"I took my ship, my borrowed ship that was owned by the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx, and I went to twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nil. And what I found was a big, fat, fuzzy red giant. Talk about the purloined letter! Men must have been watching that star with telescopes before ever they flew."
"Naturally I believe you," I said. "Every word, immediately. But I seem to remember that the puppeteers walked in Earth's gravity, breathed terrestrial air, and never wore protective clothing against the ultraviolet waves in sunlight." Mann was grinning like he had my wallet. "All right, I know I'm off the track, but how? The puppeteers must have come from a nearly Earthlike world under a nearly GO sun."
"That's where everyone else went off the track, too. They were all searching around G- and F - class sun. Funny thing is, that fat red giant probably was a yellow dwarf a million or two years ago."
"But--"
"How about Procyon? We Made It has a population near a billion, yet everyone knows it'll start expanding in half a million years. We'll be gone long before then, of course. The Core explosion.
"I see why you're confused, of course. I saw that red giant, and I decided the Jinxian had lied to me after all. I searched what should have been the habitable temperature bands. I found rocks up to the size of Ceres, no bigger. I'd been assuming a transparent, Earthlike atmosphere. Now I searched further and further out, assuming denser atmosphere, more greenhouse effect. I searched out to two billion miles from the primary. Nothing. The Jinxian had lied."
Mann got up to refill our glasses. I said. "If that's your story, I'm going to brain you with a Hrodenu."
"It almost was the end. I was a week toward Silvereyes before I turned back.
"I'd been thinking. The puppeteers were used to G-type sunlight. If their world was actually circling a red giant sun, they must be using supplementary ultraviolet. That would release more heat on their world. Plants would need it too. More heat, higher temperatures. They'd be further out."
"You could carry that on forever," I speculated. "Assume more and more power per individual, more and more individuals. Any flatlander uses more power in a day than a citizen of Russia, at its peak of power, used in a lifetime. Seawater distilleries alone. . . ."
"Now you've got it," said Mann.
"Excuse me?"
"Think it out the way I did. The puppeteers are cowards. They couldn't relieve their population pressure by migration. So the population of the home world went up and up. So did the power expenditure per capita.
"It's the same on Earth. It never snows on the big cities, because the people are putting out too much power. Street lights, house lights--why, if a reading lamp put out only visible light, the only light that didn't get absorbed by the walls would be the fraction that escaped to space through windows. Then there are refrigerators, air conditioning, transfer booths, crematoriums, neon signs, the frequencies of tridee transmission, messages lasered in from the Moon and asteroids. How about underwater street lights in the continental shelf cities? And dolphin industries? It all has to go somewhere. And Earth's population is only eighteen billion."
"How many puppeteers are there?"
Mann shrugged, "I didn't get that close. A trillion, I'd guess, and all fanatics for comfort. They must use total conversion for power. Would you believe--"
"Instantly."
"You're kind. I found the puppeteer planet two light-weeks out from its primary. The sun was no more than a blurred pink dot."
I closed my mouth.
I'll be damned," Mann said wonderingly. "You meant it. You haven't called me a liar yet. But it makes sense to put a planet out there. With all the heat they were putting out, they needed a sun like they needed an armed kzinti invasion. A long, long time ago they must have moved their world out to where they could radiate enough heat away to keep the planet habitable. When the sun blew up like a big red balloon, the chances are they hardly noticed."
"No wonder they were never found. Why do you suppose they kept a sun at all?"
"They probably wanted an anchor, to keep them from drifting all over space."
"Um."
"You should have seen it, the way it blazed against the stars. Not like a planet. The continents flamed like yellow-star sunlight. I could have read a book in the light that came through my windows."
"They let you get that close?"
"Who'd have dared attack me?" He was taking to himself now, and his thoughts were nowhere in this room. "The continents flamed like sunfire, but the oceans were black as space, with light scattered across them to mark islands, maybe. Points of light like bright stars. It was as if black, starry space pushed its edges through black, starry seas to the borders of the burning continents. I'm the only man alive who's ever seen it. The Jinxian saw it, he and his pirate crew, but they're dead. All dead."
