Betrayer of Worlds Read online

  Not just anyone could relax on the bridge of a starship. Few objected to the speed of hyperdrive: a light-year every three days. Hyperspace was another matter entirely. Less-than-nothingness lurked just beyond the ship’s hull. Instruments revealed nothing about the space behind space. Theoreticians disagreed on what hyperspace was.

  On commercial starships, passengers turned to liquor, pills, and sex—to anything that helped them forget or deny or ignore where they were. Or weren’t. Semantics dealt poorly with the situation. The bridge displays, had they looked outward, would have shown less than nothing. The Blind Spot, pilots called the phenomenon. For many people, the wall surrounding a window or active view port seemed to come together. It was as though the port—and whatever it purported to show—did not exist. For other observers, the mind blanked out entirely. People had gone mad staring into the Blind Spot, forgetting where—and even that—they were.

  He tried to forget having thought of pills.

  The ancient race of Outsiders, from whom humans and every other known starfaring race had purchased hyperdrive shunts and instantaneous hyperwave radio, priced underlying theory separate from the designs. The designs, without explanation, were expensive enough.

  Only it was no longer every known race. The Gw’oth had evidently invented hyperspace technology independently, from observations taken in flight. Surreptitious observations, apparently. Nessus was less than forthcoming about why Gw’oth had been aboard a Puppeteer ship.

  So much for a break from study and worry.

  “Voice,” Louis said, “resume instruction.” A holo popped open, text and images scrolling past at a quick-skimming rate. From time to time Louis would insert a hand into the holo, speeding or slowing the scroll rate with a gesture. A virtual tap-tap would open auxiliary displays with related information.

  More often, the same tap-tap would lead to an apology from Voice. “I am not authorized to provide further information.” Nessus, who perhaps could, was not responding.

  From time to time Louis spared a glance at the pilot’s console, into the clear sphere from whose center radiated short lines. Only in details did the Puppeteer implementation differ from the instruments with which he was familiar. Perhaps the mass pointer’s purpose was too straightforward to permit more than one fundamental design.

  Each line in the sphere pointed toward a nearby star. The longer the line, the stronger the gravitational influence, proportional to mass over distance squared. What passed for piloting in hyperspace was keeping the desired line pointed at you.

  A trained dog could do the job, except that the mass pointer only responded to a sapient mind. AIs could not operate a mass pointer, either. The Outsiders priced explanations for that, too, above what anyone would pay.

  When a line approached the surface of the sphere, you changed course or returned to Einstein space. The mathematics of hyperdrive, to the degree anyone understood it, had issues with gravitational singularities. Wait too long and—

  Well, what would happen was one of those topics about which the “experts” perpetually disagreed. Except this: you would never be seen again.

  Just as Louis might never see home again?

  He glanced yet again at the mass pointer. Logically, a peek every day or two more than sufficed. Stars were days apart even at hyperdrive speed. Only logic could not dispel the gnawing doubt that a real universe, a place of heat and light and matter, still existed. Logic had no answer for the need to reactivate a view port, despite the less-than-nothing that would stare back at you. And so, logic be damned, for their own sanity pilots dropped out of hyperspace every few days just to see the stars.

  When had he last seen a star?

  He pressed the intercom button. “I’m going to take us back to normal space for a while.” He gave Nessus a chance to disagree. A short chance. “In five. Four. Three. Two. One. Now.” Louis flicked on the view port. Amid infinite blackness, stars blazed, diamond bright. To starboard, a nebula glimmered.

  The universe still existed. A bit of the tension he had not admitted to having drained from his body.

  Which of these stars were in Known Space? Not knowing made his skin crawl. (“You’d like to think it’s that, and not the pills you still crave.”)

  The ’doc had ejected Louis’s wrist implant—lest its built-in comp hint at the way home? Not knowing how long he had been in the ’doc, he could not even venture a guess how far they might have come since Wunderland.

  Maybe none of these stars warmed any world known to humans. Before retreating to his cabin, Nessus had told Louis which star to steer by. After that way station, there would be another, and another, and another.

