The Ringworld Throne

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 ru

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.

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 u

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 9

Familiar Faces

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?”