Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI

by Larry Niven

  “If you can call it living,” said Rykermann. “The worst that Sol people endured was paradise beyond dreams compared to what we had here.”

  “I know. But the possibility of a negotiated surrender for Sol was an inducement to defeatists and others: People worked out that those who did services for the kzinti—assisted them in their conquest—might expect to be rewarded by them. They worked out there were probably people like that on Wunderland.”

  “There were,” said Rykermann. “Since I was out of things at the Liberation I missed seeing most of what was done to them then.”

  “At first we hadn’t bothered with security much, discounting any possibility of kzin spies or agents,” said Guthlac. “No human would spy or do sabotage for the kzinti, we assumed. But we learnt better as time went on. Humanity wasn’t united. Secrets did matter. Operation Cherubim was deadly secret: To send a ship to Alpha Centauri with human volunteers—childless, of course—who would be converted into Pak Protectors. They carried tree-of-life agent in a sealed compartment. Something went wrong. They never arrived. Perhaps they ran into kzin ships. Perhaps just one of the accidents of spaceflight.

  “But there was another operation on the same lines: To send tree-of-life agent in an unmanned ship.”

  “Why?”

  “It was the emergency backup. There were many advantages from the covert operation point of view: simpler, quicker, a ship able to accelerate and decelerate faster and, without life-systems, smaller, harder to detect or intercept. Plus, we weren’t over-supplied with suitable Protector volunteers. The resistance had instructions to pick it up at the edge of the system and smuggle it to Wunderland.”

  “As geriatric drugs and trace elements.”

  “Yes. Not a complete lie, of course. It is a geriatric drug—and how! Always make your cover story as close to the truth as possible. The idea was, even if someone at the Alpha Centauri end who had an idea of what it was fell into kzin hands and was probed by a telepath, he or she could fix on the idea of a geriatric drug and medicine, just possibly the telepath would not detect an actual lie. That was the idea, anyway. Whether or not it would have worked is another matter. But anyway nothing was said in our maser as to what it really was. Then, of course, when it arrived it was to be hidden.

  “If Sol system had been plainly falling, instructions would have been masered to open the containers and make Protectors. From there it would, we hoped, go as Operation Cherubim had been meant to go. Of course, we would give instructions then to try to ensure that the Protectors created would be suitable individuals—volunteers, with high ethical standards and records—good people, in short—and childless. We would have wanted trained scientists and fighters, of course, so they’d have as big a start as possible in knowledge and experience.

  “We would do the same on Earth. The kzinti would find themselves attacked by Protectors in both systems simultaneously. We sent the nukes as well so the Protectors would have powerful weapons ready to hand right away, either as bombs or pumps for lasers. Even Protectors couldn’t build nuclear processing-plants and factories in a kzin-occupied system overnight. But it was a desperate ploy, only to be used if all else was lost. We wouldn’t have control over the process, or over who the human Protectors in this system would be. You know Protectors, once they are used to their state, are more or less indestructible, smarter than human geniuses, and unless they’re killed they live for thousands of years. One can’t imagine they would ever have handed power back to breeders, or even agreed not to make more Protectors. They could produce their own tree-of-life, given time. There was fear that we were exchanging one demonic enemy for a worse. But even if they had been universally benevolent, even if they defeated the kzinti, it would have changed our society utterly and probably forever…

  “Anyway, the plan never had to be used, for which we may give thanks. The ramscoop raid and the death of Chuut-Riit gave us a breathing space, and instead of Protectors the hyperdrive saved us. We were lucky.

