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.