It cried out again, and I swear that there was something in the tone of its voice that told me it was asking some question! I have heard a wounded Pathan warrior die so, crying out, I believe, to know the name of the warrior who killed him.
It sprang as well as it could. Our guns discharged together. All aimed at the chest, and it was blown backwards against the cave wall. Still, it made another attempt to attack us as we fired shot after shot into it from our repeaters, clawing and dragging itself along the ground, still shrieking and snarling in its strange voice. I never imagined any beast so hard to kill. But at last it died.
When we examined the beast closely, I was astonished, and moved to pity for it. I said most man-eaters are old or crippled beasts. That is why there is no particular sport in hunting them: They are simply vermin.
I have seen deformed beasts before, that are sports or unhappy freaks of nature, but this was the most deformed I have ever seen. Pity? Why should a soldier not feel pity for an enemy once he has done his job and the enemy lies dead before him? But when I examined the great carcass more closely, I was overcome with bewilderment and a strange sort of fear such as I have never felt before. I had thought of my quarry as a noble beast, though a man-eater. But now, what can I say?
What can I say? Should I write a tale none will believe? I write this as an old done man, with my career behind me. I do not wish to be called mad, yet I have set out to tell the plain narrative of my life, and I have the skull and the skin with me yet. The creature had not paws but hands! And its head was like the head of no tiger I have ever seen.
Was it a previously unknown species that had wandered down from the high snows of Tibet? The tail was wrong, too. Hairless and pink like that of some giant rat. There was something disgusting about that tail.
Do not think me mad, but I have lived in the East long and seen something of Eastern magic and know that mysteries exist we of the West cannot solve. Even in an Indian cantonment, I have seen things which would not be believed were I to recount them in London or Sydney.
Was this creature the product of Tibetan magic? Was it indeed a Demon? If I attend Church-parade and pray to the God at the head of my men, how can I not, in the end, be prepared to accept the existence of Demons too?
But could a Demon be killed with a shot from my rifle? This was a flesh-and-blood creature.
In many a village I and others have heard stories of ghosts and were-tigers: tigers shot at night whose bodies were never found, but next day some man in the village – usually the local moneylender – was found dead in his house with a bullet in him. I never gave these stories much countenance when first I heard them in my early years in the East, but the skin of the Tiger-Man is before me as I write.
Then, too, there was the thing clasped in its furred beast's hand, and the things we found a little way away, whose origin and nature none can guess. Are the things we found the works of Tibetan priests? What is the writing on the heavy knife? I have enquired since of Mr. Lockwood Kipling of the Lahore Museum and he says he has seen none like it. I leave it to others to make sense of these things.
Did the tiger previously devour some traveler in that cave? Or were those things left there by no more than chance, perhaps by Ruhmalwallahs or other secret travelers? Were they connected with the tiger at all? Why did it clutch at that object as it died? Sher Ali, when he could be persuaded to enter the cave (and I could hardly understand his fear now that the beast was dead, that Bravest of the Brave when it was alive!) seemed almost to lose his wits. He babbled that the tiger had brought the things there itself!
And yet, his words have stayed in my mind… who had access to biological engineering shops and metallurgical labs. He was rich. Rich families generally stayed that way by wanting to get richer.
Vaughn-Nguyen had no wife now. He had left the farm at an early age and had returned to it only a few years before. Much of his life had been spent working with dolphins. There were no trips into space recorded, only excursion flights to the moon. During his absence the farm had been run by robots, and the buildings had been sealed for about eighty years.
An hour later the clincher came: Paul Vaughn-Nguyen who had gone to the Belt was the same Paul Vaughn in my dossier: the systems-controller in the Angel's Pencil.
There seemed little more to investigate. We knew who now. It only remained to clear up the question of why.
But something about the photographs in the colonels book nagged me. I had them enlarged and computer enhanced. It took me several days to work out what was puzzling about them.
There was one taken of him as a young 'captain', posed with a group of other men dressed in strange clothes, at the conclusion of the famous tiger hunt.
The tiger itself had been dragged out and skinned and lay on the ground a dark mass, the skin and raw skull beside it. The old photograph preserved no details of morphology. Further, the three men and another differently dressed – Sher Ali, I presumed – were standing with their feet on the body, obscuring it further.
His next photograph was another of the colonel, presumably as an older man, standing posed with a group of others shortly after the 'Dirragha Campaign', which, I discovered, appeared to have been not a game but some sort of conflict.
Vaughn wore more or less the same odd clothing in both. The captions identified the others with him, including two who appeared in both photographs called Captain Curlewis and Lieutenant Maclean. There was another photograph of Sher Ali. All the photographs had been taken by one Hurree Mukkerjee, who was described as the 'Original Brigade and Regimental Photographer'. Photography, even primitive photography like this, was rare enough in those days for the photographers name to be thought worth preserving.
But surely all real wars had ended long before that? Soldiers even then had been anachronisms, reduced, as I had learned from our courses, to minor policing duties like this of hunting dangerous animals in wild country. Had there been groups of criminals… what was the word… banditos? brigantes?… that they had apprehended?
Something did not add up.
And soldiers had used rockets?
It was like military fant stuff.
I slept badly again that night. And I kept seeing the faces of the Military Historians. They were like a snag in my mind. And they worried me not only for themselves, but for the very fact I thought about them now. One who does what I do has no business thinking too much upon those it is his duty to care for.
They were still in the hospital. By law, they had a certain time to go through the formality of an appeal. Finally, and I was not sure why I did this, I sent an order to delay the memory-wipe.
CHAPTER 5
Our inability, with all our great resources, to answer the comparatively simple question: "Are we alone in the galaxy?" is maddening. But it is also, as Professor [Glen David] Brin points out, somewhat frightening. It is all very well to suggest, as others have done, that the reason for the Great Silence is that no other civilizations exist, but there may be a more sinister explanation… It is not only the dead who are silent, so also is… the predator…
– Adrian Berry, Ice with Your Evolution, 1986
We had planned a six-month-long festival of concerts and games. My own section had little to do with it, but a lot of ARM resources were involved. We had several hundred people I knew about and a lot of computer time invested simply in researching and inventing games, music and dances, and an investment many times greater than that in promoting them.
It looked as if, when the history subprogram was completed, new games would vie with landscape redesign as one of our major activities, rather than those things usually identified with ARM's public image.
I knew what effort had gone into the games, especially 'Graceful Willow', with its premium on good losing, but of course they weren't for me. I had been busy since returning from Australia, and a lot of my time had been taken up persuading Alfred O'Brien to give me access to files with higher security classifications.