Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI Read online

  Guthlac struggled free of the dead weight of the first thunderbird. Cumpston ran to them. Karan got to her feet, staggered and fell again, pumping gouts of purple and orange blood from gaping lacerations in her thighs. Guthlac found the end of a severed blood-vessel and held it shut while Cumpston raced for the crashed car and its medical kit, killing the broken-limbed avian as it struggled and snapped at him. The car’s fuel lines had ruptured, and as Cumpston turned and ran back to Karan a spark ignited the clouds of hydrogen billowing from it. Automatically released jets of inert gas quickly smothered the flames, but the cabin and control console were wrecked.

  Frantic work with a kzin military chemical bandage stabilized the wound, but it took time. Karan was weak and barely conscious.

  The car, it was soon obvious, was not going to fly again without major repairs, and the lock on the car which Vaemar and Dimity had used was keyed to open to the patterns of Vaemar’s and Dimity’s hand or their tappetum or retina respectively. It was centuries since the last manually pickable lock had been made for anything as expensive as a car. Any attempt to burn the doors open, if it did not ruin the car’s delicate mechanisms, would probably exhaust their weapon first. They carried Karan into the meager shelter of an overhang as rain began to fall from the grey sky. Mobile telephones were a standard part of their equipment. They called for help, and waited. After a time the rain gave way to sleet and snow. More thunderbirds came.

  The comet-debris had served them well, Kzaargh-Commodore thought. Night-Lurker had passed undetected into the thick asteroid belt the humans called the Serpent Swarm.

  The long descent back towards the sun had not been spent in idleness. Heroes had worked to disguise the ship.

  At first Kzaargh-Commodore had thought to disguise it as a derelict, but had changed his mind after coming across a genuine kzin derelict warship. After stripping it of all that might be useful and giving the dead Heroes aboard space burial, he had sent it sunward for a test, cold, tumbling, patently helpless and dead. Human instruments had identified it, and interrogated it, and when it did not respond batteries of laser-cannon had vaporized it. The same happened when he sent in a stealthed ship’s boat, manned by a crew of Hero volunteers. Stealth technology took them quite a long way, but it was plainly not the whole answer. Rocks did better, if they were not identified as being on a collision course with Ka’ashi or some other large body—there were too many rocks for the human defenses to vaporize them all, and in any case many contained valuable ores.

  The apes seemed arrogantly confident of their mathematics and of their meteor defenses. Any large meteor whose path missed Ka’ashi by more than 50,000 miles was generally not intercepted.

  Night-Lurker became a lurker indeed. Like Lord Hrras-Charr of legend, who had cut off his own ears to fool his enemy, the cruiser had lost external parts. So altering something as complex as a spaceship without dockyard facilities was a mighty task, but his Heroes were skillful. Most of the removed parts had been stored inboard or put into orbits from which they might one day be retrieved, but one way and another it had changed shape and shrunk. Its sleek lines and mirror-finished surface had disappeared under stony plating and rubble. The ports of its great rail-guns and laser-cannon were hidden by lids. Its gravity-engines were never used. There was sufficient delta-V for it to maneuver with short bursts of low-powered chemical rockets, inefficient but far harder to detect in space.

  “What do you think of Chorth-Captain?” asked Dimity.

  “He is not his own master. I do not only say that because it is unbelievable that a Hero would voluntarily serve such monsters. He appears to have no power to correlate. And there is a spot on the back of his neck that is not a battle-scar. It is metallic. I saw it gleam. I think it is some kind of Protector-made descendent of a zzrou.”

  “Could a Protector have learnt of such things?”

  “The caves contained abandoned equipment of all kinds. The Protector could have found a zzrou and improved on it. Chorth-Captain is likely not the first Hero it captured. It could have experimented on others until it perfected what was necessary for a reliable…slave…servant…?”

  “Catspaw?”

  “It is not a term I would choose. But an enslaved Hero—or a succession of them—would have been very useful to the Protector at first. I imagine less so now. But I do not know why it did not simply create an army of Protectors on Wunderland as soon as it knew how.”

