Footfall

by Larry Niven

  What was there to talk of? How could they expect to negotiate before their capabilities had been tested? But the prey had sent no missiles, no ships of war. Only messages.

  The Breakers wondered if the prey might not know how to make war. This violated all the Herdmaster knew of evolution. Yet even when the attack began, the prey did little. The orbiting satellites didn’t defend themselves. Half of them were gone in the first hour. Warriors braced to fight and die veered between relief and disappointment.

  But the natives did have weapons. Not many, used late, but . . . a long scar, melted and refrozen, lay along Message Bearer’s flank, crossing one wing of a big troop-carrying lander. Digit ship Forty-one might still operate in space, but it would never see atmosphere. Four more digit ships had been destroyed in space.

  Missiles still rose from the planet’s surface, and missiles and beam weapons still fired from space. A few satellites remained in orbit. Message Bearer surged under the impact of a plasma jet, and trembled as a missile launched away toward the jet’s origin.

  Oh, yes, the great ship had suffered minor damage. But this was good, in its way. The warriors would know, at least, that there was an enemy . . . and now they knew something about the alien weapons, and something about their own fighting ability. And the Herdmaster had learned that he could count on the sleepers.

  He’d wondered. Would they fight, these ancient ones? But in fact they were doing well. Ancient they might be, considered from their birthdates; but frozen sleep was hard on the aged. The survivors had been eight to sixteen years past sexual maturity. They had run the ship for four years before their bodies had been frozen; they knew its rooms and corridors and storage holds as well as those who had been born aboard.

  "Permission to report," said Attackmaster Koothfektil-rusp.

  "Go ahead."

  "I think we’ve cleared everything from orbit, Herdmaster. There could be something around the other side of Winterhome, moving in our own orbit. We’ll have to watch for that. We find four missiles rising from Land Mass Three. Shall I send them some bombs?"

  "No. Wasteful. We’ve done enough here. Defensemaster, take us out of here, out of their range." Most of the native weapons would barely reach orbit—as if they were designed to attack other parts of the planet. Knowing the launch site was enough. It could be destroyed just before the troops went down to test the prey’s abilities.

  The digit ships could trample lesser centers before they descended: destroy dams, roads, anything that looked like communication or power sources. He hoped it would go well. His son Fookerteh’s eight-cubed of warriors would be in the first assault. K’turfookeph was much concerned about him, though pride would never allow her to admit it . . .

  "Follow the plan, Defensemaster. Take us behind that great gaudy satellite on a freely falling curve. Hide us. Attackmaster, I want every prey’s eyes on that moon stomped blind before we begin the second phase of our acceleration."

  The Herdmaster waited for acknowledgments, then ordered, "Get me Breaker-Two."

  * * *

  Breaker-Two had been a profession without an object until now. Takpusseh had been chosen young. He was only entering middle age, if one excluded the decades he had spent in frozen sleep, and the years worth of damage that had done. He had been trained to deal with aliens since before the starship ever left home; yet his training was almost entirely theoretical.

  Almost. There had been another intelligent race on Takpusseh’s homeworld. The Predecessors had died out before Takpusseh’s race developed gripping appendages and large brains. They were the domain of Fistarteh-thuktun the historian-priest, not of Takpusseh.

  Fistarteh-thuktun was a sleeper. Since the Awakening he had become more stiff and formal, more withdrawn, than ever. His spaceborn apprentices spoke only to him. His knowledge of the thuktunthp would be valuable here. Perhaps Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz—with the authority of a spaceborn, and a tact that was all his own—could draw him out . . .

  The sleepers knew, in their hindbrains and spines and in their very cells, how to live on planets, what planets were like. The spaceborn could only guess. And yet—more was at stake than this artificial division of the Traveler Herd. The sleepers would die, one by one, eventually, and the Traveler herd would be one fithp again. The fithp needed what Fistarteh-thuktun knew: the stored knowledge of that older, now alien species.

  Before they received the first pictures broadcast by the prey. the question had been debated endlessly. Would Winterhome’s natives resemble the Predecessors? Or the fithp?