  The longer Louis traveled, the more unlikely a return to home seemed.

  Whatever home meant. He did not lack candidates.

  First there was home, the world on which Nathan had grown up. And from which he had fled as soon as he could.

  Next came Fafnir, from which the Graynors had emigrated. Fafnir, unlike Home, permitted group marriages. Nathan had traveled from Home to Fafnir, hunting for his past—but to a suspicious eye, the Graynors in the public archives on Fafnir were not the Graynors he knew. Not to mention that the Fafnir version of the family had included a second woman.

  His family must have had a second wife to pass itself off as the strangers in the holos. Who was she? Where was she?

  Fafnir was a water world, with one small continent and lots of coral islands. Its gravity was mildly oppressive. Its day lasted only twenty-two standard hours. (Twenty-two, he remembered. The meaning of standard eluded him.) And if that was not enough, plenty of Kzinti—like eight-foot-tall erect tigers—had remained behind after their Patriarchy lost yet another war and ceded the planet to human settlers.

  Not exactly Earth-like.

  Home was supposedly the most Earth-like of the human-settled worlds. Its active plate tectonics had produced several continents. It had all-but-standard gravity and a day more than twenty-three hours long. Even parts of the biosphere were Earth-like. Some mutated native pathogen had wiped out the first batch of settlers.

  For all that, his mother often hid indoors, shaking and muttering, with every curtain tightly drawn. If Home gave her panic attacks—flat phobia, in the vernacular—how could she have grown up on Fafnir?

  Obviously, she hadn’t.

  Mother’s flat phobia suggested she (and all the “Graynors”?) were from Earth. When Nathan finally made it to Earth, he understood. Eons of evolution could not be denied: Earth looked, smelled, and felt like home.

  A DNA sample might have told local authorities who he was. Nathan had tortured himself for months: Should he try to find out? Suppose Earth was his birth world. He had been taken away as a child, surely innocent. But his parents . . .

  If his suspicions were correct, they had gone to extraordinary lengths to escape. To hide. But why? From whom? Were they criminals or refugees? His imagination failed him. Not knowing, he would not risk setting the authorities back on their trail.

  And while Nathan waffled, he had met Paula Cherenkov. And lost her. And fled his own misery to Wunderland. And found new miseries.

  And become Louis Wu, champion of—and not-quite-prisoner to—the fabled Puppeteers.

  The rush of memories made the hunger for drugs that much worse.

  The more information Nessus doled out—and the more old memories that stimulated—the clearer it became: Louis’s family had been driven into hiding. Now it gnawed at Louis that he had added to their pain by abandoning them.

  What if he did make it home? Would Nessus have left intact any memory of Louis’s personal history?

  Voice had not noticed Louis’s distraction. “Freeze display,” Louis snapped. He would have to go back to pick up the thread. He jiggled his drink bulb. All but empty. He strode briskly to the relax room, telling himself it was only for coffee—

  And the tanjed synthesizer refused to make painkillers. Not, anyway, unless Nessus entered an authorization.

&nb
sp; Louis told himself he only wanted to know if he could get pills. His addiction wasn’t broken unless he had a choice to lapse.

  Knowing himself for a liar, Louis went to his cabin in the hope of sleep.

  7

  Insanity ebbed and flowed. Right now insanity was at low tide, and it was all Nessus could do not to hide in his own belly. He had rallied sufficiently merely to cower in his cabin, monitoring Louis through reports from Voice and widely strewn sensors.

  The shipboard AI was yet more insanity, but without Voice for company Nessus might long ago have succumbed to catatonia. The farther the Fleet of Worlds raced from the little corner of the galaxy humans so arrogantly called Known Space, the more grueling these solo trips became. After 135 years of steady acceleration, more than thirty light-years farther.

  Earth years and light-years. After so much time spent away from Hearth, Nessus even thought in those terms. He even, sometimes, found himself thinking in English.

  Baedeker had insisted Nessus take along an AI—no matter that AIs were strictly prohibited by Concordance law. Not even Clandestine Directorate was to know.

