Louis shrugged. "I'm still two falans behind the rest of you."
Bram looked at them. His hard face permitted little expression. The Hindmost and City Builders watched him anxiously. Acolyte seemed relaxed, perhaps bored.
Bram picked up a chair and moved it to ... a skeletal structure in an unused corner. Tubes and metal domes and wires had been fixed to a wooden spine in a manner that seemed not quite useful, not quite random. There had been too many distractions, but now that he came to look at it, Louis would have placed it as representing some brief ancient fad in sculpture. It had that kind of esthetic unity.
But Bram was moving it into place between his knees, plucking the strings ...
The Hindmost asked, "Did you finish the Mozart Requiem?"
"We shall see. Record."
The puppeteer whistled chords of programming music, speaking to the fourth webeye. Louis shrugged his eyebrows at Harkabeeparolyn sitting in his lap. This nonsense was burning up time they might spend together ... but the City Builder woman whispered, "Listen."
The protector's fingers were suddenly everywhere, and the air exploded with music.
Acolyte strolled out the door and was gone.
The music was strange and rich and precise. The puppeteer was singing accompaniment, but Bram held the structure of it. Louis couldn't remember where he'd heard anything like it.
It was *human* music, paced for human nerves. No sound shaped by aliens could have done *this* to his central nervous system. He felt a roaring optimism ... a godlike calm ... wistful longing ... the power to conquer worlds, or move them.
The music he knew was shaped in computers, not made by toenails softly kicking or stroking stretched surfaces or a bronze plate, fingernails strumming wires, a lipless mouth blowing into pipes with holes in them.
It was making him horny as tanj, and Harkabeeparolyn was half melted in his lap. He thought, You were right, but he wouldn't interrupt even to whisper that in her ear. Instead he settled back and let the vibrations flood through him.
And when the sound had finally died away, he sat stunned.
"I think we have it," Bram decided. He set the orchestral sculpture aside. "Hindmost, thank you. Louis, can you describe the effects?"
"Stunning. I, ah ... no, I'm sorry, Bram, it's nonverbal."
"Might it be used as a tool of diplomacy?"
Louis shook his head. "Tanj if I know. Bram, had you thought of mounting a webeye in Fist-of-God Crater?"
"Why? Ah, to point it *down*."
"Yeah, down, *out*, for a view in the plane of the Arch. Fist-of-God is a hollow cone the size of a moon -- well, *big*, with a hole in the peak. You could mount a sizable fortress in there if you could anchor it in the Ringworld floor material --"
"The scrith."
"Scrith, yeah. A volume a tenth the size of the RepairCenter and at least as well hidden."
"Defend the plane of the Arch from inside Fist-of-God?"
Louis hesitated. "I'm sure you can do your spying from there. Defend? Any enemy is bound to think of hiding in the shadow of the Ringworld. I'm not sure you *can* defend that. If you fight from the rim wall, it's the same problem. The Meteor Defense can't fire *through* the scrith, can it?"
"We cannot split our defense. I must command the rim wall, and its protectors, too," Bram decided. "We'll put the refueling probe in place tomorrow. Louis, when did this notion come to you?"
"Just popped into my head. Maybe the music distracted me and my brain went on without me."
"Did your brain pop up anything else?"
"I don't know enough about protectors," Louis said. "There was a skeleton in the Meteor Defense room. You didn't let me get close, but that was a protector, wasn't it?"
"I will show you. Tomorrow, after we place the probe."
The Machine People cruiser was an uncontrolled toboggan now, running up the side of a green hill, veering away. Hell of a ride. The plate's bobbing rim gave him glimpses up the higher, more distant spill mountain. Louis saw blinking brilliance above the snow line. The empire of the Night People was here, too.
Chapter 24 -
These Bones
They flicked from cloudy daylight to the pinkish artificial light of Needle's lander bay; thence to the crew cabin and a webeye view of the rim wall zipping past in vacuum-harsh sunlight.
