The Wunder War mw-10

by Hal Colebatch

  “While there is one tall shrine to shake

  Or one live man to rend;

  For the wrath of the gods behind the gods

  Who are weary to make an end.

  “There lives one moment for a man

  When the door at his shoulder shakes,

  When the taut rope parts under the pull,

  And the barest branch is beautiful

  One moment, while it breaks.

  “So rides my soul upon the sea

  That drinks the howling ships,

  Though in black jest it bows and nods

  Under the moon with silver rods,

  I know it is roaring at the gods,

  Waiting the last eclipse…

  “ 'Think on, of those who write so,' he said. But there is other:

  “The world is so full of a number of things,

  I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.

  “I think, if I may say so to you, that Gay thinks like that latter. But I know the darknesses in which kzin can live, too. I know it well. Charrgh-Captain…”

  To a knowledgeable observer, his body language said more than his words.

  “Does he distress you so much?”

  “Yes. Like many kzintosh of his generation, he has no religious faith. Why believe in the Fanged God who gave kzinti the Universe and domination of all life when humans keep winning the wars? But that does not modify his loathing of me. On the contrary, it increases it. When you have lost anything to worship, it is a comfort to find something to despise. Thank the God I am good at shielding. I work at it.”

  “And how do you feel about the Fanged God, Peter?” It was one of those questions spacers on watch could ask one another.

  “We high Wunderkzin are not low Kdaptists. Some of us believe Fanged God and Bearded God have their own kingdoms. Others have conceptions more subtle: that the Fanged God is the heroic aspect of the Bearded God, who being omnipotent has no need for heroism.”

  “In Christianity the Incarnation is meant to solve that problem: God had to know by experience everything human, including courage and even despair: 'My God! my God! Why have You forsaken me?' ”

  “We never despair. In any case, I do not necessarily speak for myself. And there are other things. For the relatively few of us on Wunderland there are many sects. Be assured we do not dress in human skins for our services or make chalices and candlesticks of human bones, as the low Kdaptists do. But Charrgh-Captain believes in nothing beyond the material. Or so he thinks. Yet he also thinks his values are those of the old Kzin culture. Like so many adult kzintosh of the Patriarchy today, there is great confusion in him. Once there was a haunting fear, never, never admitted, that the fabled Free Jotok Fleet would return with vengeance. More lately humans have been seen by a few as avatars of the Free Jotok—who probably do not exist. My own fears are different, perhaps a little more human: to have some great task, some great test, and fail—that fear comes to me sometimes at a late hour. Fear of being proven to be a Nothing, a creature of neither world. Charrgh-Captain would never think of failure. He would conquer or die.”

  “Is he dangerous, do you think?”

  Peter Robinson extended one set of black-tipped claws whose curvature shone like steel, claws that could have torn a man apart with a single leisurely pass, and a tiger with a couple more. “He is a kzin.” He paused and added: “As I am not.”

  “I don't know whether you say that as boast or complaint, my friend.”

  “I don't know either. But as I have paced the silent corridors of this ship, while I have enjoyed the silence, I have been glad my friends were sleeping near me. Is that foolish?”

  “No.”

  “The founder of our line was raised by humans when he was a war-orphaned kitten, found blind and starving for his mother's milk. But when he was old enough he made a conscious choice.

  “And you gave us a chance to rise… more than we would have given you. Great-Grandsire was proud, proud, when he became the first Wunderland Kzin elected to an office by humans. The old fellow still talks about that day. When he made a speech to the Wunderland Assembly—'Let us grow together: not an imitation cat but a better human,' he said, thinking of Markham and what had happened to him, 'not an imitation human but a better cat'—and they applauded, he recorded the applause and laid down the recording in the new family shrine. He said we had found our own Honor.”

  “He knew about Markham? I only learned of that when I gained the security clearance for this work.”

  “One of many secrets we had.”

