by Larry Niven
“Very well, pending further explanation I shall release him under sanction. He is free to move so long as he does not make overt threats against another authorized crew member.”
“More than half the crew are pirates,” I said bitterly. “You are a bit behind.”
“I know that S’maak-Captain ordered me to destroy one of the landers but I was unable to do so. I presume he believed that the crew inside it were mutineers, and some of the memories I have extracted from the K’zarr personality confirm a mutiny. But I do not have any information about the happenings on the planet. Perhaps you would tell me now.”
“Before that, I must know if there is any live being on this ship, because there may be pirates aboard,” I told her.
“Organic life comprises you, the kzin here, and the kzinrett Marthar in the autodoc on level five,” Valiant replied.
“No other crew members?”
“No.”
“How is Marthar? Her implant was destroyed and we are hoping the autodoc is replacing it,” I asked anxiously.
“Marthar is in good condition and will be waking within thirty minutes. The autodoc is working normally. It is doing a little more than you suggested; there is a certain hormone modification which is being corrected. Lack of the appropriate neurotransmitters triggered an early hormonal development, which is premature for an intelligent kzinrett. She is in need of some minor changes. She should be the Marthar you knew in a very short time.” Valiant was soothing. I think she was discreetly checking up on my health and decided I was on edge, and she was dead right. She could monitor my pulse rate and the stress patterns in my voice, and probably pick out any number of odd chemicals the body emits.
“Perhaps now you can give me a status report on the affairs on the surface of the planet, Peter,” Valiant said patiently. “You should perhaps know that I have been checking to see how I was hacked. It was ingenious and quite unexpected. It would seem that the pirates have some very clever software, and they installed it some time ago. It is now disabled; the same trick will never work again. And I shall ensure that the trick becomes widely known. That will protect other ships.”
I sat back with a sigh of relief. If Valiant was back and she couldn’t be hacked again, or at least not by the same methods, we were likely on the home stretch. But there was still Silver. He was awfully clever. I wouldn’t feel safe until he was dead. I started to tell Valiant all that had happened. It took a long time.
Bengar and I were waiting patiently for the autodoc to finish with Marthar. At last it did, and the panel slipped back and Marthar sat up.
“Marthar!” I cried. “How are you? Are you back to normal? Can you talk and think?”
“Peter, now I know what it feels like to be even dumber than you, and it’s truly terrible,” Marthar said with a yawn and a flick of the ear. “Sorry. I want to thank you. I remember what you did, every bit of it, and I owe you. Oh! I am as deep in your debt as anyone could be. And you are my Hero! You are braver than I am, much. Whenever I tease you, remember that. Now, how do I get out of this wretched box?”
It didn’t seem to be much of a problem. She sprang out and marched up to Bengar.
“Bengar, if you are willing, I would have you be my personal guard and also my friend. And if not, when I tell my Sire, Orion Ritt, he will reward you so you need never labor again.”
Bengar stood silent for a moment, struggling to take in something too big to understand. Then he made a claw-across-the-face military salute, went down before her in the Full Prostration, clutching her ankles. “My Lady, I have no combat skills such as your guard will surely need, but I will gladly be your servant, as I am anyway. For I swore fealty to you, and that can never be undone save by death.”
Marthar did something I have never seen any kzin or kzinrett do before: she motioned him to his feet, then held out her arm horizontally with the fist clenched and the palm down. Bengar bent and licked her paw. They looked at one another, both showing pleasure. I didn’t know what it meant exactly, but I thought it meant that they had some relationship that went beyond fealty and acceptance. One of those feudal things that some of the more backward kzin worlds still followed, I daresay.
“I took my belt off down in the lander hangar, and I want it back,” Marthar announced positively. She was back in her body alright, as full of bounce and certainty as ever. So we went down in the elevator until we got to the hangar and went in. The body of Vaarth had been removed; Marthar was slightly disappointed. “I would have liked his ears. Well, one of them for you, Peter, and one for me, I guess. Joint effort. Or at least a photograph.” She hoped the body was in a bin somewhere, but it was already in recycling. The belt with its wtsai had been removed too, but it had only been moved to storage, and she took it with pleasure. “I shall have to get it mended; I seem to have clawed right through it.”
“I could do with a proper belt again, indeed four of them,” Bengar said ruefully. “I have made do with vegetable belts, and a terrible thing that is, to be sure. And now I am ready to rejoin civilization. Perhaps I can get something a little more in keeping for My Lady’s servant, don’t you think?”
“See to it, Valiant,” Marthar told the ship. “I want to see the full equipment for a senior servant of my house as soon as possible. Oh, and a new belt for me too. Just don’t lose the old one. I shall keep it as a memento.” Bengar would do all right, I thought. There were several old and war-battered kzin on Wunderland to whom the Riit Clan felt it owed a debt. Under Vaemar and his sons, it paid its debts.
“I’m surprised you want to be reminded of the whole ghastly business,” I said. Marthar looked at me thoughtfully.
“I shall explain it to you someday, Peter, my Hero. You are a fine and noble being, but not overbright. And you don’t understand me a bit. But then,” she relented, “I keep thinking I understand you and discovering I don’t. Maybe we are just not mutually intelligible in the end. Still, we get along, don’t we?”
