by Larry Niven
Distractions. Stet. “Acolyte, go suit up. Get my suit, and a webeye sprayer, too, and my cargo disk stack, wherever Bram—Bram?”
“Dining hall aboard Hidden Patriarch,” Bram said.
“Hindmost, route him there first. Bram, get him some weapons. If we have a working stepping disk on the probe, we should use it.”
Bram said, “Go.”
The Hindmost rattled / chimed / bonged. Acolyte stepped and flicked out. The Hindmost stepped where the granite block had been and was gone, was in his cabin, his tongues licking out at what looked like an alien chess set but must be a virtual keyboard. One head rose to say, “We have a link. The stepping disk still operates.”
“Try the webeye sprayer,” Bram ordered.
“Spray what?”
“Vacuum.”
Eleven minutes later the blacked-out window lit again: a revolving starscape with a slow ripple to it. Louis could picture a webeye falling free through vacuum, spinning a little—was the probe spinning too?—drifting gradually away from the probe. And while the protector was worrying about the Kzin and trying to watch the puppeteer and all four hologram windows, Louis knelt above the stepping disk and lifted the edge.
A tiny hologram of glowing sticks rose just above the disk itself—the map of the stepping disk system. A larger display would have given him away, but the Hindmost had fixed that. Louis tapped his changes in quickly and pushed the rim down.
“Do you see?”
“Hindmost, explain to see me how we could have missed that until now!”
Bram and the Hindmost sure as tanj weren’t watching him. Louis turned.
As viewed through the free-falling webeye, the silver thread had become a silver ribbon with raised edges, a shallow trough not unlike a miniature of the Ringworld itself. Slender toroids arced over it.
Unmistakably, it was the transport system: the magnetic levitation track that ran along the top of the rim wall for a third of its length. Teela’s repair crew must have led it over the rim wall and down the outside.
Louis said, “Well, I haven’t been watching the rim wall for a good half year.”
“We should have looked closer,” the Hindmost said.
The silver rail swept past. Now there was only starscape. The fluttering webeye was below the Ringworld floor, falling into the universe.
Louis said, “I might have guessed. You, too, Bram. What else would Teela’s crew use to move their reclaimed ramjets?”
“The terminus is far to spinward, perhaps on a spaceport ledge. We’re in the wrong place to be looking for a factory.”
Stacked cargo plates flicked in, with pressure gear and a webeye sprayer added to Louis’s clutter. Louis shouldered the floating mass aside to leave room for Acolyte.
The Kzin flicked in wearing full pressure gear: concentric clear balloons and a fishbowl helmet. He tipped back the helmet and asked, “Are we ready?”
Louis gestured at a rippling starscape. “You don’t want to flick into that.”
Unexpectedly, the Hindmost said, “The link is still open and has stopped moving.”
Louis said, “What …
Bram snapped, “Sprayed with plasma flame, dropped for a thousand miles, and it still works? Improbable!”
Louis took the webeye sprayer off the stacked cargo plates. “Try it.”
Heads turned. They didn’t get it. Louis said, “Hindmost, I want to spray a webeye through the stepping disk link. Set me up. We’ll just see what it hits.”
The Hindmost whistled. “Try,” he said.
Louis sprayed a bronze net at the stepping disk and saw it vanish.
They waited. Acolyte used the time to take a shower. Thirty-five degrees of Ringworld arc: five and a half minutes in transit, and the same again before they’d see it arrive. Transfer booths didn’t work faster than lightspeed, and neither, it seemed, did stepping disks.
“Signal,” the Hindmost said as his other tongue licked out. A fifth window popped up.
They looked up at stars crossed by the rim wall. A fuzzy bulk at the edge might be the probe. A lousy view—but the probe wasn’t falling. It had landed on a tiny target, the maglev track.
Bram said, “Acolyte, take the sprayer. Go through. Spray us a camera where we might see something interesting. Return instantly and report. Don’t wait for danger. We know it’s there.”
Too fast. Louis was just beginning to pull his suit on. Acolyte would be gone before he was ready. He said, “Hold it. Bram, he’s got to be armed!”
“Against protectors already on site? I prefer Acolyte to be conspicuously unarmed. Acolyte, go.”
The Kzin flicked out.
Louis finished getting into his suit. They’d have eleven minutes to wait.
Did Chmeee really think an old man like him, Louis wondered, could restrain and protect an eleven-year-old Kzin male?
It had been four minutes, and something was in view.
They watched a dark blur moving around the blurred edges of the window, inspecting the probe at its leisure. Then suddenly it was clear and close, an elegant alien pressure suit with a bubble helmet, and a near-triangular face with a mouth that seemed to be all bone. A single fingertip came closer yet, and traced curves Louis couldn’t see. It had found the webeye.
It snapped around quicksilver-fast, and still wasn’t quick enough. Something fast and black brushed across it and leapt away, out of range, gone.
The elegant intruder’s suit was slashed wide along the left side. It lifted a weapon like an old-fashioned chemical rocket motor. Violet-white flame lashed after the attacker. It must have missed. The elegant one bounded after, holding its suit almost closed with one hand, firing with the other. A ghost-trail of ice crystals followed it.