  They did not.

  Breaker-Two watched the surviving locals through a one-way transparency, while his assistant and a pair of soldiers worked with the alien artifacts. "They look so fragile," he said.

  The ship shuddered.

  "They’ve hit us again," one of the soldiers said. "Fragile they may be, but they’re fighting back."

  "They do fight. Some were dead and some surrendered. Their plight was hopeless," said the Octuple Leader. "Yet one fired a weapon through its life support system! It killed itself to kill two of my warriors!"

  "Your explanation?"

  "Do you forget your place?"

  "Your pardon. Shall I request that your superiors ask you? Shall I call the Herdmaster and request that he tell you to answer my questions? Wish you to continue this?"

  "I don’t know! It killed itself to kill two warriors! Surrender would have been easy. I—I have no explanation, Breaker. This is your own task."

  "Have you a theory, Octuple Leader?"

  "Mad with battle lust . . . or sick? Dying? It happens." His digits knotted and relaxed, knotted, relaxed. "I should be fighting."

  It happens. Fumf! The spaceborn know only what they have read, and studied, yet they—

  These thoughts were useless. "If you’re needed, you’ll be summoned," Breaker-Two Takpusseh told him. "I need you now. You were aboard the ruined space habitat. I will have questions." "Ask, Breaker."

  Takpusseh hadn’t yet learned enough to ask intelligent questions. "What did we take, Octuple Leader . . . Pretheeteh?"

  "Pretheeteh-damb . . . sir. We took out quite a lot of stuff; there wasn’t room for it all in here."

  Alien voices from the restraint room formed a muted background. Takpusseh half listened while he meandered through the loot Pretheeteh-damb’s troops had moored to walls. For fifteen years he had studied the alien speech that crossed on radio waves between Winterhome and the ringed giant. Sometimes there had been pictures. Strange pictures, of a herd that could not exist. Boxes that danced with legs. Bipeds that changed shape and form. Streams of very similar paintings arriving within tiny fractions of a second. Contrasts; cities with tall buildings and machines, cities of mud huts and straw roofs.

  Reception was terrible, and some of what could be resolved was madness. Such information was suspect, contaminated, contained falsehoods. Better to trust what one learned directly.

  One fact stood out. Most of the broadcasts had been in one language. Takpusseh was hearing that language now, but he was hearing another too.

  The prisoners were of two or more herds. For the moment that hardly mattered, but it would. It would add interest to a task that was already about as interesting as a fi’ could stand.

  There were big metal bins filled with smaller packages, each bearing a scrawled label: FOUND FROZEN. Piles of cloth too thin to be armor: protection from cold? Alien-looking machines with labels scrawled on them:

  FROM FOOD PREPARATION AREA (?)

  COMPUTER (?)

  PART OF WASTE RECYCLING SYSTEM.

  PROJECTILE WEAPON.

  Corpses, bloated by vacuum, had been stuffed into one great pressure package, half frozen during the crossing and stuck together. Breaker-Two Takpusseh pulled the package open and, ignoring a queasy tremor in his digestive system, let his eyes rest on an alien head. This body had been ripped half apart by projectiles. Takpusseh noted sense organs clustered around a mouth filled with evil-looking teeth and
a protruding flap of muscle. Two bulging, vulnerable-looking eyes. The nose was a useless knob; the paired nostrils might as well have been flat to the face. But the array was familiar, they weren’t that peculiar. Bilateral symmetry . . . He reached to pick up a partially thawed foreleg and found five digits reinforced with bone. The aliens used those modified forefeet for making and using tools. They certainly didn’t use that bump-with-holes for anything but smelling. All known from pictures—but this was different.

  The weapon: it was a tiny thing, with a small, curved handle. Could this modified foot really hold it aimed and steady? "This is the weapon it used?"

  "Yes, Breaker-Two. That weapon killed two warriors."

  "Thank you." Takpusseh moved the digits of an alien forefoot, thoughtfully, noting how one could cross over the flat surface behind the other four. And they all curved inward—

  He was wasting time. "First priority is to get their food separated out. They’re bound to need water, they’re certainly wet inside. Then autopsies. Let’s get some idea what’s inside them. Pretheeteh-damb, did you put these things in pressure containers after they had been subjected to vacuum?"

