by Larry Niven
“I don’t expect it will work out that way,” John Wayne objected. “If the tiger folk look like winning with guns and bombs, the human beings might use them back. They were pretty good at killing each other before they saw sense. The tiger folk may need a bit of guns and bombs argument before they see that logic is a lot cheaper. I don’t recall Shere Khan ever used a gun . . . These might be different, of course.”
“I don’t think the human beings have come to logic for logical reasons. They seem to have got there by telling each other lies. They’ve rewritten their history so as to make people think that they can’t use guns and bombs without being intensely bad mannered. It’s not much of an argument. Better than guns and bombs perhaps, but not really convincing.”
“True,” John Wayne admitted. “You know these lies are fascinating. It’s all a matter of bandwidth. The lower the bandwidth, the easier it is. You’d think evolution would make it harder to get away with it.”
“I expect it does. Give them time. Just a few of our lifetimes and they’ll have evolved enough to see the awful waste involved.”
“In the meanwhile, I must say I could get to really enjoy it . . .”
When, like the Dilillipsans you have no natural enemies on your planet, and when there are certain problems with movement once you have matured, communication becomes very important. So does fun. They worked overnight preparing a city for the kzinti.
A new star shone in the sky that night: Far-Ranging Prowler descending on chemical rockets. Before long the details of the city became visible from the kzin ship, but they were puzzling. Rocking with laughter, the Dilillipsans reabsorbed most of their avatars. All of them, planet wide. Unlike human beings and the kzinti, they didn’t have to be close to each other, or rely on mobile phones to pass the word around. They warned their children not to move for the next few days, explaining that it was a matter of life or death.
The children wanted to know the details of course, and took some convincing, but the arguments were flawless and backed up by comprehensive records. The children would watch carefully and see for themselves. They weren’t big on trust, but the hypotheses had high a priori credibility.
* * *
Captain led his Heroes in the landing, of course. They descended on a number of well-armed gravity-sleds, and spread out on foot, weapons at the ready. They had discovered only one city on the entire planet, which seemed strange, particularly as it was not a very big one. The captain had landed close to the city, which was where the action might be expected, others had landed further afield to find out if there were outposts of single homes scattered about hidden by the trees, of which there were a lot.
Captain recalled the conquest of Chunquen. Rich industrial cities, bordered by wide blue seas. The locals had been feeling proud of themselves because, despite the fighting between the sexes, they had just sent a rocket to the nearest of their moons. Telepath had translated their excited and boastful broadcasts to one another. Far-Ranging Prowler had been scout for a squadron of dreadnaughts then.
Gutting Claw and the sibling dreadnaughts, Spine-Cruncher, Sthondat’s Leg-Bone Crusher Leaving it Crippled and Careless Blood-Spiller had landed infantry and put a stop to their boasting.
They had been passing over the seas to the next continent when the Chunquen missiles rose from their undersea ships Spine-Cruncher, Crusher and Careless Blood-Spiller had closed to destroy the primitive devices. Another missile was detected heading toward the main encampment which the kzinti had established on the first continent. The kzinti, having only encountered peaceful space-faring races in the Eternal Hunt up the Spiral Arm, had had little experience of war.
Captain had been at a conference aboard Gutting Claw at the time, dealing with the agreeable subjects of dividing up land, loot, and slaves, and the recommendations for the award of Names to appropriate Heroes, and he remembered Feared Greiff-Admiral’s puzzlement that the enemy had fired only one missile rather than a volley at each of the ships and at the kzin ground installation.
The reason had occurred to Greiff-Admiral and to Captain simultaneously. Captain remembered leaping to the com-link, screaming to his ship to boost out of orbit. Gutting Claw did the same. It was too late for the other ships and the ground-troops. When the electromagnetic pulses from the thermonuclear explosions cleared, three kzinti dreadnaughts and several thousand Heroes had been converted to unstable isotopes, their very atoms dying. Greiff-Admiral himself had gone to the arena over that blunder, when the Supreme Council of Lords heard about it, and Feared Zrarr-Admiral had taken his place. Captain had sometimes thought that had he been in Feared Greiff-Admiral’s fur he would have gathered together what remained of his fleet and headed beyond the frontiers of the Patriarchy; but presumably, when one was an Admiral, honor prohibited such a course.
It was, the episode had taught him, unwise to assume anything about a new world, or to take even an apparently easy Conquest for granted.
Then he wondered if these new aliens could overhear his unspoken thoughts. Perhaps they were telepathic. The Ancients had had telepathy, as they, apparently, had used faster-than-light travel. Some students had speculated on a possible connection between the Slaver power and the Telepathic ability which kzinti possessed to a greater or lesser degree, even though the two species were not contemporaries by billions of years.
What if this new species had FTL technology? To discover such a secret would give him more than a Full Name, let alone a mere partial Name (why, even particularly distinguished NCOs might hope for partial Names). It would mean adoption into the Riit Clan itself!
* * *
Strategist looked around. The sled he commanded had come to rest in a long valley, the far end of which twisted out of sight. The sky above was a darker, purpler shade than he was used to, with long stringy clouds streaky and fast moving. There were groves of trees in the valley and long grass blowing in the stiff wind. In fact it was almost a storm by kzin standards. That would be the rapid spin of the planet, of course, transmitting unusually high levels of energy to the air masses.
