“I get cramps, too. Walk.” Sawur was asleep.
He limped outside. The side of his calf was shrieking. He hated muscle cramps!
The daylit arcs of the Ringworld reflected far more light than Earth’s full moon. The medical kit would give him medicine for a cramp, but it didn’t act any quicker than just walking it off.
His foot crunched dry twigs.
Low dry brush surrounded the guests’ huts. Friendly as they were, the Weavers must have some way to discourage thieves. This dry stuff might be their defense.
The cramp had eased, but he was wide-awake. His cargo plates floated outside the guest hut. He pulled himself aboard. He crossed the brushy barrier without a sound, weaving among the tree trunks.
Not a bit nocturnal, these Weavers. No sign of any of them. Sleeping like the dead, how would they catch a thief? The visiting aliens had retired, too. Lanterns lit the bow and stern of a long, low sailboat he hadn’t noticed earlier.
In a minute or two Louis was floating silently above the pool, lit by Archlight real and reflected.
Motion within the cliff… and a light blazed in his face.
Louis squinted, cursing. He looked into the glare… through a window with fuzzed-out edges, at an impressive cinder cone capped in what seemed dirty snow. On any world, that would be a volcano. Here it could be a meteor crater punched from below. It looked very like Fist-of-God, crowned with vacuum and naked Ringworld floor structure.
A message from the Hindmost?
Once the puppeteer knew Louis was moving up the river, he could have moved his probe ahead. He’d sprayed a spy device on this rock cliff, and others elsewhere, no doubt. He’d talked to the Weavers… easy enough, but why bother? What did he want?
Something spat from the crater, twice, thrice within ten seconds.
“Six hundred and ten hours ago,” said a familiar contralto. “Watch.”
The view zoomed on the three objects. Lens-shaped spacecraft, big. Kzinti design, Louis thought. They stopped just above the peak, then began their descent, two or three meters above the glassy crater wall.
“The warcraft are moving quite slowly. Let me show you fast-forward,” the Hindmost said. The warcraft moved briskly downslope. Beyond and below, cloudscape jumped into streamlined motion. “In two hours, twenty minutes at just under sonic speed, they had covered fourteen hundred miles. For kzinti, amazing restraint. Then they diverged, thus—”
The cloudscape and the saucers jerked to a near stop. Two veered off at right angles; the third continued straight on.
White light blinked. Then the scene was as before, but the three ships had a blobby, half-melted look, and they gleamed like mirrors. They began to descend… to fall.
“Stasis fields. They stopped your beam,” Louis said.
“Worrisome, Louis. Wrong twice within five seconds. Is your brain deteriorating?”
“That can happen,” Louis said equably.
The Hindmost said, “Those beams were intense. Vast energy flux was trapped inside the stasis fields before they formed.”
“But—”
“You and Nessus survived a similar attack because we design defense mechanisms to react quickly! Those kzinti warcraft are nothing but bombs now. And that was the Ringworld Meteor Defense, but I did not use it.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Observe.” The view jumped… a view of the magnified sun, darkened to something tolerable. From the fluid storm a plume rose in fast-forward motion. Higher, straight toward the camera… hundreds of thousands of miles. A brighter shock wave was rising from its base. It lashed out along the plume and was suddenly terribly bright.
“A superthermal laser effect, definitely the Ringworld Meteor Defense, Louis. But not mine.”
The Hindmost would lie. But would he shoot down an invading ship?
“Louis, I’m not shooting down invading spacecraft! I want to contact them. A hyperdrive motor could free me from this place!”
“I buy that, I guess, but-Hindmost, do you think someone is in the Repair Center with you?”
“I do not believe my defenses have been breached. Louis, there are two Great Oceans.”
It took Louis a moment to see what the Hindmost meant.
A single Great Ocean would unbalance the Ringworld. The water involved would mass as much as a major Jovian moon. There had to be two, on opposite arcs; and there were.
The Hindmost’s crew had found a Repair Center in one Great Ocean, under the Map of Mars. The other ocean they had never explored at all.
And it was across the Ringworld’s diameter. The Ringworld was sixteen light-minutes across. Sixteen minutes at lightspeed before a second Repair Center could see invading ships coming through Fist-of-God. Eight minutes more to begin to affect the sun. More time-an hour? Two? — to stretch a plume of plasma some millions of miles out from the sun, then cause it to lase. The terrible sword of light would be another eight minutes on its way.
Two hours and twenty minutes was a plausible guess. Louis said, “Stet. You’d best assume there’s another Repair Center on the far side of the Ringworld Arch, and a protector inside.”
“Why a protector? Mind you, Louis, I think so, too.”
“A protector would find a way in. If a hominid got in somehow-a breeder-he’ll be a protector by now. The other Repair Center must be infested with tree-of-life, like ours was. Is this what you wanted me for? You know almost as much about protectors as I do, and it’s dead of night here, so my brain may not be fully functional.”
“Age, too, may have affected your brain. We do need to talk, and I have more to show you. Louis, shall I appear to the Weavers and acknowledge your power? Or shall I not?”
“Thoughtful of you, but that may be out of our hands.” The locals slept, but Fishers or Sailors must have seen this glare, and who could know when a Ghoul was nearby?
Actually…
The Hindmost missed Louis’s sudden grin. He said, “These Weavers seem hospitable.”
“Every species around the Great Ocean is friendly if you watch your mouth.”
“What news of our companions?”
“Chmeee took an assault vehicle to carry his gear. Didn’t you have a webeye on that?”
“He buried it,” the Hindmost said.
Louis laughed.
“He can unearth it if he has need. What of the City Builders?”
Louis said, “Kawaresksenjajok and Harkabeeparolyn had two children to raise and another on the way. I won’t say we were bored with each other, but… futz. I put them off at a village downstream from here, with one of the assault boats. They’re teaching there and along the far shore. How are you?”
“Not presentable. Louis—” Three silver blobs bouncing down the slope of Fist-of-God were replaced by a glare of snow, a mountain ridge in broad daylight. A green outline blinked around two dots crawling through a cleft in the ridge. “-let me direct your attention to these. Ten years ago I showed you—”
“I remember. Is this the same view?”
“Yes, as of three days ago, taken from the rim of a floating structure above a vampire nest.”
“Is this what you’ve been showing the Weavers?”
“Yes.” The view zoomed. Those were great crude six-wheeled vehicles, possibly powered by steam. One of them was turning back, upslope. The view zoomed on the other, on the driving bench. “These are Machine People?”
Louis looked. “Right. Note the beards. Looks like Machine People vehicles, too. Hey…”
“Louis, my computer’s recognition program—”
“That’s Valavirgillin!”
CHAPTER SIX — SNOWRUNNER’S PASS