The Ringworld Throne

Vampires couldn’t swim, or the Water Folk would have known it. Tegger was a plains dweller; he had never tried to swim.

It was ankle deep, knee deep… Pause a moment to get his pack on his back. No kilt. He’d left it. Sword: into the sheath on his back. He’d need his arms to swim, if hominids swam like Rooballabl, if Reds could swim at all. And he ran on. Knee deep, knee deep… and out.

“Here,” said Whisper, from far away. “Go to the downstream end.”

He’d crossed thirty paces of knee-deep river to reach a shallow bulge of dark mud that did not really deserve the name of island. Vampires were piling up on shore. One, then another, stepped into the water and came toward him.

Downstream he went, running over mud, beneath a shadow too big to be anything but fog patterns. Wondering if vampires could fight while water impeded their feet. This might really be the best place for a final stand.

He did not shy from dying. I killed a vampire woman for not being Warvia, he’d told himself. But when he killed the six, it felt like he was killing Warvia over and over, killing her for what she’d done in the night, and he gloried in it.

If he killed more vampires, he would lose Warvia even in his mind.

As his feet pounded across the mud, the monstrous shadow shifted. It was too rigid. Was solid, suddenly, and alongside him. He lashed out at it with his sword, and whacked something. He rapped it with his fist.

Not a fog pattern. It was flaky and a bit springy, like layers of hammered metal.

He’d seen this thing from much farther away. It was a tilted plate with square corners, obtrusively artificial, fifteen paces by fifteen paces if half of it was under the mud. It stood out of the mud at an angle of forty degrees. The mud had piled up against it.

There were notches along the rim, big enough to attach cables. A thick post stuck up from the center. At one of the visible corners was what looked like a pulley. If there had been a cable, it was gone.

The highest corner bulged.

(Whisper was silent. Whisper spoke rarely. It might be Whisper expected him to work things out on his own, Tegger thought. But why?)

There was no smell of vampires here.

At the fall of the cities, hundreds of falans ago, vehicles were said to have rained out of the sky. Most of those were gone, buried or corroded out of existence. Sometimes you could find the shell of a floating car, and curved sheets of stuff as transparent as water, usually broken: windows. Sometimes something bigger.

Like a big plate for carrying cargoes too big to fit into a car.

The fog concealed, revealed. The plate’s highest corner bulged like soap bubbles stuck together-faceted- and as with soap bubbles, you could see in. One facet was crazed as if crawlerwebs covered it. Others were clear.

When Tegger tried to climb, the plate was too smooth and too slippery with rain and mud.

He’d better do something. He didn’t doubt he had outrun this latest wave of vampires, but even wading, they’d catch up. Tegger backed up several paces, then ran at the plate.

Halfway up he ran out of momentum. He dropped, arms and legs spread wide. The mud didn’t reach this high. It wasn’t metal, or it was covered metal: a gritty surface, offering traction even under a rain slick. He crawled.

The bulb was a single bubble, part windows, part painted metal. What was clearly a door hung by one hinge. Tegger’s fingers found an edge of the opening and pulled himself up and in.

He looked down to see a vampire below him. She looked back, watching him.

Now two. Now four.

Tegger reached down for the hanging door. His thrashing foot went through something crunchy. He ignored that. He lifted the door-it wasn’t heavy-pulled it into place and looked for a way to lock it. There was clearly a lock, but he couldn’t make it work.

Now the vampires began to climb, and slip, and climb again.

The door wouldn’t stop them. The slope might. Otherwise this bulb would become their larder.

“Whisper? What next?” he asked, expecting nothing.

Nothing. He must have left Whisper down there. With the vampires. Funny, but he couldn’t make himself worry for Whisper’s safety.

Tegger took off his pack. He wanted light, and there was no harm now in setting a fire. He struck his firestarter until he had a blaze.

He studied the crunchy stuff for a moment. He’d seen the bones of prey and of cattle, and he knew the feel of his own bone structures. His foot had punched through some ribs, it seemed.

The pilot had been of an unknown species, bigger than a Red, burly, with long arms. Its clothing was mere shreds of no particular color. The skull had fallen too easily, as if its neck was broken when the carrier hit the mud. It had the massive jaw of an herbivore.

A hominid skeleton. Imagine that. The Ghouls had never come for it.

At the fall of the cities the Night People must have been gorged and busy beyond imagination. When they found they couldn’t climb this wreck to reach the corpse in the control bubble, they’d given up. Nothing else would be climbing up here-they must have reasoned-to find an abandoned corpse and upbraid the untidy Ghouls.

In the dazzle of the firelight he couldn’t see the vampires below. The shell glowed around him. One curved window was not covered with webs, as he’d thought, but shattered; the pieces still stuck together. Others were intact.

Before him were toggles just big enough for his fingertips, that slid horizontally or vertically. There was a little door as big as his two spread hands, and another twice that size, but neither would open. There was a wheel on a post that Tegger found he could push in all six directions, though that took both hands and all of his strength. He moved all of the toggles, right or left or up or down, whichever way they’d move. None of them did anything.

His tinder was running out, and there was nothing here to burn.

If Warvia were here. She’d figure this out.

If Warvia were here. He’d tell her he never doubted her. She hadn’t chosen to break their marriage, she’d been overwhelmed by a smell that entered below her mind and clamped down on the soul. How long had he been hearing that vampire song? The light was going, and now he could see a triangular face peering longingly in at him.

Animal. Brain half the size of his. If she ever realized what the door was, he was dead. But the real danger, Tegger knew, was a scent that would have him tearing it free himself. He shouted, “Whisper!”

She shied from his scream, just for a moment, then answered with her song.

He drove his fist into one of the little doors with all his strength.

It popped open. The compartment behind it wasn’t large, but he found what he needed: a thick book full of dry sheets of thin stuff that would burn.

The vampire woman-women-shied back from the light. Two women now, and a man, too, all trying to balance above him on the shell. Waiting.

He held a burning sheet above the compartment. There was the book-he was tearing up a thick book of maps-and a paper bag filled with dry mold, and a peculiar dagger which he took, and nothing else.

So he smashed the other door. It hurt, but the door popped open.

This recess was no deeper than one joint of a finger. What showed was entirely cryptic, a maze of toy knob. The gun of a City Builder machine, Tegger thought, and he looked for silver threads linking the little knobs. He had been told that they were what carried power. He was disappointed not to find them.

He touched two of the points with his fingertips.

The muscles in his arms spasmed hard and threw him back in the seat. For a long moment he couldn’t remember how to breathe.

Was this what lightning felt like? Power! But it would kill him.

He lit another paper and held it above the recess.

Some of the little knobs were linked by slender lines of dust. His own touch had disturbed the rest.