The Ringworld Throne (42 page)

Bram eased Louis out of his suit, stretched him out next to Acolyte, and examined him. That hurt. “You’ve torn some muscles and tendons,” he said. “You need the ‘doc, but the Kzin needs it more.”

“He goes first,” Louis said. If Acolyte died, what would he say to Chmeee?

Bram lifted the Kzin with no apparent effort, rolled him into the ‘doc and closed it. An odd notion: had Bram been waiting for permission?

Not so odd. Louis was starting to hurt in earnest now, and it wouldn’t do to let Bram know. Louis was a hominid and Acolyte wasn’t, and a protector might
need
a breeder’s permission to heal an alien first.

Bram picked him up and set him on the cargo plates in one smooth motion. Pain flashed through him, blocking his breath, turning his scream to a squeak. Bram hooked up leads and tubes from Teela’s portable ‘doc. He said, “Many of the reservoirs here need filling, Hindmost. Can your larger ‘doc make medicines?”

“The kitchen has a pharmacy menu.”

The port and starboard walls glowed with orange heat.

In another window he saw a black, baggy shape roll over the rim of the maglev rail. Then nothing, only a silver path receding to infinity.

The pain was receding. Louis knew he wouldn’t be lucid much longer.

He felt lean and knobby arms around him. Hard fingertips probed him here and there. A rib felt distant pain, then eased. His back cracked, and again lower down, and a hip joint, and his right knee.

Bram spoke near his ear, but not to Louis. “The Night People went to some effort to show us a spill mountain village, one out of tens of thousands. Why?”

The Hindmost replied, “Didn’t you see the way ...” and Louis was asleep.

“Feel that?”

“Yes,” said Warvia.

The room was trembling, a tiny vibration in all the walls and the rock below.

Riding weird vehicles had left them dizzy and disoriented, but they’d had hours to sleep that off. This was something else. Tegger hadn’t noticed at first. Now Warvia’s breathing and the endless tremor were the only sensations in the dark room.

“Any idea—“

“Seabottom mulch. It’s pounding on the peak, and we feel it all the way down here.”

Tegger stared at her in the dark.

“Pipes pump it up the back of the rim wall. It falls fifty daywalks from the edge of the rim,” Warvia said. “It falls on all the spill mountains. It’s what
makes
the spill mountains. Without the pumps, all the soil beneath the Arch would end up in the seas. Whisper told me all about it.”

“You got more out of Whisper than I ever did.”

“I wonder where she is now.”

“She?”

Fingers caressed his jaw. “I’m guessing. I asked, but she wouldn’t say. Do you know what that seabottom muck is called?”

“What?”

“Flup.”

Tegger belly-laughed. “What? You mean all this time—Flup, everyone I
know
thinks he knows what flup means. Seabottom?”

“This mountain is made of it. Pressure turns it into rock—“

White light flooded them. A voice said, “Hello.”

They leapt to their feet, wrapping fur around them. The High Point People had left them a fur like Saron’s, relic of a green-spotted sloth with a damaged head. On Warvia it looked quite lovely.

Warvia had other concerns. She whispered, “That was no High Point accent—“

“Hello? You hear the voice of Louis Wu. May we talk?”

Tegger blinked against the painful light. Details weren’t there, but he could pick out a man’s shape and something stranger.

“You have invaded our privacy,” he said.

“You were not sleeping. Ours is the spy device you carried for so long. Will you speak or shall we come another time?”

Something rapped on the wood beside the skin door. A woman’s voice called, “Teegr? Wairbeea?”

“Flup! Come in,” Tegger ordered.

Through the skins came Jennawil and Barraye and a smell of blood. “We hear voices,” the young woman said, “else we would have left this in the anteroom. It’s a gwill. Skreepu killed it for you.”

The gwill was a big lizard. Its tail still twitched.