  Humans had long used AIs, even back to the old, stolen colony ship from whose embryo banks New Terra had been settled. A copy of Jeeves, the colonists’ primitive AI, was unlikely to go rogue during this trip.

  A most unusual Hindmost, Baedeker.

  The first time he and Nessus met, Baedeker was only an engineer at General Products Corporation. He and Nessus had, in a completely un-Citizen-like manner, almost come to blows. And now they were friends. More than friends. At times it seemed they could become—

  That was another matter that did not bear thinking about so far from home.

  “What is Louis doing?” Nessus asked Voice.

  “Examining the geometry of the situation, sir.” An explanatory holo opened.

  Nessus studied the star map, centered on the Fleet. Suns and worlds were not to scale, of course, or none would have shown. Twenty light-years in the Fleet’s wake: Jm’ho, home world to the Gw’oth. Eleven light-years ahead: Kl’mo, the aliens’ newest colony.

  Predators’ jaws, waiting to close.

  The crooning, chanting, murmuring crowds of Citizens on his cabin wallpaper had lost their power to calm. The redolence of herd pheromones endlessly circulating through the ventilation system no longer eased his loneliness. He pawed at the cabin’s deck, the lure of catatonia stronger than ever. “And what does Louis have to say about that?”

  “He wonders why the Concordance would choose to fly the Fleet into such a dangerous neighborhood.”

  Because every challenge we overcome only reemerges as a newer, even bigger challenge. That answer would beget even less welcome questions.

  “I will go speak with him,” Nessus said.

  “Very good, sir.”

  Nessus found Louis in the relax room, nursing a drink bulb, slowly circling another instance of the star map. Half-empty plates covered the small table, waiting to be recycled. The notepad beside the plates showed a doodle of a Gw’o.

  Nessus settled onto his padded bench. “What do you think?”

  “I think your people should reconcile with the Gw’oth.”

  “Assume others are pursuing that course and that they fail. What are the Fleet’s risks?”

  “The Fleet is doing half light speed?”

  That was information Voice would not have divulged. With lots of suppositions, Louis might have reached that conclusion from estimating the red shift of the Nature Preserve worlds’ suns. This was the son of Carlos Wu, all right. “Close enough.”

  “They need only to scatter stealthed objects in the Fleet’s path. At those speeds, even a small mass would become a potential planet-buster.” Louis frowned. “You had to know that.”

  “It is why you are here.” Nessus plucked nervously at his mane. “Your suggestions?”

  “I gather the Fleet passed safely by”—Louis pointed into the holo—“Jm’ho. Why expect trouble when you pass the new Gw’oth colony?”

  Nessus looked himself in the eyes. Because we are cowards, the gesture said. We worry because there might be a problem.

  That was an easier answer than the whole truth.

  “Why would they care, Nessus? Here we are, breathing the same air, comfortable with the same lighting and room temperature. Hearth must be like Earth or Home. The Gw’oth evolved in frigid water beneath a permanent roof of ice. It’s not as though either species would covet the other’s worlds.” Louis squeezed the last drops from his drink bulb and ordered another. “Unless you’ve given the Gw’oth a reason to distrust . . .”

  “We have no reason to trust them. The Gw’oth developed hyperdrive in secrecy, inside their water-filled habitat module, while aboard our ship.” Our could be misconstrued as Citizen. Louis had no need of the more complicated details. “They took their habitat to hyperspace without warning—from inside our ship. Do you know what that did?”

  “Give me a minute.” Louis paced a bit, brow furrowed. “Ships wrap themselves in a normal space bubble to protect the crew from hyperspace. The hyperspace shunt carries with it everything inside the bubble. So if the Gw’oth bubble was any larger than this habitat . . .”

  “Among other things, it carried away most of our ship’s hyperdrive shunt.” And cut the General Products hull itself in half. Nessus was not about to reveal a way to destroy the supposedly impregnable hull. “The remaining crew barely survived long enough to be rescued.”

  A crew, at that point, of only two. Sigmund Ausfaller was insane, all but comatose, by the time rescuers arrived. He had preserved Baedeker in medical stasis.

