Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - VI

by Larry Niven

  “Yah, he’s here. How bad is the damage?”

  “It hasn’t affected her intelligence at all. Bright as a brass button. She just doesn’t think with words, that’s all. Whatever intelligence is, it’s not language.”

  “You can’t think without words, Yankee.”

  “That so? Try catching a ball with words. What you mean is: words facilitate communication. A hermit never needs words.”

  “She has no words at all?”

  “I haven’t been able to teach her a single word of English. She has some kzinti chitchat, not much. She calls me ‘Hairless Hero.’ That’s a grievous insult but she says it with a smile. She’s still got her dimples.”

  “She can smile?” General Fry was reaching for straws.

  “You bet. Her specialty is practical jokes. It’s Nora’s smile because the face is the same, but it isn’t Nora’s smile. It’s less inhibited. Nora was coy. This lady hasn’t got a drop of coyness in her body. When we met she was more interested in my funny-looking penis than me.”

  Chloe giggled and put both hands over her mouth, sputtering.

  “General, you have a eunuch’s giggle,” complained Yankee.

  Chloe grabbed the comm. “It’s me, silly. Do you think I’m not down here waiting for you?”

  “As long as your father’s not there. It’s so good to hear your voice. How’s the kid?”

  “Thumping,” she said proudly.

  “They grow up to be monsters, you know. I have one eight-year-old here who is half as big as the general, and twice as smart. He damn near threw me over his shoulders and hauled me off to Kzin.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just one of my misadventures. I’ll tell you about it someday.”

  The general wrestled with Chloe to take back his comm. “How are Nora’s brats?”

  “The three boys are fine. The three girls are a bit spacy—brain damage. Now put my sweetheart back on the line.”

  “Stop talking!” Chloe complained. “Come down here instantly!”

  “I’ll have to jump out of the Lincoln and come down on beam power.”

  It was ARM guards who brought Nora to the surface. They had “restricted” quarters for her set up, spacious for Starbase. Yankee had called ahead to see that Nora’s strange boudoir furniture from the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch was used. The medical staff and equipment were in place. And teachers, psychologists, nursery staff. But no press. Absolute censorship.

  Chloe took over to become one of the few people with easy access to Nora. She was attracted to this heroine of the wars. Here was the mother she had never had—a woman brave enough to attack kzinti with what amounted to bare hands. One mother had died. This “surrogate” mother was only wounded. Chloe was absolutely determined to be her friend, even find a way to talk to her.

  Nora, in turn, was attracted to Chloe. Pregnancy had been a large part of Nora’s remembered life; she couldn’t recall a time before she had been pregnant. In her mind she was the only child-bearing woman in the universe. That her daughters might someday bear children was unreal. Her first reaction to Chloe was to try to pull off those maternity clothes to see the belly. Nora was not fond of clothes.

  The guards restrained her, but Chloe knew how to handle the situation and when they met again a few hours later, in privacy, the expectant mother showed the experienced mother what she wanted to see and held the woman’s hand where it could feel the baby kicking. From that magical moment on, there was a bond between them. Chloe was the only one able to reassure Nora when her fur began to fall out.

  The psychologists left around many objects so they might observe their patient’s interaction modes. Nora loved picture books and discovering new ones with Chloe. Her favorites she shared with her children. She loved to play Russian-egg games with her four-year-old daughter. She’d pop off a layer of egg and hand it to her daughter. Her daughter would pop off the next layer of egg and hand it back. When they got down to the tiny chicken, they’d both laugh, put the chicken back in the tiniest egg, and begin to reassemble the eggs again. Over and over.

  Nora liked to pile up chairs against the door to keep the psychologists out, take off her clothes and chase Chloe around the four-posted bed with a pair of VR goggles until she had them firmly on Chloe’s head so they could gallivant together in a virtual reality game called Other Worlds. It was hide-and-seek in a booby-trapped landscape whose rules of physics changed with each game.

