by Larry Niven
“It’s just me now. Daff is dead…What happens after I climb up there?”
“Burn some leaves or something with a rifle pulse. I’ll do the same.”
“All right. I’ll be watching for you. Out.”
Cuiller climbed while Jook stayed below. Daff was dead? As commanding officer, Cuiller would have pressed Krater for the details—except their messages had to be brief, to keep the kzinti from taking a radio fix. Anyway, Cuiller could well guess what had happened. One of the kzinti had caught up with them, and the Jinxian would not have run from that fight. Instead, with his lifetime of training, Daff had probably welcomed and invited it. And he had sent Krater on ahead, with the Slaver stasis-box, to safety.
Daff Gambiel had been a good man. Sober, quiet, strong, patient—and loyal. He never seemed to have much to say, but Cuiller knew the Jinxian was always working out problems in his head, so he would have the answers ready when needed. Callisto’s crew was diminished by his loss, more than they knew…Cuiller could only hope Gambiel was finally at peace with his fate.
When he at last broke through the top layer, Cuiller felt like a swimmer in a great, green ocean. The treetops swelled like rolling waves above the lower branches and netted vines. The lazy winds pushed them back and forth, like the conflicting chop around a point of land. He clung to his bole with one hand and held down the fine sprouts of greenery with the other. To look east and west, he had to climb around the tree.
He gave Krater ten minutes to settle into her treetop, then faced east, unslung his weapon, and took aim at the nearest clump of leaves. Cuiller fired a long burst, circling it around to get a good fire going. Soon a puff of white smoke rose out of the canopy and blew raggedly away on the breeze.
He divided his time between watching that and looking out for any fires Krater might have set.
Nothing. “Captain,” from the radio again, softly. “I think I see smoke—or haze—about half a klick away. Try again.”
He burned a fresh patch upwind of the first.
“Got you. Be there in a bit.” Then the radio went dead.
Cuiller climbed back down to Jook’s level.
In half an hour, they heard her winder motor, coming through the trees. At the end of a long swing, Krater burst through a fan of leaves and settled on the branch next to Jook. She was strangely encumbered.
“Daff didn’t make it?” the commander asked gently.
She shook her head. “We were followed by a kzin, who climbed up into the canopy. Daff fought a delaying action—and bought me time to get away.”
“Dead?” Jook asked.
“If he were alive, I wouldn’t have left,” she said defiantly.
“Sorry. I meant the kzin.”
“Daff hurt him badly, knocked him out of the trees. But he was still moving.”
After a pause, Cuiller asked, “Where is the stasis-box?”
“This is it.” Krater lifted the dog out of its curled-up position, snuggled in the crook of her arm, and held it out with her fingers under its chest and around its forelegs. “Daff opened the box and found this—we call him Fellah—plus a flute-thing and some dried rations.”
“I asked where the box was.”
“Back along our path. It was empty, and we couldn’t carry everything.”
“Why did you open it in the first place?”
“Daff opened it. The kzinti were tracking on the stasis field.”
“Oh…right.” Cuiller put a hand to his chin.
Hugh Jook had taken the animal from Krater and was examining it while Cuiller absorbed her report. The commander watched his navigator move the animal’s legs, feel around its eyes, look into its ears.
“Remarkably mammalian structure,” Jook murmured.
“I noticed that,” Krater said.
The Wunderlander felt the animal’s hindquarters and lifted its tail.
“Do not…touch,” the creature said in a halting approximation of Interworld. The sounds were thick as they wrapped around its long, pink tongue.
Jook dropped the dog. It landed on its feet amid the vines and glared over its shoulder at the startled navigator.
The three humans looked down at the animal, dumbstruck.
“You…you can talk?” Krater asked.
“Yes. You-you can talk,” it replied—and waited expectantly.
Cuiller tried to decide if he was hearing a ventriloquist’s trick or just some kind of mimicry, a parrot’s mindless repetition. But then, he thought back, the dog’s first fragmented sentence hadn’t just repeated their own words. It had been wholly unprompted, arising out of nothing the humans were saying. And the words had fit the physical circumstances. So Cuiller had to accept that the “dog” was reacting to its environment, verbally, in Interworld.
