by Larry Niven
“These are United Nations craft made by Louis’s species.”
Louis had finished his checklist. The suit would keep him alive for weeks, maybe months.
“Very good. Allow me,” the knobby man said. He stepped on another cargo plate, and rose. His hands were dexterous where the puppeteer’s mouths had been unsure. A second screen lit with a darkened view of the sun.
Minutes passed. Then a bright plume began to rise, twisting in magnetic fields.
Louis said, “You’re going to kill them, I take it.”
“Such are my directions. They came as invaders,” the Hindmost said.
“So did we.”
“Yes. Are you healthy?”
Louis wiggled his bound hand. “Healing. It’s a waste of time, anyway, if I’m going into your magic ’doc. What have you been doing?”
“We’ve destroyed six carrier ships and a fleet of thirty-two landers. Those were the ships closest to the sun, the most vulnerable. These last are so distant that we may do no more than enrage them. I’m inclined to ignore the installation in the comet. We would only boil ice. I found an Outsider ship on one of the farthest comets—”
“Tanj! Knobby man? You didn’t shoot down an Outsider, did you?”
“The Hindmost advised against.”
“Good. They’re very fragile, but they’ve got technology we can’t even properly describe. For that matter, they don’t want anything we’ve got, and what they want, they buy. There’d be no point to hurting an Outsider.”
“Do you like them?”
That was a somewhat surprising question. Louis said, “Yes.”
“What would they be doing here?”
Louis shrugged inside his suit. “The sky is full of planets. There’s only one Ringworld. Outsiders are curious.”
The solar plume was still rising. “Observe and criticize,” the knobby man said to the Hindmost. Fingers like strings of walnuts danced over the wall.
The puppeteer watched. He said, “Good.”
It all seemed very leisurely. The plume would take hours to form. The superthermal laser effect would be propagating for minutes before it left the plume. The targets looked to be hours away at lightspeed.
Louis had already discarded the notion of a last minute rescue.
Louis Wu owed nothing at all to the United Nations or the ARM. He wasn’t obliged to protect kzinti ships either. Disarmed and injured, he was no match for a protector of any species. He knew he’d be lucky to keep his life, now that he was back in this dance of powers.
His contract didn’t bind him to rescue the knobby man’s prey. And they had come as invaders.
“I pointed out a monitor station, too. One of mine,” the Hindmost was saying. “The Conservatives will never miss it.”
“Right. Knobby man, I’m tempted to call you ‘Dracula.’ Dracula was the archetype of story vampires.”
“Follow your whim.”
“No. Trite. You’re a protector, a prime mover among vampires. Let’s call you ‘Bram.’ Can you tell me what you want of me?”
“I want what is best for my species. Vampires face three threats, and each threatens all beneath the Arch including yourselves.”
The knobby man watched Louis’s face as he spoke. “First, if vampires become numerous, we deplete our prey. Intelligent hominids might even find a way to exterminate us. I don’t want any species of vampire getting too much attention. You don’t want us spreading.”
“The vampire slayers, were they yours? No, that’s crazy. They’re your own species.”
“No, Louis, they’re not. There must be a hundred separate species of vampire on the Ringworld.”
“Ah. Where do yours live?”
Bram ignored that. “Louis, I did not shape the Shadow Nest Alliance. Their solution was elegant, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Second, these invaders from space threaten the Ringworld structure itself.”
Louis nodded. “An interstellar warship can always use a meteoroid impact for a weapon. Watch for falling comets.”
“The third threat is protectors, for the duels they fight.”
Louis asked, “Just how many protectors have we got already?”
“Three or more involved in repairing the rim wall installations. Each would seem to have its task, but all will bear watching.”
“What species, can you tell?”
“It’s an important question, isn’t it? Those who rule would be vampires. Any others would be servants drafted from local species. Louis, one can argue—”
“How the tanj did the Ringworld come to be infested with vampire protectors?”
