The Ringworld Throne r-3 Page 17

  “There were some big metal sheets at the dock. I used them for plugs.”

  “—and waited for the rain to fill them up, and the city went down.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for the light.”

  Tegger laughed. “Heh, I thought you’d like that. I lit all my torches and dropped them over. Then I poured a canteen’s worth of fuel down on the fire.”

  “And now what?”

  Tegger said, “Now we’re where we can do something, and now I’ve got fifteen bright friends to work something out.”

  Vala nodded. Tegger didn’t have an answer, but he’d done miracles already.

  Chapter 15

  Power

  In the blaze of full day, Tegger led them up Stair Street to show them his discoveries.

  He found it frustrating. Warvia would dive into houses, jungles of ornamental plants, and half-filled swimming pools, then rush back with questions. Tegger couldn’t follow her; he must keep to the pace of the rest. Gleaners were even faster than she was, and they got into places no Red would fit, then came sprinting back to chatter at the Grass Giants.

  “Here, these grasses ought to serve you,” Tegger told Waast, while she was the only Grass Giant handy. She took the handful, smiled at him and, chewing, followed Perilack and Silack into a collapsing house. “I haven’t seen any plant eaters,” he told Coriack. “I looked for droppings. Nothing. Oh, we’ll find something to eat. There’re webspinners if nothing else. Did we bring any insect eaters?” He was talking to Valavirgillin now. “You’d think there must be animals to eat the plants, but I haven’t been able to catch anything but birds, and I haven’t seen any insects.”

  Vala asked, “Carrion?”

  He guessed her meaning. “Old dry bones. The Ghouls won’t eat until we starve. But I did find these. Pomes, a whole line of pome trees. Here.”

  Vala broke a pome apart and began to eat. They’d feed Machine People, yes, for a while. “Tegger, what do these factories make?”

  “I found a warehouse full of cloth. Maybe they make that here. Vala, I haven’t really looked yet.”

  Vala was interested in the factories. With her pack full of Louis Wu’s magic cloth, she might get some motors working. Even if she couldn’t, if everything had deteriorated too far, she might still find wonders made before the Fall of the Cities, stacked in factories or warehouses, still waiting to be shipped.

  But Tegger himself must be starving. Her people had to be fed now. Look for profit later. After she found some way down!

  The little party trickled up Stair Street to the bubble at its top, and in.

  What Tegger found mysterious was clear enough to Machine People. Barok smiled and led them up the giant stairs and into the back. “Banquet hall,” he pronounced. “City Builders are omnivores who cook. They like a lot of variety. Look at all this equipment!”

  Tegger said, “It’s all boxes and surfaces that get hot.”

  “Yes, and a table for chopping stuff.”

  Above Stair Street was only the chimney and its spiral stair. Warvia was on the rim of the chimney, kicking her heels in space, looking down on the floating factory city and the lands beyond. She seemed indecently happy.

  “I can see our River Folk waving. Rooballabl! Hey, any of you, come up here and show them we made it! They’ll think I’m just Tegger.”

  Vala climbed the spiral stair to meet her, past a bronze web clinging to the stone. The women edged around the rim to leave room for those who followed: Coriack, Manak [sic—should be “Manack”], Paroom, Barok. Tegger stopped to study the web, then climbed to join them.

  There is something about being at the top of … well, anything … that puts one in command.

  Practically speaking, Vala could see nothing of what was most interesting: vampires swarming in the Shadow Nest below and the regions nearby. But far into the mountains, sluggish pale streams flowed through the passes. Flowing along the Homeflow they became individual dots: vampires returning in their thousands.

  The river and the snow-crested mountains glittered in patchy sunlight. Close in, two squat black manshapes stood against the glitter. Vala and the others waved. Reassured, Rooballabl and Fudghabladl sank beneath the water.

  But she could see all of the factory complex. Tegger had left lights burning everywhere. A broken line of green ran down Stair Street. Green showed nowhere else; none near the chimney. What would a webspinner eat?

  The flat tops of warehouses and factories, the curved tops of tanks, were all a glittery gray. The only exceptions were the houses along Stair Street, where the flat places were soil and pools, and the stairs were glittery gray.

