by Larry Niven
He saw Cumpston raise his right hand and pinch his lower lip between forefinger and thumb in a nervous or thoughtful gesture he sometimes had. It also had the effect of pointing the table-facet of the jewel in the ring on his index finger at the man. Not yet, Michael, he thought. But if necessary...
"You lie," the man answered. "God knows why you should bother. But female ratcats can't think. After Liberation we kept some in zoo cages and fed collaborators to them. They didn't stop to ask them their political opinions before they sat down to dine."
"This one thinks," said Guthlac. "A few have always done so, secretly. If you are opposed to the Kzin Patriarchy and Empire you should see what an asset to humanity intelligent kzinretti may be.
"All of which," he added, "is irrelevant to the fact that I am giving you a direct military order. I am not debating. She comes with us. And she will be given the best of treatment. That is more than because she is our companion and was wounded fighting in our defense, and has been beside other humans in peril before. There are high reasons of policy. Harm her, and you will regret it more keenly than I can say."
"Wunderland is independent! I do not need to take orders from the UNSN."
"I tell you of my certain knowledge that if you give that reason at your court-martial it will do you little good."
Cumpston intervened. "Do you know Nils Rykermann?" he asked.
"Yes," said the man.
"One of the resistance's greatest leaders in the war, and now a close friend of ours. Harm that kzinret, and you will answer not only to the kzin who is her mate, but to him. In your place I would prefer the kzin."
He could kill us all and make it look an accident, Cumpston thought. By the time anyone else arrived, the thunderbirds wouldn't have left enough of our bodies to investigate. I doubt he has too much inhibition against killing humans. Best get him now, perhaps, and as many of the others as I can with the ring, then draw and fight it out with the rest. But they have beam rifles and they're ready and they look like fighters....
"Rykermann was my commander," the man said at length. "For him I will do this. Get it into the car."
Getting Karan into the car was not easy. If much smaller than a male kzin, she was still the size and weight of a tigress. But she was partly conscious and did her best to help. The car carried them to a dome that rose out of the near-tundra landscape. There were other buildings with the dishes of heavy-duty com-links, all surrounded and covered by strong fencing. Karan was put into shelter. Guthlac, using all the psychological dominance at his command, and his brigadier's identity and electronic passes, demanded a desk and called his headquarters and then Rykermann. He summoned his modified Wolverine-class command ship, the Tractate Middoth. It was well-armed for its size, and its small permanent crew were his own picked men. It was a vast relief to see its familiar shape appear and grow in the gray sky and swoop to the landing-pad.
Chapter 11
"First, I wish to know more about your gods," said the Protector. "The internet has told me something, but not enough." Despite the squeaking and popping of its beaklike muzzle, the words were understandable. Its grammar was good.
Pain. Dimity sensed it dimly. Vaemar with his hunting instincts sensed it more acutely but all his training was to ignore and despise pain save when it was a useful alarm signal. Not surprising it is in pain after such a transformation, thought Dimity. Thank you, Herr Doktor Asperger. I think I understand something of it. Doubtless we owe Asperger's Syndrome to our own Protector inheritance.
"You"—it fixed its gaze on Dimity—"have a god that is everywhere and all-powerful. It can never know achievement, striving, the conquest against odds, triumph. Because it is, it can only be, and never know becoming. Do you agree?"
"Up to a point," said Dimity. "I'm not a theologian. I think there is an idea that our God can know such things through us, His creatures. Perhaps that is one of the purposes of our creation. To know becoming."
"'Perhaps'? What kind of a concept is that? And you"—its bulging Morlock eyes swivelled to Vaemar—"You have a god like yourself, only bigger. A fanged beast that needs courage and fights against Infinity and something called Fate that will one day overcome it. You are both promised a life beyond death, but given only barest hints of what that will actually be like. Somehow humans will be given worlds to rule, somehow kzinti will be hunted and devoured by the Fanged God, yet somehow live again in him if they defy him and fight so that they become worthy. Their identities will survive, for if they fight nobly the Fanged God will give them a new and greater life. Have I simplified your theology?"
