by Larry Niven
The tnuctipun once used a few worlds in Known Space. Jinx, for instance. They left behind them (not long ago; certainly less than a million years) a few stasis boxes, and, of course, the stage trees and bandersnatchi and sunflowers and so forth.
The only hoax involved is the Slaver War. Certain stasis boxes were left floating through Known Space; and Kzanol was created, very artistically, and dropped on the continental shelf for the dolphins to find. Other real evidence of the tnuctipun will be worked into the structure of the hoax. Thus the presence of the tnuctipun, now, will never be suspected.
The truth is that the tnuctipun are all through Known Space. It will be seen how this is possible.
The whitefood/bandersnatchi were not designed to spy on the thrintun/Slavers. Their purpose was much simpler. Tnuctipun enjoy feeding on the meat of sentient beings, so they built one.
As part of the hoax, they recently settled some of their number on a world of Known Space, with false memories and a drastically reduced technology. Their technology was just great enough that they could slow the advance of the frontiers of human space, until the tnuctipun could plant all the evidence they needed to.
Another purpose of this group was to make it possible for tnuctipun to move freely about in Known Space.
The group knows nothing of the tnuctipun or their plan. Their ancestors were not volunteers. They call themselves kzinti. Note that a tnuctipun caught doing anything, moral or not, in Known Space will be taken for a kzin.
14) Note also, a psychological point. Female kzinti are dumb animals, no more. Thus the kzinti may be thought of as asexual. So it is with the tnuctipun. A kzin will understand perfectly the kick they get from eating sentient meat. There has to be something to replace the missing sex kick.
15) This is one of the motives behind the hoax.
16) The core of the hoax is the Core explosion. In twenty thousand years, the alleged Core explosion will make all of Known Space uninhabitable. Thus, during the next twenty thousand years, Known Space must be evacuated by every sentient species.
The hoax may extend much further than Known Space. Refugees will be showing up from further in.
Most species will plan to return after the wave of radiation passes; or at least, they will consider the possibility. They will make at least some attempt to mothball their artifacts.
All the worlds of Known Space, with their maintenance machinery more or less preserved, will be open to the tnuctipun. Further, up to a trillion beings (and perhaps many more, depending how far the hoax extends) are available in spacecraft moving at Quantum I hyperdrive. All flavors, these beings. All moving at the same velocity; match direction and you’ve matched course for boarding. In most cases, no weapons; the species would concentrate on the enormous task of moving billions of individuals clear out of the galaxy, and would in most cases move as soon as they had the capability.
Obviously this must be the last of the Known Space stories. (If only Blish had stopped with the second Okie novel! He ended the universe there; and then he had to go backward!) Above are the assumptions I am forced to make to get a coherent picture. Some minor questions arise, and some are answered:
Why wasn’t the Quantum II hyperdrive sold to some entrepreneur in human space? It was advertised for sale; why didn’t someone buy it?
Answer: those who tried couldn’t get in contact with the right puppeteers. They got the runaround until they gave up in disgust. There is no Quantum II hyperdrive.
The Grogs are not the mutated descendants of the Slavers. They never claimed to be. But the tnuctipun knew of Grogs, and designed Kzanol with the Grogs in mind. They slipped up there. They should have made him female.
Since they were planted the Kzinti have changed. They were given a technology which would ensure their being beaten over and over again by the ships of human space. Evolution doesn’t always hold for sentient beings who tailor their own environment instead of adapting to it, but it holds here. The most serious warmongers among kzinti, and the ones with the least self-control, were those who died first. And the kzinti population has dropped by half in half a dozen wars. Those left are not peaceable, but they have developed some self-control, some ability to think first before jumping. Further, telepaths are their own development.
And they’ve been done wrong. Assuredly they will join the minions of human space when the hoax becomes known.
Consider “The Soft Weapon.”
It had to be a shuck, part of the hoax. The handle of the stasis box did not fit a kzinti, i.e. a tnuctip, claw. But a weapon so powerful could not be allowed to fall into the hands of humans.
