Hal Colebatch: The Man-Kzin Wars 07

He paused and contemplated his cigar, frowning. Then he switched his gaze to the pictures again.

“These things could be rather… disturbing, somehow?”

“Somehow, yes,” I said, “I don't like them.”

“No. Only a few people have seen these things yet, all trained ARM personnel and a few of the Belter security people, and everyone has the same response. There's art gone into this.

“We're descended from creatures that were hunted by felines, Karl. It's almost as if whoever made up the morphology of these things has tapped into some sort of ancestral memory.”

“I still don't see exactly how I come into it.”

I did to some extent, though. And I saw another thing: If these holos of the alleged aliens became public, it was possible some gullible people might actually believe in them. Not as the symptoms of a space madness, though that would be bad enough, but as being real in themselves .

There were, I knew, plenty of people around bored and stupid enough to believe anything. Indeed, that was already a major social problem in itself. I understood why he had sent for me.

All right. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. Let something come. Start with tigers.

“Tigers are Indian, aren't they?”

“I don't know. Someone downstairs could tell you.” A lot of the museum below us was gallery and display rooms, and I knew Arthur Guthlac, the head guide and Assistant to the Museum's Chief of General Staff.

“Were there any Indians in the crew?”

He handed me a wafer. “Complete dossiers and pictures.” I dumped it in my wrist-comp.

“Any more pictures of the… things?”

“Hundreds. They've been sending them back continually. This will give you the general idea. You see they remembered to give them thumbs.”

He began flicking them up. No, I didn't like them. None of the Jenny Hannifers were whole, just as if they really had been burned or suddenly exposed to explosive decompression in space. Some were only fragments. Big catlike beings with thumbs. They were colored orange with some variations of shade from near red to near yellow and darker markings. One was smaller than the others. I was fairly experienced in dealing with sickness, pathology even, that was part of the job, but this was something different.

It was wrong that someone should have gone to so much care to concoct a hoax, and shown such ingenuity in its details. I thought again of what years in space might do to human beings — really thought about it — and realized for the first time how brave those first colonists of Wunderland and Plateau and Jinx and the rest had been.

There were holos of allegedly dissected 'aliens', too: cartilaginous ribs that covered the stomach region, blood that varied in color between purple and orange, presumably an analogue for arterial and venous, streams of data that purported to be DNA codings, skeletons, analysis of alien alimentary-canal contents and muscle tissue purporting to contain odd proteins, sheets of what was allegedly alien script, looking like claw marks. There were also holos of what purported to be alien skulls.

“There's possibly a connection with your other work,” the controller went on. “Or in any case, it seems to fall into our area as much as anyone else's. Your clearance has been upgraded one threshold in case you need special information. With our own people, normal need-to-know should be enough.”

I was getting signals that Alfred O'Brien was a nervous man taking a risk, and perhaps carrying me with him. I guessed opinion in the higher reaches was still divided on how to deal with this. A wrong decision, and early retirement; a very wrong decision, and… because, bizarre as it was, it could be serious.

Colonists were all volunteers, and could hardly be anything else. But they also went through rigorous screening and selection. It was quite right that rumors or reports of odd mental diseases in space could kill enthusiasm for colonizing ventures. And, yes, the ferocious three-meter tiger-cat images, however created, did have a disturbing quality about them. Somehow too many of them were difficult to look at for too long, whole or in pieces. But were they utterly unfamiliar? Why did I ask myself that question?

Deep, deep in memory, something stirred. What? I'd never seen anything much like these supposed aliens before, but… I looked at the dissection pictures again. There was the tiniest suggestion, somewhere in the back of my mind…

“The skulls might be a starting point,” I said.

“Oh. How so?”

“I feel they look… familiar somehow.”

“Good. It's good if you've got a starting point, I mean.”

“Can I tell Arthur Guthlac about it? I know he's been interested in biological history.”

“If you think so. But only what he needs to know.”

“It's an odd job.”

“That's why we need you.”

“It's needle-in-a-haystack territory.”

“I know.” He picked up a sheet of paper and passed it to me. “I don't know if its much of a start, but I've had the computers search for literary references to 'space' and 'cat' together. There isn't much. Here's one you might not know: An ancient Australian poem by an author Gwen Harwood, called 'Schrödinger's Cat Preaches to the Mice':”

I looked down to the end:

He handed me a card embossed with the symbol of a level of authority I had encountered only two or three times before.

“Stay away from 'docs,” he said. “That's your permit to do so. In fact your order to do so. No medication till further notice. We're turning you loose exactly as you are.”

“You do believe in taking risks, don't you?”

“You're not a schizie. You won't kill anyone. At least, I don't think so. But this is an intellectual problem. You'll need that intuition of yours as sharp as you can get it. And your wits sharp, too.

“ 'Space will put on the shape of any cat…' ” he quoted again as I left him. “It was written four hundred years ago.”

Snow whirled round. A snarling roar shook the eardrums. Over the crest of a snow-covered ridge a saber-toothed head appeared, fangs dripping. With a single fluid motion the feline leaped to the top of the rock, poised for a moment, the eyes in its flat head blazing at us.