by Larry Niven
The shock of that brought him back to Starbase. The dream had been an astonishing exercise of his imagination. He hadn’t realized just how many competent people he knew. When had that happened? That old bastard Fry had been doing things to him.
He peered into his past. One must look back to have the wisdom to look forward. What had Fry seen in him, a misfit who was challenging every petty mind with words, even fists? What exactly had Fry done to transform him into a man who felt comfortable with the people who did the real work of the world? It was a bit of a puzzle.
A liberating idea was forming in Yankee’s head as he continued to stare at Tam’s chart. Why not set up a General Staff-In-Exile and really get ready for the Patriarch’s next move. What had the sergeant said to the soldier who found himself recruited into an incompetent army? “Complaining will only kill you—fast; start recruiting your own good men!”
Chloe was now very pregnant. One of her more devious schemes involved deceiving her obstetrician. She planned it very carefully without Nora’s help. Nora wasn’t very good with lists and lying. She thought of the idea when Nora started to plan for the birth in her own way—everything they’d need, water for washing the baby, swaddling clothes, makeshift tools to cut and tie the cord.
“How does she know these things?” Chloe asked in bed with Yankee that night “I can’t believe it. Look. What do you think this is?”
“It looks like a piece of wood.” He pinched it. “Hardwood.”
“It’s for me to bite on when I’m in labor! She made me test it.”
“What’s so surprising about that?”
“She doesn’t remember anything about Earth!”
“Her kzin taught her.”
“Those male-centered strutters! What would they know about women?”
“He was a professional slave trainer, remember. In her dairy Nora thought he wanted to set up a business breeding human slaves. He taught her everything she’d need to know to teach her daughters how to bear healthy babies.”
“You’re joking! A kzin?”
“Who do you think was Nora’s midwife? According to our xenologists, kzinti males are wiser about birthing than human males. Their females bear and nourish, even protect. The males have to handle the emergencies and the cultural transmission. Fathering one’s male kits is a very serious business.”
“They are warriors who go off to war and abandon their young!”
“Chloe. You were pregnant. I abandoned you to go off on a wild military cloak-and-dagger adventure to W’kkai that some young firebrand could have done just as well. If the kzin had killed me, you would have born our child and probably done a very good job of raising the tyke, teaching, nourishing. That’s human society. Men have abandoned women all through history—and the women have raised their children. Why do you think, willy-nilly, that kzin society works the same?”
“They’re warriors! They run off to battle the minute they hear a shot fired!”
“You’re anthropomorphizing.”
“What?”
“Seeing man in kzin. Think about this. In a kzin warship there is no age barrier to service. If a kzin cannot find a baby-sitter for his sons, or a creche, or a brother to take care of them, he takes them to battle with him. They fight—just like the four-year-old son of one of your farmer ancestors milked the cows.”
“Child labor on a warship? That’s horrible!”
“Think about this. Suppose a kzin leaves or sells a wife. Suppose she runs away. Suppose a mightier kzin is attracted to her and takes her by force. Who gets the kits? Always, always, always the father. Suppose he is killed or goes to prison or abandons his kits. The male who takes over the family of a kzinrret who is left with young kits kills her male offspring. That is hell on the patriarchal line of any kzin who doesn’t have very strong fathering genes. Now a monkey like me, I can sow my wild oats, abandon my woman and know that some other man will bring up my kid, or she will.”
Chloe switched on the night light. She rose in the bed like a Valkyrie who had chosen a warrior about to die. “You wouldn’t do that to me!”
“I already have. I have a boy on Earth, about your age. He was raised by another man—successfully, so far as I know.”
She was shocked, “You never told me.”
He smiled wanly. “You never told me about the first boy you seduced when you were thirteen.”
“You ratcat!” She smashed a pillow down on his face.
“Mumflpuf,” he said.
She lifted the pillow off because she wanted to hear the rest of the story “Well?” she said.
“It’s a long story I’ll tell you someday. It was war. The kzinti were at our gates. Who knew? The next fleet might be the end of the human race. The hyperdrive was new I had a chance at a deep space attack, maybe farther than any man had ever gone. It seemed like the thing to do.”
