Ringworld's Children

Magnetically powered vehicles could rise to any height.

It was night when the skycycles lifted. Sixty miles high, effectively out of the atmosphere, they followed the gouge spinward. Verdant landscape became stormy, in ripples and streams of lightning-lit cloud rather than in whorl patterns. Then it was all unbroken clouds.

The terminator, the shadow of the edge of a shadow square, swept over them. A growing sliver of sun became a noonday glare. How long had it been since Louis saw a sunrise?

They crossed above a tremendous, sagging, faintly glowing tube. Horsetails of mist were flowing over the tubes flaccidities and disappearing into vacuum. Tunesmiths plug wouldnt hold forever.

Soil and rock still clung to the scrith floor. There were pools and ribbons of foamy ice, all ravaged in a radial pattern. They followed it inward toward the puncture.

The rim of the hole glittered. Maybe, maybe Tunesmiths "reweaving" system was working.

"Spacecraft," Acolyte said. "Above the hole."

There was no exhaust. The ship hovered on thrusters: a cylinder with a flattened belly, a little bigger than the tank it had left behind, but with a bulb of transparent canopy for a nose.

"Thats an ARM design, Kittycatcher Class," Louis said. "A fighter. Three crew. Theyll have seen us by now."

"Will they fire on us?"

"We must look harmless enough." Louis was trying to persuade himself.

Hologram miniatures of his two allies blurred, then became two views of a dark-ski

"Im Luis Tamasan," Louis Wu answered. "Can you hear me?"

"We hear you, Luis Tamasan. Please approach Snail Darter."

"What are your intentions?"

"We are observers for the United Nations," the woman said. "What do you know of events in this region?"

"We came to observe a puncture in the Ringworld floor."

"Your associate is a Kzin."

Louis laughed. "Acolyte is local, a Ringworld native. Im local too."

She peered at his hologram. "You look human."

"Im human. Born here. Acolyte was too, and hes Kzin."

"There are Kzinti here?"

"Archaic Kzinti, in the Great Ocean." That should rouse their curiosity.

The ARM woman sounded peevish. "We tried every reasonable frequency. Why are you communicating in a mode used by the Fleet of Worlds?"

"Puppeteers found the Ringworld and puppeteers explored it first," Louis said with a trace of chill in his voice. "My parents and Acolytes father came here with Piersons puppeteers."

"Land there at the edge."

"We came to examine the puncture. May we circle above it?"

"Land now, Ringworlds children."

Louis said, "Down, Acolyte." He let his flycycle sink.

The ARM asked, "Acolyte, do you speak Interworld?"

"Madam LE, I do," the Kzin rumbled.

"While I serve the United Nations you may address me by my rank, as Copilot or Tec, not as Legal Entity. How may I call you?"

"Acolyte, until I earn a more worthy name."

"What is your co

"I hear of them from my father. We see the lights of the Fringe War."

The skycycles settled on bare scrith.

Snail Darter descended with evident caution, and touched down. An airlock opened below its rounded tip. A human shape emerged, then a second pulling a bulb of some kind through a door that was too narrow. It got through anyway.

One ARM flew to meet the flycycles while the other lowered the bulb to the desiccated turf. The bulb was a rescue pod, an inflated balloon with a few opaque bulges of life-support gear. The shadow of a walking man showed in the bulb as it rolled toward the flycycles.

Tec-First Gauthier — easily recognized through her fishbowl helmet — must have had a clear view of Hanuman riding alert in Acolytes lap. Acolyte attached a line to Hanumans pressure suit, as if the Hanging Person might scamper away and have to be caught. The pair debarked and joined Louis. Gauthier settled before them.

"I feel small," Acolyte said uneasily.

This close to the puncture, the floor was polished by the antimatter blast: featureless scrith, translucent and smooth, artificial and infinite. Louis and his companions were tiny. Louis hadnt felt it until the Kzin spoke.

"LE Acolyte, LE Luis," said Gauthier — courtesy, because Acolyte couldnt ever have been registered as a Legal Entity, nor could Luis Tamasan. " — meet Tec Oliver Forrestier and LE Wembleth. Im Tec Roxa

Tec Forrestier, the second flyer, was large and pale, perhaps a Belter raised in low G. Like Gauthiers his rust-colored curly hair was cut close to his scalp. He smiled and touched gloves with the man, then the Kzin. "Were glad to find you," he said, Gauthier asked, "Can you take Wembleth for us? We dont have room for him."

"Its a three man ship," Forrestier explained.

"Whats Wembleth, then?" Louis asked. "Local?"

Wembleth had lagged behind. Rolling a balloon by walking on its bottom didnt seem to bother him, but it was slow going. When he tried to stop, the balloon kept moving; he fell over, and got up without embarrassment.

Could Wembleth hear their communicators? He wasnt speaking.

Forrestier said, "We found him where the air was disappearing. Corpses and smashed burrows all around him. Do you recognize his type?"

"His species?" Louis studied Wembleth.

Wembleth blinked back as if light hurt his eyes, but they met Louiss without a flinch. He was eight inches shorter than Louis, five feet six or a little more. He was dressed in woven cloth, trousers and a loose shirt with patch pockets, all the color of sand. His feet were bare, large, and horny, with toenails like jagged weapons. His skin was darker than Louiss, paler than Roxa

"I dont know this exact species." Louis hadnt met any locals within hundreds of millions of miles, but he didnt say that. He hadnt decided how far "Luis Tamasan" had traveled. He said, "There are thousands of hominid species on the Ringworld, maybe tens of thousands, and most of them are sapient. Wembleth is about average size. Dark skins pretty common too. Teeth—" Wembleth smiled; Louis winced.

Wembleths teeth were crooked and discolored. Four were missing, leaving black gaps. Louis could feel what that must be like. Wouldnt he be constantly chewing up his tongue?

Wembleth still had three canines, though. Louis asked, "Meat eater?"

Tec Gauthier shrugged. "We gave him a standard dole brick. Theres a setting for raw meat, of course, in case we get a Kzinti prisoner. He ate some of that."

"We can feed Wembleth, then. Even if his whole ecology is dead," Louis said.

"Good! Another matter. Tell me anything you can," Oliver Forrestier said, "about that." His arm swept a circle.

"The sudden mountain range." Obvious first question, yet Louis hadnt pla

"Chiron?"

"He brought my father to this place. A puppeteer."

"Stet. Come here, Luis." Forrestier walked toward the puncture seventy feet away. Louis followed.

Forrestier stopped. His toes were too near the edge. From this viewpoint it was still a bottomless pit ten or fifteen miles across. Shrinking, it was shrinking. The edge was hard to focus on; it blurred and shimmered when Louis moved his head.