The Ringworld Throne (17 page)

“Louis, I weary of your not listening to me!”

Louis took two more steps. But he’d refused to listen to the Hindmost for eleven years, and he found apologizing tanj awkward ... so he turned back and resumed his seat on the boulder. “Speak,” he said.

“I have my own medical facilities.”

“Oh, yes.” The Hindmost would surely be protected against any concievable [sic—should be “conceivable”] accident or malaise. Nessus had lost a head and neck on their first visit, and Louis had seen it replaced. “Surgery for a Pierson’s puppeteer. What would that do for a human?”

“Louis, this technology was of human origin. We bought it from a Kzin law enforcer on Fafnir, but it appears to have been an ARM experiment of more than two hundred years ago, stolen from Sol system. The system uses nanotechnology to make repairs inside the cells themselves. No second was ever built. I’ve had it modified to heal humans or kzinti or my own kind.”

Louis was laughing. “Tanj, you’re careful!” Most of what was aboard Needle was of human manufacture, and what wasn’t had been carefully hidden. If the Hindmost were caught while abducting his crew, he wouldn’t implicate the Fleet of Worlds.

“Pity I’ll never see it.”

“I can move it to the crew deck.”

Louis felt cold running up his spine like river water. He said, “You’re not serious, and I’m too tired to think. Good night, Hindmost.”

Louis parked his stack of plates next to the guest house. Dry brush rustled as he stepped down. He spoke to the night, not loudly.

“When you’re ready to talk, I’m here. And I bet you’re wearing an embroidered kilt.”

The night had no answer.

Sawur barely stirred when he crawled into the tent. He fell asleep at once.

A whiff of corruption pulled her half awake. Pointed fingernails pressing hard into her elbow pulled her the rest of the way. Vala sat up with a yelp. Harpster ducked below the gun she managed not to fire.

“Valavirgillin, come and see.”

Flup. “Are we attacked?”

“You would smell vampires. I’m surprised they haven’t come to look at us. Perhaps they’re distracted.”

Vala stepped out onto the running board.

Rain was falling in fat drops. The awning kept her half dry, but visibility was low. Lightning played to antispin-starboard, the direction of the vampires’ stronghold. Lightning and something else. Downslope, toward the river, a steady white light.

After all their talk, had Tegger lit a fire? But fire wasn’t quite that color, and fire would have flickered.

Grieving Tube was above them on the rock, on sentry duty. Harpster said, “Will you wake Warvia?”

“Yes.” Vala slipped into the payload shell. No point in waking anyone else, but Warvia could see details; she might even see something that would tell her this was Tegger. “Warvia?”

“I’m awake.”

“Come and look.”

Rain came and went at random, permitting glimpses of the light. The glow wasn’t a dot, she saw presently; it was a tilted line.

The light blinked off, then on again. Warvia said, “Tegger likes to fiddle with things.”

“Is it him?”

“How would I know?” the Red woman snapped.

They watched. By and by Harpster said, “Light could keep away the vampires, if it’s bright enough.”

Warvia was slumped against a rock, asleep. Vala said, “Wake me if something changes. I’ll be out here, but I want a blanket.” She started to climb into the payload shell, thinking, Get two. One for Warvia.

The light began to jitter. Vala paused to watch.

Then a bright dot separated from the tilted line and went straight up.

The hauler was shuddering, shaking, trying to tear itself apart. Tegger clung to the seat as he would have clung to Warvia. Could he free a hand to pluck the strip of Vala-cloth away from the contacts?

Did he want to? The shaking wasn’t killing him, only jarring his teeth.

Mat was doing this? Some half-ruined motor? Or else a motor doing just what it was told to, trying to lift a cargo hauler, along with the riverbed it was buried in.

And while his mind toyed with such notions, Tegger’s fingers toyed with toggles.

Flup, that was the lights again. That one didn’t do anything, nor that one. That one turned the wind off, then back on. An ominous grating sound from somewhere below had been the response to this one, but now it did nothing.

Something protruded from the shadowed recess where the skeleton’s knees would have gone. A big two-pronged handle ... that didn’t move under his hand.

Tegger gritted his vibrating teeth, gripped the chair with his knees and the handle with both hands and
pulled
.

Nothing. Fine.
Push
.

Push and
twist
.

It lurched under his hands, and his head banged hard into the controls. He was being hurled into the sky.

The twist of cloth! Get it out of there --
He dared not let go of the chair, and perhaps that was a good thing. Dark as the night was, he could see the riverbed dwindle. A fall from this high would kill him.

If he could free a hand or a toe from its death-grip on the chair ... there must be a way to steer this ... bubble. As the river wheeled past him he glimpsed a half-buried square plate with a notch missing at the high corner. He’d torn the control bubble loose from the hauler.

Then he
was
falling. He felt it in his belly. Falling, falling,
surge
, twenty to thirty manheights above the river and moving inland. Moving toward the City.

A way to take control, there must be a way—

Did he trust Whisper?

Whisper had led him to the cargo hauler. Whisper had put Vala-cloth into his hands. What would Whisper have done if Tegger hadn’t experimented on his own? But Whisper had never suggested he steer the hauler—or its ripped-away control bubble, either—anywhere but where he was going now. The damaged machine was going home to its aerial dock.

So, Whisper’s minimal guidance was taking him where he wanted to go. To trust Whisper was to let it happen. But he didn’t know Whisper’s nature and had never known Whisper’s motives ...

Rain running down the windows had Tegger half blind. By flickering lightning and glimpses of Archlight he saw a flat-topped mass approaching. He could see no motion. Wait, the rain was swirling, wheeling ... suddenly he was in a cloud of screaming birds.

