Ringworld's Children (11 page)

"Aren't we all. Should Tunesmith have taken such a risk?"

"How should I judge?" Hanuman's frantic dance, the hands pounding his chest, would have been an uncontrollable rage in any human. "Tunesmith implies that the greatest risk was not to act. Louis, how can you remain so still?"

"Fifty years... two hundred falans of yoga. I'll teach you."

"I
must
act," Hanuman said, "but not because to be still is wrong. It may be that way with Tunesmith. How can I know? I am enraged with no target."

The sun's gravity was bending the package's course minutely.

Tunesmith and Acolyte walked over. Tunesmith asked, "Louis, do you have your hearing back? Have you rested?"

"I slept. Where did you land
Long Shot?"

"Why would I tell you that?" Tunesmith waved it off. "You and Acolyte and Hanuman must observe my plug in action. Has Hanuman told you anything?"

"It's a double-X-large-size meteor plug."

"Good. I have a stepping disk in place--"

"You saw this coming," Louis said.

"I did."

"Could you have stopped it?"

"How?"

"Don't steal
Long Shot?"

"I need to understand the Quantum II hyperdrive. Louis, you must
see
that the Fringe War would never have stayed in the comets. These Ball World species covet the technology that made the Ringworld. It isn't the Ringworld they want to preserve. They want the knowledge, and to keep it from each other."

Louis nodded. It wasn't a new thought. "Scrith armor. Cheap fusion plants."

"Trivia," Tunesmith said. "The Ringworld engineers needed motors to spin this structure up. They must have confined a hydrogen mass equivalent to a dozen gas giant Ball Worlds, then fed it all through force fields arrayed to act as hydrogen fusion motors. Your Ball World bandits don't have decent magnetic control, and what they have won't scale up. They might learn something by studying our motors on the rim wall. They would study the Ringworld. They need not preserve it. Am I talking sense?"

"Maybe."

"Louis, I want you in place to observe the meteor patch as it deploys."

"Tunesmith, it bothers me to be expendable."

"I don't use the word, Louis. I don't use the concept. All life dies, all life resists dying. I would not put you in unneeded danger."

"Interesting word."

"I have a stepping disk in place from which you may observe. A sight not to be missed. Hanuman will go. Will you? Acolyte, will you go? Or will you rest here in comfort to learn if all we know has been destroyed?"

Acolyte looked to Louis.

Louis threw up his hands. "Stet. You want us in pressure suits?"

"With all my heart," Tunesmith said. "Use full gear."

They geared up in
Needle
and flicked from there. The Hindmost wasn't with them. They'd left the puppeteer in a depressed and uncommunicative state.

At lightspeed via stepping disks, they'd arrive ahead of Tunesmith's plug package.

Acolyte wore Chmeee's spare pressure suit, retrieved from
Needle's
stores. He looked like a bunch of grapes. Hanuman, in a skintight suit with a fishbowl helmet, went first. Louis stepped onto the plate.

The bottom dropped out.

Louis hadn't expected free fall. He hadn't expected to be thousands of miles up, either. He snatched at something: Hanuman's hand. Hanuman pulled him to the stepping disk.

The Ringworld, two or three thousand miles below, skimmed past at ferocious speed. It looked infinite in all directions. The rim walls were too distant to show as more than sharp lines.

Acolyte yowled.

Louis didn't dare reach for the thrashing, terrified Kzin. Acolyte's father's spare pressure suit was all balloons, but there were waldo claws on all four limbs. It would have been like reaching into a threshing machine.

"It's all right. You have attitude jets," Louis shouted. "Use them when you feel like it."

The yowling stopped.

Louis's magnetic soles held him down. Hanuman had turned the stepping disk off. Otherwise they'd be back aboard
Needle.

"Plenty of time, Acolyte," Louis said. "We're orbiting the sun." Louis held his voice calm, soothing.
He's only twelve.
"Essentially we're standing still, and the Ringworld goes at the usual seven hundred and seventy miles per second, so we'll see the whole thing go under us in seven and a half days. Hanuman--?"

"Eight," Hanuman said. "Eight stepping disks are now in orbit. Tunesmith intended more. This was the nearest. I've committed the stepping-disk system to memory. If we need to reach the surface, there's a service stack not too far, but meanwhile we can see it all. Can you pick out the puncture?"

