The Ringworld Throne r-3

by Larry Niven

  “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.

  ***

  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, “Tha
t’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.

  Chapter 29

  Collier

  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.