Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - XIV

by Larry Niven

  The men arrived at the village in darkness. Lights showed through the palings of the palisade that encircled the village; generators had been purchased and put to interesting uses. Eleven of the men dismounted, and some broke their breach-loading rifled muskets, loading them from bandoliers, while eyes watched them from the dark. The eleven crept up to the gate. The last man at the back sat and watched them, the three pack horses behind him sniffing the air nervously. His gun was already loaded.

  There was a young man at the gate. Hearing the bandits, he opened the gate cautiously and peered out, shining a torch at them. Had they been marauding lesslocks, he’d have slammed the gate shut and given the alarm by blowing on the whistle he kept on a chain around his neck. Seeing humans, he called out to them:

  “Hi, guys, who are you, then?” The lead bandit shot him, but did not kill him. The sound split the night more than the whistle would have done. The young man fell back, raised his own gun and shot the bandit stone dead, but it was too late. Inside the gate, the bandits shouted in triumph and fired into the air.

  Outside the stockade, the horses were beginning to panic. One of the pack animals screamed, reared, broke the lead which tied him to the last man’s horse and turned to run. There was a chorus of howls and the horse was submerged under a horde of lesslocks. The man caught the red eyes of the brutes and fired at them.

  Lesslocks were so called because the species was clearly related to the Morlocks, but were smaller and squatter. They were less intelligent than the baboons they somewhat resembled, but were stronger and much more aggressive; they hunted in big packs of several hundred. They surged towards the man, who reloaded quickly and fired again before he went under a snarling mob.

  Inside the stockade, deaf to the sounds outside because of their own firing, the bandits felt that things were going their way. The villagers were looking at them with horror, the women screaming. That was when Ruat and his deputies arrived. One of the bandits looked at a charging kzin, and tried to get off a shot. That settled things as far as Ruat was concerned. None of the other bandits even managed to aim; having five kzin warriors coming at you numbed the mind. The gates were dragged shut, leaving most of the lesslocks surging futilely about outside. The eleven bodies were torn apart. It made a bit of a mess, but, apart from the lead bandit’s head, caught in the branches of a high tree where it had been flung, it could be tidied up easily enough come morning.

  “Are we allowed to eat them?” one of the deputies asked.

  Ruat pondered. He wasn’t sure; he’d have to ask the judge for a definitive ruling, but he suspected not.

  “No, we do not eat intelligent beings. Not unless they taste really good, and these won’t,” he explained. This seemed reasonable to the rest of the kzinti.

  Outside the stockade, one of the lesslocks had picked up a musket. He found out how to break it, and copied what he had seen the man doing, taking a bullet from the bandolier and poking it into the breach. Then he closed the gun and pulled the trigger. It exploded and blew apart the head of another lesslock. Some dim sense of power came to the one holding the gun. It led the way back into the darkness, taking the gun and the bandolier with it.

  The cross-benchers had taken the side of moral virtue and supported Vaemar’s proposals when they had been made into a formal bill. This had allowed it to pass by a very respectable majority, to the discomfort of the government, which had opposed it on the principle that the opposition must always be wrong about everything. Vaemar had declined to be on the committee investigating the swamp-draining proposal, explaining that his presence might detract from the necessity of demonstrating complete objectivity. This was thought to be rather an eccentric perspective, but had, as it turned out, the effect of the committee feeling obliged to investigate the matter carefully and relatively honestly. The argument in favor of investigating the Valiant had some support from the anti-kzin faction, who hoped that it would show once again that the kzinti were murderous scum. The conservatives, joining with a minority who saw the force of Vaemar’s argument that truth had to be confronted no matter how uncongenial, and another, larger minority, which had some serious suspicions about von Höhenheim and were worried about being seen to support him, again had the numbers, and the item passed. And so it was agreed that an expedition was to be sent out to do something about the sunken spacecraft. Rarrgh and the Rykermanns, Greg and Sarah, and Stan Adler, as well as a sizeable crew, and two other teams of Stan’s news competitors were to go with it. This was going to be a very public event.

