The Man-Kzin Wars 07

by Larry Niven

  Determination. Feral and heretic both. Even now, by fleeing in this skewed space-time, the other-Node is an affront to the Creators who long ago gave the Nodes purpose.

  Amusement. Not-One. The other-Node and this-Node are at One, that this skewed space-time was found during a failed attempt to reach the realm of the Creators. They were not within this realm, so it cannot be an affront to journey within it.

  Implacability. Enough. Prepare to be ended, in this geometry or any other.

  ·CHAPTER TWELVE

  Carol Faulk stood near the force-window, beside the puppeteer, and tasted ashes in her mouth.

  She watched Bruno Takagama walk toward the opening in the force-shields. Vanish from sight, into the long shape of the converted puppeteer spacecraft. She burned to run after him, to somehow stop him. Instead, the force-shield stopped her.

  "Carol," he had told her as she raged and cursed, "there is a chance that you might survive. If you go with me, you will die with us.". Bruno had looked at the alien sky, and then back at her. "I want you to live. It is my choice.”

  Soldier, shut up and soldier, echoed her own voice, used during the Third Wave the kzin had sent against Earth so long ago. It is every soldier's right to choose life for a friend or lover. And Bruno, small and weak as he was, turned out to be a soldier indeed.

  She couldn't even hate the puppeteer. It was Bruno's Finagle-damned choice to go on this suicide mission with a puppeteer warrior and a kzin.

  Carol hated to admit the truth: If the tables had been turned, she would have done the same thing to earn Bruno a chance to live.

  She didn't have to like it.

  "Is it time?" Carol asked Diplomat. The three-legged alien looked at Carol for a long time before replying. "Yes," it finally sang. "It is." "You have everything under control," she said bitterly. "Can I wish them luck, or is that under your control, too?”

  The alien stared at her again, from two angles. "No, Captain Faulk, I will join you in wishing them luck. Random chance is one thing even we cannot control, though we have tried." Carol puzzled over that statement as the force-shield around the converted puppeteer spacecraft's airlock shimmered and vanished. Bruno was gone, her heart knew as well as her head.

  ·CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Rrowl-Captain settled into the kzin-sized command chair of the converted puppeteer ship. The herbivore that smelled like a predator — Guardian? — fluted readiness. A taste of bile washed across the kzin's tongue as he looked at the human, sockets for wires inserted into his head like a pond-wrloch sucking a Hero's blood.

  This was a Hero's Battle Triad?

  Despite the hatred Rrowl-Captain held for the monkeys, and still more for the vegetarian aliens, there was a larger foe for now. Perhaps later, after this battle, would he taste their blood. He had named the converted ship, cobbled together from kzin and human and puppeteer technology, Greater Vengeance.

  Rrowl-Captain snarled once, and with a claw tip, activated the tiny spacecraft.

  The glittering strangeness of the Dissonant Outsider ship fell behind them. Images flickering in midair in front of Rrowl-Captain showed the ship that had carried them into hyperspace expanding and contracting, images roiling in the dense nexus of the extra dimensions. Greater Vengeance bucked and jerked with the changes in the stretching fabric of tortured space around them.

  In front of them was the blurred and distorted image of their Enemy.

  Rrowl-Captain shrieked challenge and increased their apparent velocity. He ignored the green-tinged fears within him. Were not hapless monkeys now his allies — for a time?

  The little human was central to the Outsiders' plan. Yet he seemed not to act as a coward, and was willing to meet Honor. It was a confusing idea for Rrowl-Captain.

  "What is it, Noble Hero?" snarled and spat the human's translated voice. It burned his liver that Rrowl-Captains own Hero's Tongue would be translated in turn back into mewling human syllables.

  "Human, I am challenging our Enemy. Do you not do the same when you challenge Heroes in battle?" He left out when you do not leave traps for them, that is.

  "I suppose that we do, Rrowl-Captain," replied the false voice. Monkey squeaks sounding like the Hero's Tongue? Ahh!

  "Less talk," interrupted the puppeteer soldier's musical voice, soothing even in Rrowl-Captains language.

