Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII

by Hal Colebatch, Paul Chafe, Matthew Joseph Harrington

  “There was an automated monitor on Phobos—that’s the nearer moon, it was passing almost overhead—that was able to relay a picture of a big circle around the base turning X-ray blue before it melted.”

  “The orbital monitor melted?” said Perpetua.

  “Phobos melted. A lot of it, anyway. The monitor evaporated along with that side of Phobos’s surface. Recoil kicked Phobos into a less eccentric orbit, as a matter of fact.”

  Ginger said, “At a planet’s surface, thorium can be easier to find than lead. You’re lucky he didn’t sterilize the system.”

  “I know. The affected area was a bit over half a kilometer across—pretty sharply defined, in the pictures. The blast was later calculated at something like thirty thousand megatons. Popped every dome on the planet. Land by that big one, it’s the Customs shack.”

  Perpetua was settling Jubilee when Smith abruptly said, “Damn, come back up and move us to the other side of the dome.”

  She took them up smoothly and shifted position, then said, “People?”

  “No, some kind of plants. This whole region is in a depression, not just the lake and clouds. Pictures taken right after it happened show this hemisphere looking like somebody put a bullet through a sheet of glass. This area was scooped out, and even up here it has ten times the atmospheric pressure you’d find at the antipodes. Still not much, but they’ve been trying to breed grass that’ll survive it. Either they’ve succeeded, or they dumped in another ice asteroid when I wasn’t paying attention. Here’s good.”

  They suited up and went outside. There were smaller domes clustered about the Customs station, and various people had already come out of these, holding guns in a conspicuous fashion, not quite pointed at them. They paid a lot of attention to Ginger.

  Smith held up an ARM ident and triggered its flasher, then said over the common channel, “If it’s your intention to start fighting the next war now, by all means let me know so I can start conscripting troops.” People began to disperse.

  “What do you expect people to do when they see a kzinti ship landing?” somebody said defensively.

  “Around here? Raise meat prices.”

  There was some grumbling, and another voice said in amused tones, “There’s still time, Kate.”

  “Aw, shut up,” said somebody else.

  Smith signaled for the private channel and said, “Don’t say anything you don’t want heard. Sooner or later someone will break the encryption.”

  “ARMs?” Perpetua said.

  “Hobbyists. These people are all obsessives. This place is still a dumping ground for lunatics—it’s just that now they’re self-diagnosed.”

  “You grew up here,” Ginger guessed suddenly.

  “Yes, didn’t I say? I didn’t. Yeah. I started working out very young.” The gravity was about two-thirds that of Wunderland; he must have started wearing a weight suit well before puberty.

  As they went through the airlock—the biggest they’d ever seen—Perpetua said, “You wanted to join the ARMs that young?”

  “I wanted to leave that young. The ARMs had the best deal.”

  “Were there any survivors of the blast?” Ginger said.

  “Everybody except the ARMs survived,” Smith said. “The exiles lived on the other side of the planet, but they heard about the project and started wearing pressure suits all the time, and keeping their kids near them with bubbles handy. The ARMs made fun of them, until Blowout Day. Then they stopped.” The inner door opened, and he and Perpetua took off their helmets, while Ginger folded his back.

  “Any fissionables or bioactives?” said a bored-looking man with beige skin and a green-and-yellow suit. The suits outside had just been green.

  “Okay. How much?” Smith said.

  The man frowned, then saw the ARM ident and grunted. “Get your own,” he said, and waved them by. As they passed, he said, “Hey, why is he wearing a military suit?”

  “What do you mean?” Smith said.

  “No tail.”

  Ginger had never thought about it before, but it made sense; the convenience of being able to stretch his tail for balance would make the suit more vulnerable. This was simply the only design anyone on Wunderland had ever seen.

  “So nobody will suspect he’s a spy,” said Smith.

  Ginger and Perpetua both stared at him, but the Customs inspector just snorted and waved them back into motion.

