The Man-Kzin Wars 07 Read online

  Family history and traditions were dangerous. Interest in the memory of an 'ancestor' was but a short step from family pride and loyalty, and that was clearly and totally inimical to the interests of Earth's good government, or, as far as they were distinguishable, of ARM.

  But if the Vaughn-Nguyens thought too much of the past, that was useful to me now.

  "The old colonels tiger-man? Yes. Quite famous in its day," he said. Then he added perfectly casually, "Would you like to see the skin?”

  I had not been expecting this. I looked at Arthur Vaughn-Nguyen closely. What was he really up to?

  "You have it here?”

  "Why, yes.”

  He led me into another room. The dog followed us for a few steps, and then stopped, making a peculiar noise.

  "Is he all right?" I asked.

  "You've just seen a family mystery in the flesh." He said, "No animal will go into that room." He laughed. "We say it's haunted by a ghost tiger.”

  Against the wall stood a large box of some dark wood, obviously very old, hand carved with decorations. It was much more elaborate than the one at the museum.

  Another antique, and this time, I would have guessed, of great value. There was, I noticed, no electronic lock on it, no recording device. Impossible to prove when it had been opened last. Had any of the Angel's Pencil crew been here? I didn't fancy the time-consuming job of tracking down their movements over the last generation.

  "Its in there?”

  "We keep it here. We used it for a rug once, but it was put away, a long time ago.”

  It had been a crime to keep the skins of rare animals. In the days when there was a never-ending demand for material for the organ banks, and crimes, however minor, attracted only one punishment. Those days were long gone, but the Vaughn-Nguyens must have some genes for either courage or foolhardiness for one of their ancestors to have risked keeping the thing at all. Did this point to involvement in criminal behavior today? "I'd like to see it very much," I said. The chest smelled bad when it was opened, not powerful at first, but like nothing I have ever smelled before. Like nothing I have ever smelled before? There was something about that smell, something that made me want to be away from that place. I guessed what it was after a moment, though I had never encountered it before: It must be the tiger smell. I got it under control easily enough. I heard, from the next room, a howl and a frantic scrabble of claws on flooring as the dog fleet. My host pulled out the skin and rolled it out across the floor. Although parts were missing, it was huge as the skull we had seen was huge. It had longer legs than any tiger and it was still a blazing orange. There were some darker markings but it was not a normal tigers striped pelt. It almost looked as if it had been made of some synthetic fabric (Perhaps it was. Well, that would be tested).

  The head was enormous. It felt toylike when I examined it because the cavity where the skull had been was stuffed with some sort of papier-mâché, now crumbling. The jaws were set in a huge gape, and I thought absurdly for a moment how many feet must have caught on them when it was used as a rug, The eyes were glass balls, and the teeth ivory pegs.

  The hind part and chest had been crudely stitched to pull it together around what I now guessed had been, assuming it was genuine, bullet holes. "It hasn't got a tail," I said. There was a ragged gap at the base of the spinal ridge where the pelt had been hacked.

  "No," said my host, "there was meant to be something wrong with the tail. They didn't keep it." "There seems to be something wrong with everything about it," I said. "But isn't there a breed of tailless cat?”

  "I think so. The face is a cat's face, anyway. But look at those ears!" A cat's face, yes, even with the strangely large skull. The ears were complex arrangements, still flexible, reminding me of bat wings or bits of umbrella. They turned to something like leather at the outer parts, and ended raggedly in what might once have been membrane. There was something else about them, too. I examined the dark, gristly surfaces more closely. "They've been tattooed." "Oh. With anything in particular?" He seemed not to have known this. "I can't tell." He got a lamp. Shining this through the outer membrane I could see a pattern. It seemed to be made up of... I called them 'bones' for want of a better term. "Who'd tattoo a tigers ears? And why?" "Tattooing a live tiger would be a difficult job, I'd think. It must have been dead. Perhaps to identify it." "A creature as odd as this would hardly need further identification, I should think." "You're right there. Look at the hands. That's where the Tiger-Man' idea comes in.”

