by Larry Niven
“It was marginally legal for a long time, or at least illegality was difficult to prove. A joker wanted to buy real estate. He spread rumors of nasty diseases in the neighborhood, even paid nasty neighbors to move in, perhaps spread stories of nasty developments in area planning. Property values fell, he bought the property for less than its real value.
“For obvious reasons, that hasn’t happened for a long time on any major scale, but this may be blockbusting brought up to date. The rumor gets out that space travel of more than a few light-years sends people crazy. Shares in all space and colonizing industries fall. Some smart guy buys them up, then—”
“He’d be prosecuted, and treated. Unless—”
“Unless it couldn’t be traced back. And if that’s right, whoever thought it up is subtle and powerful.”
“And you think this could have such an effect?”
“Not by itself…and not if this was to be the last we heard of it, perhaps…Frankly, we’re simply bewildered by it. I guess,” he added, “quite a lot of what I’ve said is grasping at straws.”
It was an unusual confession for someone in his position to make to someone in mine.
“So suppress it.”
“We did. The reports were dead-filed by Director Bernhardt and Director Harms left them that way. With the cooperation of the Belt. But our new director feels that leaves too many questions unanswered. And the messages keep coming. Find out where this thing originated.”
He touched the desk again and the heavens disappeared. We had windows and view again. Alfred O’Brien’s office was on the fortieth floor of a museum complex, and out the window I could see the high leafy crowns of megatree oxygen factories and, on the ground beyond, a herd of pigmy mammoths, a gift from St. Petersburg, browsing on buttercups in their climate-controlled subarctic meadow. There was a complex of sports stadia beyond that, part of the vast group ringing the city, and the river blue in the sun.
“We’re puzzled,” he said, “not only as to why they should have delusions or whatever it is, but why this particular one. You see, they are trying to tell us that these Outsiders tried to destroy them!
“The word is war.”
He fell silent. It was as if the obscenity hung in the air before us.
“The word, Karl, we have been working for centuries to remove from human consciousness. Why did they resurrect the idea?”
The progressive censorship of literature had been my job for a long time. Search and closure operations of military fants cults went with it. It was an inescapable complement to the genetic part of the program.
“You remember 1938,” he said.
It was one of the secret dates every ARM operative in my section knew: In that year a “radio” broadcast about an imaginary hostile Martian invasion had caused panic and terror and had paralyzed a large part of the United States of America for a night. One of the most serious landmark outbreaks of the Military Fantasy. The “War of the Worlds.” It was pointed out to us in our training, lest we become complacent, that the idea of war had still had the potential to be taken seriously by large numbers of people only five years before the first test flight of the V-2 had launched the beginnings of the Space Age. Did the hoaxers know of that, too?
“I’ll need to know more,” I said.
“Of course. Look at these.”
O’Brien touched his desk again. A succession of holos sprang up in the air between us. There were also a series of flats.
“Here are the pictures they sent back. Well, what do you think of the Outsiders they’ve dreamed up? Pleasant-looking sons of bitches, aren’t they?”
There were humans in the pictures, evidently in order to give some idea of scale. The humans were less than shoulder-high to the other creatures, orange colored, fanged almost like ancient saber-toothed tigers, but with odd differences: four-digited forepaws like clawed hands, shorter bodies and longer legs than real tigers, and triangular heads with bigger crania above feline faces. Distorted ears. The effect was of a monstrosity.
They appeared to be three-dimensional objects.
“Jenny Hannifers,” said the controller. “Sailors in ancient times sewed together dead monkeys and fish to sell as mermaids. These are a sophisticated version of the same thing.”
I looked down at the little mammoths, whose DNA had come from specimens preserved in the Siberian permafrost.
“The tissue was grown in tanks, you mean?”
“No, I don’t think so. It’s possible perhaps. As a colony ship they had a lot of animal cell cultures and they had plenty of advanced facilities for DNA sewing machines. But there are much easier ways. They had every kind of virtual reality simulator and program.
“We’ve checked what records there were of the loading of the Angel’s Pencil, of course. They weren’t complete because a lot of personal property of crew members was never itemized.
“In any case the requirements of a colony ship are enormously complex. Some of the containers loaded might have held fake alien body parts. Some cargo had come from the Belt and we have no inventories of that. As you know, Belters hate keeping nonessential bureaucratic records and they hate any intrusions on their citizens’ privacy. But they didn’t need to carry physical props: Their computers would do the job. Entertainment programs and computer space are things no deep-spacer—especially no colony ship—is short of.”
“It seems a very queer sort of joke.”
“Exactly. Normal minds wouldn’t do such a thing. Which means, obviously, that we’ve got problems whatever the motive for producing them was.
“They say that these Outsiders approached them at an impossible speed, stopped dead in space in defiance of elementary laws of physics, and then tried to kill them by some sort of invisible heat ray after giving them all headaches. You can see how crazy it is. They haven’t even bothered getting the basic science right, let alone the sociology.