  They went through another pressure door, but before either of them could say anything to Smith, somebody said, “Hey, Waldo, what’s the password?”

  Smith, in the lead, stopped, and slowly turned to the group of five men to the left of the doorway. “There’s a new one,” he said, in a low voice. “It’s, ‘I’m not an unarmed child anymore.’”

  He had been a mild, affable companion for the past three days. Now Ginger smelled murder.

  Since humans who fight for trivial reasons are typically of inferior intelligence, it was a common error to suppose that kzinti were rather dim. In fact, they averaged somewhat brighter than humans, due to intense competition for mates; but for the same reason, they just didn’t care.

  But Ginger had a responsibility to see to. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to Smith, “but you did say back at the embassy you wouldn’t kill anyone else until you found me another job.”

  Smith turned sharply, staring. “What?”

  Ginger moved, quickly and smoothly, out of Smith’s reach. “I realize these aren’t kzinti, Mr. Smith, but you did say anyone, sir.”

  The five men had already dwindled to two, the others having worked out the implications at once. Smith blinked a few times, looked back at the remaining two, looked at Ginger again, and nodded. “Fair enough.” He turned to face the pair again, and said in a declamatory tone, “‘Would you buy it for a quarter?’”

  Both of the men had the smoothness of motion that indicated a human past 100, but Smith must have been nearly that old himself; and while he was no Hero, compared to a low-gee build he looked like a Jinxian. One was whispering frantically in the other’s ear; Ginger was able to catch the phrase “ARM Commando,” this being one of the first terms he’d learned in Flatlander. The one being spoken to was shorter and solider, but not in Smith’s shape.

  That human looked at Ginger, then at his own companion; then he said, “Uh, pass, friend.”

  As they went by, Ginger thought to hear a suit’s recycler start up. He didn’t look—he was pretty certain whose it was, anyway.

  They were in a broad inner space, like a courtyard, only with no gun turrets. Smith led them through it, past unlabeled pressure doors, to a door just like the others, and started it opening. Perpetua, who was just getting the idea that she’d come very close to being held by the UN as principal witness, started up an innocuous subject: “How did this settlement get started?”

  “After the Blowout one of the old lifers talked people into gathering everything up and bringing it here. More air and water. They stayed up here because it wasn’t stable down lower. Still isn’t. Once a habitat was set up, they formed a government and petitioned the UN for membership before the ARM thought of jamming them. The ARMs try to keep people from hearing more than absolutely necessary about this place, but it’s really popular with smugglers since the ARM moved in on Luna,” he said.

  “What was this lifer’s name?” Ginger said, impressed—he was picturing what the weather must have been like for the migration.

  “He didn’t know. He dated to brainwipe days,” said Smith. They entered the door, and he closed it; abruptly the floor began to descend. “There are stories that he was actually Raymond Sinclair, but I checked ARM records, and Sinclair was murdered years before the Founder arrived. He seems to have been something of an invisible man—the Founder, that is. Have you ever heard of the Tehuantepec Canal?” They hadn’t. “Okay. On Earth there’s an ocean bordered by two continents, and one of the two is kept from freezing solid by an ocean current from the other. Now, the sun has been abnormally co
ol for thousands of years, and keeps getting worse by stages. The warm current started to give up most of its heat in hurricanes as a result. Sharper gradient, see? What the Founder appears to have done, to get arrested and brainwiped, was make secret arrangements with local officials and investors to blast open a sea-level trench at a place called Tehuantepec, where two oceans weren’t separated very far. The ocean to the east was the one with the current, and the one to the west was cooler, with a higher sea level. Water washed out the trench, and mixed with the warm water, so it got stirred up and wouldn’t stay put long enough to let hurricanes form. They need still, saturated air. The ocean current wound up transporting more heat than it had in a thousand years, so everybody was saved. But the man responsible had already been brainwiped, so the ARM made his records vanish and claimed it was their own project. The Founder turned out to be one of those people who does really well in low gravity, so he was still here a couple of centuries later for the Blowout.” The elevator stopped. Another door was now visible.

