At the center of the bridge, to the howl of a klaxon, Koala’s jump timer reset from a bit longer than five minutes to just less than one. New destination coordinates popped onto the pilot’s console.
“What do you think, Lieutenant?” Commander Johansson asked.
Tanya Wu stiffened in her seat at the comm console because, almost certainly, the question was a test. She was newly rotated aboard a ship long deployed. And posted as a lowly purser in a combat zone. And Wu being such a common name — unless she had somehow, without knowing it, pissed off someone in Personnel back on Earth — she had ended up serving under her own father as captain. Dad swore he had had nothing to do with her assignment to Koala, but oh, how pathetic the situation made her look.
Amid the orderly bustle of the bridge, she caught sidelong glances and heard yet another whispered reference — damn this ship’s name — to marsupial pouches and helpless offspring.
“You do think?” Johansson prompted.
“Yes, sir.” External view ports showed only stars, and Tanya turned toward the bridge’s main tactical display. A supply ship as defenseless as its name suggested, Koala, one vessel among hundreds, huddled near the middle of ARM Task Force Delta. Scattered around the periphery of the holo: two small clusters of Kzinti warships. A Trinoc battle group. An ARM squadron, perhaps patrolling, perhaps returning from, well, Tanya did not try to guess its assignment. Apart from fellow ships of the task force, even the closest icons registered as farther from Koala than Saturn from the sun.
The local star was merely the brightest among dimensionless points in the display, and all these ships were outside its gravitational singularity. Out here, light had ceased to set the speed limit. Jump to hyperspace and back out: the nearer group of Kzinti could emerge within the ARM formation, laser cannons blazing, antimatter munitions spewing, within seconds. Still …
“Too many ships too close together,” she temporized, “but that’s always the case.”
“Business as usual, then?”
Definitely a test and the bridge crew knew it. In unending round-the-clock high alert, even lowly pursers took their turn standing watch.
Tanya said, “Let’s hope this never becomes the usual.”
Of the thousands of warships in and around this solar system, at any given moment someone was jumping from or reentering Einstein space. Even within formations ships shifted, the fluid configurations yet another complication for anyone contemplating a sneak attack.
The tactical complexity was staggering. Hawking, the chief artificial intelligence aboard the task force’s flagship, and its distributed subsets in computers across the armada, continually integrated readouts across hundreds of ARM ships and tens of thousands of sensor-laden probes. It pondered every hyperspace-related ripple to triangulate its point of origin. It endlessly assessed evolving risks and opportunities, calculating new deployments for the task force.
Attempted to do all that, anyway.
“Thirty seconds to jump,” the pilot announced over the intercom.
Meaning that soon after thirty seconds, recently disappeared ships in threatening numbers could emerge in synch in and around Task Force Delta, to blast away at everything in sight and return to hyperspace faster than mere mortals could react. Or zip through the formation without shooting, just to rattle the ARM crews. Or stay in hyperspace a few seconds longer, to target another nearby formation.
Or remain in hyperspace for a long time, leaving this chaos behind. Nothing remained to fight over. Nothing tangible, anyway. To be the first to go would be to retreat, and honor remained to fight over.…
Too many possibilities and too little information to choose among them. Tanya said, “It looks like a routine precautionary fleet jump to me, Commander.”
A maneuver that would, in turn, unleash a torrent of new ripples, to which thousands more ships, in formations large and small, all around this solar system, must hurriedly react.…
Johansson left her hanging almost till the jump. “To me, too,” he finally allowed.
“Jumping in three, two, one…” the pilot announced over the intercom.
Across the bridge, view-port screens went dark. The human brain was not wired to perceive hyperspace. Lucky people so confronted sensed walls snapping together, denying the less-than-nothingness presented in a porthole or view port. Unlucky people got lost in the … whatever hyperspace was. The Blind Spot, starfarers called the phenomenon, and it had driven people mad.
“In three,” the pilot called. “Two. One. Dropout.”
On dropout, stars refilled the view ports. Pale, translucent spheres popped up scattered throughout the tactical display. Each sphere centered on the most recent confirmed pre-jump coordinates of a ship; the sphere grew with the moment by moment uncertainty of where that ship had the potential to be now. One by one, like soap bubbles pricked, spheres vanished. Everywhere a ship had been definitively located, whether by Koala’s instruments or in hyperwave downloads from remote sensors, a tiny icon replaced the bubble. Sometimes nothing replaced a bubble; that meant a ship had disappeared into hyperspace in the seconds while Koala had been disconnected from the familiar universe.
“Report,” Johansson ordered.
“Jump timer at three minutes and holding, sir,” the pilot said.
“No threatening deployments, Commander,” the tactical officer said.
“Hyperwave links opened to London and Prague” — respectively the task force’s flagship and Koala’s assigned escort — “sir,” Tanya said.
“What do you think?” Johansson asked her again.
She reached into the tactical display to point out a nearby proto-comet, a vaguely potato-shaped glob about five kilometers along its shortest axis. “I don’t care for the snowball,” she said. “We’re too close, and a decent-sized squadron could hide behind it.” If so, perhaps well stocked with nukes or antimatter.
The grating, prepare-to-jump tone blasted.
“Jump in twenty seconds,” the pilot called over the intercom.
At eleven seconds, another audible alarm, at the pitch that warned of a bogey. It morphed into the warble that identified the bogey as a hostile. A scattering of new icons, lens-shaped, manifested in the tactical display, from Koala’s perspective lurking behind the snowball. The latest intel download from Hawking.
“I see some Kzinti agreed with you,” Johansson said, a rare touch of approval in his voice.
“Jumping in three. Two…”
The task force executed seven more micro-jumps before the watch changed and Tanya, exhausted, could shamble to the ship’s mess for a hurried meal.
TANYA TOSSED AND TURNED, suspended in midair between sleeper plates in her tiny cabin. As the intercom blasted alerts every few minutes, her thoughts churned. Could three navies, and armed observers from yet more military powers, converge like this without everything ending in disaster? How long until someone lost patience, or cracked under the unending pressure, or simply made an honest mistake?
Reaching through the loose mesh of the crash netting, she slapped the touchpoint and collapsed the antigrav field. She recorded a quick it’s-crazy-here-how’s-it-going-with-you message for Elena, wrapped it in standard fleet encryption, and queued it for transmission. She and Elena hadn’t managed a live vid call since soon after Tanya arrived; now they counted themselves lucky when even short texts got through without long delays. As the pace of jumps grew ever more frenetic, tactical traffic between ships consumed almost every scrap of available bandwidth.
After graduating ARM Naval Academy, she and Elena had gone their separate ways. Elena had been posted to the Artifact Monitoring Mission, two hundred light-years from Earth. Tanya’s first posting was as assistant cargo officer on a supply ship supporting the Fleet of Worlds diplomatic mission, even farther from home.
Elena was a line officer, however junior, and Canberra an actual warship. Tanya, in her heart of hearts, admitted to a twinge of envy. She had volunteered repeatedly and insistently for reassignment. Nothing interesting, in any military sense, would ever happen around the Fleet. No matter that the Puppeteers were cowards — or, perhaps, because they were — an intimidating defensive array of sensors and robotic craft protected their worlds.
Which was too tanj bad! The Puppeteers had much for which to answer.
A Puppeteer scout had bared the Concordance’s sordid history of interspecies meddling. (Why? Tanya did not begin to understand. The retired admirals among the Academy faculty did not pretend to understand, either.) And this scout, Nessus, had revealed those secrets — and the long-hidden location of the Puppeteer worlds, the theretofore unimaginable Fleet of Worlds — and the existence and location of the yet more inconceivable Ringworld — to, of all improbable people, her great-grandfather! Louis Wu had vanished from Human Space before Tanya was born. Dad scarcely remembered the man.
After six interstellar wars and their megadeaths, human governments and the Kzinti Patriarchy had learned to coexist — the uneasy peace of four centuries that had given way in this system to bloody skirmishes. A peace whose prospects further crumbled by the nanosecond.
Wherever they were, if they still were, did Nessus and Louis comprehend the mess they had left behind?
Whatever the reasoning behind past disclosures, day by day, year by year, the Puppeteer worlds receded farther into the galactic north. Even by hyperdrive, the Fleet was already a two-plus-year epic journey from Earth. Maybe the aliens gambled — if so, correctly — that humans and Kzinti, no matter their just grievances with the Puppeteers, would put off confronting the Concordance to first seize a nearer, stationary, more enticing — and seemingly defenseless — prize.
