Not a coffin, he remembered, but he was on an adrenaline high, with good reason to stay in motion. What had been happening while he was in the box?
His ankle stung. He’d kicked something. Ignore it.
The strangest thing about his waking was the way he felt.
In their early twenties, Louis and a dozen friends had run an ancient martial arts teaching program. A few dropped out when the computer had them hitting each other in the face. Louis had stuck with it, play-fighting for ten months. Then it all turned stale, and two hundred years went by, and …
It didn’t feel like waking from steep or surgery. He felt more like a fighter halfway through a yogatsu match he knows he can win. Absolutely charged up, seething with adrenaline and energy.
Great! Bring ‘em on!
Motion! He whirled around. His hands felt naked.
Beyond the forward wall, rocky rolling terrain flashed past on either side, too fast for detail. Needle must be moving like a hypersonic shuttle at ground level. And the view was toward the captain’s cabin—
Only a picture. None of those great rocks was about to mash him into jelly. The black basalt walls to left and right, the lander bay behind him, were all quite motionless.
The thing he’d kicked was a block of stone in the forward-starboard corner of crew quarters. He’d never seen that before. It looked completely inert and harmless: a roughly dressed granite cube as tall as his knee.
He was alone.
Louis understood why Bram had left Acolyte in an induced coma until he could attend to him. Waking alone, a Kzin might set traps and barriers, or force the wardrobe and kitchen systems to produce weapons. But Louis did not understand why Bram had left him to wake alone.
How fast did a protector learn? Bram had observed him for … hmm? Up to three days, if he’d tapped into the webeye camera at Weaver Town. Could Bram already know me well enough to trust me?
Not likely! Bram hadn’t done this. The Hindmost must have reset the ’doc to open when his treatment was finished.
Now, what was the Hindmost trying to show him? Louis wondered. Did the protector know what kind of show the Hindmost had running here?
The hologram view streamed past him. Distant trees flashed past, an extensive forest of what looked like pines. Dead ahead, mountains and cloud patterns seemed infinitely distant.
The Hindmost could hide anything in the captain’s cabin, and his crew would see nothing but this bounding, lurching hologram projection. Maybe that was the point.
The bouncing lower rim was dark wood: the front of an alcohol-burning Machine People cruiser. Under that, a bit of a curved rim of gleaming metal or plastic.
The webeye camera that the Ghouls had mounted on a Machine People cruiser now rode something that flew.
Blocks of rock protruded from fringes of forest. The vehicle flew no more than two hundred feet up. The speed? Subsonic, but not by much.
What kind of hominids could tolerate such speed? Louis wondered. Even Disney Port didn’t run rides this fast. Most Ringworld hominids would die if they merely traveled beyond their local ecologies. A ride like this would stop their hearts.
What was he supposed to do with this?
How much time did he have to play?
Trapped in a bungalow-sized box buried miles deep in cooled lava, he was hardly a free agent. Stepping disks would get him out, but they would only take him to where his masters waited.
Louis knew that he was reacting instead of acting, like a good dog trying to guess the will of his masters. He was seething with new youth, and he couldn’t do anything.
Sit down, he told himself. Relax. Distract yourself. Eat?
The kitchen menu was running. It showed kzinti script and a picture: some kind of sea life. Alien sashimi! Better not. Louis reset it for human metabolism, Sol, Earth, français [francais], pain perdu, added café [cafe] au lait, and called it breakfast. And while he waited … hmmm?
Using the stepping disk would lose him his options.
Examining the stepping disk …
He lifted the rim as he’d seen Bram do.
The racing landscape blinked out, replaced by an abstraction: the diagram of the stepping disk network.
More links had been added. Several networks had merged into one. The restricted flick from crew quarters to the captain’s cabin was still isolated, and so were a few other pairs. Still, the Hindmost had given up some security for greater convenience. Bram must have made him do that.
The diagram measured distance on a logarithmic scale. At and near Needle, detail was fine enough to discriminate between crew quarters and the lander bay. There were flick points all through the Repair Center. Louis picked out Weaver Town, hundreds of thousands of miles distant. One point was far to starboard of Needle’s position, almost to the rim wall, half a million miles away or more. The most distant point must be a third of the way around the Ringworld’s arc: hundreds of millions of miles.
Brighter lines would indicate links that were currently open. If he was reading this right … open circuits ran from Needle’s crew quarters to Needle’s lander bay to the far point on the Great Ocean. Bram must be exploring.
Had he taken the Hindmost? Or had the Hindmost returned to his cabin?
Knowing that, Louis thought, would tell him exactly how much trust was between the Hindmost and Bram. In his cabin the Hindmost would be next to invulnerable, with General Products hull material between him and any enemy. Locked off from his grooming aids, he would grow scruffy and uncomfortable—
Ding. French toast with maple syrup. Coffee with foamy steamed milk appeared a moment later. Louis ate rapidly.
Then he tried using the fork on the stepping disk controls.
The tines bent and broke.
Humming, Louis dialed {Earth, Japan, assorted sashimi}.
The hashi felt like wood. They even had a grain. He cracked one along the grain to get a point. He began moving whatever would move in the stepping disk controls.
Bright lines faded, others brightened, as links opened and closed.
A slide turned everything off. Moving the slide back the way it had come got him a blinking half brightness: the system wanted instructions.
He kept playing. Presently he had a bent ring of seven bright lines, and a virtual clock, and weird music playing in the background. He couldn’t understand the musical puppeteer language, and he couldn’t read a Fleet of Worlds timepiece, but he saw how to set it for fast.
If he’d read this right, the circuit would take him to the lander bay; then to Weaver Town, to see what had changed. Pick up a pressure suit in the lock, or else he’d be sniffing tree-of-life when he flicked to the Meteor Defense room! Keep the suit on when he flicked to the surface of the Map of Mars, and thence to the farthest point on the diagram, which seemed to be on the rim wall. On to the mystery point at the far shore of the Great Ocean, and back to Needle.
Second thoughts? This shouldn’t take him more than a few minutes, unless he found something interesting.
He set the sashimi plate on the stepping disk.
Nothing happened.
Of course not: the rim of the stepping disk was still lifted, exposing the controls. Louis pushed it down. The sashimi plate flicked out.
The network blinked out, too. Louis had to shy from sudden motion. The racing landscape was back, and mountains beyond, spill mountains with the rim wall as backdrop. They were nearby, by Ringworld measure, a few tens of thousands of miles away.