The Man-Kzin Wars 07 Page 5

...faster than any tiger I have known, moving towards us with a strange loping gait like that of an English weasel. But a beast three or four times the bulk of a man! It came...

  The beast shrieked again with a cry like no tiger I have heard before. Utterly fearless, it charged straight uphill towards our party! Such speed! Two of the beaters in its way were flung aside and killed by no more than a passing blow of its paws. It was coming straight at me as if it knew my purpose and had singled me out from among all the rest.

  The size of it! I thank the Lord I had the elephant gun with me, not the Martini. I was sure the first shot hit it, a shot to knock down a tusker, but it appeared to impede its progress not at all. It was almost upon me when I fired the second time: a bad shot, for the creature, again like no tiger I have seen before, reared up on it hind legs as I fired. I was quick of eye and hand in those days, but the beast was quicker than I, quicker than anything I had known.

  I had aimed at the head, hoping to take the eyes and lungs together, as you sometimes can with a tiger charging head-on. But the exploding bullet must have struck it in the pelvis, from the manner in which it collapsed. Yet it seemed, despite its wounds, to be gathering itself as I fired again. I heard the guns of the others behind me.

  Again, the third shot was one I was not proud of. You would not understand the difficulties unless you fully comprehended not merely the size of the beast but also its speed. With astonishing quickness — a quickness that would have been astonishing even had it not been gravely wounded — it hurled itself aside. More shots hit it: from the elephant guns, the Martinis, the Winchesters. The tower-muskets of the tribesmen joined in. I saw the bullets hitting. A normal beast would have been blown into several pieces by those impacts.

  Yet even then it was not finished. It rolled into the undergrowth and a moment later we heard it crashing away. It passed close to Sher Ali (Great Heart! When the magazine of his repeater was empty, he did not stop to reload, but drew his Khyber knife!), and I heard the others pumping shot after shot from the Winchesters after it.

  I was sure the shots were mortal. It had absorbed enough lead to kill a herd of elephants, yet no wounded tiger can be left. I was deafened, my head was ringing and my nose bleeding from the concussion of the .606.

  I examined the beaters who had fallen. Sadly, a swift examination was all that was needed. One had been decolloped, the other torn almost into two pieces by those claws. As soon as I might I called for Maclean, Curlewis, Sher Ali and the head beaters to follow me.

  Mortally wounded or not, it traveled quickly, up a thickly grown rocky hillside. The blood trail was easy to follow but the blood was strange. It seemed sometimes purple and sometimes orange. There was orange hair, fragments of meat and smashed bone, even entrails. I knew the exploding bullets had done their work well.

  But the too-deep quietness was still sending a message to our hunting instincts. Somehow I knew the brute was not dead yet. But it was no longer shrieking and it could not be heard. I did not believe it was dying quietly. It was, I felt somehow certain, husbanding its well-nigh unbelievable strength and vitality for a last charge. I was glad indeed of the trusty guns behind me!

  We searched the jungle-grown rock holes for a long time, or so it seemed with every nerve keyed up. We had followed our quarry into a long, deep ravine that twisted and turned. Overgrown, with dark clefts and overhangs. Then we heard the creature again. It was not roaring and snarling, but its strange voice, muffled by distance, rose and fell like water on a dying fire. It came from deeper within the ravine.

  By now the morning mist was lifting off the distant hilltops. I remember the reluctance with which I led the way down. I looked at those hilltops where I had hunted innocent sambar and musk deer and wondered if I would see them again. The high rocky walls almost shut us off from the sky so that it seemed to us as if we were deep underground.

  Then suddenly there was a deafening crack and a flash across the sky. So loud was it I did not know whether it was lightning immediately overhead (though it was louder than any thunderclap I have heard, even in the mountain country) or a hundred batteries of artillery firing simultaneously. A blast of hot air smote us. Across the crest of the ridge a vast column of dust boiled into the sky like smoke. I have seen a magazine explode in a bombardment, but this far eclipsed that detonation. The wind picked up stones and flung them so we covered our faces.

  Leaving even the hunt for a moment, and turning our backs on our quarry as we should never do, we hurried up the slope. A vast avalanche had torn away half the side of the next valley. The tiger that was said to have come in a thunderstorm died in the midst of another great convulsion of nature.

  So great was the force of the avalanche that we saw trees and boulders flung high in the air above us, to crash down again adding to the ruin below. We stood and stared at it for many minutes, but before such a cataclysm we were helpless. We could do no more than pray that no unfortunate souls had been trapped in the landslide's path. Luckily, as I have mentioned, all the people in that valley had already fled from the tiger's predations. There would have been no hope for any who had remained.

  "He was on the top of a ridge, and he saw a landslide in the next valley throw trees and boulders high in the air above him?”

  "That's what it says. He goes on.”

  As the sounds of the avalanche died away, we heard again the sound of our quarry. No other tiger I have heard before or since made such a sound, resembling almost articulate speech. But now it was weaker, and I thought I could hear blood in its lungs. Guided by these sounds through the thick undergrowth, we saw at last a cave entrance, and the blood trail entering it.

