Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII

by Larry Niven

  “Yes, usually one, sometimes two. More are rare.”

  “A lot of your cubs must survive, then. This is the first time I have left Kzin-aga. You are the first aliens I have met. Such spindly limbs, no muscles at all.” He reached out and touched. “Such soft skins. Yet you have fought Heroes. And won. I am glad you are not like Heroes.”

  His voice changed.

  “But so many similarities,” he said. “Spinal column, skull, ribs, two forelimbs, two hindlimbs. Same number of eyes and ears, similar mouth, same arrangement of alimentary canal, same division of functions by organ. Both mammalian. It is extraordinary.”

  “Well, it’s a good design,” said Richard. “Crops up all over. The ancestors of humans evolved on a world in the Galactic Core, while I understand that kzinti evolution can be traced back in a nearly unbroken chain to an incredible distance.”

  “I hadn’t known that myself,” Telepath said.

  “It was in an article in Jinx Goshographic,” Richard said. “Something about geological stability—or, no, continuity of processes,” he said, trying to remember. “What’s the word—gradualism! Changes were very standard, and laid down fossils pretty reliably up to two or three million years ago.”

  “What happened then?” Telepath wondered.

  “Asteroid impact. After that the geology wasn’t as stable. Anyway, it’s not that big a coincidence.”

  “But our brains have functional similarities, too, I think. I have read minds of Pierin, of Jotoki. More strange. They don’t understand about the need to fight.” Telepath’s voice was becoming slurred. His eyelids were beginning to droop. “I think I am going to sleep now,” he said. “Let me sleep here. They will not come and kick me here.” He curled on the deck like a house cat after a large meal. After a minute he began to purr faintly, his claws extending and retracting rhythmically, though irregular twitches also ran over his muscles. He was runtish for a kzin, under eight feet tall, but it was still fortunate that their cabin was roomy. I think the poor creature is actually happy at this moment, Richard realized with a shock. With some memory of their own old cat in mind, he moved to scratch him under the chin, a gesture which with old Shebee had never failed to produce an ecstatic purring. Gay reached out quickly to halt him, and he stopped, shaking his head at himself. Telepath was, after all, still a kzin, small and weak by kzinti standards, but still with teeth and claws and speed capable of dismembering a buffalo. The rules for a human touching kzinti were very strict, and the rule for touching a sleeping one was NEVER.

  It was a long time later that Telepath awoke.

  “I have never slept so well that I remember,” he said. “But I should not have trespassed on you.”

  “Perhaps you will come and talk with us again,” said Gay.

  “We don’t want him as a permanent guest!” said Richard after Telepath left.

  “I think he knows that. Well, he would, wouldn’t he? But I’m sorry for him.”

  “I’d rather have him for a friend than an enemy,” said Richard. “I hate to think what a telepath enemy might do! But you’re right as usual. And I guess I’m sorry for him, too.”

  “I know you are. I’ve known you a long time, remember?”

  The voyage proceeded. Neither Richard nor Gay could feel very comfortable in the main body of the ship, with its dim light, lower temperatures, and the hulking kzinti here and there—not all of them, they suspected, as sophisticated as Charrgh-Captain about the company of humans, or with the pathetic friendliness of Telepath. Their orange fur, camouflage in this light, and their capacity for perfect stillness, often made them hard to see, for all their size, until the humans came startlingly close. Their eyes, glowing in the dimness, were not friendly, and both Richard and Gay knew enough of kzinti body language to be under no illusions about that.

  Things were peaceful enough—the kzinti had a gym to work off their energy and aggression, Charrgh-Captain forbade death duels among the relatively small crew, and foodmakers in private quarters avoided the most common source of fights—but it was still like walking through a cage of tigers.

  They spent some time with Charrgh-Captain on the bridge, familiarizing themselves further with the ship—it was the instinct of any spacer to do that, though they couldn’t really hope to know more than the rudiments of the systems. Especially since they were wary of touching meters or control panels or interrupting kzinti watchstanders. Both made as sure as they could that the other kzinti were reminded as often as possible, by the sight of the three of them together, that they were under Charrgh-Captain’s protection—the Patriarch’s protection, if it came to that.

