Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven

by Larry Niven

  "Several decades ago we did find a stasis box. Unfortunately it contained nothing useful, but we eventually found out how to turn the stasis field on and off. It made good bait for a trap. For forty Kzin years we have waited for ships to happen by with stasis boxes in their holds. You are our second catch."

  "You'd have done better finding your own boxes," said Jason. He had been examining the silent Kzin. This one was smaller than their interrogator. His fur was matted. His tail drooped, as did his pointed ears. For a Kzin the beast was skinny, and misery showed in his eyes. As certainly as they were aboard a fighting ship, this was not a fighting Kzin.

  "We would have been seen. Earth would have acted to stop our search." Apparently dismissing the subject, their interrogator turned to the smaller Kzin and spat out an imitation of cats fighting. The smaller Kzin turned to face them.

  A pressure took hold of Jason's mind and developed into a sudden splitting headache.

  He had expected it. It was a strange thing: put a sane alien next to an insane one, and usually you could tell them apart. And Kzinti were much closer to human than were any other species; so close that they must at one time have had common microbe ancestors. This smaller Kzin was obviously half crazy. And he wasn't a fighter. To be in this place at this time, he had to be a trained telepath, a forced addict of the Kzinti drug that sent nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand Kzinti insane and left the survivor a shivering neurotic.

  He concentrated on remembering the tasteof a raw carrot - just to be difficult.

  Telepath sagged against a wall, utterly spent. He could still taste yellow root munched. between flat-topped teeth. Chuft-Captain watched without sympathy, waiting.

  He forced himself to speak. "Chuft-Captain, they have not hidden the stasis box. It may be found in a locker to the left of the control room."

  Chuft-Captain turned to the wall screen. "See to it. And get the puppeteer's pressuresuit. Then seal the ship."

  Flyer and Slaverstudent acknowledged and signed off.

  "The relic. Where did they find it?"

  "Chuft-Captain, they did not. The stasis box was found in deep interstellar space, considerably closer to the Core, by a ship of the Outsiders. The Outsiders kept it to trade in known space."

  "What business did the prisoners have with the Outsiders?"

  "The puppeteer had business with them. It merely used the humans for transportation. The humans do not know what business it was."

  Chuft-Captain spit in reflex fury, but of course he could not ask a Kzin to read the mind of a herbivore. Telepath wouldn't, and would have to be disciplined; or he would, and would go insane. Nor could Chuft-Captain use pain on the puppeteer. He would get the information if it was worthless; but if the puppeteer decided it was valuable, the creature would commit suicide.

  "Am I to assume that the Outsiders did in fact sell the relic to the prisoners?"

  "Chuft-Captain, they did. The sum was a puppeteer's recorded word of honor for fourteen million stars in human money."

  "A lordly sum."

  "Perhaps more than lordly. Chuft-Captain, you may know that the Outsiders are long-lived. The male human has speculated that they intend to return in one or more thousands of years, when the recording of a puppeteer's voice is an antique worth eights of times its face value."

  "Urrr. I shouldn't stray into such byways, but ... are they really that long-lived?"

  "Chuft-Captain, the Outsider ship was following a starseed in order to trace its migratory pattern."

  "Urrr-rrrr!" Starseeds lived long enough to make mating migrations from the galactic core to the rim and back, moving at average speeds estimated at point eight lights.

  A patterned knock. The others entered, wearing pressure suits with the helmets thrown back. Flyer carried the puppeteer's pressure suit, a three-legged balloon with padded mittens for the mouths, small clawed boots, an extra bulge for a food pouch, and a hard, padded shield to cover the cranial hump. Slaverstudent carried a cylinder with a grip-notched handle. Its entire surface was a perfectly reflecting mirror: the sign of the Slaver stasis field.

  The prisoners, the human ones, were silently glaring. Their post-telepathy headaches had not helped their dispositions. Telepath was resting from the aftereffects of the drug.

  "Open it," said Chuft-Captain

  Slaverstudent removed an empty cubical box from the table, set the stasis box in its place, and touched a pressure-sensitive surface at the table's edge. The cylinder ceased to be a distorting mirror. It was a bronzy metal box, which popped open of its own accord.

