by Larry Niven
Bengar had changed, much for the better, with company, I thought. He was still gangly and showed the signs of his privations, but he had been given the oxygen and glucose drips, and it made him more formidable.
“You learned a lot, Bengar,” Marthar told him, and he glowed with pride. He obviously set a high store by what Marthar thought of him.
“Ooh, aye, so I did, warrior lady. Some of it was luck, like when I got desperate on account o’ the cold and took a disc at random. Fortunate for me, it led to a tower in the sunlight, and right pleased I was to have the warmth agin. But then I found how to read these curly wriggles, not well, but well enough. Some o’ they discs go places where no one would want to go, other worlds maybe. But most o’ them lead to other towers like this one, and I kep’ a record, so I did, and I knows where all the best bits are. And happy I am to pass it onto ye all, for I know when I have a good berth, so I does, and I hopes to be goin’ to a proper world right soon, when we departs this hell planet.”
“It won’t be long now, Bengar. S’maak-Captain says the first lander is nearly ready, and the second one well on the way. A third is being started soon, too,” Marthar told him. “As soon as we can load up the landers with the good stuff, we’ll be off. And you are coming with me back to Ka’…Wunderland. I need a servant I can trust.”
Bengar glowed again. “Ah, I be that, ye may be sure of it, warrior lady!”
“We shall need the mathematics if we are to understand the physics and the engineering,” I pointed out. “And there are an awful lot of these bars. How will we know which are the best ones?”
“I imagine there’s a lot of redundancy in them,” Marthar argued. “It wouldn’t make sense to leave only one copy of everything. Not if you plan to leave a legacy for posterity, given that posterity might not arrive for a billion years. Think meteor impacts and tectonic events.”
Bengar became expansive. “Aye, to be sure, and there be machines on the higher levels; and some in a basement which be harder to get to, but I been down there in one tower. And some o’ them be making new bars, as soon as ye take one away. So there be enough for everyone, I’m thinkin’. And I learned t’ read from a sort o’ kit’s book that had a great many pictures in it.”
This sounded promising. “Do you have it with you?” I asked him. There was a sort of introduction in every bar, but a bar that aimed at teaching you to read would certainly help.
“Ooh, aye, so I do, there be dozens o’ them, and I brought them here by hand, so I did. And there be a great many different ways o’ readin’ them too, some for one species, some for another. Some o’ them assume you has a head, and some does not. Some supposes what you got claws and some what ye ha’ tentacles. Some supposes you got one brain, and some that ye ha’ no sich thing, maybe for creatures wi’ but a few nodes, like they insects. I suspects they could gi’ ye a kind o’ brain transplant to make sure ye’re smart enough to read it. I hopes nothing like that happened t’me, but I think ’tes what happened t’ Gra-Prompyh, I reckon they snakes was tryin’ to make his brain fitter for the readin’ which is nothin’ proper for kzin or man, I believes.”
“Yes, that was disgusting,” I agreed.
“And obviously not necessary,” Marthar said. “Still, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving kzin. I suppose we shall find out quite a bit more about the aliens that built the towers and filled them up with all these books. The information must be somewhere other than those silly stories.”
“Ooh, aye, in this very tower, my lady. I can show ye if ye will wait a moment. Did I not say that here be all the life, science stuff?” He loped off up the ramp and returned with a curious collection of boxes. He rummaged in them and brought out some cables that looked uncomfortably like the snakes, and some shiny smaller boxes. Then he started joining things together.
“See, the thing is, some species would be like they insects, and ’twould be the hive that had all the sense, not the indiwiddles. So they needed t’ provide for a sharing device what allows a whole lot t’ see and hear what is goin’ on in a bar. And this does it, ’tes a sort o’ helmet for a crowd o’ beings, which is just what we is at present.”
The arrangement made a kind of three-dimensional projector, and when he plugged the snakes on the bar, the familiar blue glow came again, but this time in a hemisphere a yard across. We could see the same sort of thing as I had seen in the helmet, but we could all see it at once.
“There they be, so far as I can tell. But mayhap these things are some other species, mayhap we be lookin’ at some other aliens from a different world. For it don’t look much like this one, I must say.”
We saw a landscape, something like a city set in a forest, and with creatures moving around in a kind of dance. I found the zoom icon and focused on it, but nothing happened. Perhaps it needed a team of people to make it work. We watched it for a minute or two, silent. It was strange and hard to make any sense of what we were seeing and hearing, but they were definitely no species I had ever seen before. It would take years of hard work for anyone to get much from this.
Marthar got bored first.
“Well, I daresay a xenologist would be able to get something out of it, but I can’t. So let’s see, pull out that map again, Bengar. I want to make a list of places to plunder when the lander gets here.”
So we made a list with Bengar’s help, while the rest, who had been very quiet, as if knowing they were out of their depth, retreated back to get a meal from Bengar’s farm.
At Marthar’s request, the lander came down the next day to Bengar’s tower. S’maak-Captain brought it in, and insisted on taking the pinnace straight back to the Valiant. I think he much preferred to be on his ship, and I must allow that I felt safer with it under his command. He had been grave, and very civil to Marthar and even me.