  "Breaker, they were bound to suffer some damage during an assault. I suppose you could have come along to guard them."

  Takpusseh was stung. "You suppose wrongly. The Herdmaster refused me permission." Because he was too valuable, or because a sleeper was untrustworthy: who could know?

  Again he looked through one-way glass at the prisoners. "We’ve watched their ships take off. Chemicals: hydrogen and oxygen, energetic and difficult to handle, but still chemical fuels. The expense must be formidable. We must assume that these prisoners are the best they breed; else they would not be worth the cost of lifting them."

  His assistant twitched her ears in assent. "Language first. We must make them teachers for future prisoners."

  "You say that easily, Tashayamp. It will be difficult. It may be impossible, with most of our team lost to the military mission." Breaker-Two turned to the stacked cloth from the space station, then to cloth that had been cut from the prisoners. It was oddly curved; it had fastenings in odd places. Designed to fit an odd shape. These stiffened cups for the hind feet were thicker, padded. Takpusseh found nothing that might protect the fragile-looking foreleg digits.

  "Pretheeteh-damb, did you search this detritus for weapons?"

  "Yes. There were none, not even a bludgeon."

  "The prisoners were all covered with cloth, weren’t they?"

  "They were. So were the corpses."

  "It isn’t a rank symbol and it doesn’t hold personal weapons. They were in a space habitat; they’d regulate the temperature. Could they be so fragile? I think we had better give them cloth to protect their skins." He looked back into the padded room.

  Could the cloth be used for humidity regulation? If they didn’t exude enough moisture to be comfortable . . . Well, that would be tested.

  Hunch prodded him to add, "And get the cloth off the corpses, Tashayamp. Start with this one."

  "The Herdmaster for you, Breaker-Two."

  Takpusseh took the call. The Herdmaster looked tired, in the fashion of those whom exhaustion turns nasty. "Show them to me, Breaker-Two."

  Takpusseh turned the camera toward the one-way glass wall. The Herdmaster was silent for two or three breaths. Then, "And these you must integrate into the Traveler Herd? I don’t envy you. Breaker-Two. What do you know so far?"

  "Their skins are fragile. They need cloth for protection."

  "Will they survive?"

  "One seems near death . . . and it isn’t the legless one. That one seems active enough. As for the rest, I’ll have to be careful. We have their stored food, thanks to the troops, though we will have to identify it."

  "How soon can I expect—"

  "When I tell you so. You have heard the sounds they make. They will never speak well. Another matter: We do not have a representative sampling here. That may be to the good; they may be more easily taught than their dirtyfoot kin." Takpusseh glanced at the smallest of the half-frozen corpses, now denuded of cloth. Eyes protruding, mouth wide open, distress frozen in its face. The protected area between the legs . . .

  His guess had been right. The genitalia were oddly placed. He tried to imagine how they might mate. But this was a female; the breasts confirmed it. "Our survivors are all adult males. Before we can understand anything about the natives we will need to study females, children, the crippled, the insane, the merely adequate—"

  "Do what you can, Breaker. We won’t be able to furnish you with other prisoners for some days yet. Unless you would prefer to stay behind with the digit ships?"

  Takpusseh’s ears flattened against his head. Had he just been named a coward? "At your orders, Herdmaster."

  "I wasn’t serious, and neither are you. You’re needed here."

  "Sixty-four of us are needed here, Herdmaster! You’ve taken all but three of us for the digit ships, and you expect—"

  "They must be near the battle to advise our warriors regarding the prey’s mentality, and to learn. Do what you must." The Herdmaster’s face faded.

  The prisoners were not very active now. The one who spoke a known language was prowling, exploring the restraint room. The rest were talking in their own gibberish. They must belong to Land Mass One, the largest land block, and not to the herd that was so free with their radio noise . . . all but the prowler, and possibly the dark-skinned one, who might almost have been dead.

