The Ringworld Throne

“Forty hours ago.”

Louis asked what he had refused to ask for eleven years. “Are you claiming Teela lied? Why?”

“She acted on insufficient knowledge. With enhanced intelligence comes enhanced arrogance, and she never did have good sense, Louis. She could have done what I did, with my computers to play with. Louis, Teela never grasped how closely I was able to guide the plasma plume we ripped from the sun. I set it flowing directly into the attitude jets on the rim wall. The plasma never played across the main Ringworld surface. The radiation she feared … of course it was well above background level.”

“The rim,” Louis said. He was begi

“Yes, the rim, of course.”

“And how do you suppose the Spill Mountain People made out?”

“Along five percent of the rim wall, I suppose I must have killed a great many.”

Ten million, a hundred million people of a kind Louis Wu had never met. Several species, maybe.

Nonetheless Louis said, “Hindmost, I believe I owe you an apology.”

The Hindmost chimed. Making sure it’s in his records, Louis thought. Then, “Another matter. Notice the man in lookout position. Red Herder?”

“Yeah. Little red carnivores, lived not that far from the rim wall. Very fast ru

The great wagon suddenly zipped downslope, fast-forward, dodged boulders at Mach 5 in a storm of streaming cloud-shadows, and was lost in a maze of rocks. “I lost the wagons for a time,” the Hindmost said. “Fifteen hours later I picked up this.”

A small red man ran down a river shore, Mach 12 for sure. Louis laughed. “They’re not that fast.”

“It’s the same man?”

“I can’t tell. Slow him down.”

The red man slowed to something an Olympic ru

“Infrared,” the Hindmost said. A pink shadow glowed through the fuzzy-edged window in the dark Cliff, ru

A ru

Louis couldn’t get any notion of its shape.

“Louis, we watched the burning of three Patriarchy ships. I suspect a protector,” the Hindmost said. “Might we have another protector here?”

“Why not just a Ghoul?”

The red dots streaked away in fast-forward, then shifted to normal light. The Red Herder ran alone. Near him there was a suggestion of sporadic motion, and the man’s eyes were constantly shifting.

Something popped up in front of him. His sword came out—

Pause. And the Hindmost’s cursor pointed. “Red Herder. Vampire. Do you see anything else?”

“Give me infrared.”

In infrared Louis found five glow spots. In normal light … The cursor pointed. “Red Herder. Vampire. This and this are Ghouls. See.”

Louis remembered Ghouls; though they were hidden in brush and shadow, he knew their lanky shape.

But the fifth glow was hiding even from the Ghouls. Louis could make out a hand smaller than a Ghoulish hand, nearly hairless. An old man’s hand, arthritic, with knobby knuckles.

Protector? “Why would a protector bother?”

“Unknown. But see this.” Fast-forward. The vampire woman fell dying. The Red ran, stopped, splashed in the river, and was suddenly fighting half a dozen vampires. The recording went dead slow. The Red’s sword swept around … a woman was uncoiling herself at his back … a hand slapped her ankle.

The hidden one was mud-colored, plastered with mud. Its knotted hand only just touched her, closed and released. The woman swiped with her claws at nothing she could see; returned to the attack, and died on the red man’s sword.

“Minimalist,” Louis said. A rustling sound was trying to find his attention.

“Secretive,” the Hindmost said.

The Red Herder ran along mud. Vampires converged … and they all faded into distance.

“He’s out of my instrument’s range. I lost him for a time. I nearly lost the hidden one, too, and that concerns me. Look.”

The camera viewpoint swung back along the river, caught a splash, then moved fast upslope and into shadow.

Louis said, “I don’t—”

“Here, again, in infrared. The lurked is nearly invisible.”

“Yeah. He was underwater, of course, shedding heat. Where’s he going? Into the vampire nest?”

The sequence ran again, light-enhanced. Splash: something emerged from water and ran upslope in jerky, random fashion. Pause: not a good view, but the shadow was clearly hominid. Run: up into shadow, gone.

“That was the last I saw of it. Clearly it is not a vampire. It guards the Red Herder, and perhaps his companions, too, avoiding notice at all costs.”

In a crunching of brush the Fishers and Sailors were lining up along the pool to stare at Louis Wu afloat in midair; or else at a window in a rock cliff, a view of distant daylit mountains.

Louis asked, “What else have you got?”

“Nothing of interest since three hours ago.”

“Hindmost, my brain really is dying for lack of sleep.”

The Hindmost said, “Wait. This thing—”

“Is thirty-five degrees up the curve of the Arch, five and a half minutes away at lightspeed. Can’t hurt you. You’re right, though, it’s a protector.”

“Louis! You must accept medical help.”

“You don’t have medical help. You put the ’doc on the lander, remember?”

“The crew cabin kitchen has a medical menu. Louis, it can make boosterspice!”

“Boosterspice doesn’t make a man well. It only makes him young:

“Are you—”

“No, I’m not sick. But humans get sick, Hindmost, and I keep remembering why we don’t have a full working ’doc. Chmeee and I, we didn’t volunteer for this work. You thought we might refuse to operate the lander. So you put the autodoc in the lander, and Teela flamed it.”

“But—”

“Leave the window ru

“Louis, I weary of your not listening to me!”

Louis took two more steps. But he’d refused to listen to the Hindmost for eleven years, and he found apologizing tanj awkward … so he turned back and resumed his seat on the boulder. “Speak,” he said.

“I have my own medical facilities.”

“Oh, yes.” The Hindmost would surely be protected against any conceivable [sic—should be “conceivable”] accident or malaise. Nessus had lost a head and neck on their first visit, and Louis had seen it replaced. “Surgery for a Pierson’s puppeteer. What would that do for a human?”

“Louis, this technology was of human origin. We bought it from a Kzin law enforcer on Fafnir, but it appears to have been an ARM experiment of more than two hundred years ago, stolen from Sol system. The system uses nanotechnology to make repairs inside the cells themselves. No second was ever built. I’ve had it modified to heal humans or kzinti or my own kind.”

Louis was laughing. “Tanj, you’re careful!” Most of what was aboard Needle was of human manufacture, and what wasn’t had been carefully hidden. If the Hindmost were caught while abducting his crew, he wouldn’t implicate the Fleet of Worlds.

“Pity I’ll never see it.”

“I can move it to the crew deck.”

Louis felt cold ru

Louis parked his stack of plates next to the guest house. Dry brush rustled as he stepped down. He spoke to the night, not loudly.

“When you’re ready to talk, I’m here. And I bet you’re wearing an embroidered kilt.”

The night had no answer.