by Larry Niven
“If that’s Valavirgillin, she doesn’t took good.”
“Neither do you, Louis. Perhaps she’s been neglecting her boosterspice?”
Louis ignored the dig. “She’s gotten old. Eleven years …”
Louis himself had lived eleven years without the bioengineered seeds that kept a human being from aging. Vala had never touched the stuff. Was it really Valavirgillin?
It was. He’d rished with the woman!
“This skews the odds a bit, doesn’t it, Louis?”
“She must be tens of thousands of miles starboard of where I left her. What would she be doing there?”
“Attacking a vampire enclave, I believe. It’s her, isn’t it? Have I made my point? If I show you ten healthy hominids, they could be ten survivors out of a thousand dead. But I show you a woman you knew before the radiation storm, and clearly in present time. What are the odds now?”
Louis shifted on the water-smoothed boulder he’d chosen for a seat. “Is this present time, Hindmost?”
“Forty hours ago.”
Louis asked what he had refused to ask for eleven years. “Are you claiming Teela lied? Why?”
“She acted on insufficient knowledge. With enhanced intelligence comes enhanced arrogance, and she never did have good sense, Louis. She could have done what I did, with my computers to play with. Louis, Teela never grasped how closely I was able to guide the plasma plume we ripped from the sun. I set it flowing directly into the attitude jets on the rim wall. The plasma never played across the main Ringworld surface. The radiation she feared … of course it was well above background level.”
“The rim,” Louis said. He was beginning to believe.
“Yes, the rim, of course.”
“And how do you suppose the Spill Mountain People made out?”
“Along five percent of the rim wall, I suppose I must have killed a great many.”
Ten million, a hundred million people of a kind Louis Wu had never met. Several species, maybe.
Nonetheless Louis said, “Hindmost, I believe I owe you an apology.”
The Hindmost chimed. Making sure it’s in his records, Louis thought. Then, “Another matter. Notice the man in lookout position. Red Herder?”
“Yeah. Little red carnivores, lived not that far from the rim wall. Very fast runners they were.”
The great wagon suddenly zipped downslope, fast-forward, dodged boulders at Mach 5 in a storm of streaming cloud-shadows, and was lost in a maze of rocks. “I lost the wagons for a time,” the Hindmost said. “Fifteen hours later I picked up this.”
A small red man ran down a river shore, Mach 12 for sure. Louis laughed. “They’re not that fast.”
“It’s the same man?”
“I can’t tell. Slow him down.”
The red man slowed to something an Olympic runner might hope for. Louis said, “Looks like him.”
“Infrared,” the Hindmost said. A pink shadow glowed through the fuzzy-edged window in the dark Cliff, running along a black river amid glowing rocks. A brilliant green cursor pointed. “This?”
A running pink shadow, and glimpses of another. The Red ran steadily. Some warmer shape flitted from cover to cover, flashed between rocks—“Slow that down!”—now through brush, now where was it? Reds ran fast, but this thing was keeping up with the Red while hiding most of the time.
Louis couldn’t get any notion of its shape.
“Louis, we watched the burning of three Patriarchy ships. I suspect a protector,” the Hindmost said. “Might we have another protector here?”
“Why not just a Ghoul?”
The red dots streaked away in fast-forward, then shifted to normal light. The Red Herder ran alone. Near him there was a suggestion of sporadic motion, and the man’s eyes were constantly shifting.
Something popped up in front of him. His sword came out—
Pause. And the Hindmost’s cursor pointed. “Red Herder. Vampire. Do you see anything else?”
“Give me infrared.”
In infrared Louis found five glow spots. In normal light … The cursor pointed. “Red Herder. Vampire. This and this are Ghouls. See.”
Louis remembered Ghouls; though they were hidden in brush and shadow, he knew their lanky shape.
But the fifth glow was hiding even from the Ghouls. Louis could make out a hand smaller than a Ghoulish hand, nearly hairless. An old man’s hand, arthritic, with knobby knuckles.
