"Then Paula left Earth because she wanted a large family.
"A few years later I brought a new intelligent species into known space. The UN wanted to give me a birthright for finding the Trinocs and serving as their first ambassador. Now the doctors were waiting to fix what shouldn't have been already fixed. When Nessus made his offer, I went to the Ringworld."
Proserpina set her hands on Louis's belly and moved them around. Pressure above his left hip. "Old damage to the gut?"
"Yah."
"There's barely a trace. This floating rib is newly cracked--"
"Agh!"
Hands like a score of walnuts palpated his numb hips, then ran down his legs. "Six breaks, maybe more, all on the left. It doesn't matter, they can all heal at the same time. In four days you'll walk, in seven you'll run. Would you try solid food?"
Louis pointed: "That one's good. The Hinsh gave it to us." She broke a canteloupe-sized yellow fruit for him, and fed him, and ate some herself.
He asked, "Who are you?"
"I'm the oldest protector, the last of the rebels," she said. "Tell me who you are. The woman doesn't know. She didn't perceive Hanuman either. What does she think he is?"
"We let her think Hanuman is a tame monkey. She thinks I'm the son of an ARM who got himself stranded. Can we keep it that way? Roxanny is an ARM detective. There are things they shouldn't know."
"ARM is one of the factions--"
"Amalgamated Regional Militia. From Earth, the United Nations police since eight hundred years ago. There are a few hundred ARM ships in the Fringe War. How much do you know, Proserpina? Have you been hacking into Needle?"
"Yah. Puppeteer civilization is too fascinating. I could become lost in it. Still, this Hindmost has extensive records of human civilization. Do you know the name 'Proserpina'?"
"Pluto's wife, the Lady who rules Hell. Greek myth, Elizabethan pronunciation. Is this Hell to you?"
"In a loose sense. Tell me about Tunesmith."
"Not yet. I want to know about you. Who you are."
He had the impression she was grinning. She said, "Your muscle cues aren't easy to read, flat on your back, hips and legs inert, and the rest hooked to all these pumps and sensors. Still, I sense something proprietary. Do you own Tunesmith?"
Louis laughed. "He thinks he owns me."
"You don't agree, but you don't hate him. You'd free yourself if you could. Will you serve me? No. For a time, then? Perhaps if you knew me better? I'm not prone to rages or bouts of frantic activity or megalomania, Louis. I don't suck blood, though you served a bloodsucker. I've been passive for millions of falans while the rest of my kind burned themselves out. Of course you must know me first, if we have time. My tale is complicated. I helped build the Ringworld."
"I've heard that before," Louis said.
"From some braggart breeder? They've become hugely various, haven't they? My telescopes won't penetrate atmosphere well enough, and I dare not travel to see more, but I've dealt with spill mountain species. Louis or Luis, I'm the real one. I broke promises before the work was finished, so it was finished without me, but I believe I'm the last builder. Would you like your legs back?"
What did she mean? She bent over him, reached around behind him. Pain surged.
"Can you tolerate it? It's better if you can feel what's going on."
"That's pretty fierce," he gasped.
"I'll cut the input by half--" (The pain receded.) "--and change your chemical balance a little." The pain fuzzed. "There. Will you try to urinate and evacuate? The 'doc system is equipped to handle that."
"In privacy, please."
"Stet." She turned away. "Then you can tell me about the people of the Ringworld. Who have you met? What are they like? I have the right. Our children became their ancestors."
Louis considered keeping silence. It was not his nature. He couldn't hide anything from a protector anyway. He did wonder if Proserpina had set ARM truth drugs dripping into him.
But the vampire nest wasn't a secret to be kept. It was a futzy good story. Breeders--Ringworld hominids--had evolved into an ecological slot elsewhere occupied by vampire bats. Louis Wu had interfered with the weather over a world-sized area. His intentions had been good--he'd ruined the environment for some dangerous plants--but over the next few years, vampires moved under the permanent cloud deck established by Louis Wu, and took over a floating industrial park.