  “As for Operation Cherubim, it seems that all those in the need-to-know circle in the Centauri system died. The kzinti found the maser transceiver in due course and they didn’t stop at half-measures in blasting Nifelheim out of the sky with all its personnel. Also, quite a lot of ARM intelligence people from Sol died in the war, you know. We had gaps in our own records and knowledge. We didn’t keep a lot of things electronically at all, for fear of kzinti or their agents hacking into our files. We lost both hard copy and computers when the kzin hit assets on Earth, which happened more often than most people know. Anyway ARM decided the consignment had never arrived and wrote it off…And you say the containers were hit in the fight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, at least they can’t have been breached,” Guthlac said. “If any tree-of-life agent had escaped you’d have known all about it at the time. How old are you, Nils?”

  “A hundred and one last birthday.”

  “Even twenty-six years ago, you would have been too old to make the change. Exposure to tree-of-life would have killed you. But you’re still here. And none of the rest of your party was affected either. I think—I hope—we can assume the integrity of the containers. They were made strong, after all…Although no stronger than the ordinary hospital containers they were supposed to be. We expected them to be inspected and x-rayed by the collabos at least, and we didn’t want to arouse suspicion by making them anything special.”

  “They may have been damaged, though,” said Rykermann. “I remember seeing them take hits. And twenty-six years buried wouldn’t have improved them. There can be some powerful microorganisms and compounds in Wunderland soil, in the caves in particular. I’d suggest they be removed at once.”

  “Obviously. That’s why I sent for you as soon as I realized what your report was about. Can you find them?”

  “With deep-radar it should be easy enough,” Rykermann said. “I remember the locality.”

  “We want to be discreet about this,” Guthlac said. “We also don’t want humans being put at risk of exposure to tree-of-life. Trustworthy—very trustworthy—kzinti would be useful on a job like this. The stuff’s no danger and no value to them. I say that because I think of Vaemar. Can Vaemar destroy them?”

  “He’s still up at the caves. He’s due to return in the next day or two. You know why.”

  “This is tricky,” said Guthlac. “We don’t want humans approaching those containers, not given the state they might be in, but I’m not happy about any kzinti, not even your young paragon of virtue, finding out too much about them. It might be best to simply clear the whole area and nuke it.”

  “It might be best,” said Rykermann, “to make sure the containers are still there first.”

  “Why shouldn’t they be?”

  “There were several people in our own party—the party that met the couriers when they were buried—who survived. I’ve lost touch with some of them. I’m not saying any of them would necessarily steal such things or have any motive to, but who knows who they might have talked to since then? The fighting’s been over on this planet for thirteen years. Barroom reminiscences about some buried containers of weapons might have tempted some crook or adventurer to go on a private treasure-hunt for all we know.”

  “If such a crook had opened them he or she would have had a surprise. And I think we would have known about it by now.”

  “Even so, surely they should be counted and inventoried before they’re destroyed?”

  “I take your point. Can Vaemar do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get him onto it then. I don’t need to tell you to stay well away from the area yourself. It shouldn’t be too dangerous for him.”

  “May I tell Vaemar what he’s doing? He knows about the Pak, by the way. He searched old Earth records for another project.”

  “I didn’t know that. Act at your discretion. If he knows about the Pak there doesn’t seem much point in concealing this from him. It’ll give him an incentive, in fact.”<
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  Chapter 4

  Circle Bay Monastery, despite being home to an order of celibate male monks, had detached guest houses for lay visitors, including females. With a wedding planned to be held there shortly the bride, Gale, and her guests Leonie Rykermann and Karan, who had arrived early by air-car, were experimenting with clothes and cosmetics in front of a mirror. Twenty-fifth-century cosmetics, including skin-coloring agents as permanent as tattoos until one wanted to remove them, gave plenty of scope for experiment.

  “You think headband suits me?” Karan asked.

  “Not one like mine,” Leonie told her. “Try a white one. Or better, the one holding the jewel.”

  Karan surveyed the result from several angles. “Little cape?” she asked. “Like this?” She demonstrated.

  “That ought to turn a few heads,” said Leonie. “Including Vaemar’s.” She herself wore a long skirt that hid her legs, legs that she still moved awkwardly.

