The Ringworld Throne

“I need allies who are not protectors. Protectors kill each other,” the knobby man said. “I can hold you to a formal promise made for mutual advantage. Read.”

The Hindmost read.

The knobby man—or woman: he was a bit shorter, a bit more slender than Teela Brown had been after she turned protector. The hairless, leathery skin, the swollen joints, the triangular face and bulging skull, all made it difficult to assign him a gender. Louis thought he could make out traces of male genitalia, but he couldn’t swear to that.

Behind the impenetrable wall, a million hologram puppeteers danced. The Hindmost must have thought he’d be back among them before he missed a step.

“‘… if in his sole judgment the commission involves undue risk—’ Sole judgment?”

Louis smiled and shrugged.

“—undue damage—clear violations of ethics—’ Sole judgment?”

The protector asked, “Hindmost, will you bind yourself similarly?”

The Hindmost whistled indignantly. “You speak of enslavement! How can you possibly compensate me? What I offered Louis Wu was his life! Point taken, I accept.”

Louis could hold back no longer. He asked, “Who are you?”

“I have not needed a name. Choose what you like.”

“What’s your species?”

“Vampire.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

Louis was about to faint.

He’d found Teela Brown’s medkit welded to the top cargo plate, long ago. He had to stand up to reach it. Grinding his teeth against the pain, he pushed his swollen right hand into the diagnosis well.

The pain went away. A readout asked him questions. Yes, he wanted to remain awake. No, he couldn’t replenish supplies of various medicines … an ominously long list.

His whole right arm seemed gone and nothing else really hurt. His mind was lucid, free to toy with the pieces of reality and try to put them back together. He had bound himself to serve a protector … hadn’t he? The protector had bound himself to Louis, to limitations on his power over Louis Wu. And the puppeteer had bound himself, and was himself bound to the protector, by Louis’s contract.

He could hear what the others were saying, but the words slipped through his ears and were gone. “Require most urgently … invaders … beyond the Arch.”

“ARM and Patriarchy ships,” Louis said. “Bet.” Political entities would invade: it was their nature. He had described the Ringworld for United Nations records. Chmeee had spoken to the Patriarch. What other organizations would know of the Ringworld? “Fleet of Worlds, too?”

“So poorly designed, so ill-protected?” The puppeteer fluted, “Those are not ours!”

“Are these political entities dangerous?” the knobby man asked.

The puppeteer thought they were endlessly dangerous, and said so. Louis’s head was bubbling with chemicals; he did not contribute.

“Are they likely to give up their plans?”

“No. I can show you where their interstellar transports hide,” the Hindmost said. “Those won’t participate in an invasion. Even your sun-powered superthermal laser won’t reach the farthest targets. The ships that land will be warships carrying no hyperdrive motors.”

“Show me.”

“From my cabin.”

Louis laughed inside his head.

The unmarked stepping disk flicked only to the Hindmost’s cabin, and it wouldn’t pass aliens. The Hindmost would be behind an invulnerable wall. What chance was there that the knobby man would permit that?

Vampire protector. Louis made his mouth work. “What do you eat?”

“I make a vegetable mash. I have not tasted blood in twenty-eight falans,” the knobby man said. “My hunger is no risk to you.”

“Good,” Louis said, and closed his eyes for a moment.

He heard, “Hindmost, you will only break your contract once. Show me all of the invader ships.”

The Hindmost’s answer was a warbling, whistling music with overtones in subsonic bass. Louis’s eyes popped open to see the dancers disappear, replaced by rotating three-space star maps.

The system looked nearly empty save for the Ringworld and its shadow squares. Color-coded lights blazed far from the Ringworld’s arc, and scores of smaller sparks swarmed much nearer. Louis couldn’t see motion on this scale, but they seemed to be taking positions around the system, as if just becoming aware of each other.

“I must return to defend the Arch,” the knobby man said. “You come.”

The puppeteer shied. “But maps are only available here in Hot Needle of Inquiry!”

“I have seen them now. Come.”

Louis was alone.

And the picture changed as they flicked out. In the captain’s quarters was a three-dimensional circuit diagram of some kind …

Enough. Louis leaned his head against the stacked cargo plates and closed his eyes.

He dozed, leaning against the stack of cargo plates with his arm in the medkit. Loss of balance snapped him awake from time to time.

Behind the aft wall was the lander dock, nearly empty since Teela burned the lander. Louis couldn’t quite remember what else was in there. Lockers for pressure suits and armor, of course, and a stack of stepping disks. He had a vague impression that the Hindmost had made changes, eleven years’ worth of fiddling.

To ship’s port and ship’s starboard the walls were black. Needle was embedded in black basalt: cooled magma.

A network of lines and dots floated beyond the forward wall, like an ant’s nest seen by deep-radar. It teased at his mind.

Dots there and there and there. Those two linked, and those three. Here, a network of ten. Way off in the distance, one of the ten appeared to be two dots superimposed. Sketchy contours in the background might shape a map.

The Hindmost must be trying to show him something.

When bladder pressure was stronger than his fear of pain, Louis pulled his hand free and wobbled to the toilet. Evidently he still had a medical problem. Afterward he drank a quart of water. He ate a civilized Caesar salad for the first time in eleven years, left-handed. No more of eating whatever he could find! That, he would not mind giving up.

He examined his hand with meager satisfaction. The swelling was down; the bones seemed to be in place.

He left the machine twice more. The pattern caught his eye again as he left the recycler.

Stepping disks!

His subconscious must have been at work. That map defined the stepping disks the Hindmost had deployed. Several were scattered through the millions of cubic miles of Repair Center. Four in Hot Needle of Inquiry itself. One just outside. The double-point must be the refueling probe in Weaver Town, with one disk for transport and another for hydrogen.

The Hindmost had left him this. Louis studied it, fixing it in memory, wondering at the puppeteer’s motives …

And it all popped back to dancing puppeteers as the knobby man flicked in.

The protector had something in his hand. He blew into it, watching Louis’s face. Music fluttered in the air, a woodwind sound.

Louis’s reaction must have been unsatisfactory. The protector put the thing away. He examined Louis as a primitive doctor would have, probing here and there to see what hurt. Presently he said, “Not much longer.”

Louis had had a notion. He said, “My kitchen wall can be made to dispense blood.”

“Will you drink first?”

“No, I won’t. I’m not a vampire. Also, the Hindmost will have to rewrite the kitchen program. No, wait, let me try something.”

At the kitchen wall Louis popped up a virtual keyboard for kzinti cuisine, marked in dots-and-commas, Hero’s Tongue. Louis knew a little of that. He sca