by Larry Niven
There were the eyes and nostrils of a couple of small crocodilians in the still water, looking like pairs of floating Bob's Berries or drifting bubbles. In a way the sight was reassuring: the presence of adolescent crocodilians meant the probable absence of big ones. A twin-tailed serpiform thing sailed by with head held high like a periscope. Something very large and white and curved floating just under the surface brought me up short, heart jumping, until I realized it was the marshman's boat. Or part of it. There has been violence and disaster here, I thought. I had occasionally had dangerous moments on field trips, but that had been different. My assistants and I had always been equipped and prepared. Here I felt prepared for nothing. What am I doing bringing Dimity into a place like this? The unknown is always dangerous. Get her out now! And not just because I love her!
"Nils! Look at this."
Something metal glittering in churned-up mud, almost buried. A heavy automatic gun, the sort the marshmen used to kill the big crocodilians whose back armor might deflect even the needles of a strakkaker. Useless for specimen collecting, it would leave little of any specimen.
It was smashed. Twisted into junk.
It had been loaded with high-explosive bullets and set for automatic fire at 300 rounds a minute. Three rounds only had been fired. There were the casings on the ground. And there were stains on the recoil compensator and pistol grip that looked like blood. A predator?
"Nothing that powerful fits the ecology."
"I know."
"And this is the longest-settled part of the planet. If there was a predator like this here before we'd have known it. You would have seen it in all the other animals. Things would be faster, more powerful, better defended."
She was confirming what I had thought. But I had needed her to confirm it. I didn't want to damage the evidence before any investigation, but now that I had handled the gun already I thought I had better take it back. It would be easy enough to separate my DNA from anything else that might be on it. I saw the honker, an electronic fence device to keep crocs and other possible intruders away, including humans if necessary. Honkers were a good deal more potent than their name might suggest, and like most modern electronics they worked perfectly when they were in one piece. This one was in many pieces, strewn in the mud.
Then Dimity pointed again. There was something different in her walk and stance, as though she had changed into something like a hunting predator herself. The café coffee-drinker was not there. Her ears were laid flat back. I had forgotten she had that much Families blood in her. There was a dark pool of what I was now sure was blood, surrounded by froggolinas and covered with small insectoids, scraps of cloth, and, gleaming pinkish-white among them, what I recognized at once as a human femur, cracked open at the lower end, part of the pelvic socket still attached at the upper.
I dropped the broken gun as we ran to the car. I saw another bone fragment in the mud as we passed: it looked like part of the zygomatic arch of a human skull, but I didn't stop to examine it. There were other scattered fragments too, I now saw. I wanted to get back to the city fast, but was still unable to recognize the voice of my own survival instincts. We gained a reasonable height and turned a little farther into the swamp.
"The monastery looks like a fort," Dimity said as we approached it. "High walls round the courtyard, no windows, the tower, the edifacium like a castle keep. It looks quite defensible. You've even got that." She pointed to a tall, smooth-lined metal spire that rose out of a small wooden chapel some distance away. "It looks like a rocket or missile ready for launching. And the marshmen's shacks?"
Nothing like that. You saw what was left of them. Just thin walls and the honkers."
"That may be the point: it looked defensible."
The abbot might be a friend and glad to see me on the occasional evening when there was a bottle to be shared. But the monastery was a working organization, and my arrival unannounced in the middle of the working day, and with a woman, might well have been thought inconsiderate. All he said was: "What's wrong?"
"Is it that obvious?"
"You look terrible."
"There's trouble. We've been to six of the marshmen's cabins. They're dead. We've found... evidence. The cabins destroyed. We're on our way to the police. But first I need to ask the Brothers something. About that thing they saw."
I showed them a small copy of one of the holos I had been shown the night before. "This is a dead specimen, and not a very good picture now. But is that the same species?"
"Yes." Three yeses. Three nods.
"Without a doubt?"
"Without a doubt."
"And it ran from you. I wonder why."
"It didn't want to alert the 'fortress,' " said Dimity.
"We had no weapons when we saw it, no guns."
"It's not scared of guns. And it had already eaten. It didn't want to be discovered, and it probably thought there were too many of you in a building of this size..."
"It thought... ?"
"I can only tell you what you have probably guessed for yourself," I said. "These creatures are—obviously—highly dangerous, fearless of humans, and, we have reason to believe, intelligent."
How intelligent?"
"Highly."
"Where do they come from?"
"We don't know." That was only too true.
I guessed the abbot must be a clever administrator to maintain an institution like the monastery in the modern world. I had not noticed before how penetrating his eyes could be.
"Let me put it this way," he said. "Are they going to come horizontally or vertically?" The other monks were hanging on the question. Dimity looked as if she already knew. I didn't see the need for secrecy, but it was still a condition I was bound by.
"I'm not at liberty to say what I think," I told them. "I'm sure if there is a continuing problem you'll be put in the picture."
"Thank you. I think that answers my question...
