The Houses of the Kzinti

by Larry Niven

  "Fatuous young scoundrels," Chuut-Riit said. His eyes narrowed dangerously. "You haven't been communicating outside the household, have you?" he snarled.

  "Oh, no, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit!"

  "Word of honor! May we die nameless if we should do such a thing!"

  The adult nodded, satisfied that good family feeling had prevailed. "Well, as I said, I am somewhat pleased. If you have been keeping up with your lessons. Is there anything you wish?"

  "Fresh meat, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit," the spotted one said. The adult could have told him by the scent, of course. A kzin never forgot another's personal odor; that was one reason why names were less necessary among their species. "The reconstituted stuff from the dispensers is always . . . so . . . quiet."

  Chuut-Riit hid his amusement. Young Heroes-to-be were always kept on an inadequate diet, to increase their aggressiveness. A matter for careful gauging, since too much hunger would drive them into mindless cannibalistic frenzy.

  "And couldn't we have the human servants back? They were nice." Vigorous gestures of assent. Another added: "They told good stories. I miss my Clothidal-human."

  "Silence!" Chuut-Riit roared. The youngsters flattened stomach and chin to the ground again. "Not until you can be trusted not to injure them. How many times do I have to tell you, it's dishonorable to attack household servants! You are getting to be big enough to hurt them easily; until you learn self-control, you will have to make do with machines."

  This time all of them turned and glared at a mottled youngster in the rear of their group; there were half-healed scars over his head and shoulders. "It bared its teeth at me," he said sulkily. "All I did was swipe at it. How was I supposed to know it would die?" A chorus of rumbles, and this time several of the covert kicks and clawstrikes landed.

  "Enough," Chuut-Riit said after a moment. Good, they have even learned how to discipline each other as a unit. "I will consider it, when all of you can pass a test on the interpretation of human expressions and body-language." He drew himself up. "In the meantime, within the next two eight-days, there will be a formal hunt and meeting in the Patriarch's Preserve; kzinti homeworld game, the best Earth animals, and even some feral-human outlaws, perhaps!"

  He could smell their excitement increase, a mane-crinkling musky odor not unmixed with the sour whiff of fear. Such a hunt was not without danger for adolescents, being a good opportunity for hostile adults to cull a few of a hated rival's offspring with no possibility of blame. They will be in less danger than most, Chuut-Riit thought judiciously. In fact, they may run across a few of my subordinates' get and mob them. Good.

  "And if we do well, afterwards a feast and a visit to the Sterile Ones." That had them all quiveringly alert, their tails held rigid and tongues lolling; nonbearing females were kept as a rare privilege for Heroes whose accomplishments were not quite deserving of a mate of their own. Very rare for kits still in the household to be granted such, but Chuut-Riit thought it past time to admit that modern society demanded a prolonged adolescence. The days when a male kit could be given a spear, a knife, a rope, and a bag of salt and kicked out the front gate at puberty were long gone. Those were the wild, wandering years in the old days, when survival challenges used up the superabundant energies. Now they must be spent learning history, technology, xenology, none of which burned off the gland-juices saturating flesh and brain.

  He jumped down amid his sons, and they pressed around him, purring throatily with adoration and fear and respect; his presence and the failure of their plot had reestablished his personal dominance unambiguously, and there was no danger from them for now. Chuut-Riit basked in their worship, feeling the rough caress of their tongues on his fur and scratching behind their ears. Together, he thought. Together we will do wonders.

  Chapter 3

  Dreaming, Harold Yarthkin-Schotmann twitched. Sweat ran down his stubbled bulldog face, and his fingers dug into the sodden sheets. It had been—

  Crack. Crack.

  Pulses of orange-purple light went by overhead. Ahead of them the building where the aircar was hidden exploded. The air was pitch-black, stars hidden by the smoke of burning buildings, air full of a chemical reek. It rasped at the inside of his throat, and he coughed savagely as they went to ground and he slapped down the hunting goggles. Green-tinted brightness replaced the black, and he raised his head to peer back over the rim of the shattered house. Overhead the scorched yellow leaves of the jacaranda tree rustled.

