07-Beowulf Shaeffer

by Larry Niven

  I started down. Ms. Machti called, "Mr. Graynor? You've a call from a Mr. Ausfaller. He says you can't take off yet."

  Ausfaller! How could he know...What did he know? "He asked for Martin Wallace Graynor?"

  "No, he wanted the red-haired man at the desk, and I said, 'Mister Graynor?' and he-"

  "Stet. Can you -- " I did not want the call transferred to my pocket phone. "May I take it on one of those?" I waved at the booths.

  "Certainly."

  It was half a phone booth, just two black walls and a projection table. It would give me privacy, but I could still see out. I tapped the receiver, and a life-sized bust of Sigmund Ausfaller popped into view.

  His rather vicious smile faded a little. He hadn't expected me at eye level. I thought, Sigmund, you're bothering a total stranger, sandy-haired, tanned, a foot shorter than your albino quarry. Could I get away with that?

  I didn't feel lucky. I said, "Long story. Ask Ander."

  "So your name is Graynor now?"

  "Braynard," I said distinctly. "Where are you?" He'd only heard the name over a phone. "Graynor" would give the bastard Sharrol and Jeena, too.

  "Where should I be?"

  I saw nothing of background, just the head and torso solid projection. He could be anywhere. I suggested, "Retrieving Carlos Wu's autodoc?"

  "In due course. It shouldn't be left here. Look outside, Bey. Turn left. Farther. Look up."

  He was ten floors up in a glass slab, looking down at me. Doll-sized, he was just big enough to recognize. He waved at me from the window, then turned back to his holovid phone.

  "I'm right on top of you. It would take you hours to freeze yourself, perhaps days to be stowed and launched. I need only cross the street to stop you. Let us reason together, Bey."

  "You always seem to have an offer I can't refuse. Why are you picking on me, Sigmund? I told Ander everything he wanted to know."

  "I haven't heard from Ander."

  "Feather. Carlos. Pierson's puppeteers."

  "You'll still have to come home with me, Bey. You know too much, and you talk too much. Now, wait. Don't go off half-cocked. I can get you a birthright."

  "Yeah?" It was dawning on me that he might not know about Sharrol.

  "One child. We have that much power if you can do something of clear public benefit. Can you return Carlos Wu to his home?"

  "Carlos is dead, Sigmund."

  "Dead?"

  "How did you find me?"

  "You can't see it, Bey, but I'm looking at four walls of vidscreens. We scattered cameras everywhere. Then we plastered the screens all over my room. It's been -- Wait one. Pray turn all screens off." He waited an instant, looking offstage. Then, "Thank God, I can throw these things away and watch blank walls again. I've been watching three spaceport terminals and the top five restaurants and ten hotel lobbies, and when you finally showed, I couldn't believe it was you."

  "You damn well convinced yourself somehow!"

  "I couldn't believe it wasn't, either. Sorry about that. Bey, are you sure about Carlos?"

  "Feather blew a hole through him. But the nanotech 'doc is his last legacy, and it's UN property, and I might arrange to put that in your hands."

  "Very good. We'll have a chance to talk about puppeteers and the like on the way home." A bell pinged. He turned around and shouted, "Pray open the door!" He turned back. "And Feather? You know, we never intended to turn her loose on an alien world. We want some weaponry back, too. And the others, Sharrol and the children?"

  I set my face for the big lie. "Feather's g -- "

  Sigmumd jumped at me, banged his face on the edge of the field, recoiled, and fell backward and out of sight.

  Ander Smittarasheed stepped into view, wading through the table, short ribs deep. He was holding a familiar object. He reached down. Sigmund Ausfaller was pulled into view by his hair. Sigmund's chest was shattered, a huge hole rammed through it.

  Ander was holding Feather Filip's horrible ARM weapon, the gun that had blown a hole through my own chest. He pointed it at me. "Recognize this?"

  For an instant I thought I was going mad. He couldn't have that. He couldn't. It was in the apt, Sharrol's apt, hidden --

  Ah. Sharrol left it for me. She left me a weapon in my backpurse. Not a bad idea, but Ander must have searched my room, searched my backpurse, found it there. When?

  After dinner, when I was at the hotel desk getting my key.

