by Larry Niven
The container's surface was still seamless, but had acquired a creamy hue. Richard had been watching the views from the scanners around the box, and he said, "Where's the cutoff switch?"
Slaverexpert, who had never previously spoken unless directly addressed, startled Richard by saying, "True." In Interworld.
"Explain," commanded Charrgh-Captain.
"These were designed to be opened easily, Charrgh-Captain. A panel would be spring-loaded, to break the conductive surface when the field was interrupted. The stasis has ended, but the surface is still seamless."
Gay, who had gotten curious and was having a look, said, "It isn't. It's split in half. Look, there." She pointed at one of the screens. The seam was at an inconvenient angle, so nobody else had noticed it.
And it hadn't been as big. The split was getting wider.
"Battle stations," Charrgh-Captain said. Still in Interworld, addressing the two humans—kzinti routine was Battle Stations. The Guthlacs got to their couches and strapped in.
"Sir," Telepath said dopily, drugged with sthondat-lymph extract, "I detect no life."
"You can't read Slaverexpert, either," Charrgh-Captain replied.
"No, sir, but I can tell where he is."
"Noted. Slaverexpert, report."
"The only energy I detect is heat, in amounts consistent with being present before stasis began, plus the separation of the shell. Shall I deep-radar?"
"Yes. Display the results."
The image on the humans' screens was divided into wedge-shaped compartments, almost all full of materials slightly denser than water. One held even denser material, probably metallic, in boxes. "It looks like an orange designed by ARMs," Richard said.
Charrgh-Captain, relieved of tension, snorted amusement. "An orange? The fruit?"
"Sure. Armor-plated for safety, big so it's easy to find, opens automatically when ripe."
"So what's all the metal?" Gay chuckled, pointing at the last wedge.
Slaverexpert spoke up. "Emergency escape pods for the seeds?" After a moment of utter silence, he looked up to find everyone else staring at him—even Telepath. "Sorry, sir," he said faintly to Charrgh-Captain, and looked back down at his instruments in a marked manner.
"We'll examine that section before taking the box in tow," Charrgh-Captain said.
Probably the best thing about working in space with kzinti was that they had been doing it for so long. Lighting, for instance. Humans, even those in the mining industries, tended to put up one or two bright lights, and wear one or two smaller lights on their helmets, producing sharp-edged shadows and a nagging conviction that something was hiding just out of sight. Here, though, Second Trooper strewed fistfuls of little spheres toward the partitions: where they hit, they stuck, and presently began to glow gently. They had frosted surfaces, so the light was diffuse. The kzinti suits also had multiple lights: a couple at each wrist, and two rows of three each down the torso, where things would be held to work on them. A light under the chin illuminated things directly ahead.
The Guthlacs were given clusters of faint blue lights to strap onto their suits, which in conjunction with standard kzinti lighting gave them a spectrum they could use easily. The amount of thought and preparation this implied was extremely flattering: They were being extended enormous courtesy. Richard found himself wondering if Charrgh-Captain had known all along that human-model food dispensers included a toilet.
There wasn't much time to dwell on this. The parcels were full of gadgets.
Most of them were pretty straightforward power tools: drills, saws, hammers, trimmers, shapers, diggers, a couple of amazingly elaborate grippies, and something that Gay and Slaverexpert tentatively labeled, after much consultation, as a handheld turret lathe. "These must have been for the use of a slave race," said Slaverexpert. "They are too large for Tnuctipun hands, and Thrintun would rather starve than toil." He sounded troubled.
"What's wrong?" said Richard.
"There is something familiar about the workmanship. Disturbing."
"What would this be?" Charrgh-Captain said, holding up a thing that included a short spike, a knife, a crank, and little spring-loaded rollers. "It hardly seems useful as a weapon."
Slaverexpert took it and turned it over a few times. "I am open to any suggestion," he said, baffled.
"It looks..." Richard began, then said, "Nah, crazy."
"So?" said Charrgh-Captain.
"Good point. Well, it looks like an apple peeler. A good one, too."
"It does, doesn't it?" Gay agreed.
