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  Ell watched a little longer. Satisfied that the course Allan had the waldo on would take it down to the bottom of the rimwall and out to the enormous, apparently flat expanses beyond, she said, “Let me know when you get down to the plains.”

  A little later, back up on the rimwall, the rocket that had delivered the waldo lifted slightly on a jet of hydrogen. It scooted to the edge, paused a second, then dropped off the outside of the wall, hurled away into space by the rotational force of the ringworld. At that point the rocket became inert, merely a small metallic object travelling through space at the nearly 21,000 miles per hour that the rotation of the ring had flung it.

  It, however, had dropped off the edge with precise timing so that that “fling” would send it on a ballistic path to pass near the presumed origination world of the ring builders. At that speed the trip would take about 211 earth days.

  Chapter One

  San Francisco—For the first time in history, the most heavily viewed videos online were uploaded by a scientific journal. This phenomenon has been driven by the immense popularity of the clips showing the “Teecees” going about their daily lives on the third planet of Tau Ceti…

  Querlak awakened about the same time as the rest of her clade, occasional pings on her connections sparking consciousness. For a brief beautiful moment she connected to both daughters, her mother, father, grandmother, both grandfathers, two ggms, three ggfs, and one gggf. The processing power afforded by the neural connections through their fifth dimensional quantum connections raised their consciousness and briefly produced a sweet TS (Transcendental State). Today’s TS was centered on Querlak. It felt sublime to have the TS centered on her rather than someone else. Everyone in this morning’s TS was her direct ancestor or descendant. Almost every morning, shortly after waking, Querlak participated in an awakening TS, but usually someone else was the focus or center. Querlak would most often be connected through one of her ancestors to that ancestor’s descendants—Querlak’s cousins—with that ancestor as the focus. It was always pleasurable just to be in the morning TS, but to have the waking period’s transcendentally heightened intelligence centered through herself instead of someone else, gave her a sublimely godlike sensation.

  Then the TS broke up, Querlak’s intelligence dropped precipitously as the processing power from her clade dropped away from her consciousness. For just a brief moment Querlak sensed the dullness of her ordinary life, then the ability to perceive her normal intelligence as so much lower than that of the TS was gone as well. With the dissatisfaction at her own lack of mental acuity absent, she looked out on the boring agenda of the day in front of her without dismay.

  Querlak relieved herself amongst the starchy tubers of the nearby field of delan and ate food from her travel pack. With a sigh she took to the air and resumed her inspection of the rimwall, flying slowly along the wall where it met the fields and carefully watching for any signs of cracking or fraying.

  ***

  Allan spoke in Ell’s ear. “Sigwald will land on the plains of the ringworld in five minutes.”

  Ell stood up from where she’d been meeting with the Tau Ceti team. “Sorry guys, I’ve got a time critical issue to deal with. Anything else exciting happening with the Teecees?”

  Piscova, the linguist, lifted her hand briefly for attention. “Goldy appears to have ascended to the very top of the social ladder in their tribe. She’s made two major contributions to their society: teaching them to hunt from the air with spears and how to build snares to leave on the forest trails at night. Even more importantly, she has now successfully sutured small wounds in the wings of two more tribe members, something that the tribe regards as almost magical. I have the impression that they regard her with something akin to reverence.”

  “That’s great to hear. I’ve come to like him quite a bit.” Harald Wheat said, perpetuating the group’s chronically good natured tiff over whether to refer to the androgynous aliens as “he,” “she” or “it.”

  Ell laughed, “OK, see you guys at next week’s meeting.”

  Walking to her office Ell looked up at her HUD and saw what looked for all the world like a farmer’s field rising up to meet Siwald. Once she’d shut the door Ell stepped astride the waldo saddle she’d had placed in her office. She put on some real waldo goggles. With this waldo control setup she could operate Sigwald on the ringworld as well as remotely running waldoes at ET Resource’s low earth orbit habitat or the asteroid mine. More importantly, this waldo controller had a narrow bicycle type seat and clips for her shoes so she could move Sigwald’s legs by moving her own legs.

