Choosing Names mw-8 Read online

  “I was speaking a truth that I could feel and taste, and in that instant I knew I was describing myself. I had to force myself to go on. ‘Their instinct will be to care for any injured creature, a weakling human, an animal, even an enemy, even an alien. Tell them that Toolmaster needs his companions about him and they will believe. They will take you all inside. I can’t guess what precautions they will take first.’

  “White Mask’s scream of triumph rang through his head and mine. In his throat it was only a strangled squeak. ‘Tell them, then! Get us inside and we will do the rest!’ He stooped over Toolmaster. ‘Of course he’s dying. Is he dead already?’

  “I reached for Toolmaster’s mind. ‘He lives. Let me guide you now and I’ll get you in. Huddle around Toolmaster. Ear Eater, imagine how his posture might be more comfortable, and move him. White Mask, talk to him.’

  “ ‘Saying what?’

  “ ‘Does it matter? Speak, listen, speak again.’ I could feel Toolmaster’s remote agony lessen: he could just barely sense the attention, and he liked it. ‘Now, White Mask, go to the window and shout. Wave your arms at the doctors. Stumpy, you join him. Ear Eater, you stay with Toolmaster. Lift his head a little and slide that flat rock under it for support. Gently! Good.’

  Toolmaster felt the motion and was soothed.

  Doctors massed on the other side of the window. The merest touch of their minds gave me their thrill of anthropomorphic empathy, as that scarred monster showed such tenderness to his fallen fellow. I called, ‘Now, White Mask, shout at me! Your friend is sick and you don’t speak human language, so tell me, instead! They don’t know I can read minds—’

  “He came to the bars and shook them and shouted, ‘Did you think I’d forgotten, you fool?’ Stumpy had got the idea: he was beside White Mask shouting poetry we’d all learned from the Keepers as children. And the doctors came running to my window, the window to my pen, and listened as I shouted at them in their language. In the midst of all that I felt Toolmaster die.

  “So here I am.”

  The interrogator nodded behind the glass. “So here you are. But you weren’t saying what your companions thought you were saying. I take it you do not advise us to take them out of their cage.”

  “I do not,” Telepath said. “You might bear in mind that they know what I told them of you. They should not run loose to shout their news. They should not even be brought near another telepath.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Telepath said, “I caught something in your mind. A large ship, drive shredded, survivors—?”

  “Yes, we believe we found females of your species.”

  “Dead, though. You found an Admiral’s harem.”

  “If you want to mate—”

  “Yes! But you don’t have that to offer.”

  “There will be a next time, a chance to capture female warcats. We can bargain. But as for your name, take that as a gift. Would you like Selig? Or Aycharaych? Or Greenberg?”

  Mind-readers out of humans’ classic fiction, Telepath saw. “Better some ancient warrior’s name,” he said, and reached for what surfaced. “Ronreagan. Call me Ronreagan.”

  “So be it. Ronreagan, it’s feeding time, and if you’re not hungry I am.” I saw him for an instant as meat, prey, and he sensed that somehow, and it amused him. “But then I want you to tell me every last thing you know about, what did you call—”

  “Patriarchy.”

  “About the Patriarchy. And gravity generators! Can you tell us how to build one of those?”

  “When you capture a warcat female, find me an Engineer, too.”

  TELEPATH’S DANCE

  Hal Colebatch

  Easter Island

  Arthur Guthlac, who could never hope to go further into Space than a cheap package holiday to the Moon, envied his sister Selina more than he could easily say.

  Apart from the ramrobots and the few, incredibly expensive, colony-ships, journeys beyond the Solar System were rare, and the queue of scientists with projects for Space was always growing. It was a staggering accolade for the gravity-anomaly project to have been selected for funding.

  But the museum attendant and his brilliant sister had always been close, and the separation would be long. They stayed together for the last few days before the Happy Gatherer left Earth. He produced the model the night before the research ship’s departure.

  “Take this,” Arthur said. “A small gift for you.”

  It was an ancient sea-going ship, cast in metal, a little more than the length of her hand.

