Man-Kzin Wars - Anthology 07.pdf - Larry Niven - przemosta

Man Kzin Wars VII

Larry Niven, 1995

THE COLONEL'S TIGER

Hal Colebatch, 1995

India, Northwest Frontier, 1878

"Lie still. Rest," the doctor told him. "You're not recovered yet."

"Lie still? And listen to that ?"

The wind brought to the field hospital the sounds of an intermittent drumfire from the barren,

snow-topped hills to the north, the flat thud-thud of screw-guns and the thorns-in-fire crackle of distant

musketry.

"Rest, I say. You're out of this one, Captain Vaughn."

"I've had enough. Dreams. Sickness. Delirium."

The sick man swung his legs to the floor and rose to his feet. He took a half dozen steps, and the doctor

caught him as he fell.

A punkah coolie took part of the emaciated soldier's weight and they helped him back to the bed.

"I'll make a bargain with you: When you can get as far as the latrine without help you can try leading your

squadrons in the mountains. Not before."

"I just feel so ... useless lying here. Those are my men."

"If it's any consolation to you, the cavalry have been resting for the last week: It's work for mules and

infantry up there. And if it's any further consolation, I had you marked off for dead a week ago. You and

your friends."

The sick man smiled weakly. "I don't suppose my kit would have fetched much. There must have been a

few auctions in the mess lately."

"It hasn't been too bad. Old Bindon's cautious with men's lives on punitive expeditions. Your tigerskin

would have fetched something though ... here, steady on!"

The doctor held the sick man's head as a violent retching shook him. Then, as he recovered, Vaughn

raised his hand to the part of his scalp the doctor had held and gasped, "My head! What's happened?"

"I suppose I can show you." The doctor held up a mirror.

"Oh, my God!"

"Curlewis and Maclean are the same. And that Afridi devil of yours. But you're all alive. It was blood you

were spewing a week ago, though you were in no condition to notice." The doctor held a glass of water

to the captain's lips, steadying his trembling as he drank. "I must go. Rest, I say."

"Where is the skin?"

"Salted. The gomashta's got it. I advanced him a couple of rupees." He rose at the sounds he had been

waiting for: hooves and the approaching wheels of ambulance carts from the direction of Dirragha.

Captain Vaughn sank back exhausted. He closed his eyes and saw again, hanging in blackness, the great

cat's head with its blazing gold and violet eyes and batwing ears, the interlocking fangs protruding beyond

the lips, the great cat they called his tiger-man. The dark cave, the rockets ...

The wounded were being brought from the carts. The unmistakable sounds recalled him from his own

visions to reality, and the work that had been done that day. At the tail end of the Afghan Campaign, a

force of no less than five thousand men was fighting to pacify these barren hills with all that that implied in

terms of death and wounds. Beside that, his own recent moment was nothing at all. But he was not fully

clearheaded yet. The doctor could say what he liked, but at that moment the feeling of his weakness and

uselessness oppressed him. He felt ashamed.

"They will forget you and me," he whispered to the image of his enemy. "But they will not forget the

Dirragha Expeditionary Force."

Adding these statements together he was, at best, only partly correct.

CHAPTER 1

It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent

causes of decay and corruption. The long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced

a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the

same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated.

— Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

One of the largest of all British local council libraries, at Brent, lately destroyed approximately 66,000 of

its 100,000 books. The explanation which the council gave for this destruction was that the offending

books were "books on war, history books and other books irrelevant to the community."

— R. J. Stove, Where Ignorance is Bliss, 1993

Sir Bors had been taken away, so had Sir Kay, and Sir Launcelot and Lady May and Lady Helen and

the rest. It was a routine matter, and the 'doc would soon be logging its report.

When they emerged from memory-wipe, the members of the Order of Military Historians, restored to

their proper names, plus numbers, would find themselves new people.

They would be privileged in a sense, with an all-expenses-paid trip into space, and actual paid jobs at the

end of it. Not very far into space, and not the very best jobs, of course — tending elderly machinery at

the bottom of Martian canyons in a long-term, low-priority terraforming project, kept up mainly for its

use in criminal rehabilitation. But work that some would envy, for all that.

