Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

by Larry Niven

  After the revolution, confusing correlation with causation, the new regime had reached a strange conclusion: that the emergencies from which Sigmund had time and again saved this world he had provoked through his own interstellar meddling. The new government made clear just how unwelcome he was. Now they wanted his help?

  Nameless, faceless, they had haunted Sigmund for much of his life, but it was all too clear who thought to manipulate him today. The current minister.

  There’s a reason the Defense Forces sent, specifically, you, Captain. The minister believes I can’t say no to you. And he is probably right.

  Many of Sigmund’s family had joined the New Terran military, and among them Julia was neither the youngest nor the oldest, the most junior nor the most senior, the least nor the most accomplished. And yet she was special. Sigmund would deny it if asked, but of all his grandchildren, Julia was his favorite — because she was the spitting image of her grandmother.

  Tanj, but he missed Penelope! His deaths faded from memory. Never Penny’s. Hers had stuck. He had met her soon after coming to this strange and wondrous world, awakening from his second death —

  “Grandpa?” Julia said hesitantly. “At the Ministry, we need some … creative thinking.”

  “About what might have tricked the sensors, and how,” Jeeves commented.

  “It’s the current theory,” Julia agreed. “That something, or someone, somehow confused our sensors. Only our experts have yet to find evidence of tampering or intrusion.”

  Something stirred in the back of Sigmund’s mind. Not quite the old paranoia, but maybe more than the skepticism of age. One could never discount a security breach, but he doubted that a breach explained this big ripple. Anyone who could spoof the planetary defense network would keep that ability secret — until they attacked.

  Transparent manipulation be damned, the safety of the world was at stake. “Show me the data.”

  “Sorry, sir. That information is only available at the Ministry. Very restricted.”

  Except for the security breach the “experts” thought they had. Fools.

  Sigmund stared out at the desert. The suns had all but set, and a few bright stars managed to show themselves overhead. A thick, inky smear near the western horizon hinted at mountains. “Then take me to the Ministry.” He started walking toward her vehicle.

  “Not the flitter, Grandpa.” When he turned back, Julia pointed at the upside-down stepping disc inset in his patio. “You’re needed now.”

  As he turned over the disc, Sigmund switched off the self-destruct. Surreptitiously, to be sure, but Jeeves would have seen it through the house security cameras. No need, old friend, to net yourself someplace else.

  Sigmund gestured to Julia to step ahead. Seconds after her, flicking across half a world into the security vestibule of the headquarters of the New Terran Defense Forces, he brooded what nightmare this latest astronomical phenomenon portended.

  2

  An overweight, florid-faced colonel met Sigmund and his granddaughter in the secured teleportation foyer, expediting their way through screening. With a half-dozen armed escorts, they strode deep into the building, past one interior checkpoint after another.

  Once you’ve overthrown one government, why wouldn’t you suspect others of plotting to overthrow yours?

  The previous government had vanished almost overnight through a self-organizing consensus process Sigmund had never understood and would never accept, but that the native New Terrans somehow considered proper. The transfer of power was more Puppeteer-like than the rebels appeared to recognize, even if the new technocracy had more of a human feel to it.

  Sigmund had sworn to uphold the elected government, but when the demonstrations went worldwide, he had ordered his troops to lay down their arms. On his watch New Terrans would never attack their own people.

  Or maybe he had rejected violence because, at some level, resistance would have been self-serving. Ultimately, the old government’s downfall was about him. To be rid of all alien “entanglements” — to hide from the galaxy — the people had had to be rid of him. And so, on the heels of the Gw’oth War: the revolution.

  Never mind that he had maintained New Terran neutrality, that he had guided his adopted world, unscathed, through yet another interstellar crisis —

  Stop dwelling on the past, Sigmund lectured himself, no matter that mostly he lived there. He was too ancient to do otherwise.

  And ancient was how everyone here would see him. The doddering old man. The relic of a bygone era. The freak from another world. Why would they heed him?

  Astronomical phenomenon, he reminded himself, with a shiver. Figure it out, then make them listen.

