by Larry Niven
Kzanol was in a bad state of mind. It seemed that his ship had missed not only Neptune but both its moons. What could have gone wrong with the Brain? Probably it had never been intended to last three hundred years. But deep in the bottom of his mind, he knew better. The Brain had missed deliberately. Kzanol had ordered it to commit suicide, not realizing what he asked. The Brain—which was a machine, not a slave, not subject to the Power—had disobeyed. His ship must have hurtled through the solar system and gone on into interstellar space at .97 light. By now it would be beyond the curve of the universe.
He felt the muscles pulling at his mouth, flattening the eating tendrils against his cheeks to protect them, opening his jaws as wide as they would go, and wider, pulling his lips back from the teeth until they were ready to split. It was an involuntary reaction, a reaction of fear and rage, automatically readying the thrint for a battle to the death. But there was nothing to fight. Soon Kzanol’s jaws closed and his head drooped between his massive shoulders.
All in all, the only pleasure he had was to watch the last ship searching Neptune for the third time—and to see its bright flame suddenly lengthen, then shorten again. The sleepy slave had given up.
Then Kzanol knew that he too was going to Triton. A feeling of noble pity stole over him, and he remembered the tradition that the family of Racarliw had never mistreated a slave. Kzanol went to meet the sleeper at Triton.
“One…two…I can’t find Garner’s ship. He must have landed somewhere, or turned off his drive. The others are just milling around.”
“Funny he hasn’t called us. I hope nothing’s happened to him.”
“We’d have seen the explosion, Smoky. Anyway, he was going for Nereid when his drive stopped. If it failed, we can find him later.”
When Kzanol was close enough, he Told the sleeper to turn ship and join him. In an hour the Navy ship and the Golden Circle were alongside.
Kzanol’s pilot and copilot were worried about the fuel situation, so as soon as the sleeper’s ship was close enough Kzanol Told him to transfer his fuel to the Golden Circle. He waited while various clanking and banging sounds rang through the ships. Fortunately the cards were magnetized, and there was webbing to hold him in his seat. He followed-the movements of his three personal slaves with the back of his mind: the sleeper near the tail, the pilot and copilot motionless in the cockpit. He didn’t want to risk their lives by letting them help the sleeper.
Naturally he jumped like a terrified gazelle when his airlock door swung open and a slave walked in.
A slave with a mind shield.
“Hi!” it said, incomprehensibly in English. “I guess we’ll need a translator.” And it coolly walked forward to the control room. At the door it stopped and gestured—with Kzanol’s disintegrator.
A man of Leeman’s talent and education should never have been given such a boring job. Leeman knew it could never have happened in the Belt. Someday soon he would migrate to the Belt, where he would be appreciated.
Meanwhile, Geoffrey Leeman was the foreman of the Lazy Eight III’s skeleton maintenance crew.
Leeman envied the crew of the other section, the drive section at Hamburg. Busybodies with good intentions were constantly ordering minor changes in the starship’s drive while they waited for politics to let them launch. The Lazy Eight III’s life system hadn’t been altered in two years.
Until today.
Now Leeman and his three subordinates watched a horde of technicians doing strange things to the number three “stateroom.” A complete balloon of fine wire mesh was being strung over the walls, floor, and ceiling. Heavy machinery was being welded to what would be the ship’s floor and was now the outer wall. Taps were let into the power system. Leeman and his men found themselves running errands through the ring-shaped corridor, bringing coffee and sandwiches and detail diagrams, tools and testing machinery and cigarettes. They had no idea what was going on. The newcomers were willing to answer questions, but the answers were gibberish. As:
“We’ll be able to triple the number of passengers!” said the man with a head like a speckled brown egg. He shook an ammeter for emphasis. “Triple!”
How?
The man waved his ammeter to include the room. “We’ll have them standing in here like rush-hour commuters in an elevator,” he confided. When Leeman accused him of levity he became mortally offended and refused to say another word.
By the end of the day Leeman felt like a flatworm in a four-dimensional maze.
