Treasure Planet

by Larry Niven

  “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 if 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 mig
ht 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 Marthar’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.”

  I did and stuck it in my belt, and grinned at Marthar. I took off the offending backpack and dropped it at her feet. I also took a blaster, a kzin one, which required both hands to hold it. I was going to present it to S’maak-Captain.

  I ran towards the hole that was more or less the door in the wrecked lander, carrying the blaster. There was nobody on guard, which was a puzzle, but I could hear voices coming from inside. Kzin voices. I slowed down as some instinct told me that something was wrong.

  Then one of the snarling, hissing voices became louder and a kzin came out sideways and stood up. I didn’t recognize him, and realize this as he moved in a blur and took the blaster from me. I just stood and gaped. Then another figure came out, who I did recognize. It was Silver.

  He took in the pinnace, me and the blaster that the other kzin was holding. That was when the pinnace shot into the sky, soundlessly, faster than you could believe. Silver grabbed the blaster and raised it towards the pinnace, but he didn’t fire. He watched it streak up until it had vanished, to my eyes at least.

  Silver turned to me, sticking the blaster in his belt. “Well, well, ’tis young Peter back again, after all this time. And wi’ some interestin’ stories to tell us, I’ll lay to that. And what looked rather like one o’ K’zarr’s boats, I’d say.” He turned his head on one side and opened his eyes wide as he looked at me. “Interestin’ indeed, an’ I’ll be sittin’, an’ listenin’, wi’ my full attention while ye tells me what’s been happenin’ to ye. And I thank ’ee kindly for this present, what you made me.” He tapped the blaster with a claw tip. He was as jocular and friendly as he had been when we first met him.

  The other kzin snarled something and made a move towards me. I thought my last moment had come.

  “Belay that, this man-kit is my friend, I tells ye,” said Silver, pushing him away amiably. The other kzin looked at him resentfully, but didn’t try to dispute the matter. He glared at me, and at Silver’s back, then went back into the wrecked lander, where we could hear him roaring at the others.

  “Let’s you an’ me walk a little way to get out o’ the noise and babble o’ the rabble, shall we? But not too far, for as ye know, when I set down, ’tes hard for me to get up again.” He walked further down to the nose of the crashed lander, broken and cracked, took off the gr
eat cutlass on his back, stuck it in the rocky soil, then lowered himself down next to it, sitting not on the ground but on a broken shard of the lander, and motioned me to join him. I didn’t have much choice, so I sat down on the ground facing him. A kzin can usually crouch quite easily, but I suppose his artificial leg was stiff. It must have been an emergency repair rather than a proper prosthesis, perhaps done on a backward world, far inferior to those fitted to kzin war veterans on Wunderland. But he was poised to rise again quickly.

  Silver looked at me quizzically, his gaze flicking over my belt and the needler before returning to my face. He made no move to confiscate the needler. I don’t suppose I could have killed him with it before he killed me anyway.

  “I suggests we has a little trade, Peter Cartwright, yes, a little trade o’ information: you tells me o’ the explanation for ye vanishing, an’ who was the other kzin wi’ ye when ye vanished. And how ye came by the pinnace, and how ye got back to the Warrior Beast, which must be dead now and restored to the old Valiant, if the thing over there is to be used in evidence,” he indicated the smiley face carved in molten stone. “Then I’ll explain to ye how it comes that we’re here and your friends are not. So fire away, me little friend, blast me wi’ surprises, and then I’ll answer any questions ye may have o’ me, and we’ll both be up to date.”

  I thought about it. I wanted desperately to know if Orion, the Judge, the Doctor and the others were still alive. But could I believe Silver would tell me the truth? Kzin almost always do; their pride would make them disdain to tell a lie except as an occasional tactic with an enemy. But I thought Silver regarded everyone as an enemy and would lie and tell anyone what he thought they wanted to hear.

  I didn’t have much choice. “All right, one question each alternately. And I go first. Are the captain and Orion and the others still alive?”