by Larry Niven
Or that's what the dockyard scuttlebutt was saying. No one at Jared Cuiller's lowly rank—lieutenant commander, with two years to go on the list for his next promotion—had ever been invited to read the Admiralty's secret reports.
On the basis of HQ's analysis, the Navy had received appropriations to restock its fleet, at least in part, and establish a cordon of patrol vessels around the Patriarchy to monitor and screen future kzinti activities. They had a huge volume of space to cover, and resources were still spread thinly. So Callisto was a General Products No. 2 hull bought at auction, stripped down to its keyway holes, and rebuilt up from the slippery monomolecular surface, inside and out. Cuiller knew that this was the hull's fifth incarnation, but what their vessel had been before—scout ship, miner, or pleasure yacht—not a scrap of material remained to show. Now it was simply a slender, 200-meter-long spindle hastily fitted out with inertial thrusters, regenerative weapons, sensors and controls, sleeping cocoons and energy pods, and a massive hyperdrive engine, assigned a small scratch crew, and pressed into blockade-and-reconnaissance service—although the Navy preferred to say "deep-space survey."
As to who was right in the debate, Jook or Gambiel, and whether the Patriarchy was indeed ready for another fight, Jared Cuiller wasn't even trying to decide anymore. About the mass of the approaching body, the navigator probably knew more than Daff Gambiel. But about the warmaking capabilities of the Patriarchy, Cuiller would trust the weapons officer's instincts over Hugh Jook's. After all, the Jinxian had trained to take on the kzinti hand-to-hand.
But, then, maybe in this debate the more relaxed Jook was right. Gambiel's Hellflare tattoo might be making him too eager for a fight. Cuiller tried to place himself in the mental state of a human male who had prepared most of his adult life for just one battle. To pit his entire strength in one synaptic burst against 200 kilograms of angry catflesh tipped with ten-centimeter claws. That would put unique stresses on anyone's body and mind. After all, could a man be truly at ease knowing exactly how, if not when, he will die?
But, then, the tactical computers at HQ did back up Gambiel's version. Jook was being too simplistic in thinking that the last war had cured the kzinti of their natural instincts. The universe was a perpetual challenge to the kzin psyche, pure and simple. It was there to be stalked and seized. And perhaps this time they would practice a more subtle form of stalking and less outright seizing.
No, Cuiller sighed, neither of his crewmen had the final answer. Nor, probably, did the technical experts at Naval HQ. And Cuiller himself didn't, either. He was just going to follow fleet orders and see.
* * *
Nyawk-Captain dreamed of monkeys and his fingers twitched. He hung in the control cradle at his leading station aboard Cat's Paw. The interior spaces of the former Scream of Vengeance-class interceptor were eaten up with extra ship's stores and a station cradle for a third kzin. So the crew members had no private space to themselves at all and only a cruelly limited area where they could loosen their limbs—one at a time, in rotation. Otherwise they ate and slept while plugged into their panels. And dreamed there, too.
For most kzinti, if their dreams ever crossed the sweat-scent of human flesh or their minds played on the shallow softness of a human face, the experience was pleasurable. Then breath quickened, the tail twitched, ears fanned out, fingers and toes splayed slightly, and the tips of razor claws peeked involuntarily from behind black pads.
But when the monkeys danced in Nyawk-Captain's dreams, his breath stopped, his tail went stiff and his fingers curled nervously, anchoring his bulk into the crash couch. Nyawk-Captain—reputed to be the best fighter pilot of his generation—in his secret dreams was terrified.
Years ago, during Most Recent War, he had been Tactician aboard a much larger vessel. His duties there had once required him to be present when Telepath peeled the brain of a human prisoner. This specimen also served as Tactician aboard his own human ship, although he had his own name, too. Chatterjee. While Telepath gnawed at the edges of Chatterjee's awareness, seeking the plan of an expected attack, the human had thrown up unrelated memories and concepts as a screen. And Telepath had reported them faithfully. One of these memories—or perhaps it was simply an evasion—concerned a person called Hanuman.