Somehow he managed it so that the entire group went to dinner together, for mutual brain-picking. Things became clearer during dinner. Leeman’s ears went up when he heard the phrase “retarder field.”
Dinner turned into a party. It was almost two hundred before Leeman could make a phone call. The other man almost hung up. But Leeman knew the words to stop him.
The Lings’ first honeymoon had been spent at Reno, Nevada, thirty years ago. Since then Ling Wu had become rich in wholesale pharmaceuticals. Recently the Fertility Board had granted the couple the rare privilege of having more than two children. And here they were.
Here, before the crystal wall of the main dance bubble, looking out and down at a ringed and banded world. They didn’t hear the music behind them. It was magic music, the sound of imagination, brought to life by the wild, desert loveliness before them. Soft curves of ice ran out to a horizon like the lip of a nearby cliff; and above the cliff hung a bauble, a decoration, an aesthetic wonder such as no habitable world has ever known.
Ask an amateur astronomer about Saturn. He won’t just tell you; he’ll drag out his telescope and show you. He’ll break your arm to show you.
Ling Dorothy, fourth generation San Franciscan, pushed the palms of her hands against the crystal wall as if half wanting them to go through. “Oh, I hope. I hope,” she said, “I hope it never comes for us!”
“What, Dot?” Ling Wu smiled up at her, for she was an inch taller than he was.
“The Golden Circle.”
“It’s five days late already. I love it here too, but I’d hate to think people died just to let us stay a little longer.”
“Haven’t you heard, Wu? Mrs. Willing was just telling me that somebody stole the Golden Circle right off the spaceport field!”
“Mrs. Willing is a romantic.”
“Givvv me ti’, givvv me ti’,” Charley mimicked. “First Larrry, then ’Arrnerr. Time is all we get. Do they want the stars all for themselves?”
“I think you underrate them,” said the older dolphin.
“Surely there’s room for both of us on any world.” Charley hadn’t been listening. “They practically didn’t know we were here until a short time ago. We could be useful, I know we could.”
“Why shouldn’t they have time? Do you know how much time they themselves needed?”
“What do you mean?”
“The first walker story about a trip to the moon is thousands of years old. They didn’t get there until a hundred and fifty years ago. Have a little patience,” said the one with the worn teeth and the scarred jaw.
“I don’t have thousands of years. Must I spend my life looking at the sky until my eyes dry out?”
“You wouldn’t be the first. Not even the first swimmer.”
Dale Snyder walked down the hall like a conqueror planning new conquests. When he passed patients he smiled and nodded, but his brisk walk discouraged conversation. He reached the door to the nurses’ lounge and turned in.
It took him fifteen seconds to reach the coffee stand. In that time Dale Snyder aged forty years. His body sagged; his shoulders slumped; his cheeks slid half an inch downward, leaving a mask of puffy-eyed discouragement. He poured a foam-plastic cup of black coffee, regarded it with curled lip, and poured it down the drain. A moment of indecision before he refilled the cup from another spigot. Yerba mate. At least it would taste different.
It did. He flowed into a chair and stared out the window, the cup warming his hand. Outside, there were
trees and grass and what looked like brick walks. Menninger’s was a labyrinth of buildings, none more than four stories tall. A mile-high skyscraper would have saved millions in land, even surrounded by the vitally necessary landscaping; but many woman patients would have run screaming from the sexual problems represented by such a single, reaching tower.
Dale shook himself and gulped at the brew. For ten minutes he could forget the patients.
The patients. The “alien shock” patients. They had fooled him at first, him and others, with their similar behavior. Only now was it becoming obvious that their problems were as different as their fingerprints. Each had gone into some kind of shock when the alien cut loose. Dale and his colleagues had tried to treat them as a group. But that was utterly wrong.
Each had borrowed exactly what he needed from the ET’s tantrum of rage and shock and grief and fear. Each had found what he had needed or feared. Loneliness, castration syndrome, fear of violation, xenophobia, claustrophobia—there was no point even in cataloguing the list.
