Man-Kzin Wars XII Page 12

  "They did, didn't they?" Ginger was a pacifist, but still a kzin. Somebody else's casualty rate had not particularly commended itself to his attention. "Did you notice the floor was warm there, too?"

  "Well, it is the tropics—hey," Perpetua said, frowning.

  " 'Hey' indeed. We were in a tree. Trees are cool."

  "A hypocaust in a forest?"

  "If that was a forest, a farm is a meadow. Those trees were planted just where they wanted them," Ginger said, "and now I know why their industries have never been detected. The foundries are underground, and they use the water from that dam—"

  "What dam?"

  "The one we walked through," he said, surprised.

  "That was a dam? Where was the water?"

  "Underground," Ginger said. "Where most of the dam was. They must have been a couple of centuries diverting the entire aquifer into that channel. It'd be why there's no offshore trench—the runoff must be spread out to blur the heat signature."

  "You just happened to notice that?" Perpetua said incredulously.

  "No, of course not, I was paying very close attention," he said. "The way you were to the language and culture. It's called perspective. It's why we're a team, Pet. And why it works . . . their industrial exhaust gases must be cooled and filtered with water, and they probably use slag and ashes to neutralize the acids that makes . . . Remember what I said about humans and conservation? I was right but I was wrong. Omnivores aren't much motivated to limit their effect on their environment, but humans do turn out to be awfully good at concealing it. If they want to. These do, and they're making more effective use of their resources than any culture I've seen, human or kzinti. Hunt Master couldn't very well say much, but the idea that the humans he was hunting might be making their own firearms worried him. I think they do, and I think they could do a great deal more if they wanted. I think these hunts are used to cull out weak and stupid humans, too—except that the humans are really doing it, not corrupting the system." His tail lashed once.

  "I wonder if that was Warrgh-Churrg's own idea," Perpetua said.

  "I'm off the scent."

  "Well, if the Jotoki are all working together, what about the humans? During the Occupation there were some Wunderlanders who managed to talk their masters into some amazingly bad plans. And that was after just a few years' acquaintance."

  Ginger's tail lashed again. "I now find myself less enthused about rescuing them. Some kzinti's only virtues are courage and honor. It's consistent with what I've read of Roman history, too."

  "Huh?"

  "They raised the children of potential rebels in the homes of Roman nobles. Disgraceful. No respect for heritage."

  Every so often Perpetua was forcibly reminded that her partner was an alien. His regarding Rome's most brilliant peacekeeping innovation as a betrayal of family values accomplished this now. "Oh. I didn't know where, but I knew they had to have decent industrial technology."

  "The lamps?"

  "No, M—what about the lamps?"

  "They gave white light. That takes superior refining techniques. The thorium that goes into lamp mantles is found with other things that are hard to remove, and those would have made the light yellow."

  "How come you know so much about thorium?"

  "It can be bred into fissionable material. I got interested in its other uses when I was a student."

  "Why did you want to know about fissionable material?" she said, a little alarmed.

  "I didn't, particularly. It's just used in making weapons." Seeing her expression, he said, "I'm a kzin! Do I get all suspicious because you know how to cook things? I mean, you might be planning to boil me up, right?"

  "Meat isn't usually boiled," she said, her expression one of distaste.

  "Aha," he said archly. "You've been thinking about this, then?"

  Perpetua made a strangling noise in her throat, then said, "Behave."

  Having made his point, and enjoyed it, he recalled what he'd been saying. "So if it wasn't the lamps, what?"

  "Marcus Augustus didn't talk down to me, and the female slaves we saw were treated about the same as the males. You surely know that humans die easily. Well, pregnant female humans, in a society without high technology, die really easily. Women tend to be regarded as property unless they're aristocrats, and even then they're not included in serious discussions. Nothing that'll endanger them, see?"

  "Not really."

  "I guess you'll have to take my word for it. He didn't treat me like I was helpless, so he's used to women who aren't."

  "Oh, now I see.—I think that purple dye was synthetic, too."

