by Larry Niven
They all recognized it, of course. Nobody could be in their line of work in the Jotuns and not recognize gold dust; for one thing, nothing else was that heavy for its size. They counted the bags, running their hands over them until their leader lashed the tarpaulin back.
“Ten, fifteen thousand krona,” one muttered. “Oh, the verguuz and bitches I can buy with this.”
“Buy with your share, if Ed Gruederman can keep your shitty head on your sisterfucking shoulders that long,” their leader replied. “Back! There’s an assessor’s office in Neu Friborg. We’ll stop there and get krona and sell the mule, and then head for Munchen or Arhus-on-Donau, the Jotuns is no place for an honest man these days—too many police. Look at them, letting ratcats wander around attacking humans.”
That brought grins and laughter. “What’s this, boss?” one asked, lifting the smooth featureless egg that balanced the mule’s load.
It shifted in his arms, and he dropped it with a cry of surprise. That turned to horror as it split open, and a spindly-limbed creature rose shakily from the twin halves; it was spider thin, blue-black and rubbery with three crimson eyes and a mouthful of teeth edged like a saw.
“Scheisse!” the bandit screamed. The mobile lips moved, perhaps in the beginning of wait.
The motion never had time to complete itself. A dozen rounds tore the little creature to shreds, until Gruederman shouted the bandits into sense—they were in more danger from each other’s weapons than from whatever-it-was. Even then three of them hacked it into unrecognizable bits with their machetes. Their fear turned to terror as the twin halves of the egg began to glow and collapse on themselves.
“We get out of here,” Gruederman said. “The advokats will take care of the bodies.” There were always a pack of them around a human settlement, waiting for garbage to scavenge, impossible to exterminate. “Come on. Money is waiting.”
“Not more than an hour or so,” Jonah said, with an odd sense of anticlimax. And yes, he thought. Sadness. The mangled remains of the tnuctipun were pathetically fragile in the bright light of Alpha Centauri. To come so far so long, for this. There Ain’t No Justice.
Tyra shied a stone at a lurking advokat that lingered, torn between greed and cowardice. It yelped and ran back a few paces; tears streaked her face.
“Come look at this!” Hans said sharply. He reached down with a stick and turned the dead kzin’s head to one side. Not much of the soft tissue was left after the advokat pack, but for some reason they had avoided the shattered bone.
Spots began a snarl of anger, then stopped as he saw what was revealed. The others stood beside him, watching the silver tendrils move in their slow weaving. Hands probed with the stick; several of the threads lashed towards it and clung for a moment. A button-sized piece of the same material was embedded in the shattered remains of Bigs’ inner ear.
“Stand back,” Spots said, unslinging his beamer.
None of the others quarreled with that; they crowded back with the gaping outbackers as the kzin stood on the edge of the creekbank and fanned a low-set beam across the bodies until nothing was left but calcinated ash. The tendrils of the device in his brother’s brain shriveled in the heat, and the central button exploded with a small fumf of released pressure. Spots kept up the fire until the wet clay was baked to stoneware, then threw the exhausted weapon aside.
“That…thing explains a good deal,” Jonah said; Tyra nodded, reached out a hand and then withdrew it.
“I am owed a debt of vengeance by a race three billion years dead,” Spots said, in a voice that might have been of equal age. “How shall I requite it?”
“There’s a debt of vengeance only about three hours old,” Hans said sharply. “Those tracks are heading for Neu Friborg.”
“Let’s do it then,” Jonah said grimly. “Let’s go.”
“Hey, it’s a good mule,” Ed Gruederman said. “But we don’t need it any more—we had good luck up in the mountains.”
His men were on their best behavior; grinning like idiots with their hats clasped to their chests, and keeping their mouths silent the way he had told them. Gruederman felt a swelling of pride at their discipline; he’d had to boot plenty of head to get them so well-behaved. A big crowd had gathered around the mule with the unbalanced load as the four of them led it into town. Well, nothing ever happened in little arse-pimple outback towns like this, even if it did have a weekly run down to the lowlands. Fine well-set men like themselves were an event. He caught the eye of a young woman, scowling when she looked away.
