by Larry Niven
"Watching with its instruments," Chorth-Captain continued. "I saw the apes were gaining the upper hand, and before they had gained all air- and space-superiority about Ka'ashi I took this gig and, leaving the fighter as hidden as might be, I flew back to Ka'ashi, evading the apes' clumsy, noseless searchers, back to the wild country and the great caves. I lurked there when the war ended, hoping to find some way back to Kzinhome so I might fight on, or some way to die gloriously in battle, killing monkeys eights-squared times as Lord Dragga-Skrull killed Jotok. I made occasional raids on the surface. I learnt of Chuut-Riit's hidden redoubt which the monkeys had found. It was abandoned and sealed when I reached it but I broke the seals and took equipment from it. Years passed. Monkeys died at my claws, when they were foolish enough to wander alone or in small troops. In the caves I met my ally. He alone had been exposed to the chemical and made the change. He had memories of his previous life, and of the war. Of Heroes and monkeys, of weapons and fighting, which he was soon able to understand. His intelligence had, of course, become very high, though he had been barely sentient before. He did not kill me, but showed me that an alliance against the apes would be in the interest of both our kinds." He lied a moment ago, but he's not lying now, Vaemar thought. Chorth-Captain went on.
"He demonstrated his intelligence to me, and together we modified this craft, and built other things. I contacted Heroes the apes had not corrupted and they too supplied us with knowledge and equipment. We tested his improvements to cloaking devices and they worked. We flew to the southern island undetected and carried out much work there, free from the attention of monkeys or... other things. Under his direction we studied what we could of the plight of Ka'ashi. I told him what I knew of space and the war. We agreed the monkeys were the most noxious vermin of the universe..."
Dimity caught it vaguely, Vaemar much more clearly. There was a great deal wrong with Chorth-Captain. There was a strange kind of buzzing in his voice. But there was more than that. Most kzinti of the officer class, used to framing orders, did not commonly in such a situation deliver themselves of prolix monologues like this, least of all to monkeys or prisoners. And Vaemar's Ziirgah sense picked up a fuzziness, something off-key, in Chorth-Captain's emotions as well as in his voice and body-language. His brain has been tampered with, thought Vaemar. By the Protector, obviously. The thing that was a brainless Morlock. Rykermann is right. They are a peril indeed.
"Where are we going?"
Chorth-Captain gestured at another screen. Wunderland was a great sphere. Vaemar saw they were already several hundred miles up, and still accelerating. There was no interference from the guardships, manned and automated, that patrolled the space above the planet.
"The Hollow Moon. There we will be undisturbed."
I don't think so, thought Vaemar. Our disappearance will be noted. But then he thought that, thought they might be searched for, there would be no particular reason to include the Hollow Moon in the search, especially if this craft's cloaking was truly good. There would be no reason to think they were in space at all.
Dimity had thought of no way to remind him of the locators.
"Where is the tree-of-life?" asked Dimity.
"Most of it is still in the caves, along with most of the warheads. It is safe. There was a little we took to the Hollow Moon but it is now being used. You will not be exposed to it."
There was something else Dimity and Vaemar could hardly help noticing. Chorth-Captain would hardly be talking to them so frankly if he expected them to live to tell the tale, whatever the Protector said. The Protector may be smarter than most human geniuses, thought Dimity, as, by our IQ tests, are Vaemar and I. But Chorth-Captain sure isn't.
Wunderland continued to shrink on the screen. Now it was a great, multicolored disk in space. The Protector had been sitting calmly in a lotus-position. Its oversized eyes appeared almost dreamy. But both the captives sensed it was absorbing every word. Both knew that in an instant it could spring. After a time it spoke into what appeared to be the mutated descendant of a standard kzin-pattern com-link. When Dimity asked who it was speaking to she was ignored. There were flexible tubes for food and waste-disposal, and human and kzin were evidently expected to use them together, in each other's sight. On Wunderland members of the two species who had ties with one another might sometimes drink together, or eat small delicacies like ice cream, but there were usually powerful taboos beyond more than that. Evidently there had been captives on this vessel before.