So the tnuctipun planted the box for the Papandreous to find; but they were there to take it away, making sure the humans saw it first. Only one of the kzinti on the Traitor’s Claw was a tnuctip. It was Flyer.
What of the Outsiders?
They are in no danger from the tnuctipun, who seek only meat of proper chemical composition. If they maintain their neutrality, nobody should harm them. And they must have known of the tnuctip plot for some time.
They sell information. How well can we balance profit against fear? Can we use them?
Obviously I am thinking in terms of Armageddon. The end result of exposure of the tnuctip fraud will be a cataclysm to shake the stars. Fire and death, and from here it looks like the tnuctipun will probably win. They will have no allies, none at all; but their technology will be enormous.
What happens to ships that go too deep into a gravity well? Snatched by the tnuctipun! There is no relevant physical law, no mysterious singularity in hyperspace. Such is part of the fraud; for the necessity of moving into a system at sublight speeds is enough to slow the spread of humanity and keep it from regions where the fraudulence of the Slaver War would become apparent. Their ships will be faster until we learn this.
Note that the tools we have found in Slaver stasis boxes are largely planted. They throw this technology away! What more are they hiding?
Now you have the background. What of the story itself?
I know some of the characters I’ll need. Oddly, the most necessary are the most familiar. I’ll need either Kzanol or Larry Greenberg to expose one side of the Slaver War hoax. At some point, on some city pedwalk, he will point to a large orange kzin and shout, “Heavens preserve us! It’s a tnuctip!”
I’ll need Beowulf Shaeffer. He’s the key man in the Core explosion hoax.
It would be convenient to ring in Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann, expert on Slaver relics, to show how the hoax must have been worked, and to guess what must be true and what false.
Probably Elephant’s money and ships will be needed for backing, as the tracking of the truth becomes a major project.
In addition, three strangers: a mountaineer girl with Plateau eyes (Matt Keller’s power), and a kzin for a central character, and a grog to read the mind of a true-tnuctip prisoner.
DETAIL: KOBOLD
Brennan knows certain things. He knows them because he’s had plenty of time to think about them and has figured them out.
He knows the kind of place to find the puppeteer world. He knows they probably took it with them.
He knows why the Outsiders follow starseeds. (But does he tell Shaeffer?)
He lives in a place he designed himself, using antigravity as an art form. It’s way the hell out in the cometary belt of Sol, beyond the hyperspace singularity, but it didn’t grow there; he built it from asteroids, in the Belt. It’s Kobold. In Kobold, streams flow two ways; you can swim on either side of a stream; the tongue of flat rock which extends out as a runway for spacecraft has service installations back to back. On that space-port tongue are tractors to draw the ships into the air. A huge version of the “pressure curtain” in “Relic of Empire” surrounds the whole setup, except for the spaceport tongue. There are rooms for sports never invented before, including many that could be enjoyed only by adult-stage humans. Detail:
The sphere covered with grass. It’s five hundred meters through,
and that’s all there is: grass, one asymmetrically shaped pool, and a huge tree. You reach it by jumping from another point to the top branches of the tree, then climbing down. Note that the sphere touches no other part of Kobold.
A kind of museum, holding sculptures made of water. Fields hold the place and shape of each statue.
The Moebius miniature golf course.
The shadowed place: a life support system for Outsiders, with mooring facilities for any kind of ship. Brennan can talk to them through a pressure curtain, with him on one side under pressure, and the Outsider in low-gee and vacuum.
The “Finagle bullet” mounted somewhere, with lighted warning signs. It’s a captured ten-foot sphere of neutronium, like others in Known Space. There are other such traps, suitably labeled; in an emergency Brennan can turn off the signs. Even the machinery which makes the signs will vanish without a trace. That’s one reason Brennan rarely invites humans to Kobold.