"Yes," said Dimity and Vaemar together.
"I had no idea of a god," said the Protector. "In the caves there was Hunger. Eating. Hatred. Fear. Mating. Enemy-prey. Thoughts moved sluggishly but emotions surged. Then enemy-preys. All danger. All food. Old preys. The flyers and the runners. New enemy-preys. Things like you and you, that killed and killed. Killed like the water flooding the lower tunnels, with things that blinded and burnt. The big ones were hard to kill, the small ones were hard to kill too. I survived. I knew almost nothing but survival and breeding. Those about me died, for your kinds killed them and then you killed the flyers and other things that were our food. That was all. That, and a dim idea that something had sent our food to us, and made the waters flow.
"Then, after the Change, I began to wonder who had made the caves—the caves that I thought then were the world. Then, when the light burnt less outside, I left the caves. I saw what I now know is the scarp, sweeping down to the great valley. The sound of what I know is wind. Smells I had never imagined. I saw what I now know are the stars. Something had made this. It could not exist without a cause. Since then I have come to understand other concepts. Worship... I need to know much more... so much more."
It went on for a long time. It spoke with them of the creation of stars, and the physics of the Big Bang and the Monobloc, theories discarded with new knowledge in the twenty-second century, and resurrected with newer knowledge in the twenty-fourth. They tried to divert it. Finally it left them.
* * *
"No time to get her to kzin facilities. She'll have to stay with us," Guthlac said. "I'm not leaving her here with these gonzos." There had been tense hours while they waited for the ship to arrive.
"I agree," said Cumpston. "But will she make it?"
"She's a kzinret. She's tough."
"We don't have a kzin autodoc."
"Her main problem's loss of blood. We've got some universal plasma. It won't carry oxygen but it'll give her heart something to work on and stop her blood vessels collapsing."
"Can you give it to her?"
"I had infantry combat training, a long time ago, including first aid. Never thought then that I'd be using it on a kzin, though. And my men are versatile. Wait till you try Albert's recipe for the wedding punch! Looking after a very important kzinret shouldn't be too much for them."
"Now to find our missing pair."
Guthlac wiped his forehead. "They're alive," he said at last.
He pointed to the screen before him. A ship could be stealthed, but, at least for a time, its passage through atmosphere could not. "That could be the trace of the ship."
"It could be." The instrumentation showed a faint trail of atmospheric disturbance, dissipating as they watched.
"If that's a ship, it's got the best cloaking I've ever seen. Beyond the atmosphere there will be no way to follow it."
"We are looking for Protectors. Rykermann thinks the Hollow Moon was the original Protector ship. Could they be heading for it?"
Guthlac punched numbers. "It gives us somewhere to start looking," he said.
"I've got them," he said at last. "Extreme range, and there's interference, but that's where they are." He turned to Albert Manteufel, his pilot. "Take her up!"
* * *
"Gnosticism..." said Vaemar thoughtfully. "You said it is the idea of man becoming a god through his own inner efforts, or having a secret piece of go
d-ness inside him..." The Protector had gone, leaving them together in what they were coming to think of as "their" room.
"I think that's what it means," said Dimity. "Salvation by knowledge. Gnostics were 'people who knew,' and therefore spiritually superior beings. Perhaps a sort of race-memory of the Breeder-Protector cycle. But as I said, I'm not a theologian. The abbot once told me that almost all serious heresies are forms of gnosticism. He also said that, given that the universe had been created, it didn't matter much in religious terms where Man came from biologically, what mattered was where we were going spiritually."
"That Protector would seem to justify this gnosticism," said Vaemar. "A being turning into a god."
"I don't think so," said Dimity. "The kzinti wouldn't say that, would they?"
"No. Our souls go to the Fanged God, and are devoured by Him after a good hunt."