  Perpetua began, “That is the filthiest—”

  “Who goes there?” said a speaker over the door.

  “A true believer,” said Smith.

  “What do you want?” said the speaker.

  “To do one thing.”

  The door began opening. “Surely they didn’t call him Founder all the time,” Ginger said, and stopped to gape.

  The cavern before them had to be artificial, its lining fused dust; but it looked like an enormous natural cave, bigger than the dome they’d landed by. There were gardens, with trees, and light sources in the roof that made it about twice as bright as on the surface. In the center of the cavity floor, hundreds of meters away, was what looked like a big rock formation with its own cave opening; a waterfall trickled down one side over a couple of pretty good bonsai. There was a sign above the cave opening:

  ODD JOHN’S TOXIC DUMP

  “No,” said Smith. “They called him John Smith.”

  “Your ancestor?” Ginger said.

  “Who knows? Lots of people on Mars took the name Smith after the Blowout. Classical allusion. In his case, though, it was just a standard label for someone whose name was unknown.” He led them toward the rocks.

  “‘Toxic dump’?” Perpetua said, alarmed at the unfamiliar term.

  “Another ancient reference. People didn’t use to reduce sewage and garbage to simple organics with superheated steam. They just left things in pits.”

  “How did they make plastics?” wondered Ginger.

  “The raw materials originally came from underground.” Smith paused to look at Ginger. “Your homeworld hasn’t had petroleum for about ten thousand years, has it?”

  “Wunderland has petroleum,” Ginger said, surprised.

  “He means Kzinhome,” Perpetua said. “Like his is Earth.”

  Smith scowled, and Ginger snorted amusement. “I see. Probably not. What did people do about the smell?”

  “Lived somewhere else,” Smith said.

  “The fellow who first began mining those pits must have gotten awfully rich,” Ginger speculated as they got to the entrance. There was a door a little ways in.

  “No, on Earth it’s a branch of government. There’s still some garbage fortunes in the Belt, though,” said Smith, lifting a sign that said SCOPPY FEVER and tapping the keypad underneath. The door opened, and he went in first.

  They heard, “What the hell do you—Waldo!”

  “Hilda!” Smith replied as they moved into better lighting than the entryway’s.

  After a short silence the woman said, “Theo. Good to see you. What do—Theo, there’s a kzin behind you.”

  “Yes, he keeps me out of trouble. I gather Larch is still mooching off his mother.”

  The shop was something out of Davidson, with counters and racks and display cases crammed with unrelated oddities. There was actually a stuffed crocodile up by the ceiling; it must have been ruinously expensive. The woman behind the sales counter was very tall, like most other locals, and beige, but with hair going gray and lines at the corners of her eyes. “Yes,” she said, watching Ginger. Then she pointed at him and said, “Don’t think you can try your telepathy for a better price. I’m a junk dealer, the only thing that works on me is money.”

  Smith held up a hand in front of Ginger—unnecessarily, as Ginger was too astonished and offended to speak—and stepped forward to tell her in a very low voice, “Mom, first of all, it was the Slavers who used telepathy to control minds; second, damn few kzinti are telepaths; third, none of those have Names, which he does, indicating high social value; and fourth, telepaths are all addicted to a drug that enhances the facility and destroys their health, so you’ve just done the equivalent of greeting a total stranger by calling him a wirehead.”

  She opened her eyes wide, then closed them and kept them shut for a bit. She hunched down about a handspan—human handspan—and her face changed color, getting lighter in some places and darker in others. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and said in a low voice, “Sir, I apologize. Please feel welcome.”

  “Thank you,” said Ginger.

  There was a moment of awkward silence. Perpetua broke it by saying, “Was Larch the short one?”

  Smith gave her a stare, then apparently realized that she was shorter than every person they’d met except one, and said, “Yeah. Hey Mom, you should have heard Ginger. Managed to convey the idea that I was some kind of trained killer.”

