Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XII

by Larry Niven

  The two of them were engaged in an effort to collect humans from wherever they were being kept as slaves, for some reason—it might be a religious ritual, if it mattered—and, working to that end, were practicing subtlety and deceit on Warrgh-Churrg. Successfully, so far. Still, they had never encountered such a large human population, and were unprepared to deal with it. The feral Jotoki, however, sneaking little beasts, had worked out plans for all kinds of situations, and had one that could be adapted now. Once he heard it, Trrask-Rarr immediately pointed out, “Warrgh-Churrg doesn’t own the ships in orbit outright. He’ll need to buy out the other partners before he’ll agree—he wouldn’t do anything that he thinks benefits them.”

  “The Jotoki can provide the gold,” Trader said.

  “Not without a reason he’ll believe. But if you give me the gold, I can claim I captured it on a raid, and use it to buy land from him.”

  “You’d need to do a real raid,” said the monkey—their many faults didn’t include stupidity.

  “Of course,” Trrask-Rarr said tolerantly. “Have them collect it somewhere and flee at our approach. I buy land, Warrgh-Churrg buys out the ships and starts refitting them, and you take his gold and go off to wherever you go, and bring back what you need to.”

  “Aren’t you concerned about the possible consequences to the Patriarchy?” said the monkey, then leapt back when he grinned at it. (Not stupid at all.)

  “If the Patriarch desires my assistance,” Trrask-Rarr rumbled, “let the Patriarch send an investigator to find how Warrgh-Churrg’s Hunt Master managed to get my two best sons killed but bring the foolish ones back alive. Warrgh-Churrg is using kz’zeerekti to weaken every clan but his own, which means he’s acting against the Patriarchy himself. Anything that keeps him from doing that helps the Patriarch.”

  They discussed money. It was going to be expensive to buy back the land that should be his—more than the ships cost. Trrask-Rarr didn’t like the idea of Warrgh-Churrg having the surplus, but the monkey said, “If we get you more gold than that, you can spend it on other things after you buy the land, and prices will go up.”

  “Why should they do that?” said Trrask-Rarr.

  “Inflation. More money in circulation,” said the monkey unhelpfully. Trrask-Rarr puzzled over the images this called up.

  “Everybody will want some,” Trader explained.

  That was reasonable. “So the ships will cost more,” Trrask-Rarr said, to be certain.

  Both agreed. “Parts shouldn’t. Refitting will, though,” said the monkey.

  “I doubt the slaves will be getting higher pay,” he said ironically.

  “Supplies.”

  Trrask-Rarr ran the brush along his leg, then turned to the Jotok that had been waiting nearby for a little while and said, “Report.”

  “Potent Trrask-Rarr, the adjuncts are removed. Shall we do engine maintenance, so as to provide evidence of why a landing here was necessary?”

  “Yes. Good thinking.” As the Jotok left, Trrask-Rarr said, “Marrrkusarrg-tuss was very probably warning you not to go on another hunt when he warned about garlic, Trader. They eat it constantly, and no doubt another group of assassinations is planned.”

  “I…don’t think Warrgh-Churrg makes direct arrangements with the kz’zeerekti,” said Trader doubtfully.

  “Of course not. I don’t make them either. And yet, arrangements seem to have been made,” Trrask-Rarr said dryly.

  “Urr. I see what you mean. I believe the press of business will be too heavy for me to join another hunt in any case.”

  “Of course. So: First you propose the plan to Warrgh-Churrg, then I get the gold and buy land. He buys out the ships and sends you for what he needs, and the refit begins…?”

  “While we’re gone,” the monkey said.

  “Urr. Good.” He was beginning to understand how Trader could put up with it: The monkey tended to be interesting. “When will you get back with the key parts?”

  Trader and the monkey looked at one another. “Two hundred days?” Trader hazarded.

  “Two hundred!”

  “We’ll have to go to more than one place,” the monkey said, misunderstanding.

