The Man-Kzin Wars 07 mw-7

by Hal Colebatch

  There were several chapters devoted to “border skirmishes,” and another game called “polo” of which the colonel had evidently been fond.

  There were descriptions, too, of ancient Indian rituals I knew nothing about, like “durbars” and “famines,” of ceremonies and “manoeuvres.” There were also a few ancient flat photographs, of poor quality. He had been told, at last, by his doctor (all had human doctors then) to settle in a climate that was free of both the fevers of India and the winter cold of England.

  I turned to the last pages:

  In the service of the Empire I have spent much of my life in exile. But it has been, at the end, a life I would have changed for none other. I have written this little book for my sons. Never since I left the East has my health been good, but I have survived several illnesses and I am not quite ready to die yet. I have felt, sometimes, old before my time, but if that is so then I must say that my old age has been blessed with an unexpected marriage, children, and life in a new country full of promise. But in my gladness is one sorrow: I know I can hardly expect to live long enough for my sons to know me as men.

  Therefore, I have set down these reminiscences of times past and distant places, that they may know of their father's deeds in the service of the Queen-Empress and the Empire that is our common heritage, that they may know of our traditions of service, and know, too, that they come of a family with traditions of its own. Soldier's sons…

  The last page had crumbled away entirely. I spent several hours going through ARM files and ancient library stacks in various parts of the world. There had been several popular accounts of the “tiger-man” published in the nineteenth century, though all these were gone except the various scraps and fragments I had seen already. The colonel had even given lectures about it in his retirement.

  Given time and patience, and knowing what he was looking for, any researcher with a medium-to-high-security clearance could have found all this out. I left Bannerjee working on the other artifacts.

  None of the Vaughn-Nguyen family had any apparent or recorded connection with the military fant cults. But one of Vaughn-Nguyen's sons had gone to the Belt. The other was a deep-sea farmer and miner, who had access to biological engineering shops and metallurgical labs. He was rich. Rich families generally stayed that way by wanting to get richer.

  Vaughn-Nguyen had no wife now. He had left the farm at an early age and had returned to it only a few years before. Much of his life had been spent working with dolphins. There were no trips into space recorded, only excursion flights to the moon. During his absence the farm had been run by robots, and the buildings had been sealed for about eighty years.

  An hour later the clincher came: Paul Vaughn-Nguyen who had gone to the Belt was the same Paul Vaughn in my dossier: the systems-controller in the Angel's Pencil.

  There seemed little more to investigate. We knew who now. It only remained to clear up the question of why.

  But something about the photographs in the colonel's book nagged me. I had them enlarged and computer enhanced. It took me several days to work out what was puzzling about them.

  There was one taken of him as a young 'captain', posed with a group of other men dressed in strange clothes, at the conclusion of the famous tiger hunt.

  The tiger itself had been dragged out and skinned and lay on the ground a dark mass, the skin and raw skull beside it. The old photograph preserved no details of morphology. Further, the three men and another differently dressed — Sher Ali, I presumed — were standing with their feet on the body, obscuring it further.

  His next photograph was another of the colonel, presumably as an older man, standing posed with a group of others shortly after the 'Dirragha Campaign', which, I discovered, appeared to have been not a game but some sort of conflict.

  Vaughn wore more or less the same odd clothing in both. The captions identified the others with him, including two who appeared in both photographs called Captain Curlewis and Lieutenant Maclean. There was another photograph of Sher Ali. All the photographs had been taken by one Hurree Mukkerjee, who was described as the 'Original Brigade and Regimental Photographer'. Photography, even primitive photography like this, was rare enough in those days for the photographer's name to be thought worth preserving.

  But surely all real wars had ended long before that? Soldiers even then had been anachronisms, reduced, as I had learned from our courses, to minor policing duties like this of hunting dangerous animals in wild country. Had there been groups of criminals… what was the word… banditos? brigantes?… that they had apprehended?

  Something did not add up.

  And soldiers had used rockets?

  It was like military fant stuff.

  I slept badly again that night. And I kept seeing the faces of the Military Historians. They were like a snag in my mind. And they worried me not only for themselves, but for the very fact I thought about them now. One who does what I do has no business thinking too much upon those it is his duty to care for.

  They were still in the hospital. By law, they had a certain time to go through the formality of an appeal. Finally, and I was not sure why I did this, I sent an order to delay the memory-wipe.

  CHAPTER 5

  Our inability, with all our great resources, to answer the comparatively simple question: “Are we alone in the galaxy?” is maddening. But it is also, as Professor [Glen David] Brin points out, somewhat frightening. It is all very well to suggest, as others have done, that the reason for the Great Silence is that no other civilizations exist, but there may be a more sinister explanation… It is not only the dead who are silent, so also is… the predator…

  – Adrian Berry, Ice with Your Evolution, 1986

  We had planned a six-month-long festival of concerts and games. My own section had little to do with it, but a lot of ARM resources were involved. We had several hundred people I knew about and a lot of computer time invested simply in researching and inventing games, music and dances, and an investment many times greater than that in promoting them.

