by Larry Niven
“I’ve a number of things to say to you, m’lord, and you are not going to like them,” he growled to Orion. He was tall enough to look Orion directly in the eyes, and he did.
“Say on, Captain,” Orion said mildly.
“I don’t like the crew, Dominant One. I don’t like the cruise, and I don’t like my first officer. And that’s the long and the short of it.”
“Perhaps you don’t like the ship either?” the Doctor answered sarcastically.
“The Valiant is old, but for a mon…a human ship she’s trim, sir, and well set up,” S’maak-Captain said just as coldly. “I’ll know more of how she handles in a few more days.”
“And do you disapprove of your employer, perhaps?” the Doctor challenged.
“Steady, Doctor. Let’s not provoke bad feelings. S’maak-Captain, it seems to me you have said either too much or too little.” The Judge was patient and calm. But I sensed his hidden alarm. It was very foolish indeed to provoke a kzin.
“As it’s been said, mayhap I must say more, sir,” the Captain allowed. “As to the crew, I find they have set up an inn down in crew territory and they serve rum. Now alcohol fuels discord in man and kzin alike, and kzin are less used to it. It impairs the efficiency of all who partake of it, and I’ll have none of that on my ship, sir, save by way of reward and by my leave. And I have found that with the connivance of my first officer, whom I do not trust, they have loaded the personal arms down at crew level. I am ordering them all to be transferred up to officer levels immediately. I’ll not have weapons at the disposal of the crew. And I have no faith in an officer who would.”
“Do you anticipate a mutiny, perhaps, S’maak-Captain?” the Doctor asked, with biting charm. “Is that your objection to the cruise?” I gave silent thanks he had not said “fear a mutiny.” I knew enough of kzin to know that that would be an insult beyond any possibility of repair. I noticed S’maak-Captain’s heavily-loaded ear-ring. Yes, it seemed what I had read about his wartime exploits was true.
“Sir, had I reason to suspect a mutiny I would turn back to Wunderland immediately,” the Captain answered. “Whatever my own inclinations, I would have no right to carry on in such circumstances, with the Blood of the Riit aboard. But as to the cruise, I signed up to sail under sealed orders, to receive my directions today. All I knew was that we should head north of the ecliptic, and that I have done. I had no other notion of our destination than that. But what do I find, sir? That every member of the crew is better informed than I am. That it is known that we head for the swirl-rift, and in search of treasure. I do not care for searching for treasure at any time, sir. And the rift is exceeding dangerous territory, being infested by pirates. Having accepted the commission, I should have carried it out. But now I discover that every man and kzin on board knew the destination before I did. They have the full coordinates of this star, which is orbited by what they are calling the treasure planet. Now I ask you, is that right, Dominant One, sir? Is it proper?” He appealed to Orion and the Judge, having given up on the doctor.
“No, S’maak-Captain,” Orion rumbled. “It is neither right nor proper. And I am at fault for having used a factor with neither sense nor discretion. I beg you to forgive me.” We are making progress, I thought. From what I have read, a generation or so ago, those words would never have passed the mouth of any kzin. But perhaps Orion-Riit found it easier to apologize because of rather than in spite of being a high Noble. In the old days, again from what I had read, kzin discipline had been largely a matter of swinging claws and hot needles.
“And the crew, Dominant One. I should have had the signing of them, and if I had, I’d not have taken many of those we have, I assure you. It was taken from my hands, Dominant One, which again is most improper.”
“So it is, S’maak-Captain,” Orion agreed. “And all I can do is to ask you to tolerate a discourtesy which I never intended and which came about because I was not diligent enough to oversee things better. Part of that is inexperience; I suppose I had assumed that everything was being done in a standard and orthodox manner.”
“Well, Dominant One, it’s as far from being ship-shape and Bristol fashion as could be. It is far from satisfactory, far indeed.”
