Man-Kzin Wars IV

by Larry Niven

  The yellow-orange monster brought out a portable translator which began to recite the same phrase in many languages. Finally the cultured electronic voice asked, “What languages do you speak?”

  “English,” she said.

  “My English also is very nasty,” spat-hissed the kzin. “Might be machine help us. I learn English. You teach?”

  “Thomas Alva Edison!” she swore in utter amazement.

  “Brain injury,” he growled. “I am decorous and able veterinarian. Skilled with female brains.” His ears unfolded proudly. “Much experimentation. Fix all animals.”

  He set the autodoc to raise her to a sitting position and then held out a dish for her, a stemmed sherbet glass with a spoon. Nora noticed that she was ravenously hungry. Her kzin continued to babble without making much sense. “Please be decorous slave and clean cage,” he said. He held a spoonful of his gift to her mouth.

  It was vanilla ice cream flavored with chunks of fish.

  CHAPTER 22

  (2420 A.D.)

  While Lieutenant Nora Argamentine recovered in the autodoc of the slave quarters, Hrith-Master-Officer maneuvered his Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch to pick up the wreck of the mystery scout. The floating drydock’s maximum acceleration capability was ten g’s, thus they took much longer to reach the scout than had the original fighting triad. After grappling the wreck into the repair hangar, Trainer-of-Slaves and his Jotoki mechanics began a meticulous study of the vehicle.

  The structure of the engine made no immediate sense. Trainer didn’t expect it to. His first priority was to determine its function and limitations, his second, its manufacturability. Then, at leisure, he could reverse-deduce its operating principles with the aid of a team of physicists.

  Long-Reach came up with a preliminary assessment of pieces that were clearly gravitic manipulators. That tended to confirm Trainer-of-Slaves’s suspicion that the monkeys were now building a sophisticated gravity polarizer that could travel very close to the speed of light, somehow bypassing the “blue-light” bleeding effect that limited all kzin drives.

  Such a conclusion fitted the data. The peculiar pulse patterns observed at Man-sun and transmitted by the Patriarch’s Nose were five years old. They looked like a series of tests of a new vehicle. And here, 4.3 years after the completion of the tests, was one of the test vehicles on a test combat mission. Simple. Grraf-Hromfi’s fear-hope of faster-than-light magic was just that.

  Non-scientists like Grraf-Hromfi, in spite of their admonitions to others, were always leaping to conclusions before they gave their science speculations deep thought. The rumors about an ancient lost civilization that had spanned the galaxy before the birth of the sky’s brightest stars provided just the kind of fantasy universe in which to dream of superluminal travel.

  Spread the rumor that fossil relics survived on some wrinkled moon of a red star forty light-years thither and kzin, by the herds, would set upon an aimless life of wandering to track down the chimera. The older the empire, the grander its mysteries. The deader the empire, the greater the heights to which it must have risen. The Hero’s Tongue had a short word for such fantasies: the-forest-bush-with-leaves-that-smell-like-meat. Somewhere there were always kzinti hunting that bush.

  Trainer made the rounds, feeding the naked children in the cages. His experimentation schedule had been destroyed by recent events, but animals had to be fed no matter what. Tired, he retreated to his cramped quarters, putting off Long-Reach, who wanted a game of cards.

  He rubbed in the talcum to get at the dirt and smell. He worked the powder into his fur, and then massaged himself down with a good vacuum vibrator. That felt good! He found a hard pillow for his head, and stretched out on the bunk. Now for a liver-jolting virtual adventure to get away from life’s problems! He popped the goggles over his eyeballs with a little squirt of lubricant.

  Would it be possible to find out what Grraf-Hromfi had been watching lately to get him so nervous about superluminal superstitions? The Lord’s access file was restricted, but that didn’t stop some shrewd guessing. Vocally, he keyed in “faster-than-light,” then, after some thought, “ancient empires.” He already knew that would give him more than a thousand titles, so he narrowed it down even farther by adding to the list, “fight adventure,” and for good measure, since he hadn’t had a sniff of kzinrret in years, “female interest.”

