Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

“Then what?”

“Something about the situation keeps nagging at me.” Sigmund took the comp from his pocket. “Protocol gamma,” he told it. Colored lights began chasing each other around its display: “For privacy.”

“I remember.” Louis sighed. “All right. One final debrief.”

“Start with your first trip to the Ringworld. Nessus knew you already, even though you didn’t remember, so I understand why he picked you. Then you and the team arrived on Hearth for a briefing from a Puppeteer avatar named Chiron?”

It was never hard getting Louis talking.

After a while, Sigmund interrupted. “Now tell me about the Fringe War around the Ringworld, and this boss protector, this Tunesmith.”

Louis did.

The suspicions had been a long time coming. No, that wasn’t exactly true. The suspicions had been there all along, because that’s who Sigmund was. But any hint of a possibility of a rationale for those suspicions? That had been a long while coming.

Sigmund interrupted again. “Do I have this right? Tunesmith reprogrammed nanites from the Carlos Wu autodoc, replicated them, and then used space probes to spread the nanites around the Ringworld. The nanites infected, rewired the … scrith, did you call it? The Ringworld foundation material?”

“The superconducting paths within the scrith,” Louis said.

“Based on what he had learned about hyperdrive studying the super-duper version aboard Long Shot. Turned the whole Ringworld into a hyperdrive.”

“A Type II hyperdrive,” Louis clarified.

“Right. Then Tunesmith launched the Ringworld into hyperspace despite being in — despite its own Jupiter-sized mass producing its own — singularity.”

“You got it.”

The disbelief at the back of Sigmund’s brain kept at him. “But the drive aboard Long Shot wasn’t anything like that. No scrith. No superconductors.”

“What the futz do you want from me?” Louis snapped. “Tunesmith worked with what he had. And protectors are smart.”

“You said you were a protector. So explain.”

“Right. I was a protector,” Louis said. “I can’t explain beyond that Tunesmith learned enough from studying the first Type II drive to make an improved version, working with the resources he had.”

“As he improved the drive aboard the Long Shot itself.” The modified version Baedeker studied for the months you were in the ’doc, becoming a breeder once more.

“Well, yes,” Louis said.

“Okay, we’ll move on. Despite the attack on Long Shot, Nessus got to the ground on one of the Fleet worlds. Presumably Baedeker, too. Because of the doubly magic hyperdrive?”

“I’ve wracked my brain trying to understand how Nessus pulled that off. I’ve got nothing, Sigmund.”

“Okay. Go on. What happened next?”

He let Louis talk, occasionally questioning a detail, only so Louis would not know what really interested him.

After a while Sigmund asked, “So Achilles and Proteus contacted you separately about Nessus. Then you heard once from Nessus himself. You never heard anything from or about Baedeker?”

“The answer is the same, no matter how many different ways you ask the question. I don’t know what happened to Baedeker.” Sadly: “Not that it matters anymore.”

“And Nessus and Baedeker were together aboard Long Shot the last time you saw them.”

“Yes, tanj it!”

“I’ll miss them, too,” Sigmund said. “You know I spent months with Baedeker during the Pak War.”

“I know,” Louis answered softly. “Are we about done here?”

A warning klaxon and a blared prelaunch announcement over the intercom settled the matter. Sigmund said, “Go live happily ever after with Alice.”

“That’s advice I can follow.” Louis offered his hand. “Good luck on Earth.”

“My granddaughter and your great-granddaughter have become good friends. I think you and I can admit it, too.” Sigmund slipped past the hand to start a quick back-slapping bear hug. “Now beat it before Koala takes off.”

* * *

THE FIRST “EVENING” AFTER TAKEOFF, the small diplomatic mission were guests of honor at the captain’s table. There were enough toasts before and during the meal that when the after-dinner rounds began Sigmund’s taste buds had ceased to care that the wine was synthed.

“To fallen friends,” Sigmund offered when, circling the table, the honor of the toast once more reached him.

That got a subdued reaction. Every officer and crewman aboard had had friends in the lost ARM fleet. Glasses clinked in remembrance.

People on Earth, on all the human-settled worlds, were in for a shock when Koala reached home. An entire ARM fleet, destroyed with all hands. And a Patriarchy fleet. And a Trinoc fleet, although Sigmund had only secondhand information about that bunch. They sounded like bad news, and he intended to study up on them during the long trip.

Wesley Wu said, “One way or another, our return will mark the end of an era.”

“Within the ARM most of all,” Wu’s executive officer said. “And I’m willing to bet it will change the whole dynamic between the ARM and the civilian leadership.”

“Then there’s the power balance among human worlds,” another officer mused. Sigmund hadn’t caught that man’s name, either. “The Ringworld expeditionary force was a United Nations initiative. Most colony worlds refused to take part.”

“And between humans and the other spacefaring species,” Tanya Wu added.

Where would the ripples end? Sigmund had reshaped the New Terran government. Might not a chastened Earth citizenry be open to improvements? Temptation beckoned.…

But only for a moment. New Terra was his home and his family’s. He would represent that home, and nothing more, and be happy for it.

“Now that you’ve settled in, Sigmund, are you and your staff comfortable?” Wesley Wu asked, changing the subject.

Comfortable with the less than nothingness lurking outside the curve of the hull? Comfortable in the knowledge that the savviest scientists on Earth and New Terra understood even less about hyperspace and hyperdrive than they had imagined? “Quite comfortable,” Sigmund said. Call this lie his first act of diplomacy. “But it has been a long day.”

“That it has.” Captain Wu stood. “If I might offer one final, happier toast?”

Everyone stood.

Wesley Wu toasted, “To the reunion between our two worlds.”

* * *

A TOUCH UNSTEADY ON HIS FEET, Sigmund made his way through crowded corridors back to his cabin. As claustrophobic as it felt, somewhere aboard Koala two officers must be sharing another room no larger than this so that he could have private quarters. It could be worse.

Anyway, he had other issues on his mind.

The wine had only deepened Sigmund’s suspicions. He took out his computer. “Protocol gamma. Jeeves?”

“I am here, sir.”

As much of him, anyway, as the portable unit could store. Sigmund was not about to interface his AIde to Koala’s much larger Hawking fragment.