This Hanuman was either a clan chief or a god, depending. Chatterjee did not make the distinction clear. Hanuman spoke and moved as a full-grown person, and yet he had a sense of morality more suited to a kzitten. He told lies and untrue stories for amusement. He played tricks on his enemies in battle, dodged their arrows, and routinely ambushed them instead of engaging them openly and honorably. Then he danced and laughed when they were discomfited.
From Chatterjee's telling, filtered through Telepath's own awareness, it was uncertain that Hanuman was even, in fact, a human Being. One part of him was otherness: pre-human or perhaps proto-human. Chatterjee sometimes called him a "monkey." Monkeys, it seemed, had no true adulthood but lived and danced as lively, happy, cruel children all their lives. They screamed and threw things. They told lies, stole from each other, taunted their peers and inferiors, and made a joke of anything they could not desecrate or steal. They ate fruit out of the trees or the flesh of their dead, and copulated with great frenzy at any time.
These monkeys depicted an aspect of personal behavior that stayed in Tactician's, later Nyawk-Captain's, mind long after this Chatterjee was dead. Any creatures that could waste such a huge fraction of their lifetimes in frivolous, carefree, and even disgusting activities—and not die of them—must be very powerful indeed and have brain capacity to spare. They must be devastating.
This Hanuman, whom Chatterjee had revered as either leader or god, a man or a monkey, embodied for Nyawk-Captain all that was creative, lively, resourceful, and awful about the humans. This god had no fighting skills worth mentioning but instead defeated all his enemies by trickery. Low, unworthy—and devastating.
The interrogation incident had driven another nail of fear home into Nyawk-Captain's brain. While this Chatterjee was a full human, he considered himself different from those around him, even from his shipmates. He thought of himself as "Hindu-human," and seemed to be more Hindu than human in the shape of his life and thoughts.
Nyawk-Captain tried to imagine sapient beings who could endure diverging breeds and varieties—Hindu, Chinese, Belter, Lunatic, Russky, American, Wunderlander, Englishman, Jinxian—and not fight each other down to a single pride governed by a single patriarchic family! The fact that so many could live and work together, without continual killings, spoke to Nyawk-Captain of great inner resources, huge mental agility, varying strengths. Perhaps the humans had grown so cunning through learning to deal with the differences among themselves. Frightening thought! A race that did not need enemies to fight and test itself against, because it provided its own.
In Nyawk-Captain's dreams, the monkeys danced and chattered, and he trembled.
* * *
The fifty-eighth day, and twenty light-years beyond Known Space . . .
". . . not put your butts in the 'cycler!"
Sarah Krater's soprano voice rang out, echoing off hard surfaces of the ship's interior and rising toward an unpleasant screech. From the context of her complaint, Jared Cuiller could identify without effort both her location and the object of her wrath. Callisto's communications officer, linguist, and fourth crew member had cornered Hugh Jook in the cocoon that was fitted out for the combination ship's head and recycler unit.
"Now, Sally," the Wunderlander's voice began in his usual, joking defense. "I've told you a dozen times that cocasoli is a perfectly harmless alkaloid derivative, which the 'cycler absorbs completely. The carrier is a totally organic fiber which is likewise converted. You can't be tasting it."
"Wrong!" she barked. "It makes lime gel taste like wet leaves."
"Then the machinery must be a tad out of adjustment."
"I checked. It isn't. If you would just not put your butts down the can—"
Whic
h was where that conversation had started, Cuiller thought. It looked like time for him to intervene officially. The captain unhooked from the forward control yoke and exchanged glances with Gambiel, who was strapped in beside him.
"Better you than me," the Jinxian said quietly.
Cuiller did not reply. But he took a leisurely pace, choosing his handholds carefully, as he worked his way downship.
Four people should not be asked to seal themselves in a glass bottle and venture beyond the magnetosphere of a G-type sun, he told himself. They should not have to hurl themselves through a dimension of the universe that had no dimension. And even though they dropped out of hyperdrive regularly to examine new systems, prepare charts, and leave probes, four people should not have to go for months with no other distractions than they could devise for themselves inside a crammed hull.