  One remembers smells from such times. There was the landslide smell of pulverized flint filling my nostrils, as well as a strange gingery smell, and blood.

  A hunter and a soldier must at times do dangerous things, but there is no wisdom or glory in foolhardiness. Maclean, Curlewis and I waited at the entrance with our guns ready and sent the bearers back for torches and rockets. Several were moaning on the ground and vomiting, I believe through hysteria induced by the two excitements of the chase and the awesome convulsion of nature we had just witnessed. When my friends at length returned we fired several rockets into the cave in the hope of flushing the beast out.

  At last, not, I confess, liking the work particularly, I entered the cave, with a light held well before me, and all of us with the triggers of all our guns at their first pressures. There lay the tiger. Its forepaw appeared to be holding something.

  It was plainly dying. Its hindquarters were shattered and it lay in a pool of its own blood. It had been burnt again by the rockets that lay flickering out around it. Yet at the sight of us it gathered itself as if to spring.

  It cried out again, and I swear that there was something in the tone of its voice that told me it was asking some question! I have heard a wounded Pathan warrior die so, crying out, I believe, to know the name of the warrior who killed him.

  It sprang as well as it could. Our guns discharged together. All aimed at the chest, and it was blown backwards against the cave wall. Still, it made another attempt to attack us as we fired shot after shot into it from our repeaters, clawing and dragging itself along the ground, still shrieking and snarling in its strange voice. I never imagined any beast so hard to kill. But at last it died.

  When we examined the beast closely, I was astonished, and moved to pity for it. I said most man-eaters are old or crippled beasts. That is why there is no particular sport in hunting them: They are simply vermin.

  I have seen deformed beasts before, that are sports or unhappy freaks of nature, but this was the most deformed I have ever seen. Pity? Why should a soldier not feel pity for an enemy once he has done his job and the enemy lies dead before him? But when I examined the great carcass more closely, I was overcome with bewilderment and a strange sort of fear such as I have never felt before. I had thought of my quarry as a noble beast, though a man-eater. But now, what can I say?


  What can I say? Should I write a tale none will believe? I write this as an old done man, with my career behind me. I do not wish to be called mad, yet I have set out to tell the plain narrative of my life, and I have the skull and the skin with me yet. The creature had not paws but hands! And its head was like the head of no tiger I have ever seen.

  Was it a previously unknown species that had wandered down from the high snows of Tibet? The tail was wrong, too. Hairless and pink like that of some giant rat. There was something disgusting about that tail.

  Do not think me mad, but I have lived in the East long and seen something of Eastern magic and know that mysteries exist we of the West cannot solve. Even in an Indian cantonment, I have seen things which would not be believed were I to recount them in London or Sydney.

  Was this creature the product of Tibetan magic? Was it indeed a Demon? If I attend Church-parade and pray to the God at the head of my men, how can I not, in the end, be prepared to accept the existence of Demons too?

  But could a Demon be killed with a shot from my rifle? This was a flesh-and-blood creature.

  In many a village I and others have heard stories of ghosts and were-tigers: tigers shot at night whose bodies were never found, but next day some man in the village — usually the local moneylender — was found dead in his house with a bullet in him. I never gave these stories much countenance when first I heard them in my early years in the East, but the skin of the Tiger-Man is before me as I write.

  Then, too, there was the thing clasped in its furred beast's hand, and the things we found a little way away, whose origin and nature none can guess. Are the things we found the works of Tibetan priests? What is the writing on the heavy knife? I have enquired since of Mr. Lockwood Kipling of the Lahore Museum and he says he has seen none like it. I leave it to others to make sense of these things.

  Did the tiger previously devour some traveler in that cave? Or were those things left there by no more than chance, perhaps by Ruhmalwallahs or other secret travelers? Were they connected with the tiger at all? Why did it clutch at that object as it died? Sher Ali, when he could be persuaded to enter the cave (and I could hardly understand his fear now that the beast was dead, that Bravest of the Brave when it was alive!) seemed almost to lose his wits. He babbled that the tiger had brought the things there itself!

  And yet, his words have stayed in my mind... who had access to biological engineering shops and metallurgical labs. He was rich. Rich families generally stayed that way by wanting to get richer.

  Vaughn-Nguyen had no wife now. He had left the farm at an early age and had returned to it only a few years before. Much of his life had been spent working with dolphins. There were no trips into space recorded, only excursion flights to the moon. During his absence the farm had been run by robots, and the buildings had been sealed for about eighty years.

  An hour later the clincher came: Paul Vaughn-Nguyen who had gone to the Belt was the same Paul Vaughn in my dossier: the systems-controller in the Angel's Pencil.

  There seemed little more to investigate. We knew who now. It only remained to clear up the question of why.

  But something about the photographs in the colonels book nagged me. I had them enlarged and computer enhanced. It took me several days to work out what was puzzling about them.

  There was one taken of him as a young 'captain', posed with a group of other men dressed in strange clothes, at the conclusion of the famous tiger hunt.

  The tiger itself had been dragged out and skinned and lay on the ground a dark mass, the skin and raw skull beside it. The old photograph preserved no details of morphology. Further, the three men and another differently dressed — Sher Ali, I presumed — were standing with their feet on the body, obscuring it further.