  He got a bad virtual adventure of a Pride of Heroes swept beyond the Border of the Patriarchy by a Warp Storm. They fought giant worms who chased them into the crystalline ruins of a civilization that had been born during the Fireball of Creation, so old it had died before the galaxies could form. Just as the largest worm was about to eat them for slaying its worm warriors, they fell into a crystal room with a perfectly preserved superluminal device that glowed malevolently when they touched it.

  Unable to resist temptation, they were transported to the inner glory of the galaxy, to a dark cool world guarded by giants. The giants were protecting the galaxy from the sight of creatures that would destroy all who looked upon them, such was their beauty. Over the dead bodies of the giants they found the svelte kzinrret-like creatures deep at the center of the dark forest, at a wondrous waterhole. Then kzin warriors fell upon each other, slicing, stabbing, clawing until only the greatest warrior remained. Faster than light, he brought his kzinrret-like harem back to the ancient crystalline mysteries and lived happily ever after, hunting throughout the grassy plains beyond his palace.

  In the morning Trainer-of-Slaves tried gentle questioning of the lieutenant-beast about her ship. She was not yet fit enough for torture. She volunteered only her name and rank, a puzzling concept for Trainer. He did discover that she was interested in a picture of her youngest sister and so he went through the personal effects of the Shark’s crew which had survived. That was how he came to be caught up in the illustrations of a “comic book,” copyright date: January 2420 After the Damning. Purple-caped flying monkeys KAPOWed ferocious red kzin who were defending the walls of their captured Elvis Presley Monastery.

  Something made him check the data-link files on the material they were receiving from Man-home. He didn’t keep it in his head but their dating system was well known because of its oddity. All events were referenced from the time they had tortured a Trinity of Criminals on Golgotha Hill, nailing the Father and the Son and the Grandfather to wood so that buzzards (a carrion bird) might feast upon their livers.

  The latest events to come in from the Patriarch’s Nose and the Tigripard’s Ear carried the Man-sun date: November 2415 After the Damning. By the immutable laws of physics any Solar event later than that was forbidden to Alpha Centauri. 2420 was essentially a taboo future.

  Trainer-of-Slaves pondered alien copyright law for a day. Did they have a five-year grace period in which plagiarism was allowed before the copyright applied? In the meantime, his Jotoki disassembled a burned controller. All the intricate electronic parts were labeled We Made It. That would have been an ear tickler—if you didn’t know that We Made It was a monkey colony more than eleven light-years from Man-sun and thirteen light-years from Alpha Centauri. There wasn’t any economical way that such standard parts could be shipped via ramscoop or slowboat.

  It was time for another devious conversation with the lieutenant-animal. He researched the transcripts from the First and Second Black Prides, selecting nonmilitary items that she might be willing to talk about. He had an ally in Long-Reach. His Jotok had discovered that she liked the sweet-bitter berries his slaves enjoyed with their ration of leaves.

  He came armed with berry ice cream. She was still suffering from extensive burns and the after-effects of a concussion, but she could remain out of the autodoc for hours at a time, if she was properly chained.

  “Fur Face, when does my uniform come back from the cleaners?”

  He grinned at her around his fangs in response to her insolence, though his liver wasn’t in the expression. The indignities one had to put up with from kzinrretti! He was confused. He
wasn’t sure which rules applied to sentient females. The grin was purely reflexive.

  “All right, already. Sire! I abjectly request some decent clothing, and will kiss the ground you sit on when they appear.”

  He put on his goggles to consult his English Vocoder, spitting and growl-hissing requests. “I can inject you with chemicals that will make your fur grow,” said the elegant voice of the machine. Then a rougher voice. “Auburn hair. Your head,” said Trainer-of-Slaves who hated to rely on translators, but he had to give up and let the machine finish his thought. “Your fur will grow in fine and attractive. I have already done the experiments and can guarantee a positive result.”

  So much for having 98 percent of the genes of a chimpanzee, thought Nora wryly. “Sire! I’m sure your five-armed sewing machine over there could stitch together an elegant little outfit for me in no time at all! He gets to wear livery. Why can’t I? Please.”

