The Man-Kzin Wars 03

by Larry Niven

  Don't worry, kinder. Hot irons are a waste of time; ratcats are hardcases every one. "All I need is some wax, some soft cloth and some spotglue to hold his suit to that chair."

  It's time, Harold decided.

  The kzin whose suit clamped him to the forward chair had stopped trying to jerk his head loose from the padded clamps a day or so ago. Now his massive head simply quivered, and the fur seemed to have fallen in on the heavy bones somehow. Thick disks of felt and plastic made an effective blindfold, wax sealed ears and nose from all sight and scent, the improvised muzzle allowed him to breathe through clenched teeth but little else. Inside the suit was soft immobile padding and the catheters that carried away waste, fed and watered and tended and would not let the brain go catatonic.

  A sentient brain needs input; it is not designed to be cut off from the exterior world. Deprived of data, the first thing that fails is the temporal sense; minutes become subjective hours, hours stretch into days. Hallucinations follow, and the personality itself begins to disintegrate… and kzinti are still more sensitive to sensory deprivation than humans. Compared to kzinti, humans are nearly deaf, almost completely unable to smell.

  For which I am devoutly thankful, Harold decided, looking back to where Ingrid hung loose-curled in midair. They had set the interior field to zero-G; that helped with the interrogation, and she found it easier to sleep. The two dead crewkzinti were long gone, and they had cycled and flushed the cabin to the danger point, but the oily stink of death seemed to have seeped into the surfaces. Never really present, but always there at the back of your throat… she had lost weight, and there were bruise-like circles beneath her eyes.

  "Wake up, sweetheart," he said gently. She started, thrashed and then came to his side, stretching. "I need you to translate." His own command of the Hero's Tongue was fairly basic.

  He reached into the batlike ear and pulled out one plug. "Ready to talk, ratcat?"

  The quivering died, and the kzin's head was completely immobile for an instant. Then it jerked against the restraints as the alien tried frantically to nod. Harold pulled at the slipknot that released the muzzle; he could always have the computer administer a sedative if he needed to re-strap it.

  The kzin shrieked, an endless desolate sound. That turned into babbling: "nono grey in the dark grey monkeys grey TOO BIG noscent noscent nome no ME no me DON'T EAT ME MOTHER NO—"

  "Shut the tanj it up or you go back," Harold shouted into its ear, feeling a slight twist in his own empty stomach.

  "No!" This time the kzin seemed to be speaking rationally, at least a little. "Please! Let me hear, let me smell, please, please." Its teeth snapped, spraying saliva as it tried to lunge, trying to sink its fangs into reality. "I must smell, I must smell!"

  Harold turned his eyes aside slightly. I always wanted to hear a ratcat beg, he thought. You have to be careful what you wish for; sometimes you get it.

  "Just the code, Commander. Just the code."

  It spoke, a long sentence in the snarling hiss-spit of the Hero's Tongue, then lay panting. "It is not lying, to a probability of 98%, plus or minus two points," the computer said. "Shall I terminate it?"

  "No!" Harold snapped. To the kzin: "Hold still."

  A few swift motions removed the noseplugs and blindfold; the alien gaped its mouth and inhaled in racking gasps, hauling air across its nasal cavities. The huge eyes flickered, manic-fast, and the umbrella ears were stretched out to maximum. After a moment it slumped and closed its mouth, the pink washcloth tongue coming out to scrub across the dry granular surface of its nose.

  "Real," it muttered. "I am real." The haunted eyes turned on him. "You burn," it choked. "Fire in the air around you. You burn with terror!" Panting breath. "I saw the God, human. Saw Him sowing stars. It was forever. Forever! Forever!" It howled again, then caught itself, shuddering.

  Harold felt his cheeks flush. Something, he thought. I have to say something, gottdamn it.

  "Name?" he said, his mouth shaping itself clumsily to the Hero's Tongue.

  "Kdapt-Captain," it gasped. "Kdapt-Captain. I am Kdapt-Captain." The sound of its rank-name seemed to recall the alien to something closer to sanity. The next words nearly a whisper. "What have I done?"

  Kdapt-Captain shut his eyes again, squeezing. Thin mewling sounds forced their way past the carnivore teeth, a sobbing miaow-miaow , incongruous from the massive form.

