The Ringworld Throne

“What would they be doing here?”

Louis shrugged inside his suit. “The sky is full of planets. There’s only one Ringworld. Outsiders are curious.”

The solar plume was still rising. “Observe and criticize,” the knobby man said to the Hindmost. Fingers like strings of walnuts danced over the wall.

The puppeteer watched. He said, “Good.”

It all seemed very leisurely. The plume would take hours to form. The superthermal laser effect would be propagating for minutes before it left the plume. The targets looked to be hours away at lightspeed.

Louis had already discarded the notion of a last minute rescue.

Louis Wu owed nothing at all to the United Nations or the ARM. He wasn’t obliged to protect kzinti ships either. Disarmed and injured, he was no match for a protector of any species. He knew he’d be lucky to keep his life, now that he was back in this dance of powers.

His contract didn’t bind him to rescue the knobby man’s prey. And they had come as invaders.

“I pointed out a monitor station, too. One of mine,” the Hindmost was saying. “The Conservatives will never miss it.”

“Right. Knobby man, I’m tempted to call you ‘Dracula.’ Dracula was the archetype of story vampires.”

“Follow your whim.”

“No. Trite. You’re a protector, a prime mover among vampires. Let’s call you ‘Bram.’ Can you tell me what you want of me?”

“I want what is best for my species. Vampires face three threats, and each threatens all beneath the Arch including yourselves.”

The knobby man watched Louis’s face as he spoke. “First, if vampires become numerous, we deplete our prey. Intelligent hominids might even find a way to exterminate us. I don’t want any species of vampire getting too much attention. You don’t want us spreading.”

“The vampire slayers, were they yours? No, that’s crazy. They’re your own species.”

“No, Louis, they’re not. There must be a hundred separate species of vampire on the Ringworld.”

“Ah. Where do yours live?”

Bram ignored that. “Louis, I did not shape the Shadow Nest Alliance. Their solution was elegant, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Second, these invaders from space threaten the Ringworld structure itself.”

Louis nodded. “An interstellar warship can always use a meteoroid impact for a weapon. Watch for falling comets.”

“The third threat is protectors, for the duels they fight.”

Louis asked, “Just how many protectors have we got already?”

“Three or more involved in repairing the rim wall installations. Each would seem to have its task, but all will bear watching.”

“What species, can you tell?”

“It’s an important question, isn’t it? Those who rule would be vampires. Any others would be servants drafted from local species. Louis, one can argue—”

“How the tanj did the Ringworld come to be infested with vampire protectors?”

“That is an intricate tale, but why should I tell it?”

Louis had carefully not bound himself or the Hindmost to reveal secrets. How could he urge Bram to reveal his? He said, “It’s your call. First decide what you want. Decide if we can give it to you. Then decide how much we need to know to do it right.”

The knobby man’s hand danced over the wall. He said, “You keep secrets. Why should I tell mine? You are bound to obey regardless.”

Try this—“You’ve been shooting down ships. Stet, but suppose you miss one? You’ve no way to judge what they’ll do next. We three, I and Acolyte and the Hindmost, are the only aliens at hand. You expect to watch us and extrapolate what invaders would do. But we don’t react if we don’t know anything.”

The bright plume pulled from the sun had been arcing over, but now it started to straighten, to narrow. Bram said, “Hindmost?”

“The prominence is nearly in place.”

“Will you complete the maneuver?”

“Destroy all four sources?”

“Leave the comet. Louis, how can you react properly if you know you’re being watched?”

“When I’m being watched, I watch back. Take it into account. Bram, who are you? How did a vampire get into the Repair Center?”

“I mapped my way in.”

Louis waited.

“Louis, have you seen how hominids behave when they drink the fuel the Machine People make?”

“I’ve done it myself.”

“I never have. Now you must imagine that you have drunk fuel begi

“I was born … I was shaped 7,200 falans ago. Corpses lay all about me, tens of my kind, days dead, and one strange shape that was all knobs. I was all knobs, too, sexless, and cold and hungry and gashed by fighting, but I was solving the world like a great puzzle. Three others were waking, changed like me.”

Louis asked, “You trapped a protector? Vampires aren’t that intelligent.”

“This one was born trapped, made to be a servant.”

Made by …? “Go on.”

“The city stood on a vertical cliff and one great stilt. I was born in its shadow. We were always hungry. A ramp wound up the stilt to the smell of prey, but iron lace stung us when we tried to climb the ramp or the mountain face. Transport flew to and from. The ramp was never used. After we became protectors, we guessed at the reasons our lives ran as they did. I think we were a defense—”

“Moat monsters,” Louis said. “Invaders would have to face vampires before they reach the real guards.”

“Plausible,” the knobby man said. “There came a famine, when no more produce flowed into the city. A lost war, political games, bandits on the roads, who can tell? We vampires knew only that the flow of garbage slowed to a trickle, and water and sewage, too. What ate of the garbage went elsewhere, and we who survived partly on scavengers’ blood began to starve.

“Many days later the iron lace barrier lifted and great boxes rolled down the ramp. We tried to get them open, get to the blood within. Their wheels rolled over us. A fantastic warrior danced about the vehicles and killed all who came, and stayed after the vehicles were gone, killing all who would follow. She would not heed our pleading—”

“Pleading?”

“She was immune to our scent and ignored our body language. That enraged us. We had never seen a protector. We were stupid and angry and hungry. We brought the knobby one down at last, swarmed her and took what blood she hadn’t lost in the fight, and were still hungry enough to drink from our fallen. Then others fell into a sleep like death, and so did I.

“When I woke, I was changed. But I remembered, and that was already a new thing.

“Many of us tasted protector blood that day. Some died in their sleep. Four protectors woke. By her scent, one was my favored mate, and so we knew each other.”

“I wondered. Vampires are monogamous?”

“Say?”

“Mate once.”

“No, Louis. When a hominid doesn’t have the scent, that is prey. I drink her veins empty while I rish. Her scent may mark a woman as my kind and make her safe. But we were starving, Louis. She and I, my mate, what shall I call her …?”

It surprised Louis, the fervor with which Bram told a tale he’d had to be goaded into. Was this the first time he’d ever had listeners? He said, “A

“A

The memory took him by surprise, and Louis shuddered. Trust a vampire?

She had seemed an angel in rut, supernaturally desirable, the vampire who attacked Louis Wu twelve years ago. His hands in her ash-blond curls had found too much hair, too little skull capacity. It was not possible for another hominid to judge what a Ringworld vampire really was.