"I don't understand."
"It's not -- an intelligence test."
"How do you feel?"
"Wonderful. Disoriented. Alive! Hindmost -- don't use -- the Olympus stepping disk."
"Why?"
"Martians -- they're alive -- set a trap." Louis drew a deep breath and blew it out. Salt air on his taste buds: wonderful! His breath was holding, his legs were holding. He pumped harder. "They'll set another."
"Two can play that game. What if I dropped a disk in the sea and began flicking water to Mons Olympus?"
"You ask me? Don't exterminate -- anything. You might need it -- later. It's the reason -- you didn't kill off -- the kzinti!"
"More or less," the puppeteer acknowledged. A one-eyed head dipped toward a puff of orange glimpsed far ahead along the top mid-deck. Acolyte.
"Louis, your advent is opportune. We have much to catch up on."
"Where's Bram?"
"Cooking our dinner."
His heads were arced around to look into his own eyes.
Was the Hindmost joking? Maybe that was puppeteer laughter and maybe it wasn't.
"Bram has a sensitive nose," the Hindmost added.
Louis asked, "How goes the dance?"
"The dance! It proceeds without me. I'm tanj sick of using your recycler, Louis! I haven't even had time to redesign it."
"Thank you for that." *Keep it casual.* But if Bram didn't trust the Hindmost enough to let him take normal exercise or use a toilet and shower designed for puppeteers ...
Then the Hindmost might be ready to take back his life.
***
The top mid-deck ended. Louis clambered through ladders and corridors. Kzinti ladders were heavily tilted and the rungs were too far apart, but Louis went up and down like an ape on steroids. He kept expecting to pass Acolyte. Worse, he expected Acolyte to leap out at him from some alcove. He stayed to the heights.
In his mind he tried to map his way around the garden. It would take too long. At the end of a corridor he ran up a flight of hardwood steps to the top of a wall, along the wall to avoid a thicket of big yellow puffballs with impressive thorns, and dropped ten feet into dirt.
It had been a kzinti hunting park. For two years Louis and the City Builders had tended these plants. They had been growing wild when he arrived. Once they must have fed herds for kzinti sailors. The herds were gone, and he didn't expect to find animals now, unless Acolyte was about to leap out from some citrus thicket.
But he never saw the Kzin.
***
There were eight tremendous main masts and uncountable sails, and the winches that moved them could only be worked by a Kzin. Or a protector? This mast was the foremast, with the fore crow's nest at the top. Louis was blowing hard. His legs felt like overcooked noodles.
Someone was waiting in the bow.
Louis cursed in his mind. He didn't have breath to spare. A moment later he recognized the protector shape.
Louis slowed. Bram waited like a statue. Louis couldn't tell if he was breathing at all.
"I think you win," Louis gasped.
"Were we racing?"
Bram wouldn't have known of an intruder until the City Builder boy found him in the kitchen, or until he heard feet pounding across the deck overhead. He *must* have run. Louis said, "Whatever. I needed exercise."
Before him was a mountain range ... an un-Earthly mountain range. Conical mountains, spaced wide apart and varying in size, ran left and right. Without a horizon, he had no real grasp of their size. Most were tall enough to have ice-white peaks, but below the ice they were all green patchwork.
Then his eye/mind perceived what loomed above them.
They were *tiny*.
Wait now, the rim was a thousand miles high. Of the twenty or thirty mountains he could pick out, five or six were mere foothills leaning against the rim wall, but two or three might match Everest.
The Hindmost drifted toward the bow. Behind him, a puff of orange pulled itself into view.
The Kzin plodded up. He was done, winded. Louis said, "Thank you, Acolyte. I really, really needed that. I was carrying enough adrenaline to run a war."
The Kzin panted, "Father. Let me win. Didn't want to. Kill me."
"Ah."
"How. Did you pass me?"
"Must have. Maybe in the garden."
"*How*?"