And that far from being an opportunity, the Ringworld would turn out to be a trap.
THE RINGWORLD …
A loop of ribbon, its circumference rivaling Earth’s orbit, encircling its sun. A ribbon broader than four times the distance that separated Earth from its moon. A ribbon as massive as Jupiter and with a surface area to equal millions of Earths. An inconceivably huge construct, made of a mysterious, impossible something as strong as the force that bound together the particles of an atomic nucleus. Home to many trillions of intelligent beings. Home, undeniably, to wondrous technologies.
Its civilization fallen; its wealth and its secrets ripe for plunder.
And more incredibly still, vanished in an instant into hyperspace, no matter that the “experts” insisted such a thing could not happen.
All that mass disappearing had sent a gravity wave crashing through this system’s Oort Cloud. Billions, perhaps trillions of snowballs careened from their once stable orbits. Snowballs? Snow worlds, rather, some of them bigger, even, than Pluto. Large and small, they plunged inward toward the sun, or hurtled outward into the interstellar darkness, or shattered one another. Wherever they went, they made an already overcomplicated tactical situation that much worse. All those fleets dodging —
The ceiling light of Tanya’s cabin flashed. Her wake-up gonged. Time again to stand watch on the bridge.
THIS WASN’T A WAR ZONE. Not exactly. Not technically.
A distinction without significance to all who had died here.
“Welcome back, Lieutenant,” Commander Johansson said, yawning despite the blat of another emergency-jump alarm.
“Yes, sir.” Tanya managed not to yawn back.
In Koala’s main tactical display chaos still reigned, as it had for the weeks since the Ringworld — somehow — vanished.
Even without the prize, the mission continued. Artifact Monitoring Mission, the deployment was officially called, although outside of formal communications no one called it that. Across the fleet, names ranged from Mexican Standoff to Cold Confrontation, from the Interspecies Scrimmage to the No-Win War. Tanya favored the Frigid Face-Off. Naval Intelligence said the Kzinti called it something that sounded like a cat fight (then again, what in Hero’s Tongue didn’t?) and that translated loosely into Interworld as Grudge Match. What the Trinocs called the situation was anyone’s guess.
Or the locals when, at last, they had joined the fray. The natives were not as helpless as they had first appeared. The rumor mill whispered about ships erupting, blazingly fast, from the Ringworld, and even more incredibly about X-ray lasers — powered by solar flares! — vaporizing intruders that had ventured too close.
And that was only the combatants. Puppeteers had ships here observing, too, as did the Outsiders, as did —
“Jump in ten seconds,” the copilot announced, her voice grown hoarse.
“Sit, Lieutenant,” Johansson ordered.
Tanya sat.
Once again, they flashed in and out of hyperspace. Seconds after Koala reemerged, an outgunned Trinoc squadron jumped away, leaving what spectrographic analysis suggested was the hull debris of an Avenger-class Kzinti scout ship.
An ambush? An accident, someone’s nerves stretched beyond endurance? Or the beginning of something much, much worse?
Thousands of warships far from home, and nothing left to justify the huge expense of their deployments. Nothing to excuse the lives already lost. Nothing to distract from historic grudges, or from fresh setbacks amid the endless jockeying for advantage. No brass ring left to grab. No one left to confront but one another.
“How does this mess end, Commander?” Tanya asked.
“Well above my pay grade, Lieutenant,” Johansson said, and the pay reference didn’t come across like a wisecrack about pursers, either. “Ours is just to do and die.”
The intruder alarm wailed.
Hindmost capered up, down, all around a maze of serpentine access tunnels. Within the digital wallpaper virtual herds accompanied him, left and right, for as far as the eye could see. He was free!
Not safe, to be sure. Not restored to power. Not unburdened of doubts and regrets. Not yet home, but in possession of a starship.
Rid — at long last! — of the Ringworld.
Still, thousands of alien warships prowled the vicinity, and every faction in the conflict coveted the technologies in this vessel. As would the observers aboard the three skulking ships of obvious Fleet provenance. That ships of the Concordance remained scattered around the war fleets told Hindmost who commanded aboard those ships. Who must yet rule Hearth.
If he ran out of options, he would sooner let humans take this ship.
As reality crashed down on Hindmost he stumbled, missing a step and ruining the unfolding pattern. But with a kick and a tight pirouette, he put himself back into the dance. Every Citizen lived in fear. That he had left Hearth and herd sufficed to prove him insane, besides. He had managed his fears — mostly — for a very long time. He would cope a bit longer.
Soon, he told himself, he would go home. He and his loved ones would be together again. He tried to picture the happy day, but his imagination failed him. It had been so long.
The dance must suffice for a while longer.
“Analysis complete,” Voice sang.
“Thank you,” Hindmost sang back.
His politeness was neurotic; having an AI at all was psychotic. No sensible being set out to build his prospective successor. But in the subtle calculus of countless dangers and endless responsibilities, to have a companion — any companion — had won out. Had he chosen otherwise, had he dared to undertake his Ringworld adventure without an illicit AI, he would doubtless have faded, long ago, into terminal catatonia.
The sweet release that ever beckoned.
“Another segment of hyperdrive-control software characterized,” Voice continued. “Calculating next jump.”
Working directly in binary code, Tunesmith had reprogrammed many of the computers aboard Long Shot. The new programming was convoluted beyond Hindmost’s ability to parse, one more instance of the arrogant improvisational brilliance that came so naturally to protectors.
If not as natural as doing anything, no matter how extreme, to protect their own kind.
“Are more jumps necessary?” Hindmost asked.
“Yes. The software I am studying continues to self-modify. As I analyze the code, I only fall further behind.”
“So you theorize from functional tests.”
“Theorize and confirm, especially as to the apparent behavioral constraints on the self-modifications. As you say, Hindmost.”
Once the hyperdrive customizations had been characterized he would refocus the AI on other changes. Humans, Kzinti, and Tunesmith, each in their turn controlling this ship, had modified shipboard systems, stripped out test instrumentation and decoy equipment, and retrofitted their own paraphernalia. He knew by placement and deductive reasoning how many of the bridge controls must function, but of settings and status displays, all in the dots-and-commas script favored by the Kzinti, he could read nothing.
It would be a long time before he could undertake the flight home. Time for Louis to heal, and to emerge from the autodoc. Time, again and again and again, to overtake the spreading gravity wave unleashed by the Ringworld’s disappearance, to study the only direct evidence as to how the impossible had been accomplished. Time between stints in hyperspace to gradually build up speed in normal space — fearful, all the while, that even across great distances the white-hot exhaust of Long Shot’s fusion thrusters would attract unwanted attention.
Time to prepare for the surprises certain to await him at the end of his journey. He had been trapped on the Ringworld much too long.
With a graceful twirl he concluded this dance. “Keep us far from the other ships in the system,” he ordered. A terrifying number of ships. Ships all too easily seen with Tunesmith’s exquisitely sensitive instruments.
“Long Shot is much faster than any vessel among the Fringe War,” Voice commented.
Thousands of times faster. Faster than Hindmost trusted his reflexes to pilot, even if he could read the Kzinti displays. Even if he understood Tunesmith’s alterations.
But Louis could fly it.
Picking at his meticulously coiffed mane, Hindmost sang, “And yet Tunesmith took this ship from the Kzinti.”
Trickery that one protector had conceived, another could, too. As fervently as Hindmost hoped all protectors had gone away with the Ringworld, their departure remained theory.
“Far away, Hindmost, as you have ordered.”
HINDMOST SQUINTED THROUGH the frost-speckled dome into Long Shot’s single autodoc. In thirty-seven days, if the master readout could be believed, the autodoc would complete its treatment and release its occupant. “You are looking much better,” he sang, and it was true.
Despite Louis Wu’s ashen pallor. Despite the splotches of red and yellow and very little green among the progress indicators reflecting from the dome’s inner surface. Despite swollen joints and contorted limbs and genitalia just beginning to regrow. Despite the distended brain case and toothless gums. Despite all that, Louis began to look again like an adult human, and a bit less like a human turned protector.
“I was too twisted up when the tree-of-life started to change me,” Louis had admitted before, with Hindmost lifting from behind, he had climbed into the autodoc. Only minutes had passed since their escape from the Ringworld. “I’m dying.”
