Man-Kzin Wars XII Read online

  Perpetua began, "That is the filthiest—"

  "Who goes there?" said a speaker over the door.

  "A true believer," said Smith.

  "What do you want?" said the speaker.

  "To do one thing."

  The door began opening. "Surely they didn't call him Founder all the time," Ginger said, and stopped to gape.

  The cavern before them had to be artificial, its lining fused dust; but it looked like an enormous natural cave, bigger than the dome they'd landed by. There were gardens, with trees, and light sources in the roof that made it about twice as bright as on the surface. In the center of the cavity floor, hundreds of meters away, was what looked like a big rock formation with its own cave opening; a waterfall trickled down one side over a couple of pretty good bonsai. There was a sign above the cave opening:

  odd john's toxic dump

  "No," said Smith. "They called him John Smith."

  "Your ancestor?" Ginger said.

  "Who knows? Lots of people on Mars took the name Smith after the Blowout. Classical allusion. In his case, though, it was just a standard label for someone whose name was unknown." He led them toward the rocks.

  " 'Toxic dump'?" Perpetua said, alarmed at the unfamiliar term.

  "Another ancient reference. People didn't use to reduce sewage and garbage to simple organics with superheated steam. They just left things in pits."

  "How did they make plastics?" wondered Ginger.

  "The raw materials originally came from underground." Smith paused to look at Ginger. "Your homeworld hasn't had petroleum for about ten thousand years, has it?"

  "Wunderland has petroleum," Ginger said, surprised.

  "He means Kzinhome," Perpetua said. "Like his is Earth."

  Smith scowled, and Ginger snorted amusement. "I see. Probably not. What did people do about the smell?"

  "Lived somewhere else," Smith said.

  "The fellow who first began mining those pits must have gotten awfully rich," Ginger speculated as they got to the entrance. There was a door a little ways in.

  "No, on Earth it's a branch of government. There's still some garbage fortunes in the Belt, though," said Smith, lifting a sign that said scoppy fever and tapping the keypad underneath. The door opened, and he went in first.

  They heard, "What the hell do you—Waldo!"

  "Hilda!" Smith replied as they moved into better lighting than the entryway's.

  After a short silence the woman said, "Theo. Good to see you. What do—Theo, there's a kzin behind you."

  "Yes, he keeps me out of trouble. I gather Larch is still mooching off his mother."

  The shop was something out of Davidson, with counters and racks and display cases crammed with unrelated oddities. There was actually a stuffed crocodile up by the ceiling; it must have been ruinously expensive. The woman behind the sales counter was very tall, like most other locals, and beige, but with hair going gray and lines at the corners of her eyes. "Yes," she said, watching Ginger. Then she pointed at him and said, "Don't think you can try your telepathy for a better price. I'm a junk dealer, the only thing that works on me is money."

  Smith held up a hand in front of Ginger—unnecessarily, as Ginger was too astonished and offended to speak—and stepped forward to tell her in a very low voice, "Mom, first of all, it was the Slavers who used telepathy to control minds; second, damn few kzinti are telepaths; third, none of those have Names, which he does, indicating high social value; and fourth, telepaths are all addicted to a drug that enhances the facility and destroys their health, so you've just done the equivalent of greeting a total stranger by calling him a wirehead."

  She opened her eyes wide, then closed them and kept them shut for a bit. She hunched down about a handspan—human handspan—and her face changed color, getting lighter in some places and darker in others. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and said in a low voice, "Sir, I apologize. Please feel welcome."

  "Thank you," said Ginger.

  There was a moment of awkward silence. Perpetua broke it by saying, "Was Larch the short one?"

  Smith gave her a stare, then apparently realized that she was shorter than every person they'd met except one, and said, "Yeah. Hey Mom, you should have heard Ginger. Managed to convey the idea that I was some kind of trained killer."

  "You are a trained killer," said his mother.

  "I don't go around single-handedly massacring groups of kzinti when I get offended, which is what he implied."

  "Of course, you couldn't talk about it if you did," she observed with a straight face.

  Smith sighed heavily, then said, "How quickly I recall why I don't drop by more often. We need two hyperdrives."

  His mother gave an incredulous chuckle—a little late, Ginger thought. "You want inertialess drives along with those?"

  "It's Marley Foundation business."

  Her manner changed utterly. She leaned back, her face grew still, and her eyes narrowed. She said, "What have you done for it?"

  "I got transferred to the Belt eleven years ago. Check funding and dates for the Outback Restoration Project."

  She nodded once and went through a door. Ginger heard tiny clicks from different parts of the room they were in, and held quite still. Perpetua said, "T.C., what's going on?"