There weren’t enough doctors. There wasn’t room for the number of doctors they would need. Dale was exhausted—and so was everyone else. And they couldn’t show it.
The cup was empty.
“On your feet, soldier,” Dale said aloud. At the door he stood aside for Harriet Something, a cheerfully overweight woman who looked like everybody’s mother. His mind held the afterimage of her smile, and he wondered, how does she do it? He didn’t see the smile drain away behind his back.
“It’s the details,” said Lit. “The double damned details. How could they have covered so many details?”
“I think he told you the truth,” Marda said decisively.
Lit looked at his wife in surprise. Marda was notoriously slow to reach decisions. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “The Arms could have attended to all these—little things. What bothers me is the work it must have taken. Hiding Greenberg. Coaching his wife. Tearing things up in the starship’s life system. They can put everything back later, of course, but imagine going to all that trouble! And the disturbance at Menninger’s. My God, how could they have worked that? Training all those patients! And they flatly couldn’t have borrowed the Golden Circle. Ninety millionaires at the Titan Hotel are all screaming murder because they can’t go home on time. Thirty more on Earth are going to miss their honeymoon trips. Titan would never have let that happen! The Arms must have out-and-out stolen that ship.”
“Occam’s Razor,” said Marda.
“Occam’s—? Oh. No. Either way, I have to make just too many assumptions.”
“Lit, how can you take the chance? If Garner isn’t lying, the whole solar system’s in danger. If he is, what’s his motive?”
“You’re really convinced, aren’t you?”
Marda bobbed her head vigorously.
“Well, you’re right. We can’t take the chance.”
When he came out of the phone booth he said, “I just sent the fleet the record of my interview with Garner. The whole bloody hour. I’d like to do more, but Garner’ll hear everything I say. At this distance he’s bound to be in the maser beam.”
“They’ll be ready this way.”
“I wonder. I wish I could have warned them about the helmet. The very worst thing I can think of is that Garner might get his hands on the damn thing. Well, Lew’s bright, he’ll think of that himself.”
Later he called Ceres again, to find out how the other side of the check was going. For more than two weeks now, Belt ships had been stopping and searching Earth ships at random. If Garner’s snark hunt was an attempt to cover something, it wasn’t going to work! But Ceres reported no results to date.
Ceres was wrong. The search-and-seizure tactics had had at least one result. Tension had never been so high between Earth and Belt.
The copilot sat motionless listening to Kzanol/Greenberg’s side of the conversation. He couldn’t understand overspeak, but Kzanol/Greenberg could; and Kzanol listened to the shielded slave through the mind of the copilot.
“I ought to get rid of you right away,” Kzanol mused. “A slave that can’t be controlled can’t be trusted.”
“That’s truer than you know.” A hint of bitterness showed in Kzanol/Greenberg’s voice. “But you can’t kill me yet. I have some information that you need very badly.”
“So? What information?”
“I know where the second suit is. I also know why we weren’t picked up, and I’ve figured out where the rrgh—where our race is now.”
Kzanol said, “I think I also know where the second suit is. But for whatever else you may know, I won’t kill you.”
“Big of you.” Kzanol/Greenberg waved the disintegrator negligently. “I’ll tell you something you can’t use first, to prove I know my stuff. Did you know whitefoods were intelligent?”
“Whitefood droppings.”
“Humans have found them on Sirius A-III-1. They’re definitely whitefoods. They’re also definitely sentient. Can you think of any way they could have developed intelligence?”
“No.”
“Of course not. If any form of life has ever been mutation-proof, it’s the whitefoods. Besides, what does a herbivore with no manipulatory appendages, and no natural defenses except sentient herders to kill off natural enemies, want with intelligence? No, the tnuctipun must have made them sentient in the first place. Making the brains a delicacy was just an excuse for making them large.”
Kzanol sat down. His mouth tendrils stood straight out, as if he were smelling with them. “Why should they do that?”
He was hooked.
