Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XI

by Larry Niven

  “Most of us only know it round the edges,” Marshy said. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

  “Life in the center. New life,” said Vaemar. “And anything else worth studying. New ecological relationships, for example. Urrr.” His ears betrayed the equivalent of a human frown of concentration as he spoke.

  “You are…abstractly curious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Umm…I see.” There was a flicker of a new expression in the man’s bleak old face. “I was there just after the Liberation. Everything dead. The water still covered with floating carrion. It made me sick and I’ve seldom been back. But I suppose nature’s tidied the place up in its own way now.”

  “That’s what we want to measure,” said Anne von Lufft, her face and voice full of eagerness. “The extent to which the center is being re-colonized.”

  “Can’t you do it with satellites?”

  “Not in enough detail,” said Hugo Muller. “Some of the life-forms are small. And satellites are expensive. There’s no substitute for being on the ground.”

  “That’s the right answer,” said Marshy. “Also, I suppose, there’s not much thesis-fodder to be had from satellite readings.”

  “We’re only third-years,” said Toby Hill. “They’re not big theses.”

  “But they might lead to big theses,” said Marshy. “What do you want an old swamp-hermit to do for you?”

  “Tell us about Grossgeister,” said Swirl-Stripes.

  “That would take eight minutes or eight lifetimes.” He touched a button and a map was thrown up on one wall. “You know its center is an ancient meteor crater, like Circle Bay itself. Or in this case, more than one crater. The bigger islands are mainly remnants of ancient ring-walls. It’s big. No one knows it all. You can’t even map it by satellite because satellites can’t tell all that’s land and all that’s shallow water, or see through overhanging forest. Peat burns under the surface in places and makes smoke and steam. A lot of the boundaries between land and water can’t be defined, anyway. Many of the channels and marshlands and smaller islands change. In the wider waters the currents build up sand bars and tear them down.

  “There are stretches like a great river of vegetation, miles wide and a couple of inches deep. It’s fed by rivers and by the sea and by underground springs. Part of it’s shallow, part of it’s fresh, part of it’s deep, part of it’s salty from the sea. There are wide stretches of open water. Men who have lived in it longer than I have perished, without modern navigation aids or smart boats, only a short way from home, lost in channels and islands that all look exactly like each other. Nobody’s ever known everything that lives—or lived—in it.

  “Humans have always fossicked round the edge of Grossgeister, but in the three hundred years we’ve been on this planet, we’ve never tamed it. We’ve hunted in its margins and its creeks ever since the first explorations—but from the first day we’ve had a feeling it was also hunting us. Your kzin Sires”—he told Vaemar and Swirl-Stripes—“never took much interest apart from the military aspects—of course you like to hunt dry-footed.”

  “We can conquer water,” said Swirl-Stripes.

  “You know that the heart was cooked out of it. The kzinti used the heat-induction ray when a particularly troublesome gang of Wascal Wabbits took refuge there. Then, during the Liberation, a big kzin cruiser was shot down. It came down slowly, and there were survivors who went on fighting for a while. The hulk’s still there, as far as I know. I suggest you leave it alone. I take it you’ve had basic ROTC training and know better than to monkey with any weapons or propulsion systems…I see you have your own weapons.”

  “Of course. We know there are many dangerous life-forms. We have had instructions.”

  “Never forget it. When the kzin ship went down, the crew abandoned it when they had fired the last of the ready-use ammunition that they could reach at the circling fighters and took to the swamp. They were a big crew, even after their battle losses, but their number was smaller by the time they got to this island. I’m talking about fighting kzinti, well-armed. You have maps, compasses, GPS?”

  “Yes, and motion-detectors and autoguards for our camp. And a field autodoc. Telephones, of course.”

  “Don’t rely on autoguards. And see here—” He showed the skull of a crocodilian on the shelving. “See those teeth? Bigger than yours, young kzinti, and a lot bigger than the rest of you can muster. Doc or no doc, you’ll be a long way from help if you strike trouble.”

  “We’ve got telephones and rockets,” said Rosalind.

  “If you have problems, don’t be backward about using them! I’ll come if I pick anything up.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We all help each other in the Swamp. And the abbot is an old friend of mine. He says to help you, and I owe him…Look there.”

