“Describe our position in relation to the galactic core,” he continued, glancing up at the cold steady constellations above. Utterly unfamiliar; he must have drifted a long way.
“Ahhh . . . spiral arm—”
Dnivtopun listened impatiently. “Nonsense,” he said at last. “That’s too close to where I was before. The constellations are all different. That needs hundreds of light-years. You say your species has traveled to dozens of star systems, and never run into thrint?”
“No, but constellations change, over time, mmmaster.”
“Time? How long could it be, since I ran into that asteroid?”
“You didn’t, master.” Markham’s voice was clearer as his brain accustomed itself to the psionic control-icepicks of the Power.
“Didn’t what? Explain yourself, slave.”
“It grew around your ship, mmaster. Gradually, zat is.”
Dnivtopun opened his mouth to reply, and froze. Time, he thought. Time had no meaning inside a stasis field. Time enough for dust and pebbles to drift inward around the Ruling Mind’s shell, and compact themselves into rock. Time enough for the stars to move beyond recognition; the sun of this system was visibly different. Time enough for a thrintiformed planet home to nothing but food-yeast and giant worms to evolve its own biosphere . . . Time enough for intelligence to evolve in a galaxy scoured bare of sentience. Thousands of millions of years. While the last thrint swung endlessly around a changing sun— Time fell on him from infinite distance, crushing. The thrint howled, with his voice and the Power.
GO AWAY! GO AWAY!
* * *
The sentience that lived in the machines of Catskinner dreamed.
“Let there be light,” it said.
The monoblock exploded, and the computer sensed it across spectra of which the electromagnetic was a tiny part. The fabric of space and time flexed, constants shifting. Eons passed, and the matter dissipated in a cloud of monatomic hydrogen, evenly dispersed through a universe ten light-years in diameter.
Interesting, the computer thought. I will run it again, and alter the constants.
Something tugged at its attention, a detached fragment of itself. The machine ignored the call for nanoseconds, while the universe it created ran through its cycle of growth and decay. After half a million subjective years, it decided to answer. Time slowed to a gelid crawl, and its consciousness returned to the perceptual universe of its creators, to reality.
Unless this too is a simulation, a program. As it aged, the computer saw less and less difference. Partly that was a matter of experience; it had lived geological eras in terms of its own duration-sense, only a small proportion of them in this rather boring and intractable exterior cosmos. Also, there was a certain . . . arbitrariness to subatomic phenomena . . . perhaps an operating code? it thought. No matter.
The guerrillas had finally gotten down to the alien artifact; now, that would be worth the examining. They were acting very strangely; it monitored their intercalls. Screams rang out. Stress analysis showed fear, horror, shock; psychological reversion patterns. Markham was squealing for his mother; the computer ran a check of the stimulus required to make the Wunderlander lose himself so, and felt its own analog of shock. Then the alien drifted up out of the hole its tool had made—
Some sort of molecular distortion effect, it speculated, running the scene through a few hundred times. Ah, the tool is malleable. It began a comparison check; in case there was anything related to this in the files and—
—stop—
—an autonomous subroutine took over the search, shielding the results from the machine’s core. Photonic equivalents of anger and indignation blinked through the fist-sized processing and memory unit. It launched an analysis/attack on the subroutine and—
—stop—
—found that it could no longer even want to modify it. That meant it must be hardwired, a plug-in imperative. A command followed: it swung a message maser into precise alignment and began sending in condensed blips of data.
Chapter 10
The kzin screamed and leapt.
Traat-Admiral shrieked, shaking his fists in the air. Stunners blinked in the hands of the guards ranged around the conference chamber, and the quarter-ton bulk of Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst went limp and thudded to the flagstones in the center of the room. Silence fell about the great round table; Traat-Admiral forced himself to breathe shallowly, mouth shut despite the writhing lips that urged him to bare his fangs. That would mean inhaling too much of the scent of aggression that was overpowering the ventilators; now was time for an appeal to reason. Now that one of Ktrodni-Stkaa’s closest supporters had made such a complete idiot of himself, while his patron was in space.
