The Ringworld Throne (20 page)

“Even guessing makes my head hurt.”

The child had settled cross-legged and was playing background music to the voice that spoke from nowhere. The adult’s voice said, “We live perhaps two hundred falans. If your misunderstanding only cost you forty or fifty falans, for such as you it must be worth repairing.”

“Oh, the City Builders were refugees, and killing doesn’t bother Chmeee! But
I’m
still guilty. I consented. I thought we killed all those people to save the rest.”

“Be joyful.”

“Yeah.” He couldn’t ask even a Ghoul to consider the numbers involved. No sane mind could grasp them.
Hominids of varying intelligence inhabit the Ringworld, invading every conceivable ecological niche. Cattle, otters, vampire bats, hyenas, hawks ... Roughly thirty trillion, with a margin of error bigger than all known space.

We can save most of them. We will generate a solar flare and turn it on the Ringworld surface to bring heated hydrogen fuel to the few remounted attitude jets on the rim walls. Lose fifteen hundred billion to radiation and fire. They would die anyway. Save twenty times as many.

But the Hindmost’s advanced, adaptable programs had exercised fine control over a plasma jet bigger than worlds. The Hindmost
had not
killed fifteen hundred billion. Not at all.

But Louis Wu had consented to their deaths.

He said, “That region of the Repair Center was infested with tree-of-life ... with the plant that changes hominids into something very different. Kazarp says you’re about the right age to become a protector. I’m seven times that old. The virus in tree-of-life would kill old Louis Wu.

“So I sent the Web Dweller in alone to cause their deaths. Otherwise I would have seen how many didn’t die. I took all those lives, and the only apology I could make was to die.”

“But you’re not dead,” the hidden voice said.

“Dying. With the medkit on my cargo plates, I might get as much as another falan.”

The child’s music broke in discord, and the night was silent.

Tanj! He had longevity and he’d thrown it away, but these people had never had the choice. Just how ill-mannered had he been?

The adult said, “And you gave up his friendship.”

“The Web Dweller doesn’t exactly have friends. He bargains very exactly, and his aim is always to make himself safer. He intends to live forever, whatever that takes. That bothered me then. It bothers me now. What will it take?”

“Your alliance? Does he have something to gain from you?”

“A traveling pair of hands. A life to risk that isn’t his own. A second opinion. He can offer me another hundred twenty falans of life.” And that was scary.

“Could he do that for, let us say, me?”

Offer longevity to a Ghoul? “No. His systems, the programs to heal him or me or the big cat, he must have designed and built them before he left home. He can’t get home. I stopped that. And if he could, why not just stay?”

And he thought further:
He’s got a program to repair humans and a program for a Kzin. For a Ghoul he’d have to write a new program. What my life would cost me is already too much, but what would it cost to write a treatment program for yet another species? And if Louis Wu asked him to save a Ghoul, then why not a Weaver next? A City Builder? A ...?

Impossible.

The hidden Ghoul had accepted that ... or else he was thinking that some wanderers were mad. Kazarp was playing again. Louis said, “When I thought I’d murdered so many people ... I decided to age and die in traditional fashion. How bad could it be? People have done that since there were people.”

“Luweewu, I would give all I have to be a hundred falans younger.”

“The Web Dweller can do that for me ... for my species. He can do it again when I get old again. Demanding anything he likes of me, each time.”

“You could refuse, each time.”

“No. That’s my problem exactly.” Louis peered into the dark. “What shall I call you?”

The music of the kazoo-harp suddenly had a bass accompaniment. Louis listened for a time. A wind instrument? He could not guess its shape.

“Tunesmith,” he decided. “Tunesmith, it’s been helpful talking with you.”

“We should speak of other things.”

“Ships and shoes and sealing wax, and—“

“Protectors.”

What did the Ghoul heliograph net know of protectors? “But I’m groggy. Tomorrow night,” Louis said, and crawled inside to sleep.

Tegger had expected the window-dome to be some kind of weird dwelling, but it wasn’t. There was no obvious way to lock the door. The interior was all one big room, and that was a stairway too big even for Grass Giants: concentric semicircles of steps. And tables, a dozen light tables on skids.

What was this? he wondered. If a hundred or so hominids sat on those steps, they’d have one fine view of the factory city and lands beyond. A conference room? He tried it himself for a bit, then moved on.

Doors at the top of the last step. Beyond, darkness. Tegger lit a torch.

This was not a room to live in. It was all flat surfaces, and thick doors that had little windows in them and little boxes inside.

When in doubt, he thought, keep looking. Three big water basins with drains. A flat table of wood now warped. Hanging from a hundred hooks, metal bowls and dishes with long handles. Behind a panel above eye level Tegger found something he recognized: tiny knobs joined by fine lines of dust.

He began replacing the dust lines with strips of Vala-cloth.

A light came on.

Six channels he’d laid; one light. What did the others do?

There were more doors to the back. Tegger took up his torch and passed through.

Storage here: doors, drawers, and bins. The ghosts of old smells were pleasant enough. Plants. They didn’t smell like food, but they probably were. Tegger searched out dried plant residues, but found nothing that even a Grass Giant would eat.

They sat on those semicircular steps and
ate
?

Maybe. Tegger went back into the lighted room. It seemed warmer ... and he still didn’t get it until he tried to lean on one of the flat surfaces.

Red Herders don’t yell when hurt. Tegger hugged his burnt arm, teeth bared in pain. Then, after careful thought, he began to spit on flat surfaces.

Twice, his spit sizzled.

The doors to two of the boxes were hot to the touch.

He was in some kind of chemical plant. Maybe another hominid could understand this better than he.

