“Or something else from then,” Hans said. “That hull’s like nothing in Known Space, that’s for sure. Tensile strength and radiation resistance is right off the scale; none of the gear we brought can even test it.” He scratched in the perpetual white three day’s beard that covered his chin. “Wish we hadn’t found it. Gold I understand. This I don’t. Don’t like it”
“This could make us one bleeping lot richer than all the gold on Wunderland,” Jonah said.
“We do not know if there is anything valuable in the artifact,” Spots said. “Not yet”
“There is a stasis field!” Bigs replied. “Neither the Patriarchy nor the monkeys have that as yet. There is the hull material. Think of the naval implications of such ships! We know the ancients had superluminal drives-undoubtedly the secret of that is inside as well. Matter conversion…”
He licked his chops and forced his voice to quietness; they were near the disused gold-washing boxes, but the humans could be anywhere and both of them had some command of the Hero’s Tongue.
“You said we could not return to the Patriarchy-we, defeated cowards with nothing to offer. Now we can return. Now we can return as Heroes, assured of Full Names-assured of harems stocked from the Patriarch’s daughters, and a position second only to his!”
Spots nodded thoughtfully. “There is some truth in that,” he said judiciously; his voice was calm, but his eyes gleamed and the wet fangs beneath showed white and strong in the morning light. “If we could get the secrets, and if we can get them off planet-you do not hope to ride aloft in the alien craft, I hope,” he added dryly.
Bigs snorted; neither of the humans could fit in any likely passenger compartment, much less a kzin.
“We must get the pilot, or download the data from the craft’s computers,” he said decisively.
“Easy to say,” Spots said, flapping his ears. Bigs grinned at the reminder that his sibling had always been better with information systems. “The hardware and programs both will be totally incompatible-fewer similarities in design architecture than kzinti-human system interfaces have. At least we and the monkeys have comparable capacities, and integrating those systems was a reborn-as-kzinrett nightmare. I did some of that during the war. What kind of computer would the monkey slaves of the thrintun build?” “And yet. To be a true Hero, to have a name, it never was easy. Until not it was not possible. Now it is.”
Spots paused thoughtfully, scratching himself under the jaw. “And the monkey authorities-if they sniff one trace scent of this, they will bury us so deep that we will stay submerged as long as that spacecraft did.”
Bigs’s fur rippled, and he gave an involuntary dry retch. Ever since the cave-in he had been unable to force himself closer than the outer entrance of the shaft. The darkness, the stifling closeness… he retched again. As nearly as they could estimate the tnuctipun spaceship had spent the last three thousand million years in the planetary magma, bobbing around beneath the Aeserheimer Continent’s crustal plate. The hot spot must be connected with it, somehow-the how of it was beyond them; none of them was a specialist in planetary mechanics-and only chance had ever brought it to the surface again. Vanishingly unlikely that it should be then, although erosion would have revealed it in another few centuries. On the other paw, it had to be discovered sometime. It looked to be eternal.
To be buried that long, though. His mind knew that it had been less than an instant; inside a stasis field, the entropy gradient was disconnected from that of the universe as a whole. Less than a single second would pass inside during the entire duration of the universe, from the explosion of the primal monobloc to the final inward collapse into singularity. His mind knew that, but his gut knew otherwise.
Spots chirred. “For that matter, what of the humans here? They seem no more anxious than we to attract the government’s”-he fell into Wunderlander for that; the Hero’s Tongue had no precise equivalent-“attention. Yet they may be reluctant to allow us to depart with the data-they are monkeys, after all.”
“We can bury their bones. They are outcasts, not dear to the livers of the monkeys in authority. Who will miss their Scent?”
The smell of anger warned him; he looked up just in time to jerk his head backward, and Spots’s claws fanned the air over his nose rather than raking through the sensitive flesh.
“Honorless sthondat!” the smaller kzin hissed. “Did you forget the oath we swore with Jonah-human? You are alive because of the Jonah-human! Oath-breaker! Are you without regard for the bones of your ancestors? The Fanged God will regurgitate your soul.”
Bigs bristled, swelling up to a third again his size; his ears folded back.
“They are monkeys,” he growled back; the sound was a steady urrreeuueeerree beneath the modulations of his words. The Menacing Tense in Imperative Mode.
“That monkey crawled into the darkness to rescue you as you lay helpless,” Spots said; he stood higher, unwilling to let Bigs’ height give him dominance. All eight claws on his hands were out. “Blood for blood.”
They began to circle, tails rigid. “What of our duty to the Patriarch?” Bigs spat.
“Our first duty to the Patriarch is to be Heroes,” Spots replied. “Heroes do not break their solemn oath!”
They both sank on their haunches for the final leap. Then Bigs let his fur fall and looked aside.
“There is a true trail among the prints of your words,” he admitted with sullen reluctance. Earth rumbling and the walls closing around-“If the monkey… if Jonah-human refuses to let us leave with the data, I will challenge him to honorable single combat.”
Spots straightened suspiciously; he sniffed with his jaw open and licked his nose for a second try.
“I smell reservations. They smell stronger than a dead kshat,” he warned. “Be sure, I will not permit less. No under-the-grass killing. And if you duel Jonah-human, you must preserve his head for the Ancestral Museum of our line.”
“Agreed. We shall all act as Heroes. Even the Jonah-human.”
Spots’s pelt rippled in a shrug. “We quarrel over the intestines of a prey that grazes yet,” he said. “So far, all we have is an impenetrable mystery.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“What did you do?” Spots demanded, springing back and bruising his tail against a timber upright. He rubbed at it absently, eyes locked on the tnuctipun spacecraft with the same intent longing that they might have fixed on a zianya bound in the blood trough of a feasting table.
“I did nothing,” Bigs said.
Jonah grunted, and Hans whistled softly. For the better part of a week, nothing. And now the stasis field had vanished, seemingly of its own accord.
The hull had turned… translucent, as well. Much of the interior seemed to be packed solid with equipment of various sorts; none of it familiar, although he thought he recognized something like the wave-guides of a gravity polarizer. If it’s that small, arid can lift this ship, it’s better than anything we or the kzin can make, he thought. Nothing this size could make space on its own-the power-plant alone would be too large-and nothing this size could possibly mount a superluminal drive, from what little was publicly known about them. On the other hand, nothing humans or kzinti knew would stand three billion years of immersion in liquid metal, either.
“Tnuctipun,” he whispered, awed. In the center of the forward bulge was a capsule, and inside that he could dimly see the outline of a body inside a cocoon of tubes and wires.
Small, was his first thought. He knew from his time on the thrintun ship Ruling Mind that tnuctipun were small; they had built that thrintun vessel, and many of the crawlspaces were too cramped for a human to enter. Long limbs in proportion to the body, and twelve digits, longer and more jointed than human fingers. Another indication; there was a rough correlation between manual dexterity and the length of time a species had been sentient. Dolphins and bandersnatch were exceptions, of course. Overall he thought it would come to about his waist standing erect, but the arms were as long as his. A single nostril in the long snout, ahead of an even longer swelling of braincase; a pattern of holes on either side of the head that might correspond to ears, or might not; two large eyes and a smaller one set where the forehead would be if there was one. The eyelids dosed side-to-side rather than up and down.