by Larry Niven
“Bloody fools ha’ tried to open it,” muttered Silver savagely. “What sort o’ eedjut would not know better than that? Old K’zarr were not the one to leave a memo pad open for anyone to read.”
“I don’t have any idea,” he called back. “K’zarr kept his council, so he did. But ye may trace a triangle, so ye may; ’tis a faint possibility.”
The kzin was holding what must have been the memo pad, and he put a claw tip to it and began to trace something when it exploded in green fire. It wasn’t loud, but the fire ran up the kzin’s arm onto his face, and he screamed horribly as it consumed him. He twisted and fell, with the pad underneath him. Then there was a whump! and his body jerked once. One more of the crew tumbled out, looked at the body and roared to the inside of the wreck, then jumped back and fanned the air, roaring a warning to the others. A faint green mist hovered over the corpse. Kzin came rushing out, their paws over their faces as they saw the green mist, until the whole of them, even the wounded, were outside standing well away from the lander, looking with horrid fascination at the corpse and the slowly dissipating mist.
Then they turned back to Silver. “Silver-Captain, what do we do now, we ain’t got the memo pad?” one of them wailed. They came staggering towards us, coughing, eyes streaming. They had not been very close to the green mist, but it had affected all of them nonetheless.
Silver looked wrathfully at his crew as they stood there looking lost.
“And what fool tried to wrest K’zarr’s secrets from him?” Silver asked. “What fools among ye thought that K’zarr was to be easy? Ye’re lucky that it happened outside; had ye tried in in the lander ye’d all be deader’n cow guts by now, so ye would and deserve to be too.”
Some of them looked furtively at the others. “But Cap’n, we done lost it. How are we to know what the treasure is and where, izackly?” Rraangar was the spokesman.
“The damned thing was useless; I already ha’ the information on it,” Silver growled. “And so does the man-kit here, on his phone. And K’zarr hisself knew little. I was there when he found it, so I was, all I needed to know was the coordinates of the planet and the place on the planet where the tower be. And ye can almost see it from here. So there is but small loss in the contrivance, else why would Orion ha’ given it to us?”
This gave them pause for thought, and they gradually brightened. “Well, we shall have him for a feast when we get there,” one of them said with a snarl. “One last attack in the tower and we shall see to that.”
Silver said nothing. He knew about the discs. He knew that there were ways in and out of the tower that the pirates did not. Their position was weak indeed, but only Silver would accept that. The crew seemed to believe that a brutal assault would get them what they wanted, prisoners perhaps to extort details of where the pinnace was. Men who served in the war had told me that the kzin’s addiction to head-on attack had been what had saved the humans time and again. But I knew and Silver must suspect that the others were now better armed. All the crew had were wtsais and cutlasses, with the needlers out of ammunition. They wouldn’t do much against the blasters which Marthar would have gotten to Orion and S’maak-Captain by now. The crew had no idea of the perils of their position, and I surely wasn’t going to tell them. And neither was Silver. Which carried its own perils for him.
“Right then, let’s to work!” roared Silver. He clapped Rraangar on the shoulder, and gestured to the others. “Once we get the treasure we can cast about for the pinnace; we need to take prisoners who can give us a little help on that!”
They cheered him at the prospect, snarling in anticipation. He was lifting their spirits, and, I rather more than suspected, his own at the same time.
“As for our hostage,” he continued, “that’s his last talk, I guess, with those he loves so dear. I’ve got my piece o’ news, and thankee to him for that; but it’s over and done. I’ll take him in line when we goes treasure hunting, for we’ll keep him like gold in case of accidents, you mark, and in the meantime. Once we get the pinnace and treasure both, and back into space like jolly companions, why then we’ll talk to Peter Cartwright again, so we will, and we’ll give him his due share to thank him for all his kindness. Meanwhile we’ll take good care of him, so we will.” Saying which, he took a metal rope and tied a noose around my neck and took the other end in his paw.
The crew were in good humor now and for my part, I was most horribly cast down. Should the scheme he had sketched prove feasible, Silver, already doubly a traitor, would not hesitate to adopt it. He still had a foot in either camp, and while the pirates offered him wealth and freedom, our side offered him, at best, a bare escape from death.