That happened far around the Ringworld's arc from where Louis was dwelling with a Weaver species. He'd watched through the Hindmost's webeye camera. Louis described it for Proserpina, and the Weaver village, and that led him back and back. Floating buildings gathered to form a city, and the shadow farm beneath, that grew a hundred kinds of fungus. The Ringworld slid off center, near to brushing against its sun. Back and back, until he was telling her how he'd come to the Ringworld, lured into an expedition to explore something strange beyond the worlds he knew.
She knew what questions to ask, when to keep silent, when to break and feed him fruit. "Here, this machine makes a nutrient fluid too. Would you eat that?"
He tried it. It was basic stuff to feed an injured soldier. "Not bad."
"You eat meat too, don't you? Fresh killed? I'll hunt you up a sampling tomorrow. I'm more of a scavenger than you are, I think. How did you return to the stars? Through an eyestorm?"
"Something like that."
He spoke of Halrloprillalar, the City Builder who claimed that her kind had built the Ringworld. "She was joking with me, but she had it backward. She and her species nearly destroyed it."
"How?"
"They dismounted the attitude jets on the rim wall and built them into their spacecraft. Proserpina, why did you let that happen?"
Poker face. "We made attitude jets to be easily dismounted so that they can be easily replaced. We expected them to wear out in time. Was this a part of the Fringe War?"
"No. Earlier."
"We'll speak of this again. When did the Fringe War start?"
"Tanj, I don't know. The first ships may have got here ahead of the Hindmost, a hundred falans ago. You stole Gray Nurse's library, didn't you? Have you got it running? See if it's got footage of Needle coming in."
"I'll do that," said the protector.
Louis called after her. "Check on the others, will you?"
"They're safe here, but I will. Sleep."
It was night, and he'd talked himself hoarse. He slept.
He woke to find Roxanny and Wembleth asleep on the plastic sheeting. He didn't disturb them. In an hour they woke, found the store of fruit, and ate.
Roxanny fed him delicately. Perhaps she'd raised a child once.
She and Wembleth had spent yesterday exploring while Louis lay in his ICC. "These elbow trees are easy to climb. It's even somewhat safe, once I found some rope. We got a wonderful view. It's all flat, the horizon never curves out of sight, and I had these." Mag specs. "Luis, did you notice one big central mountain, coming in?"
"Yah, inland."
"It's windows top to bottom, but there are only a few picture windows. The rest looks like a spray of glitter everywhere. I'd call that structure an arcology, but big, and built by military, or maybe paranoid crazies. Straight highways with towers at the end, wonderful fields of fire. Big helipads. I didn't see any guns; I just saw where they should be mounted.
"There's only that one huge palace. Over the rest of the island--I keep saying island, just because I can see so much of it, even though most of it dwindles into what looks like fog. Continent. The buildings nearby are all very basic, and there's nothing big further out. Wembleth thinks it's all housing for breeders, Homo habilis. We didn't see any, they could all have died off, but Luis, if this was a protecto
r's home, there'd be defenses and research labs and libraries, wouldn't there?"
"Well, there's the arcology," Louis said.
She grinned at him. "Do you even know what arcology means?"
"Big building."
"Well... yah. I don't think she's using it. It was left by the previous tenant. I think Proserpina has a base, maybe on the little continents, maybe on another Map. She wouldn't have turned us loose where she works. This place is... remember I said 'garden'? Suppose you had to turn the whole Earth into a garden? Earth is a closed ecology, but it changes. It drifts." She looked deep into his eyes, seeking understanding. "Gardeners don't like weeds. They'd do something about deserts... wouldn't have to worry about tundra because there's no winter... but a gardener might have to control the weather."
"Weather's chaotic. It can't be controlled," Louis said.
"What if you had huge air masses to work with? An area of a thousand Earths, and no hurricane patterns to foul you up because you're not on a spinning ball. Air masses wouldn't move fast--"
Louis laughed. "Stet. Maybe."