Slaverexpert worked the crank a little. "It seems articulated to follow a complex surface."
"Potato peeler, then?" Gay said.
Slaverexpert looked at her, then at Richard. His ears were distinctly cupped, as if he were expecting ambush. He said, "Charrgh-Captain, it may be prudent to inspect the other sections as well."
"Very well, once we're done with this one."
Other devices were more complex. Several were lasers, or included lasers, but would have required great modification of focus for use as weapons. Another seemed intended to take in some kind of powder and extrude solid material in any desired shape. The purpose of a few remained unclear. All the tools that required power had to be plugged in; they had no power supplies of their own.
And it was Telepath, whose drugs were wearing off, who said, "Are there two of anything?"
Charrgh-Captain gave a startled grunt. "He's right," he said. "There are no duplications. Or spare parts," he realized. He picked up an object that had been mysterious a moment before. "This could be used to wind wire around a rotor." He added in Hero, "Everyone pick up an object and examine it for signs of usage."
His tone of command was such that the Guthlacs did so along with the rest. Richard inspected the peeler and found the blade and spike unstained. "Clean, no wear," he said. Similar remarks were made by others.
"These may be models," Charrgh-Captain declared. "Meant only to be copied. Were not the Slavers highly mercantile?"
"Charrgh-Captain, they were," said Slaverexpert. "These may indeed be articles of commerce. Shall I see what organic goods they stocked?"
"Certainly."
Slaverexpert had gone from being taciturn to interested, and had now gone from interested to stiffly formal. If Richard understood kzinti reactions (and he had some reason to think he might), Slaverexpert was experiencing immense stress, about something he didn't want to discuss.
Slaverexpert's conduct while inspecting the other segments verged on bizarre. One held thirty-one bacterial-containment canisters, and he barely glanced at them. The next three held clear plastic shells, each containing seeds of different sizes and shapes, which were also virtually ignored. The fifth held larger bins, that fitted into the shell segment; he shone a light on one, then said, "Charrgh-Captain, I have a security problem."
"From plants?"
"Tree-of-life," said Slaverexpert. There was a moment's silence.
Then, "Discuss it with the humans. The rest of you withdraw and switch to a music channel. Telepath, take your sedative."
"Thank you, sir."
"Tree-of-life" was a term coined over seven centuries earlier by a man who had eaten some. It had been brought by a Pak protector, a sort-of-alien from the Galactic Core, and it had turned the man into an asexual killing machine with vastly increased intelligence and the single goal of ensuring his descendants' propagation—just the effect it had on the Pak. An ill-conceived attempt by the ARM to do the same thing deliberately during the First War had misfired, and had things gone even a little worse all other intelligent life in Known Space would have been methodically exterminated.
Richard was beginning to recover from the shock, but only in stages. "This can't be tree-of-life," he protested. "The time is off by a factor of, of eight hundred. How the tanj do you know about tree-of-life, anyway?"
"It's in my area," said Slaverexpert. "The Pak were a Tnuctip bioweapon."
Richard stared for a mome
nt, then said, "Impossible. In two billion years they would have evolved beyond recognition."
"They ate their mutations," said Slaverexpert. "They could distinguish variation of a single codon by smell."
"Richard, I read a monograph on that once," Gay said. "The author made a good case."
"Where was this?" he exclaimed.
"Fractal Edge netzine."
Richard sighed. "Gay, the only people who contribute to that are conspiracy theorists."
"You mean, like the people who used to believe in alien abductions?"
Gay was one of a large proportion of modern Wunderlanders descended from kidnapped humans that the Jotoki had engaged as mercenaries; Richard's ancestral kin had been aboard so many kzinti warships that it was practically a Guthlac family tradition. Richard opened and closed his mouth once, scowled, and stuck out his tongue.
"Don't change the subject," Gay said primly.
As Richard was sputtering, Second Trooper, who had been idly watching him from a distance, touched helmets with First Trooper and said, "Why would he expose his tongue?"
"From what I've read on them, humans spend most of their spare time either mating or making plans to mate. That's why there are so many of them."
