by Larry Niven
“A Slaver stasis field?” he said. Despite himself, awe showed in his voice. One such field had been discovered on Earth, then lost, one more on a human-explored world. Three centuries of study had found no slightest clue concerning their operating principles; they were as incomprehensible as a molecular-distortion battery would have been to Thomas Edison. Monkey-see monkey-do copies had been made, each taking more time and expense than the Gibraltar, and so far exactly two had functioned. One was supposedly guarding UNSN headquarters, wherever that was.
“Uh-mmm, give the captain a big cigar, right the first time.”
Jonah shuddered, remembering the flatlander’s smoke. “No, thanks.”
“Too right, Captain. Just a figure of speech.”
“Call me Jonah. We’re going to be cramped enough on this trip without poking rank-elbows in each other’s ribs.”
“Jonah. The Yamamoto skims through the system, throwing rocks.” At .90 of c, missiles needed no warheads. The kinetic energies involved made the impacts as destructive as antimatter. “We go in as an offcourse rock. Course corrections, then on with the stasis field, go ballistic, use the outer layer of the sun for braking down to orbital speeds.”
Nothing outside its surface could affect the contents of a Slaver field; let the path of the Catskinner stray too far inward and they would spend the rest of the lifespan of the universe at the center of Alpha Centauri’s sun, in a single instant of frozen time. For that matter, the stasis field would probably survive the re-contraction of the primal monobloc and its explosion into a new cosmic cycle…He forced his mind away from the prospect.
“And we’re putting in a Class-VII computer system.”
Jonah raised a brow. Class-VII systems were consciousness-level; they also went irredeemably insane sometime between six months and a year after activation, as did any artificial entity complex enough to be aware of being aware.
“Our…mission won’t take any longer than that, and it’s worth it.” A shrug. “Look, why don’t we hit a cafeteria and talk some more. Really talk, you’re going to have briefings running out of every orifice before long, but that isn’t the same.”
Jonah sighed, and stopped thinking of ways out of the role for which he had been “volunteered.” This was too big to be dodged, far and away too big. Two stasis fields in the whole Sol system; one guarding United Nations Space Navy HQ, the other on his ship. His ship, a Dart-Commander like ten thousand or so others, until this week. How many Class-VII computers? Nobody built consciousness-level systems anymore, except occasionally for research; it simply wasn’t cost-effective. Build them much more intelligent than humans and they went non-comp almost at once; a human-level machine gave you a sentient with a six-month lifespan that could do arithmetic in its head. Ordinary computers could do the math, and for thinking people were much cheaper. It was a dead-end technology, like direct interfacing between human neural systems and computers. And they had revived it, for a special purpose mission.
“Shit,” Jonah mumbled, as they came to a lock and reoriented themselves feet-down. There was a gravity warning strobing beside it; they pushed through the air-screen curtain and into the dragging acceleration of a one-G field. The crewfolk about them were mostly flatlander now, relaxed in the murderous weight that crushed their frames lifelong.
“Naacht wh’r?” Ingrid asked. In Wunderlander, but the Sol-Belter did not have to know that bastard offspring of Danish and Plattdeutsch to sense the meaning.
“I just realized…hell, I just realized how important this must all be. If the high command were willing to put that much effort into this, willing to sacrifice half of our most precious military asset, throw in a computer that costs more than this base complete with crew…then they must have put at least equal effort into searching for just the right pilot. There’s simply no point in trying to get out of it. Tanj. I need a drink.”
“Take your grass-eater stink out of my air!” Chuut-Riit shrieked. He was standing, looking twice his size as his orange-red pelt bottled out, teeth exposed in what an uninformed human might have mistaken for a grin, naked pink tail lashing. The reference to smell was purely metaphorical, since the conversation was ’cast. Which was as well, he was pouring aggression-pheromones into the air at a rate that would have made a roomful of adult male kzin nervous to the point of lost control.
The holo images on the wall before him laid themselves belly-down on the decking of their ship and crinkled their ears, their fur lying flat in propitiation.