  “Are you all right, Grandpa?” Julia whispered.

  “Fine,” he lied.

  They passed a Puppeteer in the hall: two-headed; three-legged; the fluffy mane between his serpentine necks/arms elaborately coiffed. He wore only a narrow sash, from which hung pockets and a clipped-on computer, but insignia pinned to the sash showed him to be a civilian.

  Of course he was a civilian. At the first hint of danger, Puppeteers ran. As, even now, the trillion Puppeteers aboard the Fleet of Worlds fled from an astronomical phenomenon that would not reach this corner of the galaxy for twenty thousand years. Puppeteers only defended themselves in desperation, when neither flight nor surrender was an option. Or when — undeniable, because Puppeteers had set their robots to seize Long Pass — they could strike with overwhelming superiority and their meddling could not be traced back to them.

  Cowardice did not preclude ruthlessness.

  A few Puppeteers, outcasts and misfits, had asked to remain after New Terran independence. More Puppeteers had arrived as refugees amid the Gw’oth War; some of them had stayed, too. Most had settled on the continent of Elysium, on territory first planted as a nature preserve for Hearth life. A very few lived and worked among humans.

  This Puppeteer was deep in conversation, in full two-throated, six-vocal-corded disharmony. With a final jangling chord he made some point, to which, voices rumbling out of the dangling pocket comp, another Puppeteer responded in similar atonality.

  Without recourse to a chamber orchestra, humans could not begin to reproduce Puppeteer languages. Puppeteers, fortunately, managed English without difficulty.

  Approaching an intersection, Sigmund’s entourage met six people coming down the corridor from the opposite direction. Among the newcomers was a pallid, white-haired woman. Tall despite her pronounced stoop, she towered over her uniformed escorts. Turning the corner, the two groups merged.

  “Hello, Alice,” Sigmund said. Meeting her here did not surprise him. Whatever motivated pulling him out of disgrace and retirement would merit retrieving her, too. But he had not spoken to Alice in over a century; seeing her so old was a shock.

  Alice, coldly, said nothing.

  They halted before a well-guarded entrance: the situation room. Sigmund knew this place all too well, having spent far too many days and nights there. Alice, as his deputy, too. One of their escorts pointed, unnecessarily, to the lockers on the right of the doors. Shielding in the walls, floor, and ceiling blocked unauthorized transmissions, but security also demanded that no one inside make illicit recordings. After Sigmund, Alice, and Julia deposited their comps in lockers and initialized the biometric pads with their handprints, a guard opened a door and waved them through.

  Donald Norquist-Ng, minister of the New Terran Defense Forces, presided from one end of the long oval conference table. He was short, gaunt, and dour, with eyebrows like wooly yellow caterpillars. He sat stiffly, and rising to his feet to point into a tactical display, he moved ponderously, too. The man was not yet even a hundred; the stiffness was all for effect: would-be gravitas that struggled even to achieve pretension.

  As Sigmund, Alice, and Julia entered, Norquist-Ng glanced up. His eyes slid over them without acknowledgment, and the session went on without pausing for introductions. Sigmund thought he recognized s
ome of the faces around the table from the 3-V.

  Current events held no interest for Sigmund, but what little he knew about the current minister suggested a Napoleon wannabe. Not that anyone on this world had heard of Napoleon. The Puppeteers had never admitted to their servants knowing … anything about humanity, its origins, or its culture. Even English — irregular verbs, illogical spellings, and all — had been designed by their selfless patrons. So, anyway, the slaves had once been taught.

  The table offered no empty chairs. Julia found them seats against a wall, among the aides, adjutants, and flunkies, while the discussion continued.

  This was not Sigmund’s first crisis and he thought he could bring himself up to speed. For all the tech improvements since his era, nothing meaningful had changed: too much data still spewed from too many displays. Star charts. Sensor scans. Ship statuses. Weapon inventories. Lists of speculations.

  “… Compromise of the sensor array. Our security experts continue to search for the means of intrusion. Regrettably they have yet…”

  “… Obviously spurious data. If ships were near, we would have found them by…”

  “… Once we learned to leave the galaxy alone, it’s been content to return the favor.”