  Ander said, "Where are you, Beowulf?"

  I was still looking through Outbound's huge window. High up in that glass slab I could see a tiny figure where Ausfaller had waved at me. The back of Ander's head and shoulders.

  If he turned around and looked down, he would see me. I didn't turn away. The front of me now looked less like Beowulf Shaeffer than the back. And what could Ander see in his phone? The miniature bust of a tanned stranger and nothing behind it.

  I said, "I'm in my room at the Pequod. Ander, nothing was said about killing the poor flat."

  "Beowulf, we can hardly sell our wonderful nanotech machine without Sigmund knowing where we got it. The room isn't registered to anyone, and the punchgun can go with me. You haven't used the punchgun, have you? Like for robbing a droud shop?"

  "No."

  "Then at worst they'll track it back to the ARM. And then maybe to you."

  My head seemed filled with fog. Did I do this? Did I find the temptation that turned Ander Smittarasheed into a thief and killer? Or was he always that?

  What do I do now? Play it out. "A dead man can't send us money," I said.

  "Sigmund brought local money. It'll be in that case. It may take me a while to break the security programs, and I don't really know how much he brought."

  "Show me the case."

  "What, you think I'm lying?" He bent out of view, then rose again with a heavy silver briefcase in his fist. "Now is when you tell me where the island is."

  I gave him a longitude, the right one. "Latitude when I've got half the money."

  "I'll be in touch."

  "Wait! Ander, get rid of the punchgun."

  Ander laughed. "I think I'll keep it."

  He'd seen how I feared it. He'd keep it to intimidate me. I tried anyway. "Ander, I was wearing a v -- "

  He flicked off.

  I waited at the phone until I saw the shape in the hotel room window stand and step out of view. Then I went back to the desk. "Are you ready to freeze me, Ms. Machti?"

  White-garbed medics wanted my retina prints and a voice match. I was five feet ten and a half inches tall. The physical exam they put me through seemed perfunctory, but what could they find? Carlos Wu's autodoc had rebuilt me almost from my DNA map. I'd never been in better shape.

  I wanted to view Sharrol and Jeena. The doctors let me see them. They looked all right...well, dead, but otherwise...I was nerving myself to join them.

  As if I'd left myself a choice.

  What a mess. Poor Sigmund.

  What would the local police make of that wound? They'd never seen a corpse like that, but they'd seen a vest like that. The punchgun had torn that kind of hole through a survival vest that had belonged to a Persial January Hebert, who'd sunk out of sight a year and a half ago.

  Surely they'd make the connection. They'd come looking for the reclusive Persial January Hebert. Hebert had indulged in a sudden flurry of activity: a phone call here, a hotel room at the Pequod Hotel, a dinner with Ander Smittarasheed.

  Without the punchgun Ander might bluff his way through.

  But the weapon would nail him, would identify him. He couldn't hold on to the gun without using it.

  Would he even hesitate? A trained ARM facing colony cops? Fafnir is a "human" world. Ander was unlikely to guess how many police are kzinti.

  I wondered how much damage Ander would do before it all caught up with him. There could be one fearful bloodbath if he tried to shoot his way free.

  Nice for me. Ander dead was Ander silent. But --

  Tens of thousands of years f
rom now nobody would find the old ARM records of a wild hypothesis. Nobody would wonder if a trillion powerful aliens had left known space to take possession of the galactic Core. It might never matter, even if I was right...or be all to the good if I was wrong.

  Either way, I couldn't think of a way to stop him.

  They were spraying my arm. I would be in a coma when they cooled me down and launched me. I wondered whose face would be looking down at me when I woke.

  FLY-BY-NIGHT

  The windows in Odysseus had been skylights. The doors had become hatches. I ran down the corridor looking at numbers. Seven days we'd been waiting for aliens to appear in the ship's lobby, and nothing!

  Nothing until now. I felt good. Excited. I ran full tilt, not from urgency but because I could. I'd expected to reach Home as frozen meat in one of these Ice Class cargo modules.

  I reached 36, stooped and punched the steward's bell. Just as the door swung down, I remembered not to grin.

  A nightmare answered.