“Leave the recordings and flee, devourers of your own kittens!” screamed the kzinti governor of the Alpha Centauri system. The Hero’s Tongue is remarkably rich in expressive insults. “Roll in your own shit and mate with sthondats!” The wall blanked, and a light blinked in one corner as the data was packed through the link into his private files.
Chuut-Riit’s fur smoothed as he strode around the great chamber. It stood open to the sky, beneath a near-invisible dome that kept the scant rain of this area off the kudlotlin-hide rugs. They were priceless imports from the home world; the stuffed matched pair of Chunquen on a granite pedestal were souvenirs acquired during the pacification of that world. He looked at them, soothing his eyes with the memory-taste of a successful hunt, at other mementos. Wild smells drifted in over thin walls that were crystal-enclosed sandwiches of circuitry; in the distance something squalled hungrily. The palace-preserve-fortress of a planetary governor, governor of the richest world to be conquered by kzin in living memory. Richest in wealth, richest in honor…if the next attack on the human homeworld was something more than a fifth disaster.
“Secretariat,” he rasped. The wall lit.
A human looked from a desk, stood and came to attention. “Henrietta,” the kzin began, “hold my calls for the rest of the day. I’ve just gotten the final download on the Fourth Fleet fiasco, and I’m a little upset. Run it against my projections, will you?” Most of the worst-case scenarios he had run were quite close to the actual results; that did not make it much easier to bear.
“Yes, Chuut-Riit,” he said—No, God devour it, she, I’ve got to start remembering human females are sentient. At least he could tell them apart without smelling them, now. Even distinguish between individuals of the same subspecies. There are so many types of them!
“I don’t think you’ll find major discrepancies.”
“That bad?” the human said.
The expression was a closed curve of the lips; the locals had learned that baring their teeth at a kzin was not a good idea. Smile, Chuut-Riit reminded himself. Betokening amusement, or friendliness, or submission. Which is it feeling? Born after the Conquest Fleet arrived here. Reared from a cub in the governor’s palace, superbly efficient…but what does it think inside that ugly little head?
“Worse, the——”—he lapsed into the Hero’s Tongue, since no human language was sufficient for what he felt about the Fourth Fleet’s hapless Kfraksha-Admiral—“couldn’t apply the strategy properly in circumstances beyond the calculated range of probable response.”
It was impossible to set out too detailed a plan of campaign, when communication took over four years. His fur began to bristle again, and he controlled his reaction with a monumental effort of will. I need to fight something, he thought.
“Screen out all calls for the next sixteen hours, unless they’re Code VI or above.” A thought prompted at him. “Oh, It’s your offspring’s naming-day next week, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Chuut-Riit.” Henrietta had once told him that among pre-Conquest humans it had been a mark of deference to refer to a superior by title, and of familiarity to use names. His tail twitched. Extraordinary. Of course, humans all had names, without having to earn them. In a sense, they’re assigned names as we are rank titles, he thought.
“Well, I’ll drop by at the celebration for an hour or so and bring one of my cubs.” That would be safe enough if closely supervised; most intelligent species had long infancies.
“We are honored, Chuut-Riit!
” The human bowed, and the kzin waved a hand to break contact.
“Valuable,” he muttered to himself, rising and pacing once more. Humans were the most valuable subject-species the kzin had yet acquired. Or partially acquired, he reminded himself. Most kzin nobles on Wunderland had large numbers of human servants and technicians about their estates, but few had gone as far as he in using their administrative talents.
“Fools,” he said in the same undertone; his kzin peers knew his opinion of them, but it was still inadvisable to get into the habit of saying it aloud. “I am surrounded by fools.” Humans fell into groups naturally, they thought organization. The remote ancestors of Kzin had hunted in small packs; the prehumans in much larger ones. Stupidity to deny the evidence of senses and logic, he thought with contempt. These hairless monkeys have talents we lack.
Most refused to admit that, as though it somehow diminished the Hero to grant a servant could do what the master could not. Idiocy. Chuut-Riit yawned, a pink, red, and white expanse of ridged palate, tongue, and fangs, his species’s equivalent of a dismissive shrug. Is it beneath the Hero to admit that a sword extends his claws, or a computer his mind? With human patience and organizational talent at the service of the Heroes, there was nothing that they could not accomplish! Even monkey inquisitiveness was a trait not without merit, irritating though it could be.
