Larry Niven: The Man-Kzin Wars 03

So was Anton. “I've played it,” he said. “Can't talk about it, of course.”

He looked mildly bored. His hands looked like they were trying to break chunks off the edge of the table.

I nodded placidly.

Anton shouldn't have told me about the broadcast from Angel's Pencil . But he had ; and if the ARM had noticed, he'd better mention it again.

Company joined us, sampled and departed. Anton and I spoke to a pair of ladies who turned out to have other tastes. (Some bends like to bug the straights.) A younger woman joined us for a time. She couldn't have been over thirty, and was lovely in the modern style… but hard, sharply defined muscle isn't my sole standard of beauty…

I remarked to Anton, “Sometimes the vibes just aren't right.”

“Yeah. Look, Jack, I have carefully concealed a prehistoric Calvados in my apt at Maya. There isn't really enough for four—”

“Sounds nice. Eat first?”

“Stet. There're sixteen restaurants in Maya.”

A score of blazing rectangles meandered across the night, washing out the stars. The eye could still find a handful of other space artifacts, particularly around the Moon.

Anton flashed the beeper that would summon a taxi. I said, “So you viewed the call. So why so tense?”

Security devices no bigger than a basketball rode the glowing sky, but the casual eye would not find those. One must assume they were there. Patterns in their monitor chips would match vision and sound patterns of a mugging, a rape, an injury, a cry for help. Those chips had gigabytes to spare for words and word patterns the ARM might find of interest.

So: no key words.

Anton said, “Jack, they tell a hell of a story. A… foreign vehicle pulled alongside Angela at four-fifths of legal max. It tried to cook them.”

I stared. A spacecraft matched course with the Angel's Pencil at eighty percent of lightspeed? Nothing man-built could do that. And warlike? Maybe I'd misinterpreted everything. That can happen when you make up your code as you go along.

But how could the Pencil have escaped? “How did Angela manage to phone home?”

A taxi dropped. Anton said, “She sliced the bread with the, you know, motor. I said it's a hell of a story.”

Anton's apartment was most of the way up the slope of Maya, the pyramidal arcology north of Santa Maria. Old wealth.

Anton led me through great doors, into an elevator, down corridors. He played tour guide: “The Fertility Board was just getting some real power about the time this place went up. It was built to house a million people. It's never been fully occupied.”

“So?”

“So we're en route to the east face. Four restaurants, a dozen little bars. And here we stop—”

“This your apt?”

“No. It's empty, it's always been empty. I sweep it for bugs, but the authorities… I think they've never noticed.”

“Is that your mattress?”

“No. Kids. They've got a club that's two generations old. My son tipped me off to this.”

“Could we be interrupted?”

“No. I'm monitoring them . I've got the security system set to let them in, but only when I'm not here. Now I'll set it to recognize you. Don't forget the number: Apt 23309.”

“What is the ARM going to think we're doing?”

“Eating. We went to one of the restaurants, then came back and drank Calvados… which we will do, later. I can fix the records at Buffalo Bill. Just don't argue about the credit charge, stet?”

“But— Yah, stet.” Hope you won't be noticed, that's the real defense. I was thinking of bailing out… but curiosity is part of what gets you into the ARM. “Tell your story. You said she sliced the bread with the, you know, motor ?”

“Maybe you don't remember. Angel's Pencil isn't your ordinary Bussard ramjet. The field scoops up interstellar hydrogen to feed a fusion-pumped laser. The idea was to use it for communications too. Blast a message half across the galaxy with that. A Belter crewman used it to cut the alien ship in half.”

“ There's a communication you can live without. Anton… What they taught us in school. A sapient species doesn't reach space unless the members learn to cooperate. They'll wreck the environment, one way or another, war or straight libertarianism or overbreeding… remember?”

“Sure.”

“So do you believe all this?”

“I think so.” He smiled painfully. “Director Bernhardt didn't. He classified the message and attached a memo too. Six years of flight aboard a ship of limited size, terminal boredom coupled with high intelligence and too much time, elaborate practical jokes, yadda yadda. Director Harms left it classified… with the cooperation of the Belt. Interesting?”

“But he had to have that .”

“But they had to agree. There's been more since. Angel's Pencil sent us hundreds of detailed photos of the alien ship. It's unlikely they could be faked. There are corpses. Big sort-of cats, orange, up to three meters tall, big feet and elaborate hands with thumbs. We're in mucking great trouble if we have to face up to such beasties.”

“Anton, we've had three hundred and fifty years of peace. We must be doing something right. The odds say we can negotiate.”

“You haven't seen them.”

It was almost funny. Jack was trying to make me nervous. Twenty years ago the terror would have been fizzing in my blood. Better living through chemistry! This was all frightening enough; but my fear was a cerebral thing, and I was its master.

I wasn't nervous enough for Anton. “Jack, this isn't just vaporware. A lot of those photos show what's maybe a graviton generator, maybe not. Director Harms set up a lab on the Moon to build one for us.”

“Funded?”

“Heavy funding. Somebody believes in this. But they're getting results! It works!”

I mulled it. “Alien contact. As a species we don't seem to handle that too well.”

“Maybe this one can't be handled at all.”

“What else is being done?”

“Nothing, or damn close. Silly suggestions, career-oriented crap designed to make a bureau bigger… Nobody wants to use the magic word. War .”

“War. Three hundred and fifty years out of practice, we are. Maybe C. Cretemaster will save us.” I smiled at Anton's bewilderment. “Look it up in the ARM records. There's supposed to be an alien of sorts living in the cometary halo. He's the force that's been keeping us at peace this past three and a half centuries.”

“Very funny.”

“Mmm. Well, Anton, this is a lot more real for you than me. I haven't yet seen anything upsetting.”

I hadn't called him a liar. I'd only made him aware that I knew nothing to the contrary. For Anton there might be elaborate proofs; but I'd seen nothing, and heard only a scary tale.

Anton reacted gracefully. “Of course. Well, there's still that bottle.”

Anton's Calvados was as special as he'd claimed, decades old and quite unique. He produced cheese and bread. Good thing; I was ready to eat his arm off. We managed to stick to harmless topics, and parted friends.

The big catlike aliens had taken up residence in my soul.

Aliens aren't implausible. Once upon a time, maybe. But an ancient ETI in a stasis field had been in the Smithsonian since the opening of the twenty-second century, and a quite different creature—C. Cretemaster's real-life analog—had crashed on Mars before the century ended.

Two spacecraft matching course at near lightspeed, that was just short of ridiculous. Kinetic energy considerations… why, two such ships colliding might as well be made of antimatter! Nothing short of a gravity generator could make it work. But Anton was claiming a gravity generator.