Charrgh-Captain inspected his own quarters and assured himself that the kitchen and food supplies were suitable for kzin needs. He ran a quick eye over their stores in general and a rather more thorough one over their weapons. He stared coldly at the kzin autodoc, though with many kzinti traveling on human ships now it was no longer on the military secret list. He checked it without comment. There was little more to be done. He watched as Richard and Gay went through the takeoff checks.
The Whomping Wallaby climbed out of the vast singularity of the Centauri system and dropped into hyperdrive.
Few humans or Kzin can stand to “look” upon Hyperspace for long, and there is no purpose in trying to do so. For most of its flight the Wallaby’s ports were opaqued. A crew member remained on watch in case of emergencies, which would mainly concern the life-system, but automatic pilot and mass-detector—the latter considered by many a greater technological miracle than the hyperdrive shunt itself—flew the ship.
Most spacefarers of all kinds adjust to the long watches alone or with a skeleton crew while their shipmates hibernate. It is also a widespread ritual of human space travel that changeover time is leisurely. This is not merely for debriefing and briefing: The retiring crew member, if he or she has stood watch alone, is usually hungry for company and conversation before returning to hibernation, and the relieving crew member needs time to adjust.
Gatley Ivor, first on watch, had spent changeover rambling gently to Melody Fay about the antiquities he loved. Charrgh-Captain, who took over from Melody, was the only one who had not obeyed—and possibly did not know of—this convention of relaxed talk, though in his case no one would have insisted upon it, and the Jinxian apparently did not care for Kzin company in any case. His hand-over report to Gay had been brief and to the point, though comprehensive. She had no idea whether the big kzin was hardened against loneliness and boredom or simply not prepared to betray feeling them. But to a previous generation the idea of entrusting the watch of a human ship to a kzin of the Patriarchy would have been beyond belief in any case. Gay spoke long to Peter Robinson when she handed over to him in turn.
The watches aboard the Whomping Wallaby had had to be planned with some care. Richard relieved Peter Robinson to take what they calculated would be the last watch of the voyage. They inspected the ship and the log, and settled down in the couches on what was still called the bridge for a bourbon and ice cream together.
Peter Robinson knew the ritual even if he did not need it. And perhaps he does need it, thought Richard. He is far more talkative and gregarious than any kzin of the Patriarchy—anxious to prove his human credentials, perhaps. And his preference for being called by his full name—there are two explanations for that, of course: While on the one hand it reinforces his Wunderkzin identity, on the other hand in kzin society a full name is the rare and ultimate sign of high nobility.
Aloud he said: “I hope the watch was not too boring.”
“Being alone for a while is no great hardship for me,” the Wunderkzin replied. “The computer’s gaming skills are adequate without being overwhelming, and I have my sculpting tool and my poetry. There is my little laboratory, and I enjoy experiments—I assure you I stick to safe ones in these circumstances. I do not miss my mate much without her scent. To me being on watch in a spaceship when all others aboard sleep is the equivalent of silence, such as I only know otherwise sometimes in the wilder parts of Wunderland. It is very peaceful. It is precious to me.
“The human drugs are incomparably kinder than the sthondat drugs of the Patriarchy, but they are not perfect, nor do they armor us against all the ordinary neuroses of telepathy, which even human telepaths—such as they are—are subject to. We fight battles always against too much empathy, against losing ourselves in other minds—with the glands of hunting carnivores who can never enjoy the chase and kill of our prey as even an ordinary nontelepathic Wunderkzin of Arhus or the Hohe Kalkstein may. Have you seen what we eat? Either animals too mindless to know terror, or meat made to move artificially, or dead meat. The one time I tried to eat Zianya was terrible for me…Still, it is a small price to pay. But sometimes I have waves of fear.”
“What do you do?”
