by Larry Niven
Presently she said, “I am Valavirgillin.”
“I am Louis Wu.”
“Your devices are strange. The speaker, the lifter, the variable light—what more have you?”
“Tanj dammit! I left the eyepieces.”
She pulled the binocular goggles out of a pocket. “I found these.”
She may have found the stunner too. Louis didn’t ask. “Good. Put them on and I’ll show you how they work.”
She smiled and shook her head. She must be afraid he’d jump her. She asked, “What were you doing in the old city? Where did you find these things?”
“They are mine. I brought them from a far star.”
“Do not mock me, Louis Wu.”
Louis looked at her. “Did the people who built the cities have such things?”
“They had things that speak. They could raise buildings in the air; why not themselves?”
“What of my companion? Have you found his like on the Ringworld?”
“He seemed monstrous.” She flushed. “I had no chance to study him.”
No, she’d been distracted. Nuts. “Why do you point a gun at me? The desert is enemy to both of us. We should help each other.”
“I have no reason to trust you. Now I wonder if you are mad. Only the City Builders traveled between the stars.”
“You are mistaken.”
She shrugged. “Must you drive so slowly?”
“I need practice.”
But Louis was getting the hang of it. The road was straight and not too rough, and there was nothing coming at him. There were drifts of sand across the road. Valavirgillin had told him not to slow for these.
And he was moving at a fair clip toward his destination. He asked, “What can you tell me about the floating city?”
“I have never been there. The children of the City Builders use it. They no longer build, nor do they rule, but our custom is that they keep the city. They have many visitors.”
“Tourists? People who go only to see the city?”
She smiled. “For that and other reasons. One must be invited. Why must you know these things?”
“I have to get to the floating city. How far may I drive with you?”
Now she laughed. “I think that you will not be invited there. You are not famous nor powerful.”
“I’ll think of something.”
“I go as far as the school at River’s Return. There I must tell them what happened.”
“What did happen? What were you doing there in the desert?”
She told him. It wasn’t easy. There were gaps in the translator’s vocabulary. They worked around the gaps and filled them in.
The Machine People ruled a mighty empire.
Traditionally an empire is a cluster of nearly independent kingdoms. The various kingdoms must pay taxes, and they follow the emperor’s commands as regards war, banditry control, maintenance of communication, and sometimes an official religion. Otherwise they follow their own customs.
And that was doubly true within the Machine Empire, where, for instance, the way of life of a herd-keeping carnivore was in competition with the life style of the Grass People; was useful to the traders, who bought the carnivores’ tooled leather goods; and was irrelevant to the ghouls. In some territories many species worked in cooperation, and all allowed free passage to the ghouls. The various species followed their own customs because they were built to.
Ghoul was Louis Wu’s word. Valavirgillin called them something like Night People. They were the garbage collectors and the morticians too, which was why Valavirgillin had not buried her dead. The ghouls had speech. They could be taught to give last rites in the local hominid religions. They formed an information source for the Machine People. Legend said that they had done the same for the City Builders when the City Builders ruled.
According to Valavirgillin, the Machine Empire was an empire of trade, and it taxed only its own merchants. The more she talked, the more exceptions Louis found. The kingdoms maintained the roads that linked the empire, if their people were capable of it, which (for instance) the tree-living Hanging People were not. The roads marked the borders between territories held by different species of hominid. Wars of conquest across the roads were forbidden; and so the roads prevented wars (sometimes!) merely by existing.
The empire had the power to draft armies to battle bandits and thieves. The large patches of land the empire took for trading posts tended to become full colonies. Because roads and vehicles linked the empire, the kingdoms thereof were required to distill chemical fuel and hold it available. The empire purchased mines (by forced sale?), mined its own ore, and leased the right to manufacture machinery according to the empire’s specifications.
There were schools for traders. Valavirgillin and her companions were students and a teacher from the school at River’s Return. They had set out on a field trip to a trade center bordering the jungle lands of the Hanging People—brachiators, Louis gathered, who traded in nuts and dried fruit—and the Herders, carnivores who dealt in leather goods and handicrafts. (No, they were not small and red. A different species.) They had veered for a side trip to an ancient desert city.
They had not expected vampires. Where would vampires find water in this desert? How would they get there? Vampires were almost extinct except for—
“Except for what? I missed something.”
Valavirgillin blushed. “Some older people keep toothless vampires for—for the purpose of rishathra. That may be how it happened. A tame pair escaped somehow, or a pregnant female.”
“Vala, that’s disgusting.”
“It is,” she agreed coolly. “I never heard anyone admit to keeping vampires himself. Where you come from, is there nothing that some do that others find shameful?”
That shot struck home. “I’ll tell you about current addiction sometime. Not now.”
