by Larry Niven
They did this because the Pak were all coming out in the direction of Earth. Earth was known to be habitable, and their own world wasn't going to be.
This was because the Galaxy was exploding.
Greenberg's head was exploding. He took a smoke break before he read on—
This was known hereabouts because it had been seen: The puppeteers had developed an improved hyperdrive, from mathematical hints dropped by Peace Corben after she'd become a protector. (The puppeteers had fled the Galaxy as soon as they saw the films.)
She'd become a Protector when she'd gone to Home fleeing a kzinti invasion of her home planet. (She had subsequently won that war single-handedly by walking into the Patriarchy's Central Command inside an accelerator field, walking out with their entire order of battle, and arranging for every kzinti attack after the first to be met with overwhelming force.)
The kzinti were now mining antimatter, from a stray solar cloud that was passing through the Galaxy at about point eight C. And that meant that her arrangements to alter kzinti civilization had been changed by someone capable of mental control.
The protector came back while he was reading her speculations about what was happening on Kzin. He looked up and said, "You did all this to collect me?"
"Right. The records don't say where the device was put."
Back in 2107, Larry Greenberg had been Earth's top telepath. Greenberg had been put into contact with an alien, Kzanol, who'd been in stasis for, it turned out, two billion years. Kzanol had been a much more powerful telepath—a Slaver of the Slaver Empire, with the Power to control dozens of ordinary minds—and his transferred memories had overwhelmed Greenberg's personality for weeks. There had ensued a hunt for something which would have made Kzanol, essentially, God:
"You mean the stasis field with the Slaver amplifier in it?"
"No, Lucas Garner's hoverchair, I always wanted it for my weapon collection." Given that Garner had then been a 169-year-old paranoid, that was almost reasonable; his travel chair probably violated all kinds of safety laws, and possibly one or two disarmament treaties.
Greenberg flushed a little and said, "It was dropped into Jupiter."
"Good. I was afraid Garner would have talked them into the sun. That'd be difficult."
"You can retrieve it?"
"What do you think I've been working on while you read, a better mousetrap?"
"Oh... Still mice around, huh?"
"Yeah, but changed some. All that radiation during the Kzinti Wars. We've signed a treaty, though."
"You're kidding."
"Yes."
"...You are kidding."
"Yes."
He blinked a few times, shook his head violently, and said, "Where's everybody else?"
"Still in stasis. I wanted you apprised of the situation before I extended the accelerator field around them. I mean to spend about fifteen subjective years in this ship, in part to get them adapted before I release them, and I need you to look after their sanity."
"I thought you had an emergency."
"To the rest of the universe it'll be about eleven days. Stasis won't work inside any kind of time-distortion field, so I had to tell you separately."
"Wait a minute, what about my wife?"
"She's here. I got everybody."
"I mean, we wanted children."
Peace nodded. "This vessel was built to house up to half a million Protectors and their fighter craft. You won't find it crowded in fifteen years, I don't care how enthusiastic you are."
* * *
The Tnuctip walked right past a group of older kzintosh, who were following a Pierin tutor. (Paid regular staff were a recent innovation, but one that seemed to work. All it took was regarding a contract as an oath.) There were six to avoid, not counting the Pierin, who wasn't being paid to notice Shleer. The group fell silent as the Tnuctip scurried by.
"Here we have the tablets of Great Sire Chof-Yff-Riit, who, in amongst his personal tastes, specified the penalties for willfully ignoring a known gesture of surrender, which act was a great contribution to all kzinti cultures, and may be argued to have led to unification thereof under the Patriarchy. Who knows how humans signal surrender?" the Pierin asked. It would take more than the end of civilization to shut a Pierin up. Shleer crept along the wall behind his siblings—far behind.
K'nar-Riitt, who was likely to be the next Patriarch, said dryly, "Their hearts stop beating. It's not always a sure sign, though."
"Wittily phrased, though possibly misleading. Humans do not have a surrender gesture. They are descended from the Pak, a species that knew nothing but war, and are as a consequence the least reasonable or tractable intelligent race presently known. They are never satisfied until things are entirely the way they want them, and genuinely expect everyone else to cooperate."
One of his siblings was turning toward Shleer. Shleer froze, turned only his head, and made eye contact as soon as he was seen. The kzintosh flexed his ears a little and turned back to the Pierin. Shleer continued out of the hall, head pounding terribly.
The Tnuctip was out of his sight, but passed through somebody else's. Shleer took the correct exit from the next chamber, doing military respiration exercises to get the headache under control. It got a little easier each time.
He evaded the guards who'd seen the thing, which was indeed heading for the Jotoki labs. Shleer shortened the distance between them to get through the (manifestly useless) containment doors on the same activation, then let it get ahead. It went into the lifeboat, out of sight.
Then it vanished from his perception.
Shleer immediately took cover. The Tnuctip came out of the lifeboat wearing a cap of metal mesh, then went over to where the Jotoki traditionally worked on weapons they fondly imagined the kzinti didn't know about, entered, and was invisible again.