One thing about Kobold: its wonders are human wonders. There is nothing like the peculiar floor construction in WRONG WAY STREET. The things Brennan does with his artificial gravity and his fusion plants and his high IQ are the things any human would do, given an impulse to play.
PLOT:
1
Beowulf Shaeffer is relaxing somewhere, probably in an anarchpark, when the Brennan-monster taps him on the shoulder. “I need you,” he says, and produces credentials. Shaeffer suffers himself to be led away, knowing very little. But Brennan has mentioned the Core explosion and Shaeffer’s trip.
2
At the spaceport, gunshots. (Weaponry, anyway.) In fact, the weapons being used are unfamiliar, but they eat holes in things quick as hell. (They will turn out to be an improvement on the disintegrator, with two parallel beams, one to suppress electron charge, one to suppress proton charge. Brennan suspects this from the start.)
The shots lash out around them, and Brennan takes them both in a mad run. Knowing that losing a major limb would kill Shaeffer, he takes a beam meant for Shaeffer and loses a leg, cauterizes it with his own X-ray laser, and off they go, Brennan hopping.
What being has been shooting? It turns out to be a species as agile as Phssthpok, but without much brain. One thing marks them at once: they are drones of some kind. Perhaps there is a sentient queen bee somewhere.
3
They reach Brennan’s ship and take off. En route, the Brennan-monster explains something of what he is, and gets Bey to go over the tale of his Core trip.
4
At Kobold, Brennan puts Shaeffer under drugs and gets a transcript of the Core trip. He still hasn’t said what he’s after. Whatever it is, he doesn’t get it. Yet he knows it’s there, if only because he and Shaeffer were shot at.
He does his research on the corpse of their attacker—the one he saved for examination. He guides Shaeffer around Kobold. They talk…(Exposition here!)
And Shaeffer mentions the trip to Swoosh.
Brennan knows a good deal about the Outsiders, and shows it.
Shaeffer wonders about some of the questions he was asked on that interview.
When Shaeffer names one question—“What will you do now that you know the Core is exploding?”—Brennan hops up yelling, “That’s it!” Right then, the attack begins.
5
The attack starts with a whistle of a set frequency. Brennan blurs into motion. A pressure suit hits Shaeffer, and he stands stupidly holding it. Brennan flips some switches, one motion of both hands, and is gone in a long jump across one of the gaps on Kobold’s space.
The beam spears him in midair, vaporizes him, and blasts the gravity controls.
Kobold’s air gathers itself to vanish into space. Shaeffer, in sudden free fall, can hear the whisper of it. He jumps for the only door in sight. In his own opinion, this is quicker than trying to don the pressure suit in time.
The door is not marked. But Brennan has turned off all the markings.
Shaeffer is inside, safe. He inhales once in relief, once in glorious disbelief, once to find out where the incredibly delicious smell is coming from. Then his mind is off, and he’s tracking the tree-of-life root, down through the corridors of Kobold’s heart.
6
Shaeffer’s transition from a vegetable to a superman is instantaneous, or nearly so. In his next moment of self-awareness he is consciously giving up every plan he ever had. He will never be a father. His travels, if any, will not be with Sharrol. Chances are he will never see Elephant again. Et cetera.
That’s his first moment. His next is a driving urge to kill every last Grog. These are the only beings he knows must be destroyed. Then it comes to him that Brennan did not exterminate the Grogs.
Why?
Review the Grog problem, with reference to the Slavers, etc.
Why didn’t Brennan take care of this? Is the answer connected with the other problem, the one he solved when Shaeffer said what he said? And what the hell did the Outsiders have to do with anything, including the Core explosion, which is even more important (though less urgent) than the Grogs?
There is some unknown race trying to destroy him. It has already destroyed Brennan. Further, Shaeffer must reach civilization without standard transport. But the Grog problem is most clearly defined, most puzzling, therefore most urgent. Shaeffer puts it first on agenda.
