by Larry Niven
I called ARM, and there was another deep expedition into ancient British archives. Both Curlewis and Maclean had retired early, owing to recurrent illness.
Births and deaths had to be registered in Britain before the end of the nineteenth century, and with their army numbers it was, as it turned out, relatively easy to track them down. Both had died in their fifties, of cancer. Colonel Vaughn had lived longer. I had to go to the Australian records to find his death certificate, but he had eventually died of cancer, too.
ARM’s bio-labs were still testing the skin and fur. So far they had been unable to match them with any known felines. In fact they had discovered quite radical differences. Now they were taking the dried tissue apart molecule by molecule, and from what they told me they were baffled by what they were finding.
But I still did not know the Vaughn-Nguyens’ motives. I ran the possibilities through my mind again.
We had started with the presumption that if the story of a madness involving delusions of horrible aliens was somehow taken seriously, the immediate result would be to inhibit space exploration, but, as had also been immediately obvious, a scam would be very hard to get away with, at least on Earth. ARM would have records of anyone selling heavily in space-industry shares.
Religious fanatics? Highly unlikely, we ran most cults.
Chiliastic panics? ARM knew about them too. It had acted to turn several of them off (or on). This could, given promotion, be a socio-political forest fire. But why light such a fire at all?
I even wondered if it was an internal ARM power play. ARM’s resources would make setting up even such a complex hoax relatively easy.
If that was so, there was nothing I could do. ARM was no monolith, I knew. There were conflicts in it, factions and sometimes accelerated promotions and early retirements, but the idea of ARM hoaxing ARM smelled wrong. If my intuition was worth anything at all, that wasn’t the answer.
The artifacts? Where had they come from? Bannerjee had mentioned the Belt. Space-grown metals?
Were the Vaughn-Nguyens Belter agents? Earth-Belt rivalry had been (I was told) relatively dormant for generations, but any inhibition of Earth’s space activities would give the Belt comparative advantage.
A story about warlike aliens—or of delusions about warlike aliens—would not do that in itself, but it could be a start point in long-term psychological gaming.
Next, perhaps, physical remains would be produced. Not virtual-reality products this time but “real” flesh-and-blood Jenny Hannifers grown in vats in Belt laboratories, perhaps the result of genetic tinkering with zoo felines. Had there been any thefts of genetic material from zoos recently? What genetic material might be available in Belt zoos or universities already?
Did the Belt have zoos? Living space was limited there but I knew that on Confinement Asteroid, which had been artificially created to provide an Earth-gravity environment for births, there had been a relatively large amount of extra space, years ago, space given over in part to parks, entertainment facilities and…zoos? But the Belt’s population was bigger now. I asked for up-to-date data on Confinement.
And surely on the bigger asteroids there would be at least a few domestic cats. There were cats in space, too, as mousers (the superefficient—as they always reminded us—Belt might have done better, but the bigger flatlander ships such as cruise-liners never seemed quite able to eliminate the very last mouse), as company for spacers on lonely ships and rocks and as medical aids. A number of people were still kept in low gravities because of heart conditions, and for an ailurophile the old prescription of stroking and playing with a cat was still one of the best nonmedical tranquilizers known. Hell! The Belters must have a complete library of DNA codes and could grow and sew and splice what they liked!
The hoax could be built up in stages. Next, an “alien” spaceship with specially grown “alien” cadavers could be crashed on Earth or conveniently be “found” in space. It might even be arranged that one or two Earth ships would disappear as further proof that here was something hostile and horrible in the black void reaching beyond the solar gravity-well. Something coming to get us. No, not just “something”: big orange catlike aliens. Hideous fanged carnivores in possession of technology far outreaching our own, images crafted by someone’s perverted genius so that they were a terror even to look upon…triggering ancestral memories of the ancient predator: the feline was the most perfect killing machine nature had produced. An image for the minds of Earth’s masses to seize on…Earth’s masses for whom boredom was today the greatest enemy and the future’s major anticipated social problem. An image came into my own mind of straw in a flame.
But why? I had got no closer to an answer to that question. I found it difficult to imagine any gain that could possibly justify such an investment of time and resources. Vaughn-Nguyen would tell us when a warrant was issued to take him in, but by then he might have alerted confederates and other damage might be done.
What if the motive was to impoverish Earth and weaken it relative to the Belt? Creating a war panic could do that.
That was a Belter-cunning idea: to win a real economic war by having Earth divert its resources preparing for a false war!
Would even the Belters be capable of such a crime? Even the Belters? What was I thinking of? Belters were people like us…surely? Thinking that way lay…an abyss.
I was no longer inclined to believe the conspirators wanted us to think they had been sent into a state of crazy delusions by some effect of prolonged deep-space travel. Their objective was more radical than that: They wanted us to believe the big catlike aliens were real. Hence the elaborate preparations at the Earth end.
Perhaps that was why some brave Earth crew member aboard the Angel’s Pencil had secretly rewritten the message program to destroy its credibility, by putting in not just warlike aliens but obviously impossible inertia-proof aliens with reactionless drives whose ship could match velocities with another travelling at 0.8 light-speed and ignore Delta-V!
