Larry Niven - Man-Kzin Wars 10
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- Prologue
One War For Wunderland
Prologue
The ship flew in like a drunken bat, an automatic distress beacon shrieking. It did not respond to signals.
When they came within visual sight they saw it was grossly damaged, and plainly not under
maneuvering control.
When they boarded the ravaged ship with its crew of crumbling, desiccated, drifting corpses, some in
strange costumes, the only survivor they found was a head-injured woman in coldsleep. They slowed it
and stopped it just before it entered the deadly embrace of one of the outer gas-giants.
The ship had come a long way under its autopilot from the general direction of either Sol or the Alpha
Centauri System. The oddly shaven-headed man who must have instructed it as he died still floated with
a freeze-dried hand on the controls.
But they tested the hull metal where they cut their way in and found that, if it had come from Earth, it
must have been a very old ship before it started.
There were many dead. Far more than a normal crew. This was as packed as a colony ship, more packed,
indeed, for a large part of a colony ship's complement would have been frozen embryos. Nor did it carry
the vast array of stores and supplies a colony ship would have had: almost nothing but people and
hibernation cubicles and bare provisions for a skeleton crew of watch-keepers.
They were tough spacers who boarded the ship, and most had seen death in space before, but still this
was especially horrible and upsetting.
Apart from the strangely costumed and coiffured men, a large number of the dead were women and
children. The hibernation facilities could have just accommodated them all and looked as if these had
been being prepared for use when disaster struck, but only the one had been activated.
It was easy to see but difficult to understand what had happened. It had been sudden. Perhaps the ship
had accidentally crossed a big com-laser near its point of origin. A laser—a big one—had burned
through the rear of the hull and opened one compartment after another to space, punching its way
through hull-metal and human tissue indiscriminately. But if that was what had happened, why had the
ship or the station that had fired the laser not come to its rescue?
Anyway, it had stopped short of total destruction, and a few emergency systems were still working,
including the beacon that had signaled its arrival.
The damage had caused short circuits and fires that had raged even in sealed compartments until the last
oxygen in the life-system was consumed. The logbook was melted slag. The last minutes of life aboard
the crowded ship were better not imagined but must have been mercifully brief.
The activated coldsleep unit was damaged and operating with a backup of questionable efficiency. They
took the woman down to the surface, and tugs with electromagnetic grapnels moved the strange ship into
a parking orbit.
Even if the woman had not been head-injured to start with, brain-death seemed a near certainty. When
they checked the brainwaves' readouts with their own equipment they were astonished by their strength.
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- Prologue
They were careful, and took a long time healing her and bringing her back to consciousness. The people
of We Made It were sometimes painfully aware of being a colony, without the vast medical and
scientific resources of Earth or even Wunderland, but their science was still good. The robots of twenty-
fifth-century nanotechnology—comparable in size to some large molecules—crawled into her brain, and
when a net of them had been formed whose neural connectivity made a whole that was far greater than
the sum of its microscopic parts, they sought to trigger a memory. Sensors, receptors, cognitive and
motor response units more delicate by far even than those used in normal reconstructive nerve surgery
linked their impulses.
It was a new technology and imperfect. The watchers saw some of what little was left of her memory
translated into flickering holograms. There was a jumble of images, including, quite clearly, a scene of a
sidewalk café and a man with a lopsided yellow beard under an open sky.
It looked to those who examined it like something from a picture book of old Earth, though it was not a
Flatlander's beard. The tiny robots sewed and spliced and healed a little and crawled out of her brain.
They would wait before applying nerve-growth factors so new neuronic connections would not interfere
further with the grossly damaged, immeasurably delicate and diffuse network of connections that created
the hologram of memory.
The woman's brain continued to puzzle them, even when they had repaired it as much as they might.
There were few pictures but many abstract symbols.
They tested her DNA but that told them nothing save that she was of human stock originally from
northern Europe. They brought her back to consciousness.
She could speak only in broken sentences when they began, gently, to question her in the hospital at We
Made It.
Back | Next
Contents
Framed
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- Chapter 1
Chapter 1
2367 a.d.
Some lead a life of mild content . . .
