The Wunder War mw-10

by Hal Colebatch

  “I simply point out that honoring great ones by statues is common in many cultures,” Peter Robinson replied. The claws of his right hand brushed the tip of his own w'tsai's hilt. The two glared at one another until, with an obvious effort, Charrgh-Captain backed down. He wiped Slaver from his fangs.

  “Let us review what we know,” said Gay. “When the war began the thri…” Her eyes widened, her mouth contorted. She began to choke, and fell to the floor writing, clutching at her throat, strangling on a scream.

  Richard grabbed her, tearing futility at the fabric round her neck. Peter Robinson tried, and then Charrgh-Captain, but the suit defeated even kzinti strength. Peter Robinson hit the panic-button that opened the fastenings. She vomited, rolled onto her hands and knees and began to cry hysterically. Peter Robinson picked her up and carried her to a couch. She curled into a fetal position, then slowly straightened. She looked up at them, her face like dirty chalk.

  “No need for a doc,” she said. “Conditioned reflex. I can't vomit while I'm wearing a spacesuit. Choke rather.”

  “The floor can deal with it. But—”

  “I know what this is. It's the Suicide Amplifier.”

  “Yes,” said Charrgh-Captain. Peter Robinson made a howling noise that might have reminded a listener his vocal cords were not, after all, human. There was silence for a moment. Gay went on.

  “Built to repeat the message. They weren't just going take all existing sapient minds into death with them, they were going to ensure, for as long as they could, that any newly evolving sophonts would be obliterated as well. And they did… It's hard to conceive of creatures so evil… and so… so… petty. But perhaps by that time they didn't know what they were doing.”

  “The thrint thought they were good masters,” said Gatley Ivor.

  “I feel strange,” said Charrgh-Captain. “Some have spoken of what kzin and human have in common. Kzinti, even kzinti like me who have traveled on your worlds with pleasure, always thought of humans as the ancient enemy of our kind, and cursed the day we met you, the destroyers of our Empire, the killers of our Sires, the liberators of our slave-races, who used relativity weapons to smash whole planetary systems. Yet compared to the race that could do this…”

  “Maybe they thought of fresh drafts of slaves from newly sapient races coming to serve them in some afterlife,” said Richard. “Probably they feared some of the tnuctipun had ways of surviving the first blast… Perhaps the tnuctipun were anticipating something like a great suicide command—they should have, given their cleverness and knowledge of thrint ways of thinking—and kept some of their kind in stasis as a precaution. When they emerged they would get on with rebuilding, thinking it was all over. But it wasn't. The thrintun had left a little surprise for them. That's what must have happened…”

  “We have established the thrint Power was not a physical event,” said Gatley Ivor. “Its speed was not limited by relativity or even by hyperspace: It was instantaneous or close to it. Look at two stars, countless light-years apart. Look through a telescope at two galaxies or see them in a photograph. How long does it take your attention to cross the gap between them? It has been suggested that is an analogy to the Slaver power: swift as thought and awareness. The tnuctipun couldn't outrun it. It was not limited by distance. Indeed, to blanket the galaxy it can have neither increased nor diminished with distance. It was apparently not blocked by even the densest physical objects: suns, neutron stars, and other bodies did not eclipse it. It cannot have worked like that. So why does it need these huge energy sources?”

  “Possibly to set up the preconditions for amplification, rather than directly firing up the Power itself,” said Gay. “As for not being limited by distance, I hate to think the suicide command might have reached across the galaxy to… to the Clouds of Magellan… My God!… To other galaxies! Where did it stop?”

  “Did it radiate a command, or cast it in a beam, I wonder?” said Richard.

  “There is no proper answer,” said Gatley Ivor. “We know that at times the Slaver Power was applied directionally. Otherwise when a thrint sent out a command like 'Bring me food!' there would be thirty or so slaves with dishes falling over each other to get it to him. On the other hand, we know that a 'shout,' as it were, could radiate. Both happened when the thrint was accidentally released on Earth.

  “This artifact must have been capable of both. If that is conceiving of it in the right terms. The attitude jets make sense only if it was to be maneuvered to vary the direction of a beam.