He pulled his mind away from vistas of endless victory, a hunt ranging over whole spiral arms; that was a familiar vision, one that had driven him to intrigue and duel for this position. To use a tool effectively, you had to know its balance and heft, its strengths and weaknesses. Humans were more gregarious than kzin, more ready to identify with a leader-figure; but to elicit such cooperation, you had to know the symbol-systems that held power over them. I must wear the mask they can see. Besides which, their young are…what is their word? Cute. I will select the cub carefully, one just weaned, and stuff it full of meat first. That will be safest.
Chuut-Riit intended to take his offspring, the best of them, with him to Earth, after the conquest. Early exposure to humans would give them an intuitive grasp of the animals that he could only simulate through careful study. With a fully domesticated human species at their disposal, his sons’ sons’ sons could even aspire to…no, unthinkable. And not necessary to think of it; that was generations away.
Besides that, it would take a great deal of time to tame the humans properly. Useful already, but far too wild, too undependable, too varied. A millennium of culling might be necessary before they were fully shaped to the purpose.
✩ ✩ ✩
“…didn’t just bull in,” Lieutenant Raines was saying, as she followed the third aquavit with a beer chaser. Jonah sipped more cautiously at his, thinking that the asymmetry of nearly pure alcohol and lager was typically Wunderlander. “Only it wasn’t caution—the pussies just didn’t want to mess the place up and weren’t expecting much resistance. Rightly so.”
Jonah restrained himself from patting her hand as she scowled into her beer. It was dim in their nook, and the gravity was Wunderland-standard, .61 Earth. The initial refugees from the Alpha Centauri system had been mostly planetsiders, and from the dominant Danish-Dutch-German-Balt ethnic group. They had grown even more clannish in the generation since, which showed in the tall ceramic steins along the walls, plastic wainscoting that made a valiant attempt to imitate fumed oak, and a human bartender in wooden shoes, lederhosen, and a beard clipped closer on one side than the other.
The drinks slipped up out of the center of the table, of course.
“That was, teufel, three years ago, my time. We’d had some warning, of course, once the UN started masering what the crew of the Angel’s Pencil found on the wreckage of that kzin ship. Plenty of singleships, and any reaction drive’s a weapon; couple of big boost-lasers. But”—a shrug—“you know how it was back then.”
“Before my time, Lieutenant,” Jonah said, then cursed himself as he saw her wince. Raines had been born nearly three quarters of a century ago, even if her private duration included only two and a half decades of it.
“Ingrid, if you’re going to be Jonah instead of Captain Matthieson. Time—I keep forgetting, my head remembers but my gut forgets…Well, we just weren’t set up to think in terms of war, that was ancient history. We held them off for nearly six months, though. Long enough to refit the three slowships in orbit and give them emergency boost; I think the pussies didn’t catch up and blast us simply because they didn’t give a damn. They couldn’t decelerate us and get the ships back…arrogant sons of…” Another of those broad urchin grins. “Well, bitches isn’t quite appropriate, is it?”
Jonah laughed outright. “You were in Munchen when the kzin arrived?”
“No, I’d been studying at the Scholarium there, software design philosophy, but I was on sabbatical in Vallburg with two friends of mine, working out some, ah, personal problems.”
The bartender with the unevenly forked beard was nearly as attenuated as a Belter, but he had the disturbingly mobile ears of a pure-bred Wunderland herrenmann, and they were pricked forward. Alpha Centauri’s only habitable planet has a thin atmosphere; the original settlers have adapted, and keen hearing is common among them. Jonah smiled at the man and stabbed a finger for a privacy screen. It flickered into the air across the outlet of the booth, and the refugee saloonkeeper went back to polishing a mug.
“That’d be, hmmm, Claude Montferrat-Palme and Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann?”
