Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI

by Larry Niven

  She waited for him to go through the checklist, even though she could see everything was right. She wasn’t the one who needed to know it was right, in order for the suit to have any purpose. While he was doing that, she again speculated on the possibility that starseeds had been created as a genetic lifeboat for the tnuctipun, with Outsiders a machine lifeform created to guard them, immune like all machines to Slaver power. It was possible, but couldn’t be checked without taking apart a starseed, and she still hadn’t come up with a way to be safe from Outsiders if she did that. (Though if she cut into a starseed without being shot, sliced, blown up, neatly sorted out by isotopic weight, or accelerated off the edge of the visible universe, it would indicate that the theory was probably flawed. It was not an immediate concern.)

  It would have been good to be able to get more direct information about the tnuctipun, but Larry Greenberg had been the nearest thing to an expert, and his slowboat had never made turnaround on the trip to Jinx. That had been just barely too early to be Brennan’s work, so the sabotage must have been by puppeteers. She couldn’t fault their decision—a telepathic human breeder with a Slaver’s memories was dangerous.

  “It smells good,” was the first thing he said. He was surprised, as well he might be.

  “Yes, this has a good recycler. Let’s get you familiarized with the ship’s controls.”

  “Now?”

  “You surely don’t want to be around when I start scattering radioactive thallium. And this area’s going to be submerged by then anyway, because I have to melt the icecaps. Now, move along before I have to get the broom.”

  He didn’t understand that, fortunately for his dignity, but he moved along.

  “The planer will develop two and twenty sixty-fourths 512s of a Kzin gravity. I’ve made up some wargame programs to add to the entertainment supplies, and the ship’s autodoc is a lot better than your ship had. Tell the Patriarch you stole it from human experimenters, and he’ll have to give you at least a partial Name. Damaged data files in the computer will support your claim. Don’t go anywhere but Kzin with this ship. If this ship attacks any human settlement I will blow up Kzin’s sun.”

  “How?” he demanded, incredulous at last.

  Peace looked at him. “I am not about to tell a kzin how to blow up a sun,” she said. A porous tube of a ton of lithium, extruded through the hilt of a variable-sword to half a million miles’ length, filled with another ton of lithium, to be placed in stasis in its turn. The end of the wire thrust into a star’s core, the central wire’s stasis shut down, and fusion propagates violently up the tube to the hilt, spraying fusing plasma out the pores. The shock disconnects the tube’s stasis power supply, and a channel of fusion convects heat out of the core and fuel in. Until he asked, she’d been bluffing. “This panel controls the ionizing laser for the ram’s fuel—” she continued.

  Something had been wrong with him. Possibly all his life. He had accepted the word of his father, his clan priest, and the Patriarch’s Voice without ever questioning them; and now this thing, this Fury called Human Victory, that had shown them all to be fools merely by existing, was telling him to accept its word without question too. Ftah.

  From now on he would question what he’d been taught. That, at least, Peace had taught him correctly. No doubt that was against the God’s orders, Peace having been created to protect humans. Well, eat God.

  Come to think of it, there was a human religion that claimed to do just that. If there was anything to human religion—and, given this creature’s existence, it should at least be considered—God didn’t sound too bright. There was the tuft of an idea there.

  A hand like a knotted branch took hold of his muzzle and turned his head. “What was the last thing I said?” Peace asked him.

  Manexpert glared at the liberty, then said, “If I shut down the synchrotron oscillation in the fusion pinch for more than a few minutes of my subjective time, the ship will stop generating the ultraviolet laser beam for long enough to begin encountering nonionized matter, and the ram field may not deflect all of it quickly enough. That’s probably what happened to the Evita Peron on the way to Wunderland. Am I listening to you.”

  Peace nodded once, said, “All right,” and continued the instructions.

  It finally said, “Any questions?”

  “Is all this knowledge in the computer too?” Manexpert asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. What would be a good Name?”

  Peace’s hands, almost incessantly busy, dropped to its sides. It blinked and said, “I have no idea. You could take the Name of somebody famous, that you’d like people to associate you with.”

  After considering what he’d learned here, and what he’d already known of human practices, Manexpert decided to say, “Thank you.”

  After the ship was out of the atmosphere, Peace contacted her assistants and said, “Okay, he’s been released back into the wild, you can knock it off.”

  “He didn’t even get to see me,” complained Technology Officer over the channel. “I had a squeak and everything.”

  “You wouldn’t have had much effect after Gnyr-Captain’s performance,” said Power Officer. “He sounded like Hroft-Riit’s haunted axe!” He laughed softly.

  “I always liked that play,” Gnyr-Captain admitted, pleased.

  “Okay, you guys, I didn’t splice your brains back together so you could do dramatic reviews. I need that free-association on kzinti life more than ever now: the altered body chemistry works, and his paranoia is developing nicely. He’s already got a plan, so the next Kzinti War is going to be kzinti fighting each other, and it should be the last. But I’ll have to understand kzinti culture better than I do to keep the civil war from sterilizing the planet,” Peace said.

