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Twenty-three of the mounts now held motors. At highest magnification, the tiny pairs of toroids were just visible.
“Here is what they look like firing.” The puppeteer jumped the view, fast-forward.
The change was not great. Hydrogen fusion radiates mostly X rays. A fusion motor radiates visible light because it is hot, or because working mass has been added to increase thrust. When a rim wall motor was firing, the wire outline glowed white-hot, and flexed against the plasma’s magnetic fields. The toroids were the wasp-waist constriction in an hourglass of white-hot wire, and an indigo ghost flame ran down the axis. Twenty-two of those in a row.
The Hindmost displayed successive views of work around the twenty-third motor. There were cranes and cables big enough to see, and flatbed things that might be used for magnetic levitation, but not a hope of seeing anything man-sized.
And all Louis could think of was his need to talk where Bram couldn’t hear.
The protector was using the bath setup in the crew cabin. No doubt that equipment had kept Chmeee and Louis sane, and Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok, too. Still, it was cramped and complicated and primitive. They could hear the whisper of spray through the wall.
Louis said, testing, “Given he bathes at all, I’m surprised he didn’t use your cabin.”
“Louis, I wish now that I could show you my cabin. The dedicated stepping disk is hardwired. It ca
The Kzin rumbled, “You value your privacy greatly.”
“You know better. I want company,” the Hindmost said. “Louis or even you, if I ca
“You persuaded Bram of that?”
“I hope so. It’s true.”
The probe was an hour short of matching the Ringworld’s spin. Louis said, “We’re going to have to use pressure suits. Let’s do something about them.”
“I keep my own well-maintained,” the puppeteer said.
“Stet. Send me and Acolyte to the lander bay.”
“I should come,” the Hindmost said. “There’s other equipment I should see to.”
They flicked out.
“We ca
Acolyte snorted. Louis said, “Suppose a protector-level intelligence really wanted to hear us?”
“No, Louis. I intended to spy on you and Chmeee and—” Harkabeeparolyn hadn’t made the cut. “I made this my listening post. No entity could add a spy device in the lander bay without signaling me.”
Maybe. “Hindmost, aren’t you safe when you’re in your own cabin?”
“Bram has a way to attack me there.”
“Can you block it?”
“I haven’t worked out what he has.”
“A good bluff? Bram’s had a long time to work on you. He has you terrified.”
The Hindmost’s gaze converged on Louis: binocular vision with a baseline of three feet. “You have never understood us. The hidden protector frightened me from the first. I remain frightened. However you plan to circumvent Bram, I may accept the risk or reject it, but only on the odds. I do not turn my mind from danger.”
“I don’t expect to break my contract.”
“Excellent.”
There were pressure suits and air racks designed for humans. He and Bram would need two of everything. Louis checked pressure zips on the suits and the racks. He emptied waste recycler reservoirs and filled nutrient reservoirs, flushed the interiors of the suits and the air and water tanks, topped off the air, charged the batteries.
Acolyte was tending his own suit. The Hindmost was inspecting a stack of stepping disks.
Louis said, “I know why Teela Brown died.”
The Hindmost said, “Protectors die fairly easily, when they no longer feel needed—”
Louis shook his head. “She found something. Maybe it was A
“Louis, we don’t have time. What do you want of us?”
“I want to change the stepping disk pattern without Bram knowing. Then I may want to change it back. I’m not sure I’m right yet. I need a default option.”
The Kzin asked, “Default option?”
The Hindmost answered, “Decide in advance what you will do if you don’t have time to decide.”
“Like the first move you learn in fighting with a Kzin dagger, a wtsai,” Louis said. “If you’re attacked too fast to think, there’s your training.”
“The disembowel.”
“Whatever. I just knew there must be one. Epees and handguns and hand-to-hand and yogatsu, it doesn’t matter: you train the moves into your reflex arcs so you don’t have to make up something while you’re being attacked. Likewise, you instruct a computer on what to do if you don’t tell it what to do.”
“Clever notion,” said the Kzin.
“Hindmost, I don’t quite understand your stepping disk network …”
They discussed it. The system wanted to know that you really meant the change you’d whistled or typed in. Push the edge of the disk down.
“Stet. Now I can do this and you ca
“See if you can describe it,” Acolyte said.
“I haven’t the faintest bloody idea. I only need it for about two breaths.”
As they flicked through to the cabin, the Hindmost was saying, “Louis, are you aware that you were dying?”
Louis smiled faintly. “Tradition says that everyone is dying. Exceptions may be made for puppeteers and protectors. Hello, Bram. Any change?”
Bram was in a rage. “Hindmost, amplify the light and zoom. The village!”
The probe was moving through shadow; but much closer than the distant oncoming band of daylight was a glimpse of pattern crusting the dim snow-colors of a passing spill mountain.
The Hindmost sang flute and strings. The pattern brightened and began to expand.
The spill mountain village looked like a great blotchy cross seen from almost overhead. Houses were white of a different shade from the snowfields: sloped roofs under a snow blanket, strung out along ledges on a background of naked rock and snow laced with dark paths, sparsely patterned along twenty miles and more. Factories and warehouses crossed that band vertically, much more closely clustered, ru
Bram’s temper was under tight control. “You were needed. I feared the probe would pass before you returned. Can you see why that might be a concern?”
“Not … yes.”
Then Louis saw, too. Three bright silver squares: three of the oversized cargo plates. One was bare; one was loaded with cargo, hard to see for what it was. The third, a brown square with a bright rim: the Machine People cruiser still riding its cargo plate. It was tethered at the upper dock next to a naked rock cliff painted bright orange, and two patches of yellow and orange and cobalt blue: deflated balloons.
“That was a quick ride,” Louis said.
Daylight swept upon them at 770 miles per second. The view flashed bright, then dimmed to truer colors.
Acolyte reminded them: “They have their own webeye.”
The Hindmost popped up a window next to the probe’s—four now. They were now seeing through the bow of the cruiser.
Here were Red Herders muffled in lovely furs striped gray and white. Louis only glimpsed red hands in long loose sleeves, flat noses and dark eyes deep within hoods, but who else could they be? The Fearless Vampire Slayers. Several larger furry shapes must be Spill Mountain People. Their hands were broad, with thick, stubby fingers. Glimpses of faces inside hoods were silver-gray, like the hands.