Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII

by Larry Niven

“I meant now.”

  He’d surprised her again. She got both out of her carryall, and he began drafting, smoothly and swiftly.

  “What’s a donderbeck?” she asked, after a minute or so of watching precision diagrams appear.

  “Something I thought of but never needed. Easy to make. Here.” He turned the drawing with hands that had become shaky once more. “The breech mechanism is from the Thompson, an early twentieth-century light machine gun. The round casings are cast nitrocellulose, no debris, nothing to eject. Solid propellant continues accelerating the rounds after they leave the barrel. The slugs are clusters of glass needles in a teflon matrix, each needle tipped with a heavy metal. I recommend tungsten.”

  “Uranium’s cheaper.”

  “You’ll be needing uranium for other things. The needles strike a target, the metal punches through armor, the needles slide out of the matrix and diverge, and the glass shatters as they tumble. That’ll tear things up. Huge holes. If these folks don’t have physical shock, they must have circulatory cutoffs, so this should trap a lot of their blood where it’s no use to their brains. Knock ’em down and keep ’em there. What do the aliens look like?”

  “Uh, large feline bipeds, eight feet and up. Here.” She got out a display flat and passed it over.

  He looked at it. “Ears like dragons.”

  “Dragons?”

  “Mythical creatures. They were in the library the cops confiscated, if you’re curious. I’ll need to see autopsy data for further designs.”

  “We’ve made anatomical diagrams.”

  “Those will help, but I mean the autopsy films.”

  “Can you handle that? Never mind,” she said, remembering who she was talking to.

  “I’ll manage,” he said, not unkindly. “I’ll need to be undrugged for a few days while I work on this, and I could do with a fabricating shop and a remote operating system for it.”

  “Why remote?”

  “To save time. Otherwise someone will argue about whether I should be handling weapons. This way, I won’t be.”

  “Good point. Anything you want for yourself?”

  He thought. “One thing they might not take back, after I’m done, is a manual shutoff for my chair. I really hate being whisked off somewhere by remote control, and it’s not as if the staff here has too many inmates to look after to send someone to get me.”

  “The ARM could get you out of that chair,” she said. “That’s actually something I’m authorized to offer.”

  “I won’t take transplants,” he replied. “Organ banks are morally wrong.”

  Her mouth fell open. “This from someone who by the age of nineteen had methodically assassinated a hundred and sixty-two people?”

  Muldoon shrugged. “As far as you know.”

  “You mean there were more?” she said, aghast.

  “No,” he said, and made an odd soft sound that turned out to be laughter. (There was something wrong with his larynx, too.) “Sorry. I killed a hundred and thirty-one people for being needlessly cruel. I wasn’t myself. The rest were sloppy kills, where people died in great pain or took more than a few minutes to die. Those weren’t mine.” He spoke with quiet, regal pride.

  “Didn’t you ever tell anyone?”

  “Such as who? The police and prosecutor certainly knew already; they were using me to clear their files. Besides, I thought a couple looked like they’d been done by police officers, and I had no particular desire to be found hanged in my cell.”

  Lancaster absorbed this, narrowing her eyes. There were going to be some fresh investigations. Then she said, “There are nontransplant procedures—regenerative—available in limited cases.”

  “They won’t be limited for long, I think. You’ll need them for soldiers.”

  He was right. “I guess you’ll be the first. Do you need anything else right now?” she said.

  “Dinner. High thyroid, I’m always hungry.”

  “I’ll see to it,” she said, and left.

  They could fix him up. Without transplants.

  Ralston reached up and felt the dents in his skull through his thinning gray hair. He hummed through his nose, a children’s song from a more realistic time:

  Now dogs and cats

  And even rats

  Will nevermore be seen—

  They’ve all been ground to sausage-meat

  By Donderbeck’s machine.

  It felt good to be needed.

  III

  Second Front

  Ucomo was what his friends called him. Among the Smart People, one’s full name was essentially a capsule biography, and as Ucomo was unusually Smart his full name was getting pretty long.

  He was working on an interesting intercept when Dabak, his longtime facilitator and good friend, let himself in and took a deep breath. “Ucomo, the air in here is overburdened with carbon dioxide, and moist enough for a Stupid. This cannot be good for your health, nor by extension your rest, your work, or your consequential prosperity. I am opening the blackout screen.” Dabak went to the office window, exposed the outside view, gasped, and said, “I am closing the blackout screen.” Once he had done so, he took a moment to recover, then turned and said, “You should get an office that doesn’t have a view of the moon, so you can get some fresh air in.” After a pause, Dabak added, “I hate that thing.”

  “Not really,” Ucomo remarked. “Oras, our ancestral homeworld, is in almost the same orbit as a similar body, Agad, and every few hundred orbits whichever one is closer to their sun catches up with the other. They interact gravitationally, the closer speeds up and moves into a wider orbit, the other slows and moves in, and they separate for a few hundred more orbits. During each period of interaction, conditions on Oras are beyond belief, and that’s just the precursor of a massive climatic shift.