—Saki
Around me as I flew, the evening sky of Wunderland was full of light. Alpha Centauri B was so brilliant
in its time as to cast its own sharp shadows at dusk and to fill the air with color, yet at an average of 25
AUs easily distant enough to be looked at with the naked eye.
There too was the red jewel of Proxima and the diffuse, braided lines of the Serpent Swarm. There, a
routine sight in this system, was the sliding and flash of meteors, plus a couple of fair-sized moons and
other smaller satellites, natural and artificial. There were other points of light that were in fact potato-
shaped stony worldlets of various sizes, some carrying loads of instruments, the axled wheels of the old
spacestation, the squares and rhomboids of advertising signs (hardly used now—they proved unpopular
and counterproductive), high aircraft and spacecraft, and, higher still and parked in their plodding orbits,
the old slowboats that had brought the original colonists.
The towns and city too had their high points of light, not because population pressure in a limited space
had forced them upward—Wunderland's chief cities were still quite small—but because .61 Earth
gravity made for both high but easily conquerable hills and a few relatively inexpensive architectural
flights of fancy.
Wunderland. Humanity's first interstellar colony was well-named, I thought, watching the landscape
pass below me, high crests and ridges still lit by the rays of setting Alpha Centauri A, mountainsides
glowing. I had seen pictures of Earth, and understood again the delight our ancestors must have felt in
their first days and nights on this new world.
Not a new thought but still a good one. With its towering hills and mountains, sparkling seas and lush
life, its forests, parklands and savannahs where the red-gold of the local vegetation now mixed with the
green of Earth plants, its brilliant sky, a gravity that gave good health, good looks (if we exercised hard)
and long life, it was impossible to imagine a more wonderful place. Someone had once compared it to
the valleys of Malacandra in C. S. Lewis's ancient fantasy Out of the Silent Planet, and noted how
Lewis, even if his Mars was a billion years or so behind the times, had anticipated the effects of low
gravity on waves. The frustrations of my personal life could be seen in their proper perspective as I flew
over that glorious landscape, under those stars.
I have often remembered the details of that night, and the contentment I did not then know I felt. In fact,
I was relieved to be getting away for a few hours from my own thoughts and from the political intrigues
and pressures that were becoming more and more obvious between Herrenmanner and Prolevolk on the
one hand, and Teuties and Tommies on the other, with the déclassé jumping about on the edges.
Because of the frequency of meteor impacts, our fathers had been wary of building near the coast, but
we had a good meteor guard force now, with sensors and big rock-blasting lasers mounted in spacecraft
and also on the ground, and Circle Bay Monastery stood on a headland, high on the rim of an old crater.
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- Chapter 1
To the west a wide swath of open parklike country swept down to merge with the outer marshes of
Grossgeister Swamp. There were ponds and limestone caves, some with odd populations descended
from sea creatures washed inland by ancient tsunamis. To the south-east were hills and, seeming far
away but still just visible from the air, the diffuse glow of Munchen against the sky. As the night
deepened the lights of scattered hamlets and farms were spilled beads rolling to the horizon. A sudden
bright plume of orange smoke climbing starwards indicated a takeoff from Munchen spaceport. It had, I
thought, been unusually busy lately.
Munchen had been called New Munchen immediately after its settlement, and its river the New Donau,
but the prefixes had fallen out of use. The other Munchen and Donau were more than four light-years
away, and there was little chance of confusing them.
There was the outline of the monastery ahead, dark walls and lighted windows, growing larger as the
autopilot shifted into descent.
I brought my car down in the monastery courtyard. The abbot was waiting for me, visible from a
distance as a spot of red light. He had taught me at school, and I had used the monastery as a base for
collecting expeditions in the past. We knew one another well.
"That's where it was seen," said the abbot when I alighted and we had exchanged greetings. "It vanished
down there." He gestured with his cigar to a grove of red Wunderland trees near the outlying margin of
the swamp, dark in the night shadows.
"Did you watch the area?"
"Not continuously, I'm afraid. We thought the best thing was to call you. We kept an eye on the trees
during the day, but there doesn't seem to be anything there now. Unless it's good at hiding. But it would
have to be good. Some of the brothers aren't bad hunters."