  The oddly long forelimbs ended not in a tiger's pug paws but in four-digited hands with black extremities. One of the digits on each was like a thumb.

  Did they work like cat's claws? I pressed the pad of one digit. Nothing happened. I pressed harder and a claw emerged. A black claw. I touched it and then jerked my finger back, to suck at a bleeding gash. It was razor sharp. All about was the fear smell. And a hint of something like... ginger.

  "There's some of the colonels other stuff here, too," he said. "It all goes together.”

  "It looks as if it hasn't been opened for a long time.”

  "No. I was shown it as a child, but it was getting pretty moldy even then. I didn't want to touch it too much, and since then there has hardly been a lot of call. The house was shut up for a long time." He would have been a child, I guess, about a hundred years before.

  A wooden grating divided the top and bottom of the chest The lower part contained rotting cloth. Some of this had once been dyed red, and on some was gold lace and wire, still unfaded. Parts of the colonels 'uniforms', I supposed.

  The cloth parted at the folds as if cut with a knife. I had not realized before that ancient fabrics were so weak and perishable — or had they been weakened chemically to seem ancient?

  Two metal things I recognized from ARM's special history course as weapons, one, called a 'sword', for cutting, one, called a 'revolver', was a sort of 'gun' for projecting 'bullets' — solid pieces of metal — by chemical explosion. I had had an idea the bullet-projector had come after the sword and was surprised to find they were evidently contemporaneous. Near the bottom was a bundle marked 'Tiger-Man'.

  It contained some odds and ends wrapped further in cloth, and a piece of crumbling paper with what Vaughn-Nguyen said was the colonel's own handwriting: "This is what I found in the lair of the Tiger-Man.”

  There was one thing in this last bundle whose use and purpose I recognized at once: an oversized knife, almost the size of the colonel's 'sword', but different, in a metal holder. When I drew it forth it was straight-bladed and, while the sword was black with age and pitted with rust, this looked new.

  I am not a metallurgist, but the metal was different from any I had seen before. I took the sword in one hand and the sword-sized knife in the other. Their weight, balance and general feel were quite different too.

  The old and rust-pitted sword was easier to move in my hand than the knife. The knife was too heavy and seemed badly designed. My fingers could only just close around the handle. There were grips for a hand bigger than mine, with one finger less. I held the two weapons up to the light, comparing their textures and cutting edges, then pressed the two blades against the wooden side of the box, not very hard. The rusty sword made no impression. The other cut into it effortlessly, as if it was edged with mono-molecular wire.

  I apologized to Vaughn-Nguyen, and took it into the light. On the handle was a design in dots and claws.

  The next thing was a hand-computer. But like the knife, built for an oversized hand, and of an unfamiliar design. It appeared to be damaged.

  There was an oversized belt with pockets, and small metal artifacts. They and the computer-thing seemed to have come from the same shop and they had what looked like homogeneous power-couplings. On these too, and on the big knife, the bonelike design was repeated.

  "There's also the old man's book," said Vaughn-Nguyen. "He wrote it for the family. There's a chapter on the Tiger-Man in it. Grandfather read it to us when I was a child. I th
ink that was one of the last times we took the skin out of the chest. I don't imagine you can get copies of it anymore. It must have been out of print for a long time, and I don't think it was ever electronically transcribed.”

  He was right there. You couldn't get a large number of those old books. There were old mine-tunnels full of them, veins of cellulose running through Earth's geological strata. There were whole construction industries, even space industries, whose main products came from pulped and highly compressed paper. Some of our best and most expensive natural-grown food came from soil that had originated as books, sent to vermiculture farms to be passed through the bodies of worms. The 'book-soil', or 'B-plus Compost' to give it its trade name, helped form the hydroponics gardens for the first-class kitchens of luxury spaceships.

