Destroyer of Worlds

by Larry Niven

  “Sigmund? From what Brennan told us about Phssthpok, news doesn’t come any better.”

  He grunted to show he’d heard her and kept thinking things through.

  2341 plus 173. The Pak would have arrived in 2514. Sigmund had turned twenty-four that year. A Pak invasion or relativistic bombardment seemed like something he would have noticed, and he felt none of the absence Nessus’ editing left behind.

  2514, or a few years difference if they changed speed or veered toward any human-occupied world. If the Pak even came close to Human Space, they could hardly have failed to spot the human worlds. Every settled planet proclaimed itself with radio emissions. Not to mention that at some point a couple hundred fusion engines would have been spotted.

  It didn’t add up.

  “One ship and two people destroyed two oncoming fleets,” Sigmund snapped. “I don’t think so.”

  “They did! That is, they must have. They went for help.” Alice was suddenly raging. “Damn you, Sigmund, listen! To me this was yesterday. I wanted to go with them. I demanded to go with them. I had police and weapons training. But because I was pregnant, they packed me off like an invalid.”

  Meaning she had just said her good-byes to Truesdale. “That’s why you returned. Why on the ancient singleship and not the ship you and Roy brought Brennan-hunting?”

  “Brennan’s ‘ship’ was going to be a hollowed-out rock, with a Pak-style ramscoop and Roy’s ship along as cargo. Me taking the singleship cost them the fewest resources.”

  A million questions and growing fast. “All right, Alice. That’s a lot to take in. Let’s start again from the top.”

  46

  Thssthfok jogged about his cell, the deck hard on his bare feet. Metal plates lined the floor, covering the area he had softened and a large margin around it. He ran so that his movements, when he did try again to escape, would not immediately seem suspicious—and to stay warm. Questions about the recent cold brought no answers, only a few blankets.

  If he explained how he had softened the floor, Sigmund was willing to discuss the accommodations.

  That left Thssthfok exercising regularly, which was all right. When he didn’t exercise, he sat or lay wrapped in his blankets, hands within, working by touch on improving his equipment. The onetime structural modulator had been modified again, its electro-optics now repurposed into a broad-spectrum scanner. The hull seemed to embody a fascinating material, as atomically perfect as twing but much harder. The device still fit, when Thssthfok was not using it, behind the softened spot, behind the grip bar, in one of the cell’s recessed zero-gravity handholds.

  He would escape again. The main question was when. Amazing materials, faster-than-light travel, two-headed creatures, water-breathing creatures, flying worlds, great city/ships in space . . . there was much to be learned here. He need not rush.

  “Move away from the hatch,” came a voice over the intercom. Sigmund.

  Thssthfok jogged a bit more and did some chin-ups (stashing his scanner under the grab bar) before retreating to the big external hatch. He settled onto the deck, sitting on a folded blanket and wrapped in another.

  The hatch opened. Sigmund entered, armored as usual. He lobbed a drink bulb. The container was warm in Thssthfok’s hands, and the hot beverage within felt good going down. “Thank you, Sigmund.”

  “You can return the favor,” Sigmund said.

  Thssthfok sipped, saying nothing.

  “Tell me about the fleets that followed Phssthpok.”

  Thssthfok had never mentioned those fleets. How could Sigmund know? Deduction was the likely answer. That many childless protectors would follow Phssthpok was implicit in Pak nature. “I was not yet born, Sigmund. I know little.”

  “Here’s a fact for you, Thssthfok. We beat them.”

  Was it possible? True, these humans and their even more profane allies had impressive technology. That alone could not suffice to defeat an entire Pak fleet! One or two Pak ships, surely, could easily reverse-engineer and duplicate most human tech from only remote observation. He could reproduce much of it, if only he had the resources and the privacy in which to work.

  “Then you know more than I,” Thssthfok said.

  Sigmund leaned forward. “Tell me what you do know.”

  “Phssthpok’s project required tremendous resources, more protectors and more wealth than even the Library normally controlled. They started a war. Without descendants of their own to serve, such action was unthinkable—and yet they took it. Whole clans became childless, breederless, and then entire armies looked for a cause. They joined Phssthpok’s movement. The war and the carnage expanded until the Library had all the resources Phssthpok needed to launch his rescue.”