The Tnuctip was wearing a shield against telepathy. The sthondat-nuzzling imbeciles had had a mental shield, but hadn't been using it when they went into stasis! Shleer noticed his claws were out, and retracted them with an effort. A phrase he'd picked up from Felix crossed his mind: "unusually stupid." It certainly seemed to apply.
What would the Peer do now? Examine his options.
Shleer could sneak in on just nose and ears.
He could wait and follow the Tnuctip further.
He could wait and look inside after the Tnuctip left.
Or he could leave now—at least in theory; he only listed it to be thorough.
Shleer waited.
Eventually the Tnuctip came out—looking directly toward him. Pure chance, but bad. Shleer hoped really hard their brains were arranged like modern ones, and maintained eye contact. The Tnuctip sniffed a few times, then turned and went to put the shield back in the lifeboat.
After it had scurried away, Shleer moved for the first time in over an hour, stretching slowly. The only place for the Tnuctip to go was the Residence; it could therefore be ignored now. Shleer entered the Jotoki secret weapon shop for a look.
Nothing was lying out, but compartments had been handled. He sniffed them out, then checked for traps. One had a hair across the opening, another hair hanging from the hinge, and a deadfall of a canister of dry lubricant powder inside. Intended only to reveal Jotoki interference—so kzinti reflexes kept the powder from spilling a grain.
The Tnuctip had been working on another mental shield. Cruder-looking, but with an active power source. Jamming? Would that work?
He looked it over carefully, Felix having taught him a great deal. It most certainly would not work. There were conductors that would melt if full power were applied for more than a few seconds. The Tnuctip had been Programmed to waste its time here.
Shleer almost pitied the evil little creature. Almost. He replaced the deadfall and the hairs, and began trying to remember, as he headed back toward the harem, where he'd last seen a camera.
The design seemed worth copying—and Shleer hadn't been Told to use flawed components.
* * *
<
br /> The Slaver Gnix watched a movie and sucked a gnal, or at least the best approximation his slaves had produced so far. He had nobody to tell it to—yet—but he was mostly pleased. He'd been lucky beyond belief.
He'd manifested full Power later than usual for a Thrint. This had led to his being employed at a food developer's, which was where he'd discovered the spy among the Tnuctipun. Darfoor, the spy, had had a generator for one of the new stasis fields, which had been developed in the course of his last spying job. All Tnuctipun innovations turned out to be part of a long-term plan to disrupt Thrintun commerce. Gnix had taken over Darfoor and his contacts, and they had been working on ways for Gnix to profit from the disruptions when a competing food company had attacked the development habitat.
By then Darfoor had installed the stasis field in the escape boat, and Gnix had Told him to forget to put on his Power shield.
The stasis had held while the galaxy rotated several times.
Amusingly, the creatures that had opened the field had been looking for a weapon to use to escape from slavery. They had built Gnix an amplifier, and he had taken over the rest of the creatures here and set his Tnuctipun to growing some females from his genetic material. There was some problem, not too clear—Tnuctipun minds wandered so—with getting the chemistry right in the host females, but there were plenty of them. His new chief slave had apparently been collecting females.
There were plenty of potential slave races, too, but the fighting slaves' records said some of them knew how to shield against the Power, so Gnix had sent some of the fighting slaves to gather antimatter from a source that had passed by a while back. (For some reason they hadn't done so before.) He was the only Thrint alive—stasis didn't count—and ruler of a small interstellar empire, soon to be a large interstellar empire.
Not bad for a foreman in a food workshop.
The only thing he really disliked was the slave telepaths. All the fighting slaves had a touch of it—his sire Gelku would have been terribly upset by that, as he'd been deeply religious—but some had so much that they'd developed mental shielding techniques to stop the noise. He'd finally ordered those removed from the palace. Not killed, since they were useful; but he didn't like running into them. It was too startling. The amplifier could get through a shield to detect them, of course, but that tended to paralyze anyone in range who didn't have one, which in this case meant most of the planet.
TOO MUCH OIL, he Told the slave burnishing his scales.
The Patriarch of Kzin wiped off the excess.
* * *
It was almost two years before Greenberg saw the protector again. Judy was expecting a daughter, according to the autodoc, and he was edgy: "Hey! Where've you been?"
"Working" was the reply. "What the hell did you think?"
"How should I know? There're discrepancies in the history you gave us."
"This is your idea of news? How are the rest getting along?"
That diverted him briefly. "They're afraid of you. They doubt the explanation of why they can't look outside the ship." Cordelia was in hyperdrive. "—And the history doesn't add up!"
"Okay, name some problems."
"How many wars were there with these 'kzinti'?"
"Depends who you ask. Flatlanders say six, because they got involved in all of them. Kzinti and Pleasanters say four because there have been that many peace treaties: Kzinti needed some kind of conceptual dividing line to get a handle on the idea of peace, and Pleasanters are almost all descended from lawyers. Old Wunderland vets say one, because there are still kzinti alive, so the war's still running." She spread her hands, momentarily resembling a cottonwood tree. "Take your pick. Next?"
"How many do you say?"