  Sometimes—not very often—Charrgh-Captain was in the mood to talk; sometimes, when he wished to relax, even to joke and share a drink and reminiscences, or game with them in his suite; but the other kzinti were not companions from a past adventure, and it soon became abundantly clear that, for some reason, they had no particular inclination to socialize with representatives of the most terrible enemy their race had ever known.

  As far as Richard could tell, none of the other kzinti spoke Interworld. He thought it unwise to try to press conversation upon them in either his insulting, monkey-mangled attempt at the Heroes’ Tongue, or in what was still known in the Patriarchy (of which this ship was a part) as the slaves’ patois. The windows were opaqued and there was nothing to be gained by looking through them anyway, except possibly madness—the blind-spot effect of looking upon hyperspace affected kzinti every bit as badly as it did humans. In their cabin there were entertainments.

  Telepath, however, visited them; as often, they surmised, as he thought they could tolerate him. They played chess and card games with him sometimes, never developing the violent headache which would have warned them he was cheating. He won routinely at chess, but card games that involved bluffing were something of a kzinti handicap. He could easily sense their emotions when one of them had a good hand; it was the idea of folding—surrendering—that so often threw him.

  They had brought some old-fashioned jigsaw puzzles. He enjoyed them hugely, and could assemble them with blur-quick movements—except for the one that was all-white. That kept him poring over the pieces for hours at a time. They gathered he had no possessions or pastimes of his own. Anything a telepath had that another kzin fancied, the other kzin would take as a matter of course. Once he surprised them by bringing them a model of a kitten he had carved from some kind of wood—surprised them doubly, as they hadn’t realized that sculpture was so strongly nonvisual. (Kzinti paintings could be incomprehensible to human perceptions.) Sometimes he told them about his life, including the fact, which also surprised them, that he had kits. Both Richard and Gay, as reserve officers, filed his information away, though they felt slightly uncomfortable about doing so. Mostly he took their company, games, and talk as a preliminary and aid to relaxation and sleep, and their cabin as a refuge from the other kzinti.

  There came the indescribable moment, the discontinuity as the ship dropped out of hyperspace. The ports became transparent again, and stars reappeared. Strange stars. Then there were planets. They swung past two ringed gas giants, with the families of moons and Trojan-point asteroids that had first attracted kzinti miners to this system. They fell toward the system’s heart, and toward a small inner planet.

  It was not unlike Mars. A red surface suggested oxygen locked in iron. There were eroded stumps of mountains and what might have been seas a billion years previously. There was a tenuous atmosphere, mainly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, which for breathing purposes might as well have been a vacuum, but which sufficed to stir winds and dust clouds, and slowly traveling processions of crescent dunes. Kzinti instruments had detected no life but microbes. There were small icecaps. A small but bright sun gave good light.

  With hyperdrive, this was not far beyond the existing borders of kzin-settled space. If the kzinti ran out of better planets, and humans let them, they could probably kzinform it one day. Despite the broad streaks of anarchy in the
ir government, and a bureaucracy which depended largely on inefficient and unreliable slaves, they were capable of great constructive feats when they put their minds to it.

  At present they had an application before the human worlds to mine the gas giants’ moons: on probation after four major and several minor wars launched against humans, the Patriarchy was now under close observation in any effort to expand its territories. The kzinti had lost all the wars, of course. If they had won one, there would have been no more after it.

  The stasis box, its general position already known, was easy to locate with deep-radar, and easy to uncover. Cunning Stalker simply hovered over it, holding position with a gravity generator, and ran its reaction drive on very low power so as to blow the dust away.

  The mirror surface of the stasis box was revealed about fifty feet down. Magnification brought the image of the exposed section into the control center. Whether it had been deliberately buried there, or it and the planet had collided in the remote past, or it had once been housed in some installation whose metal was now coloring the sand, there was no way of telling. There were curves of vitrified rock that might be the last traces of the rimwall of an ancient impact crater—not necessarily related. Anyway, unanswerable speculations as to how it got there were of no importance at all, beside the question of what it might contain.

