CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR — THESE BONES
They flicked from cloudy daylight to the pinkish artificial light of Needle’s lander bay; thence to the crew cabin and a webeye view of the rim wall zipping past in vacuum-harsh sunlight.
Bram arrived last. He set down his orchestral sculpture where Louis had dropped his pressure suit components, and went straight to the kitchen dispenser. “Get us an update on the probe, Hindmost. How long until we can dock?”
The Hindmost spoke orchestral chords. Equations wrote themselves across the air in Interspeak symbols. “We could begin to decelerate now at two gee and dock in fifteen and a half hours.”
“You’ve told me the probe can take ten gee.”
“I prefer a margin of error.”
“Hindmost, the probe’s drive is a powerful, conspicuous X-ray source. We’ll give an enemy minimal time to track it down. Wait, then decelerate at ten gee.”
“At high thrust a fusion drive becomes
Bram said nothing.
“Wait, aye aye. Decelerate at ten gee beginning in six hours. Dock in just more than nine hours. May I return to my cabin to eat and bathe and dance and sleep?”
The protector sipped from a squeezebulb. The Kzin’s nose wrinkled, though Louis couldn’t smell anything. Bram said, “You can do all of that here.”
“Bram, I must enter my cabin when the time comes to decelerate the probe. Let me go now.”
“Show me your cabin.”
The Hindmost whistle-chirped. The rim wall faded out, and they looked into the Hindmost’s cabin.
The light was yellow shading toward orange, but the decor was the infinite greens of a cold weather forest. There were no corners, no edges. Floor and wall, table space and storage space, it was all curves.
Bram instructed, “Leave it thus. Bathe and sleep. If you dance, dance alone—”
The Hindmost snorted like an angry horn section.
“If I see a hologram where I should see the Hindmost, I must act. You want me to feel safe, don’t you?” Bram stooped with bent knees above the granite block. He lifted, swung around, and set it down.
The Hindmost stepped where the granite had been, and was on the far side of the bulkhead.
The contours of the cabin shifted as he moved. A bowl formed from the floor and took on shades of peach. The puppeteer stepped daintily into it. It grew like a flower until it had almost closed above: a high-sided bathtub much like those used in lunar cities.
Bram must have noted Louis’s rapt gaze. “What strikes you, Louis?”
What struck Louis was that the Hindmost wasn’t going to be much help to Louis Wu. Bram had had too much time to intimidate the puppeteer. Louis said instead, “I had an insight. The Hindmost’s cabin, what does it look like to you?”
“A womb, perhaps.”
“How about the interior of an animal?”
“Are we playing word games?”
“There’s a difference. It might matter. Female puppeteers don’t have a womb. A… prey animal evolved into a symbiote so long ago that they think of it as the puppeteer female, but it isn’t. Nessus had an ovipositor. Bram, get into the Hindmost’s records and see if he has a file on digger wasps.”
“Digger wasps, stet,” Bram said. “We have some nine hours to play with. You were going to lecture me about protectors.”
Louis asked, “Shall we go look at bones?”
“Lecture,” Bram said.
Louis complied. “Our ancestor was the Pak breeder. The Pak evolved on a planet near the galactic core, say a hundred and thirty thousand falans from here at lightspeed.” Thirty thousand light-years and a bit. “Some of them tried to set a colony on my planet, on Earth, long ago. There wasn’t enough thallium to support the virus that grows in the yellow roots, and that’s what turns a breeder into a protector.
“The protectors died off. They may have cleared off some predators first to give the breeders room to expand. The immature Pak, the breeders, evolved on their own, just like they did here. They spread over Earth from landing sites in Africa and Asia.”
“Speculative?”
“We have bones of Pak breeders from Olduvai Gorge and other sites. There’s a mummified Pak protector in the Smithsonian,” Louis said. “They dug it out from under a desert on Mars. I never saw it myself. Even at my age you can’t do everything. But we studied a hologram of the thing in General Biology.”
“How did you come by that?”
“He came to rescue the old colony. That’s hearsay evidence, Bram, from a Belter who ate the yellow roots, but the Hindmost probably has it in memory. Ship components, Brennan’s tale, the dissected mummy, chemical —”
“Let us not disturb the Hindmost. But you studied this mummy?”
“Yes.”
“Let us look at bones.”
The knobby man’s hand felt like a handful of marbles, and his pull on Louis’s wrist was irresistible. Acolyte followed, suitless. Kzinti needn’t fear the smell of tree-of-life. Louis found himself walking rapidly toward a skeleton looming in amplified starlight.
Bram brought them face-to-face, stepped back and said, “React.”
Acolyte circled the skeleton. “It died in combat,” he murmured. He sniffed, then followed his nose to Cronus’s array of tools and clothing.
Louis ran his fingertips over the eroded edges where bone was broken. Would Bram guess that he’d been here before? Louis said, “Well, it looks thousands of falans old.”
“Near seven thousand,” Bram confirmed.
“Beaten to death. You?”
“I and Anne.”
Acolyte turned, his ears up. “Tell us the tale. He challenged you here?”
“No, we hid our existence.”
“How did you find him? How did you lure him?”
“He had to come. We waited.”
The Kzin waited. But Bram didn’t speak again, so Louis said, “This could almost be a deformed Pak protector. Still, the jaw’s a bone cracker. The skull doesn’t have much brow ridge. The torso, I think it’s too long for a standard issue Pak. Bram, I think you have here a carrion eater.”
Back came Acolyte to see what Louis was talking about. Bram asked, “On what basis?”
“Jaw built to crack bones. A predator would have teeth to tear open big arteries or an abdomen. The long torso gives him a gut long enough to deal with a difficult meal. The missing brow ridge-well, he could be going out only at night, or maybe he had bushy eyebrows for eyeshades, but—”
Acolyte asked, “Might he be a Night People protector? Distort the skull, expand the joints—”
Louis shook his head. “I saw a Ghoul child at the Weaver village. I saw adults among the Fearless Vampire Slayers, and more adults in the fungus farm under a floating city once upon a time. I would swear they were all the same species, and this isn’t it.
“Look, the Ghouls at the fungus farm were my height and a bit. He’s four inches shorter. No teeth, of course, but look at the hands. Ghoul hands are bigger, thicker, they can tear anything apart. More to the point, Acolyte, the current species is identical across two hundred million miles of distance.”
Acolyte watched, saying nothing. It was rare to see a Kzin so still.
“But it’s obvious,” Bram said patiently. “This is the old one, the species that became the People of the Night.”
Louis said, “Cronus?”
“Precursor god of the Greeks?”