"And that's the end? It sounds rather bleak to a human."
"No. The souls of cowards are regurgitated into... well, the human word is Hell. The souls of Heroes go on somehow, but as it said we have only hints about that. It is a Mystery. But the hints are enough for us to have fought wars over them."
"And I don't think the abbot would say this is a case of beings turning into gods," said Dimity. "That thing is not a god, it is just a fast calculating machine... less human than a human, almost incapable of choice, almost without the advantages of limitation and imperfection. Mentally like me, only more so. As impaired as I am."
"No, Dimity, not like you."
"You are a chess master, Vaemar. Is it not true for you as for me that you come to some point in chess where you no longer seem to be moving the pieces, but rather watching them move."
"Yes, the moves become inevitable."
"Choice disappears. My life has been like that—watching equations become inevitable. As I think a Protector sees the world. I do not think this Protector sees it in such terms yet. But it will soon."
"Was it like that even when you were a cub... a child?"
"I got a lot of my memories back with being on Wunderland and with the treatments... I can say: especially when I was a cub. I did not speak for the first few years of my life, because there seemed nothing worth saying. Why state the obvious?"
"Humans often do. And I think it is another habit we are catching from them. I have noticed we Wunderkzin tend to talk more even when we do not need to."
"Yes, humans often do. I didn't. I watched it all happen. The tests, the brain scans. I recorded my parents weeping over me as I looked up at them without expression because there was nothing to express, their whispers about 'abnormal alpha waves,' 'Asperger's Syndrome,' 'moron...' 'there are special schools...' 'Love and cherish her...' It was the fritinancy of insects.
"I sat in a playpen in my father's study while he worked, watching him at his keyboard, the equations crawling across his computer screen. They put in swings, and made little tunnels for me to explore and there were all sorts of books and toys that lay on the floor. I sat there and heard Father talk with his colleagues. One of them had a son, a very bright little boy to whom Father gave lessons in calculus. Postgraduate students, too—he took some tutorials with the cleverest of them in his house. I listened in my playpen, and later, sitting on my chair. I didn't do much. I did not speak much but I was puzzled, and eventually angry—why were they so slow? Why did they use such clumsy and incomplete symbols? Why did they not bring down their quarry—tidily, simply, beautifully? At length I decided to find out. That curiousity I had about humanity was the little, vestigial thread I had connecting me to it.
"One day, when I was seven, Father came in and found me at the keyboard. I remember how his face lit up. That was the first time a human's emotions had touched me. "Who's a clever little girl then?" he cried. Then he shouted to Mother: "Moira! Moira! Come and look! She's playing!" Then I saw him lift his eyes. He saw what was on the screen, and I saw his face change. His mouth began to twist, his hands went up to his mouth, and I knew he was fighting back a scream. By the time Mother arrived, he had stopped shaking.
"'We do have a clever little... girl,' he said, taking Mother's arm, and pointing. And already I heard him stumble over that word 'girl.' Girls are human, you see. They both stared at it for a long time.
"'Can it be what I think it is?' But Mother was no longer looking at the screen when she said that. She was looking at me. It must be hard to have the realization hit you in a second that you have given birth to a monster, a freak. Father printed everything off and looked at it for a long time.
"'I think I understand the implications of the simpler equations,' he said. 'I think it shatters a principal paradigm of our knowledge of paraphysical forces... One of the paradigms... At least one...' Then he began to laugh, a strange laugh such as I had never heard before.
"I was getting bored again by that time, so I gave them a lecture. Rebuked Father for his slowness and stupidity. Told him I was angry at the limitations of the symbols he used. It was hard on my vocal chords because I'd used them so little before and that made me angry, too. Wondered at their tears. Thus began the career of Dimity Carmody. More tests, more brain-scans. The special schools—I told you I'd heard them speak of special schools—and everything else. Lessons in how to choose good clothes, for example. How to do my hair. Looking normal is a big part of being normal. Efforts to socialize the machine, the monster, with chess and music, to teach it to relate to human beings. They strengthened the little, little thread that connected me to normal humanity."
