There was a problem here. Which to watch? The silver fleck that was Speakees flycycle, or the smaU orange cat-face above the dash? One was real, one was detailed. Both offered information, but of different kinds.

In principle, no answer was entirely satisfactory. In practice, Louis naturally watched both.

He saw that Speaker was over the rift …

The intercom echoed Speakees yowl. The silver fleck had gone suddenly brighter; and Speaker's face was a glue of white light. His eyes were closed tight. His mouth was open, screaming.

The image dimmed. Speaker had crossed the rift. One arm was thrown across his face. The fur that covered him was smoking black char.

Beneath the diverging silver speck of Speaker's flycycle, a bright spot showed on the cloud cover … as if a spotlight followed Speaker from below.

"Speaker!" Teela called. "Can you see?"

Speaker heard and uncovered his face. The orange far was unburned in a broad band across his eyes. Elsewhere the fur was ash-black. Speaker opened his eyes, closed them tight, opened them again. "rm blind," he said.

"Yes, but can you see?"

In his worry over Speaker, Louis hardly noticed the strangeness of that question. But something in him noted her tone of voice: the anxiety, and beneath that, the suggestion that Speaker had given a wrong answer and should be given a second chance.

But there wasn't time. Louis called, "Speaker! Slave your 'cycle to mine. We've got to get to cover."

Speaker fumbled at the board. "Done. Louis, what kind of cover?" Pain thickened and distorted his voice.

"Back to the mountains."

"No. We would lose too much time. Louis, I know what attacked me. If I am right, then we are safe as long as we have cloud cover."

"Oh?"

"You will have to investigate."

"You need medical attention."

"I do indeed, but first you must find us a safe place to land. You must descend where the clouds are most dense …"

It was not dark, down here below the clouds. Some light came through, and enough of that was reflected toward Louis Wu. It glared.

The land was an undulating plain. It was not Ring floor material, but soil and vegetation.

Louis dropped lower. squinting against the glare.

… A single species of plant evenly dispersed across the land, from here to the infinity-horizon. Each plant had a single blossom, and each blossom turned to follow Louis Wu as he dropped. A tremendous audience, silent and attentive.

He landed and dismounted beside one of the plants. The plant stood a foot high on a knobbly green stalk. Its single blossom was as big as a large man's face. The back of that blossom was stringy, as if laced with veins or tendons; and the inner surface was a smooth concave mirror. From its center protruded a short stalk ending in a dark green bulb.

All the flowers in sight watched him. He was bathed in the glare. Louis knew they were trying to kill bun, and he looked up somewhat uneasily; but the cloud cover held.

"You were right," he said, speaking into the intercom. "They're Slaver sunflowers. If the cloud cover hadn't come up, we'd have been dead the instant we rose over the mountains."

"Is there cover where we can hide from the sunflowers? A cave, for example?"

"I don't think so. The land's too flat. The sunflowers can't focus the light with any precision, but there's a lot of glare anyway."

Teela broke in. "For pity's sake, what's the matter with you two? Louis, we've got to land! Speaker's in pain!"

"Truly, I am in pain, Louis."

"Then I vote we risk it. Come down, you two. We'll just have to hope the clouds hold."

"Good!" Teela's intercom image went into action.

Louis spent a minute or so searching between the plants. It was as he had surmised. There was no alien survivor anywhere in the domain of the sunflowers. No smaller plant grew between the stalks. Nothing flew. Nothing burrowed beneath the ashy-looking soil. On the plants themselves there were no blights, fungus growths, disease spots. If disease struck one of their own, the sunflowers would destroy it.

The mirror-blossom was a terrible weapon. Its primary purpose was to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node at its center. But it could also focus to destroy a plant-eating animal or insect. The sunflowers burned all enemies. Everything that lives is the enemy of a photosynthesis-using plant; and everything that lived became fertilizer for the sunflowers.

"But how did they come here?" Louis wondered. For sunflowers could not coexist with less exotic plant life. Sunflowers were too powerful. Thus they could not be native to the Ringworlders' original planet.

The engineers must have scouted nearby stars for their useful or decorative plants. Perhaps they had even come as far as Silvereyes, in human space. And they must have decided that the sunflowers were decorative.

"But they would have fenced them in. Any idiot would have that much sense. Give them, say, a plot of ground with a high, broad ring of bare Ring flooring around it. That would keep them in.

"Only it didn't. Somehow a seed got across. No telling how far they've spread by now," said Louis to himself. And he shuddered. This must be the "bright spot" he and Nessus had noticed ahead of them. As far as the eye could see, no living thing challenged the sunflowers.

In time, if they were given time, the sunflowers would rule the Ringworld.

But that would take much time. The Ringworld was roomy. Roomy enough for anything.

CHAPTER 15 — Dream-Castle

Louis, musing, was only half aware of two flycycles dropping beside his own. He was jerked from his reverie when Speaker barked, "Louis! You will take the Slaver disintegrator from my 'cycle and use it to dig us a hiding-hole. Teela, come and tend my injuries."

"A hiding-hole?"

"Yes. We must burrow like animals and wait for nightfall."

"Yeah." Louis shook himself. Speaker should not have had to think of that, injured as he was. Obviously they could not risk a break in the clouds. All the sunflowers needed to murder them was a point-source of light. But at night -

Louis avoided looking at Speaker while he searched Speaker's cycle. One look had been enough. The kzin was burnt black across most of his body. Fluids leaked through the oily ash that had been fur. Flesh showed bright red in wide cracks. The smell of burnt hair was strong and terrible.

Louis found the disintegrator: a double-barreled shotgun with a fluid-seeming handle. The weapon next to it made him grin sourly. If Speaker had suggested burning off the sunflowers with flashlight-lasers, Louis probably would have gone along with it, fuddled as he was.

He took the weapon and withdrew quickly, feeling queasy, ashamed of his weakness. He hurt with the pain of Speaker's burns. Teela, who knew nothing of pain, could help Speaker better than Louis could.

Low aimed the gun thirty degrees downward. He was wearing the breathing-helmet from his pressure suit. As he was in no hurry, he flipped only one of the two triggers.

The pit formed fast. Louis couldn't see how fast, for the dust was all around him after the first instant. A hurricane blew at him from where the beam fell. Louis had to lean hard into the wind.

In the cone of the beam the electron became a neutral particle. Soil and rock, torn to atoms by the mutual repulsion of the nuclei, reached him as a fog of monatoinic dust. Louis was glad of the breathing-helmet.

Presently he turned off the disintegrator. The pit looked big enough to fit the three of them and the flycycles too.

So quickly, he thought. And he wondered how fast the tool would dig with both beams on. But then there would be a current flow, he thought, borrowing Speaker's euphemism. At the moment he wasn't looking for that much excitement.