  "Schiesse," Harold muttered. I never heard a kzin cry before, either. "Sedate him, now." The sounds faded as the kzin lost consciousness.

  "War sucks," Ingrid said, coming closer to lay a hand on his shoulder. "And there ain't no justice."

  Harold nodded raggedly, his hands itching for a cigarette. "You said it, sweetheart," he said. "I'm going to break out another bottle of that verguuz. I could use it."

  Ingrid's hand pressed him back towards the deck. "No you're not," she said sharply. He looked up in surprise.

  "I spaced it," she said flatly. "You what?" he shouted.

  "I spaced it!" she yelled back. The kzin whimpered in his sleep, and she lowered her voice. "Hari, you're the bravest man I've ever met, and one of the toughest. But you don't take waiting well, and when you hate yourself verguuz is how you punish yourself. That, and letting yourself go." He was suddenly conscious of his own smell. "Not while you're with me, thank you very much."

  Harold stared at her for a moment, then slumped back against the bulkhead, shaking his head in wonder. You can't fight in a singleship , he reminded himself. Motion caught the corner of his eye; several of the screens were set to reflective. Well… he thought. The pouches under his eyes were a little too prominent. Nothing wrong with a bender now and then… but now and then had been growing more frequent. Habits grow on you, even when you've lost the reasons for them , he mused. One of the drawbacks of modern geriatrics. You get set in your ways. Getting close enough to someone to listen to their opinions of him, now that was a habit he was going to have to learn.

  "Gottdamn , what a honeymoon," he muttered.

  Ingrid mustered a smile. "Haven't even had the nuptials, yet. We could set up a contract—" she winced and made a gesture of apology.

  "Forget it," he answered roughly. That was what his Herrenmann father had done, rather than marry a Belter and a Commoner into the sacred Schotmann family line. Time to change the subject , he thought. "Tell me… thinking back, I got the idea you knew the kzinti weren't running this ship. The computer got some private line?"

  "Oh." She blinked, then smiled slightly. "Well, I thought I recognized the programming, I was part of the team that designed the software, you know? Not many sentient computers ever built. When I heard the name of the 'kzinti' ship, well, it was obvious."

  "Sounded pretty authentic to me," Harold said dubiously, straining his memory.

  Ingrid smiled more broadly. "I forgot. It'd sound perfectly reasonable to a kzin, or to someone who grew up speaking Wunderlander, or Belter English. I've been associating with flatlanders, though."

  "I don't get it."

  "Only an English-speaking flatlander would know what's wrong with kchee'u Riit maarai as a ship-name." At his raised eyebrows, she translated: Gigantic Patriarchal Tool.

  Chapter VIII

  "Now will you believe?" Buford Early said, staring into the screen.

  Someone in the background was making a report; Shigehero turned to acknowledge, then back to face the UN general. "I am… somewhat more convinced," he admitted after a pause. "Still, we should be relatively safe here."

  The oyabun's miniature fleet had withdrawn considerably further; Early glanced up to check on the distances; saw that they were grouped tightly around another asteroid in nearly matching orbit, more than half a million kilometers from the Ruling Mind. The other members of the UN team were still mostly slumped, grey-faced, waiting for the aftereffects of the thrint's mental shout to die down. Two were in the autodoc.

  "Safe?" Early said quietly. "We wouldn't be safe in the Solar System! That… thing had a functionin
g amplifier going, for a second or two at least." Their eyes met, and shared a memory for an instant. Drifting fragments of absolute certainty; the oyabun's frown matched his own, as they concentrated on thinking around those icy commands.

  Early bared his teeth, despite the pain of a lip bitten hah 0 through. It was like sweeping water with a broom; you could make yourself believe they were alien implants, force yourself too, but the knowledge was purely intellectual. They felt true, and the minute your attention wandered you found yourself believing again… "Remember Greenberg's tape." Larry Greenberg had been the only human ever to share minds with a thrint, two centuries ago when the Sea Statue had been briefly and disastrously reanimated. "If it gets the amplifier fully functional, nothing will stand in its way. There are almost certainly fertile females in there, too." With an effort as great as any he had ever made, Early forced his voice to reasonableness. "I know it's tempting, all that technology. We can't get it. The downside risk is simply too great."