Disclosure that offered no prediction as to whether, to heal Louis, the autodoc would undo or perfect his conversion into a protector.
With any other autodoc there would have been no hope, but this unit was one of a kind. Frightfully advanced. Nanotech-based. This autodoc could, if necessary, rebuild a person from the molecular level up; Hindmost was convinced that it was doing that to Louis. Carlos Wu had built this amazing prototype, long ago and far away. It had been smuggled from Earth, then stolen, but — not for lack of trying — never duplicated.
Yet in a way, Tunesmith had surpassed it.
He had extracted nanites from the autodoc, reprogrammed them, distributed them far and wide across the Ringworld to replicate, and — well, Hindmost remained fuzzy on what, exactly, Tunesmith had done. Used the nanotech to rewire the Ringworld’s whole superconducting substrate. Adapted what he had learned in his brief study of Long Shot’s hyperdrive.
So, anyway, Louis had explained. It took a protector to understand a protector. And not even a protector ever fully trusted another protector.
Trembling, Hindmost continued studying the twisted figure in the autodoc. “I am glad for you, Louis.” And relieved for myself.
For Louis knew the harm the Concordance had once brought to the Ringworld. As a human protector, Louis would seek to destroy Hearth and the Concordance.
If the autodoc did not undo the transformation, he must kill Louis while that remained possible. With Louis defenseless in a therapeutic coma.
Louis-as-protector would have seen that, too, and yet Louis had climbed, defenseless, into the autodoc. Hence, Louis knew he would wait to act until the course of the cure revealed itself. Hence Louis expected to emerge as a normal human, or he would have killed Hindmost before getting into the autodoc.
Matching wits with a protector was futile.
“I look forward to again having your company, Louis,” Hindmost said. In thirty-seven days.
Until then, Louis, I have the dance.
In Endurance’s claustrophobic exercise room, Alice plodded away on the treadmill. She had little to do on the long flight but exercise. Puppeteers were the galaxy’s consummate worriers, and scant days from New Terra even Nessus had run out of contingencies to plan for and theories to fret about.
On the tarmac, Sigmund had taken Alice aside to warn her Nessus would be stingy with facts. Two relics exchanging the obvious about a third relic. She had promised Sigmund to set aside their differences for the sake of the mission. Also, her differences with Nessus. Once this situation was settled, the Puppeteer had a lot of explaining to do.
The wallpaper showed rolling forest, the foliage a riot of autumn colors. On solid ground, the view would have been stunning. Here, the imagery only reminded her that behind the thin-film display, outside thin ship walls, lurked … Finagle knew what.
Something stirred in her gut, whispered unintelligibly in her ears, tickled behind her eyes. Something that her hindbrain denied and her forebrain rejected.
Hyperspace couldn’t kill any deader than could vacuum, and she had no trouble living around vacuum. But she had grown up in the Belt. Vacuum was something to respect, to guard against — but also something understood.
Unlike hyperspace.
Was hyperspace an alternate reality? Hidden dimension? Parallel universe? She didn’t pretend to know. The so-called experts didn’t.
If anyone understood hyperspace, it was the Outsiders. They had invented hyperdrive. Which, although they sold it, they themselves never used.
That seemed instructive.
Blotting sweat from her face and arms with a towel, she abandoned the treadmill. She strode down the corridor to the bridge to check the mass pointer. Because one thing she did understand about hyperspace: while crossing it, keep your distance from large masses. Get too close to a gravitational singularity while in hyperspace and you never came out.
A light-year every three days. Logically speaking, stars being light-years apart in this region, a glance at the mass pointer every few hours more than sufficed for safety.
Logic failed to convince the tingling behind her eyes.
In the mass pointer, the most prominent instrument on the pilot’s console, nothing looked close. As Alice could have predicted from her last peek, less than an hour earlier. But her skin still crawled. The … whatever … behind her eyes prickled worse than ever.
The bridge walls showed forest, too, but that only emphasized how unnatural their surroundings were. If the less-than-nothing of hyperspace could be said to surround —
“Not very convincing, is it?”
She flinched at the unexpected voice.
Nessus stood at the bridge hatch. With one head, he indicated the mass pointer. His other head tugged at the remaining braid in his much-stirred mane.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“Can you?”
“Not very well.” She cleared her throat. “What did you mean, the mass pointer isn’t convincing?”
“It was once my misfortune to be brave.” With a final yank and a plaintive sigh, he released the tortured braid. “That is to say, I was insane. Insane enough to volunteer to leave home and become a scout. On my last scouting mission…”
“Go on.” They had the bridge to themselves, and she sat on an armrest of the pilot’s crash couch.
“I returned home missing a head.” His two-throated wheeze came out like minor scales in clashing keys. “I left the autodoc scared normal.”
Did he want her to feel sorry for him? Fat chance. “The unconvincing mass pointer?”
“My last mission. We are going there now. To the source of the ripple that summons us.” He sang a musical phrase, sad and jangling. “You and Julia have heard me describe it.”
More of the facts with which Nessus had long been stingy.
She still struggled to believe that such a place could exist. “And?”
“Even after the Ringworld, I kept my trust in mass pointers. No one who could readily colonize the planets of other stars would build a habitat so vast. They would have no need.”
“No one with hyperdrive, you mean.”
Heads moved in alternation: up/down, down/up, up/down. A Puppeteer nod.
She was old, tanj it. Tired. Behind her eyes, the itch got even worse. Mass pointer. Trust. The Ringworld.
She whirled to stare at the mass pointer.
The Ringworld was massive; it would create its own gravitational singularity. Despite that, the armchair experts on New Terra had concluded that the Ringworld somehow jumped to hyperspace. That the Ringworld was itself the source of the ripple.
No one had even a theory how that could be possible.
Alice said, “But it looks like the Ringworlders have hyperdrive. What if the Ringworld returns to normal space?”
“Without warning,” Nessus agreed. “Bringing its gravitational singularity.”
And if Endurance was in the wrong place at the wrong time? They would be hurled, or interdimensionally shredded, or whatever. Without warning.
The mass pointer, despite the booming thump it offered when Alice slapped it, seemed a very nebulous thing. The itching grew fierce behind her eyes.
“Could you use some help twisting your mane?” she asked.
“AND … NOW,” JULIA ANNOUNCED from the pilot’s crash couch.
Where fall foliage had long reigned, crisp points of light teemed. The bridge’s wraparound image looked no different from the starscape Nessus had had digitally painted, the past several days, across his cabin walls. Somehow these stars felt different.
“Still there,” Julia said, standing and stretching. “Always good to see stars.”
“Very much so,” Nessus said. “How long will we stay?”
Because except to eject another hyperwave-radio buoy every few light-years, Julia had been keeping them in hyperspace, charging toward … Nessus trembled to imagine what they would find.
Julia tilted her head, considering. “We’ll remain here for half an hour. Longer if the folks back home have something to talk about.” She uploaded a text message, their galactic coordinates appended, to the nearest buoy in the chain. Trip remains uneventful. Endurance out.
“They will,” Alice predicted from the corridor outside the bridge.
With only the three of them aboard, they staggered their sleeping hours so that someone was always awake to check on the mass pointer. Not today, though. Not on such a long flight. No one would choose to sleep through a scheduled respite of normalcy.
Nessus suspected Alice was right.
Outside of gravitational singularities, hyperwave propagated instantaneously. Dropping relay buoys along the way to boost the signal, one could talk across many light-years. Delay only cropped up when an end of the link was inside a singularity. Then, to do hyperwave/laser-beam conversions, you needed a relay at the singularity’s brink. For a free-flying world like New Terra, its mass tiny compared to a star’s, the one-way delay was less than a minute.
One could converse across the light-years — with something useful to say, or not.
“We’ll know soon enough,” Julia said, squeezing past Alice to leave the bridge. “Meanwhile, I’ll drop another buoy.”
While he had the opportunity, Nessus uploaded long messages he had recorded on his pocket computer. It helped to be in touch, even fleetingly, with the children. As the transfer proceeded, he pulled up an old holo of himself with the children, taken in the sprawling, well-tended garden behind their house.
“Your family?” Alice asked.
“Aurora and Elpis. Elpis, though younger, is the taller one.” He took a moment to savor the memories. “As a scout, I never expected to mate, to have children. It was hard to leave them.”
