Fate of Worlds

  “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.…

  Earth Date: 2851

  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 t
he 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.

  Earth Date: 2893

  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.

  10

  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.”

  REUNION

  Earth Date: 2893

  11

  Alice pored over the bridge displays, at once fascinated and anxious. From the way Nessus tugged at his mane, he felt no such ambivalence. Alice couldn’t decide how Julia felt.

  A poker face is a good skill in a commander.

  Space seethed with hyperwave chatter. The longer Endurance skulked about, the more hyperspace-jump ripples its instruments detected. The ship stocked—and had widely scattered—sensors far better than anything the Ministry had had in her day. Compared to the tech with which Alice had, long ago, grown up in the Belt, the new sensors were scarcely distinguishable from magic. The sensors, like twing, were a gift from the Pak Library.

  Alice froze her display on a ship so long and thin that it suggested a crowbar. At the limits of resolut
ion, smaller dartlike ships buzzed around it. “We see lots of ships like this, a second type like thick lenses, and a third kind more like squat cones. Each shape seems to stick with its own. Fleets, do you suppose, Sigmund?”

  “Almost certainly,” Sigmund answered a minute and a half later. “The formations look defensive. As makes sense when at least one faction has antimatter weapons.”

  “But whose fleets are they?” Julia asked. “Sigmund, Nessus, do you know?”

  Pausing his soft, rhythmic humming, Nessus looked up from the pilot console. “The Ringworld is gone. The danger it embodied is gone. The mystery of the hyperspace ripple is resolved. I do not understand why we tarry.”

  Changing the subject, Alice noted. She waited for Sigmund to comment.

  Sigmund’s answer eventually arrived. “When I left Known Space, most human warships, including ARM ships, had been built in GP hulls. Kzinti warships, too. Of course, General Products had just pulled out of Known Space and…”

  Nessus turned one head toward the camera. “Not knowing whose fleets these are, we must consider them dangerous.”

  Strange creatures, Alice thought. Puppeteers had no curiosity. And though Nessus yearned to flee, he stayed alert. Sigmund used to say something about no true coward ever turning his back on danger. And that Nessus always had undisclosed motives.

  This was neither the time nor the place to let her mind wander. Damn old age.

  “… Almost certain I recognize some ARM and Patriarchy vessels,” Sigmund was saying. “Cut off from their supply of General Products hulls, I suspect naval designers reverted to proven configurations.”

  Sigmund’s brow furrowed in the manner Alice remembered so well.

  Even … before, the closest of friends, working together every day, she hadn’t always understood what had plunged him into one of his dark moods. But this scowl held no mystery: General Products hulls were among his fiercest obsessions.

  It turned out that a GP hull was a single nanotech-grown super-molecule, the interatomic bonds massively reinforced by an embedded power plant. Disable that hidden fusion generator, and a ship’s own air pressure blows apart the hull.