Man-Kzin Wars IV

by Larry Niven

  “You will tell us exactly what happened, step by step, and how you allowed animals—plant-eaters—to capture War Loot.”

  Fixer-of-Weapons slumped in abject despair. “I have told, again and again.”

  Halloran-Kzin showed no signs of relenting. Fixer-of-Weapons lashed his lone pink rat-tail, sitting in a tight ball on the floor, swallowed hard and began his tale again, and again Halloran used the familiar litany as a cover to probe the kzin’s inner thoughts.

  If Halloran was going to be a kzin, and think like one for days on end, then he had to have everything exactly right. His deception would be of the utmost delicacy. The smallest flaw could get him killed immediately.

  Kzinti, unlike the UN Space Navy, did not take prisoners except for Intelligence and culinary purposes.

  Fixer-of-Weapons finished his story. Halloran pulled back from the kzin’s mind.

  “If I have disgraced myself, then at least allow me to die,” Fixer-of-Weapons said softly.

  That’s one wish you can be granted, Halloran thought. One way or another, the kzin would be dead soon; his species did not survive in captivity.

  Halloran exited the cell and faced three men and two women in the antechamber. Two of the men wore the new uniform—barely ten years old—of the UN Space Navy. The third man was a Belter cultural scientist, the only one in the group actually native to Ceres, dressed in bright lab spotter orange. The two women Halloran had never seen before; they were also Belters, though their Belter tans had faded. All three wore the broad Belter Mohawk. The taller of the two offered Halloran her hand and introduced herself.

  “I’m Kelly Ysyvry,” she said. “Don’t bother trying to spell it.”

  “Y-S-Y-V-R-Y,” Halloran said, displaying the show-off mentality that had made his social life so difficult at times.

  “Right,” Ysyvry said, unflappable. “This,” she nodded at her female companion, “is Henrietta Olsen.”

  Colonel Buford Early, the shortest and most muscular of the three men, nodded impatiently at the introductions; he was an Earther, coal-black and much older than he looked, something Ultra Secret in the ARM before the war. Early had recruited Halloran four years ago, trained him meticulously, and shown remarkable patience toward his peculiarities.

  “When are you going to be ready?” he asked Halloran.

  “Ready for what?” Halloran asked.

  “Insertion.”

  Halloran, fully understanding the Colonel’s meaning, inspected the women roguishly.

  “I’m confused,” he said, smiling.

  “What he means,” Ysyvry said, “is that we’re all impatient, and you’ve been the stumbling block throughout this mission.”

  “What is she?” Halloran asked Early.

  “We are the plunger of your syringe,” Henrietta Olsen answered. “We’re Belter pilots. We’ve been getting special training in the kzinti hulk.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Halloran said. He glanced back at the hatch to the cell airlock. “Fixer-of-Weapons will be dead within a week. I can’t learn any more from him. So… I’m ready for a test.”

  Early stared at him. Halloran knew the Colonel was restraining an urge to ask him, Are you sure?, after having displayed such impatience.

  “How do you know Fixer-of-Weapons will die?” the black man said.

  Halloran’s smile stiffened. He disliked being challenged. “Because if I were him, and part of me is, I would have reached my limit.”

  “It hasn’t been an easy assignment,” the cultural scientist commented.

  “Easier for us than Fixer-of-Weapons,” Halloran said, smirking inwardly as the scientist winced.

  * * *

  There would be many problems, of course. Halloran would never be as strong as a kzin, and if there were any sort of combat, he would quickly lose…

  Halloran, among the kzinti, thinking himself a kzin, would have to carefully preprogram himself to avoid such dangerous situations, to keep a low profile concomitant with his status, whatever that might be. That would be difficult. A high-status kzin had retainers, sons, flunkies, to handle status-challenges; many of the retainers picked carefully for a combination of dim wits and excellent reflexes. An officer with recognized rank could not be challenged while on a warship, punishments for trying included blinding, castration, and execution of all descendants—all more terrible than mere death to a kzin. Nameless ratings could duel as they pleased, provided they had a senior’s permission … and Halloran-Kzin would be outside the rank structure, with no protector.

