept across the eyestorm. Louis was looking across a hundred and ninety million miles, past the rim of the sun and the black edges of shadow squares.

Silver knots and threads still marked rivers, lakes, seas; but time and a puncture wound had desiccated this land. Three ships dodged and weaved in and out of a flattened hourglass made of storm. These must be the ships that had followed Needle down. The big ship was Kzinti, and the smallest was an ARM fighter, and the third was ARM too. Theyd be able to detect each other through cloud, as anyone could given deep-radar.

Lightning flickered sporadically in the constriction, but a sudden sputter was too bright to be lightning.

"The trouble with an antimatter bullet," Louis surmised, "is that the crew will use any excuse to get it off the ship."

Both ARM ships were chasing the Kzin ship. The Kzin dove back into cloud. Louis could track its deep-radar shadow through the axis of the eyestorm, one ARM ship in its wake, one darting ahead through open air. Then the Kzin ship was gone, down through the drainhole and out.

Two ARM ships now commanded perhaps a trillion square miles of Ringworld. They spent the next several hours quartering the area, returning every so often to the eyestorm.

"Guarding the puncture against entry," the Hindmost suggested. "You and Chmeee blurted that secret to all of known space, didnt you, Louis? Enter and leave the Ringworld through any meteor puncture. Otherwise face a solar-pumped superthermal laser meteor defense."

"If they find Needle," Louis said, "theyll have access to the stepping-disk network. Hindmost, is that technology easy to copy? The United Nations never had the chance. Its a lot more advanced than transfer booths."

The Hindmost didnt answer, of course.

Louis found himself staring at the display of the Other Ocean. The vast expanse of water and land looked like tapestry on a castle wall. Clusters of islands… continents; theyd be that big, as big as the maps in the Great 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 u

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 u

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 i

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.