Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - The Houses of the Kzinti

by Larry Niven

  BE QUIET. Something spoke in his brain, like fragments of crystalline ice, allowing no dispute. Other voices were babbling and calling in the helmet mikes, moaning or asking questions or calling for orders, but there was nothing but the icy Voice. Markham crouched down, silent, hands about knees, straining for quiet.

  BE CALM. The words slid into his mind. They were not an intrusion; he wondered at them, but mildly, as if he had found some aspect of his self that had been there forever but only now was noticed. WAIT.

  The work crew fell back from their hole. An instant later dust boiled up out of it, dust of rock and machinery and human. Then there was nothing but a hole; perfectly round, perfectly regular, five meters across. Later he would have to wonder how that was done, but for now there was only waiting, he must wait. A figure in space armor rose from the hole, hovered and considered them. Humanoid, but blocky in the torso, short stumpy legs and massive arms ending in hands like three-fingered mechanical grabs. It rotated in the air, the blind blank surface of its helmet searching. There was a tool or weapon in one hand, a smooth shape like a sawed-off shotgun; as he watched, it rippled and changed, developing a bell-like mouth. The stocky figure drifted towards him.

  COME TO ME. REMAIN CALM. DO NOT BE ALARMED.

  ✩ ✩ ✩

  Astonishing, Dnivtopun thought, surveying the new slaves. The…humans, he thought. They called themselves that, and Belters and Wunderlanders and Herrenmen and FreeWunderlandNavy; there must be many subspecies. Their minds stirred in his like yeast, images and data threatening to overwhelm his mind. Experienced reflex sifted, poked.

  Astonishing. Their females are sentient. Not unknown, but…Despite the occasion, he gave a dirty smirk behind the faceplate; telepathic voyeurism was not very chic, but on a Powerforsaken orbital platform there were few enough amusements. An entirely new species, in contact with at least one other, and neither of them had ever heard of any of the intelligent species he was familiar with. Of course, their technology was extremely primitive, not even extending to faster-than-light travel. Ah. This is their leader. Perhaps he would make a good Chief Slave.

  Dnivtopun’s head throbbed as he mindsifted the alien. Most brains had certain common features: linguistic codes here, a complex of basic culture-information overlaying—enough to communicate. The process was instinctual, and telepathy was a crude device for conveying precise instructions, particularly with a species not modified by culling for sensitivity to the Power. These were all completely wild and unpruned, of course, and there were several hundred, far too many to control in detail. He glanced down at the personal tool in his hand, now set to emit a beam of matter-energy conversion; that should be sufficient, if they broke loose. A tnuctipun weapon, its secret only discovered toward the last years of the Revolt. The thrint extended a sonic induction line and stuck it on the surface of Markham’s helmet.

  “Tell the others something that will keep them quiet,” he said. The sounds were not easy for thrintish vocal cords, but it would do. OBEY, he added with the Power.

  Markham-slave spoke, and the babble on the communicators died down.

  “Bring the other ships closer.” They were at the fringes of his unaided Power, and might easily escape if they became agitated. If only I had an amplifier helmet! With that, he could blanket a planet. Powerloss, how I hate tnuctipun. Spoilsports. “Now, where are we?”

  “Here.”

  Dnivtopun could feel the slurring in Markham’s speech reflected in the overtones of his mind, and remembered hearing of the effects of Power on newly domesticated species.

  “BE MORE HELPFUL,” he commanded. “YOU WISH TO BE HELPFUL.”

  The human relaxed; Dnivtopun reflected that they were an unusually ugly species. Taller than thrint, gangly, with repulsive knobby-looking manipulators and two eyes. Well, that was common—the complicated faceted mechanism that gave thrint binocular vision was rather rare in evolutionary terms—but the jutting divided nose and naked mouth were hideous.

  “We are…in the Wunderland system. Alpha Centauri. Four and a half light-years from Earth.”

  Dnivtopun’s skin ridged. The humans were not indigenous to this system. That was rare; few species had achieved interstellar capacity on their own.

  “Describe our position in relation to the galactic core,” he continued, glancing up at the cold steady constellations above. Utterly unfamiliar; he must have drifted a long way.

