by Larry Niven
There was an awkward silence.
“Look at that!” Patrick pointed excitedly again. A smile returned to Leonie’s eyes as she watched the Crashlander’s excitement. Much remained park-like—woodlands, glades, small streams. Herds of gagrumphers and other creatures could be seen. There was also a scattering of human farms and hamlets. Fruit trees, and even a few vineyards for small bottlings of wine grown in the old natural way. Leonie had flown over this landscape many times, but she could still appreciate its loveliness. Humans had become human in a landscape not too unlike this. For both of them there was some touch of Eden about it.
“I can’t get over it!” said Patrick. Then: “Where are the caves?”
“Underneath us. Underneath all this country. You can trace them on the deep radar.”
“I’d rather just watch all this,” His face was alight with wonderment. “I feel so lucky to have seen it! When this is all over I want to walk through this country. I don’t think I’d get agoraphobia again, the treatments were good. I’d love to live under a sky for a while!”
“We’ll be down in it shortly,” Leonie said. “I hope it comes up to expectations.”
Chapter 8
The tunnel was roofed over, but the grey light of the sky penetrated. There was a room at the end of the tunnel, entered through what looked like a spaceship’s airlock. Power cables snaked about. There were familiar computer-screens and consoles, mostly kzin-sized and of more-or-less kzin military pattern, as well as instruments and machinery whose function neither Vaemar nor Dimity could guess at. Vaemar and Dimity were deposited there, weaponless but unharmed. As Chorth-Captain covered them with a beam rifle, the Protector removed their garments, searching them thoroughly and ripping Dimity’s apart in the process—Vaemar beneath his coverall wore much less, mainly straps and pouches. It ran police tape over their hands and feet. This was specially made to restrain kzinti from using their claws, and far stronger than was necessary to immobilize a human. Then the Protector surveyed them.
So far, things had moved too fast for Vaemar or Dimity to see the Protector properly. Guthlac had surmised that it would be close to the original Pak form. For all its immense strength it was smaller than Dimity and barely half the height of either kzin, with a protruding muzzle hardened into a horny beak, a bulging, lobed, melon-like cranium, with large bulging eyes, and exaggerated ears and nostrils, part of its Morlock heritage, in a parody of a human face even more bizarre than the face of a Pak or human Protector, joints like huge balls of bone and muscle rolling below a skin like leather armor. Chorth-Captain stood beside it.
“Traitor!” Vaemar snarled at the other kzin. “You hand your own kind to alien monsters! I challenge you—to the death and the generations!”
“Traitor? Handing our kind to alien monsters? Who speaks?” Chorth-Captain replied in the Mocking Tense. “Do I speak to Vaemar, sometimes called Riit, chief kollabrratorr on Ka’ashi? Holder of a commission in the Human Reserve Officer Training Corps? Who would join our kind with the vermin of the Universe? Yes, kollabrratorr, I call you, kollabrratorr and kwizzliing, perversions that only the vermin had words for till they infected our tongue! As for your challenge, it is nothing. The mere jabbering of a Kz’eerkt-chrowler.” Kz’eerkt meant “ape,” “monkey” or “human.” “Chrowl” depending on who used it and when, was an either intimate or obscene term among kzinti for sexual intercourse. In normal kzin society such as had existed pre-Liberation, a death-duel would inevitably have followed such an insult. Dimity thought she could feel the effort with which Vaemar controlled both his voice and his body language to reply calmly. At least he has had good training at that, she thought. Growing up among humans, learning to follow human rules—like me.
“You are brave when your monster has tied my claws,” said Vaemar. “If you had wished to know why I have done as I have, and spoken with me, I could have told you my reasons. But you are one of those who weary me with your stupidity, who think with hot livers instead of brains. Who may yet be the destruction of our kind. What do you think you have done?” He gestured with his tail and ears at the Protector. “You are the slave of this thing?”
“He is an ally,” replied Chorth-Captain. “It is not I who am the slave of aliens. We have watched you long, Vaemar-sometimes-called-Riit. Ka’ashi has Heroes still who do not crawl like bugs into your fur as you abase yourself before the monkeys.”
