Ringworld's Children

CHAPTER 20

Telling a Tale

Launch Room. Louis only needed an instant here. He wanted to see the workspace, Long Shot, and the nanotech autodoc.

Carlos Wus rebuilt autodoc was spread around the stepping disk hed flicked onto. Tools lay about. He could guess their intent, most of them. Cables and rainbow threads of laser light led to a score of instrument stacks. This maze would take minutes to disentangle… an hour or more for the Hindmost.

Long Shot loomed, a bubble a mile tall. At first sight it looked partly disassembled. A curved hatch as big as a fairgrounds gaped near the bottom. Equipment was piled about, and there was lightweight packing stuff everywhere.

Look again: that stuff wasnt intrinsic to any likely hyperdrive system. Here was a General Products #2 ship, a lifeboat. Those were tanks. Those, inflatable habitats for ground and orbit, and a deuterium refinery fitted to suck up seawater. Some of it was mere misdirection. Distorted hull fittings turned out to be a holoprojector left ru

Tunesmith had cleaned out cargo and packaging to get at the works, done his investigations, and rebuilt the ship. Close that hatch and — Louis couldnt instantly see how it would exit the cavern. Hmm?

The linear ca

"Theyll notice!" In Ghoulish.

They were over by the hole, looking down along the linear ca

"…Risk?"

"The missiles most of these factions have been using, one antimatter explosion wouldnt tear up much of the Repair Center. An enemy couldnt know hed hurt me, and hed anger me, and I might find him. I admit theres risk. Im stalling. I dont want the ARM and the rest of them wondering what the Mars protector is up to. So this is what Im up to, closing holes. Keeps me out of mischief."

They wouldnt scent him: Louis was in a pressure suit. Louis couldnt smell anything either, so he kept looking around. He saw a few Hanging People protectors. They werent near him. He saw a webeye camera sprayed on the docs Intensive Care Cavity. He waved at it, Hi, Hindmost! and wondered if Tunesmith was linked into the same cameras.

"…need the holes?"

"Im through with them. Were almost…" Their voices dropped as their hearing came back. Louis wasnt going to learn more this way.

He saw them cover their ears, so Louis covered his. As lightning roared up the linear ca

Proserpina caught it and sent it whizzing back at him… almost: it would hit the service wall, shatter, and shower him with slivers, Louis danced around the service wall, caught the grippy as it struck, and flung it slantwise at the floor, to ricochet at Proserpina, who caught and returned it. Suddenly other objects were in motion, tools and a random chunk of concrete and a long dead animal as big as Louis. The animal disintegrated in his hand. Louis caught the rest and returned them. He turned a spigot on a tank and was behind the service wall again, popped up and returned the grippy and a block of lava tuff, then threw himself behind the puff of featherweight packing plastic that had emerged from the tank. He kicked it upward and was behind the tank while they looked for him there. The grippy burst through the foam plastic, shattering it -

But there were too many things moving now, and elements in his torso and hip were trying to tear themselves apart. He caught what missiles he could, juggled them, and presently set them down. He limped toward the protectors.

Proserpina said, "Fu

"What makes you feel so safe?" Tunesmith demanded.

"You left me a chair. You fiddled with my metabolism."

Tunesmith said, "Louis, everything has happened out of sequence. You ate early and finished your change late. An ARM ship exploded early. We could have taken our sweet time extrapolating the behavior of all these factions in the Fringe War. Now — talk to me. What will they do?"

"A sanity check first?"

"Whose?"

"Have you solved how Long Shot works?"

"Yes."

"And embedded the principle in a quintillion nanotech devices? Made from a much-altered experimental autodoc?"

"The numbers—"

"And run nanodust into the superconducting network under the Ringworld, so that its structure can be altered?"

"Yes, with help from Proserpina and our associates."

"Proserpina, are you with this?"

"Yes, Louis. There werent enough holes in the landscape, so we had to drill in spots—"

"Is it working?"

Tunesmith said, "I think so."

"Stet, Im sane and so are you, or else were all crazy. Is the system ready to go?"

"It may be, if my power storage holds. I cant include the shadow squares or the sun. At best I can only run for a little more than two days. But, Louis, Im not sure the nanosystems have finished infecting the entire grid. I need to know how much time weve got. What will the Fringe War do?"

Louiss mind was dancing down a new path. "You can build a new day-and-night system. Tunesmith, why not build a real Dyson sphere? Ten million miles diameter with a sun at the center and the Ringworld around it. Make it thin like a solar sail so light pressure will inflate it. Give it windows to let daylight through to the Ringworld. The rest of the material is a photoelectric transformer. Youll be collecting most of the power of a sun."

Proserpina said, "Youre fresh, Louis." In Ghoulish speech that implied meat not ready to eat: unacceptable immaturity. "Protectors can be scatterbrains. You must solve one problem at a time. Were still looking at the Fringe War fleet. When will they strike?"

"Theres another matter—"

Tunesmith bellowed, "No! Already some faction has destroyed one of my attitude jets. Who? What motive? Was it a deliberate provocation?"

"Show me the event. Meteor Defense Room."

They flicked out.

He absolutely couldnt signal the Hindmost. The puppeteer would have to move now.

Meteor Defense. Proserpina and Tunesmith took their chairs in a jump. Twisted Louis had to climb to reach the third chair. He looked for where stepping disks ought to be. The one hed come through was clearly marked. A Hanging People protector, Hanuman, flicked through an unmarked site and awaited orders. Others might be concealed there or there. Bet on three or four, no more. Why were the chairs on these booms so massive?

The wall displayed the Ringworld system as if viewed from the sun. The Ringworld was a mere outline, white threads against starscape. "I need a pointer," Louis said, and found touchpoints on a knob. "Stet. These are Outsider ships, right? Two. Do you see more?"

"No."

"Were not really of interest to anything that different. These," he highlighted lenses and spheres, "are Kzinti, and these are ARM," long levers studded with lesser ships. "I dont see the Sheathclaws ship."

"It went away."

"Probably ordered off, or they might have run from Kzinti. Kzinti use telepaths as slaves. What are you wondering about?"

"Interactions," Proserpina said.

He needed a way to use up some time, then send the protectors off on some sort of distraction. Louis drew a net of lines linking various ships, and added vector arrows. "See? Distance and velocity and gravity, you need to take it all into consideration, so its complicated—"