"What does that have to do with what I said?"
"Human mating rituals include grooming each other's genitals," First Trooper replied.
Second Trooper, who like all kzinti had a tongue not unlike a wood rasp, looked at the Guthlacs with new respect. No wonder human fighters were so tough.
Richard got back on track: "Look, two and a half million years ago the Pak colonized Earth, the root didn't grow right, the breeders stopped turning into protectors, and they wound up evolving into us. If the Pak had been around for two billion years, wouldn't that have happened somewhere else by now?"
"It likely did," said Slaverexpert. "Repeatedly. It may have come to your attention that humans are warlike. Certainly it has not escaped ours. It would have been easy for them to exterminate one another."
Richard was still finding it too incredible. "Look, the plants needed thallium to work right. Where's the thallium supply?"
"Richard Guthlac," Slaverexpert said gently, "did you see any tools suitable for Tnuctip use? This is a cache prepared for rebellion against the Tnuctipun. The proto-Pak would have tailored a root for themselves that was not limited by the availability of a rare-earth element, which was doubtless a feature designed by the Tnuctipun to restrict their spread."
It was chillingly plausible.
Gay made it a little more so: "I just realized there are no fabricators, to copy those model tools," she said. "A protector would build one on the spot after the stasis box was opened, rather than waste storage space that could be used for more models."
It accounted for the potato peeler.
—Except that nothing accounted for the potato peeler: "Why is there a potato peeler?" Richard exclaimed. "They ate the whole things, didn't they?"
Slaverexpert thought. Then he looked at the roots and thought some more. Finally he said, "All I can think of is flavor, which is illogical; they could surely have tailored for that as well. I shall have to analyze one for better information."
As Slaverexpert signaled to Charrgh-Captain, Gay murmured to Richard, "Do you think he'd have destroyed them without testing otherwise?"
"If they're tree-of-life, I'd help," he replied in equally low tones. "Protectors are asexual and all look ancient. I prefer to be young and dumb and...keep my hair."
"I like your hair too." She smiled.
Cunning Stalker's lab was a thorough one, and its safety features were appallingly practical: In an emergency, the entire lab would be ejected from the ship and into the path of the message laser, which would keep firing until the beam was unobstructed. "No need for the calcium notch," said Richard weakly. He had won the toss, and Gay was back in their compartment, watching by screen.
"Urr?" said Slaverexpert, as he put the sample case into the lab manipulator with one hand and began undoing his suit with the other.
"On the spectroscope next to the laser."
"Why a spectroscope?" The kzin's Interworld was excellent.
Surprised, Richard said, "I thought it was standard equipment. When something is blown up, the spectroscope scans the cloud, and if there's no band at the calcium frequency it was a miss or a decoy."
"Because a real target would include something with a skeleton," Slaverexpert said. "I see. Richard Guthlac, I find I enjoy working with you, so I hope you will take this suggestion: Do not say things like that very often around kzinti. There is something deeply disturbing in the didacticism that humans bring to the business of battle."
Richard could think of nothing to say—it probably had been thought up by someone sitting at a desk somewhere, who might never have so much as seen a live kzin.
Slaverexpert opened a cabinet next to the manipulator controls and put on a set of goggles from it. He looked through various compartments in the cabinet, growled very deep in his throat, and took off his goggles. "There is no human-version viewer," he said, putting them away, "so we will have to use window displays. I would prefer something that stayed in view when I turned my head, but leaving you out would violate the agreement."
Richard was about to ask why he couldn't use kzinti goggles, when the displays appeared on the window before them. The one in front of him was familiar in style, with different kinds of information displayed in different colors of high chroma, arranged in rows and columns with any useful diagrams at the top. The one in front of Slaverexpert had kzinti script in deep purple written right across light gray diagrams, whose shapes were constantly shifting, just slightly. The writing moved around slowly within the diagrams. The positions of the diagrams underwent abrupt changes every few seconds, too. Just looking at it was disturbing; trying to get information out of it would have given him a bad headache very quickly. "Telepath should see this," Richard murmured.