"How do you know?"
"I killed them."
"Did you have reason?"
"Ample reason. Points of honor," said Mann. He knocked his vodka back with a flip of the wrist. "The Jinxian gave me the coordinates as he was dying. Revenge, he thought. He was right. I should have gone straight to We Made It, but I had to see the planet for myself. And then I came to Silvereyes, which was closer, and I went to the puppeteer embassy, and it was gone."
"Oh," I said, for I had the whole picture.
"That's right. While I was looking for their planet, the puppeteers found out about the Core explosion, So they fled the worlds of men, and where did that leave me? The Institute decided I'd misused my ship. Presently they confiscated it."
"Surely you could have gotten something out of it. You knew where the puppeteer world was."
"Did I?" He grinned mockingly.
"Sure. A news agency would have paid you plenty for the biggest scoop of the generation. Even if the puppeteers had left their world empty behind them."
"But they didn't."
"Excuse me?"
"They didn't have to travel in hyperspace, because they weren't coming back. The relativistic time lag wouldn't inconvenience them. They felt safer in normal space. That meant there was no limit to the mass they could move."
"Eventually, my host, you will strain even my credulity."
"Why boggle at this? They'd already moved their world once. They hated spacecraft. This is no random guess. When I couldn't find an embassy I decided to go straight to the puppeteers themselves. I left a message behind in a safe deposit box, to protect myself, like any blackmailer. The puppeteer world was gone when I got there. Gone like a dream. I turned back to Silvereyes, and there the Institute confiscated my ship. Ship and score and riches beyond dreams, all gone.
"Now I have only the memory of a world that shone by its own light, that blazed in the colors of sunfire and darkness." He hefted the Hrodenu. "And this. I thank you. Every man should own one good thing."
A pretty compliment. "It was well traded," I told him. "And the vodka is almost gone. Shall we go drinking and dining? You can play guide for me, since you've been here for forty years."
And so Mann donned clothing and we went to Grushenko's, I and the finest liar in known space. There, hours later, we traded tales with a pair of sloe-eyed computer programmers. One girl, by luck, turned out to have a father-fixation; and so we were well paired.
It was a fine night to be down. The only uncomfortable moment came when Mann retold his tale of the puppeteer world, and produced a pocket holograph. Somehow the luck of the gift held, and Mann didn't see my jaw drop.
There in the holograph, a light the color of the sun blazed against starry space. The blazing figure had the shape of a fiery amoeba, but two reaching pseudopods had been lopped at their tips by arcs of a circle.
"I wonder where it is now," said Mann. The beauty he saw in the holograph, the beauty I could not see, was all the beauty there is.
The Hunting Park
October 20, 2899 CE
"Why do they call you 'white hunter'?"
I smiled but didn't grin. "It's anyone
from somewhere else who conducts hunting for sport in Africa. I was born in Confinement Asteroid and raised in Ceres and Tahiti." He was wondering about my skin, of course. The parts he could see, hands and face, are jet black, from moderately black American ancestry subjected to three decades of raw sunlight in space and in the islands.
"Odd," said the kzin, but he waved a big furry hand, claws sheathed, dismissing the subject. Waldo had ordered hot milk with black rum; he slurped noisily. I'd ordered the same. He asked, "Why is it taking so long to arrange a safari?"
"First rule is, everything takes forever when you're gearing up. When you're out in the field, everything interesting happens before you can blink. That's when you find out what you forgot to take."
We studied each other. Waldo was big for a kzin, maybe five hundred pounds, maybe eight feet four or five inches tall. No chairs here could hold him; he squatted in a cleared space in a corner of the restaurant. His fur was marmalade, with a darker stripe diagonally down his chest and abdomen that followed four long runnels of scar tissue, and a shorter scar, also darkly outlined, that just missed his left eye and ear. A thong around his neck held a few leathery scraps: dried ears, I presumed. He kept his claws sheathed as carefully as I kept my lips closed. You don't show your teeth to a kzin.
