by Larry Niven
“Why did you come back?” he whispered. “Why did you come back, to torment us here in hell?”
✩ ✩ ✩
“Right, now download,” Jonah said. The interfacer bleeped quietly and opened to extrude the biochip.
“Well, this ought to be useful, if we can get the information back,” Ingrid said dully, handing him the piece of curved transparent quasi-tissue.
He unwrapped his hand gingerly and slid the fingernail home, into the implanted flexible gasket beneath the cuticle. “Provided we can get ourselves, this or a datalink to the Catskinner,” he said, wincing slightly. Useful was an understatement; intelligence-gathering was not the primary job for which they had been tasked, but this was priceless load. The complete specs on the most important infosystem on Wunderland, and strategic sampling of the data in its banks. Ships, deployments, capacities. Kzin psychology and history and politics, command-profiles, strategic planning and kriegspiel played by the pussy General Staff for decades. All the back doors, from the human systems, then, through them, into the kzin system. UN Naval Intelligence would willingly sacrifice half a fleet for this…
“That’s it, then,” Jonah said. “It’s not what we came for, but it can make a difference. And there—”
Ingrid was not listening. “Hold on! Look!”
“Eh?”
“An alert subroutine! Gottdamn, that is an alert! Murphy, it’s about us, those are our cover-idents it’s broadcasting. We’re blown.”
“Block it, quick.” They worked in silence for a moment. Jonah scrubbed a hand across his face. “That’ll hold it for a half-hour.”
“Never make it back to Munchen before the next call gets through,” she said. “Not without putting up a holosign that this system’s been subverted down to the config.”
“We don’t have to,” Jonah said. He squeezed eyes shut, pressed his fingers to his forehead. “Finagle, why now…? The aircar shuttle. Computer,” he continued. “Is the civilian system still online? Slaved to the core-system here?”
“Affirmative, to both.”
“That’s it, then. We just get on the ten-minute flight. Right. Key the internal link to that one. Code, full-wipe after execution, purge. Ingrid, let’s go.”
✩ ✩ ✩
“Is the system compromised?” Chuut-Riit asked, looking around the central control room of his estate. His nostrils flared: yes, the scent of two of the monkeys, a male and…He snuffled further. Yes, the female was bearing. Grimly, he filed the smell away, for possible future reference. It was unlikely that he would ever encounter either of them in person, but one could hope.
One of the kzin technicians was so involved with following the symbols scrolling by on the walls that he swept his hand behind him with claws extended in an exasperated protest at being interrupted. The governor bristled and then relaxed; it helped that he came from the hunt, had killed and fed well, mated and washed his glands and tissues clear of hormones, freeing the reasoning brain. Even more that he had spent the most of his lifespan cooling a temper that had originally been hasty even by kzin standards. He controlled breath and motion as the Conservors had taught him, the desire to lash his tail and pace. It ran through him that perhaps it was his temper that had set him on the road to mastery, that never-to-be-forgotten moment in the nursery so many years ago: the realization that his rage could kill, and in time would kill him as dead as the sibling beneath his claws.
The guards behind him had snarled at the infotech’s insolence, a low subliminal rumbling and the dry-spicy scent of anger. An expressive ripple of Chuut-Riit’s fur, ears, tail quieted them.
“These specialists are all mad,” he whispered aside. “One must humor them, like a cub that bites your ears.” They were sorry specimens, in truth: one scrubby and undersized, with knots in his fur, the other a giant but clumsy, slow, actually fat. Any Hero seeing them would know their brilliance, since such disgusting examples of bad inheritance would only be kept alive for the most pressing of needs.
The governor schooled himself to wait, shifting only enough to keep his heated muscles from stiffening. The big technician mumbled to himself, occasionally taking out a brick of dull-red dried meat from his equipment apron and stuffing it into his mouth. Chuut-Riit caught a whiff of it and gagged, as much at the thought of someone eating infantry rations for pleasure as at the well-remembered smell. The other one muttered as well, but he chewed on the ends of his claws. Those on his right hand were actually frayed at the tips, useless for anything but scratching its doubtless completely ungroomed and verminous pelt.