  “Unfortunately, this means that you and I are descended from ancestors whose response to the sight of a nearby body in half-phase was never to remain calm and await developments. Since every colony world has a moon, we have blackout screens at every window.”

  “Are you recording?” Dabak said anxiously.

  “Constantly, but that conclusion was already known.”

  “Too bad, it sounded lucrative.”

  “It was. What did your Mother think of my strategic plan?”

  “She sent me with an invitation to donate.”

  Startled, Ucomo picked up a currycomb and said, “How much?” as he began instinctively to brush himself out.

  “I would suppose however much you normally produce,” Dabak said.

  Ucomo gestured as if to throw and exclaimed, “I mean what’s the bid, you fish!”

  Wriggling with satisfaction—he was almost never able to get a joke in on Ucomo—Dabak said, “No bid. You’re invited to donate.” At Ucomo’s gasp, he added, “I also overheard her discussing how much her latest brood of sons could be lent for bids when you turn female. She’s very impressed with you.”

  “I don’t know if I want to be a Mother myself,” Ucomo reflected. “It takes up so much time.”

  “Everyone says that, but we keep settling more planets, don’t we? You’ll just do what the Founding Mother did and look for the Smartest mates.—What’s wrong?”

  “All her mates must have been Stupids. I don’t know how a Mother can stand talking to anyone but another Mother. We must all seem like Stupids to them.”

  “I doubt that’s their primary interest in us anyway,” Dabak observed.

  It was a good point. Only the survivors of male-phase competition became Mothers. Typically about one male out of every eight or nine born lived long enough to resume development, so everyone was descended from Mothers who had preferred to be continuously pregnant. “Did your Mother send a container?”

  “No. I believe she intends to invite you home.”

  “What, like a war hero?” Ucomo said, flustered.

  “If that plan works, you are a war hero. And how’s your analysis coming?”

  Ucomo was
immediately all business. “The kzinti are still unaware that we can monitor their message lasers by observing trace effects on interstellar dust and gas. Their encryption remains uninspired. I believe I’ve figured out why they always call us Smart; the prisoners they take naturally address one another formally, being mutual strangers at peace with one another, and kzinti speech lacks the overtones needed to distinguish the word Ally” [pi’rrin] “from the word Smart” [Pierin]. “Given that the words undoubtedly have a common origin, this is not unreasonable.”

  “It certainly makes more sense than the theory that they’re being polite,” Dabak agreed. “Is there any sign that the kzinti can monitor us?”

  “I believe there would be no sign if they could,” Ucomo said. “To combine clarity with brevity our communications are in Ancestral mode. We are descended from creatures that spent some time living in shallows, before the oceans became too dangerous, and our brains still possess structures designed to grasp 3-D sonar pulses. This is why it’s so difficult for most males to express a thought unless it’s completely formed, but it also means that we get far more information out of holographic data than any alien could. If they broke our encryption, the kzinti would obtain only linear and visual information from our messages. Even their sonar-using slaves use it primarily for vision equivalence. Incidentally, I’m convinced the kzinti believe our females are nonsentient, like theirs.”

  Dabak went rigid with amazement, and stayed immobile for at least ten heartbeats. Then he said, “Why?”

  “Because they never see them.”

  “They never see them for the same reason we never see their Patriarch!”

  “Of course. But it’s well for an enemy to have false beliefs. Oh, and they’ve found another alien race. Quite numerous, apparently. A fleet is being assembled to invade one of the aliens’ planets, and since the force we face is the largest they have deployed, it will be contributing the largest number of ships. I intend to recommend to your Mother that we strike just as the convoy is formed, to maximize disruption.”

  “What are the aliens like?” Dabak wondered.

  “I couldn’t find anything about that. The annoying thing about spying on carnivores is they don’t give enough information to each other, either. However, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my weapon,’ after all. Whatever else they’re like, they’re useful.”

  “True,” Dabak said. “Well, maybe they can keep the kzinti distracted for a few years.”

  AQUILA ADVENIO

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Hal Colebatch and

  Matthew Joseph Harrington

  Prologve

  Avgvstvs, A.V.C. 832

  Jegarvindertsa gestured with two of their arms at small details in the center of the picture the ship’s roving cameras presented. Another of their arms enlarged the section, filtering out the vast plume of black smoke and ash clouds.

  Under the organization of uniformed members of their own species, the surviving bipeds from the towns the volcanic eruption had destroyed were lining up to receive food.

  Others, with weapons and without, were setting up temporary wood and fabric dwellings with material being unloaded from primitive oar- and sail-powered sea vessels and beasts of burden. Some bipeds, evidently injured, were being carried on litters. Details could be seen clearly.

  In the days of their trade empire the Jotoki had dealt with many worlds, and not all the knowledge of sapients’ behavior which they had accumulated then had been lost in the generations of long and terrible war. Following age-old procedures that had become almost reflexive, they had sent down camouflaged cameras and listening devices among the aliens, had translated their speech and recorded their organization, economics, sociology. There were still a few among the Jotoki remnant whose trades included the once-proud occupation of alien sociotechnician. Despite these beings’ unpleasantly suggestive appearances and primitive technology, it was obvious to the watchers what was going on.