But four people was optimal minimum crew size, or so the Bureau of Personnel had ruled. Four was the minimum of personality variations, sleep cycles, pairs of hands, and skill levels required for an extended patrol. A crew of four has the available brain capacity and viewpoints to interact as a population. And when disagreements arose, as now, four allowed for a referee, a judge and jury, or even an innocent bystander.
Four was the optimal minimum—if, Cuiller reminded himself, you had the right four.
It took a lot, Cuiller knew, to break through Jook's easygoing persona. But even as a failed aristocrat, the Wunderlander had developed habits and tastes certain to bring out the worst side of people who had not enjoyed parallel advantages. Like Sarah Krater, who had been brought up under the strict air disciplines of a Belter mining cooperative. She would react instinctively against anyone who wanted to burn fibers and chemicals in the open, and draw the residue into his lungs, just for the psychological effects, no matter how harmless the substances under discussion.
Rather than change his behavior to suit her, Jook had simply adopted a light and laughing tone. His personal defense mechanism was to let others go their own way, and he only asked the same of them in return. Nothing seemed to bother him too much. And the navigator did have his good points. Jook was levelheaded and philosophical, with a bent for mathematics and ship propulsion technologies.
Krater, by contrast, was touchy and aggressive. A perfectionist in her work, she was always finicky about her personal surroundings and was quick to note the shortcomings of others. That sort of tightass was out of character for a trained xenobiologist. Perhaps greater perspective did not, as Cuiller had once thought, provide for greater tolerance. But then, Belters could be strange. She was also ambitious and, from her first day aboard had made clear that she did not intend to stay with "this bucket of a patrol ship" for very long. Krater wanted a command of her own, and to get that she would have to transfer aboard a bigger vessel and begin working her way up into the command structure. As Callisto had no formal wardroom and was not going in any direction that would win ship and crew much distinction—at least, not on a peacetime patrol—Krater's frustrated ambitions spilled over into her personal contacts.
Double that frustration once she had learned that both Cuiller and Jook had served on those bigger ships and then been rotated down to Callisto. She was beginning to realize that accidents can happen in a Navy career, even hers.
And, much to the frustration of the three males in the crew, the willowy Belter had also announced her intention of keeping all her shipboard contacts purely professional. She was married to her career, she pointedly told them, and didn't fool around on the side. But that was hard if you were a healthy young man sharing less than 12,000 cubic meters of mostly machinery-filled space with a healthy young woman whose eyes were a lovely shade of violet, whose cheekbones stood out above a full and pouting mouth, and whose long, blonde roostertail haircut begged to be stroked.
When Cuiller reached the cocoon's dilated sphincter, he found Krater and Jook floating practically nose to nose. They were about three seconds from an exchange of blows.
"Do you two want to go back to the gym-bag and strap on the pads?" he asked.
Jook half-turned away at the sound, but Krater remembered her basic training and never took her eyes from the vacant point off her opponent's left shoulder.
If it came to hard-edged hands, Cuiller would bet on the woman. Growing up in a near-weightless environment, she had the reach on Jook and was strong from an early life of wrestling rock drills and mandibles. The navigator once boasted that he had never lifted anything heavier than a booktape, a fork, or a squinch racquet.
"I guess not, Cap'n." Jook shook his head.
"Any time, boy," Krater said into his ear.
"Cut some slack, Lieutenant," Cuiller told her. ". . . And that's not a suggestion."
"Yes, sir." And still she did not relax the position of her limbs.
"Now, Lieutenant! Make space!"
Her hands flexed out of their semi-rigid, thumbs-in shape and her arms came down. Krater pirouetted a half-meter away from the navigator.
"That's better. . . . Sarah, I think you ought to take that 'cycler apart and find out why it's making you sick. Adjust it to your own taste specs, if you like."