“Is the system compromised?” Chuut-Riit said again, patiently. Infosystems specialists were as bad as telepaths.
“Hrrwweo?” muttered the small one, blinking back to a consciousness somewhat more in congruence with the others’. “Well, we couldn’t know that, could we?—Chuut-Riit,” he added hastily, as he noticed the governor’s expression and scent.
“What—do—you—mean?” he said.
“Well, Chuut-Riit, a successful clandestine insertion is undetectable by definition, hrrrrr? We’re pretty sure we’ve found their tracks. Computer, isolate-alpha, linear schematic, level three.” A complex webbing sprang up all around the room, blue lines with a few sections picked out in green. “See, Dominant One, where the picks were inserted? So that the config elements could be accessed and altered from an external source without detection. We’ve neutralized them, of course.”
The claws went back into his mouth, and he mumbled around them. “This was humans, wasn’t it? It has their scent. Very three-dimensional; I suppose it comes of their being monkeys. They do some wonderful gaming programs, very ingeniou—I abase myself in apology, Chuut-Riit.” He flattened to the ground and covered his dry granular-looking nose. “We are as sure as we can be that all the unauthorized elements have been purged.” To his companion: “Wake up, suckling!”
“Whirrrr?” the fat giant chirruped, stopped his continuous nervous purring and then started. “Oh, yes. Lovely system you have here, Chuut-Riit. Yes, I think we’ve got it. I would like to meet the monkeys who did the alterations, very subtle work.”
“You may go,” he said, and crouched brooding, scratching moodily behind one ear. The internal-security team was in now, with the sniffer-machines to isolate the scent molecules of the intruders.
“I would like to meet them too,” he said, and a line of saliva spun itself down from one thin black lip. He snapped it back with a wet chop and licked his nose with a broad wash of pink tongue. “I would like that very much.”
Chapter 6
“Somehow I think it’s too quiet,” Ingrid said. When Jonah cast a blankly puzzled look over his shoulder, she shrugged. “Aren’t you interested in anything cultural?”
“I’m interested in staying alive,” Jonah said.
They were strolling quietly down one of the riverside walks. The Donau rolled beside them, two kilometers across; it sparkled blue and green-gray, little waves showing white. A bridge soared from bank to bank, and sailboats heeled far over under the stiff warm breeze. Away from the shrilling poverty of the residential quarters, the air smelled of silty water, grass, flowers.
“Of course, staying alive from now on jeopardizes the mission,” Jonah continued.
“No.” Ingrid shook her head. “You have to get back.”
“I do? Why?”
“You just do.” Murphy’s balls! Those ARM psychists really do know their stuff. He’s forgotten already. What have I forgotten? It’s no fun, holes in your memory. Even if they’re deliberate.
“The plan doesn’t matter,” Jonah said. “If it were going to blow, it would have done it. And we’d have heard the bang.” Something itched at the back of his mind. “Unless—”
“Jonah?”
“Nothing.” I don’t want to remember. Or maybe there’s nothing to remember. “My hand hurts. Wonder what I did to it?”
“You don’t need to know that, either.” It was the tenth time he’d asked. Clearly the
psychists had done some powerful voodoo on Jonah.
After the war, I’m getting out of Sol system. The more I learn about the ARM, the more they look nearly as bad as the kzin. Maybe I should write a book exposing them or something.
It was odd that there was so little resentment of them, back among the flatlanders—even the Sol-Belters didn’t kick up much of a fuss anymore. Or, considering Jonah’s present state, maybe not so odd. She shivered and put it out of her mind; time enough for that later, if she lived.
They hailed a pedicab and climbed into the twin-passenger back seat. They had both been surprised to see the little vehicles skittering about the streets; surely machinery could not have become that expensive. The man hunched over the pedals was thin, all wire and leather, dressed only in a pair of ragged shorts. It was not that machines were so dear, but that labor was so cheap, labor of a certain kind. For those with skills needed by the kzinti war economy, there was enough capital to support reasonable productivity. For the increasing number of those without, there was only what unaided brute labor would buy: starvation wages.
