by Larry Niven
Cha'at-Captain was to lead Pouncing-Strike on a scream-and-leap directly at the human spacecraft, firing all weapons, drawing monkeyship weapons fire in turn. Spine-Cruncher would use the diversion to fly past the alien ship in a hyperbolic trajectory, and deliver the heavily stealthed monopole bomb. The bomb would detonate close enough to the human ship to temporarily incapacitate its electronics with a hammerblow of an electromagnetic pulse. The human monkeys placed great reliance on electronics.
Spine-Cruncher would then land a boarding party of Heroes to capture and secure the prize. Rrowl-Captain and Belly-Slasher would observe how the humans responded to the attacks, aid in the capture if necessary, and direct the mopping-up operation. As soon as the alien craft was secured, Rrowl-Captain would inspect the monkeyship personally, and proceed with converting it to kzinti use and the long trek to Ka’ashi.
Rrowl-Captain disliked risking the blood of octal-squared Heroes in Pouncing-Strike to create a mere diversion, but if the redoubtable Cha'at-Captain was sufficiently wise and skilled — which Rrowl-Captain thought most unlikely — it might be possible for his crew to survive.
If that became the case, he would deal with Cha'at-Captain's increasingly insubordinate manner in another and more direct fashion. One with less opportunity for the other kzin to accrue honor. Of course, the crew of Pouncing-Strike was loyal to their captain. Rrowl-Captain would have to be careful, or at least thorough.
However, in the most likely tactical scenario, Cha'at-Captain and his crew would not present any difficulties whatsoever, after their brave diversionary scream-and-leap toward the monkeyship.
Rrowl-Captain relaxed slightly, daydreaming of his estates to come on Man-home, after he was rightfully rewarded for bringing the contra-matter drive to Ka’ashi for use against the monkeys. A palace would be built for his many beautiful kzinretti, who would surely be of noble blood, enriching his own line. He would also have his own hunting park, he decided, a place where only he and his litter kittens would stalk and kill prey. Perhaps he would hunt a naked monkey each week, just for the sport of it.
That would relieve him of nightmares tinged with green hell-light, surely.
A languid tongue moved across thin black lips as he considered his certain reward of a double name. Which one would he choose? Perhaps the name his litter-brother had liked so, before he had died while they were still living in the crèche.
Rrowl-C'mef. Rrowl-Captain rumbled the name deep in his throat. It sounded wise and powerful. The name tasted of honor and dignity, did it not? Of teeth tingling with the crunching success of prey between jaws. He would surely wrest honor and victory from the defeat of Third Fleet.
Alarms suddenly yowled, echoing on the control bridge. Rrowl-Captain folded his ears swiftly against the din. His slit pupils narrowed as he looked at the status boards, which blurred with rapid changes.
"Status report!" he shrieked.
Strategist pointed wordlessly at the main thinscreen. Rrowl-Captain saw that the tapered end of the monkeyship had stabilized. He watched as a great cloud of ionized gas emerged from the drive section of the human ship.
"What is the attitude of the alien drive section?" he roared angrily. Pouncing-Strike would begin its high acceleration scream-and-leap attack on the alien vessel at any time now.
"Nearly the approach path assigned to Pouncing-Strike." replied Strategist with a snarl.
Sure enough, the blinking marker on the tactical thinscreen representing Cha'at-Captain's vessel was accelerating along a coincident vector. Rrowl-Captain snarled his anger.
"Is there sufficient time to warn Pouncing-Strike by laserlink?" he shouted to Communications.
The young kzin's tail drooped. "No, Dominant One," he replied submissively. "We are too far away.”
Rrowl-Captain looked back at the tactical thinscreen and saw that it was true. He slashed the air in front of him with bared claws in impotent rage. May the One Fanged God damn light-speed!
The contra-matter drive of the monkeyship ignited. The cloud of gas surrounding the drive section glowed eye-searing violet for a moment.