  The booby traps didn’t “kill” you—but they did do things like change the frequency of your visual spectrum, or change your size, or change the coefficient of friction of your skin, or your permeability to stone. When the two friends found themselves in one world where some objects had positive mass while others had negative mass, Chloe learned a major lesson about intelligence. Nora adapted to the strange forces. Chloe floundered, desperately trying to figure out what was going to happen by solving Newtonian equations like F = -ma.

  Nora was generally just a good-natured child-woman who liked to play practical jokes on the psychologists and doctors who were studying her, but she had a terrible temper. Once, when the ARM was tightening up security; the maintenance men came in and put a lock on the door between her room and the nursery ARM wasn’t thinking of the nursery when they specified all doors. Nora improvised tools out of broken furniture and smashed the lock to bits, spitting and snarling like a kzin the whole while.

  Of course, Nora and Chloe had their fights. Nora began to avoid Chloe, sulk, pretend she didn’t exist, hide Chloe’s goggles and retreat into their virtual world alone. “What’s the matter?” She knew she wasn’t going to get an answer, but she kept asking it. I’ve got to teach her to talk! She sat down with Nora’s favorite picture book. She let Nora turn the pages, but she was very firm about pointing at things and naming them. That afternoon Nora painted the book with mayonnaise.

  All of this had been observed. Chloe knew that one-way mirrors were in the walls but they were so unobtrusive that they were easy to forget. The staff who watched was invisible, even socially. But one day Lura Hsi invited Yankee’s wife to lunch. She was the wife of Dr. Hunker, the boosterspice expert who was in charge of repairing Nora’s brain—if that turned out to be possible. Lura was petite for a Jinxian, shorter even than most Jinxians, but she had the round powerful muscles of an ox on a neck thick enough to have pulled a yoke. She was a psychologist.

  “Let me tell you what Nora can’t.”

  “But I love her! I’m doing everything I can to help. She’s just misunderstanding. I’ve got to talk to her. Communication solves everything. Yankee and I have this wonderful way of settling our problems because we can talk it out!”

  “She’s not going to talk,” said Lura.

  Chloe slumped. “I know. She growls at me, though. Sometimes she cusses me out in kzinti. I know because my translator told me.”

  “She has a vocabulary about the size of a chimp’s.”

  “She must be able to learn something, just a few words. She’s so bright! I hate the kzin who did that to her!” Chloe was trying to hold back her tears.

  “Let’s focus. State the problem.”

  “She can’t learn to talk,” said Chloe.

  “I see.” Lura smiled. “Is that your problem, or her problem?”

  “It’s her problem. Yankee says I talk too much.”

  “If you could ask her, she would agree with Yankee. You talk too much.”

  “How else is she going to learn to talk!”

  “Chloe, think. You are running on automatic instinct. When mothers teach their children to talk—they chatter. They point at things and say words. They open doors and say ‘open.’ A normal child has the machinery to process that and that’s the way you should teach them. Nora has a great soul—but souls don’t learn to talk; it’s neural machinery that learns to talk.” She paused to make her point.

  “She’s angry at you for trying so hard to make her talk. She can’t talk. People have been insisting that
she do what she can’t do ever since the first day she boarded the Abraham Lincoln. For Finagle’s sake have pity on her! Everyone who meets her sees a sweet two-year-old and they fall in love with her—and go into an automatic language teaching mode. ‘See the doggie. Isn’t he a nice doggie? Doggie won’t hurt. Do you like black doggies? Old Rover, here, is black or do you like brown doggies like this one in this book? See the brown doggie. Oh, look at the red retriever.’”

  Chloe thought about all this silently.

  “Let me make an analogy. I had the sweetest father in the world. He was just as sweet as you are.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “But all he ever talked about to me was Riemannian Metrics and Gödel Recursives and Fiechbacker Hyperspaces—since I was two. He might be having an interesting discussion with my mother about ancient Roman politics or about ice cream flavors with his brother but whenever I would walk in the room his eyes would glaze over and he’d go into his education-of-Lura mode. He had his mind set on making a mathematician out of me. He was a research mathist at the Institute because he was a hopeless teacher. He lectured and little me listened. I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t ask questions.

