by Larry Niven
“Yeah,” Harold heard himself say. Looking at the liner officer, he found himself wondering whether the woman’s words had been compassion or a beautifully subtle piece of vengeance. Easier if you called him a ratcat-lover or begged, he decided. Then he would be able to use anger to kill guilt, or know he was condemning only a coward to death. Now he can spend the next couple of years having nightmares about the brave, kind-hearted lady being ripped to shreds.
Unexpected, fear gripped him; a loose hot sensation below the stomach, and the humiliating discomfort of his testicles trying to retract from his scrotum. Ripped to shreds was exactly and literally true. He remembered lying in the dark outside the kzinti outpost, back in the guerrilla days right after the war. They had caught Dagmar the day before, but it was a small patrol, without storage facilities. So they had taken her limbs one at a time, cauterizing; he had been close enough to hear them quarreling over the liver, that night. He had taken the amnesty, not long after that…
“Here’s looking at you, sweetheart,” he said, as they cycled the lock closed. It was not cramped; facilities built for kzin rarely were, for humans. A Slasher-class three-crew scout, he decided. Motors whined as the docking ring retracted into the annular cavity around the airlock. Weight within was kzin-standard; he sagged under it, and felt his spirit sag as well. “Tanjit.” A shrug. “Oh, well, the honeymoon was great, even if we had to wait fifty years and the relationship looks like it’ll be short.”
“Hari, you’re…sweet,” Ingrid said, smiling and stroking his cheek. Then she turned to the inner door.
“Hell, they’re not going to leave that unlocked,” Harold said in surprise. An airlock made a fairly good improvised holding facility, once you disconnected the controls via the main computer. The Wunderlander stiffened as the inner door sighed open, then gagged as the smell reached him. He recognized it instantly: the smell of rotting meat in a confined dry place. Lots of rotting meat…oily and thick, like some invisible protoplasmic butter smeared inside his nose and mouth.
He ducked through. His guess had been right: a Slasher. The control deck was delta-shaped: two crash-couches at the rear corners for the Sensor and Weapons operators, and the pilot-commander in the front. There were kzinti corpses in the two rear seats, still strapped in and in space armor with the helmets off. Their heads lay tilted back, mouths hanging open, tongues and eyeballs dry and leathery; the flesh had started to sag and the fur to fall away from their faces. Behind him he heard Ingrid retch, and swallowed himself. This was not precisely what she had expected…
And she’s got a universe of guts, but all her fighting’s been done in space, he reminded himself. Gentlefolk’s combat, all at a safe distance and then death or victory in a few instants. Nothing gruesome, unless you were on a salvage squad…even then, bodies do not rot in vacuum. Not like ground warfare at all. He reached over, careful not to touch, and flipped the hinged helmets down; the corpses were long past rigor mortis. A week or so, he decided. Hard to tell in this environment.
A sound brought his head up, a distinctive ftttp-ftttp. The kzin in the commander’s position was not dead. That noise was the sound of thin wet black lips fluttering on half-inch fangs, the ratcat equivalent of a snore.
“Sorry,” the screen in front of the kzin said. “I forgot they’d smell.”
Ingrid came up beside him. The screen showed a study, book-lined around a crackling hearth. A small girl in antique dress slept in an armchair before a mirror; a white-haired figure with a pipe and smoking jacket was seated beside her, only the figure was an anthropomorphic rabbit…Ingrid took a shaky breath.
“Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann,” she said. “Meet…the computer of Catskinner.” Her voice was a little hoarse from the stomach-acids that had filled her mouth. “I was expecting something…like this. Computer, meet Harold.” She rubbed a hand across her face. “How did you do it?”
The rabbit beamed and waved its pipe. “Oh, simply slipped a pseudopod of myself into its control computer while it attempted to engage me,” he said airily, puffing a cloud of smoke. “Not difficult, when its design architecture was so simple.”
Harold spoke through numb lips. “You designed a specific tapeworm that could crack a kzinti warship’s failsafes in…how long?”
