by Larry Niven
And a wonderful sunset for one mustered-out stingship pilot to sit and savor, particularly if he was drunk enough. Unfortunately the bottle was empty.
A sudden spasm of rage sent it flying, out to crash among the other debris along the front of the Ritterhaus. The ancient government house had been a last strongpoint for the kzinti garrison in Munchen. Scaffolding covered the front of the mellow stone, but the work went slowly while more essential repairs were attended to. Much Centauran industry had been converted to war production during the occupation, and what survived was now producing for the United Nations Space Navy and Wunderland's own growing forces.
Jonah lurched erect, mouth working against the foul taste, blinking gritty eyes. For a moment the sensation reminded him—
"Oh, Finagle, I hurt."
They had come from Earth, Jonah and Ingrid and the artificial intelligence ship Catskinner, and the ship's computer had found something that shouldn't have been there. A ship that had floated in the Belt for so long that it had accreted enough dust to become an asteroid. A ship held unchanging in stasis, unchanging for billions of years, until it was awakened. Not just the ship. The Master.
Jonah shuddered.
That had been one of the times the thrint's mind-control had slipped. It had been busy, keeping control of all the minds of the Free Wunderkind flotilla, trying to find out what had gone on during the several billion years it had lain in timeless stasis.
Eyes blurring, burning, skin hanging loose and gray and old around the wrists of bleeding hands, speckled with ground-in-dirt.
Thrint tended to forget to tell their slaves to remember personal maintenance; they were not a very bright species. What humans would call an IQ of 80 was about average for Thrintun, and Dnivtopun hadn't been a genius by Slaver standards. That had been almost the worst of the subconscious humiliation. The Master had been so stupid—and under the Power you couldn't help but try to change that, to rack your brains for helpful solutions. Help the Master!
Jonah had been the one to crack the problem of making a new amplifier helmet to increase the psionic powers of the revenant Slaver. That would have made Dnivtopun master of the Alpha Centauri system and every human and kzin living there. Made him ruler of a new Slaver empire, because there had been fertile thrint females and young in the ship, the ship encased in its stasis field and the asteroid that had accreted about it over the thousands of millennia.
He moaned and pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. Yes, he'd broken free for an instant at the end, enough to struggle with Markham. Ulf Reichstein-Markham, who had liked the telepathic hypnosis the Slaver imposed. The psychists had erased Markham's memories of that; now he was a hero, space-guerrilla kzin-killing Resistance fighter and stalwart of the Provisional Government. The psychists hadn't been nearly as thorough with Jonah Matthieson, one-time Terran Belter, ex-combat pilot in the UNSN, assassin of Chuut-Riit. They'd just given him a strong block about the secret aspects of the affair, and turned him loose. He was supposed to recover fully in time, too. Not soon enough to have his job back, of course. No one wanted an unstable combat pilot. They'd give him his rank, but he'd be a paper shuffler, a useless man in a useless job. So he'd asked to go home. Belter prospectors were slightly mad anyway. And he learned that a hyperdrive transport back to Sol was out of the question, and there wasn't even a place for him in cold sleep aboard a slowship. Shuffle paper or get lost. Of course they'd hinted there was one other possibility, one he'd hated even more than shuffling paper.
He'd been bitter about that. That had led to more trouble . . .
A man was walking by, with the brisk step of someone with a purpose and somewhere to go.
"Gut Herr, spare some money to feed a veteran?" Jonah asked. He despised himself each time he did this, but it was the price of the oblivion he craved.
"Lieber Herr Gott," the man's voice rasped. Wunderland was like that, conservative: they even swore by God instead of Finagle. It had been settled by North European plutocrats uneasy with the way Earth was heading under the UN and the ARM. "You again! This is the third time today!"
Startled, Jonah looked up. The face was unfamiliar, clenched and hostile under a wide-brimmed straw hat. The man's suit was offensively white and clean, a linen bush-jacket. Some well-to-do outbacker in town on business.
