by Larry Niven
“Small matter, lads, small matter. For you can be certain she is not far away, and once we have the kz’zeerkt, we have her too, be sure of it.” It struck me later that, foul as it was, the blind thing still had a kzin’s awareness of honor, though it might not share it. It knew Marthar would not leave me. “Search about, that way, and find him.” He pointed with his staff, almost straight at where Mother and I hid in straw.
A whistling sound came. The orange-furred kzin took out a phone, very like the one the Captain had used. He glanced at it and listened to a message. “Ware, all o’ ye. The deputies are coming this way, and fast. We must begone.”
“No, the kz’zeerkt, ye fools, get the kz’zeerkt!” The blind one slashed about with his staff, and the others avoided him. This enraged him further. “Didn’t I get the death claw to that damned Skel, when none of you liverless cowards had the nerve to face him? Ahh, I’ll get him m’self, ye sthondats!” he shouted and started in my direction. There was another sound, a little like horses’ hooves, but with more thud to it, a sound I recognized as running thoats. They could run twice as fast as any horse over short distances, and carry an armed kzin on their backs, sometimes two.
The crew scattered, some back into the alley, which was too narrow for thoats, some towards each of the roads out of the square; those who had taken the north side suddenly turned and bolted back. The sound of the thoats was very loud now, and my spirits lifted, even as the blind thing made his way towards me. Then he recognized his danger. “Where are ye, help me, ye scum!” But the other kzin had left him, and he stood alone in his great cape, his head turning north, the staff waving wildly. He started back to the alley, but stumbled and went to one knee. That was when seven thoats surged into the square, bearing kzin upon their backs. They tried to avoid him; I saw one try to divert his steed, but those things had the momentum of a spacecraft and they went over him. Not one, but two. I heard the snap of his spine and the start of a scream cut off, and the hiss of air leaving his crumpled body. After the thoats had drawn up, there was a black, bloodstained cloak covering a flattened corpse. I had seen yet another death, and was heartily glad of it.
The sheriff got down, and a figure appeared from the corner.
“You got here just in time, Sheriff,” Marthar spoke calmly. “How did you know to come?”
It turned out that the lad who had left on his pony had stopped at the first big house and borrowed their telephone to call the sheriff’s office and warn him that K’zarr’s crew were in town and bent on mayhem. There had been an alert posted that they were on Wunderland, so the sheriff had believed it, and had made for the Lord Templemount and then followed the noise.
I rose unsteadily and walked towards them. “They nearly had us,” I said and half-fell, but Marthar was there to hold me.
“We must get Mother to the Doctor,” I mumbled, but we didn’t have to, for minutes later, the Doctor trotted his horse down the alley, leading some men. They had also heard the noise, and the lad on his pony had met them and directed them to us, and he was following at the best pace his tired pony could manage. Mother recovered under the sting of ammonia in her nostrils, and was greatly relieved to be in the hands of humans and the deputies. She was inclined to gabble, until the Doctor gave her a sedative.
“And why were they after you?” the sheriff wanted to know.
“The gold, but it was ours, and more of it should have been,” Mother said shrilly.
“I think it was this,” Marthar held up the memo pad. “We found it among the Captain’s possessions. And if it’s what I think it is, it’s worth a lot more than any amount of gold.”
“Then I should take it and hold it,” the sheriff said firmly. “Give it to me, kzinrett child.”
Marthar looked at him speculatively. “I think that I would rather give it to my Sire, Orion-Riit. Or the Doctor here. Or maybe Judge von Thoma.”
The sheriff nodded in a very human gesture. Well, we had copied each other’s mannerisms for generations now. Some of the humans who could do it would waggle their ears instead of laughing. But her use of the name “Riit” changed everything. I knew Lord Vaemar-Riit regarded her as one of the high nobility, but even I had not quite realized just how high until she said that word and I saw its effect. Had the villains injured or insulted her, I thought, the vengeance of her Sire and Grand-Sire would not have been quickly forgotten.