  "You can see purple?" she said.

  "Of course," he said, surprised. "Why not?"

  "Well, Kzin's sun is a lot redder than Sol. I'd have thought it was outside your range."

  "How are we supposed to tell if a kill is diseased?" he said. "Liver color is everything."

  "Oh."

  Ginger reflected for a moment. "I never thought about it before, but now that I do, purple tends to look brighter than other colors. I suppose it doesn't show up well on Kzinhome. We should make a note of that; it could be useful to someone."

  "How?"

  "Well, say if someone is trying to hide from kzinti aerial surveillance in a garden, he'll want to look for violets. They'll blot out what's around them."

  Perpetua frowned, but plugged in a pad and began writing. She was far from the first, of either species, to find such things counterintuitive. (During the Second War, when there was real combat rather than conquest, it had taken considerable time for the combatants to realize that human eyes identify shapes, while kzinti eyes detect motion—so that, at first, both had used camouflage gear that was guaranteed to stand out to the enemy's vision.) When she finished, she said, "It occurs to me to wonder what the Romans are planning that they haven't told us."

  It had evidently just crossed her mind for the first time. Every so often Ginger was forcibly reminded that his partner was an alien. "We just have to present them with nothing but specific courses of action and explain it as force of circumstance," he said, as if he had thought it up on the spot.

  "I suppose," she said, looking something up. "I hope things go quickly. It's going to be summer soon on We Made It."

  Ginger thought about it. "How does that affect us?"

  "It's hard to land in a wind traveling twice the speed of sound."

  "Why would we want to?"

  "Aren't we going there for hyperdrive parts?"

  "What? No. Earth," said Ginger, confused.

  "Earth? How are we supposed to keep the ARM from finding out?"

  "But that's who we have to get them from," Ginger said. "They're the only ones who would keep it a secret. If anybody else found out about the Romans, they'd never be left alone again. The ARMs will keep it a secret, because they keep everything a secret."

  "I don't . . . If . . . But . . . Give me a minute here."

  "Certainly."

  Perpetua sat and thought it through. Finally she said, "Why would they help us?"

  "To reduce the Patriarchy's capabilities, which is one of their constant goals, without having to go through channels. I know some of the flatlander veterans who settled on Wunderland, and more than one has joked that the UN bureaucracy was a kzinti plot. I'll give you an example—and I had to see records of this before I believed this fellow wasn't making fun of me, so I know it's true: Chemical firearms, delivered in response to a properly logged requisition, arrive without ammunition. There's a different requisition to be completed, for ammunition without which the firearm is useless. This procedure is still in use. My Name as my Word."

  Perpetua, who had lived with human government all her life and didn't see what was so odd about the story, said, "I'm convinced that's true," which was meant to please him, and did. "Maybe it will be enough to get them to agree. We can try."

  Warrgh-Churrg summoned Trader the next day, and when the offworlder arrived (without the monkey) demanded,
without formalities, "You went for a look at the kz'zeerekti, and had to land at Trrask-Rarr's castle with a breakdown. Did you say anything that might have let him know where they kept their gold?"

  Trader froze, his ears cupped and swinging slowly from side to side: genuine surprise. "Feared Warrgh-Churrg, I don't know where they keep their gold," he replied.

  "They don't," the satrap snarled. "Trrask-Rarr has it. Made a sudden raid this morning on a cavern deep in the wasteland, and when a wall caved in his troops found a stockpile."

  Trader settled himself slightly and said, "Dominant One, did he take any slaves?"

  "Not one. They'd cleared out, almost as if they were warned. . . ." Warrgh-Churrg glared at one of his own slaves, standing in an alcove, ready to fetch on command. The kz'zeerekti very properly stayed in its place, but began to smell panicky.

  "The reason I ask, Fully-Named, is that there are far more kz'zeerekti out there than I had even speculated, and with that quantity of gold I thought he might be interested in taking part in a major shipment."

  Warrgh-Churrg abruptly looked at the eyes of Trader, who ducked. "Why would he need gold to do that?"