  “The first of my family to set foot on Wunderland,” said Richard, “was a staff officer with the Liberation forces. On one leave after the cease-fire he was hunting in Gerning and came across a cottage in the forest.

  “It was occupied by an old lady, a proud, impoverished aristocrat, pure Nineteen Families blood, long since come down in the world, living alone with a couple of animals and with a little charity from the nearby farmers. Post-Liberation Wunderland had a lot of rather queer fish, of course. I suppose it still does…

  “The place was dilapidated, and he did a few chores and repairs for her. She gave him tea in an ornate old service of genuine Neue Dresden china, apologizing for the lack of servants. Not unexpectedly, she came to talk of the 'Good Old Days,' and how much better things were then. She missed her lost boys. Arthur was always interested in history—he'd worked in a museum before the war—and he took notes.

  “It took him quite a long time—plus a reference by her to 'those nice big pussycats'—to realize that she was actually talking about the Occupation, and her 'boys' were a couple of kzin officers of the local garrison who for some reason had made a pet of her—if they were in the vicinity and wanted to sharpen their claws, they might do it by tearing a pile of wood into kindling for her. If they were hunting in the forest and had made a kill, they might throw her a haunch of meat as they passed. I suppose that meant non-monkey meat. She gave them bowls of cream. I doubt they realized how she thought of them… She was quite mad, of course. But that, coming on top of a couple of things that had happened to him on Wunderland earlier and later, influenced old Arthur's thinking. His story, “Three at a Table,” has become a family legend. He'd been an Exterminationist, but he ended up patron of the first official mixed chess club.”

  “Quite mad, as you say… And Wunderland still does have a lot of queer fish… like me.”

  “We like Wunderland,” said Richard. “Partly because of the queer fish. We've been thinking of settling there.”

  “May I say… I hope you do.”

  “Only five hundred and forty million years ago, billions of years after the time when the thing we seek was built,” said Richard, “our ancestors on Earth lived in a placid sea. They were parading the vicinity of the Burgess Shale on multiple jelly legs. Your ancestors and ours cannot have looked much different.”

  “We know thrint and tnuctipun planted common life-forms throughout the galaxy,” Peter Robinson replied. “You and I are alike enough to indicate common primordial ancestors.”

  “Alike enough to eat each other. I do not mean that observation to be cruel or offensive, but it emphasizes our common biology.”

  “Also, there have been speculations that the telepaths' power is somehow—I know not how—related to the Slaver Power—some inherited vestige of tnuctipun biological engineering, perhaps? Something in our nucleonic acid? A laboratory experiment that was thrown away and survived?”

  “It's hard to see how that could be. Thrint and kzin are not contemporaries by billions of years.”

  “I find much hard to see. You will have another bourbon? You face quite a long watch.”

  “I'm used to it. It goes with the job.”

  “A lot goes with my job.” The Wunderkzin said, “Thank you for being my… friend, Richard. It will be good to go to sleep with that emotion in my mind.”

  “The human race as it is today evolved out of a lot of different breeds,” said Richard awkwardly
. “You've seen that on Wunderland. A lot of humans must have asked at times: 'What am I?' But in the end we shook down fairly well.”

  “I wonder if they ever asked as emphatically as I do,” said Peter Robinson, “and who they asked.”

  Richard was still on watch when the mass-detector dropped the Wallaby out of hyperspace. The nearest stars were distant but the singularity that was a stasis field was sharp and bright in the center of the radar screen. By the time the awakened crew assembled on the bridge it had grown.

  Behind it was a deep-radar ghost. The artifact was in wide orbit around a flattened sphere—a free-floater planet, dark and cold, a gas giant too small to glow. How had the Puppeteers found this thing?

  “Big,” said Melody. “Bigger than we thought.”

  “It certainly is,” said Richard. “As a matter of fact it is in visual range now.”

  “It's too far away!”

  Richard touched the control panel. Spotlights flooded space, and illuminated nothing except a silver bead.

