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 20
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.
“I found four more,” the Hindmost said. He was at a wall of clumsy, clunky lights and dials and switches. Now Louis recognized where he was. This was the system that twisted the sun’s magnetic field. He had seen this array in a holo projection, eleven years ago, when the Hindmost manipulated the Meteor Defense.
The air here must be soupy with tree-of-life spores.
It was a tidy place, except—hmmm?
Across that great width of floor, a shadow-shape was standing in near darkness. A shape of motionless menace, skewed from the human shape, too thin and too pointy in spots. Bones. Bones mounted in a pose of attack.
In the shadows beyond those standing bones, gear seemed scattered at random.
Later. Louis said, “I should finish my checklist. Do you need me instantly?”
The knobby man said, “No. Hindmost, show me.”
No Belter would have yanked a man into a vacuum before he had checked his pressure suit. That would be murderously rude. Had the protector read the readiness of his suit at a glance? Louis wondered. Was the protector testing his attitude? His equipment? His temper?
The Hindmost was riding one of the cargo plates. He lifted by a yard; his heads dipped among the controls. The skyview zoomed on an orange near-sphere marked in black dots-and-commas. A kzinti ship, probably centuries old and retrofitted with hyperdrive.
The view shrank, and moved, and expanded. This next ship looked big, a long, slowly rotating lever with a bubble at the near end. Louis didn’t recognize the type.
The view shrank and moved and expanded to show a gray and black object like a diseased potato seen through fog. The Hindmost said, “The Ringworld engineers left only the most distant comets. Too many to destroy them all—”
“Air reserve,” the knobby man said. “To replace air lost over the rim walls.”
“… Yes. Now note this …” A blinking green circle marked a crater on the proto-comet. The view expanded, then shifted to deep-radar, with a blurred view of structure in the ice below the pock.
The knobby man asked, “What species built that?”
“I can’t tell,” the Hindmost said. “Mining projects always have that look, like the root system of a plant. But here …” Another rotating lever, a ship of the same make, viewed from the side. Familiar little stubby-winged aerospacecraft were strung all along its length.