“I understand.” And tentatively, “And your mate?”
“Long gone.” So long that it was hard to maintain any hope.
“I’m sorry,” she said. And angry, her manner added. Consumed by a well-cultivated bitterness.
Before her simmering rage, even the lopsided, eager grins Elpis wore lost the power to charm him. “A funny thing, Alice. They grew up on New Terra. They expect suns during the day, and for stars to sparkle like diamonds in the night sky.”
“And you don’t.”
Hearth blazed with the lights of its continent-spanning cities, was warmed by the waste heat of its industry. Hearth needed no suns. It had no suns. Its farm worlds, like four gigantic moons, bleached most stars from the sky.
“I grew up differently,” was all he could bring himself to say.
Because dissimilar skies were the least of the differences. The residents of one large arcology on Hearth would rival the entire population of New Terra, humans and Citizens combined. His children knew only wide open spaces. They had friends on New Terra. They had grown up sharing a world with humans.
If Aurora and Elpis could return to Hearth, would they?
LAUNCHING THE BUOY WAS SIMPLE ENOUGH. After a final comm check, Julia had only to turn permeable a small area on the cargo hold’s exterior wall and press the buoy straight through the hull into space. Quick swipes with a structural modulator restored that stretch of hull to its customary imperviousness, its original shape remembered.
Exceptional stuff, twing. Clear or opaque or of any semitransparency between. Tunable to any color of the rainbow. As soft or hard as desired. Only General Products hull material was stronger — and unlike GP hull material, no one could turn twing to gossamer from a distance. Grandpa had learned not to trust a GP hull.
And twing was just one of the marvels New Terra’s scientists had coaxed out of the Pak Library. But she wasn’t supposed to know about that, or that Grandpa, Alice, and Nessus had all played a part in bringing the Library to New Terra and the Ministry.
Her task done, Julia dawdled in the hold, leaving Nessus and Alice alone to talk. They had to work past their issues.
Because who didn’t have issues? She lived her life in her grandfather’s shadow. Sigmund Ausfaller was a hero to some, New Terra’s bane to many. Self-deluded fools, the latter, an opinion she kept to herself. In order to serve she played along, telling herself Grandpa would understand.
With a drink bulb of coffee from the ship’s mess, Julia returned to the bridge. “What did I miss?”
Alice gestured dismissively at the comm console, where a new message read: We’ve been waiting for you to check in. The minister has called a strategy session. We’ve begun contacting participants. Expect to begin in about two hours. Acknowledge.
They could travel far in two hours. Farther in two hours plus a meeting.
And she knew how Grandpa felt about too many cooks.
“If they had urgent news for us, they would have texted it,” Julia decided. “And we have nothing new to tell them.”
Acknowledge, the comm console chided.
“Too bad we didn’t see that message in time,” Julia said. “Hyperspace in twenty minutes, people.”
Alice managed to shiver and smile at the same time.
One mouth grasping a curler, the other a brush, Hindmost primped and teased, combed and curled. Strings of newly synthed jewels, of Experimentalist orange more often than any other color, glittered in his mane. He had already buffed his hooves and brushed his hide until they glistened.
The elaborate grooming was not for the lack of pressing things to do. Quite the contrary. He needed to assimilate Voice’s observations and analyses of Long Shot’s controls. Synthesize the measurements taken of the gravity wave set off by the Ringworld’s disappearance from normal space. Account for the absence of a second hyperspace ripple: either the Ringworld had yet to emerge from hyperspace or it had reentered many light-years away, so remote as to be undetectable. Sift his memories of Tunesmith’s cryptic and misleading explanations, and of Louis-as-protector’s interpretations, for clues. Connect all that he had learned/heard/surmised to what little he might know about hyperdrives — which, demonstrably, was not enough.
And there was the madness of Louis launching Long Shot into hyperspace from inside the Ringworld. Escaping through the Ringworld floor! From the depths of a singularity!
Every conventional theory of hyperdrive and hyperspace insisted they should be dead.
Except to eat and sleep and jettison more of the decoy equipment that still clogged the ship, for days Hindmost had done nothing but struggle to understand. He had accomplished little. The wonder was that he functioned at all when, at any time, any of the thousands of warships that his sensors showed might detect this ship.
And while fear-ridden before every jump that this ship might cease to exist such that it could be noticed.
To sense mass from within hyperspace required psionic abilities that mere software lacked. On every hyperdrive jump, the AI’s dead-reckoning navigation might drop them into the nearby star.
His circumstances were intolerable, but setting off in a jury-rigged ship was not the answer. Protectors lived by the jury-rig, supremely confident in their improvisations — and in the makeshifts and expedients, yet to be imagined, by which they would resolve other crises yet to emerge.
Not so Citizens, certainly not the Hindmost. Especially not this Hindmost. He dare not undertake a long voyage, especially with unintelligible Kzinti controls.
Unable to flee, his every instinct called out for catatonia. Instead, he continued to brush. Finally, he set down his implements. Rising from his nest of mounded pillows, he pivoted before a full-length wall mirror, also newly synthed. Through his appearance, if in no other way, he would be worthy of his station.
If only all the responsibilities of the office were as easily satisfied …
Haunch brushing haunch, Hindmost and his most senior aides and ministers settled astraddle twenty padded, Y-shaped benches. Despite the companionable closeness, Hindmost did not feel in the least part comforted. No one did.
Above head level at midroom, centered within the circle of benches, floated that which they must discuss. The pale blue loop of thread could have been pretty, but not with that yellow spark blazing at its center. The spark was a star, and that meant the loop was enormous.
Soft and urgent, plaintive and terrified, phrases of song filled the room. When the cacophony gave no sign of abating, Hindmost intoned, with harmonics of command, “We will begin.” The murmuring stopped abruptly.
“Explain what your long-range instruments have seen,” he directed Minerva, the deputy director of Clandestine Directorate.
Minerva gestured at the blue ring. “The unexpected sighting lies a little more than two light-years distant, not far off the Fleet’s path,” he sang.
“Why have we not heard before of this object?” Hindmost asked, feigning ignorance. In truth, he had feared this day since — it felt like forever. Since Chiron’s arrival.
“We knew something encircled the star.” Minerva sang in low, apologetic tones. “Until we observed it at a suitable angle, we thought it an ordinary dust ring. Not” — he glanced once more at the blue thread — “that.”
“And so only recently did you look closely.”
“Yes, Hindmost,” Minerva agreed timorously.
“Who built it?” Aglaea, an aide, wondered.
“We don’t know,” Minerva answered.
“Why build it?” another asked.
“We don’t know,” Minerva repeated. “Nor how. Nor of what. To construct something so huge — ”
“We must send an expedition,” Chiron interrupted brashly. His mane was a glorious structure of complex silver ringlets.
More precisely, its mane. Chiron was a holographic projection, animated by Proteus: an illicit AI. And equally, their mane, because directing Proteus was the Gw’oth group mind known as Ol’t’ro. Two truths unimaginable to those physically in the council chamber, save by the Hindmost and one other.
Hindmost’s ministers and aides knew Chiron as the long-serving Minister of Science, resident on and governor of Nature Preserve Five, the better to oversee research best performed off the home world. Governments came and went, Hindmosts came and went, and Chiron served them all.
If only that were so.
In the blackest secret in the long, dark history of the Concordance, behind He Who Leads from Behind, Chiron served only him/it/themselves. The herd chose whom they wished to rule the Concordance; time and again, their choices changed nothing. Each outgoing Hindmost revealed to the next the unbearable secret: Chiron, in a moment, could obliterate five worlds and a trillion Citizens. Chiron had promised to do so, if he/it/they ever deemed its unwitting subjects a danger to the worlds of the Gw’oth.
The Gw’oth were native to the sea-bottom muck of the ice-locked ocean of a now-distant moon. A Gw’o was mostly tubelike tentacles: like five snakes fused at their tails. One was no longer from tip to tip than the reach of Hindmost’s neck, little thicker through its central mass than the span he could open a mouth. The uninformed Citizen might feel more pity or disgust at the sight of a Gw’o than cause for fear.
And, as usual, the uninformed Citizen would be mistaken.
Gw’oth were courageous and curious, psychoses they shared with other species evolved from hunting animals. And they had used those flaws to terrible purpose. Within Hindmost’s lifetime, the Gw’oth had broken through the ice of their home world and advanced from fire to fusion, from muscle power to hyperdrive starships.
