Larry Niven: Fate of Worlds: Return From the Ringworld

But young and old on New Terra know the hard-won truth: that their former masters had attacked their ancestors’ ramscoop, not chanced upon a derelict starship. That from the wrecked ship’s embryo banks the aliens had bred a race of slaves.

Independence had not come easily, but now New Terra sets its own course through space.

And what of Old Terra? Earth? No one here could say where the ancestral world may lie.

Not only artificial suns accompany New Terra on its seemingly endless trek through the darkness. Myriads of tiny spacecraft, sprinkled across many light-days, hold formation with the world. The early-warning array endlessly scans in all directions, endlessly probing with every known method of long-range sensing.

In the planetary defense center, staffed round the clock, people try to imagine against what, besides boredom, they stand guard. New Terra is light-years from the nearest star. Aboard their Fleet of Worlds, the ruthlessly cowardly Citizens — increasingly, and aptly, come to be known to all here as Puppeteers — have receded beyond the reach of every instrument except powerful optical telescopes.

Suddenly every element in the planetary early-warning array clamors in unison. Every watch stander in the planetary defense center jolts to full alertness to stare at their consoles.

To gape at the impossible.

“There is an intruder, sir,” Jeeves announced, breaking the silence.

Sigmund Ausfaller sighed. Age had not so much mellowed as exhausted him. The universe was out to get him, and so what? It had been — years? — since he had mustered the energy to care. Maybe it had been years since he had cared that he no longer cared.

“Sir?”

Shading his eyes with an upraised hand, Sigmund peered across the desert. The day’s final string of suns was low to the horizon. Here and there, scattered across barren landscape, cacti cast long shadows. A lone bird glided overhead. Beyond the limits of his stone patio, civilization had left no visible mark.

A cluster of cacti reminded him of other columns. Long ago. Far away. Columns of a world-shattering machine. And they had shattered a world, although by the time it had happened he had been dead. That happened to him far too often. The getting dead part. Peril to entire worlds, too, but —

“You should withdraw to safety, sir,” Jeeves prompted.

Sigmund sighed again, this time at himself. Age made one’s mind wander. So did living by oneself. Not that, with Jeeves around, he was truly alone. To be old and alone —

“Sir,” Jeeves insisted.

Sigmund struggled out of his big mesh hammock to stand. “Describe the intruder.”

“An antigrav flitter. It’s on approach from the east at just within the low-altitude speed limit.”

“Visual sighting?”

“Too distant at present. Radar, sir.”

“How long until it arrives?”

“Ten minutes, sir, if the craft maintains its current velocity.”

Sigmund glanced at the dark circle inset in a corner of his patio. The circle was the bottom of a stepping disc. Apart from its active side being obstructed — and so rendered inert — the device was like millions across the world. Flip to light-colored side up and in one pace he could teleport at light speed to any disc of his choosing, almost anywhere on the planet.

But were he to invert the disc, then others, if they had the authority to preempt his privacy settings, could teleport here.

Sigmund valued his privacy, and his stepping disc stayed upside down.

And to be honest, his disc was not exactly like the millions of others. The micro-fusion reactor on this disc would overload seconds after he stepped out, destroying all record of his destination.

He really valued his privacy.

“Sir?”

Sigmund considered. “They’re not stealthed. They’re approaching from the east, easy to spot, not flying out of the setting suns. They want us to know they’re coming.” Sigmund gestured at his modest home, in which, on the oaken desk he had crafted by hand, his pocket comp sat powered down. “It’s not as though they can call ahead.”

“Very good, sir,” Jeeves said in his gentleman’s gentleman tone of voice: acknowledgment and mild reproach together.

Jeeves was more ancient even than Sigmund. The butler mannerisms that had once been a few lines of code — an affectation or a jape on someone’s part — had, over the centuries, permeated every facet of the AI’s persona. Kind of like paranoia in Sigmund’s brain.

Friends don’t reprogram friends, even when they’re able.

Sigmund dropped back with a grunt into his hammock. “Let’s find out what our visitor wants.”

THE FLITTER MORPHED from invisible to droning speck to, all of a sudden, here. Sigmund stood watching as the craft swooped in for a landing on the windswept sands. The canopy pivoted upward from its aft edge; a woman, dressed in the trim blue uniform of the New Terran Defense Forces, stepped out of the cockpit.

“Good evening, Minister,” his granddaughter called.

Minister. An official visit, as though her uniform would not have told Sigmund that.

“It’s hot,” Sigmund said. “Join me in the shade, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir.” Julia looked around before joining Sigmund under the awning that overhung half the patio. She was a tall, lithe, beautiful woman with pale blue eyes and shoulder-length ash-blond hair.

“Sit, Captain. May I get you something to drink?”

“No, thank you, sir.” His visitor stood, ill at ease, uniform cap clutched under an arm.

Her nametag read BYERLEY-MANCINI. Sunslight reflecting off the nametag rendered a shimmering hologram, detailed beyond the capability of badge-sized photonics to mimic. So, too, did her rank insignia. On a world where everyone dressed in garments of programmable nanocloth, where on a whim the wearer could change the color, texture, and pattern of her clothing, the credentials of the planetary defense forces remained — special. And, in theory, difficult to counterfeit.

In progeny and in uniforms, Sigmund’s legacy survived. And in a third respect: that New Terra remained free and whole. If others had had their way …

“If I may, sir,” Julia prompted gently, as though channeling Jeeves.

“Go ahead,” Sigmund said. “What brings you here?”

“An astrophysical phenomenon, sir. An anomaly.”

Sigmund twitched. Twice in his long life he had been marooned, alone, deep in space. Three times he had been murdered, each death grislier than the last. A glimpse of an astrophysical phenomenon had presaged his most recent death and, after resurrection, left him stranded in interstellar space.

Turbulence in the ineffably tenuous interstellar medium. An uptick in concentrations of interstellar helium. Only by such subtleties had the Pak invasion armada, wave upon wave of ramscoop warships, given warning of its coming.

The Pak were genocidal xenophobes, a pestilence upon every other form of life. As protectors, the neuter postadult life stage, Pak were freakishly brilliant, reflexively aggressive, utterly selfish in the defense of their bloodlines. Eating tree-of-life root transformed an adult, what protectors dismissively called a breeder, into a protector.

Humanity, it turned out, descended from a Pak colony that had failed on Earth millions of years ago, because Earth lacked trace elements essential to tree-of-life. From the Pak perspective humans were, rather than distant cousins, mutants to be obliterated.

Sigmund shivered, all too aware that the universe cared not a fig for his memories or his phobias.