“Ah, another instance of the kzin adopting human culture,” said the doctor, indicating the skull.
“The Black, ah, Predatory Flying Creature—Falcon, perhaps, would be closest,” Orion–Riit rumbled, translating the script. “That was K’zarr’s ship indeed. The terror of the swirl-rift. A very newly settled region of space extending from the Montego system to the Quintana Row, and a natural route from the yonder worlds to beyond Sol and its neighbors.” Sol was the brightest star in our skies, unless you counted Alpha B. brighter than Proxima. That was because Sol was close, at about 4.2 light-years, and bigger than Alpha A.
The next fifty pages were a list of settlements, ships and their cargoes that presumably had been seized by the pirates; the cargoes were priced, and the places they had sold them were listed. Kzin worlds, many of them unknown to us. Well, we had always known the Kzin Empire was big and disunited. It was because of that disunity that we humans were still free.
“ARM should have this information,” the Doctor said in anger.
“ARM might just use it for selling their own illicit stuff,” the Judge remarked drily. “Put not your faith in princes. Or governments. And that goes double for largely secret instrumentalities. ARM nearly destroyed us all, with their perverted principles. God save us from the high-minded. They do far more damage than the evil malicious bastards; us evil malicious bastards just don’t have the numbers.”
Marthar scrolled through them quickly after the first few pages. “These evil psychopathic bastards certainly did plenty of damage,” she pointed out.
“They wouldn’t have got more than a fraction of a percent of the wealth transferred through the rift. Enough to pay for their fuel and the occasional bender on kzin-settled worlds that were too poor to have much anyway. Places like Tortuga, where there’s less than a million beings on the whole planet,” the Judge told her.
“Why would anyone live there?” I asked.
“Because nowhere else would want them. Scum who were failed pirates don’t make good citizens,” the Doctor explained. “With the hyperdrive, there are lots of worlds like that now, particularly in the vicinity of the rift. Barely in the Goldilocks Zone, half of them. Nobody counts them as part of the Kzin Empire or the Human Diaspora, mainly because they are barely habitable. With the hyperdrive, we can barely afford to leave habitable worlds alone now, and new colonies are cheap to start, compared to what they were. Oh, eventually we’ll take them over when the various species start growing their populations enough, if the kzin ever cut down on their internecine dueling and the humans recover from their war losses. Even with immortality drugs, our populations aren’t big enough for our people to want to take over somewhere like Tortuga or Royale.”
“Piracy doesn’t look like a good way of making money,” I said. “Not if what you say is right.”
“They were making hundreds of millions a year,” Marthar objected.
“And they had almost equal expenses in fuel and arms bills, not to mention buying up medical materials to replace bits of busted pirate by autodoc,” the Judge told her with a laugh. “The main attraction of piracy is that you think you’re going to be free of the constraints of society. But you exchange having to be civil to your neighbors for living in fear of your captain and his officers. Living with government is bad enough, but living without any government at all becomes very . . . wearing . . . after a time. And I suppose pillaging and rapine look more fun than holding down a steady job. Raping females looks good to the very unattractive.”
“People with a low threshold for boredom wind up in that sort of state,” the Doctor stated.
“Well that’s me and Peter for starters,” Marthar pointed out.
“Yes, but you two can find excitement in ideas,” her father rumbled. “At least I hope you can. That isn’t an option for the stupid.”
If Marthar’s father thought she could get excited about homework, I rather thought he was wrong. She was thorough, she was honest, but I wouldn’t say she got excited by it very often. And I never had.
Marthar had come to some pictures. One showed a planet like Saturn, but with many more rings, and another a purple nebula with a swirl at its core. “Where the purple nebulae lit the sky, where ancient suns go to die,” she quoted. “That must surely be a black hole at the center of that one.”
I felt pleased that my guess had been correct, or at least likely. Marthar swept the picture and it showed some more purple nebulae, or bits of the other one which had become disconnected from it. She zoomed in, and what was purple became a range of colors and textures, from rose-pink to lilac and even green. They were lit by hot young stars and there were older ones, more likely to have planets than the babies, which would still be accreting them from junk worldlets. Marthar tapped on the picture and enlarged it to show more details. There were other things disturbing the nebulae, more black holes or neutron stars. She swept down and the picture was framed by snow-capped mountains with a spaceship, possibly a tender, in the foreground. It had the same kzin script anyway. The sky was black between a million stars, telling us that there was next to no atmosphere.
“Where are we?” muttered Marthar. She tapped at various places until she got the data file which told where and when the image had been captured.
“Ten years old. About the time we stopped hearing tales of K’zarr. This must be where he died. And we’ve got galactic coordinates, so we could find it,” the Judge said thoughtfully.
“Why bother?” the Doctor shrugged. “There’s no shortage of planets or stars. That’s a pretty view, ’tis true, but we can see that without stirring. And at least as well as if we saw it through the helmet of a spacesuit.”
“We haven’t found out anything about the treasure yet,” Marthar said. “There must be some. Nobody would go to any trouble to get accounting records and some pretty pictures.” She scrolled through some more pictures and then paused. “Now that’s interesting.”
