by Larry Niven
28
“Go down fighting” was not a plan.
Oh, Sabrina and her senior ministers, consulting over hyperwave radio, entertained other options. Volunteers would be shuttled to other worlds, yet to be identified, to live lives hopefully primitive enough to escape Pak notice. On New Terra itself the government would dig deep shelters, in the unlikely event sensors spotted the inward plunging planet-buster with enough warning for an evacuation.
Neither precaution could save more than a few thousand lives.
No one had liked the idea of exposing childless volunteers to tree-of-life root, and that made Sigmund proud. Human protectors would be scary smart. If anyone could find a way to defeat the Pak, they would. But afterward, would New Terra be a human world? Better to rebuild a shattered world as humans than to become the enemy.
So going down fighting was the best anyone could offer. Sigmund stood in awe of the courage to confront such overwhelming odds. To fight at all was to triumph over centuries of Puppeteer conditioning.
It was all so futile.
Sigmund shook off the depression that threatened to overwhelm him. He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and looked straight into the camera. “Sabrina, you and I need to speak alone.” He sat in stubborn silence until her advisors, looking grim and relieved at the same time, shuffled from her cabinet room. The secure cabinet room, in the undisclosed location in which Sigmund’s people did not allow bugs.
“We can’t defeat the Pak, Sabrina. We don’t begin to have the resources. The Puppeteers might have the resources, but they don’t have the will.” Baedeker, the last time he had emerged from his cabin, was a twitchy mass of reflexes, his mane long collapsed into the tangle at which he had plucked compulsively. Yet for a Puppeteer, Baedeker was crazy/brave. He could not otherwise have left home and herd. “If we have any chance, it’s by our worlds working together. It’s time we bring Concordance authorities into the loop.”
“Do you believe we can convince them to provide ships?” Sabrina asked. “From past dealings, I fear this news will be more than they can handle. I picture them going catatonic.”
“They might rise to the occasion,” Sigmund said.
And pigs might fly. The slightly more hopeful scenario was that enough Puppeteer ships could be stolen for use by New Terran pilots. For that gambit, Sigmund needed lots of intel. It could only be gathered on the ground, among the worlds of the Fleet.
He respected Sabrina too much to involve her in such a harebrained scheme.
“You were right to want everyone to leave, Sigmund. We’ll have to get an audience with the Hindmost himself, and that’s always a most sensitive matter.” Lost in thought, Sabrina brushed a strand of loose gray hair from her forehead. “Maybe Nessus can help us.”
The last time Nessus wanted to help New Terra, he had kidnapped Sigmund and poked holes in his memory.
Sigmund shook his head. “I need to do this in person, Sabrina. It’s best the Puppeteers not speculate uselessly until I get there.”
That meant appearing with little warning. Hearth’s safety had long lain in stealth and secrecy, but the home world’s location was hardly a secret from its former colony. In the years since New Terra won its freedom, the Concordance had surrounded Hearth with conventional planetary defenses. Not nearly enough to inconvenience the hordes of Pak, but Don Quixote alone? Despite an “invulnerable” hull, they would not stand a chance.
“On second thought, Sabrina, once we’re back to the Fleet”—months from now—“maybe you should give Nessus a heads-up. You can hint that we’re all in danger and I need an audience with the Hindmost.”
HATING THE TOO-FAMILIAR RELAX ROOM, hating the too-familiar ship, hating—impersonally and without reservation—everyone else aboard, Baedeker waited. And waited some more. His mane, unattended, had long ago dissolved into the snarl at which he now plucked listlessly. All the herd pheromone in the world could no longer comfort him.
Those with whom he waited were as despairing. Kirsten clearly had not slept in days. Eric’s cheeks were hollow and his eyes dull; he had stopped shaving days ago. The Gw’oth participated by comm link and did their waiting remotely. Baedeker could not read their body language, anyway, assuming they had any.