  “No matter how hard I listened it was all gibberish. I loved that man but he expected me to do the differential geometry of n-space before I could count, let alone add. I wanted to be a math genius, I was desperate to please him but I wasn’t at all sure of what he did. I thought he laid kitchen floors because of a very famous piece of mathematics called Kitchener’s Tiling that he was working on when I was three. I wanted him to stop and start over, but I was too shy to tell him. He was uninterruptable! I was a very angry young girl.”

  “I’m talking too much?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she’s going to have to learn how to communicate.”

  “Oh, she can communicate, all right. A very word-oriented Chloe just isn’t listening. Didn’t Nora brush mayonnaise all over your pretty book today? How else is a non-verbal person going to tell a verbal person to shut up?”

  “Should I stop seeing her?”

  “Darling, you’re doing great. But I have an exercise for you to try with her that will make all the difference in the world. I’m forbidding you to use words around her—except words like ‘yikes’ or ‘ouch’ or ‘wowie’ or ‘damn’; she’ll understand those.”

  “Talk like a brainless teen-ager?” Chloe was horrified.

  Lura smiled and broke out a second beer for herself offering one to Chloe without saying a word.

  “Oh wow!” said Chloe taking one and popping the top, comprehension dawning. She took a swig.

  “Remember when she was playing the Russian-egg game with her little girl? What was she saying? Watch me open the pretty egg. Look at the prettier egg inside! Take the egg. Copy what I did! Now give me the egg and I’ll copy what you did.’ All without using any words. You can’t tell me that’s not communication.”

  Chloe was conceding the argument with her facial expression, if reluctantly. “She’s not ever going to learn differential geometry that way,” she said glumly.

  “Yes. And she can’t wish her mother in Iowa City a happy birthday. And she has a very hard time telling a chatterbox like you to stop trying to teach her how to talk. She tries so hard to be human—but we humans insist on thinking that only language is what makes us human.”

  “I’ll be good,” said Chloe. “Yikes! I forgot to tell you; we just got a box from Iowa City. Her mother sent us all her old homework. We even have her nursery school crayon stick figures with arms coming out of the ears! She drew this fantastic picture of a kzin when she was in the second grade. It is so tall it has to stoop under the top of the page. It scared me cross-eyed! I am a chatterbox, aren’t I?”

  •

  Chapter 23

  (2438 A.D.)

  One morning Tam Claukski eased himself into Yankee’s office, warily stepping around a wobbly pile of books, Adam’s apple bobbing. He had big plans. Before he had even found secure footing, he was proposing a gigantic simulation of a future Second Man-Kzin War that he had just thought up.

  It was Tam’s immoderate imagination which had induced Yankee to steal him from Admiral Blumenhandler. Like most enthusiastic young men this prodigy was totally unaware of the size and scope of the tasks he took upon himself. Yankee liked to describe such gargantuan efforts in terms of “gallons,” an ancient flatlander measure of the amount of midnight oil that had to be burned in a whale oil lamp to get the job done. The major kept a straight face. “Well, don’t just stand there pontificating, sit down!”

  “Where?”

  Yankee motioned for Tam to move the VR helmet onto the pile of books. Then he took assorted reports off the controller for the wall screen so that Tam would have a way to show off. “Fire away. You have five minutes.”

  In response, Tam moved the helmet to its pedestal, balanced it, and recklessly rolled his chair up to the controller, smiling the whole while. What appeared on the screen was “several gallons” worth of an incomprehensible organization chart. Tam was rapturous. “I got hit by this bolt of lightning. For a tactician like me, Grand Strategy is a bit awesome.”

  “I suppose one cure for awe is to grab a million volt line.”

  “This is the first time I’ve ever been able to get a handle on the whole bag.” He raised his arms in supplication to the wall. “What do you think of that?”

  “I don’t understand a line of it,” complained Yankee. “It looks like the command structure of a military org. That’s not the way ARM is organized.”

  “But the ARM is peacekeeping,” admonished Tam. “We’re talking about a real war, here.”

