Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - VII

by Hal Colebatch, Mark O Martin, Gregory Benford, Paul Chafe

But could a Demon be killed with a shot from my rifle? This was a flesh-and-blood creature.

  In many a village I and others have heard stories of ghosts and were-tigers: tigers shot at night whose bodies were never found, but next day some man in the village—usually the local moneylender—was found dead in his house with a bullet in him. I never gave these stories much countenance when first I heard them in my early years in the East, but the skin of the Tiger-Man is before me as I write.

  Then, too, there was the thing clasped in its furred beast’s hand, and the things we found a little way away, whose origin and nature none can guess. Are the things we found the works of Tibetan priests? What is the writing on the heavy knife? I have enquired since of Mr. Lockwood Kipling of the Lahore Museum and he says he has seen none like it. I leave it to others to make sense of these things.

  Did the tiger previously devour some traveler in that cave? Or were those things left there by no more than chance, perhaps by Ruhmalwallahs or other secret travelers? Were they connected with the tiger at all? Why did it clutch at that object as it died? Sher Ali, when he could be persuaded to enter the cave (and I could hardly understand his fear now that the beast was dead, that Bravest of the Brave when it was alive!) seemed almost to lose his wits. He babbled that the tiger had brought the things there itself! And yet, his words have stayed in my mind…

  Mr. Kipling’s famous son has written for one of his poems: “Still the world is wondrous large—seven seas from marge to marge—/ And it holds a vast of various kinds of man / And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu…,” and also he has since written stories of a boy raised by wolves in India. Perhaps those stories have a germ in my Tiger-Man. But what I shot was no man raised by tigers. Of that at least I am sure. As I have said before, and as all white men who have served there long know, the East is full of mysteries.

  But perhaps this was not the only one of its kind. Perhaps there are other such tigers in the high fastnesses of Thibet. We have heard tell of other strange creatures there. Is the Tiger-Man one with the man-eating Yeti or Migou that the Thibetians dread?

  The chapter ended and a new one began.

  Two weeks after the killing of what the Mess came to call “Vaughn’s Tiger-Man” we received orders for the Frontier where we would join the Dirragha Expeditionary Force under Brigadier-General Bindon. I had been ill for several days, ever since we got back to the cantonment, in fact, and I spent the first part of the campaign in hospital. It was some fever unlike any I have had before, and Curlewis and Maclean also succumbed…

  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 photographers 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 crafts 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 its 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 ancestors 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.