Larry Niven Ringworld 4 Ringworld's Children

Author:Ringworld's Children
Language: eng
Format: epub

" 'But always at my back I hear Time's winged footsteps hurrying near'," she said. "No, eat. I need to know how urgent this matter of the Fringe War is. Does Tunesmith have it under control?"

"More or less," he said.

"Eat. Is it more, or less?" She scowled at what she saw in his face. "Less. Hanuman tells me of the blast that tore a hole into space. I saw it from a distance, and knew I must act. Antimatter. Could it have killed all life? Did Tunesmith really prevent that?"

"Yes."

"What did you see?"

"Wembleth and Roxanny would eat some of that," Louis said.

The protector met his eyes for a long heartbeat. "I'll fetch them," she said. She set a great slab of meat in his reach, and departed.

Daylight was fading when they returned. Proserpina and the others cooked dinner outside. Louis smelled wood smoke and roasting meat. What Roxanny brought to Louis included vegetables: green-and-yellow leafy plants, and roasted yams.

Proserpina was becoming a skilled chef. She ate with them, but what she ate was raw meat and raw yams. When they had finished eating, she said, "I want your trust."

The ancient protector's eyes locked with theirs, skipping past Hanuman as if he were a dumb animal. "Wembleth, Roxanny, Luis, you'd be demented to trust me knowing no more than you do."

"Tell us a story," Louis said. Proserpina was keeping Hanuman's secrets, and Louis's, and perhaps Roxanny's too. There was no reason to trust her, and every reason to listen.

"These events all took place near the galactic core. We who held our world were ten to a hundred million protectors of the Pak species," the protector said. "The number varied wildly in the endless war.

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"Something more than four million falans ago—I've lost track of time to some extent—ten thousand of us built a carrier ship and some fighter scouts. Eighty years later, six hundred were left to ride them." Proserpina spoke slowly, reaching far back into her memory. Interworld was a flexible language, but it wasn't built for these concepts.

"This land is a good map of the Pak world. Did you see its shape? Circles everywhere," Proserpina said. "Blast craters, new and ancient, from an endless variety of weapons. These maps were identical when we built them, but they've changed since. On the Pak world and here, we fought for any advantage for our blood line. Luis, what?"

"Well, it's strange," Louis Wu said. "One world, over and over? The Pak world was in the galactic core. Suns are packed close together there. You came here, thirty thousand light years in one leap. Why didn't you use worlds closer in?"

"Yes, our worlds were much closer together than yours. Endless room, endlessly coveted. We saw no way to reach them in a spacecraft carrying breeders, because we would fight for advantage of the breeders. If we solved that, we'd face another problem. Any world would require reshaping for periods of thousands of years. Before the work was complete, each would be snatched away by armies of other protectors.

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