"Before our Order left Earth," he went on, "the Vatican gave us instructions on what to do if we met aliens. What the theological position was. Did they have souls? It's a very old question, predating space travel by centuries. Saint Paul was quite definite: The Resurrection applied to 'everything in the Heavens and everything on Earth.' The early church writers said we need not worry until we actually knew if they existed or not. To insist that 'God could not have made other worlds' was declared a heresy in the thirteenth century—and that covers alternate or parallel universes as well! Good aliens may have already experienced 'baptism by desire.' Still, it's an area of imprecision."
"But if aliens do exist, good or bad, you do have precise instructions?"
"We got some pretty comprehensive manuals when we set out. As far as that precise situation goes, I've never had cause to look, though no doubt it exercised our Founding Father when we first landed, along with a lot of other concerns. I'll have to get Brother Librarian to find them. But we have to be orthodox. We're too far from the Holy Father to risk departing from his instructions. Perhaps he'll send us a laser message."
If Earth's lasers aren't all busy with another thing, I thought.
"Don't go out at night," said Dimity. "Keep your lights on and your doors locked. Don't go out unarmed even in daylight. Don't go out alone."
"Now there's something odd," said Dimity as we flew toward München .
Although ground-effect air cars were common, there was still plenty of wheeled traffic, particularly for heavy hauling. The road we were passing over turned south and led to the industrial districts of Glenrothes and Gelsenkirchen, then on to Dresden (still sometimes Neue Dresden), which had been created deliberately to recapitulate the history of its famous namesake town on Old Earth, and was famous for its experiments in low-gravity baroque architecture and artistic china.
Glenrothes and Gelsenkirchen shared a small landing field well out of the way of the main port's traffic and had some industries based on recycling redundant or obsolescent space material, the equivalent of old-time s
hip-breaking. Old, material-fatigued or overly damaged spacecraft were disassembled there and their component parts generally taken to München for resale. A spacecraft life system, for example, had all sorts of uses for someone needing a habitat when establishing a new farm, whether on land or sea, and their complex computer hardware and powerful engines always found plenty of uses in things like industrial process control and mining. Sometimes, of course, old ships were cannibalized for new ones.
There were plenty of spaceships getting hard wear in our cluttered and dusty system, filled as it was with minable asteroids, and ship-breaking was quite a busy industry. It reminded me a little, and unpleasantly, of the way criminals had been dissembled for organ banks until modern medicine made such customs unnecessary, which was silly and irrational of me. But possibly others felt the same, because, apart from the fact that it was often a noisy business, it was kept well away from the city.
We were passing over a column of transports carrying parts of spacecraft, the bulk of main engines, including toroid sections of what looked like a ramscoop collector-head, being the most obvious. But on this road it was an everyday sight.
"What's odd about that?" I asked.
"The direction they're traveling," said Dimity. "They're taking those engines to Glenrothes Field, not from it."
"I heard there had been a special meeting called last night," said Dimity. "Would it have been about what I think it was about?"
"I can't say." Again, that was all the answer needed.
"I told you about the Sea Statue."
"Oh, yes." We had talked for a long time after returning from the monastery. She had told me more about the near-catastrophic attempt to open the ancient stasis field discovered on Earth many years ago. I had had a vague idea: What had been learned as a result of "opening" the Sea Statue was knowledge similar to the knowledge in the Dark Ages that the Earth was spherical: A lot of educated people knew about it but didn't talk about it much. "What's the connection?"
"It appears likely that the ancients seeded this part of the galaxy at least with common life-forms."
Yes." We had both studied what was known about the two-billion-year-departed ancient races and their omnicidal war, which wasn't much.
"That's probably why our plants and animals can grow on Wunderland, and why we can eat a lot of Wunderland plants and animals."
"Yes." I was beginning to see where she was leading, and didn't like it.
"Tigripards eat our sheep. Beam's beast bites poison us. Advokats eat our garbage. Zeitungers eat our garbage and affect our moods as well... Something that the old SETI people could never have foreseen, but we should: Beings from at least two different star systems have biochemistry alike enough for them to be able to eat each other."
"So it seems."
"It puts some of my... mathematical speculations... in a rather different light, doesn't it?" I had thought that before. But the full implications of what she was saying took a moment to hit me. Then it was like a physical blow. "We've got to get you out!"
"That may not be so easy. Where am I going to go?"
"We've got to get you back to Earth."
"How?"
There seemed no answer to that. I was beyond regretting that I had basically confirmed to her what the previous night's meeting had been about.
Chapter 5
That fatal drollery called a representative government
—Benjamin Disraeli
Despite the seriousness of what I had found, several days passed before I got a chance to see Grotius. I filed a report with the police but received a mere mechanical acknowledgment. Grotius, when I did see him at a meeting of the committee, was abstracted and uninterested. He looked weary and surprisingly aged. My report of evidence of multiple homicides produced little more than a shake of the head. "I've no officers to spare now," he said. "Most of them are busy trying to find out how to reinvent the wheel. Or they're at the spaceport, working on the meteor guardships.