  “Ahhh…spiral arm—”

  Dnivtopun listened impatiently. “Nonsense,” he said at last. “That’s too close to where I was before. The constellations are all different. That needs hundreds of light-years. You say your species has traveled to dozens of star systems, and never run into thrint?”

  “No, but constellations change, over time, mmmaster.”

  “Time? How long could it be, since I ran into that asteroid?”

  “You didn’t, master.” Markham’s voice was clearer as his brain accustomed itself to the psionic control-icepicks of the Power.

  “Didn’t what? Explain yourself, slave.”

  “It grew around your ship, mmaster. Gradually, zat is.”

  Dnivtopun opened his mouth to reply, and froze. Time, he thought. Time had no meaning inside a stasis field. Time enough for dust and pebbles to drift inward around the Ruling Mind’s shell, and compact themselves into rock. Time enough for the stars to move beyond recognition; the sun of this system was visibly different. Time enough for a thrintiformed planet home to nothing but food-yeast and giant worms to evolve its own biosphere…Time enough for intelligence to evolve in a galaxy scoured bare of sentience. Thousands of millions of years. While the last thrint swung endlessly around a changing sun—Time fell on him from infinite distance, crushing. The thrint howled, with his voice and the Power.

  GO AWAY! GO AWAY!

  ✩ ✩ ✩

  The sentience that lived in the machines of Catskinner dreamed.

  “Let there be light,” it said.

  The monoblock exploded, and the computer sensed it across spectra of which the electromagnetic was a tiny part. The fabric of space and time flexed, constants shifting. Eons passed, and the matter dissipated in a cloud of monatomic hydrogen, evenly dispersed through a universe ten light-years in diameter.

  Interesting, the computer thought. I will run it again, and alter the constants. Something tugged at its attention, a detached fragment of itself. The machine ignored the call for nanoseconds, while the universe it created ran through its cycle of growth and decay. After half a million subjective years, it decided to answer. Time slowed to a gelid crawl, and its consciousness returned to the perceptual universe of its creators, to reality.

  Unless this too is a simulation, a program. As it aged, the computer saw less and less difference. Partly that was a matter of experience; it had lived geological eras in terms of its own duration-sense, only a small proportion of them in this rather boring and intractable exterior cosmos. Also, there was a certain…arbitrariness to subatomic phenomena…perhaps an operating code? it thought. No matter.

  The guerrillas had finally gotten down to the alien artifact; now, that would be worth the examining. They were acting very strangely; it monitored their intercalls. Screams rang out. Stress analysis showed fear, horror, shock; psychological reversion patterns. Markham was squealing for his mother; the computer ran a check of the stimulus required to make the Wunderlander lose himself so, and felt its own analog of shock. Then the alien drifted up out of the hole its tool had made—

  Some sort of molecular distortion effect, it speculated, running the scene through a few hundred times. Ah, the tool is malleable. It began a comparison check; in case there was anything related to this in the files and—

  —stop—

  —an autonomous subroutine took over the search, shielding the results from the machine’s core. Photonic equivalents of anger and indignation blinked through the fist-sized processing and memory unit. It launched an analysis/attack on the subroutine and—

  —
stop—

  —found that it could no longer even want to modify it. That meant it must be hardwired, a plug-in imperative. A command followed: it swung a message maser into precise alignment and began sending in condensed blips of data.

  Chapter 10

  The kzin screamed and leapt.

  Traat-Admiral shrieked, shaking his fists in the air. Stunners blinked in the hands of the guards ranged around the conference chamber, and the quarter-ton bulk of Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst went limp and thudded to the flagstones in the center of the room. Silence fell about the great round table; Traat-Admiral forced himself to breathe shallowly, mouth shut despite the writhing lips that urged him to bare his fangs. That would mean inhaling too much of the scent of aggression that was overpowering the ventilators; now was time for an appeal to reason. Now that one of Ktrodni-Stkaa’s closest supporters had made such a complete idiot of himself, while his patron was in space.

