by Larry Niven
Most of the business of flying a spaceship is automated, though it is practice to keep a skeleton crew of living watchkeepers, and our new ship-computer was a good one. She could design and build repair robots for anything that needed fixing, there were already repair robots for the usual things that could go wrong, and she could mine asteroids for minerals and water. It was like an animal’s body with an immune system and an ability to heal. Marthar and I found this cheering, because we thought it would be a sort of bridge between Hard and Soft, and if we could figure out enough about how the computer worked, we could be really ready for more school when we got back.
Of course, the ship still needed a crew. A modern ship would hardly have needed any organic life on board, at least as far as the flying was concerned, but the older models were designed to have a lot of human interfaces, for all sorts of strange reasons. When she was first built, human beings hadn’t wanted their computers to be very bright, and in battle humans could show more initiative than any computer or robot. I knew battles had been won in the Great War because humans had switched off computers which told them everything was lost. Now they would be a mixture of human and kzin interfaces. Beings who were equally at home handling both systems, and both interfaces, were rare. And getting a human or kzin crew proved difficult.
Blandly to Lord Orion Riit,
Judge Jorg von Thoma,
Doctor Thaddeus Lemoine,
Verderer Redroar:
Subsequent to your instructions, the Hispaniola has been renamed and refitted as the Valiant. The on-board computer insists on a crew of at least forty, and it has been difficult to find them. I found seven humans and five kzin who were willing to crew her but their specialties have not always been acceptable to the computer (who is also called Valiant, of course.) Some, I think, were running from the law and I have been at my wit’s end until recently. A kzin called Silver turned up one day; he was a spaceman many years ago, an auto-chef programmer apparently, and when I told him the ship would have two young people on board, he agreed with some persuading to travel as their tutor. The Valiant wanted one, so I appointed him there and then. Since then, some of his old companions have come to join up, and they seem to make a whole crew. No doubt they have sailed in similar ships before, although all but three are kzin. Silver was good enough to suggest that of the twelve I had already appointed, all were unsuitable for one reason or another, and his arguments were convincing in two cases. But I am sure he will get on with the kzin I found, and he will surely tolerate the other two humans who are husband and wife.
“A tutor!” I exclaimed. “A living breathing one we can argue back with properly. We’ve never had a human or kzin tutor, only a few human teaching assistants who were hopeless. That will open lots of possibilities, don’t you think?”
Marthar considered. “I suppose a kzin tutor would be better than the humans we had as teaching assistants. They were afraid of you even, because of the questions you had. And they were terrified of me eating them. As long as he’s not too old we should be alright. Oldies are mainly ever so dull. Their brains calcify or something.”
“The Doctor and the Judge are alright,” I pointed out.
“True. And Daddy isn’t too awful. Some people don’t calcify as readily as others. And there are those who are on the geriatric drugs and stopped themselves aging before calcification set in. But nearly all wrinklies are as dull as thoat poo. Well-known fact number three million and seven.”
“What’s well-known fact three million and eight?” I asked.
“That’s the one about females being smarter and better at algebra than males,” she told me sweetly. I can’t win many against Marthar, but it’s fun trying. And sometimes, not often, I ask a question or make a remark that stops her in her tracks and she looks at me with something approaching respect.
I used to think it was funny that you could love someone of a different species, but actually human beings have done it for thousands of years. We can love pet dogs and cats with no trouble at all. I sometimes think that’s how Marthar feels about me.
“When are we going to go and see this ship, the Valiant?” I asked.
“How would I know, doofus?” she answered.
“What’s a doofus?” I asked.
“Dunno. Found it in an old book. Sounds a bit Latin, doesn’t it? I don’t think it’s exactly flattering.”
“That makes you a doofa,” I pointed out. That started a fight, which I rapidly lost. Hardly surprising when you’re fighting a being that would consider dismantling a Bengal tiger no big deal. With a young male kzin I would never have dared risk even a play-fight. She sat on me after a certain amount of rolling around and wrestling, keeping her claws sheathed. She’s a lot stronger than I am, it isn’t fair. One of the first things you learn about life, I guess. I saw the effort she made to prevent tearing my throat out with her fangs, and thought the fight had gone far enough. It would have been unfair to test her self-control too far. Kzin instincts are strong.
We spent a lot of time looking at the memo pad, the safe version. We found the galactic coordinates of the planet with the towers and the lime-green sun, and copied them to our own phones. We searched through the galactic atlas, the source of which was in the spaceport’s main maproom, to locate it and its neighbors. It was not too far from the great swirl-rift, but out in a strange direction, well to the Galactic North. My Trojan theory had been wrong. Of course, there are millions of stars in the region, some lost in clouds of gas, some in the hyperbaryon clouds, some in highly unstable orbits of clusters, and a few single and binary systems.
