Larry Niven - Fate of Worlds - Return From the Ringworld

No longer. Not after watching those lens-shaped ships in action …

“It’s not our decision to make,” she said, shivering.

“True, we lack the authority. On the basis of qualifications, don’t you think the answer is different? Millions of lives are at stake.”

The worst of it was, she agreed with Sigmund. That didn’t give them the right to decide for everyone on New Terra.

Wait. How had he gotten access to a Ministry comm channel to plot sedition? “You’re working with someone in the Ministry,” she said. The notion made joining him in rebellion more palatable. Maybe.

“You could say that.”

And maybe not. Knowing Sigmund, she guessed that that someone wasn’t cooperating by choice. Someone embezzling from the Ministry? Sloppy with classified information? Sigmund had always made it his business to know. He had never admitted, even to her, every trap and back door hidden in the Ministry’s computer systems.

“Let’s say I agree with you,” Alice said. “What then?”

“Then you and Julia decide if you can safely reach out to the ARM.” For a moment, the demented mastermind paranoid expression melted to simple human worry. “I stress, safely.

“If you succeed in making contact, the story for everyone here will be that an ARM ship reached out to you.”

Some elements of the current investigation were well established: Eleven-dimensional tensors for the quantum-gravitational-field model. The differential geometry that had proven itself useful, if only empirically, in past analyses of hyperspace. Multiverse matrix mechanics.

Ol’t’ro lost themselves in the beauty of the mathematics.

But multiverse theory embraced an infinite number of possibilities. The equations had no known closed-form solution, and offered scant guidance which approximations might converge, even given the massively parallel, reconfigurable computers of the —

“Your Wisdom,” a timid voice intruded into the sealed melding chamber.

Ol’t’ro ignored the intercom, but the voice returned.

“Your Wisdom, it is time. You asked that I remind you.”

Almost, they had a candidate partitioning onto the processor arrays of the latest set of equations. The granularity of the partitioning was coarser than they would have liked. If only they had another million processing nodes for the simulation —

“Your Wisdom,” the servant tried again, plaintively, a bit louder.

The gathering on Hearth is at your demand, the Cd’o unit chided. And fainter, from an imprint of one long dead, Doing science is not our main purpose on this world.

“Your Wisdom, please. Before the meld, you were most insistent.”

They had not insisted. Before the meld there could be no they. Cd’o had insisted.

Frustrated and distracted, the gestalt began to crumble. Like an underwater avalanche, slow and inexorable, the mathematical synthesis fell into ruin.

From deep within the communal mind came the image — from how long ago? — of rocks and mud cascading down the side of a seamount. When, Ol’t’ro wondered, had they last experienced the sea? Many generations, and yet within their newest units the memories remained fresh. The ice-locked, world-spanning ocean of Jm’ho. The storm-tossed seas of Kl’mo, the colony they had —

Shaking off the reverie, Ol’t’ro spoke through the microphone positioned deep within a unit’s tubacle. “Thank you,” they told the anxious servant. “That will be all.”

Binding a Proteus fragment to the meld, linking to the Hindmost’s council chamber a world away, they opened the eyes of Chiron.

“THESE ARE WORRISOME TIMES,” this most recent Hindmost sang, directing a furtive, entreating glance at his master. “Without the Ringworld to fight over, at any time three alien fleets may turn our way. We have preempted additional resources to strengthen our defenses. As that effort progresses, we may find we need to divert yet more resources.”

“And I agreed,” Ol’t’ro, through Chiron, sang. To extend Proteus would be an intriguing experiment. “Nonetheless, our own research is important. It — ”

“Worrisome times,” Selene repeated. He was new, his predecessor as Minister of Industrial Production lost to catatonic collapse at the previous cabinet meeting.

From the indifferently brushed nature of Selene’s mane, Ol’t’ro did not expect this one to last, either. They ignored the interruption. “My research could lead to a new defensive weapon.”

Silence greeted this justification: the harmony of discord. Everyone waited for someone else to object aloud. The Ministry of Science had many open-ended projects, often claiming defensive improvements — eventually — as the justification.

We could destroy their worlds, an angry chorus welled up in Ol’t’ro’s thoughts. The mind traces of many departed units, a Gw’otesht within a Gw’otesht. And Do they not also remember our successes?

For alien ships were already all around the Fleet, had been for years, yet everyone on these worlds remained safe. Ol’t’ro ’s efforts kept the alien visitors well behaved. The all-but-reactionless drives they had devised — the closest anyone, anywhere, had come to duplicating the Outsider reactionless drive technology — propelled the thousands of defensive drones that held alien ships at bay.

Self-congratulation accomplishes nothing, scolded an ancient engram, the faint echo of a unit long departed.

As faint as were those thoughts, and as impertinent, the unit made sense.

“Chiron?” the Hindmost sang. “Have you taken into account this matter of priorities?”

The insolent unit: If the Fleet should fall, what then of your research?

Ol’t’ro considered:

That the least of their interests was how the Concordance managed its affairs, as long as Citizens stayed far from the Gw’oth worlds.

That as politicians went, Citizen or Gw’oth, Horatius was stolidly reliable.

That by a show of deference to Horatius, should they choose to offer one, they would strengthen him as Hindmost.

That Cd’o’s wanderlust was illogical. Suppose they were so rash as to expose one of themselves as a potential hostage. Sealed into an environmental suit, immobile without a motorized exoskeleton, still restricted to viewing the outer world through sensors … Cd’o might as well remain within the habitat.

That to go from the water-filled habitat into the crush of gravity would be peculiar.

And intriguing, too.

That it was interesting to speculate how expanded computing resources would affect Proteus, and that diverting resources to the AI’s extension would answer that question sooner.

At the cost of further emboldening Achilles, whose reticence to enhancing Proteus was so blatantly contrived.

That if alien armadas, having chased away the Ringworld, should set out today, standard hyperdrive could not deliver them to the Fleet of Worlds any sooner than a hundred days. There would be more than ample time to enhance Proteus.

That if the alien fleets had had Type II hyperdrives, the situation would be different. But the Type II hyperdrive was a conundrum, a cosmic joke, an unending frustration.

That they half hoped the reports from the Fleet’s observers were correct: that the Long Shot had vanished with the Ringworld, never again to confound them.

That if alien navies did come to the Fleet of Worlds, their unwelcome attention would be drawn ever farther from the Gw’oth worlds.

That logic aside, a part of them, too, hungered to see new vistas. That a cacophony of engrams, echoes from deep into their past, remembered leading much different lives.