Betrayer of Worlds

by Larry Niven

  Louis felt Nessus watching him. Gauging him? “All right, Sigmund. Why would Brennan attack Home colony?”

  Ausfaller grimaced. “The plague was a variation of the virus in tree-of-life root. It’s the virus that triggers the life-stage change in adults. I believe Brennan set loose the virus on Home to raise an army of protectors.”

  Louis remembered something else from that long-ago virtual tour of the Pak exhibit. “Tree-of-life doesn’t affect Pak until they’re old enough. Why did the virus affect the younger colonists on Home? Remember, no one was left.”

  “If I’m right,” Ausfaller said, “Brennan engineered his virus to kill everyone too young or too old to change. Without descendants to protect, the new protectors would lose their will to live—or they would adopt a bigger cause. Brennan’s cause. A war against the Pak.”

  A world exterminated to build an army. Louis felt sick. “Against a follow-up Pak fleet?”

  “That’s our best information,” Ausfaller said. “If so, it worked. But, as you said, you would have noticed a Pak War. And, no doubt, you would have noticed any survivors of that war, whether Pak or human protectors. That sounds to me like the two sides fought to a draw. And to the death.”

  And a few years later, a colony ship arrived and found no trace of plague. Because Brennan engineered his virus not to survive without hosts?

  Horrific as were Ausfaller’s speculations, Louis found himself believing. “It was bizarre enough that Nessus drafted me to help—”

  “Our business does not concern Sigmund,” Nessus interrupted.

  But Ausfaller’s business must concern Nessus. Every minute spent listening in normal space was a minute that, spent in hyperspace, would have brought Aegis about two million kilometers closer to the Fleet.

  How had this started? A New Terran criminal had broken into archives of a Pak War. Why was that an emergency for Nessus? Why was Achilles interested?

  Ausfaller resumed his history dump. Voice would be recording; Louis only half listened, trying to see the bigger picture. No one knew exactly when the Lost Colony fell, but it was around 2400. Close to four centuries ago. A battle to the death then between Pak and human protectors could hardly be cause for alarm now.

  Louis broke into the recitation, even though it would take Ausfaller a while to notice. “So there’s been another Pak invasion, this one threatening the Fleet or New Terra. That’s the archive this Roland broke into.”

  “The new Pak advance threatened both our worlds,” Nessus said, “but it has since been deflected. They are going around us. Sigmund, I do not understand your alarm.”

  “I’m almost there,” Ausfaller said. “There is a final bit of background to cover. Brennan’s cold-blooded slaughter on Home was not an isolated event. On the Pak home world, they had developed whole institutions around childless protectors needing a reason to live. If you convinced yourself you served the whole Pak race, you might get past losing your descendants. Phssthpok spent his life hunting for Earth because he had become childless.

  “One such institution was the Library, the fail-safe repository of Pak knowledge. Whenever clan rivalries got out of hand and civilizations fell, the Library helped the survivors rebuild. Lots of childless Pak ended up serving the Library.

  “After Phssthpok set out, some Pak explorer discovered the leading edge of the radiation erupting from the galactic core explosion. Pakhome is near the core, and Pak don’t have hyperdrive technology. Everyone who could get onto a ramscoop did. Everyone who didn’t have a ship did his best to steal one. Once the ships were gone, everyone left behind fought over the dwindling resources with which to build more.

  “So you’re right, Louis. Pak hordes came toward the Fleet and New Terra. And yes, the Pak fleets were deflected away from our worlds, in what I called the Pak War, although Nessus glossed over a lot.”

  Glossed over what? Nessus was plucking at his mane again, Louis noticed, just as he had noticed that the Puppeteer did not want Louis to mention the Gw’oth. Meanwhile Ausfaller worried about Achilles’ disappearance, while Nessus worried about Achilles’ feud with the Gw’oth. And the New Terran spy gone bad, this Roland fellow, broke into Pak War records before vanishing, presumably in league with Achilles. Round and round the clues went, the Gw’oth surely somehow at the heart of things.

