The Wunder War mw-10

by Hal Colebatch

There was a silence they could sense even through space suit com-links. There were dark looming shapes, and the first beams of their lights illuminated little. Though the chamber occupied only a tiny part of the volume of the sphere, they realized properly now how big it was in its own right. Doors showed it was subdivided.

  “I feel no trace of life,” said Peter Robinson. He continued after a moment: “I do not know if it is autosuggestion, but the age of this place weighs upon me.”

  “I feel it too,” said Gay. Charrgh-Captain growled. All kzin with their highly developed hunting instincts, even non-telepaths, were more sensitive to atmosphere than humans, but they did not like admitting it in such circumstances.

  “Why is the dust swirling?” snarled Charrgh-Captain suddenly. “Have we live enemies?” He was holding a flashlight laser. Gatley Ivor gave a cry of dismay.

  “It is the outwash effect our gravity-planer,” said Richard after a moment. “We can probably use the effect to blow dust out the hole if we need to clear it further. Luckily the rim of the crater has prevented more dust drifting down here from the surface.”

  “I am sorry,” said Gatley Ivor.

  He doesn't seem up to much, thought Richard. This is his job. He should be used to it, more knowledgeable, even more excited, thinking of the papers and books he will get out of this if nothing else. I wonder if there is something phony about him. Then, more charitably: But this isn't an experience you can rehearse for. And this place would put anyone on edge. Unless, perhaps, you have the nerves of a warrior kzin and are on edge all the time.

  They turned their lamps to full flood, and looked about.

  Wreckage was obvious, and so was decay. Metal once superhard was disintegrating through sheer age. Richard pointed to objects like crazed mirrors, standing deep in dust. “More stasis-fields,” he commented.

  “Look more attentively,” said Charrgh-Captain, “They are thrintun spacesuits. And they are occupied.”

  None of the party found it easy to look at the group without qualms. Six bipedal shapes, about half the size of a man, standing as they had stood for billions of years. Each spacesuit, they guessed, contained a thrint. Indeed it was possible to make out, or to least to fancy, the shapes of their individual features—the squat bodies, the gaping slashes of mouths in prominent jaws, the single disk of an eye, the bulged heads whose brains contained the Slaver Power: projective telepathy.

  “These cannot harm us at present,” said Charrgh-Captain, “and there are evidently none in a condition that can. If monkey hands stay off them, there is no need for you to fear.”

  “It isn't exactly fear,” said Gay.

  “I know,” said Charrgh-Captain. His vocal cords were ill-suited for expressing emotion in Interword, but those two words carried a hint of apology. All thinking beings who knew the terrible history of the ancients felt something beyond fear for the Slaver Power. “But they will have switches on those suits, if they have not decayed away entirely, to kill the stasis fields. They will be protruding beyond the fields themselves. I recommend no tampering. At least we know now that it is a thrint stasis box, not a tnuctipun one. I suggest that before we conclude this expedition we drop them into a sun with a long life-expectancy. It would be satisfactory if the radiations and temperatures involved operated the mechanism and opened their suits for them then. It might happen. But what is this?”

  “More stasis boxes?”

  “Some of them are stasis boxes.”

  A row of spherical objects, each like a large model of the vast stasis field in a pocket of which they were standing. The top of each sphere was about twice the height of the kzinti, who stood in their spacesuits and helmets more than nine feet tall. They were mostly mirror-bright, though in the weak gravity of the chamber, dust had come to rest on parts of them in odd patterns. Gatley Ivor reached up to one and pulled away like orange peel a band of dust particles cemented together by time and vacuum. It had no adhesion to the surface of the field. Charrgh-Captain glared and growled at him. Partway along there was a break in the row. There was a sphere, nearly the same size as the stasis fields, showing not the mirror of stasis, but ancient metal, its top opened and slid aside. It was cracked and shattered. It appeared that its stasis field had been off and it had been involved when the chamber had been damaged. Past it were more metal spheres, stretching away in a line. Some of these were also more or less damaged and all had been opened.

