by Larry Niven
Silver seated himself on the ground with some difficulty. He didn’t have his cutlass with him, and his wtsai was not in evidence. “Well, well, a sweet pretty gig ye’ve got yerselves here, ain’t it? And there’s Lord Orion himself, me respects to you Milord. And to you, Judge, and the Doctor too. And there’s Peter, I see. Top of the mornin’ to ye, Peter, so to speak, though ’twill be mornin’ for quite some time yet, I’m thinking. Why, there ye all are, all together, like a happy family as it might be!”
“If you have anything to say, then say it!” S’maak said.
“Aye aye, right you are, S’maak-Captain. Dooty is dooty, to be sure. Well now, you look here, that were a good lay of yours that ye did when we was sleeping. I don’t know how ye managed it, silent as the grave ye were. Some of ye is pretty handy wi’ a wtsai, and ’tis not easy to kill one of us wi’out waking any. And more than one, ye got, I allow. And I don’t deny there was some of us shook by it. Maybe all was shook. Maybe I was shook meself. Maybe that’s why I’m here for terms. But mark me, S’maak-Captain, it won’t do twice, by thunder! We’ll have to do sentry-go and ease off a point on the rum. Maybe you’ll be thinking we was all of us a sheet in the wind’s eye, but I wasn’t; I was sober as…as the Doctor there. I was tired, that I’ll grant ye, and if I’d woke a second sooner, I’d ha’ caught ye in the act, so I would.”
“And so?” asked S’maak-Captain, as cool as a cucumber. He might not have worked Silver’s intentions out yet, but you could never have said so from his manner. I slowly realized that Bengar had been at work in their sleeping period. And he must have moved among them like an avenging ghost not to be detected. Of course they would have been drunk; Silver had ensured that there was rum on their lander. At least two had gone down by the sound of it. The odds were improving.
“Well, here it is,” said Silver, with his head to one side and his eyes opened wide. “We wants that treasure, and we shall have it. You, I would say, wants your lives, and ye may have them. But we cannot get back to the Valiant and no more can you. But if we was to cooperate, then maybe we could get around the little difficulty. I’d be willing to let ye have Valiant back if ye’ll take it that we will be with ye and watching ye closely. Oh, briefly, briefly, there’s limits to how trusting the lads would be, d’ye see? But if I can get through to what remains of the computer in the other lander, and that would be easy enough since my men have her, and if I restore the ship to the Valiant as was, and if ye let her free the lander, why then we could all get back into space again. And us with the treasure or enough of it. Now I’ve never wished any of ye harm meself. Just the treasure it is, and always was.”
“That won’t do, get of a sthondat,” S’maak told him contemptuously, an insult I knew to be one of the most mortal and unforgivable in all the kzin’s rich vocabulary. “We know exactly what you planned. And we came within an ace of destroying your lander before you subverted Valiant.”
“Ah, well, you will be glad to know that your precious Valiant got off a shot and damned near destroyed us before my hack took effect,” Silver replied, still politely.
“Pity we didn’t have another second or two, for it’s deep in hell with the mist demons where you belong, every damned mutinous one of you,” S’maak said. “There’ll be a second ship along to pick us up before long, and then we’ll be only too happy to leave you here, if I don’t command your execution by destroying you from space.”
I worried that S’maak was being too intransigent. If we went with Silver’s idea, we might get Marthar back to the Valiant much sooner. I knew she was listening to all this behind the door, and I could imagine her feelings. But could we trust Silver? I had heard him while I was in the meat-locker, and I would never trust him again. Was there some way to bind him, to cheat him? I’d have broken my word to Silver without a moment’s hesitation if it would save Marthar. Of course, Silver didn’t know how desperate we were to get Marthar back to the Valiant, and he must not know. Which explained S’maak’s manner. He wasn’t going to give an inch until he had worked out how to spoil Silver’s plan.
This whiff of temper seemed to calm Silver. He had been growing nettled before, but now he pulled himself together.
