The Ringworld Throne (43 page)

Four High Point People carried the web and its backing. They climbed uphill in the charcoal night. Saron moved ahead of the Red Herders and Night People to point out footholds for them.

The Ghouls had tried to help carry, but they were doing well just to catch their breath.

“Sunlight soon,” Warvia said to the Ghoul woman. “What will you do then?”

“I was told we would come to the passage. Shelter.”

There were no roads here. What paths there were, were only scuff marks on hard dirt and rock. The High Village People moved up and up across a tilted land, on and on, miles above the infinite flatland.

To spin was the oncoming terminator line, and daylight.

Close up against the spill mountains the land below was a relief map, like the map the Ghouls had made for them outside the Grass Giants’ hall. A view like this may have given them that notion. Farther away, all detail was lost. A thread of silver linked by puddles might have been the Homeflow, or any other body of water, or something else entirely.

Warvia may have been thinking similar thoughts. “The lands the Red Herders move through, are they even big enough to see? How will we ever find Red Herders again?”

Harpster said, “That’s not the problem at all—“

Grieving Tube said, “Our people know the routes of the Red Herders. They’ll map—Forgive me.” She had to stop for breath. “They’ll map a path for us—by mirror—speech. You’ll find a new home—as quickly as you came here.”

“Oh. Good.” Then Warvia laughed. “Your solution was extreme! We didn’t need to travel quite so far.”

Tegger wouldn’t show weakness with Warvia watching. With dying strength he followed Saron. The old woman moved more slowly now. He could hear the other High Point People gasping as they carried the web’s weight along the hill.

Day swept toward them from spinward. As the first edge of sun peeped around the shadow of night, Harpster pulled from his pack two rolled-up hats with gigantic brims. Now only the Night People walked in shadow.

“We should be on the fringes of Red Herder turf,” Warvia said, “as far as possible from stories that must have started already.”

Harpster said, “No. Warvia, Red Herders aren’t all the same species.”

“Why, of course we are!”

Tegger said, “We woo our mates from other tribes at the feasts, when the herds cross. We’ve done it since before anyone can remember.”

Harpster said, “Good idea—“

“But you don’t always,” said Grieving Tube. “You and Warvia, you have the same accent—“

“Yes, we both were born into Ginjerofer’s tribe, but others mate across the lines.”

“Some tribes have given it up. Some just don’t push it, like Ginjerofer’s people. Tegger, the farther you go from Ginjerofer’s tribe, the less likely your children will find mates who can give them children. It wouldn’t matter so much if you didn’t mate for life.”

“Flup,” Tegger whispered.

Something flashed at them as they rounded a barrier of crumbling rock.

Tegger had tried to imagine what a mirror might look like. Now he couldn’t see it. What he saw was himself, Warvia, the Ghouls and High Point People, the sky and the rim wall. A mirror was a flat window that showed what was behind the viewer. It stood as high as a Red Herder man, and three men wide.

They set the web and its backing carefully in place, flat onto the mirror. Saron and the men went to the ends of the mirror, and the Night People went with them.

Harpster began to talk, spitting his consonants, as if he were addressing a crowd.

The men began to tilt the mirror up and down. It was mounted on hinges. Jennawil stood behind Tegger and pointed along the rim.

Toward the next spill mountain.

A highlight played on the mountain’s flank, falling and rising as the men tilted the mirror.

Tegger asked, “How does it work?”

Jennawil laughed. “Ah, the Night People haven’t told you everything! Sun mirrors flash a code known to us and Night People. They carry news between mountains, but also news of flatlands to mountains and back to flatlands.”

That explained much. The Ghouls had always known too much about the weather, the Shadow Nest, the bronze spinnerweb itself.

The four took up the eye of Louis Wu again. “Around this jut of rock,” Saron said, “and up.”

“We’ve been discussing your problem, Grieving Tube and I. We think we have an answer,” Harpster said.