  Deep-radar showed it was spherical—unusual—and about twenty feet in diameter. Far smaller than the last one, but still huge for a stasis box. All aboard Cunning Stalker knew it was quite big enough to contain live Slavers.

  The box was now uncovered. A “mining robot” (which bore a remarkable resemblance to a Third War automated sapper) was landed next to it; it burrowed beneath the box with a disintegrator, emerged a few minutes later, and rose to be picked up. Cunning Stalker moved aside, and a fusion charge blew the stasis box off the planet.

  They had to catch it before it fell back; it didn’t reach escape speed. The charge had been meant to accomplish that, so the box was significantly more massive than expected. This might be good or bad: it could mean the box was packed solid, with no room for inhabitants, or it could mean that there was extremely heavy equipment inside, which suggested weapons—and someone to use them.

  The box was towed to high orbit, and the ship’s fusion drive was aimed at it and kept hot. Charrgh-Captain, Slaverexpert, Telepath, two troopers, and the humans took the gig over to it. (The “gig” had oversized gravity compensators and a remarkably heavy layer of hullmetal lining its nose, almost as if it was meant to be used to ram a hole in something.) Slaverexpert fired a parcel of fine black material at it: superconductor. The fabric wrapped around the box, formed a closed surface, turned silver briefly, and rolled itself back up into the parcel. “Clever,” Gay murmured.

  “The dropcloth is Pierin emergency firefighting equipment,” Charrgh-Captain remarked. “I don’t think they had this in mind.”

  The container’s surface was still seamless, but had acquired a creamy hue. Richard had been watching the views from the scanners around the box, and he said, “Where’s the cutoff switch?”

  Slaverexpert, who had never previously spoken unless directly addressed, startled Richard by saying, “True.” In Interworld.

  “Explain,” commanded Charrgh-Captain.

  “These were designed to be opened easily, Charrgh-Captain. A panel would be spring-loaded, to break the conductive surface when the field was interrupted. The stasis has ended, but the surface is still seamless.”

  Gay, who had gotten curious and was having a look, said, “It isn’t. It’s split in half. Look, there.” She pointed at one of the screens. The seam was at an inconvenient angle, so nobody else had noticed it.

  And it hadn’t been as big. The split was getting wider.

  “Battle stations,” Charrgh-Captain said. Still in Interworld, addressing the two humans—kzinti routine was Battle Stations. The Guthlacs got to their couches and strapped in.

  “Sir,” Telepath said dopily, drugged with sthondat-lymph extract, “I detect no life.”

  “You can’t read Slaverexpert, either,” Charrgh-Captain replied.

  “No, sir, but I can tell where he is.”

  “Noted. Slaverexpert, report.”

  “The only energy I detect is heat, in amounts consistent with being present before stasis began, plus the separation of the shell. Shall I deep-radar?”

  “Yes. Display the results.”

  The image on the humans’ screens was divided into wedge-shaped compartments, almost all full of materials slightly denser than water. One held even denser material, probably metallic, in boxes. “It looks like an orange designed by ARMs,” Richard said.

  Charrgh-Captain, relieved of tension, snorted amusement. “An orange? The fruit?”

  “Sure. Armor-plated for safety, big so it’s easy to find, opens automatically when ripe.”

  “So what’s all the metal?” Gay chuckled, pointing at the last wedge.

  Slaverexpert spoke up. “Emergency escape pods for the seeds?” After a moment of utter silence, he looked up to find everyone else staring at him—even Telepath. “Sorry, sir,” he said faintly to Charrgh-Captain, and looked back down at his instruments in a marked manner.

  “We’ll examine that section before taking the box in tow,” Charrgh-Captain said.