  "Scheisse," he muttered in awe. Half of Munchen seemed to be burning, the ruddy light glittering off the unnatural waves of the Donau river.

  "Von Sydow, Hashami, get a hundred meters or so west and take overwatch on our route. Mogger, spread the rest out. Wait for my word," Harold snapped. The half-dozen others melted back into the rubble of the low stone-block houses that had lined this street, the half-dozen who were left out of the thirty who had been with them yesterday.

  Sam Ogun grunted beside him, shifting the burden of the makeshift antitank rocket in his arms. Everything was makeshift. . . . "Anything, Claude?" he said.

  "Spaceport's still holding out," he said, fiddling with the keyboard of the communicator unit. "And the Ritterhaus. Not for long. We make it in half an hour or we don't make it."

  "Why they still letting launches go on?" Sam wondered.

  "I think they're playing with us," Harold said. God, I'm tired. At least there were no civilians around here . . . Most of them had gone bush, gone to ground outside town, when the ratcats landed. Nobody had known what to do; no human had fought a war for three hundred-odd years.

  At least we weren't completely domesticated, like the flatlanders. Wunderland still had the odd bandit, and a riot now and then. The Families maintained a ghost of a martial tradition as well . . . We knew enough to take the Angel's Pencil warning seriously. The Angel had been the first human ship to contact the kzinti, and had survived by a miracle. Back in the Sol system, the ARM had suppressed the news—suppressed the fact that the first aliens humans had encountered traveled in warships. Wunderland had had a year to prepare, although most of it was spent reinventing the wheel.

  "Much good it did us, oh scheisse," he muttered.

  A vehicle was floating down the broad stone-block pavement of K. von Bulowstrasse. Some sort of gravity-control effect, too small for fusion-power, but massive, like a smoothly gleaming wedge of some dark material, bristled with the pickups of sensors and communications gear. From the sharply sloped front jutted a segmented tube. Plasma gun, he recognized from the sketchy briefings. The howling whine of its passage overrode the roar of flames, and gusts of smoke and dirt billowed sideways from under it. A wrecked groundcar spun away from a touch of the kzinti vehicle's bow, flipping end-over-end into the remains of an outdoor restaurant.

  The others had frozen; he heard Claude whisper, very softly; "Why only one?"

  Because it's more Finagle-fucked fun, Claude, Harold thought savagely. Because they're hunting us.

  Don't miss, Sam. There was a taut grin on the black Krio's face as he raised the tube.

  Crack. The hovertank had pivoted and fired a plasma-pulse into an intact house on the other side of the street and a few hundred meters down. Stone spalled away, burning white as it turned to lime; the front of the building rumbled down into the street, and the interior stood exposed. It was like a breakaway doll's house, kitchen and autochef, bedrooms upstairs with beds neatly made, all perfect and small for a moment before the floors fell in. Rubble cascaded into the street, snapping off trees. The vehicle pivoted again to aim its gun down the street, slid sideways and began circling the pile of broken stone and furniture.

  "Now," Harold whispered.

  Thup. The missile whooshed out of the tube, driven by magnetic coils. The kzin tank detected it, lost a vital half-second trying to bring its gun to bear before it was around the last of the stone. The hovertank's rear swung wide as its bow ground against rock, and the missile arrived overhead. A bang this time, a pancake of orange fire t
urning to a ball as the self-forging arrowhead of tungsten drove straight down into the upper deck of the war machine. It staggered, died, fell with an echoing clang to the road; hatches like gull-wings popped open on either side just behind the gun.

  "Now!" Harold shouted.

  His strakaker gave its high-pitched strangled scream, spitting out a stream of high-velocity pellets filled with liquid teflon. Four others did likewise. The two huge orange shapes were springing out of the tank, blurring fast. One staggered in midair, fell to the pavement with a thud audible even now; the other managed to recoil, but a long pink tail and short thick arm sprawled out, motionless. The hand flexed and then went limp, four digits like a big black leather glove, the claws glinting as they slid free a last time. Blood dripped, darker than human; on general principle he emptied the rest of the clip into the compartment, aiming where the body would be. Limb and tail jerked as the pellets jellied the corpse.

  "Samedi bless, it worked," Sam Ogun said.