But even among their own kind, the sixteenfold Gw’oth group mind that was Ol’t’ro was the exception. A perversion. Frightfully intelligent.
Their power of life and death over a trillion Citizens was absolute.
Chiron had spoken; the decision was foregone. The Concordance would send an expedition. And like the herd’s delusions of self-determination, the mission would be meaningless, too.
Worse than meaningless. Dangerous. The expedition could serve no purpose beyond the keeping of secrets.
For the Ringworld was not newly discovered, but rediscovered, and the Concordance’s historic role in defanging the trillions of Ringworlders must remain hidden at all costs. In Hindmost’s first, temporary, fall from power, he had purged that dangerous information even from the Hindmost-only archives, lest Ol’t’ro come upon it.
Room-temperature superconductors underpinned most advanced technology on the Ringworld. Or had, until Hindmost’s many-times-removed predecessor approved the dispersal there of a gengineered plague. The airborne microbes devoured the ubiquitous superconductor wherever they encountered it.
Very quickly, everything had stopped working. How many Ringworld natives had perished when the floating cities crashed? Millions, without a doubt. More likely, billions.
He must hide this history from Chiron. Else his Gw’oth overlords would surely judge the Concordance irredeemably dangerous to their own kind.
And so Hindmost only half listened to the debate, its outcome predetermined. In jangling chords and chilling arpeggios, the arguments washed over him in the dreamlike slow motion of inevitable disaster.
“… Cannot veer,” Hemera, Minister of Energy, was singing. “It is basic physics. At the Fleet’s present velocity, in the time remaining before we encounter this Ringworld we can make no meaningful change to our course.”
“I propose that we not deviate at all from our longtime course,” Zephyrus, Minister of Foreign Affairs, sang back. “As we have seen the Ringworld, so we must assume the natives have seen us. Suppose we veer off our course from comparatively close, traveling at our present high speed. It could suggest that after launching impactors we seek to put distance between ourselves and the debris from kinetic-weapon strikes. If the Ringworlders should suspect that, what weapons will they turn against us?”
Several ministers bleated in dismay at song of weapons and strikes, and Chiron glanced warningly at Hindmost.
“Sing no more about such terrible things,” Hindmost directed. He held his gaze on Zephyrus, but sang for his master. We consider no such drastic measures, Ol’t’ro. As ever, we are rendered harmless by our fears.
“All the more reason to send an expedition,” Achilles sang. “Let the Ringworlders not misunderstand us.”
Did that mean, let the Ringworlders fear us?
Achilles rivaled Ol’t’ro in madness. Achilles was a sociopath with limitless ambitions. During the era of human servants, many Citizens had had reason to take human-pronounceable names. But only one Citizen had assumed the name of a legendary human warrior!
Insane ambition had led Achilles to interfere in Gw’oth affairs, scheming to turn his manufactured Gw’oth threat into mass hysteria across Hearth, into rule over the Concordance. When his meddling had gone spectacularly wrong, reconciled Gw’oth worlds had turned their massed might toward the Fleet of Worlds. In an evil alliance, Achilles had smuggled a few Gw’oth warships past Hearth’s defenses, had let Ol’t’ro take possession of Nature Preserve Five’s planetary drive.
If destabilized, the drive would pulverize every world within the Fleet.
From their position of absolute power, Ol’t’ro had demanded that the Hindmost abdicate, that he endorse Achilles to succeed. Achilles promised the terrified public a deal. Accept him as Hindmost, and he would negotiate withdrawal of the Gw’oth fleets. And so, on a wave of popular ignorance, the architect of disaster came to rule as Ol’t’ro’s first puppet Hindmost.
And ever after, from their watery habitat module, a few unsuspected Gw’oth held five worlds hostage.
Achilles remained, for reasons Ol’t’ro declined to explain, a bit like Chiron: among the favored few every incoming Hindmost was made to accommodate in his new government. In the current government, Achilles ruled Nature Preserve One as its planetary hindmost.
As he had been imposed, for a time, on Achilles’ erstwhile government. Much to Achilles’ displeasure.
“What do you say, Hindmost?” Achilles prodded. “Do we send a ship to investigate this object?”
“I believe we should,” Hindmost sang, and it galled him to be seen taking Achilles’ side.
“I propose that Nessus lead the expedition,” Chiron offered. “He remains our most accomplished scout.”
Achilles glowered: there was no love lost between Nessus and him.
For his own reasons Hindmost objected to sending Nessus, but he held his tongues.
“I will go,” Achilles sang. “We can learn much from close-up observation, and Nessus is no scientist.”
“Your place is here,” Chiron sang back.
Achilles twitched, then dipped his heads respectfully. He knew who spoke through Chiron.
“Lead the expedition?” Hemera sang, breaking the sudden, awkward silence. “Chiron, your melody implies that more than Nessus will go. Who else among us” — and he glanced, apologetically, at Achilles — “would dare to scout out this Ringworld?”
“Doubtless, some humans,” Chiron sang. “Let Nessus recruit his own team.”
“The New Terrans no longer serve us,” Hindmost gently reminded. “We are no longer welcome on their world.”
“Wild humans,” Chiron clarified. Several ministers started at the petulant grace notes in his song. “Nessus can recruit on Earth.”
“Earth is too distant,” Zephyrus sang. “Sooner than Nessus can reach Earth, the Fleet must already have encountered the Ringworld.”
“Not if Nessus takes Long Shot,” Chiron rebutted.
With renewed forebodings of disaster, without options, Hindmost once more concurred.
With a shiver of dismay, Hindmost turned from his mirror.
So many years. So much travail. Only to find himself on this ill-fated ship! He at best half understood normal hyperdrive, a level of insight that made him more knowledgeable than most. The Outsiders priced their technology and the underlying theory separately — and the technology was costly enough.
But somehow, just once, inspired (and demented) tinkerers in General Products Laboratories had created what they called the Type II drive. The Type II hyperdrive shunt was huge: the largest hull that General Products built, a sphere more than a thousand feet in diameter, could barely contain the apparatus.
After years of hideously expensive research had failed to duplicate the initial prototype, General Products Corporation was no closer to understanding why this particular hyperdrive flung this particular ship through hyperspace thousands of times faster than any other. The Outsiders, when Concordance engineers approached them, had expressed no opinions and declined to participate in any research. No one knew why, but no one understood why the Outsiders did most things. Creatures of liquid helium, the Outsiders were, simply, different.
General Products was on the verge, reluctantly, of halting their futile research program when inspiration struck.
From Hearth’s ancient place of hiding, the Concordance did business in that era with a half-dozen alien trading partners. With some grand demonstration, some spectacular publicity stunt, General Products thought to lure alien investors into underwriting continued experimentation. They jammed every nook and cranny of the prototype with extraneous equipment to mask the ad hoc nature of the only working Type II drive. They recruited a human pilot to fly the ship he named Long Shot all the way to the galactic core.
Of such convoluted origins comes disaster.
Except for Beowulf Shaeffer’s flight, the chain reaction of supernovae among the close-packed stars of the core would have gone undiscovered. A dangerous thing not to know, to be sure. But better to be ignorant of a peril many millennia into the future than to evoke immediate catastrophe.
Except for Long Shot and Shaeffer’s discovery, the Fleet would never have cast off its gravitational anchor from Giver of Life, its ancestral star.
Except for Hearth’s sudden, unplanned sprint from the galaxy, Citizens would never have trained their human servants to explore in the Fleet’s path. Their humans would never have uncovered their true past. Nature Preserve Four would still be one among the farm worlds serving the Concordance.
Except for scouting ahead in the Fleet’s hastily chosen path, the Gw’oth would have remained unknown to this day.
And yet …
Had the Gw’oth not spotted the refugees running from the core explosion, had the Gw’oth not contacted newly independent New Terra, Pak war fleets would have caught everyone unawares, would have pounded all their worlds, Hearth included, back into the Stone Age.
Hindmost plucked loose a tress he had just tucked into place. It seemed every course of action led to disaster.
Now he rode the ship that, from Beowulf Shaeffer’s era until Ol’t’ro’s covert reign, none had dared to fly. The ship on which Ol’t’ro had demanded the Concordance dedicate its wealth and best scientists, in vain hopes that the technology would be mastered.
