by Larry Niven
We thought we had cracked the problem of the discs, or at least Marthar did. It was difficult to tell, but it did look as though we had designs for them that might work. You had to create them in pairs with some sort of quantum entanglement between them; it might turn out that nobody could build the things because there doubtless would be tools to be built first to build the tools you’d need, and so on, five levels deep. Or maybe fifty-five. Still, if we could make it work, it would be worth all the money on Old Earth tied up in a sack. Which would be a big sack. We could make all of Wunderland rich, not just us.
Marthar and I looked around. “I don’t suppose you could say we’ve finished,” she said. “But I think we’ve got enough on the Valiant to keep a whole planet busy for a few hundred years. The next thing to worry about is getting everyone back on board the ship. Then S’maak-Captain takes us home, while we work on the next serious problem.”
“What’s that?”
“How to spend all that money. If we can make anything much work, everyone on Wunderland will be able to buy their own planet. Those discs alone could do it. And I’ve a fair idea of the principle, although you can understand the principle of a computer without being able to build one, unless you made it out of brass gear wheels. We ought to be able to make something that works like the discs, even if we have to make it out of the equivalent of brass gear wheels.”
I wish I had Marthar’s confidence, but she knew a lot about Hard, and the discs certainly came under that heading. I thought we should be working on understanding the easy bits on the way home, not thinking about what to do with the money, and said so.
“Oh, of course we shall. We’ve all got heaps to do, and we’ll do it. But there are big organizational issues: we have to start off in a small way and make enough money to reinvest it in another project, and then get enough cash from that to go onto the next project, and so on. Until we can buy a few solar systems. The first thing to do is to work out what the starting project is; it has to be something Daddy can finance with his own money. Not Riit funds, we want to own this ourselves.”
I hadn’t though that far ahead. “Well, it will be nice to be rich, I suppose,” I said slowly. And it occurred to me that neither ARM nor the Riit Clan would like so much power concentrated in other hands. We might have to go a long way away.
“I can tell you now, rich won’t be the word for it. And I suspect you won’t like it much at all. Anywhere there is money, there are parasites; in this case there’s going to be an awful lot of money so they’ll be huge parasites. Governments and whole planetary systems I expect. The problem isn’t going to be making money—the problem will be keeping it, or at least some of it. And I’m a bit worried about Daddy. He’s seen super-rich, at least the records of what it was like in the old days. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want it. I suspect he doesn’t want me to be rich either. Bad for the character or something.”
“Will wealth spoil Marthar?” I teased her. “Does power corrupt, and will it corrupt you?”
She took this seriously. “It’s a good saying, that one; some of you humans are quite perceptive. About power corrupting, I mean. I don’t know if power corrupts, or if people who are power-hungry start off corrupt and some of them get power and it sort of comes out in them in a way which wasn’t obvious until they got it. I suppose I shall be a controlled experiment, shan’t I?”
“Are you sure you aren’t already a little bit corrupt?” I said in a tease she didn’t recognize.
She was silent. “I don’t know,” she said very quietly, as if to herself. “I can see that I might be quite horrible in some circumstances. I think if I were an empress I might be one of the really, really bad ones. I’m really not very kind. On the other hand, my name is Riit.”
“You’re kind to me,” I told her, a little bit frightened.
She looked at me in silence. “Yes, I’m kind to you. You’ll always be my Peterkin, at least I hope so. After that episode with the implant, I know what it is to just let go, to let the animal reign. I don’t want that, and yet I do. And I think it might be awfully addictive.”
“You are strong, Marthar. You are capable of frightful things. I saw what you did to Vaarth, and I saw you burn those pirates down as if they were just weeds. But I think that deep down there, you are kind and decent and honorable.”
