The Houses of the Kzinti

by Larry Niven

  "I was thinking of volunteers," said Locklear, who knew very well that Scarface would honor his wish if he made it a demand.

  "If we had time to train them," Scarface replied. "But that ship could be searching for the pinnace at any moment. Only you and I can pilot the pinnace so, if we are lost in battle, those volunteers will be stranded forever among hostile monk—hostiles," he amended. "Nor can they use modern weapons."

  "Stalwart probably could, he's a natural mechanic. I know Kit can use a weapon—not that I want her along."

  "For a better reason than you know," Scarface agreed, his ears winking across the fire at the somnolent Kit.

  "He is trying to say I will soon bear his kittens, Rockear," Kit said. "And please do not take Boots' new mate away merely because he can work magics with his hands." She saw the surprise in Locklear's face. "How could you miss that? He fought those acolytes in the cave for Boots' sake."

  "I, uh, guess I've been pretty busy," Locklear admitted.

  "We will be busier if that warship strikes before we do," Scarface reminded him. "I suggest we go as soon as it is light."

  Locklear sat bolt upright. "Damn! If they hadn't taken my wristcomp—I keep forgetting. The schedules of those little suns aren't in synch; it's probably daylight there now, and we can find out by idling the pinnace near the force walls. You can damned well see whether it's light there."

  "I would rather go in darkness," Scarface complained, "if we could master those night-vision sensors in the pinnace."

  "Maybe, in time. I flew the thing here to the village, didn't I?"

  "In daylight, after a fashion," Scarface said in a friendly insult, and flicked his sidearm from its holster to check its magazine. "Would you like to fly it again, right now?"

  Kit saw the little man fill his hand as he checked his own weapon, and marveled at a creature with the courage to show such puny teeth in such a feral grin. "I know you must go," she said as they turned toward the door, and nuzzled the throat of her mate. "But what do we do if you fail?"

  "You expect enemies with the biggest ship you ever saw," Locklear said. "And you know how those stasis traps work. Just remember, those people have night sensors and they can burn you from a distance."

  Scarface patted her firm belly once. "Take great care," he said, and strode into darkness.

  * * *

  The pinnace's controls were simple, and Locklear's only worry was the thin chorus of whistles: air, escaping from a canopy that was not quite perfectly sealed. He briefed Scarface yet again as their craft carried them over Newduvai, and piloted the pinnace so that its reentry thunder would roll gently, as far as possible from the Anthony Wayne.

  It was late morning on Newduvai, and they could see the gleam of the Wayne's hull from afar. Locklear slid the pinnace at a furtive pace, brushing spiny shrubs for the last few kilometers before landing in a small desert wadi. They pulled hinge pins from the canopy and hid them in the pinnace to make its theft tedious. Then, stuffing a roll of binder tape into his pocket, Locklear began to trot toward his clearing.

  "I am a kitten again," Scarface rejoiced, fairly floating along in the reduced gravity of Newduvai. Then he slowed, nose twitching. "Not far," he warned.

  Locklear nodded, moved cautiously ahead, and then sat behind a green thicket. Ahead lay the clearing with the warship and cabin, seeming little changed—but a heavy limb held the door shut as if to keep things in, not out. And Scarface noticed two mansized craters just outside the cabin's foundation logs. After ten minutes without sound or movement from the clearing, Scarface was ready to employ what he called the monkey ruse; not quite a lie, but certainly a misdirection.

  "Patience," Locklear counseled. "I thought you tabbies were hunters."

  "Hunters, yes; not skulkers."

  "No wonder you lose wars," Locklear muttered. But after another half-hour in which they ghosted in deep cover around the clearing, he too was ready to move.

  The massive kzin sighed, slid his wtsai to the rear and handed over his sidearm, then dutifully held his big pawlike hands out. Locklear wrapped the thin, bright red binder tape around his friend's wrists many times, then severed it with its special stylus. Scarface was certain he could bite it through until he tried. Then he was happy to let Locklear draw the stylus, with its chemical enabler, across the tape where the slit could not be seen. Then, hailing the clearing as he went, the little man drew his own wtsai and prodded his "prisoner" toward the cabin.

