Voices, dimly heard. Louis stirred, and turned in free fall, and looked about him.

Beyond the aft wall, Harkabeeparolyn and Kawaresksenjajok were in animated conversation with the ceiling. To Louis it was gibberish. He didn't have his translator. But the City Builders were pointing into a rectangular hologram floating outside the hull, blocking part of the s.p.a.ceport ledge.

Through that "window" Louis could see the sunlit courtyard of a gray stone castle. Rough-hewn stone in big ma.s.ses; lots of right angles. The only windows were vertical arrow slits. Some kind of ivy was crawling up one of the walls. Luxuriant pale-yellow ivy with scarlet veins.

Louis pushed himself out of the field.

The puppeteer was at his bench on the flight deck. Today his mane was a cloudy phosph.o.r.escent glow. He turned one head at Louis's approach. "Louis, I trust you are rested?"

"Yeah, and I needed it, too. Any progress?"

"I was able to repair the reading machine. Needle's computer doesn't know enough of the City Builder tongue to read tapes about physics. I hope to pick up a vocabulary by talking to the natives."

"How much longer? I've got some questions about the Ringworld's general design." Could the Ringworld floor, the whole six hundred million million square miles of it, be used to manipulate the Ringworld's position electromagnetically? If he could know for sure!

"Ten to twenty hours, I think. We all need to rest occasionally."

Too long, Louis thought, with the repair crew coming down their throats. Too bad. "Where's the picture coming from? The lander?"

"Yes."

"Can we get a message to Chmeee?"

"No."

"Why not? He must be carrying his translator."

"I made the mistake of turning the translator function off by way of coercion. He isn't carrying it."

"What happened?" Louis asked. "*What's he doing in a medieval castle?*"

The Hindmost said, "It has been twenty hours since Chmeee reached the Map of Kzin. I've told you how he made his reconnaissance flight, how he allowed kzinti aircraft to attack him, how he landed on the great ship and waited while they continued their attacks. The attacks lasted some six hours before Chmeee himself broke off and flew elsewhere. I wish I understood what he hoped to gain, Louis."

"I don't know either, really. Go on."

"The aircraft followed him some way, then turned back. Chmeee continued to search. He found a stretch of wilderness with a small, walled stone castle on the highest peak. He landed in the courtyard. He was attacked, of course, but the defenders had nothing but swords and bows and the like. When they were well a.s.sembled around the lander, he sprayed them with stun cannon. Then he-"

"Hold it."

A kzin sprinted out of one of the rounded arches and across the gray flagstones, moving toward the hologram window at a four-legged dead run. It had to be Chmeee; he was wearing impact armor. An arrow protruded from his eye, a long wooden arrow with papery leaves for feathering.

Other kzinti ran behind him,, waving swords and maces. Arrows fell from the slit windows and glanced from his impact armor. As Chmeee reached the lander's airlock, a thread of light lashed from a window. The laser beam chewed flame from the flagstones, then focused on the lander. Chmeee had disappeared. The beam held ... then snuffed out as the slit window exploded in red and white flame.

"Careless," the Hindmost murmured. "Giving such a weapon to enemies!" His other mouth nibbled at the controls. He switched to an inside camera. Louis watched Chmeee lock the airlock, then stagger toward the autodoc, struggling to take off his impact armor, dropping it as he moved. The kzin's leg was gashed beneath the armor. He heaved the lid of the autodoc up and more or less fell inside.

"Tanj! He hasn't turned the monitors on! Hindmost, we've got to help him."

"How, Louis? If you tried to reach him via stepping discs, you would be heated to fusion temperatures. Between your velocity and the lander's-"

"Yeah." The Great Ocean was thirty-five degrees around the curve of the Ringworld. The kinetic energy difference would be enough to blast a city. There was no way to help.

Chmeee lay bleeding.

Suddenly he cried out. He half turned over. His thick fingers stabbed at the autodoc's keyboard. He heaved himself on his back, reached up and pulled the cover closed.

"Good enough," Louis said. The arrow had entered the socket at a sharp outward angle. It might have missed destroying brain tissue ... or it might not. "He was careless, all right. Okay, go on."

"Chmeee used stun cannon to irradiate the entire castle. Then he spent three hours loading unconscious kzinti onto repulser platforms and taking them outside. He barred the gates. He went away, into the castle. For nine hours I saw nothing of him. Why are you grinning?"

"He didn't take any females outside, did he?"

"No. I think I see."