The main thinplate viewscreen went suddenly white, then corrected automatically for the awful glare of the reaction drive. It became a great blazing column of light, brighter than suns, stretching rapidly across the viewscreen. Rrowl-Captain ground razor-sharp teeth impotently as he watched Pouncing-Strike attempt to vector away from the expanding drive wash.
"Pouncing-Strike has ceased acceleration!" shouted Strategist.
Rrowl-Captain bared his teeth. Clearly, the other ships gravitic polarizers had failed under the great stress of attempting to maneuver away from the spreading death of the contra-matter drive exhaust. It had become a ballistic lump, helpless.
The command bridge crew watched the tactical screen impotently as inertia carried Pouncing-Strike into the blazing column of radiation and plasma. Rrowl-Captain snarled and tore a claw on the Kdatlyno-hide arms of his command chair.
The white blaze erupting from the monkeyship slowly turned against the color-shifted starscape toward them, like a great sword out of mythology.
"Communications," roared Rrowl-Captain, "send a burst transmission to Spine-Cruncher. Tell them that we will divert the monkeys in order to allow them to carry out their mission.”
"At once," said Communications, proudly.
Rrowl-Captain hunched forward in his command chair, mastering his hidden fears. Honor would be his, and this victory would slay his inner demons.
"Navigator," he rasped, "begin evasive maneuvers, inward toward the monkeyship. Attempt to draw their fire. Strategist, aid him with your knowledge." Rrowl-Captains torn claw began to bleed, unnoticed, onto the spotless arm of the command chair.
"At once, Dominant One," the two other kzin shouted with one Hero's voice.
The entire command bridge seemed to blur and tremble as the gravitic polarizer's mutter grew to a low roar. A scorching odor began to emanate from the ventilators as the polarizer was pushed beyond basic design limits. The command bridge filled with the snarling of the agitated crew and the pheromonal scent of their fury.
The deadly white blaze of the alien contra-matter reaction drive stretched across the thinplate viewscreen. It grew swiftly larger and began to move to one side. But slowly.
Rrowl-Captain made the slashing gesture of fealty to the One Fanged God, and watched his fate rushing toward him.
·CHAPTER SEVEN
Linkage was godhead.
Bruno felt the hail of relativistic particles slowly eroding the hull of Sun-Tzu like an invigorating breeze on bare skin. The lethal blaze of radiation sleeting through the sensors was like desert sunshine, warm and friendly.
But he knew that there was so much more than what lay immediately outside the spacecraft to perceive and cherish, to make part of himselves! Everything about Sun-Tzu was now part of Bruno: the raw power of the antimatter drive, the patient, lethal tensions of the weapons systems, the exquisite fineness of his growing sensorium.
Linked, he could do many things besides wear a spaceship like a slick and sensitive skin. Bruno's mind had become more than simply human.
It had become Mind.
From its tiny human kernel, loci of subminds with special interests quickly formed and grew, each with full independent consciousness as well as being part of the developing interconnective Whole. He had become a clamoring community, a society of minds, each subunit far greater than their woefully limited biological ancestor.
Bruno sent his enhanced consciousness ranging restlessly through the sensory and computational net of Sun-Tzu, gazing outward and inward simultaneously. He could at once encompass the All, the depth and range of the universe, from quanta to quasars. A portion of Bruno was still staggered by the whirlwind of knowledge within his thoughts, but with every full Linkage, he became better able to access the vast vault of data surrounding him. It was as if his myriad selves were dissolving in a warm ocean of knowledge and certitude.
But that did
not concern him overmuch, even the part of himselves that was still Bruno.
For Bruno knew that he was changing, improving, with every Linkage. His times not in communion with the computer network became less and less important, like faint memories almost forgotten over many decades of time.
Linkage also gave Bruno mastery of self. He was learning how to expand or contract his duration-sense at the slightest whim. Soon, he would be able to stretch a microsecond into eternity, or the reverse. A tiny, flawed part of Bruno — his limited biological component — wanted to shout with exhilaration, but he was far beyond mere human emotion.
Bruno, once again in full Linkage, was Transcended.
