by Larry Niven
He stepped outside.
Broken cloudscapes swept sluggishly overhead. Sunlight swept in vertical beams along the dock. Tegger didn’t see any birds until he crept to the edge on hands and knees and looked down.
The windowed bulb that had carried him here was below him, crushed. He wasn’t going home that way … hadn’t planned to.
Myriad birds wheeled with spread wings in the sunlight, dropping to snatch up—what? Makaways in such numbers must be finding plenty of prey. A whole ecology would be feeding off what the vampires left, off whole populations of drained corpses.
There might be nothing but birds up here.
No, wait: here was some kind of web on the vertical face of the dock, facing outward, to starboard. He had to lean far over to see it.
The threads were bronze when the light fell right; otherwise nothing could be seen at all. Size was hard to judge because of the way the web divided itself into nothing at the edges. It might be as wide as a Grass Giant was tall. The motionless black dot at the center might be the webspinner … dead of starvation. Tegger hadn’t seen an insect since he left the ground.
Birds and a webspinner implied insects, but the birds might have eaten the insects. Tegger wondered if he would starve. At best he faced a time limit. As if he hadn’t known that already!
***
What he’d been thinking of as the “City” was unfamiliar in nearly every detail. Tegger didn’t have names for most of what he could see. The City sloped upward in irregular geometries, and peaked at the center in a vertical tube.
Tegger began running.
There was no fear in him now. It was just a way of exploring. He ran, and the dock, eight manheights wide, ran away before him. Now it narrowed, but continued, two manheights wide: not a dock anymore, but merely the rim of the City.
Rim Street. Structures lined it. Some had doors. Here and there an alley ran out of sight between windowless bulks. Rounded, doorless shapes had ladders running up their sides.
The rain resumed. Tegger had to watch his footing now, but the surface was rough beneath his feet, and the rain was running off into a gutter along Rim Street’s inward edge.
He was not much more than warmed up when he saw an anomaly, a wide street becoming flights of steps, and on either side—
Tegger stopped. Dwellings? He knew the Thurl’s tents and Ginjerofer’s much smaller tents; he’d seen permanent dwellings kept by more sedentary hominids. He’d never seen anything like these brightly painted square houses. But they were houses, with manheight doors, and trees arrayed about them, and windows.
Later. He ran on.
There were no more houses along Rim Street. He saw Brobdingnagian shapes, rectangular solids, distorted eggs, forests of tubing, great flat and curved metal webs. His mind wasn’t making much sense of what he saw. Get a rounded picture, that was it; go for detail later.
He was looking at the City, not at the landscape beyond. But he had the river in view again, and a line of rocky bluffs—
The cruisers!
No species had better distance vision than a Red Herder, and no natural shape could pass for a Machine People cruiser. He couldn’t be wrong. He’d found Valavirgillin’s caravan on that rocky peak.
Most of the expedition seemed to have gone off. He saw no sign of life until one of two specks stood up to stretch. Grass Giant sentries? Tegger stepped to the edge and waved like a man trying to fly.
Would they see him?
Not here, against all these confusing shapes. But if he could put the sky behind him …
All in good time. The cruisers would keep.
***
Surprises were not easy to come by when you recognized nothing.
Rim Street opened out, widened. Far ahead, that was the door he’d kicked open last night. And here at the port-spin end of the docks, a street ran off at a right angle. A dark-mouthed street eight manheights wide, angling steeply down, where everything else ran uphill toward the City’s center.
He turned right.
He was running into darkness.
He slowed. The stench would have stopped anyone. Death and corruption, and something under that, something familiar. A bit of night vision was coming now. The street curved off to the right, still descending …
He ran out faster than he’d gone in.
What he’d seen as a spiral staircase last night was far larger than he’d realized. Big enough for four cruisers moving abreast, he thought. For vampires too, this was the way up.
Tegger looked into the darkness and knew that he would have to go there. And wait while his eyes adjusted. And look into the Shadow Nest, and see what looked back.