“That is an intricate tale, but why should I tell it?”
Louis had carefully not bound himself or the Hindmost to reveal secrets. How could he urge Bram to reveal his? He said, “It’s your call. First decide what you want. Decide if we can give it to you. Then decide how much we need to know to do it right.”
The knobby man’s hand danced over the wall. He said, “You keep secrets. Why should I tell mine? You are bound to obey regardless.”
Try this—“You’ve been shooting down ships. Stet, but suppose you miss one? You’ve no way to judge what they’ll do next. We three, I and Acolyte and the Hindmost, are the only aliens at hand. You expect to watch us and extrapolate what invaders would do. But we don’t react if we don’t know anything.”
The bright plume pulled from the sun had been arcing over, but now it started to straighten, to narrow. Bram said, “Hindmost?”
“The prominence is nearly in place.”
“Will you complete the maneuver?”
“Destroy all four sources?”
“Leave the comet. Louis, how can you react properly if you know you’re being watched?”
“When I’m being watched, I watch back. Take it into account. Bram, who are you? How did a vampire get into the Repair Center?”
“I mapped my way in.”
Louis waited.
“Louis, have you seen how hominids behave when they drink the fuel the Machine People make?”
“I’ve done it myself.”
“I never have. Now you must imagine that you have drunk fuel beginning with your mother’s milk. Tens of falans later you wake sober for the first time, sober and buzzing with energy and ambition.
“I was born … I was shaped 7,200 falans ago. Corpses lay all about me, tens of my kind, days dead, and one strange shape that was all knobs. I was all knobs, too, sexless, and cold and hungry and gashed by fighting, but I was solving the world like a great puzzle. Three others were waking, changed like me.”
Louis asked, “You trapped a protector? Vampires aren’t that intelligent.”
“This one was born trapped, made to be a servant.”
Made by …? “Go on.”
“The city stood on a vertical cliff and one great stilt. I was born in its shadow. We were always hungry. A ramp wound up the stilt to the smell of prey, but iron lace stung us when we tried to climb the ramp or the mountain face. Transport flew to and from. The ramp was never used. After we became protectors, we guessed at the reasons our lives ran as they did. I think we were a defense—”
“Moat monsters,” Louis said. “Invaders would have to face vampires before they reach the real guards.”
“Plausible,” the knobby man said. “There came a famine, when no more produce flowed into the city. A lost war, political games, bandits on the roads, who can tell? We vampires knew only that the flow of garbage slowed to a trickle, and water and sewage, too. What ate of the garbage went elsewhere, and we who survived partly on scavengers’ blood began to starve.
“Many days later the iron lace barrier lifted and great boxes rolled down the ramp. We tried to get them open, get to the blood within. Their wheels rolled over us. A fantastic warrior danced about the vehicles and killed all who came, and stayed after the vehicles were gone, killing all who would follow. She would not heed our pleading—”
“Plead
ing?”
“She was immune to our scent and ignored our body language. That enraged us. We had never seen a protector. We were stupid and angry and hungry. We brought the knobby one down at last, swarmed her and took what blood she hadn’t lost in the fight, and were still hungry enough to drink from our fallen. Then others fell into a sleep like death, and so did I.
“When I woke, I was changed. But I remembered, and that was already a new thing.
“Many of us tasted protector blood that day. Some died in their sleep. Four protectors woke. By her scent, one was my favored mate, and so we knew each other.”
“I wondered. Vampires are monogamous?”
“Say?”
“Mate once.”
“No, Louis. When a hominid doesn’t have the scent, that is prey. I drink her veins empty while I rish. Her scent may mark a woman as my kind and make her safe. But we were starving, Louis. She and I, my mate, what shall I call her …?”
It surprised Louis, the fervor with which Bram told a tale he’d had to be goaded into. Was this the first time he’d ever had listeners? He said, “Anne?”
“Anne and I had the will to keep our mouths shut while we mated. Of course we never mated after we woke changed, but we remembered that we trusted each other.”