His awareness surrounded and permeated Sun-Tzu, at one with the All. A portion of his Mind watched one of the kzin warships slide helplessly into his antimatter drive wash. Without specifically desiring to do so, Bruno's new sensorium analyzed and reported the spectral characteristics of the vaporized alien craft: Flayed atoms of carbon and iron, silicon and indium, shattered and broken.
Whirling motes, once part of a mighty warship and alien flesh, blasted now and scarred.
A billowing cloud of humbled ions, now a slight contaminant of the incandescent torrent of plasma and gamma radiation sweeping behind him for millions of kilometers.
***
Bruno relished his control. The drive was its lowest setting; he could pivot and swing the exhaust like the weapon it was while still maintaining proper attitude control. So graceful, so clean, so true.
Bruno looked beyond the drive wash, past the sweeping fields of force and glitter of ions, into the vast and varied face of infinity. An emotion much like awe filled his circuits and neurons.
He permitted part of his Mind to appreciate and cherish the subtle wonders surrounding his myriad selves, while another fragment of that expanded consciousness dealt with the growing threat to Sun-Tzu.
A tiny bit of his consciousness noted that Carol was speaking to his human component. He felt the urge to reply, to speak in human terms, much as his un-Linked self felt the dull pangs of hunger or the first stirrings of lust. While fully Linked, merely human concerns seemed akin to instinct, lacking the crystalline certainty and broad range of Transcendence. He sent a tendril of his greater Mind into his minor and insignificant biological portion, increasing his consciousness and processing capacity in that location.
His pale perception of the navigation deck sharpened suddenly to razor-edged clarity.
"Yes, Carol. I am with you. I have been so all along." The words, mere modulated sound waves, seemed frustratingly imprecise and limited.
Insufficient.
Bruno called up the realtime image of Carol's face from the navigation-deck cameras, then finally used his biological vision-sense organs on the captain of Sun-Tzu. The image didn't seem more accurate than the camera images to Bruno's sensorium; quite the reverse, in fact. Still, he knew that Carol felt more comfortable when he turned his biological eyes on her.
It was a human quirk, one Bruno didn't mind indulging. Even if it wasted some small amount of processing capacity.
Carol's face was lined with worry and other fitful emotions that were difficult to quantify. He focused on her words.
"Thank you for turning your head. Tacky, I just saw one of the ratcat ships vaporize.”
"Indeed. The kzin ship attempted to maneuver around the drive wash, lost maneuvering power, and... was consumed.”
Bruno accessed biotelemetry and voice-stress-analysis datalinks. Calculating, calculating... Clearly, Carol was as worried by his condition as by the alien craft. Bruno felt the electronic analog of amusement at her colorless concerns.
They were sweet, cute; as touching as a dog trying to understand an aircar.
"What about the other two ships, Pilot? Can your magnificent intellect find them, or are you drunk again on godhood?" Her tone sounded angry, like the annoying buzz of an insect.
"Allow me a moment," he replied, trying to force reassuring patterns of emotional context into his vocalizations, to soothe Carol while he considered the situation. Bruno was intrigued. Mere human or not, she had said something to hold the attention of his greater Mind. He wanted to ponder and savor the words, but first had to evaluate their status and implications.
Bruno directed his full Attention outward for a moment, and perceived the two kzin ships at a relatively safe distance. Nothing threatened, to a first approximation of risk. He could spare a few seconds for improving his internal functioning, surely.
A human-analytical portion of his Mind continued to consider Carol's statement. 'Drunk' was clearly pejorative, and implied suboptimal performance.
Perhaps some subminds were functioning at less than ideal efficiencies. Clearly, the weak link in his Mind must be his inept and poorly designed human components. A rapid internal diagnostic confirmed and quantified the inefficiencies. He forced a far greater portion of his Mind into his biological component, the modest seed from which his larger Self had sprouted with Linkage. He began to make changes in his neurological system architecture. The body in the crash couch began to twitch and shake, in a coarse and empty parody of Linkage.