Or was that too complex? Look at simpler economic motives: inhibiting space colonization would cause a stock-market crash. The block-busting. But then there would be a flow of money that could hardly be concealed for long. It could be done through dummy companies and cutouts, even off-planet. Again, the Belt would make a good hiding place for the real manipulations. There were rumors of many things hidden in the Belt, even weapon hoards. Vaughn-Nguyen was complaining to the museum that he wanted his property back.
War with the Belt? It was out of the question. Space flight and war were incompossible. What gave this whole investigation its crazy aspect in the first place was that to think or speak of a race simultaneously warlike and scientific made no more sense than to speak or think of a square circle. But economic war? Economic…what was the word…sabotage?
And there had been that accusing look in the Military Historian’s eyes. Why should that concern me? Look at what was before me: a massive, if still enigmatic, conspiracy that was quite enough to keep me fully occupied.
The Vaughn-Nguyens, whether principals or agents, had set themselves up to be investigated and to emerge with their story enhanced. The “tiger,” the provable source of the hoax and thus seeming at first a potential weakness, could be turned into a point in its favor: It would not have taken great resources of imagination to think of turning it into some sort of lost or exiled alien.
I called Bannerjee again. He thought he had begun to make a breakthrough with the language. He had identified certain frequently recurring groups of sounds and he had reasoned that anything purporting to be the records of a solitary creature stranded on an alien world would contain the word ‘I’. Further, anything purporting to be the record of a space-traveling alien could be expected to make reference to space, space travel, spaceships and drives. I suggested to him that he look for the word “bone” or “bones,” too, remembering the design I had seen.
The people who had cooked this up would want the language to be difficult—
very difficult—to translate, it would have no credibility otherwise, but not quite impossibly difficult—that would defeat whatever their purpose was (Their purpose? To create a belief in aliens? Why? Why?).
There had been fads from the late twenty-first century at least about such things, claims the pyramids and Easter Island statues and circles in cornfields were made by aliens. Hadn’t there been a film, suppressed centuries ago, about something called a Darth Vader? These had no foundation in any science, but they had made some people rich.
Were there still Cuthulu (was that the word?) worshipers? Believers in old gods, not unlike the various military fant cults. Had frustrated, space-sick Arthur been involved? I was quite sure, remembering his literary collection, that even if he was not a full military fant he was on that path. Had he played a part and deliberately pointed me at the Vaughn-Nguyens? No, I had sought him out myself. Had Alfred O’Brien pointed me before that, with his quotation of the strange poem? Why? Why?
Motive? Motive? I had a teasing feeling somewhere in the back of my skull that the whole answer to the inexplicable situation was something much simpler that I was missing.
Careful. Lose the plot and I was useless. But…the museum. I suddenly knew something about the museum was important…not the British museum, with its ancient vaults, but Arthur’s, with its educational displays and its ARM offices above. There was something there…
Something…I tried to let the images and associations run freely…Guthlac’s dreams of space were involved, of going to Wunderland…No, not Guthlac’s dreams, my own similar dreams, from long ago. Why was that important? The museum…Wunderland. They were connected?
Wunderland, the nearest and oldest-established extrasolar colony in the Centauri system, four and a half light-years away…settled originally largely by a North European consortium, led by families from Germany, Holland, Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. German…I had learned German long ago, with the dream of Wunderland in my head.
German, and the museum with its history of space flight and science displays…space flight…they were connected…an ancient rocket in flight…a German rocket…
And now a thought came driving in from my peculiar chemistry, enigmatic still, but hard and sharp and clear: the designations of V-1 and V-2 could not have stood for “weather rockets.”
The German word for weather was not spelled “Vetter” but “Wetter.” It was pronounced as if, to an English speaker, it began with a V, but it actually began with a W.
It mattered. At that moment I didn’t know why. But something felt different for me.
Isolated. Childless, long celibate. Schizies are often attractive. People like me less so. A secret policeman without attachments. Resentful, more or less, of my condition. Why was I suddenly feeling…no, there was no other word for…grateful? Grateful for loneliness and lovelessness? Grateful that I had no one? Why did the world suddenly seem more…not exactly more beautiful, but more…precious?
Leave it. Any answer would surface by itself, I had other puzzles before me.
Three British soldiers dying of cancer. But surely in those days cancer had not been a big killer? As I recalled, few people had lived long enough to develop it.
I made a cursory search to confirm my notion: old medical records in the public domain were fragmented like other historical records, but comparatively easy to access. I found in the memory banks a “Bill of Mortality” for London in one week of 1665. Not quite contemporary but close enough, something called “Consumption” had killed 134 people; “Feaver,” 309; “Spotted Feaver,” 101 and “Plague” an amazing 7,165. In all, 8,297 people had died that week, of diseases ranging from “Ague” to “Wormes,” but only one had died of “Canker.”
Back to the British Army records. The second photograph in the colonel’s book had been a group photograph: there were thirty officers lined up, all their names spelled out in the caption underneath.
Computer search again. Several of the officers (I was coming to feel familiar now with terms I had only come across in banned fiction and military-fant circles before) had died in India in the regiment. The death certificates of others were traced, following a trail through what had been the British Records Office that I was coming to know. Most had died of illnesses that no longer existed, but no others had developed cancer.