  His next photograph was another of the colonel, presumably as an older man, standing posed with a group of others shortly after the 'Dirragha Campaign', which, I discovered, appeared to have been not a game but some sort of conflict.

  Vaughn wore more or less the same odd clothing in both. The captions identified the others with him, including two who appeared in both photographs called Captain Curlewis and Lieutenant Maclean. There was another photograph of Sher Ali. All the photographs had been taken by one Hurree Mukkerjee, who was described as the 'Original Brigade and Regimental Photographer'. Photography, even primitive photography like this, was rare enough in those days for the photographers name to be thought worth preserving.

  But surely all real wars had ended long before that? Soldiers even then had been anachronisms, reduced, as I had learned from our courses, to minor policing duties like this of hunting dangerous animals in wild country. Had there been groups of criminals... what was the word... banditos? brigantes?... that they had apprehended?

  Something did not add up.

  And soldiers had used rockets?

  It was like military fant stuff.

  I slept badly again that night. And I kept seeing the faces of the Military Historians. They were like a snag in my mind. And they worried me not only for themselves, but for the very fact I thought about them now. One who does what I do has no business thinking too much upon those it is his duty to care for.

  They were still in the hospital. By law, they had a certain time to go through the formality of an appeal. Finally, and I was not sure why I did this, I sent an order to delay the memory-wipe.

  ·CHAPTER 5

  Our inability, with all our great resources, to answer the comparatively simple question: "Are we alone in the galaxy?" is maddening. But it is also, as Professor [Glen David] Brin points out, somewhat frightening. It is all very well to suggest, as others have done, that the reason for the Great Silence is that no other civilizations exist, but there may be a more sinister explanation... It is not only the dead who are silent, so also is... the predator...

  — Adrian Berry, Ice with Your Evolution, 1986

  We had planned a six-month-long festival of concerts and games. My own section had little to do with it, but a lot of ARM resources were involved. We had several hundred people I knew about and a lot of computer time invested simply in researching and inventing games, music and dances, and an investment many times greater than that in promoting them.

  It looked as if, when the history subprogram was completed, new games would vie with landscape redesign as one of our major activities, rather than those things usually identified with ARM's public image.

  I knew what effort had gone into the games, especially 'Graceful Willow', with its premium on good losing, but of course they weren't for me. I had been busy since returning from Australia, and a lot of my time had been taken up persuading Alfred O'Brien to give me access to files with higher security classifications.

  I began to read about weapons again. I had thought at first that the placing of the 'sword' and the 'revolver' together in the colonel's chest might have been an anachronistic mistake by the hoaxers, but I learned swords had been carried by 'officers' for ceremonies and rituals long after they ceased to have any practical use. Sometimes, in warrior cultures, they had been handed down from father to son. But in any case, by 1878, surely both sword and revolver would have been equally ceremonial?

  I began to realize how little I knew. Take it that the original story at least was true: then Colonel Vaughn had shot the tiger-man in a primitive and dangerous hunt less than a hundred years before the beginning of the Space Age.

  And then, it seemed, he had been in a war! Wars as recently as the nineteenth century? When every schoolchild had been taught that they had ended at the same time as, by definition, civilization and recorded history began?

  We in ARM literary section knew they had ended later, but still hundreds of years before that. Before Columbus, before Galileo.

  But everything I had read and researched recently — and this time it was not fiction like the old books I had been involved in destroying, but official records — showed armies in the 1870s. Granted that crime control had been primitive then, and the world
dangerous and still partially unexplored. But all for police duties and tiger hunting? I was having trouble believing it.

  Among the history taught and displayed in our museums the date 1943 was a touchstone. Every child knew that was when von Braun had launched the first successful rockets to study cosmic rays and weather: the Vetterraketen, or V-1 and V-2. Society must have made great advances in a short time during the twentieth century for wars and armies to have disappeared so quickly and space flight to have got under way. Improbably great.

  Suppose those old books of pathological fiction and fantasy I had helped suppress had not all been fictions? And there had been so many of them!

  There was something else: Apparently harmless books on comparative literature and ancient literary construction had had very high priority, not for suppression and concealment, but for total, immediate destruction. Why? Was it perhaps so operators like me would not be able to tell fictional techniques from documentary ones?

  There had been the continual warnings, both overt and subliminal, when I first joined the literary section, warnings of the absolutely fatal career consequences of becoming too interested in the work.

  Why hadn't I seen these things before when I saw them now? Because I had been off medication for days and that medication had included an intelligence depressant? How much intelligence did you need to recognize a fant book or infiltrate a fant cult? Not a lot, I began to understand. Schizies like Anton Brillov and Jack Strather, in a different section and with different personal programs, had had access to far more real history than I.

  And the fant cults themselves... why were they so persistent and, within certain parameters, so consistent? Why had past generations manufactured bizarre artifacts like 'toy soldiers' and the plastic 'models kits', fragments of which still occasionally come to light?

  The Lady Mays question on her way to memory-wipe came back to me: Had I known what I had been destroying?