And yet it was worth the price, any price, to divert Ol’t’ro from wondering if the time had come to pull the doomsday trigger. Every Hindmost had complied willingly.
Then Ol’t’ro had ordered Nessus to Earth. Aboard any normal vessel, even then, that would have been a trek of almost two years. On Long Shot, the trip was a matter of a few hours. Nessus had recruited two humans and a Kzinti diplomat for the “first” Ringworld expedition, bartering Long Shot itself as their payment.
Humans and Kzinti could waste lives and treasure trying to duplicate the Type II drive. Hindmost remembered his relief that the ill-fated ship was gone.
Only to find, long after, while stranded on the Ringworld by his own foolhardy misadventure, that Long Shot had returned! Kzinti had usurped the fastest ship in existence, using it as a courier to coordinate their part of the interspecies mayhem Hindmost knew as the Fringe War. Until Tunesmith seized Long Shot from the Kzinti. Until Louis and Hindmost took it from Tunesmith, because the protector chose to be rid of them.
And here I am aboard Long Shot. After … how long?
“Voice,” he called.
Notes tinkled from a nearby intercom speaker. “Yes, Hindmost.”
“Do onboard computers indicate the current date?”
“They do, although not using the Concordance calendar.”
“The human calendar will serve.”
“The Earth date is 2893, Hindmost.”
Much as he had expected — but suddenly, so terribly real. He had fled Hearth in 2860. Thirty-three years ago! Thirty-seven years as reckoned on Hearth, except that in the Fleet, rushing northward out of the galaxy at eight-tenths light speed, clocks ticked a third slower.
By any measure, and in every frame of reference, too long.
He looked himself in the eyes. All those years gone forever, and for what?
“Have I ever explained why I brought us to the Ringworld?”
“No, Hindmost.”
As he had thought. One does not justify oneself to one’s tools. But when only a tool stands between oneself and catatonia …
He left his cabin to canter once more around this accursed ship. The AI would track and hear him through hallway sensors, would continue the dialogue through any convenient intercom speaker. “I came for technology. The Ringworld must have had, the Ringworld embodied extraordinary technologies. It did not matter that the Ringworlders themselves had forgotten.”
Technology he meant to trade. No matter the depth of his loneliness, with whom he must negotiate went unstated. Some burdens only a Hindmost can bear.
“And did you find what you sought, Hindmost?”
To this day, he believed that the Ringworld foundation material, the wondrously robust stuff the natives called scrith, could only have been manufactured through some industrial-scale process of transmutation. That was the magic he had sought, the enticement for Ol’t’ro, the treasure with which he had hoped to buy freedom for Hearth. The technology of which he had gotten not as much as a glimpse in his years on the Ringworld.
“Not even close.” Hindmost rounded a corner —
And froze.
He did have Long Shot with Tunesmith’s improvements. Louis had jumped it to hyperspace from within the singularity that was the Ringworld, which itself was within the singularity of the nearby star — and despite all theory and experience, the ship had come back out. He had clues painstakingly collected to the operation of Ringworld-become-hyperdrive, imprinted in its obscenely powerful gravity wave.
After much anguished deliberation, the outline of a new hyperspace physics had begun to take shape in Hindmost’s mind.
When Louis emerged from the autodoc, hopefully still able to pilot this ship, perhaps they could use that knowledge.
A very thin line encircled the bridge: short navy-blue dashes alternating with longer pale blue dashes.
The Ringworld.
Or, rather, Endurance having exited hyperspace sixty light-days from its destination, the Ringworld as it had appeared sixty days earlier.
Alice stood at the center of the bridge, turning slowly, trying to take it in. Her view was from above the plane of the Ringworld, and she could see … everything. She just couldn’t wrap her mind around what she saw.
Six hundred million miles in circumference. It was an expanse beyond comprehension, so she tried changing scales. About sixty feet around the bridge. Each foot of image along the wall represented … six million miles. Still unreal. Call it 830,000 miles — more than thirty times around New Terra — to the inch!
“I wish you luck,” Nessus said, his voice quavering. He sat astraddle the pilot’s couch, looking uncomfortable. He had offered to pilot so that Julia could concentrate on observing. He had seen it before.
Left unstated: who better to be ready to run?
“What do you mean, Nessus?” Alice asked.
He looked himself in the eyes. “You wish to grasp the scale of the thing. I never succeeded.”
Julia walked up to the wall and with her thumb covered a bit of the loop. “The width of my thumb? It’s almost a million miles! Walk fifty miles a day, and you couldn’t cross the width of that place in fifty years.”
A hoof scraped at the deck, but Nessus said nothing. With one head he stared at the main sensor panel; with the other he watched the panorama streaming in an auxiliary display: the Ringworld, spinning in place beneath their telescope, simulating a flyover.
Alice watched terrain undulate past at an almost hypnotic pace. Hills. Lakes. Grassy plains. Forests. A sea. Make that an ocean. A big ocean.
“Any signs of civilization?” Alice asked.
“Not yet,” Nessus said, “except for the structure as a whole, of course.”
Julia said, “How long until — ”
“Wait! Back up.” Something in the flyover had caught Alice’s eye. Something familiar. But what here could be familiar?
The close-up stopped and then retraced its path. And there, little more than a speck in that vast ocean, what had caught her eye: a patch like a flattened map of Earth! Nearby was a reddish disk that could be Mars. More disks, unfamiliar to her, lay scattered nearby. Other worlds?
“The world models are full-sized,” Nessus said. “No, I can’t explain them.”
Julia had never seen Earth or Mars. No native New Terran had. She asked, “How long until light from the anomaly itself reaches us?”
Nessus glanced at a timer running on his console. “Call it five minutes.”
At two, he banished the simulated-flyover view, turning an eye back to the wall and its view of the ring. “It’s coming up,” he said. “Five seconds. Four…”
At zero, from almost a trillion miles away, they saw the Ringworld — disappear.
UNIFORMED ESCORTS HUSTLED SIGMUND through the corridors of the Ministry of Defense, past closed doors and hushed but intense hallway conversations. Something was going on, and it had not just begun. There had been time for rumors, if not yet actual news, to run rampant through the building.
Since Julia’s departure, he had carried his pocket comp at all times. He had kept the stepping disc at home right-side up. That he hadn’t been contacted the moment … whatever happened was someone’s deliberate choice.
He did not think he was being paranoid.
Knowing Julia, she had kept her normal-space sanity breaks to a minimum. Endurance might have reached its destination.
Was that why he had been summoned?
In the situation room, too crowded for his taste, Sigmund found a meeting already in progress. The bridge of Endurance occupied the room’s main holo display. The crew looked weary but unharmed, and Sigmund breathed a little easier.
He took a chair at the main table next to one of the more helpful, less doctrinaire deputy ministers. Corinne somebody. Age had not improved his problem remembering names.
“Here.” Corinne tapped the personal display inset in front of Sigmund. “The real-time feed so far for the link.”
“Thanks.” He fast-forwarded through the recording, skimmed the transcript. Much of the session had gone to waiting for light to crawl to and from the hyperwave relay at the edge of New Terra’s singularity. He hadn’t missed much.
Except for the Ringworld disappearing.
An inner band, rapidly spinning, had remained behind. Even at full magnification it looked like co-orbiting panels, but Nessus’ Ringworld expedition had found that invisibly thin wires held the panels together.
Shadow squares, Nessus had called the structure. Without the shadows it cast, Ringworlders would have lived in unending day. Compared to the Ringworld itself, the shadow-square band looked flimsy — only it, too, must be incredibly robust or centrifugal force would have torn it apart. Clever, but Sigmund was more interested in the other technology purportedly on the shadow squares: solar power plants and vast numbers of sensors.
“… Thorough survey, across the spectrum,” Minister Norquist-Ng was saying. “Our scientists have proposed several theories, and we’ll want to give them — ”
“Excuse me, Minister.” Sigmund turned to address the camera. “I have to ask something time-sensitive. Who else came to investigate this phenomenon?” Are the three of them safe?
The light-speed delay to and from the hyperwave relay gave Norquist-Ng plenty of time to frown.
“You’re right, Sigmund, we have company,” Alice said. “Lots of ships, to judge from hyperspace ripples and comm chatter. But the comm is unintelligible, whether alien or just encrypted. Our Jeeves hasn’t yet had any luck with it.
