Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

50

Squaring her shoulders, taking a deep breath, Julia decided: today was the day. She had made that resolution often. Before second thoughts muzzled her yet again, she flicked to Grandpa’s place in the desert.

Grandpa was setting empty plates around the big picnic table. A big black metal contraption, like nothing she had ever seen, stood near an edge of the patio. Next to that contraption, of all implausible things, was a portable fire extinguisher. Maybe the apparatus had something to do with this mysterious family lunch, and whatever barbeque was.

Not why you’re here, she reminded herself.

Grandpa waved off an earnest-faced adjutant who’d rushed over at her arrival. “It’s fine, Colonel. This is my granddaughter.”

“Very good, Minister.” The colonel withdrew to the house.

Grandpa said, “You’re a half hour early, Julia. That’s not to say you aren’t always welcome.”

“Minister, could I have a word before the rest of the family arrives?”

“Oh. One of those visits.” Grandpa grimaced. “Not an astronomical phenomenon, I hope.”

“Please, sir,” Julia said. “In private.”

He set down his stack of plates. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Stop sirring me,” he said. He walked off the patio onto the sand. “As beautiful as I find this desert, it’s just not complete. I don’t miss snakes, but an armadillo or a roadrunner would be nice.” His gaze grew wistful. “Maybe not rabbits.”

Earth animals, she supposed.

They walked in silence for a while. Finally, Julia said, “I haven’t been truthful with you, sir … Grandpa.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“It’s about Endurance.”

“About how you came home without your ship.”

She felt so guilty. “The ship wasn’t stolen. I … I gave it to Alice.”

He jerked to a halt. “With its autodestruct disabled, I hope.”

“Of course!”

“I’m relieved.” He fixed her with a penetrating stare. “However…”

“I think I should explain things from the beginning.”

After hearing her out, Grandpa said, “So Louis and Alice are, most likely, well on their way to Earth with one of the Ministry’s few long-range ships.”

“Most likely, sir, although that’s only a side effect of what I was after, getting an ARM ship to visit us.” She could not meet Grandpa’s eyes. “If you don’t mind, I’ll leave before the rest of the family arrives. You have my promise I’ll turn myself in first thing tomorrow morning. I wanted to tell you first, and to apologize in person.”

Grandpa lifted her chin. “Do you suppose sitting in jail will fix anything? What if, instead, you fetch back the ship?”

Huh? “You want me to go to Earth for it?”

“Why not? I’d enjoy the company.”

“You’re going to Earth?”

Wasn’t this world Grandpa’s home, after so many years? Her parents, her brothers and their wives, Uncle Charles and Aunt Athena, her many cousins … weren’t they family? Wasn’t she family? That Grandpa would abandon them at his first opportunity hurt worse than her confession.

And inexplicably, he laughed. “Maybe this will teach you not to sir me. I invited the family out to hear this, but I don’t mind telling you first. Without you, it wouldn’t be happening. Tomorrow afternoon the governor will formally accept my resignation as Minister of Defense and announce my appointment as ambassador to the United Nations. When Koala heads for Earth, that’s why I’ll be aboard.”

“And what about Endurance?” Julia could not help asking.

“You were light-years from home, and you did what you thought best.” He gave her a hug. “When you’re that far from home, using your best judgment to represent everyone is the job. As far as I’m concerned, you did the right thing.

“First thing in the morning come by my office in the Ministry. We’ll clear up this little matter before the announcement.”

“TELL US EVERYTHING,” little Annabeth said, tugging on Julia’s sleeve.

“About the Ringworld,” her twin Lilith clarified.

The twins and a gaggle of Julia’s other youngest cousins leaned closer, expectantly. Most of the little faces wore streaks and smears of barbeque sauce. Their parents, staying in the background, looked almost as curious.

“It’s a huge place,” Julia told them. She didn’t know much about it directly, but Tanya had told her plenty during their long flight. “Bigger than millions of New Terra.”

Fortunately she could talk about Ringworld on autopilot. People asked about the Ringworld wherever she went. The wonder had not worn off — nor the awe that such a thing could pick up and move — but other things were on her mind. She would be going to fabled Earth, not to jail? That was … that was …

Words failed her.

Grandpa had gone to stand at the head of the picnic table. Ready to tell everyone about the ambassadorship? As he waited for the family to quiet down, an adjutant in uniform burst from the house. He whispered in Grandpa’s ear.

Grandpa nodded, cleared his throat, and caught Julia’s eye.

He led her to what she remembered as his cozy den, into which a secure office and comm center had somehow been shoehorned. He said, “Well, Captain, your little retrieval project just got easier.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean that the urgent news was from the planetary defense center. Endurance will be here in a few days, with Alice and Louis Wu aboard.