The Protector gestured. Chorth-Captain disappeared for a few moments while the Protector watched them. They guessed he was attending to their car. The Protector’s voice when it spoke was a series of clicks and poppings. But it spoke slowly, taking trouble, and it used what had once been called the Slave’s Patois, but which was now becoming a common, value-neutral, lingua franca between humans and kzinti on Wunderland.
“Obey and you will live,” it said. Its strange eyes travelled from Dimity to Vaemar and back. It was Dimity who replied.
“What do you want?”
“Teach.” It touched a keyboard and a bank of screens sprang into life. Wunderland television channels and internet sites. One of them, Dimity and Vaemar saw, showed Vaemar’s palace and its surroundings and outbuildings, including the guest house Dimity used. A camera somewhere in the woods. Others showed Munchen University, including the Dimity Carmody Physics Building with its inscription.
“Teach…what?”
“Everything. You I know.” It touched another keyboard. An old newsreel, showing Dimity and a group of scientists. Patrick was right, thought Dimity. It was stupid to broadcast the fact of my return to Wunderland. But too many people knew anyway.
“We have been watching you for a long time,” said Chorth-Captain, returning to the room. “I supplied the original equipment, which has been improved upon. The Patriarchy will be grateful to Chorth-Captain when those improvements are incorporated into the standard equipment of our Navy. We improved surveillance and stealthing among many other things. We know much. But my ally wishes to learn more. You two are…associates”—he cast another look of loathing and contempt at Vaemar, black lips curling—“with one another. We have known for some time, and considered it advantageous for all its loathsomeness and indignity, monkey-dirt scratched upon the Name of Riit. Did you think we were careless with the trail of radioactives? We laid a trail to bring you here.”
“We will need to know more,” said Dimity. “Teach? Teach what?”
“Context,” said the Protector. Its beak clacked over the word. “Teach about humans. About kzinti on this planet. About space.” It paused. “Gods,” it said, surprisingly. Then it said the word Dimity and Vaemar had hoped against their reason not to hear. “Hyperdrive.”
“I haven’t the tools,” said Dimity. She knew it would be pointless to play dumb. The Protector knew. Vaemar and I set ourselves up, she thought.
“Make tools,” said the Protector. And then: “We have begun.” It turned its back, leaving Chorth-Captain to guard them. Its fingers blurred with speed on the keyboard. Doors flashed shut almost soundlessly around them. For a moment there was a hint of G-force, gone almost instantly, and a purring noise. Both Dimity and Vaemar recognized it. They had flown in ships with kzin gravity-motors before. The panel of grey sky above was suddenly swirling with indescribable colors.
“Yes,” said Chorth-Captain. “A gravity-planer. Much improved. And shielding devices, also much improved. Good enough to get us past the monkeyships and the monkeys’ machine-sentinels. Again I supplied the basic equipment from kzin stores. Once I had demonstrated them to my ally he was able to make advances with them. Hear how quiet the planer has become.”
“How did you meet your ally?” asked Vaemar, with a mildness, almost a casualness, in his voice that Dimity had heard once or twice before. She felt a shiver run up her spine.
“In the caves. When the traitors struck in the great battle before the humans attacked”—You don’t say which side you consider the traitors, Vaemar thought—“I took a Scream of Vengeance fighter we carried and flew
to the Hollow Moon. In the confusion it was not noticed there.”
So, thought Vaemar. Are you a coward, Chorth-Captain, and has your knowledge of cowardice driven you mad? Or is this all a lie? The latter, he thought. Chorth-Captain’s body-language suggested lying. So, he saw, did the instrumentation numbers on the bulkhead. This craft was not from a ship of one of the Ka’ashi-based squadrons. He said nothing.
