Man-Kzin Wars IV (Man-Kzin Wars Series Book 4)

by Larry Niven

  For years after that terrible six months, war-impoverished professors from the Munchen Scholarium gathered in the cafés along Karl-Jorge Avenue in Old Munchen, writing equations and speculating with preposterous assumptions while they sipped their schnapps. Research equipment can be confiscated. Equations and speculation are free. When Alpha Centauri B was in the night sky, wan but brighter than any streetlight, each new theory about kzin technology was carried like an epidemic between the sidewalk cafés until second sunset when the nightlife of Munchen died.

  Given that a reactionless drive did exist they eventually sketched out the beginning of an understanding that had a sound theoretical footing by the time Chuut-Riit arrived as governor. The human mind, unlike the kzin mind, is obsessed with resolving the contradictions between what it observes and what it thinks it should be seeing.

  Momentum did not appear to be conserved by the reactionless kzin ships, but the gravitic field equations upon which the polarizer was based invoked negative space curvature, a necessary element of any reactionless space drive. Normal intuitions about momentum fail in the presence of negative curvature—momentum then has a direction opposite velocity—but the equations of momentum conservation still hold.

  Trainer-of-Slaves took up his gunner’s berth on the Blood of Heroes. He was outfitted with mask-goggles. They imposed diagrams upon his visual field which supplied all that he might need to know while firing. During check-down he had time to make simulation runs—with his goggles feeding him the dangers of a virtual world. It gave the liver a jolt to kill monkey-ships even if they were only program-generated ghosts.

  The five spherical ships of the hunter-pack drifted into position. There was ear-bulb chatter as the captains readied themselves for the three light-hour sweep from Alpha Centauri B across to Alpha Centauri A, roughly the equivalent of a run from the distance of Uranus to Man-home. The Serpent’s Swarm would give the sweep realism, though it contained hundreds of times the mass and debris of the Solar Belt.

  Because of this plethora of asteroids, the Kzin Training Command was able to designate as many target asteroids as it pleased without disrupting the economy of the Swarm. Fourth Fleet attack-training stressed destruction of the kind of asteroid defensive installations which the monkeys used extensively to protect the north and south approaches to Man-home.

  At maximum acceleration the Blood of Heroes could make the three-light-hour trip from B to A in less than two days at a turn-around velocity a tenth the speed of light, but this was not common practice because of the density of matter in the Centauri System which created field energy losses.

  The gravity polarizer of the kzin high-velocity drive contained a natural mechanism to protect the ship from impact by gas and micrometeoroids. The offending particle was violently accelerated as it entered the field while, at the same time, the ship reacted to the added mass by recoiling. In the exchange, field energy was re-converted to mass. The particle size was not critical—unequal masses accelerate at the same rate within any gravitic field.

  Unfortunately, atoms impacting into a polarizer’s field generated a weak electromagnetic interaction which drained field energy into radiation. Inside a planetary system this could have been a serious problem if high velocities had been desirable. Between the stars, where high velocities are desirable, kzin ships weren’t able to travel much above eighty percent of light speed through normal densities of interstellar gas without bleeding to death from “blue shine.”

  While a gravity polarizer was accelerating it converted mass to energy, when it decelerated it converted that same energy back to mass. Its power requirements were orders of magnitude less than a torchship, needing power only to make up for the losses involved in field interactions with the local media.

  * * *

  The hunting pack was practicing the standard maneuver. Come in high over the Swarm, then attack down through it at a moderate velocity. There was much bantering back and forth between the offensive team and the defensive team during an “engagement” debriefing. All kzin insults weren’t delivered in anger—the real meaning lay in the inflections of the spit-hisses. Ssis-Captain was fond of calling his opponents baboons because they had been ordered to “think like monkeys.” Amiably they dubbed him “Kshat-Lunch,” referring to a herbivore who was known to eat offal.

  It took them twelve days, not two, to work their way across the Swarm on patrol/attack status, instruments scanning at full vigilance. The Blood of Heroes recorded static from the Tiamat industrial world: instructions to some lonely rockjack in his torchship, calls for part replacements, a medical emergency. Doppler shifts alerted monitors.