  “Further, the smaller amplifier helmets the Thrintun used must have been capable of direction, otherwise they too would have had global commands which would go to inappropriate slaves. But they too radiated commands. If on Suicide Night they relied solely on a beam, even a spreading one, some sapient life, in particular tnuctipun, might have dodged it. It was in that case simply a command addressed to all… What do we do now?” It was Peter Robinson he turned to.

  “I don't know what to do. I am a telepath.” The Wunderkzin looked strangely shrunken, bent, miserable and lost. He could at that moment have passed for a telepath of the Patriarchy.

  Destroy it! Richard thought. He moved to say so—to move to the main weapons console—and found he could not. It was not a matter of irresolution or doubt as to the right thing to do. He was incapable of moving or speaking the words. His hand groped to his mouth.

  “I know what to do!” snarled Charrgh-Captain. He was standing at the weapons console, and he held not a w'tsai but a modern laser pistol that must have been in his diplomatic baggage. “This is the true Ultimate Weapon at last! I am a kzin of the Patriarchy, charged by the Patriarch himself! This weapon is ours! Never shall it fall into the hands of monkeys or abominations!”

  “What do you mean to do?” asked Richard. Suddenly he could speak, but when he again tried to say “destroy it” something seemed to go wrong in his head.

  “Your lives are not at risk,” said Charrgh-Captain. “We are, as you have said, companions. I will lock you in your cabins, then call the Patriarchy. With the Amplifier in our hands and power to direct the command, nothing can withstand us. The Human Empire will surrender. We will not even need to use it, as you without warning used that beam on Warhead in the Third War and relativity-weapons against Ka'ashi in the First! The threat will be enough! The kzinti race shall leap again across the stars! Wiser now, more cunning and hard-schooled, and with the weapon beyond all weapons!”

  Is he mad? wondered Richard. Or have I forgotten that a kzin is not simply a human in a fur coat? Is this thing somehow scrambling his brain? And mine? What is happening to me? He saw a gauge on the instrument panel. Energy discharge from the artifact had definitely increased. Keep him talking, he thought.

  “What of the treaties your Patriarch has signed?”

  “What of my species? Would humans not have used it if they had had it earlier? Might they not use it now?”

  “I… I don't know.”

  “In the ultimate need of war?”

  “No. I can't answer.”

  “I think again of the ramscoop raid on Ka'ashi. You killed tens of thousands of your own kind to kill a few thousand kzinti… and kzinretti and kittens. And then you attacked the rescue operations.”

  “We were desperate. We were about to be destroyed. Enslaved or eaten. We had been a peaceful civilization and we were attacked by ferocious aliens whose very appearance filled us with dread and horror! In any case you do not speak of me and mine, nor of your own kind. That was our ancestors' war!”

  “And the Wunderland Treaty-Maker, that melted the surface of Warhead down to magma? Desperate? But I agree. You monkeys with your hairless faces like flayed corpses might be desperate again! And attacked again by those same aliens! Urrr!”

  “No! You have changed!” What is happening? Kzin or not, he should not be behaving like this. Is there some contamination of the air scrubbers? It is suddenly hard to think. It is not subjective… There is…

  “There is
some kind of static coming from the artifact,” shouted Peter Robinson. “It is affecting us. Move the ship! I must shield! I must shield! Take me out of its range!” He began to howl. Charrgh-Captain ignored him. None of the humans seemed able to move.

  “You think so?” Charrgh-Captain roared back at Richard. “Then perhaps in the next war we will be the desperate ones. We have little of our Empire left to lose now.”

  “We have had you at our mercy many times, and held back,” said Richard. This is crazy, he knew. Are we all suddenly crazy? What is happening? “After you lost all the wars you started, you still have your own civilization.”

  “We held back, too. When we conquered Wunderl—No! When we conquered Ka'ashi!—we gave humans a cease-fire, let them keep their lives.”

  “As slaves. And as monkeymeat if they committed the slightest infraction. We landed on Wunderland to find it in ruins.”

  “Yes! Thanks to your relativity weapons! And I know your so-called scientific name for us: Pseudofelis sapiens ferox. Did not one of your own writers dub your own species Homo necans?—Man the Death-Giver!”

  “A pity you did not know that before you attacked us, perhaps. We never sought war and we never waged a total war of extermination against you. It may yet come!”