  It looked as if, when the history subprogram was completed, new games would vie with landscape redesign as one of our major activities, rather than those things usually identified with ARM's public image.

  I knew what effort had gone into the games, especially 'Graceful Willow', with its premium on good losing, but of course they weren't for me. I had been busy since returning from Australia, and a lot of my time had been taken up persuading Alfred O'Brien to give me access to files with higher security classifications.

  I began to read about weapons again. I had thought at first that the placing of the 'sword' and the 'revolver' together in the colonel's chest might have been an anachronistic mistake by the hoaxers, but I learned swords had been carried by 'officers' for ceremonies and rituals long after they ceased to have any practical use. Sometimes, in warrior cultures, they had been handed down from father to son. But in any case, by 1878, surely both sword and revolver would have been equally ceremonial?

  I began to realize how little I knew. Take it that the original story at least was true: then Colonel Vaughn had shot the tiger-man in a primitive and dangerous hunt less than a hundred years before the beginning of the Space Age.

  And then, it seemed, he had been in a war! Wars as recently as the nineteenth century? When every schoolchild had been taught that they had ended at the same time as, by definition, civilization and recorded history began?

  We in ARM literary section knew they had ended later, but still hundreds of years before that. Before Columbus, before Galileo.

  But everything I had read and researched recently — and this time it was not fiction like the old books I had been involved in destroying, but official records — showed armies in the 1870s. Granted that crime control had been primitive then, and the world dangerous and still partially unexplored. But all for police duties and tiger hunting? I was having trouble believing it.

  Among the history taught and displayed in our museums the date 1943 was
a touchstone. Every child knew that was when von Braun had launched the first successful rockets to study cosmic rays and weather: the Vetterraketen, or V-1 and V-2. Society must have made great advances in a short time during the twentieth century for wars and armies to have disappeared so quickly and space flight to have got under way. Improbably great.

  Suppose those old books of pathological fiction and fantasy I had helped suppress had not all been fictions? And there had been so many of them!

  There was something else: Apparently harmless books on comparative literature and ancient literary construction had had very high priority, not for suppression and concealment, but for total, immediate destruction. Why? Was it perhaps so operators like me would not be able to tell fictional techniques from documentary ones?

  There had been the continual warnings, both overt and subliminal, when I first joined the literary section, warnings of the absolutely fatal career consequences of becoming too interested in the work.

  Why hadn't I seen these things before when I saw them now? Because I had been off medication for days and that medication had included an intelligence depressant? How much intelligence did you need to recognize a fant book or infiltrate a fant cult? Not a lot, I began to understand. Schizies like Anton Brillov and Jack Strather, in a different section and with different personal programs, had had access to far more real history than I.

  And the fant cults themselves… why were they so persistent and, within certain parameters, so consistent? Why had past generations manufactured bizarre artifacts like 'toy soldiers' and the plastic 'models kits', fragments of which still occasionally come to light?

  The Lady May's question on her way to memory-wipe came back to me: Had I known what I had been destroying?

  The program had been to remove a strand of destructive madness from human culture, as its genetic aspect was to remove, eventually, a gene of destructive madness from the human gene pool. Useless and dangerous. But my own condition was madness without treatment, like the schizies ARM kept employed and did not medicate during working hours. Were we useless and dangerous? Presumably when the program was concluded we would be.

  But too many things were not meshing. Or rather, too many of the wrong things were meshing. Things I had never thought about before.

  I knew ARM kept forbidden knowledge even from its own people beyond what we needed to know, dangerous facts as well as dangerous inventions, but now I could not close my mind to all the inconsistencies displayed to me.

  I tried to follow other thoughts: When the Angel's Pencil had left Earth, the program had been less far advanced. There might well have been crew aboard who had studied the more sensitive areas of history.

  And the gross, glaring scientific errors in their descriptions of the alleged alien craft's capabilities: Were they deliberate signals, perhaps inserted by some crew member who did not want to be party to the business?

  Bannerjee called again. He had been working on the artifacts in New Sydney.

  “It's an electronic book,” he said. “Look: you speak in here, and this is a memory bank of some sort. This is a display screen. It's a notebook. At least, I don't see what else it could be.”

  “Can you read it?”

  “It's damaged. I had it speaking back to me for a minute. At least I think it was speech, not just noise corruption. Sounded like a catfight. And it’s weird. The circuit design is quite odd. I can tell you the metal's been grown in space. Real high-tech stuff.”

  “How old is it?”

  “It would have to be pretty new, I'd say. Newer than it smells. It may be something the Belt dreamed up.”

  “It's meant to have come from India,” I said. “It's meant to be very old.”

  “Umm… my father was keen on India. Brass bowls all over the house. This isn't brass though. Definitely Space Age. We had ancestors on the first Indian space program, you know. Well, the circuitry seems to be in order. I can give it power again, and see what happens.”