  "There isn't enough room on my ship for that many slaves. It would be necessary to obtain one or two large ships, possibly equipping them with hyperdrive if the price was right."

  "You had implied that you couldn't get ships with hyperdrive," Warrgh-Churrg said, growing dangerous.

  "I cannot. But most of the parts for a hyperdrive can be fabricated, and the key parts are available as spares. I never had enough money to do it, but if Trrask-Rarr has that much gold—"

  "He's spending it," Warrgh-Churrg cut him off. "Buying land his sires once held. Suppose someone already had a large ship. Or two," he added offhandedly. "What would hyperdrive parts cost?"

  Ginger was pleased to see that Perpetua had a shattergun aimed at the airlock door as he came through. When she saw it was him, she safetied it, set it down carefully, and ran up and grabbed him around the middle, to his great astonishment. She held him very hard, as human strength went, and after a few seconds he began having the strangest urge to wash her head like a kitten's. This gave him a hint about what she was doing, though, and after a little thought he patted her head, a gesture much used in entertainments. It appeared to help. She let go and looked up and said, "You're okay."

  "I'm okay," he agreed. It seemed better than I know. "I have been cleverly talked around into going to purchase hyperdrive parts."

  Perpetua began laughing. It took her a while to get it under control.

  The gold began arriving two days later.

  XI

  The trip to Earth took almost ten weeks. As usual, they spent a lot of time playing games; as usual, Ginger almost always won.

  The dangerous part of the trip, at least in Ginger's estimation, had been right at the start, when they were depending on pursuit countermeasures to stay intact. Perpetua, however, grew more uneasy the closer they got to Earth. She didn't say anything about it, but she was at least partly conscious of it: She bathed more often, sometimes twice in a day. (He in turn was not conscious of the fact that his tail began lashing when she smelled upset; but she was. She was trying to keep at least one of them calm.)

  He would never have asked why. Such an assumption of authority over her mental state would have been treating her as a subordinate, and she was a friend; more, she was a Hthnar—something humans translated as Battle Companion, a term which did express the concept if given sufficient thought.

  However, she was also a human, and therefore weird, so one day she suddenly decided to explain. "I don't trust the ARM," she said when he showed up for his watch on the mass detector.

  "Good," he said agreeably, steering them around a fuzzy patch that was probably nothing much. (The thing worked better for him than for her. Its manual spoke of psionic aptitude and something called the Copenhagen Interpretation, but to him the matter was simple: It was a hunting device.)

  "That's why I've been so worried. They were the ones who got Wunderland conquered, you know."

  Ginger cupped an ear at her. "I'm pretty sure the Patriarchy was involved too."

  She snorted. "They suppressed weapon technology and rewrote history books as propaganda, so everybody believed that no civilized being was capable of making war. When the first reports of contact with the kzinti came in they suppressed those too, as disruptive."

  "I didn't know that!" he exclaimed.

  "It's not something humans are proud to discuss," she said.

  He had no idea what to say—before confiding something that potentially demeaning, a Hero would want hostages. However, she continued almost at once.

  "They're perfectly capable of suppressing knowledge of the Romans and keeping them all for study somewhere," she said.

  "They'd want them off Kzrral first, though, right?" Ginger said.

  "I would think so," Perpetua said, sounding puzzled.

  "Then we'll be fine. I won't make a final plan until we've left Earth, so they won't be able to get it out of us."

  "You haven't decided what to do after we have the Romans?"

  "What would be the point? We don't have them," he said, honestly puzzled. "We don't even know if we can get the hyperdrives here."

  "What? You acted so confident!"

  "I'm a kzin. I am confident. I may also be wrong."

  "I'm starting to get a glimmering of why we won," she muttered, walking out.

  Ginger thought about that for a while, but couldn't see the connection.

  They'd dropped out of hyperspace and were moving into Sol System, and Perpetua was trying to ease her own tension. " . . . and the Herrenmann says, 'Never mind the thanks—repeat the instructions!' "

  Ginger was just starting to laugh when the hyperwave spoke up: "Incoming ship, identify yourselves."