  And it would be a disaster if we could, he thought grimly. Native human inventions were bad enough; the ARM and the Order before them had had to scramble for centuries to defuse the force of the industrial revolution. The thought of trying to contain a thousand years of development dumped on humanity overnight made his stomach hurt and his fingers long for a stogie. Memory prompted pride. We did re-stabilize, he thought. So some of the early efforts were misdirected. Sabotaging Babbage, for example. Computers had simply been invented a century or two later, anyway. Or Marxism. That had been very promising, for a while, a potential world empire with built-in limitations; Marx had undoubtedly been one of the Temple's shining lights, in his time. Probably for the best it didn't quite come off, considering the kzinti, he decided. The UN's done nearly as well, without so many side effects. "There are no technological solutions to this problem," he went on, making subliminal movements with his fingers.

  The Oyabuns eyes darted down to them, reminded of his obligations. Not that they could be fully enforced here, but it should carry some weight at least. To remind him of what had happened to other disloyal members; Charlemagne, or Hitler back in the twentieth century, or Brennan in the twenty-second. "We're running out of time, and dealing with forces so far beyond our comprehension that we can only destroy on sight, if we can. The kzinti will be here in a matter of days, and it'll be out of our hands."

  Shigehero nodded slowly, then gave a rueful smile. "I confess to hubris," he said. "We will launch an immediate attack. If nothing else, we may force the alien back into its stasis field." He turned to give an order.

  Woof, Early thought, keeping his wheeze of relief purely mental. He felt shock freeze him as Shigehero turned back.

  "The, ah, the…" The oyabun coughed, cleared his throat. "The asteroid… and the alien ship… and, ah, Markham's ships… they have disappeared."

  "Full house," the slave on the right said, raking in his pile of plastic tokens. "That's the south polar continent I'm to be chief administrator of, Master. Your deal."

  Dnivtopun started to clasp his hands to his head, then stopped when he remembered the bandages. Fear bubbled up from his hindbrain, and the thick chicken-like claws of his feet dug into the yielding deck surface. Training kept it from leaking out, the mental equivalent of a high granite wall between the memory of pain streaming through his mind and the Power. Instead he waved his tendrils in amusement and gathered in the cards. Now, split the deck into two equal piles, faces down. Place one digit on each, use the outer digit to ruffle them together.

  The cards flipped and slid. With a howl of frustration, Dnivtopun jammed them together and ripped the pack in half, throwing them over his shoulder to join the ankle-deep heap behind the thrint's chair. He rose and pushed it back, clattering. "This is a stupid game!" The humans were sitting woodenly, staring at the playing table with expressions of disgust.

  "Carry on," he grated. They relaxed, and one of them produced a fresh pack from the box at its side. "No, wait," he said, looking at them more closely. What had the Chief Slave said? Yes, they did look as if they were losing weight; one or two of them had turned grey and their skin was hanging in folds, and he was sure that the one with the chest protuberances had had fur on its head before. "If any of you have gone more than ten hours without food or water, go to your refectory and replenish."

  The slaves leaped to their feet in a shower of chips and cards, stampeding for the door to the lounge area; several of them were leaking fluid from around their eyes and mouths. Remarkable , Dnivtopun thought. He called up looted human memory to examine the concept of full. A thrint who ate until he was full would die of a ruptured stomach… it was hard to remember that most breeds of slaves needed to drink large quantities of water every day.

  " I am bored," Dnivtopun muttered, stalking towards the coreward exit. There was nothing to do, even now while his life was in danger. No decisions to be made, only work. And the constant tendril-knotting itch of having to control more slaves than was comfortable; his Power seemed bruised, had since he awoke. He leaned against the wall and felt his body sink slowly forward and down, through the thinning pseudomatter. There had been one horrible instant when he regained consciousness… he had thought that the Power was gone. Shuddering, the thick greenish skin drawing itself into lumps over the triangular hump behind his head, he made a gesture of aversion.

  "Powerless," he said. A common thrintish curse, but occasionally a horrible reality. A thrint without Power was not a thrint: he was a ptavv. Sometimes males failed to develop the power; such ptavvs were tattooed pink and sold as slaves… in the rare instances when they were not quietly murdered by shamed relatives. Wasn't there a rumour about Uncle Ruhka's third wife's second son? he mused, then dismissed the thought. Certain types of head-injury could result in an adult thrint losing the Power, which was even worse.