  “The fleets,” Sigmund prompted.

  Had Sigmund not inferred? Clearly, then, the humans had encountered the fleets. It hardly mattered. This was all harmless information. “Phssthpok’s departure left thousands of childless protectors again without a reason to live. They would either die, or find a new cause.”

  “So they rationalized a reason to follow. To help. For backup. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, Sigmund.” And then the human did surprise Thssthfok.

  “The Librarians of your time faced exactly the same dilemma when the clans evacuated Pakhome. What was their new cause?”

  “I don’t know, Sigmund.” Nor did Thssthfok, not in the sense of a personally verified fact. Still, the inference was unassailable and messages from the rear of the evacuation claimed to confirm what logic demanded. Would Sigmund see it?

  Gloved hands tapped a rhythm against the bulkhead. “After the clans abandoned the Library, the Library must follow the clans. How else could the Librarians serve? Any who didn’t see the situation this way lost their will to live. Yet if they followed, their most valuable asset would be their ships and not their store house of knowledge. As in Phssthpok’s time, they must be warriors, preserving and defending their knowledge. They must look to an era of resettlement in which they can again serve all Pak.”

  That was surely correct. Again, Thssthfok said nothing.

  Sigmund continued. “The modern Librarians will control a mighty fleet—and this will be the final fleet. They will have sown massive destruction across Pakhome, lest anyone follow to covet their ships.”

  Sown? Covet? These were unfamiliar words, and Jeeves did not step in to explain. The overall meaning remained clear. “And does this matter, Sigmund?”

  “Not at all, Thssthfok. Not at all.” Armored shoulders slumped. “By the time the Librarians arrive, my people will be extinct.”

  47

  Alice sat with her back to the galley and synthesizer. She turned when Kirsten came into the relax room, offered a quick greeting, and went back to retelling her story to Sigmund. New details continued to emerge.

  Like that, once more, a path to Earth had been blocked.

  “It was an incredible piece of technology.” Alice set down her fork to speak with her hands. She was describing the fuel tank from the ancient Mariner XX probe, salvaged by Brennan before he encountered Phssthpok, and lashed to the singleship. “Primitive, certainly, but beautiful in a way. Worth a fortune to any museum, if I’d gotten it back to the inner solar system. And worth more to you.” She frowned. “Brennan detached the relic before I left Kobold. He said carrying it would use too much fuel.”

  An early unmanned interplanetary probe seemed about as useful to Sigmund as the Mayflower. “Worth something to me? How?”

  “Like most of the early outer-planet probes, it carried a plaque with a star map. In case, eons later, someone found it adrift in space.” She reclaimed her fork and took a bite of salad. “Bearings on a bunch of nearby pulsars.”

  Tanj! With that plaque, a blind man on a fast horse could have found the way to Earth. And that, surely, was why Brennan had separated the probe from the singleship. Something other than a wayward ARM might recover the map.

  Kirsten took a tray from a cupboard and began piling
it with food and drinks. From the number of plates, she meant to feed the whole work party. She tried to catch Sigmund’s eye. He nodded and continued questioning Alice.

  “She’s pregnant,” Kirsten finally burst out, cheeks aflame. “Let the woman rest.”

  Puppeteers were prudish, and they had inflicted that behavior on their slaves. The New Terrans remained, to Sigmund’s thinking, Victorian. Maybe it was Elizabethan. History was not his subject. The mother-to-be could be due tomorrow, and outside of immediate family New Terrans would be loath to acknowledge her condition in mixed company.

  “Wait a minute,” Alice barked. “I’m perfectly capable of—”

  “It’s all right, Alice,” Sigmund said. “I’m glad Kirsten showed up. If you wouldn’t mind pausing for a bit, I have other business to discuss with her.”

  Alice took the hint and disappeared into the ship, drink bulb in hand.

  “Close the hatch,” he told Kirsten. “What have you found?”

  Kirsten complied, and went back to synthing snacks. “Not much.”