  “That’s about it,” Ausfaller was saying. “Picture thousands of childless Pak, the keepers of an ancient Library. Safeguarding knowledge on a doomed world no longer gives them a reason to live. But if they could carry away that knowledge . . .”

  Taking a long swallow from a drink bulb of coffee, Louis tried to take it in. Thousands of childless protectors and an ancient Library—they would need a lot of ships. Protectors with family would take those ships if they could. Could even thousands of Librarians have prevailed against a world of desperate refugees?

  Not without help. Not without, like Brennan on Home, ruthlessly slaughtering whole clans to turn surviving protectors into allies. Either there was no Librarian fleet or . . .

  “There’s an enormous armada of Librarians, isn’t there?” Louis said. “It’s carrying the best of Pak technology. Your bad apple knows everything you know about the Library, and he’s leading Achilles right to it.”

  Louis glanced at Nessus. None of the fine print committed Louis to keeping Puppeteer secrets. “And Achilles will use whatever Pak technology he can steal against the Gw’oth. And to make himself Hindmost—if he doesn’t get everyone killed first.”

  Nessus bleated like a bagpipe that had been dropkicked.

  A few seconds later, long before Louis’s speculation could have reached him, Ausfaller said, “I fear that Achilles is going after the Library, hoping to use Pak technology to take on a nearby species called the Gw’oth. He means to make himself Hindmost.”

  Two minutes later, Louis had the satisfaction of watching Ausfaller twitch in surprise.

  A rare, creamy solid white, his elaborately coiffed mane resplendent with gems of Experimentalist Party orange, achingly handsome, Nike looked at Nessus from a recorded message.

  Nessus had spent much of his life trying to impress the charismatic politician, to earn Nike’s trust and gain his favor. To get into Nike’s life. Too late, Nessus had come to understand the essential truth about Nike: Nike’s main purpose was to help himself. By then Nike had turned crisis into opportunity, and emerged as Hindmost.

  Experimentalists remained in power, but Nike’s reign had ended. He now served where his talents most benefited the Concordance: at the rear of the Clandestine Directorate. At that task, he was brilliant—and Nessus’ superior.

  “Achilles is away,” Nike was saying, his voices rich with undertunes. “That was never a secret. He was personally overseeing an experiment involving planetary drives, reporting from onsite.”

  The Concordance had bought its planetary drives ages ago from the ancient race of Outsiders, and Citizen scientists still had only an incomplete sense of how the devices worked. About all Nessus understood regarding planetary drives was that they harnessed staggering amounts of energy. Purposefully destabilized, they became destructive beyond imagination, able to shatter whole worlds into shrapnel. As the Pak had learned.

  You experimented with the technology, if at all, far from the Fleet.

  Once outside the Fleet’s gravitational singularity, reports submitted by hyperwave could have been relayed from—anywhere.

  And that, once Nike got to the point, turned out to be the point. Sigmund, once more, was on to something. Achilles’ underlings had covered for his absence for much of a year. They had no idea where Achilles had taken a ministry ship—

  Or why he had stopped communicating.

  12

  Had there been life before Aegis? Truly? Louis found that harder and harder to believe. Only the occasional craving for painkillers reminded him of such a bygone era—and he was happy to feel those particular urges fading away.

  As Ausfaller had hoped and Nessus dreaded, Aegis was t
he ship best positioned to hunt for Achilles. Best positioned did not mean close. Here was more fine print to Louis’s arrangement with Nessus. No end date! Gw’oth, Pak, psychotic Puppeteer politicians, paranoid émigré spies . . . Nessus could involve Louis with anything.

  Next time—if there was a next time—Louis would negotiate more wisely.

  He spent his waking hours poring over the information Ausfaller had hyperwaved. Technological civilizations flattened by relativistic planet-busters, for no more reason than that they lay along the Pak’s path. Interrogations of the Pak prisoner Ausfaller had briefly held. Memories, guesses, and surmises from Ausfaller’s long-ago reading of ARM files. The Puppeteers’ own horrific weapons demonstrated—Nessus was more evasive than usual on the specifics—to convince the Pak fleets to change course. Wondering if Achilles’ attempt to seize the Library would provoke the Pak to turn back toward worlds Louis had never seen.