  Ell gazed around in astonishment at what looked like endless square fields of some kind of crop. If they weren’t crops, somehow the enormous flat plain of at least this part of the ring appeared to be covered with only one kind of plant. Perhaps they all just looked the same from a distance?

  Ell guided Sigwald down to land at a road intersection, or at least where what looked like roads joined. “Ring circling” roads ran parallel to the upcurving rimwall. More of them could be seen running in parallel farther and farther out onto the ring floor until they disappeared in the hazy distance. Other “ring crossing” roads, perpendicular to the rimwall, ran out across the floor of the ring toward its center. Perhaps they went all the way across to the other rimwall? The perpendicular roads divided the fields of plants into huge squares. Some of the roads in the distance had what looked like huge fences on them. Fences of dark columns or posts with gaps between them. Windbreaks maybe?

  Once he’d—Ell considered “Sigwald” to be a male-sounding name, so thought of the waldo as a boy—landed on the dark gray surface of the road, Ell walked him over to the edge to look at the plants. The road’s surface was higher than the field and curved down to either side from its crown so that rain, if such fell, would wash it clean. A small section rimward of the field of plants was filled with dark brown material. Compost? In the field the plants themselves were stubby, thick stemmed affairs with just a few very large, chlorophyll green leaves in a bunch at the top. They looked a little like short palms. The ground underneath the plants lay mostly in darkness because the leaves appeared to catch almost all the light that fell on them.

  Sigwald reported the air pressure to be 3.45 atmospheres. Temperature was 36o C or about 97o F. Ell looked around. She saw no evidence of farmers. Despite having an unobstructed view over a tremendous distance she didn’t even see any signs of habitation. The place felt deserted, though she didn’t think that could be possible. The ring arced up and away into a blue sky on either side. The fields stretched away into a hazy distance interrupted only by the perpendicular roads. It gave the appearance of a checkerboard on which all the squares were the same color of green. Slicing obliquely across the fields and approaching rapidly was the shadow of “ring night.”

  Ell reached out and pulled up a plant to examine it. The dense root system dripped water with what looked like a few bits of rotting vegetable matter intermingled. It didn’t have the granular structure of soil. Looking back down where it came from showed some kind of black perforated structure with pebbly material on it. Hydroponics? She pulled the plant up onto the road and spread it out. The broad leaves pulled off fairly easily suggesting that they were seldom exposed to heavy weather or winds. The bottom of the mostly vertical stem was very thick and, when she bent it, it broke open, pouring a thick white liquid out onto the black road. A small sample of leaf inserted in Sigwald’s test kit came out positive for DNA, just like the specimens from Tau Ceti had.

  As the rapid rotation of the ringworld turned his part of the ring so that it faced away from the sun, shadow swept over Sigwald. With the ringworld rotating its full 360 degrees every 3.03 hours the “days” and “nights” on the inside of the ring were only about an hour and a half each. The sky quickly faded from blue to black and now Ell could see the other side of the brightly lit ring arching overhead. Approximately 5,000 kilometers wide and only 20,000 kilometers away, to the eye th
e ring had a visual width of about fourteen degrees, and of course it arced all the way across the sky. The visual diameter of earth’s moon is only a half a degree, so in comparison to that, the ring appeared enormous. It lit the dark side of the ring where Sigwald stood far more brightly than the full moon lit the night back on earth. The ring arching overhead appeared to be an unremitting green except for a blue strip down the middle.

  Ell turned Sigwald to look at the area right around him. The lighting seemed less like evening twilight and more like a cloudy day.

