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

  “Well, the idea is we should at least know our planet’s past. What’s the point of a historical display if it isn’t real? Nature really was red in tooth and claw once. Remember the Africa Rover.”

  “A good deal too red in tooth and claw for me to want to know about, thanks. I’ll leave that to the children. But you know I don’t mean you putting up with cold air currents and nasty holograms. I mean spending your life here.”

  “Look at this,” said Arthur. He touched a display of letters below a permanent reproduction of a great felinoid. “It’s a poem from an ancient children’s book on paleontology called Whirlaway: ‘The Song of the Saber-Tooth’:”

  On all the weaker beasts

  I work my sovereign will.

  Their flesh supplies my feasts,

  my glory is to kill.

  With claws and teeth that rend,

  with eyes that pierce the gloom

  I follow to the end

  my duty and my doom.

  For I shall meet one day

  a beast of greater might,

  And if I cannot slay

  I’ll die in rapturous fight.

  “Don’t you think it’s got a sort of ring to it?”

  It was my job, but I still found myself rather shocked, not just at the antisocial content of the poem, but because it seemed unpleasantly close to holos and flats I had been studying. Why had he chosen it to quote? “Do you think that’s really suitable for children?” I asked.

  “I don’t think it can do any harm to show what prehistory—prehuman history—was like. You don’t feel any sense of wonder looking back at the mammoth, the cave bear and the dire wolf?”

  “Well, a bit, I suppose.”

  “You can be creative here.”

  Arthur turned to a smaller holo in a cabinet by the door leading into the main diorama space. A hominid on the shore of an alkaline lake screamed and ran from another great cat. Other hominids jerked up from their clam gathering to scatter before it. Long-extinct birds rose in a screaming cloud. This time the saber-tooth was foiled. Geological and evolutionary time had passed since the first scene. The hominids were taller and some of them had sticks.

  The guard operated another switch and the scene changed again.

  “We have a lot of things to do here. This is a new one for the children. Our might-have-beens.” He spoke to a panel and a succession of prehistoric animals appeared, altered.

  “You can do your own genetic engineering here: These are how our friends might have developed had conditions been different.” He turned a dial and the holos changed. “Look! Here other creatures got the big brains.”

  Tigerlike creatures walked improbably erect, with fanciful tigerish cities in the background.

  “It’s been worked out what might have happened.”

  There was something here. I didn’t understand it, but there was a hint of a scent. Had something been planted here?

  Not, I thought, by Arthur Guthlac. All that was marked in his file was a certain interest in unsuitable games and reading, perhaps an occupational risk for someone in his job, and a general restlessness and reluctance to apply himself (apply himself to what?). Further, I had already checked that he had no conceivable financial or other links with anyone or anything that might profit from stories of space madness. I kept my voice casual.

  “Yes, I’m sure the children love it. But all the same, you must get sick of it, day after day. I don’t know why you bother with such a job. If you want to work, there are plenty of better things to do.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t really get sick of it. It can be fun working with the holos. The children can make it fun, too. In any case, what else should I be doing? Nobody’s going to send me into space, are they?” There was resentment buried somewhere there, I noted. Buried none too deeply, at that.

  “This wing is largely a children’s museum, as far as display goes,” he continued. “Which is why they have human guides, of course. You know it’s impossible to make anything child-proof if they’re left to run loose without supervision. A lot of the equipment here is expensive.”

  Arthur paused and then added, “And, after all, Karl, history is important.”

  “Of course it is. But the world is full of people telling themselves their hobbies are important. We’ve all got a great deal of leisure time to fill. All right, I agree we need people doing what you are doing. But you wanted to go into space once.”

  “What good is an amateur savant in space? They sent plenty of real professors to Wunderland, but someone like me would only take up valuable room on a colony ship. I know.

  “I applied a long time ago…I have no skill that would justify the expense of transporting me, or will allow me to earn enough money to pay my own way. One family seems to have been rationed to one space-farer. But you haven’t heard me complaining, have you?”

  “Not in so many words.” I kept my voice neutral. There was nothing to be gained by thinking of why I would never be allowed very far into space.

  His sister, I knew, was a navigator on the Happy Gatherer, a genius, genetic engineer turned space pilot. He was proud of her and, I guessed, subconsciously resentful.

  “Anyway, look at this.” Arthur opened another door onto a vast panorama of the asteroid belt, as seen from the surface of Ceres, the rocky landscape lit by the blue-white fusion flame of a miner’s ship passing closer than a real ship would ever be allowed.

  He touched another switch, and we seemed to stand on the red surface of Mars. Our feet disappeared in dust.

  “You can do a lot with holos,” Arthur said. “Being a gallery supervisor can be a lot of fun if the museum’s big enough and has VR as good as we have here.”

  He gestured. “Do you want to see our Great Moments in History? The Sportsman’s Hall of Fame? The panorama of the Olympic Games? The Hall of Music? We’ve got it all here. Science, the history of space flight: Werner von Braun sending up the first V-2?” He pointed down the hall, to the strange yet familiar shape of the historic weather-research rocket’s replica suspended from the ceiling.