“Would you think it best to turn back and start again?” Orion asked. It struck me then what a great kzin Orion-Riit was. He, who if he wished could speak in the Ultimate Imperative tense reserved for Royalty, could put to another kzin, without giving offense, a question the substance of which, in the mouth of a less-skilled leader, ‘Riit’ suffix to his name or not, might have provoked a death-duel. And it was as well they had not learned such skills and restraint when they were our enemies, I thought also.
“The Fanged God knows I am sorely tempted, Dominant One. But none shall have reason to call me a coward. I am willing to complete the bargain so long as I have no further interference.”
“You may be sure of that, S’maak-Captain,” Orion rumbled. “I understand that you are wholly in command and that we are all of us within the grasp of your claws.”
“Then why are you here, Dominant One, with all these supernumeraries? You have made me responsible for the safety of yourself and your female kit, both members of the Riit Clan. I do not fear responsibility, but that is a heavy burden. And that young man is not even that.” He glared at me as if I was to be his next meal, and pronounced the word ‘man’ in, well, in a marked manner. “He is entered up as a ship’s boy, a servant. What in the thrice damnation of V’irrt is he doing on my bridge?”
“He’s my friend,” Marthar shouted at him. “And you can be as peppery as you like, and good luck to you, but you’ll not stop me from being with my friend.”
The Captain scowled at her with distaste, then looked hard at Orion-Riit. “I’m little disposed for parleying, to fit the wit of a chit of a kit, Dominant One, and no ship can function without respect for authority.”
I hated the Captain at that, and so did Marthar. And it was a fearful situation, to be standing there with these monstrous kzin quarrelling. Again, I saw them not as intelligent beings with whom we shared a world, but as terrifying aliens who would have reduced us to slaves and prey-animals if they had been able. Most, at one time or another, would have eaten human flesh.
Orion-Riit nodded. “You have a point, S’maak-Captain, and if there is nothing more we shall leave. I have entered up the coordinates of our destination into the Valiant just before we came, so I have fulfilled my obligations, I believe.”
“I shall confirm that the crew got it right, then, Dominant One,” he said with extreme distaste. “And I note that your kit has a tutor who is one of the crew, and presumably has the run of most of the ship in consequence. I’ll not have it, lord. Apart from that, there is nothing more. I should be obliged were you all to withdraw.” And with that he turned back to his computer, and according to species we all slunk or strode away.
“Well, there’s a fine tyrannical oaf, and what do we do about him?” the Doctor asked as we returned to our table in the eating area reserved for humans. He started to fire up his pipe. Orion-Riit and Marthar also joined us. I saw the Judge unobtrusively program the robot waiter: while the kzin were present it would bring no offensive monkey food. But perhaps the ship had guessed that anyway.
“He’s an honest kzin, I reckon,” the Judge said calmly. “I’ve dealt with many. And his complaints were entirely reasonable.”
“What about being rude to Peter?” Marthar demanded.
“Oh, S’maak-Captain’s a trifle authoritarian, no doubt, he wants to follow the rules,” the Judge said as he lit a cigar. “He is in a difficult position: Captain, but with, as he says, the Blood of the Riit in his charge. From his point of view, Peter should be below with the crew. Them’s the rules. The trouble is, you and Peter are bright enough to see that some rules are not appropriate to the situation and should be ignored. You look at the reasons for the rules and ask if they make sense in the here and now. But it does cause trouble if you do that,
you know. Before you know where you are, stupid people who really ought to follow the rules decide they can break them too. You need to think of precedent, of the danger of setting what might be a dreadful example.”
“But we’re setting a good example in asking what the point of the rules is, and doing some thinking about them,” Marthar argued.
“It’s not so easy to follow an example of someone thinking, because most folk don’t see the process, only the outcomes,” the Judge said drily. “And for you troublemakers, the outcome is frequently chaos.”