  Fixer-Halloran, when he returned to the kzinti fleet, would likely find all suitable billets on other vessels filled. To regain his position and keep face among his fellows, he could not simply “fit in” and be docile. But there were more ways than open combat to gain social status.

  The kzinti social structure was delicately tuned, though how delicately perhaps not even the kzinti understood. Halloran could wreak his own kind of havoc and none would suspect him of anything but overweening ambition.

  All of this, he knew, would have to be accomplished in less than three hundred hours: just twelve days. His body would be worn out by that time. Bad diet—all meat, and raw at that, though digestible, with little chance for supplements of the vitamins a human needed and the life of a kzin did not produce; mental strain; luck running out.

  He did not expect to return.

  Halloran’s hope was that his death would come in the capture or destruction of one or more kzinti ships.

  The chance for such a victory, however negligible it might be in the overall strategy of the war, was easily worth one’s life, certainly his own life.

  The truth was, Halloran thought he was a thorough shit, not of much use to anyone in the long run, a petty dilettante with an unlikely ability, more a handicap than an asset.

  Self-sacrifice would give him a peculiar satisfaction: See, I’m not so bad.

  Nobility of purpose.

  And something deeper: to actually be a kzin. A kzin could be all the things Halloran had trained himself not to be, and not feel guilty about it. Dominant. Vicious. Competitive.

  Kzinti were allowed to have fun.

  * * *

  The short broadcast good-byes to his friends and relatives on Earth, as yet unassailed by kzinti:

  His father, now one hundred and twenty, he was able to say farewell to; but his grandfather, a Struldbrug and still one of the foremost collectors of Norman Rockwell art and memorabilia, was unavailable.

  He disliked his father, yet respected him, and loved his grandfather, but felt a kind of contempt for the man’s sentimental passion.

  His grandfather’s answering service did not know where the oldest living Halloran was. That brought on a sharp tinge of disappointment, against which he quickly raised a shield of aloofness. For a moment, a very young Lawrence—Larry—had surfaced, wanting, desperately needing to see Grandpa. And there was no room for such active sub-personalities, not with Fixer-of-Weapons filling much of his cranium. Or so he told himself, drowning the disappointment as an old farmer might have discarded a sack of unwanted kittens.

  Halloran met his father on the family estate at the cap of Arcosanti Two in Arizona. The man barely looked fifty and was with his fifth wife, who was older than Halloran but only by five or ten years. The sky was gorgeous robin’s egg at the horizon and lapis overhead and the green desert spread for ten kilometers around in a network of canals and recreational sluices. Arcosanti Two prided itself on its ecological balance, but in fact the city had taken a wide tract of Arizona desert and made it into something else entirely, something in which bobbing lizards and roadrunners would soon go crazy or die. Halloran felt just as much out of place on the broad open-air portico at two kilometers above sea level. Infrared heaters kept the high autumn chill away.

  “I’m volunteering for a slowboat,” Halloran told his father.

  “I thought they’d been suspended,” said Rose Petal, the new wife, a very attractive natural blond with orienta
l features. “I mean, all that expense, and we’re bound to lose them to the, mmm, outsiders…” She looked slightly embarrassed; even after nearly a decade, the words war and enemy still carried a strong flavor of obscenity to most Earthers.

  “There’s one going out in a few weeks, a private venture. No announcements. Tacit government support; if we survive, they send more.”

  “That does not sound like my son,” Halloran Sr. ventured.

  When I tried to assert myself, you told me it was wrong. When I didn’t, you despised me. Thanks, Dad.

  “I think it is wonderful,” Rose Petal said. “Whether characteristic or not.”

  “It’s a way out from under family,” Halloran Jr. said with a little smile.

  “That sounds like my son. Though I’d be much more impressed if you were doing something to help your own people…”

  “Colonization,” Halloran Jr. interjected, leaving the word to stand on its own.

  “More directly,” Halloran Sr. finished.