  Might that be a disease, a lethal skin condition? Could the rest catch it? Leaving the Breakers without a profession again. One more thing to worry about.

  He assumed, and would continue to assume, that Breaker-One Raztupisp-minz was listening via intercom. They would talk later. Meanwhile—"Pretheeteh-damb, your attention." Takpusseh pointed through the one-way transparency of the wall. "That one. He’s talking now; do you see his mouth moving?"

  "I see."

  "Take your octuple and fetch him to me."

  "Breaker-Two, I would have no trouble fetching it myself, save for fear of crushing it by accident."

  "Take your octuple." Takpusseh felt no need to justify himself. They were an unknown. Best to be wary. At worst the show of strength might impress the aliens.

  They did look fragile. Fragile enough to make him queasy.

  He couldn’t afford to think that way. He was Breaker-Two, and these alien beings constituted the only career open to him. We must come to know each other well. Without you I’m nothing.

  * * *

  The door was square, ten feet by ten feet or thereabouts, and padded. When Wes pounded on it with his fist he got a peculiar echo, not quite like metal. Foamed metal? Thick, like the door on a bank vault. What do they think we are, The Hulk? Could they have picked up some Saturday-morning TV? It opened inward, he remembered; but no hinges were in sight. And no handle. Maybe the Invaders had prepared this cell before they knew what humans would be like. Maybe it was built for Invader felons or mental cases.

  Whatever. We won’t get out of here with just muscle.

  CLACK! The door jumped under his hand. Wes kicked himself away as it swung open.

  What showed first were pale brown tentacles gripping a bayoneted rifle. The Invader entered behind the blade, slowly, its wary eyes on the cloud of drifting humans. It looked—Wes found himself grinning. He let it spread. It wouldn’t know what a grin meant.

  The Invader looked like a baby elephant. The tentacle was an extended nose: a trunk. It branched halfway down, with a nostril in the branch; and branched again near the tip, and again. Eight digits. Base eight!

  Straps of brown leather wove a cage around it, with a flap of cloth between the legs and a pouch behind the head.

  Wes struck the wall opposite the door and managed to absorb most of the recoil.

  Another baby elephant with two trunks entered, similarly dressed, similarly armed. They took positions against the bulkhead to each side of the door. Their claws sank easily int
o the thick, dampened padding. Their weapons were aimed into the room, not at anyone, but ready. A third, unarmed, stayed in the doorway.

  The cell was getting crowded. Giorge was finally showing signs of life, staring wall-eyed, making feeble pushing gestures at the air. Arvid pulled the black man behind him. The recoil drifted him into the first Invader. It skillfully turned the rifle before Rogachev could impale himself, then gently thrust him away with the butt.

  The Invader in the doorway held Dawson’s attention. This one wore straps dyed scarlet, and a backpouch patterned in green and gold. Its feet were clawed, not really elephant-like except for the size. The tail was paddle-shaped. The head was big; the face, impressive. Grooves of muscle along the main trunk focused attention on the eyes: black irises surrounded by gray, looking straight at Wes Dawson.

  It pushed itself into the cell.

  It was coming for him. Wes waited. He saw no point in trying to escape.

  The jump was skillfully done. The Invader landed feet-first against the wall, just next to Wes; wrapped its trunk around Wes’s torso (and two of the eight branches had him by the neck); jumped on the recoil, thrust him through the doorway ahead of itself (a fourth Invader had pulled aside), and barely brushed the doorway as it came through behind. It would have crushed Wes against the corridor wall if its claws hadn’t closed on the doorjamb.

  Wes was near strangling. He pulled at the branches around his neck, then slapped thrice at the joint with the flat of his hand. Would it understand? Yes: the constriction eased.

  Five more Invaders waited in the corridor. Three moved off to the left. Wes’s captor followed, and the others followed him. They must think we’re hot stuff, he thought. Maybe we really are hurting them. Or maybe . . . just how many are they, that they can spare eight behemoths to collect one fragile man?

  Where are they taking me?

  Dissection?

  But with so many around him, there was surely no point in struggling.