“This the assessor’s office?” he said. It should be, the best building in the town and the only one of prewar rockmelt construction.
“Ja.”
A young girl often or so had slid under the mule, examining the girth and then running a hand down the neck. She seemed interested in the bar-code brand; not many of those out in the hills, he guessed. Then she ran up the stairs into the building.
“How long did you say you’d been up in the Jotuns?” a man said, his tone friendly.
The crowd was denser now; Gruederman felt a little nervous, after so long in the bundu, but he kept his smile broad, even when he felt a plucking at his belt. Nothing there for a pickpocket to get, but in a few hours he’d be rich. With luck, he might be able to shed the others before he got to Munchen and cashed the assessor’s draft. Pickings were slim in the Jotuns these days. From what he heard, Munchen was a wide-open town with plenty of opportunities for a man with a little ready capital and not too many foolish scruples.
A woman in a good suit came down the steps with the little girl and touched a reader to the mule’s neck.
“That’s the one,” she said quietly.
Danger prickled at Gruederman’s spine. He shouted and leaped back, reaching for his machete. It was gone, hands gripped him, the honed point of his own weapon pricked behind his ear. He rolled his eyes wildly. All his men were taken, only one had unslung his weapon and it was wrestled away before he could do more than fire a round into the air. The crowd pushed in with a guttural animal snarl.
“Kill the bandits!” someone shouted.
The snarl rose, then died as the woman on the steps shouted and held up her hands:
“This is a civilized town, under law,” she said firmly. “Put them in the pen—tie them, and two of you watch each of them. We’ll call the police patrol back, they can’t have gone far.”
“Take your hands off me!” Gruederman screamed, as rawhide thongs lashed his wrists behind his back and a hundred hands pushed him through the welded steel bars of the livestock pen. “You can’t do this to me!” He spat through the bars, snapping his teeth at an unwary hand and hanging on until a stick broke his nose. “Motherfuckers! Kzinshit eaters!”
He screamed and spat through the strong steel until the square emptied.
“What do we do now, boss?” one of the men asked, from his slumped position on the floor of the cage.
“We fuckin’ die,” Gruederman shouted, kicking him in the head. His skull bounced back against the metal; it rang, and the bandit fell senseless.
Neu Friborg seemed deserted in the early evening gloaming, as Jonah and his party rode down the rutted main street. He stood in the saddle—painfully, since riding was not something a singleship pilot really had to study much—and craned his neck about. He could hear music, a slow mournful march, coming from the sidestreet ahead, down by the church.
A little ahead of the riders, Spots lifted his head and sniffed. “They are there,” he said flatly. “Also a large crowd of monke—of humans. Many armed. They do not smell of fear, most of them; only the ones we hunt.”
“Odd,” Jonah said.
He swung down from the saddle. Finagle, but that beast was trying to saw me in ha if from the crotch up, he thought. It had been downright embarrassing in front of Tyra, who seemed to have been born in the saddle from the way she managed it. She’d said something, about how a spacer must know more real skills than riding, though…quite a woman.
“Cautious but polite,” Jonah said, leading the way. “Remember that.” For Spots’ benefit; the kzin seemed to be in a fey mood, bloodthirsty as usual but relieved. Perhaps that his brother hadn’t broken an oath entirely under his own power, although Jonah suspected the tall kzin had been a willing victim at the start. The temptation was simply too great. There are times when I think Early is right, he mused. But they never last.
The little laneway opened out into a churchyard, and a field beyond that; the crowd stood in an arc about the outer wall of the graveyard. There, outside the circle of consecrated ground, four men were digging graves. A double file of armed men and women faced them, with Provisional Gendarmerie brassards. Seeing the genuine article, Jonah wondered how he could have been taken in by the bandits, even for a moment. He also decided that the mounted police were decidedly more frightening than the freelance killers had ever been. Beside him, Tyra checked for a moment at the sight of the tall crop-haired blond officer who led the firing party.