I scanned the grove with my nitesite. There were a few dull red points in the dark of the trees showing
the body heat of small animals. Nothing much bigger than a large rat or perhaps a Beam's beast, but
some of the Wunderland reptiloids, even the big ones, were cold when resting. So close to the swamp, it
was as well to be respectful of what might be out after dark.
"Well, I'm not going in there now."
"Of course not. But you'll take a drop of wine?"
The monks of Circle Bay Headland made their own wine in the old way. It was famous and expensive
and part of the reason I had not waited and flown out in the morning. The abbot was a good host, and the
guest rooms were comfortable in an old-fashioned style. We crossed the wide lawn of the courtyard to
his study.
"Something like a big cat, you said. Who saw it?"
"Three of the Brothers. Peter, Joachim, and John. They'd been fishing in the marshes. They wrote down
their impressions separately, as you asked. All emphasized cat."
I knew them quite well. Brother John was a trained reptiloid handler and had come collecting with me;
the others were horticulturists with a good bit of botany and a good deal more zoology than most, even
by the standards of an educated and intellectually curious community that lived largely by farming on
what was still a comparatively new world with two competing and adjusting biosystems. All intelligent
and reliable men.
"And it was how big? Not a tigripard?"
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- Chapter 1
"No. Not a tigripard. It was big, bigger than a man, bigger than an Earth tiger, as far as I know, and far
bulkier, and they said it ran differently. Sometimes on four legs, undulating like an Earth weasel,
sometimes—and this is odd—on two legs. Nothing that they recognized as either a local or an Earth
creature."
"And it didn't attack them."
"No. But it was plainly a carnivore. They didn't get to see it for long, but they said there was no
mistaking the teeth and the limbs."
"And nothing local, you say?"
Some of the bigger Wunderland animals, like gagrumpers, were—appropriately for Alpha Centauri A's
planet—centauroid in form, but they generally went about in herds and with all six legs on the ground.
In any case, gagrumpers were herbivores and placid unless threatened. And as far as large animals go,
even creatures as evolved as humans can generally tell herbivores from carnivores instinctively at a
glance. It's deep in our genes.
"Definitely not."
"Everything we know about evolution says such a creature wouldn't evolve in this ecology," I said.
"Predators don't grow bigger than they need, and the native prey-animals all around here are quite small.
If there was anything big enough to jump on adult gagrumpers, we'd know about it by now . . . we'd
have seen anything really big long ago. On Earth nothing preyed on elephants, at least not healthy ones."
"I know. But you said the native prey-animals. We've introduced equids and cows and sheep and pigs.
That might attract visitors from farther afield. What's in the hills and the forests? You haven't got the
whole planet classified yet, have you?"
Wunderland is smaller than Earth but a good deal bigger than Mars. The last I heard, even the surviving
vestiges of Martian life had had their mysteries. "I might say: 'Give us a chance!' It is a whole planet!" I
told him.
"And things can grow bigger in water, can't they? We've got both the sea and the swamp not far
away . . . But they're sure this was not a water dweller. I told you I had something odd for you."
Something odd. It gave me a sudden queer shiver. Sometimes we remembered that, if Wunderland was
wonderful, we were also still alien intruders upon it.
"The cat aspect is strange, certainly," I said, "Even a tigripard isn't very catlike. But this sounds more
like the persistence of an Earthside myth than anything else. Many wild places on Earth had legends of
solitary, wild giant cats that had no business being there—there were sightings, even photographs, of the
Beast of Bodmin in England for centuries." Cryptozoology was one aspect of Earth history I had to
know something about—the habits of a lot of Wunderland's fauna might be described as cryptic.
"They were probably actually big wild dogs that had turned sheep-killers, plus sightings of domestic cats
that had gone feral and bred a bit bigger than normal, or surviving Felis sylvestris wildcats. Maybe there
were one or two big felines that had escaped from captivity. But it would be odd to find the same legend
here. And they are sure it wasn't a tigripard? They can be quite dangerous enough!"
"No. It was the first thing I asked them. They are quite sure. I don't want to overreact, but I thought it
could be something special—which can mean specially dangerous."
"If it's unknown, it could be dangerous. What looks more harmless than a Beam's beast? They caused a
lot of casualties before we got the measure of them."