  Worlds he nonetheless felt increasingly bound to protect.

  But it was the long-range surveillance files, showing wave upon wave of Pak ramscoops, that seized Louis’s imagination. With the imagery greatly accelerated, the all-but-static ship deployments became a hypnotic dance. In that deadly choreography Louis read conflicts of every scale, from skirmishes to full-blown battles, of clan alliances made and betrayed on the fly. It made him ill to watch—and he could not look away.

  Awful truths seeped into his consciousness. The Pak were bred for warfare. Why would they hesitate to squash an alien race when they so freely attacked their own? If Ausfaller was to be believed—and Nessus, at the least, did—Pak had been at each others’ throats for eons.

  And Louis and Nessus were hurtling into this particular hornets’ nest. Alone.

  “What are we supposed to do when we get there,” Louis finally asked Ausfaller.

  “Improvise,” Ausfaller had said. Something in his demeanor—or perhaps it was only Louis’s subconscious—added: If you’re half the man your fathers are, you’ll find an answer.

  Louis studied a vast and orderly arrangement of white-hot sparks, ringed by widely spaced, more distant sparks. Those outliers, Louis decided, were patrols to guard the main group’s flanks. In space or in the jungle, some principles of warfare must be universal.

  Aegis had just emerged from hyperspace, behind what the Fleet’s best instruments suggested was the tail of the Pak migration.

  “Your thoughts?” Nessus probed.

  Louis walked around the holo, considering. “If there is a Library fleet, this would be it. It’s more than big enough to take on the wave just ahead, and yet it’s not accelerating. The Library fleet would defend itself, but it wouldn’t pick fights. There’s no purpose in being a Librarian without living clans to use the Library. And loitering at the back of the line makes it less likely clans would attack the Library for its resources.”

  And maybe the Pak War prisoner, Thssthfok, had only been messing with Ausfaller’s head. How do you interrogate a prisoner that much smarter than yourself?

  “My conclusion, too,” Nessus said.

  Suppose these were the Librarians. Then what? There was no sign of Achilles, and no response to Nessus’ hyperwave broadcasts.

  At least they had been able to use hyperwave. If the Pak had had hyperwave capability, they would have had hyperdrive, too. They wouldn’t be taking millennia-long flights by ramscoop.

  “Voice,” Louis asked, “how large a volume does this last wave of ships occupy?”

  “About a hundred cubic light-years.”

  “Too large a volume to search,” Nessus added. Hopefully? “Perhaps this is the time Sigmund is wrong.”

  Louis kept pacing. No matter where he moved, all he saw was the same precise central array, ringed by the same patrol ships. Hmm. “Nessus, I’d like a closer look.”

  “How much closer?” Nessus pawed nervously at the deck.

  They were eighty light-days from the nearest ramscoop. “Five jumps, just a few light-minutes each. We’ll stay only long enough for Voice to get a new image.”

  “Proceed.”

  Louis sat at the copilot console and took Aegis through a series of hyperspace micro-jumps. Each reemergence into normal space slightly expanded the view in the main display. “That should do it,” he finally said. “Jumping us back to our original distance.”

  At that announcement, Nessus ceased his anxious pawing but said nothing.

  The naval formation looked stable to Louis. “Voice. Take all the views since we got here. Normalize the images to a constant size, as though viewing the central formation from a single place. Orient all images the same way. Superimpose them, if you can, ship upon ship.”

  “That will take a few seconds,” Voice replied.

  Nessus sidled toward Louis. “What are you looking for?”

  The nearer to the ramscoops they jumped, the more recent the light Aegis sampled. Time travel, of a sort. “Wait for Voice,” Louis said.

  “Here is the composite image you wanted,” Voice said. A new holo popped up.

  Image superimposed upon image, the sparks that marked the central fleet were blinding. The patrol ships, circling the main formation, followed short, dotted arcs. To one side of the main array, three arcs took starkly different courses.

  Louis reached into the holo, a fingertip at the spot toward which three ramscoops were converging. He said, “There is where we’ll find Achilles.”