  “You are a trained killer,” said his mother.

  “I don’t go around single-handedly massacring groups of kzinti when I get offended, which is what he implied.”

  “Of course, you couldn’t talk about it if you did,” she observed with a straight face.

  Smith sighed heavily, then said, “How quickly I recall why I don’t drop by more often. We need two hyperdrives.”

  His mother gave an incredulous chuckle—a little late, Ginger thought. “You want inertialess drives along with those?”

  “It’s Marley Foundation business.”

  Her manner changed utterly. She leaned back, her face grew still, and her eyes narrowed. She said, “What have you done for it?”

  “I got transferred to the Belt eleven years ago. Check funding and dates for the Outback Restoration Project.”

  She nodded once and went through a door. Ginger heard tiny clicks from different parts of the room they were in, and held quite still. Perpetua said, “T.C., what’s going on?”

  “The Marley Foundation is a private charity dedicated to saving people from foolish planning, often their own. Very old. I was assigned to investigate them and wound up joining, about fifty years back. Twelve years ago there was a big ARM project to clear out the Australian Outback—a large desert—so it could be preserved in its natural condition, without a lot of tourists coming in. I was in charge of selling the idea to the voters. The thing is, there were people who’d been living there for thousands of years, and they couldn’t be expelled—they were arguably part of the natural condition. I went and talked to a lot of them, and we cooked up a plan. I sold the ARM on the idea of making them official caretakers of the region, and I arranged to supply them with plans and equipment, and as soon as they were put in charge of the region they cut a channel from the sea to the middle of the desert. Logarithmic spiral, uniform grade, so Coriolis force caused air to move up the channel of its own accord. Water condensed out as the air rose, and a little stream formed. In another century it’ll be a pretty decent river. They didn’t particularly like the desert, you see. They were just the descendants of people who knew how to survive there.”

  Perpetua was openmouthed and shaking with silent laughter. “How did they mask the explosions?” she finally got out.

  “Oh, I gave them a couple of disintegrators.”

  “That’s the shape!” Ginger exclaimed, making them both jump. “This cavern was carved with a disintegrator, wasn’t it?”

  Smith recovered and said, “Yeah, they didn’t have t
oo much intact dome material. Bored down, ran an air tube in to blow the dust out, and had another disintegrator up on the surface aimed at the falling dust. Opposite charge, so when it came down it fused to the ground.”

  “And the current fused the wall of the chamber,” Ginger said, as pleased as if he’d done it himself. “There are caverns back home that humans carved that way during the Second War, with openings a kzin couldn’t get a leg into. A lot of invaders died after passing by one of those.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Perpetua.

  “How come it took you so long?” Smith wondered.

  “This one’s a lot bigger,” Ginger said.

  “Never saw one with trees in it, either,” said Perpetua.

  “True.”

  The proprietor returned. “Excuse me; what’s your name?” said Perpetua.

  “Joanna.” She seemed a little startled, but went on with what she had come back for: “This way.”

  “Perpetua, and Ginger.”

  “How do.”

  They followed her into a back corridor, then into a cramped chamber which looked like a storeroom for things too odd to keep out front—which was saying something. Ginger just had time to notice that while things sat on the floor or hung on the walls, nothing on the floor leaned against a wall. Then the floor descended.

  The elevator was slower than the one before. “I keep meaning to study tap dancing,” Joanna said after a while, for no discernible reason.

  T.C. seemed to find it funny. “Another archaic reference,” he told them. “One reason the ARM presence here is so thin on the ground. They have to do constant data searches to find out what people are saying. Usually just conversation—drives them nuts.”

  The light was from overhead, and grew fainter as they went down. The walls ended, leaving blackness at the edge of the floor. They were in a big volume, and still descending. Ginger’s tail tried to lash.

  When they stopped, Joanna said, “Basement dungeon, everybody out.”