"Sorry, sir," Jonah said, backing up slightly. "Honest—I didn't look at your face, just your hands and the money. Please, I won't hit on you again, I promise."
"Here." A solid gold-alloy coin, another Wunderlander anachronism. "And here, another. To keep your memory fresh. Do not bother me again, or the polezi I will call." Frowning: "How did a combat veteran come to this?"
Jonah ground the coins together in his fist, almost tempted to throw them after the retreating back of the spindly low-gravity. Because the bloody ARM is punishing me! he screamed mentally. Because I spoke out! Not anything treasonable, no secrets, no attempt to evade the blocks in his mind. Just the truth, that they were still holding back technological secrets—had even while Earth faced defeat at kzinti hands—that they were conspiring to put the whole human race back into stasis, the way they had in the three centuries of the Long Peace, before the kzinti came. That the ARM had secret links, secret organizations on all the human-settled worlds. Buford Early, Prehistoric Man, has frozen me out. The ARM general probably thought he was giving a gentle warning, tugging on his clandestine contacts until every regular employment was closed to Matthieson. So that Matthieson would come crawling back, eventually.
Early was at least two centuries old, probably more. Old enough to remember when military history was taught in the schools, not forbidden as pornography. Possibly old enough to have fought against other humans in a war. He was very patient . . . and he had hinted that Jonah would make a good recruit for the ARM, if he altered his attitudes. Perhaps even for something more secret than the ARM, the thing hinted at by the collaboration with the oyabun crimelords here in the Alpha Centauri system. Jonah had threatened to reveal that.
Go right ahead, Lieutenant, Buford had said, laughing. It creased his carved-ebony face, gave you some idea of how ancient he really was, how little was left of humanity in him. Laughter in the gravel voice: It's been done before. Whole books published about it. Nobody believes the books, and then they somehow don't get reprinted or copied.
"Finagle eat my eyes if I'll crawl to you, you bleeping tyrant," Jonah whispered softly to himself.
He looked down at the coins in his hand; a five-krona and a ten. Enough to eat on for a couple of weeks, if you didn't mind sleeping outside in the mild subtropical nights. Of course, that made it more likely someone would kick your head in and rob you, in the areas where they let vagrants settle. Another figure was crossing the square, a woman this time, in rough but serviceable overalls and a heavy strakkaker in a holster on one hip.
"Ma'am?" Jonah asked. "Spare some eating money for a veteran down on his luck?"
She stopped, looking him up and down shrewdly. Stocky and middle-aged, pushing seventy, with rims of black under her fingernails. Not one of the tall slim mobile-eared aristocrats of the Nineteen Families, the ones who had first settled Wunderland. A commoner, with a hint of a nasal accent to her Wunderlander that suggested the German-Balt-Dutch-Danish hybrid was not her native tongue.
"Pilot?" she said skeptically.
"I was, yes," Jonah said, bracing erect. He felt a slight prickle of surprise when she read off the unit and section tabs still woven into the grimy synthetic of his undersuit.
"Then you'll know systems . . . atmosphere training?"
"Of course."
"We'll see." The questions stabbed out, quick and knowledgeable. "All right," she said at last. "I won't give you a fennig for a handout, but I could have a job for you."
Hope was more painful than hunger or hangover. "Who do I have to kill?" he said.
She raised her brows, then showed teeth. "Ach, you joke. Good, spirit you have."
She held out a belt unit, an
d he laid a palm on it as hope flickered out. There would be a trace on it from the net, General Early would have seen to that. There had been other prospects.
"Hmm," she grunted. "Well, a good record would not have you squatting in the ruins, smelling . . ." She wrinkled her nose and seemed to consider. "Here." She pulled out a printer and keyed it, then handed him the sheet it extruded, together with a credit chip. "I am Heldja Eldasson, project manager for Skognara Minerals, a Suuomalisen company.