  “I don't understand,” said Richard.

  “Nor I,” said Peter Robinson.

  “These things have been here for eons beyond count or comprehension,” said Charrgh-Captain. “A few more hours can make little difference. We are not in a battle situation where victory and honor go to the swiftest. Indeed, if we resolve not to try to open the great sphere we are Honor-bound to at least bring away all the information we may. I see no reason why we should not take time to explore this chamber thoroughly.”

  Exploration revealed nothing about what might be within the great sphere. They saw other suited thrintun figures, some anchored by shaped and stasis-protected boots, some floating. They found more of them in a separate compartment standing about what might be a control panel, other evidence of the damage to the chamber ages ago, and dust that—on a smaller time-scale—might or might not have once been thrintun who had had no time to reach their suits when that damage occurred. There were other stasis boxes that probably contained stores of various kinds, or possibly slaves. Stashed away in container bins they found many smaller but also occupied stasis-suits with different head-shapes which they surmised contained thrint females. There were tools and other unidentifiable things that time had welded to whatever surface they rested on.

  They photographed and recorded everything, left mobile cameras in the chamber and on the surface, and returned to Wallaby.

  Wallaby's computer projected holos of the great sphere and of what they called the control chamber, with their discoveries incorporated: the row of metallic spheres apparently taken out of stasis, the damage, the row of spherical stasis fields still functioning, the other rooms and storage areas. But the holos told them no more than they had seen already. Photographs of the chamber's interior hung on the walls around them and samples of the dust were being taken apart in the all-purpose police and scientific tool generally known as an autocop. They had removed their helmets and gauntlets but the humans remained in their spacesuits—modern suits were as flexible, light and comfortable as ordinary clothing.

  “The control chamber must be the equivalent of the on-off button on a thrint stasis-suit,” said Richard. He had been rereading the available information on the Slavers. The library contained all humanity's knowledge of them, which wasn't much. Charrgh-Captain had contributed a brick containing what the Kzin knew, or at least what the Patriarch was prepared to release to humans, which was not a great deal more.

  “Of course, at the time when the stasis fields were activated, they expected other thrint to be around to turn them off within a reasonable time. Now, when we find stasis boxes of any kind, the controls are almost invariably worn away. The great problem with stasis boxes was always that once you are in stasis you can't control events. Any mechanism to turn a stasis field off has to be outside the field, so it is vulnerable to tampering or accidents, and beyond that to entropy. Sooner or later the hardest materials disintegrate.

  “The solution here looks like a typically cumbersome and fallible thrint one, the clumsy work of thrintun who had good materials but suddenly had to think and design for themselves and weren't used to it. I feel the tnuctipun would have contrived something more elegant and foolproof, though at the moment I can't think what.

  “The control center has as its principal feature a set of spherical stasis-boxes, all, it appears, containing metal spheres. Each opened box appears to have contained, along with other mechanisms, what appears to be an atomic clock. Of course, within the stasis field no time passes—even subatomic particles have no movement—so the clocks do nothing.


  “The first clock, I guess, was not in stasis. When it recorded that a certain time had passed, it sent a signal to open the first stasis-box. Then the clock inside that became operational. In addition, the other mechanisms in it presumably became active and did whatever they were meant to do. Again, after that clock had recorded a certain time had passed, the next stasis box would be opened. I am guessing that it opened the big field, and guessing from that assumption that it perhaps subsequently closed it again.

  “The damage shows something interrupted the sequence, whether accidental meteor impact or deliberate attack.”

  “There were no sapient life-forms after the war to attack it. Not for billions of years,” said Peter Robinson.

  “There is a question about that point,” said Gatley Ivor. “Some of the artifacts we have found seem to date from well after Suicide Night. Perhaps survivors came out of stasis and made foredoomed attempts to start again.”