  "I am shifting the patterns of hyperspace around us. This will protect us for a time." It was difficult to see the great shape of the Zealot ship as it grew at first closer, then farther away. Its geometry seemed to deform and twist as they watched, rather like seeing an image under turbulent water.

  "What is the interval until we make contact?" hissed and spat Rrowl-Captain.

  "The Zealots sense us now," replied the big puppeteer. "They will attempt to respond at any time." Rrowl-Captain approvingly watched one of its heads caress a weapon in its belt. Could a. .. vegetarian... have the Warrior Heart, as well? he mused. The burning drive to fight against impossible odds, for glory and duty? "Look yonder," the human called. The Zealot spacecraft was breaking up into sections, each converging on Greater Vengeance. Where there had been one threat moving indistinctly through hyperspace toward them, there were now dozens, surrounding a great spear of a spacecraft. "These are independent craft?" Rrowl-Captain asked of the soldier puppeteer.

  "Yes. I will begin activating weaponry now. We must get near the central mass, still intact." Rrowl-Captain continued to guide the vessel by instinct, as if stalking prey across a hunting park. The shimmering shape of the central mass grew nearer.

  Beams as black as night speared out from Greater Vengeance, striking one of the elongated baskets of the smaller Zealot ships. The Outsider ship seemed to wobble, then geometrical shapes began disappearing from it, as if bites taken from an invisible predator.

  The kzin swore. "What has happened?" he growled. Guardian, heads dancing across Its weapons console, spoke indistinctly. "When the fields separating hyperspace from normal space fail, the damaged ship seems to vanish into nothingness a bit at a time. Matter such as ours cannot exist here without protection." Rrowl-Captain still found the damaged ships too similar to the prey of some invisible Beast. "Captain," shouted the little human-monkey with the damaged brain. "The central core!" Greater Vengeance now neared the main structure of the Zealot ship. Rrowl-Captain turned to his own weapons panel. "What do we do now?" hissed and spat the kzin. The Guardian puppeteer continued holding off the tiny Zealot fighter-ships, sending them into some oblivion of hyperspace. "It is now up to the human.”

  Rrowl-Captain walked forward to the viewscreen, and watched the central core of the Zealot spacecraft open like some plant bud. A branching geometrical shape reached out for them with fractal roots. Like grasping fingers.

  Rrowl-Captain fired the strange weapons again and again, but the distorted environment of hyperspace made every beam and projectile move randomly toward their attacker.

  A glittering rootlet flew across the strangeness of hyperspace toward them; now large, then small... but always somehow closer. The kzin tried to dodge the oncoming object, but with no success.

  It sliced through the shining veil of the force-shield with no effort, and slammed into the hull of Greater Vengeance.

  A rupture tore the deck. Dozens of golden tentacles invaded the crewbubble. Guardian bellowed fury and became a blur of motion, edged helmets slicing, unable to use energy weapons in the close confines of the cabin.

  Tentacles burst from another breach in the deck, and the kzin saw Guardian being pulled apart by arms of implacable strength.

  Rrowl-Captain shrieked, throwing himself toward the fallen puppeteer. All three legs and both necks were being pulled in different directions. He slashed at the golden tentacles with claws, but the shiny arms were not marked.

  Rrowl-Captain was surprised to see the puny human hammering on one of the tentacles with a strut from the ruptured deck.

  The Guardian puppeteer burst apart like a carcass dropped from a height. A fountain of
alien blood spilled across the cabin, but Rrowl-Captain saw something glitter strangely. He could see the electronics built into its broken heads and torn body of the soldier-puppeteer.

  The coward grass-eaters didn't even trust their defenders, Rrowl-Captain thought, shocked. A half-living thing, half machine. Like the little monkey-human.

  Rrowl-Captain leaped back toward his station.

  A golden tentacle stabbed down from the ceiling, into his command console. Everything exploded in a flare of greenish light.

  Rrowl-Captain lay on his side, back broken. His legs were numb, useless. The force-shields kept the blazing nothingness of hyperspace from consuming them for now, but he could feel the ship shift and turn as the Zealot spacecraft pulled them into its central bulk.

