The Man-Kzin Wars 07 Read online

  Bannerjee called again. He had produced a display of script from a small viewing screen on the 'book'. I guessed it would be in dots and claw marks.

  A few hours later I was back in the controller's office. I didn't ask about the V-rockets. There was a code we all had that certain subjects, once indicated as forbidden, were not approached again. Besides, it wasn't necessary.

  "The script the Angel's Pencil sent back, have you had it translated?”

  "No. What would be the point?”

  "Do it.”

  "It's not as if it's a real language... there's a lot of high priority work on at the moment.”

  "They want us to come to the conclusion that an abnormal tiger shot in India hundreds of years ago was a lost alien and now we're running up against the same creatures in space.”

  "Who are they?”

  "The Vaughn-Nguyens probably remembered the old stories and had the original idea. And there must be others But I need more corroboration. And if I'm right, it'll solve the whole problem of the Angel's Pencil transmissions.”

  I gave him the readouts of the hand computer from Australia. "And scan this in, too.”

  He looked at it. "The same script.”

  "Yes. And you know how it originated? In a computer obviously.”

  "Let's find the computer. They may not have wiped the program yet.”

  It took time to get the additional computer access on top of what we had already and then to stitch in to what Bannerjee's translation program had achieved, more time for the translation itself to come through. But now the translation was becoming easier with the preliminary work done and further with the great mass of material the Angel's Pencil had beamed back. Some of this, purporting to be astronomical data and navigations tables, could be converted fairly quickly. A lot was lists: allegedly weapons inventories, fire-control tables, part of what appeared to be a poem. The poem gave us more military terms. Working from these, the translation of the electronic book gave us script and spoken language together.

  There was still noise corruption, still untranslatable sounds, but the essential sense of it was there, and now computers rigged in series with gigabytes of capability were sharpening it all the time. There were extrapolations and guesses, but at the end there was a message: Leg-bone shattered I cannot leap. Little time left. May Hero Death be mine! But life is end and time reflection.

  Arriragh kharzz uru... Let avenging sons preserve bone in worship-shrine! And Patriarch, I demand, grant Full Name again: Skragga-Chmee! If I not Conquest Warrior High, I have great Conquest discovered. From my nneiierkrew glory for my House and the Patriarch.

  The translator stumbled for a moment. The next sound was something like a live power cable dropped into water. Again, it could have been molecular or electronic distortion or an attempted simulacrum of nonhuman speech. Then the translation resumed: Sons know I have drawn off hunt, as plan. Sons will come when torn to pieces usurper Tskrrarr-Nig and regain estates on Skrullai and Name. I details of my course left. Kz'eerkti! The Kzinti come upon you!

  I have hunt well. Hot. Riper world for Conquest than any I have heard ancient tales. Great hunting territories each my son. ArrearrrLLaghh Karssht Krrar RsssRRLaghh... Preserve and honor bone Skragga-Chmee.

  What hunting has been! I live as Fanged Gold mean kzintosh live, even... I the noble Kzrral'eeAHrawl kill I need no weapon but Sire's w'tsai. Until today. May Fanged God's curse on Tskrrarr-Nig and his seed! May the God vomit forth his Soul!

  Sight fail. Moment I trigger self-destruct Distant Prowler. Gravity-motor and armory will not fall to tool-using kz'eerkti's hands.

  I do kz'eerkti service, preserving them for Patriarchy. Kz'eerkti population grow fast... Survey before landing I see kz'eerkt-bands fighting in eights of places.

  The computer adjusted at this point. It noted that an analogue had been identified and that the sound 'kz'eerkt' was replaced by the word 'monkey'. The translation seemed to be getting better now.

  Passing over oceans I see monkey-ships carry primitive guns as though even fight on sea! Toothsome good sport clever slaves, but if discover weaponry Distant Prowler with chemical rifles, the next heroes reach this planet find smoking craters. Should monkeys find gravity polarizer, the God's joke. But they will not.

