“We hoped you would become able to deal amicably with other species. My faction also established a trading empire in this region. Despite our successes, we were losing our authority. Then it was discovered that the core of our galaxy has exploded. The shock wave will arrive in twenty thousand years. Our faction stayed in power, to arrange the exodus of the Fleet of Worlds.”

“How fortunate for you. Yet they deposed you after all.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

The puppeteer didn’t answer for a time. Then: “Some of my decisions were not popular. I meddled with human and kzinti destiny. Somehow you learned our secret, how we had tampered with the Fertility Laws on Earth in an attempt to breed lucky humans, and with the course of the First War With Men, to produce reasonable kzinti. My predecessor established General Products, the interstellar trading empire. It was said that he had made a virtue of madness, since only the mad among us will risk their lives in space. When I arranged your expedition to explore the Ringworld, I was called mad, to risk contact with so advanced a technology. But one does not hide one’s sight from danger!”

“So they deposed you.”

“It may have been … a convenient excuse.” The Hindmost paced restlessly: clopclopclop, clopclopclop. “You know that I agreed to take Nessus as mate if he returned from the Ringworld. He demanded this concession. And he returned, and we mated. Then we did it again, for love. Nessus was mad, and the Hindmost has often been mad, and … they deposed me.”

Louis suddenly asked, “Which of you is male?”

“I wonder why you did not ask that of Nessus. But he would not have told you, would he? Nessus is shy on certain subjects. We have two kinds of male, Louis. My kind implants its sperm in the female’s flesh, and Nessus’s kind implants its egg in the female with a most similar organ.”

Chmeee asked, “You have three sets of genes?”

“No, two only. The female contributes none. In fact, females mate among themselves in another way to make more females. They are not properly of our species, though they have been symbiotic with us for all history.”

Louis winced. The puppeteers bred like digger wasps: their progeny ate the flesh of a helpless host. Nessus had refused to talk about sex. Nessus was right. This was ugly.

“I was right,” said the Hindmost. “I was right to send a mission to the Ringworld, and we will prove it. Five days in, and no more than ten on the spaceport ledges, and five more to reach flat space where we may escape by hyperdrive. We need never board the Ringworld at all. Halrloprillalar told Nessus that the Ringworld ships carried lead, for compactness, and transmuted it into air and water and fuel during the journey. A Conservative government could not deal with the ramifications of such a technology. They will reinstate me.”

Current-withdrawal depression left Louis no urge to laugh. Still, it was all very funny, and funnier still because it was his own fault from the beginning.

The next morning the aliens cut the droud’s current flow in half again, and left it alone thereafter. It shouldn’t have made that much difference. Under the wire he was still content. But for years he had suffered through the depression when the timer stopped, knowing what he would feel when the current resumed. His depressions were worse now, and there was no security. The aliens could cut the current at any time … and even if they didn’t, he would still have to give it up.

What the aliens talked about during those four days he didn’t know. He tried to concentrate on the ecstasy in the wire. Vaguely he remembered them calling up holograms from the computer. There were the faces of Ringworld natives: the small ones completely covered with golden hair (and one, a priest, was shaven); and the tremendous wire sculpture in the sky castle (stub of a nose, bald head, knife-slash lips); and Halrloprillalar (probably of the same race); and Seeker, the wanderer who had taken Teela under his protection (almost human, but muscled like a Jinxian, and beardless). There were cities ruined by time and by floating buildings that had fallen when their power died. There were holograms of Liar’s approach to a shadow square, and of a city nestled in a smoke cloud of fallen shadow-square wire.

The sun grew from a point to a black dot with a bright rim around it, its brightness blocked by flare shielding on Needle’s inner hull. The blue halo around the sun expanded.

In dreams Louis returned to the Ringworld. In a great floating prison he hung head down from his burned-out flycycle, ninety feet above a hard floor strewn with the bones of earlier captives. Nessus’s voice beat in his ears, promising rescue that never came.

When awake he took refuge in routine … until on the evening of the fourth day he looked at his dinner, then dumped it and dialed for bread and a selection of cheeses. Four days to realize that he was forever beyond the reach of the ARM. He could eat cheese again!

What’s good besides the wire? Louis asked himself. Cheese. Sleeping plates. Love (impractical). Wild skin dye jobs. Freedom, security, self-respect. Winning as opposed to losing. Tanj, I’ve almost forgotten how to think like this, and I’ve lost it all. Freedom, security, self-respect. A little patience and I can take the first step. What else is good? Brandy poured in coffee. Movies.

Twenty-three years earlier, Speaker-To-Animals had brought the spacecraft Lying Bastard close to the Ringworld’s edge. Now Chmeee and the Hindmost watched recordings of that event.

Seen from that close, the Ringworld became straight lines meeting at a vanishing point. From out of the point where the checkered blue inner surface dropped to meet the top and bottom edges of the rim wall, the rings of the spacecraft decelerator system seemed to fly straight into the camera, over and over, in infrared and visible and ultraviolet light and deep-radar images. Or they crept past in slow motion, huge electromagnets, all identical.

But Louis Wu watched the entire eight hours of the Changeling Earth fantasy epic while getting soddenly drunk. Brandy in coffee, then brandy and soda, then brandy alone. It was a movie he watched, not a sensual: it used live actors and only two of the human senses. He was at two removes from reality.

At one point he tried to engage Chmeee in a discussion of Saberhagen’s use of impossible visual effects. He retained just enough wit to desist at once. He dared not talk to Chmeee while drunk. The puppeteers have hidden ears, hidden ears–

The Ringworld grew large.

For two days it had been a finely etched blue ring, narrow, flimsy-looking, off center to its sun, growing as the black circle of its sun grew. Gross detail appeared. An inner ring of black rectangles, the shadow squares. A rim wall, a mere thousand miles high, but growing to block their view of the Ringworld’s inner surface. By evening of the fifth day Hot Needle of Inquiry had lost most of its velocity, and the rim wall was a great black wall across the stars.

Louis was not under the wire. Today he’d forced himself to skip it; and then the Hindmost had told him that he would send no current until they had landed safely. Louis had shrugged. Soon, now—

“The sun is flaring,” the Hindmost said.

Louis looked up. Meteor shielding blocked the sun. He saw only the solar corona, a circle of flame enclosing a black disc. “Give us a picture,” he said.

Darkened and expanded in the rectangular “window,” the sun became a huge, patterned disc. This sun was slightly smaller and cooler than Sol. There were no sunspots, no blemishes, except for a patch of glaring brightness at the center. “Our vantage is not good,” the Hindmost said. “We see the flare head on.”