"He was tanj lucky to get his armor on fast enough. He got that slash on his leg before he finished."

"It does seem that Chmeee is no threat to me."

He'd be in the 'doc twenty to forty hours, Louis estimated. Now it was Louis Wa's decision alone. "There's something we ought to discuss with him, but I guess there's no help for it. Hindmost, please record the following conversation. Send it to the lander on a looped tape. I want it in Chmeee's ears when he wakes up."

The puppeteer reached behind him; he seemed to chew at the control panel. "Done. What is it we are to discuss?"

"Chmeee and I haven't been able to make ourselves believe that you'll take us back to known s.p.a.ce. Or even that you can."

The puppeteer peered at him from two directions. His flat heads spread wide, giving him binocular effect, the better to study his dubious ally and possible enemy. He asked, "Why should I not, Louis?"

"*First*, we know too much. Second, you don't have any reason to go back to any world in known s.p.a.ce. With or without the magic trans.m.u.ter, the place you want to be is the Fleet of Worlds."

Muscles in the puppeteer's hindquarters flexed restlessly. (That was the leg a puppeteer fought with: turn your back on the enemy, zero in with wide-s.p.a.ced eyes, kick!) He said, "Would that be so bad?"

"It might be better than staying here," Louis conceded. "What did you have in mind?"

"We can make your lives very comfortable. You know that we have the kzinti longevity drug. We can supply boosterspice, too. There is room in Needle for hominid and kzinti females, and in fact we have a City Builder female aboard. You would travel in stasis, so crowding is not a problem. You and your entourage may settle on one of the four farming worlds of the Fleet. You would virtually own it."

"What if we got bored with the pastoral life?"

"Nonsense. You would have access to the libraries of the home world. Access to knowledge humanity has wondered about since first we revealed ourselves! The Fleet is moving through s.p.a.ce at nearly lightspeed, eventually to reach the Clouds of Magellan. With us you will escape the galactic core explosion. Likely we will need you to explore ... interesting territories ahead of our path."

"You mean dangerous."

"What else would I mean?"

Louis was more tempted than he would have expected. How would Chmeee take such an offer? Vengeance postponed? A chance to damage the puppeteer home world in some indefinite future? Or simple cowardice?

He asked, "Is this offer contingent on our finding a magic trans.m.u.ter?"

"No. Your talents are needed regardless. However ... any promise I make now would be more easily carried out under an Experimentalist regime. Conservatives might not recognize your value, let alone Chmeee's."

That was nicely phrased, Louis conceded. "Speaking of Chmeee-"

"The kzin has defected, but I leave my offer open to him. He has found kzinti females to save. Perhaps you can persuade him."

"I wonder."

"And after all, you may see your worlds again. In a thousand years, known s.p.a.ce may have forgotten the puppeteers. Mere decades will have pa.s.sed for you, falling near lightspeed with the Fleet of Worlds."

"I want time to think it over. I'll put it to Chmeee when I get the chance." Louis glanced behind him. The City Builders were watching him. It was a pity he couldn't consult them, because he was deciding their fate too.

But he had decided. "What I'd like to do next," he said, "is move on to the Great Ocean. We could come up through Fist-of-G.o.d Mountain and go slowly enough-"

"I have no intention of moving the Needle at all. There may be threats other than the meteor defense, and surely it is enough!"

"I'll bet I can change your mind. Do you remember finding a rig for hoisting the Bussard ramjets on the rim wall? Have a look at that rig now."

For a moment the puppeteer remained frozen. Then he whirled and was out of sight behind the opaque wall of his quarters.

And that ought to keep him busy long enough.

At his leisure Louis Wu moved to his pile of discarded clothing and equipment. He fished the flashlight-laser out of his vest. Step four: coming up. A pity his autodoc was in the lander, a hundred million miles out of reach. He might need it soon.

There was certainly flare shielding on the outer hall of Needle. Every ship had that, at least on the windows. Under the impact of too much light, flare shielding became a mirror, and maybe saved the pilot's eyesight.

It stopped solar flares, and it stopped lasers. If the Hindmost had set impervious walls between himself and his captive crew, surely he would have coated the entire flight deck with shielding.

But what about the floor?

Louis knelt. The hyperdrive motor ran the whole length of the ship; it was bronze colored, with some copper and hullmetal. Puppeteer machinery, with all angles rounded, it looked half melted already. Louis angled the flashlight-laser into it and fired through the transparent floor.

