"There are bandersnatchi on a lot of worlds. They were Slaver food animals. I wouldn't be surprised to find them all through the galaxy. The question is, what made the Ringworlders bring them here?"

"Decoration," Teela said promptly.

"Are you kidding?" A bandersnatch looked like a cross between Moby Dick and a caterpillar tractor.

Still, Louis thought, why not? Why wouldn't the engineers have raided a dozen or a hundred stellar systems to populate their artificial world? By hypothesis, they had had ramscoop-fusion drives. By necessity every living thing on the Ringworld had been brought from somewhere else. Sunflowers. Bandersnatchi. What else?

Forget it. Go straight for the rim wall; don't try to explore. Already they had come far enough to circle the Earth half a dozen times. Finagle's law, how much there was to find!

Strange life. (Harmless, so far.)

Sunflowers. (Speaker flaming in a glare of light, yowling into the intercom.)

Floating cities. (Which fell disastrously.)

Bandersnatchi. (Intelligent and dangerous. They would be the same here. Bandersnatchi did not mutate.)

And death? Death was always the same, everywhere.

They circled the castle again, looking for openings. Windows there were, all shapes, rectangles and octagons and bubbles and thick panes in the floor; but all were closed. They found a dock for flying vehicles, with a great door built like a drawbridge to act as a landing ramp; but, like a drawbridge, the door was up and closed. They found a couple of hundred feet of spiral escalator hanging like a bedspring from the lowermost tip of the castle. Its 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. Thhey 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 kideed, 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 commmd. 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 dry pool. Framed by glass walls and a glass floor, the white skeleton of a Frumious bandersnatch looked back at him with empty eyes set in a spoon-shaped skull.

The opposite wall, equally transparent, opened a thousand feet over the city.

Louis rolled over three times and dropped off the edge of the bed. The floor was soft, covered with a fur rug whose texture and color distintingly resembled a native's beard. Louis padded to the window and looked out.

(Something was interfering with his vision, like a minor flicker in a tridee screen. Consciously he had not even noticed it. Nonetheless it was annoying.)

Beneath a white and featureless sky, the city was all the colors of gray. Most of the buildings were tall, but a bare handful were tall enough to dwarf the rest; taller, a few of them, than the bottom of this floating castle. There had been other floating buildings. Lotus could see the scars, broad gaps in the cityscape, where thousands of tons of masonry had smashed down.

But this one dream-castle had had its own independent power supply. And a bedroom big enough to fit any decent-sized orgy. With a tremendous window-wall from which a sultan might contemplate his domain, might see his subjects as the ants they were.

"This place must have been conducive to hubris," said Louis Wu.

Something caught his eye. Something fluttering outside the window.

Thread. A length of it had hung up on a cornice; but more of it was still drifting down from the sky. Coarse thread. He could see the two strands trailing from the cornice down over the city. It must have been falling for as long as he had been looking out the window. Interfering with his vision.