“Very well, but I want to see it handed over. Give it to Doctor Lemoine if you wish, and Doctor, I want the Judge to see it. The old Judge, the first one. Him I trust to do what is best. Far better him than the government, which is where it would have to go if I took it.”
Marthar rather reluctantly handed the memo pad over to the Doctor, who looked at it thoughtfully.
“I shall take good care of it, and yes, Judge von Thoma needs to see it. And your father too, young Marthar. And I think it would be as well if we all met together and you can tell us everything you know.”
A distant humming, and a light in the sky which rose and headed west interrupted us.
“That will be the rest of the crew making off, no doubt of it,” the sheriff said. “You saw less than a dozen, you say. There would be three times that many in K’zarr’s Horde. They must have collected the few you left alive and are escaping justice. Well, there’s little can be done now. I’ll send a message to München and to the spaceports, but I doubt they landed at any regular place. They’ll be back in space within an hour or two. At least, with luck we’ll never see them again.”
“But will not the sentry-satellites detect them?” I asked.
“They are keyed to detect objects approaching Wunderland, not leaving it,” he replied. “And you know how many small moons we have. In any case, the surface of a whole planet is vast. We could not cover it all.”
We went back to the Lord Templemount, me on the back of a horse behind one of the Doctor’s men, my mother behind the Doctor, and Marthar behind the sheriff on his horse, which she greatly enjoyed. The Lord Templemount, when we got back, was the most awful mess you can imagine, and Mother and I set about cleaning it up. The sheriff took possession of the corpse of the Captain, and of his belongings that were left.
“Come and see us in the morning, Peter, at my father’s palace. We shall have a story to tell, and we must open the memo pad and find out what it has to tell us. And we’ll have the Doctor and the Judge there too. It will be such fun!” Marthar had recovered from the events of the night on the ride back. If she ever felt bad about killing the telepath and several of the pirate band, she showed not the slightest sign of it, then or later.
How on earth humans managed to defeat the kzin I cannot imagine. We were lucky nearly all the kzinretti had such stunted intelligence. If many of them had been like Marthar, we wouldn’t have had a chance.
CHAPTER SIX
We were gathered around a huge orangewood table in Orion-Riit’s mansion. It wasn’t really all that big, I suppose, not compared with the palace his father owned in the hills outside München, but it was the biggest house in the town. Orion was the second son, so relatively free as to where he lived, and for some reason—probably because the hunting was good and there was plenty of elbow room—he’d chosen to live out with us in the sticks.
Not that our town wasn’t quite famous in its way, we had some historic associations with the Riit family. I know the old Judge and Orion-Riit were friends, as well, of course, as Rarrgh, who ran Lord Vaemar’s palace. Perhaps that was why he lived here. Marthar’s uncle and aunt, Orlando and Tabitha, were frequent visitors; so was her other aunt, Arwen. But she had a whole host of uncles and aunts. I knew these things from odd scraps that I had picked up from Marthar, although she didn’t talk about her family much. It was easy to forget she was a member of the most important kzin clan, and that meant the most important not just on Wunderland, but connected to the Patriarch himself. I wonder if that wasn’t part of the reason Orion-Riit lived out here, too. I expect having everybody be respectful could be
a bit of a drag at times.
There were five of us. The old Judge Jorg von Thoma sat at the top of the table in the place of honor, with Orion-Riit to his right, and Marthar to his right. The Doctor sat at the old Judge’s left, and I sat next to him opposite Orion-Riit. There was a kzin butler, or something like, that who came in and out periodically to make sure we were well supplied with drinks, mostly lemonade, which isn’t exactly exciting. The kzin drank something else.
The memo pad lay on the table. Marthar and I had told our stories, interrupting each other as we remembered bits of it, but at last we couldn’t think of anything we had left out.
“Can’t we just switch it on and find out what all the mystery is?” I asked.