"I don't see it yet."

"Look antispin."

"It's
behind
us? Stet, I have it. It looks like a target." Airless moonscape rimmed with cloud, scored with lines pointing inward toward a black dot.

The land racing below them still had river networks lined with the dark green of life. Through the land a white streak ran to antispin. Louis thought he knew what that was, but it was less urgent than the puncture. "Acolyte--?"

"I see the wound. I do not see the plug package."

"I haven't found that either," Hanuman said. 'Too small. Tunesmith, are you with us?"

"Half hour delay," Louis reminded him. "Sixteen minutes each way, lightspeed." This was a
protector?
But upgraded from an animal. You didn't expect a protector to forget things... and Hanuman must be very accustomed to Tunesmith's guidance.

Acolyte bounced against the stepping disk. Magnetic boots clung. He stood uncertainly. "My father tried to tell me about free fall," he said. "I don't think he ever feared it."

Tunesmith spoke from sixteen minutes in the past. "I've sent the signal to deploy the double-X-large meteor plug. Tell me what you see, all three of you. Be free to interrupt each other, I can sort your voices."

A lamp lit above the target.

It didn't look much brighter than a street lamp, but its size... Louis squinted past the glare. "Something unfolding. Tunesmith, it looks like fire salamanders mating... or a balloon inflating... it's bulking up into a shape like a sailing ship's life preserver. Jets firing at fusion temperatures. What have you got there, Tunesmith?"

Acolyte: "It's settling. Slowing. A torus. It's much wider than the puncture, a thousand to two thousand klicks across. Was this what you wanted to hear?"

Hanuman: "The scrith foundation that holds the Ring together demonstrates tremendous tensile strength. I've done the numbers. The forces that hold scrith together would generate showers of quarks if pulled apart. A bag made of such material would be strong enough to confine a hydrogen fusion explosion. There's risk, Tunesmith, but it seems to be holding."

Acolyte: "It's settling--"

Louis: "--enclosing the puncture. Leaving the puncture exposed like a bull's-eye on a target. I'm guessing your balloon stands fifty miles tall, so it'll confine the atmosphere as long as it holds."

Hanuman: "Tunesmith, how good an insulator is a scrith balloon? We wouldn't see it if it weren't leaking energy. When it cools enough, it'll collapse. Tunesmith, it will leak air. The ground beneath will be uneven."

Answer came there none. Tunesmith's reaction was a Ringworld diameter away.

So he must have spoken sixteen minutes ago. "Watch for the second package," the protector said. "Tell me if it settles inside the ring."

Acolyte: "I don't see anything. Louis? Hanuman?"

Louis: "There won't be a meteor trail--"

Acolyte: "Rocket! I see it. Fusion, by its color. Settling slowly at the edge of the hole. It's down."

Louis: "We're drifting too far. I can't see the puncture any more."

Hanuman bent over the rim of the stepping disk. "I'll fix that. The next stepping disk is thirty degrees around the Ringworld arc. Ready?"

They flicked.

The Ringworld flowed beneath them. They'd jumped thirty degrees, about fifty million miles. Louis, looking ahead of him, found a line of white several worlds wide, and a brighter line peeping above its center. Acolyte said, "There it is. We can't see detail, Tunesmith. We won't be over it for half a day."

Louis: "There's a zoom function in our faceplates. Tunesmith, I don't see any change. Your balloon plug is still inflated. Everything outside the balloon is fog. We've lost a... few percent of the Ringworld already."

Around the edges of the fog, the land would be ravaged by shock waves running through air, sea, earth, and the scrith foundation. Weather patterns would be shattered.... Louis realized he was being optimistic. He was assuming that Tunesmith would plug the hole, stop the loss.

He had once estimated the Ringworld's population at thirty trillion, with hominid species in every possible ecological niche. That vast plain of fog would be water droplets condensed by a drop in pressure. Ecologies under that fog blanket would be dehydrated and suffocating. Around it they'd soon be ravaged by climate change.

But only if Tunesmith made a miracle.

"I think a ship in stasis crashed to antispin of the puncture," Louis said. "I can't see it from here."

Hanuman said, "We won't be over it for half a day. I'm going to flick us home."