  The telephone on Karan’s belt beeped. As she listened to its message her eyes lit and her whiskers twitched. She bared her teeth and raised her ears.

  “From Nurse and Orlando!” she told the others. “Tabitha looking at pages of picture-book! Not eating it!” Life with Vaemar had improved her Wunderlander grammar and vocabulary.

  “That’s wonderful!” said Leonie. “Wonderful for us all! Wonderful for history!” They had all been hanging upon evidence that the first daughter of one of the Secret Others—the thin, hidden line of intelligent kzinrretti—had bred true. It didn’t always happen. The Secret Others had been few to begin with, and they were very few now. Karan on human-liberated Wunderland was perhaps the first intelligent kzinrret in millennia who did not have to hide her sapience.

  “Hurrah for history!” said Gale. “Bring them to the wedding!”

  “Yes, now I can. And rate Nurse charges can’t leave them alone with him too long.” Karan’s ears swivelled. “Car coming,” she said.

  Leonie’s ears also twitched slightly—she had a little Families blood. She stepped to the door. “If that’s Arthur, I won’t let him in. It’s unlucky for the groom to see the bride before the wedding.”

  “If Vaemar,” said Karan, “I’ll not see him till finished here.” She applied a little nontoxic gold paint to the tips of her fangs and surveyed the result thoughtfully.

  “And Tabitha?”

  “News will keep,” Karan told her. “Want to break not all at once. Better still, perhaps, let him find out for self. Proud quicker if his discovery, I think. He’s got lot to adjust to.”

  “He’s a genius,” said Leonie. “He’ll adjust.” Her voice trailed off. The word “genius” was haunted for her. She thought of another genius trying to adjust. Then, a moment later: “It’s not Vaemar. It’s Nils.”

  “Is he all right?” asked Gale. “None of them were due yet.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Arthur about Morlocks?” Vaemar asked. It was night and Rykermann, bringing Leonie back to Munchen, had summoned him. Rykermann had told him in private code that there were secret matters to discuss.

  “I was about to,” Rykermann told him. “Then I remembered Early. And Arthur reports to Early, wherever he may be now. I’m not sure that I wanted Early nipping trouble in the bud by sending a comet or asteroid into the Hohe Kalkstein. Or worse. Never forget what a totally ruthless swine Early is. I believe there’s more unevolved Pak in him than in most of us…

  “I’d like to be able to go back to Arthur and report the stuff is safe or destroyed before I give either of them the happy news that we spent so much toil and blood to deposit tree-of-life with a colony of Pak breeders who are really unevolved. Let’s destroy the stuff first. Or make sure it is destroyed.”

  “Unevolved? Or evolved differently?” asked Vaemar.

  “Leonie and I were discussing that a very long time ago. When she was a student, before the first reports of the kzinti began coming in. The Angel’s Pencil warnings, the disappearing ships…It seems like another age. But plainly the Morlocks have remained far closer to the original Pak breeders than humans have…And it was another age. It was a good post-graduate class I had. She’s the only survivor of it.”

  “I raised the question then,” said Leonie. “Why, after coming so far from the direction of the Core, hadn’t the Pak gone one small and logical step further and planted a second colony a mere four light-years away on Wunderland? And we found the answer: they did. I remember spooning a fossil out of the cave floor, cleaning it with sonics, inch by inch, day by day, finding the analogues of human bones and organs that no alien life-form had any right to possess. DNA from live specimens confirmed it. It was going to be my doctoral thesis. I even began wondering about plans to somehow…rehabilitate…them when my work had made me famous. Then, er…no offence…our studies were rudely interrupted…Nils set me and the other post-grads to work analyzing an orange hair he’d found…”

  “In any case, it seemed interesting and even exciting before the invasion, but not important, the way our priorities were after that,” said Rykermann. “If there was any reason to worry about potential Pak Protectors, there were several million around in the form of humans anyway, even if we hadn’t suddenly found ourselves with other things on our minds.”

