The Ringworld Throne

{OVERRIDE laws pertaining to Shasht / Fafnir, Earth, Jinx, Belt, Serpent Swarm …}

A bulb popped into the dispenser port, filled with sluggish red fluid.

The knobby man took the bulb. He took Louis’s jaw, faster than he could flinch. His grip was like iron. “You drink now,” he sad.

Louis opened his mouth, obedient. The knobby man ejected a dollop of sticky red fluid into Louis’s mouth. The taste was unfamiliar, but Louis recognized the smell. He swallowed anyway.

The knobby man drank, watching Louis. “You surprise me. Why would you make blood for me?”

For eleven years Louis had been eating what he could catch, or what unknown hominids would offer as food. “I’m not squeamish,” Louis said.

“Yes, you are.”

In truth, what he had smelled and tasted was making him nauseous. He said, “I have kept to our contract, which calls for me to act in your interest. You are in violation. I judge it wrong for me to drink human blood, and I said so.”

The knobby man said, “The medkit is through with you, isn’t it? You put on your pressure suit. Come with me.”

“Pressure suit. Where are we going?”

The protector said nothing.

Louis gri

“Didn’t you have a contract?”

“Not then.”

“I learned how to use stepping disks. Come here.”

The knobby man had lockpicking tools made of hardwood. He knelt by the disk and lifted its edge.

Louis couldn’t see what he was doing. The protector’s fingers worked too fast. He saw the stepping disk diagram appear in the Hindmost’s quarters, and flicker. Then the protector set the disk in place, pushed Louis onto the stepping disk and followed.

With the lander destroyed, the lander bay was mostly empty space. There were suits for men and kzinti and puppeteers. The transparent walls of the airlock opened into a tu

Louis glanced at the weapons racks but did not approach them. He pulled out a skintight pressure suit already zipped open along the torso, sleeves, and legs. He wouldn’t need the cummerbund. He started to crawl into it, and stopped with a gasp of pain.

Before he could ask for help, the protector was there, easing his half-healed hand and arm into the sleeve and glove, then fashioning a sling from the tie that had been Acolyte’s tourniquet. He zipped up Louis’s suit, screwed a helmet onto the neck ring, and set an air rack on his back. They waited for the suit to contract to Louis’s own shape.

The knobby man worked the controls of the big stepping disk the cargo disk. Louis began his checklist. Helmet camera, airflow, air recycler, CO2 and water vapor content—

The knobby man pulled him through.

Chapter 20

Bram’s Tale

The Map of Mars stood forty miles high above the Great Ocean, a north polar projection at one-to-one scale. From the Ringworld’s underside there was no sign of the Map of Mars, because the entire forty-mile-high pillbox was hollow.

Louis had seen vast spaces inside the Repair Center, but he had never been inside this one. It was huge and dark. Skeletal chairs equipped with lap keyboards rode on long booms. The ellipsoidal wall was a display screen thirty feet high. The only light came from the screen: a wraparound view of the local sky.

There were no planets or asteroids in Ringworld system. The Ringworld engineers must have cleared all of that out, or used it as building material. The Ringworld’s night-shadowed rim showed pale against the black background. Light-amplified stars glared, and four tiny green circles: cursors.

“I found four more,” the Hindmost said. He was at a wall of clumsy, clunky lights and dials and switches. Now Louis recognized where he was. This was the system that twisted the sun’s magnetic field. He had seen this array in a holo projection, eleven years ago, when the Hindmost manipulated the Meteor Defense.

The air here must be soupy with tree-of-life spores.

It was a tidy place, except—hmmm?

Across that great width of floor, a shadow-shape was standing in near darkness. A shape of motionless menace, skewed from the human shape, too thin and too pointy in spots. Bones. Bones mounted in a pose of attack.

In the shadows beyond those standing bones, gear seemed scattered at random.

Later. Louis said, “I should finish my checklist. Do you need me instantly?”

The knobby man said, “No. Hindmost, show me.”

No Belter would have yanked a man into a vacuum before he had checked his pressure suit. That would be murderously rude. Had the protector read the readiness of his suit at a glance? Louis wondered. Was the protector testing his attitude? His equipment? His temper?

The Hindmost was riding one of the cargo plates. He lifted by a yard; his heads dipped among the controls. The skyview zoomed on an orange near-sphere marked in black dots-and-commas. A kzinti ship, probably centuries old and retrofitted with hyperdrive.

The view shrank, and moved, and expanded. This next ship looked big, a long, slowly rotating lever with a bubble at the near end. Louis didn’t recognize the type.

The view shrank and moved and expanded to show a gray and black object like a diseased potato seen through fog. The Hindmost said, “The Ringworld engineers left only the most distant comets. Too many to destroy them all—”

“Air reserve,” the knobby man said. “To replace air lost over the rim walls.”

“… Yes. Now note this …” A blinking green circle marked a crater on the proto-comet. The view expanded, then shifted to deep-radar, with a blurred view of structure in the ice below the pock.

The knobby man asked, “What species built that?”

“I can’t tell,” the Hindmost said. “Mining projects always have that look, like the root system of a plant. But here …” Another rotating lever, a ship of the same make, viewed from the side. Familiar little stubby-winged aerospacecraft were strung all along its length.

“These are United Nations craft made by Louis’s species.”

Louis had finished his checklist. The suit would keep him alive for weeks, maybe months.

“Very good. Allow me,” the knobby man said. He stepped on another cargo plate, and rose. His hands were dexterous where the puppeteer’s mouths had been unsure. A second screen lit with a darkened view of the sun.

Minutes passed. Then a bright plume began to rise, twisting in magnetic fields.

Louis said, “You’re going to kill them, I take it.”

“Such are my directions. They came as invaders,” the Hindmost said.

“So did we.”

“Yes. Are you healthy?”

Louis wiggled his bound hand. “Healing. It’s a waste of time, anyway, if I’m going into your magic ’doc. What have you been doing?”

“We’ve destroyed six carrier ships and a fleet of thirty-two landers. Those were the ships closest to the sun, the most vulnerable. These last are so distant that we may do no more than enrage them. I’m inclined to ignore the installation in the comet. We would only boil ice. I found an Outsider ship on one of the farthest comets—”

“Tanj! Knobby man? You didn’t shoot down an Outsider, did you?”

“The Hindmost advised against.”

“Good. They’re very fragile, but they’ve got technology we can’t even properly describe. For that matter, they don’t want anything we’ve got, and what they want, they buy. There’d be no point to hurting an Outsider.”

“Do you like them?”

That was a somewhat surprising question. Louis said, “Yes.”