Man-Kzin Wars XIII

by Larry Niven

  * * *

  The light was wan, most of it coming from the lights of two landers. Overhead, the bright arm of the Milky Way was cold and remote.

  Flex stood next to the spacesuited Jarko-S’larbo, on the dead moon of a gas giant circling a spent sun beyond 18 Scorpii that was gasping its last breaths of exhausted hydrogen. He had timed his arrival just ahead of the kzin. To his surprise, S’larbo had landed alone, presumably to claim his prize for himself. Perhaps not so surprising after all. Flex had a beam rifle leveled on the cat, who was surprised, though he did not yet recognize his human adversary. Spacesuits and vacuums do wonders to mask odors. It was too late for the cat to call for reinforcements and preserve his honor.

  The dead moon was larger than Earth, orbiting in a leaden march as if looking for a more pleasant site to be buried. It was a wonder anyone found it. Flex suspected that the Outsiders had tipped someone off, but since the information had been bought and sold several times already, it was impossible to determine.

  At nearly twice the gravity of Earth—a bit more than Jinx—Flex felt quite at home. The burden on the kzin helped even up the odds, should there be a fight. Then again, S’larbo’s gloves were tipped with metal claws twice the size of his natural ones. Overhead, Catscratch Fever and the kzin ship, Sizthz Chitz, circled in wary orbits. Zel Kickovich had reconfigured the Fever so as not to be recognized from the cat-and-mouse game back at Meerowsk. It got no trouble from the kzinti ratliner—so called because of the fresh game allowed to scurry the dim corridors as food and sport.

  Zeno’s Wormhole? Flex stood at the mouth of an artifact, a cylindrical tube of something like a General Products hull, but showing signs of scarring from what must have been hundreds of millions of years of exposure to the cruel elements of space. The tube was sixty-four meters long, according to data collected shipside (and downloaded into Flex’s in-helmet knowledge well) and just under ten meters in diameter. It floated above a gravity polarizer that had been set up below it by the unnamed party that had vanished from record.

  The only other features on the airless surface were piles of rocky rubble that outlined what were once walls. The moon had never had an atmosphere; it was likely that the natural regolith had once protected an underground compound. No doubt the ruins would be worth digging up, but for now, the prize hovered half a meter above the contemporary lift system.

  Even with two lights blazing into the tube, Flex couldn’t see a thing inside. “After you,” he said to Jarko-S’larbo through his com unit.

  “I don’t trust Jinxians,” S’larbo said, and Flex didn’t blame him. “For example, those protrusions on your helmet look like weapons. Then again, since you are a coward, they are probably antennae, linking you to your precious Institute of Knowledge.”

  He was referring to the horns. Flex had a horn affixed to his helmet’s forehead, and a smaller one just above it. The horns represented the weapons of Flex’s self-adopted totem, the rhinoceros. They also contained not a link to Jinx, but a complete data set from the Institute, bootlegged, of course. S’larbo was more right than he knew.

  “Bad guess,” said Flex. “Are we going in there, or not?”

  “After you,” said the ratcat-in-a-can.

  Maybe not such a bad idea, thought Flex, depending on what was inside. If the earlier expedition lay dead in there, the disarmed S’larbo might find a weapon. On the other hand, he would be foolish to go in alone.

  “We go together.”

  They climbed a portable stair that had been erected at the left end of the metal cylinder. One long stride from there, and they were inside the cylinder. Its surface was a charcoal gray, so that helmet lights revealed no internal detail. Flex expected to at least see the star glow at the far opening, but it was blackness.

  They continued ahead, walking cautiously down the inner length of the alien artifact. It seemed safe enough, and there was no trace of the prior expedition. They reached the far end, at which point they could see outside. The nearby midden heaps had blocked most of the light from that side.

  “It’s inert,” S’larbo said. “There’s no stasis box here!”

  Stasis box? Now that’s a rather important bit of information to have missed, Flex thought. “Maybe someone beat you to it.”

  “You!” shouted S’larbo.