  I stood by while he powered the thing up. There was a hissing, screeching sound. I couldn't tell if it was articulated or simply malfunctioning electronics. But it did seem varied and modulated as speech might be. Behind Bannerjee on the screen I could see other screens: banks of computers with endlessly changing arrays of numbers. I knew the class of those computers and felt awed and more than a little alarmed at what their use must be costing someone. This investigation of a hoax was getting out of hand.

  “There's a relatively small group of frequently recurring sounds,” said Bannerjee. “If it's plain language and not encrypted, that might give us a start.”

  “Keep me stitched in.”

  I watched the groups of numbers and phonetic symbols dancing on the green sheets of glassine behind Bannerjee's dark face. The shape of the hoax was becoming clearer: I guessed that the tiger was to be presented as some sort of lost alien.

  The Vaughn-Nguyens had used the story of their ancestor's freak tiger as a starting point or inspiration for this. But why?

  The 'language' in the 'book' was explained easily. A computer wrote it. Imaginary alien languages were a staple of some legitimate imaginative writing, and there were whole societies dedicated to concocting them, as there were societies of bored people dedicated to many things. ARM ran most of them. The language would have to be translatable eventually. It would be gilding the lily for those who had concocted it to have put it in cypher as well.

  The 'relics', organic and inorganic? Easy enough to fake, given time and high-tech resources.

  As far as I was concerned one possibility as least had been eliminated. That was that there might be a real space sickness and the reports of felinoid aliens had been products of genuine madness, triggered, perhaps, by some subconscious childhood memory of the story of the Vaughn Tiger-Man and too many hours in a virtual reality programmer. This had been deliberately constructed before the Angel's Pencil left Earth.

  Was it an odd form of political rebellion, connected somehow with the Vaughn-Nguyens' notions of family pride? That was possible, too. Quite likely there were several motives.

  An ancient tiger freak had been killed. That, as far as I could tell, had really happened. I did not think all the records I had searched could have been tampered with, or the direction of my searches anticipated. Apart from the accounts published later I had, after getting a special permit, retrieved the relevant part of the 4th Lancers' 'Regimental Diary' from underground archives in an operation more like archeology than historical research.

  I remembered the old photographs, the two pictures of the colonel and his friends.

  They were of the same respective 'ranks' in both photographs, and from what the book said the two had been taken only a short time apart.

  Yet between the taking of the first picture and the second, these three had aged years. In the first picture Curlewis wore a strange 'pith helmet' which covered his head, but the others had evidently lost theirs and were bareheaded. They had full heads of hair, though cropped close in a way that looked strange beside today's fashions, and all three had mustaches. In the second picture, taken before some ceremonial dinner, all three were bareheaded, and all three were completely bald.

  And there was the picture of the Indian hunter, Sher Ali, too. He wore an odd piece of cloth wound round his head in both pictures, but in his second photograph his face had been hairless. In the first, with the dead tiger, he had had a flowing black beard and mustache.

  I called ARM, and there was another deep expedition into ancient British archives. Both Curlewis and Maclean had retired early, owing to recurrent illness.

  Births and deaths had to be registered in Britain before the end of the nineteenth century, and with their army numbers it was, as it turned out, relatively easy to track them down. Both had died in their fifties, of cancer. Colonel Vaughn had lived longer. I had to go to the Australian records to find his death certificate, but he had eventually died of cancer, too.

  ARM's bio-labs were still testing the skin and fur
. So far they had been unable to match them with any known felines. In fact they had discovered quite radical differences. Now they were taking the dried tissue apart molecule by molecule, and from what they told me they were baffled by what they were finding.

  But I still did not know the Vaughn-Nguyens' motives. I ran the possibilities through my mind again.

  We had started with the presumption that if the story of a madness involving delusions of horrible aliens was somehow taken seriously, the immediate result would be to inhibit space exploration, but, as had also been immediately obvious, a scam would be very hard to get away with, at least on Earth. ARM would have records of anyone selling heavily in space-industry shares.

  Religious fanatics? Highly unlikely, we ran most cults.

  Chiliastic panics? ARM knew about them too. It had acted to turn several of them off (or on). This could, given promotion, be a socio-political forest fire. But why light such a fire at all?

  I even wondered if it was an internal ARM power play. ARM's resources would make setting up even such a complex hoax relatively easy.

  If that was so, there was nothing I could do. ARM was no monolith, I knew. There were conflicts in it, factions and sometimes accelerated promotions and early retirements, but the idea of ARM hoaxing ARM smelled wrong. If my intuition was worth anything at all, that wasn't the answer.

  The artifacts? Where had they come from? Bannerjee had mentioned the Belt. Space-grown metals?

  Were the Vaughn-Nguyens Belter agents? Earth-Belt rivalry had been (I was told) relatively dormant for generations, but any inhibition of Earth's space activities would give the Belt comparative advantage.

  A story about warlike aliens — or of delusions about warlike aliens — would not do that in itself, but it could be a start point in long-term psychological gaming.