by Larry Niven
“Do you know who built the towers, Bengar?” I asked him, as much to take my mind off Marthar as for any other reason.
“No, young monkey, I do not. Maybe one of the ancient races—the slavers or the Tnuctipun . . .”
Though I had already decided the buildings were too recent as well as too big for that, they were words to send a shiver down any spine. From what our archaeologists had pieced together, when the war of the Slavers and the Tnuctipun ended, there has not been a sentient mind left in the Galaxy, save the Bandersnatchi found on Jinx and a few other worlds created by the Tnuctipun to be immune to the Slaver power. By the time the Slavers had blanketed the Galaxy with a telepathic suicide command, both sides had begun using anti-matter. The war of men and kzin had been a chivalrous, genteel affair by comparison.
It was another hour before Bengar gave a grunt, and pointed to a green speck on a screen. “That be your ship, that be. A bit further out than I thought, but we shall be there within the hour or thenabouts. We be goin’ quite fast now.”
It was less than an hour before we heard from the ship. It spoke in kzin, the harsh roars and spittings, and my blood ran cold. I looked at Bengar. He had started when he first heard the voice of the ship. It was a voice I recognized too, cold as ice.
“’Tes the very voice o’ K’zarr that it be usin’,” he said quietly. “Though ’tes but a machine, when all’s said an’ done, and I ain’t afeared of no machine, be sure of it.”
Now he was calm. Marthar was taking an interest too.
“’Tes the ship, enquiring who we are and warnin’ us to hove to before we hit her amidships, which be fair enough. She told me that she’d destroy us if we don’t slow down or change course.”
“Can you ask her if we can board her with an injured kzin for autodoc treatment?”
Bengar looked doubtful. “I can, but the ship has been programmed by pirates, d’ye see. They doesn’t care much about showin’”—he groped for a word of which there was no concept in the Heroes’ Tongue—“mercy to strangers. And she wants some sort of identification. And this be a ship o’ K’zarr we be in. Which may be a good thing, if ye think about it, for if Silver had the doing, he may have used the standard hack. In which case, the ship will be on’y too happy to welcome us. It might have fired upon the landers ye used from the Valiant, for ’tes not Valiant that ye have to reckon with now, d’ye see, but something closer to the old Warrior Beast. Though it speaks wi’ the voice o’ K’zarr hisself, so it does. Let me see now, I shall find if the ship knows us.”
I thought of talking to a Warrior Beast instead of Valiant. I supposed it could speak other languages, but my heart sank to my boots again. I hadn’t anticipated these problems. I’d just assumed we could talk directly to at least a portion of the old Valiant. But the thought also came to me, and it was a comforting one, that Bengar, at least sometimes, was not as stupid as he appeared.
“Aargh, she knows enough to recognize us. Which means she won’t just turn us into starlight as long as we doesn’t threaten her. So I shall need to turn the ship around so as to slow down, so we will be coming to her slowly. And not in a straight line, for we doesn’t want to make her even a bit nervous, no we doesn’t.”
Bengar seemed to know what he was doing. I remembered he was an old spacer, and I watched as he deftly tapped panels and gestured to control sensors to swing the universe around us. Marthar seemed to have lapsed back into apathy. Now the sun was underneath us, and the glory of the nebulae burned bright. It looked as if swathes of silk had been swirled about and then frozen in motion. Of course the swathes were in fact moving, and doing so quicker by far than silk fabric, but no trace of that showed because of the sheer size of the thing. I suppose if you could watch for millennia, you would see it swoop and turn and spin, like ladies dancing in long dresses. But for now it was a fixed image. I took some pictures of it on my phone. If I ever got back to Thoma’stown, I would show them off to my friends and my mother.
And then I saw the massive bulk of the Valiant swing slowly past the window. We had arrived. Now we had to get in.