  The Kzin called Slaverstudent reached in and brought out:

  A silvered bubble six inches in diameter, with a sculptured handle attached. The handle would not have fit any gripping appendage Chuft-Captain knew of.

  A cube of raw meat in something like a plastic sandwich wrap.

  A hand. An alien hand furnished with three massive, clumsy-looking fingers set like a mechanical grab. It had been dipped in something that formed a clear, hard coating. One thick finger wore a chronometer.

  "A bad thing has happened," said Nessus.

  The Kzin who had opened the box seemed terribly excited. He turned the preserved hand over and over, yowrling in Kzinti. Then he put it down and picked up the sphere-with-a-handle.

  "Let me' guess," said Jason. "That's not a Slaver box. It's a tnuctipun box."

  "Yes. The first to be found. The handle on the bubble tool is admirably designed to fit a tnuctipun hand. The preserved Slaver hand must be a trophy- I am quoting the student of Slavers. Jason, this may be a disaster. The tnuctipun were master technologists."

  The "student of Slavers" was running his padded, retractile-clawed hands over the sphere-with-a-handle. No detail at all showed on the sphere; it was the same mirror color as the stasis field that had disgorged it. The handle was bronzy metal. There were grooves for six fingers and two long, opposed thumbs; there was a button set in an awkward position. A deep, straight groove ran down the side, with a guide and nine notched settings.

  Anne-Marie spoke in a low voice. "It looks like the handle of a gun."

  "We need information," said Jason. "Nessus, is that bigger Kzin the boss? The one who speaks Interworld?"

  "Yes. The one with the bubble tool is a student of the Slaver Empire. The one with the white stripe is the pilot. The mind reader is resting. We need not fear him for several hours."

  "But the boss Kzin understands Interworld. Do the others?"

  "I think not. Your inaptly named Interworld is difficult for nonhumans to learn and to pronounce."

  "Good. Anne, how are you doing?"

  "I'm scared. We're in big trouble, aren't we, Jay?"

  "We are. No sense fooling ourselves. Any ideas?"

  "You know me, Jay. In a pinch I usually know who to call for help. The integrator if the house stops, the taxi company when a transfer booth doesn't work. Step into an autodoc when you feel sick. If your lift belt fails, you dial E for Emergency on your pocket phone. If someone answers before you hit the ground, scream." She tried a smile. "Jay? Who do we call about Kzinti kidnapings?"

  He smiled back. "You write a forceful note to the Patriarch of Kzin. Right, Nessus?"

  "Also you threaten to cut off trade. Do not worry too much, Anne-Marie. My species is expert at staying alive."

  "Undoubtedly a weapon," said Slaverstudent. "We had best try it outside."

  "Later," said Chuft-Captain.

  Again Slaverstudent dipped into the cylindrical box. He removed small containers half filled with two kinds of small-arms projectiles, a colored cap that might easily have fitted a standard bowling ball, a transparent bulb of clear fluid, and a small metal widget that might have been anything. "I see no openings for bullets."

  "Nor do I. Flyer, take a sample of this meat and find out what it is made of. Do the same with this trophy and this bulb. Telepath, are you awake?"

  "Chuft-Captain, I am."

  "When can you again read the-"

&nbs
p; "Chuft-Captain, please don't make-"

  "At ease, Telepath. Take time to recover. But I intend to keep the prisoners present while we investigate this find. They may notice some detail we miss. Eventually I will need you."

  "Yes, Chuft-Captain."

  "Test that small implement for radio or hyperwave emissions. Do nothing else to it. It has the look of a subminiature communicator, but it might be anything: a camera, even an explosive.

  "Slaverstudent, you will come with me. We are going outside."

  It took several minutes for the Kzinti to get the prisoners into their suits, adjust their radios so that everybody could hear everybody else, and move them through the double-door airlock.

  To Jason, the airlock was further proof that this was a warship. A pressure curtain was generally more convenient than an airlock; but if power failed during a battle, all the air could leave the ship in one whoof. Warships carried double doors.

