by Larry Niven
The cub wiggled in his grasp and looked down. "I hope you like your armadillo, Ilge," he said. Ilge looked down at the creature she had not released since the gift-giving ceremony and patted it again. A snout and beady eye appeared for a second, caught the scent of kzin, and disappeared back into an armored ball with a snap.
"They're lots of fun." Kzin children adored armadillos, and Chuut-Riit provided his with a steady supply, even if the shells made a mess once the cubs finally got them peeled.
"It's nice," she said solemnly.
"The ball of fiber was an excellent idea," Chuut-Riit added to Henrietta. "I must procure one for my other offspring."
"I thought it would be, Honored Chuut-Riit," the human replied, and the kzin blinked in bafflement at her amusement.
One of the guards was too obviously entertained by his commander's eccentricity. "Here," Chuut-Riit called as he walked through the small crowd of bowing humans. "Guard Trooper. Care for this infant as we fly, in the forward compartment. Care for him well."
The soldier blinked dubiously at the small bundle of chocolate-and-mud-stained fur that looked with eager interest at the fascinating complexities of his equipment, then slung his beam rifle and accepted the child with an unconscious bristling. Chuut-Riit gave the ear-and-tail twitch that was the kzin equivalent of sly amusement as he stepped into the passenger compartment and threw himself down on the cushions. There was a slight internal wobble as the car lifted, an expected retching sound and a yeowl of protest from the forward compartment.
The ventilators will be overloaded, the governor thought happily. Now, about that report . . .
* * *
Tiamat was shabby. Coming in to dock on the rockjacker prospecting craft Markham had found for them it had looked the same, a little busier and more exterior lights; a spinning ironrock tube twenty kilometers across and sixty long, with ships of every description clustered at the docking yards at either end. More smelters and robofabricators hanging outside, more giant baggies of water ice and volatiles. But inside it was shabby, rundown.
That was Ingrid Raines's first thought: shabby. The hand-grips were worn, the vivid murals that covered the walls just in from the poles of the giant cylinder fading and grease-spotted. The constant subliminal rumble from the freighter docks was louder; nobody was bothering with the sonic baffles that damped the vibration of megatons of powdered ore, liquid metal, vacuum-separated refinates pouring into the network of pumptubes. Styles were more garish than she remembered, face-paint and tiger-striped oversuits; there was a quartet of police hanging spaced evenly around the entry corridor, toes hooked into rails and head in toward the center. Obstructing traffic, but nobody was going to object, not when the goldskins wore impact armor and powered endoskeletons, not when shockrods dangled negligently in their hands.
"Security's tight," Jonah murmured as they made flip-over and went feet-first into the stickyfield at the inward end of the passage. There was a familiar subjective click behind their eyes, and the corridor became a half-kilometer of hollow tower over their heads, filled with the up-and-down drift of people.
"Shut up," Ingrid muttered back. That had been no surprise; from what they'd been told the collaborationist government had reinvented the police state all by themselves in their enthusiasm. They went through the emergency pressure curtains, into the glare and blare of the inner corridors. Zero-G, here near the core of Tiamat, away from the rims that were under one-G. Tigertown, she thought. The resident kzin were low-status engineers and supervisors, or navy types: They liked heavy gravity; the pussies had never lived in space without gravity control. Tigers, she reminded herself. That was the official slang term. Ratcat if you wanted to be a little dangerous.
They turned into a narrow side corridor, what had been a residential section the last time she was here, transient's quarters around the lowgrav manufacturing sections of the core. Now it was lined on three sides by shops and small businesses, with the fourth spinward side playing down. Not that there was enough gravity to matter this close to the center of spin, but it was convenient. They slowed to a stroll, two more figures in plain rockjack innersuits, the form-fitting coverall everyone wore under vacuum armor. Conservative Belter stripcuts, backpacks with printseal locks to discourage pickpockets, and the black plastic hilts of ratchet knives.
