by Larry Niven
“We thought of you fifty years ago.”
Again, the ’Runner squinted, suspicious, but Hilda saw that he was also intrigued. “Whaddyu mean, that you thought of us fifty jahr ago?”
Smith squatted down, and Hilda admired the posture change: without sending any message too overtly, it signaled that this was to be the beginning of a story, told in a casual fashion. He’s good, thought Hilda, maybe too good, the way he manages to slowly draw more and more people into whatever ultimate scheme he’s hatching.
“So,” Smith began, “fifty years ago, when it was pretty clear the ratcats were going to overrun Wunderland, there were some folks in the ARM and UNSN who were thinking ahead to how humanity was going to come back and kick their furry butts off our home.”
A few smiles sprung up around the group; Hilda folded her arms, thought: and once again, Smith gets the measure of his audience and begins to work them. He could’ve made a small fortune peddling snake oil . . .
“There were a lot of ideas tossed around. Most did not survive close eye-balling by the experts, but a handful did. And most of those were going to take time: time spent watching the kzinti, learning about them, their habits, their biochemistry, their society. You all hunt, right?”
The slick, unwashed heads all nodded in unison.
“Well, how well could you hunt an animal if you didn’t know its habits, where it liked to sleep, to feed, to rut, to run?”
Now the same heads shook from side to side. “Might as well stay home and stay hongry,” drawled one of Smith’s audience; a few snickers followed it.
“Exactly. And that’s what the war-planners realized: that they’d be damn fools trying to put any plans into motion until they knew more about the species they were hunting. And when it comes to kzinti, we’ve got to have the advantage in smarts, because they’ve got it all over us in speed and strength.”
Somber, even grim nods followed Smith’s assertion, as well as one solemn, “Ja, stimmt.”
“So, fifty years ago, the war planners put long-range projects in motion. And they put a bunch of people like me down for the longest nap in human history, without even telling us what the plans were. That information, along with whatever tools and weapons we’d need, were added to our cryo-capsules years later. That way—”
“That way, if the ratcats found you before the plans were ready, they couldn’t learn anything about what was in store for them.” The ’Runner who’d completed Smith’s sentence was quick-eyed, clean-shaven, and lean.
Smith nodded his agreement and appreciation. “Exactly: just like he said. So when I woke up early last week, I had no idea of what I was supposed to do. But there was a briefing packet with me: hardcopy only, which was lucky, since my capsule’s electronics had been fried. In that, I learned that I was to land in any one of four locations that the experts said would be the best place to try out a brand new weapon, which is in that box right there.” He pointed at the safe-case that Hilda was carrying: all eyes turned toward her. She resisted—barely—the impulse to sheepishly wave at them all.
“What is it?” shouted one of the ’Runners.
“He can’t say, not yet,” countered the quick-eyed lean one.
“I ain’t fighting for people—outsiders!—fifty years dead and a weapon no one will tell me about,” a third rebutted.
“Stille!” shouted their gap-toothed spokesman, who looked back to Smith. “You tell a mighty schon story, hauptman,” he said quietly, “but maybe that’s all it is: a story.” He and Smith watched each other: neither blinked. “I don’t see, and I haven’t heard, anything that proves that your experts chose four locations or that the Susser Tal was one of them.”
Smith nodded, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a slim strip of plasticoding. He read from it: “42.68.2113 by 89.61.4532; do you know where those planetary coordinates are?”
The spokesman sat up as if someone had jabbed a spear into his back. After a long moment, he said, rather formally, “Yes. I know the location of those coordinates.” His followers looked stunned, first at him, then at each other, murmuring as they did. Hilda couldn’t tell if it was his sudden loss of local accent, or knowledge about the global coordinate system that had surprised them most.
Smith was nodding. “Then here’s what you do. Go to those exact coordinates, which, unless I am very much mistaken, are about a day’s march further east. Then dig. You’ll probably need to go down at least a meter or maybe a little more, given the fact that this valley is like one big compost heap. You’ll find a box. In the box, you’ll find a plasticoding strip like this one and there will be a single word on it. Don’t tell anyone else what the word is; just come to me. I’ll tell you the word on the strip.”