  Of the man-ships they saw only glimmers flicking across detection screens. Somewhere among the stones armed feral humans grubbed about, plotting revenge—but the Blood of Heroes saw none, though its instruments were looking. These sullen beasts were mostly no more of a nuisance than fur-ticks but they made good target practice when found. On this run the Heroes sparred only with tumbling rubble.

  Trainer-of-Slaves was an experienced gunner by the time they reached the cloud-streaked globe of Wunderland. He was not yet an experienced politician.

  CHAPTER 13

  (2402 A.D.)

  In its simplest design, the kzin gravity polarizer just floated. If it was shoved toward a mass, energy was fed into its polarizer field—which forced it to rise. If it was pushed away from a mass, energy was drained from its polarizer field—which forced it to fall.

  The shuttle “platforms” that transported freight and passengers into and out of Wunderland’s mass-well were straight modifications of this primitive device. Descent was controlled by electromagnetically bleeding the field to charge molecular distortion batteries. Ascent was controlled by feeding the field from those same batteries. Horizontal velocity was controlled by a torsion field interaction that spun-up or spun-down Wunderland’s rotation.

  The cycle was highly efficient, leaking some spillover energy at the electromagnetic-gravitic interface and some in tidal friction. When dropping from orbit around Wunderland to the surface, the shuttle’s polarizer rose only a few degrees in temperature.

  Munchenport was a depressing introduction to the fabulous wealth that Trainer-of-Slaves had heard about all his life. A proper spacedrome had yet to be constructed. They settled onto an open field that was serviced by extruded buildings of recent fabrication, all square and ugly, all laid out and finished by forced labor. The Wundervolker wryly called it the “himmelfahrt”—both because it was from here that one ascended to the heavens and because so many of them had “gone to heaven” building it.

  The number of unleashed man-beasts was appalling, lined up with their baggage, milling around, shuffling through the weapons scanners, arguing with attendants. Most of them were looking for work in the military industries of the Serpent’s Swarm, needing the wages badly enough to be willing to build weapons that would be used against their father system. They smelled of unwashed bodies and poverty, a peculiar sweet-sour odor blending with the machinery-and-synthetics smell of the building and the residual ozone from cheap electric vehicles.

  Ssis-Captain knew the routine. He hired some man-beasts of burden to carry his and Trainer’s luggage to the aircar terminal. The clean cool breeze inside the car was a relief. “We’ll go to the old city. It’s better there,” he said.

  To a Hero born in space on a hostile outpost near a dying star, Munchen was odd for a city. This was a city? The low-pitched tile roofs weren’t airtight and the windows opened to the atmosphere. From some views the buildings were hidden by the trees that shaded streets. The broad blue waters of the Donau cut through parks of palms and blooming frangipani. Of what use was the steel steeple of the Saint Joachim cathedral?

  Ssis-Captain found a room for them in an old four-story brick mansion that had been converted for kzin use by knocking out the tops of all the interior doors. He gave their luggage to an old man-female who staggered under the load, finally setting it down to breathe befor
e dividing her job into two trips.

  “She’s ready for the glue-factory,” commented Ssis, who was three times her size.

  “It’s a she? But she took your instructions!”

  “Of course.”

  He stared at the old lady. Dumb male-animals, Trainer-of-Slaves could understand, but females who comprehended sentences? He tried to imagine his mother speaking in whole phrases. He had talked enough to her, and sometimes … sometimes he had imagined that she was listening, such big round eyes she had.

  It was a powerful deception. A kzinrret always gave the impression of being intelligent. Once as a spoiled kit in the Chiirr-Nig household he had been so taken by this illusion that he had given his mother an adventure picture-book to read to him at nap-time. She had chewed the book to pieces.

  But enough of amazement. They beeped their automatic car on its way, settled into their room, and set about to pad the rest of the way to the Admiralty by foot.