  “I’d asked Earth to send us everything known about the Pak, although the university had the basic texts here. Not much more had arrived before the invasion. Partly caution at the Earth end, I suppose. The Pak story was like the knowledge in the early Middle Ages of the Earth being a spheroid. Scientists knew about it and it wasn’t exactly secret, but people didn’t talk about it much. Partly, there simply wasn’t much known. Besides, the university had a limited budget for buying interstellar maser time…

  “Presumably tree-of-life failed here for the same reason it failed on Earth and the Protectors eventually died. As on Earth, some breeders survived.”

  “But there were differences,” Leonie told Vaemar. “You know because of Wunderland’s lighter gravity the caves are much bigger here than on Earth or Kzinhome. Big enough to be inhabited by large life-forms on a permanent basis. There are fewer roof-collapses and the slower flow of water means larger volumes of limestone are dissolved in ballroom chambers and honeycombs rather than along the narrow lines of stream-courses. With the mynocks and other flying things there is a lot more protein being brought into the caves than is usually the case on Earth. The breeders moved into the caves—possibly to escape tigripards or other predators—and found themselves on top of the food chains there.

  “Without many predators or competitors in the caves and without weather or any need to devise shelter or protection from it—without rain or heat or ice-ages—they were under far less evolutionary pressure than were the breeders on Earth. Those grew up fighting leopards on the savannah.”

  “Leopards?” asked Vaemar. “I remember, they are…”

  “Big cats. Fighting such creatures is a good way to sort out the cleverest as survivors.”

  “I see.”

  “The caves were like a great womb they never had to leave, and in which they had almost no need to develop. Possibly the radiation from the Pak ships and engines on Earth also caused mutations that didn’t occur here. Anyway, these breeders on Wunderland didn’t need many brains. They also escaped the worst of the meteor impacts that have obviously affected evolution on the surface here. In fact the meteor-impacts would probably have helped them by changing water-levels and giving the caves more suspended tables and more habitable layers of chambers.

  “In this gravity they were well-muscled and already well suited for leaping and clinging to stalactites and so forth. Once their eyes and other senses adapted to the dark, their evolution must have almost ceased, as it has with many life-forms in Earth caves. On Earth there is a species of crustacean found in caves in Australia whose close relatives live in caves in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean. They hardly changed in the time continental drift separated them so far.”

  Rykermann nodded.

/>   “Earth scientists think Homo sapiens is not all Pak in its inheritance,” he said. “The theory is that the original Pak Protectors probably modified the breeder population to better fit the Earth ecosystem and biochemistry. Sewed in the genetic material of Earth primates. That is why humans seem to fit well into the Earth animal kingdom…It also raises the possibility that the breeders on Wunderland were not so modified, or modified differently. It’s patently obvious that they have never developed anything resembling a civilization. We three know that all too well. Predatory bands, with rudimentary stone weapons, almost entirely carnivorous…”

  Rykermann went to a collecting pannier.

  “And there is your latest specimen, Vaemar.” He produced a translucent container and handed it to his pupil. “It is dry and withered, but…”

  Vaemar turned the thing over. “A Morlock infant or late-term fetus. A mummy.”

  “Or a human infant or fetus, perhaps?”

  “It could be, I suppose,” said Leonie. “There were children who took refuge in the caves during the war. Maybe this was a stillbirth. Or an abortion by some poor child. They had no birth control.”

  “Damaged as it is,” said Rykermann, “it has sufficient characteristics of both species to puzzle us as to its identification, does it not? I think it may be a hybrid. A human-Morlock hybrid, not carried to term. And humans and Morlocks are meant to have evolved under different stars. It should be as impossible as…as a human-Kzin hybrid. Add that to the DNA profiles. Anyway, Vaemar, just let me know if the stuff’s still there, and sealed. Obviously, take all precautions for dealing with dangerous material. And don’t forget there’s radioactive material there as well.”