“Your timing is good,” Tegger said. He hefted the gwill. Its skin felt armored. It would have to be skinned. To the glare in the web and the monsters within, he said, “You speak to Jennawil and Barraye of the High Point People. They know what we only guess. Jennawil, Barraye, we meet Louis Wu at last.”

Dozing with his chin on the portable ‘doc, Louis heard himself speaking. “You hear the voice of Louis Wu. You see my associates, Bram and the Web Dweller. We have kept silence because we have enemies.”

“We are Warvia and Tegger,” a high-pitched alien voice said. Louis’s eyes were open now, and he recognized the red-skinned vampire slayers. “Why do you break silence now?”

“We must ask questions.” That was the voice of Louis Wu, all right, but it was coming from the Hindmost.

A High Point man said, “We are to show you the hidden mirror and the passage through the rim and anything else you desire.”

“Thank you. Are you prepared to go through the passage?”

Jennawil jumped in shock. “No! There are vishnishtee—“ Louis’s translator hesitated an instant. “—protectors moving constantly through the passage.”

Louis decided not to speak. He was feeling mellow and foolish, and pain lurked if he wanted to feel it. He wouldn’t make sense, and what would they make of two “voices of Louis Wu”?

The Hindmost said, “Tell us what you know about protectors.”

“Of two kinds they are. Protectors of our own kind would keep us safe, but they obey flatland protectors—“

“May we speak to a High Point protector?”

“I think not Keeping secrets from flatland protectors is near impossible, and protectors are conspicuous. I can ask.”

The puppeteer asked, “Will Whisper speak to us?”

Huh?

The Red Herders looked at each other. The woman said firmly, “Whisper will not.”

“What can you tell us of Whisper?”

“Nothing.”

“What ties beyond the passage?”

Barraye said, “Poison, we think.”

Jennawil explained: “Protectors wear suits that cover every part of them when they go through the passage. They carry a great bulk of tools back and forth. Rumors say they are building something out there, something monstrous.”

The red woman said, “Louis Wu, it was the massed might of the Night People that moved the eye here. Come night, you may speak to them.”

“How long until night?”

Jennawil said, “Two tenths.”

The voice of Louis Wu said, “We wait,” and sang like a bass string quartet.

Bram asked, “Did you hear, Louis?”

“Some of it. Good act, Hindmost, but you need better makeup.”

“Louis Wu is vashnesht. Wizard. He remains out of sight,” the Hindmost said, “while his weird servitors speak for him.”

“Stet. Who’s Whisper?”

“Anne is Whisper,” Bram said. “I’ve seen your tapes of Whisper guiding the red man. She used the cruiser’s mission for concealment.”

“’Whisper’ fits her,” Louis said.

The Hindmost turned from the window. “Louis, what do you think? Where is Whisper? Will she interfere?”

Louis was watching the people in the window. There wasn’t quite enough anesthetic in him to knock him out. “Bram, you’re the only one who might guess what she wants.”

“Yes.”

“I’m too groggy to think. I think I want my voice back.”

“As you will,” said the Hindmost.

Warvia stripped the gwill with a knife. Tegger said, “Red Herders have to eat meat freshly killed. Watching may distress you.”

Warvia tore the gwill apart and gave part to Tegger. They ate. The High Point couple seemed fascinated and appalled. Tegger wondered why they were still here, now that the window was only a bronze web again.

Bones only. Tegger looked the question; Barraye pointed to a receptacle.

Jennawil said, “Tegger, Wairbeea, we noted that you did not speak of reshtra until you saw what was under our furs.”

Ah.

“Our people mate once, for life,” Warvia said, and looked at her mate. Something passed between them, and she added, “A thing happened to us, to change us. But we don’t
need
rishathra. What changed was only that we have a choice.”

Tegger had thought it through. “Barraye, Jennawil, there are no tales of Red Herders who rish. What if your talking mirrors spread that tale all across the flatlands? Where could we live? Who would mate to our children?”

The High Pointers looked at each other.

