The Ringworld Throne (26 page)

Louis could see three Sailing People peering over the Council House roof. They showed courage, but they weren’t seeing any more than Louis was. The window in the cliff had become no more than dark rock. The Hindmost’s spy device lay in darkness in the payload shell of a six-wheeled wagon.

The Hindmost said in Interspeak, “I still can hear them, Louis, and smell them.”

The dark cliff became a dark window. A Pierson’s puppeteer danced, and uncountable others wove a pattern behind him: a dark forest of one-eyed snakes.

Louis was amused. “Dancing in the dark?”

The Hindmost twirled. “A test of agility. Darkness was common enough, long, long ago. Not impossible that the dark might come to any of us.”

So: they tested each other for mating privileges, like the Fertility Board on Earth. The Hindmost was honing his skills. But he’d said—“You can hear whom?”

“I can hear Valavirgillin’s company. With the door in the payload bay closed, I can still resolve voices. They are organizing to defend the wagons. Now the wagons are in motion, with vampires all about. Would you hear?”

“In a minute. I wonder what our Ghoulish observers make of your dancing.”

“The small one shifts position constantly. The larger remains still. Would you capture him?”

“... No.”

“Touch your translator to the core of the webeye. I will transmit.”

Louis waded through shallow water to the cliff. It remained a fuzzy-edged doorway to Pierson’s puppeteers dancing in dusk. A black dot like a lumpy heart floated unsupported at nose level, and Louis pushed his translator against that.

He heard voices, human shading into animal, bass to tenor and higher, agony and rage and urgency. Once, a cry of surprise and pain, more yelling, then a solid thud as a body fell on the webeye itself. Once, he made out Valavirgillin’s voice bellowing orders as she never had in his presence. Otherwise it was all a confusion of screaming.

The vampire shrieking dwindled over several minutes. Then, jarring as hell, came a cool, musically persuasive voice that sounded not quite like speech. That stopped suddenly, followed by eerie quiet.

Vala turned them downstream because the upstream direction seethed with vampires returning from the hunt. She kept them moving for a tenthday after they were clear. Slick black heads popped into view on the river: the River People were keeping pace.

Cruiser One was still rolling when Beedj swung the payload bay doors open and rolled inside.

Vala waited.

Something heavy rolled out.

Paroom. They’d been all over him, tearing him to ribbons, while friends hacked at them from above and below. A vampire had slashed Perilack, too. Vala waited.

Beedj climbed up beside her. “Dead,” he said. “Perilack doesn’t look bad. I washed the scratches with fuel. Does that really do anything?”

Vala nodded, wondering if Grieving Tube and Harpster would be offended ... would understand why Paroom’s body was better left for strangers than for his Night People friends. She said none of that to the Thurl’s heir. It was all his own decision.

A meadow stretched away from the river. It looked like good hunting. Valavirgillin kept them in a clump, all the several species, and made them wear towel masks. There were vampires about.

Vala had taken stacks of cloth from the dock warehouses. She gave Rooballabl and Fudghabladl a long sheet of gauzy stuff for netting fish. They were hugely successful, and now there was fish for any who could eat it.

The Grass Giants had found some acceptable river grass. There was prey about. Reds and Gleaners didn’t need to wait for fire. The Machine People had a firepot starting to boil, and roots and meat in it.

Her crew was being fed.

Valavirgillin looked her people over while she waited. Tegger looked much better with food in him. Forn and Barok were cooking dinner together. If they shied from body contact, it was hard to tell.

Grieving Tube and Harpster were kneeling twenty manlengths away, and a good thing, because they were eating. The Ghouls had found a hominid of the Farming Folk, perhaps a vampire’s captive fallen on the trek to the Shadow Nest. They’d stopped short of actually dragging the carrion into camp.

Vampires still dotted the passes. The excitement around the Shadow Nest drew them. Eventually, Vala knew, she would have to get past that.

Gradually, perhaps only from hunger, Vala’s mood darkened. An antic whim set her walking toward the Ghouls.