  Two stunners followed them up the sloping ice tunnel. Jason had thought there would be four. He'd need to fight only the boss Kzin and one other. But both carried stunners and both seemed alert.

  He took too much time deciding. The boss made Nessus stand on a flexible wire grid, then did the same with Anne-Marie and Jason. The grid was a portable police web, and it was as inflexibly restraining as the built-in web in the ship.

  The Kzinti returned down the sloping tunnel, leaving Jason, Anne-Marie, and Nessus to enjoy the view. It was a lonely view. The blue and yellow stars were rising, invisibly. They showed only as a brighter spot at one foot of the red-smoke arch of hydrogen. Stars showed space-bright in curdled patterns across the sky; they all glowed red near the arch. The land was cold rock-hard ice, rippling in long, low undulations that might have been seasonal snowdrifts millions of years ago, when the Lyrae twins were bigger and brighter. Black-faceted rock poked through some of the high spots.

  Several yards away was the Court Jester. A thick, round-edged, flat-bottomed disk, she sat on the ice like a painted concrete building. Apparently she intended to stay.

  Jason stood at parade rest on the police web. AnneMarie was six inches to his right, facing him. For all of his urge to touch her, she might have been miles away.

  Two days ago she had carefully painted her eyelids with semipermanent tattoo. They showed as two tiny blackand-white-checked racing victory flags, rippling when she blinked. Their gaiety mocked her drawn face.

  "I wonder why we're still alive," she said.

  Nessus' accentless voice was tinny in the earphones. "The captain wants our opinions on the putative weapon. He will not ask for them, but will take them through the telepath."

  "That doesn't apply to you, does it?"

  "No. No Kzin would read my mind. Perhaps no Kzin would kill me; my race holds strong policies on the safety of individual members. In any case we have some time."

  "Time for what?"

  "Anne-Marie, we must wait. If the artifact is a weapon, we must recover it. If not, we must survive to warn your people that the Kzinti are searching out Slaver stasis boxes. We must wait until we know which."

  "Then what?"

  "We will find a way."

  "We?" said Jason.

  "Yes. Our motives coincide here. I cannot explain why at this time."

  But why should a puppeteer risk his life, his life, for Earth? Jason wondered.

  The boss Kzin emerged from the airlock carrying the sphere-with-a-handle. He stood before Jason and held it before his eyes. "Examine this," he commanded, and turned it slowly and invitingly in his four-fingered hands.

  There was the reflecting sphere, and there was the bronzy-metal gun handle with its deeply scored groove and its alien sculpturing. The groove had nine notched settings running from top to bottom, with a guide in the top notch. Squiggles that must have been tnuctip numbers corresponded to the notches.

  Jason prayed for the police web to fail. If he could snatch the artifact--

  The Kzin moved away, walking uphill to a rise of icy ground. A second Kzin emerged from the pressure curtain carrying an unfamiliar gadget of Kzinti make. The two Kzinti spat phrases at each other. Kzinti language always sounds like insults.

  Nessus spoke quietly. "The meat was protoplasmic, protein, and highly poisonous. The small, complex tnuctip implement does operate in hyperspace but uses no known method of communication. The fluid in the clear bulb is forty percent hydrogen peroxide, sixty percent hydrogen oxide, purpose unknown."

  "What's the Slaver expert carrying?"

  "That is an energy-output sensor."

  The puppeteer seemed calm enough. Did be know of some way to interrupt a police web?

  Jason couldn't ask, not when the boss Kzin could hear every word. But he had little hope. A police web belonged to the same family as a pilot's crash field, triggered to enfold the pilot when signaled by excessive pressure on his crash webbing. A crash web was as deliberately foolproof as any last-ditch failsafe device. So was a police web.

  Probably the puppeteer was slipping back into the manic state and was now convinced that nothing in the universe could harm him. Somehow that made Jason's failure worse. "One thing you should know, Jason, is that my species judges me insane." It was one of the first things the puppeteer had told him.Unable to trust his own judgement, Nessus had warned him by implication that he would have to trust Jason's.

  They'd both trusted him.

  "I had to show you Beta Lyrae," he said bitterly.

  "It was a nice idea, Jay, really it was."