Protector? “Why would a protector bother?”
“Unknown. But see this.” Fast-forward. The vampire woman fell dying. The Red ran, stopped, splashed in the river, and was suddenly fighting half a dozen vampires. The recording went dead slow. The Red’s sword swept around … a woman was uncoiling herself at his back … a hand slapped her ankle.
The hidden one was mud-colored, plastered with mud. Its knotted hand only just touched her, closed and released. The woman swiped with her claws at nothing she could see; returned to the attack, and died on the red man’s sword.
“Minimalist,” Louis said. A rustling sound was trying to find his attention.
“Secretive,” the Hindmost said.
The Red Herder ran along mud. Vampires converged … and they all faded into distance.
“He’s out of my instrument’s range. I lost him for a time. I nearly lost the hidden one, too, and that concerns me. Look.”
The camera viewpoint swung back along the river, caught a splash, then moved fast upslope and into shadow.
Louis said, “I don’t—”
“Here, again, in infrared. The lurked is nearly invisible.”
“Yeah. He was underwater, of course, shedding heat. Where’s he going? Into the vampire nest?”
The sequence ran again, light-enhanced. Splash: something emerged from water and ran upslope in jerky, random fashion. Pause: not a good view, but the shadow was clearly hominid. Run: up into shadow, gone.
“That was the last I saw of it. Clearly it is not a vampire. It guards the Red Herder, and perhaps his companions, too, avoiding notice at all costs.”
***
In a crunching of brush the Fishers and Sailors were lining up along the pool to stare at Louis Wu afloat in midair; or else at a window in a rock cliff, a view of distant daylit mountains.
Louis asked, “What else have you got?”
“Nothing of interest since three hours ago.”
“Hindmost, my brain really is dying for lack of sleep.”
The Hindmost said, “Wait. This thing—”
“Is thirty-five degrees up the curve of the Arch, five and a half minutes away at lightspeed. Can’t hurt you. You’re right, though, it’s a protector.”
“Louis! You must accept medical help.”
“You don’t have medical help. You put the ’doc on the lander, remember?”
“The crew cabin kitchen has a medical menu. Louis, it can make boosterspice!”
“Boosterspice doesn’t make a man well. It only makes him young:
“Are you—”
“No, I’m not sick. But humans get sick, Hindmost, and I keep remembering why we don’t have a full working ’doc. Chmeee and I, we didn’t volunteer for this work. You thought we might refuse to operate the lander. So you put the autodoc in the lander, and Teela flamed it.”
“But—”
“Leave the window running. I don’t want anyone to think we’re hiding something from them.” Louis stood and turned away.
“Louis, I weary of your not listening to me!”
Louis took two more steps. But he’d refused to listen to the Hindmost for eleven years, and he found apologizing tanj awkward … so he turned back and resumed his seat on the boulder. “Speak,” he said.
“I have my own medical facilities.”
“Oh, yes.” The Hindmost would surely be protected against any conceivable [sic—should be “conceivable”] accident or malaise. Nessus had lost a head and neck on their first visit, and Louis had seen it replaced. “Surgery for a Pierson’s puppeteer. Wha
t would that do for a human?”
“Louis, this technology was of human origin. We bought it from a Kzin law enforcer on Fafnir, but it appears to have been an ARM experiment of more than two hundred years ago, stolen from Sol system. The system uses nanotechnology to make repairs inside the cells themselves. No second was ever built. I’ve had it modified to heal humans or kzinti or my own kind.”
Louis was laughing. “Tanj, you’re careful!” Most of what was aboard Needle was of human manufacture, and what wasn’t had been carefully hidden. If the Hindmost were caught while abducting his crew, he wouldn’t implicate the Fleet of Worlds.
“Pity I’ll never see it.”
“I can move it to the crew deck.”
Louis felt cold running up his spine like river water. He said, “You’re not serious, and I’m too tired to think. Good night, Hindmost.”
***
Louis parked his stack of plates next to the guest house. Dry brush rustled as he stepped down. He spoke to the night, not loudly.
