“I must return to defend the Arch,” the knobby man said. “You come.”
The puppeteer shied. “But maps are only available here in Hot Needle of Inquiry!”
“I have seen them now. Come.”
Louis was alone.
And the picture changed as they flicked out. In the captain’s quarters was a three-dimensional circuit diagram of some kind…
Enough. Louis leaned his head against the stacked cargo plates and closed his eyes.
He dozed, leaning against the stack of cargo plates with his arm in the medkit. Loss of balance snapped him awake from time to time.
Behind the aft wall was the lander dock, nearly empty since Teela burned the lander. Louis couldn’t quite remember what else was in there. Lockers for pressure suits and armor, of course, and a stack of stepping disks. He had a vague impression that the Hindmost had made changes, eleven years’ worth of fiddling.
To ship’s port and ship’s starboard the walls were black. Needle was embedded in black basalt: cooled magma.
A network of lines and dots floated beyond the forward wall, like an ant’s nest seen by deep-radar. It teased at his mind.
Dots there and there and there. Those two linked, and those three. Here, a network of ten. Way off in the distance, one of the ten appeared to be two dots superimposed. Sketchy contours in the background might shape a map.
The Hindmost must be trying to show him something.
When bladder pressure was stronger than his fear of pain, Louis pulled his hand free and wobbled to the toilet. Evidently he still had a medical problem. Afterward he drank a quart of water. He ate a civilized Caesar salad for the first time in eleven years, left-handed. No more of eating whatever he could find! That, he would not mind giving up.
He examined his hand with meager satisfaction. The swelling was down; the bones seemed to be in place.
He left the machine twice more. The pattern caught his eye again as he left the recycler.
Stepping disks!
His subconscious must have been at work. That map defined the stepping disks the Hindmost had deployed. Several were scattered through the millions of cubic miles of Repair Center. Four in Hot Needle of Inquiry itself. One just outside. The double-point must be the refueling probe in Weaver Town, with one disk for transport and another for hydrogen.
The Hindmost had left him this. Louis studied it, fixing it in memory, wondering at the puppeteer’s motives…
And it all popped back to dancing puppeteers as the knobby man flicked in.
The protector had something in his hand. He blew into it, watching Louis’s face. Music fluttered in the air, a woodwind sound.
Louis’s reaction must have been unsatisfactory. The protector put the thing away. He examined Louis as a primitive doctor would have, probing here and there to see what hurt. Presently he said, “Not much longer.”
Louis had had a notion. He said, “My kitchen wall can be made to dispense blood.”
“Will you drink first?”
“No, I won’t. I’m not a vampire. Also, the Hindmost will have to rewrite the kitchen program. No, wait, let me try something.”
At the kitchen wall Louis popped up a virtual keyboard for kzinti cuisine, marked in dots-and-commas, Hero’s Tongue. Louis knew a little of that. He scanned through the extensive menu with the knobby man watching. {Wunderland cuisine} — no. {Fafnir cuisine}? Not under that name. Try {sea life}. There, under the planet’s kzinti name, {Shasht}. {Meat}, {drink}, too many items. Try {seek: meat/drink}. Four times. Three were soups, with as an ingredient, and that left {shreem} itself.
{OVERRIDE laws pertaining to Shasht / Fafnir, Earth, Jinx, Belt, Serpent Swarm…}
A bulb popped into the dispenser port, filled with sluggish red fluid.
The knobby man took the bulb. He took Louis’s jaw, faster than he could flinch. His grip was like iron. “You drink now,” he sad.
Louis opened his mouth, obedient. The knobby man ejected a dollop of sticky red fluid into Louis’s mouth. The taste was unfamiliar, but Louis recognized the smell. He swallowed anyway.
The knobby man drank, watching Louis. “You surprise me. Why would you make blood for me?”
For eleven years Louis had been eating what he could catch, or what unknown hominids would offer as food. “I’m not squeamish,” Louis said.
“Yes, you are.”
In truth, what he had smelled and tasted was making him nauseous. He said, “I have kept to our contract, which calls for me to act in your interest. You are in violation. I judge it wrong for me to drink human blood, and I said so.”
The knobby man said, “The medkit is through with you, isn’t it? You put on your pressure suit. Come with me.”
“Pressure suit. Where are we going?”
The protector said nothing.
Louis grinned. He pointed through the transparent wall aft. “Vacuum gear, landing craft, airlock, anything Chmeee and I might need to get out of this ship is in the lander bay. I can’t get there except by stepping disk. The Hindmost was holding us prisoner.”
“Didn’t you have a contract?”
“Not then.”
“I learned how to use stepping disks. Come here.”
The knobby man had lockpicking tools made of hardwood. He knelt by the disk and lifted its edge.
Louis couldn’t see what he was doing. The protector’s fingers worked too fast. He saw the stepping disk diagram appear in the Hindmost’s quarters, and flicker. Then the protector set the disk in place, pushed Louis onto the stepping disk and followed.
With the lander destroyed, the lander bay was mostly empty space. There were suits for men and kzinti and puppeteers. The transparent walls of the airlock opened into a tunnel that led through several cubic miles of magma, undisturbed since the war with Teela Brown.
Louis glanced at the weapons racks but did not approach them. He pulled out a skintight pressure suit already zipped open along the torso, sleeves, and legs. He wouldn’t need the cummerbund. He started to crawl into it, and stopped with a gasp of pain.
Before he could ask for help, the protector was there, easing his half-healed hand and arm into the sleeve and glove, then fashioning a sling from the tie that had been Acolyte’s tourniquet. He zipped up Louis’s suit, screwed a helmet onto the neck ring, and set an air rack on his back. They waited for the suit to contract to Louis’s own shape.
The knobby man worked the controls of the big stepping disk the cargo disk. Louis began his checklist. Helmet camera, airflow, air recycler, CO2 and water vapor content -
The knobby man pulled him through.
CHAPTER TWENTY — BRAM’S TALE
The Map of Mars stood forty miles high above the Great Ocean, a north polar projection at one-to-one scale. From the Ringworld’s underside there was no sign of the Map of Mars, because the entire forty-mile-high pillbox was hollow.
Louis had seen vast spaces inside the Repair Center, but he had never been inside this one. It was huge and dark. Skeletal chairs equipped with lap keyboards rode on long booms. The ellipsoidal wall was a display screen thirty feet high. The only light came from the screen: a wraparound view of the local sky.
There were no planets or asteroids in Ringworld system. The Ringworld engineers must have cleared all of that out, or used it as building material. The Ringworld’s night-shadowed rim showed pale against the black background. Light-amplified stars glared, and four tiny green circles: cursors.