Get your mind off the troubles of Wunderland and on to the more urgent matter of saving your own ass, she told herself as they turned into the Baha’i quarter. Back to Harold’s Terran Bar…She winced. Then out to the Swarm; the Catskinner would be waiting, and Markham would simply have to accept them; that was one of the virtues of a ship with a will of its own. Then a straight boost out of the system; a Dart usually didn’t have anything approaching interstellar capacity, but the stasis field changed things. Boost out, tightbeam the precious data, and wait for the fleet to scoop them up. Nothing could affect them within a stasis field, but the field as a whole could still be manipulated with a gravity-polarizer…
The chances of coming through this with a whole skin had seemed so remote that it wasn’t even worth the trouble of thinking about. Now…
The ship will hold three. Hari, this time I won’t leave you.
They turned into the street that fronted Harold’s Terran Bar. Ingrid had just time enough to see the owner standing beside Claude at the entrance. The police vomited forth, dark in their turtle helmets and goggles, and aircars rose silently over the roofs all about. Giant ginger-red shapes behind them—
She rolled out of her side of the pedicab as Jonah did on his, a motion so smooth they might have rehearsed it. The light-pen was in her hand, and it made its yawping sound. A policeman died, dropping like a puppet with the strings cut, and she dove forward, rolling, trying for an angle at the kzin and—
Blackness.
✩ ✩ ✩
“The interrogation is complete?” Chuut-Riit reclined again at ease on the bubblecouch behind his desk; a censer was sending up aromatic smoke.
The holo on the far wall showed a room beneath the Munchen police headquarters; a combination of human and kzin talents had long proven most effective for such work. Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals was there, and a shabby-looking Telepath. The mind-reader’s fur was matted and his hands twitched; Chuut-Riit could see spatters of vomit down the front of his pelt, and hear his mumble:
“…salad, no, no, ak, ak, pftht, no please boiled carrots ak, pfffth…”
He shuddered slightly in sympathy, thinking of what it must be like to enter the mind of a human free-associating under drugs and pain. Telepathy was not like speech, it was a sharing that extended to sensations and memory as well. Food was a very fundamental drive. It would be bad enough to have to share the memory of eating the cremated meats humans were fond of—the very stink of them was enough to turn your stomach—but cooked plants…Telepath fumbled something out of a wrist-pouch and carefully parted the fur on one side of his neck before pressing it to the skin. There was a hiss, and he sank against the wall with a sigh of relief. His eyes slitted and he leaned chin on knees with a high-pitched irregular purr, the tip of his tongue showing pink past his whiskers.
Chuut-Riit wrinkled his nose and dismissed false compassion. How could you sympathize with something that was a voluntary slave to a drug? And to an extract of sthondat blood at that.
“Yes, Chuut-Riit,” Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals said.
“Telepath’s reading agrees with what the trained monkeys determined with their truth drugs.” Chuut-Riit reminded himself that the drugs actually merely suppressed inhibition. “The attempt was a last-minute afterthought to the main attack of the monkey ship last month. Some gravitic device was used to decelerate a pod with these two; they came down in a remote area, using the disturbances of the attack as cover, and reached the city on foot. Their aim was to trigger the self-destruct mechanisms on your estate, but they were unable to do so.”
Chuut-Riit brooded, looking past the kzin liaison officer to the human behind him. “You are not the human in charge of the Munchen police,” he said.
“No, Chuut-Riit,” the human said. It was a female. A flabby one, the sort that would squish unpleasantly when your fangs ripped open the body cavity, and somehow the holo gave the impression of an unpleasant odor.
“I am Chief Assistant Axelrod-Bauergartner at your service, Dominant One,” she continued, giving the title in a reasonably good approximation of the Hero’s Tongue. A little insolent? Perhaps—but also commendable, and the deferential posture was faultless. “Chief Montferrat-Palme delegated this summary of the investigation, feeling that it was not important enough to warrant his personal attention.”