“Oh, about 2.7 seconds, objective. Of course, to me, that could be any amount of time I chose, you see. Then I took control of the medical support system, and injected suitable substances into the crew. Speaking of time…” The rabbit touched the young girl on the shoulder; she stretched, yawned, and stepped through a large and ornately framed mirror on the study wall, vanishing without trace.
“Ah,” Harold said. Sentient computer. Murphy’s phosphorescent balls, I’m glad they don’t last.
Ingrid began speaking, a list of code-words and letter-number combinations.
“Yes, yes,” the rabbit said, with a slight testiness in its voice. The scene on the viewscreen disappeared, to be replaced with a view of another spaceship bridge. Smaller than this, and without the angular massiveness of kzinti design. He saw two crashcouches, and vague shapes in the background that might be life-support equipment. “Yes, I’m still functional, Lieutenant Raines. We do have a bit of a problem, though.”
“What?” she said. There was a look of strain on her face, lines grooving down beside the straight nose.
“The next Identification Friend or Foe code is due in a week,” the computer said. “It isn’t in the computer; only the pilot knows it. I’ve had no luck at all convincing him to tell me; there are no interrogation-drugs in his suit’s autodoc, and he seems to have a quite remarkable pain tolerance, even for a kzin. I could take you off to Catskinner, of course, but this ship would make splendid cover; you see, there’s been a…startling occurrence in the Swarm, and the kzinti are gathering. I see I’ll have to brief you…”
The man felt the tiny hairs along his neck and spine struggle to erect themselves beneath the snug surface of his Belter coverall, as he listened to the cheerful voice drone on in upper-class Wunderlander. Trapped in here, smelling his crew rot, screaming at the walls, he thought with a shudder. There were a number of extremely nasty things you could do even with standard autodoc drugs, provided you could override the safety parameters. It was something even a kzin didn’t deserve…then he brought up memories of his own. Or maybe they do. Still, he didn’t talk. You had to admit it, ratcats were almost as tough as they thought they were.
“I know how to make him talk,” he said abruptly, cutting off an illustrated discourse on the Sea Statue; some ancient flatlander named Greenberg stopped in the middle of a disquisition on thrintun ethics. “I need some time to assimilate all this stuff,” he went on. “We’re humans, we can’t adjust our worldviews the minute we get new data. But I can make the ratcat cry uncle.”
Ingrid looked at him, then glanced away sharply. She had a handkerchief pressed to her nose, but he saw her grimace of distaste.
“Don’t worry, kinder. Hot irons are a waste of time; ratcats are hardcases every one. All I’ll need is some wax, some soft cloth and some spotglue to hold his suit to that chair.”
It’s time, Harold decided.
The kzin whose suit clamped him to the forward chair had stopped trying to jerk his head loose from the padded clamps a day or so ago. Now his massive head simply quivered, and the fur seemed to have fallen in on the heavy bones somehow. Thick disks of felt and plastic made an effective blindfold, wax sealed ears and nose from all sight and scent; the improvised muzzle allowed him to breathe through clenched teeth but little else. Inside the suit was soft immobile padding, and the catheters that carried away waste, fed and watered and tended and would not let the brain go catatonic.
A sentient brain needs input; it is not designed to be cut off from the exterior world. Deprived of data, the first thing that fails is the temporal sense; minutes become subjective hours, hours stretch into days. Hallucinations follow, and the personality itself begins to disintegrate…and kzin are still more
sensitive to sensory deprivation than humans. Compared to kzinti, humans are nearly deaf, almost completely unable to smell.
For which I am devoutly thankful, Harold decided, looking back to where Ingrid hung loose-curled in midair. They had set the interior field to zero-G; that helped with the interrogation, and she found it easier to sleep. The two dead crewkzin were long gone, and they had cycled and flushed the cabin to the danger point, but the oily stink of death seemed to have seeped into the surfaces. Never really present, but always there at the back of your throat…
She had lost weight, and there were bruise-like circles beneath her eyes. “Wake up, sweetheart,” he said gently. She started, thrashed, and then came to his side, stretching. “I need you to translate.” His own command of the Hero’s Tongue was fairly basic.
