Ringworld's Children

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, Roxa

"Tell us a story," Louis said. Proserpina was keeping Hanumans secrets, and Louiss, and perhaps Roxa

"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 rolled-up landscape. Their food would grow there too, water and air and wastes recycled, a locked ecology. No pheromones from breeder housing would reach the flight control complex. The breeders were not to love us; they would not be aware of us at all. Any protector violating the ban must die.

"Of course there was natural selection at work. Many breeders would die, did die without the company of protectors." Proserpinas eyes sought theirs. "Even now, four million falans evolved, dont you Ball Worlders sometimes need the companionship of something greater than yourselves?"

Roxa

"I find records of scores of religions."

"Weve outgrown them," Roxa

After a moments pause, Proserpina said, "Stet. Many breeders died for lack of our company, but less every generation. Again, many protectors found we must smell or touch our own kind. Many found ways to enter breeder housing, and died when they were caught. Others stopped eating. In the first thousand years we lost half our number. Replacing them from breeder stock was a chancy thing. Natural selection took its toll.

"What emerged at the end of three hundred and fifty thousand falans of travel, was a race that can live without the smell of our own blood line constantly in our nostrils.

"We veered away from the target world. A colony there had failed, but we could not know how badly. We might find protectors already in place, and our ship was a fragile bubble. We believed — Yes, Roxa

"Earth?"

"Yes, your world, Earth. We could have had Earth. Your tree-of-life plants werent growing right. Your protectors died. Their descendants were mutating in many directions. We didnt know that. I learned too little of the Earth colony before your evolved breeders began blasting radio waves at the stars. By then—"

Proserpina blinked at them; started over. "We arrived in the local neighborhood. We found worlds we might take, but our ambitions were greater than that. We chose a system with a gas giant planet huddled close up against its star. We surmise it formed far out in the disk that became the planets. Then it was drawn in over the billions of years, eating lesser worlds as it came. Thus we found a planetary system already cleared out for our convenience, and most of the mass gathered in a single body, a mass of almost twenty Jupiters, Roxa

"So we built. We met difficulties working that close to a sun, but we could use the suns magnetic fields to confine the masses we worked with, particularly the hydrogen we needed for fusion motors to spin up the ring.

"Stars that can generate extensive planetary systems form in clusters. There were stars with planets around us where we stopped, and some were Pak-like or close to it. We identified those that might evolve dangerous enemies. We collected local ecologies and settled them on maps of their worlds.

"We never approached Earth, Roxa

"Whales," Louis said. "There are whales in the Great Ocean. Some protector must have gone to Earth."

"It may have happened after I was isolated," Proserpina said. "Wembleth, are you keeping up with this?" Proserpina changed languages and spoke rapidly. She switched back: "Later Ill show Wembleth maps of the sky, and diagrams. You two should try to tell him what a Ball World is. Roxa

"I was one of those."

"Why?"

"Oh, Roxa

"They confined me on one of the Maps, not this one. They collected a hundred of my line and scattered them in pairs through this land. I must build a land they could live in. I must guide the breeders myself so that ultimately they meet and interbreed, or else inbreeding would destroy them. While I did all that, time passed me by. I was out of the loop. Others of my descendants lived among the Ringworlds expanding population, and their genes were hostage too."

Proserpina fell silent. Louis asked, "How long did it last? What stopped it?"

"A few hundred thousand falans — Im guessing, Luis. Wembleth, Roxa