But not yet. Tegger ran on.
***
Docks and storage … great silvered tanks … here, sunlight flashed off windows. Short streets and wide stairs, skewed as they rose, windowed houses rising tier after tier to what might be a great eyeball.
He’d reached Stair Street. Tegger began to climb.
The houses had bands and patches of dirt around and between them. For most of Stair Street’s length the wide dirt patch stretching out from the front door of one house was the flat roof of the house below.
Some of these plots were flooded. Some had been washed away or reduced to sand by hundreds of falans of rainfall. Here grew tall grass; here grew nothing. There were dead trees, fallen trees, live trees, fruiting trees. Here a straggling line of pomes ran from the topmost house nearly down to Rim Street. They looked planted, at first; but two topmost pome trees were dead, and the bottommost were just beginning to produce head-sized fruit. Tegger pictured tens of thousands of spherical pomes rolling downhill over hundreds of falans, seeding this whole slope from one tree.
Here was a window-flat, not like a vehicle window, as big as the Thurl’s bed. Awesome. Its surface was murky. Tegger peered through it, but the interior was dark.
Next door, a huge tree had uprooted and cracked the wall of a house. This house, too, had one great window facing the earthen plot. Tegger picked up a chunk of fallen rubble and tried to smash it. It was the rubble that cracked.
But the cracked wall. Might he squeeze through that opening?
Yes.
***
The place was big by Tegger’s standards: larger than a tent. The scale was larger, too: not quite Grass Giant size. A chair he sat in left his feet dangling.
He found an oval bed on the other side of the picture window. Five skeletons on the bed. Three adults, two children. They were a friendly group and seemed at peace. One more, child size, was off the bed, reaching for a door.
The space behind that door looked very dark.
He used rotted bedding to make a torch and went in.
No windows here. There were furnishings … controls? Levers that would wiggle, anyway, above spouts that came out of the wall. Two were at either end of a tub with a drain in the bottom. Water spouts, but no water ran from them.
Tegger continued his search.
Another windowless room. Another skeleton, adult size, lay near a shallow opening with tens of tiny knobs inside. More controls—Tegger thought, reaching for his pack—like the recessed control panel in the hauler.
Towel. Wedge-bladed knife. Strips of Vala-cloth already cut. He began pushing them into place.
Nothing, nothing, nothing … a miracle happened.
Light. A point in the ceiling was blazing too bright to look at.
Tegger got out of there.
Lights were shining throughout the house. Tegger left them that way. It surprised him that there was still power. Where did it come from? Thunderstorms? Power was directed lightning …
***
He moved up the line of houses, faster now, looking through windows. Here and there he saw skeletons. Always inside. Bodies outside were gone, meat for birds.
There were scrubby grasses, some he knew as edible to hominids. Plants too weird to be anything but ornamental. Unless that one with big purple leaves … ?
; He dug a bit, pulled, and found fat roots. Cloudy River Delta Farmers would eat those boiled.
These were miniature farms!
Tegger settled himself cross-legged on the roof edge of a plot of earth, slumping within his earth-colored poncho, letting the rain wash over him like just another lump on the landscape.
These little patches of dirt were farms no longer. The plants were no orderly array of crops. Untended since the Fall of the Cities, likely enough. But was it not strange that in this restricted space the occupants would seed croplands too small to feed a smeerp?
Tegger found it more than interesting. He hadn’t been nibbled by pests last night. Maybe he’d climbed out of their reach. Maybe nothing lived here save for the makaways who foraged below. But if there was anything like a food chain up here, it would begin with growing plants.
So, he would hunt.
What else was worth noting here?
Vines had grown from two narrow strips of soil to engulf the house behind him and tear it down. Windows and their frames had buckled. He could see furniture ruined by rain.
