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 beginning with your mother’s milk. Tens of falans later you wake sober for the first time, sober and buzzing with energy and ambition.
“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 fro. 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, “Anne?”
“Anne and I had the will to keep our mouths shut while we mated. Of course we never mated after we woke changed, but we remembered that we trusted each other.”
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.
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. Anne and I, we saw that the root was our blood now. We would starve without it. We killed the others.”
“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. Anne and I taught each other to read. Writings in Wedge City guided us to cities with libraries. We chose a cold climate so that we might hide ourselves under clothing. They took us for visitors from afar. We paid taxes, bought land, ultimately gained a citizen’s access to the library of the Delta People.
“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.”