Chorth-Captain told them of how he had made contact with a number of the kzinti who had been in Chuut-Riit/Henrietta's Redoubt and escaped or survived its storming. Through them he had begun to build up a knowledge-base for the Protector about Dimity and Vaemar.
The kzinti had been masters of gravity control for millennia—the gravity-planer was their principal space-drive—and normal Wunderland gravity was maintained in the chamber. Chorth-Captain fitted caps on their heads and they slept.
* * *
Leonie, after asking permission and giving certain passwords, landed her car in the courtyard of Vaemar's palace. Patrick Quickenden remained in the car, keeping out of sight as much as possible.
Raargh, Seneschal in charge in Vaemar's absence, greeted her. One of his kittens, folicking in the long grasses nearby, leapt to join his sire, going down into a mock-attacking crouch at the sight of the human. He was about as big as, and somewhat more powerful than, an Earth leopard. Leonie had once beaten such a kitten to death with a metal bar in a prolonged and desperate fight. Her old legs and thighs had borne the scars of that fight for a long time. Rarrgh looked at him, gave a single growl in an unmistakable tense, and the kitten fled.
Twenty-five years earlier Rarrgh and Leonie had seen each other for the first time, across the sights of a beam rifle, as Raargh lay pinned under rocks in a Morlock-infested cave. Each owed the other at least one life. Raargh raised his remaining natural arm and touched her shoulder.
"Got message, urrr!" he said. "Trouble!" He gave a purr of satisfaction and anticipation. He passed Big John the w'tsai of the Seneschal's office, in its ornately-engraved gold and purple sheath. "Care for this, Hero, till I return." He slapped his belt where his own old w'tsai hung. "Urrr!" he repeated, snapping his teeth and flexing his claws.
Chapter 9
"The Hollow Moon," said Chorth-Captain, waking them.
The purring of the gravity-planer had ceased. The panels opened. Chorth-Captain gestured and they followed him out. The Protector came behind them.
Gravity changed abruptly. This was less disorienting for Dimity and Vaemar than it would have been had they not spent years with kzin gravity-technology. Since both knew something of the Hollow Moon it was easy to work out their situation.
They were in a compartment on the inner surface. There was a great concave roof above them, vanishing into blackness overhead, and a concave floor at their feet, but so partitioned and divided that it was impossible to see far. There was a diffuse light. The ship they had travelled in now looked like a stony spheroid. Its surface sparkled here and there with quartz-like chips that they guessed were miniaturized cloaking-generators. Held by gravity anchors, it stood within a translucent tube, one of several, on a landing pad such as was more-or-less standard for small spacecraft in the Serpent Swarm Asteroids. Above it was a hatch, now closed, obviously leading to the surface and space. There, too, was the glowing blue dome of a Sinclair time-acceleration field.
Some of the machinery around had, for both human and kzin, an alien look. But much of it appeared to be kzin military and naval equipment, either standard or modified. There were kzinti control consoles, close to standard naval models, and banks of screens, some blank, some with idly moving data. To Vaemar, they might almost be inside a kzin space station, though he knew more about this from Reserve Officers' intelligence courses than from his own experience. There was a nest of gravity-sleds, the kzin all-purpose transporters, which he had used often. Both took it all in fast. Gravity technology,
Sinclair technology, Cloaking technology already better, or more compact, than anything we have. And now they are after the Hyperdrive! Chorth-Captain led them into another compartment.
A smell of Morlock struck Dimity, repellent even to her weak human nostrils. What she saw reminded for a moment of a hospital ward. A row of creatures lay on beds. Quasi-humanoids with swollen bellies. Morlocks, gorged on tree-of-life, beginning the change into Protectors. Dimity felt a stab of panic. She clutched at Vaemar's arm. "There is tree-of-life here!"
"You do not need to fear, monkey," said Chorth-Captain. "It is gone. It has been ingested. Before we flew we signalled to those here that we had you, and for the process to begin. These will have teachers when they awake. And there will be builders for the superluminal drive."
