Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - V

by Larry Niven

  “I should try to get off a position report,” Krater said. “If that’s possible, with the antenna cable damaged—”

  “Do what you can,” Cuiller told her. He swiveled around in the stirrups, hanging head down in the webbing, to observe the crew at their stations. “Anybody take injuries in that last fall?”

  “Well…it’s my knee, you see,” Jook said. His webbing was loose enough that he had bashed his leg against the mass pointer. No damage to that piece of equipment, of course, but Jook’s knee was swelling rapidly. Otherwise the crew was shaken but unhurt. Cuiller directed Krater, who doubled as medical assistant, to help the navigator into the autodoc.

  “Daff, take air samples,” he ordered. “And if it’s clean, pop the hatches. Let’s get outside and see where we are.”

  The main entry hatch, normally oriented toward the underside of the hull, was now positioned near the top, Cuiller, Krater, and Gambiel climbed up handholds and over equipment bracing to reach it. Jook stayed inside, nursing his knee in a bubble cast foam-molded by the ’doc. While they went outside, he would use the time to catalog and schedule their estimated repairs.

  After levering themselves through the opening, the three crewmembers stood on the roughened ceramic surface and surveyed the landing site. Callisto lay on clear ground, angled slightly upward at the bow, where the hull was wedged between the smooth trunks of two trees. Those trees, and every other tree in view, supported a high forest canopy whose underlayer was more than ninety meters overhead.

  Cuiller searched for the hole they must have made in passing through it but found nothing. No clearings punctuated the vaults of leaves and wailing moss that soared above them. The surrounding world was a uniform green gloom, without a splash of sunlight.

  “Beanstalk,” Krater said suddenly. “That’s what we’ll call this planet”

  “What?” from Gambiel. “This patch, maybe. But who can say what’s going on in the next county over”

  “I can say,” she answered. “There is no ‘next county.’ We’ve been around this world once and taken a radar image of it. This is one huge, unbroken rainforest, girdling the planet, covering probably sixty percent of its surface.”

  “Well, at the poles, then…” the weapons officer said, trailing off.

  “There ought to be what?” Krater asked. “This planet’s rotational axis is perpendicular to its ecliptic. So you won’t get seasonal temperature variations, as you do on Earth. You can expect the temperature to drop uniformly at the higher latitudes, because of the sun’s lower angle in the sky. But that only means that the rain-forest is going to peter out in low scrub, then mosses and lichens, and eventually frozen deserts. This planet clearly has no plate tectonics, which means not much in the way of topography ever formed here. So no mountain ranges, no valleys, no river floodplains, no oceanic heat sinks. That means there can’t be any weather.”

  “What about Coriolis effects?” Cuiller asked. “You’d still have moving air masses, trade winds, horse latitudes—any planet that’s turning has them.”

  “All right, I’ll agree to trade winds. But on a smooth ball like this, they sorted themselves out long ago. Even flows without much intermixing. That’s the cloud banding we saw from far out.”

  “Hugh said he detected a smooth surface, and it was—even a hundred meters up in the treetops,” Cuiller said. “That’s what fooled me, I guess,” he added sheepishly. It was as close as a commanding officer could come to officially apologizing to his crew for that fiasco of a landing. “Daff, if you would rig a rope ladder or something like it, we can go down and check out the ground.”

  “Aye, sir.” Gambiel climbed back down through the hatchway.

  The commander looked off into the distance, a perspective of spaced tree trunks vanishing into a brownish-green mist. Something about the trees…He turned his head one way, then the other. He moved his head sideways, left then right, along the baseline of his shoulders. He widened that line by taking two steps to the side. As the angle changed, the trunks seemed to line up in a geometric pattern. And then the pattern faded out as he moved farther to one side or the other.

  “Sally? Does it look to you like the trees are—”

  “Lined up? Yeah, I was thinking that, too. They’re spaced in a matrix, actually.”

  “Like an orchard,” he agreed.