  Trader got it. “Trrask-Rarr was expecting it to be longer,” he explained. “It’s hard to get used to how fast hyperdrive is.”

  “Oh.”

  “It occurs to me that the fastest way for the Patriarch to learn of Warrgh-Churrg’s folly would be through you,” Trrask-Rarr said. “Have you some means of contacting someone who can reach him?”

  “Somebody will have it,” the monkey said confidently.

  X

  In the circumstances, it was reasonable not to discuss anything in the car on the way back, and Ginger was too busy flying to hold a written conversation. Likewise there was no sense in talking in Warrgh-Churrg’s car hangar, nor in the open; so by the time they were back in the ship, there was a certain amount of pressure built up.

  As soon as the airlock had cycled, Perpetua burst out, “That Jotok mechanic was a spy for the Romans!”

  Ginger, who had his own revelations to make, stopped. “How do you know?”

  “It spoke with the same accent as Jinvaretsimok’s translator.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Ginger, have I ever disputed your sense of smell?”

  “Urr.” He thought about it, then added, “No offense was intended.”

  “Thank you,” she replied, a little startled. “So now we know how the car got bugged.”

  It took Ginger a second. “They all work together!”

  “Sure. Trrask-Rarr’s Jotoki talked to Warrgh-Churrg’s.”

  “That’ll save us some time,” Ginger said thoughtfully. “The gold-theft ruse is probably being arranged already.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that…You know, the male population of the original colonists must have been almost completely wiped out.”

  “They all smelled about the same on the hunt,” he agreed. “Hunt Master had to use instruments to check for outsiders.” Then he said, “How did you know?”

  “They pronounce the ‘s’ at the end of a name. That was out of fashion by the time of Julius Caesar. Most of the first generation must have learned Latin in written form, so that means the Caledonians—and their men had an even higher casualty rate than the Romans.”

  “They did, didn’t they?” Ginger was a pacifist, but still a kzin. Somebody else’s casualty rate had not particularly commended itself to his attention. “Did you notice the floor was warm there, too?”

  “Well, it is the tropics—hey,” Perpetua said, frowning.

  “‘Hey’ indeed. We were in a tree. Trees are cool.”

  “A hypocaust in a forest?”

  “If that was a forest, a farm is a meadow. Those trees were planted just where they wanted them,” Ginger said, “and now I know why their industries have never been detected. The foundries are underground, and they use the water from that dam—”

  “What dam?”

  “The one we walked through,” he said, surprised.

  “That was a dam? Where was the water?”

  “Underground,” Ginger said. “Where most of the dam was. They must have been a couple of centuries diverting the entire aquifer into that channel. It’d be why there’s no offshore trench—the runoff must be spread out to blur the heat signature.”

  “You just happened to notice that?” Perpetua said incredulously.

  “No, of course not, I was paying very close attention,” he said. “The way you were to the language and culture. It’s called perspective. It’s why we’re a team, Pet. And why it works…their industrial exhaust gases must be cooled and filtered with water, and they probably use slag and ashes to neutralize the acids that makes…Remember what I said about humans and conservation? I was right but I was wrong. Omnivores aren’t much motivated to limit their effect on their environment, but humans do turn out to be awfully good at concealing it. If they want to. These do, and they’re making
more effective use of their resources than any culture I’ve seen, human or kzinti. Hunt Master couldn’t very well say much, but the idea that the humans he was hunting might be making their own firearms worried him. I think they do, and I think they could do a great deal more if they wanted. I think these hunts are used to cull out weak and stupid humans, too—except that the humans are really doing it, not corrupting the system.” His tail lashed once.

  “I wonder if that was Warrgh-Churrg’s own idea,” Perpetua said.

  “I’m off the scent.”

  “Well, if the Jotoki are all working together, what about the humans? During the Occupation there were some Wunderlanders who managed to talk their masters into some amazingly bad plans. And that was after just a few years’ acquaintance.”

  Ginger’s tail lashed again. “I now find myself less enthused about rescuing them. Some kzinti’s only virtues are courage and honor. It’s consistent with what I’ve read of Roman history, too.”