  “An antique? You haven’t stolen it from the museum, have you?”

  She put a laugh in her voice. So did he.

  “Antique, but not stolen. I was at a conference at Greenwich Museum in London on automated security for children’s galleries, and they gave the delegates mementos. So I hand it on to you, setting out on a voyage, like those old pioneers of the sea. I got one for each of us. They were two sibling-ships, I gather: built to the same design.”

  “Nice of them to give you two.”

  “They were throwing them away to make space for dance history exhibits. I saw hundreds in a trash-compactor… Perhaps,” he added with seeming carelessness, “they were Military Fantasy cult objects.”

  “A depiction of a… military ship? You wouldn’t have such things in a responsible museum, would you?”

  “I don’t know if there ever were real military ships. There have been Fant stories, of course. If they did exist, they would have been much earlier. This ship is from the iron-age. The steel-age in fact… No, it’s not that.

  “Anyway,” he continued in the official voice of an ARM, “it’s impossible that pirates or banditos could have had the resources to build a ship like this. It was very big engineering for its time. Only major companies or governments could have built such a thing. Besides, the Military Fantasy was about sociopathic ideas, and this doesn’t look to me like the idea, however diseased, of a military ship. Where would the war-men fire their weapons from?

  “I guess this was some sort of bulk cargo-carrier. These devices here would have been to pour grain or ore or something into hoppers. This is unless they are meant to be giant ‘gun-barrel’ weapons.”

  He gave a cautious, almost furtive smile and inflected his voice with mockery as if to show anyone monitoring the conversation that he was making a tasteless private joke.

  He pointed to a model of a small boat attached to the main model. “That shows the scale—about 1,000:1. I’m not sure how they measured length in those days, but the real ship would have been about 35,000 tonnes. Police—the fore-runners of ARM—still carried guns then, but for these things to have been guns,”—he touched one of the three sets of triple tubes on turntables on the fo’c’sle—“they would have had to fire ‘bullets’ as big as a man! Also, see how wide the hull is. That’s for weight and volume. In any real world, of course, races that made war with each other could never advance to build machines like this.”

  “That’s a—what did they call it?—a lifeboat?”

  “Yes. Analogous to the boats on a Spaceship. Used for going ashore when the water was not deep enough for the main ship to go right in. And for emergencies, I suppose. Not very nice to have to get into such a thing when your ship was sinking in a storm, though. I bet the sailors on”—he read the name and date on the model’s stand—“the HMS Nelson of 1928 would envy your conveniences. The other was called the HMS Rodney. Of course civilization was long established then. I don’t know what the names mean, but they were built the same. Perhaps a bit like us… It might matter, you know.”

  This last was their private cryptic, indicated by inflection. Satellites could detect key-words. “Quixotic” had gone from the unrestricted vocabulary, but she knew something of his mission that dared not speak its name.

  A strange linkage between them. It had been suggested that she had some telepathic potential, but she refused to be tested. Her internal life was complex enough, and if she had any abilitie
s, latent or otherwise, in that direction, she did not want to know it. Without proper shields and controls telepathy might be a fatal gift.

  Modern research hinted that telepathy had killed the Neanderthals, making them too vulnerable, too able to empathize with the pain of prey, of competitors, and of one another. Modern telepaths—the very few there were—tended to be abnormal in a number of ways, and often desperately disturbed. She had met a few when the idea of testing her was raised and that had been more than enough.

  Arthur and Selina were perhaps lucky to be brother and sister. Otherwise they would undoubtedly at their first meeting have become lovers, in an intense, consuming relationship probably ultimately doomed, for they were consort personalities, not complementary ones. As it was, there was much of closeness and comfort they could give each other which no lover or husband or wife could touch, in a relationship that had no sexual tension or jealousy about it.

  A last night of delicate, careful talk. Then it was time for her to board the shuttle to the Happy Gatherer in its parking orbit. They had driven to the field together, under the gaze of the preserved monoliths.

  * * *

  Angel’s Pencil

  “We’ve lost the wreckage.” Steve Weaver turned from the instrument console and stood up. The remnants of the alien enemy had dwindled and vanished on the last screen.