I grinned at her. Once upon a time, a human couldn’t grin at a kzin without risking his life, but those days are long gone back on Wunderland. Well, the bits I know about anyway.
“Yes, we get along pretty well,” I told her and gave her a hug, which she returned, along with a brief lick of the forehead. I still don’t know exactly what it means, but I think there’s something like affection in there somewhere.
“Valiant, can you make us some more landers? And how long would it take?” Marthar asked.
“Yes, I can have another lander operational in about a week,” Valiant spoke in her warm, feminine voice.
“Well get started, because we’ve lost two. But we want one quickly. We could ferry people up here one at a time in the pinnace, but it would be a problem as the numbers down planetside get too small to hold off the pirates. The best bet is to take everyone off at once.”
I had a question. Meeting K’zarr’s ghost had given me an idea. “Valiant, if we made a ghost, could it be maintained on the planet? A solid one, not one you could walk through.”
Valiant thought about it. “It would need more computer power than you have down there at present. A dedicated machine could be built in twenty-four hours and sent down in the pinnace. It would not be big, nor would it take up much space.”
“What’s in your mind, Peter?” Marthar asked.
“I was thinking of ghosting Silver. It might be useful to have a Silver that could be mistaken for the real one but was under our control. And ours could be even faster than the real one; move faster, I mean. Maybe we could get them to fight it out down there, or give orders contradicting the real one. Lead the pirates around in circles.”
Marthar looked at me. “I’ll say this for you, Peter, you do a fair amount of lateral thinking. Some of your ideas are really weird. Do we have enough information to make a good one that would fool people?”
“Silver must have got at the records to make the ghost K’zarr. And he fooled Bengar for a bit. And he terrified me. I guess Valiant would know i
f we have enough data on Silver.”
Valiant spoke. “I could produce something that looked like him and moved like him and sounded like him. There would be the things he knows that I don’t, which would allow those who know him well to tell the difference in any sort of interrogation,” she told us. Marthar and I looked at each other.
“You know, it’s so utterly silly, nobody would even think of it. Of course, it would mean holding us up for a day. I really want to let Daddy know I’m safe. He’ll be worrying. He won’t show it, of course, but that sort of thing eats you up and deforms your judgment. So it’s important to get back soon, and also to have some regular communication with Valiant from planetside.”
“Valiant, is there any way of getting those pirates out of the green lander? I asked her. “From here, I mean. They seem to be pretty much impossible to shift from down there.”
“I have no real control from this location. But if a Silver were to be manufactured, he could be programmed to order them out. That would give you a fully functioning lander once I released the lock. And you could kill the pirates in her at present, which would improve the odds.”
Valiant was cold and heartless and very, very practical. Well, she was a computer program.
“I like it,” Marthar said enthusiastically. I didn’t think I could kill anyone who was helpless, even a pirate. Except Silver, I’d kill him the first chance I got.
“Valiant, I need to let Sire and S’maak-Captain know I’m back in play. We have no communications to them. Is there anything we can do?” Marthar wanted to know.
Valiant considered a few squillion possibilities, most of them ridiculous. “I could send a message by laser. I managed to hit the red lander in the last few microseconds before I was disabled. So I could put a laser beam with enough power to fuse rock in the vicinity of the blue lander. You could send a handwritten message. Of course, it would not be exactly private, nor would it be temporary. It would last tens of thousands of years, perhaps longer.”
The thought of handwriting a message on the desert that would last a million years was bound to appeal to Marthar.
“Won’t it be too big to read?” she asked, obviously thinking about what to write.
“Make it a short message; the very fact that it is being written from the ship will say quite a lot, I should think,” Valiant said.
“I think I have just the thing,” Marthar said with a wolfish look.
And that’s why there’s a smiley, a hundred yards across, made of melted rock, not far from one of the Garthian canals, and visible from L1 in a reasonably good telescope. It was written quite slowly so anybody there had a good time to get out of the way of the beam. I gather it made enough noise to get even the pirates in the green lander outside for a look. I have no idea what they made of it, but the Judge laughed every day for a week.
Marthar decided that we would wait for the computer on which we would run a fake Silver, so we had a day to kill. I wanted some sleep, so we agreed that I would go into a human autodoc for a few hours to repair the small amount of damage to me and also to get me out of the way and cleaned out of toxins. Our oxygen packs and glucose feeds were replenished and Bengar fitted with his own, which heartened him even more. He was also cleaned of some small parasites. Bengar obviously felt trusted and that his life had improved rather a lot in taking an oath of fealty. He worshipped Marthar, and he had seen her at her best and her worst, which in turn comforted Marthar.
Before I went into the autodoc, I talked quietly with Marthar.
“Peter,” she said. Then she stopped.
“Yes, what is it?” I asked, puzzled.
“Peter, I don’t know if I do remember everything. Maybe the autodoc told me to think I did. Maybe I’m benefitting from a well-meant post-hypnotic suggestion. It’s not the sort of thing you can ever be sure about, is it?”
“So what do I do?” I asked.
