Proserpina paused, then said, "I must inquire as to the state of the Map of Earth. Tell me what you can. I give speech over to Hanuman."
Hanuman chattered at length. Meticulous descriptions of Proserpina, Roxanny,
Gray Nurse,
and ARM warriors, the sunfish ship, the flight from the rim wall, the continent on the Map of Pak, local vegetation probably imported from Pak, Proserpina's not-quite-hidden servants... Concise as the Ghoulish language was, he spoke for a long time.
When he stopped, it was not because Proserpina forced him to. He had given away every secret he knew, and Proserpina had not killed him to stop his mouth.
Proserpina climbed from the flycycle saddle. "How shall we occupy our time?"
"Lunch."
"Good."
They spread fruit on the grass and added a weasel carcass. Proserpina asked, "How do you suppose our guests are getting on?"
Hanuman ate a dwarf apple. He quoted something he'd found in
Needle's
library. " 'When the cat's away, the mice will play.' Did you leave them a boat? Anything that flies? No? Then they'll try to reach the Penultimate's palace."
"There's no access," Proserpina said.
"Not even for you?"
"I have mapped hypothetical routes, but I deem the risk unacceptable. The Penultimate's inventions are nothing I can't evolve for myself. Hanuman, they are only breeders."
"They will search."
"Hello. Bored?"
"Yah."
"How are you entertaining yourself?"
"Counting up mistakes," Louis said.
There's another one. Youths don't remember enough mistakes.
Did they? He didn't really recall. It had been too long.
"Are we still friends?"
"Sure, why not?"
She cocked her head, studying him for signs of sarcasm. "Luis, I want you to forgive me for shooting you."
"Okay."
"Tanj, you're easy. You could ask me to forgive you for Claus."
"Claus pretty much killed himself," Louis said.
"Your friend killed him."
"First chance he got. Stet, why not? It's a prisoner's duty to escape. Why in the name of sanity would Claus hold a Kzin at gunpoint?"
"That's war."
"Who declared war? Roxanny, who decided to imprison me? I could have been conned into going for a ride. Done that way, maybe you could have had Acolyte too."
"What if you said no?"
He asked, genuinely curious, "Are you schitz?"
"What?... Not right now."
The ARM was manned by schizophrenics and paranoids. Everyone knew it. In real life, any 'doc could provide chemicals that would keep a schitz sane, but in the ARM, they did without chemicals at least some of the time.
Louis didn't comment. Roxanny glared at him. "This is pretty personal, isn't it, Luis? I've been diagnosed not schitz. I didn't join the ARM because I was schitz, I did it for the adventure."
"Ah."
"But I can fly on psychomimetics. I'm not getting them any more, but they were used in training." She shrugged it off. "Want to go for a walk?"
"I don't climb out of this thing for another two days."
"You're going to love it. This place is the Garden of Eden. There's nothing harmful, and God walks. She's just gone away for a bit."
"Any idea where she went?"
"Nope. Why did she take the little ape? I thought it might be a pet. Then I thought, maybe it smells like a relative. What do you think?"
"Not a relative. No more than you or me."
There was silence. Then, "Luis, are we lovers?"
He smiled. "In this condition?"
"I saw her turn off the nerve block. Does it hurt much?"
"Not much. Aches." He watched her take her clothes off. His own must be back aboard
Gray Nurse.
Suddenly he felt helpless. He wondered what she would do if he said "No."
She ran her hands over his feet. "Feel that?"
"Yah."
Her hands moved upward, part massage, part caress. Where he winced in pain, her touch grew lighter.
The thrill never went away. Among the Giraffe People he'd been too flustered and in too much of a hurry. When she climbed onto the ICC, he said, "You drop all your weight on me, I'll scream my head off."
"Nobody'll hear, my poor boy. I sent Wembleth to look for anything that flies. Let's see if I can get you interested. Luis, how old are you?"
"Two hundred and--"
"Seriously." She squeezed him intimately. "Sometimes you seem older. You know things you shouldn't." Breast tips brushed against his chest hairs as she hovered above him. "How do you know there are whales in the Great Ocean?"
