The Smoke Ring

by Larry Niven

(part 2 of the Intregal Trees)

Prologue

Discipline

THE PLANET BELOW HIM WAS HIDDEN TO ALL OF SHARLS'S senses save for the Neutrino Screen, the Neudar. What had been a gas giant planet a billion years ago was still a world two and a half times the size of the Earth: an egg of rock and nickel-iron hidden in world-sized storms. The storms spread out into a cloudy ring occupying the entirety of Goldblatt's World's orbit around the neutron star.

Sharls watched storms spin outward from the gas giant. Streams of fog and cloud and dust ran slow near the Smoke Ring's outer rim, faster at the Smoke Ring median, faster yet as they neared Levoy's Star; and everywhere there were flattened whorls of hurricane. The gravity gradient was savage this near the ancient neutron star. The innermost limits of the Smoke Ring circled Levoy's Star every two hours.

The Smoke Ring was tinged with green-it had its own billion-year-old ecology-and somewhere in that cloud were men.

The temptation to go to them was a constant low-level irritant.

When moving between stars. Discipline burned the near-infinite hydrogen of interstellar space; but Discipline had been at rest for a long time now, and onboard fuel was limited. Refueling could not have progressed far when the mutiny came. Sharls's supply of deuterium-tritium mix was finite. He had no way of knowing how long he must wait for the children of Discipline's crew to rediscover civilization, to build their own spacecraft, to come to him. He was always short of power. The solar collectors on his two remaining CARMs didn't give him much.

Sharls ignored the stars, most of the time. He watched the Smoke Ring. When the boredom became too much for him, he edited it from his memory. Boredom was a recurring surprise.

Five hundred and thirty-two Earth years was one hundred and ninety-two orbits of Levoy's Star round its companion star. But the natives of the Smoke Ring measured years from the passings of the neutron star (Levoy's Star, "Voy") across the face of the yellow dwarf (T3, "Sun"); so a Smoke Ring "year" was 1.384 Earth years. Sharls had been waiting in the L2 point behind Goldblatt's World for three hundred and eighty-four Smoke Ring years.

Best to sit it out in a stable orbit, and watch, and wait for men to develop civilization. Best to edit the memory of boredom . . .

Discipline's computer/autopilot stored its information as a human brain did, or a hologram, though Sharls could feel differences. Memories from his time aboard Discipline were sharp and vivid. Those he had edited were gone completely. But memories from his time as a man, transferred long ago from a human brain now long dead, were blurred, hard to retrieve.

So: it wasn't like a relay clicking over.