by Larry Niven
Neither of us had any weapons beyond Marthar’s wtsai, and they wouldn’t have been any use if we had. I looked around, hoping that someone was watching, but we were alone at that moment, just us and the mountain of orange fur and fangs coming towards us. There was no doubt in my mind that we would be killed within a minute.
“Help!” I yelled at the top of my voice. I pulled my hand out of my pocket where I’d been fingering my tetrahedron, and I threw it with all my strength, right in the face of the kzin. He fielded it by reflex, and looked at it in puzzlement. For a moment, he stopped.
“It won’t do you any good to kill us, the ship knows where we are, and will catch you,” I shouted at him. “Valiant, we are being attacked!” There was no answer from the ship. I felt for my phone. Zero would get her, surely, even here.
He had a cutlass over his shoulder and pulled it out with a snarl of pleasure. Seven or eight feet of gleaming steel glittered in the glare of lights high overhead. Marthar hadn’t moved, she was as helpless as I, but her eyes flickered over the scene. She was planning something, but there was no time.
Then help arrived. It arrived behind the kzin. The first we knew of it was when the kzin dropped his cutlass, then a yard of steel erupted from his chest along with a gout of blood. It squirted all over the floor and spattered us. Killing a kzin warrior takes a bit of doing, but a sword thrust straight through the heart from behind will do it. The orange-furred mountain sagged and fell. Behind him, Silver withdrew his bloody cutlass, carefully wiping it clean on the orange fur.
“Seems t’me ye’re really good at findin’ trouble, young kits. Now isn’t it a good thing ye have a wakeful tutor around ye?”
“Silver, thank you, you saved our lives,” I told him. A silly thing to say, given the cooling body with its drawn sword, but I was gabbling.
“Aah, well, glad I am t’be of assistance; this ’ere be that one what Claws chased after but could never find. Well, he’s paid for his score now, to be sure. But what be this?”
His eyes were sharp enough, and he bent over and picked up my tetrahedron which his victim had dropped. His speed in bending over made up for any myth that he was old and stiff.
“It’s my tetrahedron. It’s part of a set.”
“Is that so?” Silver looked at it curiously.
“Just a toy Peter plays with. At least it slowed down this orange fur for a moment. Peter threw it at him,” Marthar explained.
“Then mayhap it be a lucky tetrahedron,” Silver said whimsically, and handed it back to me. I was curiously reluctant to talk about it. It would be hard to explain where I’d got it from without going into details of the whole trip to the treasure planet, and Marthar changed the subject too, as though she felt the same way.
“The robots will clean up the mess,” Silver said, giving the corpse a gentle prod with his cutlass. He finished cleaning the weapon on the corpse and slipped it back into its sheath over his shoulder. “Now I think after all that excitement, ye’d do well to take the rest of the day off, get back forrard to office country, and maybe get a bit of studyin’ in tomorrow.”
Marthar and I went back into the elevator and emerged at our regular meeting place. The others were sitting and talking as if they’d not moved all day. I told them what had happened, and the Judge and Orion-Riit looked at each other. Then I excused myself and went off to bed. It was only mid-afternoon ship’s time but I felt drained. I was still spattered with purple blood and needed to wash it off and change my clothes; Marthar had just licked the blood off her fur quite casually. Sometimes the gulf between us seems very wide.
I thought I would toss and turn, but fell asleep within a minute and slept for twelve hours, though I had some awful dreams.
The following morning at breakfast we learned that Arrow had disappeared. It’s hard to disappear on a spaceship and so it was all a bit mysterious. Arrow had been every bit as bad as S’maak-Captain had said, being anxious to be liked by the crew, which, I have learned, is bad enough in someone who is supposed to be a leader and an officer, but it was much worse than that. He’d been found drunk on several occasions, staggering as he arrived at the bridge, and the Captain had sent him to his quarters. Had it been a kzin ship of the Patriarch’s Navy, the discipline, I guess, would have been considerably more than that (there are still a few old kzin on Wunderland who had been disciplined during the occupation. They walk oddly and painfully, and other kzin try not to notice them). He had spent a lot of time in crew territory, and I suspected that the crew had got him drunk, possibly because they despised him. It’s easy to despise someone who courts your favor, and the kzin hated that sort of thing.