  The motion-detector at the Rykermanns’ door rang. Leonie awoke instantly, still with the reflexes of a guerrilla leader. The console by her bed identified the visitor as a large male specimen of Pseudofelis sapiens ferox. The lock identified the paw-print as Vaemar’s.

  The Rykermanns’ ground-floor sitting room was equipped with a footch, the couchlike furnishing on which a Kzin warrior might recline. After shaking hands with Nils Rykermann, Vaemar presented Leonie with a small gold music box, mounted on what he said was Morlock bone, intricately sculpted. Rykermann felt his eyes narrowing very slightly as he looked at this. A valuable, if small, gift from a kzin of high rank was often the prelude to a request. He also knew, however, that this request would not come at once. A trouble with such requests was that, should danger be involved, the kzin would fail to mention it, politely assuming that all had as much contempt for danger as itself.

  The robot butler brought appropriate food, and they chatted about the matters of Vaemar’s estate, such as the doings of Rarrgh’s increasing brood of kittens, and the work being done by Dimity Carmody, which Vaemar was sponsoring, on the further applications of Carmody’s Transform. Finally, as if by chance, the talk drifted to the doings of Orlando and Tabitha.

  “I would be grateful,” said Vaemar, “if you would allow them to accompany you on the Valiant expedition. Rarrgh will go with you, of course, to keep them out of mischief, and Nurse. They should not be a burden.”

  It was not the favor Nils Rykermann had been expecting.

  “My friend, may I ask why?”

  “Because I am too tied up with politics to go myself, and I want them to start mingling with humans at the earliest possible age. An expedition into the wild will be an excellent introduction for them.”

  “They are very young,” said Leonie.

  “Not much younger than I was when Rarrgh, who was then Rarrgh-Sergeant, defended me at the last siege,” said Vaemar. “There is an important matter at issue. You know only a small handful of female kzin have retained high intelligence. Karan is one. It will be a good chance to test Tabitha’s intelligence under stimulating conditions.”

  “I do not think that is all you have in mind, friend,” said Nils Rykermann.

  “No, not quite all. My Honored Sire came to the belief, as a result of his experiences not only on this world, but on others earlier, that one of our species’ greatest defects was the low place we gave to abstract knowledge. He had been on Chunquen, when many Heroes died because we kzin had no interest in Chunquen’s seas, or the locals’ submarine boats. When the Heroes saw their deaths coming upon them on the tips of nuclear missiles, it was too late to start learning. So he set out to study humans,” (A trifle of awkwardness here: a lot of the preliminary part of that study had taken the form of dissection, but there was no point in reviving that fact now.) “But I know as a result of my own studies how many other areas there are that we have neglected. Seas take up about sixty percent of Wunderland’s surface. I would like my son to have some knowledge of marine biology. The swamp taught me something of its fascination.

  “Certainly, I do not want him to fall into the trap I have seen in the history of both our species—to grow up overly aware that he is a noble’s son, living a life of ease and privilege, a Caligula, a Commodus, a Virritov-Riit. The abbot has mentioned this to me as a risk more than once. I want to start him on adventure while he is young. Something more than mere hunting for sport. Remember the Sage’s Chant:r />
  Knowledge, Oh Heroes, stands alone,

  Knowledge that comes with kittens’ playing,

  Knowledge that comes with rampant slaying.

  A mighty weapon on its own…

  “Certainly I plan to get even more sons. But Karan has so far disapproved of other possible candidates for my harem. She says we must be modern.” Leonie turned away to hide a smile. She could guess what form Karan’s disapproval would take. “And, of course, one must be careful with the Riit bloodline.

  “I was not much bigger than Orlando is now when I killed my first Morlock. We had come in wild country after Rarrgh put down Jorg von Thoma. I had slipped away from Rarrgh and entered the caves alone. I was no bigger than one of those Earth leopards at the time. Rarrgh disciplined me severely afterwards, but I believe he was secretly pleased with me. When he had finished he groomed me and fed me with some zinyah meat as a treat. I don’t know how he had got hold of it.”