  “We’re on it, we’re on it,” said Gnyr-Captain. “You just work on restoring us to normal appearance, stealing some females, and finding a planet where we can settle down.”

  “And terraforming this one just a trifle,” Peace said in dry tones.

  “In your free time,” Gnyr-Captain replied, magnanimous and deadpan.

  “Ftah,” said Peace, quite well for somebody with no lips. In fact she was amused; she was undoubtedly the first to discover that the slavering predators who’d been humanity’s bogeymen for centuries were, in fact, a race of utterly stagestruck hams. The gaslighting wouldn’t have gone nearly so well without them—it had been a chance remark by Gnyr-Captain about Manexpert deserving a Name that had inspired it in the first place. She congratulated herself yet again for the idea of reviving their brains with the telepathic region removed; they were remarkably reasonable without it.

  Manexpert’s brain seethed with growing convictions. Kzinti were losing their will to fight, but they’d fight one more War if there was a real chance of winning. He thought he knew how to gain that chance: trick God into supporting them.

  It would involve remaking the basis of Kzin’s culture. So be it. He would have to work with great care, to avoid rousing suspicion. It would be unwise to take the Name of a great leader or philosopher; he needed something innocuous, even ridiculous. Who was that Hero who’d come back from the First War, driven to madness and advocating an end to warfare? Ah, yes.

  Kdapt.

  WAR AND PEACE

  Matthew Joseph Harrington

  Attention Outsider vessel. Please hold your fire. I have been able to override my genetic programming.

  My name is Peace Corben, and I am a Protector of human origin. I wish to engage in commerce.

  It came to her, as she awaited a reply through the relay, that for the first time in almost thirty years she was afraid. It would have been interesting, if it hadn’t been so unpleasant. She found herself constantly formulating contingency plans whenever her mind wandered, and it was designed to wander, and none of the plans were worth a thing.

  Her plan to lie dead in space and use passive instruments to monitor the relay’s fate was no good either. A maypole of metal ribbons, seemingl
y billowing around its central shaft, suddenly manifested nearby, appallingly huge, having decelerated at what instruments said was a couple of hundred thousand gees. As this was over 170 times what Peace could get out of a gravity planer before it became unable to compensate for anything outside its housing, she was at least reassured that she wasn’t wasting her time.

  Whether she was wasting her life remained to be seen.

  The being that would eventually be known as Outsider Ship Twelve had been carrying its children exposed to space, as was usual, its maturity limbs arranged to maximize shadow borders in the illumination it provided for them. At .9c, with Doppler effects bringing gamma bursters into their spectral range aft, and the microwave background just visible forward with a starseed silhouetted against it, life was pleasant. The youngest and oldest enjoyed watching things change color as they went by, too, though the ones in between preferred to watch the starseed.

  They had been moving into a region of considerable modulated radio noise, its largest source about eighteen light-years away. Trade was good in such areas. It took time to be noticed, though, so things were quiet—until a hyperwave message came in, using a chord that should have been known only to Outsiders. The content of the message explained why it wasn’t, but raised other issues of interest. The Outsider saw that the transmission came from a relay, looked around, and spotted an inactive hyperdrive motor. The Outsider ability to do this was not advertised. Some species tried to erase debts by erasing creditors. It moved over there for a better look.

  There was a well-made ship, and its sole occupant was indeed a Protector. If it had made the ship, it was much smarter than a Pak. Not attacking the Outsider was also evidence of this. The ship had lots of mountings for weaponry, as was to be expected, but the equipment that fitted them had been not merely dismantled, but distributed, so that it would take at least half a minute to assemble the easiest items—plenty of time for an Outsider to do practically anything. This Peace Corben was displaying what must have been, to a Protector, near-suicidal good faith.

  Of course, it might still be up to something. Protectors were like that.

  The Protector sent power through a radio receiver, and the Outsider said, “Greetings. What did you wish to purchase?”

  “I have information to sell first, to establish a credit balance.”

  “We do not normally purchase information. We sell it, and use the proceeds to pay for supplies.”

  “I doubt you possess this information, and you’d be able to sell it to customers you trusted for amazing sums.”

  Interesting. “What price do you set on it?”

  “I’ll trust you to be fair.”

  “We may not be able to afford a fair price.”

  “I’ll stipulate that my credit balance will not be drawn on if you show me that the matter and/or circumstances of a request would work a hardship on you.”

  More interesting. “How would a hardship be defined?”

  “Inability to meet your other bills, or worse.”

  “Agreed. What is the item?”

  “Direct conversion of mass to photons, via suppression of the spin on the neutron.”

  Peace waited.

  It was almost half a minute before the Outsider replied. “Is there a working model?”

  “Yes. Not nearby; it was too obviously usable as a weapon. About a light-hour away, in stasis. If you examine my ship, you’ll see there’s a vacant space near the fusion tube. The converter fits in there.” Peace waited a couple of minutes for a response—a huge interval for an Outsider—and finally said, “Are you okay?”