  “But some. What did you find?”

  She said, “The nav code on Alice’s ship is horrifically complicated. I can only see the raw machine code, of course. I tried to deduce the kind of programming language or symbolic notation the developer used, find a way to recover the higher-level logic. Jeeves, too, when he was last awake. Apparently there isn’t any.

  “We’re talking about a protector. Brennan wrote directly in binary. The program logic is so interwoven and dense that I’m still struggling to make sense of it. Here’s my best guess. Brennan’s programs are like the gadgets we recovered from Thssthfok’s cell. The components serve multiple purposes. Change a bit anywhere and Finagle knows how the effects would ripple. No normal mind could maintain it.”

  Sigmund stood and stretched, considering. If Kirsten said the code was inhumanly complex, it was. “Why rewrite the nav code at all?”

  She shrugged.

  Well, Sigmund had no theory, either. “Set aside the programming. What about simple data structures? Does anything useful jump out?” Like, say, the location of Sol?

  She nibbled on something from the tray. “Something, yah. I can’t make sense of it. Navigation is always relative to a location in space. So what was Brennan’s reference point? It’s not the sun, because the software expects that reference point to move independent of the ship’s drive.”

  “Moving where? How fast?”

  “The short answer? I don’t know, Sigmund. The time and distance units in the program don’t match English measurements or the metric system you’ve described. If I knew the performance characteristics of the singleship I could derive the reference point’s independent velocity. The thing is, Brennan so altered the fusion drive that Eric won’t even hazard a guess.”

  The more Sigmund heard, the less he understood. It was like talking with Alice. Well, one part made sense. “It’s clear why Brennan rewrote the code. He didn’t want anyone to backtrack from the singleship should they find it.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Kirsten sighed. “I’m not giving you much. Anything else I can look into?”

  “Yeah. Why isn’t the ship still near Sol? Brennan wouldn’t rewrite the nav functions to hide Sol’s location unless he also knew the ship wouldn’t be near Sol.”

  “I have no idea. Only one more mystery for you.” She hoisted the tray. “The stasis-field generator was on a software timer. If the Outsiders had not come across the ship, Alice would have wakened in about another five hundred years.”

  Alice had returned to the relax room for reasons not volunteered. She took in two sentences of Kirsten’s continuing speculation about the nav software before erupting. “Kirsten, you’re wrong! There was only one preprogrammed maneuver in navigation. Brennan had the singleship slingshot around the neutronium for a boost. And I mean close. I went through the ring that was Kobold proper.”

  Sigmund imagined the singleship falling, and another long-dormant synapse fired. The ship tumbled not through an artificial world, but down. . . a rabbit hole? But this Alice did not get to go to Wunderland.

  Thssthfok exhibited no sense of humor. Brennan, Sigmund was suddenly sure, still did.

  Alice was justifying even the one preprogrammed maneuver. piloting a singleship was at the core of the Belters mythos: how their far-flung domain was conquered. Whether or not a Belter did fly a singleship, all wished that they could.

  “It was a close approach, Kirsten, too fast for hands-on nav. I remember zipping past. A little later Kobold blinked off. After that I just pointed the bow at the sun. Not rocket science.”

  You never impugned a Belter’s self-sufficiency, especially with regard to piloting.

  Kirsten continued, oblivious. “I found two maneuvers. Two.”

  Kirsten was mild-mannered by nature. To see her argue was rare enough. To watch her nose-to-nose with a Belter giantess—that was extraordinary. But questioning Kirsten’s math and computer skills was like doubting a singleship pilot’s nav skills. You just didn’t do it.

  Even the Puppeteers had learned—at the cost of a world—not to tangle with Kirsten.

  She plowed ahead. “First I considered a second slingshot. Would that make sense, Alice?”

  “Hardly. I’d be in the inner solar system before there was anything to slingshot around.”

  “A moving reference point,” Sigmund interjected. That seemed odder than a maneuver Alice had not known was in the computer.

  Kirsten nodded. “Yes, that’s significant. Because if the moving reference point overtook the ship, the second course change could be an orbital insertion, not a flyby.”