Grieving Tube saw her coming. She came over to stand not too close. “You haven’t eaten yet,” she said.

“Soon.”

“Your mood will improve. We’ve escaped, Valavirgillin. We’re free, with a tale to tell that no hominid can match.”

“Grieving Tube, what have we accomplished here?”

“I don’t grasp your point.”

“We came. We found our way up. We used up most of Louis Wu’s magic cloth. We found our way down. We killed some vampires and drove the rest out into the rain. We’ve lost one cruiser, and Paroom, and what else can I brag about?”

“We rescued Foranayeedli. You loaded ten manweights of wonderfully preserved ancient cloth into your cruiser.”

Vala shrugged. Indeed, she’d reap a profit from what she’d collected from the docks, and not just the cloth. And Forn ... yes.

The Ghoul woman dropped a stripped rib and walked closer. “Boss, we’ve ended the vampire infestation.”

“Oh, Grieving Tube. We drove them out. Now they’ll spread to every land around us. The vampire infestation is going to get
worse
.”

“They’ll be far fewer in a generation,” the Ghoul woman said placidly, “in forty to fifty falans. Brag now. Await vindication.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Valavirgillin, you’ve felt the pull of the vampire musk. No hominid can stand against it, not even a Red Herder. Does it not strike you that they also secrete that scent to lure a mate?”

“What?”

“Vampires secrete their musk when prey is about. When food is to be had, that is a time to breed. When they’ve found a cave for refuge, that too is a time to breed, and a cave concentrates the musk. It was their mating scent when their ancestors were like ours, and it is their mating scent now. But we’ve taken away their refuge and driven them into the rain, the same rain that hasn’t stopped since Louis Wu boiled a sea, Boss. The rain is washing off their mating scent.”

Valavirgillin thought it over until she believed it. Then she stood up and whooped. “They’ll stop breeding!”

Day was near its end. Before night the cruisers must be where vampires couldn’t reach them. Come morning she would siphon the fuel from Cruiser Two to move Cruiser One home.

She said, “And you, you’ve got the bronze web.”

“Somewhere beneath the Arch, Louis Wu can look and hear through that pattern. There is something we must show the wizard ... if the wizard still lives and cares to look, if the web is still a window.”

“You’ll have to find your fuel somewhere else,” she told Grieving Tube.

The woman nodded placidly. “We’ll make our needs known. Night People will set fuel dumps all the way to the rim wall. I suppose Tegger and Warvia told you, they’ll travel with us.”

“Not a bad notion. There are Reds everywhere. They’ll find a home.”

“Yes.”

“How do you propose to buy a trading cruiser?”

She blinked. “Ah, the legendary greed of the Machine People. Valavirgillin, we need Cruiser Two to end a threat that endangers all who live beneath the Arch. You know enough to take my words seriously.”

“Seriously, yes, but moving your massive spying thing formed no part of our agreements.” Valavirgillin smiled, remembering the negotiations outside the Thurl’s wall. The
effort
with which she’d persuaded the Night People to join her assault on the Shadow Nest! She couldn’t have driven them away with a cannon.

“You went to some effort to get Louis Wu’s spy thing. You thought to keep that secret from me, I expect, but
how
?”

A Ghoul’s shrug looked like she’d disjointed both shoulders. “How were we to know we couldn’t just peel the web off and roll it up and walk off? But it’s embedded in the brick, and so we must reveal our need. Valavirgillin, we will buy your cruiser.” She named a sum. “Payable in Center City, by any local Night People concern, when you return.”

“Sold.” The money was at the low end of reasonable, and so what? Long before she could return to get it, Grieving Tube would have fuel to simply
take
Cruiser Two. “I may have to explain this to my superiors. Will your people back me up?”

“Your associates may learn as much as I will reveal to you tonight. Some secrets we keep. But let us gorge first, Boss. Isn’t your meal prepared yet?”

Foranayeedli bellowed two words in Vala’s Center City tongue. “Boss! Eat!”

