The Ringworld Throne

“She … let’s see … she wakes as a protector. Seeker’s dead. Teela’s a protector in the Repair Center. She plays around. She finds out how to turn the sun into a superthermal laser. Blasts a few comets?”

“She did that.”

“She learns how to display telescope views with the Meteor Defense setup. She notices that the Ringworld has a wobble to it. She finds attitude jets on the rim wall, but most of them are gone. Any protector could predict the results of that.

“She goes to the rim wall. Bram, did she take roots with her?”

“Roots and a flowering plant and thallium oxide.”

“She finds City Builder ships built around the rim attitude jets. A

Bram waited.

“Poor tanj Prill. That could twist a person’s mind.”

Waited.

“So there’s already a few attitude jets back in place, but all Teela sees is that the ship builders haven’t stolen them all yet. She takes over A

“They had twenty in place and no more ships in view, and the motors didn’t have enough power by themselves. Teela left the other protectors tending the motors. She came back to the Repair Center. She must have known what she was going to do next. She didn’t see Hot Needle of Inquiry coming at her until she was using the Repair Center telescope again.”

Acolyte said, “She must have had a telescope on the rim, Louis.”

“Sure, and it must have been good enough to see the big City Builder ships coming in. Needle’s much smaller.”

“Would she recognize Needle?”

“A General Products number-three hull? Sure.”

Bram asked, “How could Needle affect her plans?”

“What did I tell you about reading a protector’s mind, Bram?”

“But you must try.”

Louis didn’t want to try. “Here’s what Teela told me. She just couldn’t make herself kill a trillion people even to save thirty trillion. Protector intelligence and Teela Brown empathy: she could feel their deaths. She knew it had to be done, and she knew we’d figure out how, me and Chmeee and the Hindmost, and she couldn’t let us do it, either. She was inviting us to kill her, Bram.”

“I watched her fight. I could have fought better while dead.”

“Yeah. It was the fight of my life, but nobody outfights a protector.”

“If she knew she couldn’t play a plasma jet along the rim wall, why did she return to the Repair Center?” Silly question. Bram didn’t wait for an answer. “What did she really want?”

Louis shook his head. “What do protectors want? That’s one thing we learned about you. Your motives are hard-wired. You protect your genetic line. When the line dies out, you stop eating and die. Teela didn’t have children on the Ringworld, but there were hominids. Relatives, if you close one eye and squint a little. She had to save them. Why wait? With the Ringworld sliding off balance—”

Bram brushed it away. “She waited for Hot Needle of Inquiry, for puppeteer-derived computer programs. I watched you use them and was glad I had not interfered.”

Oh. “But why not just say so? Tanj dammit, why the fight?” Wait, now—“Bram, did A

“She took several days to prepare.”

“And that was just under seven thousand falans ago?”

“Yes.”

“Around twelve hundred A.D., my calendar. Did she take roots? And does she have to come back for more?”

“A

“Yeah. Teela had the same idea? Roots, plants, thallium oxide. If there’s a good place to plant all that, then A

“A

“You can’t hide plants from sunlight. She couldn’t put it where any passing hominid would sniff it. She’d want it within her reach, on a spill mountain, in a place even hot-air balloons couldn’t invade. A fissure, a steep valley, maybe. And now we have to guess whether Teela saw it.”

“And if she did?”

Louis sighed. “Bram, what have you got on living protectors?”

“Hindmost, show him. I propose to bathe.”

Chapter 25

Default Option

A hundred miles above the spill mountain tops, the probe accelerated. The Ringworld raced toward and past it like a frozen river bigger than worlds, but no longer at 770 miles per second. The probe was catching up.

Louis asked the puppeteer, “Are we in view of that comet installation you didn’t blast?”

“Yes, it’s far enough above the Ringworld plane, but we will have landed before the light reaches the comet.”

Acolyte reclined, huge and silent. Chmeee had sent him to learn, and he had been learning from Bram for these past 2.2 falans. Teaching him wisdom would be a neat trick, Louis thought. Protectors had intelligence coming out of their ears, but wisdom? Could a Kzin see the difference?

“And you’ve blasted everything else that can see us.”

“Yes.”

“Stet. Show us the rim.”

“I can’t really show you protectors, Louis. It’s what Bram asked, but I ca

“What have you got?”

The Hindmost had months, falans, of observing the rim wall and the spill mountains. Winking heliographs were everywhere, not just on the rim wall. Several times the probe had caught daylit flashes from—one presumed—client species on the flatlands.

A village flashed past, and the Hindmost froze it for their eyes: a thousand houses spreading out from one side of a magnificent waterfall, eight to ten thousand feet high. On the other side of the falls, a dockyard for hot air balloons, marked by a cliff splashed with bright orange paint. Below the dockyard, clustered factories and warehouses ran down the ice and rocks to another orange boulder and a lower landing pad. Come in high or come in low, travelers would find refuge.

The Hindmost jumped the view to another village fifty million miles away. A spread across a shallow green hillside: houses with sloped sod roofs, and a vertical row of industrial works with orange-marked landing pads above and below.

Louis said, “Acolyte, you’ve seen a lot more of this than I have. What am I likely to miss?”

“I can’t guess what you might miss, Louis. They have no more problem with garbage disposal than a school of fish. They—”

Louis laughed widely, white teeth showing. Acolyte waited it out. “Their houses differ but their placement follows a pattern. Balloons and factories are alike everywhere. Bram and I surmise that the Night People mirrors can relay designs, maps, weather alerts, perhaps written music: a trade in ideas.”

“Trade between stars is like that.”

The rim wall was a continuous sheet of scrith, of Ringworld floor material as strong as the force that held an atomic nucleus together. Even that force wasn’t as strong as a meteoroid moving at Ringworld speed, and Louis noted a punch hole high up on the rim wall, a few million miles antispin from the other Great Ocean. Otherwise the great empty mountings stood three million miles apart along a featureless rim, and a slender thread ran along the top for a third of its length. They’d seen that eleven years ago: a maglev track, never finished.