  “There is some difficulty in calculating your credit balance,” the Outsider said. Its voice, which had been pleasantly sociable, was now a clearly-synthetic monotone.

  “Enact an upper limit of the total value of information available, excluding personal questions,” Peace said at once.

  “Thank you,” said the Outsider in its usual tones. “What do you wish to know?”

  “I need my math checked,” Peace replied. “I’m trying to design a ship that can travel at the second quantum of hyperdrive, but the parts interactions are too complex for me to be sure I’ve worked them out right, and whenever I build a computer big enough to do the work it promptly goes into a state of solipsistic bliss.”

  “Transmit the converter design and the equations.”

  “Right…I had to invent 3-D matrices for the equations; I hope the notation is implicit enough.” Peace sent the data.

  “It is,” the Outsider said. “Interesting approach,” it added.

  Peace waited, and watched the Outsiders.

  They were linking their tendrils together, as she expected.

  It was a difficult problem, requiring network processing. Technically, doing this before a customer qualified as giving away personal information; but the Protector wouldn’t have come here if it hadn’t figured out that Outsider families linked up mentally sometimes.

  The technique of cubic matrices would have paid for that knowledge anyway. It simplified problems that normally required vast computations. However, it in turn was being unavoidably given away. Information exchange of this value normally occurred only during prenuptial adoptions—Peace Corben was sparing no pains to ingratiate itself. The possibility that a Protector would not have worked these concepts out in advance was considered only in order to dismiss it, for the sake of thoroughness.

  The motor design was unusually compact for what it was meant to do—it would fit into a prolate spheroid 150 feet wide by 200 long. This was accomplished by using hyperwave pulses instead of electronic ones to regulate it, so there was a failsafe of sorts: if it was switched on in a region where space was excessively curved, it wouldn’t make the ship disappear into a tangent continuum—it would simply blow all its circuits and destroy the motor. The really tricky part of the design was the throttle: an interrupter that flickered the field state between the first and second hyperdrive levels, allowing speed to vary from 120 to 414,720 times the speed of light. There was a risk of affecting the hyperwave control pulses with the changes in field state, so the signal generators were fed power in inverted rhythm, to exactly counter this. The question was whether the transition waveforms could be precisely matched and simultaneous. The whole concept of simultaneity was an uncomfortable one to Outsiders, which was another reason for preferring travel at sublight speeds; but other races seemed to like it a lot.

  After long minutes of work, the network disassembled, and the Outsider told Peace Corben, “Your reckoning is correct. However, the mechanism will need retuning at regular intervals, as natural radioactive decay will alter compositions unpredictably.”

  “Thanks, I was planning on using isotopically pure materials.”

  “The incidence of quantum miracles in such is anomalously high,” the Outsider warned.

  “Is it. That’s interesting. Any idea why?”

  “Many theories, none capable of accurate prediction. There is considerable documentation of the effect in all isotopes, however. Do you want it?”

  “I do, but I’d better not take it. It sounds like something that would occupy all my unused attention. Thanks for the warning. What’s the charge?”

  “None. It is not personal, and therefore you are entitled to it. Neutron conversion offers a means of rejuvenating stars and thus extending the life of the Universe, and potentially that of all species living here. Volunteering information you might find useful merely simplifies the process of paying a fair price, within the ceiling you set.”

  There was a pause as the Protector absorbed this. “I see…In a similar spirit of courtesy I suggest that any information you provide me that you hope to sell within, say, sixty light-years from here, be tagged as such, so I don’t spread it around and screw up your market.”

  “Many thanks. Do you need any other information?”

  “Undoubtedly,” the Protector replied, “but I don’t know what yet. I can find this starseed again when I do know. You ca
n keep the relay, in case you have to leave the starseed’s vicinity—you can mark it with an encrypted message saying where you’ve gone.”

  “Why would we have to leave?” the Outsider said, unable to think of a compelling reason.

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to leave you the relay.”

  That was reasonable. “Very well. Are you aware that your converter could be adapted to suppress the spin on the proton?”

  “Certainly, but I don’t need yet another kind of large bomb. It’d annihilate the generator. Unless I beamed two partial fields and had them intersect—which seems like a lot of trouble, for not much more result. Here are the coordinates for the working model.”

  “Thank you.”

  Neither of them saw any necessity for formal goodbyes.

  Peace hadn’t even thought of rejuvenating stars. The converter beam was a statistical effect, and beyond a certain dispersion of the cone it simply didn’t work; but partial fields intersecting in a star’s core would do a decent enough job of cleaning it out, as slowly as you liked. Warming the core would expand it, and since it would be ridiculously difficult to do so symmetrically there would be massive convection, extracting trapped fossil heat and delaying helium ignition. Sol could be restored to full luminosity in time to keep it from turning red giant. The star was plainly older than current theory supposed; but then, so was the Universe.