  “Huh?”

  “They raised the children of potential rebels in the homes of Roman nobles. Disgraceful. No respect for heritage.”

  Every so often Perpetua was forcibly reminded that her partner was an alien. His regarding Rome’s most brilliant peacekeeping innovation as a betrayal of family values accomplished this now. “Oh. I didn’t know where, but I knew they had to have decent industrial technology.”

  “The lamps?”

  “No, M—what about the lamps?”

  “They gave white light. That takes superior refining techniques. The thorium that goes into lamp mantles is found with other things that are hard to remove, and those would have made the light yellow.”

  “How come you know so much about thorium?”

  “It can be bred into fissionable material. I got interested in its other uses when I was a student.”

  “Why did you want to know about fissionable material?” she said, a little alarmed.

  “I didn’t, particularly. It’s just used in making weapons.” Seeing her expression, he said, “I’m a kzin! Do I get all suspicious because you know how to cook things? I mean, you might be planning to boil me up, right?”

  “Meat isn’t usually boiled,” she said, her expression one of distaste.

  “Aha,” he said archly. “You’ve been thinking about this, then?”

  Perpetua made a strangling noise in her throat, then said, “Behave.”

  Having made his point, and enjoyed it, he recalled what he’d been saying. “So if it wasn’t the lamps, what?”

  “Marcus Augustus didn’t talk down to me, and the female slaves we saw were treated about the same as the males. You surely know that humans die easily. Well, pregnant female humans, in a society without high technology, die really easily. Women tend to be regarded as property unless they’re aristocrats, and even then they’re not included in serious discussions. Nothing that’ll endanger them, see?”

  “Not really.”

  “I guess you’ll have to take my word for it. He didn’t treat me like I was helpless, so he’s used to women who aren’t.”

  “Oh, now I see.—I think that purple dye was synthetic, too.”

  “You can see purple?” she said.

  “Of course,” he said, surprised. “Why not?”

  “Well, Kzin’s sun is a lot redder than Sol. I’d have thought it was outside your range.”

  “How are we supposed to tell if a kill is diseased?” he said. “Liver color is everything.”

  “Oh.”

  Ginger reflected for a moment. “I never thought about it before, but now that I do, purple tends to look brighter than other colors. I suppose it doesn’t show up well on Kzinhome. We should make a note of that; it could be useful to someone.”

  “How?”

  “Well, say if someone is trying to hide from kzinti aerial surveillance in a garden, he’ll want to look for violets. They’ll blot out what’s around them.”

  Perpetua frowned, but plugged in a pad and began writing. She was far from the first, of either species, to find such things counterintuitive. (During the Second War, when there was real combat rather than conquest, it had taken considerable time for the combatants to realize that human eyes identify shapes, while kzinti eyes detect motion—so that, at first, both had used camouflage gear that was guaranteed to stand out to the enemy’s vision.) When she finished, she said, “It occurs to me to wonder what the Romans are planning that they haven’t told us.”

  It had evidently just crossed her mind for the first time. Every so often Ginger was forcibly reminded that his partner was an alien. “We just have to present them with nothing but specific courses of action and explain it as force of circumstance,” he said, as if he had thought it up on the spot.

  “I suppose,” she said, looking something up. “I hope things go quickly. It’s going to be summer soon on We Made It.”

  Ginger thought about it. “How does that affect us?”

  “It’s hard to land in a wind traveling twice the speed of sound.”

  “Why would we want to?”

  “Aren’t we going there for hyperdrive parts?”

  “What? No. Earth,” said Ginger, confused.

  “Earth? How are we supposed to keep the ARM from finding out?”

  “But that’s who we have to get them from,” Ginger said. “They’re the only ones who would keep it a secret. If anybody else found out about the Romans, they’d never be left alone again. The ARMs will keep it a secret, because they keep everything a secret.”

  “I don’t…If…But…Give me a minute here.”