“What can I do? I shield and carry on…Everyone I touch leaks a little. One human aboard this ship is keeping a secret of which I sense enough to guess the rest without probing. I will say no more of that. I do not think it has a vital bearing on the success of this mission, and we have vows not to divulge any such secrets we may stumble on save in direst emergency. Better for me to keep my shield strong…
“At least, my friend, I know that you do not dislike me. Nor Gay. I have not tried to probe the minds of any aboard here, but all give forth a general…coloration, an aura. Hers is one mind whose aura I enjoy. I do not mind if you and Gay call me by my first Name alone.”
Richard said, “Gay dislikes very little that lives. She found me when I was broken and unlovable, and rebuilt me…You are a telepath on a human world. You must know the darknesses in which humans can live.”
“Yes. And once or twice in my work I have found myself screaming and leaping as a result. Angry enough to use my claws and fangs as well as the Telepath’s Weapon. Some human poetry is dangerous for the likes of me to read, you know. Chuut-Riit set ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ as a text for the human-students of his day:
“While there is one tall shrine to shake
Or one live man to rend;
For the wrath of the gods behind the gods
Who are weary to make an end.
“There lives one moment for a man
When the door at his shoulder shakes,
When the taut rope parts under the pull,
And the barest branch is beautiful
One moment, while it breaks.
“So rides my soul upon the sea
That drinks the howling ships,
Though in black jest it bows and nods
Under the moon with silver rods,
I know it is roaring at the gods,
Waiting the last eclipse…
“‘Think on, of those who write so,’ he said. But there is other:
“The world is so full of a number of things,
I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.
“I think, if I may say so to you, that Gay thinks like that latter. But I know the darknesses in which kzin can live, too. I know it well. Charrgh-Captain…” To a knowledgeable observer, his body language said more than his words.
“Does he distress you so much?”
“Yes. Like many kzintosh of his generation, he has no religious faith. Why believe in the Fanged God who gave kzinti the Universe and domination of all life when humans keep winning the wars? But that does not modify his loathing of me. On the contrary, it increases it. When you have lost anything to worship, it is a comfort to find something to despise. Thank the God I am good at shielding. I work at it.”
“And how do you feel about the Fanged God, Peter?” It was one of those questions spacers on watch could ask one another.
“We high Wunderkzin are not low Kdaptists. Some of us believe Fanged God and Bearded God have their own kingdoms. Others have conceptions more subtle: that the Fanged God is the heroic aspect of the Bearded God, who being omnipotent has no need for heroism.”
“In Christianity the Incarnation is meant to solve that problem: God had to know by experience everything human, including courage and even despair: ‘My God! my God! Why have You forsaken me?’”
“We never despair. In any case, I do not necessarily speak for myself. And there are other things. For the relatively few of us on Wunderland there are many sects. Be assured we do not dress in human skins for our services or make chalices and candlesticks of human bones, as the low Kdaptists do. But Charrgh-Captain believes in nothing beyond the material. Or so he thinks. Yet he also thinks his values are those of the old Kzin culture. Like so many adult kzintosh of the Patriarchy today, there is great confusion in him. Once ther
e was a haunting fear, never, never admitted, that the fabled Free Jotok Fleet would return with vengeance. More lately humans have been seen by a few as avatars of the Free Jotok—who probably do not exist. My own fears are different, perhaps a little more human: to have some great task, some great test, and fail—that fear comes to me sometimes at a late hour. Fear of being proven to be a Nothing, a creature of neither world. Charrgh-Captain would never think of failure. He would conquer or die.”
“Is he dangerous, do you think?”
Peter Robinson extended one set of black-tipped claws whose curvature shone like steel, claws that could have torn a man apart with a single leisurely pass, and a tiger with a couple more. “He is a kzin.”
He paused and added: “As I am not.”
“I don’t know whether you say that as boast or complaint, my friend.”
“I don’t know either. But as I have paced the silent corridors of this ship, while I have enjoyed the silence, I have been glad my friends were sleeping near me. Is that foolish?”
“No.”
