by Larry Niven
A price well paid—for victory and honor. Both captains and crewkzin of Pouncing-Strike and Spine-Cruncher had been, even unwittingly, a credit to the Riit and the One Fanged God. He would pay for a Warrior’s Honor Ceremony for both crews from his own pride-funds when he returned in triumph to Ka’ashi.
Rrowl-Captain growled once for silence on the command bridge.
“Navigator,” he spat and hissed in rare good humor, “please fly us toward the monkeyship forward hull, where Alien-Technologist has apparently found an access airlock.”
“At once, Dominant Leader,” the proud crewkzin snapped.
“Do not assume the monkeys are without resources, even now,” Rrowl-Captain cautioned. “Follow standard evasive maneuvers.”
“Surely the monkeys are helpless, Leader!”
Rrowl-Captain fanned his ears in humor. “It would appear so, yes. But what is the True Hero’s approach with these monkeys?”
“Feint-and-pounce!” the bridge crew hissed and spat in rough chorus.
Rrowl-Captain purred approval.
He spent a few moments considering how to take possession of the alien craft. It would take some time to discover its alien workings and procedures, for the monkeys did not think like Heroes. He would necessarily have to select a crew to pilot the monkeyship back to Ka’ashi, after the vessel had been adapted to the needs of kzin crew. Who to trust? What crewkzin valued obedience above opportunity? Rrowl-Captain rumbled in contemplation.
That, however, would be in the future. The Teachings of the One Fanged God were explicit on this matter: Clean no prey before its capture. The Teachings, upon reflection, often placed fangs deeply into agile truths.
“I require an octal of Heroes to accompany Alien-Technologist after we rendezvous with the monkeyship,” he growled into the shipwide commlink. Consulting his command chair thinscreen’s database, Rrowl-Captain selected his most aggressive Heroes to balance the natural, if unkzinlike caution of Alien-Technologist. It would be, he reflected, good practice for both factions under his command.
Rrowl-Captain settled back in his command chair, purring softly, as he honed his bandaged claws and mused over satisfying bloody dreams of conquest.
Only the slightest hint of green hell-light marred the excellence of his reveries.
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bruno dimly felt Carol lay him in the autodoc of Dolittle. His eyes fluttered open. A curving metal wall above him. Carol’s lips, moving. Her voice, as if underwater, all gargles and rumbles. Bits and pieces of sounds, syllables flying like frightened birds. Hard to capture.
“Bruno, I have to get us out of here. We don’t have any choice but Dolittle.” Her eyes were close to his, her lips near his ear. “It’s that or become ratcat food, love.”
Words and meanings met and fled one another in his damaged mind.
He felt her hands tucking his arms into the coffinlike box of the autodoc, connecting telltales to various parts of his body. Numb. He struggled to force words past dead lips.
“Love…” he managed to grunt.
Bruno watched the blur that was Carol’s face smile sadly. A glint around her eyes in the painful light?
“I love you, too, chiphead.” Her vague face sobered. “The autodoc will fix you, I think.” She kissed him, a faint pressure on his dead lips, and vanished from his fading horizon.
The lid of the autodoc whined shut, clicked with finality. In the darkness, he felt the pressure of sensors against his wrists and neck. There was a low gurgling in the microgravity as the autodoc began to fill with healing liquid. A mask lowered gently over his face, and he felt the bright whiff of pure oxygen burn in his lungs.
Bruno felt the darkness in his mind rise like a relentless tide, carrying him again into oblivion.
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Ten-year-old Bruno looked at the isolation tank curiously. Thick wires and consoles and strange machines meshed like some jigsaw puzzle of electronics. Faceless technicians stood around at a discreet distance, saying nothing. But always watching.
“And this could help me talk to computers?” he asked, incredulous.
Colonel Early of UN Special Projects smiled reassuringly, his teeth white in his seamed coal-black face.
“That’s right, son. You already know how to give machines mental commands through your interface, right?”