“Watching with its instruments,” Chorth-Captain continued. “I saw the apes were gaining the upper hand, and before they had gained all air- and space-superiority about Ka’ashi I took this gig and, leaving the fighter as hidden as might be, I flew back to Ka’ashi, evading the apes’ clumsy, noseless searchers, back to the wild country and the great caves. I lurked there when the war ended, hoping to find some way back to Kzinhome so I might fight on, or some way to die gloriously in battle, killing monkeys eights-squared times as Lord Dragga-Skrull killed Jotok. I made occasional raids on the surface. I learnt of Chuut-Riit’s hidden redoubt which the monkeys had found. It was abandoned and sealed when I reached it but I broke the seals and took equipment from it. Years passed. Monkeys died at my claws, when they were foolish enough to wander alone or in small troops. In the caves I met my ally. He alone had been exposed to the chemical and made the change. He had memories of his previous life, and of the war. Of Heroes and monkeys, of weapons and fighting, which he was soon able to understand. His intelligence had, of course, become very high, though he had been barely sentient before. He did not kill me, but showed me that an alliance against the apes would be in the interest of both our kinds.” He lied a moment ago, but he’s not lying now, Vaemar thought. Chorth-Captain went on.
“He demonstrated his intelligence to me, and together we modified this craft, and built other things. I contacted Heroes the apes had not corrupted and they too supplied us with knowledge and equipment. We tested his improvements to cloaking devices and they worked. We flew to the southern island undetected and carried out much work there, free from the attention of monkeys or…other things. Under his direction we studied what we could of the plight of Ka’ashi. I told him what I knew of space and the war. We agreed the monkeys were the most noxious vermin of the universe…”
Dimity caught it vaguely, Vaemar much more clearly. There was a great deal wrong with Chorth-Captain. There was a strange kind of buzzing in his voice. But there was more than that. Most kzinti of the officer class, used to framing orders, did not commonly in such a situation deliver themselves of prolix monologues like this, least of all to monkeys or prisoners. And Vaemar’s Ziirgah sense picked up a fuzziness, something off-key, in Chorth-Captain’s emotions as well as in his voice and body-language. His brain has been tampered with, thought Vaemar. By the Protector, obviously. The thing that was a brainless Morlock. Rykermann is right. They are a peril indeed.
“Where are we going?”
Chorth-Captain gestured at another screen. Wunderland was a great sphere. Vaemar saw they were already several hundred miles up, and still accelerating. There was no interference from the guardships, manned and automated, that patrolled the space above the planet.
“The Hollow Moon. There we will be undisturbed.”
I don’t think so, thought Vaemar. Our disappearance will be noted. But then he thought that, thought they might be searched for, there would be no particular reason to include the Hollow Moon in the search, especially if this craft’s cloaking was truly good. There would be no reason to think they were in space at all.
Dimity had thought of no way to remind him of the locators.
“Where is the tree-of-life?” asked Dimity.
“Most of it is still in the caves, along with most of the warheads. It is safe. There was a little we took to the Hollow Moon but it is now being used. You will not be exposed to it.”
There was something else Dimity and Vaemar could hardly help noticing. Chorth-Captain would hardly be talking to them so frankly if he expected them to live to tell the tale, whatever the Protector said. The Protector may be smarter than most human geniuses, thought Dimity, as, by our IQ tests, are Vaemar and I. But Chorth-Captain sure isn’t.
Wunderland continued to shrink on the screen. Now it was a great, multicolored disk in space. The Protector had been sitting calmly in a lotus-position. Its oversized eyes appeared almost dreamy. But both the captives sensed it was absorbing every word. Both knew that in an instant it could spring. After a time it spoke into what appeared to be the mutated descendant of a standard kzin-pattern com-link. When Dimity asked who it was speaking to she was ignored. There were flexible tubes for food and waste-disposal, and human and kzin were evidently expected to use them together, in each other’s sight. On Wunderland members of the two species who had ties with one another might sometimes drink together, or eat small delicacies like ice cream, but there were usually powerful taboos beyond more than that. Evidently there had been captives on this vessel before.
Chorth-Captain told them of how he had made contact with a number of the kzinti who had been in Chuut-Riit/Henrietta’s Redoubt and escaped or survived its storming. Through them he had begun to build up a knowledge-base for the Protector about Dimity and Vaemar.
The kzinti had been masters of gravity control for millennia—the gravity-planer was their principal space-drive—and normal Wunderland gravity was maintained in the chamber. Chorth-Captain fitted caps on their heads and they slept.