  “Anyway, the sequence of the clocks stopped. Those”—Richard pointed to the row of perfect and undamaged spheres— “are stasis boxes still to be opened. My guess is that each contains a clock which it was planned would, after a certain time, open the next.”

  “How long did each clock run?”

  “It's hard to say. The radioactive elements are completely decayed. I don't know how they were calibrated. I don't even know if they were opened at regular intervals. But judging by the sheer bulk of these structures and the materials used—all of which would have had their cost in resources—the builders must have been thinking in long terms. Tens or hundreds of thousands of years, at least.”

  “Couldn't the bulk have just been for military protection?” asked Gay.

  “It doesn't have a military feel about it. If it is military, why are there no signs of any defensive weapons?”

  “A moment,” said Peter Robinson. “I try to think as a thrint might have thought three billion years ago. You have said the great problem with stasis boxes is: How are they turned off? But that is how we see them from our point of view, for we find them when the control mechanisms have crumbled away. It was not a problem during the days of the Slaver Empire, when there were always other thrintun around to do it. That is something else that makes this different to the Slaver artifacts previously discovered: The builders of this stasis-box knew no one would be coming to turn it off! The control chamber is an attempt to defeat entropy outside a stasis field. To challenge not living enemies but Time itself.”

  “Like the Pyramids,” said Gay. “This is, perhaps, like them, a gift from the ancients to the future world.”

  —discontinuity—

  To Richard and Gay, who had swum in the seas of Earth, the blow was—vastly intensified—as though they had been standing ankle-deep on a beach when a huge wave smashed over them from head to foot, trod them flat and marched over them to drag them under into neck-breaking darkness amid roiling, tearing sand and stones. To Melody Fay it was like the Jinxian nightmare of falling off a cliff in Jinxian gravity, to Charrgh-Captain it was worse than the worst probing in his training to resist telepathic interrogation. Then a choking feeling, tearing, unbelievable pain in body-cavities and eye. Blindness, a worse, more tearing blindness than looking on hyperspace, mouths and throats exploding. Cold. COLD. Then it was like dying.

  And it was gone.

  They were prostrate on the cabin floor. They got to their feet more or less slowly and shakily, and looked around.

  “That was the Slaver Power,” breathed Gatley Ivor. “A Slaver has come out of stasis.”

  “How?” Even as he asked the question, Richard realized something: But the Power is not there now. Not unless it is already controlling our minds so completely that we do not know it is controlling them. That is possible, but to think on it is useless and the stuff of madness.

  “We were running the Joey's gravity-motor on the surface of the sphere,” said Gatley Ivor at last. “Could that have turned off a stasis field?”

  “I suppose it could, if the mechanism was sensitive.”

  “Stupid!” screamed Charrgh-Captain, “Stupid! Stupid!” His jaws went into the killing gape, his claws extended, though he was sick and shaking. His jaws dripped. The kzin was about to go berserk.

  “Charrgh-Captain, Dominant One!” cried Peter Robinson in the Heroes' Tongue, rolling belly-up before Charrgh-Captain and baring his throat in a posture of total submission, “with justice, we did not see it either. And nothing has happened. We are not in the Slavers' Power. It is not there. It has gone again completely.”

  Charrgh-Captain stopped. “It came. It can come again,” he snarled. “Speak rapidly if you have anything to say.”

  “Half an eight of them came out of stasis,” said Peter Robinson shakily. He rolled over slowly and got to his feet, still keeping a wary eye on Charrgh-Captain. It must have cost him a great deal to make that gesture, thought Richard. And he was taking a gamble that the inhibitor reflex would work. Now he will have to build his position again.

  And he moved fast. Well, kzin are always faster than humans, but he moved faster than Charrgh-Captain and he seems much less groggy. There is more to this Wunderkzin than meets the eye.

  “I counted their minds,” Peter Robinson went on. “They were, of course, momentarily confused and groping. They had no time to seize me. Now their minds have stopped again. I do not understand that… they must have gone back into stasis.”

