The Ringworld Throne

Then Bram sang the song of an orchestra being gu

He stepped on the disk and flicked out, gone, here. As the light through the webeye window showed his going, Bram walked off the stepping disk, lifting his helmet. Something like a fat burl flute was in his hard beak of a mouth.

When a puppeteer is upset, he loses control, not of speech, but of emotional signals. The Hindmost’s song was as pure as wind chimes. “You’ve learned my programming language.”

Bram put the flute away. “Our contract does not preclude such a thing.”

“I am disturbed.”

“Did you follow what you saw? No? Of Mary-Shelley’s blood-children, we’ve killed Lovecraft and Collier. Collier’s servants tell us that Lovecraft’s servants are ready to load cargo. We expect that they will aid us. Now only King remains. When King is dead, Whisper will control the rim and I the Repair Center, and then we may accomplish something.”

The kitchen delivered a flask, and Bram drank deeply. Louis noticed he was carrying the big light-weapon. That thing would probably kill everyone in the cabin if it was fired.

Bram looked at him. “Louis Wu, what would you do now?”

“Well, she’s got to kill King. Too late for anything else. Me? My suit would keep me alive for two falans, so I don’t have to board a sled and rev it up to seven hundred seventy miles per second and then let King shoot at me. I might come back to this side of the rim, then climb up the wall from here.”

“You would lose all surprise.”

“He still—”

Bram waved it away. “A

“Mph.” Cargo, Bram had said. “Well, if I had something King wanted, I could put it on the sled with me. Of course he’d have to know I had it. What does King want?”

“Never mind, Louis. I thought it worth seeking a different viewpoint.” Bram whistled at the stepping disk system, then flicked out.

“Now where’s he gone? Hindmost, are you still locked out?”

“I can’t use stepping disks. I can find him.”

“Do it.”

Two windows showed moiré patterns: webeyes destroyed in the battle. The Hindmost sang them out, then popped one up in their place. It began flicking past other views. Weaver Town. Hidden Patriarch: the foremast crow’s nest.

The Hindmost sang flutes and percussion. He said, “I’ve begun a search program. If invaders come using familiar craft, we’ll know it in minutes.”

“Good.” Louis pointed at the window half obscured by that one. “I hope you were recording that.”

“Yes.”

The stolen webeye had reached the spaceport ledge. Tiny starlit pressure suits walked through vacuum toward a structure too huge to show its shape. It took them forever to round the curve of it.

Bigger yet: a pair of golden toroids mounted on tall gantries. It took Louis a moment to see the rest of it.

Cables were growing out of the toroids, spreading like a growing plant, narrowing at the ends to invisibly fine wire.

“Stet. They’re actually making new motors.”

The Hindmost said, “I’ve wondered if the wire frames are an i

“Interesting notion, but maybe the City Builders took just the toroids. That wire frame could be awkward if you wanted to land a ship.”

The shifting window showed Hidden Patriarch’s aft crow’s nest; then the kitchen and two adult City Builders and three children. Where had the older children been hiding, Louis wondered, that he hadn’t met them? But they were all moving out the door. And now they came chattering back with Bram between them.

Bram had stripped off his suit. He stretched out on a bench. Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok began a massage.

Bones and swollen joints and no fat anywhere. “He looks like a tanj skeleton now,” Louis said.

Bram seemed asleep.

“If Bram thinks there’s time for that, he’s likely right. Hindmost, let’s get Acolyte out of that box and me in.”

The puppeteer whistled up a window. “Louis, the nanotech devices are still repairing damage to his spinal cord. He should be free in a few hours.”

“Tanj!”

“Leave him?”

“Yes!” Louis curled up on the water bed. “I’m going to sleep.”

Chapter 30

King

Louis uncurled slowly. Pain is a great teacher. Still, he moved more easily than he had these last four days.

The medkit had been giving him diet supplements, but he’d turned off the pain drip. Louis disengaged himself and went to the fore wall.

Here: in Hidden Patriarch’s dining hall, Bram was speaking to the City Builders. The webeye windows in the walls were active, and one was the same as this second window—

Here: the vast width of the spaceport ledge. The nearly finished rim wall motor was gone, completed and moved somewhere. Here passed a huge floating sledge with skeletal towers and alien waldos at the corners. A tower with a spiral decor … more than decor: it was bending over like a silver tentacle, and its tip was an infinite bifurcation. It englobed the picked-over hull of a City Builder starship and lifted.

Beyond the edge of the ledge was a line of vertical rings: the deceleration track for incoming ships.

Here: a blur of maglev track with stars showing faintly through. Whisper must have set her sled moving, Louis decided. Built up considerable speed, too, while he slept. It had to be Whisper; who else would have sprayed a webeye?

Here: a sluggishly drifting starscape seen through a filigree maglev track, and a tiny green blinking cursor. “I found a spacecraft,” the Hindmost said.

“Show me.”

The puppeteer sang and the view zoomed hugely, to a blurred view of something more crowbar than ship. Little winged spacecraft ran its length like aphids on a twig. At the near end, a big drive cone and/or plasma ca

“Another ARM ship,” Louis said. “Good catch.”

Bram had left the dining hall.

The Hindmost noticed motion along the maglev track. He chimed. The window reversed to show the other side of Whisper’s webeye.

That wasn’t the sled Whisper had been using. It was a vast dark plane. Cable rose in loops of varying thickness and varying curvatures, branching like arteries, reaching around and up and out of sight. A slender pillar rose out of the center.

Whisper’s handhold was on the narrowest of these loops. She was floating in close foreground, with one hand on a cable as thick as her fist.

It seemed a fantasy, like some ancient book cover. The only item Louis could recognize was welded just behind Whisper: the stepping disk off the refueling probe.

Louis realized that his mind wasn’t tracking. What he needed was breakfast.

Muscles in his back, groin, right hamstring, and some transverse muscles under his ribs protested when he moved to the kitchen wall. Lifting a Kzin, even a Kzin not quite grown … “Remember, I’m a trained professional,” he muttered. “Don’t try this stunt in Earth gravity.” He dialed up a pastiche omelet, papaya, grapefruit, bread.

“Louis?”

“Nothing. Is Acolyte ready to come out?”

The Hindmost looked. “Yes—”

“Wait.” Louis tapped an order. “Let’s pacify him with haunch of mammal.”

Acolyte sat up fast and found himself looking at a rack of beef ribs. He took it and found the Hindmost behind it. He said, “Your munificence as host must be legendary,” and began to tear ribs apart.

The Hindmost said, “Your father came to us as an ambassador. He’s taught you well.”

Acolyte waggled his ears and kept eating.

The puppeteer dialed up a big bowl of grassy stuff, but it only stopped one mouth at a time. For Acolyte’s benefit, he described the deaths on the maglev track, singing up visual displays, with Louis filling in a word here and there. The puppeteer didn’t grasp strategy. One thing Acolyte wasn’t hearing was that Bram had begun treating his alien serfs as prisoners.