The trees tinkled. Their leaves seemed almost metallic, and moved constantly, as did the branches. Each grove seemed to consist of three or four large mature trees and a greater number of smaller bushes. Higher up on the slopes of the hills, the trees were much denser. There was no sign of animal life, except for insects, some of them flying. Creatures like wasps, as big as his head, flew around and made an irritating deep drone. Some of the trees had fruit on them, which the insects seemed to be feeding on. Strategist’s nose quivered with disgust. Clearly very low grade life forms.
“I want infrared detectors for picking up animal traces,” he instructed his sergeant. “There must be some. All this vegetation must be food for the very primitive animal species, and they in turn food for the less primitive. And we know there are some advanced life forms on this world. The less advanced ones must therefore exist. Find them. I want to know of anything bigger than a strovart. And I want a fence of wires around our position, able to stun or kill anything that attacks us.”
His reasoning was essentially sound, but there were, unfortunately for him, some false assumptions buried in there.
Strategist sniffed the air. High in oxygen. Much too high for convenience, one could get intoxicated on it at this level. And it was strange that there was so much. Forest fires usually turned it back into carbon dioxide at levels lower than this. Continent-wide forest fires had happened in the remote past on his own world. And wind rates like this should make thunderstorms and lightning strikes happen a lot. So he had a problem here which merited some thought. Oxygen, of course, was a waste product of plant life. And a source of energy for animal life; outputs joined to inputs to produce an ecology. His forehead wrinkled. He would need to consult Technologist to see if some plausible ecological modelling could be done as they started to get results on animal types. They would, of course, slot into roughly the usual collection of ecological niches, but they might be physically diffe
rent from anything known to the Heroic Race, and there might be some strange niches never seen before. Modelling would make nasty surprises less likely. Strategist didn’t like nasty surprises.
He sneezed. A good deal of organic particulate matter in the air; they might have to take shots against allergy reactions. Some of these things could be mistaken by the immune system for a virus.
* * *
The captain and his troops approached the city with what was unusual caution for kzin warriors. The superior technology of the Dilillies had the effect of making the captain take precautions, so the troops advanced in small groups, others covering them, until an ambush seemed unlikely. There was nothing like the collection of tall buildings they had expected.
The city, when they entered it, was weird even to those kzinti who had seen alien architecture on different worlds. It seemed to consist of little more than ribbons of metal, with Mobius strips a frequently occurring feature, with vegetation growing through it, and a few tall trees, planted in scenic locations. A plinth with a most peculiar statue on it occupied their attention for some minutes. Then they found the rails. They were a pair of some sort of metal, possibly aluminium, less than an arm span apart, and disappearing behind the strips of metal and the trees in both directions. Some sort of road?
“We follow them, that way.” The captain ordered. They had gone only a few hundred paces when they heard a whistling sound and a curious regular pounding. Coming around the bend was some sort of monster with eyes and a face wearing an imbecile smile. It bore no resemblance to the creatures they had seen, and it puzzled the kzinti, who were of course unacquainted with Thomas the Tank Engine. Possibly, they thought, it was a local god, something like a moving idol. It ran towards them on wheels connected by rods, mouth agape, and screaming with apparent excitement. They opened up with massive firepower, and it exploded, leaving almost nothing behind.
The captain pondered the ineffectual attack, and inspected the remains of the monster. The absence of blood worried him. The absence of almost anything worried him. Even a war machine should have left more than this, a quantity of what a human being would have thought looked rather like the result of scraping the burnt bits from overdone toast. And which, moreover, was being rapidly dissipated by the ever present wind. They went back to following the rails in the direction from which the thing had come, to find the track terminated in a large but empty shed.
Exploring from the shed in different directions led to more inconsequential discoveries. There were lakes and canals, one of which contained a small replica of what an informed human being or Dililly would have recognized as the Bismarck, though the armament in its turrets, which the kzinti had taken at first to be rail-guns, turned out to be dummies. When the metal of these various artifacts was analyzed, they turned out to be common alloys, with a large amount of the aluminium which was found in ordinary clays on many worlds. There was nothing the automated mining and factory facilities of the big carrier could not easily synthesize. Sitting forlorn and solitary in another shed they found a copy of the British State Coach. This yielded some small amount of gold, which the kzinti valued as ornaments and a source of coinage, but of course their physics had enabled them to synthesize it for generations. The coach was too small for adult kzinti, but Captain could, he supposed, present it to Feared Zrarr-Admiral as a plaything for his kittens. Working out what were the seats and doors enabled him to make an estimate of the occupants’ size. Unfortunately, this had no relevance to the Dilillipsans—a fact he could hardly be expected to guess. There were no rare earths in worthwhile quantities.
Captain was more than a little disappointed. One totally pointless attack didn’t appear to be much ground for glory, he hadn’t lost a single kzin. Losses in battle were taken to be a mark of success, so he could hardly claim one. He doubted any kzinti would want to settle on the planet, even if game were imported: it was too far away from anything. Population pressure was not a problem on Kzin worlds, given the kzinti’s predilection for death-duels. Its alien industrialization, such as it was, seemed useless. The search continued but no trace of the natives or their advanced technology was found. They had gone . . . somewhere.