7
Escape is his first action. There’s no ship; there’s not much left of Kobold. Presumably the attackers were nonsentient, the same species that attacked them earlier. They may have been searching for thinking minds with a detector. This would explain why Shaeffer lived.
There’s no ship, and no drive per se. But there are the gravity generators. Shaeffer lines them up as a momentum tube and aims himself for the sun. Someone is bound to discover him before he gets there.
Somebody does. The nonsentient enemy makes one more attack, as Shaeffer’s makeshift ship drops toward the solar system. Shaeffer uses the momentum tube to throw rocks at them, following with the Finagle’s Bullet. They go into hyperspace to avoid the rocks, and the mass of the Bullet keeps them there—forever.
Then the Pluto Watch picks him up. Shortly he’s in contact with the few humans who know of him.
8
Now he has a small human army. He does research.
Data on Grogs tells him very little. But he sees the major point. If the Grogs are degenerate but dangerous Slavers, how did the dominant sex switch from male to female?
He needs the advice of a Slaver expert.
9
Rich Mann is on Silvereyes. Shaeffer finds him, takes his corpses along. Arranges a safe way of reviving Kzanol and instantly killing him.
Mann quickly recognizes the corpse as a tnuctip artifact.
Kzanol is a fraud.
What else is a fraud? Shaeffer shows Mann the corpse of one of his attackers. That, too, is a product of tnuctip biological engineering.
The tnuctipun are alive and well. Now what?
Chains of hypothesis lead Shaeffer to assume that there was no Slaver War, or indeed, even a Slaver race. Kzanol was copied from the Grogs, but the tnuctipun, whose sentient members are male, made him male.
Shaeffer can only guess the purpose of the deception. Since there was plenty of evidence of the tnuctipun presence, the beasties contrived a fraud to make it look like they had been gone a billion and a half years. Whereas they were actually contemporary, and dangerous.
What are they planning?
10
They need a Grog. Shaeffer and Mann leave Silvereyes for Gummidgy.
They are in hyperdrive when Shaeffer figures it out. He asks himself, what could the Outsiders have answered? How could their answer be so important?
By now he has an accomplice. Mann has used just enough boosterspice to put him in the right age bracket. Shaeffer has fed him tree-of-life.
What answer?
We will die. No.
We will flee. No.
The radiation cannot harm us. No.
We have a
protection. Maybe. If it will work on humans.
The radiation is not dangerous. Maybe. Not even to humans?
There was no Core explosion. Nonsense. I saw it. The whole thing was a hoax. To what purpose? Yet there is already a hoax involved, and the tnuctipun are involved. The whole thing was a tnuctip hoax. They blackmailed the puppeteers. The puppeteers then fled, not the Core explosion, but the tnuctipun. Great! but the Crosshatch species—
The Crosshatchers are tnuctipun.
And their purpose is obvious.
11
Also obvious: the tnuctipun/crosshatchers can enter a ship in hyperdrive. Shaeffer sets up defenses and waits.
The attack comes. Again it’s the nonsentient warriors, and again they lose. Mann-monster and Shaeffer-monster reach Earth.
Suspicions confirmed.
12
Now dig Shaeffer’s complex plan.
The ships which are already fleeing the Core explosion, have decided to go up along the galactic axis to get clear space, then cut out toward the rim.
There is no Quantum II hyperdrive. Shaeffer is restricted to a light-year per three days. But he can take a diagonal and catch the third of the human ships. First and second are beyond his reach.
He takes a #4 hull, and half the men who know what he is. He takes them off boosterspice. In about ten years, he intercepts the third ship. (During the ten years, he has figured out how the tnuctip interception technique works.) Destroys boosterspice reserves of the ship. Leaves some of his men in control, drops back to the next ship. Repeats. Goes to third ship alone.
He now has three ships. The third, he controls alone. The first two are in the hands of adults who know what is going on.
Twenty years later, the first two ships have a number of protectors aboard. In thirty years, all three ships are all protectors.