  "The Marley Foundation is a private charity dedicated to saving people from foolish planning, often their own. Very old. I was assigned to investigate them and wound up joining, about fifty years back. Twelve years ago there was a big ARM project to clear out the Australian Outback—a large desert—so it could be preserved in its natural condition, without a lot of tourists coming in. I was in charge of selling the idea to the voters. The thing is, there were people who'd been living there for thousands of years, and they couldn't be expelled—they were arguably part of the natural condition. I went and talked to a lot of them, and we cooked up a plan. I sold the ARM on the idea of making them official caretakers of the region, and I arranged to supply them with plans and equipment, and as soon as they were put in charge of the region they cut a channel from the sea to the middle of the desert. Logarithmic spiral, uniform grade, so Coriolis force caused air to move up the channel of its own accord. Water condensed out as the air rose, and a little stream formed. In another century it'll be a pretty decent river. They didn't particularly like the desert, you see. They were just the descendants of people who knew how to survive there."

  Perpetua was openmouthed and shaking with silent laughter. "How did they mask the explosions?" she finally got out.

  "Oh, I gave them a couple of disintegrators."

  "That's the shape!" Ginger exclaimed, making them both jump. "This cavern was carved with a disintegrator, wasn't it?"

  Smith recovered and said, "Yeah, they didn't have too much intact dome material. Bored down, ran an air tube in to blow the dust out, and had another disintegrator up on the surface aimed at the falling dust. Opposite charge, so when it came down it fused to the ground."

  "And the current fused the wall of the chamber," Ginger said, as pleased as if he'd done it himself. "There are caverns back home that humans carved that way during the Second War, with openings a kzin couldn't get a leg into. A lot of invaders died after passing by one of those."

  "Oh, yeah," said Perpetua.

  "How come it took you so long?" Smith wondered.

  "This one's a lot bigger," Ginger said.

  "Never saw one with trees in it, either," said Perpetua.

  "True."

  The proprietor returned. "Excuse me; what's your name?" said Perpetua.

  "Joanna." She seemed a little startled, but went on with what she had come back for: "This way."

  "Perpetua, and Ginger."

  "How do."

  They followed her into a back corridor, then into a cramped chamber which looked like a storeroom for things too odd to keep out front—which was saying something. Ginger just had time to notice that while things sat on the floor or hung on the walls, nothing on the floor leaned agai
nst a wall. Then the floor descended.

  The elevator was slower than the one before. "I keep meaning to study tap dancing," Joanna said after a while, for no discernible reason.

  T.C. seemed to find it funny. "Another archaic reference," he told them. "One reason the ARM presence here is so thin on the ground. They have to do constant data searches to find out what people are saying. Usually just conversation—drives them nuts."

  The light was from overhead, and grew fainter as they went down. The walls ended, leaving blackness at the edge of the floor. They were in a big volume, and still descending. Ginger's tail tried to lash.

  When they stopped, Joanna said, "Basement dungeon, everybody out."

  "As I said," T.C. remarked, but didn't go on.

  When they were off the platform, lights began to go on.

  This took a while.

  Eventually Ginger said, "Why don't you all live down here? There's more room than all the domes."

  "We do. Different families have their own caverns, but they all connect up—how do you think we got this stuff down here?"

  The equipment could have made up a well-equipped multifunction carrier—troopship, fighter station, hospital, and kzinforming—though the assembled hull sections would have given it an awfully odd profile. And extra nacelles would have had to be custom-made for all the weaponry. Possibly a tertiary power plant to supply them, too.

  "This way," Joanna said, interrupting Ginger's reverie. They stepped onto a slidewalk, one of many, and began moving through what might have been the toy box of a precocious infant Titan. "What do you need two hyperdrives for?" she said.

  "Equipping a couple of transport ships to evacuate a lot of humans from a kzinti world," T.C. said.

  "And Jotoki," said Perpetua.

  "What's that?" Joanna said.

  Ginger and Perpetua stared at her, speechless with astonishment.

  "They look sort of like starfish," T.C. said. "They don't come to Sol System much," he explained to the Wunderlanders. "The ARM harasses them about what they can sell."

  "They're aquatic?" Joanna said.

  "Amphibious, if I remember right," T.C. said.

  "They have an immature aquatic stage, and five sexes," Ginger said. "Each limb starts as a separate nonsentient creature. They meet and join at maturity. They develop intelligence just before they breed."

  "Oh," said Joanna. "Just the opposite of us, then."

  They had to get off to go back and get Perpetua; she was laughing so hard she fell off the slidewalk.

  Once they were going again, Joanna asked T.C., "You two up to something?"

  "Mother," he said.

  "Well, I just don't like surprises."

  "Neither do I, so keep the next one to yourself. . . . Great Ghu, where did all these come from?"

  There were five complete hyperdrive systems, and parts to make up perhaps a dozen more. Two of the complete hyperdrives would need extensive rework before use—there is something distinctive and disquieting about a functional hyperdrive, at least to most organic intelligences, and those two systems didn't have it. Of the working ones, one was immense—about the right size for the hypothetical ship made from everything in the cavern. The other two were about of a size, but not much alike in appearance. One was clearly human design. The other . . . "Who made that?" said T.C.

  "Beats the free ions out of me," said Joanna. "Came off a smuggler that piled in about nine years back. Notice how all the parts are linked to a central armature, so you can disconnect them without them floating away?"