“The founder of our line was raised by humans when he was a war-orphaned kitten, found blind and starving for his mother’s milk. But when he was old enough he made a conscious choice.
“And you gave us a chance to rise…more than we would have given you. Great-Grandsire was proud, proud, when he became the first Wunderland Kzin elected to an office by humans. The old fellow still talks about that day. When he made a speech to the Wunderland Assembly—‘Let us grow together: not an imitation cat but a better human,’ he said, thinking of Markham and what had happened to him, ‘not an imitation human but a better cat’—and they applauded, he recorded the applause and laid down the recording in the new family shrine. He said we had found our own Honor.”
“He knew about Markham? I only learned of that when I gained the security clearance for this work.”
“One of many secrets we had.”
“The first of my family to set foot on Wunderland,” said Richard, “was a staff officer with the Liberation forces. On one leave after the cease-fire he was hunting in Gerning and came across a cottage in the forest.
“It was occupied by an old lady, a proud, impoverished aristocrat, pure Nineteen Families blood, long since come down in the world, living alone with a couple of animals and with a little charity from the nearby farmers. Post-Liberation Wunderland had a lot of rather queer fish, of course. I suppose it still does…
“The place was dilapidated, and he did a few chores and repairs for her. She gave him tea in an ornate old service of genuine Neue Dresden china, apologizing for the lack of servants. Not unexpectedly, she came to talk of the ‘Good Old Days,’ and how much better things were then. She missed her lost boys. Arthur was always interested in history—he’d worked in a museum before the war—and he took notes.
“It took him quite a long time—plus a reference by her to ‘those nice big pussycats’—to realize that she was actually talking about the Occupation, and her ‘boys’ were a couple of kzin officers of the local garrison who for some reason had made a pet of her—if they were in the vicinity and wanted to sharpen their claws, they might do it by tearing a pile of wood into kindling for her. If they were hunting in the forest and had made a kill, they might throw her a haunch of meat as they passed. I suppose that meant non-monkey meat. She gave them bowls of cream. I doubt they realized how she thought of them…She was quite mad, of course. But that, coming on top of a couple of things that had happened to him on Wunderland earlier and later, influenced old Arthur’s thinking. His story, ‘Three at a Table,’ has become a family legend. He’d been an Exterminationist, but he ended up patron of the first official mixed chess club.”
“Quite mad, as you say…And Wunderland still does have a lot of queer fish…like me.”
“We like Wunderland,” said Richard. “Partly because of the queer fish. We’ve been thinking of settling there.”
“May I say…I hope you do.”
“Only five hundred and forty million years ago, billions of years after the time when the thing we seek was built,” said Richard, “our ancestors on Earth lived in a placid sea. They were parading the vicinity of the Burgess Shale on multiple jelly legs. Your ancestors and ours cannot have looked much different.”
“We know thrint and tnuctipun planted common life-forms throughout the galaxy,” Peter Robinson replied. “You and I are alike enough to indicate common primordial ancestors.”
“Alike enough to eat each other. I do not mean that observation to be cruel or offensive, but it emphasizes our common biology.”
“Also, there have been speculations that the telepaths’ power is somehow—I know not how—related to the Slaver Power—some inherited vestige of tnuctipun biological engineering, perhaps? Something in our nucleonic acid? A laboratory experiment that was thrown away and survived?”
“It’s hard to see how that could be. Thrint and kzin are not contemporaries by billions of years.”
“I find much hard to see. You will have another bourbon? You face quite a long watch.”
“I’m used to it. It goes with the job.”
“A lot goes with my job.” The Wunderkzin said, “Thank you for being my…friend, Richard. It will be good to go to sleep with that emotion in my mind.”
“The human race as it is today evolved out of a lot of different breeds,” said Richard awkwardly. “You’ve seen that on Wunderland. A lot of humans must have asked at times: ‘What am I?’ But in the end we shook down fairly well.”
