The Ringworld Throne by Larry Niven

already in place after the battle eleven years ago. It was Teela Brown’s medkit.
    Furry adults and small furry children saw the bird catchers returning early. Most stayed with their tasks, but a man and a woman waited at the arch to greet them.
    Strill cried, “He’s a wizard! Kidada-sir, he says it’s a ring!”
    The man glanced at the floating plates. He asked, “Do you know this?”
    Louis said, “I’ve seen it. I’m Louis Wu of the Ball People.”
    It shouldn’t have meant anything to them, but the Elders gaped and the children ooohed.
    The woman said, “Louis Wu of the Ball People?” Age had put white in her golden fur, and more of that in the man’s. Their knee-length kilts were elaborate tapestries that would have been valuable in any culture. “I am Sawur and this is Kidada, both of the Council, both of the Weaver Folk. You are from nowhere on the Arch, yes? The Web Dweller has vouched for your power and wisdom.”
    “Web Dweller?” How could anyone have known of him here?
    Kidada said, “The Web Dweller is certainly of another world. It’s got two heads! And servants like itself in uncountable numbers.”
    Aw, tanj. “What else did the Web Dweller have to say?”
    “It showed us pictures from far up the Arch, so it says.”
    “What did you see? Vampires?”
    “Strange humanoids living in darkness, and an alliance of many kinds of people come to attack them. Can you tell us of those?”
    “I know something of vampires. The Web Dweller may know more, but I haven’t spoken to him in thirty-six falans.”
    “How do your folk manage rishathra?” Sawur asked, and there was suppressed giggling.
    Louis grinned. “As best we can. Yours?”
    “We Weavers are said to be very good with our hands, and visitors speak well of the touch of our fur. One must ask, shall we wash?”
    “Good idea.”
    Weavers, they called themselves.
    Their village -- city -- was nowhere crowded, but it seemed to go on and on, spilling up and down both sides of the river, sprouting among the trees of the vast forest. Their houses were wickerwork shells shaped like low mushrooms, not unlike the trees.
    Louis was being led toward a vertical cliff of bare pale rock. Kidada said, “See you water running down that cliff face? The baths are below. Sunlight warms the water as it flows, a little.”
    The pool was long and narrow. Low tables bore little heaps of embroidered kilts. Sawur and Kidada added theirs to a heap. Three parallel furrows ran through the hair across the old man’s buttocks, old scars rimmed with white fur, leading Louis to wonder about local predators.
    Weavers were already bathing themselves. Children and the elderly seemed to gravitate together; postadolescents separated out, but rarely formed pairs. Louis had learned to look for such patterns.
    The water was muddy. He didn’t see any towels. He set his clothing—Canyon style camping garb and backpurse, from two hundred light-years away—on a table, and stepped in. When in Rome ...
    It wasn’t all that warm, either.
    Now all the ages mixed as the Weavers gathered around the visiting alien, the teacher. Newly met species always had the same questions.
    “My companions and I steered our great ship to the shore of the Great Ocean, forty falans ago. We found desolation. Long before any of you were born, Fist-of-God raised the shore forty manheights along twenty thousand daywalks of shoreline ...”
    Confusion. Louis’s translator would translate Sol system measurements into the Ringworld’s thirty-hour day, seventy-five days to a falan; but daywalks and manheights varied by species. Louis floated on his back, treading water while they spoke of distance, time, height. No hurry. He’d done this dance before.
    “People to spinward remember Fist-of-God in their legends. Something bigger than any mountain struck the floor of the world from underneath at hellish speed, thirty-five hundred falans ago”; A.D. 1200, by Louis’s best guess. “It pushed the land