“Well, I suppose a human being isn’t the best judge. You humans do it differently from us. We are not kind. But deep down you are utterly ferocious on a level we kzin can’t reach. All the truly frightful things you can’t face, you let your subconscious handle. That’s how you beat us. Only you don’t see it. You won’t let yourselves see it. You fool yourselves into thinking there’s something nice at your core. But down there in the id, you have a monster lurking, little Peter. You can’t see it, but I can.”
Marthar talks some silly nonsense at times.
We got everyone loaded into the two landers, and waved farewell to the treasure planet. We went over the third tower and, down below, we could see some figures moving around near it. A telescope showed that the pirates were there, hunting. There were only three of them. The fourth had gone—very likely dead; possibly they had fought. They looked up at the lander and waved, hopelessly. But we weren’t stopping.
Back on the ship we were badly undercrewed, but S’maak had set up some automation systems with the help of Valiant. It was a temporary measure, but would get us at least into the Wunderland system. Or so we hoped.
We had to go slowly to the edge of the system where spacetime was flat enough to engage the hyperdrive. It took a lot longer than it had coming in. Not that Marthar and I were bored, nor any of the others. All of us were learning, with Bengar as a sort of coach in the early stages. We wanted to be able to use anything important we had got, and that meant recognizing it. I was the one who concentrated on trying to understand the mathematics. It was horrible. I’m not all that good at human-kzin mathematics; it would be unlikely that I’d be able to break the code of this totally alien set of ideas in a language that made no sense. We needed Dimity Carmody here. I persevered. You have to, don’t you? Once you’ve set your hand to something, you must never give up or you feel cheap. You’re allowed to change your strategy though, and I scrolled through some Jotok mathematics in case it was any help. They had invented something like networks instead of strings, and rules for rewriting them, or redrawing them. It came from being compound animals, I suppose. They were called digraph-grammars, and humans had also invented something similar, though not pushed it as far. They made a certain amount of sense, but although I could follow the rules and apply them, I never really got the semantics of the things—what they meant—which is the important bit, I guess.
At least we had established that it was mathematics. The engineering and science bars were chock full of it. So it had to be useful and not just a game or a pure art form. I found that comforting, and it made me persist through some horrible frustration at my own lack of ability.
We weren’t going straight home. The Valiant was headed for another system just outside the rift itself, a new colony called Tamburlaine in the human starmaps. It had a place where we could refuel, which was important because we had used up a lot with the landers doing all that ferrying, and the ship was a few kilotons heavier now. Also we had used up a lot of metals in making the new landers and hadn’t wanted to stay to reclaim the scrap of the old ones, though we did recover the green lander. So the first stage was getting out of the treasure-planet system, which took an age.
We finally made the transition to hyperspace, with all that entailed and after only a few days, we came back to our familiar universe with a bright star in the distance. Now it was the slow drag in normal space to get us to Tamburlaine.
I think the thing I liked best about being back on the ship was the regular day-and-night cycles. Valiant turned the lights down at night and up again in the day, so you could actually tell which was which, unlike the treasure planet. The other thing I liked was ta
lking to Valiant, who was even helpful with the Jotok mathematics. She could tell me about it in simpler terms than the web references, all of which seemed to assume I already grasped a whole raft of stuff I didn’t.
It took us almost a week to arrive at the heart of the Tamburlaine System from the outer limits because we were moving slowly to conserve fuel. There was a human naval base there on the fifth planet, or in orbit around it. We took a lander down to the surface while Valiant was organizing the refueling, and Marthar and I wandered around.
This was the second alien planet I had stepped on, and it was certainly very different from the treasure world. There were very few kzin here, and a lot of human beings. To tell the truth it was rather dull. Any big city looks very like any other, and although this was big compared with Munchen, and the buildings were higher in the sky, I can’t say it was fun. We didn’t need anything special by way of clothes or drips; the oxygen levels were high and the climate warm where we were. We did some shopping. I didn’t have any money, so Orion changed some platinum blocks into local currency and gave us both what turned out to be plenty for eating and shopping. I think the local kzin had never seen an intelligent kzinrett before, which meant that there was not a lot of shopping to be done from Marthar’s point of view. And the kzin traders seemed to want to talk to her, just to check that she could talk.
