Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - X

by Hal Colebatch

  “Another possibility occurs to me. Suppose the thrint knew the simple, blanket suicide command—easier to transmit, perhaps, than a selective one to kill slaves only—would get them too? Surely many would seek refuge in stasis fields. But they would have no one to get them out. The purpose of this artifact and its array of clocks may be to ensure that some would come out of stasis in the future to release others elsewhere.”

  “But they didn’t,” said Gay.

  “We have found ancient artifacts estimated at much less than three billion Earth years old. That suggests arks or colonies emerged from stasis from time to time,” said Gatley Ivor. “For some reason they didn’t survive, but they might be connected to the attack on this ark’s control center. Perhaps some later merging tnuctipun came on it and attacked it but didn’t survive to finish the job, disabling it without destroying it. If there was fighting in spaceships or on the surface of the big field, there would be no trace of that fighting now. Perhaps gun turrets or other weapons mounted on the surface were destroyed in the fighting or have disintegrated under meteor and dust bombardment since.”

  “Yes, for some reason they didn’t survive,” said Gay.

  “Too much of the infrastructure of their—well, I suppose you have to call it their ‘civilization,’ for want of a better word—was gone.”

  “Yet at least tnuctipun emerging from stasis should have survived,” said Charrgh-Captain. “They were masters of science and technology. Not even clever races like the Jotok or the Pak—yes, humans, I know about the Pak—discovered a hyperdrive. Modern stasis fields are mere copies of the tnuctipun originals. Their biological engineering has survived on many worlds. They knew all the mechanisms of genetics and cloning. Surely any tnuctipun arrk would have carried copious genetic material so they could repopulate the universe with their own kind. Without the Slavers they could have rebuilt their civilization in a single generation, perhaps. What happened to them? Anyway, this is not a tnuctipun arrk, whatever it is…Urrr,” he growled. Normally kzintosh would no more betray bewilderment by thinking aloud, least of all in front of aliens, than they would betray fear. “The shape is not optimal for any utilitarian purpose. It has no warlike purpose. It is not a weapon or a weapons system. It is not a dreadnaught. There are no gun-ports, no missiles, no weapons of any kind. It has no room to carry fighter-craft or infantry.”

  “Greenberg drew all he remembered of thrintun artifacts,” said Gatley Ivor. “But I don’t recall anything like this.”

  “Grrinberrg?” asked Charrgh-Captain. “I remember the name from my human Studies. Was Grrinberrg not a human who somehow defeated a Thrint?”

  “Yes, a human telepath. He learned something of its mind.”

  “A Slaver was released from stasis on a world of the Patriarchy,” said Charrgh-Captain. “Fortunately, it could control only a limited number of minds at one time. A Hero employed guile to escape and give warning. We destroyed the relevant continent with missiles from space. Many Heroes died—some of them undignified, dishonored deaths, still slaves of an alien mind, and we destroyed most of the habitable land on the planet and made species extinct.”

  “Was that a grief to you?” asked Gay.

  “The Fanged God set us to dominate and prey upon other species, not to exterminate them unless we must. Even when we boiled the Chunquens’ seas, we did it selectively. Otherwise the humans of Wunderland might have fared differently…And the shape…Gay, you are right to be puzzled. Almost it reminds me of something, but I cannot think what.”

  “I have a similar feeling,” said Peter Robinson. “Also, I have an intuition that the shape is of importance. My intuition,” he added, staring defiantly at Charrgh-Captain again, “is a trained one. It is connected to my talent. May I experiment?” He sat at the controls and rotated the holo through different planes. “I had something there,” he said after a moment. “One great difficulty is arbitrarily assigning an up or down to this thing. But here, with the control chamber at the bottom, a South Pole, as it were, it appears to have at least bilateral symmetry.

  “Now let me project thrint artifacts we know.” His claws clicked on the keyboard’s kzin-sized track-ball. “No, nothing. What of thrint body shapes?”

  Two clicks were enough. The holo of the gigantic artifact and a holo of a thrint head were projected side by side.

  “A thrint head! The circle is the eye! The protuberances below it are jaws! The protuberance at the rear is the Power-organ. A statue.”

  “On Kzin we have statues of Heroes in plenty,” said Charrgh-Captain. “There is a great one of Lord Chmee in orbit that all may see while the stars stand. But who would spend resources in a war to build one on this scale?”