"If you show up at the listed address in two days, there will be work. I am short several hands; skilled labor is scarce, and my contract will not wait. The work is hard but the pay is good. There's enough money in the chip to keep you blind drunk for a week, if that's your problem. And enough for a backcountry kit, working clothes and such, if you want the job. Be there or not, as you please."
She turned on her heel and left. Alpha Centauri had set, but the eye-straining point source that was Beta was still aloft, and the moon.
"I won't spend the chip on booze," he said to himself. "But by Murphy's ghost, I'm going to celebrate with the coins that smug-faced farmer gave me."
The question of where to do it remained. Then his eyes narrowed defiantly. Somewhere to clean up first, then—yes, then he'd hit Harold's Terran Bar. It would be good to sit down and order. Damned if he would have taken Harold Yarthkin's charity, though. Not if he were starving.
The chances were he'd be the only Terran there, anyway.
CHAPTER THREE
Minister the Honorable Ulf Reichstein-Markham regarded the Terran with suspicion. The office of the Minister for War of the Provisional Government was as austere as the man himself, a stark stone rectangle on the top floor of the Ritterhaus. Its only luxuries were size and the sweeping view of the Founder's Memorial and Hans-Jorge Square; for the rest it held a severely practical desk and retrieval system, a cot for occasional sleep, and a few knickknacks. The dried ear of a kzin warrior, a picture of Markham's mother—who had the same bleakly handsome, hatchet-faced Herrenmann looks with a steel-trap jaw—and a model of the Nietzsche, Markham's ship during most of his years as a leader of Resistance guerrillas in the Serpent Swarm, the asteroid belt around Alpha Centauri. Markham himself was a young man, only a little over thirty-five; blond asymmetric beard and wiry close-cropped hair, tall lean body held ramrod-tight in his plain gray uniform.
"Why, exactly, do you wish to block further renovation of the Munchen Scholarium?" he said, in his pedantic Wunderlander-flavored English. It held less of that guttural undertone than it had a year ago.
General Buford Early, UN Space Navy, lounged back in the chair and drew on his cheroot. He looked to be in late middle age, perhaps eighty or ninety, a thick-bodied black man with massive shoulders and arms and a rumpled blue undress uniform. The look was a finely crafted artifact.
"Duplication of effort," he said. "Earth and We Made It are producing technological innovations as quickly as interstellar industry can assimilate them—faster than the industries of Wunderland and the Serpent Swarm can assimilate them. Much cheaper to send data and high-end equipment directly here, now that we have the hyperdrive, and hyperwave communications. You're our forward base for the push into kzinti space; the war's going to last another couple of years at least, possibly a decade, depending on how many systems we have to take before the kzin cry uncle."
Markham's brow furrowed for a moment, then caught the meaning behind the unfamiliar idiom.
"The assault on Hssin went well," he pointed out.
That was the nearest kzin-held system, a dim red dwarf with a nonterrestrial planet; the assault that took the Alpha Centauri system had been mounted from there. UN superluminal warships and transports had ferried Wunderlander troops in for the attack. Early could read Markham's momentary, slightly dreamy expression well. Schadenfreude, sadistic delight in another's misfortune. Hammerblows from space, utterly unexpected, wrecking the ground defenses and what small warships were deployed at Hssin. Then the landing craft floating down on gravity polarizer drive, hunting through the shattered habitats and cracking them one by one. Hssin had unbreathable air, and it had been constructed as a maintenance base more than a fortress.
"True," Early nodded. "And that's just what Wunderlanders should concentrate their efforts on—direct military efforts. Times have changed; it doesn't take decades to travel between Sol and Alpha Centauri any more. With the Outsider's Gift”—the hyperdrive had been sold to the human colonists of We Made It by aliens so alien they made kzinti look familiar—“star systems don't have to be so self-sufficient anymore."
Markham's frown deepened. "Wunderland is an independent state and not signatory to the United Nations treaties," he pointed out acerbically.
Early made a soothing gesture, spreading his hands. The fingers moved in a rhythmic pattern. Markham's eyes followed them, the pupils growing wider until they almost swallowed the last gray rim of the iris.