  Flex was about to deny that when the great cat made his move. Kzinti were notorious for announcing their attacks with a scream, but evidently this fellow had enough sense to attack first, and scream later. He went for Flex’s rifle, but only succeeded in knocking it to the curved floor. Fighting in a spacesuit usually had less than satisfactory results.

  Flex scrambled for the weapon, and once the kzin realized he would get it, the cat bounded away down the corridor. By the time Flex raised the rifle, S’larbo was nearly out of the artifact. He would undoubtedly return, with a weapon from his lander. Unable to catch him, Flex opted to stay put, saving his strength. In this gravity, the kzin would tire out quickly. Besides, by staying at the far end of the corridor, Flex could fire, while maintaining an escape route at his back.

  He kept an eye on that opening, in case S’larbo tried to sneak in that way, but there were no stairs to allow an easy approach.

  After a while, Flex heard a blip from his warning system. His sensor had detected the priming of a beam rifle. Flex could see S’larbo silhouetted at the far opening of the tunnel. He cut off his lights and stepped up the curving wall to his right, to get out of the line of fire. He left his data display up, but covered the lower part of his visor with an arm, to block the light.

  “What’s wrong, you hairless coward?” S’larbo was gloating.

  “Is that the honor of the kzinti, to hunt with overwhelming force? I thought you hunted with bare claws.”

  “Your gibbering spews like bandersnatch dung. Too long have my people faltered at the lies of you bony worms.”

  Flex could not keep his position so high up the wall, and slid down. As he sought better footing, two strange things happened. First, he felt the entire cylinder roll slightly under his foot. While the cylinder hung stable over the ground, it was free to rotate on its long axis without friction. And Flex’s weight was enough to set it in motion. Second, as it moved, some hidden mechanism must have awoken, because a dull amber light emanated from an area at the center of the structure.

  Jarko-S’larbo grunted with surprise, not knowing that Flex had triggered the device. Flex stepped higher up the rounded wall, and the tube cooperated, rolling down under his weight.

  Time to shake things up a bit, Flex thought.

  S’larbo fired two bolts down the center of the tube, missing Flex, who continued to climb up the wall. He heard the kzin grunt again, and guessed that the ratcat had momentarily lost his balance.

  “Is it true,” said Flex, stopping the roll and reversing it as hard as he could, “that cats always land on their feet?”

  “Grrraaarr!”

  Flex again turned around and treaded hard up the opposite wall. Once the tube got going, he stopped it, and ran the other way. More bad shots from S’larbo, but they were getting better. Sooner or later, one would connect, and that would be it. Not content to die at the hands of this fur ball, Flex pounded full-bore up one wall, to get the cylinder spinning as fast as he could. It was more fun getting the kzin dizzy, storming him, and fighting hand-and-claw. He wanted to beat the shit out of that bastard before boring a hole in him.

  The cylinder rolled at a good clip, so that if Flex stopped too long, his feet would be swept out from under him. Not a problem; at a mere meter and a half, he’d have a better time of it than a knock-kneed feline twice his height.

  “Let’s go even faster!” he said.

  “You’re doing this?” S’larbo hissed, unable to suppress his astonishment.

  Flex worked his way to the center, but slowly, because he wanted to reverse the direction at unpredictable intervals. An image from history formed in his mind: that of two men rolling on a floating log, until
one fell into the water. No doubt a competition from the Olympic games of ancient Greece.

  Meanwhile, the light at the center of the tunnel was growing, and Flex feared that the keen eyes of the kzin would have no trouble seeing him now. Yet, in the growing light, an object seemed to descend from the ceiling, blocking most of the tunnel at its center. It made no sense, since the “ceiling” was constantly rolling around. When the object—or group of objects, as they now appeared to be—reached the “ground,” the light shot back upward. The beam seemed to reach through the cylinder, forming a shaft of light reaching up at a right angle to the tunnel, extending beyond it, where there was once a curved ceiling. The new shaft appeared to be another cylinder like the first, but Flex could see only a little way up into it.

  The objects under the new tunnel were bathed in the amber light. They were solid rectangles of differing sizes, open on their tops. Where the two tunnels joined above, a series of armatures hung, perhaps waiting to re-hoist the empty boxes, or to bring new ones.

