After years of hideously expensive research had failed to duplicate the initial prototype, General Products Corporation was no closer to understanding why this particular hyperdrive flung this particular ship through hyperspace thousands of times faster than any other. The Outsiders, when Concordance engineers approached them, had expressed no opinions and declined to participate in any research. No one knew why, but no one understood why the Outsiders did most things. Creatures of liquid helium, the Outsiders were, simply, different.
General Products was on the verge, reluctantly, of halting their futile research program when inspiration struck.
From Hearth’s ancient place of hiding, the Concordance did business in that era with a half-dozen alien trading partners. With some grand demonstration, some spectacular publicity stunt, General Products thought to lure alien investors into underwriting continued experimentation. They jammed every nook and cranny of the prototype with extraneous equipment to mask the ad hoc nature of the only working Type II drive. They recruited a human pilot to fly the ship he named Long Shot all the way to the galactic core.
Of such convoluted origins comes disaster.
Except for Beowulf Shaeffer’s flight, the chain reaction of supernovae among the close-packed stars of the core would have gone undiscovered. A dangerous thing not to know, to be sure. But better to be ignorant of a peril many millennia into the future than to evoke immediate catastrophe.
Except for Long Shot and Shaeffer’s discovery, the Fleet would never have cast off its gravitational anchor from Giver of Life, its ancestral star.
Except for Hearth’s sudden, unplanned sprint from the galaxy, Citizens would never have trained their human servants to explore in the Fleet’s path. Their humans would never have uncovered their true past. Nature Preserve Four would still be one among the farm worlds serving the Concordance.
Except for scouting ahead in the Fleet’s hastily chosen path, the Gw’oth would have remained unknown to this day.
And yet …
Had the Gw’oth not spotted the refugees running from the core explosion, had the Gw’oth not contacted newly independent New Terra, Pak war fleets would have caught everyone unawares, would have pounded all their worlds, Hearth included, back into the Stone Age.
Hindmost plucked loose a tress he had just tucked into place. It seemed every course of action led to disaster.
Now he rode the ship that, from Beowulf Shaeffer’s era until Ol’t’ro’s covert reign, none had dared to fly. The ship on which Ol’t’ro had demanded the Concordance dedicate its wealth and best scientists, in vain hopes that the technology would be mastered.
And yet it was worth the price, any price, to divert Ol’t’ro from wondering if the time had come to pull the doomsday trigger. Every Hindmost had complied willingly.
Then Ol’t’ro had ordered Nessus to Earth. Aboard any normal vessel, even then, that would have been a trek of almost two years. On Long Shot, the trip was a matter of a few hours. Nessus had recruited two humans and a Kzinti diplomat for the “first” Ringworld expedition, bartering Long Shot itself as their payment.
Humans and Kzinti could waste lives and treasure trying to duplicate the Type II drive. Hindmost remembered his relief that the ill-fated ship was gone.
Only to find, long after, while stranded on the Ringworld by his own foolhardy misadventure, that Long Shot had returned! Kzinti had usurped the fastest ship in existence, using it as a courier to coordinate their part of the interspecies mayhem Hindmost knew as the Fringe War. Until Tunesmith seized Long Shot from the Kzinti. Until Louis and Hindmost took it from Tunesmith, because the protector chose to be rid of them.
And here I am aboard Long Shot. After … how long?
“Voice,” he called.
Notes tinkled from a nearby intercom speaker. “Yes, Hindmost.”
“Do onboard computers indicate the current date?”
“They do, although not using the Concordance calendar.”
“The human calendar will serve.”
“The Earth date is 2893, Hindmost.”
Much as he had expected — but suddenly, so terribly real. He had fled Hearth in 2860. Thirty-three years ago! Thirty-seven years as reckoned on Hearth, except that in the Fleet, rushing northward out of the galaxy at eight-tenths light speed, clocks ticked a third slower.
By any measure, and in every frame of reference, too long.
He looked himself in the eyes. All those years gone forever, and for what?
“Have I ever explained why I brought us to the Ringworld?”
“No, Hindmost.”
As he had thought. One does not justify oneself to one’s tools. But when only a tool stands between oneself and catatonia …
He left his cabin to canter once more around this accursed ship. The AI would track and hear him through hallway sensors, would continue the dialogue through any convenient intercom speaker. “I came for technology. The Ringworld must have had, the Ringworld embodied extraordinary technologies. It did not matter that the Ringworlders themselves had forgotten.”
Technology he meant to trade. No matter the depth of his loneliness, with whom he must negotiate went unstated. Some burdens only a Hindmost can bear.
“And did you find what you sought, Hindmost?”
To this day, he believed that the Ringworld foundation material, the wondrously robust stuff the natives called scrith, could only have been manufactured through some industrial-scale process of transmutation. That was the magic he had sought, the enticement for Ol’t’ro, the treasure with which he had hoped to buy freedom for Hearth. The technology of which he had gotten not as much as a glimpse in his years on the Ringworld.
“Not even close.” Hindmost rounded a corner —
And froze.
He did have Long Shot with Tunesmith’s improvements. Louis had jumped it to hyperspace from within the singularity that was the Ringworld, which itself was within the singularity of the nearby star — and despite all theory and experience, the ship had come back out. He had clues painstakingly collected to the operation of Ringworld-become-hyperdrive, imprinted in its obscenely powerful gravity wave.
After much anguished deliberation, the outline of a new hyperspace physics had begun to take shape in Hindmost’s mind.
When Louis emerged from the autodoc, hopefully still able to pilot this ship, perhaps they could use that knowledge.
8
A very thin line encircled the bridge: short navy-blue dashes alternating with longer pale blue dashes.
The Ringworld.
Or, rather, Endurance having exited hyperspace sixty light-days from its destination, the Ringworld as it had appeared sixty days earlier.
Alice stood at the center of the bridge, turning slowly, trying to take it in. Her view was from above the plane of the Ringworld, and she could see … everything. She just couldn’t wrap her mind around what she saw.
Six hundred million miles in circumference. It was an expanse beyond comprehension, so she tried changing scales. About sixty feet around the bridge. Each foot of image along the wall represented … six million miles. Still unreal. Call it 830,000 miles — more than thirty times around New Terra — to the inch!