Raines nodded, moodily drawing a design on the tabletop with a forefinger dipped in the dark beer. “Yes…teufel, they’re both of them in their fifties now, getting on for middle-aged.” A sigh. “Look…Harold’s a—hmmm, hard to explain to a Sol-Belter, or even someone from the Serpent Swarm who hasn’t spent a lot of time dirtside. His father was a Herrenmann, one of the Nineteen Families, senior line. His mother wasn’t married to him.”
“Oh,” Jonah said, racking his memory. History had never been an interest of his, and his generation had been brought up to the War, anyway. “Problems with wills and inheritances and suchlike?”
“You know what a bastard is?”
“Sure. Someone you don’t like, such as for example that flatlander bastard who assigned me to this.” He raised his stein in salute. “Though I’m fast becoming resigned to it, Ingrid.”
She half-smiled in absent-minded acknowledgment, her mind 4.3 light-years and four decades away. “It means he got an expensive education, a nice little nest-egg settled on him…and that he’d never, never be allowed past the front door of the Yarthkin-Schotmanns’ family schloss. Lucky to be allowed to use the name. An embarrassment.”
“Might eat at a man,” Jonah said.
“Like a little kzin in the guts. Especially when he grew enough to realize why his father only came for occasional visits; and then that his half-siblings didn’t have half his brains or drive and didn’t need them either. It drove him, he had to do everything twice as fast and twice as good, take crazy risks…made him a bit of a bastard in the Sol sense of the word too, spines like a pincodillo, sense of humor that could flay a gruntfish.”
“And Montferrat-Palme?”
“Claude? Now, he was Herrenmann all through; younger son of a younger son, poor as an Amish dirt-farmer, and…” A laugh. “You had to meet Claude to understand him. I think he got serious about me mostly because I kept turning him down—it was a new experience and drove him crazy. And Harold he halfway liked and halfway enjoyed needling…”
✩ ✩ ✩
Municipal Director of Internal Affairs Claude Montferrat-Palme adjusted his cape and looked up at the luminous letters that floated disembodied ten centimeters from the smooth brown brick of the building in front of him.
HAROLD’S TERRAN BAR, it read. A WORLD ON ITS OWN. Below, in smaller letters: HUMANS ONLY.
Ah, Harold, he thought. Always the one for a piece of useless melodrama. As if kzin would be likely to frequent this section of Old Munchen, or wish to enter a human entertain
ment spot if they did, or as if they could be stopped if by some fluke of probability they did end up down here.
His escort stirred, looking around nervously. The Karl-Jorge Avenue was dark, most of its glowstrips long ago stolen or simply spray-painted in the random vandalism that breeds in lives fueled by purposeless anger. It was fairly clean, because the kzin insisted on that, and the four-story brick buildings were solid enough, because the early settlers had built well. Brick and concrete and cobbled streets glimmered faintly, still damp from the afternoon’s rain; loud wailing music echoed from open windows, and there would have been groups of idle-looking youths loitering on the front steps of the tenements, if the car had not had Munchen Polezi plates.
Baha’i, he thought, mentally snapping his fingers. He was tall, even for a Herrenmann, with one side of his face cleanshaven and the other a close-trimmed brown beard cut to a foppish point; the plain blue uniform and circular brimmed cap of the city police emphasized the deep-chested greyhound build. This was a Baha’i neighborhood.
“You may go,” he said to the guards. “I will call for the car.”
“Sir,” the sergeant said, the guide-cone of her stunner waving about uncertainly. Helmet and nightsight goggles made her eyes unreadable. “’Tis iz a rough district.”
“I am aware of that, Sergeant. Also that Harold’s place is a known underworld hangout. Assignment to my headquarters squad is a promotion; please do not assume that it entitles you to doubt my judgment.” Or you may find yourself back walking a beat, without such opportunities for income-enhancement, went unspoken between them. He ignored her salute and walked up the two low stairs.
The door recognized him, read retinas and encephalograph patterns, slid open. The coal-black doorman was as tall as the police officer and twice as broad, with highly-illegal impact armor underneath the white coat and bow tie of Harold’s Terran Bar. The impassive smoky eyes above the ritually scarred cheeks gave him a polite once-over, an equally polite and empty bow.