  They stared down at a thing like a Persian carpet of lights moving through the water beyond the window, a couple of feet below the surface.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Anne.

  “There are a lot of bioluminescent forms. That’s something fairly special to show up in daylight. There are still endless wonderful things in Grossgeister, as well as dangerous ones. Night in the swamp can be something to see. If there are no natural lights I have my own.” He touched a switch and submerged lamps illuminated the water beyond the window. “As you know, the biodiversity of this planet is thought to owe a great deal to the frequency of meteor-strikes. One can watch the life-forms passing down there for hours, and always something new. I’d make a feeding-station there, but I’m afraid the big carnivores would take it over.

  “But to return to the danger, which I think is what the good Father wished me to impress upon you: there are about three hundred humans living in the margins of this swamp. People who know it relatively well. Some are second- or third-generation swamp-folk. In the last year at least fifteen have disappeared. And others in previous years. One here, one there. Don’t ask me how, or why. Just watch out.”

  “Were they wearing locators?” asked Rosalind.

  “No. These are swamp-folk, not ROTC. They live in the marshes because there they are left alone. A lot of people don’t like government, and if you suggested they carry an implant so government could track them they’d not take kindly to the idea. Even for their own good. We’re a contrary bunch who hang on the skirts of the Great Ghost…

  “Don’t forget,” he went on, “we’re relatively close to well-populated areas here. But a lot of this planet is wild. And things can come in from the wild.”

  “Then why do you live here?” asked Anne. “There’s plenty of drier land available.”

  “Very simple. I love it. Like the other swamp-folk, perhaps I’m not too partial to government. And with modern medicine available again I needn’t fear damp in my joints.”

  Not to mention the retainer you get for keeping an eye on things, thought Vaemar. Including things like me. I think your antipathy to government may be a little selective. Yet he also felt that, at one level, the old human was telling the truth.

  “The dangers?”

  “My Hero, young as you are, I see you have a few scars and ears already. What is life without danger? Even some of us monkeys know that as a question.”

  “Have these disappearances been plotted?” asked Vaemar. He was grinning, the reflex to bare the teeth for battle.

  “Of course. Here.” Marshy printed out several sheets of maps. “This is what the abbot meant you to have. Of course these are approximate areas only. Some of the times are only approximate, too. If you can see a pattern to it, good luck to you.”

  “One here, one there.”

  “Yes.”

  “But in the deeps rather than the edges…”

  “Yes, as far as we can tell.”

  “Not a plague, then. A plague would be less discriminating.”

  “Quite. But in the swamp there are always plenty of things ready to eat you. It may be people have simply grown careless with p
eace. Neglected to set their locks and fences because there’s no threat in the sky. Never mind the threat in the water. We’re not a strictly logical species.”

  They thanked him and walked back to the canoe. Marshy gestured to Vaemar and drew him back, a little behind the rest.

  “You are in charge?” he said. It was both statement and question.

  “Yes. I’m the senior student…although I’m actually younger in years, of course. We mature faster.”

  “I know the University policy: no discrimination for kzinti, no discrimination against kzinti. I agree with it. You must earn your successes fair and square. And the abbot told me about you, too. His recommendation I trust.

  “But what I did not, perhaps, wish to say in front of the others, is that with these disappearances…Kzin revanchists are suspected.”

  “I suppose that’s inevitable. Perhaps it’s even true.”

  “Do you think it’s true? Kzin defiance? It would be counter-productive…”

  “We are not very skilled at defiance,” said Vaemar. “We never had to defy enemies before. We just ate them up.” He licked his fangs. “I suppose some kzinti might do counter-productive things.”

  “Satellites and radar would show up any big movements—air-cars flying, for example, or the discharge of heavy weapons,” Marshy said. “And they’re monitored by machines and alarms that don’t nod off in the small hours. Something killing clandestinely sounds to some like kzin stalking behavior.”

  “Humans stalk, too,” said Vaemar.

  “There were a lot of feral children running wild on this planet by the time the war ended,” said Marshy. “I doubt they’ve all been rounded up. Untameable. Savage. Good at killing.”

