Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII

by Larry Niven

  I

  AD 2554

  “Basically, I am a dealer in exotic slaves.” The tall kzin drank with an expression of relish from the goblet of vatach blood his host had offered. “Like that one.”

  He gestured to the shackled female human who squatted, trembling, at his feet. The creature flinched at the gesture, its wide terrified eyes darting back and forth between the great felinoids as if it was trying to understand their speech. There were drops of skin-excreted liquid on its face, and its chest heaved. Both kzinti could sense its terror, a stimulant to kzinti senses.

  The Marquis Warrgh-Churrg, largest landowner of the planet of Kzrral’s main northern continent, regarded his guest with a look of moderate surprise. He reclined at ease on a couch, like a smaller, softer, indoor version of the stone foochesth that were a feature of some kzinti parks.

  “Between worlds? I would not have thought there was a living in it. We have not found much trade along those lines worthwhile since the war losses to our spacecraft.” There was nothing obviously threatening in his words or the tense he employed, but lying half-curled on the fooch his huge bulk dominated the room and all within it.

  “It is not necessarily a good living,” replied his guest. “These are difficult times. The Patriarch has said that a Hero’s duty now is to survive and the duty of us all is to rebuild our strength as a race for the…future. Noble and Dominant One, I trade”—the Hero’s Tongue carried an inflection of distaste—“in other high-value items too, precious stones, rare elements, W’kkai puzzles, silk from Earth, even bulk gold if there is enough marrgin in it. Liquors, perfumes, and cordials too, at times. I hope that before I leave I may present you with a few samples and recipes in some return for your noble hospitality…”

  The magnate inclined his great head.

  “But rare slaves are the mainstay,” his guest continued. “Trained, clever ones. As you are aware, the prime sources of monkeys are lost to us.”

  “You profit from the misfortunes of our kind? Do you have bulk gold in your ship at this time, then?”

  “I make a living from mitigating those misfortunes, enabling Heroes to live as Heroes should despite the worst the monkeys can do. Though we were long ago driven from Ka’ashi, we still have upon some of our own worlds a few breeding colonies of such slaves who were brought there before the truce. It is a trade the humans”—the Hero’s Tongue carried an even stronger inflection with that term, black lips drawing back to show a collection of daggerlike fangs—“would not approve if they knew of it. But yes, Noble and Dominant Marquis Warrgh-Churrg, I have a little gold. Largely monkey-minted coins. You may imagine how I acquired them. Not all humans are sufficiently wary of us in these times.”

  “What if humans should come upon you in space?”

  “Space is large. There is little chance of that. And after all, we are in a state of truce. But should they do so, I trust I have not forgotten the heritage of my Sires.”

  “You have kittens? Surely they would grow old and die while you were between worlds. You would not see them.”

  “My kits must fend for themselves for long, as in the olden time. As I say, and as we all know too well, these are difficult times for many of our kind. But there are ways to save time.”

  “You have a hyperdrive?” There was a sudden sharpness in the other’s question. There was tense silence for a moment between the two, broken only by the splash of water from the fountain that dominated the court: a great golden bowl, held aloft on the sculpted backs and shoulders of four golden humanoid slaves. The wide-eyed human flinched and sweated. The off-world kzin twitched ears and tail expressively, replying in a tone submissive but urbane:

  “Not I personally, Honored Host. You have seen my ship. But yes, your observation is shrewd and correct. My principals on my homeworld have access to one of the few hyperdrive units which the humans allow us and are aware of, though whether they know the use we put it to is another matter. We pay them a large bribe not to take excessive interest in us—monkeys, as you know, have little or no honor—but it sadly inflates all our operating costs. However, it makes long journeys feasible. At present it is parked several weeks away.”

  “You are not your own master, then?”

  “Only as far as ship captains usually are. I report ultimately to others.”

  “A telepath could show us your superluminal ship’s location.”

  “Only if he could read a mechanical brain. It is encoded in my own ship’s computer. And that will self-destruct if tampered with by anyone unauthorized.”