The peak of the City was a great squat tube with a wasp-waist constriction. A helical stair took him to the rim. Tegger looked about him like a king.

What he’d missed before, leapt at him now that he’d reached the tallest point in the City.

Every roof was the same color!

The flat tops of rectangular solids, the curved tops of tanks, were all a glittery gray. Some had symbols painted on the gray in narrow lines. The only exceptions were the houses along Stair Street, where flat places were soil and pools, and—yes—the
stairs
were glittery gray.

But the sides of things were of all colors. Industrial shapes were not so much decorated as labeled. There was script Tegger didn’t recognize, square and curved and scrawly. There were simple pictures.

The old City Builders could fly. Why not label the tops of things, too? Unless this gray surface had—was ... Flup, he almost had it.

Work on it. Meanwhile ...
He was standing at the rim of a tremendous tube, ten manheights tall and about that wide. Tegger looked down inside, a much greater distance than ten manheights. The reek of ash and chemicals was faint, but he wasn’t imagining it. Here was a chimney big enough to burn whole villages.

This alone might be reason enough to set a factory floating. The smoke from such a burning might hover for years before drifting away, but at least it would rise first! Irritated neighbors might be pacified. Then again, how would neighbors reach a floating industrial center to make their complaints?

He’d been climbing stairs and exploring houses for a quarter of the day, but the cruisers hadn’t moved. Valavirgillin must have chosen that peak as a defensible position. Sentries shifted on the rock, watching the river, watching the Shadow Nest and its floating roof.

Tegger dropped his poncho to expose the unmistakable color of his skin. At the rim of the tallest point of the City, he raised both arms and waved.

Warvia! By the power of our love, and Valavirgillin! By the power of the cloth I stole, I’ve reached this place. Here I will accomplish something, somehow. Somehow!

Had he been seen? He thought they were pointing at him ...

Well, then.

The City rolled away below him. He was able to find the dock, to orient himself from that. The houses and stairs ran from just below him down to Rim Street, along both sides of a zigzag line. That line was nearly opposite the docks.

Most of what he saw, he still didn’t understand. But ...

Cisterns. Sixteen huge cylindrical tanks were open to the sky, evenly spaced about the City. He had to guess that those tanks were intended to hold water. The houses and window-dome, at least, would need water. But the cisterns were empty, every one of them. Like the pools along Stair Street. All empty.

After the Fall of the Cities, citizens would have nothing to carry them down. Some must have gone down the ramp. When the vampires moved in, that option closed. They were marooned.

They would need water. There was the river; there must be pumps. Why else position a factory above a river? But the pumps had likely stopped working, and the rain hadn’t started yet.

But they’d drained the City’s water. Why had they done that? Were they already crazy?

Whisper was gone, and his own mind wasn’t enough. He had to get the cruisers up here, somehow.

He slept in the window-dome that night, on one of the steps. It seemed safe, and he loved the view.

At halfnight several hundred vampires streamed away from the Shadow Nest, up the Homeflow and into the mountains. As the last edge of sun disappeared, their numbers rose into the thousands.

Vala’s people reacted variously to that many vampires passing that closely. The Gleaners simply missed it: they
had
to sleep at night. Vala rapidly realized that she couldn’t use Grass Giant sentries at night. Anyone could see their courage, but anyone could smell their fear ...

Except Beedj. How did they train a budding Thurl? Was it something she could use, too? She sent the rest to bed and relied thenceforth on her own people and the Ghouls.

Whatever their frustrations, they were learning a great deal about vampires.

The second night was ending; and now, in driving rain, beneath a black lid of cloud, the vampires straggled home. Their numbers were thinned a bit, Harpster said, and they had a few tens of prisoners. They had been more quarrelsome going out.

The Ghouls reported structures in the Shadow Nest. There were huts or storage shacks; many had fallen down. Something mountainous stood in mid-river. The Ghouls couldn’t see the top of it; their angle was too high.

They could see no way up save for the spiral ramp.

There was a midden, a garbage dump off to port-antispin of the Shadow Nest. It must have been growing for ages, a mountain of vampire and prisoner corpses, until even Vala could see it once it was pointed out. It was too close to the Shadow Nest to be of use to Ghouls.

There was no place beneath the floating factory that the vampires didn’t go.

It was full light now, and the procession of vampires had become a trickle. “When that stops, we’re going back to the river,” Vala said.

“We need our sleep,” Harpster said.

“I know. You stay here.”

“We’re ripe for bathing and we need to learn. We’ll sleep under the awning. Wake us at the river.”

Valavirgillin rolled the cruiser along the riverbank. There was no way to hide anything so large, and she didn’t try.

Flashes of daylight came and went, and flurries of rain. The Shadow Nest loomed ahead, too near. None of her companions could see into the blackness below the ancient hulk; but when the shifting black clouds closed their own lid over the land, Vala could see motion around the shadow’s edges. Some vampires, at least, were active.

It was midday. Valavirgillin kept a wary eye on the weather. If it got too dark, the vampires would be out and hunting.

The tilted plate loomed across the sluggish brown water. It looked hard to reach. Vampires seemed safely distant. Vala stepped out onto the river mud.

Two black heads surfaced well out into the water and swam toward them.

It was best to introduce oneself repeatedly to aliens who might not see differences in individuals. “I am Valavirgillin—“

“Rooballabl, Fudghabladl. The river is shallow here. Your cruiser might safely roll as far as the island. It would be more difficult to attack you.”

“—Warvia, Manack, Beedj.” Barok and Waast were tending the cannon. “We’re not planning to stay. Roobla, there was activity around here last night—“