“You just abandoned him?”
“Chloe, I never got back to Earth. The mail to 59 Virginis is very slow.”
When the first of the labor pangs came to Chloe, she sneaked up to Nora’s apartment. She was worried about the one-way mirrors so she began to pile couches and different pieces of furniture into a cave with a crooked entrance, Nora helped. (She thought she knew what was going on. At Mellow Yellow’s estate on W’kkai she had seen some of his kzinrretti go into a nesting frenzy) Chloe had no intention of depending upon Nora. Nora might be a mother. She might have been trained by a kzin midwife—shudder—but Chloe had read books. She had her infocomp loaded with obstetric advice, with its comm ready to call out. In case. And she had a flashlight.
She crawled into her cave and began to deliver the baby. It was a strange sort of bonding gift that she wanted to give to Nora. Besides, she was curious about what it had been like to give birth in a kzinrret nest deep in the plundered city of Hssin, poisonous gases swirling outside, protected only by makeshift seals and a refurbished life-support machine, with no human company for light-years. It took hours. After nearly biting through her hardwood chip, she was beginning to decide that she was crazy.
The baby came out with a plop, and Nora knew what to do faster than Chloe could remember what she had read. The baby cried to fill its lungs. Nora tied off the umbilical cord while Chloe was looking up the right picture in her infocomp. They washed her tiny body in temperate water. And there she lay cuddled in swaddling clothes, a sleepy, exhausted baby girl. They watched her by flashlight in the cave of furniture, two grinning women.
Yankee was furious. He rushed her and the baby off to the infirmary. Her obstetrician was furious and she rushed the very healthy baby into an infant’s autodoc for a careful checkout. The baby woke up and wanted to be fed.
Yankee got over being mad. He was getting used to being married to a teen-ager. In many ways he was the father of nine children, varying in age from Nora down to his own newborn. It was quite an experience dealing with an adult child, a wild teen, three silent daughters, two shy boys, a baby, and Monk.
Sir Monk, as Yankee called him, helped out enthusiastically. Monk had always thought of himself as the man of the family when his family had been the whole human race. In that way he thought like a kzin. He had gross problems: when in control he acted kzinish, when unsure or overwhelmed he turned into a slave. He had a frightful time with English grammar and idiom but loved the computer that patiently taught him. He was happy to have an uncle. Politics confused him. His first real conversation with Yankee was about master Mellow Yellow, told in a broken mixture of spitting-hisses and English that never quite jelled into grammatical sentences—how he had saved his friend from the dungeons of W’kkai. Yankee didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was Mellow Yellow who had mind-wiped his mother and eaten boys like Monkeyshine for lunch after finishing up his experiments.
As a reward for working so hard, Yankee sneaked Monk into the Starbase simulators and taught him how to fly a starship in virtual space. There was no stopping this kid. He was a born warrior—and eventually his kzinti accent w
ould wear off. What Yankee dreaded was the lessons in kzinti martial arts that Monk insisted on giving him, claw to claw.
So it always came as a welcome relief to change diapers and feed the tiny girl whom Chloe insisted on naming Valiance. Val pursued the simple things of life such as sleeping in her father’s arms.
•
Chapter 24
(2439 A.D.)
The interstellar game of “Trolls & Bridges” became an instant success among a certain group of the military. Major Yankee Clandeboye had toyed with the name “General Staff-In-Exile” but went chicken before typing such blasphemy into the net. He put it down to his new maturity. After all, he had just turned fifty.
The game developed a different structure than he had originally imagined. It proved impossibly complicated to set up a “shadow” ARM. Instead, “Trolls & Bridges” evolved into a “command patch.” There were a lot of isolated officers out there for whom the command lines had failed, who were looking for the kind of “work-around” that the structure of T&B provided.
Normally, bypassing command lines in a military organization is a bad habit because it leads to contradictions and inconsistencies in practice. Nothing destroys an army faster than captains who have to carry out the orders of generals who aren’t speaking to each other. Nevertheless command lines are bypassed all the time through what has been called for centuries “the old boy’s network.” Bypassing command lines is an art form with definite strategies, rules, and protocols.