She took a deep breath and looked directly at me. “Peter, on your word of honor, did I ever do anything to shame myself while I was under the influence? Or not under the right influence?”
I could see that she was genuinely concerned and worried that she might be fooling herself, with a little help from the autodoc.
“Marthar, you did one thing that horrified me at the time: you pretended to be attracted to Vaarth. But I can see that it was a desperate move to get close enough to him to use the only weapons you had, those you were born with.”
Her eyes went out of focus. “Hmm. The thing is, Peter, I was attracted to him, in a way. I felt a strange . . . excitement. But yes, I used it to deceive him. There was still enough of me left to do that.”
“It’s over now, Marthar, my darling. I know it was horrible having your mind go on you, but it will never happen again.”
“No, it will never happen again,” she whispered, more to herself than to me. “But you don’t understand, Peter. It wasn’t horrible at all. I was losing all the things that make me an individual, and I was going back to being pure animal. And I loved it. No worrying about consequences, no inhibitions, no thought at all; only sensual pleasures heightened by the total switching off of consciousness. It was so good, Peter. That was what was horrible. I enjoyed it.”
I didn’t understand it then, but later I came to see the same temptation in human beings. Some of them love to surrender their individuality to a giant collective, or to submit their own judgments to a religion, or a political belief. I suppose it has the same appeal. You never have to think. You never have to worry about consequences. Perhaps it is the doom of all sentient species.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
We went back the next day. We took the computer that Valiant had made; it sat in a pack on my back. We also took two com-systems so we could stay in touch with Valiant and pile of weapons, mostly needlers but also some blasters. Bengar was resplendent in some new belts and pouches. I sat on Marthar’s lap again. It was a bit of a squash, with two of the blasters at our feet.
There had been some debate about where we were going. Bengar assumed we were going to take the pinnace back to where he had hidden it, but Marthar wanted to return directly to the wreck of the blue lander. Bengar was worried about the safety of the pinnace, but Marthar persuaded him.
“The safest place for it is with the Valiant, so here’s what we do: we land and go out with the blasters ready in case Silver is anywhere near. We get the rest of them, including Daddy and S’maak-Captain, armed and dangerous; then we get the Andersons to return to the Valiant with you. You wait there until the new lander is ready. Then you fly the lander back here, pick us all up, and we go to your hidey-hole and collect the treasure. When we have a good share of it, we all go back to the Valiant and blast the red and green landers and anything that moves on planet before sailing for home. How does that sound?”
“But, Ladyship. that means I shall be away from you for a whole week. My place is by your side, so it is,” Bengar fretted.
“We can manage a week without you, Bengar,” Marthar said firmly. Bengar could see there was no point in arguing, so in a resigned way he said, “Yes, Ladyship, ’twill be as you command.” He was going to have to get used to giving in, I decided. I already felt sorry for Mathar’s mate when she chose him. If he had old-fashioned ideas about kzinretti, he was going to have to change them, fast.
We squashed into the pinnace. Bengar went through the checks and we drifted up. There was a hum from outside which faded as the air was pumped out, and then the great door opened and we slid sideways until we were out in space. We were in the shadow, with the sun on the other side of the Valiant, so we could see the planet, ochre and green, below us, a disc, with only traces of clouds. There were dark blue patches which must have been lakes or small, shallow seas, and we could even see some of the craters and canals. The disc was set in the swirl-rift, the gorgeous swathes of diaphanous fabric, billions of miles wide and lit by stars like gems on a dress and with dark clouds interwoven with it all. It was beautiful in a cold, mind-numbing
way. It made the planet look friendly by comparison, though it was more Martian than it was like Wunderland or Earth. The only sound was our breathing as Bengar let us drift further away from the Valiant. I don’t think he saw anything beautiful in the sight; I don’t think he even bothered to look at it. Then a hum, as he rotated the pinnace.
In L1, your orbital speed around the sun is greater than that of the planet you are close to. If you want to get to the planet, you don’t just point the ship at it and fire your rockets. You fire sideways so as to slow your speed relative to the primary when you drift out from the primary. Orbital mechanics are easy enough once you understand that you are actually moving in a gravitational field even though you don’t feel it, but I have seen old movies about space travel that make everyone laugh now because they show spacecraft maneuvering like aircraft, which is ridiculous. The reason that L1 even exists is that although anything in it is moving faster than the planet, which would tend to move it away; the planet pulls it back. There are nice pictures which illustrate this. Marthar showed me some of them when S’maak-Captain said we would be taking up L1 position. If the planet had a sensible rotation period, we’d have gone into the orbit that matched it in order to stay fixed over the equator, but Garth was so slow that there was practically no sensible place to go.
Gradually at first, we drifted away from L1 and the Valiant, and fell towards the treasure planet.
We landed halfway between the edge of the picture of the smiley face and the wreck of the blue lander. There was no airlock on the pinnace—it was too small; you just opened a valve and the pressures equalized, which meant swallowing fast and hearing your ears pop. When this had happened, I opened the seatbelts, then the door, and sprang out.
“It’s good to have that damned backpack off of me; it was getting painful,” Marthar said. “Here, take a needler.”