But being drunk and disappearing are different matters. Had it happened on an old-fashioned sailing ship, one that sailed on open waters, I mean, it would have come as no surprise. Of course we talk about sailing in space because of our history, and the kzin also had sea-faring terms taken from the Jotok, whose technology they had seized long ago (their own culture was too barbaric for them to have got into space on their own). Anyway, how did someone disappear on a spacecraft?
“We all got RFIDs when we stepped on board,” the Judge said. “So Valiant should be able to locate every one of us at all times. She’s programmed to do crowd-control even.”
“Have I got an RFID?” I asked.
“On your shoulder. It’s sprayed into you along with a few other things to check your medical condition and report it to Valiant. I thought you’d been finding out all about her,” the Doctor teased.
“Not all, not yet,” Marthar said thoughtfully. “When did the RFID on Arrow stop transmitting, and where was he when it happened? And,” she added thoughtfully, “in what part of his body was the RFID located?”
“Valiant isn’t saying, but she asked for anybody who has any information to contact her. And nobody has said anything, which itself is a bit of a worry,” the Judge answered. “Valiant thinks he must be dead.”
“Well, he’s no loss,” Marthar replied.
“A blaster bolt could have taken kzin and RFID out simultaneously,” the Doctor mused. “But if it were that simple, Valiant would know where it happened and who else was there at the time, even if it didn’t damage the ship. The same applies to all the other ways of disposing of a body. Plenty of devices on the ship which could get rid of both a body and its implants in one hit; you could chop it into bits and feed it into the food system and it would be recycled within minutes, but as soon as the thing stops transmitting, Valiant would know when and where. Presumably she does know when it stopped, and where, but I suppose she has some reason for not saying.”
“Yeuk. You mean this sausage could have bits of Arrow in it?” I asked, indignant.
“That may be why Valiant is being coy,” laughed the Judge. I saw from their ears that Marthar and Orion were amused too.
“Doesn’t matter to me if he is,” Marthar said cheerfully. “Turning him into sausage meat would be an improvement. Although it would probably come out rum-flavored, and this isn’t. Nice flavor of zinyah, actually.” She took another mouthful. I could only hope that if Arrow was food, he was kzin food and not human food.
After breakfast, we worked some more in the rec-room at a simulated Valiant. We had lunch after making some painfully slow progress, and then went down to the Spy-Glass, but it was closed; that would be S’maak-Captain’s work. But when we knocked, Silver opened the door and squinted down at us. He led us into a small room he called the snug, which seemed to be his, because it had an amazing collection of things in it.
There were a dozen weapons of various sorts: things that looked like wtsais but couldn’t quite have been, because those were only worn and used by their owners; there were kzin-sized cutlasses in a rack, there were needlers and sabers and a katana, strange-looking knives with big leaf-shaped blades; and what looked like a suit of armor for a kzin, which is to say it looked like space-warrior armor but much older. There was a waste bucket made out of the monstrous foot of some animal th
at still had the claws on it, and an umbrella stand with an enormous umbrella, or probably a sun-shade, in it. There was a computer with a huge screen and an old-fashioned kzin keyboard with hard metal keys which were horribly scratched. There was what must have been a refrigerator in one corner, and bits of machinery laid out on a table with a pseudomatter programmer next to it. There were chess boards set up, with kzin and human pieces, and a life-sized statue of a human reaching for a banana—at least, I thought and hoped it was a statue. Marthar and I looked around with interest. We had never seen the like of many of these things before.
“Sit ye down, sit ye down,” Silver said, clearing some sort of mechanical device off an old kzin footch. Marthar and I sat down on it next to each other, there being plenty of room.
“Now have ye been good an’ vartuous an’ worked hard for your old tutor? Ha’ ye found out much about the Valiant an’ how she works?”
