by Larry Niven
There was enough truth in this to depress my hopes more than a little. If the pirates were not to be intimidated by the ghost of K’zarr, then my friends were wasting their time.
“Well, here’s where we get to find out just how real this ghost is,” said Silver, looking into the wood. “For here he comes. Nay, messmates, I’ll be the one to face him down, you’ll see. Stand back a little.” Silver released the rope around my neck and motioned me back too.
And sure enough, a tall, thin kzin came towards Silver. K’zarr was here. There was no mistaking him. I checked but there was no hint of transparency, he was as solid as Silver so far as I could see. He grinned at Silver, a battle signal from a kzin. From his back he drew a cutlass nearly as long as he was tall. He swung it idly in one hand and looked at Silver. His eyes glowed. There was something red and shining in them. It didn’t faze Silver.
“So, Silver, the smooth one, the Hero, the lordling. The subtle one, eh, Silver?” K’zarr snarled softly. “Would you take up a cutlass against me and see which of us goes to hell, you for the first time, me for the third or maybe the fourth now? For they lets me out o’ hell, they does, to walk the world o’ mortals. Now then Silver, go draw yer cutlass and have at me if you dare.”
Silver stared at him, puzzled. “You ain’t K’zarr,” he told the figure. “You talk too much. And no, I’ll not match cutlasses wi’ ye.”
With that, he drew the blaster from his belt, and fired it at the figure’s body.
A needler fires slivers of steel accelerated in a magnetic field, and they can do a lot of damage, even to a kzin. But a blaster is something else. It fires fast spinning toroids of plasma and, like smoke rings, they maintain their shape for a time; unlike smoke rings, they travel very fast and are very hot. Most of the energy is kinetic in the spinning and, although one of them has little actual matter in it, it is hot, fast matter and it shears through the chemical bonds which hold matter together. So anything made of ordinary matter evaporates in a fraction of a second. They are really for use in space, in air the stability forces are weakened, and it is lethal only over a range of a few hundred paces, but in space, the range is measured in astronomical units. I have seen videos of blasters used against matter, and it is impressive. Sometimes it is used for mining, and I have seen solid rock bubble and melt in a second and then turn into a gas that explodes all around it. I have never seen it used on fuzz. I had no idea what it would do; maybe go right through it.
The cutlass K’zarr held was a real one, that is, it was made of steel, so it whitened instantly and then evaporated in a burst of heat that knocked me back. The body of the pirate was fuzz, pseudomatter, and it just ablated. Bits peeled off and flew away like dust and I could see something like a skeleton revealed. The skin came off, then the body tissues, front and back. Then the skeleton, though it looked different from an ordinary skeleton; the bones were thinner and didn’t join up in the usual way. I was watching this in fascination, not afraid so much as awestruck. Silver grimaced as the thing slowly vanished, and the crew looked on.
Eventually there was nothing left except steaming earth and a faint dust in the air. Silver switched off the blaster and blew on it to cool it. It was too hot to stick back in his belt, so he held it loosely.
“By the powers, that was something new, I’ll be bound,” said Rraangar.
“Yes, I have heard of it, but never seen it used like that before. But the ship had the stuff, and I was learning to program it. It’s programmable matter, d’ye see? Ye can make it do all sorts o’ things. Make it look like a ghost, if yer mind works that way.” He looked down at me thoughtfully. He was making the connection with his own experiments and the thing we had just faced. We must have got into the command center in order to restore Valiant, and we would have seen his version of K’zarr. And Marthar was not here, or at least, not in plain sight. But she would know about K’zarr’s ghost even if she had not seen it. Making and controlling a robotic thing made of pseudomatter would have been a fun job of programming, with a little help from Valiant. I could see it and Silver could, too. He knew who his real enemy was. He also knew two other things. The first was that Marthar could make a robot that was faster even than a kzin, and could have won in a fight with cutlasses. The second was that there was a lot of fuzz about the place, just needing to be organized. It would take a while, but K’zarr or something even deadlier would be back.
The crew were excited and immensely pleased by Silver’s easy victory. All their confidence had been restored and they were jubilant.
“Ah, Cap’n, that were masterly, so it were. Now there is nothin’ twixt us and the treasure, ain’t it so?”
“The sooner we gets there the better, ’tis true. So onward to the tower, Heroes!”
Silver picked up the other end of my tether and pulled me towards him as the rest of them trooped off towards the tower.
“Peter, I know who I was fighting back there, and your little friend is a hard fighter, and happy to cheat. Now I think it would be good if you could let her know betimes that I am on your side and saving you from some very hungry kzin, wi’ no sense, no judgment but wi’ large appetites.”
I looked up at him. He waited patiently, as relaxed as a cat, with all the time in the world.
“That’s not what you told the crew,” I said. “The question is, who are you lying to?”
He sighed. “There’s no answer to that will please you, is there? There’s loyalty to friends, to ideals and then there’s self-interest. The last is the on’y one ye can rely upon. That’s all I’ll say. Now, come along, I don’t want to have to pull on this here rope.”
I followed him as he limped after the treasure hunters.