Bram arrived last. He set down his orchestral sculpture where Louis had dropped his pressure suit components, and went straight to the kitchen dispenser. "Get us an update on the probe, Hindmost. How long until we can dock?"
The Hindmost spoke orchestral chords. Equations wrote themselves across the air in Interspeak symbols. "We could begin to decelerate now at two gee and dock in fifteen and a half hours."
"You've told me the probe can take ten gee."
"I prefer a margin of error."
"Hindmost, the probe's drive is a powerful, conspicuous X-ray source. We'll give an enemy minimal time to track it down. Wait, then decelerate at ten gee."
"At high thrust a fusion drive becomes *brighter*, more conspicuous."
Bram said nothing.
"Wait, aye aye. Decelerate at ten gee beginning in six hours. Dock in just more than nine hours. May I return to my cabin to eat and bathe and dance and sleep?"
The protector sipped from a squeezebulb. The Kzin's nose wrinkled, though Louis couldn't smell anything. Bram said, "You can do all of that here."
"Bram, I must enter my cabin when the time comes to decelerate the probe. Let me go now."
"Show me your cabin."
The Hindmost whistle-chirped. The rim wall faded out, and they looked into the Hindmost's cabin.
The light was yellow shading toward orange, but the decor was the infinite greens of a cold weather forest. There were no corners, no edges. Floor and wall, table space and storage space, it was all curves.
Bram instructed, "Leave it thus. Bathe and sleep. If you dance, dance alone --"
The Hindmost snorted like an angry horn section.
"If I see a hologram where I should see the Hindmost, I must act. You want me to feel safe, don't you?" Bram stooped with bent knees above the granite block. He lifted, swung around, and set it down.
*Oh.*
The Hindmost stepped where the granite had been, and was on the far side of the bulkhead.
The contours of the cabin shifted as he moved. A bowl formed from the floor and took on shades of peach. The puppeteer stepped daintily into it. It grew like a flower until it had almost closed above: a high-sided bathtub much like those used in lunar cities.
Bram must have noted Louis's rapt gaze. "What strikes you, Louis?"
What struck Louis was that the Hindmost wasn't going to be much help to Louis Wu. Bram had had too much time to intimidate the puppeteer. Louis said instead, "I had an insight. The Hindmost's cabin, what does it look like to you?"
"A womb, perhaps."
"How about the interior of an animal?"
"Are we playing word games?"
"There's a difference. It might matter. Female puppeteers don't have a womb. A ... prey animal evolved into a symbiote so long ago that they think of it as the puppeteer female, but it isn't. Nessus had an ovipositor. Bram, get into the Hindmost's records and see if he has a file on digger wasps."
"Digger wasps, stet," Bram said. "We have some nine hours to play with. You were going to lecture me about protectors."
Louis asked, "Shall we go look at bones?"
"Lecture," Bram said.
Louis complied. "Our ancestor was the Pak breeder. The Pak evolved on a planet near the galactic core, say a hundred and thirty thousand falans from here at lightspeed." Thirty thousand light-years and a bit. "
Some of them tried to set a colony on my planet, on Earth, long ago. There wasn't enough thallium to support the virus that grows in the yellow roots, and that's what turns a breeder into a protector.
"The protectors died off. They may have cleared off some predators first to give the breeders room to expand. The immature Pak, the breeders, evolved on their own, just like they did here. They spread over Earth from landing sites in Africa and Asia."
"Speculative?"
"We have bones of Pak breeders from Olduvai Gorge and other sites. There's a mummified Pak protector in the Smithsonian," Louis said. "They dug it out from under a desert on Mars. I never saw it myself. Even at my age you can't do everything. But we studied a hologram of the thing in General Biology."
"How did you come by that?"
"He came to rescue the old colony. That's hearsay evidence, Bram, from a Belter who ate the yellow roots, but the Hindmost probably has it in memory. Ship components, Brennan's tale, the dissected mummy, chemical --"
"Let us not disturb the Hindmost. But you studied this mummy?"