A holo of the improvised prison hung over the relax-room table. Thssthfok was in one of his accustomed places: amid the empty storage units of the repurposed cargo hold. Privacy mattered to him, Baedeker presumed, as it did for his distant human cousins. Not that Thssthfok had privacy. Even seated as he was, on the deck between rows of empty shelves, two of the fiber-optic cables that penetrated the cell ceiling caught glimpses of his head and neck.
Sigmund, when he arrived, quite late, was as desperate as anyone. Oh, not outwardly: He was too proud, too duty bound, to project anything but serene assurance.
But after so many months together, Baedeker knew the stoic exterior for the facade that it was. That confident attitude must be harder and harder to maintain. Almost certainly, that was why Sigmund came late. He was as close to the edge as any of them. If he cracked, it was hard to imagine how any of them would ever get home.
Not that Hearth would be a haven much longer.
“You know why we’re here,” Sigmund began abruptly. No one commented, nor even met his gaze. “There’s one bit of unfinished business before we can head home.”
Everyone turned to the holo that floated over the table. The unfinished business they kept putting off: what to do with Thssthfok.
Sigmund was hindmost of the mission. What he decided would happen. To give credit, Sigmund solicited opinions before he chose. A hindmost could do worse.
“Thssthfok goes,” Baedeker said. “We all know that he must.”
Kirsten cleared her throat. “Goes where? Back to the flying squirrels?”
With a mind of its own, one of Baedeker’s paws began scraping at the deck. “The prisoner knows about us. Maybe not much, but some things. That we have starships. He knows enough to make our worlds prime targets.”
“So kill him, you mean,” Kirsten snapped. “At least admit it.”
Yes! Killing the Pak was the only safe option. But Baedeker had not said it, had he? Even a Citizen found it hard to kill in—what was the human expression?—cold blood. “Regrettably, I see no option,” Baedeker finally said.
Sigmund looked at Eric. “What do you think?”
“If a Pak ship rescued Thssthfok today, it wouldn’t matter. We’re too many light-years behind the vanguard here. The lead ships will have attacked our various home worlds, or passed them by, long before any light-speed signal from here could reach them.”
As Sigmund nodded agreement, Baedeker’s paw ceased its scratching. This was insanity! “Suppose that, for some reason, the front wave does pass by our homes. However unlikely, it is possible. We must do nothing to risk the attention of later waves.”
Kirsten stood to pace, fists jammed in her jumpsuit pockets. “Thssthfok’s clan is near the front of the pack, among the first to escape Pakhome. Clans are bitter enemies. Why would he signal another—”
“He says his clan is near the front,” Baedeker interrupted. “Assume it was. He cannot know what happened since he was marooned. He has to allow for the possibility his clan lost a skirmish and fell back, or delayed to gather supplies. You cannot know Thssthfok won’t signal ahead if he can.”
And of course the prisoner lied! Only naïveté could say otherwise. The only mystery was on which topics.
Conflict among clans was the only disclosure Baedeker truly believed—not for the stubborn skill of Sigmund’s interrogation, or anything about how or why Thssthfok revealed the detail, but because, for once, they had corroborating data. The cone of destruction that marked the Pak incursion grew wider the farther the aliens traveled from home. Such dispersal was only logical as a consequence of battles among the Pak. Some would break away from the rest to replenish supplies, or scatter after a defeat, or to find shelter behind a convenient dust cloud. They
fled from each other as much as from the deadly radiation that pursued them.
Holo Thssthfok stood abruptly and stalked across his cell. He settled again, seated, with his back against a bulkhead. That was another of his preferred spots, although Baedeker could discern no pattern to where along the long bulkhead the Pak chose to sit.
Thssthfok must go, and not back to where they found him. Blowing the hatch was the safest way to do it. And as even the youngest Citizen knew, the safest way is the only way.
Still.
To die with one’s blood boiling, screaming silently into the void to relieve the pressure and keep one’s lungs from bursting . . . Baedeker shivered. “We can leave the Pak on another habitable planet. Someplace no one can know to look for him.”
“Where he would starve to death, slowly, for lack of tree-of-life,” Kirsten said. “Even if we leave him with a supply, we won’t know if a new crop will grow. Any planet we pick might turn out like Earth, where the crop failed.”