  Now he did feel at the thin, slick, almost-living surface of the bandages. Chief Slave said the amplifier had been fully repaired, and he believed it. But he had believed the first attempt would succeed, too. No. Not yet, Dnivtopun decided. He would wait until it was absolutely necessary, or until they had captured the planetary system by other means and more qualified slaves had worked on the problem. I will check on Chief Slave, he decided. It was a disgrace to work, of course, but there was no taboo against giving your slaves the benefit of your advice.

  "Joy," Jonah Matthieson said.

  Equipment was spread out all around him; interfacer units, portable comps, memory cores ripped out of Markham's ships. Lines webbed the flame-scorched surface of the tnuctipun computer, thread-thin links disappearing into the machine through clumsy sausage-like improvised connectors. He ignored the bustle of movement all around him, ignored everything but the micromanipulator in his hands. The connections had been built for tnuctipun, a race the size of raccoons with two thumbs and four fingers, all longer and more flexible than human digits.

  "Ah. Joy." He took up the interfacer unit and keyed the verbal receptor. "Filecodes," he said.

  A screen on one of the half-rebuilt Swarm-Belter computers by his foot lit. Gibberish, except- The pure happiness of solving a difficult programming problem filled him. It had never been as strong as this, just as he had never been able to concentrate like this before. He shuddered with an ecstasy that left sex showing the grey, transient thing it was. But I wish Ingrid were here, he thought. She would be able to appreciate the elegance of it.

  "You haff results?"

  Jonah stood up, dusting his knees. Somewhere, something went pop and crackle. He nodded, stiff cheeks smiling. Not even Markham could dampen the pleasure.

  "It was a Finagle bitch," he said, "but yes."

  Something struck him across the side of the face. He stumbled back against the console's yielding surface, and realized that the thing that had struck him was Markham's hand. With difficulty he dragged his eyes back to the Wunderlander's face, reminding himself to blink; he couldn't focus properly on the problem Master had set him unless he did that occasionally. Ab
sently, he reached to his side and attempted to thrust a three-fingered palm into the dopestick container. Stop that , he told himself. You have a job to do.

  "Zat is, yes sir," Markham was saying with detached precision. "Remember, I am't' voice of Overmind among us."

  Jonah nodded, smiling again. "Yes, sir," he said, kneeling again and pointing to the screen. "The operational command sections of the memory core were damaged, but I've managed to isolate two and reroute them through this haywired rig here."

  "Weapons?" Markham asked sharply.

  "Well, sort of, sir. This is a… the effect is a stabilizing… anyway, you couldn't detect anything around here while it's on. Some sort of quantum effect, I didn't have time to investigate. It can project, too, so the other ships could be covered as well."

  "How far?"

  "Oh, the effect's instantaneous across distance. It's a subsystem of the faster-than-light communications and drive setup."

  Markham's lips shaped a silent whistle. "And't'other system?"

  "It's a directional beam. Affects on the nucleonic level." Jonah frowned, and a tear slipped free to run down one cheek. He had failed the Master… no, he could not let sorrow affect his efficiency. "I'm sorry, but the modulator was partially scrambled. The commands, that is, not the hardware. So there's only a narrow range of effects the beam will produce."

  "Such as?"

  "In this range, it will accelerate solid-state fusion reactions, sir." Seeing Markham's eyebrows lift, he explained: "Fusion power units will blow up." The herrenmann clapped his hands together. "At this setting, you get spontaneous conversion to antimatter. But—" Jonah hung his head "-I don't think more than point-five percent of the material would be affected." Miserably: "I'm sorry, sir."

  "No, no, you haff done outstanding work. The Master vill—" he stopped, drawing himself erect. "Master! I report success!"

  The dopestick crumbled between the thrint's teeth as he looked at the wreckage of the computer and the untidy sprawl of human apparatus. The sight of it made his tendrils clench; hideous danger, to trust himself to unscreened tnuctipun equipment. He touched his hands to the head-bandages again, and looked over at the new amplifier helmet. This one had a much more finished look, on a tripod stand that could lower it over his head as he sat in the command chair. His tendrils knotted tight on either side of his mouth.