Ingrid looked around her, acutely conscious of the hard shape nestling butt-down on her collarbone. Distortion battery, and a blade-shaped lozenge of wire; switch it on, and the magnetic field made it vibrate, very fast. Very sharp. She had been shocked when Markham's intelligence officer pushed them across the table to the UNSN operatives.
"Things are that bad?"
"The ratcats don't care," the officer had said. "Humans are forbidden any weapon that can kill at a distance. Only the collabo police can carry stunners, and the only thing the ratcats care about is that production keeps up. What sort of people do you think join the collabo goldskins? Social altruists? The only ordinary criminals they go after are the ones too poor or stupid to pay them off. When things get bad enough to foul up war production, they have a big sweep, and maybe catch some of the middling-level gangrunners and feed them to the ratcats. The big boys? The big boys are the police, or vice versa. That's the way it is, sweetheart."
Ingrid shivered, and Jonah put an arm around her waist as they walked in the glide-lift-glide of a stickyfield. "Changed a lot, hey?" he said.
She nodded. The booths were for the sort of small-scale industry that bigger firms contracted out; filing, hardcopy, genetic engineering of bacteria for process production of organics, all mixed in with cookshops and handicrafts and service trades of a thousand types. Holo displays flashed and glittered, strobing with all shades of the visible spectrum; music pounded and blared and crooned, styles she remembered and styles utterly strange and others that were revivals of modes six centuries old: Baroque and Classical and Jazz and Dojin-Go Punk and Meddlehoffer. People crowded the 'way, on the downside and wall-hopping between shops, and half the shops had private guards. The passersby were mostly planetsiders, some so recent you could see they had trouble handling low-G movement.
Many were ragged, openly dirty. How can that happen? she thought. Fusion-distilled water was usually cheap in a closed system. Oh. Probably a monopoly. And there were beggars, actual beggars with open sores on their skins or hands twisted with arthritis, things she had only seen in historical flats so old they were shot two-dimensional.
"Here it is," Jonah grunted. The eating-shop was directly above them; they switched off their shoes, waited for a clear space, and flipped up and over, slapping their hands onto the catch net outside the door. Inside, the place was clean, at least, with a globular free-fall kitchen and a human chef, and customers in dark pajama-like clothing floating with their knees crossed under stick-tables. Not Belters, too stocky and muscular; mostly heavily Oriental by bloodline, rare in the genetic stew of the Sol system but more common here.
Icy stares greeted them as they swung to a vacant booth and slid themselves in, their long legs tangling under the synthetic pineboard of the stick-table.
"It must be harder for you," Jonah said. "Your home."
She looked up at him with quick surprise. He was usually the archetypical rockjack, the stereotype asteroid prospector, quiet, bookish, self-sufficient, a man without twitches or mannerisms but capable of cutting loose on furlough—but perceptive, and rockjacks were not supposed to be good at people.
Well, he was a successful officer, too, she thought. And they do have to be good at people.
A waitress in some many-folded garment of black silk floated up to the privacy screen of their cubicle and reached a hand through to scratch at the post. Ingrid keyed the screen, and the woman's features snapped clear.
"Sorry, so sorry," she said. "This special place, not Belter food." There was a singsong accent to her English that Jonah did not recognize, but the underlying impatience and hostility came through the calm features.
He smiled at
her and ran a hand over his crest. "But we were told the tekkamaki here is fine, the oyabun makes the best," he said. Ingrid could read the thought that followed: Whatever the fuck that means.
The frozen mask of the waitress's face could not alter, but the quick duck of her head was empty of the commonplace tension of a moment before. She returned quickly with bowls of soup and drinking straws; it was some sort of fish broth with onions and a strange musky undertaste. They drank in silence, waiting. For what, the pussies to come and get us? she thought. The Catskinner-computer had said Markham was on the level—but also that he was capable of utter treachery once he had convinced himself that Right was on his side, and that to Markham the only ultimate judge of Right was, guess who, the infallible Markham.
Gottdamned Herrenmann, she mused: going on fifty years objective, everything else in the system had collapsed into shit, and the arrogant lop-bearded bastards hadn't changed a bit. . . .