“Return him to where we found him,” Eric said firmly. “It’s the humane thing to do.”
“Er’o?” Sigmund called. “What do you and your friends think?”
Silence.
“Er’o,” Sigmund said again. “Are you there?”
“Yes, Sigmund,” a voice answered over the intercom.
But that voice did not belong to Er’o, nor could Baedeker match it to any of the Gw’oth. The unfamiliar voice was deeper than a Gw’o, resonant, commanding. Of course all Gw’oth “voices” were synthesized; they could be changed on a whim. Maybe Baedeker’s failure to recognize it meant nothing.
The quaver in his gut told him otherwise.
HANDS BEHIND HIS BACK, back against a bulkhead, Thssthfok activated the makeshift sensor in his fist. Hiding the device with his body, he characterized one more handspan of the cable bundle that led to the hatch.
Tracing cables and analyzing control logic were standard uses of his multi-scanner—but like most items in his utility kit, the instrument made no provision for surreptitious readout. Designing a tactile-feedback mode was straightforward. Making the modifications with the few resources at his disposal, working by touch within the unobservable regions between and inside empty storage units—that had been difficult.
To live long enough to capture this ship, he had to keep up the interest of the humans. Ancient history was curiously fascinating to Sigmund, and it would not disadvantage clan Rilchuk, so Thssthfok doled out what he knew about Phssthpok. Time spent discussing the mad Librarian was time not being questioned about far more dangerous topics.
And Sigmund talked, too. How strange to know the lost colony had actually existed. How strange that Phssthpok had found it! Alone. Without even a hibernation pod. Just twelve hundred subjective years in a tiny cabin, in a ramscoop accelerated to near light speed to prolong his life.
Was Phssthpok sane even at the beginning of his quest? Thssthfok had his doubts. Regardless, Phssthpok was surely insane when he reached the lost colony—
There to be killed.
Sigmund would not discuss Phssthpok’s fate, but a quick death was the obvious answer. Only death could stop Phssthpok from striving to exterminate the humans. They were what remained of the lost colony. And they had spread—far—or Thssthfok could not have encountered them here.
Mutants! Abominations! Their stench was unavoidable. Thssthfok’s nostrils wrinkled.
He edged his modified multi-scanner a handspan closer to the hatch. Underneath his fingers, the prickling changed subtly. Another spot along the unseen wire where insulation had degraded from friction or age. Another vulnerability.
Sigmund did not know everything.
The launch of Phssthpok’s ramscoop had left his legions of childless protectors on Pakhome without a reason to eat—so they found one. And so whole fleets had followed in Phssthpok’s wake. Lest Phssthpok failed to survive his trek. Lest inferences about the colony’s location had been imprecise, and Phssthpok’s chosen course misguided. Lest the reborn colony need succor before it could build an industrial base. The reasons did not matter.
Thssthfok told himself his clinging to life was no such delusional rationalization—and wondered if it was true.
On the one hand: a new Pak world in the galactic hinterlands. It would battle other Pak clans to the death. On the other hand: aliens who destroyed whole Pak fleets. Those were the only possibilities. Whichever doom had befallen the Librarian armadas following in Phssthpok’s wake, something barred the only marginally explored path into the spiral arm.
And so the evacuation from Pakhome in Thssthfok’s time had had to chart a different course. Thssthfok cursed Phssthpok, and his hordes of followers, and the Library yet again.
His fingers moved infinitesimally, taking yet another measurement, as he pictured the device that would wirelessly usurp the hatch controls. He did not mean to open the exterior hatch. In its porthole Mala was long gone from view, and even its red-dwarf sun had receded into a mere spark. That was why he studied here, where the humans were least likely to suspect his purpose.
Because within the bulkhead around the hatch into the ship were similar circuits.
“ER’O?” SIGMUND CALLED. “What do you and your friends think?”
Ol’t’ro considered. This Pak must die. Its death was the only prudent choice, and yet the humans hesitated. Er’ o’s advocacy would not convince them. No Gw’o could—by reason of deficiencies in human nature, not any flaw in the Gw’oth analysis.
