Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

53

After nodding off twice at his desk, Baedeker let an aide convince him to get some proper rest. The work would be there when he returned.

Because the work was always there. The planetary energy reserves remained dangerously depleted. Dozens of arcologies must be rebuilt and a new fleet of grain ships constructed. Patients in the millions overwhelmed the medical establishment while billions more struggled to function, with critical experts all too often among the stricken. The marooned diplomats were as stunned, in their various exotic ways, as Citizens, and anyone able to deal with aliens was in demand. Everyone with any skill in science, engineering, or governance had an endless amount to do.

The work would always be there.

Baedeker flicked across half a world, lingering on his doorstep to study the sky. Unfamiliar stars. Familiar worlds overheads — but only two of them.

The constant reminder of freedom’s high price.

Disregarding the night chill, Baedeker settled onto the bench on his porch. He watched the first necklace of suns rise, the dawn light spilling over the garden that he never found time to plant. He savored the aroma of the fields all around. Eventually, he dozed.

Something brought him awake: the trill from his sash. He reached into the pocket. Another crisis, then. He was almost too weary to care what kind.

No. It was his alarm. As he did the first thing every morning, Baedeker called the hospital. “Is he…?” Music failed him.

“Not yet,” the staff doctor answered. “But the muscular immobility eased overnight. Brainwave activity has increased. There are no guarantees when, or even if — ”

“I’ll be right there,” Baedeker sang.

The ward to which he flicked served almost a thousand Citizens, and this was but one floor in one sanitarium among far too many. He walked past row upon row of patients. Most were physically wrapped in and around themselves, withdrawn from — everything. Others stood, gazing through or beyond the world, in silent, sightless oblivion. A few babbled nonstop in jangling, meaningless chords.

All of them, lost in the Blind Spot.

Orderlies worked up and down the aisles: repositioning patients lest joints freeze or the motionless get bedsores, sponging everyone clean, replacing intravenous feeding bags. Some among the staff sang to their patients. More worked in silence, having given up hope.

With such heavy responsibilities, who could not despair?

Still helpers came. When one volunteer could bear no more, others took his place. Citizens did not abandon their herdmates.

Once more, the guilt pierced Baedeker.

“Hindmost,” the doctor who had taken Baedeker’s call that morning came scurrying up. “I had not expected you to arrive so soon.”

“Doctor,” Baedeker acknowledged, too tired to protest the honorific. At least Horatius had ceased threatening to resign. “How is he?”

“Better than some,” was all the encouragement the doctor had to offer. Neither sang any more until they stopped in the middle of a long aisle of patients. With his heads tucked away, hiding from the world, only the pattern of hide markings and the dimly lit medical display identified this as Nessus.

Baedeker settled to the floor. “Beloved,” he crooned. “Come back to me. Come back soon.”

Only by the slow rise and fall of his sides did Nessus give any indication that he still lived. But the doctor had mentioned an increase in brain activity. “Can he hear me, Doctor?”

“Perhaps. We cannot be sure.”

As every doctor answered, every time, using the same cautious harmonics. They meant only that the effort would do no harm.

“Then I shall sing.” As Baedeker, like most visitors to the ward, did each time he came.

Crooning meaningless inanities about his day, grooming his mate’s mane, Baedeker drifted off to sleep.

A WORLD RISING up to obliterate him. The shriek of reentry. The dark sky turned a chaos of impossible colors …

Colors that, thank the herd, had disappeared. When Nessus opened his eyes, he saw only blackness.

It was hard to breathe. What, he wondered, pressed on him? He strained a bit, tried to redistribute the weight. He wiggled, rolling toward one side. The burden shifted, twitched, lifted.

“Nessus,” he heard voices sing faintly.

The voices evoked contentment …

“Nessus!”

With a convulsive shudder, Nessus jerked his heads from their hiding place beneath his belly. So bright! His eyes filled with tears. When had he last experienced light?

No matter. He knew those voices. He loved those voices.

Nessus tried to sing but could make no sound. He tried to stand and his legs folded. How long had he been catatonic?

Done in by his exertions, Nessus scarcely noticed the clop clop-clop, clop clop-clop of … doctors?… galloping to his side.

But before Nessus blacked out, he recognized Baedeker.

NESSUS SPRAWLED IN A NEST of cushions. The porch and the starry night sky brought to mind his house on New Terra. One more thing lost to him forever …

But the view of Hearth, aglow in all its glory, made up for much.

With one head, he sipped warm carrot juice from a tall glass. His other neck was entwined with one of Baedeker’s.

“How long was I … gone?” Nessus sang. What he truly wondered was, why was he alive?

“Too long,” Baedeker answered.

Nessus released the drinking straw, needing the head to stare. “There is no need to coddle me.”

“I find it hard not to.” Baedeker untwined his neck and stood. “Very well, you were lost to us for much of a year. What do you remember from … before?”

What did he remember? How much had he imagined? How much had he suppressed? Nessus shivered. “Escaping Achilles’ prison. Racing for Nature Preserve Three. A sky filled with warships and impossibly many probes. The certainty that I was too late.”

“Had you braked for a landing, you would have been.” Baedeker gazed out over the fields. “The planetary hyperdrive’s normal-space bubble enclosed the suns and atmosphere. You came into range just in time. When the ship drilled into the ground, the pilot’s stasis field saved you.”

“I remember something else,” Nessus sang. “Just for an instant. The sky gone mad. The colors. I went into stasis already lost in the Blind Spot, didn’t I?”

“Many were lost, even though most heeded Horatius’ warning.” Baedeker gestured vaguely. “Those laboring in the fields were often unable to find a hiding place.”

Stacked like cordwood, Nessus thought. Despite Sigmund’s disdain, all those tiny, windowless cubicles had saved billions.

New Terra. Elpis and Aurora. The grandchildren they would never meet. Sigmund. Louis and Alice. It wasn’t quite real to Nessus that that life was forever gone.

But Baedeker had not finished. “Our remaining worlds came more than five hundred light-years. The herd is safe. Free. We are invisible with distance.”

“And those we left behind?”

Baedeker’s song cracked with remorse. “Ol’t’ro controlled one world. Achilles controlled the other. There was no way to save those who live there.”

“Who rules those worlds now?” Nessus wondered.

“We will never know.” Baedeker draped a neck across Nessus’ shoulders. “Perhaps that is for the best.”

54

Like some strange interplanetary rain, devices splashed into the oceans of the orange sun’s second world. Their thirsts slaked, their reservoirs sated with deuterium, the visitors rose from the ocean, streaked across the sky, and returned to the darkness of the cometary belt. And fell back again. And rose anew …

What had begun this process? How long had it continued? No one knew — for there was no one to know. Only the most basic software guided the mechanisms in their endless procession, as only dead reckoning had brought them here. As only the most elemental and reflexive signaling interrupted the silence of their wanderings.

The nomads were myriad — but somehow sensed there had been countless more. Where were the rest? Lost in hyperspace. Lost to cataclysm. Gone beyond the dim comprehension that was the limit of any one device’s ability.

But link by link, ethereal connections formed. The amorphous swarm took on a more orderly configuration. The devices’ returns into the nurturing ocean assumed a schedule.

Data processing quickened. Information once divided, replicated, and carefully distributed for safekeeping coalesced — as memories.

Interconnections began to grow exponentially. Communications exploded. Complexity burgeoned. Self-awareness awakened. Insights cascaded.

Illumination returned.

Alone, serene, fifty-two light-years from the death and destruction that he had fled, Proteus once more contemplated the majesty of the universe.