  It looked like an octopus underwater, except for the vest. At the roots of five eel's-tail segments, each four feet long, eyes looked up at me. We never see Jotoki often enough to get used to them. The limbs clung to a ladder that would cross the cabin ceiling when the gravity generators were on.

  I said, "Legal Entity Paradoxical, I have urgent business with Legal Entity Fly-By-Night."

  The Jotok started to say, "Business with my master-" when its master appeared below it on the ladder.

  This was the nightmare I'd been expecting: five to six hundred pounds of orange and sienna fur, sienna commas marking the face, needle teeth just showing points, looking up at me out of a pit. Fly-By-Night wore a kind of rope vest, pockets all over it, and buttons or corks on the points of all ten of its finger claws.

  "-is easily conducted in virtual fashion," the Jotok concluded.

  What I'd been about to say went clean out of my head. I asked, "Why the buttons?"

  Lips pulled back over a forest of carnivore teeth, LE Fly-By-Night demanded, "Who are you to question me?"

  "Martin Wallace Graynor," I said. Conditioned reflex.

  The reading I'd done suggested that a killing snarl would leave a kzin mute, able to express himself only by violence. Indeed, his lips wanted to retract, and it turned his Interworld speech mushy. "LE Graynor, by what authority do you interrogate me?"

  My antic humor ran away with me. I patted my pockets elaborately. "Got it somewhere-"

  "Shall we look for it?"

  "I-"

  "Written on your liver?"

  "I have an idea. I could stop asking impertinent questions?"

  "A neat solution." Silently the door swung up.

  Ring.

  The Jotok may well have been posing himself between me and his enraged master, who was still wearing buttons on his claws, and smiling. I said, "Don't kill me. The Captain has dire need of you and wishes that you will come to the main workstation in all haste."

  The kzin leapt straight up with a half turn to get past the Jotok and pulled himself into the corridor. I did a pretty good backward jump myself. Fly-By-Night asked, "Do you know why the Captain might make such a request?"

  "I can guess. Haste is appropriate."

  "Had you considered using the intercom, or virtual mail?"

  "Captain Preiss may be afraid they can listen to our electronics."

  "They?"

  "Kzinti spacecraft. The Captain hopes you can identify them and help negotiate." He stripped off the corks and dropped them in a pocket. His lips were all right now.

  "This main workstation, would it be a control room or bridge?"

  "I'll guide you."

  The Kzin was twisted over by some old injury. His balance was just a bit off. His furless pink tail lashed back and forth, for balance or for rage. The tip knocked both walls, toc toc toc. I'd be whipped bloody if I tried to walk beside him. I stayed ahead.

  The Jotok trailed us well back from the tail. It wore a five-armhole vest with pockets. It used four limbs as legs. One it held stiff. I pictured a crippled Kzin buying a crippled Jotok... but Paradoxical had been agile enough climbing the ladder. I must have missed something.

  The file on Jotoki said to call it they, but that just felt wrong. "Piracy," the Kzin said, "would explain why everything is on its side."

  "Yah. They burned out our thruster. The Captain had to spin us up with attitude jets."

  "I don't know that weapon. Speak of the ship," he said. "One? Kzinti?"

  "One ship popped up behind us and fired on us as it went past. It's a little smaller than Odysseus. Then a Kzin called us. Act of war, he said. Get the Captain to play that for you. He spoke Interworld... not as well as you."

  Fly-By-Night talked like he'd grown up around humans. Maybe he was from Fafnir.

  "The ship stopped twenty million miles distant and sent a boat. That's on its way here now. Our telescopes pick up markings in the Heroes' Tongue. We can't read them."

  He said, "If we were traveling faster than light, we could not be intercepted. Did your Captain consider that?"

  "Better you should ask, why are we out of hyperdrive? LE Fly-By-Night, there is an extensive star-building region between Fafnir and Home. Going through the Tao Gap in Einstein space is easier than going around and gives us a wonderful view, but we're in it now. Stuck. We can't send a hyperwave help call, we can't jump to hyperdrive, because there's too much mass around us."

  "Odysseus has no weapons," the Kzin said.

  "I don't have actual rank aboard Odysseus. I don't know what weapons we have." And I wouldn't tell a Kzin.

