Grieving Tube chitter-whistled angrily. Harpster laughed and chittered back, whistling ribald-sounding comments through his teeth.
"Grieving Tube wants you," he told the Red Herders. "She thinks we should travel with people who can look daylight in the face."
"We only need to be outside Machine People turf," Tegger said.
"Leave us when you like. But think! It's serious work we're doing. We're going up the spill mountains and farther yet. No Red Herder has ever done anything so big. You'll have so much to tell when you finally settle that you'll never remember to speak of rishathra."
The desert slid smoothly past. Warvia asked, "What are we riding?"
"It's a Builder thing. I've only heard about them. None of the Night People would use an air sled unless the need was dire, but we have permission and directions."
"How fast does it go?" The landscape was moving faster yet. The receding dockyard had become a dot. A sound was rising, as of wind heard through a sturdy stone wall.
"Fast. We'll be below the spill mountains in five days."
"No."
"So I was told. But the first stop is only three days away."
"I'm frightened." Watching the world zip past was beginning to hurt Warvia's eyes.
"Warvia, there are lines under the land. In drawings they took like a honeycomb, and they lift and move Builder things. We can only stop where the lines come together."
"Three days," Grieving Tube repeated.
Far across the desert, a caravan of hominids and beasts popped up and was gone so quickly that Warvia couldn't even identify the species. The air sled was still accelerating.
***
The payload shell smelled of Ghouls. It hummed. Warvia huddled against Tegger in the dark and didn't speak of what was happening outside. They mated with an intensity backed by fear, and for that time Warvia entirely forgot where she was. But then the whisper of motion was back, and Tegger's voice in the darkness to drown it out.
"What was Karker like?"
"Strong. Strange to hold: strangely shaped."
"Down here ...?"
"No, not *here*. His body was broad, shoulders and belly and hips. I think every man is alike *here*. And he was very eager to talk, to try his skill at trade language."
"You only talked?"
Warvia giggled. "We rished. It was his first time. Imagine, Tegger! I was his teacher!"
"Did you tell him --"
"Of course. The only Red Herder woman who ever engaged in rishathra, and all his for the night. He loved it. Who were you with?"
"Hen -- no, *Han*sheerv. I made sure I got her name right. She was the tall one, almost my size?" Warvia laughed at that, and he said, "The old leader's widow, though she's about my age. Of course we couldn't talk. We tried to rish in the dark, but we couldn't *gesture* that way, so we went outside and did it by Archlight."
"I wonder if the Night People were watching."
"I wondered, too," Tegger said. And then the whisper of uncanny speed was in their ears and souls.
They dozed. When each knew that the other couldn't sleep, they mated again. And tried to sleep again. When the outline of the door was a white glow, Warvia asked, "Are you hungry?"
"Yes. Are you going out?
"No."
The door opened on halfdawn light. The Ghouls shambled in. The door closed. "We're moving well along," Harpster said, and Tegger heard relief and fatigue in his voice. "Warvia, Tegger, are you all right?"
"Scared," Warvia said.
Tegger asked, "Shouldn't someone be steering?"
Grieving Tube said, "The air sled rides lines buried in the scrith. We can't get lost."
Tegger said, "If the air sled went astray, it would kill us so fast that we'd barely know it."
"You'll get used to it."
"How do you know?"
Harpster growled. Grieving Tube said, "Let us sleep."
Since they'd left the vampires behind, the Night People had been sleeping in the payload shell. The smell was rich. Warvia huddled against her mate and tried not to think of the smell of Ghouls, or her hunger, or the vibration in the iron around her.
She uncurled and stood up. "I'm going to hunt up a meal. Shall I bring you back something?"
"Yes."
***
They had left the eternal clouds far behind. The day was ablaze. The land streamed past, pulling Warvia's eyes with it. Warvia dropped from the cruiser and loped over to the piled sand, keeping her gaze always toward her feet.
No shrieker guards came.
Warvia found an entrance hole and tickled it with a stick. A fat shrieker popped out and screamed at her. She snatched it, broke its neck and ate voraciously.
She couldn't keep from looking. The land had become a vast forest. The tops of huge trees were all far below, all converging and disappearing behind the sky sled. The motion threw her balance off, making her dizzy.
She made herself circle the cargo tray and tickle another opening. When a defender appeared, she snatched it and wrapped it in her skirt.
She was stepping onto the running board when she heard a voice speak her name.
The shrieker fell and scampered free. Warvia jumped straight backward, her spear poised to kill. That wasn't Tegger, and the Ghouls were fast asleep ...
The deck was clear. Whatever had spoken must be aboard the cruiser.
Or under it? The space under there was black. Warvia adjusted her stance, a bit farther from the cruiser. Had she imagined ...?
"Show yourself!"
"Warvia, I dare not. It's Whisper."
*Whisper?* "Tegger called you a wayspirit. He thought he imagined you."
The voice said, "I will not speak to Tegger again. Warvia, I hope you will not babble of me to Tegger nor to the Night People. I could be killed and the Arch itself may fall if anyone takes notice of me."
"Yes, my mate said you were secretive. Whisper? Why tell me?"