Tegger had been thinking, too. “It’s like being crushed between two bulls. If we go too far, we doom our children. If we settle too close to Ginjerofer’s route, we’ll hear tales about ourselves.”

“We’re too conspicuous,” Warvia said, “too easy to recognize. When visitors tell of the vampire slayers who learned rishathra, that will be us.”

Harpster was grinning with all his spade teeth. “Suppose there was an old story,” Harpster said. “Once upon a time all hominids were monogamous. No man looked at a woman who was not his mate, and she would not look aside from him. War happened when hominids met.

“Then came two heroes who saw that hominids could live otherwise. They invented rishathra and ended a war. They spread it like a ministry—“

Warvia cried, “Harpster, was there really such a tale?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh.”

“The Night People are selective about whom we speak to, but you must not think we’re silent. You’ve seen the sun mirrors. Those are our voice. You know that every priest must know how to dispose of his dead. Priests must talk to us.”

The route had become steeper, and they were all huffing now. “We can spread the tale from several directions,” Grieving Tube said. “Only the old women remember the legend, or the old men. The tale tells of heroes of their own species who invented rishathra and ended war, and it tells that their own species has practiced rishathra ever since. Details are different among different species. When a variation appears in which the heroes were Red Herders who ended a war to gain allies against vampires—“

“It’s just a story.” Tegger laughed. He was starting to believe it would work. “Only a story. Warvia?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe. It’s worth a try. We can lie, love, as long as we don’t have to lie to each other.”

A rock as big as the tallest city building had split vertically, and the High Point People were leading them through the split. Ribbons of color ran through the rock. “Ice did this,” Deb said. “Water soaks into rock. Freezes. Melts and freezes again.”

The wind shrilled through, icy, tearing at any bit of exposed skin. Tearing at eyes. Tegger walked blind, feeling his way, following Warvia, though her eyes were closed, too.

A big hand on his chest stopped him. He opened his eyes into slits.

Finally, here it was, a place to hide from the wind: a rock tunnel into the mountain. But they’d stopped within the cleft, with the tunnel’s mouth barely in view. From the cleft a slope of shattered rock ran up to a rough rock entrance.

Barraye spoke for the first time. “Teegr, that is not shelter.”

He asked, “Why not? Monsters inside?”

“Yes. Vishnishtee.”

They set the web on its rim and propped it to face the opening. Barraye had gone silent again. Saron said, “Louis Wu, can you see?”

The bronze web spoke. “Yeah, barely. How deep is that thing?”

“We think that this is passage through the high mountain. None of us have gone that far.”

“You’ve been inside?”

Deb spoke. “Most of High Point and near a hundred of airborne visitors hid in the passage when the Death Light shone. We could only hunt at night. After the Death Light faded, we were cast out and forbidden to return.”

A breathy voice said, “Describe the vishnishtee.”

Tegger’s eyes met Warvia’s. That voice from the web must be the vashnesht, Bram, but it sounded very like Whisper.

“The vishnishtee cared for us,” Deb said, “but none of us ever saw one.”

“What, never?”

“But sometimes one of us would disappear. There was a limit to how far we could go down the passage. We knew there was death in the passage, but there was death outside, too.”

“Couldn’t you make your own shelters? Rock would stop radiation ... stop the Death Light.”

“We knew that. Hide in caves, the vishnishtee said. Make houses of rock? The mountain would shake rock down on our heads!”

The voice of Louis Wu said, “My companions are showing me a picture taken from tens of daywalks above you. It’s amazing how much detail you can see when you’re far enough away, Deb. The mountain you live on is kind of a flat cone, but around that tunnel, it’s like a sand castle piled against a wall with a pipe poking out of it.”

They waited for Louis Wu to make better sense.

“Yeah. What I mean is, the passage is older than the mountain and a lot stronger. Made of scrith, I bet. The mountain gradually settles under its own weight, but the passage stays right where it is, and vishnishtee have to keep digging the entrance again. Can you take me through?”