Bruno had expected such side effects while attempting to improve and enhance such a chimeric computing device as the electronically augmented brain of his human portion. After all, massive restructuring of entire interface grids was necessary. Extensive rerouting of neuronal connections was also indicated. Bruno commanded the crash couch restraints to hold his biological component more tightly in order to avoid possible damage to it during the reprogramming subroutines.
The results of some commands were, after all, rather drastic on the macroscopic level.
"Tacky! Bruno!" the watchdog sensory portion of his Mind heard Carol shouting, "what's happening?”
"It is quite all right," he managed to force past chattering teeth, striving for a tone that implied calmness. "You were correct, Carol. This portion of me was operating improperly.”
"What do you mean? Portion?" Her words held alarm.
The submind in charge of biotelemetry analysis and interpretation hypothesized that Carol was feeling great emotional upset. Bruno knew that he had to set Carol's fears at ease.
"We are reprogramming our human component for greater efficiency." The explanation would surely calm her agitated emotional state.
He heard Carol shouting again, and turned the major portion of his complex intellect away from her words. Sonic noise, not communication. Some aspect of her tone had become intrusive to the ongoing reprogramming process. Carol's words became fainter, and faded into the background noise of the navigation deck, only fully accessed by his human portion. Which was still under repair and retrofitting, of course.
It was difficult to erase, reprogram, and internally reroute microcircuitry contained with the electronic portion of his human component's brain. Though there was great plasticity in the interface macrostructure, there was little absolute complexity. Soon, he felt certain, he would learn to directly manipulate entirely biological subsystems as well as the electronic.
There were bandwidth and amplitude problems, of course — some quite delicious in their smooth difficulty. Still, Bruno would then be able to force compensatory neuronal rewiring of the brain tissues themselves, leading to a truly binary mind Linking the worlds of silicon and synapse.
Linkage would become still easier then, and he would be able to experience less limitation in his increasingly powerful sensorium.
Bruno noted that rerouting and macrocircuit programming was now complete, with a shadowy ghost of an emotion that had once been satisfaction. Internal debugging routines showed improved perceptual and computing ability. There was less hormonal impact on affective state, as well.
Good, good. Raw emotions often led to decreased cognitive efficiency.
Bruno's biological perceptual field expanded to include Carol, her face grim and set. Tears beaded in her eyes, flowing slowly across her cheek in the microgravity.
/> From the physical actions of the tears across her face he instantly — and involuntarily — computed the predicted acceleration of the antimatter drive in weapon mode as 0.012 gravities. The portion of his Mind controlling the drive agreed, confirming his calculations to three decimal places. Bruno reached out with a biological hand and stroked Carol's cheek, feeling the tears against his skin. There were some tactile sensations that action-response circuits could not access. Perhaps there was some emotional, hormonal component. Bruno created a submind to investigate this problem, assigning it moderate priority.
He did care for Carol, and wished her to be safe and happy. Some sign to her of his intentions would be good.
"We are improved now," Bruno told her proudly. Five seconds had passed in realtime since he had initiated the internal reprogramming.
"I... can see that," Carol replied. Tears still glinted in her eyes.
Biotelemetry subroutines reported Carol's strongly suppressed emotional state. Bruno tasted worry concerning the captain of the Sun-Tzu. A portion of his Mind considered Carol's recent behavior, and began an in-depth analysis.
The rest of Bruno looked outward for the alien threat, anxious to deal with the kzin. There was a universe to ponder.
Bruno sensed the other two kzin warships as tiny flaws in the fabric of space, glittering refractions from their inertialess spacedrives. One of the tiny wrinkles in space-time began accelerating rapidly, maneuvering nearer his drive wash.
"Initiating maneuvers," Bruno told Carol, who nodded jerkily and silently stared at the main holoscreen array.
He sent a low-resolution datadump to a holoscreen window, so that Carol could see the battle more clearly. Dimly, he felt a distraction; the odd, cool brush of Carol's tears drying on his fingers. Evaporative cooling? Bruno sensed the initiation of an increased emotional state in his biological component, and easily compensated for the decreased overall efficiency. If only he could eliminate the hormonal drivers, attain serenity —