  “As if they had been planted on purpose. But it’s not a simple design of rows and columns. More like pentagrams or hexagons.”

  Cuiller itched to get down and begin taking measurements.

  Gambiel returned with a length of spare optic-fiber cable in which he’d tied small, tight knots at half-meter intervals. He anchored it inside the open hatchway and dangled the rest across the smooth curve of the hull. They all heard its trailing end thump on the ground.

  “We might be needing that cable to make repairs,” Cuiller observed quietly.

  The Jinxian stared at him. “We won’t. I checked with Jook.”

  “Well,” he went on, “you might have brought up a spider rig from the EVA equipment.”

  Gambiel turned to show his left shoulder, where three of the rigs hung like loops of uniform braid. “We have one each. And we’ll all need them.”

  “What for?” Krater asked.

  “Climbing.”

  “Climbing where?”

  Gambiel pointed over his head. “Deep radar was your station, Sally. You saw the return image. Whatever made it, it’s still up there.”

  “In the treetops? But—”

  The Jinxian turned toward his commander. “That was why you tried to land in the canopy. You were watching the deep display instead of the navigationals…Keeping your eye on the prize.”

  “Well, yes…” Cuiller hesitated. Was that the cause of his error?

  “Honest mistake,” Gambiel offered with a shrug.

  Climbing down was not as easy as Cuiller had thought it would be. They had to go one at a time, walking backwards and paying out the knots hand over hand, until their bodies were laid out almost parallel to the ground. Then they rappelled from the ship’s side, slipping cautiously down the knotted cable until they were under the overhang. Finally they dragged their feet on the hard-packed ground to kill the final swing. Climbing back up was going to be harder and take longer.

  With his heavyworld muscles, of course, Gambiel went up and down like a monkey.

  Krater, who had the advantage of height and not much mass to go with it, seemed to step from the ship to the ground.

  Cuiller, despite Beanstalk’s lighter gravity, still found it a workout.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” Krater asked, looking around when they had assembled under the bow. Gambiel scuffed the soil with the side of his cabin moccasin. The ground was smooth and crusted, like a section of sun-baked clay in exposed terrain. He turned over no ground cover, no dead leaves, no animal droppings or pieces of bark, nothing. They found no undergrowth, either, not even around the tree trunks. None of the vines that wove through the canopy reached down to the forest floor.

  Cuiller walked over to the nearest trunk. It was at least two meters in diameter with a hard, scaly bark. He pried at the bark with his fingers but could not break off a piece. No room for invading insects, small birds, or snakes.

  He looked up. The overhead leaves were as still as the underside of a green cloud. Of course, if any wind were stirring in the treetops, the sound and movement were cushioned by 30 meters of netted foliage.

  Cuiller squatted down to examine the trunk’s base. The bark was scraped and scarred raw there, at least on the side facing him. The wounds went a third of the way around the bole and extended more than a meter up from the ground. They wept a thick, ruddy sap. He duck-walked along the trunk’s circumference and discovered that the cuts faded out into white, scraped wood, which looked almost dead. Beyond that, by another third of the circumference, was a patch of new, green bark—but even there he could see a pattern of parallel scrapes and gouges. Areas of sap, clean woo
d, and new growth alternated around the trunk.

  Something had been abusing this tree on a regular basis, coming at it from all sides.

  Cuiller stood up and walked toward the next tree, counting his paces as he went. He knew his stride was just less than a meter. Factoring the correction into his count gave him a distance of twenty-five meters between the two trees. He examined that base and found the same pattern of abuse.

  He walked on to a third tree—again, covering just twenty-five meters—and saw the same thing. And he confirmed that the three trees were growing in a line.

  On a hunch, he walked back to the second tree and sighted to the third. A patch of white wood there matched a similar patch here. In the same way, running sap faced sap on a tree sighted 120 degrees around the trunk’s circumference. Green bark matched green bark on yet another facing tree.

  Cuiller went from tree to tree, always twenty-five meters, and found the same pattern of parallel scars.

