Larry Niven - Fate of Worlds - Return From the Ringworld

Soon, he told himself, he would go home. He and his loved ones would be together again. He tried to picture the happy day, but his imagination failed him. It had been so long.

The dance must suffice for a while longer.

“Analysis complete,” Voice sang.

“Thank you,” Hindmost sang back.

His politeness was neurotic; having an AI at all was psychotic. No sensible being set out to build his prospective successor. But in the subtle calculus of countless dangers and endless responsibilities, to have a companion — any companion — had won out. Had he chosen otherwise, had he dared to undertake his Ringworld adventure without an illicit AI, he would doubtless have faded, long ago, into terminal catatonia.

The sweet release that ever beckoned.

“Another segment of hyperdrive-control software characterized,” Voice continued. “Calculating next jump.”

Working directly in binary code, Tunesmith had reprogrammed many of the computers aboard Long Shot. The new programming was convoluted beyond Hindmost’s ability to parse, one more instance of the arrogant improvisational brilliance that came so naturally to protectors.

If not as natural as doing anything, no matter how extreme, to protect their own kind.

“Are more jumps necessary?” Hindmost asked.

“Yes. The software I am studying continues to self-modify. As I analyze the code, I only fall further behind.”

“So you theorize from functional tests.”

“Theorize and confirm, especially as to the apparent behavioral constraints on the self-modifications. As you say, Hindmost.”

Once the hyperdrive customizations had been characterized he would refocus the AI on other changes. Humans, Kzinti, and Tunesmith, each in their turn controlling this ship, had modified shipboard systems, stripped out test instrumentation and decoy equipment, and retrofitted their own paraphernalia. He knew by placement and deductive reasoning how many of the bridge controls must function, but of settings and status displays, all in the dots-and-commas script favored by the Kzinti, he could read nothing.

It would be a long time before he could undertake the flight home. Time for Louis to heal, and to emerge from the autodoc. Time, again and again and again, to overtake the spreading gravity wave unleashed by the Ringworld’s disappearance, to study the only direct evidence as to how the impossible had been accomplished. Time between stints in hyperspace to gradually build up speed in normal space — fearful, all the while, that even across great distances the white-hot exhaust of Long Shot ’s fusion thrusters would attract unwanted attention.

Time to prepare for the surprises certain to await him at the end of his journey. He had been trapped on the Ringworld much too long.

With a graceful twirl he concluded this dance. “Keep us far from the other ships in the system,” he ordered. A terrifying number of ships. Ships all too easily seen with Tunesmith’s exquisitely sensitive instruments.

“ Long Shot is much faster than any vessel among the Fringe War,” Voice commented.

Thousands of times faster. Faster than Hindmost trusted his reflexes to pilot, even if he could read the Kzinti displays. Even if he understood Tunesmith’s alterations.

But Louis could fly it.

Picking at his meticulously coiffed mane, Hindmost sang, “And yet Tunesmith took this ship from the Kzinti.”

Trickery that one protector had conceived, another could, too. As fervently as Hindmost hoped all protectors had gone away with the Ringworld, their departure remained theory.

“Far away, Hindmost, as you have ordered.”

HINDMOST SQUINTED THROUGH the frost-speckled dome into Long Shot ’s single autodoc. In thirty-seven days, if the master readout could be believed, the autodoc would complete its treatment and release its occupant. “You are looking much better,” he sang, and it was true.

Despite Louis Wu’s ashen pallor. Despite the splotches of red and yellow and very little green among the progress indicators reflecting from the dome’s inner surface. Despite swollen joints and contorted limbs and genitalia just beginning to regrow. Despite the distended brain case and toothless gums. Despite all that, Louis began to look again like an adult human, and a bit less like a human turned protector.

“I was too twisted up when the tree-of-life started to change me,” Louis had admitted before, with Hindmost lifting from behind, he had climbed into the autodoc. Only minutes had passed since their escape from the Ringworld. “I’m dying.”

Disclosure that offered no prediction as to whether, to heal Louis, the autodoc would undo or perfect his conversion into a protector.

With any other autodoc there would have been no hope, but this unit was one of a kind. Frightfully advanced. Nanotech-based. This autodoc could, if necessary, rebuild a person from the molecular level up; Hindmost was convinced that it was doing that to Louis. Carlos Wu had built this amazing prototype, long ago and far away. It had been smuggled from Earth, then stolen, but — not for lack of trying — never duplicated.

Yet in a way, Tunesmith had surpassed it.

He had extracted nanites from the autodoc, reprogrammed them, distributed them far and wide across the Ringworld to replicate, and — well, Hindmost remained fuzzy on what, exactly, Tunesmith had done. Used the nanotech to rewire the Ringworld’s whole superconducting substrate. Adapted what he had learned in his brief study of Long Shot ’s hyperdrive.

So, anyway, Louis had explained. It took a protector to understand a protector. And not even a protector ever fully trusted another protector.

Trembling, Hindmost continued studying the twisted figure in the autodoc. “I am glad for you, Louis.” And relieved for myself.

For Louis knew the harm the Concordance had once brought to the Ringworld. As a human protector, Louis would seek to destroy Hearth and the Concordance.

If the autodoc did not undo the transformation, he must kill Louis while that remained possible. With Louis defenseless in a therapeutic coma.

Louis-as-protector would have seen that, too, and yet Louis had climbed, defenseless, into the autodoc. Hence, Louis knew he would wait to act until the course of the cure revealed itself. Hence Louis expected to emerge as a normal human, or he would have killed Hindmost before getting into the autodoc.

Matching wits with a protector was futile.

“I look forward to again having your company, Louis,” Hindmost said. In thirty-seven days.

Until then, Louis, I have the dance.

In Endurance ’s claustrophobic exercise room, Alice plodded away on the treadmill. She had little to do on the long flight but exercise. Puppeteers were the galaxy’s consummate worriers, and scant days from New Terra even Nessus had run out of contingencies to plan for and theories to fret about.

On the tarmac, Sigmund had taken Alice aside to warn her Nessus would be stingy with facts. Two relics exchanging the obvious about a third relic. She had promised Sigmund to set aside their differences for the sake of the mission. Also, her differences with Nessus. Once this situation was settled, the Puppeteer had a lot of explaining to do.

The wallpaper showed rolling forest, the foliage a riot of autumn colors. On solid ground, the view would have been stunning. Here, the imagery only reminded her that behind the thin-film display, outside thin ship walls, lurked … Finagle knew what.

Something stirred in her gut, whispered unintelligibly in her ears, tickled behind her eyes. Something that her hindbrain denied and her forebrain rejected.