  “They cooperate. They have organized disaster relief as well as a military caste. This is a civilization.”

  Jufadirvanlums’s mouths formed into shapes venomous with disapproval: “You would still have us recruit more alien mercenaries.” It was a statement. An accusation, not a question, part of a long-going debate.

  Jegarvindertsa raised themselves on two arms. Their gesture was in the affirmative. “What else are we to do? Half the gun mountings in our fleet are unserviced. Our asteroid miners can still fabricate infantry sledges, and we have no infantry. Do you think we can fight a war against the cursed ones without troops to ride them into battle? A war of machines? Have our failures shown you nothing?”

  “And have you learnt nothing? ‘The finest security force the spiral arm can give,’ our ancestors said when in their mad folly they trained the cursed ones.”

  “These are different.”

  “How can another Iron-level culture whose members revel in killing one another be different? They even look enough like the cursed ones to suggest they come from the same spores!”

  “These are omnivores. They have cities of a sort. And laws.”

  “So had the cursed ones, when those-whose-names-are-obliterated first recruited them, to our ruin.”

  “These are, we maintain, different. See how these organized ones even seem to feed their own poor and unfortunate. They have rudimentary medicine and public works. Like our own ancestors, they are seagoing, and you will observe that some of those ships, at least, are built for carrying cargo—they are for trade, not war.”

  “They have no shortage of war.”

  “What use would they be to us if they were herbivorous pacifists? But their military culture is not only tough and versatile, it’s well disciplined. Institutionally disciplined. The fact they have uniforms shows that: Their ranks are indicated and they depend on more than mere physical strength to see orders are obeyed. They give their slaves rights: They cannot be killed or mutilated without process of their courts.”

  “In theory!”

  “In theory, at least. They have art and poetry—a little—that is more than merely battle songs.” Their voice changed as another segment took up the argument. “Also, they have administrative ability, unlike the cursed ones.”

  “All of which will make them more dangerous enemies, when they turn against us.”

  “Have you no more sense than when you were tadpoles? Our progenitors dealt with many races in peace, successfully and to the benefit of all. Our civilization was not for us alone. And long it endured. Here, on a barbaric planet, we see others who have a civilization.” They fiddled with the viewer. “Now there is something interesting!”

  They increased the magnification: “You see those beings that have a place of honor, the trumpet players. What is it they wear about their upper segment? The skin of a creature that bears a strong resemblance to a certain other creature we know too well.”

  “You would have us risk too much. Better to flee at once with all of our kind that are left.”

  “We have no choice. We must have more troops!”—repetition had always been an important arm of rhetoric for Jotoki when both speaker and listener had five brains, one or more of which might be distracted—“We have fought for millennia as the cursed ones gathered strength, suffering defeat after defeat, losing planet after planet. Only the size of space has saved our remnant so far. Our whole civilization trembles on the verge of extinction. And we, we are its trustees!” Their arms waved in frustrated anger. “Look at this ship! How many dry and empty breeding and sleeping ponds does it contain? How many of our guns and machines are working with jury-rigged servomechanisms? We expect mechanisms to make combat decisions! Our machines can build us more ships, as long as computer memories function and there are planets and asteroids with metal in them. We cannot reproduce so easily, or train tadpoles in a single cycle! We spread ourselves thinner and thinner among our escorts, our gun turrets, our fighters. We are a fleet of shell crews propped up by mechanisms.”

  “If we had
the Trade Council—”

  “The last of the Trade Council, may we remind you, has long been eaten. We and our dwindling armsful of worlds remain. The last of the Jotoki to stand.”

  “The last we know of.”

  “It comes to the same thing. What choice do we have?”

  “And do you think iron-using primitives can help us in space battles?”

  “Eventually, yes. We also need to hold planets as well as take them. That means infantry, and it is infantry that we lack.”

  “If we must take them, we must take them from somewhere remote. Leave no witnesses to tell the cursed ones when they come of our presence.”

  Jegarvindertsa gestured at the scenes of devastation the cameras were still recording.

  “Did you see the boat that was nearly destroyed when it rowed too near the eruption? It was one of their more elaborate and ornate craft. Were those on board actually investigating the eruption from abstract curiosity? The one who went ashore from it, who walked toward the eruption and died on the beach: He was richly dressed by their standards, and had attendants. We wish we had picked up his last words…Did we see a primitive martyrdom for science?

  “They fight wars to stop barbaric customs among the tribesmen on their own frontiers,” they continued. “They actually expend their own soldiers for an abstract idea of civilization.”

  “And enslave those they conquer.”

  “Doesn’t every intelligent race before it learns economics? But they allow some of their slaves freedom eventually. They are traders, like us. Real traders. Merchant ships, warehouses, currency, courts. We say these beings actually care about civilization.”

  “They care about gold.”

  “So do we. So do you. Those who care about gold we can deal with. But we will say another thing. These beings are resilient. Their barbarians beat them occasionally but they always come back. We have a little time. We can watch them awhile.”

  Both Jotoki entities were using all five of their linked brains. The argument went on, as the world turned beneath them.