"May we talk a little?"
"I'd rather be inside."
"I know. Warvia, we're traveling at just under the speed of sound. That's not very fast at all. When an object strikes the world from outside, it moves three hundred times as fast, with ninety thousand times the energy."
"Really." The thought was shattering. But why? Had she thought the speed of sound was instantaneous?
"Light travels much faster than sound. You've seen that yourself Lightning, then thunder," the voice said.
It didn't occur to her to doubt a wayspirit. Anyone who could speak such things must really know what she was talking about. She asked, "Why not go faster than sound? Couldn't we hear each other?"
"It's the speed of sound in air, Warvia. If we make the air go with us, the sound in the air goes with us, too."
"Oh."
"The air sled is doing what the universe says it must. It can go to only one place, and then it will touch softly as a feather."
Warvia asked again, "Why tell me?"
"When you know what is happening, it can't frighten you. Of course there are exceptions, but the sky sled isn't one. It flies in a kind of invisible groove, a pattern of magnetic fields. It cannot lose its way."
"Pattern of ...?"
"I will teach you about magnets and gravity and inertia. Inertia is the force that pulls you against the inside of the spinning ring so that gravity will not pull you into the sun --"
"Is that real, too, what the Night People say? The Arch is a ring?"
"Yes. Gravity is a force you need hardly notice, but it holds the sun together so that it can burn. Magnets allow the sun's rind to be manipulated, to defend the Arch against things
falling from outside. I will teach you more, if you come in daylight."
"Why?"
"You and Tegger are frightened. If you understand what's happening here, your fright will go away. If you lose your fright, so will Tegger. You will not go mad."
"Tegger," she said, and looked around her. "Tegger must be starving." She couldn't find the shrieker she'd dropped. She went back to the shrieker village, holding her eyes to the deck. Nearly the speed of sound: how fast was that in daywalks?
A shrieker came when she tickled a tunnel opening, and she bagged it. She climbed into the payload bay, and no voice stopped her.
Chapter 22 -
The Net
HOT NEEDLE OF INQUIRY, A.D. 2893
... *Coffin!*
Louis tried to push the lid away. The lid didn't want to move that fast. He pulled his knees up to set his feet and thrust upward, then roll-dived out from under the half-raised lid. Hit the floor. Kept rolling and stood up in a crouch.
Not a coffin, he remembered, but he was on an adrenaline high, with good reason to stay in motion. What had been happening while he was in the box?
His ankle stung. He'd kicked something. *Ignore it.*
The strangest thing about his waking was the way he felt.
In their early twenties, Louis and a dozen friends had run an ancient martial arts teaching program. A few dropped out when the computer had them hitting each other in the face. Louis had stuck with it, play-fighting for ten months. Then it all turned stale, and two hundred years went by, and ...
It didn't feel like waking from steep or surgery. He felt more like a fighter halfway through a yogatsu match he knows he can win. Absolutely charged up, seething with adrenaline and energy.
*Great! Bring 'em on!*
*Motion!* He whirled around. His hands felt naked.
Beyond the forward wall, rocky rolling terrain flashed past on either side, too fast for detail. Needle must be moving like a hypersonic shuttle at ground level. And the view was toward the captain's cabin --
Only a picture. None of those great rocks was about to mash him into jelly. The black basalt walls to left and right, the lander bay behind him, were all quite motionless.
The thing he'd kicked was a block of stone in the forward-starboard corner of crew quarters. He'd never seen that before. It looked completely inert and harmless: a roughly dressed granite cube as tall as his knee.
He was alone.
Louis understood why Bram had left Acolyte in an induced coma until he could attend to him. Waking alone, a Kzin might set traps and barriers, or force the wardrobe and kitchen systems to produce weapons. But Louis did not understand why Bram had left *him* to wake alone.
How fast *did* a protector learn? Bram had observed him for ... hmm? Up to three days, if he'd tapped into the webeye camera at WeaverTown. *Could Bram already know me well enough to trust me?*
*Not likely!* Bram hadn't done this. The Hindmost must have reset the 'doc to open when his treatment was finished.
Now, what was the Hindmost trying to show him? Louis wondered. Did the protector know what kind of show the Hindmost had running here?
The hologram view streamed past him. Distant trees flashed past, an extensive forest of what looked like pines. Dead ahead, mountains and cloud patterns seemed infinitely distant.
The Hindmost could hide anything in the captain's cabin, and his crew would see nothing but this bounding, lurching hologram projection. Maybe *that* was the point.
The bouncing lower rim was dark wood: the front of an alcohol-burning Machine People cruiser. Under that, a bit of a curved rim of gleaming metal or plastic.
The webeye camera that the Ghouls had mounted on a Machine People cruiser now rode something that flew.
Blocks of rock protruded from fringes of forest. The vehicle flew no more than two hundred feet up. The speed? Subsonic, but not by much.
What kind of hominids could tolerate such speed? Louis wondered. Even DisneyPort didn't run rides this fast. Most Ringworld hominids would die if they merely traveled beyond their local ecologies. A ride like this would stop their hearts.
