If anyone understood hyperspace, it was the Outsiders. They had invented hyperdrive. Which, although they sold it, they themselves never used.
That seemed instructive.
Blotting sweat from her face and arms with a towel, she abandoned the treadmill. She strode down the corridor to the bridge to check the mass pointer. Because one thing she did understand about hyperspace: while crossing it, keep your distance from large masses. Get too close to a gravitational singularity while in hyperspace and you never came out.
A light-year every three days. Logically speaking, stars being light-years apart in this region, a glance at the mass pointer every few hours more than sufficed for safety.
Logic failed to convince the tingling behind her eyes.
In the mass pointer, the most prominent instrument on the pilot’s console, nothing looked close. As Alice could have predicted from her last peek, less than an hour earlier. But her skin still crawled. The … whatever … behind her eyes prickled worse than ever.
The bridge walls showed forest, too, but that only emphasized how unnatural their surroundings were. If the less-than-nothing of hyperspace could be said to surround —
“Not very convincing, is it?”
She flinched at the unexpected voice.
Nessus stood at the bridge hatch. With one head, he indicated the mass pointer. His other head tugged at the remaining braid in his much-stirred mane.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“Can you?”
“Not very well.” She cleared her throat. “What did you mean, the mass pointer isn’t convincing?”
“It was once my misfortune to be brave.” With a final yank and a plaintive sigh, he released the tortured braid. “That is to say, I was insane. Insane enough to volunteer to leave home and become a scout. On my last scouting mission…”
“Go on.” They had the bridge to themselves, and she sat on an armrest of the pilot’s crash couch.
“I returned home missing a head.” His two-throated wheeze came out like minor scales in clashing keys. “I left the autodoc scared normal.”
Did he want her to feel sorry for him? Fat chance. “The unconvincing mass pointer?”
“My last mission. We are going there now. To the source of the ripple that summons us.” He sang a musical phrase, sad and jangling. “You and Julia have heard me describe it.”
More of the facts with which Nessus had long been stingy.
She still struggled to believe that such a place could exist. “And?”
“Even after the Ringworld, I kept my trust in mass pointers. No one who could readily colonize the planets of other stars would build a habitat so vast. They would have no need.”
“No one with hyperdrive, you mean.”
Heads moved in alternation: up/down, down/up, up/down. A Puppeteer nod.
She was old, tanj it. Tired. Behind her eyes, the itch got even worse. Mass pointer. Trust. The Ringworld.
She whirled to stare at the mass pointer.
The Ringworld was massive; it would create its own gravitational singularity. Despite that, the armchair experts on New Terra had concluded that the Ringworld somehow jumped to hyperspace. That the Ringworld was itself the source of the ripple.
No one had even a theory how that could be possible.
Alice said, “But it looks like the Ringworlders have hyperdrive. What if the Ringworld returns to normal space?”
“Without warning,” Nessus agreed. “Bringing its gravitational singularity.”
And if Endurance was in the wrong place at the wrong time? They would be hurled, or interdimensionally shredded, or whatever. Without warning.
The mass pointer, despite the booming thump it offered when Alice slapped it, seemed a very nebulous thing. The itching grew fierce behind her eyes.
“Could you use some help twisting your mane?” she asked.
“AND … NOW,” JULIA ANNOUNCED from the pilot’s crash couch.
Where fall foliage had long reigned, crisp points of light teemed. The bridge’s wraparound image looked no different from the starscape Nessus had had digitally painted, the past several days, across his cabin walls. Somehow these stars felt different.
“Still there,” Julia said, standing and stretching. “Always good to see stars.”
“Very much so,” Nessus said. “How long will we stay?”
Because except to eject another hyperwave-radio buoy every few light-years, Julia had been keeping them in hyperspace, charging toward … Nessus trembled to imagine what they would find.
Julia tilted her head, considering. “We’ll remain here for half an hour. Longer if the folks back home have something to talk about.” She uploaded a text message, their galactic coordinates appended, to the nearest buoy in the chain. Trip remains uneventful. Endurance out.
“They will,” Alice predicted from the corridor outside the bridge.
With only the three of them aboard, they staggered their sleeping hours so that someone was always awake to check on the mass pointer. Not today, though. Not on such a long flight. No one would choose to sleep through a scheduled respite of normalcy.
Nessus suspected Alice was right.
Outside of gravitational singularities, hyperwave propagated instantaneously. Dropping relay buoys along the way to boost the signal, one could talk across many light-years. Delay only cropped up when an end of the link was inside a singularity. Then, to do hyperwave/laser-beam conversions, you needed a relay at the singularity’s brink. For a free-flying world like New Terra, its mass tiny compared to a star’s, the one-way delay was less than a minute.
One could converse across the light-years — with something useful to say, or not.
“We’ll know soon enough,” Julia said, squeezing past Alice to leave the bridge. “Meanwhile, I’ll drop another buoy.”
While he had the opportunity, Nessus uploaded long messages he had recorded on his pocket computer. It helped to be in touch, even fleetingly, with the children. As the transfer proceeded, he pulled up an old holo of himself with the children, taken in the sprawling, well-tended garden behind their house.
“Your family?” Alice asked.
“Aurora and Elpis. Elpis, though younger, is the taller one.” He took a moment to savor the memories. “As a scout, I never expected to mate, to have children. It was hard to leave them.”
“I understand.” And tentatively, “And your mate?”
“Long gone.” So long that it was hard to maintain any hope.
“I’m sorry,” she said. And angry, her manner added. Consumed by a well-cultivated bitterness.
Before her simmering rage, even the lopsided, eager grins Elpis wore lost the power to charm him. “A funny thing, Alice. They grew up on New Terra. They expect suns during the day, and for stars to sparkle like diamonds in the night sky.”
“And you don’t.”
Hearth blazed with the lights of its continent-spanning cities, was warmed by the waste heat of its industry. Hearth needed no suns. It had no suns. Its farm worlds, like four gigantic moons, bleached most stars from the sky.
“I grew up differently,” was all he could bring himself to say.
Because dissimilar skies were the least of the differences. The residents of one large arcology on Hearth would rival the entire population of New Terra, humans and Citizens combined. His children knew only wide open spaces. They had friends on New Terra. They had grown up sharing a world with humans.
If Aurora and Elpis could return to Hearth, would they?
LAUNCHING THE BUOY WAS SIMPLE ENOUGH. After a final comm check, Julia had only to turn permeable a small area on the cargo hold’s exterior wall and press the buoy straight through the hull into space. Quick swipes with a structural modulator restored that stretch of hull to its customary imperviousness, its original shape remembered.