big as a glass city, though. Or an acre of mirrors. Maybe it’s a big telescope, reflector type.”
“Then it has probably been abandoned.”
“How so?”
“We know that this civilization has returned to savagery. Why else would they allow vast regions to return to desert?”
Once Louis had believed that argument. Now…“You may be oversimplifying. The Ringworld’s bigger than we realized. I think there’s room here for savagery and civilization and anything in between.”
“Civilization tends to spread, Louis.”
“Yah.”
They’d find out about the bright point, anyway. It was directly in their path.
There wasn’t any coffee spigot.
Louis was swallowing the last of his breakfast brick when he noticed two green lights glowing on his dashboard. They puzzled him until he remembered switching Teela and Speaker out of the intercom last night. He switched them back in.
“Good morning,” said Speaker. “Did you see the dawn, Louis? It was artistically stimulating.”
“I saw it. Morning, Teela.”
Teela didn’t answer.
Louis looked more closely. Teela was fascinated, rapt, like one who has reached Nirvana.
“Nessus, have you been using your tasp on my woman?”
“No, Louis. Why should I?”
“How long has she been like this?”
“Like what?” Speaker demanded. “She has not been communicative recently, if that is what you mean.”
“I mean her expression, tanjit!”
Teela’s image, poised on his dashboard, looked at infinity through the bulk of Louis’s head. She was quietly, thoroughly happy.
“She seems relaxed,” said the kzin, “and in no discomfort. The finer nuances of human expression—”
“Never mind that. Land us, will you? She’s got Plateau trance.”
“I do not understand.”
“Just land us.”
They fell from a mile up. Louis endured a queasy period of free fall before Speaker gave them thrust again. He watched Teela’s image for her reaction, but he saw none. She was serene and undisturbed. The corners of her mouth turned very slightly up.
Louis fumed as they dropped. He knew something about hypnosis: bits and oddments of information such as a man will collect over two hundred years of watching tridee. If only he could remember…
Greens and browns resolved into field and forest and a silver thread of stream. It was lush, wild country below them, the kind of country flatlanders expect to find on a colony world, more’s the pity.
“Try to put us in a valley,” Louis told Speaker. “I’d like to get her out of sight of the horizon.”
“Very well. I suggest that you and Nessus cut yourselves out of autopilot and follow me down on manual. I will land Teela myself.”
The diamond of flycycles broke up and re-formed. Speaker moved port-and-spinward, toward the stream Louis had spotted earlier. The others followed.
They were still dropping as they crossed the stream. Speaker turned spinward to follow its course. By now he was virtually crawling through the air, moving just above the treetops. He watched for a stretch of bank not blocked by trees.
“The plants seem very Earthlike,” said Louis. The aliens made noises of agreement.
They rounded a curve of stream.
The natives were in the middle of a broad section of stream. They were working a fishing net. As the line of ’cycles came into view the natives looked up. For a long moment they did nothing more than let go of the net while they stared upward with their mouths open.
Louis, Speaker, and Nessus all reacted in the same way. They took off straight upward. The natives dwindled to points; the stream to a winding silver thread. The lush, wild forest blurred into green-browns.
“Put yourselves on autopilot,” Speaker ordered, in an unmistakable tone of command. “I will land us elsewhere.”
He must have learned that tone of command—strictly for use in dealing with humans. The duties of an ambassador, Louis mused, were various indeed.
Teela had apparently noticed nothing at all.
Louis said, “Well?”
“They were men,” said Nessus.
“They were, weren’t they? I thought I might be hallucinating. How would men get here?”
But nobody tried to answer.
C H A P T E R 12
Fist-of-God
They had landed in a pocket of wild country surrounded by low hills. With the hills hiding the mock-horizon, and the glow of the Arch drowned by daylight, it might have been a scene on any human world. The grass was not precisely grass, but it was green, and it made a carpet over places that should have been covered by grass. There were soil and rocks, and bushes which grew green foliage and which were gnarled in almost the right ways.
The vegetation, as Louis had remarked, was eerily Earth-like. There were bushes where one would expect bushes, bare spots where one would expect bare spots. According to instruments in