“I wonder if they ever asked as emphatically as I do,” said Peter Robinson, “and who they asked.”
Richard was still on watch when the mass-detector dropped the Wallaby out of hyperspace. The nearest stars were distant but the singularity that was a stasis field was sharp and bright in the center of the radar screen. By the time the awakened crew assembled on the bridge it had grown.
Behind it was a deep-radar ghost. The artifact was in wide orbit around a flattened sphere—a free-floater planet, dark and cold, a gas giant too small to glow. How had the Puppeteers found this thing?
“Big,” said Melody. “Bigger than we thought.”
“It certainly is,” said Richard. “As a matter of fact it is in visual range now.”
“It’s too far away!”
Richard touched the control panel. Spotlights flooded space, and illuminated nothing except a silver bead.
A pale gray sphere. With nothing to give a scale it was impossible for the unaided eye to tell how big it was. But there was a scale projected on the screen. And it was growing. There were a few circles like shallow, immensely eroded craters. The Wallaby orbited it, cameras busy. There were darker patches and one black spot. It looked much like the Moon seen from Earth.
“Where on the surface is the stasis box?” asked Gatley Ivor. “Or is it buried?”
“That is the point: the deep radar lacks fine definition yet, but it appears to be almost all stasis field. It is about nine miles in diameter.”
“The Puppeteers did not tell us it was so big,” said Melody.
“I suspect they may not have known. Perhaps they only picked it up on their deep radar at extreme range as a point whose magnitude had to be guessed. They would be too cautious to explore further themselves. Or perhaps they never saw it—the Outsiders may have told them about it. I suspect they have a standing order with the Outsiders to buy information about any stasis boxes they come across, but perhaps they thought they could no longer afford to pay extra for details like size.”
“If that is so, whether it was caution or miserliness that prevented them knowing, they made a mistake,” said Peter Robinson. “Had they explored boldly, or bought full information, they would have discovered it is too big for an expedition of this size.”
“A Hero—a kzin—is not daunted by size,” said Charrgh-Captain.
“I think,” said Richard, “it may not have been caution only. With so few Puppeteers left in known space, their resources
and personnel are stretched thin. A Puppeteer ship that detected this at very long range would probably have been on business it could not divert from. As for miserliness, if they bought the information about it from Outsiders, well, we know the Outsiders do not sell information cheaply.”
“Perhaps,” said Gay, “when they saw an asteroid and then a stasis field indicated from a distance on deep-radar, they thought the field was somewhere on the asteroid, as we just did. They did not realize the asteroid was the whole stasis field.”
“In any event,” said Peter Robinson, “you must agree it is too big for us to open. It is far bigger than any spaceship I have heard of. Assuming that this giant stasis field contains an artifact of a size to justify it, the chances are that there are live Slavers within. We are not equipped to handle them if they are released.”
“I am tempted in one part of me to proceed,” said Gatley Ivor. “There may be more knowledge of the ancients here than the total of all that has been gathered to date. And yet every rational instinct says this is too big for us. I must say reluctantly that we should return with a bigger expedition—perhaps a warship.”
“Would that not simply be presenting the Slavers with the warship, should they seize the minds of its crew?” asked Charrgh-Captain. “Think of human history and your Napoleon’s march on Paris after his escape from Elba—the monkeys sent to capture him simply joined him, and the more that were sent the bigger his army became.”
“Can the Slaver Power penetrate a General Products hull?” demanded Melody.
“I believe it can,” Gatley Ivor said. “First, because the Power is not a physical event and is not governed by the laws of physics. It is not a wave effect, nor does it depend on particles. Further, we know from ample experience that a General Products hull does not block the probing of kzinti—or even human—telepaths. Matter does not shield against telepathy.”
Charrgh-Captain’s tail lashed. His ears knotted and unknotted. A kzin like Charrgh-Captain could not—physically could not—admit before either aliens or his own kind that he was too fearful to execute a task.