Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

His circumstances were intolerable, but setting off in a jury-rigged ship was not the answer. Protectors lived by the jury-rig, supremely confident in their improvisations — and in the makeshifts and expedients, yet to be imagined, by which they would resolve other crises yet to emerge.

Not so Citizens, certainly not the Hindmost. Especially not this Hindmost. He dare not undertake a long voyage, especially with unintelligible Kzinti controls.

Unable to flee, his every instinct called out for catatonia. Instead, he continued to brush. Finally, he set down his implements. Rising from his nest of mounded pillows, he pivoted before a full-length wall mirror, also newly synthed. Through his appearance, if in no other way, he would be worthy of his station.

If only all the responsibilities of the office were as easily satisfied …

Earth Date: 2850

Haunch brushing haunch, Hindmost and his most senior aides and ministers settled astraddle twenty padded, Y-shaped benches. Despite the companionable closeness, Hindmost did not feel in the least part comforted. No one did.

Above head level at midroom, centered within the circle of benches, floated that which they must discuss. The pale blue loop of thread could have been pretty, but not with that yellow spark blazing at its center. The spark was a star, and that meant the loop was enormous.

Soft and urgent, plaintive and terrified, phrases of song filled the room. When the cacophony gave no sign of abating, Hindmost intoned, with harmonics of command, “We will begin.” The murmuring stopped abruptly.

“Explain what your long-range instruments have seen,” he directed Minerva, the deputy director of Clandestine Directorate.

Minerva gestured at the blue ring. “The unexpected sighting lies a little more than two light-years distant, not far off the Fleet’s path,” he sang.

“Why have we not heard before of this object?” Hindmost asked, feigning ignorance. In truth, he had feared this day since — it felt like forever. Since Chiron’s arrival.

“We knew something encircled the star.” Minerva sang in low, apologetic tones. “Until we observed it at a suitable angle, we thought it an ordinary dust ring. Not” — he glanced once more at the blue thread — “that.”

“And so only recently did you look closely.”

“Yes, Hindmost,” Minerva agreed timorously.

“Who built it?” Aglaea, an aide, wondered.

“We don’t know,” Minerva answered.

“Why build it?” another asked.

“We don’t know,” Minerva repeated. “Nor how. Nor of what. To construct something so huge — ”

“We must send an expedition,” Chiron interrupted brashly. His mane was a glorious structure of complex silver ringlets.

More precisely, its mane. Chiron was a holographic projection, animated by Proteus: an illicit AI. And equally, their mane, because directing Proteus was the Gw’oth group mind known as Ol’t’ro. Two truths unimaginable to those physically in the council chamber, save by the Hindmost and one other.

Hindmost’s ministers and aides knew Chiron as the long-serving Minister of Science, resident on and governor of Nature Preserve Five, the better to oversee research best performed off the home world. Governments came and went, Hindmosts came and went, and Chiron served them all.

If only that were so.

In the blackest secret in the long, dark history of the Concordance, behind He Who Leads from Behind, Chiron served only him/it/themselves. The herd chose whom they wished to rule the Concordance; time and again, their choices changed nothing. Each outgoing Hindmost revealed to the next the unbearable secret: Chiron, in a moment, could obliterate five worlds and a trillion Citizens. Chiron had promised to do so, if he/it/they ever deemed its unwitting subjects a danger to the worlds of the Gw’oth.

The Gw’oth were native to the sea-bottom muck of the ice-locked ocean of a now-distant moon. A Gw’o was mostly tubelike tentacles: like five snakes fused at their tails. One was no longer from tip to tip than the reach of Hindmost’s neck, little thicker through its central mass than the span he could open a mouth. The uninformed Citizen might feel more pity or disgust at the sight of a Gw’o than cause for fear.

And, as usual, the uninformed Citizen would be mistaken.

Gw’oth were courageous and curious, psychoses they shared with other species evolved from hunting animals. And they had used those flaws to terrible purpose. Within Hindmost’s lifetime, the Gw’oth had broken through the ice of their home world and advanced from fire to fusion, from muscle power to hyperdrive starships.

But even among their own kind, the sixteenfold Gw’oth group mind that was Ol’t’ro was the exception. A perversion. Frightfully intelligent.

Their power of life and death over a trillion Citizens was absolute.

Chiron had spoken; the decision was foregone. The Concordance would send an expedition. And like the herd’s delusions of self-determination, the mission would be meaningless, too.

Worse than meaningless. Dangerous. The expedition could serve no purpose beyond the keeping of secrets.

For the Ringworld was not newly discovered, but rediscovered, and the Concordance’s historic role in defanging the trillions of Ringworlders must remain hidden at all costs. In Hindmost’s first, temporary, fall from power, he had purged that dangerous information even from the Hindmost-only archives, lest Ol’t’ro come upon it.

Room-temperature superconductors underpinned most advanced technology on the Ringworld. Or had, until Hindmost’s many-times-removed predecessor approved the dispersal there of a gengineered plague. The airborne microbes devoured the ubiquitous superconductor wherever they encountered it.

Very quickly, everything had stopped working. How many Ringworld natives had perished when the floating cities crashed? Millions, without a doubt. More likely, billions.

He must hide this history from Chiron. Else his Gw’oth overlords would surely judge the Concordance irredeemably dangerous to their own kind.

And so Hindmost only half listened to the debate, its outcome predetermined. In jangling chords and chilling arpeggios, the arguments washed over him in the dreamlike slow motion of inevitable disaster.

“… Cannot veer,” Hemera, Minister of Energy, was singing. “It is basic physics. At the Fleet’s present velocity, in the time remaining before we encounter this Ringworld we can make no meaningful change to our course.”

“I propose that we not deviate at all from our longtime course,” Zephyrus, Minister of Foreign Affairs, sang back. “As we have seen the Ringworld, so we must assume the natives have seen us. Suppose we veer off our course from comparatively close, traveling at our present high speed. It could suggest that after launching impactors we seek to put distance between ourselves and the debris from kinetic-weapon strikes. If the Ringworlders should suspect that, what weapons will they turn against us?”

Several ministers bleated in dismay at song of weapons and strikes, and Chiron glanced warningly at Hindmost.

“Sing no more about such terrible things,” Hindmost directed. He held his gaze on Zephyrus, but sang for his master. We consider no such drastic measures, Ol’t’ro. As ever, we are rendered harmless by our fears.

“All the more reason to send an expedition,” Achilles sang. “Let the Ringworlders not misunderstand us.”

Did that mean, let the Ringworlders fear us?

Achilles rivaled Ol’t’ro in madness. Achilles was a sociopath with limitless ambitions. During the era of human servants, many Citizens had had reason to take human-pronounceable names. But only one Citizen had assumed the name of a legendary human warrior!

Insane ambition had led Achilles to interfere in Gw’oth affairs, scheming to turn his manufactured Gw’oth threat into mass hysteria across Hearth, into rule over the Concordance. When his meddling had gone spectacularly wrong, reconciled Gw’oth worlds had turned their massed might toward the Fleet of Worlds. In an evil alliance,