  Red-clad monkeys in white helmets hunters, one who leads chief. He will enter cave, I am sure. If he thinks I already dead, may lure him my claws.

  I retreat to program self-destruct. My sons, that why I broke off battle when I knew wounds mortal! Not coward.

  No way leave my sons clearer trail this place, they know my route to this system... planet with rudiments of industrialization only radiation signature of self-destruct will bring them to this place. My seed mighty hunters! Dying, I demand Honor's Name Conquest Warrior finds this message convey message sons of Skragga-Chmee, usurped Lord of R'kkia on Skrullai! Demand, too, Honor's Name, sons Warrior reward.

  There was another gap. The screen adjusted as a new stream of data was fed in. The next words, the last words, were close to ordinary English.

  Much pain. Hear monkeys and slave-beasts approach — I do not think I can say more.

  Avenge me. Honor my bones. Warrior's sons...

  As I had predicted. It was the only way they could have fitted everything more or less together, once the tiger-man relics were found and identified, as, we now saw, they had been meant to be found and identified by someone like me.

  The hoaxers had thought further ahead to get the details right than I had given them credit for. Even the impossible speed and maneuverability of the supposed alien ship had been accounted for, in a sense, by the reference to a technology of gravity control.

  Even the Angel's Pencil's supposed fluke destruction of such a supposedly impossibly superior 'enemy' could be explained away according to the scenario the hoaxers had concocted: Such 'enemies', though technologically superior, might be taken by surprise, once, by a reaction-drive used as a makeshift weapon if they themselves had never needed to develop such a clumsy and primitive means of propulsion.

  "You've wrapped it up," said Alfred O'Brien. "But tanj! It was a set of twisted minds that packaged this idea.”

  And a twisted mind that unraveled it, he didn't need to say.

  "What will we do next?" I asked him.

  "It'll move to another level for executive action. There'll be no interrogations. Nothing to cause any trouble with the Belt." "Shouldn't they make reparation, if they are parties to it? This must have all cost a lot of time and money." "No! That decision has been made at the highest level and its quite unequivocal. If there is Belt involvement we don't want to know. There must never be an excuse for another conflict! Now that the problem's solved, no incidents." He looked straight at me, and spoke in a voice I had never heard before, a voice gray as ash. "Not when thousands of ships are powered with fusion-drives." I thought I saw him shudder, and when the import of his words sank into me I shuddered too. Perhaps for the first time I truly understood what ARM's work and the program were for.

  Then he continued in his normal voice.

  "The Vaughn-Nguyens will have total memory-wipes and that will be the end of it. Into the Black Hole. The lot." "The Angel's Pencil?" "Too far away for us to do anything. Well simply block its transmissions. End of story. You've done well, Karl.

  "You had better keep your present operating code for a few days," he continued. "You may need to access the records again when you write your report... " He nodded to himself. "You've done well," he repeated. Did I detect a note of doubt in his voice? But, no. I had done well. I thanked him and left. I planned to take a few days off then move back to my usual routine. There was one thing outstanding, a last piece of the puzzle I wondered whether to bother touching it again or not, and decided there was nothing to lose by one small action that would settle forever a tiny voice whispering a final question. It was still day in England. I called Humphrey at the British Museum. "How long," I asked him, "was it since the skull of the Vaughn's Tiger w
as last examined? Before we saw it the other day.”

  He called me back several hours later. "The first part of the search didn't take long," he said, "but I had to go through some very old records for the rest. That part of the vault hasn't been opened since the electronic locks were installed. That's more than a hundred years. And according to the written records, the box itself hasn't been opened since the first time — when the material was sent here from Australia in 1908." The last answer. I recoiled. I felt like a man coming out of a dim cave, and, as he approached the daylight and the exit, placing his groping, overeager hand on a snake. I recoiled, but I forced myself to approach it again, to face at last what that last answer was. And at last I knew why the Angel's Pencil had sent its message. My vague intuition had been right: There had been a simple explanation, before us all the time.