Indeed, while the humans might bargain with him for his life, I was certain the kzin would not do so. Apart from anything else, there was the matter of which I had overheard him boasting: Chuut-Riit’s vow of vengeance ‘to the generations.’ Kzin were not disposed to overlook such vows once made, though centuries passed, the Riit Clan probably least of all, and I did not see how we could make them do so. At best we might be able to offer him escape to one of the remote new colony worlds, but how would we find a ship to get him there? I was sure Silver had thought of all this as well.
Even if things fell out so that he was forced to keep his faith with the Doctor, even then what danger lay before us! What a moment that would be when the suspicions of his followers turned to certainty and he and I—a cripple and a boy—should have to fight for life against seven armed kzin!
Add to this double apprehension the doubt as to where my friends now were and the Doctor’s last warning to Silver about the treasure: Look out for squalls when you find it.
Silver ordered them to work: “We can be there in the hour, be we brisk and business-like, so form a file and we go that way yonder. And be silent, for we want to gi’ them no warning.”
The pirates obediently set off after Silver and me in a single file. There were seven of them, two wounded, but it takes a lot to stop or even slow down a kzin. Silver and I were in the lead at first, but with his artificial leg and his limp, and with me being little over half their height, the crew gradually moved in front of us, until we were at the tail of a procession of dangerous monsters descending on my friends. I hoped they were keeping good lookout. Or better, had vacated the first tower for the one to which Bengar had taken us. Or better yet, some other I knew nothing of, for although I had no absolute certainty, I felt that I could recall the discs we had stepped on to get there. And under torture, I might betray my friends. I hoped I would die first. I had taken on some of Marthar’s kzin ideas in the years of being friends with her. “Everyone has to die, even with the so-called immortality drugs,” she had said with a shrug. “There were nearly fourteen billion years before the brief time now when I exist, and no doubt there will be many trillions of years after. I don’t worry about the second period any more than I do about the first. So long as I make the best use of this brief window and live life with courage and honor. DNA and self-respect. That’s what makes us the Kzin. And it should make for you too, little Chimpy, although it’s not the same DNA.”
DNA and self-respect. I had no pride of ancestry as Marthar did, but I had nothing to be ashamed of either. I was a human being, and we had made a difference to the Universe. And I understood how she felt about self-respect. I’d seen the sad people who had lost it or maybe never had any, and I pitied them. There’s an old Earth saying that the coward dies a thousand deaths, the hero dies but once. It’s not true. The coward never really lives. Once you see that, and resolve to live without fear, you don’t fear death or anything else much, save losing your self-respect. In my case death might well come as a friend.
I thought, for some reason, of the nameless, almost certainly long-dead kzin Hero who, when Wunderland was falling to the victorious human forces, had found a terrified kitten in the ruins of the governor’s palace and handed it to Jorg, and he to Rarrgh-Sergeant, commanding the last kzin garrison, a handful of cripples
besieged in Circle Bay Monastery. That kitten had grown into the mighty Vaemar-Riit, who had played a great role in bringing peace between man and kzin on Wunderland. We cannot even try to see where things will lead.
The way led through scrub and past the occasional taller bushes over hard-packed ground that had never seen anything like cultivation, with its red dirt and rocks and flints. The kzin wore nothing to protect their feet but seemed oblivious to the grit and stones; I was glad of my boots. Silver was at least considerate with my tether and didn’t pull on it. We trekked easily by Silver’s directions, so as not to weary the hands prematurely, with Silver occasionally calling them to slow down so as to accommodate himself and of course me. We got to where we could clearly see the top of the tower above the bushes, and stark and black it looked to me with broken shards of metal at the top, a sort of cream stone lower down with windows that were mere slots of emptiness through which it was all too easy to imagine alien eyes watching. A heavy-scented broom and some of the shrubs being in flower mingled their spices and made the place almost attractive. I could hear Silver purring, not with content but excitement.
