“I don’t know the term,” the protector said.
“Stet. Acolyte, most hunting creatures miss their jump eight times out of nine. If the prey runs away, they pick something slower. Only a few kinds of meat eaters pick their prey and follow it until they run it down. Wolves do that. So do humans.
“Big cats aren’t cursorial hunters, and kzinti aren’t, either. Your ancestors learned that they’d better track down an enemy or he’ll turn up later, but that’s your brain talking. Your evolution hasn’t caught up—”
“You knew you would win.”
“Yeah.”
The Kzin blinked at him. “If we had run only as far as the garden?”
“You would have won.”
“Thank you for the lesson.”
“Thank you.” That was nicely phrased, Louis thought. Who had taught him that?
Bram said, “Louis. Look around you. React.”
React? “Impressive. All that green! From the foothills to the frost line, all green. I shouldn’t be surprised. Those mountains are all seabottom muck, all fertilizer.”
“More?”
“Some of the pipes have stopped delivering flup. That would account for the lowest mountains. What’s left of them must be fairly hard rock by now. The highest ones must have a lot of water ice in them, at least at the peak. I can see rivers running from the foothills. Those mountains will get the Ringworld’s only regular earthquakes.”
“A difficult environment?”
“I suppose. Bram, we saw all this fifty falans ago. Have you seen signs of life in the mountains?”
“Once around your world would mark the distance to those mountains, but yes, we have. Louis, I have a meal to tend. Hindmost, Acolyte, take him to the dining hall. Show him.”
The Hindmost had sprayed webeyes on all four walls of the dining hall.
One was not in use: a mere bronze spiderweb.
A window shaped like a pool of spilled water looked out upon a row of dark green cones capped in white.
Another showed the edge of the rim wall drifting slowly past: a view from the refueling probe.
And one showed a score of muscular, hairy men using ropes to guide a square plate big enough to be the floor plan of a six-room bungalow. The plate floated above them. It might have been a big cargo plate, or part of a floating building. The men were pulling it toward Louis … toward the Machine People cruiser and its stolen webeye.
“I left you a record taken six days ago,” the Hindmost said, “to watch when you woke. But this is in present time.”
“What are they doing?”
The Kzin answered. “They’re approaching the rim wall any way they can.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know that yet. Bram might,” the Kzin said. “While you were in treatment, Bram found your City Builder friends and set them aboard Hidden Patriarch. They obey Bram as my father’s slaves obeyed their lord. They had the ship moving to starboard within a day. Bram is studying the rim wall.”
Louis asked again, “Why?”
“We were not told,” Acolyte said.
The Hindmost said, “I have never seen Bram show fear, yet I think he fears protectors.”
Louis saw the connection. “The attitude jets need replacing. Otherwise the Ringworld slides off center. Any protector who sees that will be found mounting attitude jets on the rim wall. Right?”
“If the theory holds.”
“Why isn’t Bram there?”
The puppeteer made a short, sharp sound, as if a clarinet had sneezed. “If protectors knew that three off-world species have mounted invasions and a fourth is in wide orbit to study the effects, they would swarm the Map of Mars instead.”
“Give them decent telescopes? No, they’d still—Ah.”
“Ah?”
“Bram has to be on the rim wall, too. He’s preparing. The other protectors will kill him if they can.”
The puppeteer’s eyes met. He said, “In any case, we have Hidden Patriarch’s view of the local rim wall. My refueling probe has been in solar orbit for more than a falan now, skimming along the rim walls, recording. We’ve learned a great deal, Louis.” The Hindmost whistled a brief trill.
All three views began a slow zoom.
From Hidden Patriarch’s fore crow’s nest: The spill mountains expanded until only one was in sight. Pale green and dark green, grass and forest, reached up to ice-white. At the very peak a black thread dipped into a compact knot of black fog. Seabottom muck fell steadily from a spillpipe a thousand miles overhead.
From the probe: The rim wall blurred past. Louis tried to keep his eyes off it.
From the stolen webeye— Louis began to laugh.
Now the Machine People cruiser was bobbing gently, twenty feet up. Beyond the edge of the floating plate was rolling landscape, hummocks like a thousand sleeping behemoths.
Ropes were pulling the cargo plate. Thirty-odd men of a species unfamiliar to Louis were pulling the ropes. The men wore light packs, but nothing else. Straight black hair covered their heads and their backs to below their buttocks. Perhaps hair was all they needed for warmth.
They were running uphill toward a ridge, and toward thirty hairy women waiting below the ridge. The women were waving, yelling encouragement. Among them was a small red woman, a Red Herder, attempting to guide them with wide motions of her arms.
The way grew steeper; the men weren’t running anymore. As they neared the crest, the women ran alongside them. They were as hairy as the men. More or less smoothly, they added themselves to the ropes. There was general laughter and brief conversations held in gasps.
The women pulled. Some were running backward. They had strong legs, Louis noted, as strong as the men’s. They were over the crest now and starting downhill. The runners were behind the window now, trying to slow the craft.
The Red Herder ran to snatch a rope and climb it.
The viewpoint moved faster and faster over the rounded land. By now all the runners must have let go. The hummocks grew larger ahead; grew mountainous. Streams ran among them and converged ahead. Louis realized that he was looking at the foot of a spill mountain.
The swaying of the plate was making Louis motion-sick. “They’re going to get themselves wrecked,” he said.
Acolyte yowled: kzinti ridicule.
“I don’t consider them sane myself,” the Hindmost said.
The view from Hidden Patriarch’s bow was expanding, too. Now the peak of the spill mountain was lost overhead. A third of the way up the slopes, Louis began to see colored dots and blinking lights.
Blinking lights? “Heliographs.”
“Very astute, Louis.”
“A Ghoul child told me about this. He thought he was being cryptic. Their whole empire must be linked by heliographs in the spill mountains. How do you suppose they do it? Ghouls can’t stand daylight.”
“At night they see flashing mirrors from daylit mountains. Easy enough, but how do they send? Louis, they must buy message services from locals.”
“Somehow. And bargain with the Spill Mountain People, too, somehow. I bet they don’t use rishathra.”
“They don’t need many. We only see the glitter from a handful of spill mountains. A few thousands of message stations on the surface would be enough to knit their empire together.”
“What about the—what are those, balloons?”
The Hindmost trilled again. The zoom stopped; the mountains began to drift sideways. A score of colored dots were adrift against the ice, a mile to a mile and a half up. Louis saw more of them in the wide spaces between mountains.
“Hot gas balloons, Louis. We see them flowing between the spill mountains everywhere we look.”
“How much variation—”
Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok entered bearing platters, and stopped in their tracks.
The Hindmost whistled. The hurtling rim wall and the bouncing foothills faded into bronze spiderwebs. It was a wonder the City Builders hadn’t dropped everything and run screaming, Louis thought. But Harkabeeparolyn was still staring, and Kawaresksenjajok was watching her and grinning.