  "Harry, we've got to move," Claude Montferrat-Palme said. "They're still not trying for a matching orbit with the slowboat"—for some inscrutable alien reason the kzinti had not tried to stop anyone leaving the Alpha Centauri system; contempt, perhaps—"but it's the last shuttle and the last launch-window."

  "Well, Ingrid's piloting," Harold said, forcing himself to grin. Suddenly the noise of fire and distant fighting seemed almost quiet.

  "Von Sydow, Hashami," he called softly. "All clear?"

  One of the other guerrillas raised her head to look for the scouts. It vanished in an almost-visible flicker of white light; beam-rifle, close range. The body stayed upright for a moment, then toppled backward like a tree. The screaming began a moment later, astonishingly loud; a month ago he would have sworn it came from something other than a human throat.

  "Ratcat!" someone shouted; there was a scramble as they dove for new positions that gave cover to their rear. All but Sam. He came to his knees, raising his jazzer.

  "Eat this!" he screamed, and the stubby-barreled weapon thumped twice, pitching out its bomblets.

  "Follow me!" Harold yelled on the heels of the quick crumpcrumpcrump of their explosion; there was no time for a firefight. One more human died before they reached what had been a sunken garden behind the house, still screened by the wreckage of a pergola and a scarlet froth of bougainvillea. The broad muzzle of a beam rifle showed above; behind him Claude snapshot with his strakaker, tearing it out of the kzin's hands. Harold dove through the screen of withes and vines—

  —and fell to his back as his feet slipped on flagstones running with blood. Human blood, mostly. Von Sydow and Hashami were here; Hashami's legs were missing, and her head. Von Sydow was still alive, but it looked as if something had bitten half his stomach out and then pulled.

  Something had. It loomed over him, immense even for a kzin, two and a half meters. Infantry this time, synthetic impact-armor glittering where fragments and bullets had cut it, a bone-deep slash on the blunt muzzle running dark-red blood as it reached for him. Pain and hysteria made it disdain the other weapons clipped to its harness; artificial claws of density-enhanced steel glittered and snapped out on its gauntlets as it reached to pull his throat to that mouthful of fangs. His strakaker seemed fixed in honey as he strained to bring it around, finger closing spasmodically on the trigger plate. Pellets splashed on the impact-armor over the thing's belly, knocking it back. The weapon hissed empty. The kzin straightened with a grunting roar, and then it was coming at him again—

  A whining buzz, and it stopped in its tracks. Then it fell, legs useless. Twirling and slashing with its claws even as it collapsed, but Sam danced back, poised as graceful as a matador, moved in with a chopping cut. Kzinti blood smoked away from the buzzing wire edges of his ratchet knife, spurted in hose-like jets from the alien's throat; the Krio thumbed the weapon off and clipped it back at his shoulder. Behind him a strakaker chittered once and von Sydow's gasping breath ceased.

  "Come on, Mr. Yarthkin," he said, extending a hand. "Miss Raines is waiting."

  —and Harold jerked awake.

  "Hunh," he mumbled, shaking his head in the darkness, shaking away the nightmare and forty years. His teeth chattered on the glass he grabbed two-handed from the bedside stand; some of the verguuz slopped down the sides, its smell sharp and minty in the stale odors of his bedroom. Fire bloomed in his gut, giving him steadiness enough to palm on the lights. That had been a bad one, he hadn't had that one for more than a decade.

  "But she wasn't waiting," he said quietly. The glass crashed against the wall. "She wasn't there at all."

  * * *

  Interesting, Chuut-Riit thought, standing on the veranda of his staff-secretary's house and lapping at the gallon tub of half-melted vanilla ice cream in his hands. Quite comely, in its way.

  In a very unkzin fashion. The senior staff quarters of his estate were laid out in a section of rolling hills, lawns and shrubs and eucalyptus trees, modest stone houses with high-pitched shingle roofs set among flowerbeds. A dozen or so of the adults who dwelt here were gathered at a discreet distance, down by the landing pad; he could smell their colognes and perfumes, the slightly mealy odor of human flesh beneath, a mechanical tang overlain with alien greenness and animals and . . . Yes, the children were coming back—preceded by the usual blast of sound. The kzin's ears folded themselves away at the jumbled high-pitched squealing, one of the less attractive qualities of young humans. Although there was a very kzinlike warbling mixed in among the monkeysounds. . . .

