Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Niven Page B

guessed, transmitted through the hull on visible light.
    He did what seemed best to protect his people and his home.
Sigmund found it much easier to dish out that line to Eric than to accept Baedeker’s deeds himself.
    Sigmund continued his aimless pacing, still seeking reassurance in the solidity of the hull. Seeking in vain. No material could protect a ship in hyperdrive from the hungry maw of a gravitational singularity.
    He looped back to the bridge to peek again at the mass pointer. Not that there could have been—he had checked just minutes ago—but the instrument revealed nothing massive nearby. With a sigh, he changed course to settle in the relax room. “Jeeves,” he called.
    â€œHere, sir,” the familiar voice answered. Most New Terran ships carried a copy of Jeeves. Puppeteers, predictably, suppressed AI development—why build a potential rival?—making Jeeves, centuries old though he was, more advanced than anything else available.
    A snake-crowned image popped into Sigmund’s mind. Medusa, his onetime AIde. Medusa was largely self-directed.
She
would have finished mining Jeeves’s archives long ago, correlated everything with everything, calculated probable relations, inferred much—
    While Jeeves had to be led by the virtual hand. Sigmund said, “At home I’ve been looking at references to Earth’s moon.”
    â€œHow may I help?”
    Sigmund had been making his way through the music library, but in the faux-night of the ship’s third shift, music seemed antisocial. He didn’t feel like reading lyrics. What, then? “Literature with moon references. Most recent publication first.”
    Jeeves offered things that were diverting or amusing or aggravating or depressing, but nothing useful. Nothing scientific, of course, not even in the fictional sense. All such had been erased. Eventually there was
Goodnight Moon
, a charming little bedtime story which Athena would surely enjoy, and
A Moon for the Misbegotten
, which Sigmund couldn’t imagine anyone enjoying. Broadening the search parameters to works with “moon” anywhere within the text gave a ridiculously long list. Sigmund had tried that before.
    He synthed a bulb of hot milk, opting to read simply for relaxation. A few titles on the list of books mentioning the moon looked diverting.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
, he decided. Connecticut sounded familiar, somewhere near a place he had once worked, he thought. Or maybe it was only that Mark Twain could be droll, or that King Arthur, like Jeeves, was English. Sigmund thought he might have seen a 3-V adaptation as a boy.
    He straightened in his chair at the first mention of an eclipse. A solar eclipse. Something stirred in the back of his mind. . . .
    â€œMay I join you?”
    Sigmund looked up. “Hi, Kirsten. Of course, I’ll be glad for the company. I thought you were in for the night shift.”
    â€œCouldn’t sleep.” She covered a yawn. “Appearances to the contrary. What about you?”
    â€œSame.” He gestured at the text projected from his comm. “Maybe a bit of reading and some warm milk will do the trick.”
    She got herself tea before joining him at the table. “What do you think the Gw’oth saw?”
    The four of them had gone round and round on that. The obvious answer, assuming the Gw’oth had seen
anything
and this wasn’t a trap, was the Fleet.
Explorer
had found the Gw’oth precisely because their transmissions came from along the flight path of the Puppeteer worlds. That flight path had been changed, but the divergence was not yet significant.
    The worrisome answer was that the Gw’oth had detected some kind of Puppeteer preemptive strike. If so,
Don Quixote
would almost certainly arrive too late to intervene.
    â€œGremlins,” Sigmund finally answered, and then had to explain what gremlins were.
Gremlin
was as good