"Yes."
"Let us look at bones."
***
The knobby man's hand felt like a handful of marbles, and his pull on Louis's wrist was irresistible. Acolyte followed, suitless. Kzinti needn't fear the smell of tree-of-life. Louis found himself walking rapidly toward a skeleton looming in amplified starlight.
Bram brought them face-to-face, stepped back and said, "React."
Acolyte circled the skeleton. "It died in combat," he murmured. He sniffed, then followed his nose to Cronus's array of tools and clothing.
Louis ran his fingertips over the eroded edges where bone was broken. Would Bram guess that he'd been here before? Louis said, "Well, it looks thousands of falans old."
"Near seven thousand," Bram confirmed.
"Beaten to death. You?"
"I and Anne."
Acolyte turned, his ears up. "Tell us the tale. He challenged you here?"
"No, we hid our existence."
"How did you find him? How did you lure him?"
"He had to come. We waited."
The Kzin waited. But Bram didn't speak again, so Louis said, "This could almost be a deformed Pak protector. Still, the jaw's a bone cracker. The skull doesn't have much brow ridge. The torso, I think it's too long for a standard issue Pak. Bram, I think you have here a carrion eater."
Back came Acolyte to see what Louis was talking about. Bram asked, "On what basis?"
"Jaw built to crack bones. A predator would have teeth to tear open big arteries or an abdomen. The long torso gives him a gut long enough to deal with a difficult meal. The missing brow ridge -- well, he could be going out only at night, or maybe he had bushy eyebrows for eyeshades, but --"
Acolyte asked, "Might he be a Night People protector? Distort the skull, expand the joints --"
Louis shook his head. "I saw a Ghoul child at the Weaver village. I saw adults among the Fearless Vampire Slayers, and more adults in the fungus farm under a floating city once upon a time. I would swear they were all the same species, and this isn't it.
"Look, the Ghouls at the fungus farm were my height and a bit. He's four inches shorter. No teeth, of course, but look at the hands. Ghoul hands are bigger, thicker, they can tear anything apart. More to the point, Acolyte, the current species is identical across two hundred million miles of distance."
Acolyte watched, saying nothing. It was rare to see a Kzin so still.
"But it's obvious," Bram said patiently. "This is the old one, the species that became the People of the Night."
Louis said, "Cronus?"
"Precursor god of the Greeks?"
Louis was startled, and showed it. "You've been studying." Tanj, that's where he learned the music!
"They're meddlesome, aren't they, these puppeteers? The Hindmost has a hundred generations of human literature, kzinti oral history, kdatlyno touch-sculpture sequences, even some trinoc vengeance tales. From your nineteenth and twentieth centuries I've viewed entertainments based on Bram Stoker's _Dracula_, including Fred Saberhagen's and Anne Rice's work. But why not reserve the name 'Cronus'? This individual can't have been the first, Louis. Shall I make blurry word-pictures for you?
"Eighty thousand falans ago there was a dead Pak protector. He might have been hundreds of falans old already. For all we know, he might have helped build the Arch. Call him Cronus. Archaic Night People came and ate his flesh. If the meat of a protector didn't bring on the change, then they found yellow roots the protector carried. They became protectors. If there were many, soon there was one."
Louis slapped the dead protector's clavicle. Dust puffed. "Bram, *this* is the oldest protector we'll ever know anything about. Maybe there *were* gods before Cronus, that the Greeks didn't know about --"
Bram nodded. "As you will. Cronus."
"Stet. Cronus's species might have been eating carrion for thousands of years after something like the Fist-of-God impact-"
"Must you speak every trivial truth aloud? Ah, you have a student. Acolyte, do you see Louis's point?"
"In truth, I see something," Acolyte said. "The numbers are ridiculous unless something was guiding Ghouls in one direction across large, very large distances. One empire. Ghouls must be the same along the entire two hundred million miles. Perhaps everywhere on the ring."