The group was completely silent. The spokesman rose, nodded soberly, and started down the trail to the east. After a moment, he turned, stared at Smith and the resistance fighters: “Well, you comin’ with us or waiting here to get snatched by the ratcats?”
* * *
Later that day, when the pace of the march had slacked off, and during a brief lull in the wave-attacks favored by the local mud-mites and swamp-flies, Hilda caught up to Smith. “Quite a performance you put on back there.”
He stared at her. “I had the choice to make the truth interesting, or dull. I chose interesting. But it was the truth, every bit of it.”
His sudden seriousness took her aback. “Hey, I’m sorry: I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“No, not exactly. But you figured a little needling wasn’t out of line.”
“Well—” she wondered if it was right to feel suddenly defensive, and decided she didn’t care. “Well, maybe it isn’t out of line, after all. You’re dragging more and more of us around by our noses, without ever telling us what we’re up to, or why we’re doing it.”
He looked away. “We’re doing it to kill kzinti. To kill a lot of kzinti.” His cheeks bunched as he said it.
“Yeah, we figured that out. But it would help if you could share a little more—”
“Look.” His voice was calm, but low. “I don’t like keeping secrets, but it’s part of my job. What if this weapon doesn’t work? What if it does but the kzinti capture some of us, now or later? This isn’t the start of the Great War of Liberation: this is only the test of a new weapon. Which will only be effective later on if it remains a surprise, a secret, after it’s been tested.”
“So what does that mean? That you’ll kill all of us after you’ve tested the weapon? Otherwise, every one of us that walks away from your apparent suicide mission is a potential security leak, right?”
“Wrong.” His expression and tone softened slightly. “That won’t be necessary. You won’t be security risks.”
“Oh? And why is that? No, wait: let me guess; you can’t tell me.”
“See?” Smith’s jocularity had returned. “You are starting to get the hang of this.”
“Ha ha. But what about you? You know about this weapon, and you could be caught. That seems like a pretty significant secrecy risk. Unless, that is, Captain John Smith has his own private poison pill, ready to go.” She had meant it as a jibe, but seeing his expression, Hilda suddenly realized that her wild fabulation had actually brought her face to face with the cold hard truth of the matter. “Gott in Himmel! I—I’m sorry. I didn’t know—I didn’t mean to—”
“Of course you didn’t. Look: I’m sure a lot of my old mates would have been happy to have a ‘final option’ rather than get captured by the kzinti, and be diced up or Hunted for sport. Besides, this mission ends one of two ways for me: success and hiding, or failure and death. So if I fail, I’d rather the death be quick, painless, and at the time and place of my choosing.”
In the silence that followed, Hilda sought desperately for a new conversation-starter and discovered that no such rhetorical beast existed: “Well, that was all a bit awkward.” He shrugged.
“And continues to be so,” she added. That got a genuine smile; handsome, even through t
he swamp muck, she had to admit.
“Having a kill-pill in your pocket is only a big deal if you let it be one,” he said gently. “Taking a mission like this—well, let’s just say I made my peace with all possible outcomes the day I said ‘yes,’ and they cut my orders.” He drew to a halt when the local that Hilda had come to think of as Papa Sumpfrunner put up a hand, listened, and then made a leisurely, palm-down motion. Sighing, the whole contingent sank to the ground, except the three that Papa selected with pointed finger; they uttered sighs of resignation, not relief, and wandered outward toward the perimeter.
Watching Smith’s easy motions, Hilda took a stab at starting a different conversation: “You seem pretty comfortable here: have you been in the Susser Tal before?”
“Not in it, but at the entrance to. A couple of times. Back when I was a kid, and my dad dragged me along on his provisioning trips, we had to make runs up here. Ours was the closest town that got regular deliveries of supplies and spare parts, so the ’Runners came to him with their orders.”