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- Chapter 1
We passed under an arched doorway, through an enclosed space I had learned was called the Garth,
through another arch with a brass-bound wooden door in a lower wall and entered the abbot's book-lined
study.
The Catholic Church, like some of the Protestant denominations, had been supported on Wunderland by
a large and wealthy congregation once, including some of the Nineteen Families. The monastery
buildings had some extravagant architectural follies from those days, including sections of battlemented
wall and a high tower that could have come from Neuschwanstein. The monks' private quarters were
austere while eschewing extremes, but the abbot had to be something of a politician now, and entertain.
As the church's support declined, paradoxically, he had to show influential visitors more than a
modicum of comfort.
Well, I wasn't sorry for it. The monastery's past generations of abbots or whoever had made these rooms
had managed to combine comfort with a rare feeling of stepping into an almost museum-exhibit-like
past. But it was part of a still-working institution with a life, a poetry, if you like, that no museum can
achieve.
I was glad there was such a place on Wunderland, where every human structure was relatively new.
There was an antique open fire burning in what the abbot had told me was called a "grate," old chairs
that one wouldn't want to sit on for long but which reminded one of how our ancestors sat, as well as
comfortable modern ones, a really ancient ornate "clockwork" clock, a shelf of antique-looking paper
books in red and gold beside the computers, a crystal decanter on a side table. It seemed odd to talk of
unknown dangers in such surroundings.
"You have weapons?"
"A few." He waved around the room: "You know we like old things. There are a couple of antique
shotguns we use as fowling pieces, and the collecting guns." A ginger kitten jumped onto his knee as he
sat, kneading the folds of his robe and purring raucously as he stroked it.
"Also, of course, we need them when we have to kill a badly injured animal or one of our own beasts for
meat. We're old-fashioned in just about all ways, you know."
"I remember the first time you fed me meat from an animal you killed," I said. "It took me a bit of
getting used to. A useful accomplishment for a biologist on field trips, though." We both laughed at the
memory of my rush to the bathroom the first time I saw—and then realized—what was on my plate.
"Sometimes I thought you were toughening me up deliberately."
"I was." There was something different in his voice for a moment that snagged my attention. Then he
resumed his usual slightly pedagogical manner. Perhaps one's old teacher never quite gets beyond
teaching, I thought.
"I've said it is part of the churches' duty not to move with the times, though not all the secular brethren
agree with me. Oh yes, and we've got some modern strakkakers in case we encounter dangerous
creatures like Beam's beasts or tigripards at the sheep . . .
"Or, between you and me," he continued, "in case we are attacked by humans, who could be much more
dangerous. We've got a few bits and pieces in the Treasury and round about that might tempt thieves."
The clockwork clock, I thought, must be just about beyond price for some rich collector. But who would
know how to maintain such a thing?
"Using strakkakers against thieves sounds pretty draconian!" The strakkaker's blizzard of glass needles
would turn a man into an anatomist's instant diagram. Even police only carried them in emergencies.
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- Chapter 1
"We wouldn't, not in the first instance. But if anyone broke in, we might have to defend ourselves. The
Papacy has always taken the long view about weapons technology. It was the Bull Romanus Pontifex
that gave the charter to the age of European exploration." He loved to lecture, I knew. When I was a
child he had spent a lot of time with me after school and guided me towards my career. "It was a pope
who tried to ban the crossbow. And it was a pope who tried to ban the sale of the noisy, inefficient stone-
throwers called cannon to Africans in 1481. We knew they wouldn't stay at that state. But the ban didn't
stick and the Moorish pirates were using them in galleys to dominate the western Mediterranean not
much later. . . ." He took a sip of wine. "We're aware our isolation could make us vulnerable."
"It's an isolation a lot of people would envy. I know I often do."
The abbot laughed. "I'm well aware of it. We're short of monastic vocations, but there's a long waiting
list of people wanting to come on temporary retreats here. A lot of people seem to get something out of a
retreat. But they want the tranquillity without the discipline—or without the religion at all . . . without
the religion at all," he repeated, and the laugh went out of his voice. We were both silent for a slightly
awkward moment. "They'd better make the most of it while it lasts," he added.