  “Children of which kind?”

  “Both. They won’t be children now, though.”

  “I suppose I was nearly one of them,” said Vaemar. “I could have been left to run wild—or die—given that a few things had happened a little differently.” They were silent for a moment save for the sand crunching under their feet as they walked.

  “A couple of kzinti have set up a fishing business on Widows’ Island,” said Marshy. “Largely supplying fish products to other kzinti, I’m told, but some human trade too. It’s marked on the map I gave you.”

  “I’ll have a look…I assume you are suspicious of me?”

  “I’m a swamp creature of a sort. I’m suspicious of many things.”

  “So you’ve probably recorded our meeting.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If there are kzinti revanchists, and I join them, and come back and eat you, ARM would know what had been happening?”

  “My dear young fellow! You don’t suppose…” Marshy threw up his hands as if in indignation. Then he looked straight up into Vaemar’s eyes. “You will see the wonder of the place. I’ve told you of the danger. I know that it is insulting to stress danger to a Hero and that I have trespassed to the limit of acceptable manners in saying as much as I have. But remember, young Hero, the fact you are in charge means you are responsible for young lives besides your own.” He paused a moment.

  “I’ve a fair nose, for a monkey. You use toothpaste on your fangs.”

  “Yes. I spend a lot of time among humans, like my Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero. It seems a good idea. But we call it fang-paste. I will care for those in my charge.”

  “Yes,” said Marshy, “I think you will.” Then in a fair rendering of the Heroes’ Tongue, he added:

  “Snarr’ grarrch.”

  “Urrr.”

  The shadows of Alpha Centauri A were lengthening as they made camp on a large island. Wide stretches of open water gave a clear field of view all round. By the time the defenses and sleeping accommodation were set up it was nearly dark. Alpha Centauri B rose early at this time of year, in a blaze of purple with a silver core.

  The sky, however, was always brilliant with the light of the Serpent Swarm and Wunderland’s satellites, natural and artificial, that had survived the war and been supplemented since, hung like multi-tinted glow-globes. Even the dust of war had contributed a legacy of brilliant sunsets and a diffusion of luminescence at night. The high sliding lights that were satellites and spacecraft made a strange contrast to the primordial feeling of the swamp about them. The swamp had lights of its own—will-o’-the-wisps of incandescent marsh-gas, light-dragons—living beings but barely more substantial—and the more solid shapes of luminescent plants and animals, above, on and below the water.

  The humans and kzinti ate and slept separately, though Swirl-Stripes and Toby played banjos together briefly. The kzinti, more silent than the humans when they chose though far bulkier, would patrol the perimeter of the camp at irregular intervals during the night. Their own weapons, though far less devastating than most of the military weapons both sides had been employing by the time fighting on Wunderland ended, were judged more than adequate to handle any known swamp-creature. Vaemar made the first patrol. The oscilloscope on the motion-detector, an invaluable tool on biological expeditions like this, was in a constant frenzied dance and small creatures were to be seen in plenty. Vaemar made field-notes of these, and relaxed enough to snap up one or two of them, but there was nothing obviously threatening.

  Drifting in the channel with leaves and other small pieces of debris were the paired berry or bubble-shapes that he knew were the eyes and nostrils of crocodilians. Some of these pairs had enough distance between them to indicate formidable size, but the camp’s defenses, both physical and electronic, were effective, and the drifting eyes caused him no concern. He settled for a while into a stand of vegetation, still as another piece of wood as his fur rose and fell minutely to compensate for the movement of his breathing. Only the lights reflected in his great eyes or a gleam of the tips of his shearing fangs would have betrayed his presence to the unwary. He made some mental notes for essays he had due on other subjects—Caesar’s use of fortifications as defensive anchors in his campaign against the Helveti, the adaptation of gravity-fields as dust-deflectors for spacecraft passing through Trojan positions, possibilities of hyper-connectivity in neuronetic logic-lattices. There was also a long essay on the Normans—their ability to combine Roman and Viking cultures in medieval chivalry, marrying order and achievement to barbarian freedom and vigor. He had selected this as his major psychohistorical topic. He allowed himself a single move in the chess game he had been playing in his mind for some weeks, and settled into reflection.