  If he'd been free, he'd have found a wall and tried to punch it down.

  Chuft-Captain stood on a rise of permafrost and let his eyes scan the horizon. Those points of dark rock would make good targets.

  The weapon was uncomfortable in his hand, but he managed to get one finger on the presumed trigger button. He aimed at the horizon and fired.

  Nothing happened.

  He aimed at a closer point, first pressing and releasing the trigger button repeatedly, then holding it down. Still nothing.

  "Chuft-Captain, there is no energy release."

  "The power may be gone."

  "Chuft-Captain, it may. But the notches in the handle may control intensity. The guide is now set on 'nil'."

  Chuft-Captain moved the guide one notch down. A moment later he had to resist the panicky urge to throw the thing as far as possible. The mirror-faced sphere was twisting and turning like something alive, changing shape like a drug nightmare. It changed and flowed and became a long slender cylinder with a red knob at the end and a toggle near the handle. The handle had not changed at all.

  "Chuft-Captain, there was an energy discharge. Eek! What happened?"

  "It turned into this. What do I do next?"

  Slaverstudent took the artifact and examined it. He would have liked to fire it himself, but that was the leader's privilege and right. And risk. He said, "Try the toggle."

  At a forward motion of the toggle the red knob lit up and leapt away across the ice. Chuft-Captain wiggled the handle experimentally. The red knob, still receding, bobbed and weaved in response to stay in line with the cylindrical barrel. When the knob was a red point sixty yards distant, Chuft-Captain stopped it with the toggle.

  "Variable-sword," he muttered. He looked for a target. His eyes lit on a nearby tilted spire of dark rock or dirty ice.

  Chuft-Captain gripped the artifact in both furry hands, like a big-game fishing pole, and swung the red light behind the spire. The artifact fought his pressure, then gave way. The top half of the spire toppled, kicking up a spray of chipped ice.

  "A variable-sword," he repeated. "But not of Slaver design. Slaverstudent, have you ever heard of a weapon that changes shape?"

  "No, Chuft-Captain, neither of the past nor of the present."

  "Then we've found something new."

  "Yes!" The word was a snarl of satisfaction.

  "That tears it," said Anne-Marie. "It's a weapon." Jason tried to nod. The police web held him fast. The other Kzinti came o
utside and moved up the rise. Four Kzinti stood spitting at each other, looking like four fat men, sounding like a catfight. Nessus said, "The first notch must have been neutral. They intend to find out what the other notches do."

  "It changes shape," said Anne-Marie. "That's bad enough."

  "Quite right," said the puppeteer. "The artifact is now our prime target."

  Jason grinned suddenly. The puppeteer reminded him of a cartoon: Two bearded, dirty convicts hanging three feet off the ground by iron chains. One convict saying, "Now here's my plan.

  First we wish away the police web. Then...

  Again the Kzinti captain moved the guide. The gun reverted to sphere-and-handle, then flowed into something hard to see at a distance. The boss Kzin must have realized it. He came down the hill, followed by the others. One at a time the Kzinti moved them to the top of the rise, so that they stood several yards behind the firing line, but still in the police web.

  The boss Kzin resumed his firing stance.

  Position number two was a parabolic mirror with a silvery knob at the center. It did nothing at all to the rock Chuft-Captain was using for a target, though Slaverstudent reported an energy discharge. Chuft-Captain considered, then turned the weapon on the puppeteer.

  The puppeteer spoke in the human tongue. "I can hear a faint high-pitched whine."

  "Another control dial has formed," Slaverstudent pointed out. "Four settings."

  Chuft-Captain nodded and tried the second setting. It did not affect the puppeteer. Neither did the third and fourth.

  "Chuft-Captain, will you hold down the trigger?" Slaverstudent cautiously peeped over the lip of the parabolic mirror. "Urrrr. I was right. The knob is vibrating rapidly. Setting number two is a sonic projector-and a powerful one-if the puppeteer can hear it through near-vacuum and the thickness of its suit."

  "But it didn't knock him out or anything."

  "Chuft-Captain, we must assume that it was designed to affect the Slaver nervous system."