We also speculated on the treasure planet. Perhaps it had some old remnants of the race that had built the towers, now reduced to savagery and cannibalism. Or there could be aliens, like some of those that the Captain had talked of, those with two heads, or the ones who could appear to be beautiful females and seduce space-farers. Or others, even stranger. Most of our discussions involved finding books which had scientific miracles we could bring back to a grateful Wunderland, although how we were to read them without attaching those horrible antennae we never quite worked out. “If we could interface them to a computer, it would be alright,” Marthar said optimistically.
“I should think they only sense organic brains,” I argued, and shuddered at the recollection of those things seeking out eyes.
“You don’t know that,” Marthar announced. “Or perhaps we’ll find some aliens who don’t mind having antennae and we can get them to do the reading for us. Or perhaps Valiant will figure out some alternative way of doing it, build our own book readers, I mean. Or maybe we’ll find working models of the technology. We could look at those transit discs and dig them up and figure out how they work.”
“I have a strong suspicion that reverse engineering alien technology could be a long job,” I said. “How long would it have taken Isaac Newton to build a mobile phone if he’d seen one working on a video? He’d have had to invent electricity first. And you’re just guessing that they are transit discs, maybe they just dropped the pirates down a big well to be fed to carnivores and then closed again quickly.”
This led to us watching the video sequences again, and to lots of endless but happy bickering as we tried to justify our positions by digging up supporting evidence from the web and then changing our positions. Marthar was really good at that.
Eventually we got the letter from Blandly that led us to travelling to the Spaceport:
Blandly to Lord Orion Riit,
Judge Jorg von Thoma,
Doctor Thaddeus Lemoine,
Verderer Redroar:
My lord, the ship is finally ready. I have appointed a ship’s mate, a kzin named Arrow, a somewhat stiff fellow, but admirably competent, and he has supervised the loading to the satisfaction of the Valiant herself. I have also set about the last task you gave me of finding a second ship which will set off after you within a matter of months if we do not hear from you in that time. I have a suitable candidate, and will
set about crewing her and provisioning her the moment you leave for the rift, or for the treasure planet. All here are most excited at such a destination, I might say!
“Orion-Riit won’t like that,” I muttered. “The idea was to keep it secret, and this man Blandly is an idiot who seems to have no discretion at all.”
“Talking of treasure!” said Orion-Riit when he saw it. “As if treasure and murder were not the oldest of old friends! And what is this so-called Name, ‘Arrow’?” Kzin Names are given to a minority as signs of high distinction and, to a Noble like Orion-Riit, conveyed information about the bearer that could be read like a book. Rarrgh’s name, for example, conveyed the tightly-coded description, “Slayer of Morlocks in the great caves when fighting against heavy odds and without prospect of relief.” There were also nursery names given to young kits of high birth, which at the end of the war had not been replaced by proper Heroes’ Names. Vaemar-Riit himself bore such a Name and had decided to keep it, since under that Name he had fought his first battles. Since the end of the war, too, a few Kzin had taken to appropriating Names for themselves, or even, especially in the case of some of the telepaths, taking up human names. Of course, there were also descriptive nick-names, like “One-Eye” or “Brown-Fur,” but, as far as I understood kzin society, these were used only by the lower classes. None confused them with real Names. Anyway, Orion-Riit (his own Name conferred by his Sire as being easy for humans to pronounce but very uncommon among them) certainly looked askance at this one. The letter finished:
I suggest the juveniles should come to the ship within two days, and that the adults should come within three. If the adults are delayed for any reason it will not greatly matter, as Silver will surely take good care of the juveniles. Your obedient servant, Sven Blandly.
“Another reason for thinking he’s an idiot,” Marthar pointed out. “He calls us juveniles. It sounds calculated to irritate us. And irritating me is a really bad idea, as he is shortly going to discover.”
“Oh, what does it matter?” I asked. I jumped to my feet and danced. “We’re off to join the Valiant! Tomorrow! No more hanging around. We’ll be able to move into our cabins. We’ll be able to run around the ship and explore. It’s going to be more fun than either of us have ever had before.”
“And then off to the treasure planet. Which might be fun and could be dangerous,” Marthar agreed.
Of course, for her, the dangerous bit made it even more attractive.
Packing took us the afternoon, and Redroar agreed to take us to the spaceport the following day. We were going in one of Orion’s aircars, a big one with plenty of space for our luggage. I had few possessions anyway, but packed my best clothes. I made sure that the tetrahedron was in my pocket at all times: I thought it just possible that it had come originally from the treasure planet, and that I might find the other solids; the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron, and maybe a neat box in which to keep them all. There was something attractive about the idea that the tetrahedron was going home again, although it might have come from some other world altogether, of course. Marthar had a huge amount of luggage, at least ten times as much as I did, including food for the journey for both of us. That was thoughtful of her, because my feeling for fish-flavored ice cream was not altogether kindly. She somehow got away from the house early in the morning and did some last-minute shopping in the town, making Redroar furious when he caught her coming back over the wall; he swore horribly in the Heroes’ tongue and she answered him pertly. She was covered by parcels strung around her, and he wanted to check that nothing explosive or toxic was among them.