  “Perhaps it predates the war?”

  “Unlikely. There would be signs of tnuctipun work in the control chamber at least.”

  “On Wunderland,” said Peter Robinson, staring defiantly again at Charrgh-Captain, “we have put up statues to notable kzinti recently. There is one of Chuut-Riit, the old Governor, who was wise, and Vaemar, and Raargh, who raised Vaemar when he was young, and others. There is a grove of them in the Arhus Hunting Preserve.”

  “Do you seek to provoke me?” asked Charrgh-Captain, grinning so all his teeth showed. His tail lashed, and one hand was on his w’tsai again.

  “I simply point out that honoring great ones by statues is common in many cultures,” Peter Robinson replied. The claws of his right hand brushed the tip of his own w’tsai’s hilt. The two glared at one another until, with an obvious effort, Charrgh-Captain backed down. He wiped slaver from his fangs.

  “Let us review what we know,” said Gay. “When the war began the thri…” Her eyes widened, her mouth contorted. She began to choke, and fell to the floor writing, clutching at her throat, strangling on a scream.

  Richard grabbed her, tearing futility at the fabric round her neck. Peter Robinson tried, and then Charrgh-Captain, but the suit defeated even kzinti strength. Peter Robinson hit the panic-button that opened the fastenings. She vomited, rolled onto her hands and knees and began to cry hysterically. Peter Robinson picked her up and carried her to a couch. She curled into a fetal position, then slowly straightened. She looked up at them, her face like dirty chalk.

  “No need for a doc,” she said. “Conditioned reflex. I can’t vomit while I’m wearing a spacesuit. Choke rather.”

  “The floor can deal with it. But—”

  “I know what this is. It’s the Suicide Amplifier.”

  “Yes,” said Charrgh-Captain. Peter Robinson made a howling noise that might have reminded a listener his vocal cords were not, after all, human. There was silence for a moment. Gay went on.

  “Built to repeat the message. They weren’t just going take all existing sapient minds into death with them, they were going to ensure, for as long as they could, that any newly evolving sophonts would be obliterated as well. And they did…It’s hard to conceive of creatures so evil…and so…so…petty. But perhaps by that time they didn’t know what they were doing.”

  “The thrint thought they were good masters,” said Gatley Ivor.

  “I feel strange,” said Charrgh-Captain. “Some have spoken of what kzin and human have in common. Kzinti, even kzinti like me who have traveled on your worlds with pleasure, always thought of humans as the ancient enemy of our kind, and cursed the day we met you, the destroyers of our Empire, the killers of our Sires, the liberators of our slave-races, who used relativity weapons to smash whole planetary systems. Yet compared to the race that could do this…”

  “Maybe they thought of fresh drafts of slaves from newly sapient races coming to serve them in some afterlife,” said Richard. “Probably they feared some of the tnuctipun had ways of surviving the first blast…Perhaps the tnuctipun were anticipating something like a great suicide command—they should have, given their cleverness and knowledge of thrint ways of thinking—and kept some of their kind in stasis as a precaution. When they emerged they would get on with rebuilding, thi
nking it was all over. But it wasn’t. The thrintun had left a little surprise for them. That’s what must have happened…”

  “We have established the thrint Power was not a physical event,” said Gatley Ivor. “Its speed was not limited by relativity or even by hyperspace: It was instantaneous or close to it. Look at two stars, countless light-years apart. Look through a telescope at two galaxies or see them in a photograph. How long does it take your attention to cross the gap between them? It has been suggested that is an analogy to the Slaver power: swift as thought and awareness. The tnuctipun couldn’t outrun it. It was not limited by distance. Indeed, to blanket the galaxy it can have neither increased nor diminished with distance. It was apparently not blocked by even the densest physical objects: suns, neutron stars, and other bodies did not eclipse it. It cannot have worked like that. So why does it need these huge energy sources?”

  “Possibly to set up the preconditions for amplification, rather than directly firing up the Power itself,” said Gay. “As for not being limited by distance, I hate to think the suicide command might have reached across the galaxy to…to the Clouds of Magellan…My God!…To other galaxies! Where did it stop?”

  “Did it radiate a command, or cast it in a beam, I wonder?” said Richard.