  A pale gray sphere. With nothing to give a scale it was impossible for the unaided eye to tell how big it was. But there was a scale projected on the screen. And it was growing. There were a few circles like shallow, immensely eroded craters. The Wallaby orbited it, cameras busy. There were darker patches and one black spot. It looked much like the Moon seen from Earth.

  “Where on the surface is the stasis box?” asked Gatley Ivor. “Or is it buried?”

  “That is the point: the deep radar lacks fine definition yet, but it appears to be almost all stasis field. It is about nine miles in diameter.”

  “The Puppeteers did not tell us it was so big,” said Melody.

  “I suspect they may not have known. Perhaps they only picked it up on their deep radar at extreme range as a point whose magnitude had to be guessed. They would be too cautious to explore further themselves. Or perhaps they never saw it—the Outsiders may have told them about it. I suspect they have a standing order with the Outsiders to buy information about any stasis boxes they come across, but perhaps they thought they could no longer afford to pay extra for details like size.”

  “If that is so, whether it was caution or miserliness that prevented them knowing, they made a mistake,” said Peter Robinson. “Had they explored boldly, or bought full information, they would have discovered it is too big for an expedition of this size.”

  “A Hero—a kzin—is not daunted by size,” said Charrgh-Captain.

  “I think,” said Richard, “it may not have been caution only. With so few Puppeteers left in known space, their resources and personnel are stretched thin. A Puppeteer ship that detected this at very long range would probably have been on business it could not divert from. As for miserliness, if they bought the information about it from Outsiders, well, we know the Outsiders do not sell information cheaply.”

  “Perhaps,” said Gay, “when they saw an asteroid and then a stasis field indicated from a distance on deep-radar, they thought the field was somewhere on the asteroid, as we just did. They did not realize the asteroid was the whole stasis field.”

  “In any event,” said Peter Robinson, “you must agree it is too big for us to open. It is far bigger than any spaceship I have heard of. Assuming that this giant stasis field contains an artifact of a size to justify it, the chances are that there are live Slavers within. We are not equipped to handle them if they are released.”

  “I am tempted in one part of me to proceed,” said Gatley Ivor. “There may be more knowledge of the ancients here than the total of all that has been gathered to date. And yet every rational instinct says this is too big for us. I must say reluctantly that we should return with a bigger expedition—perhaps a warship.”

  “Would that not simply be presenting the Slavers with the warship, should they seize the minds of its crew?” asked Charrgh-Captain. “Think of human history and your Napoleon's march on Paris after his escape from Elba—the monkeys sent to capture him simply joined him, and the more that were sent the bigger his army became.”

  “Can the Slaver Power penetrate a General Products hull?” demanded Melody.

  “I believe it can,” Gatley Ivor said. “First, because the Power is not a physical event and is not governed by the laws of physics. It is not a wave effect, nor does it depend on particles. Further, we know from ample experience that a General Products hull does not block the probing of kzinti—or even human—telepaths. Matter does not shield against telepathy.”

  Charrgh-Captain's tail lashed. His ears knotted and unknotted. A kzin like Charrgh-Captain could not—physically could not—admit before either aliens or his own kind that he was too fearful to execute a task.

  If we return for reinforcements, Richard thought, Charrgh-Captain will, quite legally, report the situation to the Patriarchy. Diminished as they are, they still, unlike us, have a command economy. By the time we, or the human bureaucracy, raises the finance for a bigger expedition, the Kzin might easily be here and have it open.

  “It is too important simply to leave,” said Melody Fay.

  “What I am saying when I say it is too big,” said Gatley Ivor, “is that I see a high probability there are Slavers inside it. It is much more than a mere good chance. A stasis field of this size plainly contains something on the order of a spaceship or a space station. Or perhaps it was once an installation on the surface of a planet that has disappeared. I have never heard of one so big. Surely it will be crewed. Perhaps it contains a Slaver army. And one Slaver alone would be more than danger enough!”