“Sure.” That was easy. You just thought it, and it happened. It was like asking someone how to make their arm raise up. You just did it.
“Well, we want you to do much more than that, with this machine. Can I tell you what we have in mind?” His tone was easy, patient.
Bruno trusted Colonel Early. He had paid for Bruno’s education, had spent a fair amount of time either in person or via hololink with Bruno. It was lonely in the research institute, and the scientists made him feel like a project, or an alien. They talked at him, not with him.
Just because they had repaired the brain damage he had suffered as a kid with neuronal emulator macrocircuitry, they felt he was property, not a person. Techtalk. Do this. Do that. Never why he should do this or do that. It made Bruno angry, and sometimes uncooperative.
Colonel Early could always talk him back into working with the scientists, though.
“Okay,” he replied to Colonel Early, who stood patiently, waiting. He always listened to Bruno, treated him like a grown-up. Bruno would do a great deal for Colonel Buford Early.
“Well, we would like to link you up to a real computer. A big one, not like the little cybernetic links you’ve been working on. Once we do that, then we will put you in the isolation tank.” Early pointed at the small tank, covered with controls and interface monitor units. Conduits snaked to a solid wall of computer systems. “The human mind, Bruno, needs stimulation.”
Bruno frowned. “And in an isolation tank, I won’t get it?”
Colonel Early nodded, looking serious. “That’s right, son. But your brain will search for a way to get that stimulation, it has to have it, but you won’t be able to see, hear, or feel inside the tank. Eventually, your brain will learn to link up with the computer interface circuitry.”
Bruno squinted, thinking. “What will it be like?”
“People who connect up with higher-order computers via their brains are called—”
“Linkers,” Bruno interrupted.
“That’s right, son. Linkers. They say that a Linker can know everything.”
“Everything?” Bruno was suddenly fascinated.
Colonel Early looked a little sad. “I doubt it. Did you ever hear of Faust, son?”
“Fawst? Who’s that?”
The older man sighed. “I guess you weren’t on the approved list. Nobody is, anymore.” He brightened a bit. “But we think that you will be better at interfacing with a computer than other Linkers.”
“Because I’m a chiphead.” Bruno grated, peeved. He made a face.
Colonel Early put a hand on Bruno’s shoulder, gentle. “‘Chiphead’ is a bad word, Bruno.” He stared directly into Bruno’s eyes, held them. “It is an ignorant term used by uneducated, prejudiced people.”
Bruno said nothing, his lips twisted in resentment. He had heard a lot of people call him a chiphead over the years, once they had learned about where he lived, and his history. The accident. What was inside his head. He hated being different.
“That’s why the scientists look at me funny, isn’t it?” Bruno asked. He couldn’t look at the other man.
Colonel Early persisted. He hooked two fingers under Bruno’s chin and forced his eyes up toward his own.
“Bruno, it’s a word used by little people who are afraid of new things. You should pity them.”
“If you say so.” He was unconvinced. At least Colonel Early liked him. Even if he was a chiphead.
They waited together in the crowded room for a few moments. Colonel Early said nothing. He never was overbearing
.
“Will it hurt?” he finally asked.
“No, son. It will be scary at first, and very lonely. Until your brain learns to Link, that is.”
A bit of enthusiasm entered his voice. “And then I’ll know everything?”
Colonel Early smiled in real amusement. “Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far, son. You will know a great deal more than anyone else, I can promise you.”
Bruno thought a moment.
“Would I be able to help you with your work at the UN?” he asked.
“Son, that is why I am asking. My children are all grown now, as are my grandchildren. And I can’t get a permit for more children.”
Bruno smiled. “That’s okay, Colonel Early. I don’t have a father or mother. But I guess you know that already.”
He certainly did. Colonel Early’s had been the first face Bruno had seen when he had awakened in the hospital after the accident and the first set of operations.
Again they waited together, silent. Colonel Early never pushed Bruno, and he appreciated it.
“I’ll do it,” Bruno finally said, ignoring the mutters of the technicians around the isolation tank.