  His neck crawling with premonition, Locklear stood five paces from the door and called again:

  "Hello, the cabin!"

  From inside, several female voices and then only one, which he knew very well: "Locklear go soon soon!"

  "Ruth says that many times," he replied, half amused, though he knew somehow that this time she feared for him. "New people keep gentles inside?"

  Scarface, standing uneasily, had his ear umbrellas moving fore and aft. He mumbled something as, from inside, Ruth said, "Ruth teach new talk to gentles, get food. No teach, no food," she explained with vast economy.

  "I'll see about that," he called and then, in Kzin, "what was that, Scarface?"

  Low but urgent: "Behind us, fool."

  Locklear turned. Not twenty paces away, Anse Parker was moving forward as silently as he could and now the hatchway of the Anthony Wayne yawned open. Parker's rifle hung from its sling but his service parabellum was leveled, and he was smirking. "If this don't beat all: my prisoner has a prisoner," he drawled.

  For a frozen instant, Locklear feared the deserter had spied the wtsai hanging above Scarface's backside—but the kzin's tail was erect, hiding the weapon. "Where are the others?" Locklear asked.

  "Around. Pacifyin' the natives in that tabby lifeboat," Parker replied. "I'll ask you the same question, asshole."

  The parabellum was not wavering. Locklear stepped away from his friend, who faced Parker so that the wrist tape was obvious. "Gomulka's boys are in trouble. Promised me amnesty if I'd come for help, and I brought a hostage," Locklear said.

  Parker's movements were not fast, but so casual that Locklear was taken by surprise. The parabellum's short barrel whipped across his face, splitting his lip, bowling him over. Parker stood over him, sneering. "Buncha shit. If that happened, you'd hide out. You can tell a better one than that."

  Locklear privately realized that Parker was right. And then Parker himself, who had turned half away from Scarface, made a discovery of his own. He discovered that, without moving one step, a kzin could reach out a long way to stick the point of a wtsai against a man's throat. Parker froze.

  "If you shoot me, you are deader than chivalry," Locklear said, propping himself up on an elbow. "Toss the pistol away."

  Parker, cursing, did so, looking at Scarface, finding his chance as the kzin glanced toward the weapon. Parker shied away with a sidelong leap, snatching for his slung rifle. And ignoring the leg of Locklear who tripped him nicely.

  As his rifle tumbled into grass, Parker rolled to his feet and began sprinting for the warship two hundred meters away. Scarface outran him easily, then stationed himself in front of the warship's hatch. Locklear could not hear Parker's words, but his gestures toward the wtsai were clear: there ain't no justice.

  Scarface understood. With that kzin grin that so many humans failed to understand, he tossed the wtsai near Parker's feet in pure contempt. Parker grabbed the knife and saw his enemy's face, howled in fear, then raced into the forest, Scarface bounding lazily behind.

  Locklear knocked the limb away from his cabin door and found Ruth inside with three others, all young females. He embraced the homely Ruth with great joy. The other young Neanderthalers disappeared from the clearing in seconds but Ruth walked off with Locklear. He had already seen the spider grenades that lay with sensors outspread just outside the cabin's walls. Two gentles had already died trying to dig their way out, she said.

  He tried to prepare Ruth for his ally's appearance but, when Scarface reappeared with his wtsai, she needed t
ime to adjust. "I don't see any blood," was Locklear's comment.

  "The blood of cowards is distasteful," was the kzin's wry response. "I believe you have my sidearm, friend Locklear."

  They should have counted, said Locklear, on Stockton learning to fly the kzin lifeboat. But lacking heavy weapons, it might not complicate their capture strategy too much. As it happened, the capture was more absurd than complicated.

  Stockton brought the lifeboat bumbling down in late afternoon almost in the same depressions the craft's jackpads had made previously, within fifty paces of the Anthony Wayne. He and the lissome Grace wore holstered pistols, stretching out their muscle kinks as they walked toward the bigger craft, unaware that they were being watched. "Anse; we're back," Stockton shouted. "Any word from Gomulka?"

  Silence from the ship, though its hatch steps were down. Grace shrugged, then glanced at Locklear's cabin. "The door prop is down, Curt. He's trying to hump those animals again."