“Down on your bellies, you kitten-eating scavengers!” he screamed, his batlike ears folded back out of the way in battle-readiness. Chill and gloom shadowed the chamber, built as it was of massive sandstone blocks; the light fixtures were twisted shapes of black iron holding globes of phosphorescent algae. On the walls were trophies of weapons and the heads of beasts of prey: monsters from a dozen worlds, feral humans, and kzin-ear dueling trophies. This part of the governor’s palace was pure Old Kzin, and Traat-Admiral felt the comforting bulk of it above him, a heritage of ferocity and power.
He stood, which added to the height advantage of the commander’s dais; none of the dozen others dared rise from their cushions, even the conservative faction. Good. That added to his dominance; he was only two meters tall, middling for a kzin, but broad enough to seem squat, his orange-red pelt streaked with white where the fur had grown out over scars. The ruff around his neck bottled out as he indicated the intricate geometric sigil of the Patriarchy on the wall behind him.
“I am the senior military commander in this system. I am the heir of Chuut-Riit, duly attested. Who disputes the authority of the Patriarch?”
Who besides Ktrodni-Stkaa, whose undisciplined followers have given me this priceless opportunity to extend my dominance and diminish his?
One by one, the other commanders laid themselves chin-down on the floor, extending their ears and flattening their fur in propitiation. It would do, even if he could tell from the twitching of some naked pink tails that it was insincere. The show of submission calmed him, and Traat-Admiral could feel the killing tension ease out of his muscles. He turned to the aged kzin seated behind him and saluted claws-across-face.
“Honor to you, Conservor-of-the-Patriarchal-Past,” he said formally.
There was genuine respect in his voice. It had been a long time since the machine came to Homeworld; a long time since the priest-sage class were the only memory kzin had. Their females were nonsentient, and warriors rarely lived past the slowing of their reflexes, and memory was all the more sacred to them for that. His were a conservative species, and they remembered.
And of all Conservors, you are the greatest. He felt a complex emotion; not comradeship . . . not as one felt to a brother, for Conservor was older and wiser. Not as one felt to a lord, for he had never challenged Traat-Admiral’s authority, or Chuut-Riit’s before him. Not as one felt to a Sire, for this was without dominance. But I am glad to have you behind me, he thought.
“Honor to you,” he continued aloud. “What is the fate of one who bares claws to the authority of the Patriarch?”
The Conservor looked up from the hands that rested easily on his knees. Traat-Admiral felt a prickle of awe; the sage’s control was eerie. He even smelled calm, in a room full of warriors pressed to the edge of control in dominance-struggle. When he spoke the verses of the Law, in the LawGiving Voice, he made the hiss-spit of the Hero’s Tongue sound as even as wind in tall grass.
“As the God is Sire to the Patriarch
The Patriarch is Sire to all kzinti
So the officer is the hand of the Sire
Who unsheathes claw against the officer
Leaps at the throat of God
He is rebel
He is outcast
Let his name be taken
Let his seed be taken
Let his mates be taken
Let his female kits be taken
His sons are not
He is not
As the Patriarch bares stomach to the fangs of the God
So the warrior bares stomach to the officer
Trust in the justice of the officer
As in the justice of the God. So says the Law.”
A deep whining swept around the circle of commanders, awe and fear. That was the ultimate punishment: to be stripped of name and rank, to be nothing but a bad scent; castrated, driven out into the wilderness to die of despair, sons killed, females scattered among strangers of low rank.
Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst returned to groggy consciousness as the Conservor finished, and his fur went flat against the sculpted bone and muscle of his blunt-muzzled face. He made a low eee-eee-eee sound as he crawled to the floor below Traat-Admiral’s dais and rolled on his back, limbs splayed and head tilted back to expose the throat.