7

One mouth grasping a curler, the other a brush, Hindmost primped and teased, combed and curled. Strings of newly synthed jewels, of Experimentalist orange more often than any other color, glittered in his mane. He had already buffed his hooves and brushed his hide until they glistened.

The elaborate grooming was not for the lack of pressing things to do. Quite the contrary. He needed to assimilate Voice’s observations and analyses of Long Shot’s controls. Synthesize the measurements taken of the gravity wave set off by the Ringworld’s disappearance from normal space. Account for the absence of a second hyperspace ripple: either the Ringworld had yet to emerge from hyperspace or it had reentered many light-years away, so remote as to be undetectable. Sift his memories of Tunesmith’s cryptic and misleading explanations, and of Louis-as-protector’s interpretations, for clues. Connect all that he had learned/heard/surmised to what little he might know about hyperdrives—which, demonstrably, was not enough.

And there was the madness of Louis launching Long Shot into hyperspace from inside the Ringworld. Escaping through the Ringworld floor! From the depths of a singularity!

Every conventional theory of hyperdrive and hyperspace insisted they should be dead.

Except to eat and sleep and jettison more of the decoy equipment that still clogged the ship, for days Hindmost had done nothing but struggle to understand. He had accomplished little. The wonder was that he functioned at all when, at any time, any of the thousands of warships that his sensors showed might detect this ship.

And while fear-ridden before every jump that this ship might cease to exist such that it could be noticed.

To sense mass from within hyperspace required psionic abilities that mere software lacked. On every hyperdrive jump, the AI’s dead-reckoning navigation might drop them into the nearby star.

His circumstances were intolerable, but setting off in a jury-rigged ship was not the answer. Protectors lived by the jury-rig, supremely confident in their improvisations—and in the makeshifts and expedients, yet to be imagined, by which they would resolve other crises yet to emerge.

Not so Citizens, certainly not the Hindmost. Especially not this Hindmost. He dare not undertake a long voyage, especially with unintelligible Kzinti controls.

Unable to flee, his every instinct called out for catatonia. Instead, he continued to brush. Finally, he set down his implements. Rising from his nest of mounded pillows, he pivoted before a full-length wall mirror, also newly synthed. Through his appearance, if in no other way, he would be worthy of his station.

If only all the responsibilities of the office were as easily satisfied …

Earth Date 2850

Haunch brushing haunch, Hindmost and his most senior aides and ministers settled astraddle twenty padded, Y-shaped benches. Despite the companionable closeness, Hindmost did not feel in the least part comforted. No one did.

Above head level at midroom, centered within the circle of benches, floated that which they must discuss. The pale blue loop of thread could have been pretty, but not with that yellow spark blazing at its center. The spark was a star, and that meant the loop was enormous.

Soft and urgent, plaintive and terrified, phrases of song filled the room. When the cacophony gave no sign of abating, Hindmost intoned, with harmonics of command, “We will begin.” The murmuring stopped abruptly.

“Explain what your long-range instruments have seen,” he directed Minerva, the deputy director of Clandestine Directorate.

Minerva gestured at the blue ring. “The unexpected sighting lies a little more than two light-years distant, not far off the Fleet’s path,” he sang.

“Why have we not heard before of this object?” Hindmost asked, feigning ignorance. In truth, he had feared this day since—it felt like forever. Since Chiron’s arrival.

“We knew something encircled the star.” Minerva sang in low, apologetic tones. “Until we observed it at a suitable angle, we thought it an ordinary dust ring. Not”—he glanced once more at the blue thread—“that.”

“And so only recently did you look closely.”

“Yes, Hindmost,” Minerva agreed timorously.

“Who built it?” Aglaea, an aide, wondered.

“We don’t know,” Minerva answered.

“Why build it?” another asked.

“We don’t know,” Minerva repeated. “Nor how. Nor of what. To construct something so huge—”

“We must send an expedition,” Chiron interrupted brashly. His mane was a glorious structure of complex silver ringlets.

More precisely, its mane. Chiron was a holographic projection, animated by Proteus: an illicit AI. And equally, their mane, because directing Proteus was the Gw’oth group mind known as Ol’t’ro. Two truths unimaginable to those physically in the council chamber, save by the Hindmost and one other.

Hindmost’s ministers and aides knew Chiron as the long-serving Minister of Science, resident on and governor of Nature Preserve Five, the better to oversee research best performed off the home world. Governments came and went, Hindmosts came and went, and Chiron served them all.