“Of course, we can talk,” Sally Krater went on patiently. “I was asking about you.” And she pointed at the creature.
“You?” it asked. “Ah…‘You’ means this—?” The animal swiveled its broad head around, including its own body in the gesture. “Fellah?”
“That’s right. You’re Fellah, and I’m Sally.”
“Sal-lee. Daff. Yowryargawsh. Fellah.”
“Yowr—?” Krater began, then shook her head.
“Other…that deaded the Daff. Yowryargawsh named itself.”
“Oh, the kzin warrior.”
“Yes, kzin. Dead itself now. But other still to come. Find you-Sallee.” Fellah seemed to grow agitated. “Find you-human. Make dead too.”
“Excuse me,” Jook interrupted. “But what the hell are you?”
The creature paused. “You-Fellah means, is one, of-class Pruntaquilun. Named itself Coquaturia.”
“But what are you?” Jook insisted.
“You-Fellah is…sing-maker?” it answered, unsatisfied with the result. “Song-maker. You-Fellah is owned-thing of Thrint named itself Guerdoth. You-Sallee, you-human, are not owned-thing? Yes. You have no…no Discipline?”
“Of course we have discipline,” Cuiller responded quickly. “We’re a Navy survey team, after all. Without discipline we couldn’t perform—”
“Captain,” Sally Krater said quietly, putting a hand on his arm. “You’re going too fast. And I don’t think that it’s—that Fellah is questioning your authority.”
“Of course not,” Cuiller said stiffly.
The dog was staring hard at him. “You-Captain are Thrint?”
“Thrint? Are you calling me a Slaver?”
“You-Captain…you impose Discipline.” The creature exhibited a rippling motion that might have been a shrug. “Thrint.”
“There are no Thrintun anymore,” Krater said. “They died out—oh, along, long time ago, while you were in the stasis-box that Daff opened.”
Fellah turned its head patiently and watched her speak, studied the way her mouth moved, as if trying hard to understand.
“Many Thrintun” Fellah said gravely. “Too many to be deaded, to die soon…What means ‘long, long time’?”
“That’s an approximation of age,” Jook interposed. “Consider it to be a large part of the age of the universe itself. About one-fifteenth of that age.” Jook had to explain this using his hands. He waved his free hand all around, to indicate the universe at large. Then he flashed his spread fingers three times, curling them off each time with his other hand.
The animal seemed to absorb this, to think about it, and then looked stunned. “No Thrintun anymore. No Pruntaquila anymore. No universe anymore.” Fellah made a noise back in the throat that might have been a whimper or a moan.
“The universe is still here,” Sally said easily.
The creature just stared at her.
“Hey, are you hungry?” Krater suddenly asked. She pulled out of her pocket some plastic-wrapped patties, which looked to Cuiller like some kind of dried meat. “We found these in the stasis-box,” she explained to the commander. “Daff tried them but he thought the taste was pretty bland.” She offered part of one patty to Fellah.
&
nbsp; The animal backed away.
“Tnuctipun,” it growled. “Head-stuff. Made dead, made cold, dry.”
“What?” Krater dropped the fragment, and it slid between the leaves. “Why were the Tnuctipun killed?”
“Secret.” Fellah turned away. “Big secret.”
“Kill them and freeze-dry their brains?” Cuiller wondered. “Why would a Slaver want to do that? It’s barbaric!”
“Maybe the Thrint wanted to preserve them,” Jook speculated. “Any sufficiently advanced technology would be able to reconstruct the brains later, rebuilding their RNA linkages through some kind of computer setup—and remember, the Tnuctipun were genetic engineers. Rendering the brain inert is like insurance. That way you could keep your pet scientist quiet, but you also keep him around in case you need him to make adjustments in whatever he built.”
From the position of Fellah’s head, Cuiller could see that the dog was listening closely. How much was he understanding?