The houses were flat surfaces and right angles. But Stair Street was crowned by a dome of window-stuff as big as two or three houses. He’d compared it to an eyeball, but he was only seeing reflections of white clouds. It had no color of us own. The tube that was the City’s peak loomed above even that.
He was among the topmost houses; and they were the biggest, with the widest of garden / farms. It seemed the City Builders liked a view.
The wilderness before and below him was almost a perfect square. The center was an empty pool in the shape of a scallop shell. Four trees had been planted at the corners, but rain had carved runnels, undercut one of the trees and felled it. Its roots poked into the air beyond the roof’s edge.
Tegger liked the pool. It might have been some Cluster Islands grotto. Its rounded bottom was smooth blue City Builder stuff, and there were stairs leading in. There was even a running waterfall, a spout in the pile of boulders at one edge. He could see where the outflow from the waterfall, and the rain, all ran into a drain at the bottom and disappeared.
There was dirt in the pool, too, but it didn’t belong. There wasn’t enough. It had washed in. Still, plants had taken root and were cracking the blue bottom.
A pool for swimming. Why? Stairs to get out: you could drown otherwise. Maybe City Builders swam; maybe Homeflow River Folk came visiting.
But having built it, why leave it empty?
Nothing was happening among the patches of plants. Tegger supposed he would have better hunting during halfnight. Between light and dark was an active time for things that were used to evading predators. Maybe he could chase something into the pool, trap it there.
Meanwhile—he dropped to the grass, then walked into the pool.
Mud had half choked the drain. It had not quite hidden the cover.
A round drain and a pipe below. A round cap the size of his spread fingers, on a hinge, with a rusted chain hanging from it. Tegger could see where it ought to lead, up there at the edge. You’d stay dry while you pulled the chain to open the cap.
He tried to close the cap. It resisted. He leaned his weight on it and the hinge snapped. He set the loose cap on the drain. It stayed. He watched as the pool began to fill.
Chapter 11
Guard Duty
WEAVER TOWN, A.D. 2892
Daylight was glowing on his eyelids. Louis tried to roll over, then stopped. He’d wake her.
His memory oozed into place. Sawur. Weavers. Shenthy River valley. Hindmost, vampires and vampire killers, a hidden protector …
She turned in his arms. Gold and silver fur; thin lips. Her breasts were near flat, but prominent nipples poked through the fur. She was awake in an eyeblink. Bare black eyelids made her brown eyes look huge.
Sawur studied him to verify that he, too, was awake. Then—he hadn’t asked, but he had guessed. Morning was Sawur’s time for rishathra, and Louis needed this in the worst way.
The worst way. She certainly sensed something wrong. She pulled back two inches to see his face. “Do you hunger in the morning?”
“Sometimes.”
“Something is distracting you.”
“Something was. Is. Sorry.”
She waited to be sure he had no more to say, then, “Will you teach today?”
“I should go looking for plants I can eat. We’re omnivores. Our guts need roughage. Hey, the older children go hunting—”
“Yes, we’ll go with them,” Sawur said. “They’ll learn more from you in the woods than they would from me in a hut. Here, this would be your parting gift, but you need it now.”
From a corner she pulled something with straps. Louis took it into sunlight to admire it. It was intricately embroidered weavework, a valuable gift: a backpouch.
***
He found remains of last night’s fish in the ashes of the barbecue, wrapped in leaves. It made a good breakfast.
He caught up to Sawur trying to herd a score of children all in one direction while she lectured on plants, fungus, animals, and animal spoor.
Yesterday he’d seen fleshy arrowhead-shaped leaves on a purple stalk, growing at the bases of the trees. Something like that grew downstream, and those leaves had been edible.
Ordinarily an omnivore could watch what other hominid species ate and try that himself, try eating whatever another hominid found safe. He couldn’t do that among strict carnivores.
Then again, what he found need not be shared. If it was poisonous, there was the medkit. Eat one thing at a time and check himself. If it was mildly poisonous, he might have to eat it anyway for roughage, for potassium, for whatever scarce substance he wasn’t getting.
