Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

Endurance safe from the ships all about. The melody ran strong in his mind.

Across several melodic lines, a synchrony of beats approached. His cue. “Ready to jump,” Nessus called in warning.

10

Haltingly, Hindmost made his way to the chamber where Louis Wu slept. The autodoc would soon wake the man, let him out. Unless he overrode the automatic release, kept Louis in suspended animation.…

The meandering tunnel led Hindmost to the hull. Most of its surface remained as clear as the day it had left the General Products factory. A glimpse of the distant blue-white flare of a fusion drive hurried him on his way.

He had abducted Louis, survivor of the first Ringworld expedition, to return there and find a transmutation device. If Louis decided to seek revenge, could the human be blamed?

But then Louis had purposefully stranded them both (and the Kzin, Chmeee, now vanished with the Ringworld) because the immense artifact had become unstable in its orbit. If Hindmost had had the choice, he would have fled. Together — without other options, and at great personal risk — they had fulfilled Louis’s improvident vow to a native woman, preventing the Ringworld from crashing into its sun, plucking trillions from the jaws of certain death.

Maybe that balanced the scales between him and Louis.

And if not? He had found Louis a hopeless tasp addict and cured him. Nor would this be the first time he had saved Louis’s life with the Carlos Wu autodoc.

Only Louis might never have suffered tasp addiction but for the first Ringworld expedition — which, as far as Louis was concerned, Hindmost had ordered. The autodoc only undid injuries Louis had suffered because of his abduction.

And Hindmost still feared to pilot this ship himself.

A complicated decision, to be sure. Best to hedge, to probe Louis’s attitude when he emerged from the autodoc. Hindmost turned and cantered back to Long Shot’s bridge.

“Voice,” Hindmost sang. “I wish to be remotely present in the autodoc room.”

“It is done,” Voice answered.

A hologram opened, its vantage above and to one side of the autodoc. Sensors brought him the soft hum of the machine, the gentle rise and fall of Louis’s chest.

And so, from the comparative safety of the bridge, Hindmost watched and waited.

* * *

THE CLEAR DOME of the autodoc slowly retracted. Looking restored and rejuvenated, Louis climbed out. If being greeted by a hologram surprised him, he hid it.

“Nothing hurts,” Louis said matter-of-factly.

“Good,” Hindmost said. After two months, Interworld felt strange in his mouth.

“I was used to it. Oh, futz, I’ve lost my mind!”

“Louis, did you not know the machine would rebuild you as a breeder?”

“Yah, but … my head feels futzy. Full of cotton. I never felt so much myself as when I could think like a protector.”

“We could have rebuilt the ’doc.” The comment was a test. If being a protector appealed to Louis, a chord sung to Voice would open hatches, would blast Louis out into space.

If matters came to that, Hindmost would feel guilty.

“No. No.” Louis slammed a fist against the autodoc lid. “I remember that much. I have to be a breeder, or dead. If I’m a protector…”

Hindmost let Louis prattle on with the irrepressible energy of one fresh from an autodoc. Then, “Louis.”

“What?”

“We haven’t moved since you went into the ’doc, two months ago Earth time.” Precision would only complicate matters: they had not moved far. “We are a warm spot on the sky. Sooner or later the Fringe War will notice us. What else has that heterogeneous mob got for entertainment but to track us down and take our ship?”

Take us far from this awful place. Please.

“Right,” Louis said.

He watched Louis set off toward the bridge. The maze of access tubes was much expanded since Louis had tumbled into the autodoc. Hindmost, from time to time, offered directions from the nearest intercom speaker as his hologram followed Louis. As footsteps approached the bridge, Hindmost sang a chord to terminate the projection.

Louis dropped into the pilot’s chair and activated the hyperdrive. The bridge screens went dark. The crystalline sphere of the mass detector lit with radial lines pointing toward the nearby stars, rotated to show their new course.

He is taking us the wrong way!

“I don’t have the nerve to fly us to home,” Hindmost had admitted, moments before helping Louis-as- protector into the autodoc.

“Not Canyon?” Louis had asked.

Canyon was where, long ago, Hindmost had tracked down and abducted Louis. “Home,” he had corrected. Faster than explaining, he had dissembled. “I did not think I could hide us on Canyon. Too small. Home is very like Earth, Louis, and has a wonderful history.”

From the course Louis had set, he had heard — misheard — Home, the human planet.

But Hindmost had meant, simply, home. Where the hearts are. After two long exiles on a quite different human world, and with the loved ones he had left there, New Terra felt like home. He had planned to give Louis coordinates to fly them there.

And then it hit Hindmost:

 — That only one place could ever truly be home to him, and that was the Fleet of Worlds.

 — That at some level he had known it all along. Why else had he built up Long Shot’s velocity until it matched the Fleet’s?

 — And that something in the bridge displays had been screaming for his attention for the past few hours.

Against all odds, Hindmost hoped he knew what it was. Who it was.

“Louis,” he said, “we must go back.”

REUNION

Earth Date: 2893

11

Alice pored over the bridge displays, at once fascinated and anxious. From the way Nessus tugged at his mane, he felt no such ambivalence. Alice couldn’t decide how Julia felt.

A poker face is a good skill in a commander.

Space seethed with hyperwave chatter. The longer Endurance skulked about, the