Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven Read Free Book Online Page A

Yes?"
    "Kzinti would do that anyway," Louis said. "Charge right in."
    Acolyte bristled. "We do not worship clocks and calendars, Tunesmith. This ship Diplomat was attacked. They will be wary."
    Louis said, "Spaceborn always worship clocks and calendars. Orbits are like that."
    "Hindmost?"
    The puppeteer asked, "What are you risking on this guesswork?"
    "Too much," Tunesmith said, "but I must gamble. Fringe War activity accelerates toward a singularity. My worst move is no move."
    "What do you intend?"
    "I will capture Long Shot."
    Louis saw that he'd been right: a crazy mission. He pointed out, "Long Shot is three thousand times as fast as us in hyperdrive, and never enters the Ringworld singularity."
    "They can't use hyperdrive if they're docked with another ship. Follow me." Tunesmith strode forward and was gone. And again, Louis followed.
     

Chapter 5
    As best he could tell, Probe Two was a perfect machine. Hanuman continued working on it anyway. Of all the fascinating machines in Tunesmith's domain, this was the one he felt justified in making his own. His own life would ride this ship.
    He had watched Tunesmith at work on the Meteor Reweaving System.
    Tunesmith talked while he worked. Hanuman almost felt he understood it. Inside a Ringworld puncture, vast numbers of minimally tiny components would weave strands of scrith out of lesser matter, pulling the vast structure back together, closing the holes. Something else would be going on while the nanomachines worked. Similarly tiny components would weave magnetic cables thinner than the hair on Hanuman's body, following superconducting cables already in place inside the torn floor of the Ringworld.
    A protector's nature was to act. It was all Hanuman could do, to stand away from the Meteor Reweaving System, to keep his hands off machines that could save the Ringworld and every species on it, including Hanuman's own. He dared not touch what he didn't understand.
    For fifteen hundred turns of the sky, Hanuman had lived in trees with others of his kind. He had loved; had sired children; had grown old. Then a knotted creature sheathed in leather armor had given Hanuman a root to eat.
    Hanuman had only been intelligent for a falan or so. He knew this much: Tunesmith was a superior intellect. Hanuman's touch on Tunesmith's machines could only ruin them unless he were explicitly directed and guided.
    But he could work on Probe Two. This was the machine that might kill him. He was hoping to understand it better. Tunesmith -- as much Hanuman's superior as he was superior to his species' breeders -- didn't quite understand it either.
    Hanuman heard a puff of air and turned around. Tunesmith had arrived, with visitors.
     
    They were in the cavern beneath Mons Olympus. Tunesmith strode toward an individual half his height. He said, "Hanuman, these are friends. Folk, this is Hanuman, pilot for Probe Two."
    The stranger's voice was high-pitched but not childish. "Acolyte, Louis Wu, Hindmost. Hello."
    Louis said, "A pleasure. Hanuman?" Still trying to decide what he was seeing. The stranger wouldn't weigh more than fifty pounds. Three feet tall, with two feet of tail, swollen joints and swollen skull and skin like cured leather pleated in folds. "You'd be a Hanging People protector?"
    "Yes. Tunesmith made me and named me. 'Hanuman' is a literary reference from the library in Hot Needle of Inquiry." Hanuman switched to another language: Ghoulish, spoken far too fast. As he and Tunesmith chattered, Louis's translator caught a word here and there.
    "--haste--"
    "--lower that into place."
    "A single theory to be tested. If your vehicle survives--"
    A cylinder waited beside the linear accelerator. It looked too small for a passenger, but the nose was fully transparent, and the magnet coils behind it--the linear accelerator--were more than a mile across.
    Machines had already mounted the rebuilt hyperdrive motor in Needle's belly. Now Needle's missing hull section crawled forward to rejoin