The memory took him by surprise, and Louis shuddered. Trust a vampire?
She had seemed an angel in rut, supernaturally desirable, the vampire who attacked Louis Wu twelve years ago. His hands in her ash-blond curls had found too much hair, too little skull capacity. It was not possible for another hominid to judge what a Ringworld vampire really was.
Louis could see the Hindmost listening: one head cocked toward Bram and him, while the other worked at the board. He said, “Stet, go on.”
“We four explored, with ten breeders too young to make the change. My mind made maps as we went. Wedge City was a triangle, the base supported by a mountain face, the point resting on the great stilt, the stilt rising farther to form a tower. We battered down doors and smashed windows, but the only hominids in the city were imprisoned in the tower. When our breeders had been fed and the edge was off our hunger, we followed a scent trail to a better protected place, a place where two protectors had lived above a hidden store of yellow roots. You know of these roots?”
“Tree-of-life.”
“We saw their nature. Anne and I, we saw that the root was our blood now. We would starve without it. We killed the others.”
“That first protector—”
“I studied her body,” Bram said. “She was smaller than me. Her jaw was massive, specialized to chew tough branches that grew locally. Her tools were primitive. She rescued breeders of her own local species, fought to cover their passage out of the city and through the vampires, and sacrificed her life in the act.
“Louis, most life, most animals, most hominids, can only survive in one locale. Imagine that your species is restricted to some one stretch of river, clump of forest, isolated valley or swamp or desert. As a protector, you become more flexible, but everything you cherish is in one place. A protector of a less restricted kind can destroy it all if you don’t obey her commands.”
“Did you see any sign of—”
“Yes, of course, clues were everywhere, they crawled up on our shoulders to bite our necks! Two protectors dwelt in the house of the roots. One served the other. We found bodies, breeders of the servant’s species. The master was of another kind, near eighty thousand falans old, protector of a species that has since changed or become extinct. I knew the smell of him thousands of falans later. The famine drove him from Wedge City. The servant stayed to rescue her species.”
“Her blood made you a protector.”
“Evidently,” Bram agreed.
“The virus. The gene-changing virus in tree-of-life root. It’s in the blood of protectors, too.” Louis found that amusing. Vampires become immortal by drinking an immortal’s blood!
But it did not amuse him to be at the mercy of a vampire protector.
Now the plume from the sun stretched tens of millions of miles into space. The Hindmost rode a cargo plate near the rounded ceiling, one head cocked to hear. Surely he was too far away. Unless … a directional mike?
Louis asked again, “How did you get into the Repair Center?”
Bram said, “Roots to last a hundred falans. We must find the source or die when we run out. Anne and I taught each other to read. Writings in Wedge City guided us to cities with libraries. We chose a cold climate so that we might hide ourselves under clothing. They took us for visitors from afar. We paid taxes, bought land, ultimately gained a citizen’s access to the library of the Delta People.
“There we learned something of the repair facilities beneath the Map of Mars.
“We reached the Great Ocean and crossed it. We had to make inflated cylinders to walk about the surface of the Map of Mars. I prefer your pressure suits. Still, we entered while still alive.”
“And you didn’t kill each other.”
“No. Vampires have no minds, Louis Wu. A vampire protector starts fresh, intelligent from birth, bound by no preconceptions and no old loyalties or promises. If a hominid cannot choose a protector of her own species, a vampire must be her next best choice.”
You’d have killed each other for the last tree-of-life root. Louis didn’t say it. He wasn’t sure it was true. “You found the master protector. How? Why did you fight?”
“We fought for who would best guard the Arch and all beneath.”
“But his record was good, wasn’t it? Whole species must have evolved and died out during his time, but civilizations rose and flourished until—”
“But we won, Anne and I.” Bram turned away. “Hindmost, what progress?”