  Given another turn of the wheel, he thought, and these humans would have been my slaves and prey animals, and I might have been a princeling in a Royal Palace. And then he thought, Yes, and with an eight-squared of ambitious elder brothers between me and my Honored Sire or any throne, not to mention Combat Master who trained, by all accounts, a great deal more lethally than does the ROTC. Very likely I would be dead. Certainly, I would not have been given a clean slate on which to write, perhaps, part of the destiny of my species on this planet. A colony of tubes, which might have been plant or animal, springing from the submerged roots of a tree at the water’s edge, pulsed with slow rings of light as it siphoned the water for small organisms. There was a fascination in watching it, though such a sessile thing, even if biologically an animal, would be beneath a traditional hunter’s notice.

  I am free to appreciate the forms and colors of life, thought Vaemar, free to see a strange beauty in all of this, and speak of it, free to pursue knowledge for its own sake, without my siblings killing me as an oddity. The thought should have been a comfortable one, but there was something about it that did not make for ease. Free to be a freak? Like Dimity-Manrret? Free not to be a kzin? That has a bad taste.

  There was a rushing in the water of a multitude of fish-like things, galvanized, it seemed, by a single mind and purpose. The bubbles of the crocodilians vanished abruptly. Something vast and dark heaved in the water before him. Phosphorescence deep below the surface showed rhomboid paddles and tapering, serpiform neck and tails. He resisted a b
rief and atavistic but, he knew, irrational, urge to leap down the bank and into the dark water after such prey. Certainly, I would have missed seeing this. Perhaps I am realizing what all royalty realizes sooner or later—high destiny is the tastiest of meat but it kills. Still, I have destiny of my own and cannot flee from it. Nor do I wish to. What does my Honored Sire Chuut-Riit think of me as he watches me from the Afterlife? That I have become half-human? Yet his own last words, found by Zroght-Guard Captain, written of his killers, my brothers, with his claw in his own blood: FORGIVE THEM. He meant allow them an honorable death, perhaps. But even so, many would think, that was an un-Kzinlike ending to his story here. And elder brother, who did not go mad with the rest, but who died saving me and the other new-born in the kittens’ nursery?

  One of my few memories of Honored Sire Chuut-Riit, my very last memory of him alive, is when I cried out to him how hungry we were. There was patience in his voice, even gentleness, as he told me: “Something very bad has happened.” Then he bade me wedge the door again and wait, as he went, knowingly, to foul and shameful death. We are more complex than we let ourselves believe.

  My destiny? I owe my life to many—to elder brother whose sense of duty over-rode the hunger-madness, to the unknown, probably Nameless and now almost certainly dead Hero who brought me to Raargh as he held the last kzin fort on Surrender Day, to Raargh himself a dozen times for his training, yes, and to the humans who fought at our side in the caves against the mad ones—against Henrietta, Honored Sire’s old Executive Secretary, and her madder daughter, Emma. There is some pattern behind it all. A kermitoid hopped onto his muzzle, then, realizing its mistake, attempted flight. He disposed of it with a swipe and snap. There was another dark wave in the water, vee-shaped, moving up the channel.

  My Honored Sire Chuut-Riit wished to understand humans, even if that began with dissection, and my Honored Step-Sire Raargh Hero has impressed on me my duty to do so now. Perhaps I begin to understand a little. The humans can be as destructive and barbaric as the kzinti, or much more so—I think of the Ramscoop raid, of humans running wild in the Liberation, of the mad ones in the caves—but humans can erect mental barriers against barbarism. Some of them are small, like the fang-paste that old human remarked on. Some are greater, like religious commands, or the human idea of the Knight. But those barriers are created, artificial, unnatural things. Kzinti can erect mental barriers against barbarism, too—where would we be without Honor, or without the wisdom and control of the Conservers?—but it strikes me, also, that there are things the civilized mind cannot cope with. Things like us, perhaps? Our ancestors came across civilized races and enslaved them with hardly a decent fight. We must change, but we must not change too much. I must study the limits of the civilized mind.