“It seems you have taken charge of the gathering of the spoils, Miss Marthar,” he said, with what I would have sworn was a twinkle in his eye. He had seen Marthar rescue me, for Marthar had carried a camera into battle, and I think he liked her style. He and Marthar had pretty much the same idea of how to deal with Silver, too. Altogether it was practically a love-fest in comparison with our first meeting. I had to own S’maak was one of the good guys, though a bit severe for my tastes.
“We need to fill it up, and the Andersons can carry everything to the Valiant, and then come back for another load. There’s a lot of this stuff, and Bengar is showing us more things we need.”
“I had anticipated you might need some mechanical assistance, Miss Marthar, and I have a cargo of robots which should help with the loading. They can be left for the next lot. And in a day or two, you will have two landers on the job. I should wish it done as soon as possible, for I have no desire to linger in this vicinity. Space is big, but I would not want to run into any more pirates, and it cannot be ruled out so near the rift. I want to get back to Wunderland at the earliest moment compatible with your convenience, and also that of your Sire, of course.”
“Thank you, S’maak-Captain,” Marthar said, and flipped an ear coyly at him. If I didn’t know her better, I should have thought she was flirting with him. But, of course, he was much too old for her.
S’maak had gone back into space to be with his beloved ship, and Orion, the doctor, the Judge and Silver had come out to watch the loading. The Andersons took possession of the craft itself and supervised where things were going inside. The lander had not been constructed for passengers, or if it had, there had been some serious modifications. There were about a dozen compartments, and first we loaded a whole lot of bookreaders, including the communal one that Bengar had shown us, and a dozen copies. Altogether there were a hundred helmets like the one I had worn, and Marthar had tried one out to make sure it would work on her. From outside, I could see it changing shape to accommodate to her skull, something I had felt happening but had never seen before. I suppose it must have happened on Silver, but I can’t say I had noticed. She seemed satisfied without spending too lo
ng doing any reading, but she confirmed that she had the same icons I had seen, and could manipulate them at least as well as I had. I told her about the intelligence test and the five platonic solids, and she nodded smugly.
“Who wants to go back to school when we can play with these things all day?” she demanded in triumph. I suspected that her father would have some opinions on that.
Silver was fascinated by the three-dimensional communal helmet, and set it up so as to see it in operation. “Why, ’tes a wonderful thing, to be sure, and what wi’ the Doctor willin’ t’ speak for me, an’ the sheer wonder o’ what we has here, why, I might even get a pardon, so I might.”
“Silver, you are a scoundrel, but you cared for my daughter’s friend, and he is my friend also, so I shall speak for you too.” Orion told him in a growl. Orion glanced my way and gave an ear flick, and I wished I could flick my ears too, because I wanted him to know how honored I felt. Young Peter Cartwright had somehow made friends with Royalty. Oh, I suppose Marthar counted too, but somehow I didn’t feel much in awe of Marthar, not even when she loped around with a blaster and a needler stuck in her belts. Her father seemed to find her present dress amusing, but he said little.
We filled two compartments of the twelve with the helmets and some bars. Then a few of us crammed into the lander to shift it to another tower, and the others were guided by Bengar to get to the same place via discs. It was only a flight in air, and we had only a few thousand kilometers to go, so nobody minded being squashed up for the half-hour it took. We went to the third tower, and this was where we had to get the robots out, for there were hundreds of bars to be loaded and it would have taken days by hand. The robots unfolded themselves endlessly, so it seemed, and stomped out of the lander one after the other. Bengar and the others were already there, of course, and were pointing out what was to be loaded. I hoped this was really useful mathematics and not just some weird game, although I suppose mathematics is a weird game for some mathematicians who do it for fun, and don’t give a damn if it is useful or not.
Valuable or no, we filled all the rest of the compartments with the bars, clearing a lot of space in the tower. Marthar took lots of pictures of where the bars came from, and the writing over the storage spaces, and printed out copies of it to put on our compartments. It was a bit like plundering a library and a bit like doing archaeology. Silver had helped stow everything, although the Doctor and the Judge mostly spent the time chatting and smoking. Then we stood well back as the Andersons lifted the lander and headed back to space and the Valiant. It had taken us a long time, so we went back via disc to Bengar’s tower and ate and slept until the next ship day. Well, the human beings slept, and the kzin napped in that way they do.
The next day was more of the same. This time we did the physics tower, or what informed opinion had decided was physics. The Doctor had looked at some of it and agreed with Bengar, and Orion had too. I was prepared to take their word for it. Getting the lander to come to a different tower was easy enough; we all went there by disc and signaled it, and the lander, after going back to collect the robots, arrived just outside with Bengar aboard. Helping with the robots was easier for Bengar than anyone else, because he could travel about on the discs without thinking about which one to step on. We started the robots out and ordered them to start loading. We were getting pretty good at this by now. The Andersons had, with help from Valiant, unloaded the lander, and Valiant was busy stowing its cargo in herself. The ship now had rather a lot of room. What had been crew quarters could be used if we ran out of space, but we would run out of time long before that.