  “I must say I am looking forward to seeing the old Teufel again,” said Nils thoughtfully, “and I guess he would not object to a field trip. But, my friend, I must be very clear about this. If Orlando and Tabitha are to accompany the expedition, they must be his responsibility, solely and entirely. You know how poor us monkeys’ senses are. I cannot run an expedition and be watching those mischievous little balls of devilment at the same time. You know, my friend—and we have been through enough together for me to be able to take politeness beyond its limits by stating this—there may be danger.”

  “You speak frankly, but I forgive you. Much rides upon Orlando. But Rarrgh will be with them.”

  The mess inside the stockade had been cleared up, graves dug outside the palisade and the bodies buried. The mess outside the stockade was harder to deal with: fifteen dead and partly eaten horses and one dead man scattered about the place. Bits of the man had been eaten as well, but the body had been torn apart. Nobody could have recognized what was left without DNA analysis, and the thinking was simpler and more direct around the village. He’d got what he deserved. Likewise the other eleven bandits. The kzin deputies and Ruat had been given a sort of triumph for saving the villagers, a parade around the village on the outside and then once around again on the inside. Slowly, roles were evolving and beaten into habits. The judge was meticulous about the discussions that went around, joining in every one and letting his opinion be known.

  Even the most obstinate of kzin-haters were coming around to the view that although kzinti in the abstract were murderous monsters, our kzinti were natural protectors. To the kzinti, something similar was happening. Although human beings in the abstract were natural slaves and food, our humans were basically, well, like kzin kits, essentially weak and helpless and to be protected. And the kits and children went to school together. It wasn’t much of a school; there were only two classes, those who could read and do sums, and those who couldn’t. They taught each other most of what they learned. They squabbled and fought indiscriminately and had to be punished when it got out of hand. Having buttons put on your claws was a dreadful disgrace to the older kits. The idea that the bigger kits should look after the little ones of both species, once planted, found good soil. The judge looked on his village with approval. If the folk in the big city could see how it was working out, here in the boondocks, maybe they’d have some hope for the future, he thought.

  Further out, things were not nearly as nice. The kzin seldom attacked villages or even homesteads. They knew they had lost a war. They believed that if they did not observe the truce, they would die, and would deserve to die. The human beings were less tolerant and would have been happy to hunt the kzin down, but with the weapons to hand, this was impractical. Some had discovered this the hard way: Darwin strikes again. In the main, the species stayed separate and distrustful.

  “Judge, there’s a man here from out east. Some small village. He says they got attacked by lesslocks, and there’s no survivors.”

  “Ask some of the men to ride out, armed. Oh, and take a couple of the kzin deputies with you. With you on horse and them on foot, you should be able to stay together. That’s important.” The judge was getting worried by the lesslocks. The numbers were getting unbelievable. Thousands of them in the neighborhood, and they were damned aggressive. They mainly hunted by night, and were cleaning up all the wildlife that moved except for fish. And they vanished for days or even weeks on end, suggesting a fair amount of travelling. Marauding lesslocks would overrun any homestead. Only a fair-sized village with a stockade and armed men stood a chance.

  When the posse got back, it was to tell a terrible story. There had indeed been no survivors. The village had been small, had no stockade and had been swarmed. There were marks of the lesslocks fangs on the gruesome half-consumed bodies of nearly fifty people. But there were no guns. The guns and the ammunition had been taken. And one of the bodies had been shot.

  The judge was worried. The village had defenses and could survive any ordinary attack, but the outlying villages, of which they had only partial and fragmentary knowledge, were another matter. And what if the lesslocks started attacking in daylight? The village could not sustain itself against a siege; their food was outside the stockade and already hunting was getting much harder.

