Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

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.