“Then, they say, in trying to turn away they pointed their com-drive laser at the Outsider ship and a Belter crewman activated it. In one way we can be thankful: Suppose such a thing had really happened! When they examined the wreckage of the alien, so the message goes, they found it loaded with bomb-missiles, laser-cannon, ray-projectors: weapons, not signaling devices. Fusion-generators deliberately designed to destabilize at a remote command—sick, nightmarish things like that.”
“You’re right,” I said heavily after the implications of what he said had sunk in. “There’s real illness here. Something deeper than I’ve encountered or read of.” Then, knowing my words sounded somehow lame in the context of such madness, “It makes no sense.”
“No. It makes no sense. And you would think the crew of a spacecraft would know better than to tell us another spacecraft matched course with them at eighty percent of light-speed, and changed course instantaneously. As if anything organic wouldn’t be killed by inertia. What about delta-v? It’s as preposterous as expecting us to believe such an insanely aggressive culture would get into space at all!”
He projected another holo.
“Look at this. It’s meant to be the Outsider ship.”
Two main pieces of wreckage tumbling in space, leaking smaller fragments of debris. Cables, ducting, unidentifiable stuff. I had the unpleasant thought that a living body chopped with an ax might leak pieces in the same way. There were tiny space-suited dolls maneuvering objects that included shrouded alien cadavers. There were other pictures, apparently taken from aboard the Outsider wreckage with the Angel’s Pencil hanging in the background. But photographs taken in space have no scale. The objects could have been a mile across or the size of a man’s hand. The EV humans could have been OO-scale figures from a child’s model kit. But as he said, they were more probably electronic impulses than models. There were a lot of ways VR had already become a forensic problem.
“Can’t we check it out? We’ve got good computers.”
“So have they.”
“I don’t see anything that looks like a drive on it,” I
said. “Nothing like a ramscoop, no jets, no light-sail, no hydrogen tanks, no fusion bottles, nothing.”
“That’s right. Rather an elementary error to design an extraordinarily maneuverable spacecraft without a drive. I told you they’ve ignored the science. But we know the things are fakes. What we want to know is why they were faked.”
He paused and contemplated his cigar, frowning. Then he switched his gaze to the pictures again.
“These things could be rather…disturbing, somehow?”
“Somehow, yes,” I said, “I don’t like them.”
“No. Only a few people have seen these things yet, all trained ARM personnel and a few of the Belter security people, and everyone has the same response. There’s art gone into this.
“We’re descended from creatures that were hunted by felines, Karl. It’s almost as if whoever made up the morphology of these things has tapped into some sort of ancestral memory.”
“I still don’t see exactly how I come into it.”
I did to some extent, though. And I saw another thing: If these holos of the alleged aliens became public, it was possible some gullible people might actually believe in them. Not as the symptoms of a space madness, though that would be bad enough, but as being real in themselves.
There were, I knew, plenty of people around bored and stupid enough to believe anything. Indeed, that was already a major social problem in itself. I understood why he had sent for me.
All right. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. Let something come. Start with tigers.
“Tigers are Indian, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know. Someone downstairs could tell you.” A lot of the museum below us was gallery and display rooms, and I knew Arthur Guthlac, the head guide and Assistant to the Museum’s Chief of General Staff.
“Were there any Indians in the crew?”
He handed me a wafer. “Complete dossiers and pictures.” I dumped it in my wrist-comp.
“Any more pictures of the…things?”
“Hundreds. They’ve been sending them back continually. This will give you the general idea. You see they remembered to give them thumbs.”
He began flicking them up. No, I didn’t like them. None of the Jenny Hannifers were whole, just as if they really had been burned or suddenly exposed to explosive decompression in space. Some were only fragments. Big catlike beings with thumbs. They were colored orange with some variations of shade from near red to near yellow and darker markings. One was smaller than the others. I was fairly experienced in dealing with sickness, pathology even, that was part of the job, but this was something different.
It was wrong that someone should have gone to so much care to concoct a hoax, and shown such ingenuity in its details. I thought again of what years in space might do to human beings—really thought about it—and realized for the first time how brave those first colonists of Wunderland and Plateau and Jinx and the rest had been.
There were holos of allegedly dissected “aliens,” too: cartilaginous ribs that covered the stomach region, blood that varied in color between purple and orange, presumably an analogue for arterial and venous, streams of data that purported to be DNA codings, skeletons, analysis of alien alimentary-canal contents and muscle tissue purporting to contain odd proteins, sheets of what was allegedly alien script, looking like claw marks. There were also holos of what purported to be alien skulls.
“There’s possibly a connection with your other work,” the controller went on. “Or in any case, it seems to fall into our area as much as anyone else’s. Your clearance has been upgraded one threshold in case you need special information. With our own people, normal need-to-know should be enough.”
I was getting signals that Alfred O’Brien was a nervous man taking a risk, and perhaps carrying me with him. I guessed opinion in the higher reaches was still divided on how to deal with this. A wrong decision, and early retirement; a very wrong decision, and…because, bizarre as it was, it could be serious.