“But I thought your dad only ‘procured stuff’ for your town.”
“Yeah, but areas as far off as the Sumpfrinne fell into a special category. Technically, they are in someone’s backyard, and in this case, it was my dad’s. Could’ve been a few other towns just as easily, but my dad wasn’t a bigot or a classist prick, so he didn’t mind being their conduit to the cities and supply sources. And they were pretty grateful. Not that they showed it much: people back in these swamps don’t show much of anything. They’re a careful bunch. But still, you could tell they liked him.”
“Oh? How?”
“They teased him a lot.”
“And that’s how they show they like you?”
He stared at her. “Of course it is. It’s their way of saying, ‘you’re okay; you can take a joke.’ You have to have a certain basic level of trust, of comfort, between two people before they can start to really tease each other.”
Hilda nodded, tried to simultaneously study his features but not get caught looking at him: every time she spent five more minutes talking with Captain Smith, she discovered things about him that were surprising. In this case, the surprise was not how he had learned to manipulate ’Runners so well, but rather, the obvious affection he had for a father now long-dead, and the genuine sympathy he had for the ’Runners themselves. As well as a sharp dislike of bigots. You’re not half-bad, Captain Smith, inside or out . . . “And so if the ’Runners don’t like you?”
“They don’t tease you. At all. They don’t do anything: they just stare at you. And spit at the ground. A lot. Not right at you, or where you’re standing. But you’d have to be a low-grade moron not to get the message.”
“So how did these people come to live in the Sumpfrinne?”
Smith shrugged. “It was better than being constantly reminded that the herrenmanner think you’re subhuman. And the rest of the Teuto-Nordic immigrants followed their example; the poorest of them were the most outspoken and harsh in their prejudice.”
“When you’re next to the lowest spot on the totem pole, you fight pretty hard to keep the one guy lower than you are in his place.”
“Ja, wirklich. A lot of these folks either traced their roots to gastarbeiters or signed on the colony ships as the equivalent of indentured servants: a lot were poor folks from the Balkans, South America, South Africa. And of course, anyone foolish enough to marry into that kind of family was encouraged to spare their high-blooded kin any further embarrassment by wandering out here to join the rest of the untermenschen. To become swamprats, hillbillies: your choice of derogatory terminology.”
“Upon whose bioharvesting skills the anti-senescent pharmaceutical firms depended, if I recall correctly.”
Smith nodded. “Until the kzinti arrived, who apparently decided that the earlier each human dies, the better they like it.”
“Ja, sure seems that way. But how do the ’Runners survive at all, now?”
“Hey, you’re the one who was born into this time period, not me.” Smith turned to look at their shabby clothing and much-repaired guns. “Looks to me like they’re just managing to hang on. Maybe not even that.” He looked away. “I don’t want to know what their infant mortality rate has been, since the kzinti arrived. Nor the prevalence of malnutrition-related diseases.”
Hilda followed his gaze, saw the same things, wondered a further question she decided not to ask: so why would they stay? The answer was in front of her, plain to see, if difficult to grasp: they didn’t leave the oppressive stink and miasmas of the Sumpfrinne because it was all they knew, and was what their parents had known before them. In almost every face, she could detect the sullen resolve of squatters. These were the faces of true parochialism, of the unfathomable intransigence of insular communities that had, since the beginning of recorded history, doggedly inhabited the most marginal and isolated of environments. Even unto their own, slow extinction.
Papa Sumpfrunner had risen to his feet again; about half a dozen of his followers drifted into the bushes rather than lining up on the trail. They wielded machetes, wore heavy gloves, carried hide sacks that they started to fill with cuttings. If there was a rhyme or reason to their action, Hilda could not discern it.
Smith nodded in the direction of the harvesters. “That’s Burn Bramble they’re harvesting.”
“Burn Bramble?”
“Yeah, the smaller branches and leaf-stems have tiny pockets of nitric acid stored in them: really discourages grazing by the local fauna.”
“And the ’Runners harvest it because—?”