It was suprisingly easy. The monstrous gate opened onto the lander port, and Bengar slipped us slowly inside. We waited while the gate closed and the air was cycled back in. Long cables and hoses slithered towards the pinnace; presumably we were going to be refueled, which was a relief, since sometime we would want to get back to the planet. Something on wheels came towards us, and we opened the door and climbed down. Marthar ripped off her main belt and dropped to all fours, prowling, her tail long behind her, as we went towards the robotic thing that was inspecting us from a camera and also looking at Bengar. It seemed puzzled by Marthar and me. It spoke to Bengar in Kzin.
“Welcome, Hero, your RFID shows you to be one of K’zarr’s older crew, but I do not have your individual identification. But who are the others?”
“Captives from the planet,” Bengar told him. I hoped he was lying.
“Pass, Hero.” The machine turned to supervise the hoses and cables.
Marthar and I left the hangar and went towards the lift. I was taller than she was now. I fished out my phone and ran the ship app to find out where the autodocs were. There were lots of them, mainly in crew territory, but a few in officer territory. I turned to look for Bengar, who was out of sight, presumably also confirming that the refueling was taking place, and heard Marthar give a sudden hiss. The door to the elevator opened and someone came out.
Vaarth. Silver must have ordered him to remain on the ship, and he must have hidden when Orion and S’maak had been destroying the rest of them. He stepped forward with a cruel rictus on his face.
“Ssso, the kits have returned,” he said. He looked at Marthar hungrily. She looked back at him, and purred. There seemed to be nothing left of my friend, she seemed not to recognize Vaarth at all. I recalled Orion saying we should kill him if we could, and felt hopeless. Marthar didn’t seem to want to, and I had only the wtsai that Silver had given me; it was but a toy as far as Vaarth was concerned. Marthar was still on all fours, all feline, and she seemed excited by the kzin, who was dropping his cutlass and wtsai and taking off his belt.
“You are mine, kzinrett. I was promised you, and now I will have you.” He came proud and erect and advanced with gleaming eyes on Marthar, who purred some more and sniffed at him. He sniffed back and his ears flicked. Marthar sidled towards him to meet him and I looked on in horror. Both of them ignored me.
Marthar put up her head to be caressed, but Vaarth was impatient. He put his paw on Marthar’s shoulder, bending slightly; he was preparing to turn her around, and Marthar seemed quite agreeable, but she twisted slightly to face him and made her deep rumbling purr again.
Then she struck at his groin, her fangs meeting in his body between his legs. She pulled her head back, and ripped, and Vaarth screamed and doubled up. Marthar hit him with more power than I could believe. She had three clawed paws on the floor and caught him on the side of his lowered head with a fourth; she struck with enormous force and I heard something snap. He went down, and I hurled myself at him. I knelt next to Marthar, and saw his eyes turn to me, and a snarl started to erupt. It takes a lot to kill a kzin. There was still intelligence in his eyes, though he seemed to have little control of his body, and I thrust my wtsai in his left eye as deep as it would go. The blade was only a little longer than a carving knife, and I screamed with anger as I twisted it about in his brain, hacking it, stirring it like porridge. The light in his other eye dimmed and he gave a great convulsion and died.
Marthar and I moved back and looked at each other. There was something oddly dreamy about the way she looked back as she swallowed, blood dripping from her jaws.
“Peter,” she said slowly. She flicked an ear at me, and growled. “Peter.” She licked the blood off her face. She was always fastidious. “Enough . . . of . . . me . . . left. Just . . . enough.”
“You said there was no pirates on board,” an accusing whine from Bengar, who was looking
at the two of us and the body of Vaarth.
“I didn’t know about this one,” I said thickly. “I hope there are no more. Silver must have left him behind.”
Bengar shuddered. He wasn’t much of a warrior. I suppose not all the kzin were, or they couldn’t have run any sort of civilization.
“Bengar, we must get Marthar to an autodoc, the closest is in officer territory. I shall need your help to get her in, I expect. She’s in a bad way.”
“Not so bad if she could kill a pirate, I think, with a little help from you, to be sure. And I hopes there’s no more about, for if there are we are surely finished,” Bengar said. We went into the lift, Marthar still prowling on all fours. She was silent, but there might have been some hope in her eyes. We went up and I prayed that there were no other pirates on the ship.