Light glared back from the bronze surface. Metal vapor spewed. Liquid metal ran. Louis let the beam chew deep, then played it around, burning or melting anything that looked interesting. A pity he'd never studied hyperdrive system engineering.

The laser grew warm in his hand. He'd been at this for some minutes. He shifted the beam to one of the six mountings that held the motor suspended in its vacuum chamber. It didn't melt; it softened and settled. He attacked another. The motor's great ma.s.s sagged and twisted.

The narrow beam flickered, strobelike, then faded. Battery dead. Louis tossed the flashlight-laser away from him, remembering that the puppeteer could make it explode in his hand.

He strolled to the forward wall of his cage. The puppeteer wasn't in sight, but presently Louis heard the sound of a steam calliope dying in agony.

The puppeteer trotted around the opaque green section and stood facing him. Muscles quivered beneath his skin.

"Come," said Louis Wu, "let us reason together."

Without haste, the puppeteer tucked both heads beneath his forelegs and let his legs fold under him.

Chapter 24 -.

Counterproposal Louis Wu woke clearheaded and hungry. For a few minutes he rested, savoring free fall; then he reached out and killed the field. His watch said he'd slept seven hours.

Needle's guests were sleeping beneath one of the tremendous clamps that had held the lander in place during flight. The white-haired woman slept restlessly, tangled in her ponchos, with one bare leg sticking out. The brown-haired boy slept like a baby.

There was no way to wake them, and no point. The wall wouldn't carry sound, and the translator didn't work. And the stepping-disc link would carry no more than a few pounds. Had the puppeteer really expected some kind of complex conspiracy? Louis smiled. His mutiny had been simplicity itself.

He dialed a toasted-cheese handmeal and ate while he padded to the forward wall of his cell.

In repose the Hindmost was a smooth egg shape, covered in hide, with a cloud of white hair tufting the big end. His legs and his heads were hidden beneath him. He hadn't moved in seven hours.

Louis had seen Nessus do that. It was a puppeteer's response to shock: to tuck himself into his navel and make the universe disappear. Well and good, but nine hours seemed excessive. If the puppeteer had been driven into catatonia by Louis's shock treatment, that could be the end of everything.

The puppeteer's ears were in his heads. Louis's words must carry through a thickness of meat and bone. He shouted, "Let me offer you several points to ponder!"

The puppeteer did not respond. Louis raised his voice in soliloquy. "This structure is sliding into its sun. There are things we can do about that, but we can't do any of them while you contemplate your navel. n.o.body but you can control any of Needle's instruments, sensors, drives, etcetera, and that's just the way you planned it. So: every minute you spend imitating a footstool, you and I and Chmeee come one minute closer to an opportunity no astrophysicist could resist."

He finished his handmeal while he waited, Puppeteers were superb linguists, in any number of alien languages. Would a puppeteer respond to a narrative hook?

And in fact the Hindmost exposed one head far enough to ask, "What opportunity?"

"The chance to study sunspots from underneath."

The head withdrew under the puppeteer's belly.

Louis bellowed, "The repair team is coming!"

Head and neck reappeared and bellowed in response. "What have you done to us? What have you done to me, to yourself, to two natives who might have fled the fire? Did you have thought for anything besides mere vandalism?"

"I did. You said it once. Some day we must decide who rules this expedition. This is the day," said Louis Wu. "Let me tell you why you should be taking my orders."

"I never guessed that a wirehead would l.u.s.t for mere power."

"Make that point one. I'm better at guessing than you are."

"Proceed."

"We're not leaving here. Even the Fleet of Worlds is out of reach at slower-than-light speeds. If the Ringworld goes, we all go. We've got to put it back in position somehow.

"Third point. The Ringworld engineers have been dead for at least a quarter of a million years," Louis said carefully. "Chmeee would say a couple of million. The hominids couldn't have mutated and evolved while the Ringworld engineers were alive. They wouldn't have allowed it. They were Pak protectors."

Louis had expected horror or terror or surprise. The puppeteer showed only resignation. "Xenophobes," he said. "Vicious and hardy and very intelligent."

He must have suspected.

"My ancestors," said Louis. "They built the Ringworld, and they built whatever system is supposed to hold it in place. Which of us has a better chance of thinking like a Pak protector? One of us has to try."

"These arguments would mean nothing if you had left us the chance to run. Louis, I trusted you."

"I wouldn't like to think you were that stupid. We didn't volunteer for this expedition. Kzinti and humans, we make poor slaves."