  “We’re going to have to get help from the government,” he told the men and kzin. “I hate to do it, I really do. Anytime a government gets its nose into anything they make a mess of it. But this time I don’t see an alternative. So Hans, Ben, take some fast horses and get to Vaemar’s palace. Get one of the deputies to run with you. Let Vaemar know the situation. He said he was here to help us help ourselves. Well, this is when we take him at his word. We need serious weaponry at the very least. Ride by daylight, come back by daylight. No night riding anywhere near here. Got it?”

  “Got it, Judge, we’ll be back as soon as we can.”

  Karan stood with her two younger kits held close, both squirming to free themselves. She was not as big as Vaemar or the deputy, but she was big for a kzinrett and had the sort of presence that made up for any lack of inches or kilograms.

  “Vaemar is not here at present, he is in the Bundestag and will be in committee meetings after that. I am his voice. Tell me your troubles and it will be as if you told him.”

  Hans explained about the massacre and the threat the lesslocks posed. The fact that they had obtained guns and seemingly knew how to use them caused Karan to think hard.

  “I must come and see for myself. I need to talk with your judge and to see the massacre. It is not that I doubt you, at least, not more than I doubt anyone, but I need hard facts, not second- or third-hand reports. If you return tomorrow, I shall be there before you. I shall fly to the village. I will bring some military people to give their assessment. Be sure that I take this very seriously and that Vaemar’s promise to you will be kept.”

  The aircar held Karan, her new kits, two military men and one military woman. It landed outside the village after overflying it, and the judge, two men, Ruat and two kzin deputies came out to meet her. The combination of human and kzin in amity struck Karan as it had Vaemar. She had plenty of human friends, but this grouping had arisen quite independently. She saw something that nobody except perhaps the judge was capable of seeing: that the lesslocks were not entirely a curse. The dynamics which had made a man-kzin cooperation inevitable were intensified by the threat of the lesslocks. Intelligence was coming together to defend itself against a blind rage that had the numbers. Villages that had a mixed population were stronger than those which did not, and would survive. A sort of social Darwinism.

  “Welcome to our village, my lady Karan,” the judge said, hobbling forward on his stick. “I take it that Lord Vaemar is busy and you are his deputy?”

  “Vaemar is busy in the Bundestag, but he knows of this matter, and although we had a slight difference of opinion on whether I should come in his place, and whether I should bring Orion and Arwen here, we are in complete agreement that this is urgent and needs to be handled
immediately. I have come to observe for myself the massacre and confirm that the lesslocks have guns.” Karan bowed politely, and let the squirming kits down, where they went racing around. It must be safe, it was mid-morning and the lesslocks were creatures of the dark. And nearly every species was kind to infants. The kits’ big eyes triggered something protective across different species. No doubt there was a genetic recognition that the kits were too small to make a good meal, and it was better to let them grow bigger before eating them.

  “Please come into the village, my lady. I suggest sending the aircar into hover mode just in case, but if you will follow me, you—” That was when the lesslocks attacked.

  There were only a handful of them, but one jumped up out of the ground almost at the judge’s feet, with a gun raised. The aircar had nearly landed on it. It was close, and much, much too close to Arwen, who gazed at it with astonishment. The judge threw himself in front of the kit and lunged. It had been a long time since he had acquired skill in fencing, and his stick was no schläger, but the tip went into the lesslock’s eye, and the creature fell back and dropped the musket. Another lesslock stood and pointed its musket. The gun waved about uncertainly, the animal having only a vague idea of aiming. The barrel fell until it pointed at Arwen. The roar from Karan, the deeper roar from Ruat, the sound of a shot and the judge throwing himself in front of the kit happened too quickly to be distinguished, but Karan snatched Arwen back only a second before Ruat hit the lesslock and ripped its head off. The other lesslocks fled, and Ruat and the two deputies took them down within seconds. Karan looked down at Arwen. The bullet had emerged from the judge with the momentum of a thoroughly slugged baseball, and the kit had caught it in one paw, and was inspecting it to decide if it was edible. “No, dear, it’s yukky,” Karan pronounced, and took it from her and threw it in the long grass.