The Ringworld Throne

It was as if something linked in his mind. Tegger pulled out Valavirgillin’s cloth. The peculiar dagger didn’t have an edge, only a flattened point. He used his badly blunted sword’s edge to cut a narrow strip from the cloth.

He should lay it along one of those lines of dust.

He brushed it, the little strip of Vala’s cloth, quickly across the knobs. Lightning flashed up his arm, jolting him just for an instant.

The smell… he couldn’t fight it forever… but he’d fight it for now, the vampire that sang in his mind. He glared at them and tried to think.

Glove? He pulled his towel out and tried gripping the strip through that. No good. He could grip the peculiar dagger through it, though. He could drop the strip of Vala’s cloth into the recess, and push it around with the point of the dagger until it mated two knobs.

He couldn’t see what suddenly glowed; it was outside the cabin. Three vampires suddenly lit up like suns. They yelped and tried to leap away from the light. Two slid away down the plate; the man dropped off the edge.

Reflected light was still pouring in. He didn’t need the fire anymore.

He left the first strip in place. He cut another strip from Valavirgillin’s cloth and began testing that. His teeth hurt from being clenched. He could hear his whimpering, and know how badly he wanted to throw himself out that door and follow two vampire women down to the mud. But Warvia, Warvia, I did it! I made the lightning flow!

Now, why didn’t he have anything but light?

It might be, he thought, that light was only the easiest part of City Builder tech, the part that lasted the longest. Or the part that used the least power, and too little power remained for any of these other unnamed wonders… But Tegger didn’t believe that. He’d felt the shock. Wherever it came from, there was power. And it was driving the vampires back.

The old skull was so clean. Something had claimed the meat. If not Ghouls, then birds? The big empty sockets seemed to be looking at him.

He set it in the larger compartment, but changed his mind about closing it. He said to the ancient pilot, “You think you had a bad day? I had a day nobody would want to live through. You had maybe a hundred breaths…”

But it must have felt like forever to the pilot, he thought. Falling out of the sky, maybe in a cloud of smaller vehicles, maybe screaming for help through a voice-sender that didn’t work anymore, as every part of his wonderful flying hauler went dark and dead.

Ah!

Tegger began sliding every toggle that would move. When the lights died, he slid that one back.

Yes! Every sliding thing was on full power when this thing fell, and in his experimenting he had turned each of them off. Everything but the lights! The hauler must have fallen in daylight!

And the next thing Tegger caused to happen was a sputtering, and a smell of something burned. He feared he had destroyed something.

But the next was a wind in the control bubble, which carried the vampire scent out and away and left his head clear and cold. And then he screamed in triumph.

He twisted himself around to look down the length of the cargo plate. It was hard to pick out the vampires. The lights seemed to be to either side of his bubble; they cast shadows, and vampires like shadows. He thought he saw five, and guessed at twice that. But they would come no closer.

Time, now, to remember hunger; to wonder if anything nested in here. The outside was too bare. He’d have to wait for full day and catch a fish. It seemed he would live through the night.

Where was the power, the lightning, coming from? He couldn’t guess.

He cut another finger-length strip and began trying that.

CHAPTER NINE — FAMILIAR FACES

WEAVER TOWN, A.D. 2892

Through the window in the cliff, Louis studied the weathered woman in weathered clothing. She was steering a steam-powered vehicle downslope, with a similar man beside her and a small red man perched above her head. “Three days ago?”

“Ninety hours exactly.”

“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