  “Hey, Slobbo!” Flex said, to see if the kzin saw what he was seeing. No answer. He tried again, but the changes to the cylinder seemed to have cut off their communication.

  Flex stopped revving up the cylinder, letting it coast. He had to keep walking up one side, or side-stepping to avoid falling down. He turned his lights back on and did a quick query of his knowledge well. Nothing was forthcoming until he correlated “Zeno’s Wormhole” with “stasis box.” This produced an obscure monogram with the intriguing title: “The Spontaneous Generation of a Quasi-Quantized Stasis Field inside a Rotating, Non-Traversable Wormhole: A Proposal on How the Slaver Stasis Boxes Might Have Been Manufactured.” It was not a quick read.

  Wisely, Flex had been studying related material, and as a professional collector and collator of information, he got the gist of it while skimming his display and side-stepping at the same time.

  Finagling mist demons, he thought. This artifact is a factory for stasis boxes, and I’ve turned the damn thing on!

  While he was coming to grips with that, he was slow to notice something else. His lower legs tingled, from the feet up past his knees, and he found difficulty in walking toward the intersecting tunnel. He took a step with his right leg, to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. He wasn’t. There was an unmistakable increase in resistance as he progressed toward this small wormhole’s pinch point.

  Flex scanned some basic material on “the dichotomy paradox,” whereby ancient Earth mathematicians such as Zeno noted that for an object to move from point A to point B, it first had to reach the midpoint between the two. But to reach that midpoint, the object first had to reach the quarter point, and so on. The paradox was that if one had to overtake an infinite number of intermediate points, one could never reach the destination. The mystery took thousands of years for mankind to unravel, by the invention of calculus.

  One speculation about non-traversable wormholes that caught Flex’s attention concerned time traps. One theory supposed that because space was squashed inside, time literally slowed as one progressed inward, until it stopped completely at the pit of the wormhole. So, he concluded, this was how the Slavers built and stocked the variety of stasis boxes found scattered throughout known space. This could be the most important technological advance since the conquest of hyperspace.

  Thank you Institute of Knowledge, he thought.

  The wormhole was only about ten meters in diameter, so there was a distracting sort of Coriolis effect—a differing temporal disparity between his head and feet. It was manageable but caused the tingling in his legs. He felt bloated, and his heart raced to pump blood to feet that plodded through congealing time.

  Flex heightened his awareness of things unseen ahead, but doubted the kzin could make it to the stasis boxes, much less past them. The cylinder was open on both ends, and its contents symmetrical, so it was logical to assume that a mirror wormhole stretched out in the opposite direction.

  Flex stumbled as he turned back to face the center, and he realized that the spin of the tunnel had slowed. The kzin! He was running himself, trying to de-spin the thing. As the cylinder slowed, Flex helped it, blindly running the same way around as his opponent. The rolling slowed, then picked up rapidly in the other direction.

  The phantom tunnel above widened, and then another one opened up at an odd angle to it. Tempted, Flex ran as hard as he could, spinning the cylinder to a breakneck pace, clockwise. As if on cue, three more lighted tunnels opened up, each at an equal angle of separation from the others, forming five spokes of a wheel around the axle spun by Flex and S’larbo.

  “Tabam!” said Flex to himself. This isn’t just a Zeno’s Wormhole, or even two or three. It’s a roulette of wormholes meeting at the hub, feeding into the machine. But feeding from where? He wanted to get nearer to the center to be able to peer into one of the adjoining tunnels—he’d be the first to see into them in over a billion years—unless the expedition that had discovered the artifact had already been sucked into eternity.

  He pressed on, feeling a thickening of space with each latent step. His left foot kept straying outward, and his right would tend to trip into the left, so he crouched to lower his center of mass and lessen the Coriolis effect.

  The next step was a toughie. To his eyes, the tunnel ahead appeared level, but his muscles told him that the floor sloped up like a summitless mountain. Just a few more arduous steps for mankind, he thought, and I should be able to get a look into the other tunnels. Then retreat.