She studied him over the metal snout of her weapon. Despite that fringe of black beard along her jaw, she looked human enough ... but widened. Her face was almost perfectly square. Louis was having trouble reading her face. That was predictable; the human face has evolved as a signaling device, and Vala’s evolution diverged from his.
He asked, “What will you do next?”
“I must report the deaths ... and give over the artifacts from the desert city. There is a bounty, but the empire claims City Builder artifacts.”
“I tell you again that they are mine.”
“Drive.”
The desert was showing patches of greenery, and a shadow square sliced the sun, when Valavirgillin bade him stop. He was glad to. He was exhausted with the battering of the road and the endless task of keeping the vehicle aimed.
Vala said, “You will ----- dinner.”
They were used to gaps in the translation. “I missed that word.”
“You contrive to heat food until it can be eaten. Louis, can’t you -----?”
“Cook.” She wasn’t likely to have frictionless pans and a microwave oven, was she? Or measuring cups, refined sugar, butter, any spice he could recognize—“No.”
“I will cook. Make me a fire. What do you eat?”
“Meat, some plants, fruit, eggs, fish. Fruit I can eat not cooked.”
“Just like my people, except for fish. Good. Step out and wait.”
She locked him out of the vehicle, then crawled into the back. Louis stretched aching muscles. The sun was a blazing sliver, still dangerous to look at, but the desert was growing dark. A broad band of worldscape blazed to antispinward. There was brownish scrub grass around him now, and a clump of tall, dry trees. One tree was white and dead-looking.
She crawled out into the air. She tossed a heavy thi
ng at Louis’s feet. “Cut wood and build a fire.”
Louis picked it up: a length of wood with a wedge of crude iron fixed to one end. “I hate to sound stupid, but what is it?”
She named it. “You swing the sharp edge against the trunk till the tree falls down. See?”
“Am” Louis remembered the war axes in the museum on Kzin. He looked at the ax, then the dead tree ... and suddenly he’d had enough. He said, “It’s getting dark.”
“Do you have trouble seeing at night? Here.” She tossed him the flashlight-laser.
“That dead tree good enough?”
She turned, giving him a nice profile, the gun turning with her. Louis adjusted the light to narrow beam, high intensity. He flipped it on. A bright thread of light licked past her. Louis flicked it across her weapon. The weapon spurted flame and fell apart.
She stood there with her mouth open and the two pieces in her hands.
“I am perfectly willing to take suggestions from a friend and ally,” he told her. “I’m sick of taking orders. I got plenty of that from my furry companion. Let’s be friends.”
She dropped what she was holding and raised her hands.
“You’ve got more bullets and more guns in the back of the vehicle. Arm yourself.” Louis turned away. He sliced his beam down the dead tree in zigzag fashion. A dozen logs fell burning. Louis strolled over and kicked the logs into a tighter pile around the stump. He played the laser into their midst and watched the fire catch.
Something thumped him between the shoulder blades. For an instant the impact suit went stiff. He heard a single crack of thunder.
Louis waited for a bit, but the second shot didn’t come. He turned and walked back to the vehicle and Vala. He said to her, “Don’t you ever, ever, ever do that again.”
She looked pale and frightened. “No. I won’t.”
“Shall I help you carry your cooking things?”
“No, I can ... Did I miss you?”
“No.”
“Then how?”
“One of my tools saved me. I brought it a thousand times the distance light travels in a falan, and it’s mine.”
She made a kind of arm-flapping gesture and turned away.
Chapter 16 -
Strategies of Trade
There was a plant that grew along the ground like so many links of green-and-yellow-striped sausage, with rootlets sprouting between the links. Valavirgillin sliced some of these into a pot. She added water, then some seed pods from a sack in the vehicle. She set the pot on the burning logs.
Tanj, Louis could have done that himself. Dinner was going to be crude.
The sun was entirely gone now. A tight cluster of stars to port must be the floating city. The Arch swooped up the black sky in horizontal bands of glowing blue and white. Louis felt that he was on some tremendous toy.
“I wish I had some meat,” Vala said.
Louis said, “Give me the goggles.”
He turned away from the fire before he put the goggles on. He turned up the light amplification. The pairs of eyes that had been watching from beyond the reach of the firelight resolved. Louis was glad he hadn’t fired at random. Two large shapes and a smaller one were a family of ghouls.
But one bright-eyed shadow was small, and furry. Louis snipped it headless with the long bright thread from his flashlight-laser. The ghouls flinched. They whispered among themselves. The female started toward the dead animal, but stopped to give Louis precedence. Louis picked up the body and watched her back away.
The ghouls seemed diffident enough. But their place in the ecology was very secure. Vala had told him what happened when a people went to the great effort of burying or burning their dead. The ghouls attacked the living. They owned the night. With magic gleaned from scores of local religions, they were said to be able to turn invisible. Even Vala half believed it.