“When you’re ready to talk, I’m here. And I bet you’re wearing an embroidered kilt.”
The night had no answer.
Sawur barely stirred when he crawled into the tent. He fell asleep at once.
Chapter 10
Stair Street
A whiff of corruption pulled her half awake. Pointed fingernails pressing hard into her elbow pulled her the rest of the way. Vala sat up with a yelp. Harpster ducked below the gun she managed not to fire.
“Valavirgillin, come and see.”
Flup. “Are we attacked?”
“You would smell vampires. I’m surprised they haven’t come to look at us. Perhaps they’re distracted.”
Vala stepped out onto the running board.
Rain was falling in fat drops. The awning kept her half dry, but visibility was low. Lightning played to antispin-starboard, the direction of the vampires’ stronghold. Lightning and something else. Downslope, toward the river, a steady white light.
After all their talk, had Tegger lit a fire? But fire wasn’t quite that color, and fire would have flickered.
Grieving Tube was above them on the rock, on sentry duty. Harpster said, “Will you wake Warvia?”
“Yes.” Vala slipped into the payload shell. No point in waking anyone else, but Warvia could see details; she might even see something that would tell her this was Tegger. “Warvia?”
“I’m awake.”
“Come and look.”
Rain came and went at random, permitting glimpses of the light. The glow wasn’t a dot, she saw presently; it was a tilted line.
The light blinked off, then on again. Warvia said, “Tegger likes to fiddle with things.”
“Is it him?”
“How would I know?” the Red woman snapped.
They watched. By and by Harpster said, “Light could keep away the vampires, if it’s bright enough.”
Warvia was slumped against a rock, asleep. Vala said, “Wake me if something changes. I’ll be out here, but I want a blanket.” She started to climb into the payload shell, thinking, Get two. One for Warvia.
The light began to jitter. Vala paused to watch.
Then a bright dot separated from the tilted line and went straight up.
***
The hauler was shuddering, shaking, trying to tear itself apart. Tegger clung to the seat as he would have clung to Warvia. Could he free a hand to pluck the strip of Vala-cloth away from the contacts?
Did he want to? The shaking wasn’t killing him, only jarring his teeth.
What was doing this? Some half-ruined motor? Or else a motor doing just what it was told to, trying to lift a cargo hauler, along with the riverbed it was buried in.
And while his mind toyed with such notions, Tegger’s fingers toyed with toggles.
Flup, that was the lights again. That one didn’t do anything, nor that one. That one turned the wind off, then back on. An ominous grating sound from somewhere below had been the response to this one, but now it did nothing.
Something protruded from the shadowed recess where the skeleton’s knees would have gone. A big two-pronged handle … that didn’t move under his hand.
Tegger gritted his vibrating teeth, gripped the chair with his knees and the handle with both hands and pulled.
Nothing. Fine. Push.
Push and twist.
It lurched under his hands, and his head banged hard into the controls. He was being hurled into the sky.
The twist of cloth! Get it out of there—
He dared not let go of the chair, and perhaps that was a good thing. Dark as the night was, he could see the riverbed dwindle. A fall from this high would kill him.
If he could free a hand or a toe from its death-grip on the chair … there must be a way to steer this … bubble. As the river wheeled past him he glimpsed a half-buried square plate with a notch missing at the high corner. He’d torn the control bubble loose from the hauler.
Then he was falling. He felt it in his belly. Falling, falling, surge, twenty to thirty manheights above the river and moving inland. Moving toward the City.
A way to take control, there must be a way—
Did he trust Whisper?
Whisper had led him to the cargo hauler. Whisper had put Vala-cloth into his hands. What would Whisper have done if Tegger hadn’t experimented on his own? But Whisper had never suggested he steer the hauler—or its ripped-away control bubble, either—anywhere but where he was going now. The damaged machine was going home to its aerial dock.