He reached into the batlike ear and pulled out one plug. “Ready to talk, ratcat?”
The quivering died, and the kzin’s head was completely immobile for an instant. Then it jerked against the restraints as the alien tried frantically to nod. Harold jerked at the slipknot that released the muzzle; at need, he could always have the computer administer a sedative so that he could re-strap it.
The kzin shrieked, an endless desolate sound. That turned into babbling:
“—nono gray in the dark gray monkeys gray TOO BIG noscent noscent nome no ME no me DON’T EAT ME MOTHER NO—”
“Shut the tanjit up or you go back,” Harold shouted into its ear, feeling a slight twist in his own empty stomach.
“No!” This time the kzin seemed to be speaking rationally, at least a little. “Please! Let me hear, let me smell, please, please.” Its teeth snapped, spraying saliva as it tried to lunge, trying to sink its fangs into reality. “I must smell, I must smell!”
Harold turned his eyes aside slightly. I always wanted to hear a ratcat beg, he thought. You have to be careful what you wish for; sometimes you get it.
“Just the code, commander. Just the code.”
It spoke, a long sentence in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero’s Tongue, then lay panting.
“It is not lying, to a probability of ninety-eight percent, plus or minus,” the computer said. “Shall I terminate it?”
“No!” Harold snapped. To the kzin: “Hold still.”
A few swift motions removed the noseplugs and blindfold; the alien gaped its mouth and inhaled in racking gasps, hauling air across its nasal cavities. The huge eyes flickered, manic-fast, and the umbrella ears were stretched out to maximum. After a moment it slumped and closed its mouth, the pink washcloth tongue coming out to scrub across the dry granular surface of its nose.
“Real,” it muttered. “I am real.” The haunted eyes turned on him. “You burn,” it choked. “Fire in the air around you. You burn with terror!” Panting breath. “I saw the God, human. Saw Him sowing stars. It was forever. Forever! Forever!” It howled again, then caught itself, shuddering.
Harold felt his cheeks flush. Something, he thought. I have to say something, gottdamn it.
“Name?” he said, his mouth shaping itself clumsily to the Hero’s Tongue.
“Kdapt-Captain,” it gasped. “Kdapt-Captain. I am Kdapt-Captain.” The sound of its rank-name seemed to recall the alien to something closer to sanity. The next words were nearly a whisper. “What have I done?”
Kdapt-Captain shut his eyes again, squeezing. Thin mewling sounds forced their way past the carnivore teeth, a sobbing miaow-miaow, incongruous from the massive form.
“Scheisse,” Harold muttered. I never heard a kzin cry before, either. “Sedate him, now.” The sounds faded as the kzin relaxed into sleep.
“War sucks,” Ingrid said, coming closer to lay a hand on his shoulder. “And there ain’t no justice.”
Harold nodded raggedly, his hands itching for a cigarette. “You said it, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m going to break out another bottle of that verguuz. I could use it.”
Ingrid’s hand pressed him back toward the deck. “No you’re not,” she said sharply. He looked up in surprise.
“I spaced it,” she said flatly.
“You what?” he shouted.
“I spaced it!” she yelled back. The kzin whimpered in his sleep, and she lowered her voice. “Hari, you’re the bravest man I’ve ever met, and one of the toughest. But you don’t take waiting well, and when you hate yourself verguuz is how you punish yourself. That, and letting yourself go.” He was suddenly conscious of his own smell. “Not while you’re with me, thank you very much.”
Harold stared at her for a moment, then slumped back against the bulkhead, shaking his head in wonder. You can’t fight in a singleship, he reminded himself. Motion caught the corner of his eye; several of the screens were set to reflective. Well…he thought. The pouches under his eyes were a little too prominent. Nothing wrong with a bender now and then…but now and then had been growing more frequent.
Habits grow on you, even when you’ve lost the reasons for them, he mused. One of the drawbacks of modern geriatrics. You get set in your ways. Getting close enough to someone to listen to her opinions of him—now that was a habit he was going to have to learn.
“Gottdamn, what a honeymoon,” he muttered.