“Like enough, like enough,” he said. “I’d set no limits on what a lord might consider shipshape or not, as the case were. I don’t suppose ye’d have a drop o’ rum wi’ ye? Ah well, I think not; not your style, is it now?”
He and S’maak looked at each other for a long moment.
“Now, here it is. You agree to let us get the treasure into the green lander, ye agree to cooperate with us and stop shooting poor spacers, you help us restore Valiant to some semblance of her old intelligence for a while, and we’ll offer ye all a choice. Either ye can come aboard when we ha’ the treasure shipped and then I’ll gi’ ye all me word to drop ye off somewhere not too far away, some world that ye can use to get back t’ Ka’ashi, d’ye see? Or if that ain’t yer fancy, seein’ as how some o’ the lads are a bit rough and ha’ some scores to settle, then ye can stay here and wait on your fine new ship coming in due course. We’ll divide stores and leave ye enough to live like princes, and I’ll even signal any nearby world that ye are here and waiting. Me word on it. Now you’ll own that’s handsome talking. Handsomer ye couldn’t look to get. And I hope,” he continued, raising his voice, “that all here have got that clear, for what is spoke to one is spoke to all.”
S’maak-Captain was immovable. “Is that all?” he asked.
“My last word, by thunder!” Silver roared. “Refuse that and ye’ve seen the last o’ me ’til ye ha’ my wtsai in yer entrails, and ye may lay to that.”
“Very well,” S’maak said. “Now you hear me. My name is S’maak-Captain. I have sworn allegiance to Vaemar-Riit because I believe peace between kzin and man is the only hope for both species. If you will come up one by one, unarmed, I’ll undertake to clap you all in irons and take you all back to Wunderland for a trial. I think, seeing Valiant is a human ship, that it would be before a combined human-Wunderkzin court. If you won’t, then as I am S’maak-Captain, I shall see you all on ship to hell. You can’t get your treasure back even if you could identify it; you can’t sail the Valiant, you don’t know enough; you can’t fight us. You’re in hyperspace with no way home, Silver, and those are the last good words you’ll get from me, for by the Fanged God, the next time I see you I’ll have your heart’s blood. Now get away while you can.”
Silver’s face was a picture, his eyes started in his head with wrath. He put one paw on the ground. “Give me a paw up,” he cried.
“Not I,” said S’maak.
“Who’ll help me to my feet?” Silver roared. Nobody moved. Growling curses, Silver crawled until he got to the hull, whereupon he hauled himself upright.
“We shall see whose heart’s blood spills first,” he swore with a murderous look at S’maak and Orion. Then he stumbled off, returned to his lieutenant, tore the flag off him and threw it far away.
An instant later they had vanished in the bushes.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I slept wrapped around Marthar that night. Not that it was night outside, of course, but we had shuttered the windows and were running ship’s time still, so it was dark and all the humans were asleep, and the kzin were resting. Marthar very gently picked me up, and I felt her rough tongue rasp my forehead briefly. Then she put me down and waited. I kept my eyes closed and pretended to sleep; it was easier because I almost was. I had to take care that my breath was steady; fooling someone with that level of sensory perception was hard. At length she decided I must be asleep and rose. I waited until she had slipped aft into the airlock, slipped my shoes back on and followed her.
When I came to the outer door, which she had opened a bit to get through it, I heard her say something to the guard and waited. Then I went out too. I waved a cheerful greeting at the kzin as he looked at me, poker-faced. He nodded briefly. Marthar was loping away into the distance and I ran after her, as silently
as I could. She could move much faster than I if she wanted to, but she seemed half-drugged now and empty of energy. My blood sugar pack cut in, and I turned up the rate a bit. Running after Marthar was going to be a difficult business even when she was going so slowly, as if every pace was pain.
She went straight to the bushes where we had ambushed the pirates, then she looked up at the lime-green sun and walked on. I went after her with determination. I had an idea of where she was headed, but she didn’t go in a straight line. She didn’t try to conceal her path, she left tracks that I could easily follow, which was as well, because she was still moving faster than I was. Sometimes I would glimpse her fur through the bushes. Kzin were less well-camouflaged here than in the vegetation of their homeworld. I turned the oxygen feed up too, which could be dangerous if I kept it high for too long. But this was an emergency; my friend was going to need me.