“It might be simplest if we promote Peter to being a supernumerary,” Orion-Riit said thoughtfully. “I think that in the circumstances it had better be approved by S’maak-Captain. I shall ask Valiant to seek his approval immediately.” Orion had his phone built into his skull instead of having a thing you had to carry about with you. Marthar was too young to have that, and I could never afford even the oldest and most obsolete; mine was a present from the Riit family. So when Orion went silent you never knew what he was doing; it might be having an argument with the Valiant or surfing the web. I was inclined to rule out playing games, except possibly Chess or Go.
“And his intention of banning Silver from venturing out of crew territory?” the Doctor demanded.
“It means that the kits will have to go to him, I suppose,” Orion-Riit said. “I don’t suppose they’ll object to that.”
We didn’t, of course, although it didn’t seem fair that we could go where we liked but Silver could not. Of course, the rotten captain had put a stop to the whole business of studying the ship.
“We’ll never be let near the bridge again, that’s for sure,” I said, with intense gloom. “How are we going to do our assignment for Silver?”
“I don’t think it’s quite that bad,” Orion told us. “You can be given permission to study the general structure of the ship and find out how she works as an organism, all the many feedback loops. There’s nothing secret or confidential about that; it’s all publicly available knowledge. You can’t go near the real bridge, but you can simulate one in the rec-room and test your understanding by working out what you expect to happen when various things go wrong, then try them out to see if you are right. Valiant can easily let you have enough computer power for that.”
“What I don’t understand,” the Doctor said, “is how the old bugger could be so rude. I mean, you’re Royalty. Shouldn’t he show some sort of respect himself?”
“It’s because Orion-Riit is Royalty, and so is Marthar, that he can’t,” the Judge explained. “He’s in charge of the ship, and he doesn’t feel any too secure with his officer, so the last thing he can afford to do is to show any weakness.”
“You are right, Judge,” Orion-Riit rumbled. “And tolerating lip from a kzinrett kit doesn’t go with maintaining his authority either. You got off lightly, child. I think he wanted me to beat you there and then.”
“You wouldn’t do that, Daddy, would you?” Marthar crept up to her father in mock trepidation. At least, I suppose it was mock. Kzin are known to be stern with their offspring by our standards, and even Wunderkzin of Vaemar-Riit’s clan are still coming to terms, sometimes painfully, with the whole new factor of intelligent females. It has meant a huge upheaval of ways of thinking.
“Holding you up by your tail and smacking your stern, you mean? Teaching you respect for force and for authority? I suspect it’s too late for that. Anyway, I want you to question authority, and I expect others to question yours in due course. Obedience is something I value less than the captain does, I daresay, but you need to understand why he needs it. We travel into danger, and if he insists on running a tight ship, I’ll not question him. Nor should you. Your life may depend on obedience one day.”
We went to the rec-room later, where we had enjoyed weightlessness so much, and explained to Valiant that we wanted to study the ship and please could we have a mock bridge to play with. She was quite happy to do this, and made us one within seconds. It was all fuzz of course, programmable pseudomatter. Not the sort of thing poor people like me had much direct experience with, but basically it’s a huge collection of communicating viruses made of non-standard matter. There’s lots of it about, and in the natural form it doesn’t have mass or interact with normal matter much, but it can be made to simulate mass and you can program it. Well, I can’t, but I shall someday. The viruses replicate under command and communicate with each other, so it’s a bit like tigripards’ spots, once you start, they sort of replicate themselves and fall into a pattern.
So Marthar sat at one computer console and I at another, and we brought up the design of the Valiant.
The difference between Hard and Soft can be summarized in one word: feedback. Hard doesn’t have any, or hardly any, and Soft does. The more complicated the organism, the more feedback. A spaceship is loaded with feedback loops, squillions of them. Plants have about a squillion times as many, and animals a squillion times more than plants. Socioeconomic systems are a squillion squillion times worse than animals of course, because animals, men and kzin among them, are part of these systems. Anyway, there’s positive feedback which can be as bad as a snowball sliding down a mountain, getting bigger until it’s an avalanche; and there’s negative feedback, which usually makes things oscillate, like your heart, or a spring bouncing, or the business cycle in economics.