Jonah scanned the slab-sided Herrenmann face, and reluctantly conceded the family resemblance. If you subtract all the humor and half the brains, he decided. Aloud, in a whisper:
“Your brother?”
“Ib,” she confirmed.
One of the digging men swung his shovel too enthusiastically, and a load of dirt ended up in the middle grave. The man there climbed out and leaned over to swat the culprit with his hat, cursing with imaginative obscenity. Hans shaped a soundless whistle.
“Seems the Provisionals got in before us,” he said. “Can’t say as I’m sorry”
“Neither am I,” Jonah said.
“I am,” Spots grinned.
The bandits stood in front of the graves they had dug. The rifles of the squad came up and Ib Nordbo’s hand swung down with a blunt finality.
Whack. The bodies fell backward, and dust spurted up from the adobe wall of the churchyard behind. A sighing murmur went over the watching townsfolk, and they began to disperse. The Gendarmerie officer cleaved through them like a walking ramrod, marching up to the little party of pursuers.
“So,” he said, with a little inclination of his head. “Sister.”
“Brother;” she replied, standing a little closer to Jonah. Ib’s pale brows rose.
“This is most irregular,” he said, and turned to Jonah, ignoring the kzin and Hans as an obvious commoner. “You are the owner of the stolen mule and gold?”
“We are,” Jonah said with a nod.
“You understand, everything must be impounded pending final adjudication,” he said crisply. “Proper reports must be filed with the relevant—why are you laughing?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Jonah wheezed. Beside him, Tyra fought hiccups, and Hans’ face vanished into a nest of wrinkles. Even Spots flapped his ears, although his teeth still showed a little as he watched the work-crew shovel the dirt in on the dead bandits.
“Ah, life,” Jonah said at last; twin red spots of anger stood out on the young policeman’s cheeks. “Tanj. And now, we’d like a line to Herrenmann Claude Montferrat-Palme, and transport to Munchen—if you please, Herrenmann Lieutenant Nordbo.”
“Except for me,” Hans said, turning his horse’s head. He leaned down to shake hands. “Goin’ back. These people, they need me. You know where to reach me—always more fried chicken and rum for visitors!”
Jonah began to laugh again as the old man touched a heel to his horse and the outbackers fell in behind him.
“One happy ending at least,” he said.
“Oh, perhaps more,” Tyra said.
“Perhaps,” Spots murmured.
• CHAPTER NINETEEN
Buford Early’s laughter rolled across the broad veranda of the Montferrat-Palme manor. Evening had fallen, purple and dusky across the formal gardens, still with a trace of crimson on the terraced vineyards and coffee fields in the hills beyond. The ARM general leaned back in his chair puffing at his cigar until it was a red comet in the darkness. The others looked at him silently; Montferrat calm and sardonic as always, Jonah stony-faced, Tyra Nordbo openly hostile. Only Harold Yarthkin and his wife seemed to be amused as well, and they were not so closely involved in this matter. With the human-style food out of the way Spots had joined them, curled in one of the big wicker chairs with saucers of Jersey cream and cognac, still licking his whiskers at the memory of the live zianya that had somehow, miraculously, been found for him.
“Glad you’re happy,” Harold said sardonically, pouring himself a glass of verguuz and clipping the end off a cigar:
“Why shouldn’t I be?” Early said. “An excellent dinner—it always is, here, Herrenmann Montferrat-Palme—”
“Please, Claude.”
“—Claude. And fascinating table talk, also as usual. Politics aside, I enjoy the company here more than I have on Earth for a long, long time. But you said you had something to negotiate! It seems to me you’ve wound this affair up very neatly, and just as I would have wanted. All the evidence buried or gone, the bandits conveniently dead, and nothing of the tnuctipun but rumors. You might,” he added to Jonah, “consider writing this up as a holo script. It’d make a good one.”
“Not my field,” the ex-pilot said with a tight smile.