“We got banned from the bridge proper, and the whole command deck,” Marthar told him. “But we got a reasonable simulation going in the rec-room, and we spend hours playing with it. Here’s our report, where do you want it?”
“This old computer here will do fine, as I don’t like those itsy-bitsy liddle screens you childer use, not havin’ young vision like.”
I knew perfectly well that Silver’s vision was superior to my own, but it seemed to amuse him to play the old dodderer. Marthar pointed her phone at the machine and clicked a claw tip to transmit the file. Silver sat at the console and looked at our report.
“So ye had to start a long way back then, if ye were using complex functions to understand the thing,” he said. “There’s much more modern ways, but I suppose ye’re not ready fer them yet. Still, complex functions are worth knowin’ for other reasons, they be wild an’ beautiful things, nary a doubt of it. An’ can ye explain t’ me why that should be the case?”
“Because there’s just enough of them,” Marthar answered promptly while I was still trying to make sense of the question which was totally unexpected.
“Expound, young kit,” Silver squinted at her with his head on one side.
“Well, the fewer functions there are, the more constraints they must satisfy. I mean there’s more real functions than the cardinality of the continuum, so we constrain them to be continuous. That reduces the number of them, so what’s left must have more power. And every complex function has a power series. So there’s even fewer of them.” I had tried to read the life of Dimity Carmody once. There had been pages in it like that.
“Well, the fact that it’s a proper subset don’t mean it has a smaller cardinality, do it now? So I think yer blethering, young miss. An’ even if you was right about the number, why should that make them more beautiful? An’ what if we was to reduce the set o’ them to say the quaternionic functions, or even down to just a single one o’ them, would it be even more beautiful still?”
Marthar tried to defend her ideas and got minced. It was fun to watch, but after mincing Marthar, Silver started on me, while Marthar watched and gloated. It was obvious that, despite his manner and his position on the ship, Silver was in his way highly educated. In those great heads, kzin have brains bigger than those of humans.
After a while, Silver started asking more about the Valiant. He seemed very interested in her, although he must surely have been able to get the design off the ship herself. I wondered why he hadn’t.
“Now I wonders whether we could do all that stuff down here?” Silver mused. “Setting up a mock bridge room, I means, same as ye did in the rec-room. Then ye could play wi’ it an’ I could watch ye, an’ question ye’ in real time, d’ye see?”
Marthar considered the matter. “If you’ve a pseudomatter programmer here, and I see you have, I don’t see why not. Why don’t you ask Valiant?”
“Better if ye do it, I’m thinkin’. Why don’t you ask her yerself, young missy,” Silver answered smoothly, so Marthar did. For some reason Valiant wasn’t having it.
“But why not?” Marthar protested.
“Captain’s policy,” Valiant answered.
“That creature is a total pest,” Marthar said, although if it was said to Valiant it didn’t get an answer.
“No, no,” Silver told her. “No doubt the good Captain ’as his reasons, an’ is followin’ ’is dooty as a good captain should. Ye’ll just have to go back to the rec-room. An’ what’s the harm in that, I asks ye? ’Twill slow us down a little, but ’tes no great matter.”
“Do you have any ideas about what happened to Arrow?” I asked him. “He’s disappeared and his RFID isn’t responding, which it surely ought to even if he’s dead.”
“Aargh, that be a great mystery, that be. But there’s many mysteries in space, an’ recall that we’re under hyperdrive, an’ who knows, maybe the god’s o’ hyperspace reached in and took him, an’ he’s now the other side o’ the galaxy.” His eyes twinkled, and it was obvious he wasn’t serious about mysteries of that order. I told him.
“Now that’s where ye’re wrong, Peter, lad. Oh, I misdoubt there’s any gods o’ hyperspace or any others fer that matter. But mysteries there be aplenty. ’Tes far from the first o’ impossible things ha’ happened in deep space, ye know. Some I’ve seen wi’ these own lamps, I tell ye, an’ there’s plenty passed on in bars where us spacers gather ’twixt voyages.”
And he proceeded to tell us some of them, most of which neither Marthar nor I believed.
