He found remains of last night’s fish in the ashes of the barbecue, wrapped in leaves. It made a good breakfast.
He caught up to Sawur trying to herd a score of children all in one direction while she lectured on plants, fungus, animals, and animal spoor.
Yesterday he’d seen fleshy arrowhead-shaped leaves on a purple stalk, growing at the bases of the trees. Something like that grew downstream, and those leaves had been edible.
Ordinarily an omnivore could watch what other hominid species ate and try that himself, try eating whatever another hominid found safe. He couldn’t do that among strict carnivores.
Then again, what he found need not be shared. If it was poisonous, there was the medkit. Eat one thing at a time and check himself. If it was mildly poisonous, he might have to eat it anyway for roughage, for potassium, for whatever scarce substance he wasn’t getting.
The children watched as he tested this and that, chewed this, threw that away, put this or that in his backpouch. Sawur tried to help. She pointed out a poisonous twining plant before Louis could hurt himself, and a blue berry the birds liked, that tested clean and tasted of lemon. A fungus the size of a dinner plate tested positive for allergies …
They reached a pond a little ahead of the children. Sawur slowed him with a hand on his arm. The water was flat and still. His knees and back protested as he knelt.
His hair … he’d never seen it like this, laced with white strands. His eyes were lined at the edges. Louis saw his age.
In an agony of regret, he thought, Like this! I should have dressed like this at my two hundredth! Everyone at the party would have freaked!
Sawur grinned at him impishly. “Were you hoping that Strill would come to you?”
Louis stared at her, then laughed with surprise. Sawur hadn’t been seeing his age, but her own! He was saved from answering: the children were crowding around them again.
There was something Louis wanted to know. He could learn by teaching. He picked out a blond-furred net thrower who was fighting hard to attract Strill’s attention. “Parald, do you know that all humans were once alike?”
They had heard of such. They didn’t quite believe and they didn’t quite disbelieve.
Louis drew in the mud: Homo habilis, life size, as best he could render him. “Pak breeder. Our ancestors lived on a planet like the world I was born on, a ball, but much closer to the center of our whorl of stars,” and he drew a barred spiral, the galaxy. “We’re out here. The Pak lived in there.” He couldn’t draw the Pak world. Nobody had ever seen it. “A plant grew there called ‘tree-of-life.’ ”
He began to alter Homo habilis, giving him a swollen misshapen head, swollen joints, wrinkled and folded skin, toothless jawbones grown through the gums into a bony beak.
“You’re turning from children into adults,” he told them. “When all humans were alike, before there was a Ringworld, there were children, and adults to make more children, and a third shape to protect them both. Adults didn’t have minds then. When an adult got old enough he would eat tree-of-life—”
“She,” Parald said, and giggled.
Stet, their generic pronoun was female. Louis said, “Then she would sleep, and change as she slept, like a butterfly. Her sex would fade away. Protector men and women look alike. Her jaw would grow to replace her teeth, her brain case would expand, her joints would expand to give the muscles greater leverage, her skin would become thick leather armor. When the change was over, she would be smarter and stronger, and she would care for nothing except to protect her children. Protectors fought terrible wars over whose children would survive.”
Strill asked, “Why doesn’t it happen to us?”
“There’s an element almost missing from the soil beneath the Arch. The virus that makes protectors can’t live without it. But in a cavern under one of the islands on the Great Ocean, tree-of-life still grows with the virus in the root.
“The terrible thing about a protector is that she’ll do anything to give an edge to her own relatives. Whoever built the Ringworld locked the tree-of-life up so nobody could reach it. It grows in artificial light in great plantations beneath the Map of Mars. But somebody must have got to it—”
“That’s what scares the Web Dweller!” Parald crowed.
“Right. He thinks he’s found a protector on the other Great Ocean, and another halfway up the Arch to antispin, and maybe more at work on the rim wall. The Web Dweller isn’t related to any human protector. By instinct they would call him an enemy. He controls the Meteor Defense in the Repair Center. With that he can burn whatever he likes, anywhere on the Arch.
“So who should we be afraid of? The Web Dweller or the protectors?”
The children shivered, and giggled, and then began to talk.
Louis listened and learned. They knew of protectors. War was only a rumor to them, yet the rumor came clothed in protector-shaped armor. All hominids seemed to carry that shape in their minds, as heroes or monsters, as Saint George or Grendel; as designs for armor among the Grass Giants and as pressure suits on the spaceport ledge.
After much argument, the children seemed to side with the Hindmost. Strangers didn’t compete, didn’t steal, didn’t rape; and what could be stranger than the Web Dweller?
Presently they all ran off to swim in the lake.
Plants here reminded Louis of another plant with a fat root like a beet. He began digging. Sawur watched for a bit, then asked, “Well, Luweewu, can you feed yourself?”
“I think so. It isn’t the style of life whereby a man gets fat,” he sad.
“And are you glad you came among us?”
“Oh, yes.” He was barely listening. A decision he’d made eleven years ago was unraveling.
“But you wanted Strill.”
Louis sighed. Strill would have been a delight, but even Sawur, mature at forty-odd Earth year, was as close as he wanted to get to child molesting.
He said, “Strill is beautiful. Sawur, if Strill had come, it would have been bad news. I can tell how wealthy a culture is from the woman who shares her tent with me. I’m the prize here, whatever my real value—”
“High.”
“—and you claimed me. But if people are starving, or beset by predators, or at war, they try to guess what prize I want. Then I find some glorious young woman in my bed and I know we have a problem.”
“But you would not.”
“No, I mean they might need more than ideas.” He’d given away two of his cargo plates to people along the river who needed heavy lifting power. He didn’t want to tell Sawur that, so he only said, “Knowledge is like rishathra. You have it, you give it away, you still have it. But I’ve had to give away tools.”
“What made you so twitchy this morning? Protectors?”
Louis dropped a root into his pack. Now he had four. “You know about protectors?”
“Since I was a little girl. In the stories they are heroes, but at the end of time their battles destroy Arch and world together. Kidada and I don’t tell those stories anymore.”
“These are heroes,” Louis agreed. “The ones on the rim wall, they’re repairing motors that hold the Arch where it belongs. Another has been repelling invaders. But protectors can be a bad thing. The Web Dweller’s records suggest that protectors destroyed all the life on Home, on one of our ball worlds. It was part of a war between protectors who wanted more turf for their breeders.”
Sawur asked, “Do you trust the Web Dweller’s records?”
“They’re very good.”
“Shall we swim?”
In mid-afternoon the boys killed something like a small antelope. The children cut a pole to carry it down to the village, with Louis marching at the fore end. It was pleasant to be the strongest man, and not all that uncommon. The average Ringworld hominid was smaller than Louis Wu.