“Good.”
“When do we start?”
“How about now?” Colonel Early said, handing Bruno the helmet with all of the strange plugs and wires. It was heavier than it looked, and Bruno held it awkwardly. “Let me help.” Early lowered the helmet onto Bruno’s head slowly, reverently.
Like a crown.
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Bruno Takagama moaned against the soft mask of the respirator in the autodoc tank. Mechanical fingers began to probe the burns around his neck socket. Small swimming robots cruised toward his wounds in the ocean of the autodoc’s fluids, bearing tiny medical instruments poised at the ready. Noting his distress, the autodoc diagnostic circuitry administered a strong sedative. Soon he slept dreamlessly.
• CHAPTER TWELVE
Carol Faulk touched a keypad and felt her crash couch shudder in response. Dolittle shot down the darkened escape tunnel toward the outer hull of Sun-Tzu.
Carol activated the escape bay doors. She goosed the fusion drive, already warmed and ready at the first sign of potential hostilities. Explosive bolts blew silently in vacuum, the hatch flew into fragments, and the long spindle shape of Dolittle was suddenly free in space.
Now. Yes! Her hands on the helm keypads of a spacecraft, Carol felt in command again. No longer helpless and unable to fight. The starscape was still relativistically squashed and distorted, but at least she had some control over her fate.
And Bruno’s.
Dolittle flashed away from the dying Sun-Tzu. They had less than an hour before her quickly set booby trap activated, and antimatter containment gently and fatally shut down.
Dolittle had to be far away indeed from Sun-Tzu by then.
Carol called up the autodoc remote diagnostic on screen above her console. The autodoc sensors were already attached to Bruno in many places, and medical robots were swarming over and in his body, doing everything possible to heal his damage. Flashing red lights indicated his serious condition.
“C’mon, Tacky,” she whispered. “You have to pull through.”
There had been little choice when she pulled his plug in the Sun-Tzu. Bruno’s brain was certainly damaged by what she had done, and even more from the EMP induction. But had Bruno remained fully Linked and directly connected to the computer net by electrical conductors, the electromagnetic pulse would have burned his brain to ashes.
Bruno: sick or dead. Those had been her choices.
Carol kept the bulk of the Sun-Tzu between Dolittle and the kzin warship that was even now approaching the earth vessel, bent on boarding and conquest. The idea of ratcats leaping down the abandoned corridors of Sun-Tzu, finding the cryogenically suspended bodies of her crewmates, felt like a violation. But perhaps she would get her revenge after all.
She would give her doomed sleeping crewmates a real Viking funeral, a far piece indeed from Scandinavia.
Carol smiled grimly. The ratcats will get a surprise in fifty-eight minutes, she thought to herself. A caution worried her. How long will it take for the kzin to analyze the command programs, and begin diagnosing drive activity?
Dolittle’s vector was straight and true. Carol was a good pilot, even by the seat of her jumpsuit, and Dolittle’s basic fusion drive was familiar. You didn’t need to be part computer to fly the little warship.
By now, the ratcat craft was close enough to Sun-Tzu to hide Dolittle’s escape behind the bulk of the earth spacecraft. Every second would translate into merciful, shielding distance when the antimatter containment system failed.
When she was a thousand kilometers from the Sun-Tzu, still undetected and unchallenged, Carol unfurled the great superconductive wings of Dolittle.
Forty minutes left now.
The vast wings of Dolittle caught at the magnetic fields between the stars, like a fledgling bird in an updraft. A conductor moving rapidly through a magnetic field generated electrical current. The current, tapped, delivered deceleration force. Electromagnetic braking writ large.
The energy thus generated by deceleration at relativistic speeds was enormous, and useful for a variety of purposes.
It had originally been the plan of Dolittle and her crew to leap from the Sun-Tzu near Wunderlander space. Bruno was to pilot Dolittle in full Linkage, while Carol and her revived crewmates were all exposed to Tree-of-Life virus behind the now-useless hermetic doors of the cargo section of Dolittle.