  Logic said that something 25 meters wide was being dragged through the forest here like a rake. And whatever it was, it swept up leaves, scored the tree trunks, clipped any undergrowth, and scoured the soil bare, compacting it to the consistency of a mud brick.

  “Did you bring radios?” he asked Gambiel.

  The weapons officer handed him a palm-sized unit Cuiller tuned and spoke into it.

  “Hugh?”

  “Right here, Jared. I can even see you through the window, sometimes.”

  “How’s the knee?”

  “Painkillers are kicking in.”

  “Can you get up to the deep radar?”

  “Not without a climb, but I can work the repeater at the comm.”

  “Right. Give us a bearing to the return image, would you?”

  “Just a sec…Ten degrees off the port bow, still at a range of two and a half kilometers. And, Captain—it’s above us now.”

  “I know. In the treetops, right?”

  “Well, the angle is right for it, anyway. But how would—?”

  “I think we’re going to find that everything interesting on this planet—which Sally has named ‘Beanstalk,’ by the way—is up in the forest canopy.”

  “All right. You’re leaving me with the ship?”

  “Can you lift if you have to?”

  “So long as you all are clear of the area, I can punch up the main ion engine, have her hot in ninety seconds, and scoot.”

  “Do that, if you see anything.”

  “What am I going to see, down here?”

  “Somebody’s keeping the grounds swept nice and clean. Watch out for whoever it is.”

  “Sure thing. Do you explorer types have weapons?”

  Gambiel overheard that. He turned his right hip toward Cuiller, exposing three hand-fitted variable lasers clipped to his belt. Over that same shoulder he carried a brace of laser rifles, which had a wider aperture and a longer beam pulse.

  “We’ve got them.”

  “What about food, water, thermal—”

  “I’ve got my field test kit,” Krater spoke up. “And we’re all carrying a foodbar or two for snacking. Quit nagging, Mother-Hugh. We’ve only got two klicks of ground to cover.”

  “Okay. Be back soon.”

  “In two shakes,” Cuiller agreed and clicked off.

  They headed out, walking easily between the trees on the bearing Jook had given them. After half a kilometer of parklike open space, they came upon their first patch of undergrowth. Green shoots, bushes, and saplings grew up in an uncleared area that was shaped like a pentagon. Cuiller noticed immediately that its points were anchored by five of the mature trees.

  “Wait here,” he ordered, and began to wade into the greenery.

  “Captain?” Gambiel called. When Cuiller turned, the Jinxian checked the charge on a hand weapon and tossed it to him.

  Cuiller accepted it with a nod.

  He pushed his way into the secondary growth, bending stalks and branches aside and wishing they had brought along a few simpler weapons, like machetes. Twenty-five paces in from the nearest tree, he found what he’d been expecting: a broken stump two meters wide and a fallen section of trunk. He looked straight up, hoping to find a patch of sky. The green vault was thinner here, perhaps lighter in color, but still unbroken. Most of the saplings around him, he noticed, had tough, straight boles with flat, branching crowns.

  He thumbed the radio and spoke into it. “Hugh, watch out for the groundskeepers. They’re definitely intelligent.”

  “How do you figure that?” Krater cut in, having caught him on the same channel.

  Cuiller described what he saw. “Whoever it is that’s dragging the forest floor also knows enough to let a downed tree replace itself,” he concluded. “Otherwise the canopy would thin out and fall within a generation or two. This forest is being managed, and that smacks of intelligence to me.”

  “You’re leaping ahead of yourself;” she said, putting on her professional xenobiologist’s hat. “A lot of natural phenomena could explain what you’ve got there.”

  “Well—” Cuiller was unsure of his ground.

  “I like Jared’s interpretation,” Gambiel said. “Anyway, let’s be prepared. Err on the side of intelligence.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Jook put in, from the ship. “I’ll watch for them.”

  “All right,” from Krater. “Have it your way. But don’t be disappointed if it’s a pack of grazing animals with picky appetites, some kind of stream flow, a toxic groundwort, or something.”