But they weren’t bothering Louis. Why would they? Louis would eat the furry beast, and one day Louis himself would die, and the ghouls would claim their due.
While they watched him, he examined the creature: rabbitlike, but with a long, flat-ended tail and no forepaws at all. Not a hominid. Good.
When he looked up, there was a faintly glowing violet flame far to port.
Holding his breath, holding himself very still, Louis raised both the light amplification and the magnification. Even his pulse in his temples was blurring the picture now, but he knew what he saw. The magnified flame was eye-hurting violet, and it fanned out like a rocket firing in vacuum. Its bottom was clipped off by a straight black line: the edge of the portward rim wall.
He lifted the goggles. Even after his eyes adjusted, the violet flame was barely visible, but it was still there. Tenuous ... and tremendous.
Louis returned to the fire and dropped the beast at Vala’s feet. He walked into the darkness to starboard and donned the goggles again.
The flame to starboard showed much larger, but of course that rim wall was much closer.
Vala skinned the little furry beast and dropped it into the pot without removing the entrails. When she had finished, Louis led her by the arm into the darkness. “Wait a little, then tell me if you see a blue flame far away.”
“Yes, I see it.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“No, but I think my father does. There was something he wouldn’t talk about, the last time he came back from the city. There are more. Turn your eyes to the base of the Arch to spinward.”
A daylit, blue-and-white horizontal stripe was bright enough to make him squint. Louis covered it with the edge of his hand ... and now, with the goggles to help, he could make out two small candle flames on the rims of the Arch, and two above them, tinier yet.
Valavirgillin said, “The first appeared seven falans ago, near the base of the spinward Arch. Then more to spinward, and these large flames to port and starboard, then more small ones on the antispinward Arch. Now there are twenty-one. They only show for two days each turn, when the sun is brightest.”
Louis heaved a gusty sigh of relief.
“Louis, I don’t know what it means when you do that. Are you angry or frightened or relieved?”
“I don’t know either. Let’s say relieved. We’ve got more time than I thought.”
“Time for what?”
Louis laughed. “Haven’t you had enough of my madness yet?”
She bridled. “After all, I can choose whether to believe you or not!”
Louis got mad. He didn’t hate Valavirgillin, but she was a thorny character, and she had already tried to kill him once. “Fine. If this ring-shaped structure you live on is left to itself, it will brush against the shadow squares—the objects that cover the sun when night comes—in five or six falans. That will kill everything. There won’t be anything left alive when you brush against the sun itself—“
She screamed, “And you sigh with relief?”
“Easy, take it easy. The Ringworld is not being left alone. Those flames are motors for moving it. We’re almost at the closest point to the sun, and they’re using braking thrust—they’re firing inward, sunward. Like this.” He sketched the situation for her in the dirt with a pointed stick. “See? They’re holding us back.”
“You say now that we will not die?”
“The motors may not be strong enough for that. But they’ll hold us back. We could have ten or fifteen falans.”
“I do hope you are mad, Louis. You know too much. You know that the world is a ring, and that is secret.” She shrugged as one shifts a heavy weight. “Yes, I have had enough of it. Will you tell me why you have not suggested rishathra?”
He was surprised. “I would have thought you’d had enough of rishathra to last
a lifetime.”
“That is not funny. Rishathra is the way to seal a truce!”
“Oh. All right. Back to the fire?”
“Of course, we need light.”
She pulled the pot a little back from the flame, to cook more slowly. “We must discuss terms. Will you agree not to harm me?” She sat down across from him on the ground.
“I agree not to harm you unless I am attacked.”
“I make you the same concession. What else do you want from me?”
She was brisk and matter-of-fact, and Louis fell into the spirit of the thing. “You will transport me as far as you can, subject to your own needs. I expect that’s as far as, ah, River’s Return. You will treat the artifacts as mine. You will not turn them or me over to any authority. You will give me advice, to the best of your knowledge and ability, that will get me into the floating city.”
“What can you offer in return?”
Here now, wasn’t this woman utterly at Louis Wu’s mercy? Well, never mind. “I will attempt to find out if I can save the Ringworld,” he said, and was somewhat astonished to realize that it was what he most desired. “If I can, I will, no matter what the cost. If I decide the Ringworld can’t be saved, I will try to save myself, and you if it’s convenient.”
She stood. “A promise, empty of meaning. You offer me your madness as if it held real value!”
“Vala, haven’t you dealt with madmen before?” Louis was amused.
“I have never dealt with even sane aliens! I am only a student!”
“Calm down. What else can I offer you? Knowledge? I’ll share my knowledge freely, such as it is. I know how the City Builders’ machines failed, and who caused it.” It seemed safe to assume that the City Builders were Halrloprillalar’s species.
“More madness?”
“You’ll have to decide that for yourself. And ... I can give you my flying belt and eyepieces when I’m through with them.”