Young men under sixty are not adept practitioners of this arcane art and are advised to seek counsel from a mentor. The game of T&B, in its first naive implementation, presently put its players in conflict with powerful men. Admiral Jenkins had a fit when one of his patrols received two sets of orders. He suspected the hand of Fry—though Fry was innocent—and moved in for the kill, demanding a full investigation of Starbase shenanigans.
Fry caught off guard, did his own instant investigation and found out that he had been elevated to Grand Vizier of a very weird caper that had been going on under his nose for months. He studied the rules in shock, penned a scathing rejoinder to all Starbase nitwits, reconsidered, remembered that he needed an excuse to see Nora and hastily hitched a ride to Barnard’s Star. Immediately on arrival he lectured his young fans in the sternest terms. But by then he was amused, even elated.
As Grand Vizier of T&B, he sat his boys down and showed them how their game really worked. With one hand he arranged to have Admiral Jenkins promoted to head up the “Jenkins Commission on Military Ethics.” Writing that report would take up at least five years of the admiral’s life. In case Jenkins got too pushy…well, there were ethical issues from his own past that he had forgotten about. With the other hand Fry used some contacts in the Wunderland House of Patricians to outmaneuver the ARM and push Rear Admiral Blumenhandler into Jenkins’ old job.
While these promotions were going through, Fry suspected that a quick review of patrol methods, desk ready, might please Blumenhandler when he moved into Jenkins office to take over. The current T&B Grand Kzin Strategy model was laid on the table. It called for new kinds of patrol information. Then a document was compiled out of recent T&B items sent in by patrol officers who felt that certain unacknowledged reports needed a critical second ear. Fry added his own wish list. Gibraltar was stumbling for lack of an aggressive assessment of the Patriarchy’s smaller worlds. Finally, synthesis produced a written policy that Blumenhandler could take seriously.
“That was a lot of work.” Fry was enjoying teaching his students. He was coming to like his maverick major. “But is your stuffy father-in-law going to read it? We need an insurance policy. A personal touch. I’m going to ask him a favor. That sets me up in his debt so later on, when he needs it, he can ask me a favor.”
With Blumenhandler’s biases in mind Fry made a special request, in his own name, for patrol time to seek out the rumored kzinti stronghold, Warhead. Perhaps, while finding it, they could also locate the rumored Pierin aliens, who might then become mankind’s ally. He implied that Wunderland officers were best equipped to carry out such a mission.
Lucas Fry had no authority to issue any such orders to the UNSN patrols. But, of course, Chloe’s father, in his new capacity, did. The orders would get issued.
Over the weeks that the general was with them, Tam Claukski watched him in awe, taking notes and codifying what he saw. The old reprobate held seminars on everything that a devious officer should know about side-stepping the rules. The general was very adamant about what should go through channels, what might profitably be transmitted through the T&B comm lines, and what had to be aborted.
One whole day he spent with Tam manually processing messages which Tam’s procedures had been editing and routing automatically.
“Take this guy.” Fry meant the message, not the sender. He used his pen as a pointer. “These three sentences are a lament to the gods and a whine about the sender’s powerlessness. The next paragraph is an outright appeal for sympathy. Then he gets angry and we have to read what is essentially a page of diatribe against his commanding officer. He wraps up his case with a conspiracy theory. Only the last two lines contain the nub of a useful suggestion. If this sadsack tried to put such a missive through normal channels, he’d get head detail.” Fry laughed. “But as I understand it, T&B is trying to be more than a normal channel.”
Tam grimaced. “It’s pretty hard to do something with that kind of ranting mess. I have a good semantic program that I’m training to sort and flush gripes like that.”
“No,” said the general. “Flushing just dumps out the gold dust with the sand.” Fry used his pen to block the whining in red, then attached the note, “Delete.” He recast the last two lines in a larger, bold typeface, this time attaching the message, “Expand and resubmit.” He grinned. “That ought to shock the shit out of our raving victim. Make him think. Otherwise send him out on head detail.”
