“I wish you luck,” Nessus said, his voice quavering. He sat astraddle the pilot’s couch, looking uncomfortable. He had offered to pilot so that Julia could concentrate on observing. He had seen it before.
Left unstated: who better to be ready to run?
“What do you mean, Nessus?” Alice asked.
He looked himself in the eyes. “You wish to grasp the scale of the thing. I never succeeded.”
Julia walked up to the wall and with her thumb covered a bit of the loop. “The width of my thumb? It’s almost a million miles! Walk fifty miles a day, and you couldn’t cross the width of that place in fifty years.”
A hoof scraped at the deck, but Nessus said nothing. With one head he stared at the main sensor panel; with the other he watched the panorama streaming in an auxiliary display: the Ringworld, spinning in place beneath their telescope, simulating a flyover.
Alice watched terrain undulate past at an almost hypnotic pace. Hills. Lakes. Grassy plains. Forests. A sea. Make that an ocean. A big ocean.
“Any signs of civilization?” Alice asked.
“Not yet,” Nessus said, “except for the structure as a whole, of course.”
Julia said, “How long until — ”
“Wait! Back up.” Something in the flyover had caught Alice’s eye. Something familiar. But what here could be familiar?
The close-up stopped and then retraced its path. And there, little more than a speck in that vast ocean, what had caught her eye: a patch like a flattened map of Earth! Nearby was a reddish disk that could be Mars. More disks, unfamiliar to her, lay scattered nearby. Other worlds?
“The world models are full-sized,” Nessus said. “No, I can’t explain them.”
Julia had never seen Earth or Mars. No native New Terran had. She asked, “How long until light from the anomaly itself reaches us?”
Nessus glanced at a timer running on his console. “Call it five minutes.”
At two, he banished the simulated-flyover view, turning an eye back to the wall and its view of the ring. “It’s coming up,” he said. “Five seconds. Four…”
At zero, from almost a trillion miles away, they saw the Ringworld — disappear.
UNIFORMED ESCORTS HUSTLED SIGMUND through the corridors of the Ministry of Defense, past closed doors and hushed but intense hallway conversations. Something was going on, and it had not just begun. There had been time for rumors, if not yet actual news, to run rampant through the building.
Since Julia’s departure, he had carried his pocket comp at all times. He had kept the stepping disc at home right-side up. That he hadn’t been contacted the moment … whatever happened was someone’s deliberate choice.
He did not think he was being paranoid.
Knowing Julia, she had kept her normal-space sanity breaks to a minimum. Endurance might have reached its destination.
Was that why he had been summoned?
In the situation room, too crowded for his taste, Sigmund found a meeting already in progress. The bridge of Endurance occupied the room’s main holo display. The crew looked weary but unharmed, and Sigmund breathed a little easier.
He took a chair at the main table next to one of the more helpful, less doctrinaire deputy ministers. Corinne somebody. Age had not improved his problem remembering names.
“Here.” Corinne tapped the personal display inset in front of Sigmund. “The real-time feed so far for the link.”
“Thanks.” He fast-forwarded through the recording, skimmed the transcript. Much of the session had gone to waiting for light to crawl to and from the hyperwave relay at the edge of New Terra’s singularity. He hadn’t missed much.
Except for the Ringworld disappearing.
An inner band, rapidly spinning, had remained behind. Even at full magnification it looked like co-orbiting panels, but Nessus’ Ringworld expedition had found that invisibly thin wires held the panels together.
Shadow squares, Nessus had called the structure. Without the shadows it cast, Ringworlders would have lived in unending day. Compared to the Ringworld itself, the shadow-square band looked flimsy — only it, too, must be incredibly robust or centrifugal force would have torn it apart. Clever, but Sigmund was more interested in the other technology purportedly on the shadow squares: solar power plants and vast numbers of sensors.
“… Thorough survey, across the spectrum,” Minister Norquist-Ng was saying. “Our scientists have proposed several theories, and we’ll want to give them — ”
“Excuse me, Minister.” Sigmund turned to address the camera. “I have to ask something time-sensitive. Who else came to investigate this phenomenon?” Are the three of them safe?
The light-speed delay to and from the hyperwave relay gave Norquist-Ng plenty of time to frown.
“You’re right, Sigmund, we have company,” Alice said. “Lots of ships, to judge from hyperspace ripples and comm chatter. But the comm is unintelligible, whether alien or just encrypted. Our Jeeves hasn’t yet had any luck with it.
“Having said that, everything we’ve intercepted, radio and hyperwave, is faint. I doubt we have anyone nearby.”
“Near being a relative term,” Sigmund said.
A minute and a half later — time enough, through hyperdrive, for any of the nearby ships to travel two light-days! — he saw Alice’s answering shrug.
Nessus turned a head toward the camera. “I keep us moving, a short hyperdrive jump every few minutes. In fact, if you’ll excuse us — ”
The holo froze for several seconds. When motion returned to the real-time feed, Nessus was giving his full attention to his instruments.
“Very well, Mr. Ausfaller,” Norquist-Ng said. “As I was saying — ”
Those ships. Might they be from Human Space? After so long, could the path be open back to Earth? But for what peaceful reason would anyone send so many ships? And if not peaceful, then …
“Whose ships are they, Nessus?” Sigmund interrupted again.
“We would need to get much closer to tell,” Nessus said, as with his other head he tugged and twisted at his mane. Clearly, he did not want to get closer. That might be only typical Puppeteer risk avoidance.
Or Nessus might hesitate lest Alice and Julia find an ARM ship to contact.
“Are you finished, Ausfaller?” Norquist-Ng asked. “We sent a ship to scope out an unprecedented event. It seems other worlds did, too. With reasonable precautions, I think we can avoid any — ”
Ostriches! Sigmund thought. Did isolation ever not backfire?
But Julia was also speaking. “… May … Ringworld left … one-light-hour hops…”
“Jeeves, back us up to the start of the captain’s last comment,” Sigmund directed.
“Yes, sir,” the conference-room AI said.
“We may have data on why the Ringworld left. We backed off several light-days in one-light-hour hops, hoping to see what led up to the departure. What we observed, scattered around and sometimes on the Ringworld, were gamma-ray bursts, some powerful.”
“So, gamma-ray bursts,” someone muttered from the back of the room. “The skies are full of them.”
“Not around planets,” Norquist-Ng barked at the hapless aide. “Ausfaller. Any ideas?”
“Antimatter,” Sigmund said. “The most powerful explosive imaginable. When matter and antimatter meet, all that’s left from the encounter is gamma rays.
“Someone was fighting over the Ringworld, and we’ve sent our people into the war zone.”