Fate of Worlds Read online

  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.

  7

  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 …

  Earth Date 2850

  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 Citiz
ens 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.