"Bram, *you* must know about cursorial hunters?"
"I don't know the term," the protector said.
"Stet. Acolyte, most hunting creatures miss their jump eight times out of nine. If the prey runs away, they pick something slower. Only a few kinds of meat eaters pick their prey and follow it until they run it down. Wolves do that. So do humans.
"Big cats aren't cursorial hunters, and kzinti aren't, either. Your ancestors learned that they'd better track down an enemy or he'll turn up later, but that's your brain talking. Your evolution hasn't caught up --"
"You knew you would win."
"Yeah."
The Kzin blinked at him. "If we had run only as far as the garden?"
"You would have won."
"Thank you for the lesson."
"Thank *you*." That was nicely phrased, Louis thought. Who had taught him that?
Bram said, "Louis. Look around you. React."
React? "Impressive. All that green! From the foothills to the frost line, all green. I shouldn't be surprised. Those mountains are all seabottom muck, all fertilizer."
"More?"
"Some of the pipes have stopped delivering flup. That would account for the lowest mountains. What's left of them must be fairly hard rock by now. The highest ones must have a lot of water ice in them, at least at the peak. I can see rivers running from the foothills. Those mountains will get the Ringworld's only regular earthquakes."
"A difficult environment?"
"I suppose. Bram, we saw all this fifty falans ago. Have you seen signs of life in the mountains?"
"Once around your world would mark the distance to those mountains, but yes, we have. Louis, I have a meal to tend. Hindmost, Acolyte, take him to the dining hall. Show him."
***
The Hindmost had sprayed webeyes on all four walls of the dining hall.
One was not in use: a mere bronze spiderweb.
A window shaped like a pool of spilled water looked out upon a row of dark green cones capped in white.
Another showed the edge of the rim wall drifting slowly past: a view from the refueling probe.
And one showed a score of muscular, hairy men using ropes to guide a square plate big enough to be the floor plan of a six-room bungalow. The plate floated above them. It might have been a big cargo plate, or part of a floating building. The men were pulling it toward Louis ... toward the Machine People cruiser and its stolen webeye.
"I left you a record taken six days ago," the Hindmost said, "to watch when you woke. But this is in present time."
"What are they doing?"
The Kzin answered. "They're approaching the rim wall any way they can."
"*Why*?"
"I don't know that yet. Bram might," the Kzin said. "While you were in treatment, Bram found your City Builder friends and set them aboard Hidden Patriarch. They obey Bram as my father's slaves obeyed their lord. They had the ship moving to starboard within a day. Bram is studying the rim wall."
Louis asked again, "Why?"
"We were not told," Acolyte said.
The Hindmost said, "I have never seen Bram show fear, yet I think he fears protectors."
Louis saw the connection. "The attitude jets need replacing. Otherwise
the Ringworld slides off center. Any protector who sees *that* will be found mounting attitude jets on the rim wall. Right?"
"If the theory holds."
"Why isn't Bram there?"
The puppeteer made a short, sharp sound, as if a clarinet had sneezed. "If protectors knew that three off-world species have mounted invasions and a fourth is in wide orbit to study the effects, they would swarm the Map of Mars instead."
"Give them decent telescopes? No, they'd still -- Ah."
"Ah?"
"Bram has to be on the rim wall, too. He's preparing. The other protectors will kill him if they can."
The puppeteer's eyes met. He said, "In any case, we have Hidden Patriarch's view of the local rim wall. My refueling probe has been in solar orbit for more than a falan now, skimming along the rim walls, recording. We've learned a great deal, Louis." The Hindmost whistled a brief trill.
All three views began a slow zoom.
*From Hidden Patriarch's fore crow's nest:* The spill mountains expanded until only one was in sight. Pale green and dark green, grass and forest, reached up to ice-white. At the very peak a black thread dipped into a compact knot of black fog. Seabottom muck fell steadily from a spillpipe a thousand miles overhead.