“No!” said Barraye and Saron and Jennawil.

Deb said, “We were cast out! If we’re seen, we will die!”

Saron said, “We have stayed on broken rock. We left no footprints and no scent. If a vishnishtee learns that we have come bearing
this
, we will die.”

It was Harpster who protested. “The eye of Louis Wu has come far to see so little.”

“That is as it is. Harreed, stay behind. If you find sign of us, conceal it. Harpster, are you strong enough to take Harreed’s place?”

And a voice said, “Leave the web.”

Nine hominids froze. Tegger could see no tenth. And that was not the voice of Whisper, nor the protector Bram, either, but it had the same breathy speech impediment.

The High Point People were quietly moving back through the cleft in the rock and downslope. Tegger and Warvia followed, leading the Ghouls, who by now were nearly blind in the black shadows of their hats. They left the bronze spinnerweb propped in the cleft and didn’t look back.

They were four in Hot Needle of Inquiry’s crew cabin: Bram and the Hindmost and Louis Wu, and Acolyte, in a great black coffin where their exercise space used to be. They all used the same shower and the same kitchen wall.

Sleeping arrangements weren’t a problem. The Hindmost wanted the sleeping plates, but that was all right. They’d moved the cargo plates beside the water bed. Louis used that.

He was sitting cross-legged on the bouncing surface, eating something crunchy and nutrition-free. Boredom had him eating too much. He might be getting too much painkiller, too.

Bram didn’t want him exercising alone in the lander bay. Louis had healed enough to want that. He had offered to take Bram along, teach him yoga or even some fighting techniques. Bram refused. He intended to be
right here
when ...

What the futz was Bram expecting? Louis wondered. For most of two days he’d watched the wreckage of the refueling probe. It lay smashed on the maglev track in a window that overlaid six others—five, now—and Bram stood before it, watching.

Louis was getting cabin fever.

To ship’s port and starboard the glow of dying coals had faded to the black of cold basalt. In space that would have been stars, an infinite universe spread to either side.

Futz, he
had
stars. One webeye lay on the maglev track, looking down at the universe through the filigree surface. Another starscape, from the webeye Louis had sprayed onto the vacuum, had fuzzed out only hours ago.

In another window the stolen webeye moved into a smooth-bore tunnel, stopped in what was clearly an airlock for several hours, then moved on through several doors, past piles of strange equipment vaguely glimpsed, and stopped again. Louis had never seen what was carrying it, nor heard that voice again.

The flight deck was windows overlaid on windows, a perspective that could cross the eyes and twist them in their sockets. One was a graph like a constantly wiggling mountain range, purpose unknown. Three were replays: High Point Mountain swept past the refueling probe; the probe maneuvered until it was smashed by violet light; a protector died, his suit slashed open to vacuum.

Nothing was happening where the ruined probe lay on the maglev track. The window held Bram like a dark Dali silhouette, say
Shades of Night Descending
.

Louis closed his eyes and sagged back on the water bed.

Popped them open again. He’d seen blue-white light flash from one of the windows.

The light was out now, but the wrecked probe was glowing cherry-red. Something tiny was coming down the maglev track from far away, running straight into the window.

It came at astronomical speed, a foot above the track: something like a floating sledge. It decelerated savagely. Something manlike dropped off the back and rolled out of view as the vehicle eased to a stop inches from the window.

The Hindmost moved up beside Bram.

The probe cooled to murky red, darker, black.

That wasn’t a sled. It was a shallow box. The bottom was black like wrought iron. The sides were so transparent as to be barely visible, but Louis could pick them out by the knobs embedded for tiedowns. Lines held tools against the sides of the box: a wand with a handle, maybe a line saw; a widemouthed thing, gun or rocket launcher or energy weapon; a pry bar; stacked boxes; skeletal metal stuff.