We had been invited out to dinner with a local kzin nobleman who wanted to be nice to Orion, and Marthar was invited too. She insisted that I go as well, which made me more than a little uncomfortable. Marthar seemed entirely happy with the prospect. I think she was intending to show the backward natives what a modern kzinrett kit was like and was looking forward to shocking them rigid.
It was held in something that was, I suppose, the local equivalent of a palace, though it covered less ground than Orion’s house in Thoma’stown. But it rose for seven or eight stories, big ones of course. They even brought me some cooked meat, which they detest for themselves.
I was seated on a huge chair made for kzin, at an enormous table, next to a gray-furred kzin with an artificial eye and a lot of scars. He turned to me.
“You arrre the ship’s, uhh, pet, is that rrright? What is the worrrd? Mascot, rrrright?”
“Not exactly, Noble Hero. At least I hope not. Actually Marthar is my pet.” I can’t say I really felt that, or anything like it, but the air of easy patronizing annoyed me.
He flipped his ears several times, the equivalent of a belly laugh from a human being.
“Sssso, you have adopted a Riit kzinrett, iss it sso? And does she behave herself well in public?”
“Not always,” I told him. “I’ve seen her do things to those who annoyed her which would make your fur curl to think about.”
He laughed again, this time with sound effects as well. “Aahhrr, I would not want the currrly fur, better I do not know, isss ssso?” And he nodded and turned to the kzin on his other side. Later, thinking it over, and when I knew a bit more about outworld kzin, my blood ran cold when I thought of the risk I had taken in saying that. But the best kzin like a bit of bravado, if you can judge the right mood and moment for it.
Orion caught my eye and winked and twitched an ear. I am sure he heard the exchange and was amused by it. I hoped that Marthar hadn’t heard any of it and that Orion wouldn’t mention it.
After the dinner, where neither Marthar nor I disgraced ourselves further, despite Marthar’s unusual volubleness—perhaps to prove she could be—we all went back up in the lander to find chaos. Valiant had been disabled again, although it had been only temporary, and she was now putting in more patches to ensure it couldn’t happen another time. Silver had escaped in the pinnace. There was, of course, absolutely no point in looking for him; he had a whole planet to hide on. He had not only managed to switch Valiant off for several hours, he had used the time to fill the pinnace with as many bars as it could carry, and two helmets, one of them a multi-user system, which meant he could read what he had stolen and show it to other people. Of course, he didn’t have much of a fraction of what we carried, the pinnace wasn’t big enough, but he had been very careful in his selection.
“At least he didn’t take anything to do with the discs,” Marthar said with relief. “Did he take any mathematics?”
“Ye-es. He did. Nothing I haven’t copied. I think he must plan to sell something. Just a fighting fund so he can get back to the treasure planet and really rifle it, I expect. I think he was looking to see what would make decoding the script possible, so he’ll know what to steal and where it is. Oh, I’ve found something new on my phone. This wasn’t here before.”
“Don’t say he’s left a note,” Marthar said with a resigned air. “I bet it is. It’s the sort of thing he would do, the old villain.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what it is, only it’s addressed to both of us. Come and look at it.”
The letter wasn’t long, and of course it was an audio-video recording. The screen cleared as I ran it, and the face of Silver looked out at us, his head on one side, and his eyes open wide.
“Hello there, me young kits. This is me farewell message to ye, and thankee for the company on this last voyage, though ye were mostly locked up wi’ the bars and suchlike to tell the truth. Still, ye were as civil as someone in my delicate position could reasonably expect, and so were the Doctor, and your Sire, young Marthar, which I take very kindly, indeed I do, and I’d thankee for passing it on to both o’ them. As to S’maak-Captain, the less said the better in that quarter, and he a spacer like me. I told him I’d come back to dooty, but he never said a word and looked like he’d swallowed some grass.