  “I think I know why,” said Dimity. “The first Protector wanted a force of Protectors it could control. These are not quite the same as the original Pak Protectors and it had become aware of how limited and temporary Protectors’ ability to cooperate is. That is why it worked gradually, in an environment where it set the parameters of existence.

  “Here it is in control of the others far more completely than it would be in the caves, where suddenly aware new Protectors might remember hiding places and so forth of their own. But there is another thing. As soon as it could, I am sure the first Protector began keying into the internet. Remember the old saying that the net is the most two-edged of all swords? A power to one’s own side but the greatest gift imaginable to an enemy? There is material about Protectors on the internet, and although most of it is under security closure a Protector’s intelligence would crack that open quickly.

  “The Protector would try to learn about creatures like itself, and I am sure it would come upon scientific papers about the Hollow Moon. The theory is that this is an ancient Pak ship. If that is so, there may be Pak machines here, Pak books…manuals…Surely for the Pak teaching newly-changed breeders must have always been a high-priority use for resources.”

  “It would not know the language of such manuals.”

  “It could learn. You and I learn languages very quickly by the standards of our kinds.”

  A dark spot grew in the lightning-streaked grey of the sky. A car from one of the monitoring stations. It landed near the overhang and six well-armed humans alighted. They were dressed in the tough uniform overalls of the Wunderland security forces.

  Guthlac and Cumpston went forward to meet them, stepping between dead thunderbirds. The creatures had been attacking in increasing numbers. Guthlac had begun to worry about their ammunition some time before. He had brought the big rifle thinking to deal with Morlock Protectors if he had to. But its size and weight, even with the mini-waldos, were a disadvantage, and even without considering that he had managed to wreck the car with it. Thunderbirds moved fast. He realized it was as well he had not had to deal with Protectors, who evidently moved much faster. Last time I was in this sort of trouble was because I went hunting with a .22, he thought, thinking Wunderland game was all sport after kzin-hunting.

  The leader of the rescue party stepped ahead of the rest to meet them. At the sight of Karan, lying unconscious, his strakkaker swept up. He cocked it with a fluid, infinitely practiced movement and trained it on her.

  “What are you doing?” Guthlac jumped forward in front of the man.

  “What are you doing? That’s a ratcat, isn’t it? A friend of yours?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact she is. She was wounded a little while ago defending us.”

  “We believe in dead ratcats here.”

  “Not this one.”

  “I’m the one who decides that around here.”

  “Do you know who I am?” Asked Guthlac.

  “Yes. Someone who owes their life to our responding to your call. Stand aside!”

  “The war has been over on this planet for more than ten years! Put that weapon in its proper place!”

  “I know the proper use for a weapon when there’s a live ratcat around.”

  “I repeat! The war is over on this planet. There is a peace treaty. I will not repeat that again!”

  “I look quite pretty now, don’t I,” the man said. “Thanks to our Liberators. But see my skin. Look at my face a little closely. A little pink here and there. I spent years with a metal jaw and half a metal face, thanks to
one of those Teufel’s claws.”

  “Well, you don’t have to now,” said Guthlac.

  “Yes, I’m lucky, aren’t I? My wife, my son, my two brothers, and my uncle, had no such luck as metal replacement parts. Just a quick, short ride down the kzin alimentary canal. Oh, I’m a lucky man, all right! A little micro-surgery to deaden the nerve ends before our Liberators arrived would have helped. All the nerve ends. I could have gone to my cousins perhaps—maybe after a while they could have looked at me without vomiting. Oh, I forgot! They were in Neue Dresden. You ask me to be a ratcat lover?”

  “We are a brigadier and a colonel of the UNSN,” said Guthlac. “We happen to be the Liberators you just thanked. The kzinti ate my only family before you were born. I have fought them for more than fifty years. But here on Wunderland things must change. And this particular ratcat was instrumental in saving the lives of two humans, not long ago. She was young when the war ended, and took no part in it. In addition she is”—not really a recommendation to tell this character she is the mate of the leading kzin on the Planet—“our friend.” Dear God! he thought. Let this character kill Karan and we can say goodbye to any hope of Man-Kzin cooperation on this planet—our best chance of building eventual peace between the species—forever.