She had found a sequence of pictures of a world with a thin but definite atmosphere. The sky was a kind of indigo and the sun lime green, casting violet shadows on red soil. There was little life; mostly it looked as dead as Mars had in the early days, but with some lichens and stunted bushes that trembled in a faint wind. There were signs of a long-departed civilization. There was a canal which was too straight to be natural, and as she swept the image it showed broken towers in the distance. She went up over the canal, and it still had some dark liquid at the bottom, with growths of plants sticking up through it. Then she zoomed in to one of the towers. There was a doorway at the base, open. There was no sense of scale, so she fiddled with the data file until she found where the images had been collected and eventually discovered how far away from the doorway we were. She did some arithmetic in her head.
“Wow, those doors are three times as big as daddy. You could ride a thoat in there.”
“Go inside, and see if there’s anything for the thoat to eat,” suggested her father.
Marthar went back to the image and zoomed in through the door. The inside was dark at first, then it automatically went into low-light mode and brightened.
“It looks like a huge storeroom for metal bars,” the Judge said. There were boxes with bars inside them, each as long as my arm and with funny-looking dents on the ends, millions of them. There was a central column in the tower with a sort of ramp winding around it and disappearing up into the gloom. I hoped the bars were gold, but they didn’t look like it. Platinum perhaps. Or uranium. I didn’t know what uranium looked like.
“Nothing for thoats,” Orion said. “But something for human and kzin, perhaps. Pan around, small fry. Look at the floor.”
Marthar obediently checked the view up closer. There was dust on the floor, and the prints of kzin made a clear impression, although there were so many that it was impossible to count the number of beings who had made them. Could it be the work of the ancient slavers? Who knew? But the doors looked too big for slavers or their Tnuctipun techno-slaves. And anc
ient as it all was, I doubted it was that ancient. Perhaps it was something to do with the strange creatures who had saved humanity in the last stages of the war by selling a human colony the secret of the FTL drive, which Dimity Carmody had translated with several miracles of intellect and intuition. Who knew how many civilizations might have risen and fallen in the galaxy’s history?
“There’s a video sequence embedded here. Let’s see . . .” Marthar clicked away rapidly. The viewpoint climbed jerkily up the ramp into another room, this one containing tables jutting out of the wall, with a rod like a broomstick sticking out below. Each rod had a sort of saddle on it. The room held about a dozen kzin, some of them pirates; I recognized the big one with orange fur. They were hiss-spitting to each other in the Heroes’ tongue, sounding like the power cables of a battery of launching lasers dropped into acid. One of the pirates sat down in a saddle, his tail hanging over the end. In front of him were two antennae, like dead serpiforms from Grossgeister Swamp. He picked them up idly, one in each paw. As if drawn by instinct, he held them up to his head, as though to show his comrades what it would be like if he had horns. Like lightning the antennae came alive and the base of each attached itself to the kzin’s head. He jumped and then screamed. He tried feebly to pull them off, but they seemed to be growing into the skull. One of the other pirates drew a wtsai and slashed at the twin snakes as they writhed and cut halfway through the skull instead. The kzin with the new antennae screamed, his brain splattered and we could see something white wriggling in it. Then he died.
It must have been K’zarr himself taking the video. We heard his cold, gray voice giving orders. He was obeyed instantly. Three kzin seized a figure in his cowled cloak and threw the cowl back. A fourth held the cowled one’s head firmly; though he was hairless and burnt, he wasn’t blind. His eyes were glazed and staring; his muzzle was scarred and burnt and bald but his nose was still there. A fifth kzin picked up two more antennae from another table and held them out towards him. The antennae stirred as they were held closer to his face. The sharper ends started to grow little roots and almost jumped out of the paws of the kzin holding them; instead they thrust themselves deep into his eyes. He shook and fainted. His holders put him in the saddle of the table from where the antennae had been taken. He slumped and had to be held up. Another order from K’zarr, and one of the bars was placed on the table in a slight indentation which fit it exactly. The antennae strained. Another order. The head of the blinded one was moved forward, and the blunt ends of the antennae found the indentations on the end of the bar and fixed themselves to it greedily, as though sucking from it.
“Dear God,” exclaimed the Doctor. “That K’zarr was a monster!”
“A clever monster,” the Judge pointed out. “He had noticed the indentation on the table that fitted the bars, and he noticed the blunt end of the antennae fitted the indentations on the bars. He worked out that this is some sort of link from brain to bar. It’s an alien book reader.”
“He was prepared to expend his crew to explore it,” the Doctor pointed out hotly.
“Pah! He makes me ashamed for my species! Still, we know that the experience didn’t kill him,” Orion observed in a low growl. “Of course, K’zarr didn’t know that beforehand. Life is cheap in a pirate world. And now we have an idea what the bars are. They are books. This is a library.”
“We don’t know what was in the book, or even if it made any sense to him,” Marthar argued.
“Likely it didn’t. If you took a book from the university library at random and read it, it could be anything from a treatise on hyperdrive physics to Pride and Prejudice. And an alien version of Pride and Prejudice would be hard to follow,” the Judge pointed out.