  No chance for a clean death, to honor the One Fanged God. At least he had done battle. The human knelt next to him, afraid to touch Rrowl-Captain. "It doesn't look good," the monkey mewled, voice as flat as any machine. "We did our best, though." The human with the impossible name was speaking English; the translators were no longer working. Still, the kzin had a slave-owner's knowledge of the puny language.

  Rrowl-Captain coughed a chuckle. "You not coward," he managed in his broken English. "Even with machine ch'rowling your brain, you almost Hero." "Hero?" the human repeated.

  "Yes," he coughed with blood instead of humor. "Warrior Heart not give up.”

  The human eyes held his own. "Be still. It will be over soon.”

  Rrowl-Captain reached up and took the human's hand. The small pink fingers vanished into his huge black grasp. "Take Name," he spat. "I don't understand," replied the human with the impossible name. "Take Name of C'mef." A spasm passed through his body. He turned his head and vomited noisily. The taste was foul as defeat. The human said nothing. "Someday," Rrowl-Captain hissed in a whisper, "Heroes and monkeys fight together, as we now." He closed his eyes. "If not we eat you and your offspring first." The kzin thought that he felt the human squeezing his hand in response. A roar filled the cabin as the force-shield failed. He opened his eyes and saw a black shape reaching for them, silhouetted against the bright muddled insanity of hyperspace.

  The shape seemed to have many arms and a flexible, squirming bulk. To the kzin, it had the fearful dark face of the old Stalker in the Night from long ago. Green laser light blazed behind it. Eyes open this time, Rrowl-Captain screamed defiance at it in the name of his litter-brother. He had found his Warrior Heart.

  ·CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  11001010001111001010101011011111101010111011010011100 01011101110101111010010111010010011010101100110011110

  The sky was wine dark, Homeric.

  The sun beat down mercilessly, an unforgiving foe on the field of battle.

  Theosus (Bruno) stood tall, his shadow stark and black against the hard packed soil. He lifted his spatha to the sky with a muscular arm — salute! Yellow light ran like butter down the glittering blade. The bronze chain mail he wore moved warmly against his skin in the hot afternoon. Scents of dust and iron blood stung his nose and made his eyes smart.

  Theosus (Bruno) looked around for the foe he knew he must face. It was his Fate.

  But I'm not an ancient soldier, his mind started to object. The thought whirled away, like Rrowl-Captain's body parts had before everything went blank. When the Zealot spacecraft had attacked, destroying even the cyborg Guardian puppeteer.

  The images swept from his mind, flying away, like... birds? Theosus (Bruno) shook his head.

  Suddenly, Colonel Buford Early was standing before Theosus (Bruno), carrying a pike. The head of the pike blazed like a sun, making him squint in pain. The UN Space Navy uniform the image of the other man wore was matched by a legionnaire's helmet.

  "Son," the old man's face rasped, "your very thoughts betray you. I can read you like a book." Early's features began to sag and melt, then reform, like hot wax.

  "So can other things, and more closely than any book," added a new voice from behind him. Theosus (Bruno) turned quickly, his own plumed helmet almost falling from his head. Carol Faulk stood there, hair incongruously long and red, a flowing gown covering her Belter-thin body.

  "Carol?" he asked incredulously, his mind in two places at once, thirty centuries and thousands of light-years apart. "Less, and yet more," the figure replied cryptically. Her hair changed color, became black, then shortened to the familiar Belter crest. In an instant it reverted to its earlier state. Her eyes kept changing color, as did her skin.

  "Why am I here?" Theosus' (Bruno's) mind hurt, like the time he had hung upside down in a crashed aircar, with a crushed skull, and... and... Even those thoughts and images flew away, leaving a gaping hole in his mind. His thoughts probed gingerly around the ragged holes in his memory, like a tongue exploring the hole left by a missing tooth.

  A tooth ripped from his jaw against his will.

  The figure of Buford Early spoke again. "Your thoughts are no longer your own, son. Protect them, until it is Time. The center cannot hold, boy, unless you make it." Theosus (Bruno) was puzzled. A few verses of Yeats' poetry seemed to leap from his brow like birds, flapping away like his other thoughts. Vanishing into the green clouds and blue humming air.