Louis looked toward a skeleton standing in dimness. He had guessed who that must be. “How did you get to him? He was eighty thousand falans old, you said.” Nearly a million Ringworld rotations. Twenty thousand Earth years. “All that time, and then there was you.”
“He had to come. Hindmost?”
The puppeteer called down. “I have played the Meteor Defense on three targets. We will not see results for two hours. Three before the installation in the comet can observe and react. Any of the others have hours to move, but who can dodge a beam of light?”
“Your opinion?”
“My people prefer to achieve our aims by giving other species what they want,” the Hindmost said.
“Louis Wu, react.”
Louis answered. “You’ve started something you can’t stop. You’ve attacked two war fleets, three if you count the Fleet of Worlds. Political structures get old and die, Bram, but information never gets lost anymore. Storage is too good. Somebody will be testing the Ringworld defenses for as long as there are protons.”
“Then the Arch must have a protector, for as long as there are protons.”
“At least one. Invaders wouldn’t just take over territory. They’d fiddle and test and maybe ruin something, like the City Builders did when they took the attitude jets on the rim wall to make interstellar ships.”
The knobby man waited.
“A vampire might be a mistake.”
“You have a vampire in place. To fight him might be a far more expensive mistake.”
When Louis said nothing—still chewing his thoughts—Bram fished something from his vest. It was carved wood, bigger than the flute he’d played earlier. The windsound was deeper, richer, with a drumbeat that was Bram’s fingertips tapping the barrel of the thing. Soothing, despite Louis’s irritation.
Louis waited for the mournful tootling to stop. He said, “You need a meteor watch in the plane of the Ringworld. I don’t know how to do that. The solar Meteor Defense can’t fire on anything that’s hiding under the Ringworld floor.”
“Come,” Bram said. “Hindmost, come. We’ll return later to see what has escaped us.”
The knobby man’s hand felt like a handful of marbles, and his pull on Louis’s good wrist was irresistible.
Louis found himself walking rapidly away. He looked back once at bones in a stance of attack. Then Bram guided or pushed Louis onto the stepping disk.
***
They flicked through into Needle’s cargo space.
The knobby man helped Louis strip the suit off inside out, careful of his injured arm, careful not to release spores that might have accreted on the surface. Where was the Hindmost?
Bram led Louis onto the other disk, flicked them both through into crew quarters. At no time had Louis considered resisting. Bram was just too futzy strong.
The protector knelt before a blank wall. “The puppeteer worked here to summon images into his own quarters. Let us see how well I observed him.” He produced wooden picklocks and went to work.
A diagram appeared: the map of the stepping disks.
Then a view of Weaver Town.
The Hindmost flicked in: lander bay, then crew cabin. “Forgive the delay,” he said.
“Were you testing my security? Hindmost, wake the Kzin now,” Bram said. “Afterward I want a better view of the rim wall where the protectors are working. Send your refueling probe.”
The Hindmost glanced at readouts in the autodoc lid, touched something, and danced back as the lid lifted.
The Kzin stood in one fluid motion, ready to take on an army.
Now the knobby man was armed with flash and variable-knife, though Louis hadn’t seen him move. Bram waited to see Acolyte relax, then asked, “Acolyte, will you bind yourself to me according to the terms of Louis Wu’s contract?”
The Kzin turned. His scars had disappeared and his hands looked fine. “Louis Wu, shall I do that?”
Louis swallowed his reservations and said, “Yes.”
“I accept your contract.”
“Get out of the ’doc.”
Acolyte did. Bram led Louis to the big ’doc and helped him in.
The Hindmost was busy elsewhere. Color-coded dots and rainbow arcs swirled and shifted in the captain’s cabin, responding to the puppeteer’s music. Suddenly he whistled in discord. “The probe!”
“Speak,” Bram said.
“Look! The stepping disk is dismounted from my refueling probe! Wait—” The puppeteer tapped at the wall. The view from the partly submerged probe became a view from the cliffside webeye. “There! Look, there it is!”