  “We can deal with those,” Gambiel said.

  “I’m coming out,” Cuiller told them, turning around in the patch of groundcover.

  “Let’s start considering options,” the commander said when he was back on the swept floor with the others. He pointed at the spider rigs on the Jinxian’s shoulder. “How do these things work?”

  Gambiel unslung them, laid two on the ground, and spread one in his flat hands.

  “This is an adjustable five-point harness. Over the shoulders, around the waist, between the legs. The takeup reel with motor winder clips on here.” He thunked himself in the chest, just below the sternum. “The hand unit—” He picked up a gun-shaped object. “—launches the grapple with a gas charge that vents backward to stabilize your reaction. That’s because this rig was designed for freefall, remember,”

  Cuiller picked up the grapple. It had a point and three spring-loaded tines—all sharpened. “We’d use a thing like this around vacuum gear?”

  “The original head has a suction pad and magnets. This is a terrestrial modification.”

  “Right.”

  “What about drag from the trailing line?” Krater asked.

  “For one thing, it’s all monofilament. Weighs about three grams to the kilometer. But you got to watch out: put it under tension and it’ll take your fingers off. Handle the line only with the winder, or with steel-mesh gloves.

  “The other thing is, the line goes with the grapple, paying out from a cassette.” Gambiel showed them, taking one from his pocket. He fitted and locked the spindle-shaped cassette into the base of the grapple, drew out a meter or so of the nearly invisible line from its end, and clicked the grapple into the gas gun. “Attach the free end to a spare reel on your winder.” He took that from another pocket. “Fire the gun—” He pantomimed shooting up into the trees. “—and when the hooks are anchored, jerk it once to set a friction brake on the cassette. Then reel in and up you go.”

  “What happens when all your line is wound in on the takeup reel?” Cuiller asked.

  “You retrieve the grapple, discard both the old reel and cassette, fit new ones, take aim and fire again.” Gambiel shrugged.

  “How much line in one setup?”

  “Ten kilometers.”

  “Okay. Simple enough. Let’s get into those harnesses now.”

  “Why?” Krater asked, her eyebrows coming together.

  “Evasive action,” Cuiller answered. “If we meet anything down on the ground he
re, we may not be able to outrun it. Or outfight it. Our best course might be to disappear. Up into the treetops.”

  The Jinxian nodded. “When you shoot, try to put the grapple as close to a main trunk as you can. Thicker branches there—more likely to hold your weight.”

  “But the canopy held our whole ship pretty well,” Krater observed. “For a while.”

  “True,” Gambiel said. “So, suit yourself.”

  Cuiller stepped into the harness, found the adjustment points, and pulled them snug. He fitted the winder motor to his chest, figured out the simple lever controls for its reversible gearing, and clipped the first empty reel onto it. He put a cassette in the grapple, fed out a meter of the silk-like line, and found a loop at the harness belt’s left side to hold the grapple. The gun fitted into a flat holster on the right. The three of them divided up their supply of gas cartridges, cassettes, and reels.

  “What happens when these run out?” Krater demanded, counting her share with her fingers.

  “We won’t be here that long,” the commander said. He looked to Gambiel. “We still walking that way?” Cuiller pointed the direction, angling his hand around one side of the pentangle of underbrush.

  The Jinxian paused, considered some inner sense, and nodded.

  They walked along, deviating from a straight line only to pass around any trunks in their way.

  “Whoop!” Krater shouted.

  She suddenly floated away from Gambiel’s other side. Cuiller caught a glance of her white jumper flashing past and in front of them as she soared into the trees. She covered the ninety vertical meters in about twenty seconds, moving so quickly that at the end of her arc Krater barely had time to cock her feet up to reach for a toehold. The lieutenant disappeared into the canopy with the barest rustle of leaves.

  “Serve her right if she cracks her head on a branch,” Gambiel said. “Should we follow her up?”