Alfred O’Brien did not call me back when I asked for clearance to access more information on the V-1 and V-2. That in itself was an answer: I knew now what they had really been.
Bannerjee called again. He had produced a display of script from a small viewing screen on the “book.” I guessed it would be in dots and claw marks.
A few hours later I was back in the controller’s office. I didn’t ask about the V-rockets. There was a code we all had that certain subjects, once indicated as forbidden, were not approached again. Besides, it wasn’t necessary.
“The script the Angel’s Pencil sent back, have you had it translated?”
“No. What would be the point?”
“Do it.”
“It’s not as if it’s a real language…there’s a lot of high priority work on at the moment.”
“They want us to come to the conclusion that an abnormal tiger shot in India hundreds of years ago was a lost alien and now we’re running up against the same creatures in space.”
“Who are they?”
“The Vaughn-Nguyens probably remembered the old stories and had the original idea. And there must be others. But I need more corroboration. And if I’m right, it’ll solve the whole problem of the Angel’s Pencil transmissions.”
I gave him the readouts of the hand computer from Australia. “And scan this in, too.”
He looked at it. “The same script.”
“Yes. And you know how it originated? In a computer obviously.”
“Let’s find the computer. They may not have wiped the program yet.”
It took time to get the additional computer access on top of what we had already and then to stitch in to what Bannerjee’s translation program had achieved, more time for the translation itself to come through. But now the translation was becoming easier with the preliminary work done and further with the great mass of material the Angel’s Pencil had beamed back. Some of this, purporting to be astronomical data and navigations tables, could be converted fairly quickly. A lot was lists: allegedly weapons inventories, fire-control tables, part of what appeared to be a poem. The poem gave us more military terms. Working from these, the translation of the electronic book gave us script and spoken language together.
There was still noise corruption, still untranslatable sounds, but the essential sense of it was there, and now computers rigged in series with gigabytes of capability were sharpening it all the time. There were extrapolations and guesses, but at the end there was a message:
Leg-bone shattered I cannot leap. Little time left. May Hero Death be mine! But life is end and time reflection.
Arriragh kharzz uru…Let avenging sons preserve bone in worship-shrine! And Patriarch, I demand, grant Full Name again: Skragga-Chmee! If I not Conquest Warrior High, I have great Conquest discovered. From my nneiierkrew glory for my House and the Patriarch.
The translator stumbled for a moment. The next sound was something like a live power cable dropped into water. Again, it could have been molecular or electronic distortion or an attempted simulacrum of nonhuman speech. Then the translation resumed:
Sons know I have drawn off hunt, as plan. Sons will come when torn to pieces usurper Tskrrarr-Nig and regain estates on Skrullai and Name. I details of my course left. Kz’eerkti! The Kzinti come upon you!
I have hunt well. Hot. Riper world for Conquest than any I have heard ancient tales. Great hunting territories each my son. ArrearrrLLaghh Karssht Krrar RsssRRLaghh…Preserve and honor bone Skragga-Chmee.
What hunting has been! I live as Fanged Gold mean kzintosh live, even…I the noble Kzrral’eeAHrawl kill I need no weapon but Sire’s wtsai. Until today. May Fanged God�
�s curse on Tskrrarr-Nig and his seed! May the God vomit forth his Soul!
Sight fail. Moment I trigger self-destruct Distant Prowler. Gravity-motor and armory will not fall to tool-using kz’eerkti’s hands.
I do kz’eerkti service, preserving them for Patriarchy. Kz’eerkti population grow fast…Survey before landing I see kz’eerkt-bands fighting in eights of places.
The computer adjusted at this point. It noted that an analogue had been identified and that the sound “kz’eerkt” was replaced by the word “monkey.” The translation seemed to be getting better now.
Passing over oceans I see monkey-ships carry primitive guns as though even fight on sea! Toothsome good sport clever slaves, but if discover weaponry Distant Prowler with chemical rifles, the next heroes reach this planet find smoking craters. Should monkeys find gravity polarizer, the God’s joke. But they will not.
Red-clad monkeys in white helmets hunters, one who leads chief. He will enter cave, I am sure. If he thinks I already dead, may lure him my claws.
I retreat to program self-destruct. My sons, that why I broke off battle when I knew wounds mortal! Not coward.
No way leave my sons clearer trail this place, they know my route to this system…planet with rudiments of industrialization only radiation signature of self-destruct will bring them to this place. My seed mighty hunters! Dying, I demand Honor’s Name Conquest Warrior finds this message convey message sons of Skragga-Chmee, usurped Lord of R’kkia on Skrullai! Demand, too, Honor’s Name, sons Warrior reward.
There was another gap. The screen adjusted as a new stream of data was fed in. The next words, the last words, were close to ordinary English.
Much pain. Hear monkeys and slave-beasts approach—I do not think I can say more.
Avenge me. Honor my bones. Warrior’s sons…
As I had predicted. It was the only way they could have fitted everything more or less together, once the tiger-man relics were found and identified, as, we now saw, they had been meant to be found and identified by someone like me.