Cronus was the oldest of the Greek gods, killer of his children, until some escaped and killed him instead. Call this one Cronus, then.
A vampire horde had killed a protector who must have been Cronus’s abandoned servant.
Bram and Anne must have stalked the master for years afterward. Years, centuries, millennia? Pak breeders, Man’s ancestors, and the vampires’, too, had been cursorial hunters before ever they left the galactic core.
Old Cronus might not have taken vampire protectors quite seriously. Vampires, after all, were mindless animals with disgusting sexual and dietary habits, and Cronus had been a superintelligent being with no distracting sex urge at all.
And so was Bram. It might give him a blind spot, Louis thought, if he could find it.
The breaks at the right hip, left arm, and shoulder, and a crack along the skull, had been fresh at death. Louis found old, healed breaks elsewhere. Cronus had broken his spine long before his death. Did a protector’s spinal nerves grow back? His right knee, that old injury hadn’t healed: the knee was fused solid.
Something else was strange about the spine … but Louis didn’t understand until he returned to the skull.
The forehead bulged. More: the forehead bone and the crest at the top was smoother, younger than the rest of the skull. The jagged ridge of growth from the jawbone still had an appearance of worn teeth. These things were recent growth. The spine, too, was recent growth: it had gone through a period of regeneration.
If Cronus had won his last battle, he would have healed again.
So think of it as a murder investigation. I know the killer, but to get a conviction in court I need every detail, every nuance. Why did Bram put these bones back together? The enemy was dead, there were none to avenge him—
Or did Bram and Anne fear others like Cronus?
A standing skeleton, and a heap of gear in the shadows beyond. Bram hadn’t let him near this stuff.
It had seemed scattered, dropped at random. It was and it wasn’t. Stuff had been laid out neatly for study; then something had swept through the pattern, like a vampire protector kicking out in rage.
Some of it had simply disintegrated. Some had left clear patterns.
This had been a wonderful fur coat, and a belt to hold it closed. It stank: just a ghost of the stench of old hide, and a Ghoul who hadn’t bathed in thousands of years. On the inner surface, the hide surface, Louis could see the traces of a score of leather pockets in a score of shapes, all empty now.
There were weapons: a knife of old metal turned to black rust, slender and a foot long. Two knives made of horn, each no bigger than a forefinger. There were six throwing knives, nearly identical though shaped from stone, as lethal as the day they were made. A slender pole of some durable metal alloy, the ends sharpened to chisels.
Patterns in the dust might once have been wooden shoes with heavy straps. Here were a fancy crossbow and a dozen bolts, each slightly different. This little box … a firestarter? Louis tried, but he couldn’t get a flame started. A stack of paper or parchment: maps?
There was a telescope … crude, but very finely shaped and polished, and set a little apart. Hello: these next to it were tool-working tools. Pumice, little knives … Bram and/or Anne had set up shop here to duplicate Cronus’s telescope.
A hard black lump the size of his fist. Louis bent low to sniff. Dried meat? A thousand years beyond its date … but jerky always did smell and taste a bit gamy. Maybe a Ghoul would like that.
How long ago had Cronus died?
Ask?
Louis knew he was playing catch-up here. He’d learn more by asking … but he’d learn what Bram chose to teach. And time was constricting around him.
Louis patted Cronus’s shoulder bones. “Trust me,” he said, and flicked out.
He was glare-blind and way off balance.
He convulsed like a sea anemone, reaching between his knees for anything solid, eyes squinted shut against raw sunlight. His gloved fingers brushed something and closed hard.
The badly tilted stepping disk slid under him by a foot or two. He was gripping the rim of the disk itself, he hoped. He held very still.
His photosensitive faceplate turned smoky gray. Still crouched, gripping the edge of the stepping disk, he looked about him.
The Map of Mars wasn’t a very good map.
He could see a hundred shades of red without moving, but the sky was the dark blue of high-altitude Earth. The sun was too bright for Mars. Nothing could be done about the gravity either.
Maybe it didn’t matter to Martians. They lived safe from sunlight beneath sand fine enough to behave like a viscous fluid. Perhaps the sand would even buoy them against Ringworld gravity.
He’d expected to be at Mons Olympus, and it seemed he was. He was a long way up. The stepping disk rested near the top of a smooth forty-five-degree slope of piled dust, and it was starting to slide again.
What had the Hindmost been thinking of, to put it here?
Yeah, right. Martians. They’d set a trap.
Sliding faster now, losing all stability. It was a long way down. Miles! Dust must have piled here over millennia [sic—should be “millennia”] in a prevailing wind … a Great Ocean stratospheric wind, in a weather pattern huger than worlds. Another flaw in the accuracy of the Map of Mars.
Louis squatted, flattened himself against the stepping disk as it became a sled.
It picked up speed. The disk was trying to bounce him off. His hands had a death-grip and he tried to grip with his boot toes, too. An arcology-sized rock stood in his path. He leaned left, trying to steer. Nope. It was going to swat him hard.
Then he was elsewhere.
And his death-grip became something more, because he was falling into a black void.
He chopped off part of a shrill scream. But I fixed it! I fixed it! I fixed it!
He was clinging to a stepping disk welded to a gracefully curved cigar shape: the puppeteer’s refueling probe. Around him was black sky and a glare of stars.
The stepping disk, the probe’s hull, everything glowed. There must be light behind him. Without losing anything of his toe-and-finger grip, Louis twisted to look over his shoulder.
The Ringworld was adrift behind and below him. He could see fine detaiclass="underline" rivers like twisted snakes, undersea landscapes, a straight black thread that might be a Machine People highway.
The naked sun was trying to broil him. No problem: the suit was one he could sweat through. Night would be a greater threat. He hadn’t thought he would need an oversuit.
He was level with the top of the rim wall, looking down at half-conical spill mountains and the rivers that ran from their bases. A thousand miles up. Far ahead of him he could make out lacy lines sketching a long double cone.
An attitude jet. He could see the twin toroids that he’d thought made up a Bussard ramjet; but they were tiny, forming the wasp waist of something far larger. The Ringworld attitude jet was made of wire so thin that it kept fading in and out of sight. A cage to guide the flow of the solar wind.
This one wasn’t mounted yet: it wasn’t pointed right.
Louis hadn’t felt fear like this in two hundred years.
But I got the bread back!
The probe was coasting … was motionless, while the Ringworld rotated below at 770 miles per second.
The system must have reset. I took this one disk out of the link, but it must have reset. I don’t understand the Hindmost’s programming language. What else have I fouled up?
The sashimi? That was easy. The plate must have drifted too far from the disk. The bread hadn’t: it was still in range when the disks cycled.