“Having said that, everything we’ve intercepted, radio and hyperwave, is faint. I doubt we have anyone nearby.”
“Near being a relative term,” Sigmund said.
A minute and a half later — time enough, through hyperdrive, for any of the nearby ships to travel two light-days! — he saw Alice’s answering shrug.
Nessus turned a head toward the camera. “I keep us moving, a short hyperdrive jump every few minutes. In fact, if you’ll excuse us — ”
The holo froze for several seconds. When motion returned to the real-time feed, Nessus was giving his full attention to his instruments.
“Very well, Mr. Ausfaller,” Norquist-Ng said. “As I was saying — ”
Those ships. Might they be from Human Space? After so long, could the path be open back to Earth? But for what peaceful reason would anyone send so many ships? And if not peaceful, then …
“Whose ships are they, Nessus?” Sigmund interrupted again.
“We would need to get much closer to tell,” Nessus said, as with his other head he tugged and twisted at his mane. Clearly, he did not want to get closer. That might be only typical Puppeteer risk avoidance.
Or Nessus might hesitate lest Alice and Julia find an ARM ship to contact.
“Are you finished, Ausfaller?” Norquist-Ng asked. “We sent a ship to scope out an unprecedented event. It seems other worlds did, too. With reasonable precautions, I think we can avoid any — ”
Ostriches! Sigmund thought. Did isolation ever not backfire?
But Julia was also speaking. “… May … Ringworld left … one-light-hour hops…”
“Jeeves, back us up to the start of the captain’s last comment,” Sigmund directed.
“Yes, sir,” the conference-room AI said.
“We may have data on why the Ringworld left. We backed off several light-days in one-light-hour hops, hoping to see what led up to the departure. What we observed, scattered around and sometimes on the Ringworld, were gamma-ray bursts, some powerful.”
“So, gamma-ray bursts,” someone muttered from the back of the room. “The skies are full of them.”
“Not around planets,” Norquist-Ng barked at the hapless aide. “Ausfaller. Any ideas?”
“Antimatter,” Sigmund said. “The most powerful explosive imaginable. When matter and antimatter meet, all that’s left from the encounter is gamma rays.
“Someone was fighting over the Ringworld, and we’ve sent our people into the war zone.”
As Alice and Julia kept trying to bring a halt to the interminable consultation with New Terra, Nessus focused on piloting their ship. Warships armed with antimatter! Against antimatter, twing would be like tissue. Not even a General Products hull could withstand an antimatter bullet. No wonder the Ringworld — however the trick had been done! — had fled.
And good riddance.
Had he not been certain that the humans would wrest back control, he would already have started Endurance on its way to … anyplace but here.
Instead, every few minutes Nessus jumped the ship around the chaos. The task required surprising concentration. Although Jeeves could have proposed jump timing, the algorithm the AI used to simulate randomness might have been familiar to ARM ships executing the same algorithms. He could not imagine them predicting this pattern.
Earth finding the Fleet? That had come to serve his purposes. Earth discovering the ancient crime by which New Terra had been settled? That was a complication and a risk he had spent much of his life trying to prevent.
(Alice had recognized the map of Earth! She had tried to cover her slip, not said what caught her eye, but he knew. He had long suspected she was from outside. But wherever Alice was from, however she had come to be on New Terra — Sigmund, too, kept secrets — if she could have guided a ship back to Earth, it would have happened by now.)
“Could Endurance be spotted?” someone on New Terra asked.
“We’re stealthed, but that goes only so far,” Julia said. “We can’t avoid giving off heat, so infrared sensors might see us. Our power plant sprays neutrinos. And ships detecting this broadcast might be trying to track us down.”
“Let’s review calibrations on your passive sensors,” someone said, missing or ignoring Julia’s hint.
“Another jump,” Nessus announced, his heads shaking. Julia or Alice would have to take his place soon.
“Be right back,” Alice told the camera.
They emerged from hyperspace three seconds — and a light-hour — from their last position in normal space. As Nessus considered his next step, he half listened to the resumed consultation. People safe in their meeting room, light-years away, continued their endless questions. Were there snowballs nearby from which Endurance could replenish its deuterium tanks? How long would it take to refuel? Did they plan to deploy additional probes for monitoring? Were …
Through it all, Sigmund kept trying to bring the discussion back to the nearby fleets, and how Endurance might identify an ARM ship to contact. Norquist-Ng kept calling anything beyond lurking “premature” and any attempt at outreach “too risky.”
“Preparing to jump,” Nessus interrupted.
So much danger. So much tension. Nessus tuned out the endless meeting. He tried to concentrate only on the choreography by which to keep Endurance one step ahead of any ship that might come after them.
But old, dread memories of the Ringworld would no longer be denied.…
The Hindmost’s council chamber: a place Nessus had never expected to see. Now he was in it, the center of attention. By his own doing. At his own insistence.
Madness took many forms.
Every time he had left Hearth and herd, he had had to work himself into a manic state. But to come in a frenzy to the inner sanctum of the Concordance?
Focus! Nessus ordered himself. Taking a deep breath, he examined the council room. Sparely furnished and devoid of ornamentation. Locked doors and no stepping discs. Well lit, the entire ceiling a glow panel. Intimate, the benches close together, the Hindmost and his ministers seated haunch by haunch. And Nessus’ true audience: a hologram — and whoever was behind it.
If observation and deduction had not led Nessus astray. A long chain of inference, from very few facts, led to his conclusion as to who must hide behind Chiron. Not even his beloved would comment upon Nessus’ speculations.
But it was too late to have doubts. Hormones surged anew, warmed his blood, stoked the flames of his transient manic euphoria.
“We shall come to order,” the Hindmost sang in a loud, clear voice. “The hindmost of our Ringworld expedition has demanded an audience.”
“I bring good news,” Nessus began. “On Earth I recruited two humans and a Kzin for investigation of the Ringworld.” He began extolling his crew’s qualifications.
“You bring them here and this is good news?” Achilles interrupted. “You have revealed the Fleet!”
“It was necessary, as I shall explain.” Nessus dipped his heads briefly in feigned regret. “Recall my assignment. I need qualified crew to explore far beyond the edge of what they consider Known Space. Before their perilous explorations can even begin, they must entrust their lives to an experimental spacecraft. Further, the Type II hyperdrive so fills Long Shot that there is scarcely room for the pilot. The rest must agree to go into stasis, trusting that they will be released.”
“All this was clear before you set out,” Achilles sang. “You made no mention then of revealing the Fleet.”
If he could, Achilles would seize control of the Ringworld mission. He would undo everything Nessus strove to accomplish.
Nessus dare not allow that to happen.
Scouts, so very rare among the herd, had to be insanely brave. Achilles was also insanely brave — he had been a scout, too, early in his career — and obsessively ambitious, and a sociopath. To further his ambitions, he had once tried to kill Nessus. To further his ambitions, he had provoked Pak and Gw’oth alike — and somehow won.
For a time.
To become Hindmost again, Achilles would do — anything.
Nessus chose his next chords with care. “I could not know in advance what payment our explorers would demand.”
“You could have offered something else to — ”
“Let him report,” Chiron sang.
At the rebuke, Achilles twitched and fell silent.
“As partial payment,” Nessus sang, “they demanded Long Shot itself.”
Two ministers warbled in surprise; others glanced sidelong at Chiron. Most, the Hindmost among them, seemed determined not to react. Chiron’s research program had been ruinously expensive.
“Why Long Shot?” Chiron asked.
Because I offered it. “Because,” Nessus sang, “their people lack the technology to move their worlds. The new hyperdrive, if their species can reproduce it, could someday be of great utility in fleeing the core explosion.” And of greater utility, much sooner, confirming the incredible discoveries my crew will bring to their homes.
Achilles straightened on his bench. “A very great prize, yet you deem Long Shot a partial payment. And you have ignored my question about exposing the Fleet. You could have arranged to meet anywhere to transfer from Long Shot to the exploration ship. You chose here.”
They had penetrated to the hearts of the matter. Nessus sang, “The reason is simple. As part of their price, the crew asked the location of the Citizen home world.”
In truth, one had made such a demand. Never suspecting that Nessus — after long protecting the Fleet’s secret location — had planned from the start to reveal the way to Hearth.
“This is madness,” Achilles sang with stern undertunes, cutting through the sudden cacophony of dismay. “We must dispose of these recruits.”