Marthar looked at me pityingly. “Peter, for the millionth time, I says it as loves you, but you’ve got less imagination than a thoat. A thoat that has guzzled itself into a coma on wengle-weed. A thoat that wasn’t all that bright to begin with. Or a particularly retarded sthondat.” Her father looked at me and then at his daughter.
“Alright, explain, smarty-pants,” I said, stung.
“Imagine you are a pirate. A truly evil pirate, a kzin pirate who is in the habit of plundering every ship he can find, who has raped whole planets, or at least a few good cities on them. And you keep some really important information on a little memo pad, which you give to your first mate when you are dying. Or which said first mate steals off your cold corpse, more likely. What would you do?”
“Uh, encrypt it? Maybe make sure there’s a key, a password, and the stuff wipes if the user doesn’t know it?”
She shook her head pityingly some more. “That too. Just in case they didn’t trigger the booby trap to blow their paws off and maybe the rest of them, and anyone else in the same village.”
She was right of course. All of a sudden, the pad looked much bigger and ready to explode and take us all out. Or maybe to spray acid or emit some poison gas.
“I think that opening it is a delicate job for a technician, young Miss smarty-pants. And I have already sent out for one,” her father rumbled. He was big, even for a kzin. “In fact he is here now, and with your permission, I shall turn this over to him.”
Everybody nodded, although Marthar was a bit put out that her father had anticipated her. The butler was given the memo pad and took it out, on a silver salver no less, to give to the technician, who was in another room. The butler was told to stay and monitor the technician. I suppose if the latter failed and it blew up, at least the rest of us would survive. Possibly. I thought this was hard on the butler, until I remembered that giving a kzin a dangerous job was a high compliment.
“There was no sign of a ship leaving since K’zarr’s crew escaped. And no sign of one at any spaceport,” the old Judge told us. “Didn’t expect the last of course. But the failure to detect a ship leaving may not mean merely that it evaded our surveillance. It may mean that they are still here, waiting for another chance. You’d better be careful, kids.” Things have changed since the old pre-invasion days when, I had been told, a certain amount of smuggling between Wunderland and the Serpent Swarm planetoids was tolerated and there were off-base landings and takeoffs, though, as I said, it was intruders that the watch was kept against. There were vast parks of derelict kzin and human pre-hyperdrive spaceships, obsolete now, and being slowly dismantled, and other war debris, as well as great cave systems, some far larger than Earth’s thanks to Wunderland’s lighter gravity. There were forests, too, and jungles further south. Old meteor craters had left swamps well overgrown with vegetation. Much could be hidden among them. After all, it had been Wunderland’s plentiful natural cover which had allowed the resistance to survive all those years when the kzin were hunting its members with some very sophisticated equipment.
I shivered. The death of Dog and the blind thing had made me feel a lot better about the future, but now I saw that we also had to fear the others, who might be even worse. And I had to do all the being afraid for both of us; there was no way that Marthar would admit to it even if she was.
“Were you able to get the records for the phone that Skel had?” the Doctor asked. “They might tell us something.”
“Yes,” the Judge said. “But we didn’t get a lot from them. Mostly he was checking on intrasystem and interstellar shipping, trying to make sure nobody found out where he was. I guess Wunderland looked a good place to hide, but when they came, they didn’t register, and our defense coverage is weaker now that the truce with the Kzin Empire seems to be holding, at least the part with Wunderland. I guess we can thank Lord Vaemar for that.
“Plus, now that they’ve got the hyperdrive too, it may even be that the Patriarchy are starting to realize that there are planets for all.” Many humans had been terrified when it had been realized that the kzin had the hyperdrive too. So far it had not led to the Armageddon some had predicted, though what was happening on the other side of the vast Kzin Empire was anybody’s guess. I thought again of the Captain’s ramblings about the things he had seen and done, and suddenly I felt I understood my tears at his death. Whatever crimes he had committed, he had lived on a scale befitting a Hero.
The Doctor drummed his fingers on the tabletop. He wasn’t good at waiting.