“The rest of the news is terrible.”

51

By virtue of standing at least a head taller than, well, everyone, Alice could appreciate just how mobbed her house was.

She was twice a matriarch, the second time by Louis. And just as she was introducing everyone to Louis, and Louis to everyone, he had invited his grandson and great-granddaughter, soon to leave aboard Koala.

Louis, Wesley, and Tanya looked a trifle overwhelmed, if not as beleaguered as Nessus and Baedeker’s sons and their mates.

Alice’s heart went out to Elpis and Aurora. She had had time to grieve. Their loss — their entire species’ loss — was still a raw wound.

Maybe she and Louis could ease the pain, just a bit. As they had eased each other’s pain.

“Coming through,” Alice announced, edging her way from the kitchen doorway across the family room toward where Louis played bartender. It was slow going, punctuated by hugs, kisses, and catch-up chats. After spending much of a year off-world, casting off two hundred years, witnessing the destruction of the Fleet of Worlds, and bringing home the patriarch her family had never known, “Oh, you know,” did not suffice in answer to, “How have you been?”

Finally she made it to Louis’s side. “How are you holding up?” she asked.

“I was telling…” He ground to a halt, another name having eluded him.

“Danae,” Alice provided.

“I was telling my charming great-great-granddaughter a little something about Known Space.”

“And you’re not going back, ever?” Danae asked.

“Ever is a long time,” Louis said. “But right now, I don’t even want to leave this house.”

Alice slipped an arm around Louis’s waist. “Our house.”

“You young people,” Danae said, grinning. “Get a room.”

“On that note,” Louis said. He raised an empty carafe and started tapping it with a spoon. “People, of two legs and three. Children of all ages. If I may have your attention.”

He succeeded only in setting off a buzz of speculation.

“Hold it down!” Alice shouted. The direct approach didn’t work much better.

Shushing everyone turned out to be a process, as curiosity brought more and more of the families crowding in. When no one else could fit into the room except near the fidgeting Puppeteers, around whom people left a respectful space, the throng finally quieted.

Louis stepped up onto the low stone hearth and offered Alice a hand up. “Everyone, we have something of a family announcement. To all our families. Alice?”

“Louis and I are expecting,” Alice said. Danae’s whoop of approval broke the silence and their families started to clap and cheer.

“Wait,” Louis shouted. “We’re not done.

“Elpis, Aurora, you and yours are always welcome in our home, but there’s another reason Alice and I invited you today. You should know that this little guy” — he patted Alice’s stomach — “is going to be named Nessus.”

“And in a few years,” Alice added, “his brother or sister will be named Baedeker.”

52

Sigmund looked about the tiny cabin, his home for the next two years or so. (“Or a stasis field will be,” the voice in his head whispered. He told the voice to shut up. He had a lot of catching up to do on the long flight to Earth.)

In the narrow corridor outside the cabin, ARM officers and sailors went by in an unending stream. Pallets of supplies for the long flight lined the walls; to pass someone coming the other way was a negotiation.

There was a sharp rap at the door frame. “There you are.”

Sigmund glanced up. “Louis, thanks for stopping by. Come in and close the door, please.”

Eyeing the close quarters dubiously, Louis complied. “Why did you want to see me? Are you reconsidering my offer? If so, you’re cutting things kind of close.”

The offer to use the Carlos Wu autodoc. “No, although I appreciate the offer. I’m not sure the twenty-year-old me would look ambassadorial. Once we reach Earth, I’ll go on boosterspice.”

Louis shrugged.

“So here’s the thing,” Sigmund said.

Louis leaned against the closed door. “Nothing good ever begins with those words. So, what? You plan to shanghai me back to Earth? Give me a lecture about how to treat Alice?”

“I think I’ll keep advice about Alice to myself.”

Louis laughed. “Yah, I guess we’ve both gotten smarter that way.”

“The thing is, I need to go over your experiences one more time.”

“Oh, finagle. You’ve heard my story. You’ve heard Alice’s. You’ve seen the ship’s logs from our Jeeves.”

“And my Jeeves has gone over the data, too,” Sigmund offered.

“Then what?”

“Something about the situation keeps nagging at me.” Sigmund took the comp from his pocket. “Protocol gamma,” he told it. Colored lights began chasing each other around its display: “For privacy.”

“I remember.” Louis sighed. “All right. One final debrief.”

“Start with your first trip to the Ringworld. Nessus knew you already, even though you didn’t remember, so I understand why he picked you. Then you and the team arrived on Hearth for a briefing from a Puppeteer avatar named Chiron?”

It was never hard getting Louis talking.

After a while, Sigmund interrupted. “Now tell me about the Fringe War around the Ringworld, and this boss protector, this Tunesmith.”