If only that were so.

In the blackest secret in the long, dark history of the Concordance, behind He Who Leads from Behind, Chiron served only him/it/themselves. The herd chose whom they wished to rule the Concordance; time and again, their choices changed nothing. Each outgoing Hindmost revealed to the next the unbearable secret: Chiron, in a moment, could obliterate five worlds and a trillion Citizens. Chiron had promised to do so, if he/it/they ever deemed its unwitting subjects a danger to the worlds of the Gw’oth.

The Gw’oth were native to the sea-bottom muck of the ice-locked ocean of a now-distant moon. A Gw’o was mostly tubelike tentacles: like five snakes fused at their tails. One was no longer from tip to tip than the reach of Hindmost’s neck, little thicker through its central mass than the span he could open a mouth. The uninformed Citizen might feel more pity or disgust at the sight of a Gw’o than cause for fear.

And, as usual, the uninformed Citizen would be mistaken.

Gw’oth were courageous and curious, psychoses they shared with other species evolved from hunting animals. And they had used those flaws to terrible purpose. Within Hindmost’s lifetime, the Gw’oth had broken through the ice of their home world and advanced from fire to fusion, from muscle power to hyperdrive starships.

But even among their own kind, the sixteenfold Gw’oth group mind that was Ol’t’ro was the exception. A perversion. Frightfully intelligent.

Their power of life and death over a trillion Citizens was absolute.

Chiron had spoken; the decision was foregone. The Concordance would send an expedition. And like the herd’s delusions of self-determination, the mission would be meaningless, too.

Worse than meaningless. Dangerous. The expedition could serve no purpose beyond the keeping of secrets.

For the Ringworld was not newly discovered, but rediscovered, and the Concordance’s historic role in defanging the trillions of Ringworlders must remain hidden at all costs. In Hindmost’s first, temporary, fall from power, he had purged that dangerous information even from the Hindmost-only archives, lest Ol’t’ro come upon it.

Room-temperature superconductors underpinned most advanced technology on the Ringworld. Or had, until Hindmost’s many-times-removed predecessor approved the dispersal there of a gengineered plague. The airborne microbes devoured the ubiquitous superconductor wherever they encountered it.

Very quickly, everything had stopped working. How many Ringworld natives had perished when the floating cities crashed? Millions, without a doubt. More likely, billions.

He must hide this history from Chiron. Else his Gw’oth overlords would surely judge the Concordance irredeemably dangerous to their own kind.

And so Hindmost only half listened to the debate, its outcome predetermined. In jangling chords and chilling arpeggios, the arguments washed over him in the dreamlike slow motion of inevitable disaster.

“… Cannot veer,” Hemera, Minister of Energy, was singing. “It is basic physics. At the Fleet’s present velocity, in the time remaining before we encounter this Ringworld we can make no meaningful change to our course.”

“I propose that we not deviate at all from our longtime course,” Zephyrus, Minister of Foreign Affairs, sang back. “As we have seen the Ringworld, so we must assume the natives have seen us. Suppose we veer off our course from comparatively close, traveling at our present high speed. It could suggest that after launching impactors we seek to put distance between ourselves and the debris from kinetic-weapon strikes. If the Ringworlders should suspect that, what weapons will they turn against us?”

Several ministers bleated in dismay at song of weapons and strikes, and Chiron glanced warningly at Hindmost.

“Sing no more about such terrible things,” Hindmost directed. He held his gaze on Zephyrus, but sang for his master. We consider no such drastic measures, Ol’t’ro. As ever, we are rendered harmless by our fears.

“All the more reason to send an expedition,” Achilles sang. “Let the Ringworlders not misunderstand us.”

Did that mean, let the Ringworlders fear us?

Achilles rivaled Ol’t’ro in madness. Achilles was a sociopath with limitless ambitions. During the era of human servants, many Citizens had had reason to take human-pronounceable names. But only one Citizen had assumed the name of a legendary human warrior!

Insane ambition had led Achilles to interfere in Gw’oth affairs, scheming to turn his manufactured Gw’oth threat into mass hysteria across Hearth, into rule over the Concordance. When his meddling had gone spectacularly wrong, reconciled Gw’oth worlds had turned their massed might toward the Fleet of Worlds. In an evil alliance, 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 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.