Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

Tanya sat.

Once again, they flashed in and out of hyperspace. Seconds after Koala reemerged, an outgunned Trinoc squadron jumped away, leaving what spectrographic analysis suggested was the hull debris of an Avenger-class Kzinti scout ship.

An ambush? An accident, someone’s nerves stretched beyond endurance? Or the beginning of something much, much worse?

Thousands of warships far from home, and nothing left to justify the huge expense of their deployments. Nothing to excuse the lives already lost. Nothing to distract from historic grudges, or from fresh setbacks amid the endless jockeying for advantage. No brass ring left to grab. No one left to confront but one another.

“How does this mess end, Commander?” Tanya asked.

“Well above my pay grade, Lieutenant,” Johansson said, and the pay reference didn’t come across like a wisecrack about pursers, either. “Ours is just to do and die.”

The intruder alarm wailed.

5

Hindmost capered up, down, all around a maze of serpentine access tunnels. Within the digital wallpaper virtual herds accompanied him, left and right, for as far as the eye could see. He was free!

Not safe, to be sure. Not restored to power. Not unburdened of doubts and regrets. Not yet home, but in possession of a starship.

Rid — at long last! — of the Ringworld.

Still, thousands of alien warships prowled the vicinity, and every faction in the conflict coveted the technologies in this vessel. As would the observers aboard the three skulking ships of obvious Fleet provenance. That ships of the Concordance remained scattered around the war fleets told Hindmost who commanded aboard those ships. Who must yet rule Hearth.

If he ran out of options, he would sooner let humans take this ship.

As reality crashed down on Hindmost he stumbled, missing a step and ruining the unfolding pattern. But with a kick and a tight pirouette, he put himself back into the dance. Every Citizen lived in fear. That he had left Hearth and herd sufficed to prove him insane, besides. He had managed his fears — mostly — for a very long time. He would cope a bit longer.

Soon, he told himself, he would go home. He and his loved ones would be together again. He tried to picture the happy day, but his imagination failed him. It had been so long.

The dance must suffice for a while longer.

“Analysis complete,” Voice sang.

“Thank you,” Hindmost sang back.

His politeness was neurotic; having an AI at all was psychotic. No sensible being set out to build his prospective successor. But in the subtle calculus of countless dangers and endless responsibilities, to have a companion — any companion — had won out. Had he chosen otherwise, had he dared to undertake his Ringworld adventure without an illicit AI, he would doubtless have faded, long ago, into terminal catatonia.

The sweet release that ever beckoned.

“Another segment of hyperdrive-control software characterized,” Voice continued. “Calculating next jump.”

Working directly in binary code, Tunesmith had reprogrammed many of the computers aboard Long Shot. The new programming was convoluted beyond Hindmost’s ability to parse, one more instance of the arrogant improvisational brilliance that came so naturally to protectors.

If not as natural as doing anything, no matter how extreme, to protect their own kind.

“Are more jumps necessary?” Hindmost asked.

“Yes. The software I am studying continues to self-modify. As I analyze the code, I only fall further behind.”

“So you theorize from functional tests.”

“Theorize and confirm, especially as to the apparent behavioral constraints on the self-modifications. As you say, Hindmost.”

Once the hyperdrive customizations had been characterized he would refocus the AI on other changes. Humans, Kzinti, and Tunesmith, each in their turn controlling this ship, had modified shipboard systems, stripped out test instrumentation and decoy equipment, and retrofitted their own paraphernalia. He knew by placement and deductive reasoning how many of the bridge controls must function, but of settings and status displays, all in the dots-and-commas script favored by the Kzinti, he could read nothing.

It would be a long time before he could undertake the flight home. Time for Louis to heal, and to emerge from the autodoc. Time, again and again and again, to overtake the spreading gravity wave unleashed by the Ringworld’s disappearance, to study the only direct evidence as to how the impossible had been accomplished. Time between stints in hyperspace to gradually build up speed in normal space — fearful, all the while, that even across great distances the white-hot exhaust of Long Shot’s fusion thrusters would attract unwanted attention.

Time to prepare for the surprises certain to await him at the end of his journey. He had been trapped on the Ringworld much too long.

With a graceful twirl he concluded this dance. “Keep us far from the other ships in the system,” he ordered. A terrifying number of ships. Ships all too easily seen with Tunesmith’s exquisitely sensitive instruments.

“Long Shot is much faster than any vessel among the Fringe War,” Voice commented.

Thousands of times faster. Faster than Hindmost trusted his reflexes to pilot, even if he could read the Kzinti displays. Even if he understood Tunesmith’s alterations.

But Louis could fly it.

Picking at his meticulously coiffed mane, Hindmost sang, “And yet Tunesmith took this ship from the Kzinti.”

Trickery that one protector had conceived, another could, too. As fervently as Hindmost hoped all protectors had gone away with the Ringworld, their departure remained theory.

“Far away, Hindmost, as you have ordered.”

* * *

HINDMOST SQUINTED THROUGH the frost-speckled dome into Long Shot’s single autodoc. In thirty-seven days, if the master readout could be believed, the autodoc would complete its treatment and release its occupant. “You are looking much better,” he sang, and it was true.

Despite Louis Wu’s ashen pallor. Despite the splotches of red and yellow and very little green among the progress indicators reflecting from the dome’s inner surface. Despite swollen joints and contorted limbs and genitalia just beginning to regrow. Despite the distended brain case and toothless gums. Despite all that, Louis began to look again like an adult human, and a bit less like a human turned protector.

“I was too twisted up when the tree-of-life started to change me,” Louis had admitted before, with Hindmost lifting from behind, he had climbed into the autodoc. Only minutes had passed since their escape from the Ringworld. “I’m dying.”

Disclosure that offered no prediction as to whether, to heal Louis, the autodoc would undo or perfect his conversion into a protector.

With any other autodoc there would have been no hope, but this unit was one of a kind. Frightfully advanced. Nanotech-based. This autodoc could, if necessary, rebuild a person from the molecular level up; Hindmost was convinced that it was doing that to Louis. Carlos Wu had built this amazing prototype, long ago and far away. It had been smuggled from Earth, then stolen, but — not for lack of trying — never duplicated.