We went on for some miles, and as I had expected the path curved. Marthar was headed for the tower but intended to come upon it from the opposite side to Silver’s red lander.
It seemed hours, and I ran and panted in the thin air, despite the oxygen pack. I had lost her, but her track was clear enough in the bright sunlight, the violet shadows thrown by boulders and bushes showing the way. I nearly stumbled several times in my hurry. I was getting desperate that I should be too late when I ran into the ambush.
It was Marthar. She rose out of the bushes and grabbed me. “Noisy, noisy,” she growled.
“Marthar, you can’t leave me,” I said and hugged her. She responded in a half-hearted way.
“Peter,” she said. “Peter.” It sounded odd, as though she were savoring my name. “Peter. I must go. There is no choice. I have to leave everything.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, my heart still pounding from the running.
“I must leave this world. I cannot stay and shame myself before all who know me. And there is only one way. The discs. The gateways to elsewhere. They are my only road, Peter. I must walk them wherever they lead.”
I clutched her and sobbed. “Marthar, there will be death that way. Most worlds will be impossible to live on.”
“That is but a small thing, Peter. We all die in the end. One must decide whether to go with honor or without, and to be without honor is to be without any reason to live. Perhaps for us kzinretti who have been given intelligence equal to males, our honor is even more precious than for others. For us to live dishonored would be even worse than for a male kzin, and for most of them dishonor is worse than death. So there is no choice, don’t you see that?”
I thought of appealing to her as a dutiful daughter, of the disastrous effect her death would have upon her Sire and on the great Vaemar-Riit, but I knew I did not understand kzin psychology and value systems enough to be sure it would help. It might make things worse.
“Then let me go with you, Marthar. If you go without me, then it will be me having to live without my honor. And without my friend.” I looked up into her great golden-green eyes.
She considered. She knew it meant death for both of us, and she knew I knew. But Marthar didn’t fear death, she feared dishonor, and she could see that even for a human this might be taken as a reasonable way of seeing the world.
“You would prefer to die with me than live without me?” she asked, her brow furrowed in concentration. I had seen her working on algebra problems with much the same look.
“Yes,” I told her unflinchingly. I meant it too. If I couldn’t persuade her to come back with me, then I couldn’t leave her. I would go with my friend wherever it led. If we were to die on some alien world with unbreathable air, in the swirling snows and ice of one world or the fire pits and roiling lava of another, better that than spending a lifetime wondering what would have happened, feeling myself a traitor for leaving her.
She saw that I meant it, and for a moment she was shaken. She shook her head slowly, as though to clear it.
“I think I understand you sometimes, little Peter, and then I find I do not. Well, I would welcome the company, though it may not be for long, little monkey. Come then, we go to the dark tower and the discs, and we take what the Fanged God sends us.”
We walked on together after that, side by side. She slowed her pace to mine, and I went forward with a spring in my step. This was as it should be, I felt. I was quite serene about it. I knew that in a way I was being rather cowardly. I couldn’t face going back and telling Orion and the others what Marthar was going to do, nor could I face living with myself after she went, never knowing what she had come up against. Far better to do it with her. We all die, as Marthar said, and she was going to do it with style. And so was I.
We were getting close to the tower when Silver and his men struck. Three of them launched themselves at Marthar, and she didn’t even have time to reach for the wtsai at her belt. She had left her needler behind; I don’t know why. Perhaps because it was out of ammunition, perhaps because she felt it wouldn’t be much use where she was going and it would be better if the others had it to use against the pirates. She went down with a squeal. When it was over, both of us were tied up, our arms behind our backs, our feet tied together. We both had our wtsais, but we couldn’t reach them and they would have been useless if we could. A big brown-striped pirate who I had seen on the Valiant carried Marthar casually over his shoulder, and Silver carried me even more casually over his. It was humiliating. I just hung there with my head down, looking at his belts and his naked rat-like tail with my face banging against his back as he walked. I could sometimes see Marthar’s legs and tail hanging down over the red-striped pirate, who was, I think, making jokes about what he planned to do to her later. I felt sick.