"You really don't care much about the Scholarium, do you?" the Terran said soothingly.
Markham nodded, his head moving slowly up and down as if pulled on a string.
"True. It vas of no use to us during the occupation, und now makes endless trouble about necessary measures." His accent had grown a little thicker.
"There are so many other calls on resources. And it really is politically troublesome."
Another nod. "Pressing for early elections. Schweinerie! What does nose-counting matter? Ve soldiers haf the understanding of Vunderland's problems. The riots against the Landholders must be put down! Too many of my colleagues prejudices against their social superiors haf."
"The alliance with the UN is important. We have to stand by our allies while the war is on, after all."
This time Markham seemed to frown slightly, his head jerking as if it tried to escape some confinement. Early moved his fingers again and again in the rhythmic dance, until the Wunderlander's face grew calm once more.
"True. For ze present."
"So you'll deny their application for additional funds."
"Ja." Early snapped his fingers, and Markham started.
"And if you have no further matters to discuss, Herr General?" he said, impatiently keying the system on his desk.
"Thank you for your time, sir," Early replied, standing and saluting.
* * *
"You got what you wanted?" the man who called himself Shigehero Hirose said, as they walked out the guarded front entrance of the Ritterhaus.
The mosaic murals were under repair, their marble and iridescent glass tesserae still ripped and stained by the close-quarter fighting that had retaken the building. It would have been safer to use heavy weapons from a distance, but the Wunderlanders had been willing to pay in blood to keep the structure intact. Here the Founders had landed; here the Nineteen Families had taken the Oath. Early shook his head slightly at that; too much love of tradition and custom, even now; too much sense of connection to the past. The ARM would have to deal with that. That sort of thinking made people uncomfortably independent. Isolated anomic individuals were much easier to deal with, and also more likely to accept suitably slanted versions of past, present, and future.
There was still a slight scent of scorch in the lobby's air, and an even fainter one of old blood. The volunteer repair crews were cleaning each section by hand with vibrosweeps and soft brushes before they began adding new material.
"Most of what we wanted," Early said, with deliberate emphasis.
Hirose was the oyabun of his clan, and a man of some weight on this planet. The organization had grown during the lawless occupation years, and they were putting their accumulated wealth and power into shrewd investments now. Nevertheless, he bowed his head slightly as he answered:
"We, of course. Still, did not your psychists plant sufficient key commands last year?"
"We had to be careful. Markham was unstable, of course”—no wonder, after the resurrected thrint had used him as an organic waldo mechanism for weeks on end—“and besides, he'd
be no use if we altered his psyche too much. We were counting on his subconscious craving for an authority figure, but evidently that's not as vulnerable as we thought. And he's getting more and more steamed about the political situation here, the anti-aristocratic reaction. Ironic."
"Which in turn is favorable to us," Hirose said.
"Oh, in the long run, yes. Nothing more susceptible to secret manipulation than democracy."
He sighed; in many ways, the Long Peace back on Earth had been more restful. A successful end to the long clandestine struggle, with an official agency, the ARM, openly allowed to close down disrupting technology. There had been fierce struggles within the Brotherhood over releasing the hoarded knowledge, any of it, even in the face of the kzin invasion. Necessary, of course; but the hyperdrive was another complicating factor. Now the other colonized systems were no longer merely dumping-grounds for malcontents, safely insulated by unimaginable distance. They were only a hyperwave call away, and each one was a potentially destabilizing factor.
He sighed. Perhaps the struggle was futile . . . Never.
"There is another factor I'd like you to check into," he went on. "Montferrat and his friends, and Matthieson. They know entirely too much."
"An isolated group," Hirose said dismissively. "Matthieson is disintegrating, and alienated from the others."
"Perhaps; but knowledge is always dangerous. Why else do we spend most of our time suppressing it? And”—he paused—“there's a . . . synchronicity to that crew. They're the sort of people things happen around; threatening things."