“Let me give it to you all in one bundle,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. He took off his helmet and sat, found and lighted a cigarette, taking his time, while Kzanol grew silently but visibly enraged. There was no reason why the thrint shouldn’t get angry, Kzanol/Greenberg thought, as long as he didn’t get too angry.
“All right,” he began. “First point is that the whitefoods are sentient. Second point, you remember that there was a depression when Plorn’s tnuctipun came up with antigravity.”
“Powerloss, yes,” Kzanol said fervently—and untactfully. “He should have been assassinated right away.”
“Not him. His tnuctipun. Don’t you see? They were fighting an undeclared war even then. The free tnuctipun must have been behind it all the time: the tnuctip fleet that escaped into space when Thrintun found the tnuctip system. They didn’t try to reach Andromeda. They must have stayed between the stars, where nobody ever goes…went. A few civilized tnuctip must have taken their orders. The whitefoods were their spies; every noble in the galaxy, everyone who could afford to, used to keep whitefoods on his land.”
“You’re a ptavv fool. You’re basing all these suppositions on the idiotic idea that whitefoods are intelligent. That’s nonsense. We’d have sensed it.”
“No. Check with Masney if you don’t believe me. Somehow the tnuctipun must have developed a whitefood brain that was immune to the Power. And that one fact makes it certain that the whole ploy was deliberate. The whitefood spies. The antigravity, released to cause a depression. There may have been other ideas, too. Mutated racing viprin were introduced a few years before antigravity. They put all the legitimate viprin ranches out of business. That started the depression, and antigravity sped it along. The sunflowers were usually the only defense for a plantation; and everyone who had land had a sunflower border. It got the landowners used to isolation and independence, so that they might not cooperate in wartime. I’d give odds the tnuctipun had a spray to kill sunflowers. When the depression was in full swing they struck.”
Kzanol didn’t speak. His expression was hard to read.
“This isn’t all supposition. I’ve got solid facts. First, the bandersnatchi, whitefoods to us, are sentient. Humans aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t make a mistake like that. Second, it’s a fact that you weren’t picked up when you hit F124. Why?”
“That is an ingesting good question. Why?”
&nbs
p; This was the starting point, the hurt that had rankled in Kzanol/Greenberg’s breast for sixteen days of retrospection and introspection, sixteen days during which he had had nothing to do but supervise Masney and brood on his bad luck. His mind had followed a path that started with a brooding, silent bandersnatch and ended in a war fought aeons ago. But he could have missed it all, he might have been spared all this torment and danger, if only that fool of a caretaker had seen the flash. He had not, and there could be only one reason.
“Because there wasn’t anyone on the Moon. Either the caretaker was killed in the revolt, or he was off fighting somewhere. Probably he was dead. The tnuctipun would have moved at once to cut off our food supply.”
“To what?” Kzanol was clearly lost. Thrintun had never fought anything but other thrintun, and the last war had been fought before star travel. Kzanol knew nothing of war.
The thrint tried to get back to basics. “You said you could tell me where the thrintun are now.”
“With the tnuctipun. They’re dead, extinct. If they weren’t dead they would have reached Earth by now. That goes for the tnuctipun too, and nearly every other species that served us. They must have all died in the war.”
“But that’s insane. Somebody has to win a war!”
He sounded so sincere that Kzanol/Greenberg laughed. “Not so. Ask any human. Ask a Russian or a Chinese. They’ll think you’re a fool for needing to ask, but they’ll tell you all about Pyrrhic victory. Shall I tell you what may have happened?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “This is pure conjecture, but it makes sense to me, and I’ve had two weeks to think about it. We must have been losing the war. If we were, some thraargh—excuse me. Some members of our race must have decided to take all the slaves with them. Like Grandfather’s funeral ceremony, but bigger. They made an amplifier helmet strong enough to blanket the entire galaxy. Then they ordered everything within reach to commit suicide.”
“But that’s a horrible attitude!” Kzanol bristled with moral outrage. “Why would a thrint do a thing like that?”