Leonie, after asking permission and giving certain passwords, landed her car in the courtyard of Vaemar’s palace. Patrick Quickenden remained in the car, keeping out of sight as much as possible.
Raargh, Seneschal in charge in Vaemar’s absence, greeted her. One of his kittens, frolicking in the long grasses nearby, leapt to join his sire, going down into a mock-attacking crouch at the sight of the human. He was about as big as, and somewhat more powerful than, an Earth leopard. Leonie had once beaten such a kitten to death with a metal bar in a prolonged and desperate fight. Her old legs and thighs had borne the scars of that fight for a long time. Raargh looked at him, gave a single growl in an unmistakable tense, and the kitten fled.
Twenty-five years earlier Raargh and Leonie had seen each other for the first time, across the sights of a beam rifle, as Raargh lay pinned under rocks in a Morlock-infested cave. Each owed the other at least one life. Raargh raised his remaining natural arm and touched her shoulder.
“Got message, urrr!” he said. “Trouble!” He gave a purr of satisfaction and anticipation. He passed Big John the w’tsai of the Seneschal’s office, in its ornately-engraved gold and purple sheath. “Care for this, Hero, till I return.” He slapped his belt where his own old w’tsai hung. “Urrr!” he repeated, snapping his teeth and flexing his claws.
Chapter 9
“The Hollow Moon,” said Chorth-Captain, waking them.
The purring of the gravity-planer had ceased. The panels opened. Chorth-Captain gestured and they followed him out. The Protector came behind them.
Gravity changed abruptly. This was less disorienting for Dimity and Vaemar than it would have been had they not spent years with kzin gravity-technology. Since both knew something of the Hollow Moon it was easy to work out their situation.
They were in a compartment on the inner surface. There was a great concave roof above them, vanishing into blackness overhead, and a concave floor at their feet, but so partitioned and divided that it was impossible to see far. There was a diffuse light. The ship they had travelled in now looked like a stony spheroid. Its surface sparkled here and there with quartz-like chips that they guessed were miniaturized cloaking-generators. Held by gravity anchors, it stood within a translucent tube, one of several, on a landing pad such as was more-or-less standard for small spacecraft in the Serpent Swarm Asteroids. Above it was a hatch, now closed, obviously leading to the surface and space. There, too, was the glowing blue dome of a Sinclair time-acceleration field.
Some of the machinery around had, for both human and kzin, an alien look. But much of it appeared to be kzin
military and naval equipment, either standard or modified. There were kzinti control consoles, close to standard naval models, and banks of screens, some blank, some with idly moving data. To Vaemar, they might almost be inside a kzin space station, though he knew more about this from Reserve Officers’ intelligence courses than from his own experience. There was a nest of gravity-sleds, the kzin all-purpose transporters, which he had used often. Both took it all in fast. Gravity technology, Sinclair technology, Cloaking technology already better, or more compact, than anything we have. And now they are after the Hyperdrive! Chorth-Captain led them into another compartment.
A smell of Morlock struck Dimity, repellent even to her weak human nostrils. What she saw reminded for a moment of a hospital ward. A row of creatures lay on beds. Quasi-humanoids with swollen bellies. Morlocks, gorged on tree-of-life, beginning the change into Protectors. Dimity felt a stab of panic. She clutched at Vaemar’s arm. “There is tree-of-life here!”
“You do not need to fear, monkey,” said Chorth-Captain. “It is gone. It has been ingested. Before we flew we signalled to those here that we had you, and for the process to begin. These will have teachers when they awake. And there will be builders for the superluminal drive.”
“Those here.” Plural, thought Dimity. We have at least four enemies. The odds are against us anyway, and they will be worse soon. I can make sense of things in that realm where mathematics and metaphysics come together, but I cannot fight a kzin, let alone a Protector. And there are forty more here, beginning to change.
There, under a cold blue light in the corner, were other still silent forms: dead, dissected humans and kzinti. So, thought Dimity, the process of learning about other species has already begun in a practical way. She indicated it to Vaemar with a roll of her eyes and twitch of her Wunderlander aristocrat’s ears.