There were communicator discs designed to be worn on a human or kzinti wrist or a puppeteer neck. They were bulky and not particularly comfortable.

"Why these?" Low asked. For the puppeteer had already shown them the intercom system built into the flycycles.

"They were originally intended to communicate with the Liar's autopilot, so that we might summon the ship when necessary."

"Then why do we need them now?"

"As translators, Louis. Should we run into sentient beings, as seems likely, we will need the autopilot to translate for us."

"Oh."

They were finished. Equipment still rested beneath the Liar's hull, but it was useless stuff: free-fall equipment for deep space, the pressure suits, some replacement parts for machinery vaporized by the Ringworld defense system. They had loaded even the air flIters, more because they were no more bulky than handkerchiefs than because they were likely to be needed.

Louis was bone tired. He mounted his flycycle and looked about him, wondering if he had forgotten anything. He saw Teela staring straight upward, and even through the mist of exhaustion he saw that she was horrified.

"There ain't no justice," she swore. "It's still noon!"

"Don't panic. The -"

"Louis! We've been working for a good six hours, I know we have! How could it be still noon?"

"Don't worry about it. The sun doesn't set, remember?"

"Doesn't set?" Her hysteria ended as suddenly as it had begun. "Oh. Of course it doesn't set."

"We'll have to get used to it. Look again; isn't that the edge of a shadow square against the sun?"

Something had certainly nipped a chord out of the sun's disc. The sun diminished as they watched.

"We had best take flight," said Speaker. "When darkness falls we should be aloft."

CHAPTER 11 — The Arch of Heaven

Four flycycles rose in a diamond cluster through waning daylight. The exposed ring flooring dropped away.

Nessus had shown them how to use the slave circuits. Now each of the other 'cycles was programmed to imitate whatever Louis's did. Louis was steering for them all. In a contoured seat like a masseur couch without the masseur attachments, he guided his 'cycle with pedals and a joystick.

Four transparent miniature heads hovered like hallucinations above his dashboard. These included a lovely raven-haired siren, a ferocious quasi-tiger with eyes that were too aware, and a pair of silly-looking one-eyed pythons. The intercom hookup was working perfectly, with results comparable to delirium tremens.

As the flycycles rose above the black lava slopes, Louis watched the others for their expressions.

Teela reacted first. Her eyes scainned the middle distance, and rose, and found infinity where they had always before found limits. They went big and round, and Teela's face lit like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. "Oh, Louis!"

"What an extraordinarily large mountain!" Speaker said.

Nessus said nothing. His heads bobbed and circled nervously.

Darkness fell quickly. A black shadow swept suddenly across the giant mountain. In seconds it was gone. The sun was only a golden sliver now, cut by blackness. And something took shape in the darkening sky.

An enormous arch.

Its outline grew rapidly clear. As the land and sky grow dark, the true glory of the Ringworld sky emerged against the night.

The Ringworld arched over itself in stripes of baby blue swirled with white cloud, in narrower stripes of near-black. At its base the arch was very broad. It narrowed swiftly as it rose. Near the zenith it was no more than a broken line of glowing blue-white. At the zenith 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 archmg 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 uniself. 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.