  “There’s the Shame Gallery, too, the displays of creatures we exterminated, like the trusting dodo bird. But the truth of the matter is I like working in the museum because we have an excellent library here. I’d still like to do something in the field of prehistory. Somehow.”

  The main doors of the great building whispered shut. On Arthur’s computer a pattern of green lights appeared, as surveillance monitors locked into a nighttime control center. Security was light, a precaution against accident more than crime.

  A holo showed an outline of the complex, secured sections turning green, the last departing visitors white flashing dots of light. A few red dots for the skeleton human staff who would monitor the surveillance screens and occasionally patrol the corridors during the night. Cleaning and maintenance machines began to stir.

  “I’m off duty now. I’m glad you made this visit, Karl,”

  “It’s been a long time. I thought it would be a good idea if we caught up with each other.”

  “Well, we’re closing down now. Would you like to come home for a while?”

  “Would your family mind an uninvited guest?”

  “I live alone. I thought you knew.”

  “Well, I’ve no engagements tonight. The little savages are having their tapes played to them by now. Yes, all right. Thank you.”

  We stepped into a transit-tube. Arthur Guthlac’s quarters, I guessed from the near-instantaneous passage, were somewhere in the museum complex itself.

  Psychologically the rooms were easy to read. There were high-detail models of spaceships, a deep-space exploration vessel dominating them, and a flat map of the interstellar colonies.

  Arthur was ARM, of course, with some clearances. Most of the museum personnel, certainly all the general staff, were under the organizations wing, even if they had no idea of what its real size and ramifications were (for that matter, I was well aware that I knew very little
of that myself). They came in contact with too much history for any other arrangement to be conceivable.

  Anyone involved with history had ARM’s eye on them, and it was better to have such people inside the organization than out. We could afford that now. The occasional secret covens of military fantasists we came across—the Sir Kays and Lady Helens with their ceremonies and Namings—were a continuing if diminishing nuisance but were no longer seen as any real threat, and with modern medical science the organ banks had long been closed.

  Still, our present problem was before us and there is wisdom in the book of sports about keeping your eye on the ball. I took him through most of what Alfred O’Brien had told me, with the major visuals. He thought it over for a while, then he said:

  “Show me the picture of the skull again…It’s odd, but this almost reminds me of something.”

  “A skull is a skull, surely.” I didn’t tell him that it almost reminded me of something, too.

  “Yes, but, somewhere, somehow, I’ve got a feeling I’ve seen something like this before.”

  “It’s a pretty freakish-looking thing,” I said.

  “So it should be easy to identify.”

  He turned to a computer terminal.

  “We’ve got a good identification program here for type specimens,” he said. “Let me scan this in.” He placed the picture in the slot and we waited as the display began to reel off numbers.

  “We’ve got all the major type specimens here,” he said, “but not the oddities.” He pressed more keys.

  “It’s too much,” he said after a while. “I was wrong. We’d have to write a new program to get anything in the next month or so.”

  “Surely not. I know these programs. They can carry virtually unlimited data. That’s what they’re for!”

  “Yes, when the data’s been given to them. This hasn’t been. There is, it seems, no general catalogue of freaks.”

  “We’ll have to go through this practically museum by museum,” he said after a minute. “This is broken down into ancient national collections, even provincial—as you probably know, most animal classification is very old and often parochial. It should have been updated, but it never has been. I don’t even know what some of these countries were, let alone the districts and provinces!”

  I thought of the poem the controller had shown me.

  “Start with Australia,” I said.

  The screens rolled briefly. Guthlac shook his head. The poem seemed to exist in isolation, and read in full seemed to have been concerned with quantum mechanics.

  “There are no true felines native to Australia,” he said after a while. “The Tasmanian tiger and so forth were marsupials—convergent evolution.”

  “Perhaps some sort of convergent evolution is what we’re after.”

  More figures. Then lines of text.

  “Abnormal feline morphology…teratology…” Guthlac read, muttering to himself. “Convergent evolution…See…”

  He began to punch up pictures of fanged skulls. None had a cranium anything like the skull in the picture the crew of the Angel’s Pencil had sent back.

  “That’s all the Australian collection has,” he said. “Ordinary felines imported from elsewhere for zoos and so forth, domestic cats and a few convergent marsupials…Did you know there was once a marsupial lion? Died with the rest of the megafauna when man got there, though. Their main natural history concern as far as cats are involved seems to have been with the effects of domestics gone feral.”

  Gone feral. It sounded a funny concept to apply to animals. Its ARM usage was reserved to apply to a certain rare type of human.

  “Yes. The life-forms there had evolved in isolation, and had no defenses when the cats came with bigger teeth and claws and quicker reflexes. They wiped out a lot of species.”

  Was that why the hoaxers had chosen cats, I wondered? Some play on subconscious associations? When the cats came. The words seemed to hang in the air for a moment.

  Then: “Wait…here’s something else…the Vaughn Tiger-Man.”

  “What’s that?” Was there the faintest ripple of memory somewhere in my own mind at the words?

  “A tiger killed in India in 1878 by Captain, later Colonel, Henry Vaughn of the Fourth Lancers.”

  “What name did you say?” An alarm bell rang in my mind.