Crime could pay in our civilized world: A coven of fantasists, who had given each other special names

and titles of rank at bizarre ceremonies and who had cherished collections of ancient weapons and

war-gaming programs, were going to get something to do to fill their lives after all.

They would have adequate medi, geri and other care in the red canyons. Lady May and Lady Helen

would still be beautiful when they returned to Earth. The 'knights' when rehabilitated would be able to

take part in approved sports. They were lucky, but even without the memory-wipe I doubted they would

ever have known just how lucky they were. Some of their predecessors had gone into organ-banks.

I closed the files down and sent Alfred O'Brien my own report. Finding and closing the Order of Military

Historians, as quietly and indeed as gently as possible, had been a piece of variety in increasingly routine

literary work. I reprogrammed my desk, wishing the 'doc could do something with my brain chemistry to

make me immune from what a forbidden book I had once come across called the Great Mystery of

Human Boredom.

At least I told myself it was boredom. There seemed to be less and less need now for the 'gifts' which

had made me valuable to ARM. There was still plenty of desk work, but desk work anyone reasonably

intelligent could do. The Games were of no interest to me when I knew how we had programmed them.

What puppet master wants to join the puppets' sports? Two days later I was toying with a

not-very-realistic idea of rearranging certain things to allow me a trip into space myself (Wunderland had

been a dream abandoned long ago, but would the Belt have use for anyone like me? I doubted it.) when

Alfred O'Brien called. He wanted to see me personally.

He began with a rundown of my report.

"Not so many of these people now," he remarked.

He had the statistics and the global picture. I didn't know, or want to know, much more than I needed to:

A long time ago, before my time, the militarist fantasy had been widespread. It had produced a great deal

of pathological fiction and pseudohistory. We had had a lot of people working on it once. But our whole

society had progressed in recent years.

Also, the study of real history was being progressively restricted. That, too, seemed to have helped put

military fants out of business. A few years ago one in ten might have had clearance to study history. It

would be one in thousands now.

Personally, I was not among that chosen few. My job was quite distinct. Literary, not historical.

The controller seemed talkative. Almost oddly so. He usually kept conversation either strictly business or

strictly social. It was not like him to ruminate on what we were doing, at least to people like me. Even

someone with less training than I possessed would have recognized him as being slightly ill at ease, and

not bothering to disguise the fact overmuch. Something was, if not worrying him, I thought, puzzling him

at least. After a moments pause he went on. "It's a few years now since we had anything like this But

they're hard to clear out altogether. I sometimes think it's I odd how military fant variations persist. Do

you remember the Magnussen business?"

I did. Magnussen, a part-time volunteer helper at this very museum and a member of a now quietly

closed-down body called the Scandinavian Historical Association had evolved a theory from ceremonial

objects he had examined that his ninth- and tenth-century Danish and Norwegian ancestors had been

members of a warrior culture living in part by war and plunder. It might have seemed a very academic

point to some, and frankly very few people would have been interested one way or another, but ARM

had not wanted it sensationalized. Actually, Magnussen had been hard done by: Those of us inside ARM,

and working professionally in the field knew that indeed there still had been sporadic outbreaks of

large-scale organized violence later than officially admitted, at least in remote areas away from the great

cities of the world. I didn't want or need to know more of the details than my work required, but of

course I had an outline. Well, whatever the reason Magnussen's ancestors had put to sea, he himself had

gone on a longer voyage.

"I do think we're getting rid of them though," Alfred O'Brien said. "Sometimes I've thought there's no end

to human perversity and folly ... Speaking of which ... " He drummed his fingers on the table, hesitated

again, and now I was sure he seemed embarrassed.

"There is another matter," he said at last.

"Yes?"

"An odd one."

"I can tell that."

"Yes. It's a bit out of our usual line, but we've been asked to look into it. Do you remember the Angel's

Pencil ?"

There had been a send-off a long time ago, shortly after I was seconded to the special literary research

section of the program. It must be beyond the orbit of Tisiphone by now. "I've heard the name," I said.

"A colony ship, wasn't it?"