  Trainer-of-Slaves had been close to only two monkeys in his life and found a city-herd of them disconcerting. Ssis-Captain just ignored the animals while they scurried around him or waited against a wall. They all wore clothes—a fact somehow surprising to Trainer—though obviously they belonged to no military unit. Since Chuut-Riit’s hunt on Hssin, he had imagined that naked was the natural state of all man-beasts.

  The Admiralty could have whatever it wanted. At the time of the occupation they had wanted the Landholder’s Ritterhaus. It stood with great Gothic arches and stone buttressing at the head of the cobblestoned Grunderplatz. The victorious Heroes had not bothered to demolish the crowded bronze memorial of the Nineteen Founders, perhaps because the Ritterhaus dominated the group and the kzinti were in the Ritterhaus. Down there, those laboring bronze figures looked like hard-working slaves.

  The Fourth Fleet bureaucracy was at a frenzy with the final logistic preparations and assignments just months away. Trainer-of-Slaves was received by a harassed kzin officer who kept having to duck under man-height doors as he busied himself trying to find his files. He couldn’t remember which computer he had fed them to. Finally, in distraction, he reset his batlike ears and offered the absolute certainty of his help tomorrow, at the same time, if Trainer would be so good as to return.

  They retreated to their lodgings in the old manor house. A dignified kzin passed them on the stairs with two leashed kzinrretti. Females could be dangerous in a city; they tended to spat with any unpleasantly odorous animal who dared approach them, and man-beasts with alcohol on their breath were always likely victims. They would even attack a male kzin twice their size if the lives of kits were at stake.

  “Reasonableness does not control female emotions,” explained their patriarch. “Have a good night. You’ll have to fold your ears against the kzin at the end of the hall—he growls and fights ghosts in his sleep.”

  A return to the Admiralty in the morning produced puzzling results. The kzin clerk dismissed Trainer-of-Slaves, and when Trainer politely persisted, another kzin ducked out of an adjoining office.

  “You are not qualified for the Fourth Fleet and your rating application has been refused.”

  “I have these recommendations…”

  The huge red officer with yellow splotches in his fur hissed. Trainer-of-Slaves immediately took the hint, saluted with a sharp claw-across-face, and retreated.

  That evening Trainer and Ssis-Captain were considering their other options at a trunkshuppen off one of the side streets that led into the Grunderplatz. There were no other kzin present at the Mondschein. The waitress was clearly terrified to serve them but she was brave in her order-taking.

  “Guten Abend, ehrenvoll Helden,” she trembled. “Haben Sie gewahlt?” When they were slow to reply, she suggested a popular bourbon with milk.

  “Ich … nehme eine … Coca Cola,” said Trainer-of-Slaves, twisting his tongue around his teeth with his best animal imitation.

  Ssis-Captain’s remarks in the Hero’s Tongue were meowls and spits of derision and approval. “The place smells like vatach-in-a-cage.” He was referring to the humid scent of furless fear. “Nice little planet, Hr-r?” He nodded his mane at the waitress while playfully punching Trainer. “I’ll take one of those to curry my backside in my European castle.” Then, he consulted his translator. “Ich nehme einen Whiskey Kentucky mit Milch,” he ordered, before he returned to business.

  “You have some slandering enemies here in Munchen so we shall go elsewhere—which will lead directly back to higher lairs.” Ssis-Captain had an invitation to the base at Gerning in the isolated northern province of Skogarna. “Friend Detector-Analyst is pleased with his post. The vast woods are isolated both from man-beast traffic and the arrogance of kzin patriarchs who are so well fed with land that they guard their holdings against the likes of us as if we were one-eyed kzinrret bandits.”

  Ssis-Captain rearranged his ears knowingly and flared his nostrils to hint that what he knew about the base was special. “Chuut-Riit established the Gerning station within months of his ascension as governor. The officers there are all kzin who sided with him in the struggle. Good contacts.”