  “Such difficulties have been overcome before.”

  “I doubt they would be in this case, my principals are very security-conscious. Perhaps even overly so. But my alive and physiologically healthy presence in my ship is necessary for it to respond to the activating code words and pattern-recognition logic. Coercing me or using parts of my dead person to gain access would be futile.”

  “The Patriarch has few hyperdrive ships. We lost most of our ships in the wars, and the accursed UNSN has informed us what their response would be to any large-scale rebuilding program.”

  “The Patriarch’s Admiralty keeps such things for military purposes, and its security is strict. It has, I am sure, a building program for a fleet that will one day enable us, at last, to…Urrr. The humans allow us a token fleet, presumably thinking that such a scrap will satisfy us…” His voice trailed off. After the Second War with Men, humans had greatly restricted kzinti access to the hyperdrive again, but any kzintosh knew what the Patriarch’s fleet would be looking to do one day.

  “However, Dominant and Feared Warrgh-Churrg, if I cannot offer you the technology of the hyperdrive, I can perhaps offer you a profitable trade. On my way here I noticed human slaves in the streets. As other visitors have told me, you have kz’zeerekti on this planet.”

  “Kz’zeerekti? Yes.”

  “Like this one?”

  “The same sort of thing, yes.” Warrgh-Churrg made a negligent, regal gesture with his tail at the sculptures and to one of the floor mosaics, showing somewhat stylized humanoids and other beasts arranged with hunting and leaping kzinti amid fylfots and patterns of battlements and teeth. His tail wave also took in a couple of stuffed specimens bearing another golden bowl and one posed in a fighting crouch with its puny fingers extended and its mouth open to scream. His hall was further adorned with the heads of several species, kzinti among them, but also a fair-sized troop of simians. “Got a few live ones around too.” His gesture also took in a live simian in slave’s drab peering at them from a distant archway. It turned and fled from sight.

  “You hunt them?”

  “Oh, the wild ones, yes.” Warrgh-Churrg indicated his trophy belt, adorned with a proud showing of dried simian ears along with kzinti ones, taking in as he did so the similar but smaller collections on his guest’s belt.

  “Are they intelligent?”

  “They are trainable, clever like trained Jotoki, but less reliable. Unless caught as infants, they are not trusty slaves. But,” he added, “trained up young they can be useful.”

  “Where do they live? In the forests?”

  “Mainly in the south. The forest belt and the hot savannah beyond. Probably also in the badlands.”

  “Are they common?”

  “I have not counted them. I chased them when I was a kit, as my own kits do now, and still I hunt there sometimes when I visit my southern estates. Some southerners hunt them regularly.” Warrgh-Churrg’s body language indicated that while he was pleased to display the visible signs of affluence in his palace, his interest in the kz’zeerekti habitat was less than overwhelming. His guest adopted a tense-of-polite-request, humble but not too humble.

  “Forgive my curiosity, Noble Host and Marquis Warrgh-Churrg, but my interest is professional. How did they get here?”

  Warrgh-Churrg shrugged his ears in a dismissive gesture.

  “We had Heroes in the first fleet to Ka’ashi. Some may have returned with kz’zee
rekti slaves. I had relations among them. And other Heroes came later. Possibly new slaves mixed with the locals…

  “Some of the landowners want to get rid of them altogether. As slaves, the adult-caught ones are never very reliable. We tried castrating them and removing their teeth and fingernails, but we found that, often enough, that only made them more savage. And, eunuchs being eunuchs everywhere I suppose, they often joined with our own kzinti eunuchs in the harems and elsewhere to plot and spread disloyalty.”

  “Still, on other worlds human slaves can command a very high price now,” Trader told him. “My principals have the resources to buy many if they are suitable—whole troops of them. They would send ships to collect them. They are still popular on Kzinhome.”

  “Even after the monkeys burnt our fleets and took Ka’ashi back?”

  “They took more than Ka’ashi in the First and Second Wars. But exactly. That is a large part of the reason why human slaves are in demand, apart from the sport the best of them can give in the hunt. It reminds us in these unfortunate times that they are not all-conquering, and that times can change. You may have a great source of wealth here.”