  “Can’t keep all our eggs in one basket,” his son continued, amused by arguing a case denied by his own actions. So tell him.

  But that wasn’t possible. Halloran Jr. knew his father too well; a fine entrepreneur, but no keeper of secrets. In truth, his father, despite the aggressive attitude, was even more unsuited to a world of war and discipline than his son.

  “That’s not what you’re doing,” Halloran Sr. said. Rose Petal stood by, wisely keeping out from this point on.

  “That’s what I’m saying I’m doing.”

  His father gave him a peculiar look then, and Halloran Jr. felt a brief moment of camaraderie and shared secrets. He has a little bit of the touch too, doesn’t he? He knows. Not consciously, but…

  He’s proud.

  Against his own expectations for the meeting and farewell, Halloran left Arcosanti Two, his father, and Rose Petal, feeling he might have more to lose than he had guessed, and more to learn about things very close to him. He left feeling good.

  He hadn’t parted from his father with positive feelings in at least ten years.

  * * *

  There were no longer lovers or good friends to take leave of. He had stripped himself of these social accoutrements over the last five years. It was difficult to have friends who couldn’t lie to you, and he always felt guilty with women. How could he know he hadn’t influenced them subconsciously? Knowing this, as he returned to the port and took a shuttle to orbit, brought back the necessary feeling of isolation. He would not be human much longer. Things would be easier if he had very little to regret losing.

  * * *

  Insertion. The hulk of the kzin cruiser, its gravity polarizer destroyed by the kzin crew to keep it out of human hands, was propelled by a NEO mass-driver down the solar gravity well to graze the orbital path of Venus, piloted by the two Belter women to the diffuse outer reaches of the asteroids, there set adrift with the bodies of Telepath and the other unknown kzin restored to the places where they would have died. The Belters would take a small cargo craft back home. Halloran would ride an even smaller lifeboat from War Loot toward the kzin fleet. He might or might not be picked up, depending on how hungry the kzin strategists were for information about the loss.

  The fleet might or might not be in a good position; it might be mounting another year-long attack against Saturn’s moons, on the opposite side of the sun; it might be moving inward for a massive blow against Earth. With the gravity polarizers, the kzin vessels were faster and far more maneuverable than any human ships.

  And there could be more than one fleet.

  The confined interior of the cargo vessel gave none of its three occupants much privacy. To compensate, they seldom spoke to each other. At the end of a week, Halloran began to get depressed, and it took him another week to express himself to his companions.

  While Henrietta Olsen buried herself in reading, when she wasn’t tending the computers, Kelly Ysyvry spent much of her time apparently doing nothing. Eyes open, blinking every few seconds, she would stare at a bulkhead for hours at a stretch. This depressed Halloran further. Were all Belters so inner-directed? If they were, then what just God would place him in the company of Belters during his last few weeks as a human being?

  He finally approached Olsen with something more than polite words to punctuate the silence. A kzin wouldn’t have to put up with this, he thought. Kzinti females were subsapient, morons incapable of speech. That would have its advantages, Halloran thought half-jokingly.

  Women frightened him. He knew too much about what they thought of him.

  “I suppose lack of conversation is one way of staying sane,” he said.

  Olsen looked up from her page projector and blinked. “Flatlanders talk all the time?”

  “No,” Halloran admitted. “But they talk.”

  “We talk,” Olsen said, returning to her reading. “When we want to, or need to.”

  “I need to talk,” Halloran said.

  Olsen put her book down. Perversely guilty, Halloran asked what she had been reading.

  “Montagu, The Man Who Never Was,” she replied.

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s ancient history,” she said. “Forbidden stuff. Twentieth century. During the Second World War—remember that?”

  “I’m educated,” he said. As much as such obscene subjects had been taught in school. Pacific Grove had been progressive.

  “The Allies dressed up a corpse in one of their uniforms and gave him a courier’s bag with false information. Then they dumped him where he could be picked up by the Axis.”

  Halloran gawped for a moment. “Sounds grim.”