  Another step, as through thick mud, then another, through hardening cement. “You’re a Jinxian,” he told himself, “the strongest race in known space, by weight. Now move your Finagling feet.”

  Aside from the difficulty in walking, Flex could only assume that the nearer he was to the stasis boxes, the slower time must be moving for him, relative to home. It was a sobering thought, but he recalled an old Jinxian adage: Only a fool wastes time worrying about time. Wisdom for a race of short lifespan, his father once said.

  When he was a swindler’s dozen paces from the center, he craned his neck to look up into one of the other spokes in the roulette. As it rolled away and out of sight, he thought he saw inside a huge vehicle of some kind, so huge that it should not have been able to fit inside. It was a transport laden with dozens of terra-movers with mounted guns. Or so it appeared to Flex. Whatever it was, it looked like it was meant to build entire worlds—or destroy them. He could analyze the fleeting image later because his helmet imager was recording.

  He gazed into the next wormhole as it wheeled into view to his right. Inside was a star field, and against that, what looked like a fleet of ships in an attack formation. The ships matched the configuration of those he had seen in a research project many years back: Slaver battleships. How a fleet of ships could fit in a tunnel not much larger than a personal yacht he did not know. Perhaps the wormhole could compress space as well as time. The fleet may have fallen into a larger wormhole that pinched into the roulette an eon ago.

  Flex kept his feet apace with the rolling floor, and tried to peer into another tunnel. To do that, he had to step aside to see past a trio of the largest stasis boxes, that were large enough to hold a groundcar. He ran opposite the tunnel’s rotation, slowing it into darkness, and then picking up speed counter-clockwise. The light from the other spokes returned, only this time their contents were different.

  In the tunnel directly above, the mechanical armatures began to move, and Flex watched in horror as a huge spindly gray creature—or robot—darted through the lowering arms like a bizarre monkey in high steely branches. The leggy creature grabbed two of the crane arms and beat them together until they came untangled. Immediately, the crane separated into two parts, each a cage of curved girders. No longer binding together, the cages lowered until they were just above the tumbling metal boxes ahead. Arms protruding from the cages unfolded to corral the boxes, holding each in the vacuum above the turning floor. What the crane was attached to up in the vertic
al tunnel was a mystery; it could not be affixed to the inner surface of a rotating cylinder.

  I’ll be damned, Flex thought. The robot just repaired this whole thing.

  He realized that not only had the wormhole been harnessed into a stasis factory, but that he had the opportunity of a lifetime—if he didn’t end up frozen in the jaws of time. No, it was Jarko-S’larbo who would be caught!

  Humans hold a great part of their reflexes in the spinal cord, so that a hand may be pulled from fire without even thinking about it. On the other hand, humans also have instincts to freeze and to flee. Kzinti had a larger part of their reflexes in the spine, hence the “scream and leap” before thinking. Sometimes freezing or fleeing was better than charging. This evolutionary difference was to determine what happened next. With all the technology, knowledge, wisdom, and experience, what matters most at times is a construction of nature that was intended for primordial worlds, not rotating wormholes.

  Flex calculated what might make Jarko-S’larbo leap, and decided it was time to reveal himself. He backpedaled, gradually slowing the tunnel’s rotation until the roulette faded into darkness.

  “Ratcat!” he said.

  “I see where you are now, Jinxian. You’re dead!”

  “Don’t you want my name and title first, so you can claim bragging rights? I’m Flex Bothme, the guy who dropped the bomb on your kits!”

  “Skalazaal!” bellowed Jarko-S’larbo in a cry meant to freeze prey. “Flex Bothme?”

  Flex ran hard, pounding up the wall to set things spinning again. His feet hurt like hell, worse than the frostbite at Brain Freeze, but he ran even harder, conjuring up the roulette, and the mechanical arms overhead.

  He only heard the kzin shout, “—you shitflick—” as the cat leaped toward him, and froze in mid-air, amidst the repaired machinery.

  When the icy-eyed monkey thing went into action, Flex needed no other warning. He made the most of that human flight reflex, taking the path of decreasing resistance.