“I hate all these feedback loops, nested six million deep, and half of them positive and half negative so you can never tell what’s going to happen when you poke something. It’s all so…unhygienic,” Marthar complained. But she started to get the hang of it after a while, although she never admitted to actually enjoying it. Marthar and I make a good team: I provide the intuitions and she explains what is wrong with them, and sometimes she’s right.
CHAPTER TEN
We spent the next day working with a simulated Valiant and the time just seemed to shoot past. It was interesting, for me at least. We certainly learned a lot. Then we broke for lunch, and shortly after that, Marthar got bored.
“Come on, we’ve done enough to get the outline. What’s the point of being on a real spaceship if you spend all your time playing with a pretend one? Let’s go check out the launch bay for the landers. I want to see something real.”
We had found the launch bay on the schematics, and knew to go down twenty-two levels. The bay was big; each of the three ships in it was capable of doing exploration of a planetary surface. Of course the entire Valiant could be landed, too, but more exploration could be done with the three babies. They were pretty big babies, each capable of holding a crew of twenty kzin or a lot more human beings. And they could be launched from deep space, not just in atmosphere, so they were spaceships in their own right.
The bay was occupied by a dozen kzin doing things to great tubes of wiring which linked the landers to the mother craft. Each of the landers was embraced by a huge mechanical thing that held it upright and fed it through yet more tubes, some as thin as my body and others ten times the size. Occasional vents of something that looked like steam, but was more likely to be liquid nitrogen, squirted into the air. The whole place was huge and noisy.
We wandered around, ignored by everyone else, with the clatter of moving robots, shaped like aircars mostly, but with wheels and tractor treads at the base, and metal arms coming out of the tops. I had never seen the crew at work before, but then, I’d never been anywhere where they might be working so perhaps it wasn’t surprising. Long cylinders, bundled onto trucks, were being moved towards the landers. I had no idea what was in them. All this industry was impressive, and made me feel even more ignorant than usual.
“Do you think they’ll let us see inside a lander?” Marthar asked optimistically.
“I’d rather we stayed out of the way, or we’ll probably get thrown out for being nuisances,” I told her. I dodged a small vehicle carting boxes. There was no driver, it was all robotic. Or perhaps Valiant herself was driving with a fraction of her brain power.
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nbsp; The huge doors to the vacuum of space were each much bigger than the ships; we could see the seams where they were sealed. Launching one of the landers would mean evacuating the entire room first, pumping the present atmosphere into pressure containers in the walls, and then when the vacuum inside was comparable with that outside, the great doors would slide away, and the small residue of air would fluff out into space. Then the landers would be carted towards the door and pushed outside. You’d never see this part, of course, unless you stayed inside wearing a pressure suit, and you’d have to hang onto something to make sure you didn’t get blown outside with the last bit of air. The air was helping to seal the doors, one atmosphere of air over things that size would amount to hundreds of thousands of tons. It would be easy to calculate it; there is a pressure of about a ton on every square meter on anything down on planet. When you find this out, you wonder why we aren’t all squashed flat, but the air is inside us as well.
We went over to one of the landers, which was a scarlet color and very shiny. The three landers were different colors, red, blue and green, so they could be individually recognized from a great distance. You might have to watch them from a telescope.
Then from behind a column strode a figure I recognized. The orange-furred kzin who I had seen in the Spy-Glass and who Silver had sent Claws to chase. He recognized me at the same time. There was absolutely no doubt; I’d seen him at the sign of the Spy-Glass, and I’d seen him in Thoma’stown with the rest of K’zarr’s men. I froze as he came loping towards us. Marthar looked at me then she looked where I was staring and saw the great kzin. She recognized him too.