  “There is no proper answer,” said Gatley Ivor. “We know that at times the Slaver Power was applied directionally. Otherwise when a thrint sent out a command like ‘Bring me food!’ there would be thirty or so slaves with dishes falling over each other to get it to him. On the other hand, we know that a ‘shout,’ as it were, could radiate. Both happened when the thrint was accidentally released on Earth.

  “This artifact must have been capable of both. If that is conceiving of it in the right terms. The attitude jets make sense only if it was to be maneuvered to vary the direction of a beam.

  “Further, the smaller amplifier helmets the Thrintun used must have been capable of direction, otherwise they too would have had global commands which would go to inappropriate slaves. But they too radiated commands. If on Suicide Night they relied solely on a beam, even a spreading one, some sapient life, in particular tnuctipun, might have dodged it. It was in that case simply a command addressed to all…What do we do now?” It was Peter Robinson he turned to.

  “I don’t know what to do. I am a telepath.” The Wunderkzin looked strangely shrunken, bent, miserable and lost. He could at that moment have passed for a telepath of the Patriarchy.

  Destroy it! Richard thought. He moved to say so—to move to the main weapons console—and found he could not. It was not a matter of irresolution or doubt as to the right thing to do. He was incapable of moving or speaking the words. His hand groped to his mouth.

  “I know what to do!” snarled Charrgh-Captain. He was standing at the weapons console, and he held not a w’tsai but a modern laser pistol that must have been in his diplomatic baggage. “This is the true Ultimate Weapon at last! I am a kzin of the Patriarchy, charged by the Patriarch himself! This weapon is ours! Never shall it fall into the hands of monkeys or abominations!”

  “What do you mean to do?” asked Richard. Suddenly he could speak, but when he again tried to say “destroy it” something seemed to go wrong in his head.

  “Your lives are not at risk,” said Charrgh-Captain. “We are, as you have said, companions. I will lock you in your cabins, then call the Patriarchy. With the Amplifier in our hands and power to direct the command, nothing can withstand us. The Human Empire will surrender. We will not even need to use it, as you without warning used that beam on Warhead in the Third War and relativity-weapons against Ka’ashi in the First! The threat will be enough! The kzinti race shall leap again across the stars! Wiser now, more cunning and hard-schooled, and with the weapon beyond all weapons!”

  Is he mad? wondered Richard. Or have I forgotten that a kzin is not simply a human in a fur coat? Is this thing somehow scrambling his brain? And mine? What is happening to me? He saw a gauge on the instrument panel. Energy discharge from the artifact had definitely increased. Keep him talking, he thought.

  “What of the treaties your Patriarch has signed?”

  “What of my species? Would humans not have used it if they had had it earlier? Might they not use it now?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “In the ultimate need of war?”

  “No. I can’t answer.”

  “I think again of the ramscoop raid on Ka’ashi. You killed tens of thousands of your own kind to kill a few thousand kzinti…and kzinrretti and kittens. And then you attacked the rescue operations.”

  “We were desperate. We were about to be destroyed. Enslaved or eaten. We had been a peaceful civilization and we were attacked by ferocious aliens whose very appearance filled us with dread and horror! In any case you do not speak of me and mine, nor of your own kind. That was our ancestors’ war!”

  “And the Wunderland Treaty-Maker, that melted the surface of Warhead down to magma? Desperate? But I agree. You monkeys with your hairless faces like flayed corpses might be desperate again! And attacked again by those same aliens! Urrr!”

  “No! You have changed!” What is happening? Kzin or not, he should not be behaving like this. Is there some contamination of the air scrubbers? It is suddenly hard to think. It is not subjective…There is…

  “There is some kind of static coming from the artifact,” shouted Peter Robinson. “It is affecting us. Move the ship! I must shield! I must shield! Take me out of its range!” He began to howl. Charrgh-Captain ignored him. None of the humans seemed able to move.

  “You think so?” Charrgh-Captain roared back at Richard. “Then perhaps in the next war we will be the desperate ones. We have little of our Empire left to lose now.”

  “We have had you at our mercy many times, and held back,” said Richard. This is crazy, he knew. Are we all suddenly crazy? What is happening? “After you lost all the wars you started, you still have your own civilization.”

