Larry Niven: Ringworld's Children

"Where are the rest of us?" Louis asked the Voice.

"Who do you seek?"

"Acolyte."

"I do not have that name—"

"The Kzin we shared this ship with. Chmeees child."

"I list that LE as—" blood-curdling howl. Louis had to pry his fingers loose from a table edge. "Rename him Acolyte?"

"Please."

The map was back, and a blinking point next to Fist-of-God… a hundred thousand miles port-and-antispin from Fist-of-God — four times the circumference of the Earth — and twice that far to spinward of the Map of Mars. The hugeness of the Ringworld had to be learned over and over. The Voice said, "Here we set Acolyte, with a service stack, thirty-one days ago. He has since moved by eleven hundred miles." The point jumped minutely. "Tunesmith has altered the setting for the stepping disk. It sends to an observation point on the Map of Earth."

Home to Acolytes father. "Has he used it?"

"No."

"Where are the City Builders?"

"Do you mean the librarians? Kawaresksenjajok and Fortaralisplyar and three children were returned to their origin—"

"Good!" Hed meant to do that himself.

"To the library in the floating city. I note your approval. Who else shall I track?"

Who else had been his companions? Two protectors. Bram the Vampire protector was dead. Tunesmith was… still busy, it seemed. In the Meteor Defense Room the protectors telescope screen was following a receding point, the vehicle hed launched earlier. Its drive was off… flared brilliantly and blinked off again.

That was a warship. Reaction motors were still needed for war; modern thrusters couldnt switch on and off as fast.

Louis asked, "Have you kept track of Valavirgillin?"

The map jumped. "Here, near the floating city and a local center of Machine People culture."

Good, and she was well away from vampires. They had not met in twelve years. "Why did you track her, Hindmosts Voice?"

"Orders."

Carefully, "Who do you take orders from?"

"From you and Tunesmith and—" a blast of orchestral chaos, piercingly sweet. Louis recognized the Hindmosts true name. "But all such may be countermanded by—" the Hindmosts name again.

"Is Tunesmith restricted from any interesting levels of this ship?"

"Not currently."

The Hindmost was still in wrapped-around-himself catatonia. "How long since hes eaten?" Louis asked.

"Two local days. He wakes to eat."

"Wake him up."

"How shall I wake him without trauma?"

"I saw him in a dance once. Turn that on. Prepare food for him."

The Hindmost dreamed of perfect safety.

He did not dream that he was Hindmost again, ruler of a trillion of his own kind. Hed been mad to be so ambitious. Always he had known that that was no stable state, that his Experimentalist faction could lose power in a moment. As it had.

He dreamed that he was young again. That was so long ago that all detail had been smoothed from his mind, and he only remembered a generic sense of being little and protected and unique.

He dreamed that no tool would ever bite his hand.

And then the dance began -

The illusion was marvelous.

Louis stood in a vast hall. The floor was all broad, shallow steps. A thousand aliens moved around him; two thousand throats uttered orchestral music that was also conversation, unbearably complex. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would have gone crazy. The Beatles… started out crazy, but futz, so did Mozart.

Kick, slide, left heads brush fingerlips; hind leg kicks, partner shies. The Hindmost kicked. A flat one-eyed head emerged from beneath his torso. Spin, kick; the Hindmost lurched to his forefeet and tried to turn. Was this a dance or a martial art?

The Hindmost whistled. The dance dissipated. "Louis," the puppeteer said.

"How long were you out?"

"I sleep much. Where is Tunesmith?"

"Fighting a war, I think."

A head turned to the display of the Meteor Defense Room. "I watched him build that vehicle. The Fringe War grows ever hotter. Have they invaded the Ringworld?"

"I have no idea. Hindmost, how did Needle come to be in this state?"

"Recall that Tunesmith accepted me as his teacher, on your advice."

Tunesmith, the Ghoul musician, had been newborn as a protector and thirsty for learning. "He needed training, and fast," Louis said. "I thought that the more he learned from us, the more we could guess what hed do. Did you try to keep secrets?"

"Yes."

"And you barred him from the flight deck, of course."

"I did," the puppeteer acknowledged. "I taught using your displays in crew quarters. I taught well, but he learned faster, always faster. He demanded access to my tools. I refused. Six days after you entered the doc, I woke to find him standing over me here where I thought he could not reach. I gave him everything."

"When did he chop up your ship?"

"Some time afterward. I was in fear-coma for eleven days. I woke and found this. Little has changed since. Louis, he has repaired the hyperdrive!"

"A fat lot of good—"

"He will reassemble the ship. When he does, I flee. Be aboard."

"When?"

The puppeteers eyes looked at each other.

That meant confusion, or amusement, or any form of internal conflict. Louis asked, "Whats he been doing? Building a warship—"

"Yes, and tracking the Fringe War, delving the secrets of my machinery — he wouldnt trust me to teach him — and ridding himself of my allies and yours. The Machine People are sent home. Acolyte is sent to spy on nothing at all. You, he kept safely asleep in the Intensive Care Cavity, and did extensive experiments there too. Louis, I must instruct you. You shall know everything you might need."

Louis asked, "Why?"

"We are allies!"

"Why?" The droud was gone from its place, a bulge in Louiss pocket. Would the Hindmost mention it?

"Tunesmith has us enslaved! Cant you see what he plans for you?"

"I think so. Hell make me a protector."

Protector was the adult form of the human species.

Child, breeder, protector. At middle age — younger for some species of hominid, older for a few, around forty-five for humans — a breeder can become a protector. His/her skin thickens and wrinkles to armor. The brain case expands. A second two-chamber heart grows where the femoral arteries run into the legs. Joints grow bulky, giving a greater momentum for greater leverage in muscles and tendons.

There are psychological changes too. A protector loses the attributes of gender. A protector will protect his/her progeny, identifying them by scent. Mutations are left to die. A protector with no surviving children usually stops eating and dies… but some may choose to protect and nurture their entire species. That can work, if there is a perceived threat.

But none of it happens without the virus that lives in tree-of-life to trigger the change.

Tree-of-life did not grow properly on Earth. On the Ringworld it had been found only in chambers beneath the Map of Mars. The hominids of Earth, and of the Ringworld too, had evolved as breeders, an unfinished form, like axolotls.

Too young a hominid does not react to the smell of tree-of-life root. The root will poison an elderly hominid. Louis Wu had been too old until Carlos Wus autodoc changed him, and now he was too young.

"Im safe for at least a quarter century," he said.

The puppeteer said, "Longer than that, if you use Carlos Wus autodoc in time. The doc rejuvenates you. Tunesmith will stop you from doing that."

Good point. Louis said, "And what if he waits that long before he puts Needle back together?"

The puppeteer spoke in mournful music. "Then I am lost. Severed from my family, my home. Slave to a creature shaped by his evolution to hold nothing of worth beyond his own bloodline. Louis, you face the same. You are not of Tunesmiths species."