So, Whisper’s minimal guidance was taking him where he wanted to go. To trust Whisper was to let it happen. But he didn’t know Whisper’s nature and had never known Whisper’s motives …
Rain running down the windows had Tegger half blind. By flickering lightning and glimpses of Archlight he saw a flat-topped mass approaching. He could see no motion. Wait, the rain was swirling, wheeling … suddenly he was in a cloud of screaming birds.
Could vampires fly? But even in the rainy dark he knew them. Bluebelly makaways, no different from the makaways of his own turf. Wingspread greater than his spread arms; good gliding ability; raptor beaks. Maks were meat eaters, big enough to carry off a herder boy. He’d never seen so many together.
He couldn’t navigate through that. He kept his hands where they were, gripping the chair back.
The birds withdrew to a wheeling pattern.
The window bubble had come to rest, still in midair.
Plainsman that he was, Tegger had once boarded a barge to trade stock with another tribe. He was familiar with docks. He was floating a manheight from the edge of what might have been a riverside dock hung in midair. Floating boats would ride against this buffer rim. Those cables hanging over the rim would tether them. Cargo in those big buildings, behind those vast doors …
The birds were losing interest, returning to roost. Makaways weren’t nightbirds.
The bubble’s doorway was facing out from the dock. Was there at least a way to turn it around? Maybe if he twisted something … Tegger was reluctant to experiment this high in the air.
What should be happening here? The hauler might be waiting for the City’s signal to land. Might be sending a signal of its own. Maybe one of those cables was supposed to reach out and secure the hauler, pull it in. But none of it was going to happen, because the dock was as dead as anything else that had died in the Fall of the Cities.
The door hung loose, as he’d found it.
Pack. Sword.
Tegger eased out into a light rain, feet on the hanging door’s wobbly rim, jump to the bubble’s slippery top, flatten and cling. The birds wheeled closer, looking him over.
Tegger crept forward on his belly, down the slope of the bubble. A little farther, hands and knees now, a bit more, knees forward, feet braced, slipping, jump.
He landed flat, banging his chin, his legs kicking in open air.
The dock felt like soft wood.
He’d have stayed but for the shr
ieking of the birds as they dropped toward him. He rolled over, pulled his sword and waited. When one came close enough, he slashed.
***
“He must have found some City Builder thing, something like an old car. Made it work. He’s up there.” Warvia stared fiercely at the light that blazed at the edge of the floating factory.
Her faith was stronger than Vala’s. Vala asked, “What do you see?”
“I can’t see past the light. There are big birds wheeling around it. I think I saw him jump—”
The light sank. Faster. Flashed painfully bright and was gone.
“He jumped,” Warvia said positively. Vala, I’m about to fall over. I’ll give you a better description come daylight.”
“Can we do anything?”
“Vala, I’d do anything to reach him.”
“Grieving Tube, any thoughts?”
The Ghoul shook her head.
“We’ll have to wait. I don’t know any safer spot for the cruisers, and the view is lovely. Dig in here, wait and watch.”
***
Makaways preferred live prey, but they would eat carrion. Makaway meat had a nasty taste.
Tegger felt much better after he had devoured the bird. Take away hunger, disperse the rutting scent of ten thousand vampires, give him a flat surface to rest … The wind was cold, this high. Tegger pulled a poncho from his pack and wiggled into it.
The cold, the aches, the troubles of a nightmare day began to recede … and sleep was a vampire with its teeth in his throat. He dared not sleep in the open. He looked about him in woozy panic.
The huge door on that storage cube was surely too heavy to move. Too heavy for anyone, and wildly wasteful of power …?
Around a corner from the huge door was a door not much taller than Tegger.
A kick sent it springing back at him. He went into darkness, found something resilient to climb, and slept.
***
He clung to sleep, fearing what his memory would tell him. Memory came anyway; but it was wavering light on his eyelids that snapped him awake.
Sunlight flooded through the man-sized doorway. It faded even as he was climbing down from a mountain of bales that smelled weakly of vegetable rot. Stuff to be turned into cloth? Foodstuffs would have been in a worse state.