“You’re forgetting something, my dear fellow,” Montferrat said with wholehearted enjoyment. “You know the approximate location of the tnuctipun spaceship. We know the exact location, and as you love to point out, you don’t believe in swift direct action. We can get to it before you can—in fact, we just might have secured and moved it already. In which case you could look forever, it’s a big planet. Treasure-trove law is clearly on our side too, for what that’s worth. We could decipher some of those secrets you’re so afraid of, and send them off—to We Made It and Jinx, for example. Think of the joy you’d have trying to suppress it there.”
“No joy at all,” Early sighed, taking the cigar out of his mouth and concentrating on the tip. “I don’t suppose an appeal to your sense of responsibility for interstellar stability…no. You might try not to be so gleeful,” he went on. “What terms did you have in mind?”
“Well, my young friends here—” Montferrat nodded at Jonah, Tyra and the kzin “—and their rather older friend back in the outback, have all gone to a great deal of trouble and expense. I think they should be compensated. To about the extent of a hundred thousand krona each, after tax.”
“Agreed,” Early said, sounding slightly surprised. “What’s the real price?”
“Well, in addition, you might get the blacklisting on Jonah removed—and have him and Fra Nordbo given security clearance for interstellar travel.”
Tyra’s face lit up with an inner glow at the ARM general’s nod.
“And?” he said with heavy patience, sipping at his cognac.
“And you go home. Or to another star system, but you get out of Alpha Centauri.”
Early laughed again, more softly, and set the snifter down. “I hope you don’t think I’m the only agent the…ARM has?” he said.
Jonah cut in: “No. But you’re the smartest—or if you’re not, we’re hopeless anyway. It’s a start.”
“It will win me time, which I will use,” Montferrat added.
Early sat in silence, puffing occasionally, while the sun set finally; the stars came out, and a quarter moon, undimmed by Beta Centauri. A flash of shooting stars lit up the night, ghostly soft lightning across the hills and the faces of humans and the kzin.
“More time than you might expect,” he said. “Bureaucracies tend to get slower as they age, and mine…” More silence. “Agreed,” he said. “It’s time for me to move on, anyway. I’m getting too well known here. Lack of discretion was always my besetting sin. There’s still the war—we have to organize the ex-kzin slave worlds we’re taking as reparations—and doubtless other work will be found for me. Ich deinst, as they say.” He looked over at Montferrat. “Checkmate—for now,” he said, rising and extending his hand.
“For
now,” Montferrat agreed. “Harold here to hold the stakes?”
“Agreed; we can settle the details at our leisure.” He bowed to the ladies, an archaic gesture he might have picked up on Wunderland. Or not, if he was what they suspected. “And now, I won’t put a damper on your victory celebrations.”
He strolled like a conqueror out to the waiting aircar, the stub of his cigar a comet against the night as he threw it away and climbed through the gullwing door. The craft lifted and turned north and west, heading for Munchen, an outline covering a moving patch of stars.
“I doubt he’s going to accept defeat gracefully,” Jonah said, sipping moodily at his coffee. Montferrat had winced a bit when the younger man dumped his cognac into it. “Especially when he discovers the interior of the spaceship melted down into slag when the tnuctipun bastard died.”
“The hull alone is a formidable secret; he’ll have the satisfaction of putting that in the archives,” Montferrat said judiciously. “You know, I could almost pity him.”
That brought the heads around, even Spots’s. “Why?” Harold demanded, pulling himself out of reverie.
“Because he’s so able, and so determined—and his cause is doomed to inevitable defeat,” Montferrat said. At their blank looks, he waved his cigarillo at the stars.
“Look at them, my friends. We can count them, but we cannot really know how many. The number is too huge for our minds to grasp! With the outsider’s gift of the hyperdrive, we have access to them all—and the kzinti will too, in their turn, you cannot keep a law of nature secret forever, despite what the ARM thinks.”
His voice deepened. “The universe is too big to understand; vastly too big to control even by the most subtle and powerful means, even this little corner of it we call Known Space. There is an age of exploration corning—as it was in the Renaissance, or the twenty-first century. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can stop what we—all the sentient species—will do, and venture, and become. That is why I pity Buford Early—and why I never despair of our cause, no matter how bleak the situation looks. Tactically we may lose, but strategically, we cannot.”