  "Damn him," Stockton railed, and both turned toward the cabin. To Grace he complained, "If you were a better lay, he wouldn't always be—good God!"

  The source of his alarm was a long blood-chilling, gut-wrenching scream. A kzin scream, the kind featured in horror holovision productions; and very, very near. "Battle stations, red alert, up ship," Stockton cried, bolting for the hatch.

  Briefly, he had his pistol ready but had to grip it in his teeth as he reached for the hatch rails of the Anthony Wayne. For that one moment he almost resembled a piratical man of action, and that was the moment when he stopped, one foot on the top step, and Grace bumped her head against his rump as she fled up those steps.

  "I don't think so," said Locklear softly. To Curt Stockton, the muzzle of that alien sidearm so near must have looked like a torpedo launcher. His face drained of color, the commander allowed Locklear to take the pistol from his trembling lips. "And Grace," Locklear went on, because he could not see her past Stockton's bulk, "I doubt if it's your style anyway, but don't give your pistol a second thought. That kzin you heard? Well, they're out there behind you, but they aren't in here. Toss your parabellum away and I'll let you in."

  * * *

  Late the next afternoon they finished walling up the crypt on Newduvai, with a small work force of willing hands recruited by Ruth. As the little group of gentles filed away down the hillside, Scarface nodded toward the rubble-choked entrance. "I still believe we should have executed those two, Locklear."

  "I know you do. But they'll keep in stasis for as long as the war lasts, and on Newduvai—well, Ruth's people agree with me that there's been enough killing." Locklear turned his back on the crypt and Ruth moved to his side, still wary of the huge alien whose speech sounded like the sizzle of fat on a skewer.

  "Your ways are strange," said the kzin, as they walked toward the nearby pinnace. "I know something of Interworld beauty standards. As long as you want that female lieutenant alive, it seems to me you would keep her, um, available."

  "Grace Agostinho's beauty is all on the outside. And there's a girl hiding somewhere on Newduvai that those deserters never did catch. In a few years she'll be—well, you'll meet her someday." Locklear put an arm around Ruth's waist and grinned. "The truth is, Ruth thinks I'm pretty funny-looking, but some things you can learn to overlook."

  At the clearing, Ruth hopped from the pinnace first. "Ruth will fix place nice, like before," she promised, and walked to the cabin.

  "She's learning Interworld fast," Locklear said proudly. "Her telepathy helps—in a lot of ways. Scarface, do you realize that her people may be the most tremendous discovery of modern times? And the irony of it! The empathy these people share probably helped isolate them from the modern humans that came from their own gene pool. Yet their kind of empathy might be the only viable future for us." He sighed and stepped to the turf. "Sometimes I wonder whether I want to be found."

  Standing beside the pinnace, they gazed at the Anthony Wayne. Scarface said, "With that warship, you could do the finding."

  Locklear assessed the longing in the face of the big kzin. "I know how you feel about piloting, Scarface. But you must accept that I can't let you have any craft more advanced than your scooter back on Kzersatz."

  "But—surely, the pinnace or my own lifeboat?"

  "You see that?" Locklear pointed toward the forest.

  Scarface looked dutifully away, then back, and when he saw the sidearm pointing at his breast, a look of terrible loss crossed his face. "I see that I will never understand you," he growled, clasping his hands behind his head. "And I see that you still doubt my honor."

  Locklear forced him to lean against the pinnace, arms behind his back, and secured his hands with binder tape. "Sorry, but I have to do this," he said. "Now get back in the pinnace. I'm taking you to Kzersatz."

  "But I would have—"

  "Don't say it," Locklear demanded. "Don't tell me what you want, and don't remind me of your honor, goddammit! Look here, I know you don't lie. And what if the next ship here is another kzin ship? You won't lie to them either, your bloody honor won't let you. They'll find you sitting pretty on Kzersatz, right?"

  Teetering off-balance as he climbed into the pinnace without using his arms, Scarface still glowered. But after a moment he admitted, "Correct."