  “Vaughn.” He spelled it out.

  One of the Angel’s Pencil’s crew was named Vaughn.

  “What are lancers, do you suppose?”

  “I don’t know. What’s a colonel?” As a matter of fact I knew what a colonel was, and from that I could guess what lancers had been, but there was no point in letting Arthur Guthlac know that. I made a mental note that these natural history records needed editing. And I saw from his body language, plainly, that he was lying too. He knew what those terms meant.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “This is an old journal. Produced by some amateur natural history society. Colonel Henry Vaughn killed an abnormal tiger.”

  “But they’re protected species!”

  “Not then. And this one was a man-eater.”

  We knew that phrase: “Man-eater” had been a term of sensational horror recently. A boutique airship, carrying tourists slowly and silently fifty feet above the African savanna, had developed engine trouble and landed. The passengers in their closed and comfortable gondola need have only waited a few hours for rescue—less if they had said it was urgent. But they had left the craft and wandered out, apparently unaware of any danger. It had been a sobering thought during the investigation which followed that any of us might have done the same. Arthur went on.

  “He kept the skull and skin and settled in Australia later. But it’s not in the Australian Museum collection. When he died his family gave the skull to the British Museum.”

  “Is there a picture of it?”

  “Yes. But it’s only a drawing. And half of it is missing.”

  “Let me see.”

  Half a two-dimensional drawing. The front of a big skull, oddly distorted. There wasn’t much detail, but such a skull could be the inspiration of the Jenny Hannifer. What there was of it was closer than anything else we had seen. And I felt I had seen that picture somewhere before. Somewhere connected with childhood, just as the words “Vaughn Tiger-Man” aroused some faint chord that had something to do with long ago. I felt almost sure that I had heard that phrase before.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated: an image of a big room, with giant furniture, and giants. A child’s-eye view of house and parents. My giant father reading to me from a yellow-covered book? I thought that was what it was, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Perhaps the original illustration had been reproduced in one of those books which we discouraged: Strange Tricks of Nature, Great Unsolved Mysteries, The Wonder-book of Marvels.

  There had been a spate of them once. My father had collected them. Well, I was in a position to know where they were gone to now.

  More screens of numbers. Then a beeping sound, and a pointer flashing red at one of these. Guthlac scrolled down another menu and searched again. “I’ve located a box number for it.” He said, “It’s in England, but I gather from this it’s not been put on display, or not for a very long time. It was put into storage when it arrived there in 1908 and I gather it stayed there.”

  “Can you get any description?”

  “Not much. A sport, a freak, it says here. There was some interest in it when it was first shot. But it wasn’t regarded as scientifically important. It was just a piece of gross pathology.”

  “The only one of its kind?”

  “Exactly. Like the Elephant-Man. Not much for an ambitious student to make a name on there. That was a great age of biological discovery, you know, with all sorts of larger projects to occupy researchers. Vaughn wrote about it himself. Abnormal limbs and fangs and a large cranial tumor. It was grossly deformed. Pity he didn’t keep the whole skeleton.”

  Arthur turned to me. He seemed suddenly e
mbarrassed. When he spoke it was with an odd hesitancy in his voice.

  “Karl?”

  “Yes?”

  “How important is this?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “If this does matter, then I’ve done ARM a service, haven’t I?”

  “Of course.”

  “Would there be…a reward?”

  “You have a real job. Isn’t that reward enough? Important work. You said so yourself. You are one of the elite twenty-five percent who have something more than sport to fill their lives. How many people out there would give all they have for that?”

  “I want to get into space.”

  “So save up for a few years.”

  “No! Not as a passenger. I want…I want…”

  His voice trailed off. I knew what he wanted. Isolated, celibate, a square peg keeping a tight hold on normality. I knew. I was glad to break the awkward silence.

  “Yes. You mentioned a skin.”

  “Nothing about that here.” Then he burst out: “You have your hunts to enjoy!”

  There was no point in arguing with him, but how wrong he was! Someone who enjoys my work in the sense I knew he meant would be useless. In any case, the mental preparation arranged for us is thorough. What I do is a duty, and not an ignoble one. Our world has—no, our worlds, plural, have—become complicated beyond imagining. There is a phrase coming into use: “known space.” Someone has to hold it together. It has never been a matter of the hunt for its own sake, or of searching for excitement.

  Warn him off. Now. Arthur had quite a lot of museum junk littering a workbench. All there legitimately, I assumed, but among it was a small heap of brown paper, the pages of old books far gone in acid decay.

  “What are these?” I asked casually.

  “Sports history. It’s been a hobby of mine.”

  “Oh.” My eye caught the bottom of one of the loose pages:

  At the end of March, 1943, the thaw started on the eastern front. “Marshal Winter” gave way to the still more masterful “Marshal Mud,” and active operations came automatically to an end. All Panzer divisions and some infantry divisions were withdrawn from the front line, and the armor in the Kharkov area was concentrated under the 48th Panzer Corps. We assumed command of the 3rd, 6th and 11th Panzer divisions, together with P.G.D. Gross Deutschland. Advantage was taken of the lull to institute a thorough training program, and exercise…