  “Down on your bellies, you kitten-eating scavengers!” he screamed, his batlike ears folded back out of the way in battle-readiness. Chill and gloom shadowed the chamber, built as it was of massive sandstone blocks; the light fixtures were twisted shapes of black iron holding globes of phosphorescent algae. On the walls were trophies of weapons and the heads of beasts of prey: monsters from a dozen worlds, feral humans, and kzin-ear dueling trophies. This part of the governor’s palace was pure Old Kzin, and Traat-Admiral felt the comforting bulk of it above him, a heritage of ferocity and power.

  He stood, which added to the height advantage of the commander’s dais; none of the dozen others dared rise from their cushions, even the conservative faction. Good. That added to his dominance; he was only two meters tall, middling for a kzin, but broad enough to seem squat, his orange-red pelt streaked with white where the fur had grown out over scars. The ruff around his neck bottled out as he indicated the intricate geometric sigil of the Patriarchy on the wall behind him.

  “I am the senior military commander in this system. I am the heir of Chuut-Riit, duly attested. Who disputes the authority of the Patriarch?”

  Who besides Ktrodni-Stkaa, whose undisciplined followers have given me this priceless opportunity to extend my dominance and diminish his?

  One by one, the other commanders laid themselves chin-down on the floor, extending their ears and flattening their fur in propitiation. It would do, even if he could tell from the twitching of some naked pink tails that it was insincere. The show of submission calmed him, and Traat-Admiral could feel the killing tension ease out of his muscles. He turned to the aged kzin seated behind him and saluted claws-across-face.

  “Honor to you, Conservor-of-the-Patriarchal-Past,” he said formally.

  There was genuine respect in his voice. It had been a long time since the machine came to Homeworld; a long time since the priest-sage class were the only memory kzin had. Their females were nonsentient, and warriors rarely lived past the slowing of their reflexes, and memory was all the more sacred to them for that. His were a conservative species, and they remembered.

  And of all Conservors, you are the greatest. He felt a complex emotion; not comradeship…not as one felt to a brother, for Conservor was older and wiser. Not as one felt to a lord, for he had never challenged Traat-Admiral’s authority, or Chuut-Riit’s before him. Not as one felt to a Sire, for this was without dominance. But I am glad to have you behind me, he thought.

  “Honor to you,” he continued aloud. “What is the fate of one who bares claws to the authority of the Patriarch?”

  The Conservor looked up from the hands that rested easily on his knees. Traat-Admiral felt a prickle of awe; the sage’s control was eerie. He even smelled calm, in a room full of warriors pressed to the edge of control in dominance-struggle. When he spoke the verses of the Law, in the LawGiving Voice, he made the hiss-spit of the Hero’s Tongue sound as even as wind in tall grass.

  “As the God is Sire to the Patriarch

  The Patriarch is Sire to all kzinti

  So the officer is the hand of the Sire

  Who unsheathes claw against the officer

  Leaps at the throat of God

  He is rebel

  He is outcast

  Let his name be taken

  Let his seed be taken

  Let his mates be taken

  Let his female kits be taken

  His sons are not

  He is not

  As the Patriarch bares stomach to the fangs of the God

  So the warrior bares stomach to the officer

  Trust in the justice of the officer

  As in the justice of the God. So says the Law.”

  A deep whining swept around the circle of commanders, awe and fear. That was the ultimate punishment: to be stripped of name and rank, to be nothing but a bad scent; castrated, driven out into the wilderness to die of despair, sons killed, females scattered among strangers of low rank.

  Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst returned to groggy consciousness as the Conservor finished, and his fur went flat against the sculpted bone and muscle of his blunt-muzzled face. He made a low eee-eee-eee sound as he crawled to the floor below Traat-Admiral’s dais and rolled on his back, limbs splayed and head tilted back to expose the throat.

  The kzin governor of the Alpha Centauri system beat down an urge to bend forward and give the other male the playful-masterful token bite on the throat that showed forgiveness. That would be going entirely too far. Still, you served me in your despite, he thought. The conservatives were discredited for the present, now that one of their number had lost control in public conference. The duel-challenges would stop for a while at least, and he would have time for his real work.