*From the probe:* The rim wall blurred past. Louis tried to keep his eyes off it.
*From the stolen webeye --* Louis began to laugh.
Now the Machine People cruiser was bobbing gently, twenty feet up. Beyond the edge of the floating plate was rolling landscape, hummocks like a thousand sleeping behemoths.
Ropes were pulling the cargo plate. Thirty-odd men of a species unfamiliar to Louis were pulling the ropes. The men wore light packs, but nothing else. Straight black hair covered their heads and their backs to below their buttocks. Perhaps hair was all they needed for warmth.
They were running uphill toward a ridge, and toward thirty hairy women waiting below the ridge. The women were waving, yelling encouragement. Among them was a small red woman, a Red Herder, attempting to guide them with wide motions of her arms.
The way grew steeper; the men weren't running anymore. As they neared the crest, the women ran alongside them. They were as hairy as the men. More or less smoothly, they added themselves to the ropes. There was general laughter and brief conversations held in gasps.
The women pulled. Some were running backward. They had strong legs, Louis noted, as strong as the men's. They were over the crest now and starting downhill. The runners were behind the window now, trying to slow the craft.
The Red Herder ran to snatch a rope and climb it.
The viewpoint moved faster and faster over the rounded land. By now all the runners must have let go. The hummocks grew larger ahead; grew mountainous. Streams ran among them and converged ahead. Louis realized that he was looking at the foot of a spill mountain.
The swaying of the plate was making Louis motion-sick. "They're going to get themselves wrecked," he said.
Acolyte yowled: kzinti ridicule.
"I don't consider them sane myself," the Hindmost said.
The view from Hidden Patriarch's bow was expanding, too. Now the peak of the spill mountain was lost overhead. A third of the way up the slopes, Louis began to see colored dots and blinking lights.
Blinking lights? "Heliographs."
"Very astute, Louis."
"A Ghoul child told me about this. He thought he was being cryptic. Their whole empire must be linked by heliographs in the spill mountains. How do you suppose they do it? Ghouls can't stand daylight."
"At night they see flashing mirrors from daylit mountains. Easy enough, but how do they send? Louis, they must buy message services from locals."
"Somehow. And bargain with the Spill Mountain People, too, somehow. I bet they don't use rishathra."
"They don't need many. We only see the glitter from a handful of spill mountains. A few thousands of message stations on the surface would be enough to knit their empire together."
"What about the -- what are those, balloons?"
The Hindmost trilled again. The zoom stopped; the mountains began to drift sideways. A score of colored dots were adrift against the ice, a mile to a mile and a half up. Louis saw more of them in the wide spaces between mountains.
"Hot gas balloons, Louis. We see them flowing between the spill mountains everywhere we look."
"How much variation --"
Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok entered bearing platters, and stopped in their tracks.
The Hindmost whistled. The hurtling rim wall and the bouncing foothills faded into bronze spiderwebs. It was a wonder the City Builders hadn't dropped everything and run screaming, Louis thought. But Harkabeeparolyn was still staring, and Kawaresksenjajok was watching her and grinning.
*Me*. Louis said, "It's still me. I've had some medical work done."
Harkabeeparolyn turned to her mate and spoke. Louis's translator said, "You knew!"
"Zelz told me."
"I'll get you for this, you little zilth!" But Harkee was laughing, and so was Kawa.
They set their platters down: a heap of brown and yellow roots and a bowl of pink fluid. Harkabeeparolyn settled into Louis's lap and studied his face from an inch away. "We've been lonely," she said.
It felt natural, as if they'd been doing this forever. It felt as if he had come home.
He said, "You weren't lonely where I left you."
"We were told to come." She nodded at the kitchen.
They had obeyed a protector. That, too, must have seemed very natural. Louis asked, "What were you told?"
"'Sail to starboard.'" She shrugged. "From time to time he comes and looks about and alters our course, or tells us of wind and water currents, or ways to catch and cook fish or warm-bloods or tend the garden. He says we don't eat enough red meat."