Louis did.

The suspicions had been a long time coming. No, that wasn’t exactly true. The suspicions had been there all along, because that’s who Sigmund was. But any hint of a possibility of a rationale for those suspicions? That had been a long while coming.

Sigmund interrupted again. “Do I have this right? Tunesmith reprogrammed nanites from the Carlos Wu autodoc, replicated them, and then used space probes to spread the nanites around the Ringworld. The nanites infected, rewired the … scrith, did you call it? The Ringworld foundation material?”

“The superconducting paths within the scrith,” Louis said.

“Based on what he had learned about hyperdrive studying the super-duper version aboard Long Shot. Turned the whole Ringworld into a hyperdrive.”

“A Type II hyperdrive,” Louis clarified.

“Right. Then Tunesmith launched the Ringworld into hyperspace despite being in — despite its own Jupiter-sized mass producing its own — singularity.”

“You got it.”

The disbelief at the back of Sigmund’s brain kept at him. “But the drive aboard Long Shot wasn’t anything like that. No scrith. No superconductors.”

“What the futz do you want from me?” Louis snapped. “Tunesmith worked with what he had. And protectors are smart.”

“You said you were a protector. So explain.”

“Right. I was a protector,” Louis said. “I can’t explain beyond that Tunesmith learned enough from studying the first Type II drive to make an improved version, working with the resources he had.”

“As he improved the drive aboard the Long Shot itself.” The modified version Baedeker studied for the months you were in the ’doc, becoming a breeder once more.

“Well, yes,” Louis said.

“Okay, we’ll move on. Despite the attack on Long Shot, Nessus got to the ground on one of the Fleet worlds. Presumably Baedeker, too. Because of the doubly magic hyperdrive?”

“I’ve wracked my brain trying to understand how Nessus pulled that off. I’ve got nothing, Sigmund.”

“Okay. Go on. What happened next?”

He let Louis talk, occasionally questioning a detail, only so Louis would not know what really interested him.

After a while Sigmund asked, “So Achilles and Proteus contacted you separately about Nessus. Then you heard once from Nessus himself. You never heard anything from or about Baedeker?”

“The answer is the same, no matter how many different ways you ask the question. I don’t know what happened to Baedeker.” Sadly: “Not that it matters anymore.”

“And Nessus and Baedeker were together aboard Long Shot the last time you saw them.”

“Yes, tanj it!”

“I’ll miss them, too,” Sigmund said. “You know I spent months with Baedeker during the Pak War.”

“I know,” Louis answered softly. “Are we about done here?”

A warning klaxon and a blared prelaunch announcement over the intercom settled the matter. Sigmund said, “Go live happily ever after with Alice.”

“That’s advice I can follow.” Louis offered his hand. “Good luck on Earth.”

“My granddaughter and your great-granddaughter have become good friends. I think you and I can admit it, too.” Sigmund slipped past the hand to start a quick back-slapping bear hug. “Now beat it before Koala takes off.”

THE FIRST “EVENING” AFTER TAKEOFF, the small diplomatic mission were guests of honor at the captain’s table. There were enough toasts before and during the meal that when the after-dinner rounds began Sigmund’s taste buds had ceased to care that the wine was synthed.

“To fallen friends,” Sigmund offered when, circling the table, the honor of the toast once more reached him.

That got a subdued reaction. Every officer and crewman aboard had had friends in the lost ARM fleet. Glasses clinked in remembrance.

People on Earth, on all the human-settled worlds, were in for a shock when Koala reached home. An entire ARM fleet, destroyed with all hands. And a Patriarchy fleet. And a Trinoc fleet, although Sigmund had only secondhand information about that bunch. They sounded like bad news, and he intended to study up on them during the long trip.

Wesley Wu said, “One way or another, our return will mark the end of an era.”

“Within the ARM most of all,” Wu’s executive officer said. “And I’m willing to bet it will change the whole dynamic between the ARM and the civilian leadership.”

“Then there’s the power balance among human worlds,” another officer mused. Sigmund hadn’t caught that man’s name, either. “The Ringworld expeditionary force was a United Nations initiative. Most colony worlds refused to take part.”

“And between humans and the other spacefaring species,” Tanya Wu added.

Where would the ripples end? Sigmund had reshaped the New Terran government. Might not a chastened Earth citizenry be open to improvements? Temptation beckoned.…

But only for a moment. New Terra was his home and his family’s. He would represent that home, and nothing more, and be happy for it.

“Now that you’ve settled in, Sigmund, are you and your staff comfortable?” Wesley Wu asked, changing the subject.

Comfortable with the less than nothingness lurking outside the curve of the hull? Comfortable in the knowledge that the savviest scientists on Earth and New Terra understood even less about hyperspace and hyperdrive than they had imagined? “Quite comfortable,” Sigmund said. Call this lie his first act of diplomacy. “But it has been a long day.”