  Charrgh-Captain bridled again at the mention of danger, but his ears settled back into a position of tacit acceptance and his tail stilled. Richard saw him curl it out of the way with a conscious motion. The big kzin might not like the suggestion that he would shy from danger, but this was plainly something beyond the normal. The threat of live Slavers might daunt the boldest of any species.

  “At any rate,” said Richard, “now that we are here, let us explore what we may. Our sponsors will hardly be pleased if we come away without having done that. First, we should make a survey of the accretion material and see where underneath it the stasis field begins. We can send progress reports back by hyperwave.”

  No one disagreed.

  “Comparing the radar pictures and what we can see visually,” Richard said a few hours later, “we see a difference: The stasis field's mostly, as we suspected, a sphere, covered with a layer, or if you like a shell, of accreted material. However, at one point on the sphere there's a pocket, a sort of dimple, in the field.

  “It looks small by comparison with the big field, but in fact it has quite a large volume: larger than our own hull. Deep-radar shows it's divided into various compartments. Also it contains smaller stasis boxes—a very dangerous set-up—and an odd linear structure. It reminded me at first of a spinal column but on finer resolution it's more like a string of large beads laid out in a row… It has a cover fitting flush with the surface so the spherical outline is not disturbed.”

  “That would be where that black mark is?”

  “Yes. In fact it's a hole. An obvious possibility is that it's where the mechanism for turning off the field was housed. It may still be there. Apart from the access face, which is flush with the sphere's surface, it's surrounded by the field on five sides and well protected.”

  “Then we examine it,” said Charrgh-Captain. “With suitable caution.”

  Melody Fay remained in Wallaby at the weapons console. Her task was simple: Any slightest suggestion of the Slaver power or other threatening activity, and she was to use the moments she had to strike a button. Wallaby would cut loose with every weapon. That was assuming she could recognize the power before it gripped her. The rest of the expedition embarked in Joey, Wallaby's main shuttle craft.

  The black mark grew on the surface of the great globe as they approached.

  “Not well protected enough,” said Charrgh-Captain after a time. “Something has smashed through it. A meteor, perha
ps.”

  “Odd that it should have struck in the one vulnerable spot,” said Peter Robinson.

  “It is the one spot such a strike would now show,” said Charrgh-Captain in a tone of freezing contempt. “The stasis box may have passed through a meteor swarm. Or been bombarded in battle. Even without other explosives, every other hit would have vaporized on impact with the field from its own kinetic energies. That may contribute to the high metal content in the stony plating over the thing.”

  “To have once encountered a meteor-swarm it must have drifted a long way,” said Gay. “This part of space is empty.”

  “We know it has drifted a long way,” said Charrgh-Captain. “It has been drifting for billions of your years and ours.”

  “Perhaps it was deliberately attacked,” said Richard.

  “We may soon see,” said Charrgh-Captain.

  The stony surface of the sphere had grown to fill all the lower viewport now. The black mark was a jagged hole, surrounded by the rim of a shallow crater.

  Joey's landing legs touched. Natural gravity was negligible, but the craft's externally mounted gravity motors cut in, anchoring it firmly. The old kzinti gravity-planer had been obsolete as a space drive since the hyperdrive ended the First Man-Kzin War centuries previously and given, eventually, both species an open doorway to the distant stars, but kzin gravity technology still had a multitude of uses.

  There was no need for ladders to descend. A gentle push and they each floated down, falling slowly through the great hole that meteor or missile had smashed through layers of super-hard shielding. There were edges of twisted metal, but even if these had not been eroded by the eons, they were unlikely to tear the fabric of modern space-suits. The hole narrowed somewhat toward the bottom. They pulled themselves on and down and into what must be the control-chamber. They activated the magnets in their boots. Their lights showed hulking machinery, wreckage and dust.