The next day, too early, Fry held a seminar for the Starbase coterie who had signed up for “Trolls & Bridges.” He combed over the T&B categories with a razor sharp ruthlessness. Tam saw his categories as a skeleton around which to build a defense strategy. Yankee saw them as an alternate command structure. Fry saw them as communication nodes that connected people in ways that command lines couldn’t. The general tried to explain to them why, in two months, the T&B team had been able to make a better strategic analysis of the rising kzinti threat than the whole apparatus of expensive ARM think tanks.
Looking out over the room, he saw that these eager officers, who would probably dominate the roster of heroes of the next war, were flattered but didn’t really believe him. They might make jokes about the ARM, but they had been brought up in awe of its secret dominion. The ARM had pulled some deadly tricks out of its hat when the kzinti seemed overwhelming. The ARM wore a mystique of invincibility, of endless cabalistic powers it could command if it had to.
So go back to basics. The general spent the next hour lecturing these neophytes on ARM’s modus operandi. How did the ARM develop Grand Strategies? It had the resources to recruit mankind’s best strategic minds. It even had a science of creative mood drugs. Inject just the right sense of danger in which to think about threat strategy. Inject just the right kind of cold concentration in which to work out logistic problems. The ARM’s think tanks were high-powered places. But they weren’t working—because they couldn’t transfer what they knew to the grunt tacticians who had to implement the Grand Strategy. Why?
For four hundred years the ARM had been acting to repress the cycles of revenge that once threatened to tear the Earth apart and infect space. From immemorial time mothers had pledged their infant sons to the task of murdering their father’s murderer. Men plotted revenge for the rape of daughters. Tribes massacred each other to revenge an insult. Each brooding generation laid down its sedimentary layer of pain, claiming special victim status. Revenge was gradually formalized to the level of religious dogma and elevated to an art form by technolog
y—eventually scouring Europe with religious wars, devastating the Middle East with Holy Jihads when vengeful Christian pushed Jew into lands where prophets had elevated revenge to a way of life.
It was all nonsense. Yet none of it was easily given up. Even later thinkers of this violent era, atheists repelled by the mindlessness of a religious spirit that buried men in the mud of France’s trenches, invented “class warfare” as their new spiritual cleanser. The ARM forced men’s minds into a mold of peace, catholic in its guidance.
The centuries of effort had been so successful that these young officers of Barnard’s Starbase didn’t know their own history. Each one of them saw mankind as essentially benevolent. Whatever they thought, they felt that evil was an aberration, not a choice. Whatever they thought, they felt that a soldier’s soul remained in mortal peril, absolution his lot.
The general spoke to shock them: whatever lurked out there, kzin or no kzin, the ARM could not permit men to risk their souls by thinking about war. Better that they die and go to heaven in a state of grace. The military strategists of the ARM were like the priests of the Old Catholic Church who read the Bible but did not permit their parishioners to read the Bible because it was too dangerous. Fry noted wryly that a priest who cannot talk to his flock about theology atrophies as a theologian and ends his days by harassing Galileos.
The general drove on with his analogies. Like deadly experimental viruses, the ARM kept its military strategists in sealed bottles, inside sealed labs, a fragile mankind protected from contact with the military mind through elaborate protocols. Were these strategists still virile? How dangerous could a mutating virus be after generations of isolation from its host, feeding on government pablum?
Was he making his audience hostile by laying on the heresy so thick? He had to convince these boys that they were mankind’s mainline of defense against the kzin. “The ARM’s military strategists can’t even talk to each other without going through rigorous need-to-know protocols. I can’t talk to them without going through channels and telling the protocol keepers what I need to know and why! I could be dangerous. I might get infected and lead Earth to a rediscovery of revenge. I might resurrect the ultimate weapon and use it.” Fry paused, then paced until he had his curious audience waiting for his next words. “When I tell you that Barnard’s Starbase is the best strategic think tank that humanity has right now, I mean you to take me seriously.”