A man slid through the screen. Expensively nondescript dress, gray oversuit, and bowl-cut black hair. Hint of an expensive natural cologne. Infocomp at his waist, and the silver button of a reader-bonephone behind his ear. This was Markham's "independent entrepreneur." Spoken with tones of deepest contempt, more than a Herrenmann's usual disdain for business, so probably some type of criminal like McAllistaire. She kept a calm smile on her face as she studied the man, walling off the remembered sickness as the kicking doll-figures tumbled into space, bleeding from every orifice. Oriental, definitely; there were Sina and Nipponjin enclaves down on Wunderland, ethnic separatists like many of the early settlers. Not in the Serpent Swarm Belt, not when she left, Belters did not go in for racial taboos. Things had changed.
The quiet man smiled and produced three small drinking-bulbs. "Rice wine," he said. "Heated. An affectation, to be sure, but we are very traditional these days."
Pure Belter English, no hint of an accent. She called up training, looked for clues: in the hands, the skin around the eyes, the set of the mouth. Very little, no more than polite attention; this was a very calm man. Hard to tell even the age; if he was getting good geriatric care, anything from fifty minimum up to a hundred. Teufel, he could have been from Sol system himself, one of the last bunches of immigrants, and wouldn't that be a joke to end them all.
Silence stretched. The oriental sat and sipped at his hot sake and smiled; the two Belters followed suit, controlling their surprise at the varnish-in-the-throat taste.
At the last, Jonah spoke: "I'm Jonah. This is Ingrid. The man with gray eyes sent us for tekkamaki."
"Ah, our esteemed GVB," the man said. A deprecatory laugh and a slight wave of the fingers; the man had almost as few hand gestures as a Belter. "Gotz von Blerichgen, a little joke. Yes, I know the one you speak of. My name is Shigehero Hirose, and as you will have guessed, I am a hardened criminal of the worst sort." He ducked his head in a polite bow. Ingrid noticed his hands then, the left missing the little finger, and the edges of vividly-colored tattoos under the cuffs of his suit.
"And you," he continued to Jonah, "are sent not by our so-Aryan friend, but by the UNSN." A slight frown. "Your charming companion is perhaps of the same provenance, but from the Serpent Swarm originally."
Jonah and Ingrid remained silent. Another shrug. "In any case, according to our informants, you wish transportation to Wunderland and well-documented cover identities."
"If you're wondering how we can pay . . ." Jonah began. They had the best and most compact source of valuata the UN military had been able to provide.
"No, please. From our own resources, we will be glad to do this."
"Why?" Ingrid said, curious. "Criminals seem to be doing better now than they ever did in the old days."
Hirose smiled again, that bland expression that revealed nothing and never touched his eyes. "The young lady is as perceptive as she is ornamental." He took up his sake bulb and considered it. "My . . . association is a very old one. You might call us predators; we would prefer to think of it as a symbiotic relationship. We have endured many changes, many social and technological revolutions. But something is common to each: the desire to have something and yet to forbid it.
"Consider drugs and alcohol . . . or wirehead drouds. All strictly forbidden at one time, legal another, but the demand continues. Instruction in martial arts, likewise. In our early days in dai Nippon, we performed services for feudal lords that their own code forbade. Later, the great corporations, the zaibatsu, found us convenient for dealing with recalcitrant shareholders and unions; we moved substances of various types across inconvenient national frontiers, liberated information selfishly stockpiled in closed data banks, recruited entertainers, provided banking services . . . invested our wealth wisely, and moved outward with humanity to the planets and the stars. Sometimes we have been so respectable that our affairs were beyond question; sometimes otherwise. A conservative faction undertook to found our branch in the Alpha Centauri system, but I assure you the . . . family businesses, clans if you will, still flourish in Sol system as well. Inconspicuously."
"That doesn't answer Ingrid's question," Jonah said bluntly. "This setup looks like hog heaven for you."
