Ringworld's Children

Something had slowed his metamorphosis.

He tried to stand up, already guessing the answer.

He couldnt stand straight. Hed been half-healed when he began to eat yellow root. The injuries were embedded in the regrowth pattern. Hed become a protector, but crippled. His knee, leg, hip, and ribs on the left side were twisted out of true. His body was nearly fat free, the fat burned out of him during too long an estivation.

He limped through the hanging garden, learning how to move all over again. A protector who couldnt fight. He reached for something badger-like and caught its leg only because it was so slow. He ate it in haste, and judged it was enough.

A few ramps below was the scorched and half-melted service stack. He limped down and had a look. It had cooled, of course. He tried to pop the controls open, but melted metal had fused it shut.

He climbed painfully onto the stepping disk. Nothing happened.

His fist slapped the rim hard.

Mars! He twisted and reached up to slap both hands against the inverted stepping disk before he could fall away. A moment later he was in a handstand in a field of high grass. He rolled to his feet quick (where was Tunesmith?) and found himself under a blue hemisphere, in the tree-of-life garden where hed killed Teela Brown.

Tunesmith?

Nowhere.

He popped the stepping-disk controls open and began to play. First things first.

There was a mile-long craft on the Great Ocean. Hidden Patriarch had brought Kzinti to conquer the Map of Earth, centuries ago, and on that ship was a stepping disk. Louis didnt remember its code, but he found it.

Hidden Patriarch. He flicked in wire-tense, ready to fight or die.

Nothing came at him. He could see a bronze fractal spider web looking at him from a rusted iron wall: one of the Hindmosts webeyes. Otherwise the location didnt seem to be guarded.

Hed left Hidden Patriarch almost beneath the Ringworlds starboard rim wall. Such a view could reduce a man to the size of a proton. Mountains as big as Everest lined its base, green with riotous life. Spill mountains were all seabottom muck, all fertilizer.

The librarians hadnt moved the ship. The Hindmost said theyd been returned home. Hidden Patriarch might well be empty.

Louis popped the controls, taking this disk out of the network. Now he was unreachable.

For a few moments now, Louis only thought. His memories were muzzy — a long lifetime of breeder memories. His memories of this last hour were diamond clear.

Long ago, it seemed, hed studied a map of the Hindmosts stepping-disk system. Now he reached back into those memories to find settings and placements for various locations. They were mostly lost… but what he needed was a disk only recently put into service. Thought and memory gave him the code by which the Hindmost designated stepping disks. Wouldnt Tunesmith keep that system? It would give Louis a handful of settings to try.

Hed better have a pressure suit.

He popped aboard Hot Needle of Inquiry and yelled, "Hindmosts Voice! Its Louis!" Despite changes in his throat structure he made himself sound like Louis Wu.

"Dont move. You are not Louis Wu," said a flat voice like the Hindmosts.

Louis didnt move. He was in the crew cabin. For an instant he considered familiar food, a shower, and a change of clothes, but it just didnt matter. He said, "Tell the Hindmost Louis Wu has become a protector. I need to talk to him."

"Louis? I warned you!" said the same voice.

"I knew. Dont tell me where you are. Ive come for a pressure suit. Have you been watching the Fringe War? Has anything happened?"

"An antimatter missile destroyed one of the ramjets on the rim wall," the puppeteers voice said. "Twenty-eight Ringworld days ago. The explosion was tremendous, not just antimatter but kiloto

"Those attitude jets always were too vulnerable. Tunesmith must have set up something else by now." Louiss mind ranged ahead of his words. "The Ringworld builders never did want rim wall ramjets as anything more than a temporary fix and a safety feature. They built the superconductor grid to move the system magnetically, push against the sun. Tunesmith controls that."

"Youre guessing."

"I guess good. Im a protector. Free me, Hindmost, and Ill get off your property."

"Whats it like?" the Hindmost asked.

"I feel confined. Im crippled," Louis said. "I cant fight and cant run. I can think faster than I ever did before. I see more answers. Thats confining too, in a way. If I see the right answer every time, therere no choices.

"Tunesmith has a plan. I wont interfere unless he threatens my N-children, but I should talk to him. Its just that there are things I have to do first. What about you? Do you have a plan?"

"Run away when I see a chance."

"Good. Do you remember where Tunesmith worked cm Needle? Do you have webeye cameras in there?"

"Beneath Mons Olympus."

"Is Long Shot there? Is it functional?"

"He took the ship apart and put it back together. He hasnt tested it since."

"What about Carlos Wus autodoc?"

"It hasnt been touched."

"Its still spread out across the floor?"

"Yes."

"Watch for me to cause a distraction. Then get the autodoc aboard Long Shot in working condition. Can you do it?"

The scream of a demented orchestra. "Why would I even consider committing burglary on a protectors turf!"

"But youll have a protector on your side. Hindmost, we are under a deadline. Tunesmith will not consider your convenience. He will act as soon as he can, because he cant predict when the Fringe War will go to hell. If we cant get off the Ringworld soon, youll lose your home forever, and so will I, and worse."

Into the silence that followed, Louis said, "Youre thinking you could hold me prisoner until you turn me over to Tunesmith. Buy something with that. Shall I tell you why you cant do that? Do you remember three chairs in the Meteor Defense Room, on booms?"

"I remember."

"Tunesmith only needs one."

The Hindmost understood. He was as quick as some protectors. "Triumvirate."

"He let me see that on purpose. Its a message, a promise. Tunesmith, Proserpina, and me. He extrapolated a surviving Pak protector, and he knew he could feed me tree-of-life. He didnt expect me to be ru

"See, you can sell me to Tunesmith, but youll have to deal with me afterward."

"Youre free to move about the ship," the Hindmost said.

Louis let himself slump into his more natural twisted pose. "Give me access to the stepping-disk master controls. I need to rewrite some instructions."

"To make yourself hard to find? I can help."

"Me and a couple of others. I dont need help."

After he had finished reprogramming the stepping-disk system, Louis flicked into Needles cargo bay. He extruded a pressure suit. It didnt fit him well in his twisted condition, but it would do. He took some gear: a rope, mag specs, a flashlight-laser.

He tapped at stepping-disk controls and flicked out.

He was in orbit. Hed thought that might happen. The settings he wanted were the most recently deployed, and some of those would match orbiting service stacks.

He spent a few moments looking down at the Ringworlds face. This was a region hed never seen in detail, partway between the Great Oceans. There were ochre deserts, and tiny pockmarks of impact craters, and three little knots of cloud: eyestorms.