Colonists were all volunteers, and could hardly be anything else. But they also went through rigorous screening and selection. It was quite right that rumors or reports of odd mental diseases in space could kill enthusiasm for colonizing ventures. And, yes, the ferocious three-meter tiger-cat images, however created, did have a disturbing quality about them. Somehow too many of them were difficult to look at for too long, whole or in pieces. But were they utterly unfamiliar? Why did I ask myself that question?
Deep, deep in memory, something stirred. What? I’d never seen anything much like these supposed aliens before, but…I looked at the dissection pictures again. There was the tiniest suggestion, somewhere in the back of my mind…
“The skulls might be a starting point,” I said.
“Oh. How so?”
“I feel they look…familiar somehow.”
“Good. It’s good if you’ve got a starting point, I mean.”
“Can I tell Arthur Guthlac about it? I know he’s been interested in biological history.”
“If you think so. But only what he needs to know.”
“It’s an odd job.”
“That’s why we need you.”
“It’s needle-in-a-haystack territory.”
“I know.” He picked up a sheet of paper and passed it to me. “I don’t know if it’s much of a start, but I’ve had the computers search for literary references to ‘space’ and ‘cat’ together. There isn’t much. Here’s one you might not know: An ancient Australian poem by an author Gwen Harwood, called ‘Schrödinger’s Cat Preaches to the Mice’:”
Silk whisperings of knife on stone,
due sacrifice, and my meat came.
Caressing whispers, then my own
choice among leaps by leaping flame.
What shape is space? Space will put on
the shape of any cat. Know this:
my servant Schrödinger is gone
before me to prepare a place…
I looked down to the end:
Dead or alive? The case defies
all questions. Let the lid be locked.
Truth, from your little beady eyes,
is hidden. I will not be mocked.
Quantum mechanics has no place
for what’s there without observation.
Classical physics cannot trace
spontaneous disintegration.
If the box holds a living cat
no scientist on earth can tell.
But, I’ll be waiting, sleek and fat.
Verily all will not be well
if, to the peril of your souls
you think me gone. Know that this house
is mine, that kittens by mouse-holes
wait, who have never seen a mouse.
He handed me a card embossed with the symbol of a level of authority I had encountered only two or three times before.
“Stay away from ’docs,” he said. “That’s your permit to do so. In fact your order to do so. No medication till further notice. We’re turning you loose exactly as you are.”
“You do believe in taking risks, don’t you?”
“You’re not a schizie. You won’t kill anyone. At least, I don’t think so. But this is an intellectual problem. You’ll need that intuition of yours as sharp as you can get it. And your wits sharp, too.
“‘Space will put on the shape of any cat…’” he quoted again as I left him. “It was written four hundred years ago.”
• CHAPTER 2
My first-year politics tutorials this week dealt with Nazi foreign policy and the lead-up to the war. I decided to loosen things a bit and just generally chat…How strange that university politics students should never have heard of the little ships that took the British Expeditionary Force off the beaches in May 1940. Or de Gaulle. Or a Spitfire. No knowledge of any of it…This was the stuff that was supposed never to be forgotten thirty, forty years ago. Next week we do the Holocaust…
—Letter to the author, October 10, 1991
&n
bsp; Snow whirled round. A snarling roar shook the eardrums. Over the crest of a snow-covered ridge a saber-toothed head appeared, fangs dripping. With a single fluid motion the feline leaped to the top of the rock, poised for a moment, the eyes in its flat head blazing at us.
I caught myself flinching, sudden instinctive terror mixing with awe at the size and malevolence of the thing. Shrieking, the great cat launched itself through the air at us, its body suddenly seeming to elongate to an impossible narrowness.
It passed between us and there was a scream of animal pain and terror as its huge incisors sank into its prey. Blood spurted.
Arthur Guthlac turned off the holo, and the Pleistocene gallery faded.
“Kids love it,” he said. “For some reason the Smilodon’s even more popular than Tyrannosaurus Rex these days.”
“Love it! It actually scared me!”
“Preschool children still have vestiges of the savage in them. You of all people should understand that. They like to be scared. They like a bit of bloodshed too.”
“I’m aware of it,” I told him. “Part of my job is to detect antisocial behavior early. And I don’t particularly like to be scared.”
Guthlac laughed. A laugh with an edge in it.
“But you, my dear Karl, are a mature, adjusted human being. Not one of our little savages.”
Warm air flowed gently round as the gallery returned to its normal temperature. A voice announced the museum would be closing in ten minutes as we stepped out of the gallery into the corridor.
I wondered if he was aware of the real meaning of the word “adjusted” in my case. It probably didn’t matter.
“That’s better,” I told him. “You make this place a lot too cold for comfort.”
“The Pleistocene was cold. That’s why you had the mammoth and mastodon, the cave bear and the dire wolf and the saber-toothed tiger. Big bodies save heat. An age of giants and ice. Then a monkey adapted to the cold by growing a big brain and that was the end of the story.”
“I know that. But we’re not in the Pleistocene now. I don’t know how you can choose to work in these conditions.”