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.

CHAPTER 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 glovesoft 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. He had been answering questions for some time when he thought of one of his own.

"Hey. Is your translator disc working?"

"No, Louis. A short time ago the instrument turned white hot before me, frightening me badly. Had I dared, I would have gone catatonic; but I knew too little."

"Well, the others are gone too. Teela's burned its case and left a sear on her 'cycle. Speaker and I both got our hands burned. You know something? Were going to have to learn the Ringworld language."

"Yes."

"I wish the old man had remembered something about the fall of the old Ring society. I had an idea …" And he told the puppeteer his theory of a mutating colonic bacterium.

"That is possible," said Nessus. "Once they lost the secret of transmutation, they would never recover."

"Oh? Why not?"

"Look about you, Louis. What do you see?"

Louis did. He saw a lightning-storm developing ahead; he saw hills, valleys, a distant city, twin mountain peaks tipped with the dirty translucency of raw Ring flooring … "Land anywhere on the Ringworld, and dig. What do you find?"

"Dirt," said Louis. "So?"

"And then?"

"More dirt. Bedrock. Ring floor material," said Louis. And as he said these words the landscape seemed to alter. Storm clouds, mountains, the city to spinward and the city dwindling behind, the edge of brilliance far away on the infinity-horizon, that might be a sea or a sunflower invasion … now the landscape showed as the shell it was. The difference between an honest planet and this was the difference between a human face and an empty rubber mask.

"Dig on any world," the puppeteer was saying, "and eventually you will find some kind of metal ore. Here, you will find forty feet of soil, and then the Ring foundation. That material cannot be worked. If it could be pierced, the miner would strike vacuum — a harsh reward for his labor.

"Give the Ring a civilization capable of building the Ring, and it must necessarily have cheap transmutation. Let them lose the technology of trasmutation — no matter how — and what would be left? Surely they would not stockpile raw metals. There are no ores. The metal of the Ring would be all in machines and in tools and in rust. Even interplanetary capability would not help them, for there is nothing to be mined anywhere around this star. Civilization would fall and never rise."

Softly Louis asked, "When did you figure this out?"

"Some time ago. It did not seem important to our survival."

"So you just didn't mention it. Right," said Louis. The hours he'd spent worrying that problem! And it all seemed so vividly obvious now. What a trap, what a terrible trap for thinking beings.

Louis looked ahead of him (and was marginally aware that Nessus's image was gone). The storm was nearer now, and it was wide. Doubtless the sonic folds could handle it, but still …

Better to fly over it. Louis pulled on a handle, and the flycycles rose toward the world's gray lid, toward the clouds that had covered them since they reached the tower called Heaven.

Louis's mind ran in idle …

Learning a new language would take time. Learning a new language every time they set down would be impossible. The question was becoming crucial. How long had the Ring natives been barbarian? How long since they had all spoken the same language? How far had the local languages diverged from the original?

The universe blurred, then went entirely gray. They were in the clouds. Tendrils of mist streamed around the bubble of Louis's sonic fold. Then the 'cycles broke through into the sunlight.

From the Ringworld's indefinite horizon, a vast blue eye looked at Louis Wu across a flat infinity of cloud.

If God's head had been the size of the Earth's Moon, that eye would have been about the right size.

It took Louis a moment to grasp what he was seeing. For another moment his brain flatly refused to believe it. Then the whole picture tried to fade like a badly illuminated holo.

Through the humming in his ears he heard / felt someone screaming.

Am I dead? he wondered.

And, Is that Nessus screaming? But he'd cut that circuit.

It was Teela. Teela, who had never been afraid of anything in her life. Teela covered her face with her hands, hiding from that vast blue stare.

The eye lay dead ahead, dead to port. It seemed to be drawing them toward itself.

Am I dead? Is the Creator come to judge me? Which Creator?

It was finally time for Louis Wu to decide which Creator he believed in, if any.