The Ringworld Throne

Louis could see the Hindmost listening: one head cocked toward Bram and him, while the other worked at the board. He said, “Stet, go on.”

“We four explored, with ten breeders too young to make the change. My mind made maps as we went. Wedge City was a triangle, the base supported by a mountain face, the point resting on the great stilt, the stilt rising farther to form a tower. We battered down doors and smashed windows, but the only hominids in the city were imprisoned in the tower. When our breeders had been fed and the edge was off our hunger, we followed a scent trail to a better protected place, a place where two protectors had lived above a hidden store of yellow roots. You know of these roots?”

“Tree-of-life.”

“We saw their nature. A

“That first protector—”

“I studied her body,” Bram said. “She was smaller than me. Her jaw was massive, specialized to chew tough branches that grew locally. Her tools were primitive. She rescued breeders of her own local species, fought to cover their passage out of the city and through the vampires, and sacrificed her life in the act.

“Louis, most life, most animals, most hominids, can only survive in one locale. Imagine that your species is restricted to some one stretch of river, clump of forest, isolated valley or swamp or desert. As a protector, you become more flexible, but everything you cherish is in one place. A protector of a less restricted kind can destroy it all if you don’t obey her commands.”

“Did you see any sign of—”

“Yes, of course, clues were everywhere, they crawled up on our shoulders to bite our necks! Two protectors dwelt in the house of the roots. One served the other. We found bodies, breeders of the servant’s species. The master was of another kind, near eighty thousand falans old, protector of a species that has since changed or become extinct. I knew the smell of him thousands of falans later. The famine drove him from Wedge City. The servant stayed to rescue her species.”

“Her blood made you a protector.”

“Evidently,” Bram agreed.

“The virus. The gene-changing virus in tree-of-life root. It’s in the blood of protectors, too.” Louis found that amusing. Vampires become immortal by drinking an immortal’s blood!

But it did not amuse him to be at the mercy of a vampire protector.

Now the plume from the sun stretched tens of millions of miles into space. The Hindmost rode a cargo plate near the rounded ceiling, one head cocked to hear. Surely he was too far away. Unless … a directional mike?

Louis asked again, “How did you get into the Repair Center?”

Bram said, “Roots to last a hundred falans. We must find the source or die when we run out. A

“There we learned something of the repair facilities beneath the Map of Mars.

“We reached the Great Ocean and crossed it. We had to make inflated cylinders to walk about the surface of the Map of Mars. I prefer your pressure suits. Still, we entered while still alive.”

“And you didn’t kill each other.”

“No. Vampires have no minds, Louis Wu. A vampire protector starts fresh, intelligent from birth, bound by no preconceptions and no old loyalties or promises. If a hominid ca

You’d have killed each other for the last tree-of-life root. Louis didn’t say it. He wasn’t sure it was true. “You found the master protector. How? Why did you fight?”

“We fought for who would best guard the Arch and all beneath.”

“But his record was good, wasn’t it? Whole species must have evolved and died out during his time, but civilizations rose and flourished until—”

“But we won, A

Louis looked toward a skeleton standing in dimness. He had guessed who that must be. “How did you get to him? He was eighty thousand falans old, you said.” Nearly a million Ringworld rotations. Twenty thousand Earth years. “All that time, and then there was you.”

“He had to come. Hindmost?”

The puppeteer called down. “I have played the Meteor Defense on three targets. We will not see results for two hours. Three before the installation in the comet can observe and react. Any of the others have hours to move, but who can dodge a beam of light?”

“Your opinion?”

“My people prefer to achieve our aims by giving other species what they want,” the Hindmost said.

“Louis Wu, react.”

Louis answered. “You’ve started something you can’t stop. You’ve attacked two war fleets, three if you count the Fleet of Worlds. Political structures get old and die, Bram, but information never gets lost anymore. Storage is too good. Somebody will be testing the Ringworld defenses for as long as there are protons.”

“Then the Arch must have a protector, for as long as there are protons.”

“At least one. Invaders wouldn’t just take over territory. They’d fiddle and test and maybe ruin something, like the City Builders did when they took the attitude jets on the rim wall to make interstellar ships.”

The knobby man waited.

“A vampire might be a mistake.”

“You have a vampire in place. To fight him might be a far more expensive mistake.”

When Louis said nothing—still chewing his thoughts—Bram fished something from his vest. It was carved wood, bigger than the flute he’d played earlier. The windsound was deeper, richer, with a drumbeat that was Bram’s fingertips tapping the barrel of the thing. Soothing, despite Louis’s irritation.

Louis waited for the mournful tootling to stop. He said, “You need a meteor watch in the plane of the Ringworld. I don’t know how to do that. The solar Meteor Defense can’t fire on anything that’s hiding under the Ringworld floor.”

“Come,” Bram said. “Hindmost, come. We’ll return later to see what has escaped us.”

The knobby man’s hand felt like a handful of marbles, and his pull on Louis’s good wrist was irresistible. Louis found himself walking rapidly away. He looked back once at bones in a stance of attack. Then Bram guided or pushed Louis onto the stepping disk.

They flicked through into Needle’s cargo space.

The knobby man helped Louis strip the suit off inside out, careful of his injured arm, careful not to release spores that might have accreted on the surface. Where was the Hindmost?

Bram led Louis onto the other disk, flicked them both through into crew quarters. At no time had Louis considered resisting. Bram was just too futzy strong.

The protector knelt before a blank wall. “The puppeteer worked here to summon images into his own quarters. Let us see how well I observed him.” He produced wooden picklocks and went to work.

A diagram appeared: the map of the stepping disks.

Then a view of Weaver Town.

The Hindmost flicked in: lander bay, then crew cabin. “Forgive the delay,” he said.

“Were you testing my security? Hindmost, wake the Kzin now,” Bram said. “Afterward I want a better view of the rim wall where the protectors are working. Send your refueling probe.”

The Hindmost glanced at readouts in the autodoc lid, touched something, and danced back as the lid lifted.

The Kzin stood in one fluid motion, ready to take on an army.

Now the knobby man was armed with flash and variable-knife, though Louis hadn’t seen him move. Bram waited to see Acolyte relax, then asked, “Acolyte, will you bind yourself to me according to the terms of Louis Wu’s contract?”