"You laugh. You weep, Dimity," said Vaemar. "I have seen your eyes when you behold a sunrise. I saw you toiling in the cave to keep Leonie alive as shots and flame flew about you. Never say you are a machine. As for a monster... do I look like a monster to you?"
"No. You are splendidly evolved to be what you are."
"A killing machine?"
"Of course not! Or that is the start. You are a carnivore, a great carnivore, a mighty hunter, top of your food chain. But you, Vaemar, are so much else as well."
"Yes. I am, thanks to the successful human reconquest of Wunderland, one of the few surviving examples under any star of an introspective kzin. Monstrous to normal members of my own kind, like Chorth-Captain. But we must not be sorry for ourselves. Would you, Dimity, really be different if you had the choice?"
"It is difficult to say. But I think not."
"Nor I."
"The only kzinti I know well are you and your Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero," said Dimity. "And I know that Raargh, too, in his gruff old way, is not merely valiant. He can be thoughtful, and chivalrous, as well. I do not forget that I owe him my life, or the pain he got saving me. We are both of species that have a great potential, and a paltry expression of it. But sometimes something shines through."
"I know you and I are not machines, merely because we can think, or because we are different to the norm of our respective kinds," said Vaemar.
"You have all the abilities of a young male kzin, and something else," said Dimity. "You are more than kzin. But in some ways I am less than human."
"You are no Protector," said Vaemar. "You have free will. You can choose. You have morality."
"In some things. Not when I dance with the equations."
Chorth-Captain entered. He carried more restraining tape, and made them bind one another again. Then he removed the locator implants from under the skin of Dimity's inner arm and from between Vaemar's shoulders. The size of rice grains, the locators were meant to be removed without too much trouble. His claws were too sharp to cause Dimity much pain, and Vaemar simply looked contemptuous. It was obvious from Chorth-Captain's manner that he was doing something he should have done some time previously. He's hoping the Protector won't realize he's neglected to do this before, Dimity thought. And I'm hoping somebody's already traced them and is on their way. But the signal will be very weak. We've got a lot of rock around us, and 60,000 miles of space. But Chorth-Captain, whatever he's been before, has become one inefficient kzin no
w. He made some show of smashing the locators. Then he released Dimity and left her to release Vaemar.
Time passed. They had few ways of measuring it.
"You are crouched in as small a space as possible. Your limbs seem to vibrate spasmodically," said Vaemar. "Are you sick? You were not hurt badly? You did not bleed for long. But I observe other differences about your body, too."
"I'm cold," said Dimity.
"You will burn energy with that vibration. You should rest and conserve your energy."
"I can't. I have done so for as long as I can. But this is cave temperature. Deep-cave. I need clothes. These torn things are quite useless. My boots are all right—" she laughed "—but they don't keep the rest of me warm."
"You may lie against me, if you wish," said Vaemar. "I will try to warm you. But I warn you seriously not to make any sudden moves. I cannot always control my reflexes."
She snuggled against his fur. He wrapped one great arm around her and presently she slept. Vaemar had not moved when the door opened again and Chorth-Captain entered. He looked down at the young kzin with disgust.
"Are you chrowling that monkey? I expected little enough of you, but this..."
He turned away. For a male kzin to turn his back on another so might be an expression of trust. But it could also be an expression of fathomless contempt. Vaemar leapt, claws extended, slashing at Chorth-Captain's neck, then striking with an elbow. His claw came away with blood and orange fur, and a short silver tube.
Chorth-Captain did not whirl into the counterattack. He staggered dazedly and sat down, hind legs splayed out before him, as old, mad bears that had spent too many years in zoo cages had once looked. Then he slumped on his side. Vaemar went to Dimity and set her on her feet.