  Vaughn-Nguyen was hardly in a position to know (or was he?) that the censoring, removal and destruction of politically incorrect books and similar records had been the main activity of several hundred thousand highly trained men and women for generations. Vaughn-Nguyen was not acting like a man who knew he was under investigation. He seemed genuinely relaxed and friendly. Or had he had training too? He had been completely cooperative so far. Or was that part of some secret agenda? He was a man it would be possible to like. I hoped that if he had to join the Military Historians in the canyons of Mars he would be reasonable happy there.

  He turned to his bookcase, another elaborate antique affair with sliding glass doors, and handed something down, carefully.

  "It's pretty fragile.”

  Vaughn-Nguyen did not want to let a Historian take family heirlooms away, even temporarily. I had to show him one of my identifications in the end. I also promised to return the things after examination.

  Many pages of the book were missing, and several broke as I handled it. They didn't tear, just snapped and crumbled soundlessly. I learned sense then and stopped touching it. If it had been made of snowflakes, the thing could hardly have been less frail.

  I had seen old books often enough professionally, but I had seldom had to puzzle out a lot of their contents. When in doubt, they went, as a general rule.

  There were few pictures in the book and the ancient cramped layout and typefaces made it horribly difficult to read after a while, even though the spelling was relatively modern. I took a painkiller and then got the book to Bannerjee at the ARM Lab in New Sydney and had him photograph it before more harm was done. Then I got to the 'doc for treatment for my finger. I had hardly ever seen real blood before, certainly not my own, and I did not like the sight. Once, people like Colonel Vaughn must have seen a lot of blood.

  The 'doc treated my finger, but nothing else. O'Briens direction on that matter had gone right through the system. I slept badly that night. A headache the 'doc again refused to medicate. A slight throb in my finger, all adding up to the unpleasant novelty of pain. It was like living in a fant book, I thought sourly, living, perhaps, as the military fants wanted it. And maybe my system was changing.

  ·CHAPTER 4

  I had been asked to travel to the Mohne Dam, that structure at the head of the Ruhr Valley which was breached by the 'Dambusters' 50 years ago, to research an anniversary article. [There was] no clue as to the events of that night of May 16/17,1943. There are no plaques, no memorials, no postcards. There are no twisted chunks of bomb casing mounted on a concrete plinth. There is no roll call of the drowned. Nothing. Girls sunbathed in the 80 degree sunshine and a couple of yachts moved sleepily in the light breeze.

  — Peter Tory, International Express, May 19-25,1993

  Bannerjee called me next morning, with the pages nicely enlarged and cleaned, and with a parallel text on the screen supplied in modern type which had been scanned from the legible parts and which I could read without developing a headache.

  I kept him hooked up and we read the pages together. The book began with a conventional description of the colonels family, apparently ancient even when the words had been set down. I soon found the chapter heading I wanted.

  The Indians said the tiger had come to the district a few months before. It had come, they said, in a blaze of light during a thunderstorm.

  Certainly their superstitious awe could be explained by its extraordinary ferocity. Man-eaters in these parts generally adopt anthropophagy because owing to age or injury they can no longer pursue and pull down swifter and stronger game. But in this case men, cattle (including buffaloes), deer, bears and other creatures tame and wild, including even elephants, appeared to have fallen victim to a single beast. It attacked by day as well as by night, and even seemed to favor the daylight hours. It was said to be fearless and made little or no effort to conceal itself, save when it was plainly stalking for pleasure.

  Efforts to kill it by a band of determined villagers had ended in disaster. Once it had disposed of them, it came into the village itself and wrought havoc.

  Then the survivors had fled en masse. Yet these were tough hillmen who regard the tiger as a natural foe and will, if there is not a British regiment in the area with breech-loading repeaters and perhaps a few elephants, normally be prepared to tackle any beast on foot with tower-muskets.