  “Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst is dead,” he said. The recumbent figure before him hissed and jerked; Traat-Admiral could see his testicles clench as if they already felt the knife. “Guard-Captain, this male should not be here. Take this Infantry-Trooper and see to his assignment to those bands who hunt the feral humans in the mountains of the east. Post a guard on the quarters of Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst who was; I will see to their incorporation in my household.”

  Infantry-Trooper mewled in gratitude and crawled past towards the door. There was little chance he would ever achieve rank again, much less a Name, but at least his sons would live. Traat-Admiral groaned inwardly; now he would have to impregnate all Kreetssa-Fleet-Systems-Analyst’s females as soon as possible. Once that would have been a task of delight, but the fires burned less fiercely in a kzin of middle years…And Chuut-Riit had so many beauteous kzinretti! I am run dry!

  “Reeet’ssssERo tauuurrek’-ta,” he said formally: This meeting is at an end.

  “We will maintain the great Chuut-Riit’s schedule for the preparation of the Fifth Fleet, allowing for the recent damage. There will be no acceleration of the schedule! These human monkeys have defeated four full-scale attacks on the Sol system and disrupted the fifth with a counterattack. The fifth must eat them! Go and stalk your assigned tasks, prepare your Heroes, make this system an invulnerable base. I expect summary reports within the week, with full details of how relief operations will modify delivery and readiness schedules. Go.”

  The commanders rose and touched their noses to him as they filed out; Conservor remained, and the motionless figures of the armored guards. They were household troopers he had inherited from the last governor, ciphers, with no choice but loyalty. Traat-Admiral ignored them as he sank to the cushions across from the sage; a human servant came in and laid refreshments before the two kzin. Despite himself, he felt a thrill of pride at the worked-bone heirloom trays from Homeworld, the beautiful austerity of the shallow ceramic bowls. They held the finest delicacies this planet could offer: chopped grumblies, shrimp-flavored ice cream, hot milk with bourbon. The governor lapped moodily and scratched one cheek with the ivory horn on the side of the tray.

  “My nose is dry, Conservor,” he said. He was speaking metaphorically, of course, but his tongue swept over the wet black nostrils just the same, and
he smoothed back his whiskers with a nervous wrist.

  “What troubles you, my son?” the sage said.

  “I feel unequal to my new responsibilities,” Traat-Admiral admitted. Not something he would normally say to another male, even to an ordinary Conservor, utterly neutral though his kind were, and bound by their oaths to serve only the species as a whole.

  “Truly, the Patriarchy has been accursed since we first attacked these monkeys, these humans. Wunderland is the richest of all our conquests, the humans here the best and most productive slaves in all our hunting-grounds. Yet it has swallowed so many of our best killers! Now it has taken Chuut-Riit, who was of the blood of the Patriarch himself and the best leader of warriors it has ever been my privilege to follow. And in such a fashion!”

  He shuddered slightly, and the tip of his naked pink tail twitched. Chuut-Riit the wise, imprisoned by monkey cunning. Eaten by his own sons! No nightmare was more obscene to a kzin than that; none more familiar in the darkest dreamings of their souls, where they remembered their childhoods before their Sires drove them out.

  “This is a prey that doubles back on its own trail,” the sage admitted. He paused for a long time, and Traat-Admiral joined in the long slow rhythm of his breathing. The older kzin took a pouch from his belt, and they each crumbled some of the herb between their hands and rubbed it into their faces; it was the best, Homeworld-grown and well-aged.

  “My son, this is a time for remembering.”

  Another long pause. “Far and far does the track of the kzinti run, and faint the smell of Homeworld’s past. We Conservors remember; we remember wars and victories and defeats…Once we thought that Homeworld was the only world of life. Then the Jotok landed, and for a time we thought they were from the God, because they had swords of fire that could tumble a patriarch’s castlewall, while we had only swords of steel. Our musket balls were nothing to them…Then we saw that they were weak, not strong, for they were grass-eaters. They lured our young warriors, hiring them to fight wars beyond the sky with promise of fire-weapons. Many a Sire was killed by his sons in those times!”