The Ringworld Throne

Parald sliced off meat and passed it to Kidada, then Sawur, then a sudden crowd. Wheek offered Louis a fish on a stick. Weavers and Sailors took their meals and moved through the huts to the cliff side.

I show you the Ringworld invaded; come and talk. I do not show you Valavirgillin alive or dead; you must ask.

Louis accepted a slice of antelope and, eating two-handed, followed Parald.

The Weavers sat on tables and the sand, watching. Sawur made room for him on a table.

Within the webeye window, a shadow square crossed the sun. Details became clearer, sharper.

Brilliant light flared on the rim wall. Over the next several minutes the point moved inward, above the Ringworld surface; dimmed; blurred; went out.

Dull stuff, but they watched. Louis wondered if Weavers would become addicted to passive entertainment.

The clouds were moving now. Vast wind patterns showed their shapes in fast-forward. A tiny pale hourglass sucked streamlines at both ends: a hurricane on its side, a meteor puncture hole.

Fast-forward, a solar prominence rose past the rim of the shadow square. A shock wave of green brilliance rose up the plume. Then a burning green star delicately touched the rim wall at the point where the earlier star had rested. The green star walked off the rim and blurred as it intersected clouds.

As the last sliver of sun vanished overhead, the Weavers all streamed off to their huts, chattering in excitement punctuated by yawns. Louis watched in astonishment. These Weavers were really diurnal.

Before the Hindmost could decide to speak in front of them, Louis strolled back to the fire. He raked two roots out of the coals.

One was acrid. One wasn’t bad. He didn’t always eat this well.

The Sailors had remained. One came to join him. “That show is for you, isn’t it?”

Louis looked back. Within the Hindmost’s window, the green star had gone out.

“I don’t know what to say to him,” Louis said. “Wheek, did he speak to you?”

“No. He frightens me.”

The Hindmost’s message seemed clear enough. Fusion drive: invading spacecraft. ARM and Patriarchy and the Fleet of Worlds all knew of the Ringworld. Each had had time to mount expeditions. Or the invader might be a returning City Builder craft, or someone else entirely.

The automatic Meteor Defense wouldn’t react if an invader moved slowly. Some entity was actively killing ships.

The killer had a problem, too. Lightspeed. The invader had landed light-minutes from the second Great Ocean, but the attack had come hours slow. A solar plume must be ejected, the superthermal laser effect must propagate along the plasma, and it all took time; but there was still that lightspeed delay. The prey might still escape.

The Hindmost would be extremely eager to find a hyperdrive ship undamaged.

Low music was playing through distant branches. Wheek had gone to his boat. Louis raked a third root from the fire. He slit it, then pushed on the ends to open it. Live steam, and a smell not too different from a sweet potato.

He wondered if he’d found wild tree-of-life. No matter. The soil wouldn’t have enough thallium; the plant wouldn’t support the virus that caused the change; and cooking would kill it anyway. Louis took his time eating, then went toward Sawur’s wicker hut.

The music seemed to grow louder. Strange stuff, with qualities of wind and humming strings. He stopped outside Sawur’s wicker hut to listen.

The music stopped. A voice said, “Will you not speak to the Web Dweller?”

“Not tonight,” Louis said, and looked around him. The voice was a child’s, with a bit of a speech impediment. Tonight was foggy, but Ringworld nights were bright, and he should have seen something, Louis thought.

“Will you show yourself?”

A nightmare rose out of low brush, too near. Lank hair covered its body, the color of the night. Big spade teeth forced an exaggerated grin. Long arms, big hands; a miniature harp in one hand.

The Ghoul seemed male, but a kilt hid that. Sparse facial hair, flat chest: a child, boy or girl.

“Nice kilt,” Louis said.

“Nice backpouch. Weaver work is loved all through the Shenthy River valley.”

Louis knew that: he had seen Weaver work tens of thousands of miles downstream. He asked, “Do you do security work for the Weavers?”

“Sec…?”

“Guard their possessions by night.”

“Yes, we stop thieves.”

“But you’re not paid for normal, ah …”

In lieu of answer—was there a word for garbage disposal plus funeral service?—the child blew into the handle of his harp while his fingers played across the holes and tweaked the strings. He played a tune on his tootling, twanging instrument, then held it out. “Do you have a name for this?”

“Illegitimate child of a harp and a kazoo. A kazarp?”

“Then I am Kazarp,” the Ghoul said. “Are you Louis Wu?”

“How–”

“We know that you boiled an ocean, far up the Arch—” Kazarp pointed. “—there. You vanish for forty-one falans, and we find you here.”

“Kazarp, your communications are awesome. How is it done?” Louis didn’t expect an answer. Ghouls had their secrets.

“Sunlight and mirrors,” Kazarp said. “Was the Web Dweller your friend once?”

“Ally. Not friend. It’s complicated.”

The pointy-faced hominid examined Louis. Louis was trying to ignore the smell of a carrion eater’s breath. The child asked, “Would you have spoken to father?”

“Maybe. How old are you?”

“Near forty falans.”

Ten years. “How old is your father?”

“A hundred fifty.”

“In falans I’m about a thousand,” Louis Wu said. He decided that the child was too easy to notice. A distraction? Was his father eavesdropping?

Well, then, how to tell this? Should he? Louis said, “The Web Dweller, the big cat, two City Builders, and me. We saved everything under the Arch.”

Kazarp said nothing. Some wanderers must be great liars, Louis thought. He said, “We had a plan. But it would kill s-s-some … it would kill many of the people we were trying to save. I’m as guilty as I thought the Web Dweller was, and I hated him for it. Now I find out that the Web Dweller saved many more than I realized.”

“Then you must thank him. And apologize?”

“I did that, Kazarp. Kazarp, I expect we’ll talk again, but my species needs sleep. If your father wants to talk, a Ghoul could certainly find me.” Louis knelt to enter the wicker house.

“Did it leave a bad taste?”

Louis laughed. A Ghoul might well know all about bad taste! But that voice wasn’t Kazarp.

He stepped back outside. He said, “Yes.”

“Still, you swallowed what you must. Now the Web Dweller must decide. A valuable alliance, a breach of ma

“Even guessing makes my head hurt.”

The child had settled cross-legged and was playing background music to the voice that spoke from nowhere. The adult’s voice said, “We live perhaps two hundred falans. If your misunderstanding only cost you forty or fifty falans, for such as you it must be worth repairing.”

“Oh, the City Builders were refugees, and killing doesn’t bother Chmeee! But I’m still guilty. I consented. I thought we killed all those people to save the rest.”

“Be joyful.”

“Yeah.” He couldn’t ask even a Ghoul to consider the numbers involved. No sane mind could grasp them. Hominids of varying intelligence inhabit the Ringworld, invading every conceivable ecological niche. Cattle, otters, vampire bats, hyenas, hawks … Roughly thirty trillion, with a margin of error bigger than all known space.

We can save most of them. We will generate a solar flare and turn it on the Ringworld surface to bring heated hydrogen fuel to the few remounted attitude jets on the rim walls. Lose fifteen hundred billion to radiation and fire. They would die anyway. Save twenty times as many.