"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.
Teela and Speaker had dismounted. Speaker was now hairless over most of his body. A large orange patch still covered him where he sat and a broad orange band crossed his eyes. Elsewhere his nude skin was veined red-violet, showing clusters of deep red cracks. Teela was spraying him with something that foamed white where it touched.
The stench of burnt hair and meat stayed Louis from coming too close. "It's done," he said.
The kzin looked up. "I can see again, Louis."
"Good!" He'd been worried.
"The puppeteer brought military medical supplies, vastly superior to kzinti civilian medicines. He should not have had access to military supplies." The kzin sounded angry. Perhaps he suspected bribery; and perhaps he was right.
"I'm going to call Nessus," Louis said. And he circled the pair. White foam now covered the kzin from head to foot. There was no smell at all.
"I know where you are," he told the puppeteer.
"Marvelous. Where am I, Louis?"
"You're behind us. You circled round behind us as soon as you were out of sight. Teela and Speaker don't know. They can't think like puppeteers."
"Do they expect a puppeteer to break trail for them? Perhaps it is best they continue to think so. What chance is there that they will permit me to rejoin them?"
"Not now. Maybe later. Let me tell you why I called …" And he told the puppeteer about the sunflower field. He was detailinh the extent of Speaker's injuries when Nessus's flat face dropped below the level of the intercom caniera.
Louis waited a few moments for the puppeteer to reappear. Then he switched off. He was sure that Nessus would not remain long in catatonic withdrawal. The puppeteer was too sanely careful of his life.