  Alice glowered. “An orbital insertion around what? A moving spot in the vacuum? A snowball? I was in the middle of the cometary belt.”

  Only there had been something nearby: Kobold and its mass of neutronium. Yet Alice remembered leaving Kobold behind. Disappearing in her rearview mirror, so to speak.

  Time for a truce, Sigmund decided. “Let’s defer this conversation until Kirsten finishes analyzing the data.”

  Kirsten would not be deterred. “Alice, you say Kobold ‘blinked off.’ What exactly do you mean?”

  “A flash,” Alice said. “When the light faded, I looked back. Even at max mag, my telescope didn’t see anything.”

  This was like Julian Forward all over again! Not an Oort Cloud object falling down a black hole, but a doughnut-shaped fairyland swallowed by a big hunk of neutronium. Julian had begun with a tiny black hole, but its mass, by the time it became dangerous, was from the chunk of neutronium Forward had fed it.

  Sigmund remembered the black hole eating Forward Station. He, Carlos Wu, and Beowulf Shaeffer—there was a name Sigmund hadn’t thought about in ages—had been too tanjed close. The flash had been blinding.

  “Kobold was swallowed by its central neutronium mass,” Sigmund guessed. “That slingshot maneuver was to get you far away, Alice. Fast.”

  “Makes sense,” Alice said. “Roy and Brennan wanted the Paks’ attention drawn away from Sol system. That’s why they headed for Wunderland. Anyone spotting Kobold—intact, I mean—would have known it was an advanced artifact. It had to be destroyed.”

  “Something else was going on,” Sigmund said. Hundreds of starship pilots a year entered Sol system—wherever that was. A deep-radar ping cost nothing, and finding an overlooked stasis box would bring a fortune. Someone would have found a neutronium mass like Kobold’s long ago. “There isn’t an object like that around Sol, at least not in my lifetime.”

  The simplest explanation was that Twenty-three had taken the neutronium. The problem was, the Outsiders paid, usually handsomely, for resources. Sigmund remembered that they leased a moon of an outer planet in Sol system, and none of the details, of course. Had they stolen neutronium? It would be the first theft ever suspected of the Outsiders. So probably not.

  What if Julian had found the remains of Kobold and tossed it down his black hole? That wouldn’t explain
why no one had found the neutronium in the centuries before him. And if Kobold—in a black hole or any other way—remained in Sol system, then how in Finagle’s name did the singleship end up orbiting yet another neutronium mass?

  48

  Haven’s bridge had a round view port. A year ago, Baedeker would have taken no notice of the shape. A year ago, he had not spent months aboard a New Terran starship. Humans favored rectangular views, oddly indifferent to the sharp corners.

  He thought often about humans these days.

  This display held a spiral of overlapped round images, reminiscent of an insect’s compound eye. The much-repeated lump of rock and ice was unexceptional. Nor did any star nearby shine especially brightly. Without lengthy observations, he could not judge with any certainty which of three nearby suns could properly claim this proto-comet. But one thing about the utterly ordinary object was unusual: the cluster of black monoliths now clinging to it.

  The most recent in his series of scale-model prototype planetary drives.

  From the center of the holo out, each sphere showed the image of the proto-comet from a progressively more distant instrument cluster. His probes were powered, each maneuvering to maintain a stationary view despite the proto-comet’s tumbling. Telemetry far too small to read scrolled across the bottom of each inset holo, captured for later analysis.

  “An impressive setup,” Nessus sang. He had arrived, unannounced, to witness the upcoming experiment. His ship, Aegis, was toylike beside Haven’s #4 hull.

  “Thank you,” Baedeker answered. The courtesy was human, because it was mostly New Terrans with whom he dealt. His experiments could only be done safely far from the Fleet, where few Citizens dared to roam. Even with Nessus’ intervention, Baedeker had obtained only eight senior scientists—volunteers, they were not—from General Products Laboratories. The balance of Haven’s crew, another forty-two, was human. To obtain that assistance Nessus had had to involve the New Terran government. “Without your influence and assistance, Nessus, I could never have pulled this together.”