The Hindmost stared at Nessus. “You had no alternatives?”
“I did not.” Through the lie, somehow, Nessus kept his harmonies firm and steady. At a higher level, he sang the truth. What he did was for the good of the herd.
Unless he had gone as psychotic as Achilles.
The Hindmost, after a long silence, sadly sang, “We can erase these memories. After the mission. There is precedent.”
“Memory edits would violate the agreements I made,” Nessus sang back. He spread his hooves, unready to flee, pretending to a confidence he lacked. “I will not travel to the Ringworld without the council’s assurances that they will honor my promises. And my crew refuses to go without me.”
Several among the council blinked at this boldness.
“We must explore this amazing artifact,” Chiron insisted. “Imagine what we can learn.”
Nessus managed not to stare. Scouting, he understood: sacrificing a very few to the perils of exploration to uncover unsuspected dangers waiting to pounce on the entire herd. But exploring to satisfy curiosity? Did no one here see that the intelligence behind “Chiron’s” hologram could not be a Citizen?
Or did they choose not to see?
The Hindmost seemed more saddened than surprised at Chiron’s melody. “It shall be as you suggest,” he sang at last.
“Respectfully, I ask that the entire council agree,” Nessus sang back. I mean you, Chiron.
“It was my understanding,” Chiron trilled, “that we honor our commercial commitments.” Following his lead, most added their assent. “Besides — if need be, we can defend ourselves.”
Curiosity and recklessness? Gw’oth, Nessus suspected, though he could not prove it. One of their group minds.
An uncertain future stretched before him. The unknowable perils of the Ringworld. And more Citizen secrets to reveal, dark secrets that would — if anyone survived the Ringworld encounter — bring humans and Kzinti navies racing to the Fleet.
Citizens alone would never oust Chiron. Perhaps the ARM or the Kzinti Patriarchy could.
SOMEHOW NESSUS MANAGED TO STAY LUCID. He returned, after finally being excused from the council chamber, to the park where he had left his crew waiting. They did not notice him arrive.
The last traces of mania drained from him. He stumbled along a curving path, heads whipping from side to side at each rustle in the foliage and every insinuation of a breeze. As he reeled closer, his crew speculated aloud about the mission. He listened —
Until a wayward flower-sniffer caught him unaware. With one reflex he squealed, leapt high into the air, and came down, wrapped into a ball, on the close-cropped meadowplant.
How tempting it was to withdraw … forever! Reluctantly, he let the aliens coax him back to reality. They asked where he had been, what had frightened him so.
Humans were obsessed with sex: their own, and rudely conjecturing about what anyone else might do. He concocted a story, told his crew that extorting a mate had been his price for going to the Ringworld. The lie satisfied them. Better vulgar fiction than the truth: that he gambled with their lives, and their peoples’ lives, and the lives of a trillion Citizens.
As through a fog, Nessus led his crew from the park. During his brief recruiting trip to Earth, the Ministry of Science was to have equipped a ship for the coming encounter with the Ringworld.
It was time to see what Chiron had provided.
But neither Kzinti nor humans had ever come charging at the Fleet. Not, in any event, before the herd threw out the Experimentalists altogether. Chiron had allowed it.
Might war fleets have converged upon Hearth after Nessus fled with his young family? No. The forces that should have liberated Hearth had gone, instead, to the Ringworld.
Throughout the flood of memories, a cadence had continued to throb and thrum in his brain. A much loved theme from the grand ballet. With an inward bleat, Nessus refocused his attention on keeping Endurance safe from the ships all about. The melody ran strong in his mind.
Across several melodic lines, a synchrony of beats approached. His cue. “Ready to jump,” Nessus called in warning.
Haltingly, Hindmost made his way to the chamber where Louis Wu slept. The autodoc would soon wake the man, let him out. Unless he overrode the automatic release, kept Louis in suspended animation.…
The meandering tunnel led Hindmost to the hull. Most of its surface remained as clear as the day it had left the General Products factory. A glimpse of the distant blue-white flare of a fusion drive hurried him on his way.
He had abducted Louis, survivor of the first Ringworld expedition, to return there and find a transmutation device. If Louis decided to seek revenge, could the human be blamed?
But then Louis had purposefully stranded them both (and the Kzin, Chmeee, now vanished with the Ringworld) because the immense artifact had become unstable in its orbit. If Hindmost had had the choice, he would have fled. Together — without other options, and at great personal risk — they had fulfilled Louis’s improvident vow to a native woman, preventing the Ringworld from crashing into its sun, plucking trillions from the jaws of certain death.
Maybe that balanced the scales between him and Louis.
And if not? He had found Louis a hopeless tasp addict and cured him. Nor would this be the first time he had saved Louis’s life with the Carlos Wu autodoc.
Only Louis might never have suffered tasp addiction but for the first Ringworld expedition — which, as far as Louis was concerned, Hindmost had ordered. The autodoc only undid injuries Louis had suffered because of his abduction.
And Hindmost still feared to pilot this ship himself.
A complicated decision, to be sure. Best to hedge, to probe Louis’s attitude when he emerged from the autodoc. Hindmost turned and cantered back to Long Shot’s bridge.
“Voice,” Hindmost sang. “I wish to be remotely present in the autodoc room.”
“It is done,” Voice answered.
A hologram opened, its vantage above and to one side of the autodoc. Sensors brought him the soft hum of the machine, the gentle rise and fall of Louis’s chest.
And so, from the comparative safety of the bridge, Hindmost watched and waited.
THE CLEAR DOME of the autodoc slowly retracted. Looking restored and rejuvenated, Louis climbed out. If being greeted by a hologram surprised him, he hid it.
“Nothing hurts,” Louis said matter-of-factly.
“Good,” Hindmost said. After two months, Interworld felt strange in his mouth.
“I was used to it. Oh, futz, I’ve lost my mind!”
“Louis, did you not know the machine would rebuild you as a breeder?”
“Yah, but … my head feels futzy. Full of cotton. I never felt so much myself as when I could think like a protector.”
“We could have rebuilt the ’doc.” The comment was a test. If being a protector appealed to Louis, a chord sung to Voice would open hatches, would blast Louis out into space.
If matters came to that, Hindmost would feel guilty.
“No. No.” Louis slammed a fist against the autodoc lid. “I remember that much. I have to be a breeder, or dead. If I’m a protector…”
Hindmost let Louis prattle on with the irrepressible energy of one fresh from an autodoc. Then, “Louis.”
“What?”
“We haven’t moved since you went into the ’doc, two months ago Earth time.” Precision would only complicate matters: they had not moved far. “We are a warm spot on the sky. Sooner or later the Fringe War will notice us. What else has that heterogeneous mob got for entertainment but to track us down and take our ship?”
Take us far from this awful place. Please.
“Right,” Louis said.
He watched Louis set off toward the bridge. The maze of access tubes was much expanded since Louis had tumbled into the autodoc. Hindmost, from time to time, offered directions from the nearest intercom speaker as his hologram followed Louis. As footsteps approached the bridge, Hindmost sang a chord to terminate the projection.
Louis dropped into the pilot’s chair and activated the hyperdrive. The bridge screens went dark. The crystalline sphere of the mass detector lit with radial lines pointing toward the nearby stars, rotated to show their new course.
He is taking us the wrong way!
“I don’t have the nerve to fly us to home,” Hindmost had admitted, moments before helping Louis-as-protector into the autodoc.
“Not Canyon?” Louis had asked.
Canyon was where, long ago, Hindmost had tracked down and abducted Louis. “Home,” he had corrected. Faster than explaining, he had dissembled. “I did not think I could hide us on Canyon. Too small. Home is very like Earth, Louis, and has a wonderful history.”
From the course Louis had set, he had heard — misheard — Home, the human planet.
But Hindmost had meant, simply, home. Where the hearts are. After two long exiles on a quite different human world, and with the loved ones he had left there, New Terra felt like home. He had planned to give Louis coordinates to fly them there.
And then it hit Hindmost:
— That only one place could ever truly be home to him, and that was the Fleet of Worlds.
— That at some level he had known it all along. Why else had he built up Long Shot’s velocity until it matched the Fleet’s?
— And that something in the bridge displays had been screaming for his attention for the past few hours.
Against all odds, Hindmost hoped he knew what it was. Who it was.
“Louis,” he said, “we must go back.”