The children watched as he tested this and that, chewed this, threw that away, put this or that in his backpouch. Sawur tried to help. She pointed out a poisonous twining plant before Louis could hurt himself, and a blue berry the birds liked, that tested clean and tasted of lemon. A fungus the size of a dinner plate tested positive for allergies …
They reached a pond a little ahead of the children. Sawur slowed him with a hand on his arm. The water was flat and still. His knees and back protested as he knelt.
His hair … he’d never seen it like this, laced with white strands. His eyes were lined at the edges. Louis saw his age.
In an agony of regret, he thought, Like this! I should have dressed like this at my two hundredth! Everyone at the party would have freaked!
Sawur grinned at him impishly. “Were you hoping that Strill would come to you?”
Louis stared at her, then laughed with surprise. Sawur hadn’t been seeing his age, but her own! He was saved from answering: the children were crowding around them again.
***
There was something Louis wanted to know. He could learn by teaching. He picked out a blond-furred net thrower who was fighting hard to attract Strill’s attention. “Parald, do you know that all humans were once alike?”
They had heard of such. They didn’t quite believe and they didn’t quite disbelieve.
Louis drew in the mud: Homo habilis, life size, as best he could render him. “Pak breeder. Our ancestors lived on a planet like the world I was born on, a ball, but much closer to the center of our whorl of stars,” and he drew a barred spiral, the galaxy. “We’re out here. The Pak lived in there.” He couldn’t draw the Pak world. Nobody had ever seen it. “A plant grew there called ‘tree-of-life.’ ”
He began to alter Homo habilis, giving him a swollen misshapen head, swollen joints, wrinkled and folded skin, toothless jawbones grown through the gums into a bony beak.
“You’re turning from children into adults,” he told them. “When all humans were alike, before there was a Ringworld, there were children, and adults to make more children, and a third shape to protect them both. Adults didn’t have minds then. When an adult got old enough he would eat tree-of-life—”
“She,” Parald said, and giggled.
Stet, t
heir generic pronoun was female. Louis said, “Then she would sleep, and change as she slept, like a butterfly. Her sex would fade away. Protector men and women look alike. Her jaw would grow to replace her teeth, her brain case would expand, her joints would expand to give the muscles greater leverage, her skin would become thick leather armor. When the change was over, she would be smarter and stronger, and she would care for nothing except to protect her children. Protectors fought terrible wars over whose children would survive.”
Strill asked, “Why doesn’t it happen to us?”
“There’s an element almost missing from the soil beneath the Arch. The virus that makes protectors can’t live without it. But in a cavern under one of the islands on the Great Ocean, tree-of-life still grows with the virus in the root.
“The terrible thing about a protector is that she’ll do anything to give an edge to her own relatives. Whoever built the Ringworld locked the tree-of-life up so nobody could reach it. It grows in artificial light in great plantations beneath the Map of Mars. But somebody must have got to it—”
“That’s what scares the Web Dweller!” Parald crowed.
“Right. He thinks he’s found a protector on the other Great Ocean, and another halfway up the Arch to antispin, and maybe more at work on the rim wall. The Web Dweller isn’t related to any human protector. By instinct they would call him an enemy. He controls the Meteor Defense in the Repair Center. With that he can burn whatever he likes, anywhere on the Arch.
“So who should we be afraid of? The Web Dweller or the protectors?”
The children shivered, and giggled, and then began to talk.
Louis listened and learned. They knew of protectors. War was only a rumor to them, yet the rumor came clothed in protector-shaped armor. All hominids seemed to carry that shape in their minds, as heroes or monsters, as Saint George or Grendel; as designs for armor among the Grass Giants and as pressure suits on the spaceport ledge.
After much argument, the children seemed to side with the Hindmost. Strangers didn’t compete, didn’t steal, didn’t rape; and what could be stranger than the Web Dweller?