The Ringworld Throne

The Kzin turned. His scars had disappeared and his hands looked fine. “Louis Wu, shall I do that?”

Louis swallowed his reservations and said, “Yes.”

“I accept your contract.”

“Get out of the ’doc.”

Acolyte did. Bram led Louis to the big ’doc and helped him in.

The Hindmost was busy elsewhere. Color-coded dots and rainbow arcs swirled and shifted in the captain’s cabin, responding to the puppeteer’s music. Suddenly he whistled in discord. “The probe!”

“Speak,” Bram said.

“Look! The stepping disk is dismounted from my refueling probe! Wait—” The puppeteer tapped at the wall. The view from the partly submerged probe became a view from the cliffside webeye. “There! Look, there it is!”

The teleport device that had been mounted on the probe’s flank now lay flat on the riverbank beside the Council House.

“Nobody’s trying to hide it,” Louis said. “The little disk in the nose with the deuterium filter, is that still in place?”

The Hindmost looked. “Yes.”

“It’s almost flattering. Someone wants me back.”

“Theft!”

“Yeah, but leave it. What you’d better do is bring the probe here and mount another disk. Acolyte, the Hindmost will read you your contract. Don’t harm either of these people. Wake me up when the ’doc is through with me. The kitchen wall has settings to feed a Kzin, and Bram here will be using it, too. Will you be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Stet.” With no small trepidation, Louis lay down in the coffin-shaped ’doc. The lid closed.

Chapter 21

Physics Lessons

They saw it days ahead: a black line against the vastly more distant starboard rim wall.

Closer, the line became a tremendous and artificial silhouette rising above the desert: a raised platform with bumps clustered near the center.

Closer yet, the Reds could see daylight under parts of the elevation. By then Warvia knew. It was the Night People’s goal, and the Sand People’s cemetery.

They were traveling through a dry land. Sand wasn’t good for the motor. There had been a hungry few days before they ran across the Sand People.

The Sand People went muffled in pastel robes. Small, compact beasts drew their wagons in groups of twelve, and served as meat animals, too. Carnivores! Red Herders and Machine People rejoiced alike.

They made gifts of the cloth they’d taken from the Shadow Nest. The Sand People killed two of their beasts to make a feast. The several species shared lore and stories as best they could. Only Karker spoke the trade language well enough to be understood, and everything had to be translated.

Rishathra didn’t require translation, only gestures. Without their robes, the Sand People were small and compact: as short as Gleaners, with broader torsos and lean arms and legs.

Harpster and Grieving Tube kept to the payload shell.

The cruiser departed at halfdawn.

It made Warvia uneasy to know that the Ghouls below her driving bench were near starving. But their goal was in sight.

They arrived in bright mid-afternoon.

An ancient road half covered with sand rose to the axis of the platform. Three arms splayed out from the center section at 120-degree angles. The arms were wedge-shaped platforms that floated unsupported.

The center section was a forest of mooring posts, metal rails, pulleys, and ropes. The roofed buildings on this structure looked like afterthoughts. They were empty and sandblasted by time: warehouses, a banquet hall, an i

On one of the wide paths between buildings, the Sand People had laid out their dead. It looked as if they had been doing that for generations. There were hundreds of skeletons. A double handful at the hub end were more mummy than bone. A few were more recent yet.

“Just as Karker said,” said Sabarokaresh. “Warvia, did Karker tell you …?”

Warvia said, “Karker told me how to find a shrieker village. Sand People don’t eat shriekers, but I told him we could.”

“You were guessing?”

“Well, what choice? Antispin of the funeral place …” Warvia waved to antispin, and then looked again. Not thirty paces paces [sic—should be a single “paces”] away, the smooth plains became a jumble of mounds. It looked like a crumbling city in miniature.

“We won’t wake the Ghouls,” Sabarokaresh decided. “Let them wake and follow their noses.”

So they set their wagon on the cemetery heights, not too close to the array of corpses, and went out to look over the shrieker village.

It was not the strangest thing Warvia had seen, yet it was strange enough.

Here on the flat plain were hundreds of squared-off mounds. It looked like a half-melted city as built by people a foot high. Every mound had a door in it. Every door faced out from the center of the city.

When the vampire killers walked toward the mounds, an army poured out of the holes and took up station.

The shriekers were of a size to make a day’s meal, Warvia thought. Their faces were blunt. They came out on all fours, then stood upright to display outsize claws intended more for digging than fighting, and shrieked. The high pitch hurt Warvia’s ears.

“Sticks,” Forn suggested.

Tegger waved it off. “If we just wade in and start clubbing them, they’ll swarm us. There’s a forest of ropes where we left the wagon. Didn’t I see a net there?”

The guard took station again to defend their city. Barok and Tegger threw the net. It was of strong, coarse weave, intended to lift cargo. Most of the guard crawled out and attacked. The Reds and Machine People ran then, pulling the net behind them, and paused to flip it over, to trap the few remaining guards. The other shriekers stopped, shrieked at the invaders, and returned to their stations.

Four big ones remained caught.

The Reds had eaten, and the Machine People were cooking their catch, before shadow crossed the sun. The Night People emerged, looked about them, and followed their noses. Warvia and Tegger crawled into the payload shell to sleep.

“Mummified, most of them,” Harpster told them at the following halfdawn. “Too far gone even to carry as hardship rations. Most of them died old. Sand People seem to lead a good, healthy life. Never mind, there was a …”

“Herder,” Grieving Tube finished for him. “Killed by his own beasts, I expect. We rarely starve.”

“Good,” Warvia said.

The sliver of sun was already too bright for the Night People. They sat under an awning while the others soaked up sunlight and waited for the morning to warm.

“We asked the Sand People about this place,” Foranayeedli said. “They grow up in its shadow, but they know nothing of it except as a burial place.”

“It’s much more,” Harpster said. “Our need now is to mount the cruiser and moor it tight. We’ll need food for five days for all four of you—”

Sabarokaresh said, “We leave you here.”

Warvia and Tegger had known this was coming. Warvia said, “We thank you for staying so long. We would have looked peculiar, Red Herders driving a Machine People cruiser. Have your plans changed?”

“We return to port at our own pace. We’ll buy our passage with stories and lore. We’ll teach the tribes we pass among to make fuel.” Barok squeezed his daughter’s arm. “When finally we reach Machine People again, we’ll have enough of bounties to make Forn a dowry.”

“For the lessons also, thank you,” Tegger said carefully.

The girl favored him with a lecherous smile. “You were easy to teach!” She glanced at her father. “Oh, there were things we never yet spoke of—”

“Courting,” Barok said.

“Yes. Remember how to court,” Foranayeedli said. “Most hominids have courting rituals. Don’t try to guess what they are. Stick to your own. It keeps you comfortable, keeps them amused. Can you remember courting?”