  The giant ball of yarn bounced around the corner of the house and across the close-clipped grass of the lawn, bounding from side to side with the slight drifting wobble of .61 gravities, trailing floppy ends. A peacock fled shrieking from the toy and the shouting mob of youngsters that followed it; the bird's head was parallel to the ground and its feet pumped madly. Chuut-Riit sighed, finished the ice cream, and began licking his muzzle and fingers clean. Alpha Centauri was setting, casting bronze shadows over the creeper-grown stone around him, and it was time to go.

  "Like this!" the young kzin leading the pack screamed, and leaped in a soaring arch, landing spreadeagled on the soft fuzzy surface of the ball. He was a youngster of five, all head and hands and feet, the fur of his pelt an electric orange with fading black spots, the infant mottling that a very few kzin kept into early youth. Several of the human youngsters made a valiant attempt to follow, but only one landed and clutched the strands, screaming delightedly. The others fell, one skinning a knee and bawling.

  Chuut-Riit rose smoothly to his feet and bounced forward, scooping the crying infant up and stopping the ball with his other hand.

  "You should be more careful, my son," he said to the kzin child in the Hero's Tongue. To the human: "Are you injured?"

  "Mama!" the child wailed, twining its fists into his fur and burying its tear-and-snot-streaked face in his side.

  "Errruumm," Chuut-Riit rumbled helplessly. They are so fragile. His nostrils flared as he bent over the tiny form, taking in the milky-sweat smell of distress and the slight metallic-salt odor of blood from its knee.

  "Here is your mother," he continued as the human female scuttled up and began apologetically untwining the child.

  "Here, take it," he rumbled, as she cuddled the infant. The woman gave it a brief inspection and looked up at the eight-foot orange height of the kzin.

  "No harm done, just overexcited, Honored Chuut-Riit," she said. The kzin rumbled again, looked up at the guards standing by his flitter in the driveway, and laid back his ears; they became elaborately casual, examining the sky or the ground and controlling their expressions. He switched his glare back to his own offspring on top of the ball. The cub flattened itself apologetically, then whipped its head to one side as the human child clinging to the slope of the ball threw a loose length of yarn. Chuut-Riit wrenched his eyes from the fascinating thing and plucked his son into the air by the loose skin at the back of his neck.

  "It is time to depart," he said
. The young kzin had gone into an instinctive half-curl. He cast a hopeful glance over his shoulder at his father, sighed, and wrapped the limber pink length of his tail around the adult's massive forearm.

  "Yes, Honored Sire Chuut-Riit," he said meekly, then brightened and waved at the clump of estate-worker children standing by the ball. "Good-bye," he called, waving a hand that seemed too large for his arm, and adding a cheerful parting yeowl in the Hero's Tongue. Literally translated it meant roughly "drink blood and tear cattle into gobbets," but the adult trusted the sentiment would carry over the wording.

  The human children jumped and waved in reply as Chuut-Riit carried his son over to the car and the clump of parents waiting there: Henrietta was in the center with her offspring by her side. I think her posture indicates contentment, he thought. This visit confers much prestige among the other human servants. Which was excellent; a good executive secretary was a treasure beyond price. Besides . . .

  "That was fun, Father," the cub said. "Could I have another piece of cake?"

  "Certainly not, you will be sick as it is," Chuut-Riit said decisively. Kzin were not quite the pure meat-eaters they claimed to be, and their normal diet contained the occasional sweet, but stuffing that much sugar-coated confection down on top of a stomach already full of good raw ztirgor was something the cub would regret soon. Ice cream, though . . . Why had nobody told him about ice cream before? Even better than bourbon-and-milk; he must begin to order in bulk.

  "I must be leaving, Henrietta," Chuut-Riit said. "And young Ilge," he added, looking down at the offspring. It was an odd-looking specimen, only slightly over knee-high to him and with long braided head-pelt of an almost kzinlike orange; the bare skin of its face was dotted with markings of almost the same color. Remarkable. The one standing next to it was black—there was no end to their variety.