  ·CHAPTER 6

  Our predatory animal origin represents for mankind its last best hope... the apes were armed killers —

  — Robert Ardrey, African Genesis

  Alfred O'Brien dumped me in an autodoc. In a 'doc, not at a 'doc. Big-league treatment. They even had a human doc look at me.

  I think now that he had guessed some time before what my final report would be and had been waiting for it.

  No one could have replicated exactly and in three dimensions the shape of a skull of which no complete drawings existed and which had been locked away before any of us was born.

  I went on a holiday. ARM moved me up the waiting list for a permit to hike and camp in the Great Slave Lake Park and dive at Truk Lagoon. I visited Easter Island and the Taj Mahal.

  After the Taj Mahal I spent a little more time in India. left the tourist routes and headed north, not exactly hiding but not calling attention to myself.

  Near the high jungle where Assam meets Tibet there was a new restricted area. Part of the park, a valley, needed special maintenance work, I was told. As I left, I saw some of the machinery going in. It was heavy digging machinery and it was heading for what I knew from a fragment of map I had seen was the site of an ancient landslide.

  I do not know if ARM will want me again. A year and half has passed and I have heard nothing official.

  Unofficially, I have kept a few contacts.

  ARM moves slowly and obliquely as a rule. I do not know when, or if, they will use the plans of the alien's bomb-missiles and laser-cannon that the Angel's Pencil sent us to begin tooling up factories. And there was a description of a gravity-motor.

  Perhaps they will move too slowly. If so, I am unlikely to know before the end.

  Did the crew of the Angel's Pencil think to search for a call-beacon in the wreckage of the enemy warship? Did they neutralize it? Too late to ask them now.

  I have been warned not to leave Earth, and under no circumstances to contact anyone connected with either the Belt or the media.

  Have I been duped? Suppose the whole thing was as we first suspected an enormously elaborate setup, perhaps not to make a bear market in some space industries but to create a bull market in a new military industry? Despite the fact we found no trace of any money movements and despite the fact no warlike race or culture could ever achieve civilization and science, let alone handle the energy processes space travel requires?

  But I have learned more about that now, and it cuts the last ground away: The axiom that a warlike race cannot progress to the point of space travel is a pious fiction, a lie made into a self-evident proposition, never tested. But before I handed in my last report, I searched those old military records one more time, following the trail whose whole length only I had come to know. Our Space Age was born in war.

  I think it is too late to re-bottle the genie now. Already, I know, there is increased use by ARM personnel of keys to ancient military history records. There is a new special history course and batches of selected ARM personnel are being put through it. My Military Historians are, I think, involved. Anyway, they have disappeared and I am sure they are not tending machinery on Mars.

  For the rest, Anton Brillov is involved, and that means Buford Early. A new base has been set up on the moon. It is not another resort for budget-class tourists. I think that in the power struggle going on inside ARM Buford Early's masters are winning.

  There have been, I have learned, unexpected postings. And I have noticed some of the sort of people posted. While waiting for my permits I called about a dozen of my acquaintances, ostensibly for company on my holiday.

  In fact, I was most interested in the whereabouts of two among the dozen: specialists in x-ray lasers. Both had suddenly relocated and I could not trace them. Some of ARM's house-schizies, my near colleagues, have disappeared, too.

  And there have been unscheduled meetings with the Belt leadership. I have heard rumors of a new spaceship design team being put together. I can guess some things about the new spaceship they will be designing. It will be well equipped with signaling devices to assist in contact, devices using large amounts of energy. But to design a new type of ship and to build it are different propositions.

  I have noticed changes in our games and entertainment. 'Graceful Willow' has disappeared from the newscasts. A new game, 'Highest Hand', has an emphasis on winning. There are no more dances.

  If those behind Early win, I think I will have a role in what is to come. Otherwise, I imagine, someone will be calling on me soon and I will be taken in to a memory-wipe. There is no point in running, ARM can find me anywhere on Earth, and if I somehow got into space, what would I be running to there?