  There had been found, indeed, the half-eaten body of another tiger it had apparently defeated, and that, said Sher Ali, the descendant of generations of hunters and marksmen who examined it and knows tigers well (he had even taken his name from them), had been a Royal Beast. I will write of Sher Ali more, for he proved himself that day and was to be long in my service, though I cannot say I took him for a servant. Rather, in the way of the Pathan — and he was an Afridi — he took me for his master. The tiger had spread terror far and wide. There were plenty of stories afoot among the villages that our quarry was in fact a demon, or a ghost.

  Indeed, but for the descriptions of it that a few lucky ones who had seen it and survived had brought back, we ourselves should have been doubtful that it was a tiger at all. Its spoor was quite unlike that of any tiger's pugmarks. Curlewis suggested its paws had been burnt to deformity in some forest fire. But then how could it travel so far and so swiftly?

  We plotted the pattern of its kills on an ordinance map...

  There was another gap here. From what was left of the page it appeared the map he referred to had been reproduced in a foldout form. Some of the village names and contour lines were left on the remaining part and I suckered a copy of this from the screen.

  It was a well-provisioned shikar, the best we could manage. We left as little to chance as possible, and owing to what we had heard of the beast's size, took the largest caliber of rifles we had: elephant guns for our first weapons. We had Express rifles with the exploding bullets from the Dum-Dum Arsenal, and of course reliable military Martinis, borrowed from the infantry (I didn't think our own carbines would be much use). We also had two of the new American Winchesters which the brigadier-general had asked us to try out. The bearers and beaters, we made sure, were well equipped with gongs, rockets, torches and guns. Sher Ali selected only the steadiest men for beaters.

  It roamed far afield, but its regular lair, we were told, was in the adjacent valley where it had first been seen, which was now virtually depopulated. Indeed the country was now almost empty of human inhabitants for miles around. Those that had not been devoured had fled.

  Not only, it seemed, was this tiger more voracious and aggressive than any man-eater I had ever heard of, but it was faster and more cunning. No horse would stay near its tracks.

  With the aid of the map we had carefully worked out a plan to disperse the beaters to drive the beast towards our guns when we had positioned ourselves in its valley. Never, in the event, did any plan prove more unnecessary...

  There was another gap here. The passage referring to the first part of the tiger hunt seemed to have been lost. Presumably the most frequently referred to part of the book had suffered the most wear and tear. The next few pages had had to be cleaned of old dirt.

  It was not to be like any stalk I have ever known. A bold tiger
will sometimes not trouble overmuch to conceal its tracks. This beast had left them everywhere. The path from the valley where it had first been seen and where it was now headquartered was beaten like a highway.

  It was a strange, oppressive day. The hills seemed lowering. The bandar — the monkeys — had disappeared from the trees and all the birds were silent. Any hunter will tell you of the strange silence when the world of nature puts aside its business as a hunt begins, but this was a more intense silence than any I had ever felt. I worried that it might affect the bearers' nerves. And though I had no doubt as to his courage, I saw the sweat of Sher Ali's face. I could not see my own, but I felt my heart beating faster than I liked. Sher Ali was my gun and I gave silent thanks that he was an Afridi and from what I knew of that breed — for we had taken tea with them many times on the Northwest Frontier — he would die a thousand deaths before he gave way to any fear he felt, least of all in front of these eastern hillmen.

  I felt danger very near in that silence as we set out from the camp in the early morning light. For the sake of all our people's morale, as the French call it, we wore our uniforms and, not much more practically, or so I thought at the time, I ordered the guns to be loaded and cocked then and there. I would not be writing these words today if I had not obeyed that second impulse.

  And then we heard a sound: a snarling roar louder than any tiger I have heard, louder than the roar of an African lion...

  Sher Ali saw it first: an orange spot moving through the trees, its coat strangely bright in the shadows. It was not hiding from us, nor was it stalking us, I realized. No sooner had it seen our party, men, guns, beasts and all, than it moved to the attack!...