"Yes! It was Cronus tending his species like a herder. Bram? Doesn't a protector try to preserve his own genetic pattern?"
The Kzin jumped on it. "Yes! How could Cronus guide his own descendants? Even a good change smells wrong. Wait, what if he chose other, similar carrion eaters? No, they would rule his own breed!"
Acolyte was learning how to solve puzzles.
Bram said, "He was a Ghoul. A carrion eater's sense of smell is altered by evolution. What to approach, what to touch, what to put in his mouth, each is a conscious choice. A Ghoul may be more free than other protectors. He may guide his kind toward what he sees as perfection."
They looked at the old skeleton. *He had to come,* Bram had said. *Near seven thousand falans,* he'd said. One thousand seven hundred years? And if Louis's dawning suspicion had any basis in fact, he'd best not ask directly.
Try something indirect. "Your mate, is she still in here?"
"Anne may be dead. When we became aware that the Arch is unstable in its plane, that there must have been motors on the rim, Anne went to fix it. I was able to track her for a time. These others now at work on the rim wall may have killed her."
"Bram, she would have had to *make* those other protectors."
"Anne felt no such urgency when she left me. She would have worked alone. These late-blooming protectors might be the work of the recent one, the Ball People protector --"
"Teela."
"Teela Brown. *Your* mate," Bram said. "The Hindmost has records of her, too."
"Were you here when Teela came?"
"Yes. It was more difficult to hide from her than from the Hindmost. I watched her learn to use the Meteor Defense. I was sure she intended what a protector must: she would save the Arch from impacting the sun. What was her true intent, Louis?"
"Teela was a protector. I can't read a protector's mind."
Bram asked, "If not hers, then whose?"
"You saw the records. Teela was strange."
"Two came into the Repair Center," Bram said. "They ate of the root. One died. The other fell into the coma that leads to the protector state. I had time to hide my presence and set up means to observe her.
"Your Teela wandered the Repair Center. It was a pleasure to watch her. She discovered things I hadn't noticed, and ultimately came here. She played with the Meteor Defense and the telescope display
.
"Then she left. I was able to track her a little as she moved to the rim wall. She used a magnetic transport system on the rim wall, much faster than the system we used, but she had an advanced pressure suit."
"Timing?"
"Some extrasolar object impacted the sun twenty-two falans past. Storms of subatomic particles threw the Arch off balance. Louis, Teela was in a great hurry."
Twenty-two falans ago: the Ringworld began sliding off balance about five years before Hot Needle of Inquiry's return. "She was educated on Earth," Louis said. "With a protector's brain and basic physics classes, she must have seen the situation quick enough. She went to fix the attitude jet system. What would she find? Anne?"
"Anne would hide," Bram said. "She would watch Teela. At the first sign of incompetence, she would kill Teela."
"Mmm."
"You knew her --"
"As a woman. Bram, nobody *knew* Teela. She was a statistical fluke, a woman who was lucky every time luck was called for, up until Nessus drafted her for the Ringworld expedition. Any kind of normal life must have been just out of her reach."
Acolyte said, "My father speaks of Teela sometimes. He never knew what to make of her. To the puppeteers, she was part of a breeding program, breeding for luck. Chmeee believed they succeeded."
"No," Bram said.
Louis said, "She's dead, Bram. She's no threat to you."
"But what might a protector leave behind to shape a future she desired? We plan far ahead. Louis, have you seen what you needed to see?"
"Yeah."
***
Bram flicked in, calling, "Hindmost, wake!"
But the Hindmost was awake and dancing in his cabin ... dancing with three ghosts, three puppeteers too translucent to hide him. "Bram, I thought of something cute. I made a brief burn an hour ago to put the probe below the rim, out of sight of invading ships."
"Numbers?"
The Hindmost whistled. Equations wrote rainbow lines.
Bram studied them. It was the first time Louis had seen him freeze up like that, but the equations looked complex, far beyond his own abilities. Then Bram said, "Good. Begin deceleration now."