  Ell gently tossed the majority of the wrecked plant back down onto the field and turned Sigwald back onto the dark surface of the intersection. She chose the ring crossing road that travelled perpendicularly away from the rimwall and out across the floor of the ring toward the middle. She activated the jets under Sigwald’s feet and he began sliding on “ground effect” down the road toward the middle of the broad ring’s inner surface. Allan could control Sigwald for a simple drive down the road out into the ring, so Ell unharnessed from the waldo controller and headed back out into the D5R research area.

  ***

  As she flew along, Querlak mechanically swept her eye up and down from the upper rimwall to the edge of the fields. She had begun looking forward to her next break to eat. Suddenly her eye caught an anomaly at the corner of a field next to the rimwall. Querlak broke flight and began to coast down toward what she’d seen. Concerned about what might have happened but secretly relieved to have a break in her routine inspection flight she sharpened her focus on the smear at the intersection of the service roads. What had first caught her eye was the brilliant contrast of some white material on the black surface of the road. But as she neared she could see that there was some green material too. Landing, she saw that one of the delan plants had been pulled up onto the road and broken apart! Most of the plant had been tossed back down onto the field but the white sap that had leaked out of its broken body was what had sharply stained the road to first catch Querlak’s attention.

  Who would do that? Querlak didn’t consider the possibility that an animal might have done it because there were no animals on the ringworld, other than the farmers themselves. Querlak felt confused and uncertain, so she reached out for a working TS, calling on her clade for help. Moments later her daughter, father, gf, gm, ggm and ggf had lent her processing power and Querlak looked about with markedly increased clarity and intelligence.

  Querlak touched the sap, noting that it had congealed on the surface and trapped a light coating of dust. This happened in the last rotation or two, she thought. As she looked about she noticed that it must have been a few days since the last rain at this location because there was dust on the road and leaves. Not a large amount, but much more than had fallen on the delan sap. At the road intersection though, the dust had been diffusely blown away. Perhaps by Querlak’s own wing beats on landing? She stared about uncertainly. Perhaps by something else? It seemed like more dust was gone than her own luffing as she landed should have produced but she couldn’t be sure.

  Looking around her eye widened, there is actually only a narrow strip where the dust is blown off the road! What could have done that! The narrow path in the dust trailed off down the ring-crossing road toward the central sea.

  Querlak stepped down into the field to examine the damaged delan plant. She could see the disruption in the bedding surface and pellets where it had been pulled up. It had been the nearest plant to the road intersection. Several leaves had been pulled off the plant and its fat stem broken to let the nutritious white sap spill onto the road above.

  Even with the increased mental acuity from the TS, Querlak could not imagine why anyone would have damaged the plant. Perhaps someone had been rendered isol and no one had recognized it?

  Anyone whose immediate ancestors and descendants all died could be left isol, completely unbound from the network of their clade. Almost all such persons soon went insane. If the clade they had been isolated from cared deeply about the isol, the clade would try to find someone from within their own clade yet genetically unrelated to the isol who might be willing to mate with the isolated one. Such mercy matings were permitted despite the current extreme restrictions on reproduction. The clade’s hope would be that a child would come quickly enough that the fetus would bind the isol back into the original clade. When sigmas recognized that someone had been cut off and they didn’t have a clade member that was willing to mate with them, the sigmas at least took such an isol to a reserved area to live with other isols. There the hope was that they would mate with another isol and have a child quickly enough to at least be bound into a group of three. A clade of three was far from ideal but it would often restore their sanity. With a few more children they would have a large enough clade to return to productive society. Unfortunately, many isols died before they produced a fetus that could bind them, even if someone in their clade did care enough to mate with them and try to bind them back to their home clade.

  The dreadful fear of becoming an isol acted as a powerful driver of procreation for the sigmas. They considered cladeless isolation to be a fate much worse than death.

  Thus, sigmas didn’t just have the evolutionary need to reproduce that drove other animals. Their intelligence and clade binding had also given them an overwhelming desire to be bound to the others in their clade through many children, thus minimizing their chances of becoming a desolate isol.

  This desire had driven the massive overpopulation of their home planet.