"If that means I've got to clean out his shit, Captain—"
"It means you'll tend to the equipment, Lieutenant. Your turn on the roster."
She glared at him, then lifted her chin. "Aye, sir."
"Jook, take station forward and get me a report on our mission profile to date."
"That I can tell you at once. We're only—"
"With a detailed threat analysis, based on all reported contacts logged throughout the Chord. Don't rush yourself. Do it right. Work on saving our asses."
"But, sir! We know the kzinti aren't coming through here. That cyber projection is just—"
"Just the reason we're out here. But I don't want you taking an expert system's analysis on faith. Do your own homework. Down in the library. Move it."
"Aye, Cap'n."
With Jook and Krater moving in different directions, on assignments that would occupy each of them for an hour or more, Cuiller could relax for a bit—unless Gambiel wanted to pick a fight, too. The commander drifted back up to the control yoke.
"Get it all settled?" Gambiel asked.
"Not that it's your business," Cuiller said shortly.
"Sorree!"
* * *
Nyawk-Captain awakened slowly. He spat the rusty taste of fear out of his mouth as soon as his brain had caught up with local reality and he could herd the monkeys back to their secret hiding places.
He checked the navigational repeaters at his station, verifying that Weaponsmaster had not let them drift off course during his watch at helm. No, Cat's Paw was still headed far out into neutral space, away from the network of manned patrols and passive trip-monitors that the humans maintained along their nearer borders with a much-reduced Patriarchy.
The course his ship was following had evolved among the Patriarch's closest strategists. These were kzinti so highly placed that each one had a full name, and it was death ever to speak of them as mere "strategists," even in the aggregate. Except that they and their counsels were secret, and thus Nyawk-Captain and his crewmates could not know their names, and so could never speak of them. Clever.
Their plan, like its origins, was a similarly constructed puzzle, a series of boxes within boxes for the humans to discover and open. This was not perhaps as satisfying for Nyawk-Captain and the other kzinti as a scream and a leap, nor as honorable as one massive attack. But it was more likely to win results under the current circumstances.
A plan almost worthy of Hanuman.
Cat's Paw and three other similarly enhanced interceptors were moving secretly out into space that the humans had not yet explored. There, unobserved, each would soon turn and find its own path back into human space. Each would pass through a different sector, and the timing of their entries would be staggered, too, just enough to appear to human strategists as individual attacks. The humans would dismiss these t
ransits as the movement of renegade kzinti, secret traders and raiders, and so not responsible to the Patriarchy and the humiliating papers that had been signed after Most Recent War.
Each interceptor would make an isolated attack against a single human world. The Paw at Margrave, the others simultaneously at Gummidgy, Canyon, and Silvereyes. With the new weapons they now carried, they could do a massive amount of planetary damage. Of course, the Paw would have to move very quickly through the Lambda Serpentis system—and find the Margravians very much asleep—if they were to be successful and still escape with their lives into deep space on the far side of the system.
But escape was not important. Survival was not important. Timing was everything.
The suddenness and brutality of the attacks would awaken the humans' highest strategists to a possible military action. But an action falling where? To meet it, the humans would spread their fleet. "Trying to cover all the bases" was the human phrase his orders had referenced. It had the smell of a sports term, and true kzinti did not practice sports.
While the humans dispatched their ships and spent their resources investigating and healing the four damaged worlds, the kzinti Last Fleet would be riding behind only one of the interceptors. Just how far depended on the humans' calculated reaction time and the reports of brave kzinti agents among the survivors on those shattered worlds. When human strength was at maximum dispersal, the Last Fleet would overwhelm the patrol screen, engulf the target planet, consolidate, and move on. The fleet would take two, three, perhaps even four key colony worlds before the humans could regroup and mount a defense. But by that time momentum and purpose would be riding with the kzinti. Confusion and alarm would be hindering the humans.
As a plan it was flawless.
As an actual attack, it just might work.
But timing would be everything.
* * *
On the seventy-first day, and twenty-four light-years into the unknown . . .