The Ringworld Throne

Louis asked again, “Why?”

“We were not told,” Acolyte said.

The Hindmost said, “I have never seen Bram show fear, yet I think he fears protectors.”

Louis saw the co

“If the theory holds.”

“Why isn’t Bram there?”

The puppeteer made a short, sharp sound, as if a clarinet had sneezed. “If protectors knew that three off-world species have mounted invasions and a fourth is in wide orbit to study the effects, they would swarm the Map of Mars instead.”

“Give them decent telescopes? No, they’d still—Ah.”

“Ah?”

“Bram has to be on the rim wall, too. He’s preparing. The other protectors will kill him if they can.”

The puppeteer’s eyes met. He said, “In any case, we have Hidden Patriarch’s view of the local rim wall. My refueling probe has been in solar orbit for more than a falan now, skimming along the rim walls, recording. We’ve learned a great deal, Louis.” The Hindmost whistled a brief trill.

All three views began a slow zoom.

From Hidden Patriarch’s fore crow’s nest: The spill mountains expanded until only one was in sight. Pale green and dark green, grass and forest, reached up to ice-white. At the very peak a black thread dipped into a compact knot of black fog. Seabottom muck fell steadily from a spillpipe a thousand miles overhead.

From the probe: The rim wall blurred past. Louis tried to keep his eyes off it.

From the stolen webeye— Louis began to laugh.

Now the Machine People cruiser was bobbing gently, twenty feet up. Beyond the edge of the floating plate was rolling landscape, hummocks like a thousand sleeping behemoths.

Ropes were pulling the cargo plate. Thirty-odd men of a species unfamiliar to Louis were pulling the ropes. The men wore light packs, but nothing else. Straight black hair covered their heads and their backs to below their buttocks. Perhaps hair was all they needed for warmth.

They were ru

The way grew steeper; the men weren’t ru

The women pulled. Some were ru

The Red Herder ran to snatch a rope and climb it.

The viewpoint moved faster and faster over the rounded land. By now all the ru

The swaying of the plate was making Louis motion-sick. “They’re going to get themselves wrecked,” he said.

Acolyte yowled: kzinti ridicule.

“I don’t consider them sane myself,” the Hindmost said.

The view from Hidden Patriarch’s bow was expanding, too. Now the peak of the spill mountain was lost overhead. A third of the way up the slopes, Louis began to see colored dots and blinking lights.

Blinking lights? “Heliographs.”

“Very astute, Louis.”

“A Ghoul child told me about this. He thought he was being cryptic. Their whole empire must be linked by heliographs in the spill mountains. How do you suppose they do it? Ghouls can’t stand daylight.”

“At night they see flashing mirrors from daylit mountains. Easy enough, but how do they send? Louis, they must buy message services from locals.”

“Somehow. And bargain with the Spill Mountain People, too, somehow. I bet they don’t use rishathra.”

“They don’t need many. We only see the glitter from a handful of spill mountains. A few thousands of message stations on the surface would be enough to knit their empire together.”

“What about the—what are those, balloons?”

The Hindmost trilled again. The zoom stopped; the mountains began to drift sideways. A score of colored dots were adrift against the ice, a mile to a mile and a half up. Louis saw more of them in the wide spaces between mountains.

“Hot gas balloons, Louis. We see them flowing between the spill mountains everywhere we look.”

“How much variation—”

Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok entered bearing platters, and stopped in their tracks.

The Hindmost whistled. The hurtling rim wall and the bouncing foothills faded into bronze spiderwebs. It was a wonder the City Builders hadn’t dropped everything and run screaming, Louis thought. But Harkabeeparolyn was still staring, and Kawaresksenjajok was watching her and gri

Me. Louis said, “It’s still me. I’ve had some medical work done.”

Harkabeeparolyn turned to her mate and spoke. Louis’s translator said, “You knew!”

“Zelz told me.”

“I’ll get you for this, you little zilth!” But Harkee was laughing, and so was Kawa.

They set their platters down: a heap of brown and yellow roots and a bowl of pink fluid. Harkabeeparolyn settled into Louis’s lap and studied his face from an inch away. “We’ve been lonely,” she said.

It felt natural, as if they’d been doing this forever. It felt as if he had come home.

He said, “You weren’t lonely where I left you.”

“We were told to come.” She nodded at the kitchen.

They had obeyed a protector. That, too, must have seemed very natural. Louis asked, “What were you told?”

“ ‘Sail to starboard.’ ” She shrugged. “From time to time he comes and looks about and alters our course, or tells us of wind and water currents, or ways to catch and cook fish or warm-bloods or tend the garden. He says we don’t eat enough red meat.”

“That might be his ancestry speaking.”

“Louis, you look as young as Kawa. Can you …?”

The puppeteer answered. “Only for Ball People and the Ball Kzinti. To heal local hominids or local kzinti or any other species, a thousand of my kind would need a lifetime of study and testing.”

Harkabeeparolyn scowled.

Kawaresksenjajok and Bram entered with more platters. Here were six big, surpassingly ugly deep-sea fish. Two were still twitching. The others had been broiled with strange looking plants … kzinti vegetables. The bowl of raw vegetables was also from the kzinti hunting park.

Louis looked at the other bowl and asked, “Fish blood?”

Bram said, “Whale blood and a vegetable puree. It would not feed me long. Your kitchen was a wonderful find.”

They sat. Kawaresksenjajok went, and returned with a two– or three-year-old child. She had a full head of orange-blond hair. Louis wouldn’t have taken her for a City Builder. The older boy was not in evidence.

Bram’s cooking was good. A little strange. Bram must have been cooking for City Builder tastes using plants from the hunting park. There would be crucial diet components missing or in short supply.

Louis asked, “How long would this keep me alive?”

Bram said, “A falan before your behavior would begin to deteriorate.” He sipped decorously.

Acolyte had already disposed of the raw fish. Louis asked him, “Are you still hungry?”

“It’s enough. One who satisfies his hunger grows fat and torpid.”

The little girl was crawling toward the edge of the table. Louis pointed; Harkee turned; the child reached the edge, slipped, and clung by her fingers. She had a grip like a monkey or a Hanging Person.

“Thought she’d fall? Hah!” The City Builder woman was laughing at him. “Wrong species.” Abruptly she asked the protector, “May we keep Louis for a time?”