What the window showed was more real than the dancers.

Chmeee and Louis Wu lolled in the foreground. The Hindmost’s servants-in-rebellion both looked a bit the worse for wear. The Hindmost’s medical programs had restored them both to youth, not much more than two years ago. Young and healthy they still were, but soft and slothful, too.

Hind kick, touch hooves. Whirl, brush tongues.

The Great Ocean lay beneath a sea of fog. Wind-roiled fog made streamline patterns over the tremendous ship. At the shore the fog piled like a breaking wave. Only the crow’s nests, six hundred feet tall, poked above the fog. Far inland, far across the white blanket, mountain peaks burst through, nearly black, with glittering peaks.

Hidden Patriarch had come home. The Hindmost was about to lose his alien companions.

The webeye picked up voices.

Louis Wu: “I’m pretty sure that’s Mount Hood, and Mount Rainier there. That one I don’t know, but if Mount St. Helens hadn’t blown her top near a thousand years ago, that might be it.”

Chmeee: “A Ringworld mountain doesn’t explode unless you hit it with a meteor.”

“Precisely my point. I think we’ll be passing the map of San Francisco Bay inside of ten hours. The kind of wind and waves that build up on the Great Ocean, you’ll need a decent bay for your lander, Chmeee. You can start your invasion there, if you don’t mind being conspicuous.”

“I like conspicuous.” The Kzin stood and stretched, claws extended. Eight feet of fur tipped everywhere with daggers, a vision out of nightmare. The Hindmost had to remind himself that he faced only a hologram. The Kzin and Hidden Patriarch were 300,000 miles distant from the spacecraft buried beneath the Map of Mars.