The Ringworld Throne

Acolyte was still in sight, moving considerably faster than he was. Then the ship structure jogged and he was gone.

Louis had lived aboard this ship for nearly two years. He wasn’t likely to get lost. He ran hard, competing only with himself. He had a full mile to cover.

“Loueee!”

The voice was faint and strange, coming from high overhead … from a Pierson’s puppeteer perched in the aft crow’s nest.

Louis bellowed, “Hellooo!”

“Wait!” the voice called.

“Can’t!” He felt good.

A squarish shadow descended. Louis ran on. It came alongside, pacing him: a Repair Center cargo plate with rails welded around it. Louis called, “Stay clear. I’m in a race.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s not—an intelligence test.”

“How do you feel?”

“Wonderful. Disoriented. Alive! Hindmost—don’t use—the Olympus stepping disk.”

“Why?”

“Martians—they’re alive—set a trap.” Louis drew a deep breath and blew it out. Salt air on his taste buds: wonderful! His breath was holding, his legs were holding. He pumped harder. “They’ll set another.”

“Two can play that game. What if I dropped a disk in the sea and began flicking water to Mons Olympus?”

“You ask me? Don’t exterminate—anything. You might need it—later. It’s the reason—you didn’t kill off—the kzinti!”

“More or less,” the puppeteer acknowledged. A one-eyed head dipped toward a puff of orange glimpsed far ahead along the top mid-deck. Acolyte.

“Louis, your advent is opportune. We have much to catch up on.”

“Where’s Bram?”

“Cooking our di

His heads were arced around to look into his own eyes.

Was the Hindmost joking? Maybe that was puppeteer laughter and maybe it wasn’t.

“Bram has a sensitive nose,” the Hindmost added.

Louis asked, “How goes the dance?”

“The dance! It proceeds without me. I’m tanj sick of using your recycler, Louis! I haven’t even had time to redesign it.”

“Thank you for that.” Keep it casual. But if Bram didn’t trust the Hindmost enough to let him take normal exercise or use a toilet and shower designed for puppeteers …

Then the Hindmost might be ready to take back his life.

The top mid-deck ended. Louis clambered through ladders and corridors. Kzinti ladders were heavily tilted and the rungs were too far apart, but Louis went up and down like an ape on steroids. He kept expecting to pass Acolyte. Worse, he expected Acolyte to leap out at him from some alcove. He stayed to the heights.

In his mind he tried to map his way around the garden. It would take too long. At the end of a corridor he ran up a flight of hardwood steps to the top of a wall, along the wall to avoid a thicket of big yellow puffballs with impressive thorns, and dropped ten feet into dirt.

It had been a kzinti hunting park. For two years Louis and the City Builders had tended these plants. They had been growing wild when he arrived. Once they must have fed herds for kzinti sailors. The herds were gone, and he didn’t expect to find animals now, unless Acolyte was about to leap out from some citrus thicket.

But he never saw the Kzin.

There were eight tremendous main masts and uncountable sails, and the winches that moved them could only be worked by a Kzin. Or a protector? This mast was the foremast, with the fore crow’s nest at the top. Louis was blowing hard. His legs felt like overcooked noodles.

Someone was waiting in the bow.

Louis cursed in his mind. He didn’t have breath to spare. A moment later he recognized the protector shape.

Louis slowed. Bram waited like a statue. Louis couldn’t tell if he was breathing at all.

“I think you win,” Louis gasped.

“Were we racing?”

Bram wouldn’t have known of an intruder until the City Builder boy found him in the kitchen, or until he heard feet pounding across the deck overhead. He must have run. Louis said, “Whatever. I needed exercise.”

Before him was a mountain range … an un-Earthly mountain range. Conical mountains, spaced wide apart and varying in size, ran left and right. Without a horizon, he had no real grasp of their size. Most were tall enough to have ice-white peaks, but below the ice they were all green patchwork.

Then his eye/mind perceived what loomed above them.

They were tiny.

Wait now, the rim was a thousand miles high. Of the twenty or thirty mountains he could pick out, five or six were mere foothills leaning against the rim wall, but two or three might match Everest.

The Hindmost drifted toward the bow. Behind him, a puff of orange pulled itself into view.

The Kzin plodded up. He was done, winded. Louis said, “Thank you, Acolyte. I really, really needed that. I was carrying enough adrenaline to run a war.”

The Kzin panted, “Father. Let me win. Didn’t want to. Kill me.”

“Ah.”

“How. Did you pass me?”

“Must have. Maybe in the garden.”

“How?”

“Bram, you must know about cursorial hunters?”

“I don’t know the term,” the protector said.

“Stet. Acolyte, most hunting creatures miss their jump eight times out of nine. If the prey runs away, they pick something slower. Only a few kinds of meat eaters pick their prey and follow it until they run it down. Wolves do that. So do humans.

“Big cats aren’t cursorial hunters, and kzinti aren’t, either. Your ancestors learned that they’d better track down an enemy or he’ll turn up later, but that’s your brain talking. Your evolution hasn’t caught up—”

“You knew you would win.”

“Yeah.”

The Kzin blinked at him. “If we had run only as far as the garden?”

“You would have won.”

“Thank you for the lesson.”

“Thank you.” That was nicely phrased, Louis thought. Who had taught him that?

Bram said, “Louis. Look around you. React.”

React? “Impressive. All that green! From the foothills to the frost line, all green. I shouldn’t be surprised. Those mountains are all seabottom muck, all fertilizer.”

“More?”

“Some of the pipes have stopped delivering flup. That would account for the lowest mountains. What’s left of them must be fairly hard rock by now. The highest ones must have a lot of water ice in them, at least at the peak. I can see rivers ru

“A difficult environment?”

“I suppose. Bram, we saw all this fifty falans ago. Have you seen signs of life in the mountains?”

“Once around your world would mark the distance to those mountains, but yes, we have. Louis, I have a meal to tend. Hindmost, Acolyte, take him to the dining hall. Show him.”

The Hindmost had sprayed webeyes on all four walls of the dining hall.

One was not in use: a mere bronze spiderweb.

A window shaped like a pool of spilled water looked out upon a row of dark green cones capped in white.

Another showed the edge of the rim wall drifting slowly past: a view from the refueling probe.

And one showed a score of muscular, hairy men using ropes to guide a square plate big enough to be the floor plan of a six-room bungalow. The plate floated above them. It might have been a big cargo plate, or part of a floating building. The men were pulling it toward Louis … toward the Machine People cruiser and its stolen webeye.

“I left you a record taken six days ago,” the Hindmost said, “to watch when you woke. But this is in present time.”

“What are they doing?”

The Kzin answered. “They’re approaching the rim wall any way they can.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know that yet. Bram might,” the Kzin said. “While you were in treatment, Bram found your City Builder friends and set them aboard Hidden Patriarch. They obey Bram as my father’s slaves obeyed their lord. They had the ship moving to starboard within a day. Bram is studying the rim wall.”