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

by Larry Niven

  It was natural for a kzinti to want a household. But Trainer couldn’t understand why he wanted sons, not after he’d had to teach the Terrible-Sons of Hromfi. Nor was it moral for a coward to pass on his traits to sons who would disgrace the Patriarchy. Nevertheless he wanted sons. He supposed that his real sons were the Jotoki he took on during their fixation phase.

  Sons challenged their fathers to physical combat. His many Jotoki “sons” wore him out by a different kind of challenge. The curiosity of a pestering Jotok in transition demanded that Trainer keep learning. It wasn’t that he needed to learn. It wasn’t that he was curious. He never asked a question whose answer didn’t have a solidly rank smell. But he hated not to have a ready retort when a slave asked a stupid question like, “What is the minimum size of the universe?” The answer to a question like that not only didn’t have a smell—it couldn’t even be seen or heard.

  Long-Reach started it all by telling four of his young apprentice polarizer mechanics about the black dwarf R’hshssira. It would collapse forever without fusing its hydrogen because it only had seven-eighths of the mass needed for ignition. But R’hshssira would still have a finite radius when there was no longer any radiation pressure pushing out from within.

  The four youthful Jotoki had been learning gravity polarizer mechanics together under the supervision of Long-Reach and Creepy. That was twenty freshly curious brains in concert in teams of five-to-a-body. To rebuild and tune a polarizer one did not need to master unified field theory, but such practical constraints never appealed to an eager transient.

  The “terrible four” roughed out the calculation that gave them the minimum diameter of a white dwarf star as a function of its mass. They didn’t do nova mechanics—that was beyond their youthful abilities, but they did work out the mass range and size at which neutron stars existed. For each mass they could calculate a number for the diameter of the neutron star.

  Masses large enough to collapse behind a light barrier were more difficult. Before those calculations were done, one of their brains infected all the others with the burningly important question, “If the whole universe collapsed, what would be its minimum diameter?”

  Mellow-Yellow tried to give them a practical kzin answer. “The universe is expanding.”

  But all four Jotoki (twenty voices) wouldn’t let him get away with that. Tuning polarizers was practical. This was recreation. What if the universe was contracting?

  Data-link texts on gravity shouldn’t be allowed. Worse, gravity polarizers were constructed all too elegantly. They should have flashing lights and be built along the lines of a W’kkai wooden puzzle. Then his Jotoki would be kept too busy to go off onto one of their wild chases.

  Alas! Let it slip that the polarizer worked with negative space curvature and immediately they were delving into the tensor equations. From there insanity was only questions away. What is the difference between negative and positive curvature? Since positive curvature is common—and that means everything attracts everything else—why isn’t the universe imploding? When will it start to implode? If the universe imploded, how small would it get? Tell us, Mellow-Yellow!

  Thank the Fanged God that Long-Reach and Creepy and Joker had outgrown such questions. Nevertheless, Trainer-of-Slaves gave up an interesting card game to examine the matter. His data-link surprised him. It asked him to rephrase his inquiry several times, then produced the answer which had been known for some octal-squared generations. It was a theorem named after Stkaa-Mathematician-to-S’Rawl.

  Stkaa, of course, was one of those kzin who wrote the commas and dots of the Hero’s Tongue in the blood of martyrs. For the return price of an equal amount of blood, he made himself clear. On the datalink screen Trainer had to run the theorem’s equations with different boundary values. He had to call up the definitions of words he’d never seen—sometimes because unified field theory was an arcane subject with its own hisses and snarls, and sometimes just because the language had mutated since the time of Stkaa. As often as not the definitions required that he run even more equations before he could make sense of the definition.

  Three days later…

  It was an easy enough theorem to declare. “A universe cannot contract beyond its lowest state of information.” But it required a hackles-raising use of the uncertainty principle to find the temperature at which every particle in the contracting universe had an equal probability of being anywhere in the fireball—the required lowest state. But once you did that: out-popped the minimum radius. Very neat.