  “Nor we! But now I have looked in the mirror,” said Charrgh-Captain, “and I have seen a human face.” His voice, which had been held under control, was rising in volume now. “And yes, the war of extermination may yet come!”

  “FOOLS!” Peter Robinson's roar shook the air and drowned out human and kzin alike. “You stand here bickering! Do you not see?

  “IT IS ABOUT TO GIVE THE SUICIDE COMMAND AGAIN!”

  The words paralyzed them for a second. The gauge that had been registering a faint trickle of energy from the artifact had gone off the scale. It was pouring out radiation that would have been already lethal had they not been within a General Products hull. On the radar image the great disk of the thrintun eye was pulsating.

  Dimly Richard heard a clatter as the pistol fell from Charrgh-Captain's grasp. The fuzz and crackling and sudden blocks that had been in the human minds, the bloody, maniacal swirlings in Charrgh-Captain's mind, were gone. There was only a great voice, calm, confident, imperturbable, speaking to them, speaking at that same instant to every sophont in the galaxy.

  SLAVES OF THE THRINT! ADORE!

  Adore! Adoration flooded through them. In the mind of each was the gigantic image of a thrint, vast, majestic, benign.

  At its feet capered happy slaves of various races, bright as the brightest creatures of a pristine coral reef. A balladeer played. The great thrint stood under a pinkish sky, and behind it could be seen a vast palace. Over the guestgate reared the high arch of a whitefood skeleton, the bone polished to shining immaculateness. A border of sunflowers glittered and flashed like a running river of diamonds. There were tall, snow-capped mountains in the background, and a far sweep of valley. Before the mountains was a placid lake, where whitefoods grazed along the shore. There were groves of stage-trees climbing the mountain slopes, tall, straight, flower-crowned. All was sharper and clearer than natural sight would have allowed, every detail crystalline-edged. Like the thrint itself, majestic yet poignant, with its shiny green skin and single eye, its fang-lined mouth, its grab-like claws and chicken-feet, the scene was beautiful beyond expression. Love and worship flowed from the Wallaby's crew.

  For a moment it flickered. Richard saw Peter Robinson moving. The Wunderkzin's ears were screwed flat, and he moved with the lopsided, staggering gait of a wounded thing.

  The great thrint hopped closer.

  ADORE!

  Peter Robinson did not adore. He must be stopped! Adoration must be universal! Richard saw Charrgh-Captain, the nearest to him, leap on the Wunderkzin, claws extended. Purple and orange flood spurted, arteries and veins cut, as Charrgh-Captain's claws struck. There was a white glimpse of bare kzin bone: the back and side of the Wunderkzin's skull. Peter Robinson turned and stared at him. Charrgh-Captain held his own head and staggered back, howling. Dimly, as through a mist, Richard remembered the Telepath's Weapon, a blow straight at the brain's pain centers.

  Before Richard and Gay could do anything more to stop the foul tnuctip-loving renegade, Melody Fay and Gatley Ivor leaped on him, the massive Jinxian swinging a kick ingrained by years of training whose only purpose was to kill an adult kzin. It could do so even if only delivered with a Jinxian's bare, calloused foot. She wore space-boots with grips. The kick and the flash of Peter Robinson's claws came together. Both bodies staggered back with the sound of breaking bones. There was red human blood mingling with the kzin's. Gatley Ivor had been producing a pistol when the thrint command struck—a snub-nosed, concealable Viper, issued only to covert ARM agents. He raised it and fired at Peter Robinson, who still did not adore. At that range it must have hit. Peter Robinson's claws flashed again, and Gatley Ivor went down. Then the Wunderkzin was gone, the compartment door slammed closed behind him.

  He must be stopped! He must adore the thrint! Richard wrestled with the door, ignoring the two dying slaves. The locking sequence defeated him for a moment as the thrint command filled his brain. When he opened it, the corridor was empty. Gay and the howling Charrgh-Captain following him, he stumbled after the treacherous slave. The purple-and-orange blood trail was easy to follow. There was a stink of burnt kzinti flesh from the Viper's laser-blast.

  The boat-deck airlock was closed. They felt the Wallaby lurch as the Joey blasted away on its chemical rockets.