  As he leaned forward with more conspiratorial details, Ssis-Captain’s chair—suddenly—collapsed, and milk-in-bourbon arced to slosh onto his mane and vest. His massive head rose above the table with a fanged grin. When he was fully erect, his mane touching the low ceiling, he snarled in the direction of the pale bartender.

  The other patrons, who had been uneasy, were now no longer even twitching.

  Their waitress calmly dried her hands, sauntered to the door as if there was nothing more important going on than quitting time—then fled.

  Ah how the liver rules the mind, thought Trainer-of-Slaves, noticing both the man-beast behavior and Ssis-Captain’s rising rage. How much different was rage than fear? He knew enough not to touch Ssis for he could not hide his amusement, and too much tail whacking would turn the rage against himself. He appealed to the Captain’s vanity as he, too, rose, “We’ll have to wash your vest right away before the milk dries. Come.” To the bartender he raised his glass, careful not to smile. He wanted to put that apprehensive creature at ease. “Zum Wohl!” he said, proud of his growing facility with animal grunts.

  Ssis-Captain did not come right away. He took his rage out on the chair, taking the remnants of its poor wooden frame apart with bare hands and teeth as if it were a United Nations Warship.

  CHAPTER 14

  (2402 A.D.)

  In an aircar over the province of Skogarna the social structure of Wunderland stood out in a way that never would have shown from the ground. It was clearly a wilderness dominated by a manorial elite. Coming into the kzin base they passed over the Nordbo estate at Korsness, huge, isolated from Gerning by hill and primeval wood along an expanse of beach. A ribbon of roads leading to Korsness clearly showed who was master of Gerning.

  The light armored aircar carried the two kzin Heroes above the forested hills, past the hillside scar of recent kzin construction. It was afternoon but sunset hues of red washed over the clouds along the horizon where Alpha Centauri B was disappearing. The sea showed an astonishingly clear blue that faded into pastel shades of green where the shallow coastal waters had flooded a crater and left a curving string of islands.

  Many such craters littered Wunderland. The planet suffered continual impact from meteorites straying out of the Serpent’s Swarm so that some nights were aglow with falling stars. A major strike every few million years had left Wunderland’s lifeforms permanently poised for adaptation. The navy that had defended Wunderland from the Conquering Heroes had consisted mainly of a Meteoroid Guard unit.

  Gerning Base was created by kzin who loved to hunt; the actual station that monitored the high atmosphere for thousands of kilometers around to detect feral spacecraft seemed more of an afterthought. Some cunning kzin had his eye on this area, anticipating the time when honor and heroism would earn him the right to a full name. In the meantime he was serving Chuut-Riit’s p
urposes.

  Detector-Analyst was a local kzin from a background that gave him a Hssin heritage, though he had never been to R’hshssira. He gave Trainer-of-Slaves special consideration out of curiosity for the planet of his patriarchs. Ssis-Captain grumbled at all this talk about a place he had passed through while in hibernation and kept interrupting to turn the conversation into a lighter vein.

  Jokes: “How do you stop a monkey from running around in circles? Nail his other foot to the floor.”

  Zoology: was a Wunderland tigripard faster than a Kzin krrach-sherrek? Or only more cunning?

  Better than he liked stalking through the forest, Ssis liked to sit in the lodge on the carved logs, supping fermented milk. The political intrigue was all in the lodge. He speculated with Trainer about the identity of the ambitious kzin who was “pissing around the borders of this territory,” looking for a noble name so that he might found a household here. They decided it must be Yiao-Captain.

  Yiao-Captain was an unlikely candidate. He was as short as Trainer and as slight, not the kind one would expect to dominate a fight, but he had a cautious cunning to him—and an energy—that would make any challenge to his honor dangerous. But it was his ambition that struck them both.

  Trainer-of-Slaves first sniffed around its edges when he was invited to share a kill with four of the local kzin. The kill was a forest herbivore, headless, and carved in places that facilitated sundering, the fresh blood still running into the table-gutters where a spout delivered it to a bloodbowl. The tang of bloodscent was overpowering. On a sidetable stood green homeblown bottles of the local akvavit, ready to mix with the blood.