The Ringworld Throne

The gun: for Tegger it might be the difference between life and death. Between thief and—there was no word for what he and Warvia were now, but every hominid knew the word thief.

“Lunatic,” he said. He was trying to put things back as he’d found them. Could he get the pack back without being suspected?

He whispered into the silence. “I do not hold title to Machine People gunpowder. Stealing that secret would be stealing,” and he rolled the pack closed, and open again. Something had felt cold.

The lining: it was cold, the cold fading under his touch.

He rubbed it in his fingers. Its weave was too fine to see at any distance. It had layers, several layers.

He separated a layer out and pulled. Threads of a less robust material separated, and the layer detached.

It was filmy stuff, very fine. He could see no way to put it back. What was it?

What was Whisper’s interest?

He stuffed it into his kilt. That was less likely to be searched than his pack. He wrapped Valavirgillin’s pack. His blade set it back on a branch, perhaps the right branch.

His erstwhile companions were all up and down the beach and into the bush. Maybe they were hunting him. He’d best be on his way.

Tegger knee-walked through brush until the brush petered out. Then he ran on bare mud, hidden in a mist growing gradually denser.

The river was broadening, and so was the mud-flat shore. The cruisers were out of sight.

Tegger wasn’t worried about River Folk. Folk whose eyes must see through air and water both would have trouble identifying him. They couldn’t swim as fast as he could run, and they could hardly walk at all. How would they inform the cruisers? He was outru

Tegger was on his own.

The knowledge was a tearing in his chest. Though four alien species had been his allies and friends, he gave them little thought. His grief was for Warvia. Never since their mating, never since his childhood or hers, had they been separated for more than a few days.

The world must change before he could ever face her again.

The cover changed as he ran. Sand. Pebbles. A stand of trees dug in all over a bare rock cliff, nearly to the water. Narrow rapids here, and he had to climb a cliff side to get around them. Three vampires and an infant, huddled in the meager shadow of an overhanging cliff across the river, watched him run away from them and didn’t give chase.

As the day passed, he ran.

Chapter 8

For Not Being Warvia

It had been raining since midday. Valavirgillin tried to find paths over bare rock, but there was mud everywhere. Tilting, skidding, never quite toppling over, the wagons moved downstream toward the Shadow Nest.

When night bit an edge from the sun, Vala already had the military high ground picked out.

The river was four hundred paces wide here. Rooballabl and Fudghabladl should be safe enough. The cruisers filled their water tanks, then rolled up toward the crest. These nearer mountains were foothills to the Barrier of Flame, but that highest one would do.

The cruisers slipped and tried to slide off cliffs. Would rain slow vampires the way it was slowing her? She should have camped earlier.

But they still had daylight when they reached her chosen position.

She set the cruisers back-to-back, not too close, ca

The Gleaners retired. They didn’t like rain and they needed their sleep. The rest talked or slept or merely waited.

Vala would have welcomed the Ghouls’ advice. They were perched on a bare granite peak overlooking the Shadow Nest, talking in their own tongue, with their backs to the doused fire and the company. Valavirgillin saw two only, but she seemed to hear several voices.

The other hominids were letting the Machine People do most of the talking. So be it. Vala said, “Any vampires that get this far should be exhausted from the trek uphill. Our smell is all on the towels. It’ll distract them. They’ll be easy meat.”

Give me your thoughts. What have I missed?

Barok said, “Vampires would be coming back from where they hunt. They won’t expect to hunt this close to their nest. There’s no prey left.”

“We’ll see.”

Chit said, “When they come, they come in hordes.”

“Reminds me,” Kay said. “I scooped up three barrels of river gravel, Vala. Want some? We still have to use powder, but we can save our shot.”

“Good.”

“How’s Warvia?”

Warvia said, “Warvia hooki-Murf Thandarthal can speak for herself, Kaywerbrimmis. Warvia is in health. Have you seen sign of Tegger?”

Vala said, “I found some things missing. Survival stuff, enough to fill a backpack, all from Cruiser One. Tegger must be the quickest thief alive.” Her backpack had been disturbed too, but nothing seemed to be missing. That, she didn’t mention.

“Next question. What do we do tomorrow? Harpster? Grieving Tube?”

“Come and see,” said Grieving Tube.

Vala climbed the rock. It was nearly flat on top, and cold to the touch. She saw that Warvia had followed her; she reached down and pulled the Red woman after her.

Downstream, the Homeflow split and split again. Her gaze followed the main cha

Grieving Tube was almost scentless, smelling only of wet fur. She said, “Valavirgillin, can you see beneath the Floater? Do you see dangling loops, near side, right of center?”

It was as Tegger had described it, a disk that bulged upward in the middle. Beneath … beneath was shadow, and a sense of restless motion about the edges.

“No,” Vala said.

“Yes,” said Warvia. “I’ll sketch it, come day.”

The Ghoul said, “Warvia, that dangling helix is a ramp wide enough for heavy machinery. There are cogs along one edge, so that machines need not slip, and stairs along the other. No eyes have seen these things in many generations. The description you hear is more than twenty lifespans old, stored in a library far to spin, given me some days ago at the Thurl’s fort.”

Given how? But communication was a Ghoul’s secret, and what Vala cared about was—“You have maps of the floating thing?”

“Yes, from before the Fall of the Cities, before so many things stopped working. Details only reached me yesterday, while we were above the clouds.”

“That’s—”

“It doesn’t touch the ground,” Warvia said.

Grieving Tube said, “I was afraid of that.”

Harpster said, “None of us have been this close in a very long time. There was no point before Louis Wu boiled a sea, and after it was too dangerous—”

Vala broke in. “Warvia? The ramp doesn’t touch?”

“I’m having trouble with distances, Valavirgillin, but it’s hanging in midair. The bottom of the ramp straightens out flat like a shovel blade, but twice as high as those vampires around it.”

“We did not expect this,” Grieving Tube said. “Our chosen path would have been to force a way onto the Floater. Then vampires would have to come to us along a narrow way. They prefer to swarm. They might even have to face raw daylight, that high.”

Vala was holding tight to her temper. Long practice made that surprisingly easy. “I see. But we can’t reach it?”

“I see no way,” Harpster said, “but there are more minds here than ours. Let us set them thinking.”

Ru