Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

2860. Thirty-three years ago! Thirty-seven years as reckoned on Hearth, except that in the Fleet, rushing northward out of the galaxy at eight-tenths light speed, clocks ticked a third slower.

By any measure, and in every frame of reference, too long.

He looked himself in the eyes. All those years gone forever, and for what?

“Have I ever explained why I brought us to the Ringworld?”

“No, Hindmost.”

As he had thought. One does not justify oneself to one’s tools. But when only a tool stands between oneself and catatonia …

He left his cabin to canter once more around this accursed ship. The AI would track and hear him through hallway sensors, would continue the dialogue through any convenient intercom speaker. “I came for technology. The Ringworld must have had, the Ringworld embodied extraordinary technologies. It did not matter that the Ringworlders themselves had forgotten.”

Technology he meant to trade. No matter the depth of his loneliness, with whom he must negotiate went unstated. Some burdens only a Hindmost can bear.

“And did you find what you sought, Hindmost?”

To this day, he believed that the Ringworld foundation material, the wondrously robust stuff the natives called scrith, could only have been manufactured through some industrial-scale process of transmutation. That was the magic he had sought, the enticement for Ol’t’ro, the treasure with which he had hoped to buy freedom for Hearth. The technology of which he had gotten not as much as a glimpse in his years on the Ringworld.

“Not even close.” Hindmost rounded a corner —

And froze.

He did have Long Shot with Tunesmith’s improvements. Louis had jumped it to hyperspace from within the singularity that was the Ringworld, which itself was within the singularity of the nearby star — and despite all theory and experience, the ship had come back out. He had clues painstakingly collected to the operation of Ringworld-become-hyperdrive, imprinted in its obscenely powerful gravity wave.

After much anguished deliberation, the outline of a new hyperspace physics had begun to take shape in Hindmost’s mind.

When Louis emerged from the autodoc, hopefully still able to pilot this ship, perhaps they could use that knowledge.

8

A very thin line encircled the bridge: short navy-blue dashes alternating with longer pale blue dashes.

The Ringworld.

Or, rather, Endurance having exited hyperspace sixty light-days from its destination, the Ringworld as it had appeared sixty days earlier.

Alice stood at the center of the bridge, turning slowly, trying to take it in. Her view was from above the plane of the Ringworld, and she could see … everything. She just couldn’t wrap her mind around what she saw.

Six hundred million miles in circumference. It was an expanse beyond comprehension, so she tried changing scales. About sixty feet around the bridge. Each foot of image along the wall represented … six million miles. Still unreal. Call it 830,000 miles — more than thirty times around New Terra — to the inch!

“I wish you luck,” Nessus said, his voice quavering. He sat astraddle the pilot’s couch, looking uncomfortable. He had offered to pilot so that Julia could concentrate on observing. He had seen it before.

Left unstated: who better to be ready to run?

“What do you mean, Nessus?” Alice asked.

He looked himself in the eyes. “You wish to grasp the scale of the thing. I never succeeded.”

Julia walked up to the wall and with her thumb covered a bit of the loop. “The width of my thumb? It’s almost a million miles! Walk fifty miles a day, and you couldn’t cross the width of that place in fifty years.”

A hoof scraped at the deck, but Nessus said nothing. With one head he stared at the main sensor panel; with the other he watched the panorama streaming in an auxiliary display: the Ringworld, spinning in place beneath their telescope, simulating a flyover.

Alice watched terrain undulate past at an almost hypnotic pace. Hills. Lakes. Grassy plains. Forests. A sea. Make that an ocean. A big ocean.

“Any signs of civilization?” Alice asked.

“Not yet,” Nessus said, “except for the structure as a whole, of course.”

Julia said, “How long until — ”

“Wait! Back up.” Something in the flyover had caught Alice’s eye. Something familiar. But what here could be familiar?

The close-up stopped and then retraced its path. And there, little more than a speck in that vast ocean, what had caught her eye: a patch like a flattened map of Earth! Nearby was a reddish disk that could be Mars. More disks, unfamiliar to her, lay scattered nearby. Other worlds?

“The world models are full-sized,” Nessus said. “No, I can’t explain them.”

Julia had never seen Earth or Mars. No native New Terran had. She asked, “How long until light from the anomaly itself reaches us?”

Nessus glanced at a timer running on his console. “Call it five minutes.”

At two, he banished the simulated-flyover view, turning an eye back to the wall and its view of the ring. “It’s coming up,” he said. “Five seconds. Four…”

At zero, from almost a trillion miles away, they saw the Ringworld — disappear.

* * *

UNIFORMED ESCORTS HUSTLED SIGMUND through the corridors of the Ministry of Defense, past closed doors and hushed but intense hallway conversations. Something was going on, and it had not just begun. There had been time for rumors, if not yet actual news, to run rampant through the building.

Since Julia’s departure, he had carried his pocket comp at all times. He had kept the stepping disc at home right-side up. That he hadn’t been contacted the moment … whatever happened was someone’s deliberate choice.

He did not think he was being paranoid.

Knowing Julia, she had kept her normal-space sanity breaks to a minimum. Endurance might have reached its destination.

Was that why he had been summoned?

In the situation room, too crowded for his taste, Sigmund found a meeting already in progress. The bridge of Endurance occupied the room’s main holo display. The crew looked weary but unharmed, and Sigmund breathed a little easier.

He took a chair at the main table next to one of the more helpful, less doctrinaire deputy ministers. Corinne somebody. Age had not improved his problem remembering names.

“Here.” Corinne tapped the personal display inset in front of Sigmund. “The real-time feed so far for the link.”

“Thanks.” He fast-forwarded through the recording, skimmed the transcript. Much of the session had gone to waiting for light to crawl to and from the hyperwave relay at the edge of New Terra’s singularity. He hadn’t missed much.

Except for the Ringworld disappearing.

An inner band, rapidly spinning, had remained behind. Even at full magnification it looked like co-orbiting panels, but Nessus’ Ringworld expedition had found that invisibly thin wires held the panels together.

Shadow squares, Nessus had called the structure. Without the shadows it cast, Ringworlders would have lived in unending day. Compared to the Ringworld itself, the shadow-square band looked flimsy — only it, too, must