Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

Achilles had smuggled a few Gw’oth warships past Hearth’s defenses, had let Ol’t’ro take possession of Nature Preserve Five’s planetary drive.

If destabilized, the drive would pulverize every world within the Fleet.

From their position of absolute power, Ol’t’ro had demanded that the Hindmost abdicate, that he endorse Achilles to succeed. Achilles promised the terrified public a deal. Accept him as Hindmost, and he would negotiate withdrawal of the Gw’oth fleets. And so, on a wave of popular ignorance, the architect of disaster came to rule as Ol’t’ro’s first puppet Hindmost.

And ever after, from their watery habitat module, a few unsuspected Gw’oth held five worlds hostage.

Achilles remained, for reasons Ol’t’ro declined to explain, a bit like Chiron: among the favored few every incoming Hindmost was made to accommodate in his new government. In the current government, Achilles ruled Nature Preserve One as its planetary hindmost.

As he had been imposed, for a time, on Achilles’ erstwhile government. Much to Achilles’ displeasure.

“What do you say, Hindmost?” Achilles prodded. “Do we send a ship to investigate this object?”

“I believe we should,” Hindmost sang, and it galled him to be seen taking Achilles’ side.

“I propose that Nessus lead the expedition,” Chiron offered. “He remains our most accomplished scout.”

Achilles glowered: there was no love lost between Nessus and him.

For his own reasons Hindmost objected to sending Nessus, but he held his tongues.

“I will go,” Achilles sang. “We can learn much from close-up observation, and Nessus is no scientist.”

“Your place is here,” Chiron sang back.

Achilles twitched, then dipped his heads respectfully. He knew who spoke through Chiron.

“Lead the expedition?” Hemera sang, breaking the sudden, awkward silence. “Chiron, your melody implies that more than Nessus will go. Who else among us” — and he glanced, apologetically, at Achilles — “would dare to scout out this Ringworld?”

“Doubtless, some humans,” Chiron sang. “Let Nessus recruit his own team.”

“The New Terrans no longer serve us,” Hindmost gently reminded. “We are no longer welcome on their world.”

“Wild humans,” Chiron clarified. Several ministers started at the petulant grace notes in his song. “Nessus can recruit on Earth.”

“Earth is too distant,” Zephyrus sang. “Sooner than Nessus can reach Earth, the Fleet must already have encountered the Ringworld.”

“Not if Nessus takes Long Shot,” Chiron rebutted.

With renewed forebodings of disaster, without options, Hindmost once more concurred.

Earth Date: 2893

With a shiver of dismay, Hindmost turned from his mirror.

So many years. So much travail. Only to find himself on this ill-fated ship! He at best half understood normal hyperdrive, a level of insight that made him more knowledgeable than most. The Outsiders priced their technology and the underlying theory separately — and the technology was costly enough.

But somehow, just once, inspired (and demented) tinkerers in General Products Laboratories had created what they called the Type II drive. The Type II hyperdrive shunt was huge: the largest hull that General Products built, a sphere more than a thousand feet in diameter, could barely contain the apparatus.

After years of hideously expensive research had failed to duplicate the initial prototype, General Products Corporation was no closer to understanding why this particular hyperdrive flung this particular ship through hyperspace thousands of times faster than any other. The Outsiders, when Concordance engineers approached them, had expressed no opinions and declined to participate in any research. No one knew why, but no one understood why the Outsiders did most things. Creatures of liquid helium, the Outsiders were, simply, different.

General Products was on the verge, reluctantly, of halting their futile research program when inspiration struck.

From Hearth’s ancient place of hiding, the Concordance did business in that era with a half-dozen alien trading partners. With some grand demonstration, some spectacular publicity stunt, General Products thought to lure alien investors into underwriting continued experimentation. They jammed every nook and cranny of the prototype with extraneous equipment to mask the ad hoc nature of the only working Type II drive. They recruited a human pilot to fly the ship he named Long Shot all the way to the galactic core.

Of such convoluted origins comes disaster.

Except for Beowulf Shaeffer’s flight, the chain reaction of supernovae among the close-packed stars of the core would have gone undiscovered. A dangerous thing not to know, to be sure. But better to be ignorant of a peril many millennia into the future than to evoke immediate catastrophe.

Except for Long Shot and Shaeffer’s discovery, the Fleet would never have cast off its gravitational anchor from Giver of Life, its ancestral star.

Except for Hearth’s sudden, unplanned sprint from the galaxy, Citizens would never have trained their human servants to explore in the Fleet’s path. Their humans would never have uncovered their true past. Nature Preserve Four would still be one among the farm worlds serving the Concordance.

Except for scouting ahead in the Fleet’s hastily chosen path, the Gw’oth would have remained unknown to this day.

And yet …

Had the Gw’oth not spotted the refugees running from the core explosion, had the Gw’oth not contacted newly independent New Terra, Pak war fleets would have caught everyone unawares, would have pounded all their worlds, Hearth included, back into the Stone Age.

Hindmost plucked loose a tress he had just tucked into place. It seemed every course of action led to disaster.

Now he rode the ship that, from Beowulf Shaeffer’s era until Ol’t’ro’s covert reign, none had dared to fly. The ship on which Ol’t’ro had demanded the Concordance dedicate its wealth and best scientists, in vain hopes that the technology would be mastered.

And yet it was worth the price, any price, to divert Ol’t’ro from wondering if the time had come to pull the doomsday trigger. Every Hindmost had complied willingly.

Then Ol’t’ro had ordered Nessus to Earth. Aboard any normal vessel, even then, that would have been a trek of almost two years. On Long Shot, the trip was a matter of a few hours. Nessus had recruited two humans and a Kzinti diplomat for the “first” Ringworld expedition, bartering Long Shot itself as their payment.

Humans and Kzinti could waste lives and treasure trying to duplicate the Type II drive. Hindmost remembered his relief that the ill-fated ship was gone.

Only to find, long after, while stranded on the Ringworld by his own foolhardy misadventure, that Long Shot had returned! Kzinti had usurped the fastest ship in existence, using it as a courier to coordinate their part of the interspecies mayhem Hindmost knew as the Fringe War. Until Tunesmith seized Long Shot from the Kzinti. Until Louis and Hindmost took it from Tunesmith, because the protector chose to be rid of them.

And here I am aboard Long Shot. After … how long?

“Voice,” he called.

Notes tinkled from a nearby intercom speaker. “Yes, Hindmost.”

“Do onboard computers indicate the current date?”

“They do, although not using the Concordance calendar.”

“The human calendar will serve.”

“The Earth date is 2893, Hindmost.”

Much as he had expected — but suddenly, so terribly real. He had fled Hearth in