itself the arch was cut by the otherwise invisible ring of shadow squares.
The skycycles rose quickly, but in silence. The sonic fold was a most effective insulator. Louis heard no windsong from outside. He was all the more startled when his private bubble of space was violated by a scream of orchestral music.
It sounded as though a steam organ had exploded.
The sound was painfully loud. Louis slapped his hands over his ears. Stunned, he did not at once realize what was happening. Then he flicked the intercom control, and Nessus’s image went like a ghost at dawn. The scream (a church choir being burnt alive?) diminished considerably. He could still hear it keening at second hand (a gutshot stereo set?) through Speaker’s and Teela’s intercom.
“Why did he do that?” Teela exclaimed in astonishment.
“Terrified. It’ll take him awhile to get used to it.”
“Used to what?”
“I take command,” Speaker-To-Animals boomed. “The herbivore is incapable to make decisions. I declare this mission to be of military nature, and I take command.”
For a moment Louis considered the only alternative: claiming the leader’s place for himself. But who wanted to fight a kzin? In any case, the kzin would probably make a better leader.
By now the flycycles were half a mile up. Sky and land were mostly black; but on the black land were blacker shadows, giving form if not color to the map; and the sky was sprinkled with stars, and mastered by that ego-smashing arch.
Oddly, Louis found himself thinking of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante’s universe had been a complex artifact, with the souls of men and angels shown as precisely machined parts of the vast structure. The Ringworld was obtrusively an artifact, a made thing. You couldn’t forget it, not for an instant; for the handle rose overhead, huge and blue and checkered, from beyond the edge of infinity.
Small wonder Nessus had been unable to face it. He was too afraid—and too realistic. Perhaps he saw the beauty; perhaps not. Certainly he saw that they were marooned on an artificial structure bigger in area than all the worlds of the former puppeteer empire.
“I believe I can see the rim walls,” said Speaker.
Louis tore his eyes away from the arching sky. He looked to “port” and “starboard” and his heart sank.
To the left (they were facing back along the gouge of the Liar’s landing, so that left was port), the edge of the rim wall was a barely visible line, blue-black on blue-black. Louis could not guess its height. Its base was not even hinted. Only the top edge showed; and when he stared at it it disappeared. That line was about where the horizon might have been; so that it might as easily have been the base as the top of something.
To right and starboard, the other rim wall was virtually identical. The same height, the same picture, the same tendency of the line to fade away beneath a steady stare.
Apparently the Liar had smashed down very close to the median line of the ring. The rim walls seemed equally distant…which put them nearly half a million miles away.
Louis cleared his throat. “Speaker, what do you think?”
“To me the port wall seems fractionally higher.”
“Okay.” Louis turned left. The other ’cycles followed, still on slave circuits.
Louis activated the intercom for a look at Nessus. The puppeteer was hugging his saddle with all three legs; his heads were tucked between his body and the saddle. He was flying blind.
Teela said, “Speaker, are you sure?”
“Of course,” the kzin answered. “The portside rim wall is visibly larger.”
Louis smiled to himself. He had never had war training, but he knew something of war. He’d been caught on the ground during a revolution on Wunderland, and had fought as a guerilla for three months before he could get to a ship.
One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happened to be right, so much the better…
They flew to port over black land. The Ring glowed far brighter than moonlight, but moonlight does little to light a landscape from the air. The meteor gully, the rip the Liar had torn across the Ringworld’s surface, was a silver thread behind them. Eventually it faded into the dark.
The skycycles accelerated steadily and in silence. At a little below the speed of sound, a rushing sound penetrated the sonic fold. It reached a peak at sonic speed, then cut off sharply. The sonic fold found a new shape, and again there was silence.
Shortly thereafter