“So what did these Tnuctipun build?” Cuiller asked. “Fellah himself?”
“Not likely,” Sally Krater offered. “Fellah said he was ‘of-class,’ part of a race, called the Pru…Pruntaquilun. But here!” She drew along, sticklike device out of her belt. “This was in the stasis-box, too.”
“What is it?” Cuiller asked, taking it from her.
“I don’t know. It looks like some kind of musical instrument.”
Fellah at first regarded it with keen-eyed interest, then turned his head away.
“Fellah?” the commander asked suddenly. “Do you know what this does?”
The animal looked back at him, reluctantly. “Stick-thing.”
“But what did the Thrint do with it?”
“Point at head. Work fingers. Reach deep inside. Set mind in—”
“Is it something the Thrint used to fiddle about with your brains?” Jook asked, trying to overcome the word-hurdles for Fellah.
“Yes, fiddle. Itself name, Fiddle.”
“It’s the source of the Slavers’ power, then,” Jook went on eagerly, to his crewmates. “It has to be! And all this time we thought they were mentalists. But instead they had these shock-rod things. ‘Fiddle,’ he calls it.”
“My-Thrint,” Fellah said slowly, “my—master, used it, it was secret…”
“Of course it would be a secret,” Jook explained. “They would keep the existence of the Fiddle from their subject races, hiding it as a musical instrument or pretending it was something else benign. In that way they could maintain the myth of their innate power. And they would be willing to kill in order to preserve their secret—as those freeze-dried brains prove.”
Cuiller, who still held the Fiddle, brought it up near his face and fitted his fingers awkwardly to the keys. He pressed them in no particular order. And nothing happened.
“I can hear music,” Krater said. “Or, sort of. Anyway, it’s…silvery, like bells and woodwinds, far off.”
Cuiller tried a different pattern of fingering.
“Yeah, me too,” Jook said. “Kind of…”
Nyawk-Captain had been trailing the remaining human for hours, walking in his powered armor across the ground while the human swung invisibly through the high branches. His reworked radar easily tracked the quarry’s particular carbon pattern as it moved east then south, pausing occasionally to rest in the trees.
Twice he had to detour around the glimmer of large white shapes, which passed in the distance under the forest roof. They did not see or sense him, and each time Nyawk-Captain was able to regain the trail of the human’s passage.
After most of the morning, when the sun was high, the prey paused once more. This time, however, it joined two more pattern signatures that had been showing to the west of it. The monkey troupe was forming up.
Nyawk-Captain shed his bulky armor, left the locator beside it, and began climbing a nearby bole. By his calculations, he was almost under the humans as they paused in the forest canopy. He moved as quietly as he could, gripping with his forepaws around the trunk’s side and pushing with his feet and claws against the bark.
Arriving approximately at the humans’ level, and shielded by green fans from their sight, he extended his natural ears and listened to their ongoing conversation. He understood only the vaguest fragments of spoken Interworld but soon realized the humans were talking about the Thrintun and their long-ago time. He picked up the word for “master.”
Nyawk-Captain was preparing himself for the forward rush that would put an end to these human thieves and intruders on his mission—when he suddenly froze. Through a gap in the greenery he saw one of them pointing a wandlike object at him. And he could not move!
The human diddled its fingers, and Nyawk-Captain felt his paws twitch, his leg kick, his tail go stiff. Either the humans had recently developed a psychokinetic power unknown to the Patriarchy, or this was a display of power from the Thrintun artifacts they had discovered in the box. Experience and common sense suggested the latter.
As the device worked his body over, Nyawk-Captain could also feel his attitude toward the human holding it begin to change, becoming mellow and accepting. Nyawk-Captain hated that! After a few seconds, the human stopped diddling the keys of the device and turned away.
Nyawk-Captain was himself again.
Without the traditional challenging scream, he leaped through the wall of leaves and slashed left and right One of the humans went down under his blows, flagging bloody strings of tissue. Nyawk-Captain paused only to shake fragments of meat and fabric off his paws.
