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.
'I simply point out that honoring great ones by statues is common in many cultures,' Peter Robinson replied. The claws of his right hand brushed the tip of his own w'tsai's hilt. The two glared at one another until, with an obvious effort, Charrgh-Captain backed down. He wiped Slaver from his fangs. 'Let us review what we know,' said Gay. 'When the war began the thri… ' Her eyes widened, her mouth contorted. She began to choke, and fell to the floor writing, clutching at her throat, strangling on a scream.
Richard grabbed her, tearing futility at the fabric round her neck. Peter Robinson tried, and then Charrgh- Captain, but the suit defeated even kzinti strength. Peter Robinson hit the panic-button that opened the fastenings. She vomited, rolled onto her hands and knees and began to cry hysterically. Peter Robinson picked her up and carried her to a couch. She curled into a fetal position, then slowly straightened. She looked up at them, her face like dirty chalk.
'No need for a doc,' she said. 'Conditioned reflex. I can't vomit while I'm wearing a spacesuit. Choke rather.'
'The floor can deal with it. But-'
'I know what this is. It's the Suicide Amplifier.'
'Yes,' said Charrgh-Captain. Peter Robinson made a howling noise that might have reminded a listener his vocal cords were not, after all, human. There was silence for a moment. Gay went on. 'Built to repeat the message. They weren't just going take all existing sapient minds into death with them, they were going to ensure, for as long as they could, that any newly evolving sophonts would be obliterated as well. And they did… It's hard to conceive of creatures so evil… and so… so… petty. But perhaps by that time they didn't know what they were doing.'
'The thrint thought they were good masters,' said Gatley Ivor.
'I feel strange,' said Charrgh-Captain. 'Some have spoken of what kzin and human have in common. Kzinti, even kzinti like me who have traveled on your worlds with pleasure, always thought of humans as the ancient enemy of our kind, and cursed the day we met you, the destroyers of our Empire, the killers of our Sires, the liberators of our slave-races, who used relativity weapons to smash whole planetary systems. Yet compared to the race that could do this… '
'Maybe they thought of fresh drafts of slaves from newly sapient races coming to serve them in some afterlife,' said Richard. 'Probably they feared some of the tnuctipun had ways of surviving the first blast… Perhaps the tnuctipun were anticipating something like a great suicide command-they should have, given their cleverness and knowledge of thrint ways of thinking-and kept some of their kind in stasis as a precaution. When they emerged they would get on with rebuilding, thinking it was all over. But it wasn't. The thrintun had left a little surprise for them. That's what must have happened… '
We have established the thrint Power was not a physical event,' said Gatley Ivor. 'Its speed was not limited by relativity or even by hyperspace: It was instantaneous or close to it. Look at two stars, countless light-years apart. Look through a telescope at two galaxies or see them in a photograph. How long does it take your attention to cross the gap between them? It has been suggested that is an analogy to the Slaver power: swift as thought and awareness. The tnuctipun couldn't outrun it. It was not limited by distance. Indeed, to blanket the galaxy it can have neither increased nor diminished with distance. It was apparently not blocked by even the densest physical objects: suns, neutron stars, and other bodies did not eclipse it. It cannot have worked like that. So why does it need these huge energy sources?'
Possibly to set up the preconditions for amplification, rather than directly firing up the Power itself,' said Gay. 'As for not being limited by distance, I hate to think the suicide command might have reached across the galaxy to… to the Clouds of Magellan… My God!… To other galaxies! Where did it stop?'
'Did it radiate a command, or cast it in a beam, I wonder?' said Richard.
'There is no proper answer,' said Gatley Ivor. 'We know that at times the Slaver Power was applied directionally. Otherwise when a thrint sent out a command like 'Bring me food!' there would be thirty or so slaves with dishes falling over each other to get it to him. On the other hand, we know that a 'shout,' as it were, could radiate. Both happened when the thrint was accidentally released on Earth. 'This artifact must have been capable of both. If that is conceiving of it in the right terms. The attitude jets make sense only if it was to be maneuvered to vary the direction of a beam.
'Further, the smaller amplifier helmets the Thrintun used must have been capable of direction, otherwise they too would have had global commands which would go to inappropriate slaves. But they too radiated commands. If on Suicide Night they relied solely on a beam, even a spreading one, some sapient life, in particular tnuctipun, might have dodged it. It was in that case simply a command addressed to all… What do we do now?' It was Peter Robinson he turned to.
'I don't know what to do. I am a telepath.' The Wunderkzin looked strangely shrunken, bent, miserable and lost. He could at that moment have passed for a telepath of the Patriarchy.
Destroy it! Richard thought. He moved to say so-to move to the main weapons console-and found he could not. It was not a matter of irresolution or doubt as to the right thing to do. He was incapable of moving or speaking the words. His hand groped to his mouth.
'I know what to do!' snarled Charrgh-Captain. He was standing at the weapons console, and he held not a w'tsai but a modern laser pistol that must have been in his diplomatic baggage. 'This is the true Ultimate Weapon at last! I am a kzin of the Patriarchy, charged by the Patriarch himself! This weapon is ours! Never shall it fall into the hands of monkeys or abominations!'
'What do you mean to do?' asked Richard. Suddenly he could speak, but when he again tried to say 'destroy it' something seemed to go wrong in his head.
'Your lives are not at risk,' said Charrgh-Captain. 'We are, as you have said, companions. I will lock you in your cabins, then call the Patriarchy. With the Amplifier in our hands and power to direct the command, nothing can withstand us. The Human Empire will surrender. We will not even need to use it, as you without warning used that beam on Warhead in the Third War and relativity-weapons against Ka'ashi in the First! The threat will be enough! The kzinti race shall leap again across the stars! Wiser now, more cunning and hard-schooled, and with the weapon beyond all weapons!'
Is he mad? wondered Richard. Or have I forgotten that a kzin is not simply a human in a fur coat? Is this thing somehow scrambling his brain? And mine? What is happening to me? He saw a gauge on the instrument panel. Energy discharge from the artifact had definitely increased. Keep him talking, he thought.
'What of the treaties your Patriarch has signed?'
'What of my species? Would humans not have used it if they had had it earlier? Might they not use it now?'
'I… I don't know.'