  Sigmund let it all wash over him, categorizing the big themes, itemizing the points of contention, winnowing facts from assumptions. Alice, her lips pursed, her forehead furrowed, appeared to be doing much the same.

  “… Audit trails in the intrusion-detection software…”

  “… Another patrol ship reports finding nothing…”

  He and Alice had yet to be recognized, much less invited to contribute. Were they here to help? Or, Julia’s earnest plea notwithstanding, had they been summoned so that Norquist-Ng could say later, if things should go wrong, “We even brought in the off-world experts.”

  The latter, of course. Futzy fools.

  The New Terrans Sigmund had been kidnapped to protect knew that the universe was a dangerous place. But that generation, the independence generation, had passed. Their children were gone, too, or retired, isolationism had long been the norm, and in their hiatus from history, Norquist-Ng and his ilk had come to mistake good luck for wisdom.

  Sigmund was the only person on this world to have heard of ostriches. No matter: to deny danger by burying one’s head in the sand was folly. He stood, loudly clearing his throat.

  Norquist-Ng turned to glower.

  “If I may summarize,” Sigmund said. “One hyperspace ripple, immense beyond all precedent. You don’t believe sensors and patrol ships could fail to find any of the many vessels emerging from hyperspace. And you don’t see how sensors and patrol ships could overlook that many ships sneaking up on us through normal space, to startle us with a massive ripple when they dropped back into hyperspace. So you infer — ”

  “We conclude, Mr. Ausfaller,” the minister snapped, “that someone compromised the sensor network. It’s the only logical explanation. Helping us to find the security breach, if you were not informed, is why you are here. The sole reason. Now if you will — ”

  “You’re wrong,” Sigmund interrupted right back. “Because another explanation is staring us in the face.” The explanation you’re all too timid to imagine. Or, perhaps, too sane.

  “And this explanation is?” Norquist-Ng asked.

  “That the sensor data mean just what they say,” Sigmund said, “notwithstanding the absence of nearby ships.”

  Alice nodded. “We need to consider the possibility.”

  “Hyperspace ripples without hyperdrive ships,” someone stage-whispered. “Nonsense.”

  “Enlighten me,” Norquist-Ng said, somewhat more pragmatically.

  “Is a Jeeves present?” Sigmund asked. “I need some calculations done.”

  “Yes, sir,” declared a voice from a ceiling speaker.

  This wasn’t any Jeeves that Sigmund knew. Sir carried no hint of an English butler; this AI sounded like a junior officer addressing his superior.

  Hyperspace-emergence ripples, like light and gravity, dropped off rapidly with distance. Sigmund asked, “Do I have this right? The ripple’s peak amplitude maxed out sensors at all locations? No discernible attenuation measured anywhere within the array’s volume?”

  “Correct, sir. Saturation strength throughout.”

  “Assume a single emergence ripple just powerful enough to overload all sensors throughout the array. What’s the nearest to New Terra that such a source could be located?”

  The pause for calculation was all but imperceptible. “A bit over five light-years.”

  “That’s ridiculous — ”

  Sigmund cut off the freckle-faced aide. “And a stronger source for the ripple could be even more distant.”

  “Correct, sir,” Jeeves said.

  The early-warning sensors took bearings on any sightings. “Continuing to assume a single source, Jeeves, what is its triangulated point of origin?”

  “Any differences in bearings are meaningless,” the same aide huffed. “With the sensors overloaded, the directional data are suspect.”

  “Jeeves, please answer the question,” Sigmund persisted.

  “All bearings point in more or less the same direction. The variations are smaller than the known tolerances in angular measurement.”

  “Averaged across all the sensors, random differences will cancel out,” Sigmund guessed. “Right?”

  “To an unknown degree, sir.”

  “Caveat noted, Jeeves. Do the calculation anyway, please.”

  “I have a result, sir, but that inferred point of origin is subject to considerable uncertainty.”