The crew were all excited now, and caught between rushing on regardless of their leader, and huddling together to await him, for we were scores of paces behind even the stragglers, those who had been wounded. They tried to roar in an undertone with limited success.
That was when there came a cry from one of the crew who had gone slightly off the trail. The others ran in his direction.
“He can’t ha’ found any treasure, for ’tis all in the tower,” Silver remarked. “Let us see for ourselves what ’tis that causes sich a commotion.”
It was certainly something very different from treasure, as we found when we also reached the spot. At the foot of what was a bush of almost tree height, and half-covered by green moss, lay a kzin skeleton with a few scraps of belt on the ground and a few fragments of fur remaining on the bones.
“He were one o’ the brotherhood,” said Rraangar, who was bolder than the rest and had gone up to examine the scraps of belts. “Leastaways, he carried a cutlass. Ye can see the mark o’ one in the sand.”
“Aye, aye,” said Silver. “Like enough; you wouldn’t look for a priest or a lordling here, I reckon. But where is his cutlass now? Or his wtsai? Or a needler?”
“Well, who might he ha’ been?” one of the crew asked.
“Whoever it were didn’t die natural,” one of the crew observed. “Or the weapons would ha’ been here too.”
“Ahh, well, those who went on trips wi’ K’zarr did tend to die. ’Twere natural enough to die wi’ K’zarr in the offing,” Silver said thoughtfully. “And if K’zarr were living, this would be a right hot spot for all of us. K’zarr wouldn’t like it that others than him were lookin’ for his treasure.”
“I saw him dead with these here deadlights,” Rraangar said. “Skel showed me the body. It were K’zarr, sure enough, wi’ a snarl on his face and his eyes open to face the Fanged God, or more like the hell demons.”
“Aye, sure enough, K’zarr be dead and gone below,” said the one with the bandages. “But if ever sperrit walked, it would be K’zarr’s. He died bad, did K’zarr.”
“That he did,” another put in. “Now he raged and now he hollered for the rum, and always he sang o’ death and blood, in that cold, cold voice of his. I dreams about that voice, so I does, like a stab of a wtsai made of ice, so it were, a stab in the ear through to the brain. And bad dreams they be, bad, bad dreams.”
“Come, Heroes, stow this talk,” cried Silver. “K’zarr is dead, and he don’t walk lest we let him. And he don’t walk by natural daylight, and there’s little night on this cursed planet, so if K’zarr walks, he walks a world away. I’ll be the Hero what lets K’zarr walk, once we’re back in space, and he will dance, not walk, and he will dance to my tune, Heroes, and my tune only. Be sure of it!” roared Silver. Yes, I thought, there was no doubt about it, the others were miserable, wretched petty criminals, unworthy of the name of Hero. But Silver was something more.
I recalled the terror with which I had seen the ghost of K’zarr on board the Valiant, a horrible joke of Silver. It must have amused him to bring a ghost of K’zarr back to life to obey his orders. What the crew made of the macabre gesture I could not imagine; maybe they had never seen him, perhaps only the senior ship’s officers knew of Silver’s strange tastes. Or maybe it was an afterthought that he had arranged to replace Valiant by K’zarr and it had never happened before. Perhaps he was planning to use the thing to terrorize the crew later. Who could fathom the working of Silver’s mind? I knew I could not.
“Not far to go now, Heroes, on to the treasure!” Silver waved the way ahead, but in spite of the warmth of the sun and the staring daylight, the pirates no longer ran separate and (despite Silver’s orders) shouting through the bush, but kept side by side and spoke in whispers. The terror of the dead pirate had fallen on their spirits.
We were mounting a light hill. The tower stood on the top of it, like a medieval fortress holding the high ground. We could not see the base of it, for it was covered by the thin foliage still, but it loomed up over us. There was no sound but the thin wind whistling through the broom and the bushes, making the flowers tremble. I was hot enough to sweat, and often brushed it out of my eyes. My spirits were low and I was half-sick with fear of what would happen. The crew were less than happy, too.
“I don’t feel too sharp,” the one with the bandaged head said. “I have a pain in my skull despite that medicine.”