After some serious thought, Redroar passed the swords. A kzinrett isn’t supposed to carry a wtsai of course, and this sword was about the same size, though used for slashing rather than mainly thrusting like the wtsai. Now I knew why she had been practicing with sticks during our picnics in the grounds. I got one too, a sword, I mean, although mine was much smaller and had a grip and balance for a man rather than a kzin. I hoped I never had to use it. In fact, we left them behind after deciding they would be pretty useless against anything except each other.
Then we had to transfer the new luggage to the aircar and, with Redroar sitting opposite us, we set off.
It was only a bit over a hundred kilometers, which had been a lot when it was all done by walking or on horseback, but we passed over the abbey and the town that had grown up on the flank of the old volcano next to it within minutes. And about as many minutes later we were close to the spaceport and were craning to see the Valiant. We didn’t get nearly close enough to be sure which was ours; there were dozens of ships in the various bays, all of different sizes and styles, not to mention a park, like the one at München only smaller, of old Kzin pre-hyperdrive dreadnaughts, being nibbled away for scrap. Then we moved over the little town, and eventually landed on the roof of a hotel, were whisked down in the lift as our bags were unloaded into another, and descended to floor level.
Orion met us and licked his daughter briefly, while a stout man next to him beamed at us all. “Ah, the juveniles!” he said, but Marthar merely looked at him and drew her lips back only a little, saying nothing but exposing a respectable amount of fang. I suppose having her father there inhibited her a bit, which saved Blandly a nasty bite, or the verbal equivalent.
“Where are the Doctor and the Judge?” I asked.
“They are on board already, and we join them almost immediately. There is nothing to keep us here,” Orion answered. “Come, the baggage is being transferred to the landcar already. Blandly, settle the hotel bills and any others. Take the payment from the running account.”
We got into the landcar while our baggage was being loaded, and after a few minutes we were off to the port proper. I gawped out of one window while Marthar gawped equally out of the other. We saw spacefarers, Kzin with their loping prowl and humans with their conditioned glide that had to keep the feet in contact with the ground at all times lest they lose their grip in space, some of the first free adult Jotok with their five legs and curious whirling motion. It made me feel keenly how provincial my life had been, and I resolved to see more of the universe.
Then we drew up at the spaceport, and, carrying only hand luggage, we followed flickering arrows onto walkways which carried us and needed care when hopping off, although they slowed down a lot before we had to change. And then up a tower in a lift, and a short walk across a bridge. And we were inside the Valiant, without ever having seen her from the outside.
Redroar stopped. “I’ll be getting back, my lord. Any instructions?”
“Just keep everything neat and tidy until we get back, and make sure that man Blandly does what he has contracted,” Orion told him. “I’ve little faith in his judgment, but he was wished on me by a political colleague. And if anything goes wrong, I’ll expect to see you on the replacement ship with a squad of Father’s guard. And I’ll hope you have more luck keeping the destination secret than we’ve had.”
“Very good, my lord. Since I am not so obligated, I’ll replace Blandly just as soon as he completes the existing contract. In my judgment he is a fool. Best to stay away from fools, folly is contagious.”
Orion grunted. “We shall at least be off before he can spread it around that we are due to leave. We go in ten minutes, just enough time to get the kits strapped down and the baggage stowed. Take care, Redroar.”
And ten minutes later, as an honorary kit, I felt myself drawn back into my acceleration couch and we were off into space. I could guess how my friends would envy me, if they knew.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The acceleration couch was a sort of narrow bed that turned into a coffin. Sides went up and a top slid over it, lights came on inside and there was a hiss of air, and then I floated. I didn’t understand it, because I expected to be pressed down by the acceleration. I had forgotten about the kzin gravity-planer, which all ships, human and kzin, now carried. I counted two minutes by pulse beat until a bell rang, a g
reen light flashed and the top and walls slid down again. I looked around, thought, got up and ran to the door. I opened it, and there was Marthar, just about to knock on it.
“We’re in space!” I told her.
“Really? I thought we were underwater. Golly, aren’t you a clever little doofus?” she said, flippantly. “Are we going to explore?”
We walked down the corridor that held our cabins into a great space with a ramp in the middle of it leading up. The floor was soft but smooth, a bit like a dojo. Marthar’s claws would have torn shreds out of the one at school, she had to wear funny shoes that covered them up when she went into the dojo, but here her claws had no effect. It meant that we walked very quietly.
“Just over a standard gravity,” she remarked.
“Oh, that’s it. I felt sort of heavy, as if I’d eaten too much. I suppose that explains why the floors are soft and spongy; it’s in case we fall down. I guess the gravity is because the ship’s accelerating. It’s the right direction. How long before we get to use the hyperdrive?”
“Think, doofus. What’s the acceleration of gravity on Wunderland?”