  “You realize, of course, that we’ll be well into a third war by the time you get the ARM to consider the idea that it might be a good idea to set up a study commission to plan an approach to reorganizing for the second war.”

  Tam looked at his diagram in consternation. “You’re misunderstanding me, sir! That’s not a military reorganization chart. I’ve just arranged my ideas into manageable lumps. Strategy is complicated. It takes a lot of praying to Murphy. I just want to know if I’ve left anything out before Murphy clobbers me for my neglect.”

  “Leave it on the wall and I’ll stare at it for a while.” Yankee stared at the wall. “I hope you’re not in a hurry!”

  “No, sir. You’ll have a couple of days with my masterpiece. Tonight I have to make up a strategy chart for the kzinti High Command. That’s going to be hard because they are used to making their major decisions at the local level. And we don’t have enough information on the Far Side.” He meant the worlds at the far side of the Patriarchy.

  “So, you’re appointing kzinti admirals too, eh?”

  “With your permission, sir.”

  “That’s quite all right with me. Make sure we have a worthy Patriarch to oppose us—and put the VR helmet back on the chair when you leave.”

  From time to time during the day, Yankee called up various different files that were attached to the wall screen’s boxes. He couldn’t get the idea out of his head that these were all job descriptions. Poor Tam thought like a Von Neumann machine; he was going to linearize the graph, and then continually cycle through it, doing everything himself, Finagle help the boy.

  Chloe called in to chat—a pleasant interlude. Her gossip about the Brozik industrial family primed him to turn from his routine screenwork to read up on the current economic outlook of We Made It. Military budgets were tight. He had been trying to determine for a long time how much strain the crashlander civilian economy could take doing military research under the table.

  The Broziks seemed to be putting all their efforts into a set of basic spaceship shells that could be finished either for civilian use or as warcraft. That meant that, in case of war, the naval assembly lines would already be in place—though Yankee wasn’t sure how much good that would do; Procyon was sitting up there with its head in the Patriarch’s jaws. Chloe’s news, direct from her f
ather, was that Barnard’s Starbase was receiving, for test and finishing, one of the Brozik shells equipped with a Wunderland salvaged kzinti gravitic drive, courtesy of Admiral Blumenhandler. Gossip through hyperspace was faster than the military command line.

  He called up his naval architect specialist to meet him for a coffee and salad. If Stefan Brozik wasn’t continually getting the right military feedback, his project could be a disaster. It was going to be damn good to get their hands on one of his shells. They could give it a workout, shake down the problems.

  When he returned from the snack he rearranged some of the book piles on his floor so that he would have pacing space. The chart on the wall kept staring at him. He sighed at its supreme logic. If only he belonged to such a rationally structured org, he could get something done. It seemed like everything that had to be done was being done out of channels if it got done at all.

  General Fry was a master at that. He didn’t even have a command at Starbase but he was essentially acting as its staffing officer from distant Gibraltar—quietly pulling out the men from Barnard who weren’t wanted here, or didn’t jibe with Starbase’s aggressive philosophy, and as quietly arranging for the inflow of people who were inclined to take the Patriarchy as a real threat. Yankee had learned a few tricks from his mentor. He was already making tough hardware decisions—and hardware wasn’t even part of his training duties. And there was Tam who didn’t even know that he was doing the work of a chief of staff’s adjutant.

  The strain of thinking was sometimes physically exhausting. Yankee stopped pacing. He flopped into his chair, confronting Tam’s electronic glyphs. Unbelievable, the number of things that had to be done just to position mankind against a new assault. In a dream world he would have real power to assign names to the boxes on the wall! They were job descriptions and jobs had to be carried out by men, didn’t they?

  The dream took on a life of its own. Reverie transported his spirit to Sol, where, in a fanciful office as the biggest black gorilla at ARM, he made endless profound decisions. He put Blumenhandler in charge of patrols. Jay Mazzetta became his top trouble-shooter. Fry was, of course, chief of staff. It was a pleasant power fantasy. Names for his mythical duty roster came like the flow of a bursting dam.