  Paroom asked, “Valavirgillin? See those gray roofs?”

  “Well?”

  “I wondered why the lights still work. Everything that’s flat-on to the sun is that same glittery gray. That stuff must be storing sunlight.”

  Tegger said, “Yes!”

  Paroom smiled. “Bothered you?”

  “Yes, but it’s obvious once you—Let’s see, they can’t have been getting much light through these clouds, but none of the power was used before I got here. Hundreds of falans. That means—”

  “Could run out. We’d better turn the lights off in the daytime.”

  “The hauler plate was that color, before I tore the cab loose. That’s why it could still lift. So lightning is sunlight … turn them off? Paroom, what are we saving power for?”

  “I don’t know,” the Grass Giant said, “but I don’t like waste. Leave the lights on around the dock, though, where the vampires come up. That’s my thought.”

  Tegger shrugged. Suddenly he looked exhausted. Warvia led him away, murmuring in his ear.

  ***

  The rest of the party weren’t finding anything noteworthy. Presently, like tourists on holiday, they trickled back to the cruisers. Most of them were ready to fall over.

  Gleaners had to sleep at night. All four looked alert enough now, at midday, the only members of the foray team who did. Vala set Manack and Coriack on guard. Then she crawled under an awning.

  Forn was there, fast asleep, not just from exhaustion, poor girl, but loss of blood, too. She looked peaceful, though. Vala dipped a towel in fuel and washed the angry-looking wounds on Forn’s neck. Then she spread a blanket and lay down.

  When Beedj came in she only closed her eyes against the light.

  Beedj spread a double armful of fresh-cut grass in what space was left, and curled himself into it. He murmured, “Clever, what Red Tegger did.”

  “Yub,” said Vala.

  “Maybe we can go further with that.”

  “Mm?”

  “Boss, we can collect more water. Bash holes in the roofs of all those factories, storage tanks, whatever. Anything that isn’t a roof, seal it so water doesn’t run out. Spread cloth for funnels. Let it rain. A sea of water! This factory-thing would sink even farther, wouldn’t it? Crush the vampires.”

  Could he be right? Vala was too tired to think …

  “No.”

  “Who speaks?”

  “Foranayeedli. It isn’t flat under here, Beedj. There’s a structure as big as Administration in Center City.”

  “Oh flup, that’s right, you were living down there. What kind of thing is it, Forn? Like a statue or like a building? Something we could crush?”

  Forn began to answer. Vala crept out into daylight, pulling her blanket along, and into the darkness of the payload shell. She spread her blanket and—

  A voice said, “Valavirgillin, this is a good time to look into the Shadow Nest.”

  Harpster. “I don’t smell you.”

  “We explored before we slept. There’s a row of houses—you saw?—and pools. Delightful. And grass to roll ourselves dry.”

  “Appreciate it. Harpster, this is a good time to sleep.”

  “Night People sleep, too, Boss. In daylight. I’d rather sleep.” One sharp claw pricked her side for emphasis. “So do vampires. They’ll be torpid. We can
just push them off the ramp. What I’m really after is the light conditions. Shall I take some Gleaners and go down?”

  Vala tried to think. “I put two on guard. Take Silack and Perilack. Take Kaywerbrimmis,” because he’d had some sleep, and they’d want a variety of viewpoints. “Ask Beedj.” The Thurl’s heir would volunteer for anything. Flup! Vala sat up and reached for a gun and alcohol flamer. “And me.”

  ***

  They were eight: two Machine People, Beedj, two Gleaners, Warvia, and the Ghouls. The Ghouls moved ahead of the circle of torchlight cast by Vala’s throttled-back flamer. The rest followed, masked and half blind.

  Vala was looking at four vampire dead. She should have been watching where she stepped. She stumbled … on a handful of vampire teeth, pointed like a Red’s teeth. Sure enough, the one woman was toothless, just as Paroom had described her, and … not just hacked. Vala shuddered.

