Larry Niven - Fate of Worlds - Return From the Ringworld

Louis squeezed onto the bridge. “Did I hear you say something?”

“I was talking to myself,” Hindmost said. Because this time, I will understand the implications of my discoveries before I unleash them onto an unsuspecting galaxy.

Dry land sweltered, mere air no obstacle to the fierce sunslight. Sessile life forms, in every color from far-red to a deep ultrablue that only instruments could detect, covered the undulating landscape. Motile creatures burrowed in the dirt, gamboled in the meadows, swam in the little ponds, and soared high into the boundless sky.

Unattainable, all of it.

Beyond the habitat was an entire existence Cd’o would never taste, a rich ecology that thrived on light instead of the bountiful chemical stew endlessly upwelling from oceanic trenches. Beyond the wall, not even a tubacle’s-length distant, was a whole alien world. Somehow, she had to content herself with glimpsing that world through satellite imagery and in the bottomless archives of the Citizens.

Her ventral sphincter agape, she spread her thorax wide. When, bloated, she could draw in no more water, she let the orifice snap shut. Her tubacles curled behind her, she expelled the water in a convulsive, frustrated whoosh and jetted across the chamber.

Two more pulses sent her jetting from the observation room, on her way to the Commons. Nothing there and no one’s company would change anything. Still, for a short while, a batch of magnesium salts sometimes let her forget that she would live and die in this prison.

And that she was warden as much as inmate.

As she coasted into the corridor, someone swam into position behind her. “Your Wisdom.”

Her servants/bodyguards/minders took shifts. Which was this? From a tubacle still arched ventrally, Cd’o looked. She found distinctive permanent textures hiding among the red and far-red patterns anxiously rippling across his integument. “Good day, Kg’o.” Knowing that in this one regard, her words would fail to elicit obedience, she added, “There is no need to call me that.”

“Yes, your Wisdom.”

Too soon they had crossed the pathetically small habitat, to glide into the Commons. Cd’o saw all-too-familiar figures inside. Scarcely five five-squared Gw’oth lived on Nature Preserve Five. Some, spawned here, thought of this metal can as home. Why wouldn’t they? The habitat was all they had ever known.

Many whom she found in Commons were Ol’t’ro’s progeny. They were brilliant and gifted in the art of the meld — and, from inbreeding, often deranged. Among them two had become infirm. The detritus of old age clogged their minds; in a meld, the noise of their petty, inconsequential thoughts grew ever more intrusive.

And so, the newcomers.

Was rage vivid on her skin? As quickly as they recognized her, Gw’oth across the Commons backed away. Conversations trailed off into respectful silence.

Respect was a sorry substitute for camaraderie.

But the Commons were not quite silent. The four newcomers clustered together in a corner, staring at her, whispering. From the accents, they were from Jm’ho, the home world. From the patterns rippling over them, they were at once scared, awed, and humbled.

As you were in their place, an elder’s engram fragment reminded.

She jetted over. “Welcome. I am Cd’o.”

Anxious far-reds deepened. “Thank you, your Wisdom.” Timidly, the new arrivals introduced themselves.

“What can I tell you about your new home?” she asked. “Have you been shown around the habitat?”

“Tell us about … them,” one said. “What are they like?”

About Ol’t’ro. About their destiny. One way or another, all would serve.

When she did not answer, another of the new arrivals asked, “What are Citizens like?”

“Citizens are intriguing,” Cd’o said. “Cowardly and ruthless. Smarter than any of us.” Individually, that was. “Their culture is older by far than any on Jm’ho. You would do well to study them.”

To truly understand Citizens, though, one had also to understand humans. Concordance leaders had a morbid fascination with humans. Much of that fixation came of guilt for the ancestral crime that had established New Terra, and fear of their former servants, and dread of the retribution “wild humans” would exact if they ever discovered New Terra and learned its dark secret. There was fascination with human curiosity — and an abiding horror of it, too.

And especially among the Experimentalist faction, Citizens were obsessed with human myths.

“Come with me,” Cd’o directed. “I will show you around.”

The tour was all too brief, mostly security measures and environmental systems. The “town” was sealed as tightly as any spaceship. Whatever entered, to the smallest drop of water — and the occasional “volunteer,” like these — was quarantined and thoroughly screened.

You were a volunteer, she reminded herself.

And a fool, she answered.

Every few years, the ultimatum went out from Ol’t’ro: send us four of your best. To be chosen is an honor. To join the meld, for the few who prove capable and worthy, is a rapture.

All lies.

She looked sadly at the latest to answer the call: you are sacrifices.

Having learned something of human myth, Cd’o had fancied herself as Theseus. She meant to slay the monster and end the demands of tribute. Only to be doomed by her aptitude for melding. Only to become the Minotaur …

We are equally the great King Minos, a ghostly remnant of the meld mocked. Part of the curse was never to be alone, even within her own thoughts. Should you think to escape on wings of wax and feathers, we are also as close as you will ever come to being Daedalus.

Cd’o brushed aside the intrusion, refocused on showing the newcomers the ways of the labyrinth. They had come to an auxiliary water lock, and she explained its sensors and redundant filtration systems. The habitat ringed the planetary drive: damage the planetary drive and a trillion Citizens died. Citizens were too smart and craven ever to risk a physical attack, but Ol’t’ro could not rule out some subtle toxicological or biological attack. If every Gw’o in the colony were to be incapacitated simultaneously, and Citizens were then to force their way in, and to locate and disable the self-destruct before the fail-safe timer set it off …

Cd’o explained the precautions in detail. Despite the endless clamor of remnant melds, she was not ready to die.

“What is it like?” a newcomer asked.

“A meld?”

“Yes, your Wisdom.”

On Jm’ho the newcomers had been a Gw’otesht-4. A computation unit, no more. They would know the mechanics of melding. They would have experienced the innocent sharing of mathematics. They could not begin to understand the majesty and misery and transcendence of a Gw’otesht-16 meld. No one could, until it had happened to them.

Until, as for her, it had been too late.

THE DAILY RESPITE ENDED all too soon.

Cd’o left the newcomers in the Commons and continued on her way. At the mouth of a long tunnel, her companion turned aside to loiter with other servants.

She swam down the long tunnel to the melding chamber. Friends/colleagues/alter egos waited inside, and more followed close behind her. They would be one soon enough and few bothered with greetings. The last to enter sealed the massive door.

Some eager, some dutiful, the sixteen sidled together. A tubacle, questing, engulfed one of Cd’o’s own. Within the maw of her tubacle, the eye and heat receptor went dark. The ear fell deaf to all but the beating of two hearts: one speeding up, one slowing down, seeking unison.