  Trainer-of-Slaves dutifully lectured his four “sons.” He set up the unified field equations. He contracted to the essentials. He pulled a trick out of his ears that allowed him to apply the uncertainty principle to eliminate all the singularities.

  If you knew the velocity of a particle you didn’t know its position. Was it still approaching the central point or had it already passed through? If you fixed the position of a particle you no longer knew its velocity. Was it inward or outward bound? All information about whether the universe was contracting or expanding had been lost.

  Presto! A minimum radius for the universe. (Thanks to Stkaa-Mathematician-to-S’Rawl, but don’t tell them that.)

  You knew you had the attention of a Jotok when three eyes were focused on you—when you commanded all five eyes you were a sensation. Big-Undermouth skittered off to bring him some squealing Grashi-burrowers in a bowl, which he munched while other arms curried his fur. Why couldn’t kzin sons be like this?

  He was beginning to understand his success as a Jotok trainer. At the onset of intelligence a Jotok bonded to anything that gave the basic verbal cues. He’d seen a machine-bonded-Jotok cripple its mind trying to be the son of a machine. The bonding moment was critical—but it wasn’t enough. The Jotok was looking for a father, and you had to be a father if you wanted a reliable Jotok slave.

  This was a confusing concept for Trainer-of-Slaves. He couldn’t be a real father to his Jotoki because he couldn’t give them combat training. They were herbivores, not Heroes. Only a father who was a coward would sire sons who were unable to fight. (Did Trainer still remember the murder of Puller-of-Noses? Perhaps. As an inexplicable aberration.)

  Trainer-of-Slaves liked his isolation, mostly because it kept him out of fights. He had to maintain a delicate balance between dueling and not dueling. He preferred to be obsequious—older warriors appreciated subservience because it allowed them to delegate duties—but younger Heroes tended to mark a deferential kzin as potential prey.

  To keep that nuisance at bay he had to maintain a reputation in the tournament ring. That he was Grraf-Hromfi’s favorite opponent was enormously useful to him. The proud warriors of the Third Black Pride, awed by their Commandant, didn’t see that Hromfi would never have hurt or humiliate Trainer, that the old warrior was only interested in providing an able disciplinarian for his sons. He was training Trainer-of-Slaves as proxy to cull his sons, a fatherly duty for which he had no liver.

  A warrior who smelled Trainer’s fear was restrained by the ear of the Commandant’s son he wore on his belt, and by the many scars Trainer carried on his arm and body from contests with those same sons. The scars were a badge of sorts which Trainer appreciated, however painful had been their healing, because they warned others to keep their irritation in check.

  Nevertheless, despite his growing skill as a combatant, he preferred his isolation. In the old days he would have hunted the savannas of Kzin-home alone.

  CHAPTER 18

  (2410–2413 A.D.)

  Isolation can never be complete within a military machine, no matter how remote the posting. Trainer-of-Slaves might hide behind his work, but his superiors always found him because they needed him. In time, Chuut-Riit came out for an inspection. The Black Prides were the bones of his Fifth Fleet, and he liked to keep his tail around developments. While his officers were with him in the maintenance hold of the Pride’s floating drydock, the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch, and looking out over a dismantled S
cream-of-Vengeance from a catwalk, Chuut-Riit turned to Trainer-of-Slaves.

  “I recall our conversation at that hunt on Hssin.”

  “Sire, I was young then, of shrunken liver and rattle-brain.”

  “But you showed the talents of a fine captain, a gift for feint and kill,” Chuut-Riit replied diplomatically. “Let me refresh your memory about the topic which intrigued me. You had a theory that male humans might be domesticated through their biochemistry. I recollect that you talked about a trigger to control the pace of their learning, then a block to freeze that plasticity once they had attained the desired slave behaviors.”

  “Sire, I have speculated thus—but never with any experimental animals upon which I could test my ideas. Mental physiology can take strange twists. The turns cannot be followed without sniffing the trail. Nor can the males be domesticated without providing the proper kind of breeding female.”