Could vampires fly? But even in the rainy dark he knew them. Bluebelly makaways, no different from the makaways of his own turf. Wingspread greater than his spread arms; good gliding ability; raptor beaks. Maks were meat eaters, big enough to carry off a herder boy. He’d never seen so many together.

He couldn’t navigate through that. He kept his hands where they were, gripping the chair back.

The birds withdrew to a wheeling pattern.

The window bubble had come to rest, still in midair.

Plainsman that he was, Tegger had once boarded a barge to trade stock with another tribe. He was familiar with docks. He was floating a manheight from the edge of what might have been a riverside dock hung in midair. Floating boats would ride against this buffer rim. Those cables hanging over the rim would tether them. Cargo in those big buildings, behind those vast doors . .

The birds were losing interest, returning to roost. Makaways weren’t nightbirds.

The bubble’s doorway was facing out from the dock. Was there at least a way to turn it around? Maybe if he twisted something ... Tegger was reluctant to experiment this high in the air.

What should be happening here? The hauler might be waiting for the City’s signal to land. Might be sending a signal of its own. Maybe one of those cables was supposed to reach out and secure the hauler, pull it in. But none of it was going to happen, because the dock was as dead as anything else that had died in the Fall of the Cities.

The door hung loose, as he’d found it.

Pack. Sword.

Tegger eased out into a light rain, feet on the hanging door’s wobbly rim, jump to the bubble’s slippery top, flatten and cling. The birds wheeled closer, looking him over.

Tegger crept forward on his belly, down the slope of the bubble. A little farther, hands and knees now, a bit more, knees forward, feet braced, slipping,
jump
.

He landed flat, banging his chin, his legs kicking in open air.

The dock felt like soft wood.

He’d have stayed but for the shrieking of the birds as they dropped toward him. He rolled over, pulled his sword and waited. When one came close enough, he slashed.

“He must have found some City Builder thing, something like an old car. Made it work. He’s up there.” Warvia stared fiercely at the light that blazed at the edge of the floating factory.

Her faith was stronger than Vala’s. Vala asked, “What do you see?”

“I can’t see past the light. There are big birds wheeling around it. I think I saw him jump—“

The tight sank. Faster. Flashed painfully bright and was gone.

“He jumped,” Warvia said positively. Vala, I’m about to fall over. I’ll give you a better description come daylight.”

“Can we do anything?”

“Vala, I’d do anything to reach him.”

“Grieving Tube, any thoughts?”

The Ghoul shook her head.

“We’ll have to wait. I don’t know any safer spot for the cruisers, and the view is lovely. Dig in here, wait and watch.”

Makaways preferred live prey, but they would eat carrion. Makaway meat had a nasty taste.

Tegger felt much better after he had devoured the bird. Take away hunger, disperse the rutting scent of ten thousand vampires, give him a flat surface to rest ... The wind was cold, this high. Tegger pulled a poncho from his pack and wiggled into it.

The cold, the aches, the troubles of a nightmare day began to recede ... and sleep was a vampire with its teeth in his throat. He dared not sleep in the open. He looked about him in woozy panic.

The huge door on that storage cube was surely too heavy to move. Too heavy for anyone, and wildly wasteful of power ...?

Around a corner from the huge door was a door not much taller than Tegger.

A kick sent it springing back at him. He went into darkness, found something resilient to climb, and slept.

He clung to sleep, fearing what his memory would tell him. Memory came anyway; but it was wavering light on his eyelids that snapped him awake.

Sunlight flooded through the man-sized doorway. It faded even as he was climbing down from a mountain of bales that smelled weakly of vegetable rot. Stuff to be turned into cloth? Foodstuffs would have been in a worse state.

He stepped outside.

Broken cloudscapes swept sluggishly overhead. Sunlight swept in vertical beams along the dock. Tegger didn’t see any birds until he crept to the edge on hands and knees and looked down.

The windowed bulb that had carried him here was below him, crushed. He wasn’t going home that way ... hadn’t planned to.

Myriad birds wheeled with spread wings in the sunlight, dropping to snatch up—what? Makaways in such numbers must be finding plenty of prey. A whole ecology would be feeding off what the vampires left, off whole populations of drained corpses.

There might be nothing but birds up here.

No, wait: here was some kind of web on the vertical face of the dock, facing outward, to starboard. He had to lean far over to see it.

The threads were bronze when the light fell right; otherwise nothing could be seen at all. Size was hard to judge because of the way the web divided itself into nothing at the edges. It might be as wide as a Grass Giant was tall. The motionless black dot at the center might be the webspinner ... dead of starvation. Tegger hadn’t seen an insect since he left the ground.

Birds and a webspinner implied insects, but the birds might have eaten the insects. Tegger wondered if he would starve. At best he faced a time limit. As if he hadn’t known that already!

What he’d been thinking of as the “City” was unfamiliar in nearly every detail. Tegger didn’t have names for most of what he could see. The City sloped upward in irregular geometries, and peaked at the center in a vertical tube.

Tegger began running.

There was no fear in him now. It was just a way of exploring. He ran, and the dock, eight manheights wide, ran away before him. Now it narrowed, but continued, two manheights wide: not a dock anymore, but merely the rim of the City.

Rim Street.
Structures lined it. Some had doors. Here and there an alley ran out of sight between windowless bulks. Rounded, doorless shapes had ladders running up their sides.

The rain resumed. Tegger had to watch his footing now, but the surface was rough beneath his feet, and the rain was running off into a gutter along Rim Street’s inward edge.

He was not much more than warmed up when he saw an anomaly, a wide street becoming flights of steps, and on either side—

Tegger stopped. Dwellings? He knew the Thurl’s tents and Ginjerofer’s much smaller tents; he’d seen permanent dwellings kept by more sedentary hominids. He’d never seen anything like these brightly painted square houses. But they were houses, with manheight doors, and trees arrayed about them, and windows.