A moment later--plus a quarter hour--they were aboard
Needle.

Moments afterward, so was Tunesmith. "Hanuman, report," he said.

"Your device deployed. It will hold for days, but it will leak. What are you expecting?"

"I sent a reweaving system to make more scrith. I based my design on nanotechnology from the 'doc aboard
Needle.
A complicated matter, this. The system must replace not only the scrith floor but the superconductor grid within."

Hanuman said, "There are species whose breeders evolved intelligent. Their protectors would be bright enough to help you with such problems."

"Bright enough to quarrel, too, and to hold the Ringworld hostage for the advantage of their own gene pool. Louis, tell me what you saw of a downed spacecraft."

"Just a streak," Louis said.

"Different from other streaks?"

He spoke too patiently. Louis flushed. "We saw it from a long way away, but--I reached the Ringworld aboard a ship in stasis.
Lying Bastard
came down with a horizontal velocity of seven hundred and seventy miles per second, like anything that brushes the Ringworld. We left a streak of molten lava and bare scrith. Now I've seen one just like it. I think when one ship exploded, another got knocked down."

"We'll have to find it."

"That's easy, but not now," Louis pleaded. "Your orbiting stepping disk won't be in view of the puncture for twelve hours anyway. Let us get some sleep." He was ready to weep, exhausted physically and emotionally.

"Sleep, then."

They slept aboard
Needle.
Louis shared sleeping plates with Hanuman. The little protector just had to try it.

They woke, they breakfasted, they returned to the workstation under Olympus where Tunesmith was waiting.

Tunesmith had added to their gear. The new gear included two flycycles.

Nessus and his motley crew had carried four flycycles: flying structures built something like a dumbbell with a seat mounted between the weights. They'd all been ruined on that first voyage. These two must have been modeled on the wreckage; but they were longer, each with two seats and a big luggage rack.

Louis inspected one of the vehicles. The kitchen converter would store in the luggage rack or swing out. Mounts on the dash carried a flashlight laser and some other tools. Nessus's team had reached the Ringworld with gear similar to this, some of puppeteer make, some purchased off shelves in human space.

"I reworked the sonic fold too," Tunesmith said. "Orbiting Stepping-Disk Eight will be almost in place, Hanuman. You can take it from here."

"Stet." To Acolyte and Louis, Hanuman said, "Get into your pressure gear, then stow your baggage. We'll push the flycycles through first."

"Where's the Hindmost?" Louis asked.

"He's still in a depressed state," said Tunesmith. "That worries me. He may be suffering a chemical imbalance. I'll put him in the 'doc after you're gone."

Louis didn't comment. They geared up and went.

And out into free fall with the Ringworld blazing below. The Kzin, the protector, Louis, and two flycycles drifted apart. Riding lights flashed on the flycycles.

Orbiting Stepping-Disk Eight had drifted in the night, twenty degrees, thirty-three million miles. Louis was looking almost straight down into a black hole with a glitter at the rim, in a quasi-lunar landscape marked with radial streamlines and glittering threads of frozen riverbed. A torus the size of a mountain range, glowing ruby from within and beginning to sag, was its border. It looked like God had dropped one of his toys. A plane of white cloud surrounded the torus, bigger than worlds.

To antispin, where cloud cover became patchy, a white scratch ran across the land.

Louis pointed it out. "A ship dug that gouge. We'll find it at the antispin end, the far end. I don't see it yet, so it'll be small. Hanuman, shall we start decelerating?"

"Yes. Board a flycycle, I'll take the other, Acolyte rides with whom he will. Acolyte?"

"With you," Acolyte said.

"Stet. Keep your altitude until your relative velocity is low, Louis. The sonic fold won't take more than a few times sonic speed. I'll keep you in sight. Guide us down to the ship."

A grid of superconducting material ran beneath the Ringworld floor. Nessus's flycycles had flown by magnetic levitation. With maglev for lift, thrusters didn't have to be powerful... but these redesigned machines did deliver some serious push. When his velocity relative to the landscape had decreased to something reasonable, Louis eased down into atmosphere until he could hear a thin whine in the sonic fold. He could see a lacework of water vapor around the other flycycle. His own shock waves were barely visible.