  “I have a partial-name for you if you succeed in this venture.”

  “Sire!”

  “Too many of our humans go feral. I suspect that on Earth, with its very large population, the problem will be worse. Hunting those humans who can’t adapt to slavery is a limited solution. The feral human is covert and has the ability to pose as a slave. When he strikes he can be deadly. There was a recent massacre of kzinrretti and their kits. It reminded me of your proposal. If you have the time to pursue the subject I can send you all the experimental animals you can use. I should like to take such knowledge with the Fifth Fleet.”

  “I am eager to accept!”

  “You have the space out here?”

  “I can set up feeding cages.”

  “Good.”

  Trainer-of-Slaves had a wall of clean cages erected in a munitions area that was unused—they were not on a war mission yet. The cages were small by kzin standards but quite adequate for a man-beast who wished to stand erect or lie down, and more than adequate for children. When the first group of experimental animals arrived, he established a fixed regime. They received five-eighths of the water and food they needed simply for keeping their cages clean. The remaining rations were given for appropriate cooperation. No other pressure was placed on the animals for refusal to cooperate.

  They were very noisy.

  Included with the first shipment was the best human-tech autodoc that Chuut-Riit’s officers had been able to locate, complete with instructions in German, English, and Japanese. Its computer was essentially a full compendium of human biochemistry, though not in an easily decipherable form. The autodoc had been supplied so that he could recycle animals damaged in experiments.

  First he tackled the autodoc’s exotic computer and set up a program to translate its records of human biochemistry into kzin-symbolics so that they could be transferred to his data-link and integrated with the generalized model of all known organic alien brains. He was amazed to recognize one of the human neuro-transmitters as similar to a kzin neuro-transmitter. Its peculiar chemical form gave him a clue as to why kzin reflexes were so much faster than human reflexes.

  Within weeks Trainer-of-Slaves had his first experiments running. Long-Reach was proving to be a talented surgical student. His initial try at removing the top of a male’s skull had provoked massive hemorrhaging—a mistake that was being repaired in the autodoc. Long-Reach’s second attempt was a success. His animal was restrained in a comfortable chair, the dome of her cranial bone sliced off at the top to expose the brain, her human head cramped rigidly to prevent her from hurting herself.

  Trainer had upped the room temperature in deference to the female’s furless skin. He had tattooed a dots and comma identification on her arm so that he wouldn’t mix her up with the other animals. Delicate probes were already embedded in her brain, measuring transmitter chemical activity, mapping the neural circuits involved in sensory input, monitoring blood flow, measuring neural activity changes as basic emotions were chemically switched on and off. He needed to get a paws-on feel for the brain structures he had extracted from the autodoc.

  But he hovered around his experiment nervously. He didn’t want her to die of shock while he was still so unsure of the human performance envelope. He had special catfish ice cream to give her when the data gathering was over in appreciation for her discomfort.

  In time he would learn how to erase her inquiring mind while retaining her ability to bear children and perform her sexual functions. He wasn’t yet quite sure what would be the best use for the males. If he was to domesticate them as work animals, he would need a different approach than if they were to be domesticated for food.

  Thus the years went by uneventfully. Experiments on slaves. Biochemistry studies. Neural map deciphering. Polarizer maintenance. A bit of fighter acrobatics in exchange for a fast repair job. Another lethal fight with one of Hromfi’s sons; another ear for his belt. More lectures on strategy. An embarrassing incident with one of Hromfi’s coy daughters, fortunately in the dark. Gunnery practice. More Jotoki to train. More questions to answer. Another round of brain experiments.

  His most productive line of research came after he deciphered the autodoc records which gave him the switching codes that turned neural growth on and off. He found it useful to know under what conditions human neurons could be made to reproduce or to bud-off new neurons. It fascinated him when he found that he could cause dendritic sprouting.