  “And no more headaches.” Sue Bhang’s eyes beseeched him for reassurance.

  “No more headaches. Maybe never again.”

  The nightmare still pressed against them, almost physically, as the Angel’s Pencil drove on its fixed course behind its vast ramscoop field. Ship and crew had changed much since the colony expedition had left Earth. The console was a small cleared space. A colony ship is crowded with cargo at the best of times, but now what had been the few free areas of the Pencil were piled with alien machinery weapons, and instruments, whole and in pieces. And in the hastily-improvised cold-room (cold, at least, tended to be easily available in Space) were the corpses and salvaged fragments of the things themselves, dissected, fragmented, burned, or—in a few cases—as nearly whole as explosive decompression in vacuum had left them. Jim Davis and Helen Boyd were supervising the filming.

  The cadavers were like a declaration of intent: huge, far bigger than humans, with black razor claws, huge slabs of muscle, cable-like sinews, bolt-cutter jaws with tremendous gape and dagger fangs. All the eyes were gone, but the huge sockets told of binocular and night-vision, and the cast of the features was still plain. Convergent evolution had produced something like enough to the ancient sabre-tooth tiger of Earth for them to name it Pseudofelis. But there was more: bigger than human brain-cases. An upright stance. Hands. A hideous contradiction in terms: Pseudofelis Sapiens.

  The resemblance to that family of creatures which made up nature’s master-work among Earth’s predators was obvious. But that qualifier Sapiens overarched all else. Not only knife-like teeth: some of the bodies had equipment that included real knives of some monomolecular-edged metal which cut through steel. There were fusion-bomb missiles, weapon-lasers, there had been the heat-induction ray. And there was a drive immeasurably better than the Angel’s Pencil’s hydrogen-fusion ramjet which was the best that human brains could build.

  The Angel’s Pencil could flee from the wreckage of the battle it had miraculously won, but the nightmare was travelling with it. The humans aboard looked older now, and more than one had a tendency to wake up screaming. The doc remained busy.

  Like so many of the best nightmares, it made no sense. There was no reason carnivores should not evolve intelligence—the dolphins had, and Steve knew something of the story of the sea-statue the dolphins had found—but intelligence like this? The evolution of humanity had surely shown that civilization and technology were interdependent.

  Well, they weren’t. There were plenty of mysteries among the things they had salvaged—the drive-motor that made no sense, the smashed bodies of a couple of things like giant starfish, weird tools and artifacts, an untranslatable script—but the overall picture was clear: the long search for intelligent extraterrestrial life was over, and humanity was in trouble.

  “They won’t believe it,” Steve said. “I wouldn’t believe it…” He stared into the humming, moving battery of camera lenses and shook his fist in confused, frustrated fury.

  “They’ll have to believe it…” Jim said. Hundreds of pictures had already been sent back to the Solar system.

  “And we,” said Helen, “have no business wondering whether they believe it or not. We’ve made our decision. All we can do for Earth is to keep sending.

  “And for ourselves, we had better finish fitting those missiles and pray for time.”

  * * *

  Gutting Claw

  First Telepath taught me new uses of the Sthondat-drug, gave me new spoor to follow, thoughts to chew bitterly upon. When Telepath talks to Telepath, we are not always humble. Are we not also Kzin?

  Long we spent in bases and in the great ship. My hunting began as First Telepath was dying. I was to succeed him.

  We had been roused from hibernation by the help-call of Tracker, our lead scout, one thirty-second of a light-year ahead of us. Our ship replied in war-code. No messages returned save the ghost-cry.

  Later First Telepath probed far down the tunnels of what some call the World of the Eleventh Sense. He thought at last that he touched strange minds at the extremity of his range. Feared Zraar-Admiral expended him. I felt his collapse, though I shielded as I could. First Telepath was old as we are counted but Feared Zraar-Admiral would not scrap him while any of his power remained: we are always used to the end. Though we may not shame the Heroes’ Race by breeding our ability is rare.

