"The wealth," mourned the Hindmost. "All gone. I lost my place as Hindmost chasing the Ringworld's wealth of knowledge. And those you spoke of, those you love, Louis, what of them?"
"I'll never find them. Hindmost, that's the point. Now let's fix that autodoc before something intimate tears loose inside me."
"I think we can ignore the tidal effect," Tunesmith said. "Don't you?"
Proserpina's fingers danced. The wall display--which showed nothing, a kind of curdled gray everywhere--went black. White hieroglyphs danced across it in a Pak mathematical system millions of falans old. "The sun's gravity pulled up and a bit inward along a very narrow angle, when the Ringworld had a sun. With the sun gone," she said, "all the seas will tend to flow toward the rim walls. We're in flight for two days? Stet, that's negligible. What I'm worried about," hieroglyphs danced again, "is the approach."
The sky had gone crazy. Roxanny and Wembleth wriggled out of the tent, Roxanny a little clumsy, and stared into a light-show that would have won awards. Wembleth asked, "What is happening?"
"I swear I have no idea. Some supersecret weapon. Futz, I hope it isn't Kzinti. I don't see any ships at all, unless--what was that?" A little black comma fell wiggling across the sky, starboard to port. It left a pockmark near the top of the rim wall, visible through mag specs.
"I don't know," Wembleth said.
"A ship bigger than
Long Shot?
No species
I
know makes one."
"It's changing again, Roxanny."
For an instant the colors faded, and then the whole
sky
was gone, and they were both blind.
It was hard to remember that there had once been sight. "It's the Blind Spot," she said. Roxanny had been trained: she looked at her feet. Yes, there they were. "Futz, I can't believe it. We're in futzy hyperdrive! Look down. Lower your--" Wembleth was wandering off, still blind. Roxanny followed him and, still without looking up, felt her way up his body and tilted his head down.
"Let's get into the tent," she said.
They lived in the pressure tent for two days. When they had a sky again, it was stars glaring on black. "This is going to drive a lot of your people crazy," Roxanny said. "The Ringworld was never this dark. The headlights on the flycycle are going to be priceless."
"I never saw stars so bright," Wembleth said. "It's a whole new age, Roxanny. You said there are Ball Worlds around most stars? They could be our children's inheritance."
One bright star was growing brighter above the portward rim wall.
The sky had returned to the Meteor Defense wall display.
Proserpina said, "We'll have to find us a sun, stet? And shift the whole Ringworld sideways to get to it. The mag fields are useless without something to push against, so we'll be using just the attitude jets. Line up with a sun, fall toward it, use the fields to stop ourselves. The seas will shift, Tunesmith."
"I know. I've found a yellow-white star with nearly our own velocity. There, the bright one, do you see it?"
"Yes. Zoom."
The star expanded, and darkened. "Increased X-ray output in this region," she said. "We'll need to boost the ozone layer until we can build a shadow square system."
"Yes."
"I'm more worried about tides."
"Yes, there will still be stress on the seas and oceans."
"I thought of letting them freeze, but we can't. We--"
"Of course not, but we can use magnetic effects on the sun itself. Look, I found a way to skew our path so the star comes straight down the axis. We'll ring the sun. We'll bob a few times stabilizing ourselves; that sends the seas back and forth, not just all in one direction, which would be disastrous."
White hieroglyphs danced across the starscape. "It would work," Proserpina said. "We'll lose much of our population, even some species."
"I know."
"I have a request. Tell me if it's feasible."
"See if you can describe it."
"Leave the sun bobbing back and forth along the Ringworld axis. We'll get tides. We'll get seasons, changing weather."
"What, like a Ball World?" Tunesmith laughed. "Like your world, the Pak world. What about breeders? Won't they go crazier yet?"
"Anyone who kept his mind through these last two days will get used to anything," Proserpina said.
Chapter 22
Louis Wu woke aflame with new life. Cautious in free fall, he waited for the coffin lid to move aside. A hologram Hindmost was looking down at him.
Louis wriggled out. "Nothing hurts."
"Good."
"I was used to it. Oh, futz, I've lost my mind!"
"Louis, didn't you know the machine would rebuild you as a breeder?"
"Yah, but... my head feels futzy. Full of cotton. I never felt so much
myself
as when I could think like a protector."
"We could have rebuilt the 'doc--"
"No.
No."
Fist against coffin lid. "I remember that much. I have to be a breeder, or dead. If I'm a protector, I
will
track down Wembleth and Roxanny, and Tunesmith and Proserpina
will
follow me."
"But they would certainly protect your blood line."
"They would, yes. But if Wembleth is loose on the Ringworld, his luck... hey."
"You don't believe in Teela Brown's luck."
"I didn't. But when I was a protector... it's not good science, stet? Because it's not falsifiable. But look at the pattern. He stole my woman, stet? She fell into his lap. The only woman in reach who could make Wembleth young again, and bear his children too. He's the only survivor of a village that died of asphyxiation, and he'd be dead if rescue hadn't fallen on him from interstellar space!"
"Louis! Teela wasn't lucky!"
"Stet, and Wembleth lost all his friends, and ended up a hunted refugee. What if it's the genes that are lucky? Teela's genes want to reproduce. You can always argue either way.
"It could still be all moonbeams. Anything that doesn't make predictions that can be disproved isn't science. Maybe Teela was only a statistical fluke until we found her. After that, whatever happens to her, you can always explain it as luckier than something else that might have happened. Read
Candide."
"I'll look it up."
"Unfalsifiable. If it's wrong, you can't prove it. When I was a protector, I didn't
dis
believe. Maybe Teela's children are the Ringworld's luck. If their location is uncertain, they protect the whole Ringworld. Basic quantum mechanics. And it's going to need that! They've all gone out into the universe at a minute and a quarter per light year--"
"Louis."
"What?"
"We haven't moved since you went into the 'doc, two months ago Earthtime. We're a warm spot on the sky. Sooner or later the Fringe War will notice us. What else has that heterogeneous mob got for entertainment but to track us down and take our ship?"
"Right." Louis climbed back through the maze of access tubes, getting lost once, guided by the puppeteer behind him. He set himself in the pilot's chair and jumped to hyperdrive. Radial lines indicating stars edged out of the mass detector, and Louis turned
Long Shot
toward Home.