Time, now, to remember hunger; to wonder if anything nested in here. The outside was too bare. He’d have to wait for full day and catch a fish. It seemed he would live through the night.
Where was the power, the lightning, coming from? He couldn’t guess.
He cut another finger-length strip and began trying that.
Chapter 9
Familiar Faces
Through the window in the cliff, Louis studied the weathered woman in weathered clothing. She was steering a steam-powered vehicle downslope, with a similar man beside her and a small red man perched above her head. “Three days ago?”
“Ninety hours exactly.”
“If that’s Valavirgillin, she doesn’t took good.”
“Neither do you, Louis. Perhaps she’s been neglecting her boosterspice?”
Louis ignored the dig. “She’s gotten old. Eleven years …”
Louis himself had lived eleven years without the bioengineered seeds that kept a human being from aging. Vala had never touched the stuff. Was it really Valavirgillin?
It was. He’d rished with the woman!
“This skews the odds a bit, doesn’t it, Louis?”
“She must be tens of thousands of miles starboard of where I left her. What would she be doing there?”
“Attacking a vampire enclave, I believe. It’s her, isn’t it? Have I made my point? If I show you ten healthy hominids, they could be ten survivors out of a thousand dead. But I show you a woman you knew before the radiation storm, and clearly in present time. What are the odds now?”
Louis shifted on the water-smoothed boulder he’d chosen for a seat. “Is this present time, Hindmost?”
“Forty hours ago.”
Louis asked what he had refused to ask for eleven years. “Are you claiming Teela lied? Why?”
“She acted on insufficient knowledge. With enhanced intelligence comes enhanced arrogance, and she never did have good sense, Louis. She could have done what I did, with my computers to play with. Louis, Teela never grasped how closely I was able to guide the plasma plume we ripped from the sun. I set it flowing directly into the attitude jets on the rim wall. The plasma never played across the main Ringworld surface. The radiation she feared … of course it was well above background level.”
“The rim,” Louis said. He was beginning to believe.
“Yes, the rim, of course.”
“And how do you suppose the Spill Mountain People made out?”
“Along five percent of the rim wall, I suppose I must have killed a great many.”
Ten million, a hundred million people of a kind Louis Wu had never met. Several species, maybe.
Nonetheless Louis said, “Hindmost, I believe I owe you an apology.”
The Hindmost chimed. Making sure it’s in his records, Louis thought. Then, “Another matter. Notice the man in lookout position. Red Herder?”
“Yeah. Little red carnivores, lived not that far from the rim wall. Very fast runners they were.”
The great wagon suddenly zipped downslope, fast-forward, dodged boulders at Mach 5 in a storm of streaming cloud-shadows, and was lost in a maze of rocks. “I lost the wagons for a time,” the Hindmost said. “Fifteen hours later I picked up this.”
A small red man ran down a river shore, Mach 12 for sure. Louis laughed. “They’re not that fast.”
“It’s the same man?”
“I can’t tell. Slow him down.”
The red man slowed to something an Olympic runner might hope for. Louis said, “Looks like him.”
“Infrared,” the Hindmost said. A pink shadow glowed through the fuzzy-edged window in the dark Cliff, running along a black river amid glowing rocks. A brilliant green cursor pointed. “This?”
A running pink shadow, and glimpses of another. The Red ran steadily. Some warmer shape flitted from cover to cover, flashed between rocks—“Slow that down!”—now through brush, now where was it? Reds ran fast, but this thing was keeping up with the Red while hiding most of the time.
Louis couldn’t get any notion of its shape.
“Louis, we watched the burning of three Patriarchy ships. I suspect a protector,” the Hindmost said. “Might we have another protector here?”
“Why not just a Ghoul?”
The red dots streaked away in fast-forward, then shifted to normal light. The Red Herder ran alone. Near him there was a suggestion of sporadic motion, and the man’s eyes were constantly shifting.
Something popped up in front of him. His sword came out—
Pause. And the Hindmost’s cursor pointed. “Red Herder. Vampire. Do you see anything else?”
“Give me infrared.”
In infrared Louis found five glow spots. In normal light … The cursor pointed. “Red Herder. Vampire. This and this are Ghouls. See.”
Louis remembered Ghouls; though they were hidden in brush and shadow, he knew their lanky shape.
But the fifth glow was hiding even from the Ghouls. Louis could make out a hand smaller than a Ghoulish hand, nearly hairless. An old man’s hand, arthritic, with knobby knuckles.
Protector? “Why would a protector bother?”
“Unknown. But see this.” Fast-forward. The vampire woman fell dying. The Red ran, stopped, splashed in the river, and was suddenly fighting half a dozen vampires. The recording went dead slow. The Red’s sword swept around … a woman was uncoiling herself at his back … a hand slapped her ankle.
The hidden one was mud-colored, plastered with mud. Its knotted hand only just touched her, closed and released. The woman swiped with her claws at nothing she could see; returned to the attack, and died on the red man’s sword.
“Minimalist,” Louis said. A rustling sound was trying to find his attention.
“Secretive,” the Hindmost said.
The Red Herder ran along mud. Vampires converged … and they all faded into distance.
“He’s out of my instrument’s range. I lost him for a time. I nearly lost the hidden one, too, and that concerns me. Look.”
The camera viewpoint swung back along the river, caught a splash, then moved fast upslope and into shadow.
Louis said, “I don’t—”
“Here, again, in infrared. The lurked is nearly invisible.”
“Yeah. He was underwater, of course, shedding heat. Where’s he going? Into the vampire nest?”
The sequence ran again, light-enhanced. Splash: something emerged from water and ran upslope in jerky, random fashion. Pause: not a good view, but the shadow was clearly hominid. Run: up into shadow, gone.
“That was the last I saw of it. Clearly it is not a vampire. It guards the Red Herder, and perhaps his companions, too, avoiding notice at all costs.”
In a crunching of brush the Fishers and Sailors were lining up along the pool to stare at Louis Wu afloat in midair; or else at a window in a rock cliff, a view of distant daylit mountains.
Louis asked, “What else have you got?”
“Nothing of interest since three hours ago.”
“Hindmost, my brain really is dying for lack of sleep.”
The Hindmost said, “Wait. This thing—”
“Is thirty-five degrees up the curve of the Arch, five and a half minutes away at lightspeed. Can’t hurt you. You’re right, though, it’s a protector.”
“Louis! You must accept medical help.”
“You don’t have medical help. You put the ’doc on the lander, remember?”
“The crew cabin kitchen has a medical menu. Louis, it can make boosterspice!”
“Boosterspice doesn’t make a man well. It only makes him young:
“Are you—”
“No, I’m not sick. But humans get sick, Hindmost, and I keep remembering why we don’t have a full working ’doc. Chmeee and I, we didn’t volunteer for this work. You thought we might refuse to operate the lander. So you put the autodoc in the lander, and Teela flamed it.”