Captain concluded heavily that there was little worth bothering with. There were the insects, probably existing in some symbiotic relationship with the vegetation, and some small animals, according to Strategist, but nothing to make a worthwhile hunt. They seemed to feed on dead and decaying vegetable matter, and there were not many of them. They had a peculiar metabolism that led them to excrete what was, for their size, very large amounts of carbon dioxide. Without that, Captain thought, the oxygen levels on the planet would be even higher than they were. Telepath reported they were not sentient. Alien Technologies Officer dissected a couple with the aid of an electron microscope, and reported that he felt—he could not give precise reasons—that their cell structures had been artificially altered to give them this peculiar metabolism. This was also disquieting in a vague, undefinable sort of way—another indication of a science beyond Kzin’s own. Why would the natives—if it was indeed their handiwork—want animals whose only use seemed to be to produce carbon dioxide? It hinted at unpleasant potentials for bio-weapons, but no facts into which one could sink a claw. There was still no trace of either of the life-forms which they had seen previously. No footprints, no factories, no houses, no nursery areas, no cemeteries or crematoria for their dead. Only the one, strangely ineffective god or war-machine.
There were considerably more animals living in the sea and rivers. These were also not sentient, and their dead bodies washing ashore (they floated with the aid of bladders, also filled with carbon dioxide which they apparently extracted from sea-water), seemed to provide much of what proteins the ecosystem contained. The people, it seemed, would be the only profitable product of the planet. Kzinti tended to have a fairly high turnover of slaves, and there was always a demand for them on kzin worlds.
But the people were nowhere to be found.
Kzinti on a hunt are nothing it not thorough. Had any sentient animals been lurking in hiding, they would have been found. Had they burrowed underground, kzinti tracking devices would have detected disturbed soil or rock. There were a few caves, but they were empty. There was one curious detail about the caves in limestone areas: the stalactites and other calcium-carbonate formations seemed to have been removed. Contemplating this, the alien’s boast that they could travel in time came back to Captain. Was there . . . could there be . . . some connection? He dismissed the thought.
They searched the ground with high-resolution cameras from space, and visually from the highest parts of the strange buildings. They set off small bombs such as a human geologist might have recognized to detect any hidden subterranean chambers. Using technology developed to deal with the Chunquen, they explored the contours of the seabed. They flew to the tops of hills to survey the country around, and they explored canyons and valleys.
Finally, Alien Technology Officer reported to Captain, “They’ve gone.”
Captain thought hard. He did not want to end up in the arena, and the more spectacular, prolonged and expensive his failure here, the greater the chances of that became. At present, things had not gone too far: he had landed on a planet which turned out to be uninhabited. He had not wasted too many resources yet, or cost the Patriarchy any assets. No one could blame him for making a mere reconnaissance-in-force of the planet, particularly if the bridge-recordings of the alien conversations were quietly destroyed.
The locals must have disintegrated themselves. The disintegrators would be valuable weapons, but where were they? The idea they had really travelled in time returned, and again he dismissed it. There were too many paradoxes involved. Or he almost dismissed it. Better not to dwell on such things . . . for a race that really had time-travel would be a threat indeed . . . It was impossible. But the Ancients had had FTL, and that was impossible, too. And the inhabitants of this planet, whether one race or more, were without doubt ver
y clever. He remembered the strange, leering smile on the face of what he did not know was Thomas the Tank Engine. It seemed to mock his perplexity.
He had done his duty in ensuring there was neither threat nor treasure on this world. His report would presumably be filed and forgotten in the Imperial bureaucracy (the kzin were terrible as bureaucrats, which was the main reason why they were always looking for slaves with record-keeping skills). He urinated formally on the ground to claim it for the Patriarch, and gave orders to return to the ship.
* * *
“There is a problem, Captain,” Strategist informed the bridge team as they gathered in the control room. “The ecology makes no sense. The only animal life is either insectoid or things that scuttle around in the detritus of the forest, nothing bigger than a paw. There are larger things in the sea, but on land, absolutely no carnivores.”
“And the aliens who came here. There was something strange about their minds, they were not in the right place,” Telepath said shrilly.
“Why is that a problem, Strategist?” Captain asked dangerously, ignoring Telepath.
“Because evolution works in predictable ways. If there is a huge supply of food, then creatures evolve to devour it. If there is a huge supply of vegetation, as on this world, then there are inevitably lots of herbivores. And when there are many herbivores, there are carnivores. But there are few if any herbivores, and no carnivores. It is absolutely impossible. Further, there is the single city with no real signs of housing and certainly none outside. We are missing something. I recommend a closer study until we find it.”
This settled things for the captain. Anything this intellectual idiot wanted to do was obviously a stupid idea.
“Overruled, Strategist. We have higher priorities than solving academic problems of no interest or importance to the Patriarchy. We leave immediately.” He hoped for some kind of argument which would have justified his taking Strategist’s throat out, but there was none.