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variety of Hanging People. None tell any tale of Teela Brown, or Seeker, or weapons that throw light, advanced medicine, famine averted, a flycycle--Whatever I thought of, they never heard of it."
    "Were you lied to?"
    "Who would dare? Who would care? Teela's path is discontinuous. I never tracked her through the sky! I only found places where she and Seeker landed. The Mechanics remember her from two or three falans after a floating building passed over, a hundred and fifty falans ago. Have you sought rumors of flying devices? Or assessed conflicting reports?"
    "Yes."
    "Louis--" Acolyte looked back, then slowed. Tunesmith slowed too: the race was over.
    "Louis, I was asked to track Seeker and Teela Brown. I found little. They disappeared for seventy or eighty falans. Then the Vampire protector Bram tells us they entered the Repair Center as breeders. The man died of tree-of-life--too old--and Teela woke from coma as a protector."
    Tunesmith said, "I want to know how breeders could find their way into the Map of Mars. I want to know why Bram let Teela wake. It would have been so easy to study her in her coma, then kill her. They may be trivial questions, but I wonder."
    Louis shrugged. He'd wondered too. Bram had had little respect for human life, breeder or protector.
    Acolyte asked, "Are you caught up with what's happening?"
    "Tanj, no. Tunesmith is driving me crazy with his secrets."
    The protector said, "I'll talk as we go.
    "Louis, you made me. You saw that a Vampire protector was unfit to decide the Ringworld's fate, or else that Bram himself was unfit. You thought a Ghoul would serve. You lured me into the Repair Center. A tree-of-life garden made me a protector. You expected me to kill Bram, and I did. I assume you considered implications." No anger, no bitterness showed. A protector's face was like hardened leather.
    "Consider this implication: no protector ever evolved to stand aside when his descendants are in danger. You saw that a Ghoul's children must benefit where other hominids survive well, but did you see that too? We must act, sensibly or not. The Fringe War was bad enough when you entered the 'doc, Louis. Now the ARM has brought antimatter-powered ships, twenty and counting. Now it seems the Kzinti have stolen the puppeteers' Quantum II hyperdrive ship. To use it for courier service tells us interesting secrets, doesn't it?"
    Louis agreed. "They don't dare endanger it. They don't know how to duplicate the drive. There's still only one ship."
    Tunesmith asked, "Hindmost, could you build another Long Shot!"
    "No. My research team could, but trial and error played a large part, and the cost... broke my power, drove me into exile, as much as any of my other mistakes."
    They circled Tunesmith's service stack, then landed. Tunesmith said, "I can't do nothing. If I can understand Long Shot --Here, let me reset our destination. Acolyte, this setting would take you to your father. Were you tempted?"
    "I have nothing to offer him yet."
    "Follow me through." Tunesmith stepped from his float plate and was gone.
     
    They came out underground, where float plates waited. The air smelled of the caverns beneath the Map of Mars. Tunesmith showed off his toys as they drifted through tunnels and caverns. A dozen float plates carried a huge laser cannon at a walking pace. "I made this from specs in the Hindmost's records," the protector said, "with a few improvements. I'll mount it on Mons Olympus. I've heliographed the design to protectors along the rim wall. Soon we won't have to depend on the sun to let us talk. I should mount one on Fist-of-God too.
    "Here--" He reached out and down to snatch up a nest of tubing. He put one end to his mouth and wild music emerged. "What do you think?" He blew again, and what the futz, Louis danced on the float plate with an imaginary partner.
    Tunesmith stopped to examine massive machinery, then reworked some superconducting circuitry with a spray gun. The mass crept away on sixty or