"I thought you were planning to be here forever."
"That's what I'd like, but I have to look at the demography. Christianity is dying on this world, as it is on
Earth. Life's too easy for most people to feel the need of a religion . . . a little mild pseudo-Buddhism
among some of the urban young, perhaps. But we've talked church history before."
I nodded. On Earth, when people mentioned the Holy Office today, it was generally a slang reference to
one of the more secretive departments of ARM, Earth's technological police. Was I right in a vague
notion that about the time the last slowboat-load of colonists left Earth, senior church figures had been
taking up day jobs? Did it matter? Earth was a long way away. We Masons, who were required only to
believe in a Supreme Being, and had a life of our own in our lodges, had an easier job surviving on the
whole, but we too had had our lean years.
"I love coming here," I said. "I could never be one for the discipline of the monastic order, but a
furlough among all this is pure contentment." He filled our glasses from the sparkling crystal decanter.
The wine shone ruby in the firelight. Perhaps my too obvious appreciation of this luxury touched a nerve.
"We're not a very disciplined society, are we? Not a very tough one," he said. "Also," he went on,
"there's this political trouble. How much do you know about that?"
"Not much. But more than I want to. We've got a whole world—a whole system—thinly settled. Huge
tracts of land still for the taking, huge tracts still unexplored from the ground, if it comes to that.
Habitable asteroids, Centauri B close by, even the Proxima system to settle if we want to live in bubbles
under a red sky. What reason is there for us to fight?"
"The reason that we're human. It's not just Herrenmanner and Prolevolk. Teuties and Tommies fought
systematically on Earth once, you know."
"I've heard about it," I said. "I don't know the details."
"Not many do now. Earth is censoring its history in a big way, and though we did bring some records of
our own there seems no reason for us to advertise the story of Earth's past. . . ."
"It's not likely to come to fighting again, anyway. Not in this century. We aren't savages."
"Not in the old sense, I grant you," he said. "Not wars and armies and so forth." We both laughed at the
absurd image. "But there are other forms of violence. Just lately . . . people have disappeared, you know."
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- Chapter 1
"What do you mean?"
"Just what I say. Von Frowein, a senior councillor. He went on a camping holiday a couple of weeks ago
and never came back."
"Didn't they search for him?"
"Yes, and they didn't find anything. He had the usual telltale beacon on him, standard equipment for lone
campers, and there wasn't a peep out of it—as if it had been deliberately smashed. It gave me a nasty
feeling when I learned about that. And there have been others. The police think we are seeing some
organized murders—political murders."
"How do you know these things?"
"I'm not just an abbot, you know. I'm also a bishop—a priest in the secular sense. I hear confessions
and . . . other things. My monks can retire from the world. I can't." He got up, pushing the kitten gently
onto the padded arm of his chair, and began to pace the room.
"Did you ever read Saki?" he asked, looking at me with a sudden curious expression, "An old Earth
writer. A heathen, as far as I can gather, but he had a hand for verses:
"Some lead a life of mild content:
Content may fall, as well as pride.
The Frog who hugged his lowly ditch
Was much disgruntled when it dried.
"He didn't write them as poetry, but as literary artifacts in a short story. Still, they can set one on a
certain train of thought." I knew enough of his manner of rhetoric to know that when he spoke again it
would be to quote something he had picked for a reason.
"You are not on the road to Hell,
You tell me with fanatic glee:
Vain boaster, what shall that avail,
If Hell is on the road to thee?"
Did he let that last line linger in the air between us for a moment? His glance turned to the blank faces of
his computers, and in the soft lighting I seemed to catch something strange there. But it passed.
"We—the church, that is—have survived by being ultra-orthodox, archaically conservative," he said
musingly. "Heresy comes too easily if you give it a chance, especially when it takes the fastest message
four and a half years to travel between us and Rome. And heresy means disintegration.
"We know our own history. The church very nearly died of tolerance once. Space travel and the
scientism that went with it looked like killing us, but it may have been the saving of us instead. We
religious weren't backward in getting into Space, you know. The first religious figure to set foot on a
new world was an Episcopal lay preacher named Buzz Aldrin.
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