  That was only one of the enthusiasms for which his kzin impatience got him into trouble. He was wildly hoping to astonish his peers by fabricating a genius slave—but when he increased the number of neural connections in a man-male’s brain by an order of magnitude he succeeded merely in killing off his animal. Depressing.

  Occasionally excitement broke through the drudgery of incremental scientific advance. Yiao-Captain visited, his fervor so persuasive that the Pride actually moved their great antenna forty degrees away from Man-sun to observe some sort of freak gamma source.

  The wonder never lasted. Always they returned to the monotony. Yes, he was having solid if exasperatingly slow success with his experiments—but the work was so tedious! Yes, he was getting so expert that he could recycle most of his man-animals through many brain operations before they died—but the finicky detail work constantly left him on the edge of rage. He wasn’t sure that he could have gone through it all if it wasn’t for Chuut-Riit’s promise of a name. Thank the Fanged God for the high spots that broke the ennui.

  There was that second vacation on Wunderland when he was able to set up steady arrangements to restock his cages from an orphanage—he couldn’t just pirate experimental animals out of the war factories without the risk of a duel with some touchy kzin manager. Criminals and political prisoners were too much in demand for the hunts.

  His Jotoki kept his mind busy. Sometimes it was a racy card game. One of his Jotok discovered a mathematical theorem that was not in any data-link. Another of his slaves did an excellent project on the biochemistry of pain-accelerated learning in humans. That cleared up a whole lot of puzzling questions about human brain function. He didn’t know how he would have survived if his incurably curious Jotoki weren’t taking so much of the load off his mind. Sometimes all he had to do was ask a question, and one of his Jotoki would experiment with an orphan and come up with the answer. They had more patience than a kzin.

  Trainer-of-Slaves knew he had been with the Third Black Pride for too long when their antenna began to receive news of the gigantic battles in the Man-system. He had been at this post almost ten years. The battles that were juicing up Wunderkzin livers were themselves more than four years dead. Of course, with light-speed messages it never seemed that way. If a space battle lasted a month, it still took a month to play out—four years after the fact.

  The Fourth and Fifth Black Prides were stationed up ahead, listening, too. The Third Black Pride was behind Alpha Centauri as the last backup. The Prides frantically compared messages, filling in the transmission gaps, but they were all light-days apart, and it took days for the final compilation to be authe
nticated by the communications officers.

  None of the news surprised Grraf-Hromfi. Stoically he repressed his rage. But Trainer-of-Slaves was surprised.

  The Blood of Heroes was destroyed on the eleventh day. Vaporized. Trainer, tired from following every new bulletin, was stunned by the heroic death of his best friend. Four years ago. His ancestors were whispering. It was as if he had been living four unearned years. I’m a ghost, he thought, but that was silly. He felt pathos. Then the kzin anger took him. He wanted to fight, and there was no one to fight. He wanted monkey ears on his belt. But they had Ssis-Captain’s ears on their belt.

  Something about these humans that he did not understand. He went to his cages in a foul mood.

  “Hey, Dr. Moreau,” jeered a female with long black hair, “when do you sew on my wolf’s head?”

  “Svelda! Clean up your cage!” he snarled with his best animal pronunciation. It was just a matter of feeding the suction nozzle.

  “You come any closer and you get shit in your fur!”

  His mouth was twitching over his fangs. “Be careful. I’m in a vile mood.”

  “That’s news to me? What do I care? What have I got to lose? Kill me!”

  He purred to disguise his ire. “I’ll give you ice cream if you clean up your cage.”

  She was weeping. “You’ve mucked around in my brain so often I can’t think straight. Ice cream! Do you understand anything? Open the cage door and I’ll kill you. Do you know what happens to a woman when you cut up her brain? All the emotions come out! She loses control. She becomes an animal.” She held onto the bars and snarled at him, gnashing her teeth.

  The orphan children in the adjoining cages began to wail. They were so much easier to manage than these political ferals.