  Grieving Tube bounded out of sight. Vala drew breath to shout, and Harpster was gone, too. Vala ran instead, flamer held high, and found the Ghouls standing over a male vampire still twitching.

  They moved on. Rich and corrupt scents were working their way through the pepperleek she breathed. But her sight was coming back.

  The party halted three loops down, two and a half loops above the vampire-infested floor.

  A broken circle of daylight lit the Shadow Nest bright enough to hurt.

  There was dark soil on either side of the Homeflow, patches each the size of a lord’s farm. That was off to port-and-antispin, where the river entered the shadow. Huge mushrooms grew in those plots, and vampires lived under them. Shadow farms. A hundred varieties of fungus might have grown here before the vampires moved in. The monster mushrooms must have been too big to trample.

  Directly below was paving similar to the stuff the Machine People used for roads.

  “You see, there’s quite a lot of light,” Grieving Tube said cheerfully.

  “I wanted to wait for a wind,” Harpster complained.

  A wind, yes. Vala felt madness bubbling in her blood. The rich smell of pepperleek had become no more than a spice for the rutting scent. Wind would have blown that away. There must be tens of thousands of them down there, she thought, and they were starting to look up.

  Warvia was breathing through her mouth in great gasps. Warvia knew her will could be broken. Kay was edging away from Vala: no distractions needed now. The others looked all right. Try to concentrate! That center structure …

  The fountain was many things. There were windows in the side that faced the ramp, and small balconies without railings, and outside stairways: probably offices rather than domiciles.

  Partway around, a flat space faced rising concentric arcs, something like the steps in the feeding dome. Seats. That had to be a stage! Piles of rotting stuff at the corners might have been a curtain; collapsing flat structures must be props; a flimsy wall, fallen, showed a honeycomb of backstage structure. Valavirgillin wondered if others would recognize it for what it was.

  Water poured from above, a waterfall surrounded by shadowy giants, and wound through and around every part of the structure. Standing statues of City Builder Folk poured water from great bowls. Water flowed down the back of the stage, a permanent backdrop. Thus watered, vividly hued mushrooms still grew behind the office structures. It all flowed down through a maze of pipes and channels to meet the Homeflow.

  Forn was right. That mountain of masonry was as big as a civic center. It wouldn’t support the mass of a floating factory, maybe, but it would stand against any mass of water this group could collect.

  “All right. All right. We can’t lower the factory on them,” Perilack said. “What if we move it sideways? Something’s holding it here. What if we could set it loose? Let it slide away with the vampires all running after it. Wouldn’t they make great targets?”

  Grieving Tube said, “She’s at least partly right. Something holds it here, some—” She went off into her own language, and so did Harpster. Vala turned back. Even the Ghouls might not be able to set a floating city adrift.

  Harpster dropped back into the Tongue. “—like at the bottom of a bowl, a low spot in the realm of magnetic power. We could tow the floater out of it if we had enough power, but with two steam cruisers? Flup, I wish you people had never heard of Louis Wu.”

  Statuary, lines of windows, a stage, a sculpted flow of water. “What’s missing?” Vala asked herself.

  Grieving Tube heard. “Boss?”

  Vala said, “Tell me what you see.”

  The Ghoul woman obliged. “Offices. Public affairs, I bet. They put it all down here so they wouldn’t have to invite political entities topside. The stage is for speeches and conferences, but it’s a stage, too. This was a social center.”

  Harpster said, “I’d like to see around the other side.”

  “What do you think you’d find?” Vala asked.

  “I think … a podium. This one’s for plays, it’s not really right for speeches, or music for that matter. I bet somebody got an award for the way he worked the fountain into it all. Think how beautiful it would be if we could clear the vampires out.”

  “Got it,” Vala shouted. “Lights!”

  The Ghouls’ eyes glowed at her.

  “Lights! Plays, music, speeches, bureaus of this and that, award-winning sculpture?” Vampire song rose high at the sound of Valavirgillin’s shout, but her warriors were listening, too. “Nobody but a Ghoul would expect all that to be played in the dark! Warvia, Tegger must know where the lights are.”

  Warvia was fully awake now. “He’d have turned them on.”