That was our first tutorial, and in the weeks that followed, they all went like that, which is to say he made us feel stupid and ignorant half the time and told us tall tales the rest of the time. He gave me a wtsai of my own, too, a beautiful thing, much smaller than those carried by the full-grown kzin warriors, but beautifully worked and made, I would guess from the precious stones that adorned it, for some high-ranking kitten. I wondered how he had acquired it.
Sometimes he would lecture us on military psychology, a matter in which he seemed to have some experience.
“’Twas the Third Battle for Ceres,” he told us one day. “I’ll never forget it. A line of cruisers was coming in, line ahead, in the old style. Looks impressive, but actually tends to reduce the number of weapons you can bring to bear. The leading ship had expended all her decoys and taken several direct hits aft—she had been venting a cloud of that terrible blood-colored fog into the vacuum. Compartments in that part of the ship were open to space, and everyone aboard in that part was dead unless they had a suit on. But she was keeping her station in the line, and her forrad rail-guns and laser-mountings were still firing as regularly as if she was on an exercise. That’s training and discipline for you! I reckon that demoralized the enemy more than if she’d been undamaged.”
“What was her name?” Marthar asked.
“I can’t pronounce it in Wunderlander,” he said, “but I could see her through the range-finder, and I’ll not forget the sight.”
If it had been a descriptive name, and most on both sides were, he could have found a Wunderlander equivalent easily enough. Wunderlander is very close to the scrambled Earth dialect called Angdeutsch. But he had avoided saying whether the cruiser has been a human or a kzin ship. “Cruiser” was a class designation used by both sides, but more commonly by humans. To have seen the ship by visual sight when the ships were in line ahead strongly suggested that he had been aboard a ship of the opposing fleet, not another in the line behind it, though of course he had perhaps watched it from a slaved drone-camera. Silver was always discreet about what he’d done in the war, but that was understandable, when there were ferocious representatives of both species on board, and when, towards the end, there had been a few telepaths, at least—not that he was anything like a telepath—fighting on the human side. Strange, anyway, to think of him in the uniform of any Navy (Kzin had found uniforms useful and copied them, like talcum powder, blow dryers and toilet paper). We laughed at some of his stories, such as the tale of one old villain of a kzin who, learning long after the war that the monkeys
were giving out medals to those who had fought in the siege of Proxima Base, also applied for one, on the grounds that he had also been there, and without him and his pride there would have been no siege and no medals for anyone.
Marthar and I had a row. It started over whether I had said anything sensible to Silver about functions of several complex variables, which is about a million times worse than functions of just one. I said that although I didn’t claim to understand it at all really, I thought that there was something in my ideas, I just needed to work out the details.
“No chance of that, usually that’s my job.”
“Well, that’s because you never have ideas of your own,” I retorted, and we were off. We finished up shouting at each other. I gather that females have these times when they are totally irrational. My father used to complain about it in my mother, and maybe it happens whatever the species; so I suppose I should have just put up with it nobly, but I didn’t feel very noble just then.
Marthar flounced off and left me, probably to have a good sulk, something females of all species do, I expect. So I went back down to the Spy-Glass to talk to Silver, which I thought could be useful. He must know more about kzinretts than I did. Maybe he knew how to manage them when they got mad for no good reason.
When I got there, I knocked on the door and nobody came. Silver must have been out, so I wandered around looking for him. I saw some of the crew loping about on some business of their own, but there was no sign of Silver. I found an empty room with screens and computers; some of the screens showed the other parts of crew territory, but none looked outside the ship, because there was nothing to see. You don’t want to look into hyperspace—you don’t just go instantly (though temporarily) blind; for a long time you forget how to see. And I’m told that for most kzin it’s worse—one reason there hasn’t been another war so far, I guess. We were in deep space and under hyperdrive, and hadn’t actually got any location in the galaxy. I found a heavy metal door and tried to open it. The handle was meant for kzin, so it was a struggle, but eventually I managed to swing the door open and looked through. A blast of cold air greeted me, and I took a step through.