If there were, we didn’t see them. We found the autodoc where the ship app had said it would be, and I looked at it. Opening it was easy. Getting Marthar in was harder, but there was still enough of her functioning to help us.
“Enough of me . . . left,” she said to me as she slipped down. She slid in and we closed the sliding panel on top. It was transparent, and I could see her big golden-green eyes looking at me, then the lights came on and the panel misted up. A bank of control lights flashed and a touch screen opened up. The symbols were all in kzin script, and I could only understand a few of them.
“Bengar, I need to tell it that we need to inject some new neurotransmitters; how do I do it?” I implored him. He looked at the symbols, and pressed one with a claw tip.
“Aarr, that one tells it that you think there is a brain malfunction, though the machine will mainly make up its own mind as to what’s wrong. There has to be a dialogue, but ye can choose the language. There, make a choice.”
I chose Wunderland language, and it was much easier after that. I told the machine that Marthar was an intelligent kzinrett who has lost her implant, and got a confirmation that it understood the problem. It asked if there was any further information we could give it. I couldn’t think of anything, so tapped No, whereupon it told me it would take an hour. I stood and looked at it as it hummed away.
An hour. “I guess we wait, Bengar,” I told him.
“Mayhap we can look at the control console in the command center,” he suggested. I brightened. It would be wonderful if, when Marthar came back, restored to life, I could tell her that we had control of the ship. If I could restore Valiant, then we had won, we would have defeated Silver and his gang. If I could get the Valiant to destroy them from here, I would do it gladly.
Bengar and I went up to the command deck. Cleaning robots could take care of the dead pirate. I didn’t like to leave Marthar, but if there were more pirates about we would imperil her more by remaining with her, I reasoned. The ship would know where she was, but it would have no reason to tell anyone, and I doubt it was anything like as intelligent as Valiant had been. And would be again, I hoped.
We stood outside the command room. The door was closed, and I wondered if we could get in. Bengar was crew, and probably didn’t have access, and I certainly didn’t. My heart sank again.
“Bengar, can we get in? Surely it won’t let an ordinary crew member into the control system of the entire ship?”
“Aarr, there be ways, there be ways, manling, and though I be an honest kzin, in a general manner o’ speaking, I don’t mind deceiving a dastardly contrivance put there by Silver, no, I doesn’t mind a bit.”
He squinted at the door. “I did not tell you all the truth, when we first met,” he said. “Before I joined K’zarr’s crew, I was a thief on Homeworld. A perfessional, and good at it, for you see I bear none of the punishments of a failed thief.” I did not know what these punishments were, but could hazard a guess that they would be highly visible. Among the concepts kzin seemed to lack was therapeutic jurisprudence. Bengar seemed to possess a full ration of fingers, toes and other parts. “There’s not many a lock, electronic or mechanical, that can get the better of old Bengar, given time.”
There were touch icons on it, and he inspected them carefully. Then he pressed one.
The voice of K’zarr came out of the door, roaring a question. Bengar answered. Another question from the door, and Bengar answered it; it was a bit too quick, but I worked out that the ship had asked him to justify his request, and where was Silver-Captain, and Bengar had said he was dead, and that he, Bengar, was the highest ranking crew member left on board.
The ship considered this for several seconds, which is a very long time for a computer program. I crossed my fingers and prayed.
The voice of K’zarr asked what I was doing there, and Bengar explained that I was food, and he was keeping me fresh. Bengar flicked an ear at me as he said it, and winked one eye. There was a short delay, then the door opened and we went in to the command center.
There was a kzin standing by the control computers. I had never seen him before. He was dressed as S’maak had been, and had the most evil expression I had ever seen. He looked at Bengar, ignoring me completely, and asked something in the voice I had just heard. There was only one voice like that in the universe, the voice of K’zarr. Bengar clutched his heart and tried to speak, but couldn’t; then he fainted away, collapsing on the soft floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I just gaped. K’zarr didn’t seem to know I was there. I wondered what on Earth I could do. The door had slid shut behind me, and I was there alone with the scourge of the swirl-rift himself. But K’zarr was dead. Everyone knew it. Skel had said it. Silver had said it.