  “Flup.”

  “Boss, the switches might be down here.”

  “Flup. That’d be nasty.”

  Harpster said, “I see it.” He was pointing up. “Warvia, that group of statues right at the top? City Builder warriors three manheights tall. They’re all carrying spears …”

  Vala could see vague hominid shapes up there, but nothing more. The ring of daylight didn’t reach that high.

  “It’s just one great black spot to me,” Warvia said.

  “They’re there,” Grieving Tube said. “That top one—”

  “Bigger than the rest. Spear as thick as my leg, and it doesn’t have a point, it just goes right up into the roof. It’s a pipe for the power. Sorry, Boss.”

  “Flup! Not water pipes? Of course not, they’ve got infinite water. All right. But we’ll search topside first because it’s easier. Get Tegger to show us what he found. Then look where he didn’t.”

  ***

  Warvia refused to let them wake Tegger. “Boss, he showed you everything he knows!”

  Harpster and Grieving Tube dropped out early. Nobody could expect Ghouls to guess where an alien hominid would put light switches!

  The rest of the warriors spread through the city. Valavirgillin cut a sheet of Louis’s cloth, once a priceless secret, into strips and gave them away like confetti. They played with the boxes and switches Tegger had showed them, and presently had the city blazing to rival the cloudy daylight.

  Thin strips of glittery gray ran from the glittery-gray rooftop patches, down the sides of buildings. Several of the party followed those lines to where they converged. When Twuk brought Valavirgillin to see, she found a hole near the city’s center that was as wide as a Ghoul’s leg. She stirred traces of dust she found inside, and sniffed her finger. She couldn’t be sure that it was ruined superconductor; but Vala didn’t doubt what they’d found.

  She hated what had to come next, but there was no help for it. The channel could be two tens of manheights high. Vala cut all of her remaining sheets of Louis Wu’s cloth into strips, knotted them together, tied the resulting rope to a chunk of wall and lowered it into the hole until it went slack.

  What was it touching, down there at the bottom of a statue’s spear haft? It might be an unbroken line of power. She’d done what she could. Now she used torn branches to move the top end of her toe to where all the channels of
silver-gray joined. That patch was flat. There was nothing to tie her line to, but she could weight it with a block of rubble only three Grass Giants could lift.

  The clouds darkened and presently sent forth a steady rain. The explorers bore what they could of that, then came trickling back to the dock area. Each looked into Ramp Street. The Grass Giants were the last to give up. The others told them what they’d found, but the Grass Giants had to look, too. The Shadow Nest remained in shadow.

  Chapter 16

  Web of Spies

  A shadow crossed the light, falling on his closed eyelids. Tegger was just close enough to waking to enjoy the warmth, the relaxation, the sense of Warvia’s back against his chest and belly, the smell of her hair. If he let himself wake further, he’d be thinking of hunger.

  Hunger. How was he to feed Warvia? The carrion birds had fled from noise and alcohol fumes and heroes. There were vampires—he shied from a sick memory—but what was here for carnivore Reds?

  Drive the vampires away. Descend. Hunt.

  In daylight all shadows were vertical. Night must have fallen, and these must be dockyard lights. Who would be moving past at night? Tegger opened his eyes.

  Two furry backs moved in and out of the light, moved away down Rim Street.

  Tegger slid away from Warvia. He found a blanket and covered her. Harpster and Grieving Tube were turning into Stair Street. Tegger followed, stalking.

  Ghouls were a secretive bunch. They had the right to their secrets; but Reds were stalkers.

  The Night People moved in a glare of artificial light. The rest of Vala’s crew had found switches Tegger missed. Night was their element, but tonight it was the Ghouls who were half blind. Would it bother them? Ghouls must depend a good deal on scent.

  The houses along Stair Street were staggered. There was plenty of cover. Tegger hid behind solid masses, trees and walls, staying well back. Where were the Ghouls?

  Coming out of a shattered window, softly complaining in their own speech. Tegger had found a whole family of skeletons in that house. Were the Ghouls sniffing out carrion? They’d find nothing but bones.