Webeye: Puppeteer technology, a multisensory transmitter.

Weenie plant: Ubiquitous Ringworld plant. Edible.

2893 A.D.

Louis Wu woke aflame with new life, under a coffin lid.

Displays glowed above his eyes. Bone composition, blood parameters, deep reflexes, urea and potassium and zinc balance: he could identify most of these. The damage listed wasnt great. Punctures and gouges; fatigue; torn ligaments and extensive bruises; two ribs cracked; all relics of the battle with the Vampire protector, Bram. All healed now. The doc would have rebuilt him cell by cell. Hed felt dead and cooling when he climbed into the Intensive Care Cavity.

Eighty-four days ago, the display said.

Sixty-seven Ringworld days. Almost a falan; a falan was ten Ringworld rotations, seventy-five thirty-hour days. Twenty or thirty days should have healed him! But hed known he was injured. What with all the general bruising from the battle with Bram, he hadnt even noticed puncture wounds in his back.

Hed been under repair for twice that long the first time he lay in this box. Then, his internal plumbing systems had been leaking into each other, and hed been eleven years without the longevity complex called boosterspice. Hed been dying, and old.

Testosterone was high, adrenalin high and rising.

Louis pushed steadily up against the lid of the doc. The lid wouldnt move faster, but his body craved action. He slid out and dropped to a stone floor, cold beneath his bare feet. Stone?

He was naked. He stood in a vast cavern. Where was Needle?

The interstellar spacecraft Hot Needle of Inquiry had been embedded in cooled magma when last he looked, and Carlos Wus experimental nanotech repair system had been in the crew quarters. Now its components sat within a nest of instruments and cables on a floor of cooled lava. The doc had been partly pulled apart. Everything was still running.

Hubristic, massive, awesome: this was a protectors work. Tunesmith, the Ghoul protector, must have been studying the doc while it healed Louis.

Nearby, Hot Needle of Inquiry had been fileted like a finless fish. A slice of hull running almost nose to tail had been cut away, exposing housing, cargo space, docking for a Lander now destroyed, thruster plates, and the hyperdrive motor housing. More than half of the ships volume was tanks, and of course theyd been drained. The rim of the cut had been lined with copper or bronze, and cables in the metal led to instruments and a generator.

The cut section had been pulled aside by massive machinery. The cut surface was rimmed in bronze laced with cables.

The hyperdrive motor had run the length of the ship. Now it was laid out on the lava, in a nest of instruments. Tunesmith again?

Louis wandered over to look.

It had been repaired.

Louis had stranded the Hindmost in Ringworld space by chopping the hyperdrive in half, twelve or thirteen years ago. Dismounted, it looked otherwise ready to take Needle between the stars at Quantum I speeds, three days to the light year.

I could go home, Louis thought, tasting the notion.

Where is everybody? Louis looked around him, feeling the adrenalin surge. He was starting to shiver with cold.

Hed be almost two hundred and forty years old by now, wouldnt he? Easy to lose track here. But the nano machines in Carlos Wus experimental doc had read his DNA and repaired everything down through the cell nuclei. Louis had done this dance before. His body thought it was just past puberty.

Keep it cool, boy. Nobodys challenged you yet.

The spacecraft, the hull section, the doc, machines to move and repair these masses, and crude-looking instruments arrayed to study them, all formed a tight cluster within vaster spaces. The cavern was tremendous and nearly empty. Louis saw float plates like stacks of poker chips, and beyond those a tilted tower of tremendous toroids that ran through a gap in the floor right up to the roof. Cylinders lay near the gap, caged within more of Tunesmiths machinery. They were bigger than Needle, each a little different from the others.

Hed passed through this place once before. Louis looked up, knowing what to expect.

Five or six miles up, he thought. The Map of Mars stood forty miles high. This level would be near the roof. Louis could make out its contours. Think of it as the back of a mask… the mask of a shield volcano the size of Ceres.

Needle had smashed down through the crater in Mons Olympus, into the repair center that underlay the one-to-one scale Map of Mars. Teela Brown had trapped them there after she turned protector. She had moved the ship eight hundred miles through these corridors, then poured molten rock around them. Theyd used stepping disks — the puppeteers instant transport system — to reach Teela. For all these years since, the ship had been trapped.

Now Tunesmith had brought it back to the workstation under Mons Olympus.

Louis knew Tunesmith, but not well. Louis had set a trap for Tunesmith, the Night Person, the breeder, and Tunesmith had become a protector. Hed watched Tunesmith fight Bram; and that was about all he knew of Tunesmith the protector. Now Tunesmith held Louiss life in his hands, and it was Louiss own doing.

Hed be smarter than Louis. Trying to outguess a protector was… futz… was both silly and inevitable. No human culture has ever stopped trying to outguess God.

So. Needle was an interstellar spacecraft, if someone could remount the hyperdrive. That tremendous tilted tower — forty miles of it if it reached all the way to the Repair Center floor — was a linear accelerator, a launching system. One day Tunesmith might need a spacecraft. Meanwhile hed leave Needle gutted, because Louis Wu and the Hindmost might otherwise use it to run, and the protector couldnt have that.

Louis walked until Needle loomed: a hundred-and-ten-foot diameter cylinder with a flattened belly. Not much of the ship was missing. The hyperdrive, the doc, what else? The crew housing was a cross section, its floor eighty feet up. Under the floor, all of the kitchen and recycling systems were exposed.

If he could climb that high, hed have his breakfast, and clothing too. He didnt see any obvious route. Maybe there was a stepping disk link? But he couldnt guess where Tunesmith might place a stepping disk, or where it would lead.

The Hindmosts command deck was exposed too. It was three stories tall, with lower ceilings than a Kzin would need. Louis saw how he could climb up to the lowest floor. A protector would have no trouble at all.

Louis shook his head. What must the Hindmost be thinking?

Piersons puppeteers held to a million-year-old philosophy based on cowardice. When the Hindmost built Needle, he had isolated his command deck from any intruders, even from his own alien crew. There were no doors at all, just stepping disks booby-trapped a thousand ways. Now… the puppeteer must feel as naked as Louis.

Louis crouched beneath the edge of some flat-topped mass, maybe the breathing-air system. Leapt, pulled up, and kept climbing. The docs repairs had left him thin, almost gaunt; he wasnt lifting much weight. Fifty feet up, he hung by his fingers for a moment.

This was the lowest floor of the Hindmosts cabin, his most private area. There would be defenses. Tunesmith might have turned them off… or not.

He pulled up and was in forbidden space.

He saw the Hindmost. Then he saw his own droud sitting on a table.

The droud was the connector between any wall socket and Louis Wus brain. Louis had destroyed that… had given it to Chmeee and watched the Kzin batter it to bits.