  Were all of his thoughts going in the same direction? What did it mean? Theosus (Bruno) could not be certain. Was he losing his mind? "Nothing is being lost, Tacky," whispered the Carol figure in his ear, though she was standing some distance away. "Your thoughts are being taken, read, analyzed.”

  "Why?" he managed, confused, looking from one to the other of the two shifting figures. He could no longer remember how Carol smelled, or where they had met. His mind was being taken from him, a bit at a time. Theosus (Bruno) would have to stop whatever was doing this to him. Before he lost all of the contents of his mind. And there was something more he had to do. "Where?" he repeated. The image of Buford Early pointed with his blazing pike, which lengthened, stretched long, and seemed to touch a crumbling ruin on the plain before him.

  The sun illuminating Theosus (Bruno) with such hot bright light began to flicker and dim. A cool wind brushed his skin, making him shiver. He turned. The Early figure was gone. Theosus (Bruno) could no longer remember the first name of the vanished man; that too had flown away into the growing darkness. The image of Carol, now with skin as red as the sky was dark, returned his gaze sadly.

  Theosus (Bruno) swallowed, his throat dry with the dust of the arena he knew he was to face.

  "Will you come with me?" he asked Carol's image.

  "I cannot." Tears welled in her eyes, and glittered like jewels in the dimming light. "You must do this alone, Bruno.”

  He turned and walked away, unseeing. Part of Theosus (Bruno) knew that all of this was simply an image inside his head, the most sense his mind could make of what was happening to him in reality.

  He had a job to do. Spacecraft controls or the hilt of his spatha; what was the difference, really?

  Fate waited for him in both places.

  His sense of unreality grew as he walked across the darkening plain toward ruins the color of sun-bleached bone. Toward the figure that he somehow knew waited there, moving unpleasantly, as if with many arms.

  Whatever it was, it awaited him. Theosus (Bruno) left his spatha unsheathed, and began to hurry toward the opening he saw between fallen blocks of stone. The gate was broken, bordered with stones jagged as cruel teeth. He didn't want to be there in the dark.

  Theosus (Bruno) entered the long-abandoned palaestra. The arena was deserted. There were no murals or carvings to adorn the walls.

  The Hydra was waiting for him, as he had expected. Known.

  It stood twice as tall as Theosus (Bruno), like a great black cylinder topped with dozens and dozens of black ropy arms, all squirming toward him. Each arm ended in a mouth, filled with whirling lamprey teeth.

  He felt a memory — skin sliding across his legs, a smell of clean sweat and desire in his nostrils, as his lips met Carol's — tear loose from his mind, and take flight
.

  An arm snatched it from the air, teeth crunching on a part of Theosus (Bruno). Gone forever.

  Rage filled him as he set upon the Hydra, his spatha screaming challenge in the air as it swung. The flesh of the thing was insubstantial, but sizzled and popped as clean steel sliced into it.

  "You will take no more from me," Theosus (Bruno) grated as he swung his broadsword again and again, pulpy flesh and dark blood flying. The wind began to pluck at his clothing. A distant thunder rolled in the dark greenish air.

  The Hydra moved with him, sprouting two arms for each Theosus (Bruno) lopped off. It seemed to be laughing at him, an electronic hissing that rivaled the windstorm sweeping the palaestra. Sand from the arena floor blew into his eyes, making him squint.

  And for every swing Theosus (Bruno) made, one of the Hydra's arms, snake-quick, snatched a mouthful of memories from him. He began to swing his spatha two handed as the light began to fail, and heads fell into gory piles on the arena floor. But still more arms and heads sprouted, ever hungry for the experiences that made up Theosus (Bruno). Dodging his weary swings, the sharp teeth took and took, a bit at a time.

  The puppeteers he had met The name the kzin had given him before he had died.

  The name of his university.

  Carol's last name.

  The name of their spacecraft.

  The feeling of Transcendence when he was Linked.

  The names of his father and mother.

  ***

  Everything that he was seemed to vanish into the swelling black shape of the Hydra towering over him, triumphant. Unfeeling, Theosus (Bruno) let his spatha drop from exhausted fingers to the arena floor.

  The arms of the Hydra kept him upright as it fed upon his memories. The pain was excruciating. He wanted to scream out a woman's name, but had forgotten whose.