“’Cause nitric acid be the main ingredient in smokeless powder, ’chen,” muttered Papa Sumpfrunner as he drifted past, seeing to the assignment of their rearguard and the laying of a few choice traps. “Can’t live without it. Easier to blow things up than cut them down here in the Sumpf. And even before the kzinti come, we stuck with old-style cartridge guns. Reload our own brass, make the powder from the Bramble.”
“And the bullets?”
He smiled at her quick understanding of their real challenge. “Ja, well, we make bullets from whatever metal works and is handy. Thayz not always so gut as we’d like, but they get the job done.” He waggled his heavy-barreled rifle.
That was the first time Hilda noticed the desiccated kzin ear attached like a tribal fetish to the trigger guard.
Papa saw her staring and nodded. “Ja, ’chen—they get the job done.”
Hilda did not doubt him in the least.
* * *
Early the next day, they arrived at the closest thing to a town that the Susser Tal could boast: about three dozen families, whose huts were perched on stilts sunk into rock pilings. Hilda stared at the spindly structures. “Spring floods come down from both sides,” Smith commented at her elbow. “And the rest of the time, the problem is the rain, which has nowhere to go but down. Slowly.”
She nodded. “How many people are—?” She stopped: again, how would Smith know, after having been asleep for half a century? Handily, wiry Papa Sumpfrunner was about to pass them, moving at a good clip.
“Bitte—” she started.
He turned, apparently agitated. “Schnell or nothing, ’chen: I got a message to dig up.” He glanced at Smith.
“Uh—how many of you are there?”
“You talking here, or the whole Tal?”
“The whole valley.”
He shrugged. “Seven hundred, maybe seven hundred twenty. Why?”
Hilda was going to confess idle curiosity, but Smith jumped in before she could. “Because that’s how many people will need to be informed that the kzinti are coming. And that’s how many may have to leave this valley as a result.”
The spokesman glared at him. “I guess we’ll see about that, hey?”
Smith shrugged. “I suppose we will.”
“And if I don’t agree, then what? You gonna make us go, you an’ your army of four?”
Smith shook his head. “They sure aren’t my army
: hell, they don’t even like me. But that’s not who’s going to convince you to leave the Susser Tal.”
“No? Who then?”
Smith pointed to the dried kzin ear hanging from the trigger guard of Papa Sumpfrunner’s rifle. “They will. Believe me.”
“Well, we’ll see whether you can be believed at all, first.” He waved the plasticode strip Smith had given him and stalked away.
He stopped directly under the center of what appeared to be his own house, given the questions that were being shouted down at him, and which he momentarily ignored. He started prying up rocks, rather than digging. When he saw Smith’s look, he spat, grumbled: “I thought my PeePaw was verruck, insisting we keep this pile clean and the plastic sheeting over it.” He paused, glared more fiercely. “Well, come on, you soft-skinned drylander; you ain’t as tough as me, but you got decent-sized muscles. Help me move these damned rocks.”
Smith joined him in his labors; four other ’Runners drifted over to pitch in, as well. In less than twenty minutes, they had moved the rocks, thrown back an all-weather tarp and heaved up an old vacuum-rated shipping crate. They opened it and found a plastic-wrapped footlocker inside. Within that was a box. And in that box was a single plasticode strip. Papa Sumpfrunner stared at it as if he were holding a live viper. Then he studied the characters scored into its impervious surface, folded it up, and jammed it in his grime-lined pocket. He turned to Captain Smith. “What’s the code, drylander?”
Smith looked him straight in the eye. “The word on the plasticode is ‘distemper.’”
The spokesman blinked, looked down in the hole, looked away. “Well, shit,” he said.
Mads looked from Papa Sumpfrunner to Smith. “So? What does it mean?”
The senior ’Runner looked at Mads with eyes that were prematurely rheumy. “It means that your friend is exackly who he says he is.” He sighed, his shoulders sloped. “Well, come on in with you all. We might as well have supper while we talk about the end.”