"Those here." Plural, thought Dimity. We have at least four enemies. The odds are against us anyway, and they will be worse soon. I can make sense of things in that realm where mathematics and metaphysics come together, but I cannot fight a kzin, let alone a Protector. And there are forty more here, beginning to change.
There, under a cold blue light in the corner, were other still silent forms: dead, dissected humans and kzinti. So, thought Dimity, the process of learning about other species has already begun in a practical way. She indicated it to Vaemar with a roll of her eyes and twitch of her Wunderlander aristocrat's ears.
Four more Protectors entered. They glanced briefly at Vaemar and Dimity and turned to the changing Morlocks. Dimity noticed again that they were laid out in four rows.
"Are they their children?" she asked Chorth-Captain.
The big kzin raised his ears in a gesture of assent. "Each cares for his own children."
"And the other Protector? Your ally?"
"He is childless. He came upon the tree-of-life first, and later we exposed others. They brought their children here, and waited. Why do you wish to know?"
Dimity began a retort, and bit it off. Her relationship with the untypical Vaemar had almost made her forget the hair-trigger temper of kzintosh in what she supposed must be called their natural state, particularly in their dealings with humans. She had never lived on kzin-occupied Wunderland, but knew that a human there who answered a question from a kzin with another, rhetorical, question, or in a formulation that smacked of sarcasm or irony, would have been lucky to keep tongue, face or life.
"I will be a more effective teacher, if I know the beings I am teaching."
Chorth-Captain inclined his own ears again. Apparently he accepted her explanation.
"And if I am to teach, I must have access to a knowledge base."
"That is anticipated. Come," Chorth-Captain said.
He led Dimity and Vaemar into another chamber nearby. They passed a couple of sealed passages, and dark tunnels with an old look about them. Only a small part of the hollow moon seemed to have been restored as living space. There was a chair for each of them, and two computers, based on kzin military models, but with what they guessed were Protectors' improvements, each with a keyboard adapted for their respective hands. "You may prepare your lessons," said Chorth-Captain. He was also carrying the suit, much ripped and of questionable use now as a garment, which he had taken off Dimity, and her boots. He dropped these on the floor and then gestured at Vaemar. "When the door is closed you may free him," he added.
He passed Dimity a tube, like an old-fashioned tube of toothpaste, and backed out. A door flashed shut behind him.
Dimity squeezed the contents of the tube over Vaemar's bonds. They foamed and dissolved.
Dimity looked desperately for a writing instrument. There was nothing. She took Vaemar's hand and pressed out one of his razor claws. She scratched on her arm. "They listen." Like most humans on Wunderland she had anticoagulants added to her blood and it dried quickly.
Vaemar raised his great eyes to the ceiling, then pointed to the tiny eyes of cameras. "They watch," he said. "They must hear what we say. Unless we do or say nothing, we must accept that fact."
"If they have been watching Wunderland television," said Dimity, "they probably know all the languages we do."
"I studied the history of Human International Law," said Vaemar. He added casually "Loquorisne Latinum?"
"Yes," said Dimity in the same language. "But it won't frustrate them long. Too logical and consistent. They'll translate. And they are bound to be recording us now."
"All the same, we have a little time to talk," said Vaemar. "Time is against us anyway for other reasons as well. How long will it take those Morlocks to change?"
"I don't know. No one knows much about the Pak. In a Sinclair field they could speed it up. But the fact that they are not using Sinclair fields for that purpose suggests the time may be variable."
"How do we stop them? How do you anticipate what they will do?"
"Wunderland has war-geared defenses," Dimity said. "If you were a Protector, what would you do?"
"I cannot think like a Protector, but here is one scenario: seize Tiamat. You agree that would be possible."
Tiamat was a roughly cylindrical asteroid of the Serpent Swarm, about fifty kilometers by twenty. It was an administrative center and military base of the Swarm and was heavily industrialized for space industries as well as a major production center for weapons and IT. It was also a research center for the Swarm. As the main site of the Swarm's experiment in commensualism it had a kzin community with a limited degree of self-government at "Tigertown" and some kzinti working with humans. Both Dimity and Vaemar had been there several times.