What was he supposed to *do* with this?
How much time did he have to play?
Trapped in a bungalow-sized box buried miles deep in cooled lava, he was hardly a free agent. Stepping disks would get him out, but they would only take him to where his masters waited.
Louis knew that he was reacting instead of acting, like a good dog trying to guess the will of his masters. He was seething with new youth, and he couldn't *do* anything.
*Sit down,* he told himself. *Relax. Distract yourself. Eat?*
The kitchen menu was running. It showed kzinti script and a picture: some kind of sea life. Alien sashimi! Better not. Louis reset it for human metabolism, Sol, Earth, fran‡ais [francais], pain perdu, added caf‚ [cafe] au lait, and called it breakfast. And while he waited ... hmmm?
Using the stepping disk would lose him his options.
*Examining* the stepping disk ...
He lifted the rim as he'd seen Bram do.
The racing landscape blinked out, replaced by an abstraction: the diagram of the stepping disk network.
More links had been added. Several networks had merged into one. The restricted flick from crew quarters to the captain's cabin was still isolated, and so were a few other pairs. Still, the Hindmost had given up some security for greater convenience. Bram must have made him do that.
The diagram measured distance on a logarithmic scale. At and near Needle, detail was fine enough to discriminate between crew quarters and the lander bay. There were flick points all through the RepairCenter. Louis picked out WeaverTown, hundreds of thousands of miles distant. One point was far to starboard of Needle's position, almost to the rim wall, half a million miles away or more. The most distant point must be a third of the way around the Ringworld's arc: hundreds of millions of miles.
Brighter lines would indicate links that were currently open. If he was reading this right ... open circuits ran from Needle's crew quarters to Needle's lander bay to the far point on the GreatOcean. Bram must be exploring.
Had he taken the Hindmost? Or had the Hindmost returned to his cabin?
Knowing *that*, Louis thought, would tell him exactly how much trust was between the Hindmost and Bram. In his cabin the Hindmost would be next to invulnerable, with General Products hull material between him and any enemy. Locked off from his grooming aids, he would grow scruffy and uncomfortable --
*Ding.* French toast with maple syrup. Coffee with foamy steamed milk appeared a moment later. Louis ate rapidly.
Then he tried using the fork on the stepping disk controls.
The tines bent and broke.
Humming, Louis dialed {Earth, Japan, assorted sashimi}.
The hashi felt like wood. They even had a grain. He cracked one along the grain to get a point. He began moving whatever would move in the stepping disk controls.
Bright lines faded, others brightened, as links opened and closed.
A slide turned everything off. Moving the slide back the way it had come got him a blinking half brightness: the system wanted instructions.
He kept playing. Presently he had a bent ring of seven bright lines, and a virtual clock, and weird music playing in the background. He couldn't understand the musical puppeteer language, and he couldn't read a Fleet of Worlds timepiece, but he saw how to set it for *fast*.
If he'd read this right, the circuit would take him to the lander bay; then to Weaver Town, to see what had changed. Pick up a pressure suit in the lock, or else he'd be sniffing tree-of-life when he flicked to the Meteor Defense room! Keep the suit on when he flicked to the surface of the Map of Mars, and then
ce to the farthest point on the diagram, which seemed to be on the rim wall. On to the mystery point at the far shore of the GreatOcean, and back to Needle.
Second thoughts? This shouldn't take him more than a few minutes, unless he found something interesting.
He set the sashimi plate on the stepping disk.
Nothing happened.
Of course not: the rim of the stepping disk was still lifted, exposing the controls. Louis pushed it down. The sashimi plate flicked out.
The network blinked out, too. Louis had to shy from sudden motion. The racing landscape was back, and mountains beyond, spill mountains with the rim wall as backdrop. They were nearby, by Ringworld measure, a few tens of thousands of miles away.
Louis thought of matters he would like to study, if he could access the ship's computer. He'd have to ask the Hindmost later. He *must* review what was known of protectors. *Where was that sashimi plate?*
Running through a yoga set allowed him to curb his impatience. How fast was fast?
Forty-five minutes later the plate hadn't come back.
His companions might be at one of these points -- probably were -- and Acolyte might have snatched the sashimi. Still: *rethink.*
The far point in the diagram had drifted a little.
Drifted a little, yeah. Louis's windpipe closed up; he was wheezing. Two hundred million miles up the Arch as measured on a logarithmic scale, and *drifting*? That point had to be moving like an interstellar slowboat, at hundreds of miles per second.
It was the refueling probe, of course. They must have mounted a new stepping disk on its flank and set it orbiting along the rim wall. As for the sashimi plate, it must have burned as a meteor.
Louis pulled the disk up to expose the controls. He began to reset them, swearing and talking himself through it, trying to ignore the orchestra. "Now *this* should reset *that* link ... tanj. Why not? Oh. Stet, *dark* means *off*, now try *this* ..."
He dialed up a loaf of bread and set it on the stepping disk. *Flick*.
An hour and ten since he had cut his associates off from Needle. He'd cut them off from the entire RepairCenter, come to that. It would be open war when they discovered that, and breach of contract, too.