I hadn't volunteered for this. What sane person would? It was October of 2899 CE; I'd hoped to celebrate my fiftieth birthday next year, when the century turned. I planned to quit the safari business and write.
Then again, who could turn this down? They were paying twice the going rate in Interworld stars, but that was nothing compared to the publicity value. I was wearing some recording gear. We'd have the whole safari on tape, right up to my death, if it broke that way, and my daughters would hold the rights. If I lived, I'd have a tale worth writing.
Waldo was examining Legal Entity Bruce Bianci Bannett, a tall, long-headed black human male forty-nine years old, with yellow tattoos around the eyes and ears that make me look just a bit like a leopard. I guessed what else he was looking for, and I said, "I don't have any really gaudy scars except for the tattoos. It's because I'm careful."
"I should be glad of that. LE Bannett, our permissions still haven't come through, and I see no kind of a caravan forming."
"We'll have our permissions." This trip I wouldn't even need bribes; the United Nations had spoken. "I'm having trouble getting bearers."
"Offer more money?"
Money isn't as powerful an argument here in Nairobi. I think they've lived too long with governments that can just snatch it away. They're all a combination of socialist and bandit. A good story, that's a lure, but a man only needs one fortune and one good story.
"But traveling with... there are four of you? With four kzinti, that's bad enough. You're not using guns?"
"No, not on a hunt. On a hunt we use only the w'tsai. You, though, you'll take a gun?
"Several."
"Do not shoot another hunter's prey," Waldo told me.
"My point was, bearers would usually count on all of us, me or any of my clients, to shoot a, say, a leopard before he gets to the bearers. But there's only one of me, and you—you can't throw a w'tsai, can you?"
Again Waldo waved sheathed claws: a shrug.
"So it's not even a spear. I've hunted with natives who use spears. They have a point. A spear doesn't jam. So my bearers would risk you not being fast enough to save them, plus anything you might do in a rage because you missed your prey."
"But we have these," Waldo said, and I saw his claws, three or four inches long, exposed only for a moment. "Not just the w'tsai."
"What do you want out of this, Waldo?"
"Wave Rider and Long Tracks and I, we are brothers," Waldo said, "part of Starsieve's crew. seeks treasures of the cosmos using ship's instruments. I operate the waldos, of course, the little hand-and-jaw-guided robots. It can be very dull work. We seek an adventure out of the ordinary here on Earth. Kashtiyee-First has been our teacher and First Officer under Prisst-Captain. Both would gain honor if we three gained partial names."
Names are important to kzinti. Most bear only the names of their professions. "Would this—"
"It would help. A hero's hunt is the story that defines him."
"What do you want to kill?"
"What have you got?" he asked.
"Not much. The Greater Africa government is solid Green. They tell me what they can spare. Some species are grown beyond the limits of the Refuge." I fished my sectry out of my pocket and tapped at it, summoning the current list, just in case it had changed in the past two hours. Sure enough— "Cape buffalo is off the list. If a Cape buffalo charges you, you hope you can duck. Elephants are out, of course. We can have a lion... or all the leopards we want. Crocs don't offer much of a trophy, but again—"
"Why are the, rrr, Greens so free with leopards?"
"We used to think leopards were scarce, even endangered. They're not. They're just shy, and really well camouflaged, and they're everywhere. If a lion turns to human prey, he's generally got a reason. Maybe he's hurt his mouth and can't hunt anything difficult. But a leopard, he kills for fun. Antelope, zebra, man, woman, whatever turns up," I babbled, and suddenly realized— "Of course none of that might apply to kzinti."
"What are the rules for kzinti?"
"Nobody's got the vaguest idea. We might not catch anything. Your scent might drive them all away." Waldo didn't smell unpleasant; just really different. "Or bring everything in from miles around. Kzinti have never hunted on Earth."
"More's the pity," Waldo said lightly.