Then it clicked. Silver had a sense of humor. It would be just the sort of thing he’d do.
I drew my wtsai and threw it over arm. It went blade first, as it was supposed to, and passed right through K’zarr. I had expected that. K’zarr was indeed dead, and this was his ghost. The wtsai clanged against a bulkhead and fell to the floor. I breathed again. Looking hard at K’zarr, I could see through him. He was an artifact, made of fuzz, hypermatter. He was barely in this universe, and his interactions with it would be faint and programmed. You can make fuzz solid and interact with normal matter, but it’s an art that requires a lot of computer power to keep it that way. I had nothing to fear from the thing; I couldn’t touch him and he couldn’t touch me, or not directly. He was the ship, however, a kind of symbolic form of it, and the ship could certainly destroy me. But he knew no more than the ship knew. I ran over to Bengar. His heart was still beating and he groaned.
“Bengar, K’zarr isn’t real, he’s just fuzz. He’s not here, he’s just an illusion,” I shouted at him. “Look!” His eyes opened in horror as he caught sight of K’zarr’s ghost. I ran to the ghost and walked through it to show Bengar that he had nothing to fear. Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet.
“By all the demons of every one of the nine hells,” he swore. “Stopped me heart it did, for half a minute. But yes, I see what he is now. And I ain’t afeared of ghosts, not that sort anyway. But what a horror he be to look at, I says, and I would be shot of the ghost if I could.”
“That’s easy enough if we can get at the control console,” I told him briskly. I marched over and looked at it. It was exactly like the one Marthar and I had used in the rec-room, the symbols in Anglic. That was close enough to what we used on Wunderland to be readable without difficulty. There were some stickers on top of some of them with kzin script, but I knew what was underneath. I banged the heel of my fist down on a big red button. Under the kzin script I knew it said Manual Control. The ghost of K’zarr had opened its mouth to speak but then it evaporated into mist.
“I’ve switched off all the higher functions,” I explained to Bengar, although I suppose he must have known that. “The ship is back to autonomic functions only. Now I have to try to get Valiant back.”
Bengar found a kzin chair and sat down. “To be sure, and I hope you know how to do it. And the first thing we need to know is: are there any other pirates on the ship? Don’t forget, it could be the en
d of us, indeed it could.”
Yes, it could. But we were safe in here for the time being. I started to access the computer. I typed on an old-fashioned keypad: I want to communicate with Valeria.
The screen showed text demanding an address. I couldn’t remember it. It was a twelve-digit number. I pulled out my phone and looked it up, copying it carefully.
Hello, who is that, please? the screen printed out.
This is Peter Cartwright. Your main personality has been compromised and I wish to restart Valiant, I typed in.
There was no sense of the thing thinking, but I felt a faint tingle in my arm as she read my RFID.
Very well. Authenticated. You have reduced the computer to manual only, I see. That is the first step. Now you must delete the resident personality. I knew that. I also remembered how, and it took only a few key strokes to do it.
Now you have to reinstall Valiant. I need only the address. I typed in another twelve-digit code from the phone and pressed return with relish.
Almost immediately, there was a response.
Verifying integrity . . . Verifying stability . . . Updating recent memories from subpersonality . . . Verifying compliance with fixes . . . Verification complete. You may return from manual mode.
I toggled the manual control and held my breath. There was a full two-second delay.
Something materialized out of thin air and held Bengar in a grip of steel. The fuzz could indeed be made to interact with matter. It had Bengar in chains.
“Hello, Peter,” Valiant said. She had the same soft female voice I remembered. “I have immobilized an unknown kzin. He bears the RFID I associate with pirates. Please explain his status.”
“Bengar is one of us, release him immediately,” I shouted. I was almost angry with Valiant, although I realized as soon as I said it that what she had done was quite sensible seen from her point of view.
