The Ringworld Throne

slipping, in the moment before the plates’ inherent stability turned him upright.

Louis’s brain and belly and inner ears were whirling. Moments passed before his eyes could focus.

No Martians were there to watch.

He was hovering alongside a glassy-smooth stretch of lava that dropped almost straight for… futz… a thousand feet before it eased toward horizontal like a ski jump. Louis could see a splash of orange at the bottom: Acolyte in his translucent suit. He might even have survived such a fall… or not.

Louis decided he needn’t fear Martians.

This time the Martians had mounted their stepping disk upside down at the top of the highest cliff they could find. Then the flame that destroyed the Hindmost’s refueling probe had flooded through the stepping disk. Any Martians watching the trap must have been crisped. The cliff side had melted and flowed, forming a slide.

Louis landed the cargo plates, loosed the lines, and jumped down.

Acolyte by at an angle on hot red rock.

Louis got a shoulder under the Kzin. Not enough, and he pulled to roll the Kzin over him. Acolyte was an inert mass. Louis could feel broken ribs shifting.

He could have used Martian gravity about now.

He tightened his abdominal muscles, knees and back, grunt and lift. Lift! A nearly grown male Kzin, pressure suit and all, rose just high enough to roll onto the cargo plate.

Louis crawled aboard. Tied the Kzin down. Took the cargo plates up. He used the little thruster to put him just under the stepping disk. Lifted until his shoulders touched.

Flick, they were upside down in Needle with the cargo plates on top of them.

Bram did the rest: rolled the cargo plates off, opened all the sealstrips that held the Kzin’s suit together, and pulled him out. The Kzin’s eyes blinked, focused, found Louis. Otherwise he seemed unable to move.

Bram eased Louis out of his suit, stretched him out next to Acolyte, and examined him. That hurt. “You’ve torn some muscles and tendons,” he said. “You need the ‘doc, but the Kzin needs it more.”

“He goes first,” Louis said. If Acolyte died, what would he say to Chmeee?

Bram lifted the Kzin with no apparent effort, rolled him into the ‘doc and closed it. An odd notion: had Bram been waiting for permission?

Not so odd. Louis was starting to hurt in earnest now, and it wouldn’t do to let Bram know. Louis was a hominid and Acolyte wasn’t, and a protector might need a breeder’s permission to heal an alien first.

Bram picked him up and set him on the cargo plates in one smooth motion. Pain flashed through him, blocking his breath, turning his scream to a squeak. Bram hooked up leads and tubes from Teela’s portable ‘doc. He said, “Many of the reservoirs here need filling, Hindmost. Can your larger ‘doc make medicines?”

“The kitchen has a pharmacy menu.”

The port and starboard walls glowed with orange heat.

In another window he saw a black, baggy shape roll over the rim of the maglev rail. Then nothing, only a silver path receding to infinity.

The pain was receding. Louis knew he wouldn’t be lucid much longer.

He felt lean and knobby arms around him. Hard fingertips probed him here and there. A rib felt distant pain, then eased. His back cracked, and again lower down, and a hip joint, and his right knee.

Bram spoke near his ear, but not to Louis. “The Night People went to some effort to show us a spill mountain village, one out of tens of thousands. Why?”

The Hindmost replied, “Didn’t you see the way…” and Louis was asleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT — THE PASSAGE

“Feel that?”

“Yes,” said Warvia.

The room was trembling, a tiny vibration in all the walls and the rock below.

Riding weird vehicles had left them dizzy and disoriented, but they’d had hours to sleep that off. This was something else. Tegger hadn’t noticed at first. Now Warvia’s breathing and the endless tremor were the only sensations in the dark room.

“Any idea—”

“Seabottom mulch. It’s pounding on the peak, and we feel it all the way down here.”

Tegger stared at her in the dark.

“Pipes pump it up the back of the rim wall. It falls fifty daywalks from the edge of the rim,” Warvia said. “It falls on all the spill mountains. It’s what makes the spill mountains. Without the pumps, all the soil beneath the Arch would end up in the seas. Whisper told me all about it.”

“You got more out of Whisper than I ever did.”

“I wonder where she is now.”

“She?”

Fingers caressed his jaw. “I’m guessing. I asked, but she wouldn’t say. Do you know what that seabottom muck is called?”

“What?”

“Flup.”

Tegger belly-laughed. “What? You mean all this time-Flup, everyone I know thinks he knows what flup means. Seabottom?”

“This mountain is made of it. Pressure turns it into rock—”

White light flooded them. A voice said, “Hello.”

They leapt to their feet, wrapping fur around them. The High Point People had left them a fur like Saron’s, relic of a green-spotted sloth with a damaged head. On Warvia it looked quite lovely.

Warvia had other concerns. She whispered, “That was no High Point accent—”

“Hello? You hear the voice of Louis Wu. May we talk?”

Tegger blinked against the painful light. Details weren’t there, but he could pick out a man’s shape and something stranger.

“You have invaded our privacy,” he said.

“You were not sleeping. Ours is the spy device you carried for so long. Will you speak or shall we come another time?”

Something rapped on the wood beside the skin door. A woman’s voice called, “Teegr? Wairbeea?”

“Flup! Come in,” Tegger ordered.

Through the skins came Jennawil and Barraye and a smell of blood. “We hear voices,” the young woman said, “else we would have left this in the anteroom. It’s a gwill. Skreepu killed it for you.”

The gwill was a big lizard. Its tail still twitched.

“Your timing is good,” Tegger said. He hefted the gwill. Its skin felt armored. It would have to be skinned. To the glare in the web and the monsters within, he said, “You speak to Jennawil and Barraye of the High Point People. They know what we only guess. Jennawil, Barraye, we meet Louis Wu at last.”

Dozing with his chin on the portable ‘doc, Louis heard himself speaking. “You hear the voice of Louis Wu. You see my associates, Bram and the Web Dweller. We have kept silence because we have enemies.”

“We are Warvia and Tegger,” a high-pitched alien voice said. Louis’s eyes were open now, and he recognized the red-skinned vampire slayers. “Why do you break silence now?”

“We must ask questions.” That was the voice of Louis Wu, all right, but it was coming from the Hindmost.

A High Point man said, “We are to show you the hidden mirror and the passage through the rim and anything else you desire.”

“Thank you. Are you prepared to go through the passage?”