bottom ended in open air. Some force had twisted it away, leaving sheared beam and broken treads. Its top was a locked door.
“To Finagle with this! I’m going to ram a window,” said Teela.
“Stop!” Louis commanded. He believed she would do it. “Speaker, use the disintegrator. Get us in.”
In the light streaming from the great picture window, Speaker unslung the Slaver digging tool.
Louis knew about the disintegrator. Objects within its variable-width beam acquired, suddenly, a positive charge powerful enough to tear them apart. The puppeteers had added a second, parallel beam to suppress the charge on the proton. Louis had not used it to dig in the sunflower field, and he knew it would not be needed for this job.
He might have guessed that Speaker would use it anyway.
Two points a few inches apart on the great octagonal window acquired opposite charges, with a potential difference between.
The flash was blinding. Louis clenched his eyes over tears and pain. The crack of thunder was simultaneous, and deafening even through the sonic fold. In the stunned calm that followed, Louis felt gritty particles settled thickly over his neck and shoulders and the backs of his hands. He kept his eyes closed.
“You had to test it,” he said.
“It works very well. It will serve us.”
“Happy birthday. Don’t point it at Daddy, because Daddy will be very angry.”
“Do not be flippant, Louis.”
His eyes had recovered. Louis found millions of glass slivers all over him and the ’cycle. Flying glass! The sonic fold must have stopped the particles, then released them to drift down over every horizontal surface.
Teela was already floating into the ballroom-sized cavity. They followed…
Louis woke gradually, feeling wonderful. He was lying on his arm, on a soft surface. His arm was asleep.
He rolled over and opened his eyes.
He was in a bed, looking up at a high white ceiling. An obstruction under his ribs turned out to be Teela’s foot.
Right. They had found the bed last night, a bed as big as a miniature golf course, in an enormous bedroom in what would have been the basement of a less unusual castle.
By then they had already found marvels.
The castle was a castle indeed, and not merely a posh hotel. A banquet hall with a picture window fifty feet tall was startling enough. But the tables circled a central, ring-shaped table on a raised dais. The ring surrounded a contoured, high-backed chair the size of a throne. Teela, experimenting, had found how to make the chair rise halfway to the ceiling, and how to activate a pickup to amplify the voice of the occupant into a thunder of command. The chair would turn; and when it turned, the sculpture above it turned too.
The sculpture was in stressed wire, very light, mostly empty space it had seemed an abstraction until Teela started it turning. Then—it was obviously a portrait.
The sculpted head of an entirely hairless man.
Was he a native, from a community whose members shaved their faces and scalps? Or had he been a member of another race from far around the curve of the Ring? They might never know. But the face was decidedly human: handsome, angular, the face of one used to command.
Louis looked up at the ceiling and remembered that face. Command had worn hues into that face, around the eyes and mouth, and the artist had somehow managed to include those lines into the wire framework.
This castle had been a seat of government. Everything pointed to it: the throne, the banquet hall, the unique windows, the floating castle itself with its independent power source. But for Louis Wu the clincher was that face.
Afterward they had wandered through the castle. They had found lavishly decorated, beautifully designed staircases everywhere. But they didn’t move. There were no escalators, no elevators, no slidewalks, no dropshafts. Perhaps the stairs themselves had moved once.
So the party had wandered downward, because it was easier than climbing up. In the bottom of the castle they had found the bedroom.
Endless days of sleeping in flycycle seats, of making love wherever the fleet had happened to touch down, had made that bed irresistible to Teela and Louis Wu. They had left Speaker to continue his explorations alone.
By now there was no telling what he had found.
Louis raised himself on one elbow. The dead hand was coming back to life. He was careful not to jar it. Never happens with sleeping plates, he reflected, but what the tanj…a least it’s a bed…
One glassy wall of the bedroom opened on a