  “You’re wasting everyone’s time, Ausfaller,” Norquist-Ng growled.

  Alice’s head had taken on the thoughtful cant that Sigmund remembered so well. “Jeeves,” she said, “plot the apparent direction and point of origin on a star chart.”

  Above the conference table, a hologram opened, dim but for a scattering of sparks. A blue dot, for New Terra, blinked at the holo’s center. Translucent concentric blue spheres centered on the blinking dot marked off the light-years. From the blinking dot, a pale red line segment reached out, not approaching any star until it ended — Sigmund counted the pale spheres — about fourteen light-years out.

  Fourteen light-years? Whoever had caused this disturbance controlled incredible energies.

  Like the power to move worlds?

  His hands trembling, Sigmund said, “Jeeves, now overlay the course taken by the Fleet of Worlds.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A green trace, at this scale perfectly straight, came into the holo. Across the room from Sigmund, someone cursed in wonderment.

  The green line representing the Puppeteers’ flight grazed the star from which — just maybe — the mysterious space/hyperspace interface distortion had originated.

  A star that this world would have encountered well before the Fleet had the revolutionary government not seen fit to divert New Terra onto its present, much different path.

  * * *

  SIGMUND GAVE NORQUIST-NG CREDIT: the man had the sense to clear the room. He asked that Alice and Sigmund stay, and also a long-faced female aide whose name Sigmund had not retained. Sigmund insisted that Julia remain.

  And the Jeeves, of course.

  “Might the Fleet have been involved?” the minister asked. “They had to have traveled well past this star when … whatever happened.”

  It was a sensible question, but posture or tone of voice or — something showed that what Norquist-Ng meant was, “Wasn’t the new regime wise to set an independent course?”

  As in, where could be safer than far from the Fleet? Than — once New Terra made it that far — deep inside the zone of devastation Pak armadas had wiped clean of technological civilizations?

  Using that logic, the revolutionary government had redirected their world’s course, tapping the planetary brakes while turning inward toward the galactic core, even as the Fleet continued its headlo
ng rush into galactic north. It had been decades since New Terra had had contact with its former masters.

  Sigmund thought once more of ostriches.

  “Maybe the Puppeteers were involved,” Alice said. “We should check out the solar system where the ripple originated.”

  “Why?” Norquist-Ng asked. “You and Ausfaller have only confirmed the wisdom of New Terra staying disengaged.”

  Disengaged? Like it or not, New Terrans had reengaged when … whatever … swept past them.

  Sigmund gestured at the star map. “Jeeves, assume the disturbance originated near where the lines converge. To produce the effects we observed here, how large an object entered or exited hyperspace?”

  “A very significant mass, sir. Perhaps a few gas giants.”

  The tremor in Sigmund’s hands worsened. “Gas giants. You mean … gas-giant planets?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Whole planets entering or leaving hyperspace?” the aide said. “Minister, respectfully, it could be dangerous not to know more.”

  “I’ll go,” Julia offered, coming to attention. “My ship, the Endurance, is ready.”

  “Your offer is appreciated, Captain,” Norquist-Ng said, “but adventuring is no longer our way.” He added, pointedly, for his aide, “This government does not go seeking trouble fourteen light-years away.”

  Ostriches! Sigmund thought again.

  “Planetary masses converted to ships,” Alice said. “Think of the technology, the sheer magnitude of the power that someone must wield. For all we know those ships are coming right at us, in swarms to make the Pak fleets look insignificant. We must check it out.”

  Norquist-Ng rubbed his chin, considering, before turning to Julia. “Captain, they may have a point. Take Ausfaller as an advisor, but you command the ship and the mission. You are only to scout out the region and report back.”

  Take Ausfaller.

  The room faded, seemed to spin. Sigmund, wobbling, groped behind himself for support. He scarcely noticed Julia guiding him into a chair.

  He had not been off-world in over a century. Not since the Pak War. Not since he had been left adrift in that useless stub of a derelict starship, light-years from anywhere. Alone but for a Puppeteer frozen in time, inert within a medical-emergency stasis field.