Larry Niven - Fate of Worlds - Return From the Ringworld

“Carlos. My father. ”

“Yes,” Nessus said. “This amazing autodoc is your legacy.”

As from a whirlpool, Louis struggled out of the ’doc. Clumsily, he slipped into the jumpsuit. “I need to talk with Alice.”

“ Endurance and Long Shot have gone their separate ways,” Nessus said. “Beyond ‘not now,’ Alice and Julia have had nothing to say to our hails.”

“Alice will speak with me,” Louis said, “once she knows that I remember.”

“Perhaps,” Nessus said.

It hit Louis: he was starving . “I’m still disoriented. Would one of you mind bringing me something to eat?”

“Of course not.” Nessus backed farther into the corridor. “Or stand between us. We will guide you to the synthesizer.”

As they walked, old memories kept erupting. Twice Louis stumbled against a wall; once he fell across Nessus’ broad back. He only avoided a tumble by grabbing hold of the mane.

With a shrill, atonal wheeze, Nessus stopped. He stood, legs braced far apart, while Louis regained his balance.

“Hindmost’s Voice,” Louis called out. “Keep hailing Endurance. Tell Alice, ‘Louis remembers now.’”

“I will let you know when they answer.”

“Thank you, Voice,” Baedeker said.

Maybe Louis had become smarter over the years. Maybe he only saw connections now because of the odd juxtapositions of random memories.

He had been naïve.

“Chiron,” Louis began cautiously.

Nessus swiveled one head to look backward. “What about Chiron?”

“He briefed the team for the Ringworld expedition.” Everything suddenly seemed so clear to Louis. “Chiron didn’t appear as a holo out of fear, because we were aliens.”

“No,” Baedeker agreed from behind Louis.

Approaching the tiny rec room Nessus pressed against the wall so Louis could squeeze past. “Chiron came as a holo to hide that he wasn’t a Puppeteer.” His thoughts churning, selecting dishes at random, Louis piled a tray with synthed food. “Puppeteers no longer rule in the Fleet.”

“Sadly so,” Baedeker said.

Still more memories spewed forth: tiny spaceships, water-filled. Not-quite-starfish. Feeling slow and dim-witted in the presence of a truly superior mind.

Ol’t’ro!

Louis said, “Nessus, you hired me to stop Achilles from manipulating the Gw’oth situation. I failed.”

“No one could have succeeded,” Nessus said.

In Louis’s mind the Gw’oth War had just concluded. He had just rescued Nessus from Achilles and prison. Baedeker had just refused to come with them. Just as — in Louis’s mind — the Ringworld and its thirty trillion inhabitants had disappeared only days earlier.

Louis said, “So, the Gw’oth rule Fleet.”

“Yes, to Ol’t’ro,” Baedeker said. “Achilles schemes anew to reclaim the semblance of power as the puppet Hindmost. You must now see, Louis, why I so desperately sought technology from the Ringworld. To free Hearth.”

Desperate enough to abduct not merely Louis, but also Chmeee. A Puppeteer kidnapping a Kzin! Even now, such an action was difficult to fathom. Louis turned to face his friends. “Did you find what you needed?”

“Maybe.” Baedeker waved a neck sinuously, the mannerism somehow inclusive. “Nessus and I must soon find out.”

Louis shook his head. “ We will find out.”

ALICE FINALLY MADE CONTACT. “You think you know me now?”

“I know I do,” Louis said. Her face seemed to cycle between the angry old woman who had slugged him and the dark-haired beauty — even more spirited — who his aching heart insisted he had just left. Could he have forgotten those eyes? Truly? That seemed impossible. “I’m glad that I remember.”

She managed a smile. “It was good while it lasted.”

It was, indeed. “Achilles would have done anything to hurt me. I was a target on New Terra. By staying, I’d have made you a target.”

“So Sigmund explained at the time. Why was I the only one without a vote?”

Apart from being light-years away, on New Terra’s business? Aside from being in and out of medical stasis so that you wouldn’t give birth to our son aboard ship? “It doesn’t matter, Alice. I’m back. I’m here. I remember. I love you as I did the day I left.”

“The day you ran away.”

That hurt. “I’d like to pick things up — ”

“Pick up again?” She laughed uproariously. “It’s been more than a century. I’m a crone. You’re a kid.”

“I’m almost as old as you,” Louis retorted.

She just stared at him.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” he finally said.

“At least you learned something.” She severed the link.

Predators crept forward, their passage through the tall wild grain visible only from above. The herd, upwind, grazed unawares, although from time to time sentry animals raised their heads the better to see, hear, and sniff.

Predator and prey alike reminded Cd’o of Citizens. The animals were smaller, of course, more similar in size to a Gw’o than to a Citizen. The grazers stood upright like Citizens, while the hunters slinked and stalked near to the ground. Cd’o zoomed her view closer still —

“Your Wisdom?” a servant said hesitantly.

The robotic aerostat hovered high above the remote island game preserve; Cd’o’s startled yank on the control stick sent her view into a wobbly spin. Her attention had been worlds away, on Hearth.

“What?” she asked crossly. She lifted a tubacle to see who had interrupted her too-rare respite. She recognized a servant, Kg’o, his integument a self-conscious far-red.

“Excuse me, your Wisdom,” he murmured. “I am to tell you that all have been summoned. An important message has just arrived.”

“From where?”

“The ship Amity, your Wisdom.”

From the Ringworld, then — or, rather, from where the Ringworld had been. From amid the mad chaos of multispecies squabbling. “A meld, then,” Cd’o said.

Uneven stripes rippled across Kg’o. “I know nothing more of the matter, your Wisdom.”

It had not been a question, and she had not meant to embarrass him. Cd’o swam away from the computer, pointing at the still-spinning image. “Do you know what this is?”

“No, your Wisdom.”

“The lone game preserve on five worlds, an island half an ocean away from anywhere. Here the Citizens maintain remnants of their primeval heritage. What do you make of that?”

Thoughtful yellows and greens washed across Kg’o. “That I do not understand Citizens.”

Because suffering predators to exist was not the logic of sentient prey? “Once gone, an ecosystem can never truly be re-created. A transplanted environment, such as we have in our habitat, is never as rich or robust as a natural ecosystem.”

“So Citizens fear losing the potential of even an old, dangerous environment? I believe I see.” Kg’o wriggled and flexed a tubacle nervously, struggling with unfamiliar concepts. “Their cowardice is more complex than I had realized.”

And far more calculating, Cd’o surmised. She jetted off, Kg’o trailing at a respectful distance, to meld.

IN THE AUSTERE inviolability of their melding chamber, Ol’t’ro considered:

That from the fringes of the vanished Ringworld’s cometary belt, the Concordance vessel Amity reported the synchronized departure of the Kzinti fleets.

That war over the wealth of the Ringworld had been inevitable.

That the artifact’s disappearance had not.

That Baedeker and Nessus, long absent from the affairs of Gw’oth and Citizens, had reappeared — from the Ringworld? — to assert that Kzinti warships were bound for the Fleet of Worlds.