Exceptional stuff, twing. Clear or opaque or of any semitransparency between. Tunable to any color of the rainbow. As soft or hard as desired. Only General Products hull material was stronger — and unlike GP hull material, no one could turn twing to gossamer from a distance. Grandpa had learned not to trust a GP hull.
And twing was just one of the marvels New Terra’s scientists had coaxed out of the Pak Library. But she wasn’t supposed to know about that, or that Grandpa, Alice, and Nessus had all played a part in bringing the Library to New Terra and the Ministry.
Her task done, Julia dawdled in the hold, leaving Nessus and Alice alone to talk. They had to work past their issues.
Because who didn’t have issues? She lived her life in her grandfather’s shadow. Sigmund Ausfaller was a hero to some, New Terra’s bane to many. Self-deluded fools, the latter, an opinion she kept to herself. In order to serve she played along, telling herself Grandpa would understand.
With a drink bulb of coffee from the ship’s mess, Julia returned to the bridge. “What did I miss?”
Alice gestured dismissively at the comm console, where a new message read: We’ve been waiting for you to check in. The minister has called a strategy session. We’ve begun contacting participants. Expect to begin in about two hours. Acknowledge.
They could travel far in two hours. Farther in two hours plus a meeting.
And she knew how Grandpa felt about too many cooks.
“If they had urgent news for us, they would have texted it,” Julia decided. “And we have nothing new to tell them.”
Acknowledge, the comm console chided.
“Too bad we didn’t see that message in time,” Julia said. “Hyperspace in twenty minutes, people.”
Alice managed to shiver and smile at the same time.
7
One mouth grasping a curler, the other a brush, Hindmost primped and teased, combed and curled. Strings of newly synthed jewels, of Experimentalist orange more often than any other color, glittered in his mane. He had already buffed his hooves and brushed his hide until they glistened.
The elaborate grooming was not for the lack of pressing things to do. Quite the contrary. He needed to assimilate Voice’s observations and analyses of Long Shot’s controls. Synthesize the measurements taken of the gravity wave set off by the Ringworld’s disappearance from normal space. Account for the absence of a second hyperspace ripple: either the Ringworld had yet to emerge from hyperspace or it had reentered many light-years away, so remote as to be undetectable. Sift his memories of Tunesmith’s cryptic and misleading explanations, and of Louis-as-protector’s interpretations, for clues. Connect all that he had learned/heard/surmised to what little he might know about hyperdrives — which, demonstrably, was not enough.
And there was the madness of Louis launching Long Shot into hyperspace from inside the Ringworld. Escaping through the Ringworld floor! From the depths of a singularity!
Every conventional theory of hyperdrive and hyperspace insisted they should be dead.
Except to eat and sleep and jettison more of the decoy equipment that still clogged the ship, for days Hindmost had done nothing but struggle to understand. He had accomplished little. The wonder was that he functioned at all when, at any time, any of the thousands of warships that his sensors showed might detect this ship.
And while fear-ridden before every jump that this ship might cease to exist such that it could be noticed.
To sense mass from within hyperspace required psionic abilities that mere software lacked. On every hyperdrive jump, the AI’s dead-reckoning navigation might drop them into the nearby star.
His circumstances were intolerable, but setting off in a jury-rigged ship was not the answer. Protectors lived by the jury-rig, supremely confident in their improvisations — and in the makeshifts and expedients, yet to be imagined, by which they would resolve other crises yet to emerge.
Not so Citizens, certainly not the Hindmost. Especially not this Hindmost. He dare not undertake a long voyage, especially with unintelligible Kzinti controls.
Unable to flee, his every instinct called out for catatonia. Instead, he continued to brush. Finally, he set down his implements. Rising from his nest of mounded pillows, he pivoted before a full-length wall mirror, also newly synthed. Through his appearance, if in no other way, he would be worthy of his station.
If only all the responsibilities of the office were as easily satisfied …
Haunch brushing haunch, Hindmost and his most senior aides and ministers settled astraddle twenty padded, Y-shaped benches. Despite the companionable closeness, Hindmost did not feel in the least part comforted. No one did.
Above head level at midroom, centered within the circle of benches, floated that which they must discuss. The pale blue loop of thread could have been pretty, but not with that yellow spark blazing at its center. The spark was a star, and that meant the loop was enormous.
Soft and urgent, plaintive and terrified, phrases of song filled the room. When the cacophony gave no sign of abating, Hindmost intoned, with harmonics of command, “We will begin.” The murmuring stopped abruptly.
“Explain what your long-range instruments have seen,” he directed Minerva, the deputy director of Clandestine Directorate.
Minerva gestured at the blue ring. “The unexpected sighting lies a little more than two light-years distant, not far off the Fleet’s path,” he sang.
“Why have we not heard before of this object?” Hindmost asked, feigning ignorance. In truth, he had feared this day since — it felt like forever. Since Chiron’s arrival.
“We knew something encircled the star.” Minerva sang in low, apologetic tones. “Until we observed it at a suitable angle, we thought it an ordinary dust ring. Not” — he glanced once more at the blue thread — “that.”
“And so only recently did you look closely.”
“Yes, Hindmost,” Minerva agreed timorously.
“Who built it?” Aglaea, an aide, wondered.
“We don’t know,” Minerva answered.
“Why build it?” another asked.
“We don’t know,” Minerva repeated. “Nor how. Nor of what. To construct something so huge — ”
“We must send an expedition,” Chiron interrupted brashly. His mane was a glorious structure of complex silver ringlets.
More precisely, its mane. Chiron was a holographic projection, animated by Proteus: an illicit AI. And equally, their mane, because directing Proteus was the Gw’oth group mind known as Ol’t’ro. Two truths unimaginable to those physically in the council chamber, save by the Hindmost and one other.
Hindmost’s ministers and aides knew Chiron as the long-serving Minister of Science, resident on and governor of Nature Preserve Five, the better to oversee research best performed off the home world. Governments came and went, Hindmosts came and went, and Chiron served them all.
If only that were so.
In the blackest secret in the long, dark history of the Concordance, behind He Who Leads from Behind, Chiron served only him/it/themselves. The herd chose whom they wished to rule the Concordance; time and again, their choices changed nothing. Each outgoing Hindmost revealed to the next the unbearable secret: Chiron, in a moment, could obliterate five worlds and a trillion Citizens. Chiron had promised to do so, if he/it/they ever deemed its unwitting subjects a danger to the worlds of the Gw’oth.