  “Certainly.”

  Perpetua sat and thought it through. Finally she said, “Why would they help us?”

  “To reduce the Patriarchy’s capabilities, which is one of their constant goals, without having to go through channels. I know some of the flatlander veterans who settled on Wunderland, and more than one has joked that the UN bureaucracy was a kzinti plot. I’ll give you an example—and I had to see records of this before I believed this fellow wasn’t making fun of me, so I know it’s true: Chemical firearms, delivered in response to a properly logged requisition, arrive without ammunition. There’s a different requisition to be completed, for ammunition without which the firearm is useless. This procedure is still in use. My Name as my Word.”

  Perpetua, who had lived with human government all her life and didn’t see what was so odd about the story, said, “I’m convinced that’s true,” which was meant to please him, and did. “Maybe it will be enough to get them to agree. We can try.”

  Warrgh-Churrg summoned Trader the next day, and when the offworlder arrived (without the monkey) demanded, without formalities, “You went for a look at the kz’zeerekti, and had to land at Trrask-Rarr’s castle with a breakdown. Did you say anything that might have let him know where they kept their gold?”

  Trader froze, his ears cupped and swinging slowly from side to side: genuine surprise. “Feared Warrgh-Churrg, I don’t know where they keep their gold,” he replied.

  “They don’t,” the satrap snarled. “Trrask-Rarr has it. Made a sudden raid this morning on a cavern deep in the wasteland, and when a wall caved in his troops found a stockpile.”

  Trader settled himself slightly and said, “Dominant One, did he take any slaves?”

  “Not one. They’d cleared out, almost as if they were warned…” Warrgh-Churrg glared at one of his own slaves, standing in an alcove, ready to fetch on command. The kz’zeerekti very properly stayed in its place, but began to smell panicky.

  “The reason I ask, Fully-Named, is that there are far more kz’zeerekti out there than I had even speculated, and with that quantity of gold I thought he might be interested in taking part in a major shipment.”

  Warrgh-Churrg abruptly looked at the eyes of Trader, who ducked. “Why would he need gold to do that?”

  “There isn’t enough room on my ship for that many slaves. It would be necessary to obtain one or two large ships, possibly equipping them with hyperdr
ive if the price was right.”

  “You had implied that you couldn’t get ships with hyperdrive,” Warrgh-Churrg said, growing dangerous.

  “I cannot. But most of the parts for a hyperdrive can be fabricated, and the key parts are available as spares. I never had enough money to do it, but if Trrask-Rarr has that much gold—”

  “He’s spending it,” Warrgh-Churrg cut him off. “Buying land his sires once held. Suppose someone already had a large ship. Or two,” he added offhandedly. “What would hyperdrive parts cost?”

  Ginger was pleased to see that Perpetua had a shattergun aimed at the airlock door as he came through. When she saw it was him, she safetied it, set it down carefully, and ran up and grabbed him around the middle, to his great astonishment. She held him very hard, as human strength went, and after a few seconds he began having the strangest urge to wash her head like a kitten’s. This gave him a hint about what she was doing, though, and after a little thought he patted her head, a gesture much used in entertainments. It appeared to help. She let go and looked up and said, “You’re okay.”

  “I’m okay,” he agreed. It seemed better than I know. “I have been cleverly talked around into going to purchase hyperdrive parts.”

  Perpetua began laughing. It took her a while to get it under control.

  The gold began arriving two days later.

  XI

  The trip to Earth took almost ten weeks. As usual, they spent a lot of time playing games; as usual, Ginger almost always won.

  The dangerous part of the trip, at least in Ginger’s estimation, had been right at the start, when they were depending on pursuit countermeasures to stay intact. Perpetua, however, grew more uneasy the closer they got to Earth. She didn’t say anything about it, but she was at least partly conscious of it: She bathed more often, sometimes twice in a day. (He in turn was not conscious of the fact that his tail began lashing when she smelled upset; but she was. She was trying to keep at least one of them calm.)