  “But why?” Louis asked.

  “The Gw’oth did not say.”

  Even within Clandestine Directorate, that was the only answer. Unofficially? Baedeker had his suspicions. The Gw’oth had surreptitiously learned the secret of hyperdrive. They must also have tapped into discussions they were not meant to hear—such as Baedeker advocating the execution of Gw’oth allies lest they bring home Concordance secrets.

  Louis considered. “But the Gw’oth know the Concordance has its own ships. That puts their worlds equally at risk. It brings to mind something from Earth history. Atomic bombs, as horrible as they were, turned out to be stabilizing. No one dared start a full-out war. Mutual assured destruction, I think people called the balancing act. MAD, for short. Surely neither the Fleet nor the Gw’oth would be foolish enough to make first use of planet-busters.”

  Mutual assured destruction. That was madness indeed! That was why the Concordance had hidden for so long from—everyone. But New Terra knew the Fleet’s location, and now, too, so did the Gw’oth.

  “What defenses does the Fleet have?” Louis asked.

  Until New Terra went free, only secrecy had been needed. And little else had been possible. Few enough Citizens could scout. There would never be enough Citizens able to crew a navy!

  Since New Terran independence, the Fleet had steadily deployed sensors and weapons: lasers, particle beams, guided missiles. Since the rise of the Gw’oth the pace had accelerated. Without crews, and unwilling to use AI, inflexible automation had to operate everything. In far too many scenarios, the Fleet’s defenses could only blast away without hesitation at any possible threat.

  “Nessus? I can’t understand the danger without knowing how the Fleet would defend itself.”

  A nasty toxin waited in the relax-room synthesizer. Louis would be in his father’s autodoc when Aegis neared Hearth and authentication codes were given. Voice would be turned off. Nessus would take no chances with compromising the Fleet’s defenses, inadequate as they were.

  “I am not prepared to discuss that.” Nessus felt little less programmed than Voice.

  With a flick of a hand, Louis banished the star map. “Then how am I to . . . never mind. I’ll leave that alone for now. Maybe the Gw’oth don’t even want to attack. The world they settled may simply be a good choice for them. Its location along the Fleet’s path doesn
’t prove anything.”

  “They may believe they have a reason,” Nessus conceded.

  And yet for all Baedeker’s antipathy toward the Gw’oth, he had never, even as Hindmost, taken action against them. MAD had prevailed.

  “A reason?” Louis finally prompted.

  “There was . . . friction in our early contacts.”

  Much more than friction, if Baedeker’s plans for the Gw’oth had been overheard. But the Gw’oth had greater cause to fear the Fleet.

  “What kind of friction?”

  “Not important.” Nessus shuddered. “This is. In recent years, the Concordance has faced one danger after another. The times being so extraordinary, the Citizens have entrusted governance to the Experimentalist Party. What you would call politics now comes down to competition among the—”

  “Politics? You brought me here to meddle in Puppeteer politics?” Louis’s eyes flicked to the synthesizer.

  Nessus fought his own self-destructive urge: to hide. “Did you ever wonder why Beowulf Shaeffer undertook such dangerous missions? No, I do not change the subject.”

  Reluctantly: “Sure, I’ve wondered.”

  “The first time, skimming the surface of a neutron star, because a Citizen scientist and scout coerced Beowulf into going. The same scout hired Beowulf for a journey to the galactic core because he had survived the first trip.”

  “You are a Citizen scout.”

  Nessus had not been far from the scene, but neither had he been responsible. He certainly was no scientist.

  “He calls himself Achilles.” And Hearth had yet to recover from the chaos unleashed when his second hiring of Shaeffer encountered the galactic-core explosion. “Achilles is a politician now, not a scout. An ambitious politician.”

  “Is there another kind, Nessus?”

  “While Experimentalists rule, the contest for power comes down to a competition among radical ideas.”

  All too often, crazy ideas, for not only scouts were insane. It took a special sort of madness to aspire to responsibility for the herd, rather than to submerge oneself within the herd. And among the few who aspired even to be the Hindmost . . .