They didn’t take long to get us back to the red lander. They threw us down and broke out the rum and sat in a circle and set about getting drunk. One tied us up, sealing the bindings with a smart electronic lock—a kzin version of the type that only opens when it recognizes the palm-print of its master.
“When do we share the kzinrett around, Silver?” the brown-striped one asked.
“Soon, me brave Heroes, soon, ye ha’ me word on it. But we have something better, we have a bargaining counter, we does. For she be by way of bein’ a princess, so she is, and princesses are worth more than their bodies, indeed. So nobody is to approach her until I have used her meself,” Silver finished. “And not for what ye might think, ha!” There were growls and calls at this, but they were more interested in the rum at this point. They sat in the sunlight, but had thrown Marthar and me contemptuously in the shadow of the lander. I looked up at her and saw her muscles were bunched up as she struggled against the ropes. I struggled myself. Modern “ropes,” though still called by the old name for spun fiber, are considerably stronger than steel. She had a rope around her muzzle so she could not even speak. Male kzin, I knew, were sexually aroused almost entirely by the odor of a female in cycle. Until that happened, they would be almost indifferent in that direction, apart from bawdy jokes.
This was close to the endgame. I knew that Silver would threaten to kill us and worse than kill us if Orion and S’maak did not negotiate. And I don’t believe either would have given anything for either of us. The war had shown that on the rare occasions kzin had been taken hostage by humans, it had almost always been a waste of time. They would reason that we would not want them to, and the humiliation of living knowing that your life had been bought at cost to another would be intolerable to us. As indeed it would for Marthar, and probably for me too. If Silver lived because I lived, I would be angry beyond the point of sanity. Better by far had we got to the tower and stepped together on one of those mysterious transit discs to go who knew where.
It was while I was thinking such thoughts and trying to wriggle free with not the smallest prospect of success that a huge paw came from behind and practically stifled me. I assumed that one of the pirates had slipped away and was going to dispose of me in a light meal. But then the bonds behind me loosened and my arms came free. Martha
r was staring behind me and nodding. Then I was picked up as though I weighed nothing and turned to face Bengar. He put his claw across his mouth to bid me to silence, and I nodded comprehension. He released my face and I drew breath to relieve my lungs. The oxygen feed meant that I wasn’t too badly out of breath.
Bengar pointed to the tower. It was the other side of the lander from the pirates, so it would be possible to get to it unobserved if I were lucky. Then Bengar moved slowly towards Marthar. He was dragging behind him the body of one of the pirates, a guard who had been on some sort of sentry, I presumed. He slowly pushed the body forward between Marthar and the pirates and then pulled Marthar back, where he loosed her bonds using, I noticed, the detached hand of the kzin who had bound us. Then he turned to me and gestured: he wanted me off to the tower. I bent down and ran as quietly as I could.
Behind me there were only the roars and spitting sounds of the pirates as they got drunk, then Marthar sprinted past me towards the tower. I was picked up and thrown over Bengar’s shoulder and had to endure the view of his tail and pumping legs. He couldn’t run as fast as Marthar, but he could certainly go a lot faster than I could, even on two legs with me over a shoulder. We got two-thirds of the way before there was a cry from behind us.
Then screams of rage came as they discovered the bodies of the sentry and the one whose hand Bengar had availed himself of, which from a distance had looked like Marthar and me, until one of them had gone to check on the prisoners. I could hear them pounding towards us, then we were through the doorway, which towered above us as we shot through. Marthar was already out of sight up the ramp. I could hear her, then we were following her. We came onto a landing but Marthar was still ahead, so we went up again. Bengar was wheezing now. The air was too thin for this sort of exercise for someone without an oxygen pack. Then we were on a second landing, with a corridor leading off, and huge open doorways with no sign that there had ever been a door. Marthar was waiting for us.