  He saw Cumpston raise his right hand and pinch his lower lip between forefinger and thumb in a nervous or thoughtful gesture he sometimes had. It also had the effect of pointing the table-facet of the jewel in the ring on his index finger at the man. Not yet, Michael, he thought. But if necessary…

  “You lie,” the man answered. “God knows why you should bother. But female ratcats can’t think. After Liberation we kept some in zoo cages and fed collaborators to them. They didn’t stop to ask them their political opinions before they sat down to dine.”

  “This one thinks,” said Guthlac. “A few have always done so, secretly. If you are opposed to the Kzin Patriarchy and Empire you should see what an asset to humanity intelligent kzinrretti may be.

  “All of which,” he added, “is irrelevant to the fact that I am giving you a direct military order. I am not debating. She comes with us. And she will be given the best of treatment. That is more than because she is our companion and was wounded fighting in our defense, and has been beside other humans in peril before. There are high reasons of policy. Harm her, and you will regret it more keenly than I can say.”

  “Wunderland is independent! I do not need to take orders from the UNSN.”

  “I tell you of my certain knowledge that if you give that reason at your court-martial it will do you little good.”

  Cumpston intervened. “Do you know Nils Rykermann?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said the man.

  “One of the resistance’s greatest leaders in the war, and now a close friend of ours. Harm that kzinrret, and you will answer not only to the kzin who is her mate, but to him. In your place I would prefer the kzin.”

  He could kill us all and make it look an accident, Cumpston thought. By the time anyone else arrived, the thunderbirds wouldn’t have left enough of our bodies to investigate. I doubt he has too much inhibition against killing humans. Best get him now, perhaps, and as many of the others as I can with the ring, then draw and fight it out with the rest. But they have beam rifles and they’re ready and they look like fighters…

  “Rykermann was my commander,” the man said at length. “For him I will do this. Get it into the car.”

  Getting Karan into the car was not easy. If much smaller than a male kzin, she was still the size and weight of a tigress. But she was partly conscious and did her best to help. The car carried them to a dome that rose out of the near-tundra landscape. There were other buildings with the dishes of heavy-duty com-links, all surrounded and covered by strong fencing. Karan was put into shelter. Guthlac, using all the psychological dominance at his command, and his brigadier’s identity and electronic passes, demanded a desk and called his headquarters and then Rykermann. He summoned his modified Wolverine-class command ship, the Tractate Middoth. It was well-armed for its size, and its small permanent crew were his own picked men. It was a vast relief to see its familiar shape appear and grow in the gray sky and swoop to the landing-pad.

  Chapter 11

  “First, I wish to know more about your gods,” said the Protector. “The internet has told me something, but not enough.” Despite the squeaking and popping of its beaklike muzzle, the words were understandable. Its grammar was good.

  Pain. Dimity sensed it dimly. Vaemar with his hunting instincts sensed it more acutely but all his training was to ignore and despise pain save when it was a useful alarm signal. Not surprising it is in pain after such a transformation, thought Dimity. Thank you, Herr Doktor Asperger. I think I understand something of it. Doubtless we owe Asperger’s Syndrome to our own Protector inheritance.

  “You”—it fixed its gaze on Dimity—“have a god that is everywhere and all-powerful. It can never know achievement, striving, the conquest against odds, triumph. Because it is, it can only be, and never know becoming. Do you agree?”

  “Up to a point,” said Dimity. “I’m not a theologian. I think there is an idea that our God can know such things through us, His creatures. Perhaps that is one of the purposes of our creation. To know becoming.”