The human holding the Thrintun device dropped it and rolled to one side. The artifact skittered through the leaves, up-ended, and dropped. The human reached for it.
Realizing its immediate value, Nyawk-Captain dove after it, pushing that human away with a forehand swipe that snagged cloth and skin. He fought his way down through twigs and vines, into the lower levels of the canopy.
Too late!
He could see the wand falling, spinning, finally striking the brittle soil of the forest floor.
Whatever the device might be, Nyawk-Captain’s instincts told him that by retrieving it he would preserve his honor and buy his way back into Admiral Lehruff’s good graces. He leapt for a nearby trunk and raced down it headfirst, moving just slower than terminal velocity. Nyawk-Captain did a diving roll across the ground and gathered up the fallen prize.
He paused only to stash it with his powered armor and then headed back up the tree to finish off the remaining humans.
Hugh Jook was messily dead, scattered in four pieces across the center of their clearing. Several meters away, Sally Krater crouched in fetal position with her hands locked around a tree limb. Fellah had disappeared.
The attack had broken Cuiller’s left arm, that much he could tell from its angle, although the onset of shock had spared him much pain yet. He also felt blood oozing from four puncture wounds in his upper chest. Possibly some cracked ribs, too.
Cuiller lifted himself and approached Krater slowly, not wanting to frighten her more. He spoke gently and touched her head, massaging her temples with his good hand.
“Lieutenant? Sally? Are you hurt?”
No response.
He began moving his palm in wide circles across the nape of her neck and shoulders.
“Sally. It’s all right. Time to wake up.”
“N-no-oh,” she moaned.
“Time to move, Sal.”
“It’ll come back!”
“No, no. The cat’s all gone. Come on now, wake up.”
Cuiller reached for her hands, still clenched around the limb, and pulled on them gently. Reason began to return to her eyes. She straightened. Her fingers slipped loose. The hands fell inertly into her lap.
He lifted them with his good hand, and worked his stiff arm gently around her shoulders. He pressed it against her as much as he could without grating the ends of broken bone.
Sally slid close to him and nestled her face against his uniform collar. Her ha
nds crept up, around his shoulders, locking behind his neck. Cuiller rubbed her back in slow, smooth circles, pulling her closer.
Sally’s mouth lifted. Her lips first touched the corner of his jaw, then moved south to find his own.
He kissed her for the first time, for a long time.
Then the world began to catch up with them, and Cuiller pulled back just enough to look into her face.
“Hello,” he said, smiling.
“What happened?” She seemed newly awakened, disoriented, lost.
“We had a visitor. Kzinti kind. Are you hurt at all?”
“I—I don’t think so. You?”
“Some. Not a lot of pain yet.”
“Where’s Hugh?”
Cuiller glanced over his shoulder. “The kzin got him…He seems to be dead.”
Krater roused. “Seems to be…? Maybe I can—”
He pulled her back down and locked eyes with her. “You can’t, Sally.”
She sagged, leaning against his good arm. He caressed her once more.
“Come on,” he said. “We can’t stay here. That kzin may come again.”
“Where can we go?”
“Anywhere away from here. Back toward the ship. I don’t know.”
“Can you use the harness?”
“Not with this arm.”
Careful not to look directly at Jook’s remains, she began to feel for his pack and gather their scattered possessions and laser weapons.
“Then we’ll have to make slow time,” she said.
The two of them moved off quietly. Cuiller remembered to keep a hand over his chest wounds so as not to leave blood spoor.
The Elders of Pruntaquila, those inventors of language and studied readers of emotion, believed that being is the process of becoming.
“And if I do not stay out of that orange monster’s reach,” Fellah muttered to himself “then I will become lunch.”
He crept under and through the varied leaf layers, hiding after the kzin’s brutal attack. He spent a few solemn moments studying the remaining humans as they crouched in place, wasting time. Then he moved on, toward a place of greater distance and safety. And as he moved, Fellah considered all that the humans had been saying.