The look she gave him produced, in him, the exact feeling other people got when they first learned he was a telepath. After a moment she said, "Two. The first began with the invasion of Wunderland, and ended when I arranged for the subordination of the kzinti religion to secular authority. The second was an act of personal retaliation by one man, Harvey Mossbauer, whose family was killed at the end of the first, against the Patriarch; he killed the Patriarch's family in return. Since then the Patriarch of Kzin has understood that humans are, by kzinti terms, people, and has treated them as such in law. They can't be held as slaves or raised for meat, for example—though if a kzin from one of the cannibal cultures kills a human in a dispute, eating him is deemed fair. The cannibals are dying out, though. They get in too many fights. Next?"
"How come humans are related to primates that have been on Earth since long before the Pak supposedly brought us?"
"Obviously there must have been previous visits, with much smaller breeder populations. Lots more drift that way. The first was probably just a few million years after the Dinosaur Killer."
"Ah. Yucatán," he said wisely.
"Oh, were the ARMs still flogging 'nuclear winter' in your time? I thought that was just when they were getting set up."
"Excuse me?"
"Guess not, must have been residual. 'Nuclear winter' was the notion that throwing a lot of dust and soot into the atmosphere would cause an Ice Age in spite of halving the planet's albedo. It was one of those political hypotheses, meant to frighten people into accepting the need for restricting technology. The ARMs spread a lot of those in the early days. Anyway, the Yucatán crater has K-T iridium in it and is therefore older. Only an ocean strike will produce an Ice Age, and only if it's big enough to punch through the crust and boil a few cubic miles of ocean with magma. In this case it obviously was, as it also produced Iceland.
"As I was saying, the protectors in that migration saw a world with no big predators and settled in. Obviously they sent back word of what a nice place it was, and just as obviously the expedition that brought our ancestors destroyed the records before they left home, to keep from being followed."
"But Brennan and Truesdale never mention any earlier expeditions."
"Truesdale had other things to deal with. Brennan didn't care. He was a Belter, and Belters who lived long enough to establish their society were not the ones who let their minds wander or indulged casual curiosity. Next?"
"There's an implausible coincidence between the departure of human Protectors and first contact with the kzinti—"
"Coincidence my ossified ass!" she snapped, startling him badly. "The puppeteers first brought us to the kzinti's attention about two months after the Fleet left for the Core."
"That's the part I have trouble with. Puppeteers are herbivores. Peaceful."
"I should have cloned a bull."
"Huh?"
"In case it has escaped your attention, the class of herbivores includes cattle, horses, elephants, the Roman legionaries who conquered Gaul, and Pak Protectors. Herbivores casually obliterate anything that encroaches on their territory—or that looks like it might. Carnivores come in all types of personality, but dedicated herbivores are merciless killers. Anything else?"
"Um. I need to think some—yah, hey, what the hell did you mean by putting that big warning in the movie archive: 'DO NOT WATCH FOR A BREATH I TARRY AND FIREBIRD IN ONE SITTING!'?" He brimmed with outrage.
"It's a bad idea," she said ingenuously. "I take it you did?"
"Everybody did!" he bellowed. "And guess who got it all secondhand, as well?"
"Didn't like them?"
He shook all over, very abruptly, but forced himself back under control. "Don't you make fun, goddamn it," he said softly.
"I'm sorry," she said at once, and brushed fingertips on his shoulder; those, at least, weren't rocklike.
"There's only so much of anything we can stand. Even beauty."
"I know. That's why I did it."
He stared at her. "What?"
"Now everyone knows I don't give warnings without a good reason. Would you rather I'd set a trap that blew somebody's hand off?"
He glared, but she was right—no one would ever ignore one of her warnings after that shattering experience. Finally he nodded
. Then he said, "We could only find the author for one—glad we looked, though, this guy Zelazny is incredible! Was Firebird published under some different title? The only other reference I could find was a piece of classical animation with the same music."
She nodded. "The one where the Firebird is the bad guy? This one was done in rebuttal, I believe. Later it was suppressed by the ARM because of its accurate depiction of the history of industrial development. I've never found the credits, but clearly somebody couldn't bring himself to destroy the last copy. The other one I made myself. I don't think anybody else ever trusted themselves to be able to convey Zelazny's imagery adequately. The old woman and the cube, for instance."
" 'Go crush ore!' " he murmured, and his voice caught.
"It wasn't easy to get the timing on that pause right," she remarked. "Look, if there's nothing else right now I've got an errand. I'll be gone a couple of months your time." And she was off again.
* * *
Shleer had to spend six days out of sight while the Thrint wandered through the harem, nagging the Tnuctipun and their Jotoki assistants. Gnix had been an immensely powerful telepath even before he had the amplifier, but he was too stupid to follow his slaves' thoughts very far when they did something as simple as free-associating. The Tnuctipun had delayed the adaptation of the kzinretti as long as they could, simply to put off the day when they had another Thrint to cope with; still, Gnix's constant pestering—Pestering, rather—forced them to maintain some kind of progress, however slow.
About one surviving kzinrett in four was hairless and developing skin flakes—the biological modifications seemed to be trying to produce scales. The survivors weren't going toxic, so it appeared the Tnuctipun had stalled as long as they could.