that the sun hangs from the Arch by a very strong thread. This thread is strong. We know,” said the priest. “A girl tried to pick it up and undo a tangle, and it cut through her fingers.”
Louis nodded. “Nothing’s falling,” he said. Privately he thought: Not even the shadow squares. Even if you cut all the wires, the squares wouldn’t hit the Ringworld. The Engineers would have given them an orbital aphelion inside the Ring.
He asked, without much hope, “What do you know about the transport system at the rim?” And in that instant he knew something was wrong. He’d caught something, some evidence of disaster; but what?
The priest said, “Would you mind repeating that?”
Louis did.
The priest answered, “Your thing that talks said something else the first time. Something about a restricted—something.”
“Funny,” said Louis. And this time he heard it. The translator spoke in a different tone of voice, and it spoke at length.
“‘You are using a restricted wavelength in violation—’ I do not remember the rest,” said the priest. “We had best end this interview. You have reawakened something ancient, something evil—” The priest stopped to listen, for Louis’ translator was speaking again in the priest’s language. “—‘in violation of edict twelve, interfering with maintenance.’ Can your powers hold back—”
Whatever else the priest said was not translated.
For the disc suddenly turned red hot in Louis’s hand. He instantly threw it as hard as he could. It was white hot and brightly glowing when it hit the pavement—without hurting anyone, as far as he could see. Then the pain backlashed him and he was half-blinded by tears.
He was able to see the priest nod to him, very formal and regal.
He nodded back, his face equally expressionless. He had never dismounted his ’cycle; now he touched the control and rose toward Heaven.
When his face could not be seen he let it snarl with the pain, and he used a word he had heard once on Wunderland, from a man who had dropped a piece of Steuben crystal a thousand years old.
C H A P T E R 17
The Eye of The Storm
The ’cycles were moving to port when they left Heaven, beneath the steel-gray lid that in these regions served as a sky. It had saved their lives above the sunflower fields. By now it was merely depressing.
Louis touched three points on the dash to lock into his present altitude. He had to watch what he was doing, because there was very little feeling in his right hand under the medicines and the spray-skin and the single white blister on each fingertip. He regarded his hand now, thinking how much worse it might have been…
Speaker appeared above the dash. “Louis, do we not wish to rise above the clouds?”
“We might miss something. We can’t see the ground from up there.”
“We have our maps.”
“Would they show us another sunflower field?”
“You are right,” Speaker said instantly. He clicked off.
Speaker and Teela, waiting in Heaven’s map room while Louis braced a shaven priest far below, had spent the time well. They had sketched contour maps of their route to the rim wall, and had also sketched in the cities that showed as bright yellow patches in the magnifying screen.
Then something had taken exception to their use of a reserved frequency. Reserved by whom, for what purpose, how long ago? Why had it not objected until now? Louis suspected an abandoned machine, like the meteor guard that had shot down the Liar. Perhaps this one worked only intermittently, in spasms.
And Speaker’s translator disc had turned red hot and stuck to his palm. It would be days before he could use his hand again, even with the miracle kzinti “military” medicines. The muscles would have to regenerate.
The maps would make a difference. Resurging civilization would almost certainly show first in the great metropoli. The fleet could cross those sites, watching for lights or rising smoke.
Nessus’s call button burned on the dash, as it might have burned for a score of hours. Louis answered it.
He saw the puppeteer’s straggly brown mane and glove-soft back rising and slowly falling with his breath. For a moment he wondered if the puppeteer were back in catatonic withdrawal. Then the puppeteer lifted a triangular head and sang, “Welcome, Louis! What news?”
“We found a floating building,” said Louis. “With a map room.” He told the puppeteer of the castle called Heaven, the map room, the screen, the maps and globes, the priest and his tales and his model of the universe.