  Querlak looked around a little more without finding any other clues to what had happened. For a minute the TS widely expanded itself by adding more members to see if even more intelligence could elucidate the event, but without success. Whatever had torn up the plant and left the trail was a mystery, whether it was a sigma, a device, or a natural phenomenon. However, the high intelligence TS concluded that understanding what had happened was important enough to be worth sending Querlak after it. With a mental shrug Querlak rose into the air and began to follow the strange trail blown from the dust on the ring crossing road. As that task required little cleverness, the TS disbanded as she flew along the roadway. The loss of the TS again left Querlak with a vague pang of regret over her loss of intellect.

  ***

  Ell’s AI Allan said, “Sigwald has encountered fields with a different crop.”

  Ell glanced up at her HUD and saw that the fields were indeed a lighter green. The plants looked like large grass, reminding her of grain crops on earth. Again there was a trough of rotting matter just rimward of the field. “Let’s stop and look at it.” Ell’s car was nearly to the little house Shan shared with Ryan. There she wouldn’t have access to a waldo controller for direct control of Sigwald. She could go back to her house or to D5R but didn’t want to.

  Allan let Sigwald coast to a stop and shut off the compressed air jets on the bottom of his feet. The hovercraft effect of the jets gone, Sigwald’s feet settled to the roadway.

  Ell asked Allan to have Sigwald turn around, scanning the surroundings. Back a ways she could see the darker green plants Sigwald had first encountered. Distantly she noticed that the jets on Sigwald’s feet had left a trail in the dust on the road. For a moment she wondered if she should break the trail by having Sigwald fly higher for a while. Then she decided that that would be pointless. After all, she wanted to meet the inhabitants. It would be counterproductive to hide Sigwald’s presence.

  Ell asked Allan to have Sigwald reach out and pull the top of one of the plants toward himself. A tufted brown section at the top had multiple pods which, when crushed, exuded a crumbly brown paste. Without direct control over the waldo, every step of this took time as Ell verbally directed Sigwald through Allan. Then it required even more time for Ell to give instructions correcting clumsy moves and misunderstandings about what she had intended for Sigwald to do. AIs were great at moving things like cars and planes from one mapped GPS destination to another. Moving the hand on a waldo to accomplish a new 3D task rem
ained far more difficult. An AI could repeat a move that had been done once by a human and do it perfectly over and over. But figuring out how to reach out and grab something and move it in a specific manner when told to, a simple task for the human brain, remained difficult for an AI.

  The leaves of this new type of plant began a little below the fruiting tuft. They seemed a little wider than typical wheat or oat leaves but narrower than corn leaves. Ell was about to have Sigwald try to pull a plant up and look at the roots when the door of her car opened and Shan leaned down, “Is something wrong?”

  Ell smiled up at him. He looked concerned. She held up a finger to get him to wait a second. To Allan she said, “Put a specimen in the DNA assay kit, then keep going the same direction you were going before.” She stepped up out of the car and put her arms around Shan’s neck, “Hey there Mr. Fiancé.”

  “Hey there yourself. I saw your car pull up and thought you’d be right in to give me the affection I need… Ten minutes later you’re still sitting out here in your car!” He frowned, “Something happening on Tau Ceti?”

  Ell blinked and tilted her head questioningly, wondering why he was asking about Tau Ceti.

  “You know, ‘cause you’re ‘getting DNA specimens’ and ‘going the same direction.’”

  “Oh… yeah.” Ell said, feeling guilty for letting him continue thinking that she’d been talking about Tau Ceti. She didn’t want to keep secrets from Shan, but so far she hadn’t told anyone but Emma about the Sigma Draconis ringworld. She kind of regretted telling Emma and had no idea what she’d do when people began demanding to know what she’d found on worlds around other stars. On the other hand, she trusted Shan with her life and could use someone to talk to about the ringworld and its implications. She grinned and leaned into him as they walked up the brick path to his little house. “Did you make me a nice dinner?”