Without the sealed doors, Bruno would have been killed by exposure to Tree-of-Life. The brain as well as the body changed its very structure under the imperious genetic commands of the ancient virus. Since Bruno’s brain was studded with implanted electronics, those changes would certainly be fatal.
Carol and her virus-exposed crewmates, on the other hand, would fall into developmental comas, tended by autodocs as their bodies underwent the metamorphosis described in the UN reports. They would emerge as something more than human—in ironic biological counterpoint to Bruno’s Linkage.
Protector-stage humans. Smarter, stronger, and faster than any human born.
During the pre-mission training, Buford Early had reluctantly shown them the holos and heavily censored summary sheets. Once an ARM, always a goldskinning ARM, so far as Carol was concerned. Early would restrict the wheel if he could.
Bruno had forced Early’s hand, insisting that he brief the crew of Sun-Tzu. Early had been shocked that his loyal Bruno would do such a thing. It was Carol’s first sign that the mission had a slim chance.
The data was both tantalizing and frightening. Carol could see why the UN kept the information under such restriction. Phssthpok, the alien who came after the failed Pak colony on Earth that had evolved into Homo sapiens, and whose dried body lay in the Smithsonian. The Belter, Jack Brennan, first modern human to be converted by Tree-of-Life. He had become the Brennan-monster or Vandervecken, and had perhaps saved humanity from itself during the Long Peace, with gifts of technological improvements even the ARM couldn’t restrict.
And, according to Early, perhaps saved the human race from Pak fleets out near the failed human colony at Epsilon Indi, Home. Home had failed due to Tree-of-Life, but Brennan’s plan had created an army to fend off the Pak fleets.
When the kzin fleets arrived at Sol, and seemed to be winning, the story of Home gave Early an idea. Project Cherubim would use Protector-stage humans against the kzin.
The human-Protector crew, piloted by the fully Linked Bruno, would enter Wunderlander space and fight the kzin. The vast power of the decelerating Dolittle would power enormous laser and particle-beam weapons. Eventually, the crew would join with the human resistance forces in the Serpent Swarm asteroid belt.
But the crew would arrive dying from radiation poisoning, unable to create more Protector-stage humans.
The plan was to limit the “infection,” as Protectors—even human-Protectors—savagely fought anything to protect their own bloodline. This would rapidly become chaos on crowded human worlds. Tree-of-Life virus made intelligence and strength the uncritical servant of emotion and instinct.
Brennan’s records had warned of this.
Carol increased deceleration, and watched Sun-Tzu vanish from her screen. She bled off the energy by powering up one of the huge gas lasers, firing randomly in different directions, hoping that no nearby dust cloud fluoresced, alerting the kzin to Dolittle’s escape.
The chronometer readout hung in midair, holographically. Carol tried not to look at it too often, and failed. From her own space-battle experience, Carol knew that waiting was the hardest part. But when the time for action arrived, she would pray to live long enough to wait once again.
Thirty-five minutes.
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Rrowl-Captain paced the command bridge of Belly-Slasher and watched the forward thinplate screen closely, his hairless tail slashing the air with impatience. He growled low in his throat as he stalked the bridge, taloned boots silent on the tapestry-covered deck. The bridge crew remained both respectful and silent, eyes averted and ears folded tightly against orange-furred skulls. Clawed fingers hung expectantly over keypads, waiting for the captain of Belly-Slasher to shriek an impatiently angry command.
It had taken half of a watch-interval for Belly-Slasher to cautiously maneuver close to the monkeyship. The wariness had worn poorly on Rrowl-Captain and his crew so soon after the monopole bomb from Spine-Cruncher had silenced the human vessel. Triumph tasted like leafy defeat in their jaws, as Belly-Slasher moved slowly toward the iceball of a spacecraft.
To skulk toward the carcass of the monkeyship denied the Octal-and-Two Truths in the Warrior Heart. Rrowl-Captain snarled wetly to himself in frustration, his jaws snapping on nothingness.