Bram said, “That was Anne.”
“Which?”
“Anne was the killer, Louis. They’re both vampire protectors, but I remember how Anne moves.”
“How do we warn Acolyte?”
“We cannot.”
Louis caught himself grinding his teeth. Acolyte was nowhere: a signal, a point, an energy quantum moving at lightspeed toward where one protector had killed another and was ready for more.
“Your Teela was too trusting,” Bram said. “She made a vampire into a protector, and that one must have changed others of his species before Teela killed him. But Anne and I are of another species than theirs.”
“Signal,” the Hindmost said as his other tongue licked out. Now they had two windows placed on the maglev transport track.
Acolyte had arrived; had sprayed a webeye on … Louis couldn’t tell. On something above his head. There was no sign of another intruder. The Kzin posed with the probe just behind him. It looked half melted and somewhat battered, and it was blocking the track.
Any protector would have to remove that blockage.
Acolyte, get out!
The track receded into infinity. It looked to be around two hundred feet across, and geometrically straight.
Acolyte was turning slowly, taking it all in. He sprayed another webeye, then stepped back to the probe and was gone.
The Hindmost said, “He flicked out.”
“Well, where is he?”
“Do you assume I want fusion plasma spraying through my cabin?”
“Where’s the link? Where did you flick him?” The Hindmost didn’t answer, and Louis knew. “Mons Olympus, you freemother?”
He lunged toward the stepping disk, stopped himself, and scrambled onto the stack of cargo plates instead. He led a line through the handholds, then around his tool belt: a poor man’s crash web. “Chmeee will have my ears and guts!” He set the cargo plates aloft and eased them onto the stepping disk.
Flick, and the sky was half stars, half black. Silver fractal filigree under his feet and stars showing through that.
Marvelous.
He looked up and down the maglev track. It was peaceful as hell. Nothing moved at all.
Silver lace. Where had he seen this kind of fractal pa
ttern? He’d expected the maglev track to be a solid trough, but you could see stars through the mesh.
Hah! It was the Pinwheel, the old orbital tether they still used to transfer bulk cargos between Earth and the moon and Belt. The fractal distributed the stresses better. But never mind that—
“Bram, Hindmost, the maglev track is lacework. Can you see it? If I had the sprayer, I’d put a webeye on it right now. Look through the lace and see whatever tries to hide in the Ringworld’s shadow.”
They’d hear that in five and a half minutes. Hot Needle of Inquiry was that far away at lightspeed.
An ink blot pulled itself over the edge and walked toward Louis … a bulk like a sack of potatoes painted black, with a flared bell held negligently in one hand.
Louis touched the lift throttle.
The cargo plates didn’t move. There was a maglev track under him, but it wasn’t giving him enough lift.
“I’m looking at an ARM weapon,” Louis said. They’d hear him and know the rest: ARMs must have landed on a spaceport ledge and found protectors there.
How do you activate stepping disks when you can’t step off first? I’ll be dead when they hear all this. Should have brought an orchestra—or a recording of the command.
The protector-killer examined Louis Wu with a proprietary air. It—Anne—She was a slender shape in an inflated suit designed for something a little taller—recessed eyes peeped over the chin readouts—and much wider—
Flick, he was upside down and falling through red light.
It was red rock all around him and below his head, and hundreds of feet of smooth lava running down, down. The cargo plates surged upward, and Louis hung head-down over red rocks. He could feel the ropes slipping, in the moment before the plates’ inherent stability turned him upright.
Louis’s brain and belly and inner ears were whirling. Moments passed before his eyes could focus.
No Martians were there to watch.
He was hovering alongside a glassy-smooth stretch of lava that dropped almost straight for … futz … a thousand feet before it eased toward horizontal like a ski jump. Louis could see a splash of orange at the bottom: Acolyte in his translucent suit. He might even have survived such a fall … or not.
Louis decided he needn’t fear Martians.
This time the Martians had mounted their stepping disk upside down at the top of the highest cliff they could find. Then the flame that destroyed the Hindmost’s refueling probe had flooded through the stepping disk. Any Martians watching the trap must have been crisped. The cliff side had melted and flowed, forming a slide.
Louis landed the cargo plates, loosed the lines, and jumped down.
Acolyte lay at an angle on hot red rock.
Louis got a shoulder under the Kzin. Not enough, and he pulled to roll the Kzin over him. Acolyte was an inert mass. Louis could feel broken ribs shifting.
He could have used Martian gravity about now.
He tightened his abdominal muscles, knees and back, grunt and lift. Lift! A nearly grown male Kzin, pressure suit and all, rose just high enough to roll onto the cargo plate.
Louis crawled aboard. Tied the Kzin down. Took the cargo plates up. He used the little thruster to put him just under the stepping disk. Lifted until his shoulders touched.
Flick, they were upside down in Needle with the cargo plates on top of them.
Bram did the rest: rolled the cargo plates off, opened all the sealstrips that held the Kzin’s suit together, and pulled him out. The Kzin’s eyes blinked, focused, found Louis. Otherwise he seemed unable to move.
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.
Chapter 28
The Passage
“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 gl
are 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 lies 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.”
