A screen lighted. A seductive contralto said, “Louis.”

“Here.”

“I return your droud,” the puppeteer said.

Louis turned. The small black thing was sitting on the stepping disc. Louis turned away as one turns one’s back on an enemy, remembering that the enemy is still there.

He said, “There’s something I want you to investigate. There are mountains along the base of the rim wall. The natives—”

“For the risks of exploring I selected you and Chmeee.”

“Can you understand that I might want to minimize those risks?”

“Certainly.”

“Then hear me out. I think well want to investigate the spill mountains. Before we do, there are just a lot of things we need to know about the rim wall. All you have to—”

“Louis, why did you call them spill mountains?”

“The natives call them that. I don’t know why, and neither do they. Suggestive, eh? And they don’t show from the back. Why not? Most of the Ringworld is like the mask of a world, with seas and mountains molded into it. But there’s volume to the spill mountains.”

“Suggestive, yes. You must learn the answers yourselves. I am called Hindmost, as any leader may be called Hindmost,” the puppeteer said, “because he directs his people from safety, because safety is his prerogative and his duty, because his death or injury would be disaster for all. Louis, you’ve dealt with my kind before!”

“Tanj, I’m only asking you to risk a probe, not your valuable hide! All we need is a running hologram taken along the rim wall. Put the probe in the rim transport loops and decelerate it to solar orbital speed. You’ll be using the system just as it’s meant to be used. The meteor defense won’t fire on the rim wall—”

“Louis, you are trying to outguess a weapon programmed hundreds of thousands of years ago by your reckoning. What if something has blocked the rim transport system? What if the laser targeting system has become faulty?”

“Even at worst, what have you lost?”

“Half my refueling capability,” said the puppeteer. “I planted stepping-disc transmitters in the probes, behind a filter that will pass only deuterium. The receiver is in the fuel tank. To refuel I need only drop a probe in a Ringworld sea. But if I lose my probes, how will I leave the Ringworld? And why should I take that risk?”

Louis held tight to his temper. “The volume, Hindmost! What’s inside the spill mountains? There must be hundreds of thousands of those half-cones thirty to forty miles tall, and the backs are flat! One could be the control and maintenance center, or a whole string of them. I don’t think they are, but I want to know before I go anywhere near them. Aside from that, there must be attitude jets for the Ringworld, and the best place for them is the rim wall. Where are they, and why aren’t they working?”

“Are you quite sure they must be rocket motors? There are other solutions. Gravity generators would serve for attitude control.”

“I don’t believe it. The Ringworld engineers wouldn’t need to spin the Ringworld if they had gravity generators. It’d make for a much simpler engineering problem.”

“Control of magnetic effects, then, in the sun and the Ringworld floor.”

“Mmm … maybe. Tanj, I’m not sure. I want you to find out!”

“How can you dare to bargain with me?” The puppeteer seemed more puzzled than angry. “At my whim you remain until the Ringworld grinds against the shadow squares. At my whim you will never taste current again.”

The translator was finally speaking. “Butt out,” Louis said. He’d been given no volume control for the Hindmost’s voice, but the Hindmost stopped talking.

The translator said, “Docile? Because I eat plants, must I be docile? Take me out of my armor and I will fight you naked, you ball of orange hair. My space in the longhouse needs a fine new rug.”

“And what,” Chmeee asked, “of these?” He showed polished black claws.

“Give me one tiny dagger against your eight. Or give me none, I will fight without.”

Louis was chortling. He used the intercom. “Chmeee, haven’t you ever seen a bullfight? And this one must be the Patriarch of the herd, the king giant!”

The giant asked, “Who or what was that?”

“That was Louis.” Chmeee’s voice dropped. “There is danger for you. I urge you to be respectful. Louis is … fearsome.”

Louis was a little startled. What was this? A reverse God Gambit, with the Voice of Louis Wu as guest star? It could work, if Chmeee the ferocious kzin was clearly afraid of an unseen voice … Louis said, “King of Plant Eaters, tell me why you attacked my worshippers.”

“Their beasts ate our forage,” said the giant.

“Was there forage elsewhere, that you could avoid risking my anger?”

Among the males of a herd of cattle or buffalo, one either dominates or submits. There is no middle ground. The giant’s eyes rolled, seeking escape, but there was none. If he couldn’t dominate Chmeee, how could he cow an unseen voice?

“We had no choice,” he said. “To spinward are the fire plants. To port are the Machine People. To starboard is a high ridge of exposed scrith. Nothing will grow on scrith, and it is too slippery to climb. To antispinward is grass, and nothing to stop us but small savages, until you came! What is your power, Louis? Are my men alive?”

“I let your men live. In”—fifty miles, running naked and hungry—“… in two days they will be with you. But I can kill you all with a motion of my finger.”

The giant’s eyes searched the ceiling, pleading. “If you can kill the fire plants, we will worship you.”

Louis settled back to think. Suddenly it was no longer fun.

He heard the giant begging Chmeee for information on Louis; he heard Chmeee lying outrageously. They’d played such games before. The God Gambit had kept them alive during their long return to the Liar; Speaker-To-Animals’s reputation as a war god, and the natives’ offerings, had kept them from starvation. Louis hadn’t realized that Speaker / Chmeee enjoyed it.

Sure, Chmeee was having fun. But the giant was pleading for help, and what could Louis do against sunflowers? Actually, it was hardly a problem. The giants had offended him, hadn’t they? Gods in general were not noted for forgiveness. So Louis opened his mouth, and closed it again, and thought some more, and said, “For your life and the lives of your people, tell me the truth. Can you eat the fire plants if they do not burn you first?”

The giant answered eagerly. “Yes, Louis. We forage along the border at night, when we grow hungry enough. But we must be far away by dawn! The plants can find us miles away, and they burn anything that moves! They all turn at once, they turn the glare of the sun on us, and we burn!”

“But you can eat them when the sun isn’t shining.”

“Yes.”

“How do the winds blow in this region?”

“Winds? … In these parts they blow to spinward. For great distances around, they blow only into the realm of fire plants.”

“Because the plants heat the air?”

“Am I a god, to know that?”

After all, the sunflowers only got a certain amount of sunlight. The way they worked, they’d heat the air around and above them, but the sunlight would never pass the silver blossoms to reach the roots. Dew would condense on the cool soil. The plants would get their moisture that way. And rising hot air would bring a steady wind from the borders of the sunflower patch.

And the plants burned anything that moved, to turn plant-eating beasts and birds into fertilizer.

He could do it. He could.

“You will do most of the work yourself,” Louis said. “The tribe is yours and you will save them. Afterward, you and they will turn toward the dying fire plants. Eat them, or plow them under and plant whatever you like to eat.” Louis grinned at Chmeee’s bewilderment, and continued, “You will never disturb my worshippers, the red people.”