Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

And where was Baedeker now? Long gone … Sigmund did not know where.

“Grandpa?” a voice called from an impossible distance.

Sigmund trembled. Fourteen light-years? It would mean forty-two days’ travel each way. Forty-two days of the less-than-nothingness of hyperspace gibbering worse than madness into his mind …

“Behold the famed destroyer of worlds,” the aide scoffed.

With a convulsive shudder, Sigmund forced himself back to the present. He couldn’t care less what politicians thought of him. But Julia’s worry? Alice’s disdain? Those cut him to the quick.

“I’ll accompany the captain,” Alice said.

If any two people on New Terra should have been friends, they were he and Alice. He was from Earth and she from the Belt, separately exiled among strangers. Neither had arrived under their own power, or by their own choice. Neither knew their way home.

Until they had lived on this world so long that this was home.

For a long time, they were friends. Not counting Penelope, Alice had been his best friend —

And when he hadn’t been paying attention, he and Alice had become relics together. Despite years spent frozen in stasis. Despite time dilation from New Terra’s sometimes relativistic velocity. She was biologically about 225 in Earth years, ancient on a world yet to invent boosterspice. She looked ancient.

Whereas he, after making the same allowances, had passed 350. By rights, he should have been long dead. Probably Alice still wished him dead.

But physically, Sigmund was younger, “only” more-or-less two hundred. The prototype autodoc that had twice, all but magically, restored him to life had both times also rejuvenated him to about twenty.

He should go with Julia to check out this latest threat. In another life, he had been an intelligence agent — an ARM — a high-ranking operative in the United Nations’ unassumingly named Amalgamated Regional Militia. He had put together what passed for a military to protect this world.

What made him feel so old? The weight of experience? Or the scorn of the one person still living who had once truly understood him?

“Ms. Jordan,” Norquist-Ng said respectfully, “it is a commendable offer, but you are in no condition for such a trip. You must realize that.”

“But I am going. I was a police detective, back in the day, back in the Belt. On this world, for a long time, I was deputy defense minister. We both know” — said staring at Sigmund — “someone with off-world experience must go.”

Tanj stubborn pride! Few Belters ever went prospecting solo, with only a spacesuit and a singleship to protect them — but loner self-sufficiency had deep roots in their mythos, their schooling, maybe their genes. No matter what was at stake, you questioned that belief at your peril. To presume to make life-or-death decisions for a Belter? That was the ultimate affront.

Once, long ago, Sigmund had presumed. In the same desperate circumstances, he would do it again. Better a live ex-friend than a dead friend.

And however scornfully Alice looked at him, he still meant to help keep her alive.

Merely the thought of setting foot onto a spaceship had Sigmund trembling. “Alice,” he said weakly, “I’m just not able. I’m sorry, but it’ll have to be you. But maybe not alone.”

“Is there another ‘friend’ you’d send?” she mocked.

Not exactly. Friends didn’t reprogram friends, even in a good cause. Friends didn’t keep dark secrets from — or kidnap — one another. Nonetheless, a champion of New Terra.

Sigmund nodded. “I won’t say who, Alice. But if I can convince him to join the expedition, you would be fortunate to have him along.”

3

Weeding, pruning, breaking apart clumps of dirt, Janus worked his way through the garden. Sweat trickled down his flanks and matted his mane. Mud spattered his legs and clung to his hooves.

The redmelons were coming along acceptably, but other melon varieties struggled. Tall stands of ornamental grasses, oddly scented, in shades of amber (a touch too orange) and violet (too pale), bowed in the warm breeze. But the fruit trees showed promise. Winged borers evidently agreed, for the red-and-purple insectivore hedge that bounded the garden was a frenzy of lunging, snapping tendrils.

Once this world had been a granary of the Fleet of Worlds. Most of the farmland here, even long after independence, had grown crops for export to Hearth. No more. Now terrestrial crops prospered, for with the severing of ties with the Concordance had come many changes. Most overt: the reprogramming of the suns. Hearthian flora had yet to adapt to cycles altered to mimic the length of Earth’s day and year.

What Janus truly craved was the terrestrial vegetable that he never dared to plant. Someone might remember a Puppeteer with a fondness for carrot juice. He had departed Hearth long ago, but among those in authority was one with long memories. One who nursed grudges.

Even on this world, Achilles might have spies.

Janus had come late to gardening. His mate had loved to garden; to work in the soil was a way, however imperfect, to commune. And gardening had been something of their lost parent to share with the children.

Absent parent, Janus chided himself. He would not, must not, think of his mate as lost, as departed.

No matter that since their parting, the “children” had grown to adulthood. Aurora had even mated. Elpis, the younger of the two, had no memory at all of Hearth, the world of his birth, the home world of his kind, the jewel of the Fleet.

And in all that time, never had as much as a grace note of rumor about Baedeker, much less any news, found its way to Janus.

Beyond the hungry hedge, in a pasture of freshly mown meadowplant, children gamboled and frolicked, bleated and sang. This is a good life, Janus thought. The humans treat us kindly, better than we deserve.

A sudden squealing erupted from among the young, and an outpouring of melodies from the adults who supervised the children’s play. Janus set down his trowel, then craned a neck, the better to listen. He was too distant to make out all the chords, and the breeze carried off most of the upper harmonics, but the little he could hear tantalized him. Surprise, certainly. Reassurances for the little ones. Reassurances for one another.

He was quite close enough to see the youngest children scattering from … a human.

Round-faced, gray-haired, thick through the middle, his garment set all to black, the newcomer stopped by a cluster of the child-tending adults. Perhaps the man spoke to them, because one indicated the garden with a briefly straightened neck. With a murmur of thanks, the man began shuffling toward Janus.

Sigmund Ausfaller?

The man looked terrible. Decrepit, to be sure; sadly, that was to be expected. Troubled. Shaken. But the eyes, dark and brooding, burned as intensely as ever.

Janus had not seen Sigmund for … since soon after taking asylum on this world. No, he should be precise: since Sigmund had smuggled him and the children onto this world. The New Terran government did not know and would never have approved. For Sigmund to reappear …

Janus yearned to gallop away like the children. He ached to collapse onto the ground and hide from the world, his heads tucked between his front legs, tightly rolled into a bundle of self. Whatever events brought Sigmund here … whatever had shaken Sigmund … it would be bad.

Sigmund edged through a gap in the hedge, flinching from the tendrils lashing out to taste his face, hands, and garment. “Janus?”

“So some call me,” he said. The name he used in the village, no human could sing.

“Two-faced god. Two-headed Puppeteer. Fair enough.” Sigmund chuckled. “And, among his attributes, also god of beginnings, endings, and time.”

Sigmund’s reappearance foretold an ending of Janus’ idylls. And a beginning, too. But the beginning of what?