He'd forgotten kzinti hearing. "Why?" said Slaverexpert.
"Oh, a while back he was talking to us about the similarities in human and kzinti thinking. There's some fundamental differences in brain structure suggested here, and it might be of interest."
"Oh. Good, I thought I was going to have to wake him up. He doesn't sleep enough." Before Richard could absorb the concept of a healthy kzin showing concern for a telepath, Slaverexpert went on, "He's right, though. The fact that your readout looks like something I'd watch to get to sleep merely reflects a difference in hunting style." His ears curled up for a moment as the readouts changed several times. Then they uncurled, the readouts steadied, and he said, "Unfamiliar equipment. I've got it now."
Behind the window, waldoes opened the bin of roots and removed one. Richard had controls at his own station, and directed a sniffer to sample the air that had been in the container. "I did read somewhere that humans and kzinti are the only races to use fissionables to make bombs," he remarked.
"Odd. It seems such an obvious idea," said Slaverexpert. "No thallium, but I didn't expect it. Air interesting?"
"Nitrogen, oxygen, a little argon. Pretty standard habitable-planet issue," Richard said, and heard the kzin snort in amusement. "Traces of medium-sized hydrocarbons."
"Urr?" Slaverexpert brought some new instruments into play, then said, "The root is rich in terpenes. And there is no taurine."
"Taurine?"
"An amino acid human metabolism uses in dendrite connections. You do not synthesize it, so tree-of-life should be crammed with it to facilitate the change... Though you may have lost the ability to synthesize it due to the supply available in Earth prey—no, Jack Brennan had no difficulty... I am unable to detect any trace of steroid compounds. The roots from the Pak ship that came to Sol System were found to contain a hormone for rapid muscle and bone development. This does not appear to be tree-of-life," Slaverexpert concluded.
"Good!" Richard said. "So what is it?"
"Let me try something." A waldo took up the
uncut half of the root, then tossed it at a wall. It bounced back. "It's rubber."
"What?"
"Rubber. Rather, a long-chain molecule assembled from terpene monomers, suitable for insulation, seals, and padding. Hardenable and readily cast into nonconductive parts."
"Rubber," said Richard, amused.
"A valuable industrial material. I speculate that many of the life-forms we have found here will be tailored to produce such. Shall we investigate?'
"Let's." Now that fear was going, avarice had come out of hiding to put in a few words.
Unreasonably many hours later, Richard said, "Is that the last?" and wiped his brow with a hand that, he noticed, was developing a twitch from operating waldo gloves for so long.
"It is," said Slaverexpert. "I marvel at your endurance."
"I'm ready to fall down," Richard protested. "You're in much better shape."
"I possess medical enhancements added long ago to repair lethal injuries, and can produce my own natural stimulants at will. Nevertheless I am losing image persistence. I need exercise and sleep."
"Me too, not in that order."
"Urr. I can't remember whether you said there were any microorganisms present in anything."
"Just the handmade stuff in the cans."
"Good." Slaverexpert cycled a sample box through the containment lock, put a few roots into it, and brought it out, saying, "These should be amus—What's wrong?"
Richard had backed across the lab and was squinting. "I'm not that fond of mint." Even the traces on the outside of the closed box were disagreeably strong.
"You'll want to avoid the relaxroom, then, because I'll be bouncing one of these around. You don't like this? It seems quite pleasant to me."
Richard's throat was trying to close up. "Have to go," he choked out, and fled.
Telepath was in their quarters, looking like he just woke up, which was likely. Gay, off monitor duty, was already in the shower. Richard said to Telepath, "Excuse me please," and began peeling off his suit.
"Certainly. What smells so good?"
"That's right, you slept through the analysis. Well, I've got time"—a pressure suit should not come off quickly—"so: there was a root that looked a lot like Pak protector root, but it turned out to be something that produced a useful organic polymer. You're smelling the monomer. There were roots that produced other polymers, bacteria that made enzymes that chelated trace elements from iodine to uranium, seeds for trees that collected other elements in their bark, other this and that. We're all going to be rich. You look better," Richard realized.