"Its in there?”
"We keep it here. We used it for a rug once, but it was put away, a long time ago.”
It had been a crime to keep the skins of rare animals. In the days when there was a never-ending demand for material for the organ banks, and crimes, however minor, attracted only one punishment. Those days were long gone, but the Vaughn-Nguyens must have some genes for either courage or foolhardiness for one of their ancestors to have risked keeping the thing at all. Did this point to involvement in criminal behavior today? "I'd like to see it very much," I said. The chest smelled bad when it was opened, not powerful at first, but like nothing I have ever smelled before. Like nothing I have ever smelled before? There was something about that smell, something that made me want to be away from that place. I guessed what it was after a moment, though I had never encountered it before: It must be the tiger smell. I got it under control easily enough. I heard, from the next room, a howl and a frantic scrabble of claws on flooring as the dog fleet. My host pulled out the skin and rolled it out across the floor. Although parts were missing, it was huge as the skull we had seen was huge. It had longer legs than any tiger and it was still a blazing orange. There were some darker markings but it was not a normal tigers striped pelt. It almost looked as if it had been made of some synthetic fabric (Perhaps it was. Well, that would be tested).
The head was enormous. It felt toylike when I examined it because the cavity where the skull had been was stuffed with some sort of papier-mache, now crumbling. The jaws were set in a huge gape, and I thought absurdly for a moment how many feet must have caught on them when it was used as a rug, The eyes were glass balls, and the teeth ivory pegs.
The hind part and chest had been crudely stitched to pull it together around what I now guessed had been, assuming it was genuine, bullet holes. "It hasn't got a tail," I said. There was a ragged gap at the base of the spinal ridge where the pelt had been hacked.
"No," said my host, "there was meant to be something wrong with the tail. They didn't keep it." "There seems to be something wrong with everything about it," I said. "But isn't there a breed of tailless cat?”
"I think so. The face is a cat's face, anyway. But look at those ears!" A cat's face, yes, even with the strangely large skull. The ears were complex arrangements, still flexible, reminding me of bat wings or bits of umbrella. They turned to something like leather at the outer parts, and ended raggedly in what might once have been membrane. There was something else about them, too. I examined the dark, gristly surfaces more closely. "They've been tattooed." "Oh. With anything in particular?" He seemed not to have known this. "I can't tell." He got a lamp. Shining this through the outer membrane I could see a pattern. It seemed to be made up of… I called them 'bones' for want of a better term. "Who'd tattoo a tigers ears? And why?" "Tattooing a live tiger would be a difficult job, I'd think. It must have been dead. Perhaps to identify it." "A creature as odd as this would hardly need further identification, I should think." "You're right there. Look at the hands. That's where the Tiger-Man' idea comes in.”
The oddly long forelimbs ended not in a tiger's pug paws but in four-digited hands with black extremities. One of the digits on each was like a thumb.
Did they work like cat's claws? I pressed the pad of one digit. Nothing happened. I pressed harder and a claw emerged. A black claw. I touched it and then jerked my finger back, to suck at a bleeding gash. It was razor sharp. All about was the fear smell. And a hint of something like… ginger.
"There's some of the colonels other stuff here, too," he said. "It all goes together.”
"It looks as if it hasn't been opened for a long time.”
"No. I was shown it as a child, but it was getting pretty moldy even then. I didn't want to touch it too much, and since then there has hardly been a lot of call. The house was shut up for a long time." He would have been a child, I guess, about a hundred years before.
A wooden grating divided the top and bottom of the chest The lower part contained rotting cloth. Some of this had once been dyed red, and on some was gold lace and wire, still unfaded. Parts of the colonels 'uniforms', I supposed.
The cloth parted at the folds as if cut with a knife. I had not realized before that ancient fabrics were so weak and perishable – or had they been weakened chemically to seem ancient?
Two metal things I recognized from ARM's special history course as weapons, one, called a 'sword', for cutting, one, called a 'revolver', was a sort of 'gun' for projecting 'bullets' – solid pieces of metal – by chemical explosion. I had had an idea the bullet-projector had come after the sword and was surprised to find they were evidently contemporaneous. Near the bottom was a bundle marked 'Tiger-Man'.
It contained some odds and ends wrapped further in cloth, and a piece of crumbling paper with what Vaughn-Nguyen said was the colonel's own handwriting: "This is what I found in the lair of the Tiger-Man.”
There was one thing in this last bundle whose use and purpose I recognized at once: an oversized knife, almost the size of the colonel's 'sword', but different, in a metal holder. When I drew it forth it was straight-bladed and, while the sword was black with age and pitted with rust, this looked new.
I am not a metallurgist, but the metal was different from any I had seen before. I took the sword in one hand and the sword-sized knife in the other. Their weight, balance and general feel were quite different too.
The old and rust-pitted sword was easier to move in my hand than the knife. The knife was too heavy and seemed badly designed. My fingers could only just close around the handle. There were grips for a hand bigger than mine, with one finger less. I held the two weapons up to the light, comparing their textures and cutting edges, then pressed the two blades against the wooden side of the box, not very hard. The rusty sword made no impression. The other cut into it effortlessly, as if it was edged with mono-molecular wire.
I apologized to Vaughn-Nguyen, and took it into the light. On the handle was a design in dots and claws.
The next thing was a hand-computer. But like the knife, built for an oversized hand, and of an unfamiliar design. It appeared to be damaged.
There was an oversized belt with pockets, and small metal artifacts. They and the computer-thing seemed to have come from the same shop and they had what looked like homogeneous power-couplings. On these too, and on the big knife, the bonelike design was repeated.
"There's also the old man's book," said Vaughn-Nguyen. "He wrote it for the family. There's a chapter on the Tiger-Man in it. Grandfather read it to us when I was a child. I think that was one of the last times we took the skin out of the chest. I don't imagine you can get copies of it anymore. It must have been out of print for a long time, and I don't think it was ever electronically transcribed.”
He was right there. You couldn't get a large number of those old books. There were old mine-tunnels full of them, veins of cellulose running through Earth's geological strata. There were whole construction industries, even space industries, whose main products came from pulped and highly compressed paper. Some of our best and most expensive natural-grown food came from soil that had originated as books, sent to vermiculture farms to be passed through the bodies of worms. The 'book-soil', or 'B-plus Compost' to give it its trade name, helped form the hydroponics gardens for the first-class kitchens of luxury spaceships.
Vaughn-Nguyen was hardly in a position to know (or was he?) that the censoring, removal and destruction of politically incorrect books and similar records had been the main activity of several hundred thousand highly trained men and women for generations. Vaughn-Nguyen was not acting like a man who knew he was under investigation. He seemed genuinely relaxed and friendly. Or had he had training too? He had been completely cooperative so far. Or was that part of some secret agenda? He was a man it would be possible to like. I hoped that if he had to join the Military Historians in the canyons of Mars he would be reasonable happy there.