"We won't actually see other maps," she said, suddenly depressed. "No boats for guests. What do you think, Luis? One whole supercontinent for a garden, and breeders are an integral part of the garden. Defenses on the islands. Telescopes and research facilities. Mines... you don't get mines on the Ringworld, do you?"
"If you could reach the spill mountains," Louis said. "Materials might layer out according to density. Otherwise, no mining rights. You dig for oil, you hit scrith, then vacuum."
"Proserpina can reach the spill mountains."
Louis shrugged. "I can't help you explore. Be cautious. Every culture has fairy tales about someone finding something he shouldn't."
"Even so," Roxanny said, "I'd like to get into that building."
Wembleth and Roxanny went out again after breakfast.
Proserpina was back at midday. She asked, "What are stepping disks?"
"Where did you find those?"
"Your own report to the ARM, Louis Wu. You didn't tell enough. What if I had to make stepping disks? Is the Ghoul protector doing that?"
"You first. How are my companions?"
"Exploring. Hanuman went off alone, Wembleth and Roxanny are together. They'll learn little in this place. The last rebel to die lived here. I took charge of his habitat, but the Penultimate's palace is trapped. I leave it alone."
She hoisted a miniature deer nearly her own weight. It dangled, its neck broken. Big insects buzzed it. "I use this animal for food myself. Can you eat it?"
"Maybe--"
"Treat it with heat?"
"Yah. Clean out the body cavity. Shall I--?"
"You may exercise your upper body, but otherwise rest. Your bones are pinned together, but let them knit. I will cook. I can research this."
Barbecue smells made him hungry. In an hour she was back with a roasted carcass. She stripped off pieces of meat for him. He found it pleasant to be waited on.
" 'But always at my back I hear Time's winged footsteps hurrying near'," she said. "No, eat. I need to know how urgent this matter of the Fringe War is. Does Tunesmith have it under control?"
"More or less," he said.
"Eat. Is it more, or less?" She scowled at what she saw in his face. "Less. Hanuman tells me of the blast that tore a hole into space. I saw it from a distance, and knew I must act. Antimatter. Could it have killed all life? Did Tunesmith really prevent that?"
"Yes."
"What did you see?"
"Wembleth and Roxanny would eat some of that," Louis said.
The protector met his eyes for a long heartbeat. "I'll fetch them," she said. She set a great slab of meat in his reach, and departed.
Daylight was fading when they returned. Proserpina and the others cooked dinner outside. Louis smelled wood smoke and roasting meat. What Roxanny brought to Louis included vegetables: green-and-yellow leafy plants, and roasted yams.
Proserpina was becoming a skilled chef. She ate with them, but what she ate was raw meat and raw yams. When they had finished eating, she said, "I want your trust."
The ancient protector's eyes locked with theirs, skipping past Hanuman as if he were a dumb animal. "Wembleth, Roxanny, Luis, you'd be demented to trust me knowing no more than you do."
"Tell us a story," Louis said. Proserpina was keeping Hanuman's secrets, and Louis's, and perhaps Roxanny's too. There was no reason to trust her, and every reason to listen.
"These events all took place near the galactic core. We who held our world were ten to a hundred million protectors of the Pak species," the protector said. "The number varied wildly in the endless war.
"Something more than four million falans ago--I've lost track of time to some extent--ten thousand of us built a carrier ship and some fighter scouts. Eighty years later, six hundred were left to ride them." Proserpina spoke slowly, reaching far back into her memory. Interworld was a flexible language, but it wasn't built for these concepts.
"This land is a good map of the Pak world. Did you see its shape? Circles everywhere," Proserpina said. "Blast craters, new and ancient, from an endless variety of weapons. These maps were identical when we built them, but they've changed since. On the Pak world and here, we fought for any advantage for our blood line. Luis, what?"
"Well, it's strange," Louis Wu said. "One world, over and over? The Pak world was in the galactic core. Suns are packed close together there. You came here, thirty thousand light years in one leap. Why didn't you use worlds closer in?"