  Achilles ate and drank indifferently, floating at random to the limit of his tether. In the beating of his hearts, in the random nudges of drifting wreckage, in the recurrence of hunger, in the coming and going of sleep and dream and catatonia, time passed. He had nothing to do but wait. He had nothing to wait for but extinction.

  Death would be quick. The Pak would come, and his hearts would stop in fright.

  Once he had had the choice of waiting in stasis. In a moment of clarity, he had taken apart the field generator and hurled its components into the void. The Pak whom Ausfaller had once captured had not known about stasis fields. Achilles would not let an enemy acquire the technology from him.

  The tether pulled Achilles up short yet again, and he looked himself in the eyes. He had aspired to rule worlds, and now the limit of his domain was this short range of salvaged fiber-optic cable. He had been a great scientist, and now his only tool was the pressure suit that kept him alive. He had traveled among the stars, and now, other than dim readouts in his helmets, starlight would be the only illumination for the rest of his miserable existence.

  Why wait for the Pak? He could end everything now. True, his pressure suit would not open in a vacuum, or allow him to turn off life support, but it could not stop him from piercing the fabric on some jagged bit of debris. Or he could slip his tether and jet from the shelter of the hull. Radiation would kill him slowly, but the suit’s life support, unable to save him, had ample drugs to ease his passage.

  He drifted in and out of sleep, considering the possibilities. To be or not to be.

  Motion!

  Not floating debris. That he no longer noticed. And his helmet lights had been off for—well, he did not know how long—but long enough. His eyes were fully adapted to starlight. He could hardly have missed the approach of a fusion-drive ship.

  Voices!

  Voices, he understood. He was talking to himself again without knowing it.

  He listened to the voices for a while, wondering why he did not sound like himself and why he muttered so softly. As long as he was feeling curious, he wondered a bit more about the odd sense that he had seen something moving.

  The motion came from outside this hulk, in the form of stars eclipsed. A ship!

  He tongued the radio controls in his helmets. The muttering became the beautiful, musical speech of another Citizen.

  “. . . Vessel Aegis. Please respond. Repeat. This is Concordance vessel Aegis. Please respond. Repeat. This is—”

  “Here!” Achilles shouted, harmonics pulsing with need. “I am in here! Here!”

&nbs
p; “Aegis. Please respond. Repeat. This—”

  The hail, obviously recorded, cut out. “I am sending in a human with a stepping disc,” the voices said. “You are safe.”

  PROMISED LAND

  13

  Achilles cantered onto the bridge, glanced at the main display, and sneered. “I suppose you think we owe them apologies.”

  Nessus dismissed the image of the Pak derelict, then stood from the pilot’s couch. He tried to make allowances, but it was hard. Maybe if Achilles had shown any sympathy for the New Terrans he had sent to their deaths. . . .

  No matter how Nessus tried, he could not justify the unprovoked attack on the Pak. The aliens had turned away from the Fleet many years ago. In a few more years, even the alien rearguard would have passed. Why draw their attention now?

  Achilles had quickly put behind him the horrors of his ordeal. His coat, off-white with patches of tan, had been brushed until it glowed. His brown mane was replete with braids and curls, freshly woven with orange garnets. Rather than wear a standard shipboard utility belt, he had synthed an ornamental sash decorated with full Ministry of Science regalia.

  By asserting his status, Achilles must hope to commandeer Aegis.

  “I suppose,” Nessus answered cautiously, “that provoking the Pak is a dangerous activity.”

  Achilles stood tall, his hooves set far apart. Unready to run: the stance of dominance. “The Pak crew of that ship is dead, not provoked, and with knowledge from the Library we can eliminate the Gw’oth as a threat. We will take what I came for and be gone before other Pak can respond.”

  One unstated assumption piled on another in that speech, Nessus thought. Whatever technology Achilles sought might never have existed aboard this specific ship—or at all. The information might be aboard and yet undecipherable, expressed in an unfamiliar clan dialect or extinct language. The information might have been destroyed in the attack, or the repositories—what was the human term?—booby-trapped by the Pak crew before they died.