  "They won't court-martial you, Scarface. Because a lying, sneaking monkey pulled a gun on you, tied you up, and sent you back to prison. I'm telling you here and now, I see Kzersatz as a prison and every tabby on this planet will be locked up there for the duration of the war!" With that, Locklear sealed the canopy and made a quick check of the console readouts. He reached across to adjust the inertia-reel harness of his companion, then shrugged into his own. "You have no choice, and no tabby telepath can ever claim you did. Now do you understand?"

  The big kzin was looking below as the forest dropped away, but Locklear could see his ears forming the kzin equivalent of a smile. "No wonder you win wars," said Scarface.

  The Children's Hour

  by Jerry Pournelle

  & S.M. Stirling

  Prologue

  The kzin floated motionless in the bubble of space. The yacht Boundless-Ranger was orbiting beyond the circle of Wunderland's moons, and the planet obscured the disk of Alpha Centauri; Beta was a brighter point of light. All around him the stars shone, glorious and chill, multihued. He was utterly relaxed; the points of his claws showed slightly, and the pink tip of his tongue. Long ago he had mastered the impulse to draw back from vertigo, uncoupling the conscious mind and accepting the endless falling, forever and ever. . . .

  A small chiming brought him gradually back to selfhood. "Hrrrr," he muttered, suddenly conscious of dry throat and nose. The bubble was retracting into the personal spacecraft; he oriented himself and landed lightly as the chamber switched to opaque and Kzin-normal gravity. Twice that of Wunderland, about a fifth more than that of Earth, home of the great enemies.

  "Arrrgg."

  The dispenser opened and he took out a flat dish of chilled cream, lapping gratefully. A human observer would have found him very catlike at that moment, like some great orange-red tiger hunched over the beautiful subtle curve of the saucer. A closer examination would have shown endless differences of detail, the full-torso sheathing of flexible ribs, naked pink tail, the eyes round-pupiled and huge and golden. Most important of all, the four-digit hands with a fully opposable thumb, like a black leather glove; that and the long braincase that swept back from the heavy brow-ridges above the blunt muzzle.

  Claws scratched at the door; he recognized the mellow but elderly scent.

  "Enter," he said.

  The kzin who stepped through was ancient, his face seamed by a ridge of scar that tracked through his right eye and left it milky-white and blind.

  "Recline, Conservor-of-the-Patriarchal-Past," he said. "Will you take refreshment?"

  "I touch nose, honored Chuut-Riit," the familiar gravelly voice said.

  The younger kzin fetched a jug of heated milk and bourbon from the dis
penser, and a fresh saucer. The two reclined in silence for long minutes. As always, Chuut-Riit felt the slightest prickling of unease, despite their long familiarity. Conservor had served his Sire before him, and helped to tutor the Riit siblings. Yet still there was an unkzin quality to the ancient priest-sage-counselor . . . a Hero strove all his life to win a full Name, to become a patriarch and sire a heroic Line. Here was one who had attained that and then renounced it of his own will, to follow wisdom purely for the sake of kzinkind. Rare and not quite canny; such a kzintosh was dedicated. The word he thought was from the Old Faith; sacrifices had been dedicated, in the days when kzinti fought with swords of wood and volcanic glass.

  "What have you learned?" Conservor said at last.

  "Hrrr. That which is difficult to express," Chuut-Riit muttered.

  "Yet you seem calmer."

  "Yes. There was risk in the course of study you set me." Chuut-Riit's hardy soul shuddered slightly. The human . . . fictions, that was the term . . . had been disturbing. Alien to the point of incomprehensibility at one moment, mind-wrackingly kzinlike the next. "I begin to integrate the insights, though."

  "Excellent. The soul of the true Conquest Hero is strong through flexibility, like the steel of a fine sword—not the rigidity of stone, which shatters beneath stress."

  "Arreowg. Yes. Yet . . . my mind does not return to all its accustomed patterns." He brooded, twitching out his batwing ears. "Contemplating the stars, I am oppressed by their magnitude. Is the universe not merely greater than we imagine, but greater than we can imagine? We seek the Infinite Hunt, to shape all that is to the will of kzinkind. Yet is this a delusion imposed by our genes, our nature?" His pelt quivered as skin rippled in a shudder.