  Probably the best thing about working in space with kzinti was that they had been doing it for so long. Lighting, for instance. Humans, even those in the mining industries, tended to put up one or two bright lights, and wear one or two smaller lights on their helmets, producing sharp-edged shadows and a nagging conviction that something was hiding just out of sight. Here, though, Second Trooper strewed fistfuls of little spheres toward the partitions: where they hit, they stuck, and presently began to glow gently. They had frosted surfaces, so the light was diffuse. The kzinti suits also had multiple lights: a couple at each wrist, and two rows of three each down the torso, where things would be held to work on them. A light under the chin illuminated things directly ahead.

  The Guthlacs were given clusters of faint blue lights to strap onto their suits, which in conjunction with standard kzinti lighting gave them a spectrum they could use easily. The amount of thought and preparation this implied was extremely flattering: They were being extended enormous courtesy. Richard found himself wondering if Charrgh-Captain had known all along that human-model food dispensers included a toilet.

  There wasn’t much time to dwell on this. The parcels were full of gadgets.

  Most of them were pretty straightforward power tools: drills, saws, hammers, trimmers, shapers, diggers, a couple of amazingly elaborate grippies, and something that Gay and Slaverexpert tentatively labeled, after much consultation, as a handheld turret lathe. “These must have been for the use of a slave race,” said Slaverexpert. “They are too large for Tnuctipun hands, and Thrintun would rather starve than toil.” He sounded troubled.

  “What’s wrong?” said Richard.

  “There is something familiar about the workmanship. Disturbing.”

  “What would this be?” Charrgh-Captain said, holding up a thing that included a short spike, a knife, a crank, and little spring-loaded rollers. “It hardly seems useful as a weapon.”

  Slaverexpert took it and turned it over a few times. “I am open to any suggestion,” he said, baffled.

  “It looks…” Richard began, then said, “Nah, crazy.”

  “So?” said Charrgh-Captain.

  “Good point. Well, it looks like an apple peeler. A good one, too.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Gay agreed.

  Slaverexpert worked the crank a little. “It seems articulated to follow a complex surface.”

  “Potato peeler, then?” Gay said.

  Slaverexpert looked at her, then at Richard. His ears were distinctly cupped, as if he were expecting ambush. He said, “Charrgh-Captain, it may be prudent to inspect the other sections as well.”

  “Very well, once we’re done with this one.”<
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  Other devices were more complex. Several were lasers, or included lasers, but would have required great modification of focus for use as weapons. Another seemed intended to take in some kind of powder and extrude solid material in any desired shape. The purpose of a few remained unclear. All the tools that required power had to be plugged in; they had no power supplies of their own.

  And it was Telepath, whose drugs were wearing off, who said, “Are there two of anything?”

  Charrgh-Captain gave a startled grunt. “He’s right,” he said. “There are no duplications. Or spare parts,” he realized. He picked up an object that had been mysterious a moment before. “This could be used to wind wire around a rotor.” He added in Hero, “Everyone pick up an object and examine it for signs of usage.”

  His tone of command was such that the Guthlacs did so along with the rest. Richard inspected the peeler and found the blade and spike unstained. “Clean, no wear,” he said. Similar remarks were made by others.

  “These may be models,” Charrgh-Captain declared. “Meant only to be copied. Were not the Slavers highly mercantile?”

  “Charrgh-Captain, they were,” said Slaverexpert. “These may indeed be articles of commerce. Shall I see what organic goods they stocked?”

  “Certainly.”

  Slaverexpert had gone from being taciturn to interested, and had now gone from interested to stiffly formal. If Richard understood kzinti reactions (and he had some reason to think he might), Slaverexpert was experiencing immense stress, about something he didn’t want to discuss.

  Slaverexpert’s conduct while inspecting the other segments verged on bizarre. One held thirty-one bacterial-containment canisters, and he barely glanced at them. The next three held clear plastic shells, each containing seeds of different sizes and shapes, which were also virtually ignored. The fifth held larger bins, that fitted into the shell segment; he shone a light on one, then said, “Charrgh-Captain, I have a security problem.”

  “From plants?”

  “Tree-of-life,” said Slaverexpert. There was a moment’s silence.