"That might be his ancestry speaking."
"Louis, you look as young as Kawa. Can you ...?"
The puppeteer answered. "Only for Ball People and the Ball Kzinti. To heal local hominids or local kzinti or any other species, a thousand of my kind would need a lifetime of study and testing."
Harkabeeparolyn scowled.
Kawaresksenjajok and Bram entered with more platters. Here were six big, surpassingly ugly deep-sea fish. Two were still twitching. The others had been broiled with strange looking plants ... kzinti vegetables. The bowl of raw vegetables was also from the kzinti hunting park.
Louis looked at the other bowl and asked, "Fish blood?"
Bram said, "Whale blood and a vegetable puree. It would not feed me long. Your kitchen was a wonderful find."
They sat. Kawaresksenjajok went, and returned with a two- or three-year-old child. She had a full head of orange-blond hair. Louis wouldn't have taken her for a City Builder. The older boy was not in evidence.
Bram's cooking was *good*. A little strange. Bram must have been cooking for City Builder tastes using plants from the hunting park. There would be crucial diet components missing or in short supply.
Louis asked, "How long would this keep me alive?"
Bram said, "A falan before your behavior would begin to deteriorate." He sipped decorously.
Acolyte had already disposed of the raw fish. Louis asked him, "Are you still hungry?"
"It's enough. One who satisfies his hunger grows fat and torpid."
The little girl was crawling toward the edge of the table. Louis pointed; Harkee turned; the child reached the edge, slipped, and clung by her fingers. She had a grip like a monkey or a Hanging Person.
"Thought she'd fall? Hah!" The City Builder woman was laughing at him. "Wrong species." Abruptly she asked the protector, "May we keep Louis for a time?"
In the instant before he replied, Bram's glance touched all their faces, judging, deciding. He said, "You may have each other until midday tomorrow. Louis, we should return to Needle soon. We can learn no more until we take the probe over the rim. Hindmost, is that why you let Louis wake?"
"Of course. I've had little chance to brief him."
Again Bram's eyes took them all in. He said, "I must know the spill mountains and the rim. The protectors on the rim wall must not learn of me. The central question is of protectors. I must know where they are, how many, what species, their intentions and methods and goals.
"I have learned what I can without acting, and avoided attention when I could. The pilfered webeye moves ever closer to the rim wall. The Ghouls must intend to show us *something*. Kawaresksenjajok, Harkabeeparolyn, you have shown me spill mountain activity far from the working site. You of the Ball People have brought me recordings made at one of the spaceports. I know more of the rim wall now than I guessed was there to learn. Soon I must show myself. Advise me."
Acolyte spoke. "If others see the probe, they will guess at interstellar invaders. You should prepare to defend the RepairCenter --"
"Yes, but the probe implies the puppeteer, not me. I have prepared. Hindmost?"
Louis was thinking: He chopped Acolyte off pretty hard. Why is the kit taking it?
The Hindmost didn't speak.
*Chmeee's son come to me as my student. Bram has had too long to impress him. Maybe I've lost a student. If I'd known I wanted the kit's respect ...*
*I'd have raced him and beat him. Hah! What's my next step?*
Bram asked, "Harkabeeparolyn, what do you know of protectors?"
She had been a teacher in the floating city's library, where Kawaresksenjajok had been a student. She said, "I remember pictures of armor collected from tens of thousands of daywalks around us. They all looked very different, fitted for different species, but all had the crested helm and oversized joints. Fanciful old tales tell of saviors and destroyers fearsome to see, with faces like armor, big shoulders, knobby knees and elbows. Neither men nor women can fight them or tempt them. Bram, do you want to hear old stories?"
"When I know what I must hear, I can learn it," Bram said. "When I ask, 'What have I forgotten?' I can only hope for a useful answer. Louis?"