Ingrid mustered a smile. “Haven’t even had the nuptials, yet. We could set up a contract—” She winced and made a gesture of apology.
“Forget it,” he answered roughly. That was what his Herrenmann father had done, rather than marry a Belter and a Commoner into the sacred Schotmann family line. Time to change the subject, he thought. “Tell me…thinking back, I got the idea you knew the kzinti weren’t running this ship. The computer got some private line?”
“Oh.” She blinked, then smiled slightly. “Well, I thought I recognized the programming. I was part of the team that designed the software, you know? Not many sentient computers ever built. When I heard the name of the ‘kzinti’ ship, well, it was obvious.”
“Sounded pretty authentic to me,” Harold said dubiously, straining his memory.
Ingrid smiled more broadly. “I forgot. It’d sound perfectly reasonable to a kzin, or to someone who grew up speaking Wunderlander, or Belter English. I’ve been associating with flatlanders, though.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Only an English-speaking flatlander would know what’s wrong with kchee’uRiit maarai as a ship-name.” At his raised eyebrows, she translated: Gigantic Patriarchal Tool.
Chapter 16
“Now will you believe?” Buford Early said, staring into the screen.
Someone in the background was making a report; Shigehero turned to acknowledge, then back to the UN general. “I am…somewhat more convinced,” he admitted after a pause. “Still, we should be relatively safe here.”
The oyabun’s miniature fleet had withdrawn considerably farther; Early glanced up to check on the distances, saw that they were grouped tightly around another asteroid in nearly matching orbit, more than half a million kilometers from the Ruling Mind. The other members of the UN team were still mostly slumped, gray-faced, waiting for the aftereffects of the thrint’s mental shout to die down. Two were in the autodoc.
“Safe?” Early said quietly. “We wouldn’t be safe in the Solar system! That…thing had a functioning amplifier going, for a second or two at least.” Their eyes met, and shared a memory for an instant. Drifting fragments of absolute certainty; the oyabun’s frown matched his own, as they concentrated on thinking around those icy commands. Early bared his teeth, despite the pain of a lip bitten half through. It was like sweeping water with a broom: you could make yourself believe they were alien implants, force yourself to, but the knowledge was purely intellectual. They felt true, and the minute your attention wandered you found yourself believing again…
“Remember Greenberg’s tape.” Larry Greenberg had been the only human ever to share minds with a thrint, two centuries ago when the Sea Statue had been briefly and disastrously reanimated. “If it gets the amplifier fully functional, nothing will stand in its way. Th
ere are almost certainly fertile females in there, too.” With an effort as great as any he had ever made, Early forced his voice to reasonableness. “I know it’s tempting, all that technology. We can’t get it. The downside risk is simply too great.”
And it would be a disaster if we could, he thought grimly. Native human inventions were bad enough; the ARM and the Order before them had had to scramble for centuries to defuse the force of the industrial revolution. The thought of trying to contain a thousand years of development dumped on humanity overnight made his stomach hurt and his fingers long for a stogie. Memory prompted pride. We did restabilize, he thought. So some of the early efforts were misdirected. Sabotaging Babbage, for example. Computers had simply been invented a century or two later, anyway. Or Marxism. That had been very promising, for a while, a potential world empire with built-in limitations; Marx had undoubtedly been one of the Temple’s shining lights, in his time.
Probably for the best it didn’t quite come off, considering the kzinti, he decided. The UN’s done nearly as well, without so many side effects.
“There are no technological solutions to this problem,” he went on, making subliminal movements with his fingers.
The oyabun’s eyes darted down to them, reminded of his obligations. Not that they could be fully enforced here, but they should carry some weight at least. To remind him of what had happened to other disloyal members: Charlemagne, or Hitler back in the twentieth century, or Brennan in the twenty-second. “We’re running out of time, and dealing with forces so far beyond our comprehension that we can only destroy on sight, if we can. The kzinti will be here in a matter of days, and it’ll be out of our hands.”
Shigehero nodded slowly, then gave a rueful smile. “I confess to hubris,” he said. “We will launch an immediate attack. If nothing else, we may force the alien back into its stasis field.” He turned to give an order.