  The monstrous yellow-orange cross between a Basketball Center and Football Tackle didn’t understand, but politely listened to the catfight coming out of his translator.

  His eyes lit up as he comprehended. “Yes. Livery. Will make red-green garters for—” he consulted his Vocoder—“knees and elbows. You like?”

  “I think I need some of that ice cream,” she groaned. She had already consulted with Long-Reach about the fish in kzinti ice cream, and he’d promised a fix. He proffered a golden dish of vanilla with purple spots. He’d already stolen some of the berries, an irresistible temptation. She didn’t complain. She just ate in silence, sometimes twirling her little curl nervously.

  “Long-Reach will now sing Top Ten Songs of 2415 years after torture of Christ Gang. English I can speak. Sing no. Now, Number One on your Hot Shot Hour!” What else could he say? He was taking the words straight off the recording.

  The green and red liveried being who was also a quintet began to sing to the naked prisoner of war as she sat among the cramped gray bulkheads of a warship, in chains, eating ice cream. She did not know that she was being deviously questioned. She did not know that this was a substitute for torture, that the answers to his questions were vital to him. Was she a seer? Could she see the future? Could she tell Trainer-of-Slaves of events between 2415 and 2420 that weren’t permitted yet at Alpha Centauri?

  The five voices that came from the five lung slits in the arms weren’t human, but they knew harmony and each word was enunciated with passionate clarity though the accent was no sound that she’d ever heard in her short life.

  “When the night is cold

  and my arms are bold

  and you are very far away…”

  It was the song they’d been singing everywhere at the time her graduation prom, at the end of High School, when the two year Military Academy course was just a kid’s dream. She had to cry. She tried not to, but that only made the bawling worse when it came. Charlie was dead. Prakit was dead. Those tough thugs in the hold, so gung ho to kill kzin, were wasted. Her mission had failed. She had failed her Dad. And she didn’t have the least idea about what to do with a seven-foot tall kzin who courted her with a five-armed singing comedian.

  “Humans cry when the ice cream is good,” she sniffed to cover herself.

  “Berries, ptui!” said Trainer-of-Slaves.

  “I think too much,” continued Nora, wiping her face.

  “That can be corrected,” said Trainer-of-Slaves. “I have done the experiments.”

  “How did you learn these songs?”

  “You animals do not keep radio silence.”

  “You listen to that? All the way out here?”

  “In past-gone hour, I watch beastly halo, Blaze of Glory!”

  She wasn’t crying anymore. She was grinning. “Lots of kzin killing in that one. I loved it! You monsters killed my beloved Dad. That holo won an award for its acting. Passion, the spirit of mankind that you’ll never crush!”

  Won an award. She was predicting the future. In November 2415 Blaze of Glory had only been nominated for an award, one of sixteen. “Bad acting,” said Trainer-of-Slaves. “Monkey in kzin-suit, too slow. Wrong emotions. Liver was sick.”

  He pulled the lieutenant-animal further into the conversation, letting her vent her anger at the kzinti. When she was angry she leapt before she thought. Three more times he caught her predicting the future.

  By then he was sure.

  He reported his suspicions immediately to Grraf-Hromfi, though the timelag between the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch and the main body of the Pride was still too great for conversation.

  Trainer’s old mentor took the news well. His return message read: “So the old warrior can still sniff out a different scent. A superluminal drive is exciting. But it compromises our whole strategic position. We’ll have to react quickly. Keep me informed.”

  In the vast hangar in the belly of the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch Trainer drove his Jotoki slaves in their dissection of the wreck. How could such a little thing, lost in the spotlights of the hangar, bring back the awful fear he thought he had lost forever? He paced around the hangar, looking down at the alien shape, keeping his feet inside the local gravitic field of the catwalk. His liver was telling him to run in panic. He was no longer the mighty Hero willing to take on the whole Man-system, and after conquering it, to ride elephants to the hunt with monkeys carrying his bedding and his equipment and his kzinrretti in palanquins.

  He returned to Lieutenant Argamentine in the middle of the day and opened the autodoc coffin, waking her, to ask her his question directly. “You came here faster than light!” he accused.