There was no sign of my friends in the tower. We walked through the huge arch of the entrance to hear only the babble of the crew above us. I took some comfort from the silence. The birds had flown, and I was relieved that they had found a way out. It must have been Bengar leading them via the discs. He and Marthar must have joined them and led them to safety.
We climbed the ramp to the next level, where we found the pirates looking in amazement at the same scene we had observed in the memo pad. There were tables around the walls, saddles on poles sticking out below them, and many of the metallic bars stacked in pigeon holes above the tables. There was one difference: instead of those terrifying snakes which had been lying on the tables, there were things that looked like coal scuttles or waste bins, and the snakes were attached to them, one on each side. At the moment, the snakes were flaccid and still.
The bins had a section cut out of them; they were thick, about two inches of metal or something that looked like it, and even thicker where the snakes joined them. The crew were staying well away from them, looking nervous.
“Ah, someone has made some changes since last time,” Silver remarked, and he picked up one of the bins and looked at it. He turned it upside down, and it became clear they were helmets of some sort, the cut-out section allowing room for the muzzle of a kzin. The snakes dangled helplessly below them. They looked harmless, but I could not erase the memory of two of them hunting for the burnt kzin’s eyes and burrowing into them, blinding him.
“A much better arrangement,” Silver commented, looking into the helmet. “Rraangar, be so good as to put this on your head while sitting on that saddle.”
“Not I, Cap’n,” Rraangar was vehement. “I ha’ seen wi’ my own lamps what they things did to old Gra-Prompyh, so I have.”
“D’ye not want the treasure?” Silver demanded. “We needs to know which o’ these is valuable and which not. We need to search for an index, some way of saving us to have to try every one o’ these things. Look, there be millions o’ them. And many o’ them worthless, I’ll be bound. We wants them that ’as engineering content, so we does. And since we doesn’t read the script over them little cubby holes, we needs to learn it, or find some shortcut.”
“Not me, Silver-Captain,” said Rraangar, obstinately. “Ye are the one t
o do the job. Likely none of us could make any sense o’ what may be in any o’ these bars anyway.”
“Why not try it on the man-kit first?” one of them suggested, and my stomach knotted with fear.
“Fair enough,” Silver agreed. “Peter, little monkey, just you sit on this here saddle and we’ll see if the thing fits ye well enough. I be certain sure ’tis safe, else why should they be here? It has to be your friends made the changes, after all. And they would not want their little kit damaged, now would they?”
The reasoning didn’t convince me. But what choice did I have? They could easily force my head into the thing. And if the snake things reached out into my brain through the sides of the helmet, well, I would probably be dead and at least no longer a hazard to my friends. My voice trembled, but I agreed.
“Very well, Silver. At least I can show you that a human being has less fear of the unknown than kzin Heroes.”
They scowled at this, except for Silver, who merely looked judicious.
“If no harm comes to ye, then I’ll try it myself, so I will. But I am sure it will not. Now sit ye down, and I’ll lower it gradually, and ye can say what it is that happens.”
He took the rope from around my neck, and threw it on the floor. I sat down, trying not to show fear. It wasn’t easy, with that image before my mind. But at least I would show them.
The saddle was too big for me, but it seemed to adapt. I put my hands on the table before me. Silver placed one of the bars in the slight indentation in the table, and turned to look at me with the helmet in his hands.
“I’m thinkin’ it will be harmless, Peter, but if it be not, then I shall be sure to tell any that cares how ye were a brave man-kit and put to shame some of the warriors. Now, talk while ye observe, that others may follow ye.” And he slipped the helmet over my head, the cut-out section over my face and mouth. It was far too big for me, but the metal part came over my eyes so I could see only blackness and hear little. The helmet too seemed to be adapting itself to me, as had the saddle.
“Tap on the table if ye can still hear me.” Silver’s voice sounded odd to me inside the helmet; it echoed strangely, but I obediently tapped a finger.
“Now the connections are going to the bar, now they have joined up. Tap again if there is anything happening.”
Nothing did happen at first, so I waited. Then the blackness lightened. At least the snakes seemed content with the connections to the helmet and weren’t trying to eat into my brain. I tapped.
“Tell us what is happening, Peter,” Silver’s voice echoed boomily.
“There’s a light come on. Can you hear me?”
“Aye, clear as a bell. Just ye let us know what comes.”
I looked at the light, a sort of pale blue. Then something like icons appeared, a bit like a computer screen or a phone. What they meant I had no idea. There was a faint humming noise, which seemed to have been there for a while but got loud enough to register. I told Silver about the sound and the icons. I stared at one of the icons and it changed. It went through a series of contortions, but at no stage did it look even remotely familiar. I looked at another, and it started changing too. Then it became a bucket helmet with the snakes attached to a bar, and as I focused on it, the snakes withdrew and the glow faded.
I felt the helmet lift, and, blinking, saw the room again.
“Those connections withdrew o’ their own accord, less ye had something t’ do with it,” Silver said, eyeing me with a thoughtful look.
“I think it was the disconnect icon. I think I told it to stop, though I didn’t mean to,” I admitted.