“I ha’ given the matter a deal o’ thought and I think the risk of the hot needle a little too great, so I’m leavin’ shortly to save the good Doctor from goin’ agin his conscience to save me, for it’s a tender little thing and I would not wish to harm it; and he bein’ the kind what would dance to whatever tune it played. I also remember the rest of the Riit Clan. And for another reason, this locality be more my sort o’ territory, bein’ so close t’ the rift, like.
“So be brave me hearties, and be so good as to remember kindly now and again, your old spacer comrade and one time tutor, one:
Silver.”
“Typical,” Marthar said tartly. “Leaves out all the murders and treachery. Hopes we’ll forget about them, perhaps. Well, I shan’t.”
Why leave the message? What did he hope to gain? I just didn’t understand him.
After days of careful checking, lest Silver had left some booby traps on Valiant, S’maak-Captain pronounced himself reasonably satisfied and steered the Valiant towards the outer edges of the Tamburlaine system, and off the ecliptic. This took another three days. Then we swung around and aimed for the Alpha Centauri system, with little Proxima out on the edge, and Wunderland close in.
It took us weeks to get back, and when we did, we needed tugs and hired crew to bring her back to ground. But we did it, and it was good to be home. Redroar was close to launching the relief vessel.
Getting into the old routine felt strange. Mother hugged me and cried and told me she’d never expected to see me again. Then she asked me if I’d bought her a present in foreign parts, and I was glad that I’d remembered to get her a roll of fabric from Tamburlaine five. I’d chosen it because it had the color of the nebulae streaming silently through it. Mother had never seen anything like it and, I suspect, had no idea what to do with it, but she kissed me and hugged me and cried all over again.
Orion had rewarded our crew generously; those loyal Kzin who had died in the course of duty had their families looked after too. I suppose that being a member of a Kzin family headed by a spacer seldom brought rewards and the risks were great, but at least these would never have to worry about money ever again.
Marthar and I often look into the night sky to see the direction of the swirl-rift and the treasure planet, although, of course, it’s much too far to see with the naked eye. But imagination and memory brin
g back the sight of those dark towers rising against an indigo sky, lit by a green oval sun with red dirt and stones underfoot. And when night falls, I can imagine the purple nebulae like the dresses of women a million light-years tall, dancing, frozen, swirling but stopped in time by sheer vastness.
Bengar is happy in his role as head of the security detail for Marthar, and although it’s been an easy job so far, that could change. Orion is happy with him, and lets him accompany Marthar to school.
We are both officially back at school, but unofficially we are trying to understand some of the alien science. Marthar still has the sunny optimism that we shall crack it one day. We have some help: Orion is hiring scholars of all sorts to make sense of it. Many seem even slower than we are and absorbed by minutiae. This vexes Marthar considerably; she does not have the academic temperament.
“Why can’t they see the wood and not get disabled by the trees?” she asked fiercely once. “Oh, well, if they had really good minds, they would be competition, I suppose, so I guess we just use them.”
Dimity Carmody had been fascinated by the mathematics. She cracked the whole thing overnight and was translating it by hand into something we could understand, then she wrote a program to do it. I gave up trying to understand the original, but I could make vague sense out of the translation. Marthar was using it to crack the problem of the transfer discs and was cursing a good deal.
And in time we will crack it, I believe, no doubt with a lot of help. And one day, we shall return to the treasure planet, with a much better idea of what we want from it. Both Marthar and I are determined, and we will never give up while we live.
I often think about Silver, and wonder if we shall ever see him again. It doesn’t seem impossible, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I am sure he would have returned to the treasure planet by now, and tried to extract wealth from it somehow, which isn’t at all an easy matter. Yet he has a first-rate mind, as even Marthar admits, and a fund of ingenuity. So he may well think of something.