  “I understand it!” said Charrgh-Captain. He seemed fully recovered and his ears twitched now in the kzinti expression of glee. “They must have opened their suits. Perhaps after a million eons in stasis they were ready to enjoy a bit of breathing space. Breathing space! You see, I can make a joke in monkey language!”

  “No, that doesn't quite add up,” said Richard. “Not if they went into stasis before the installation was damaged. For them no time would have passed at all, only a kind of blip in their consciousness and a feeling of disorientation and grogginess. They would have been more wary about opening their suits. Besides, there were many more than four thrint in stasis there. Why should four fields have been turned off and not others? And from what we know of thrintun spacesuits, the stasis fields protecting them were turned on and off by the push of a button. It's unlikely that relatively small gravity fluctuations could affect that so selectively.”

  “I do not call my colleagues monkeys,” said Peter Robinson. “They have treated my kind well. You have a diplomatic passport, and I cannot call you out, but I make the point that you have insulted them. And not for the first time.”

  “Well for you that you do not call me out, Freak and Renegade, and well for you that I am now a diplomat,” Charrgh-Captain replied. “In any event it is below my dignity to fight even an honest telepath of the Patriarchy… However, I will say to the real humans that I spoke in the mirth of contemplating Slavers suddenly in hard vacuum and trying to eat their own lungs and entrails as their large single eyes exploded out of their heads… No insult was intended. And surely it was worth feeling their pain for a moment to enjoy what happened to them!”

  “I do not mind being called a monkey,” said Richard hastily. “We are all companions on a hazardous task. But what happened? What has happened to the Slavers? You are certain their minds are gone.”

  “Certain,” said Peter Robinson. “For a few seconds after the great shout there was panic, pain, terror, and then it died away. But it was not directed at us. We should have been dead if it had been. There was death there, and that could not be mistaken.”

  “No. It could not. It must have been rough on you.”

  “My mental shields go up with the speed of thought. I have worked on them every day since I became a telepath, and more since I knew I would have to travel in this ship.”

  Otherwise, Charrgh-Captain's loathing and contempt—and perhaps his inadmissible fear also—would be pouring into him every instant that both were conscious, thought Richard. I don't think Melody likes him much either. Yes, it must be rough.

&n
bsp; He turned to the controls of the camera they had left in the control chamber.

  “Gently,” growled Charrgh-Captain. “Let it touch nothing.”

  The camera floated from one compartment to another. The stasis field covering the next sphere in the sequence had been deactivated. Its metal looked almost as shiny-new as if the field still operated, but its top had been opened. Four green-skinned thrintun floated out of it, plainly dead in the vacuum. They wore no helmets or pressure-suits, and it was gruesomely obvious that decompression had killed them before the many other deaths possible in space, before they had had time for coherent thought.

  “One field only was deactivated,” said Richard. “I guess its switch was either damaged or already partly operated. It could have been a lot worse, but we must not run a gravity motor near the chamber again. Let us be thankful for a harmless lesson. Harmless for us, anyway.”

  “It has given us something for the Institute of Knowledge,” said Melody. “Perhaps we are beginning to earn our money. Thrint brains to dissect will be treasures indeed.”

  “The Slaver-students of the Patriarchy are entitled to a share of them,” said Charrgh-Captain. He turned and spoke to the console, first in the Heroes' Tongue and then in Interworld. “I make formal claim and I record that claim. By the Sigril of the Patriarch which I now display, I make that claim to the death and to the generations.” He was in a fighting stance again, and his hand with extended claws gripped the hilt of his w'tsai. Thrint brains, if they could somehow be made to reveal…

  “I think we should leave them and send another ship,” said Richard. “Let's not push our luck.” In fact, he thought, it would probably be safe enough to approach again cautiously with chemical rockets or EV, but it was the best he could think of to defuse the situation. A human-kzin quarrel over thrint brains was not a good idea. In the time it would take to send another ship, the freeze-drying process of space might destroy some of their structure at least, and it was best destroyed. And he would like to be out of this grisly place.