"Yes, our worlds were much closer together than yours. Endless room, endlessly coveted. We saw no way to reach them in a spacecraft carrying breeders, because we would fight for advantage of the breeders. If we solved that, we'd face another problem. Any world would require reshaping for periods of thousands of years. Before the work was complete, each would be snatched away by armies of other protectors. We could see that this had happened. Worlds near Pak were shaped to a Pak ideal, then blasted back to barren waste long before I was born. We saw no way to take other worlds unless we could change the circumstances that shaped us.
"This is what we did, we six hundred. First, we gave up nearby worlds. If another ship could reach us, that world was too close. We found records of a voyage into the galactic arms, a route already tested by an earlier colony ship. The colony failed, but we knew no intervening danger had stopped it from reaching its target world.
"Second, we segregated ourselves from our breeders. We housed them in a cylinder topographed like a rolled-up landscape. Their food would grow there too, water and air and wastes recycled, a locked ecology. No pheromones from breeder housing would reach the flight control complex. The breeders were not to love us; they would not be aware of us at all. Any protector violating the ban must die.
"Of course there was natural selection at work. Many breeders would die, did die without the company of protectors." Proserpina's eyes sought theirs. "Even now, four million falans evolved, don't you Ball Worlders sometimes need the companionship of something greater than yourselves?"
Roxanny said, "No."
"I find records of scores of religions."
"We've outgrown them," Roxanny said.
After a moment's pause, Proserpina said, "Stet. Many breeders died for lack of our company, but less every generation. Again, many protectors found we must smell or touch our own kind. Many found ways to enter breeder housing, and died when they were caught. Others stopped eating. In the first thousand years we lost half our number. Replacing them from breeder stock was a chancy thing. Natural selection took its toll.
"What emerged at the end of three hundred and fifty thousand falans of travel, was a race that can live without the smell of our own blood line c
onstantly in our nostrils.
"We veered away from the target world. A colony there had failed, but we could not know how badly. We might find protectors already in place, and our ship was a fragile bubble. We believed--Yes, Roxanny?"
"Earth?"
"Yes, your world, Earth. We could have had Earth. Your tree-of-life plants weren't growing right. Your protectors died. Their descendants were mutating in many directions. We didn't know that. I learned too little of the Earth colony before your evolved breeders began blasting radio waves at the stars. By then--"
Proserpina blinked at them; started over. "We arrived in the local neighborhood. We found worlds we might take, but our ambitions were greater than that. We chose a system with a gas giant planet huddled close up against its star. We surmise it formed far out in the disk that became the planets. Then it was drawn in over the billions of years, eating lesser worlds as it came. Thus we found a planetary system already cleared out for our convenience, and most of the mass gathered in a single body, a mass of almost twenty Jupiters, Roxanny.
"So we built. We met difficulties working that close to a sun, but we could use the sun's magnetic fields to confine the masses we worked with, particularly the hydrogen we needed for fusion motors to spin up the ring.
"Stars that can generate extensive planetary systems form in clusters. There were stars with planets around us where we stopped, and some were Pak-like or close to it. We identified those that might evolve dangerous enemies. We collected local ecologies and settled them on maps of their worlds.
"We never approached Earth, Roxanny. We were afraid. We studied the system intensively at long range. The Map of Earth became home to our own breeders. We needed fifty thousand falans to build an ecology into the Ringworld's inner surface, but we started there, with the Map of Earth as a test bed."
"Whales," Louis said. "There are whales in the GreatOcean. Some protector must have gone to Earth."
"It may have happened after I was isolated," Proserpina said. "Wembleth, are you keeping up with this?" Proserpina changed languages and spoke rapidly. She switched back: "Later I'll show Wembleth maps of the sky, and diagrams. You two should try to tell him what a Ball World is. Roxanny, these maps of our world are prisons. We knew some of us would break the one law. We built the prisons first, to warn each other. Any felon would be isolated with a world to rule and a population all of her own kind, just as if they'd each conquered the Pak homeworld, but all made hostage to the majority.