"Only in the short term. Which is enough to satisfy mere thugs, mere bandits such as a certain rockholder known as McAllistaire . . . You met this person? But consider: we are doing well for the same reason bacteria flourish in a dead body. The human polity of this system is dying, its social defenses disorganized, but the carnival of the carrion-eaters will be shortlived. We speak of the free humans and those in the direct service of the kzin, but to our masters we of the 'free' are slaves of the Patriarchy who have not yet been assigned individual owners. We are squeezed, tighter and tighter; eventually, there will be nothing but the households of kzin nobles. My association could perhaps survive such a situation; we are making preparations. Better by far to restore a functioning human system; our pickings would be less in the short term, more secure in the longer."
"And by helping us, you'll have a foot in both camps and come up smelling of roses whoever wins."
Hirose spread his hands. "It is true, the kzin have occasionally found themselves using our services." His smile became more genuine, and sharklike. "Nor are all, ah, Heroes, so incorruptible, so immune to the temptations of vice and profit, as they would like to believe.
"Enough." He produced a sealed packet and slid it across the table to them. "The documentation and credit is perfectly genuine. It will stand even against kzin scrutiny; our influence reaches far. I have no knowledge of what it contains, nor do I wish to. You in turn have learned nothing from me that possible opponents do not already know, and know that I know, and I know that they know . . . but please, even if I cannot join you, do stay and enjoy this excellent restaurant's cuisine."
"Well . . ." Jonah palmed the folder. "It might be out of character, rockjacks in a fancy live-service place like this."
Shigehero Hirose halted, partway through the privacy screen. "You would do well to study local conditions a little more carefully, man-from-far-away. It has been a long time since autochefs and dispensers were cheaper than humans."
Shigehero Hirose sat back on his heels and sighed slightly.
"Well, my dear?" he said.
His wife laid the bamboo strainer down on the tray and lifted the teacup in both hands. He accepted her unspoken rebuke and the teacup, raising it to his lips as he looked out the pavilion doors. Even the Association's wealth could not buy open space on Tiamat, but this was a reasonable facsimile. The graceful structure about them was dark varnished wood, sparely ornamented, carrying nothing but the low tray that held the tea service and a single chrysanthemum. Outside was a chamber of raked gravel and a few well-chosen rocks, and a quiet recirculating fountain. The air was sterile, though; no point in a chemical mockery of garden scents.
There are times when I regret accepting this post, he thought, sipping the tea and returning the cup with a ritual gesture of thanks. It was hard, not seeing green things except ones that g
rew in a tank. . . .
Of course, this was the post of honor and profit. Humans would remain half-free longer in the Serpent Swarm than on the surface of Wunderland, and so the Association was preparing its bolt-holes. Nothing must endanger that.
Enough, he told himself. Put aside care.
Much later, his wife sighed herself. "Worthless though my advice is, yet all possible precautions must be taken," she said, hands folded in her lap and eyes downcast.
Traditional to a fault, he thought; perhaps a bit excessive, seeing that she had a degree in biomechanics. Still . . .
"It would be inadvisable to endanger their mission excessively," he pointed out.
"Ah, very true. But maintaining our connections with the human government is still essential."
Essential and more difficult all the time. The kzinti pressed on their collaborationist tools more and more each year; they grew more desperate in turn. Originally many had been idealists of a sort, trying to protect the general populace as much as they could. Few of that sort were left, and the rest were beginning to eat each other like crabs in a bucket.
"Still . . . a vague rumor would be best, I think. We will use the fat man as our go-between; we can claim we were playing them along for more information if they are taken."
"My husband is wise," she said, bowing.
"And if the collaborationists grow desperate enough, they might offer rewards sufficient to justify sacrificing those two."
"Who are, after all, only gaijin. And on a mission which will do us little good even if it succeeds."
"Indeed, there are limits to altruism." They turned their faces to the garden and fell silent once more.
* * *
"The inefficiency of you leaf-eaters is becoming intolerable," the kzin said.
Claude Montferrat-Palme bowed his head. Don't stare. Never, never stare at a ratca—at a kzin. "We do our best, Ktiir-Supervisor-of-Animals," he said.