“Ah, then we know how to stop the thing. Worth knowin’, I think ye’ll agree. Let’s start it again and see what these other icons do, shall we?” And he lowered the helmet again, and again it seemed to close in on my head and face, leaving my mouth and nose clear.
Again, the blue light came on, the icons showed and the humming started, quite a sweet noise, I suppose. I was making progress; I at least knew how to get out of the thing. Now to figure out what some of the other icons meant. It had to be fairly straightforward, surely? The icons were in a horizontal line, and the one at the extreme left was the disconnect, so I looked now at the one at the opposite end. It looked like a spoked wheel. As I focused on it, it started to turn slowly. The blue light dimmed and then came back much brighter, and underneath the icons, some sort of a script, I think. At least it looked a little like the markings on the discs, rather like a speech waveform. It lasted some seconds, then faded. I was getting interested, and had quite forgotten to keep Silver and the others informed of what I was seeing. He reminded me. “What now, young Peter?”
“There is an icon which I think is the start button, and I pressed it by looking at it. And then it showed me some sort of script, I think, and now it is a picture of something. Oh, I think they are alive. A bit like fish, dancing underwater. Only very, very slowly. Perhaps I can speed it up.” I glanced up at the spoked wheel icon and willed it to turn faster, and it did. The fish danced faster too. I willed it to slow down and again, just wanting it to happen seemed to work. The helmet seemed to have its own intelligence; it could sense what I was looking at and somehow could work out what I wanted. I wondered if I could make it go backwards and discovered I could. I told Silver I had some degree of control over the video or whatever it was I was watching.
Looking at things like dolphins or fish dancing is not particularly exciting and they didn’t seem to be doing anything else, so I looked at the other icons. There were about a dozen of them altogether. One of them changed colors. I could drive it through orange and red, so the fish were warm glowing red ghosts against a black background, and on until it was all black. Maybe it was showing me infrared pictures my eyes couldn’t detect. I then went right through the other way to violet colors and got a brief headache before I went back to the middle region of silvery fish on a blue-green ground. That was another icon learned. My spirits lifted. I was getting good at this; I was communicating with artifacts left behind by an alien race, perhaps a million years ago. Maybe much longer.
I found I could zoom in and out using another icon, but after that it got harder. I reported my findings to Silver and the rest of them. Being useful to them might have some advantages, I thought, between my experiments with the remaining icons.
One of them produced sound. I was at too high a frequency at first, and it was first a hiss, then a high-pitched howl, and I found it deafening, and discovered that part of the icon turned the sound levels down or up. When it was at a tolerable level, it sounded like whale song, which might have gone with the fish or dolphins, I suppose. We have dolphins on Wunderland, and some had served in spaceships.
I found another icon, which seemed to have something to do with smell, but since my nose was outside the helmet, it seemed a bit strange. Silver couldn’t smell anything, he said.
There were other icons I just gave up on; some senses I didn’t have perhaps.
I think the dancing fish were beginning to bore Silver. They certainly had little interest for me, but I suspected that this was some sort of test pattern to allow the newbie to figure out how to use the icons. So I had to figure out how to get on to the main menu. I explained this to Silver, and he seemed satisfied that I was trying. The truth is, I was enjoying it. Perhaps part of it was relief that I wasn’t having my brain invaded by snakes and part was the feeling that the more I learned the more useful I would be to the pirates and the less likely they were to eat me in a few bites. But some of it was just the fascination of learning new stuff.
“Should we mebbe try another bar?” Silver’s voice boomed hollowly.
“No, I still haven’t figured out how to get this one off the introductory sequence,” I told him impatiently. I suspected I’d have to go through the whole process again with any other bar, as turned out to be the case.
I looked at the wheel icon again and noticed that there were symbols on the edges corresponding to the spokes, although wha
t they meant I had no idea. As I watched them, they changed, passing through a lot of different symbols, including one that looked to be the speech waveform script. Ah! That gave me an idea.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I exited the system and Silver removed the helmet. I discovered I was hungry. I had been under the thing for hours, and I told them I needed a rest and some food. The kzin hadn’t eaten for some time either, so we went down the ramp and outside, where the kzin started hunting. They were as efficient as Marthar had been, although they just bit the heads off the animals they found. I had to eat raw scraps, which was not a whole lot of fun, but at least put an end to my hunger. After pointing out to the rest of them that I had value, and was not to be harmed, Silver disappeared for about a short time back into the tower. For what purpose I didn’t discover until later. In his absence the team made jokes about taking off little bits of me that couldn’t affect my performance with the helmet.
“So long as we don’t bite his head off, ’twill do no harm,” one of them said loudly to another. “An arm or a leg would make no never mind, so long as we leave enough to sit down.”
The others thought this very witty. I didn’t, but I just ignored them.
Silver came back and ordered me back up to the helmet. I went with him and the others stayed, lolling about, growling at each other.
“Well, what are you planning now, young Peter,” he said genially. “When are we going to find out what is in that damned bar?”
“I think I know how to learn how to read their script,” I told him. “When I know, we can see from the writing on the pigeonholes what sorts of things we have.”
“That will take too long,” Silver said flatly. “We haven’t unlimited time.”