  “I doubt the corpse minded.”

  “And I’m the corpse?”

  Olsen grinned. “You don’t fit the profile at all. You’re not The Man Who Never Was. You’re one of those soldiers trained to speak the enemy’s language and dropped behind the lines in the enemy’s uniforms to wreak havoc.”

  “Why are you so interested in World War Two?”

  “Fits our times. This stuff used to be pornography—or whatever the equivalent is for literature about violence and destruction, and they’d send you to the psychist if they caught you with it. Now it’s available anywhere. Psychological refitting. Still, the thought of…” She shook her head. “Killing. Even thinking like one of them—so ready to kill…”

  Ysyvry broke her meditation by blinking three times in quick succession and turned pointedly to face Halloran.

  “To the normal person of a few years ago, what you’ve become would be unspeakably disgusting.”

  “And what about now?”

  “It’s necessity,” Ysyvry said. That word again. “We’re no better than you. We’re all soldiers now. Killers.”

  “So we’re too ashamed to speak to each other?”

  “We didn’t know you wanted to talk,” Olsen said.

  Throughout his life, even as insensitive as he had tried to become, he had been amazed at how others, especially women, could be so ignorant of their fellows. “I’ll probably be dead in a month,” he said.

  “So you want sympathy?” Olsen said, wide-eyed “The Man Who Would be Kzin wants sympathy? Such bad technique…”

  “Forget it,” Halloran said, feeling his stomach twist.

  “We learned a lot about you,” Ysyvry continued. “What you might do in a moment of weakness, how you had once been a troublemaker, using your abilities to fool people… Belters value ingenuity and independence, but we also value respect. Simple politeness.”

  Halloran felt a deep void open up beneath him. “I was young when I did those things.” His eyes filled with tears. “Tanjit, I’m sacrificing myself for my people, and you treat me as if I’m a bleeping dog turd!”

  “Yeah,” Olsen said, turning away. “We don’t like flatlanders, anyway, and … I suppose we’re not used to this whole war thing. We’ve had friends die. We’d just as soon it all went away. Even you.”

  “So,” Ysyvry said, taking
a deep breath. “Tell us about yourself. You studied music?”

  The turnabout startled him. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Yes. Concentrating on Josef Haydn.”

  “Play us something,” Olsen suggested, reaching into a hidden corner slot to pull out a portable music keyboard he hadn’t known the ship carried. “Haydn, Glenn Miller, Sting, anything classical.”

  For the merest instant, he had the impulse to become Halloran-Kzin. Instead, he took the keyboard and stared at the black and white arrangement. Then he played the first movement of Sonata Number 40 in E Flat, a familiar piece for him. Ysyvry and Olsen listened intently.

  As he lightly completed the last few bars, Halloran closed his eyes and imagined the portraits of Haydn, powdered wig and all. He glanced at the Belter pilots from the corners of his eyes.

  Ysyvry flinched and Olsen released a small squeak of surprise. He lifted his fingers from the keyboard and rotated to face them.

  “Stop that,” Olsen requested, obviously impressed.

  Halloran dropped the illusion.

  “That was beautiful,” Ysyvry said.

  “I’m human after all, even if I am a flatlander, no?”

  “We’ll give you that much,” Olsen said. “You can look like anything you want to?”

  “I’d rather talk about the music,” Halloran said, adjusting tones on the musicomp to mimic harpsichord.

  “We’ve never seen a kzin up close, for real,” Ysyvry said. The expression on their faces was grimly anticipatory: Come on, scare us.

  “I’m not a freak.”

  “So we’ve already established that much,” Olsen said. “But you’re a bit of a show-off, aren’t you?”

  “And a mind-reader,” Ysyvry said.

  He had deliberately avoided looking into their thoughts. Nobility of purpose.

  “Perfect companion for a long voyage,” Olsen added. “You can be whatever, whomever you want to be.” Their expressions had become almost salacious. Now Halloran was sorry he had ever initiated conversation. How much of this was teasing, how much—actual cruelty?