  Ginger tapped the mike. "We're the Jubilee, out of Wunderland," he said in quite good Flatlander. "Who are you?"

  "Triton Relay Customs Station. Are you carrying any fissionables or bioactives?"

  "No, but if you make a list we could come back," Ginger said cheerfully. Perpetua's eyes went wide and she clapped her hands over her mouth as he continued, "We'd like to talk to an ARM."

  The Belter Customs officer said, "Why?" He sounded honestly perplexed.

  "To engage in commerce."

  "With the ARM? You'll walk out smiling and holding two coat hangers."

  Ginger looked at Perpetua, who was no more enlightened than he. "Nevertheless."

  "Well, I'll pass the word.—I advise against joking with them," the voice added. "There's a flatlander law against ARMs laughing at any jokes but their own."

  "Thanks," Ginger said, and cut the mike.

  "You don't ever joke with Customs, have you taken leave of your senses?" Perpetua exploded.

  "No, but hopefully you won't be the last to think of that," Ginger said. "It may help. The idea came to me when I heard that silly question—as if a smuggler of murder supplies would be surprised into blurting out a truthful answer." His ears waved, once. "Suddenly I thought of a way to cope with human bureaucracy."

  "I'll talk to the next one!" she said.

  A com laser found them about an hour later. "Attention Jubilee, this is T.C. Smith, senior agent, ARM ident RM35M4419. I am the ARM officer at earliest available rendezvous, presently at Juno, coordinates follow. Be seeing you." A datastream beeped in and was recorded.

  As Ginger altered course, Perpetua sent, "Senior Agent Smith, this is Jubilee, we will arrive your location—" Ginger showed the figures "—in about twenty-nine hours." She set that to repeat, then said, "He sounded positively friendly."

  "I've heard that ARMs are all supposed to be kept insane," Ginger said. "Perhaps he welcomes the company. I wonder what he's doing at Juno?"

  "Why, where's Juno?"

  "According to these figures, it's an asteroid. Not under ARM jurisdiction."

  Perpetua looked for herself, because she had to—if a kzin had
done so it would have been insulting—and said, "That's weird."

  Juno Traffic Control had them lie off two thousand kilometers, and at that the region seemed pretty busy. "There must be five hundred ships here!" Perpetua said wonderingly.

  "About half with their drives aimed at us," Ginger commented. When she stared at him, he said, "We are of largely kzinti design, after all. And Belters who trusted strange ships in either war probably didn't survive long enough to teach the habit to anyone."

  A tanker began signaling them. Perpetua acknowledged, and the speaker said, "Smith here. You need any fuel?"

  "No, our planer is rigged to scoop up ambient hydrogen constantly," she replied, and Ginger stuck his finger in her mouth. She spit it out, cut the mike, and said, "What are you doing?"

  "Not revealing capabilities," he said. "How did you people last long enough to get to space?"

  She glared, then switched back on. "Are you in the tanker, or relaying?"

  "In. Permission to come aboard?"

  "Granted."

  The tanker moved alongside and extended a travel tube, and presently Smith came through the lock with a parcel bigger than he was. "Great, gravity," he said, taking his helmet off.

  He was one-gee short, and blond as a Herrenmann, but his skin was quite black, at least on his head. Also, his pressure suit was decorated with the head and shoulders of a pale-skinned man in an odd-looking cap, with a bill in back as well as in front; the man was smoking a curly pipe and holding a magnifying glass before one eye. Perpetua, who had spent the past day learning something about Sol Belter culture, said, "Just how long have you been at Juno?"

  "Open curiosity, that's refreshing! Just over eleven years now. Well done. Junior assistant to the second deputy secretary of the consul."

  "What does that mean?" Ginger said, stepping into view.

  "I thought you sounded like a kzin. It means by the time I'd accumulated enough procedural complaints to be retired, my pension would have come to more than I get in salary, so they sent me where I couldn't annoy anybody worse than they normally are."