Hindmost closed his eyes but sleep refused to come. Fuzzy or not, his thoughts kept churning. Dancers. Ships. Leaps. Danger all around. Leaps. Partway home (well, Home, in any event), and back.
His eyes flew open. Louis had flown Long Shot much farther than he had allowed Voice to take it. “Voice, were internal instruments active during the hyperspace move toward Home?”
“They were.”
“Bring up the data.”
Displays lit on an arc running halfway around the bridge. Necks craning, Hindmost took it in, now and again reaching out to scroll deeper into the recordings. On other monitors, he reviewed data gleaned from studies of the Ringworld’s disappearance.
Patterns in the data reminded him of something, but for the longest time he could not put his tongue on it. An odd coincidence, he decided. He had seen such patterns before.
Long ago he had tried to reverse engineer the planetary drives purchased from the Outsiders. It was a desperate undertaking, to be sure — moving worlds involved vast energies — but not quite as insane as getting overrun by the genocidal Pak. Instead of discovering how the planetary drive worked, he had succeeded only in learning the many ways in which it might destabilize —
And that the energies so unleashed could vaporize a world.
Of course, very different mechanisms sometimes shared a mathematical description, as with pendulums and electronic oscillators. This parallelism surely meant nothing. Still, sometimes having an analogy suggested new ways to approach a problem …
Sipping from a drink bulb, his exhaustion forgotten, he thought how, while in office, he had opposed — to the modest extent Ol’t’ro tolerated opposition — the unending study of this ship. He thought how his newfound obsession with understanding the Type II drive would amuse Ol’t’ro. He thought about —
He straightened on the uncomfortable crash couch. His eyes closed, this time in concentration. For all the Ministry’s years of study, he had something they did not: protector-built instruments. And now he knew something they did not.
How to toggle the Type II drive to and from Type I speed.
The new hyperspace physics with which he dabbled remained incomplete, and yet — with Tunesmith’s help — he had made more progress in days than Ol’t’ro and the Ministry of Science together had in more than a century. Chords of triumph rose in his throats. Maybe he could barter for the Concordance’s freedom. This was his greatest insight since —
Reality crashed down. His greatest accomplishment since discovering how to destroy General Products hulls from a distance, without antimatter.
Long Shot had been built well before hulls were redesigned against such attacks.
Louis squeezed onto the bridge. “Did I hear you say something?”
“I was talking to myself,” Hindmost said. Because this time, I will understand the implications of my discoveries before I unleash them onto an unsuspecting galaxy.
16
Dry land sweltered, mere air no obstacle to the fierce sunslight. Sessile life forms, in every color from far-red to a deep ultrablue that only instruments could detect, covered the undulating landscape. Motile creatures burrowed in the dirt, gamboled in the meadows, swam in the little ponds, and soared high into the boundless sky.
Unattainable, all of it.
Beyond the habitat was an entire existence Cd’o would never taste, a rich ecology that thrived on light instead of the bountiful chemical stew endlessly upwelling from oceanic trenches. Beyond the wall, not even a tubacle’s-length distant, was a whole alien world. Somehow, she had to content herself with glimpsing that world through satellite imagery and in the bottomless archives of the Citizens.
Her ventral sphincter agape, she spread her thorax wide. When, bloated, she could draw in no more water, she let the orifice snap shut. Her tubacles curled behind her, she expelled the water in a convulsive, frustrated whoosh and jetted across the chamber.
Two more pulses sent her jetting from the observation room, on her way to the Commons. Nothing there and no one’s company would change anything. Still, for a short while, a batch of magnesium salts sometimes let her forget that she would live and die in this prison.
And that she was warden as much as inmate.
As she coasted into the corridor, someone swam into position behind her. “Your Wisdom.”
Her servants/bodyguards/minders took shifts. Which was this? From a tubacle still arched ventrally, Cd’o looked. She found distinctive permanent textures hiding among the red and far-red patterns anxiously rippling across his integument. “Good day, Kg’o.” Knowing that in this one regard, her words would fail to elicit obedience, she added, “There is no need to call me that.”
“Yes, your Wisdom.”
Too soon they had crossed the pathetically small habitat, to glide into the Commons. Cd’o saw all-too-familiar figures inside. Scarcely five five-squared Gw’oth lived on Nature Preserve Five. Some, spawned here, thought of this metal can as home. Why wouldn’t they? The habitat was all they had ever known.
Many whom she found in Commons were Ol’t’ro’s progeny. They were brilliant and gifted in the art of the meld — and, from inbreeding, often deranged. Among them two had become infirm. The detritus of old age clogged their minds; in a meld, the noise of their petty, inconsequential thoughts grew ever more intrusive.
And so, the newcomers.
Was rage vivid on her skin? As quickly as they recognized her, Gw’oth across the Commons backed away. Conversations trailed off into respectful silence.
Respect was a sorry substitute for camaraderie.
But the Commons were not quite silent. The four newcomers clustered together in a corner, staring at her, whispering. From the accents, they were from Jm’ho, the home world. From the patterns rippling over them, they were at once scared, awed, and humbled.
As you were in their place, an elder’s engram fragment reminded.
She jetted over. “Welcome. I am Cd’o.”
Anxious far-reds deepened. “Thank you, your Wisdom.” Timidly, the new arrivals introduced themselves.
“What can I tell you about your new home?” she asked. “Have you been shown around the habitat?”
“Tell us about … them,” one said. “What are they like?”
About Ol’t’ro. About their destiny. One way or another, all would serve.
When she did not answer, another of the new arrivals asked, “What are Citizens like?”
“Citizens are intriguing,” Cd’o said. “Cowardly and ruthless. Smarter than any of us.” Individually, that was. “Their culture is older by far than any on Jm’ho. You would do well to study them.”
To truly understand Citizens, though, one had also to understand humans. Concordance leaders had a morbid fascination with humans. Much of that fixation came of guilt for the ancestral crime that had established New Terra, and fear of their former servants, and dread of the retribution “wild humans” would exact if they ever discovered New Terra and learned its dark secret. There was fascination with human curiosity — and an abiding horror of it, too.
And especially among the Experimentalist faction, Citizens were obsessed with human myths.
“Come with me,” Cd’o directed. “I will show you around.”
The tour was all too brief, mostly security measures and environmental systems. The “town” was sealed as tightly as any spaceship. Whatever entered, to the smallest drop of water — and the occasional “volunteer,” like these — was quarantined and thoroughly screened.