Ten hours of daylight remained. The team waited it out in the disintegrator-dug trench.
Speaker slept through it. They walked him into the trench, then used a spray from the kzinti medkit to put him to sleep. The white stuff had congealed on him to the consistency of a foam rubber pillow.
"The world's only bouncy kzin," said Teela.
Louis tried to sleep. He dozed for a time. Once he half woke to bright daylight and to the sharp black shadow of the slope failing across him. He stirred and went back to sleep …
And woke later in a cold sweat. Shadows! If he had sat up to look, hed have been burnt crisp!
But the clouds were back, safely blocking the vengeance of the sunflowers.
Finally one horizon dimmed. As the sky darkened, Louis set about waking the others.
They flew beneath the clouds. It was vital that they be able to see the sunflowers. If dawn approached while the fleet was still over sunflowers, they would have to hide out during the next day.
Occasionally Louis dipped his 'cycle for a closer look.
For an hour they flew and then the sunflowers grew sparse. There was a region where sunflowers were scarce, half-grown seedlings growing among the blackened stumps of a recently burned forest. Grass actually seemed to compete with the sunflowers in this area.
Then there were no sunflowers at all.
And Louis could sleep at last.
Louls slept as if drugged. It was still night when he woke. He looked about him and found a glimmer of light ahead and to spinward.
Groggy as he was, he thought it would turn out to be a firefly caught in the some fold, or something equally silly. But it was still there after he rubbed his eyes.
He pushed the Call button for Speaker.
The light grow nearer and clearer. Against the darkness of the Ringworld night landscape it showed bright as a point of reflected sunlight
Not a sunflower. Not at night.
It might be a house, Louis thought; but where would a native got his lighting? Then again, a house would have gone by like that. At flycycle cruising speed, you could cross the North American continent in two-and-half hours.
The light was drifting past them on the right, and still Speaker hadn't answered.
Louis cut his 'cycle out of formation. He was grinning in the dark. Behind him the fleet, now under Speakees guidance (at Speaker's insistence), was only two 'cycles strong. Louis picked Speaker's from memory. He flew toward it.
Shock waves and sonic fold showed faintly outlined by cloud-dimmed Archlight, a network of straight lines converging to a point. Speaker's flycycle, and Speaker's ghost-gray silhouette, seemed caught in a Euclidian spiderweb.
Louis was perilously close when he turned big spotlight on and immediately off. In the dark he saw the ghost come suddenly alert. Louis guided his 'cycle carefully between the kzin and the point of light.
He blinked his spotlight again.
Speaker came on the intercom. "Yes, Louis, I see it now. A lighted something going past us."
"Then let's look it over."
"Very well." Speaker turned toward the light.
They circled it in the dark, like curious minnows nosing a sinking beer bottle. It was a ten-story castle floating a thousand feet high, and it was all lit up like the instrument board on some ancient rocket ship.
A single tremendous picture window, curved so that it formed both wall and ceiling, opened on a cavity the size of an opera house. Within, a labyrinth of dining tables surrounded a raised circle of floor. There was fifty feet of space above the tables, empty but for a free-form sculpture in stressed wire.
Always it came as a fresh surprise, the elbow room on the Ringworld. On Earth it was a felony to fly any vehicle without an autopilot. A falling car would be bound to kill someone, no matter where it fell. Here, thousands of miles of wilderness, buildings suspended over cities, and head room for a guest fifty feet tall.
There was a city beneath the castle. It showed no lights. Speaker skimmed over it like a swooping hawk, scanned it hastily in the blue Archlight. He came up to report that the city looked very like Zignamuclickclick.
"We can explore it after dawn," he said. "I think this stronghold is more important. It may have been untouched since the fall of civilization."
"It must have its own power source," Louis speculated. "I wonder why? None of the buildings in Zignamuclickclick did."
Teela sent her 'cycle skimming directly under the castle. In the intercom her eyes went big with wonder, and she cried, "Louis, Speakerl You've got to see this!"
They dropped after her without thought. Louis was moving up alongside her when he became suddenly, freezingly aware of the mass suspended over his head.
There were windows all over the underside; and the underside was all angles. There was no way to land the castle. Who had built it, and how, with no bottom to it? Concrete and metal asymnietrically designed, and what the tanj was holding it up? Louis's stomach lurched, but he set his jaw and pulled up alongside Teela, underneath a floating mass equivalent to a medium-sized passenger starship.
Teela had found a wonder: a sunken swimming pool, bathtub-shaped and brightly lit. Its glass bottom and glass walls were open to the outer darkness, but for one wall which bordered on a bar, or a living room, or … it was hard to tell, looking through two thicknesses of transparency.
The pool was dry. In the bottom was a single great skeleton resembling that of a bandersnatch.
"They kept large pets," Louis speculated.
"Isn't that a Jinxian bandersnatch? My uncle was a hunter," said Teela. "He had his trophy room built inside a bandersnatch skeleton."
"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.