"Fine," said Richard. "But where are they? Peter detects no trace of alien minds. There's all that inert tissue. Slavers in frozen sleep?"
"No. A DNA bank, maybe. Slaver genetic material with mechanisms for rearing little Slavers. That might not need much space. All that tissue… like the yolk in an egg. Food."
"Slaver genetic material? There's a nasty thought! What do we do?"
"Destroy it at once!" Charrgh-Captain's voice contained no doubt.
"We have a little time, I think. They can hardly produce adult thrintun instantaneously. And there still appears to be no activity but a very faint energy discharge."
"And where," said Gatley Ivor, "are the facilities for young thrintun? There would be creches, surely. Things of that nature. We know they took several years to mature and develop the Power. As infants, even as adolescents, they would need to be cared for, disciplined, taught. It would cost little to have living slaves to care for them-during the time spent in stasis they would consume no stores-and, indeed, why not living Thrint adults to direct the slaves? Why did the adult Slavers who built the ark not take the elementary step of preserving their own lives inside it?"
"Maybe they are the thrintun in the control chamber," said Gay. "Maybe there were other facilities outside the stasis field that have been lost. Perhaps they were attacked and had to put it into stasis before the crew could be embarked."
"It seems the artifact came out of stasis periodically, and then returned to it," said Charrgh-Captain. "Why should an arrk do that?"
"That is simple. They wished to ensure their enemies were truly dead," said Peter Robinson. "Perhaps when they first emerged from stasis they detected mental emanations from live tnuctipun. Perhaps not all tnuctipun were killed by the suicide command: They may have been coming out of their own stasisprotected arks and shelters for some time. This thrintun ark would return to stasis till all possible enemies were dead."
"That doesn't quite fit, Peter," said Richard. "The great floating stasis-bubble would be vulnerable to attack if any tnuctipun were still around. They could detect it, close on it, turn off the field-child's play for the tnuctipun, who invented the field anyway-and do a thorough job of destroying whatever was inside. And if it was an ark like that, one would expect it to be defensively armed, as well as mobile. Besides, given that a lot of genetic material might have been preserved in a small space, a smaller artifact would surely have been big enough.
"Another possibility occurs to me. Suppose the thrint knew the simple, blanket suicide command-easier to transmit, perhaps, than a selective one to kill slaves only-would get them too? Surely many would seek refuge in stasis fields. But they would have no one to get them out. The purpose of this artifact and its array of clocks may be to ensure that some would come out of stasis in the future to release others elsewhere."
"But they didn't," said Gay.
"We have found ancient artifacts estimated at much less than three billion Earth years old. That suggests arks or colonies emerged from stasis from time to time," said Gatley Ivor. "For some reason they didn't survive, but they might be connected to the attack on this ark's control center. Perhaps some later merging tnuctipun came on it and attacked it but didn't survive to finish the job, disabling it without destroying it. If there was fighting in spaceships or on the surface of the big field, there would be no trace of that fighting now. Perhaps gun turrets or other weapons mounted on the surface were destroyed in the fighting or have disintegrated under meteor and dust bombardment since."
"Yes, for some reason they didn't survive," said Gay.
"Too much of the infrastructure of their-well, I suppose you have to call it their 'civilization,' for want of a better word-was gone."
"Yet at least tnuctipun emerging from stasis should have survived," said Charrgh-Captain. "They were masters of science and technology. Not even clever races like the Jotok or the Pak-yes, humans, I know about the Pak-discovered a hyperdrive. Modern stasis fields are mere copies of the tnuctipun originals. Their biological engineering has survived on many worlds. They knew all the mechanisms of genetics and cloning. Surely any tnuctipun arrk would have carried copious genetic material so they could repopulate the universe with their own kind. Without the Slavers they could have rebuilt their civilization in a single generation, perhaps. What happened to them? Anyway, this is not a tnuctipun arrk, whatever it is… Urrr," he growled. Normally kzintosh would no more betray bewilderment by thinking aloud, least of all in front of aliens, than they would betray fear. "The shape is not optimal for any utilitarian purpose. It has no warlike purpose. It is not a weapon or a weapons system. It is not a dreadnaught. There are no gun-ports, no missiles, no weapons of any kind. It has no room to carry fighter-craft or infantry."
"Greenberg drew all he remembered of thrintun artifacts," said Gatley Ivor. "But I don't recall anything like this."
"Grrinberrg?" asked Charrgh-Captain. "I remember the name from my human Studies. Was Grrinberrg not a human who somehow defeated a Thrint?"
"Yes, a human telepath. He learned something of its mind."
"A Slaver was released from stasis on a world of the Patriarchy," said Charrgh-Captain. "Fortunately, it could control only a limited number of minds at one time. A Hero employed guile to escape and give warning. We destroyed the relevant continent with missiles from space. Many Heroes died-some of them undignified, dishonored deaths, still slaves of an alien mind, and we destroyed most of the habitable land on the planet and made species extinct."
"Was that a grief to you?" asked Gay.
"The Fanged God set us to dominate and prey upon other species, not to exterminate them unless we must. Even when we boiled the Chunquens' seas, we did it selectively. Otherwise the humans of Wunderland might have fared differently… And the shape… Gay, you are right to be puzzled. Almost it reminds me of something, but I cannot think what."
"I have a similar feeling," said Peter Robinson. "Also, I have an intuition that the shape is of importance. My intuition," he added, staring defiantly at Charrgh-Captain again, "is a trained one. It is connected to my talent. May I experiment?" He sat at the controls and rotated the holo through different planes. "I had something there," he said after a moment. "One great difficulty is arbitrarily assigning an up or down to this thing. But here, with the control chamber at the bottom, a South Pole, as it were, it appears to have at least bilateral symmetry.
"Now let me project thrint artifacts we know." His claws clicked on the keyboard's kzin-sized track-ball. "No, nothing. What of thrint body shapes?"
Two clicks were enough. The holo of the gigantic artifact and a holo of a thrint head were projected side by side.
"A thrint head! The circle is the eye! The protuberances below it are jaws! The protuberance at the rear is the Power-organ. A statue."
"On Kzin we have statues of Heroes in plenty," said Charrgh-Captain. "There is a great one of Lord Chmee in orbit that all may see while the stars stand. But who would spend resources in a war to build one on this scale?"
"Perhaps it predates the war?"
"Unlikely. There would be signs of tnuctipun work in the control chamber at least."
"On Wunderland," said Peter Robinson, staring defiantly again at Charrgh-Captain, "we have put up statues to notable kzinti recently. There is one of Chuut-Riit, the old Governor, who was wise, and Vaemar, and Raargh, who raised Vaemar when he was young, and others. There is a grove of them in the Arhus Hunting Preserve."
"Do you seek to provoke me?" asked Charrgh-Captain, grinning so all his teeth showed. His tail lashed, and one hand was on his w'tsai again.