Silver darted about, all friendly and helpful, wanting the labels explained to him, and copying them to his phone.
“Never too late t’ learn, never too late,” he said. “We must document it all so the arky-ologists will not be angry wi’ us for makin’ it hard t’ work out where everything comes from, d’ye see?”
Marthar looked at him. “I suspect him of planning something,” she said to me quietly.
“Planning what?”
“Something. I don’t know what. But that one is going to be trying something on sometime. Bet your life on it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
We had three more days of it, with two landers for some of it on a permanent shuttle service to the Valiant. We loaded thousands of tons of the bars with some other things, including a strange robot that, according to Bengar, was capable of making new bars. We got it from the tower of engineering, which we looted very comprehensively, so I hope it wasn’t the only one there. Keeping records of where everything came from and went to was a chore, but Silver was very helpful, taking lots of pictures on his phone and printing them and sticking the results over the compartments in the landers and even going up to the Valiant to ensure that they were preserved in the storage bins there.
We thought we had cracked the problem of the discs, or at least Marthar did. It was difficult to tell, but it did look as though we had designs for them that might work. You had to create them in pairs with some sort of quantum entanglement between them; it might turn out that nobody could build the things because there doubtless would be tools to be built first to build the tools you’d need, and so on, five levels deep. Or maybe fifty-five. Still, if we could make it work, it would be worth all the money on Old Earth tied up in a sack. Which would be a big sack. We could make all of Wunderland rich, not just us.
Marthar and I looked around. “I don’t suppose you could say we’ve finished,” she said. “But I think we’ve got enough on the Valiant to keep a whole planet busy for a few hundred years. The next thing to worry about is getting everyone back on board the ship. Then S’maak-Captain takes us home, while we work on the next serious problem.”
“What’s that?”
“How to spend all that money. If we can make anything much work, everyone on Wunderland will be able to buy their own planet. Those discs alone could do it. And I’ve a fair idea of the principle, although you can understand the principle of a computer without being able to build one, unless you made it out of brass gear wheels. We ought to be able to make something that works like the discs, even if we have to make it out of the equivalent of brass gear wheels.”
I wish I had Marthar’s confidence, but she knew a lot about Hard, and the discs certainly came under that heading. I thought we should be working on understanding the easy bits on the way home, not thinking about what to do with the money, and said so.
“Oh, of course we shall. We’ve all got heaps to do, and we’ll do it. But there are big organizational issues: we have to start off in a small way and make enough money to reinvest it in another project, and then get enough cash from that to go onto the next project, and so on. Until we can buy a few solar systems. The first thing to do is to work out what the starting project is; it has to be something Daddy can finance with his own money. Not Riit funds, we want to own this ourselves.”
I hadn’t though that far ahead. “Well, it will be nice to be rich, I suppose,” I said slowly. And it occurred to me that neither ARM nor the Riit Clan would like so much power concentrated in other hands. We might have to go a long way away.
“I can tell you now, rich won’t be the word for it. And I suspect you won’t like it much at all. Anywhere there is money, there are parasites; in this case there’s going to be an awful lot of money so they’ll be huge parasites. Governments and whole planetary systems I expect. The problem isn’t going to be making money—the problem will be keeping it, or at least some of it. And I’m a bit worried about Daddy. He’s seen super-rich, at least the records of what it was like in the old days. And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t want it. I suspect he doesn’t want me to be rich either. Bad for the character or something.”
“Will wealth spoil Marthar?” I teased her. “Does power corrupt, and will it corrupt you?”
She took this seriously. “It’s a good saying, that one; some of you humans are quite perceptive. About power corrupting, I mean. I don’t know i
f power corrupts, or if people who are power-hungry start off corrupt and some of them get power and it sort of comes out in them in a way which wasn’t obvious until they got it. I suppose I shall be a controlled experiment, shan’t I?”
“Are you sure you aren’t already a little bit corrupt?” I said in a tease she didn’t recognize.
She was silent. “I don’t know,” she said very quietly, as if to herself. “I can see that I might be quite horrible in some circumstances. I think if I were an empress I might be one of the really, really bad ones. I’m really not very kind. On the other hand, my name is Riit.”
“You’re kind to me,” I told her, a little bit frightened.
She looked at me in silence. “Yes, I’m kind to you. You’ll always be my Peterkin, at least I hope so. After that episode with the implant, I know what it is to just let go, to let the animal reign. I don’t want that, and yet I do. And I think it might be awfully addictive.”
“You are strong, Marthar. You are capable of frightful things. I saw what you did to Vaarth, and I saw you burn those pirates down as if they were just weeds. But I think that deep down there, you are kind and decent and honorable.”
“Well, I suppose a human being isn’t the best judge. You humans do it differently from us. We are not kind. But deep down you are utterly ferocious on a level we kzin can’t reach. All the truly frightful things you can’t face, you let your subconscious handle. That’s how you beat us. Only you don’t see it. You won’t let yourselves see it. You fool yourselves into thinking there’s something nice at your core. But down there in the id, you have a monster lurking, little Peter. You can’t see it, but I can.”