“Here’s another video sequence.” Marthar announced and started it. We were in another room, this one was bare except for some discs that seemed to be painted on the floor in a hexagonal pattern, each disc about a single pace in diameter. The discs each had something like a speech waveform on it that might have been writing. Two of the pirates wandered in through a doorway about three times their height and wide enough indeed to allow a thoat through. In response to an order from the camera-holder, they stalked in front of the camera. They looked around, saw nothing and turned to the camera. When they started to go back, one of them stepped onto a disc and vanished instantly. A breath was drawn in, then another order. The remaining kzin looked rebellious, but gave in, and deliberately stepped onto a different disc. Nothing happened for a moment, and he started to move off, then he vanished too.
“That could have been some sort of camera trick. It would be easy to fake,” the Doctor said doubtfully.
“Why bother?” the Judge asked. “I think we are seeing some kind of technology, nothing we are likely to understand. The universe is big, and we know there are intelligent species that are way ahead of us. Some of them lived on or visited that world. Remember, Earth was starting to experiment along those lines until the war made such experiments too expensive.”
Marthar looked through the rest of K’zarr’s memo pad. The last image was of an elderly kzinrett. She looked tough and mean. Who she was I could only speculate about. Would an utterly ruthless kzin pirate keep a picture of his mother? A mate? It didn’t seem likely. We never found out who she was.
“That seems to be it. Where’s the treasure?” I asked.
Marthar did her pitying look again. “Oh, Peter, wake up, my darling human. You haven’t got the sense of a wabbitoh. We spent an hour looking at it. You’ve got the records of an entire world, a civilization that was technologically well in advance of ours and died. And it left us its records. That’s treasure beyond belief. Even K’zarr could see that.”
“You are a revolting little smarty-pants, to borrow Peter’s term, but you are right, my daughter,” Orion nodded. “And I think we need to mount an expedition to find it. I suggest we look around for a spacecraft and crew, and that you, Doctor Lemoine, come with me, and you my old friend, who saved my sister’s life so long ago, yes, and Peter here too, as a cabin boy. It would be inadvisable to leave him here, far too dangerous. Anyway, for the sake of interspecies trust and cooperation, we should have a few humans come with us. I know my Sire would think so.”
My heart swelled with pride and excitement. I saw it now, yes, we had unimaginable wealth to find.
“Is Marthar coming too?” I asked. “She deserves to, after all.”
I got the pitying look again. “Of course I’m coming. Daddy wouldn’t dare leave me alone here; this place would have burnt down before he’d been gone a day and I’d think of much more frightful things to do the day after.”
Orion’s ears flicked, but he didn’t attempt to argue the point.
“That’s the way to do things,” the Doctor said with approval. “Had something like this discovery of a treasure world been made on Old Earth, nobody would have thought of setting out to look for and explore it, not for most of a thousand years, while we got permits and it worked its way through one interfering government department after another. For over three hundred years, anyone who came by it would have passed it over to the government like the obedient slaves they turned into. Well, we’ve got out of that mindset and learned the cost of slavery. You kzin taught us that, and most of the natural slaves among mankind died. Many of the rebellious too, of course, but you had to catch them.”
“Obviously we did not catch all of them,” Orion said with his deep rumble. Then he flicked his ears again. “And I am heartily glad of it, for slaves are damnably dull company.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
For an agonizingly long time, nothing much happened, or so it seemed to Marthar and me. We were left in Orion’s house and grounds, where we ran riot. We were in the charge of the butler, or whatever he was, who was called Redroar. Orion was away, as were the Judge and the Doctor. We got messages from them, mostly from Orion. The Doctor had gone to München to see about finding a replacement for himself, a locum tenens; the Judge was setting up some so
rt of financial arrangements with the von Hohenheim bank, which he partly owned. He cancelled Mother’s mortgage, which meant that she could run the inn as a sort of hobby activity and to keep herself in food. The boy who had brought help was appointed to replace me.
Marthar and I played a lot. We had the galactic web to surf, which meant we could go on with our schoolwork. Teachers can be very irritating, and they tend to disapprove of playing games unless they are horribly complicated. I think the idea is to get you ready for the algebra needed for understanding the difficult stuff, what was called Soft. I don’t know why. Marthar was good at Hard, which was about physics and astronomy and stuff. I suppose it is called Hard because it is about hard things, like raw matter. Soft is about social science and living organisms, which I suppose explains the name a bit, but is a whole lot more difficult than the Hard stuff. The easy bits are interesting, but when it gets complicated, I scream for Marthar to help me. Of course, we aren’t really ready for doing it sequentially, neither of us, but then, that’s why it counts as play. When it stops being play you know the teacher has lost track of how smart you are. Or maybe they are programmed to pretend you are smarter than you are so you have to fight back. It can get exhausting.
Redroar wasn’t exactly sympathetic either, but the grounds were big enough to hide from him, and we did. Although when he really wanted us, we both had phones he could use to summon us, which he did when we had messages from Orion that weren’t just text. And, of course, there were plenty of animals to hunt, large and small. Marthar made me improve my killing techniques, and even to develop a taste for raw meat, which turned out later to be more useful than I would have imagined.
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