"My father told me. You can see huge levels of detail underwater from high enough up."
"Oh."
"You've been treating me like a kid, Roxanny. I'm not sure I like it. I'm not sure I don't. But hey, you're definitely in charge now."
"Oh, yah. So let's see how agile I am." With a certain dexterity, she fitted them together. "I'm over fifty, Luis. This 'doc is my boosterspice supply for the foreseeable future."
"Well, don't bounce too hard or you'll wreck it."
She laughed. He felt the ripple in her powerful belly muscles.
"Roxanny. Did you know... boosterspice is made from tree-of-life?"
"What? No! Who told you that?"
"Proserpina. Look at the... implications. If the United Nations was playing with tree-of-life... half a thousand years ago... what else have they done with it? Maybe there's a protector running the ARM."
Her eyes got big. "I don't believe it. Luis, the ARM's top rank is all paranoid schizophrenics! And they don't take their shots! Can't you--"
"Keep moving. I thought that was just rumor."
"Well, everybody says so. They'd never let a protector rule them. It might take over the Earth!"
"But if they did let a protector get loose, he'd run the ARM. And he'd think like a paranoid schizophrenic, wouldn't he? Roxanny, I should stop distracting you."
"Tanj right you should. Thinking about the ARM is no fun at all. This feel good?"
"Yah."
"You're not ticklish?"
"Used to be."
"Not at all?"
He giggled. "No. Nope." He'd got his tickle reflex under control, long ago.
Wrong.
The holoscreen view of Tunesmith matched Proserpina's imagination: elongated jaws, a face bare of beard, knobs at the jaw hinges, flat nostrils, sharp-edged cheekbones: a Ghoul turned protector.
Tunesmith spoke the Ghoul tongue. Proserpina was only confused for a moment. The heliographs had spread a common language. She knew written Ghoulish, and a version spoken near the spill mountains. She had listened to Hanuman while he spoke into the holoscreen. It was only a matter of pronunciation. "Omnivore plains runner? I have long wondered about you. Your species survives on the Map of Earth, but not unaltered--"
Proserpina yowled. Hanuman was up a tree and hidden in its puffball top, before his mind quite caught up. But Proserpina was still at the holoscreen, and Tunesmith was still speaking--
"Local carnivores, transplanted Kzinti, have been selecting among the local hominids for such traits as please them. The exception is an invader who came with the first expedition. Chmeee tends hominids in his little sector of the Map, lets them run wild, and does not eat their meat or allow his servants to harm them. We might solve your problem most easily by giving the Map of Earth to Chmeee. We could deal with him through his son or through his ally Louis Wu.
"The Fringe War is a more difficult problem. I believe we must meet. You must view the Repair Center, and I must not leave you unwatched.
"What I know of you leads me to believe that you have learned not to act. Such a degree of self-control is rare in one of our kind. I believe I would be safe in your presence if I can offer reasonable guarantees for your own safety.
"A guarantee you might accept is your knowledge of what I am. We evolved as intelligent breeders. My own several species survive as eaters of the dead. Thus we normally see harm to any race as bad. Where other hominids survive well, so do we. Wars are not good for us; a battle is a glut followed by famine. Drought is not good, so we guide locals in water and canal management. Deserts are not good; we guide locals in replanting. We teach flood control and fanning. We keep local religions, but we guide them away from messy practices, jihads and human sacrifice and cremation. We keep track through heliographs managed by the people of the rim walls. We control our numbers.
"If I see no reason to harm you, I will not. If I desire your good will, I will act to your benefit. Learn what you can of me, and decide whether you will come to meet me. I will send a service stack to rendezvous with Hanuman's flycycle."
The face of Tunesmith went away. The picture remained: a background of interstellar space, skeletal black structures in the foreground. Proserpina shouted, "Hanuman!"
Hanuman climbed down.
Proserpina's grip had bent the armrests of the skycycle's forward chair. She said, "My descendants are being eaten by large orange carnivores."
"Did you know before last night?"