Wishful thinking wasn’t.
To make humans see reason, Ol’t’ro would have to reveal truths kept hidden for this entire voyage.
“Er’o,” Sigmund said again. “Are you there?”
Failure to convince Sigmund carried worse risks than disclosure.
Extending a tubacle, Ol’t’ro reconfigured a comm terminal to transmit human-authoritative acoustical properties. “Yes, Sigmund.”
“Who is this?” Baedeker asked.
“We are Ol’t’ro.” Ol’t’ro paused for the humans and Citizen to ponder the pronoun. “We are Er’o and Ng’o and Th’o. We are all the Gw’oth aboard, and we are many become one.”
“One of their biological computer groupings,” Eric whispered.
“More than that, I think,” Kirsten whispered back.
Sigmund, in an even softer undertone, wondered, “Why reveal . . . themselves now?”
The human murmuring was scarcely detectable. By correlating these acoustic scraps with months of phonetic templates and syntactical patterns, Ol’t’ro recovered the conversation.
“Let us explain,” Ol’t’ro said. They remodulated the voice in the manner calculated to be soothing. “Together we form a biological computer. In our language, we are a Gw’otesht. We thought you were aware.”
“Not from anything a Gw’o ever said.” Sigmund’s voice was now firm, even loud. Accusing. “I did not anticipate a collective mind.”
For Sigmund not to suspect—they had kept their secret well, indeed. Or Sigmund lied. No matter. “Let us explain. Even Gw’oth seldom speak of this capability.” And then, mostly, in condemnation.
Since time immemorial, a few had had the ability to link—and been shunned for it. Ensembles were inherently vulnerable, a tangle of limbs lost in contemplation. Across eons of hunting and gathering, of endless primitive tribal warfare, to link was a selfish indulgence that endangered the tribe. A corruption of nature . . .
And across the ages, some had succumbed to the addiction of deeper thought.
With the rise of great cities, ensembles became practical. Traditionalists still abhorred them. Society recoiled from them. Governments exploited them. Government biologists found ways to expand, and strengthen, and deepen the couplings.
And awareness happened.
Technology exploded. City-states with the most gifted ensembles raised empires, spread over the ice, even leapt to new worlds. And Gw’otesht, become indispensable to the rulers, became partners rather than servants—
Even as ensembles remained repugnant to all but the most progressive Gw’oth.
That was more than Ol’t’ro cared to share. “Those like us are a recent development, Sigmund. Some of our own kind . . . disapprove. We did not know how you would feel.”
“Then why reveal yourself at all? And why now?” Sigmund asked.
“We have a unique perspective.” Ol’t’ro chose their next words carefully. “It relates to whether Thssthfok returns to the planet below.”
Baedeker whistled skeptically. “How does secretiveness bestow unique knowledge?”
“Our apologies.” But no explanations. “We claim no special wisdom, Baedeker, only relevant experience. It is from the efforts of ensembles like us that the Gw’oth have recently developed much new technology.”
“Connecticut Yankee!” Kirsten blurted. “Oh, crap.”
For once, Ol’t’ro was without a clue. They disliked the feeling.
CONNECTICUT YANKEE?
Sigmund’s brief interest in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court began with insomnia and ended that same night with the discovery of the eclipse scene. He never went back to the story, never gave Kirsten the recommendation she had requested. Apparently she had proceeded on her own.
He scarcely remembered the 3-V adaptation he had watched so long ago, but one scene had stuck with him: medieval knights slaughtered with Gatling guns. The Yankee had introduced guns and gunpowder, dynamite, electricity. In short order, he had remade society.
“Finagle, yes!” To Baedeker, who looked even more troubled than usual, Sigmund explained, “Thssthfok will push ahead the flying squirrels’ technology. How quickly, and how big a threat could he create? I don’t know. I don’t see how we can know.”
“We know,” Ol’t’ro boomed in that gravelly, resonant voice. “We know because we accelerated the rate of progress of our home city. That is why, against all our instincts, we now reveal ourselves. Because you must believe us.