“That it has.” Captain Wu stood. “If I might offer one final, happier toast?”

Everyone stood.

Wesley Wu toasted, “To the reunion between our two worlds.”

A TOUCH UNSTEADY ON HIS FEET, Sigmund made his way through crowded corridors back to his cabin. As claustrophobic as it felt, somewhere aboard Koala two officers must be sharing another room no larger than this so that he could have private quarters. It could be worse.

Anyway, he had other issues on his mind.

The wine had only deepened Sigmund’s suspicions. He took out his computer. “Protocol gamma. Jeeves?”

“I am here, sir.”

As much of him, anyway, as the portable unit could store. Sigmund was not about to interface his AIde to Koala’s much larger Hawking fragment.

“You monitored my pre-takeoff conversation with Louis?”

“I did.”

“And what did you make of it?”

“I do not believe Louis is purposefully holding back anything.”

Sigmund didn’t either. And yet there was something else. He was sure of it. A nuance Louis had misconstrued. A piece of the puzzle neither of them had recognized as missing. Something to scratch his maddening mental itch. “And you’ve examined the data from Endurance.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Five worlds … gone.”

“Indeed, sir,” Jeeves repeated.

Sigmund closed his eyes. Maybe the wine, or his subconscious, or the ancient thought patterns of his ARM days would figure out whatever was bothering him.

Five worlds … gone.

Before that, Nessus had — somehow — survived the dissolution of Long Shot. Baedeker hadn’t … as far as Louis knew.

Suppose Baedeker somehow did make it to the ground. Because maybe Baedeker didn’t want his survival to be known. Because … because …

Five worlds gone and Sigmund had nothing. Maybe Baedeker’s number was up, and that’s all there was to it.

Only the Baedeker Sigmund knew, the Baedeker who had developed the planet-buster version of the Outsider planetary drives, was a proper cowardly Puppeteer. He would not charge into danger without a plan. Baedeker was smart. Brilliant, tanj it.

Sigmund had yet to unpack. He took the mini-synthesizer from his luggage and prepared a nightcap. What had Wesley’s last toast been before the group dispersed? Something apt. “To the reunion between our two worlds.”

“Indeed, sir,” Jeeves said.

Sigmund sighed. As an ARM, many years ago, two lives ago, what he wouldn’t have given to have the Puppeteers vanish. Now that the Puppeteers had vanished, it made him sad.

“Only that’s sentimental revisionist crap,” he scolded himself.

“Pardon, sir?”

“When I was an ARM, the Puppeteers disappeared from Known Space. Bey Shaeffer had just discovered the galactic-core explosion, and set the Puppeteers to running. Not knowing where they’d gone drove me crazy.”

“Indeed, sir.”

That time the answering noise made Sigmund smile. But something had just flashed through his mind …

He almost had …

No. It was gone.

“Okay, Jeeves, let’s try something else.” Because running mental laps around the same enigmatic circle was pointless. “So the planetary drives go bang and the Fleet of Worlds goes to pieces. Did Endurance capture the matter-dispersal pattern?”

“Not in any useful way. The ship had lost or had damage to too many external sensors.”

Of course. “How about the gravimetric disturbances?”

“Sorry, sir. Quantitatively, that data is also all but useless.”

“Tanj it, what do we know? Five drives blow up and we have … what? Long-range visual images? Some static? Or had Endurance lost its RF sensors, too?”

“Pardon me, sir. That’s two.”

“Two what?” Sigmund asked. “RF sensors on Endurance that still worked?”

“Two planetary-drive explosions. That’s how many space-time distortions struck Endurance.”

Sigmund froze. “Two drives exploded. Not five.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But any one planetary drive destabilizing would set off any other nearby. That’s the threat Ol’t’ro held over the Puppeteers all these years. That’s what Louis says sent Baedeker to the Ringworld in the first place, hunting for new technology.”

“That is my understanding, sir.”

“Two,” Sigmund muttered. Something was wrong here. “Five worlds are gone. You can see the debris, right?”

“Because of sensor failures — ”

“You can’t confirm that. Right.”

Sigmund located his drink bulb and concentrated on emptying it. His skepticism refused to be distracted, dissuaded, or drowned.

Something overlooked. Something misconstrued. What?

Something Baedeker had had to do in secrecy? Something Baedeker had learned about on the Ringworld?

Or, perhaps, learned immediately after …

At the back of Sigmund’s brain, that maddening suspicious itch disappeared.

He synthed another libation. He stood, raised his drink bulb, and silently toasted to Baedeker —

And to the three Puppeteer worlds Baedeker had whisked far, far away.