“The Doctor told you to rest,” I pointed out to him.
“Aargh, ’twere all that talk o’ K’zarr what done it,” he protested, looking at me and brooding.
“Ah well, my son, you praise your stars he’s dead,” said Silver.
“He were an ugly devil,” another one cried. “That blue in the face, he were.”
“That were how the rum took him,” another added. “Blue! Well, I reckon he were blue, right enough.”
Ever since they had found the skeleton and started this train of thought they had spoken lower and lower and were almost to whispering by now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The crew had advanced until we were almost within sight of the great gaping doorway into the tower, and Silver and I were some little way behind when the voice called out to them. Silver froze instantly. The crew screamed in response and fell back. The voice spoke in kzin, but I recognized it. I had heard it before on the memo pad and on the ship. A thin, cold voice like an ice dagger in the head. And there was a figure there too, some big kzin body, dark against the tower, calling out. The crew cried out again and came past us in panic. Rraangar fell to the ground and moaned; the others looked too frightened to move.
“’Tes K’zarr,” one of them cried out, his voice trembling.
Silver recovered first. “’Tes some foolery; K’zarr is dead and where he went nobody comes back. There’s a livin’ breathin’ creature ahind this, kzin or man, ye may lay to that.”
I realized that the computer I had brought back from the ship was a better explanation than ghosts. Someone on my side had decided to frighten the crew. For almost any kzin, the experience of fear tended to be destructive in itself: it was part of the penalty they paid for not admitting fear so that when they did feel it, it was worse. Marthar must have downloaded the ghost Silver had made, and programmed him to speak and move like the evil old pirate. I was not at all surprised that it had frightened the pirates; it had caused my own heart to stop for a few seconds.
Silver’s courage had come back as he spoke, for no doubt he had recognized his own creation. He must have wondered how it had come down to the planet, but this was a lesser matter than his genuine fear of the original kzin. Maybe K’zarr had feared Silver, but what need K’zarr fear after death?
The same cold, cruel voice broke out again. “Dar’marGra, Dar’marGra!” Then with an oath, “Dar’marGra, fetch aft the rum!”
The pirates st
ood rooted to the ground, their eyes starting from their heads. Long after the echoes of the voice died away, they still stared in silence, dreadfully.
“That fixes it,” said one. “Let’s go.”
“They was his last words,” moaned Rraangar. “His last words above ground.”
Still Silver was unconquered. I could see he was taken aback, but he had not yet surrendered.
“Nobody on this here planet knows of Dar’marGra save us,” he muttered. Then he made a great effort. “Shipmates,” he cried, “I’m here to get that stuff, and I’ll not be beat by man nor kzin nor devil. I was never afeared o’ K’zarr when he were alive, and, by the powers, I’ll face him when he’s dead. There’s billions not a thousand yards from here, nay, trillions! When did ever a Hero of fortune show his stern t’ that many stars for fear of a boozy old spacer wi’ a blue mug—and him dead, too?”
But there was no sign of reawakening courage in his followers; rather, indeed, there was growing terror at the irreverence of his words.
“Belay there, Cap’n,” said the one with the bandages. “Don’t you cross a sperrit.”
They would have run away had they dared. I think that in facing physical danger or even death, they would have shown the usual bravery of the Kzin, but confronted with a mystical danger, they caved in. Silver, however, had pretty well fought his weakness down.
“Sperrit? Well, maybe, maybe,” he said. “But there’s one thing not clear to me. There was an echo. Now no being ever saw a sperrit with a shadow, well then, what’s he doing with an echo to him, I should like to know? That ain’t in natur’, surely?”
The argument seemed weak enough to me, but you can never tell what will affect the superstitious, and Rraangar was, to my surprise, greatly relieved.
“Well, that’s so,” he said. “Ye’ve got a fine head upon yer shoulders, Silver-Captain, and no mistake. ’Bout ship, companions, I does believe we been takin’ a wrong tack on this. There’s someone around is tryin’ to get us afeard by playing old K’zarr at us. ’Tes some sort o’ recordin’, I’ll be bound.”