"For forty and more trained Protectors? Easy!"
"That would give them factories tooled up for hyperdrive technology, and working hyperdrive ships," Vaemar said. "And all the gravity-control industries. It would also give them very heavy battle lasers and other military weapons installations. Tiamat is well-defended."
"Yes."
"But not well-defended against the kind of surprise attack Protectors could mount. Then, if I were directing their strategy, I would attack Wunderland and the other settled asteroids of the Serpent Swarm from Tiamat. And while Wunderland's defenses are busy, crash this moon or another into it.
"Morlocks fight by dropping on their enemies and hurling rocks down on them. This would be the same thing on a bigger scale.
"The Protectors could break the moon up on its way by controlled explosions so that the fragments would impact in a predetermined pattern and with predetermined force. That would be the end of human—and kzin—life on Wunderland. If all was not destroyed by the first impacts, it would be so shattered that the Protectors could finish off any remnants at leisure. But the Morlocks in the great caves could survive. With Tiamat, they would not need Wunderland's industrial centers. They could destroy the other asteroid settlements one by one. Many are still reduced by war-damage anyway. I do not think their defenses would last long against Protectors."
"I cannot fault your reasoning," said Dimity. "And then... how many breeders would they get from the Morlocks of Wunderland?"
"Their numbers were thinned in the war, but they are breeding up again, as I know from personal experience," said Vaemar. "Hundreds, at least. Thousands, I am sure. We do not yet know how far the cave systems go."
"The Sinclair fields! That is why they have them here!"
"Yes, of course! I should have seen at once! They can use the Sinclair fields to accelerate breeding! They could have thousands more breeders and thousands of Protectors."
"That would also give them the numbers for genetic diversity."
"It would give them the numbers for a double leap into human and kzin space," said Vaemar. "And another bad thing strikes me, one which this Protector has perhaps not realized yet but sooner or later must: you humans have put much effort into developing reproductive technology, though you do not exploit its full potential. A Protector with access to that would not need to have got all its children before the change. It could clone as many as it wished from its own cell structure. There would be no limit to thei
r numbers!
"We kzinti have experimented with cloning. A band of celibate warriors, who had dedicated themselves to the Eternal Hunt, tried to breed without females once. Each cloned his own kittens. But the kittens were incurably savage and aggressive... Is that so amusing?"
"If a kzin hero calls them incurably savage and aggressive," said Dimity, "they must have been a problem indeed!"
"They were. But the point is that the inhibitions of your culture or mine about cloning would mean nothing to a Protector. Dimity, we must stop them now. The cost of our own lives is nothing in these circumstances."
"I know," said Dimity.
"Unfortunately, at this moment I cannot see how."
"Nor I."
"Why didn't the original Pak Protectors simply clone themselves?" said Vaemar.
"Perhaps they had no need to think in such directions," said Dimity. "Their mature bodies were so strong, long-lived and perfect that they did little to develop biological sciences. They didn't need to improve on what they had. All that we know of the Pak species' thinking was what Brennan picked up while he was a Pak's prisoner and told to the humans who he met later. But there seem to be some gaps in Pak thinking. Humans are more creative. And, from what little I know about them, Protectors are unable to cooperate with one another beyond the briefest temporary alliances. Further, our own science showed us long ago that cloning sapient beings is fraught with risks. It seemed to promise everything at first, but then we discovered the pitfalls.
"The Protectors' science as far as we know is exclusively military-oriented. Each cares only for his own blood-line. It seems their only stimulation and excitement is war. They could have been the greatest race in the galaxy, but their intelligence and instincts together locked them into a dead-end. Their single-mindedness virtually robbed them of free will. Even their spaceflight was stimulated by nothing but a desire to find new breeding grounds. No curiosity, no sense of wonder. No sense of anything beyond themselves. The kind of creature I yearn desperately not to be. When I had to read of them it horrified me, because I saw so much of myself in them."