  “I have much wealth already, Trader.” Warrgh-Churrg again gestured expansively about the room, heavy with gold, hung with lustrous purple, panels on floors and walls bedizened with intricate stones, their tiles slanted minutely to catch the shifting sunlight in changing pictures and patterns.

  “Feared Warrgh-Churrg, that is plain from the magnificence of your abode and of your hospitality. Still, perhaps there are things I can offer…with trade between the stars so limited by the cursed kz’zeerekti…”

  Warrgh-Churrg nodded, his ears and tail twitching thoughtfully.

  “Urrr. I will speak to Estate Manager. We will perhaps discuss this later. Now I shall prepare for the entertainment tonight.”

  “I am looking forward to it. I respectfully seek your leave to return to my ship and prepare on my own account, that my apparel and grooming may be less unworthy of your hospitality.”

  Trader bent while Warrgh-Churrg sprayed a little urine on him, an archaic lordly gesture signifying to all kzinti that he was the magnate’s guest and under his protection. Trader exposed his throat and belly in the equally ancient ritual gesture of submission and Warrgh-Churrg dismissed him with a gracious flick of his tail.

  The offworld kzin departed with decorum, striding through the great doors and down the wide snowy street toward the space port, the bowed, shackled human scurrying behind on its lead.

  II

  The inner door of the airlock closed behind the kzin and the human. Both moved differently as they stepped into the main cabin. The gravity-planer, running with a low, continuous purr, reduced gravity here to 61 percent of Earth, the gravity of Wunderland in which both had been born and grown up. The human removed her shackles and they sat down together in the control cabin. A touch on a keyboard opaqued the windows.

  “Ginger, did I do all right?” asked the human. She rubbed her chilled bare feet, and slipped out of her brown slave’s robe and into a modern fabric overall.

  “I thought you acted convincingly scared,” said the kzin in Wunderland-accented English. “A veteran couldn’t have done better.”

  “I wasn’t acting! I was bloody terrified!”

  “I know. So was I. It’s a scary job. You’ll get used to it.”

  “I couldn’t feel I’m much of a replacement for Simon.”

  “Simon was good. A good partner as well as a good friend. But you’ll learn…

  “There’s a first time for everyone, Pet. First time for piloting an air-car solo, first time for a soldier in battle, first time for walking into a kzinti palace on a kzinti world with a lie. You’ll get used to it.

  “Bloody vatach blood! I need a civilized drink,” continued the kzin as he dialed a bourbon and ice cream, “I think you do too…You followed all that, Perpetua?”

  “Pretty well,” said the woman. “So you’ve got a party on tonight.”

  “By the Fanged God! If he wishes to test his son, I hope I can survive it! And Zianya! If the Bearded God also loves me, let there not be Zianya!” Zianya were semi-intelligent animals, highly esteemed as a delicacy on kzinti worlds. The important thing was that they be torn to pieces alive at table. Their anticipatory terror and subsequent death-agonies with the first tearing bites set up a hormonal reaction that gave what was generally considered a particularly delicious flavor to their meat. “They make me sick!”

  “But that’s hardly the important thing.”

  “No. There are kz’zeerekti here, even if he’s a bit vague about them.”

  “He’s obviously not too interested in monkeys.”

  “His body language suggested he may be more interested than he lets on. He wants to establish it’s a seller’s market. But he said of the slaves from Wunderland that ‘they mixed with the locals.’ Odd. Very odd. They would hardly have just let slaves go to breed in the bush.”

  “Perhaps they escaped.”

  “Even so. But odder than that…‘mixed with the locals’? What locals? Convergent evolution? And mixed how? Could they interbreed? From different planets? Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  “No, never. But is that what he was suggesting?”

  “I thought it was ambiguous,” said the kzin, “but if he means the humans from Ka’—from Wunderland…mixed with the locals…It sounded as if he meant ‘interbred.’ I’m aware of problems with dialect, but yes, I think that’s what he meant.”