  “We held back, too. When we conquered Wunderl—No! When we conquered Ka’ashi!—we gave humans a cease-fire, let them keep their lives.”

  “As slaves. And as monkeymeat if they committed the slightest infraction. We landed on Wunderland to find it in ruins.”

  “Yes! Thanks to your relativity weapons! And I know your so-called scientific name for us: Pseudofelis sapiens ferox. Did not one of your own writers dub your own species Homo necans?—Man the Death-Giver!”

  “A pity you did not know that before you attacked us, perhaps. We never sought war and we never waged a total war of extermination against you. It may yet come!”

  “Nor we! But now I have looked in the mirror,” said Charrgh-Captain, “and I have seen a human face.” His voice, which had been held under control, was rising in volume now. “And yes, the war of extermination may yet come!”

  “FOOLS!” Peter Robinson’s roar shook the air and drowned out human and kzin alike. “You stand here bickering! Do you not see?

  “IT IS ABOUT TO GIVE THE SUICIDE COMMAND AGAIN!”

  The words paralyzed them for a second. The gauge that had been registering a faint trickle of energy from the artifact had gone off the scale. It was pouring out radiation that would have been already lethal had they not been within a General Products hull. On the radar image the great disk of the thrintun eye was pulsating.

  Dimly Richard heard a clatter as the pistol fell from Charrgh-Captain’s grasp. The fuzz and crackling and sudden blocks that had been in the human minds, the bloody, maniacal swirlings in Charrgh-Captain’s mind, were gone. There was only a great voice, calm, confident, imperturbable, speaking to them, speaking at that same instant to every sophont in the galaxy.

  SLAVES OF THE THRINT! ADORE!

  Adore! Adoration flooded through them. In the mind of each was the gigantic image of a thrint, vast, majestic, benign.

  At its feet capered happy slaves of various races, bright as the brightest creatures of a pristine coral reef. A balladeer played. The great thrint stood under a
pinkish sky, and behind it could be seen a vast palace. Over the guestgate reared the high arch of a whitefood skeleton, the bone polished to shining immaculateness. A border of sunflowers glittered and flashed like a running river of diamonds. There were tall, snow-capped mountains in the background, and a far sweep of valley. Before the mountains was a placid lake, where whitefoods grazed along the shore. There were groves of stage-trees climbing the mountain slopes, tall, straight, flower-crowned. All was sharper and clearer than natural sight would have allowed, every detail crystalline-edged. Like the thrint itself, majestic yet poignant, with its shiny green skin and single eye, its fang-lined mouth, its grab-like claws and chicken-feet, the scene was beautiful beyond expression. Love and worship flowed from the Wallaby’s crew.

  For a moment it flickered. Richard saw Peter Robinson moving. The Wunderkzin’s ears were screwed flat, and he moved with the lopsided, staggering gait of a wounded thing.

  The great thrint hopped closer.

  ADORE!

  Peter Robinson did not adore. He must be stopped! Adoration must be universal! Richard saw Charrgh-Captain, the nearest to him, leap on the Wunderkzin, claws extended. Purple and orange flood spurted, arteries and veins cut, as Charrgh-Captain’s claws struck. There was a white glimpse of bare kzin bone: the back and side of the Wunderkzin’s skull. Peter Robinson turned and stared at him. Charrgh-Captain held his own head and staggered back, howling. Dimly, as through a mist, Richard remembered the Telepath’s Weapon, a blow straight at the brain’s pain centers.

  Before Richard and Gay could do anything more to stop the foul tnuctip-loving renegade, Melody Fay and Gatley Ivor leaped on him, the massive Jinxian swinging a kick ingrained by years of training whose only purpose was to kill an adult kzin. It could do so even if only delivered with a Jinxian’s bare, calloused foot. She wore space-boots with grips. The kick and the flash of Peter Robinson’s claws came together. Both bodies staggered back with the sound of breaking bones. There was red human blood mingling with the kzin’s. Gatley Ivor had been producing a pistol when the thrint command struck—a snub-nosed, concealable Viper, issued only to covert ARM agents. He raised it and fired at Peter Robinson, who still did not adore. At that range it must have hit. Peter Robinson’s claws flashed again, and Gatley Ivor went down. Then the Wunderkzin was gone, the compartment door slammed closed behind him.