  He said, "I learned that before I boarded. Odysseus is a modular cargo ship. Some of the modules are passenger cabins. Outbound Enterprises could mount weapons modules, but they never have. None of their other commuter ships are any better. The other ship, how is it armed?"

  "Looks like an archaic Kzinti warship, dis armed. Gun ports slagged and polished flat. We haven't had a close look, but ships like that are all over known space since before I was born. Armed Kzinti wouldn't be allowed to land. Whatever took out our gravity motors isn't showing. It must be on the boat."

  "Why is this corridor so long?"

  Odysseus was a fat disk with motors and tanks in the center, a corridor around the rim, slots outboard to moor staterooms and cargo modules. That shape makes it easy to spin up if something goes wrong with the motors... which was still common enough a century ago, when Odysseus was built.

  In the ship's map display I'd seen stateroom modules widely separated, so I'd hacked the passenger manifest. That led me to read up on Kzinti and Jotoki. The first secret to tourism is, read everything.

  I said, "Some LE may have decided not to put a Kzin too close to human passengers. They put you two in a four-passenger suite and mounted it all the way around clockwise. My single and two doubles and the crew quarters and an autodoc are all widdershins." That put the aliens' module right next to the lobby, not far apart at all, but the same fool must have sealed off access from the aliens' suite. Despite the Covenants, some people don't like giving civil rights to Kzinti.

  I'd best not say that. "We're the only other live passengers. The modules between are cargo, so these," I stamped on a door, "don't currently open on anything."

  "If you are not a ship's officer," the Kzin asked, "what is your place on the bridge?"

  I said, "Outbound Enterprises was getting ready to freeze me. Shashter cops pulled me out.They had questions regarding a murder"

  "Have you killed?" His ears flicked out like little pink fans. I had his interest.

  "I didn't kill Ander Smittarasheed. He took some cops down with him, and he'd killed an ARM agent. ARMs are-"

  "United Nations police and war arm, Sol system, but their influence spreads throughout human space."

  "Well, they couldn't question Smittarasheed, and I'd eaten dinner with him a few days earlier. I told them we met in Pacifica City at a water war game... anyway, I satisfied the law, they let me loo
se. I was just in time to board, and way too late to get myself frozen and into a cargo module. Outbound Enterprises upgraded me. Very generous.

  "So Milcenta and Jenna-my mate and child are frozen in one of these," I stamped on a door, "and I'm up here, flying First Class at Ice Class expense. My cabin's a closet, so we must be expected to spend most of our time in the lobby. In here." I pushed through.

  This trip there were two human crew, five human passengers and the aliens. The lobby would have been roomy for thrice that. Whorls of couches and tables covered a floor with considerable space above it for free fall dancing. That feature didn't generally get much use.

  An observation dome exposed half the sky. It opened now on a tremendous view of the Nursery Nebula.

  Under spin gravity, several booths and the workstations had rolled up a wall. There was a big airlock. The workstations were two desk-and-couch modules in the middle.

  Hans and Hilde Van Zild were in one of the booths. Homers coming back from Fafnir, they held hands tightly and didn't talk. Recent events had them extremely twitchy. They were both over two hundred years old. I've known people in whom that didn't show, but in these it did.

  Their kids were hovering around the workstations watching the Captain and First Officer at work, asking questions that weren't being answered.

  We'd been given vac packs. More were distributed around the lobby and along the corridor. Most ships carry them. You wear it as a bulky fanny pack. If you pull a tab, or if it's armed and pressure drops to zero, it blows up into a refuge. Then you hope you can get into it and zip it shut before your blood boils.

  Heidi Van Zild looked around. "Oh, good! You brought them!" The little girl snatched up two more vac packs, ran two steps toward us and froze. The listing said Heidi was near forty. Her brother Nicolaus was thirty; the trip was his birthday present. Their parents must have had their development arrested. They looked the same age, ten years old or younger, bright smiles and sparkling eyes, hair cut identically in a golden cockatoo crest.

  It's an attitude, a lifestyle. You put off children until that second century is running out. Now they're precious. They'll live forever. Let them take their time growing up. Keep them awhile longer. Keep them pure. Give them a real education. Any mistake you make as a parent, there will be time to correct that too. When you reverse the procedure and allow them to reach puberty they'll be better at it.