I remembered my tetrahedron and pulled it out of my pocket. I carried it with me everywhere now, although I had put the box down somewhere and couldn’t find it.
“The old Captain, Skel, gave me this. It was in a box that had spaces for four other things like it. I don’t know what it means, but it might be helpful.”
“Yes, he thought it was a sort of intelligence test, one he and all his shipmates had failed. And I suppose it was,” Marthar chimed in knowingly.
“Maybe it was. But I can’t imagine how it worked,” I told her and the others. “The next one was a cube, judging by the space, and the middle one an octahedron, two pyramids glued together at the base. So of course Marthar guessed they were the five platonic solids, which seems reasonable.”
Marthar glared at me. I smiled sweetly.
The Doctor reached out to inspect the tetrahedron and turned it in his hand. “As I recall there was a plan hundreds of years ago on Old Earth to signal Mars by having fires running in trenches in the Sahara; marking out the diagram for Pythagoras’ theorem. The idea was to let the Martians know we human beings were intelligent,” the Doctor said thoughtfully.
“It couldn’t have done much good,” I objected. “There weren’t any intelligent Martians to see it.”
“Yes, but that was long ago, before they found out. It might be that this represents something similar. A mark of intelligence. You have to be fairly smart to work out that there are exactly five regular solids, no more and no less.”
The Doctor passed it around and everyone inspected it.
“Do you think it possible that some alien species made this and the other solids as a way of announcing they were intelligent, Doctor?” Orion asked politely. “Something like displaying what you call the Pythagorean Theorem?”
“It crossed my mind,” the Doctor admitted. “But I daresay the notion is fanciful.” I got it back again and returned it to my pocket. Well, that hadn’t led to anything. But at least I’d let Marthar know she wasn’t the only smarty-pants around.
It seemed an age, but eventually the butler came back. “The workman has successfully transferred the data on the pad, m’lord. And decrypted it. He seemed rather contemptuous of the encryption standard. And as you surmised, m’lord, the device was booby-trapped in several different ways. The information can be projected now, however. Shall I bring the new device in here?”
“Yes, and give the technician his money. Explain to him that if he reveals anything about this transaction, he may pay for it with his life. The threat is not from me, but from others who have no scruples whatsoever. Take him out as you brought him in, I want no speculation about his visit here.”
The butler nodded respectfully and departed. Within a minute he returned with a device s
maller than the original memo pad, a module for a phone, I guessed, connected to an even smaller projector. “I shall see about returning the specialist to his home, sir. The new memo pad is the usual sort, but I would point out that its power and likely value is even greater than the original. The password is blank.” He bowed again and withdrew.
Marthar grabbed the new pad and plugged in the projector, then switched them on. She looked around and selected the wall opposite the Judge as the best site, and pointed the projector at it. We settled down to watch.
The opening was just text, saying it was a record of some space-faring adventures and demanding a password. Marthar just tapped the return icon impatiently with a claw tip. The device obediently went to the next page which was a picture of a spaceship seen from space; it had a kzin skull and crossbones where the registry should have been, and the name of the ship in kzin symbols on the side.
“Ah, another instance of the kzin adopting human culture,” said the doctor, indicating the skull.
“The Black, ah, Predatory Flying Creature—Falcon, perhaps, would be closest,” Orion—Riit rumbled, translating the script. “That was K’zarr’s ship indeed. The terror of the swirl-rift. A very newly settled region of space extending from the Montego system to the Quintana Row, and a natural route from the yonder worlds to beyond Sol and its neighbors.” Sol was the brightest star in our skies, unless you counted Alpha B. brighter than Proxima. That was because Sol was close, at about 4.2 light-years, and bigger than Alpha A.
The next fifty pages were a list of settlements, ships and their cargoes that presumably had been seized by the pirates; the cargoes were priced, and the places they had sold them were listed. Kzin worlds, many of them unknown to us. Well, we had always known the Kzin Empire was big and disunited. It was because of that disunity that we humans were still free.
“ARM should have this information,” the Doctor said in anger.