  Arthur Guthlac has been seconded to special duties, along with several others who were at the edge of forbidden studies. But he has kept his museum title of Assistant to the Chief of the General Staff. Early's joke?

  Messages have been beamed out to his sister's ship after all, ordering it to turn back. No one has said why. Those messages will reach it in about seven years' time, and what has happened has happened already.

  I pity Arthur Guthlac and try not to imagine what he feels, but part of me wonders if he may have found the purpose in life that always eluded him.

  I have done what I could. If there is any future history now, no doubt historians will look at the chance the whole thing turned on. Colonel Vaughn shot well. He bought us five hundred years.

  They are capable of mistakes. They are capable of wishful thinking. Skragga-Chmee's creatures did not come. We had to go to them.

  The main purpose of my holiday was to say good-bye to what has been, to what we always took for granted. I visited places of Earth I had known in a longish life that has, I suddenly realize, almost too late, had its share of good times. Scenes of beauty, peace, tranquility or thronging human life. Scenes from the last days of the Golden Age.

  What will these same scenes show in a few years?

  War factories worked around the clock by forced labor? Glowing bomb craters? Or the hunting territories of Earth's felinoid conquerors?

  Time is running out.

  What shape is space? Space will put on The shape of any cat...

  I look up at night and know what is coming. ARM may or may not move in time. Perhaps the felinoids have too great a technological edge over us anyway. They have been in space a long time. Perhaps it is too late for us to rearm, and perhaps as a species we have deprived ourselves of the capacity to fight.

  Sir Bors, Lady Helen! If you and yours had been arrested three days earlier, how different an ending your story might have had! But I cannot say whether a better ending or a worse one.

  One thing I know is that the program and everything I have worked for is in ruins.

  Perhaps that is why I feel so happy.

  A DARKER GEOMETRY

  Mark O. Martin

  and

  Gregory Benford

  Part I

  The Veldt between the Stars

  ·CHAPTER ONE

  Deep space is vast and cold, stretching endlessly. Eternal, unforgiving night.

  Look first to the tiny bubbles of light and heat that n
ourish the warmlife bustle of carbon-carbon bonds, challenging the ever-patient cold and dark. Not too close to these stellar fires, yet not too distant, exist the small set of orbits which can support chemical disequilibria: warmlife.

  There spin the myriad water worlds, brimming with living things, spheres all green and blue and white, basking in oblivious torpor. The warmlife worlds swing confidently around their parent suns, ripe with energies and youth, wellsprings awaiting the patient appetite of entropy.

  Such thin slices of space-time are but tiny candles in an enormous darkened ballroom.

  Look now to what is not, to the overwhelming depths between the stars; a darker geometry, the vast majority of all space and time. Strange minds dwell in that apparent emptiness, far from the hectic heat of the sunward spaces.

  The Deep has its own beauty — stark, subtle, and old beyond measure. A flickering cold glow of plasma discharges; the diamond glitter of distant starlight on time-stained ices; a thin fog breath of supercooled helium, whirling in intricate, coded motion: These are the wonders of the Deep, far from any sun.

  Here dwell the Outsiders.

  They have ranged within the Deep for eons, thinking their cold thoughts while on still colder errands, as the barred spiral galaxy turned upon its axis dozens of times.

  What the Outsiders — cryogenic, helium-based traders — have witnessed in their vast span of time remains a mystery to the myriad warmlife races. Outsider logic is cold, their designs as shadowy as the spaces between the stars; their minds are totally alien to the bustling carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and light.

  Outsiders watched while warmlife first evolved on world after world, beginning nine billions of years ago. They remained aloof as the first warmlife sentients developed space travel, reaching out with clumsy arrogance to nearby stars in the name of exploration and empire. Now and then, some Outsiders helped such upstart and brash races, for cold, strange reasons of their own.