  "Pierin," said Ginger. "I've never met one, but they're supposed to do things like that. Incredibly fussy about details. Very good at war, the Patriarchy still isn't making much progress against them."

  "They're warlike?" Joanna said. She sounded surprised.

  "Did you think we were the only ones?" Ginger said, and he definitely was surprised.

  "Well, yes. I thought you were found by some peaceful species and got to space by conquering them."

  Ginger snorted. "We were found by the Jotoki, but what they wanted us for was to be mercenaries. If there's a 'peaceful' race advanced enough for star travel, I've never heard of them."

  "There's the puppeteers," said Joanna. "They never attack anybody."

  "Funny how you never hear about anyone attacking them, either," Ginger said. "How much for these two?"

  "How much would you like to pay?"

  "Nothing. Thanks, where can we hire a lifter?"

  Perpetua and T.C. merely stood by and watched the two traders at work. Due to his combination of predatory shrewdness and disconcerting honesty, Ginger was even more effective at bargaining with humans than with kzinti. It threw off human merchants to have their claims taken with apparent seriousness; it slowed them down, forcing them to think about what they were actually saying.

  There was another consideration. "Mom," T.C. interrupted after about ten minutes' chaffering, "has it occurred to you that he literally has a nose for just how low you'll go?"

  Joanna stared at her son, then looked at Ginger.

  Cats always look like they're smiling.

  Joanna grumbled something inarticulate and named a price.

  "Done," said Ginger.

  "I can rent you a lifter," Joanna began.

  T.C. sighed loudly—and theatrically—and then told the Wunderlanders, "My treat." He opened one of his suit pockets and undid a sealed container. Inside was a tiny vial of yellow powder, resembling pollen.

  Joanna said, "Is . . ." and trailed off.

  "A gift from Aunt Sophronia," her son said.

  "Where did it come from?" she exclaimed.

  "Jinx," he said, as if to a small and unclever child.

  "I know that," she snapped.

  "T.C., no," Perpetua said. "We can't let you give up your boosterspice."

  He looked blank. Then he dug out four more vials. "Where do you think confiscated contraband ends up?" he said.

  The quickest way to effect the trade turned out to be bringing Jubilee into the cavern. Perpetua didn't even think of doing the piloting for this. Ginger brought the ship through the series of hatchways and chambers not only safely, but symmetrically—that is, with almost identical clearance on all sides. (Locals in pressure suits stood around clapping after some of the narrower turns.) After he set the ship down and the cavern door began to shut, he turned to T.C. and said, "Breathe. It's very distracting when you stop."

  Joanna ran the cargo lifter herself. She paused to stare at the gold. "I've never seen so much," she said softly.

  "Sol System uses a power standard, don't they?" Ginger said.

  "What?" she said, startled out of reverie. "Yes, of course, what else has a value that can't change?"

  "Nothing I know of. I was just wondering why gold is still so prized."

  "Eighteen billion flatlanders watch a lot of television," she replied. "The only stuff that makes better connections is superconductor, and that can't be laid down only one atom thick." She started the lifter loading. "This planet with the refugees—" (she hadn't been told they were Romans) "—does it have a lot of volcanoes?"

  "I don't believe it has any," Ginger realized.

  "That's weird," she said.

  "Why? Jinx has no volcanoes."

  "And no gold. I was wondering where this stuff came from. Quartz is out."

  "There's quartz," he said.

  "Must be old, if there's no geological activity."

  "There's hot springs," he recalled.

  She paused the lifter and said, "It's going to bug me." She did some searching on its control screen, then said, "Calaverite and sylvanite. Gold ores found in upwelling deposits from springs. Huh, no wonder the humans haven't been rooted out!"

  "What do you mean?"

  "They're tellurium compounds. Any refining process would produce huge amounts of tellurium residues, and that'd definitely keep away anyone with a nose like yours!" She started up the lifter again and got back to work.

  "W
hy?" he said to her back.

  "They reek. Smell just like garlic," she called over her shoulder.

  Once Jubilee was back outside, T.C. wandered around while they spent some of their gold on extra supplies. They were just coming in for another load when he showed up and said, "You guys have to go now. The ARM has figured out you're buying starship parts, and they'll have a ship here in five hours or so."

  Ginger just nodded, but Perpetua said, "You're doing this without permission?"

  They both looked at her, and T.C. told Ginger, "Look out for her, will you?"

  "She doesn't need it, she's just surprised sometimes," Ginger said. "Before we go, tell me: Where did Joanna locate a tank of lobsters for sale?"

  Smith just spread his hands. "She does that."

  "Yes, but how?"

  "I've always assumed some sort of pact. Look, no fooling, you need all the head start you can get. I'll stay here and get a ride from somebody."

  "Will you be in much trouble?" Perpetua said.

  "You kidding? If they fire me my income goes up eight and a half percent. Go, shoo." He made brushing motions away from himself.