October 31, 2899 CE
Waldo it the one who speaks Interworld. The other three have translators, and I carry one built into my sectry. In Africa everyone speaks a different language, but with kzinti involved—I'd better buy a spare.
Wave Rider and Long Tracks bear wildly different markings from Waldo, though they're near as tall and about as massive. Wave Rider's a darker marmalade with no noticeable scars; he keeps his sectry open a lot, reading whenever things turn slack. It's Singapore built, with oversized keys. Long Tracks is sheer yellow, barring minor scarring close to the eyes and a missing ear. He wears a thong with one ear on it. Kashtiyee-First is smaller and older, brown and orange marked with a lot of white. No thong.
We've packed everything on floaters. Floaters go almost anywhere, but there are places where we'll have to carry everything. These kzinti will be carrying their share and the bearers' too, because we've got no bearers.
I don't worry about their stamina. Most of the kzinti-occupied worlds have Earth gravity or higher, and my clients look tough. They can port their own weight, but will they? Will they follow orders? I always worry about that. There's no sane limit to what a man is likely to do with a charged gun.
But they aren't men. Should I worry about those blades? In a kzin hand a w'tsai looks like a long knife crudely forged. In mine, it's an overbuilt sword. If they started swinging wildly—well, we'll see.
They've brought more medical gear than I'd expected given their macho background. It looks like equipment from a ship's infirmary. From Starsieve, of course. Where on Earth would they get kzinti medicines and stretchers? Kzinti forces never managed to invade Earth, not in any of the four interstellar wars (plus "incidents") that ended more than two hundred years ago.
They carry antiallergens and diet supplements. Earthly life doesn't quite fit their evolution.
Guns and ammunition: well, those are all mine. I can't carry everything I might need. One of the kzinti might have to be my bearer, but first I'd better test them out a little. It can turn sticky when the bearer runs up a tree with your gun.
Food: I've packed oranges and root vegetables and dry stuff. We'll make do with less cookware than usual, some canned goods, sugar, flour, condiments and so forth. That's all for me. Clients eat mostly meat, and we shoot that on the trail. Kzinti eat nothing but raw meat. I'll be doing all the cooking.
And of course I'm carrying nine kilos of sensory e
quipment spotted over my head and body: cameras, sound, somasthetic, scent.
Cape buffalo are back on the permitted list. I'll get them one before the Greens pull him off again.
November 3, 2899 CE
Three days into the brush. We camped by a river. It's low and yellow, and we're filtering the water. The kzinti drink a lot of it. I'm not carrying booze. It's hard on me, but I don't want them drinking.
Wave Rider wants to know why it's taking so long to get anywhere interesting. I waved around and told him to pick out a transfer booth for me. Long Tracks laughed at him, teeth showing. I've never seen a kzin's killing gape. I hope I can recognize the difference in time.
In fairness to Wave Rider, there are a few transfer booths out here, and we white hunters tanj well know where each of them is. They're big enough to pass a mini ambulance. We use them for medical emergencies, including veterinary work. I usually don't tell clients about them.
Waldo's been attacked by a lion.
He was sleeping outdoors. We set up a palisade, of course. I pitched my tent not too close so that I can cook without their complaining. Smoke my pipe, too.
I was updating my log when I heard the yowling. I got out there, armed, and barely glimpsed the lion smashing out through the branches of the palisade. I fired and got no joy of it.
Wave Rider's right front claws are bloody, but so's his ear, torn half off. He swung at the lion and scored, and the lion swung back, then kept going. But Waldo looks worse. The lion was stalking him. It found him asleep and attacked in a lion's favorite fashion: it tried to bite through the kzin's skull. Do that to a man, the prey barely twitches and the lion can just haul him away.
Waldo is big and the lion may be smaller than usual, though he sure didn't look it in mid leap in the moonlit dark. The beast's fangs didn't get through Waldo's skull. They tore off half his scalp. Waldo came awake with a screech, and I expect Leo had never heard anything like that.