not try to carry it to the Liar. The black thread was far too dangerous, the Ring floor far too slippery. Louis moved on all fours on the frictionless surface, and he pulled the knob behind him.
He found Speaker silently watching from the airlock.
Louis entered the airlock via Prill’s stepladder, pushed past the kzin and went aft. Speaker continued to watch.
The farthest point aft in the wreck of the Liar was a channel the size of a man’s thigh. It had passed wiring to machinery in the Liar’s wing, when the Liar had had a wing. Now it was sealed by a metal hatch. Louis opened the hatch, tossed the knobbed end of the win through and outside.
He moved forward. At intervals he checked the position of the wire by using it to slice a Jinxian sausage dialed from the Liar’s kitchen. Then he marked the spot with bright yellow paint. When he finished, the path of the virtually invisible thread was marked in a line of yellow splotches running through the Liar.
When the wire drew taut, it would certainly cut through some internal partitions of the ship. The yellow paint allowed Louis to gauge the path it would take, and to assure himself that the wire would not damage any part of the life-support system. But the paint had another purpose. It would warn them all to keep away from the wire, lest they lose fingers or worse.
Louis left the airlock, waited for Speaker to follow him out. Then he closed the outer door.
At this point Speaker asked, “Is this why we came?”
“Tell you in a minute,” said Louis. He walked aft along the General Products hull, picked up the knob in both hands, and tugged gently. The wire held.
He put his back into it. He pulled with all his strength. The wire did not budge. The airlock door held it fast.
“There’s just no way to give it a stronger test. I wasn’t sure the airlock door would be a close enough fit. I wasn’t sure the wire wouldn’t abrade a General products hull. I’m still not sure. But yes, this is why we came.”
“What shall we do next?”
“We open the airlock door.” He did it. “We let the thread slide freely through the Liar while we carry the handle back to the Improbable and cement it in place.” And they did that.
The thread that had linked the shadow squares turned invisibly away to starboard. It had been dragged for thousands of miles behind the Improbable, because there was no way to get it aboard the flying building. Perhaps it trailed all the way back to the tangle of thread in the City Beneath Heaven; a tangle like a cloud of smoke, that might have held millions of miles of the stuff.
Now it entered the Liar’s double airlock, circled through the Liar’s fuselage, out the wiring channel, and back to a blob of electrosetting plastic on the underside of the flying building.
“So far so good,” said Louis. “Now I’ll need Prill. No, tanj it! I forgot. Prill doesn’t have a pressure suit.”
“A pressure suit?”
“We’re taking the Improbable up Fist-of-God Mountain. The building isn’t airtight. Well need pressure suits, and Prill doesn’t have one. We’ll have to leave her here.”
“Up Fist-of-God Mountain,” Speaker repeated. “Louis: one flycycle has not the power to drag the Liar up that slope. You propose to burden the motor with the additional mass of a floating building.”
“No, no, no. I don’t want to drag the Liar. All I want to do is pull the shadow square wire behind us. It should slide freely through the Liar, unless I give Prill the word to close the airlock door.”
Speaker thought about it. “That should work, Louis. If the puppeteer’s flycycle has not the power we need, we can cut away chunks of the building to make it lighter. But why? What do you expect to find at the top?”
“I could tell you in one word; and then you’d laugh in my face. Speaker, if I’m wrong, I swear you’ll never know,” said Louis Wu.
And he thought: I’ll have to tell Prill what to do. And plug the Liar’s wiring channel with plastic. It won’t stop the thread from sliding, but it should make the Liar nearly airtight.
The Improbable was not a spaceship. Her lifting power was electromagnetic, thrusting against the Ring foundation itself. And the Ring floor sloped up toward Fist-of-God; for Fist-Of-God was hollow. Naturally the Improbable tended to tilt, to slide back down against the