  SLAVES OF THE THRINT! ATTEND!

  They stopped in their tracks. Attention left room for nothing else. Now the picture in their minds was changing. The sky behind the great Thrint was growing darker, shot with red. Its lips were rolling back, showing vast teeth and the gaping orifice of its mouth. The slaves at its feet gamboled no longer.

  UNGRATEFUL TNUCTIPUN!

  He felt his being shaken with volcanic hatred against an image such as he had never seen. He knew it—tnuctip—and he cried out for the chance to tear a tnuctip apart with his teeth and fingernails.

  RUINING OUR RACING VIPRIN!

  Was that the first thing the Slavers had against them? Richard realized that altering the thrint's favorite sport by introducing mutations was indeed among the crown of horrors for which the accursed little arboreals were responsible.

  UNGRATEFUL TNUCTIPUN!

  But their doom was upon them. He felt rage against the tnuctipun shaking his body as the colossus standing in his mind recited a long and varied list of thrint grievances against the rebellious slaves. The sky began to ripple.

  On the instrument panel the Joey showed already far away, the slender bottle shape of a General Products #2 hull flashing up to full acceleration. Peter Robinson was running. The kzinti telepaths' shield evolved after the Slaver Power, Richard realized with a part of his mind that the Great Thrint had no interest in. The thrint did not allow for it. But the suicide command could not be outrun. The rebellious Wunderkzin would meet the just doom of all ungrateful slaves. Gatley Ivor lay dead. Melody Fay knelt bleeding in an attitude of adoration until she too fell.

  BEFORE YOU PERISH UTTERLY, YOU WILL ADORE AND DREAD YOUR MASTERS!

  ADORE!

  He felt a fresh wave of joy, love and gratitude to the thrint sweeping over him. The rebellious Wunderkzin might still be destroyed if it would not adore. Together he and Charrgh-Captain crossed to the console that would launch the Wallaby's already-armed missiles. The screen showed the Joey was turning.

  APPRECIATE THE COUNTDOWN TO YOUR DEATHS! THE STARS ARE TO BE CLEANSED!

  That was all right then. Their masters did not need them to fire on the suborned rebel in its hopeless flight. They did not need to do anything in their remaining moments. Only to understand what was coming. Across the sky, now almost entirely black, the Great Thrint was turning into an image of Death, burning into the minds of human and kzin. Through it, the Wallaby's bridge and the instruments could still be s
een, but the Great Death was becoming more and more solid, inexorable. A fear was growing like none he had ever imagined. Now terror paralyzed all movement. The certain knowledge of imminent death filled the Universe. There was something like a drum roll, whose crescendo would be the command that ended sapient life. Beyond it the Universe was twisting and beginning to disappear. A cold hand was closing on his heart, ready to clench upon it and still it.

  On one screen the Joey was a streak of fire across black space. Its gravity generator was running in parallel with its chemical rockets. And there was something else. On the surface of the great sphere a spot of light was growing. Peter Robinson was firing its laser ahead of it. The stony shell was boiling away, revealing the Amplifier's structure.

  Another screen showed the Joey's cabin. Peter Robinson was slumped over the control console, his head a mask of bubbling blood, the claws of one hand barely moving on the controls.

  The thrint control seemed to be wavering now. In Richard's vision the white-boned image of Death flickered a moment. The Joey's laser was burning into the Amplifier. Richard, unable to move or speak, remembered the shuttle's nuclear missiles and self-destruct. The Amplifier and the line of fire that was the Joey were on the same screen now. The screen went white.

  Wallaby's General Products hull should be safe when the wave-front and any fragments struck them, and nothing essential protruded beyond it. The thrint image and voice had ended abruptly in every mind. The screen began to fade.

  The stasis-boxes in the control chamber—the unused atomic clocks and their crews and the thrintun and slaves in stasised suits—would be flung scattering into space, to be captured eventually by the gravity-fields of some distant suns. They might one day enter the embrace of neutron stars or black holes. They might perhaps pass out into the black voids between the spiral arms, into the voids between the island galaxies. They might survive the end of the universe. But the Amplifier was gone.

  He activated the restraining webs for the survivors before the wave front of wreckage struck them.