Hunger sank sharp teeth into Valavirgillin’s belly. “That’s my secret name,” she told Grieving Tube; and she went.

WEAVER TOWN, A.D. 2892

Even the Sailing People had retired. Now only a pair of heat shadows in grass, and Louis Wu, remained to watch the Hindmost’s dance.

The pace was brisk now, but the Hindmost never seemed to run short of breath. “This isn’t over, Louis. I heard some of what they told the Red Herders. They spoke of spill mountains and problems with a scrith surface.”

“Use the webeye. Ask them where they’re going.”

“No, I will reserve that one secret. Let them struggle for a time before I speak. Let me see how urgently they want your attention.”

“Mine?”

“Louis Wu who boiled an ocean, O Subtlest One. They know nothing of the Hindmost. Louis, you’re showing marked signs of deterioration. Do you want medical attention?”

“Yes,” Louis Wu said.

The Hindmost said, “Very well. My risk and effort involved in sending you my refueling probe must be compensated. You’ve had a free hand—“

Louis waved it off. “Don’t risk your probe, you might need it. I’ll go back the way I came, back down the Shenthy River valley. There are mistakes I don’t need to make twice, so it’ll go a little faster. I was eleven years coming, I’d be nine years returning, maybe less. It’ll give you time to move your ‘doc to crew quarters.”

“Louis, I have mounted a stepping disk on my refueling probe. In one turn of the Ringworld it can reach you. In an instant you’ll be aboard.”

“That probe is your fuel source, Hindmost, and I—“

“I have refueled Hot Needle of Inquiry, which in any case is still embedded in cooled lava.”

“—and I dare not think what price you would ask for its use. Anyway, you’ll want to move your ‘doc into crew quarters or the lander bay—“

“I have done that.” The window shifted, and Louis was looking into the cabin that he hadn’t seen in eleven years. A huge coffin occupied what had been his and Chmeee’s exercise space.

Well, futz. The Hindmost was eager. Louis said, “I left Hidden Patriarch a few thousand miles downstream. Didn’t you leave a stepping disk aboard? I can be there in seven or eight falans.”

“*Two years*? Louis, matters are becoming urgent. The Ringworld seems infested with protectors.”

“Oh?” All innocence was Louis Wu, with a smile beginning deep inside. Yes, it all came down to protectors.

“Before she died, Teela said she had left one living Ghoul protector in charge on the rim wall. I can verify that the Repair Crew is still active.”

“Show me,” Louis said.

The window in the cliff panned along a wall a thousand miles high.

The rim wall was a frieze: mountain shapes relief-carved into a continuous wall the color of Earth’s moon. Bands of night swept along its length, their motion barely visible. Spill mountains stood as tiny cones five to seven miles tall along its base. Along the top of this stretch of the rim wall, twenty faint violet flames pointed toward the stars.

The Hindmost said, “These are the rim ramjets as they were when we first saw them. I was testing a webeye camera, the same that the Ghouls now hold. Here, five years later, six years ago—“

The same view, night again, but the ghost flames had gone out. “The Ringworld was back in place by then,” Louis said.

“Oh, yes. But I kept track. Louis, can’t you see the attitude jets?” The view zoomed. Now Louis could make out the dark mouths of spillpipes high above the spill mountains, and ghostly shapes much larger than he’d guessed. Pairs of copper-colored toroids circled the tiny wasp waists of twenty-one double cones of fine wire: huge, skeletal Bussard ramjets.

“*Six* years ago?”

“Six before I noticed. Caught up in the dance, I might have lost track for as much as—“ Hesitation. “—a falan?”

Lonely to the point of madness, lost in a dance with ghosts. The poor herdbeast, once all-powerful, now all alone, rejected by his kind.

Louis shook it off. “So someone mounted the twenty-first motor, the one we found on the spaceport ledge.”

“Yes, but copied it first! Here, less than two years ago ...” Twenty-three motors, and a twenty-fourth with skewed orientation, not yet mounted. Louis couldn’t see what was moving it; he only saw minute adjustments in position.