  “You know, he didn’t specifically say that they’d brought Wunderlanders back. Maybe he was just getting your interest up. I mean, convergent evolution can hardly be that convergent! Creatures from different planets—different stars!—can’t interbreed.”

  “Well,” laughed the kzin, rippling his ears, “Simon and I always said we could trust each other with our wives.” The laughter ended.

  “How is his wife?” the human asked.

  “I saw her before we left. I think she’ll be all right. She’s strong. But he’s a loss. Simon the Simian.”

  He touched a pad on the control console with a black, ripping-chisel claw and a hologram of the planet shivered into shape above it. Kzrral’s polar and subpolar continents were colored green, with ice fields in the polar regions and mountains. It was 1.2 times the diameter of Earth, but with a smaller iron core giving it comparable gravity. It was warmer than Earth overall, though with extensive temperate zones in the high latitudes. A telltale far in the north of the largest continent marked the main kzinti settlement and their own position. At latitudes lower than 30 degrees savannah and then jungle belts were indicated, turning to wastelands while still many degrees from the equator; there, the seas steamed, and only a few mountaintops rose above ceaseless convection storms. The south pole was landless, though there was a small cap of water-ice sitting on the shallow seafloor, and some minor landmasses in the southern ocean. The planet was mostly hotter than Earth or Wunderland, much hotter than Kzinhome. Perpetua thought for a moment how fascinating a human biologist might find life-forms adapted to live in or pass through those near-boiling equatorial seas and steam-heated lands.

  “In the tropics there could be anything,” the kzin commented. “Kzinti wouldn’t have much interest in it.”

  “Unless population pressure forced them into the tropics.” Perpetua was tentative. A human-historical specialist, transferred out of academia as human Space geared up for another possible war, kzinti culture was all still largely academic for her. She had, she felt, reason to be tentative. Her experienced predecessor had either overestimated his own knowledge of that culture or been unlucky.

  “Not a problem here. There are about a thousand estates on this continent, and they haven’t yet occupied all the prime hunting territory by a long way yet.”

  “Quite a small population.”

  “About twenty-five thousand males in the whole northern hemisphere. Plus several times that number of females, of course,
and kittens.”

  There had been quite a lot more before, and there would be again, as soon as the kittens grew up. Kzrral had lost a lot of males in both wars, as well as most of its spaceships. The economy was still a long way from recovering from that loss. The kzinti had come as colonists with their own spaceships, and before the wars they had never needed to build a great new spaceflight industry with the communication that led to.

  “Always a backwater planet, relatively poor in mineral production—nothing to attract a huge population, and a good incentive to the kzinti already settled here not to welcome others. Why open up your world to competitors for territory?”

  “Military security? A bigger population means you can support a bigger army.”

  “Against whom? We met everything in space and swallowed it up. No one was going to attack us! Worse luck, a lot of kzinti thought—no space-traveling races with the warrior skills to give us good sport. Well, we know better now. As for the Patriarch’s regular forces, there would be no point in building up armed forces to defend against them. If they wanted such a planet they could take it. No doubt communications with the homeworld emphasized how mineral-poor it was, and presented the local kzinti as a loyal garrison of Heroes holding it for the Patriarch in case of need.

  “I’d say this planet, with its wide continents in the cool-temperate zone we like, became a kind of paradise of spoiled, land-rich kzinti. Plus one small city for those who liked business or recreation there, also supporting one spaceport. There are a number of such worlds in the Patriarchy.

  “Then, as the First War with Men got under way, a lot enlisted in the Patriarch’s Navy. Of course freebooters also took off in their own prides seeking Names and riches, and relatively few came back at the end of it all. It cut the breeding rate, too, because a lot of the survivors had their genes scrambled by radiation, but weren’t about to give their kzinretti to anyone else to breed from. Fertile males tried to steal kzinretti when they saw the sterile males holding them, and that led to more fighting. I’d guess that Warrgh-Churrg expanded his lands by incorporating estates that had no heir powerful enough to hold them.