Ringworld's Children Read Free

repaired.
    Louis had stranded the Hindmost in Ringworld space by chopping the hyperdrive in half, twelve or thirteen years ago. Dismounted, it looked otherwise ready to take Needle between the stars at Quantum I speeds, three days to the light year.
    I could go home, Louis thought, tasting the notion.
    Where is everybody? Louis looked around him, feeling the adrenalin surge. He was starting to shiver with cold.
    He'd be almost two hundred and forty years old by now, wouldn't he? Easy to lose track here. But the nano machines in Carlos Wu's experimental 'doc had read his DNA and repaired everything down through the cell nuclei. Louis had done this dance before. His body thought it was just past puberty.
    Keep it cool, boy. Nobody's challenged you yet.
     
    The spacecraft, the hull section, the 'doc, machines to move and repair these masses, and crude-looking instruments arrayed to study them, all formed a tight cluster within vaster spaces. The cavern was tremendous and nearly empty. Louis saw float plates like stacks of poker chips, and beyond those a tilted tower of tremendous toroids that ran through a gap in the floor right up to the roof. Cylinders lay near the gap, caged within more of Tunesmith's machinery. They were bigger than Needle, each a little different from the others.
    He'd passed through this place once before. Louis looked up, knowing what to expect.
    Five or six miles up, he thought. The Map of Mars stood forty miles high. This level would be near the roof. Louis could make out its contours. Think of it as the back of a mask... the mask of a shield volcano the size of Ceres.
    Needle had smashed down through the crater in Mons Olympus, into the repair center that underlay the one-to-one scale Map of Mars. Teela Brown had trapped them there after she turned protector. She had moved the ship eight hundred miles through these corridors, then poured molten rock around them. They'd used stepping disks--the puppeteers' instant transport system--to reach Teela. For all these years since, the ship had been trapped.
    Now Tunesmith had brought it back to the workstation under Mons Olympus.
    Louis knew Tunesmith, but not well. Louis had set a trap for Tunesmith, the Night Person, the breeder, and Tunesmith had become a protector. He'd watched Tunesmith fight Bram; and that was about all he knew of Tunesmith the protector. Now Tunesmith held Louis's life in his hands, and it was Louis's own doing.
    He'd be smarter than Louis. Trying to outguess a protector was... futz... was both silly and inevitable. No human culture has ever stopped trying to outguess God.
    So. Needle was an interstellar spacecraft, if someone could remount the hyperdrive. That tremendous tilted tower--forty miles of it if it reached all the way to the Repair Center floor--was a linear accelerator, a launching system. One day Tunesmith might need a spacecraft. Meanwhile he'd leave Needle gutted, because Louis Wu and the Hindmost might otherwise use it to run, and the protector couldn't have that.
    Louis walked until Needle loomed: a hundred-and-ten-foot diameter cylinder with a flattened belly. Not much of the ship was missing. The hyperdrive, the 'doc, what else? The crew housing was a cross section, its floor eighty feet up. Under the floor, all of the kitchen and recycling systems were exposed.
    If he could climb that high, he'd have his breakfast, and clothing too. He didn't see any obvious route. Maybe there was a stepping disk link? But he couldn't guess where Tunesmith might place a stepping disk, or where it would lead.
    The Hindmost's command deck was exposed too. It was three stories tall, with lower ceilings than a Kzin would need. Louis saw how he could climb up to the lowest floor. A protector would have no trouble at all.
    Louis shook his head. What must the Hindmost be thinking?
    Pierson's puppeteers held to a million-year-old philosophy based on cowardice. When the Hindmost built Needle, he had isolated his command deck from any