“You saw the Night People, Jennawil,” Warvia said. “What if it is told that you rished with red-skinned visitors from below? What will the Night People expect?”

Barraye nodded. “They would think to resh with us. How curious are we, my mate?”

She was whacking his massive shoulder, lightly and open-handed, and laughing. Tegger suspected that was a no. “Not their shape alone. Their
smell
!”

Barraye patted her rump reassuringly. “Well, then, must keep yet another secret.”

Fun stuff. Louis watched in passive prurience. A show like this would be a success, he thought, on pay channels on every world in known space. And of course it was being recorded ... for that matter, how many senses did the webeyes record? Not just sight and sound. Smell? Radar for a kinesthetic sense?

Somewhere in there he fell asleep.

Hours later, it seemed, he woke and stared in astonishment at himself looming above him.

No: at his pressure suit, angular like fractured bones where a human would be smooth. Bram tipped the helmet back and asked, “Are you well?”

“I’m pretty sore.” The medkit was dripping stuff into him, but he could feel where the pain was waiting.

“Two ribs were out of place. I set them. No bones are broken. You’ve abused muscles, torn ligaments and mesenteries, slipped a spinal disk that I reset. You would heal with no more than your own defenses and the portable medkit.”

“Why are you wearing my suit?”

“Reasons of strategy.”

“Too complex for my tiny mind? All right, Bram. You’ll notice that we have more visitors. If you’ll disconnect me, the voice of Louis Wu can show a face.”

The Hindmost and Bram waited to either side of Louis and a little behind. On the other side of the webeye window, the Reds huddled under a fur, letting the Ghouls take center stage.

The Ghouls were shivering. The lanky woman said, “It’s cold out there! Well, I am Grieving Tube, this is Harpster. Is your box making sense of my voice?”

“Yes, it’s fine. How did you know about my translator?”

“Your companion Tunesmith seems to have departed, but his son Kazarp spoke of your visit to Weaver Town.”

“My regards to Kazarp. Grieving Tube, why did you move two manweight of poured stone over such a distance if you could have spoken to me through Tunesmith?”

The Ghouls laughed, showing
way
too much teeth. “Spoken, yes, but what would we say? The rim wall is in the wrong hands? We don’t know that. You, are you a vashnesht?” Protector, the translator said.

Bram said, “Yes.”

Tegger started to get up; Warvia held him back. The Ghouls, too, had flinched, but Harpster made himself speak to the protector. “We know enough to know our helplessness. These are vampire protectors. They take the High Point Folk as meat from a herd. Some return as protectors. Many simply disappear.”

Bram said, “They are repairing the Arch.”

“Do they do more good than harm?”

“Yes. There are too many, and they’ll fight when the repairs are done. We hope we can improve the balance.”

“How do you expect to help?”

“We must know more. Tell us what you can.”

Harpster shrugged hugely. “You know what we know. High Point will show us more, come dawn.”

The Hindmost fluted. The window shrank to background size.

“We wait,” he said. “Louis, we recorded earlier conversation. They know much of protectors and something of Teela Brown. Or shall we serenade you?”

Bram was reaching for the instrument package he’d brought from Hidden Patriarch.

“A little dinner music would go nicely,” Louis said politely. “And I’m starved.”

Louis was trying to do some stretching. Lifting Acolyte had pulled some serious muscles and tendons. Bram’s attentions had helped, but he had to move carefully.

Many hours had passed. Now the window at High Point was rotating bumpily across night-darkened mountainscape. A mixed bag of hominids were rolling the stolen webeye like a wheel over the worn paths of the village. When they left the village and began moving uphill over rock, the motion began to jar his stomach.

Louis turned his back on the display, trusting the others to alert him when the webeye got somewhere interesting. What was taking the Kzin so long? Anyplace in known space, he could at least have used a ‘doc! The medkit wouldn’t do anything for him except inject chemicals, and he’d need it again in a few minutes.