“Chrrrriii,” Chuut-Riit said, scratching one cheek against a piece of driftwood in a stand on his desk. This Montferrat-creature did not consider an attack on the governor’s private control system important? That monkey was developing a distorted sense of its priorities. The human in the screen had blanched slightly at the kzin equivalent of an irritated scowl; he let his lips lower back over the fangs and continued:
“Show me the subjects.” Axelrod-Bauergartner stepped aside, to show two humans clamped in adjustable plastic brackets amid a forest of equipment. These were two fine specimens, tall and lean in the manner of the space-bred subspecies; both unconscious, but seeming healthy enough apart from the usual superficial cuts, abrasions, and bruises. “What is their condition?”
“No irreparable physical or mental harm, Chuut-Riit,” Axelrod-Bauergartner said, bowing. “What are your orders as to their disposal?”
“Rrrrr,” Chuut-Riit mused, shifting to rub the underside of his jaw on the wood. The last public hunt had been yesterday, the one to which he had taken his sons. “How soon can they be in condition to run amusingly?” he said.
“Half a week, Chuut-Riit. We have been cautious.”
“Prepare them.” His sons? No, best not to be too indulgent. There was a badsmelling lot of administrative work to be attended to; he would be chained to his desk for a goodly while anyway. Let the little devils attend to their studies, and he would visit them again when this had been disposed of. Besides, while free there had been a certain attraction in the prospect of dealing with this pair personally; as captives they were just two more specimens of monkeymeat—beneath his dignity.
“Get a good batch together, and have them all ready for the Public Preserve at the end of the week. Dismissed.”
✩ ✩ ✩
“Was that Suuomalisen I saw coming out of here?” Montferrat said.
“Unless you know another fat, sweaty toad in a linen suit looking like he’d just swallowed the juiciest fly on the planet.” Yarthkin grinned like a shark as he settled behind his desk and pushed a pile of data chips and hardcopy to one side. “Sit yourself down, Claude, and have a drink. If it isn’t too early.”
“Fifteen hundred too early? That’s in bad taste, even for you.” But the hand that reached for the Maivin shook slightly, and there were wrinkles in the tunic. “But why was he so happy?”
“I just sold him Harold’s Terran Bar,” Yarthkin said calmly. Light-headed, he laughed, a boy’s laugh. “Prosit!” he toasted, and tossed back his own drink.
“What!” That was enough to bring him bolt-upright.
“Why—what—you’ve been turning that swine down for thirty years!”
“Swine, Claude?” Yarthkin leaned forward, resting his chin on paired thumbs. “Or have you forgotten exactly who’s to be monkeymeat day after tomorrow?”
The reaction was more than Yarthkin had expected. A jerk, as if a high-voltage current surged through the other man’s body. A dry retching sound. Then, incredibly, the aquiline Herrenmann’s face crumpled. As if it were a mask, slumping and wrinkling like a balloon from which the air has been withdrawn…and he was crying, head slumping down into his hands. Yarthkin swallowed and looked away; Claude was a collabo and a sellout, an extortionist without shame…but nobody should see another man this naked. It was obscene.
“Pull yourself together, Claude; I’ve known you were a bastard for forty years, but I thought you were a man, at least.”
“So did I,” gasped Montferrat. “I even have the medals to prove it. I fought well in the war.”
“I know.”
“So when, when they let us out of the detention camp, I really thought I could help. I really did.” He laughed. “Life had to go on, criminals had to be caught, we were beaten and resistance just made it harder on everyone. I’d been a good policeman. I still could be.”
He drank, choked, drank. “The graft, everyone had to. They wouldn’t let you get past foot-patrol if you weren’t on the pad too, you had to be in it with them. If I didn’t get promotion how could I accomplish anything? I told myself that, but every year a little more of me was gone. And now, now Ingrid’s back and I can see myself in her eyes and I know what I am, no better than that animal Axelrod-Bauergartner, she’s gloating, she has me on this and I couldn’t, couldn’t do it. I told her to take care of it all and went and I’ve been drunk most of the time since, she’ll have my head and I deserve it, why try and stop her, it—”
Yarthkin leaned forward and slapped the policeman alongside the head with his open palm, a gunshot crack in the narrow confines of the office. Montferrat’s mood switched with mercurial swiftness, and he snarled with a mindless sound as he reached for his sidearm. But alcohol is a depressant, and his hand had barely touched the butt before the other man’s stunner was pointed between his eyes.