  When I probed in my turn I found no minds. If they had been, they were gone. To find Tracker I was not needed, and often I was left alone to sleep. Dreaming, I was, when Orderly kicked me awake, of Karan when I was her kitten, the warm, milky time of purring and kneading. Often I had that dream now.

  Tracker, when we closed with her, was in two pieces, hull chopped rather than blast-damaged. I saw mirror-shine laser-cutting at myriad points in the gaping structure. Around it was debris, much wreckage of heavy fittings which should have been securely mounted in the hull and seemed to have been pumped out like gut by hind-claws from a prey after the disabling wound.

  Damage Control and Alien Technologies Officers with crew had gathered the wreckage and investigated. Alien Technologies was on the bridge when I arrived.

  “It was one slash. The laser was close. The ship was ransacked. The gravity-planer, weapons, stores, medical supplies and many computers and memory-bricks are gone.”

  “Pirates, Weeow-Captain?” Zraar-Admiral asked. His tail was twitching.

  I caught Weeow-Captain’s thought: Pirates attack a Patriarch’s warship? And his polite answer.

  “That was my first thought, Dominant One. But holes were cut to sealed compartments for bodies far smaller than ours. They did not know access points or service ducts or corridors. They did not disable the beacon. Some remaining memory-bricks are intact and the bridge recorder is in place. If the enemy recognized our equipment they would surely have taken these or destroyed them completely.

  “The gravity motor was an Admiralty standard type. Indeed it was fitted here. I estimate from the slash in Tracker that it would have been too damaged to use again. Therefore the fact that it is gone suggests that it was a technology which the destroyers of Tracker did not possess and took to examine or copy.”

  “Urrr. What of the recorder?”

  “The laser passed through it. We’re working on it, Dominant One.”

  “Patriarch’s priority!”

  “It is so ordered, Sire. We have found small artifacts made of primitive alloys we don’t use. We have rayed and otherwise examined them and I am sure they are not miniature mines. I think they are minor tools. But if hand-tools, not for our hands.

  “Further, Feared Zraar-Admiral, some seals re-engaged
. That preserved some atmosphere and what was left of the lifesystem recycled a little more. Some compartments were not completely sterile. In one we found this.”

  Alien Technologies Officer showed a computer-enhanced print of a space-gloved hand with five long digits. Like the hand of a kz’eerkt.

  “This is the clearest but others are similar. No bodies, Zraar-Admiral, not of any kind. There were Jotok slaves aboard, but even their bodies are gone.

  “We cannot tell if or how deeply Tracker’s claws slashed the enemy. It looks as if she was taken by surprise.”

  “She was a scout. It was her task not to be taken by surprise.”

  “Dominant One, perhaps the attackers used some alien warfare method. But from the absence of spreading we think the enemy laser was fired from close quarters. Perhaps close enough to have been in easy visual sight. I do not understand how such a thing happened.”

  Zraar-Admiral twitched his tail and his ears contracted. He merrowered thoughtfully. “Urrr. Her Captain did not have a name.”

  “He was of good record,” Weeow-Captain said. “A brave and competent officer though he died nameless.”

  “Yes.” Feared Zraar-Admiral still had only a partial name himself. Had name-desire betrayed the scout-cruiser’s Captain into folly? Then Zraar-Admiral’s mind was again an unscalable crag. But an alien Space-faring race that fought! Light-years from any star! No aliens had so far been discovered—at least by what we knew of the Eternal Hunt—with more than interplanetary flight and with vestigial weapons systems. By the time lower races got into interplanetary space they had become soft and weak, had lost honor and warrior skills.

  But the Dream of the Day! Those thoughts were not new, nor strange, nor secret: We need a worthy enemy!

  The minds and the odors of the bridge-staff were pouring out messages. Enemies now had the booty of Kzin weaponry and drive-technology to add to whatever demon-arts they already owned. If they eluded radar and Telepaths, they might be targeting Gutting Claw at this moment. Or, beyond reach of my mind or Zraar-Admiral’s weapons, they might be assembling a Fleet.