"I knew that most of the Ringworld was out of my control and barred to me. This was not nearly the worst of what I imagined, but I knew with my forebrain, Hanuman, not with my glands. Well, what is a 'service stack'?"
"Float plates topped by a stepping disk. I can guide us through the stepping-disk system."
"We should look to our guests first. You take the flycycle. I'll take the mag ship home. I have an errand."
Evening.
"It isn't the same as rishathra," Louis said. "Can't you feel the difference?"
"Kid, you've had more experience than I have at that," Roxanny said, "so you say. What are we doing for dinner?"
"You could go hunting."
"I feel lazy."
"Will this system make dole bricks?"
Roxanny looked it over. "Just soup."
"Draw me a mug."
She dialed for two. "Luis, how would you get into the mountain?"
"I haven't even seen it. My daydreams have mostly involved walking erect, not climbing around in an artificial mountain. What are you thinking?"
Roxanny said, "We'd need transportation. Even on Earth, arcologies are too big to explore on foot. Then I'd worry about security. Protectors were very territorial, it's said."
"This is good stuff."
Roxanny sipped. It was a heavy, grainy soup. "You get tired of it fast."
"Think about breeders."
"What?"
"Breeders. Pak who haven't turned protector. Plains apes, adults, and children. They can run alongside an antelope whacking it on the head with a knobbed bone, and not fall over. Keeping their balance may be what got them the big, complicated brain. But they can still climb. If there are booby traps in that futzy great building, they'll be set to leave breeders alone."
"Well, unless the breeders are kept out by something like, I don't know, a
fence?"
"We should look for a fence," he agreed. "Roxanny? Don't go alone, stet?"
"What's that?" Light outside.
"Flycycle riding lights."
Roxanny went out to look. She came back holding hands with Hanuman. "That protector sent the flycycle home on automatic."
"It's got an autopilot. She might have fiddled with it. Where is she?"
Roxanny shrugged. "Nobody was aboard but the Beast."
Chapter 17
On the fourth day Roxanny told him to walk.
"It'll be another day yet," he told her.
"I know, but the diagnostics say you're nearly cured. Benefits of youth, I guess. Luis, soldiers turn out of the 'doc when they have to fight, and futz the diagnostics. It doesn't hurt them."
Louis was tempted, but--"What's the hurry, Roxanny?"
"Wembleth says he's found a way in."
"Ah."
"We've got a flycycle. It won't fly without you. Proserpina seems to have got it to fly itself, but I can't. Proserpina hasn't come back--"
"Where's Hanuman?"
"Somewhere in the forest gorging on fruit, I think. Why?"
"He needs taking care of."
"No, he doesn't. Luis, I don't know what she's doing, but the joker won't stay away forever!"
So Louis climbed out of the ICC. He limped with one hand on Roxanny's muscular shoulder, out to the flycycle where Wembleth was waiting. There were little sharp pains all through his left leg, hip, ribs.
Roxanny asked, "Will this thing hold three?"
"Sure, Wembleth can perch in the middle. Give me the front seat." Louis took his seat, wriggled carefully into a position of minimum pain. Wembleth crawled up between him and Roxanny. It was crowded, and the native's wild pelt brushed Louis's neck and ears.
He asked, "What did you find, Wembleth?"
"A path into the fortress," the wrinkled man said.
"Stet. Point me." Louis took off.
It wasn't symmetrical, or self-consciously artistic. It looked like a mountain--like the Matterhorn, all tilted planes done in dark stone, with a pervasive glitter from thousands of windows. A broad veldt surrounded the base, ending in a vertical cliff.
The veldt was a tilted plain of gold and black: lines and arcs of black grass on a field of gold. Louis asked, "What do you make of that?"
Wembleth said, "The black is dying back."
"Black isn't unreasonable for a plant," Roxanny said. "Chlorophyll throws away all the green light. What if a plant could use it all? There are some that do, in known space."
"Yah, but Wembleth's right too. This looks like... writing that's been eroded, partly erased. How about this? Genetic engineering. The Penultimate planted it for decoration. It's just not as hardy as the hay, wheat, whatever."