"Yes. With a mixed Earth-Belter crew. It left for Epsilon Eridani eighteen years ago." He touched a panel

on his desk and a hemisphere map beamed up behind him. More time had passed than I thought. The

ship's telltale reached out to a point light-years beyond the last wandering sentinel of the Solar system.

"Don't tell me they've got military fants on board?"

I laughed. We had had a little worry recently about a scientific exploration ship named Fantasy Prince.

Finally we had decided after investigation that the name was an innocuous coincidence and had nothing to

do with military fants.

He didn't laugh.

"I don't know. But it might be something like that. They've had trouble. If trouble's the right word for it ...

"We thought we knew every tanj thing that could go wrong in space, but this one came out of nowhere."

He lit one of his 'cigars'. He'd copied that from Buford Early. It wasn't usual that he had trouble putting

words together. This, I thought, is going to be something bizarre. But then, he would hardly have sent for

me otherwise. ARM has plenty of people available for normal problems.

"It may be something mental affecting the crew. Something the ships 'doc quite evidently can't handle.

We're getting its readouts and it's diagnosed nothing wrong."

Docs failing in space were a nightmare, for spacers at least.

"Either that, or it's criminal behavior, which we like even less ... They're sending back messages about ...

Outsiders."

"Yes?"

He heard the excitement in my voice. Alien contact was one of the Big Ones. It was also a mirage. We

had looked for friends among the stars for four hundred years and more and some false hopes had been

raised and dashed. His next words damped my excitement.

"No. Not real Outsiders. There would be people involved at much higher levels if they were real. What

they are sending back is quite impossible."

"Delusions?"

"Nothing so simple, though that would be serious enough. They've sent back pictures, holos. You can't

transmit photographs of delusions — There may be some sort of group psychosis. I know that's hardly a

satisfactory description, but ... they've made things ... not very nice ... "

He nodded to himself, muttered something, and then went on.

"The whole report of alien contact is bizarre but carefully detailed nonsense. They've gone to a lot of

trouble in some ways to try to be convincing, but in others they've made elementary mistakes. Mistakes

in science so obvious they look deliberate. Why? Maybe one crew member has got control of the

others."

"I don't see what that's got to do with me. I'm not a medical man. Or a psychist. You know what I am."

"We've got medical men working on it too. But a stronger possibility is criminal conspiracy: Someone

may stand to make a financial gain from this."

"But a criminal could only be rewarded on Earth — or in the Belt. Why commit a crime light-years

beyond any reward? Besides, surely being crew on a colony ship ... It just about guarantees a good life

at the end of the trip."

"That may be taking a bit for granted. Colonies haven't always gone as planned. And being beyond

reward means being beyond prosecution as well. But I won't speculate on possible Belt motives. You

can think of some yourself. And even on Earth, family could be rewarded."

We didn't like families very much. But, thinking it over in silence for a moment, another question came to

me that seemed rather obvious.

"If it's a hoax, then, at the bottom line, does it matter? I mean, it's a long way away, isn't it?"

"You know the sort of money that's involved in colonization," he said. Then he continued. "No, on

second thoughts you probably don't know. But think of this: What if it comes to be believed that long

space flights send crews crazy, light-years from treatment?"

"Not so good."

"Another thing: A colony founded by criminals — or military fants — well, that's an entire world we're

dealing with. Think about it."

I thought. It didn't take much thought to feel a chill at the long-term implications.

"Maybe that's a worst-case scenario," he went on, "but anything that might affect space colonization

matters, given the type of money we're dealing with. A colony ship is never a good investment, Karl. It's

money and resources thrown away, at least from the point of view of a lot of political lobbyists. It's never

easy to ... persuade ... a politician to take the long-term view One more negative factor at any time could

tip the balance against the whole program.

"There's another thing, too: the obvious ARM thing. We don't like anything we don't understand. We

can't afford it. One thing is sure: This business had its origins on Earth or in the Belt and we want to know

why and where.

"It doesn't look like a simple practical joke. And the whole thing is detailed enough to make me believe

it's not going to stop there. I think this was set up on Earth before they took off. There was once a

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