"And I need them in the streets, as well as everywhere else. One thing we've learned already is that a bunch of fifty people can't keep a secret. There have been rumors in the streets for days. It'll be on the newscast in a few hours. We can't stop that... We could, actually, but it would do more harm than good. My cops are so busy that I'm expecting crime too. There are almost no police on patrol. We've got a few extra strakkakers in store and I'm issuing them. At least that will look threatening if there's an emergency. "
"How many strakkakers have we got?" That was Talbot.
"I don't know, exactly. We had the one batch made for police needs, plus replacements and spares."
When?"
"Years ago. The factory's closed down now."
"Don't you think we should open it again? Fast!"
"What for?" A pause, then, "Oh, I see."
"There are police message-lasers, too. We can dial them up to weapons."
"Really?"
"Of course. It was always in the design."
"Yes. I see."
"I should clear it with the council."
"Later."
Grotius looked at him, then opened a hand-phone and began to speak fast. The Defense Committee had taken an executive action.
"I've been at the library all day," said Talbot. "Reading every book on war I could find. There aren't many."
"ARM went through our library before we left Earth. There are some records of old wars in a general way, even some copies of ancient visual films. There are a few books. But so little that is actually of practical use. They didn't want us building armies."
"No."
"I found one on a Japanese attack on some American sea-ships at Hawaii, Day of Infamy. The American ships had guns to defend themselves against flying engines, covered by awnings. An officer on one began untying the lines that held the awnings in place as the flying engines attacked. A cook ran up and cut them with a knife. We have to think differently.
"Grotius, we don't want one factory making strakkakers. We want every factory we can get on line. We want factories making factories making strakkakers. Now!"
"No! Strakkakers aren't the be-all and end-all. They are police weapons of last resort. We may want battlefield weapons, space weapons! Tie up too much of our industrial production in one thing and you lose in other ways."
"What are battlefield weapons? How are they different from other weapons?"
"I don't know. But I gather they used to have them, on Earth. I've found references to something called a main battle tank."
"We'd better ask the meteor people. They use big lasers, don't they? And bomb-missiles."
Are you seriously suggesting... "
"Yes. Of course I am! There are old launching lasers on Tiamat and down at Equatoria. They're got to be brought back on line."
Other voices raised.
"Think of the cost! Runaway inflation! We've only got one economy to play with on this planet!"
We don't want factories for strakkakers! We want factories for plutonium!"
"Whatever for? Plutonium's dangerous... Oh, I see."
"It's already happening. The Meteor Guard... "
"Shut up, you fool!"
"What trained fighters have we got? Only a handful of cops. They should be training instructors to train recruits!"
"Don't you think they've got enough to do already?"
Grotius turned to me: "Did you overfly the whole swamp?
"No. It's big."
"We should overfly it. I said we haven't time to consider homicides, but there may have been other things, things left behind."
"Aren't we jumping to conclusions?" van Roberts said. "This could be a completely purposeless panic that will do nothing but damage if we let it go on."
"But the monks saw—"
"The monks could have been mistaken. Or worse. The monastery has always been friendly to the Families, hasn't it?"
"I suppose so. The Order got the land as a deed of gift from the original Freuchens, before they moved out
to the Norlands."
"And I imagine the old records will show that Families paid their passage here!"
"As a matter of fact, they don't." I happened to know that, because while waiting I had combed the old passenger lists looking for people whose occupations or profiles suggested might have brought useful books or equipment that their descendants might still have. A couple of the Families had brought private chaplains, but there was no record of the monks aboard the original slowboats. He ignored my interruption.
"And they've survived on handouts from the Families since. All that's left of the Church has. It's been very handy for the Families. Keeping people docile by promising them a pie-in-the-sky Afterlife, and at the same time getting rid of landless younger sons by putting them into skirts."
"That's propaganda, and utterly false! Anyway, there's plenty of land left!"
"Then why do you restrict the sale of it?"
"So there will be someone to work it. Do you want a planet all of landowners starving for lack of labor?"
That argument might have made sense six hundred years ago. There are such things as machines now! I suppose you spend so little time on your own estates you neither know nor care whether they are worked by robots or peons. You keep the land of a nearly empty world locked up to preserve your own hegemony, and your own rents!"
"Then go to the High Limestone! Go and settle in the badlands! Some people do. Tougher, gutsier people than you, Teutie prole!"
I waited for Grotius to intervene. Then I saw he was asleep at the table. We'll have to bring back electrocurrent sleep, I thought. Natural sleep is a luxury we may not be able to afford soon. I was tired myself, I knew, and my thoughts were jumping about ineffectually.
"All right," van Roberts was saying. "So you admit the monastery is in the pocket of the Families."
I admit some of the Families have been friends of the Church. That's hardly anything to be ashamed of."
And your monks will say anything they're told to, including corroborating your story of hostile aliens!"