The Ringworld Throne

Tegger felt much better after he had devoured the bird. Take away hunger, disperse the rutting scent of ten thousand vampires, give him a flat surface to rest … The wind was cold, this high. Tegger pulled a poncho from his pack and wiggled into it.

The cold, the aches, the troubles of a nightmare day began to recede … and sleep was a vampire with its teeth in his throat. He dared not sleep in the open. He looked about him in woozy panic.

The huge door on that storage cube was surely too heavy to move. Too heavy for anyone, and wildly wasteful of power …?

Around a corner from the huge door was a door not much taller than Tegger.

A kick sent it springing back at him. He went into darkness, found something resilient to climb, and slept.

He clung to sleep, fearing what his memory would tell him. Memory came anyway; but it was wavering light on his eyelids that snapped him awake.

Sunlight flooded through the man-sized doorway. It faded even as he was climbing down from a mountain of bales that smelled weakly of vegetable rot. Stuff to be turned into cloth? Foodstuffs would have been in a worse state.

He stepped outside.

Broken cloudscapes swept sluggishly overhead. Sunlight swept in vertical beams along the dock. Tegger didn’t see any birds until he crept to the edge on hands and knees and looked down.

The windowed bulb that had carried him here was below him, crushed. He wasn’t going home that way … hadn’t pla

Myriad birds wheeled with spread wings in the sunlight, dropping to snatch up—what? Makaways in such numbers must be finding plenty of prey. A whole ecology would be feeding off what the vampires left, off whole populations of drained corpses.

There might be nothing but birds up here.

No, wait: here was some kind of web on the vertical face of the dock, facing outward, to starboard. He had to lean far over to see it.

The threads were bronze when the light fell right; otherwise nothing could be seen at all. Size was hard to judge because of the way the web divided itself into nothing at the edges. It might be as wide as a Grass Giant was tall. The motionless black dot at the center might be the webspi

Birds and a webspi

What he’d been thinking of as the “City” was unfamiliar in nearly every detail. Tegger didn’t have names for most of what he could see. The City sloped upward in irregular geometries, and peaked at the center in a vertical tube.

Tegger began ru

There was no fear in him now. It was just a way of exploring. He ran, and the dock, eight manheights wide, ran away before him. Now it narrowed, but continued, two manheights wide: not a dock anymore, but merely the rim of the City.

Rim Street. Structures lined it. Some had doors. Here and there an alley ran out of sight between windowless bulks. Rounded, doorless shapes had ladders ru

The rain resumed. Tegger had to watch his footing now, but the surface was rough beneath his feet, and the rain was ru

He was not much more than warmed up when he saw an anomaly, a wide street becoming flights of steps, and on either side—

Tegger stopped. Dwellings? He knew the Thurl’s tents and Ginjerofer’s much smaller tents; he’d seen permanent dwellings kept by more sedentary hominids. He’d never seen anything like these brightly painted square houses. But they were houses, with manheight doors, and trees arrayed about them, and windows.

Later. He ran on.

There were no more houses along Rim Street. He saw Brobdingnagian shapes, rectangular solids, distorted eggs, forests of tubing, great flat and curved metal webs. His mind wasn’t making much sense of what he saw. Get a rounded picture, that was it; go for detail later.

He was looking at the City, not at the landscape beyond. But he had the river in view again, and a line of rocky bluffs—

The cruisers!

No species had better distance vision than a Red Herder, and no natural shape could pass for a Machine People cruiser. He couldn’t be wrong. He’d found Valavirgillin’s caravan on that rocky peak.

Most of the expedition seemed to have gone off. He saw no sign of life until one of two specks stood up to stretch. Grass Giant sentries? Tegger stepped to the edge and waved like a man trying to fly.

Would they see him?

Not here, against all these confusing shapes. But if he could put the sky behind him …

All in good time. The cruisers would keep.

Surprises were not easy to come by when you recognized nothing.

Rim Street opened out, widened. Far ahead, that was the door he’d kicked open last night. And here at the port-spin end of the docks, a street ran off at a right angle. A dark-mouthed street eight manheights wide, angling steeply down, where everything else ran uphill toward the City’s center.

He turned right.

He was ru

He slowed. The stench would have stopped anyone. Death and corruption, and something under that, something familiar. A bit of night vision was coming now. The street curved off to the right, still descending …

He ran out faster than he’d gone in.

What he’d seen as a spiral staircase last night was far larger than he’d realized. Big enough for four cruisers moving abreast, he thought. For vampires too, this was the way up.

Tegger looked into the darkness and knew that he would have to go there. And wait while his eyes adjusted. And look into the Shadow Nest, and see what looked back.

But not yet. Tegger ran on.

Docks and storage … great silvered tanks … here, sunlight flashed off windows. Short streets and wide stairs, skewed as they rose, windowed houses rising tier after tier to what might be a great eyeball.

He’d reached Stair Street. Tegger began to climb.

The houses had bands and patches of dirt around and between them. For most of Stair Street’s length the wide dirt patch stretching out from the front door of one house was the flat roof of the house below.

Some of these plots were flooded. Some had been washed away or reduced to sand by hundreds of falans of rainfall. Here grew tall grass; here grew nothing. There were dead trees, fallen trees, live trees, fruiting trees. Here a straggling line of pomes ran from the topmost house nearly down to Rim Street. They looked planted, at first; but two topmost pome trees were dead, and the bottommost were just begi

Here was a window-flat, not like a vehicle window, as big as the Thurl’s bed. Awesome. Its surface was murky. Tegger peered through it, but the interior was dark.

Next door, a huge tree had uprooted and cracked the wall of a house. This house, too, had one great window facing the earthen plot. Tegger picked up a chunk of fallen rubble and tried to smash it. It was the rubble that cracked.

But the cracked wall. Might he squeeze through that opening?

Yes.

The place was big by Tegger’s standards: larger than a tent. The scale was larger, too: not quite Grass Giant size. A chair he sat in left his feet dangling.

He found an oval bed on the other side of the picture window. Five skeletons on the bed. Three adults, two children. They were a friendly group and seemed at peace. One more, child size, was off the bed, reaching for a door.