  She smiled at him without showing her teeth. There were dimples in her furless cheeks. “That’s not for me to say.”

  The answer terrified him and he went away.

  With a superluminal drive the animals could penetrate the Patriarchy with impunity. Every system would be isolated, on its own, unable to call on nearby warriors for aid. Heroism would be a sham. A newborn kit could kill his father with unopened eyes. In the face of such unnaturalness, run! The Fifth Fleet should run, should disperse, should hide!

  Kzin warriors are taught to obey orders on penalty of death. But it is also instinct for them to create their own orders. A superior officer might be only light-hours away but the skirmish will be decided in minutes. The General Staff might be only light-days away, but battles can be decided in hours. The Patriarch who orders a warrior to the borderspaces, gives his order only once. After that the warrior makes his own orders for a lifetime and trains his sons to train his grandsons to report back that the mission has been accomplished.

  The Patriarch requires obedience, but the ruthless Emperor of Light executes all warriors who are not their own Chief of Staff.

  Trainer-of-Slaves’s internal Chief of Staff was telling him to flee. How can I be such a coward? He thought he had conquered cowardice. He’d tried so hard! Desperately he recalled words that Grraf-Hromfi had once tossed away casually—almost unaware of their profound wisdom—words which had found a fertile home in Trainer’s mind: “To flee one’s duty is cowardice, but to flee while retaining a grip on duty can be the act of a Hero!” Perhaps his mentor would condone fleeing in this extreme case. The thought that he might have an ally in his fear was comforting.

  Trainer vowed by his grandfather that wherever he fled, he would bring duty with him. He was in turmoil. He had conquered fear only to be trapped by his own prey. Short-Son of Chiirr-Nig was running on the surface of Hssin with no place to go, every door guarded by the enemy.

  He knew that this little engine mounted in the wreck of a tiny ship was the most valuable asset in the whole of the Patriarchy. The entire Fifth Fleet must be devoted to protecting it. If a hundred thousand Heroes died in its defense, that would not be too great a sacrifice. He could flee, but there could be no honorable fleeing without the engine.

  By the time the Nesting-Slashtooth-Bitch had reestablished its station within the Third Black Pride, Lieutenant Argamentine was well enough for the cages. The berries in th
e ice cream had done no good at all. She became violent when she was introduced to the cage room, incoherent with rage at the sight of the orphans, even though there were only three of them left uneaten and they had ample room.

  “They are children! You monster, they are just children!”

  She actually attacked him. To defend himself he had to hold her by the forearms off the floor. That didn’t help him because of the well placed kicks. She had hands-and-feet combat training! He had to toss her away. It was a true kzinrret rage. But most kzinrretti did not get that angry unless you were about to eat their kit’s!

  To appease her he did what any kzintosh would have done—he gave her the children and put them all in the same cage and left her alone.

  He found it remarkable how quickly that single act calmed her down. She forgot her bruises as she lavished attention upon his experimental tots. He liked that. She was going to make very good breeding stock. The cage was too small for them all—he noticed that—but he did nothing about it because he was interrupted by an urgent message.

  There is a kzin saying: Trouble does not give the single finger; trouble comes with four claws.

  Detection staff reported three more gravitic pulses with the signature of the superluminal drive—but at distances too far to intercept. And Detection was reporting the appearance of an armed feral navy in the Serpent’s Swarm. Trainer-of-Slaves had received a priority query from Grraf-Hromfi.

  Could Man-sun, as in right now, be using superluminal craft to deliver weapon supplies for the feral fleet?

  Then Traat-Admiral began to send out ominous directives. The messages were fresh, but their source events were two days old.

  Grraf-Hromfi ordered an emergency goggle-briefing of all officers of the Third Black Pride. He wasn’t waiting for them to reach his lecture room on the Sherrek’s Ear, he wasn’t even waiting for a quorum of goggle-connects. By the time Trainer-of-Slaves was in link, the chaotic meeting was at full tempest, and though he could not smell it, he could see that the air was redolent of aggression. When Trainer moved his goggled head, he saw no less than five warriors, lips twitching, barely able to repress their fightfever.