  “‘Perhaps’? What kind of a concept is that? And you”—its bulging Morlock eyes swivelled to Vaemar—“You have a god like yourself, only bigger. A fanged beast that needs courage and fights against Infinity and something called Fate that will one day overcome it. You are both promised a life beyond death, but given only barest hints of what that will actually be like. Somehow humans will be given worlds to rule, somehow kzinti will be hunted and devoured by the Fanged God, yet somehow live again in him if they defy him and fight so that they become worthy. Their identities will survive, for if they fight nobly the Fanged God will give them a new and greater life. Have I simplified your theology?”

  “Yes,” said Dimity and Vaemar together.

  “I had no idea of a god,” said the Protector. “In the caves there was Hunger. Eating. Hatred. Fear. Mating. Enemy-prey. Thoughts moved sluggishly but emotions surged. Then enemy-preys. All danger. All food. Old preys. The flyers and the runners. New enemy-preys. Things like you and you, that killed and killed. Killed like the water flooding the lower tunnels, with things that blinded and burnt. The big ones were hard to kill, the small ones were hard to kill too. I survived. I knew almost nothing but survival and breeding. Those about me died, for your kinds killed them and then you killed the flyers and other things that were our food. That was all. That, and a dim idea that something had sent our food to us, and made the waters flow.

  “Then, after the Change, I began to wonder who had made the caves—the caves that I thought then were the world. Then, when the light burnt less outside, I left the caves. I saw what I now know is the scarp, sweeping down to the great valley. The sound of what I know is wind. Smells I had never imagined. I saw what I now know are the stars. Something had made this. It could not exist without a cause. Since then I have come to understand other concepts. Worship…I need to know much more…so much more.”

  It went on for a long time. It spoke with them of the creation of stars, and the physics of the Big Bang and the Monobloc, theories discarded with new knowledge in the twenty-second century, and resurrected with newer knowledge in the twenty-fourth. They tried to divert it. Finally it left them.

  “No time to get her to kzin facilities. She’ll have to stay with us,” Guthlac said. “I’m not leaving her here with these gonzos.” There had been tense hours while they waited for the ship to arrive.

  “I agree,” said Cumpston. “But will she make it?”

  “She’s a kzinrret. She’s tough.”

  “We don’t have a kzin autodoc.”

  “Her main problem’s loss of blood. We’ve got some universal plasma. It won’t carry oxygen but it’ll give her heart something to work on and stop her blood vessels collapsing.”
>
  “Can you give it to her?”

  “I had infantry combat training, a long time ago, including first aid. Never thought then that I’d be using it on a kzin, though. And my men are versatile. Wait till you try Albert’s recipe for the wedding punch! Looking after a very important kzinrret shouldn’t be too much for them.”

  “Now to find our missing pair.”

  Guthlac wiped his forehead. “They’re alive,” he said at last.

  He pointed to the screen before him. A ship could be stealthed, but, at least for a time, its passage through atmosphere could not. “That could be the trace of the ship.”

  “It could be.” The instrumentation showed a faint trail of atmospheric disturbance, dissipating as they watched.

  “If that’s a ship, it’s got the best cloaking I’ve ever seen. Beyond the atmosphere there will be no way to follow it.”

  “We are looking for Protectors. Rykermann thinks the Hollow Moon was the original Protector ship. Could they be heading for it?”

  Guthlac punched numbers. “It gives us somewhere to start looking,” he said.

  “I’ve got them,” he said at last. “Extreme range, and there’s interference, but that’s where they are.” He turned to Albert Manteufel, his pilot. “Take her up!”

  “Gnosticism…” said Vaemar thoughtfully. “You said it is the idea of man becoming a god through his own inner efforts, or having a secret piece of god-ness inside him…” The Protector had gone, leaving them together in what they were coming to think of as “their” room.

  “I think that’s what it means,” said Dimity. “Salvation by knowledge. Gnostics were ‘people who knew,’ and therefore spiritually superior beings. Perhaps a sort of race-memory of the Breeder-Protector cycle. But as I said, I’m not a theologian. The abbot once told me that almost all serious heresies are forms of gnosticism. He also said that, given that the universe had been created, it didn’t matter much in religious terms where Man came from biologically, what mattered was where we were going spiritually.”